Don’t fall for the spin. Western leaders need this war just as much as Putin does. In my view it was bilaterally coordinated well in advance. I believe time will eventually reveal that the US State Department and CIA along with various UK and EU interests were intimately involved in the escalation of this conflict, as they were in countless other wars over the past 75 years.
The fog of war makes it hard to gage the military realities, and the insular nature of bureaucracy means my above speculation may never be proven one way or the other. So let’s focus on what is manifestly observable.
It is very convenient for Western leaders who have recently been facing unprecedented civil unrest that the entire narrative has now shifted away from the global supply chain shortages, massive inflation and general human suffering caused by their insane and utterly ineffectual lockdowns. It is very convenient for Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Scott Morrison, Jacinda Ardern and the rest that there’s now a war between Russia and Ukraine who together export 30% of the world’s wheat. When that particular supply chain shortage bites in the coming months, regular folk will face further price rises, and many may starve. As Russia is also a massive energy exporter, fuel prices will skyrocket which will further increase the cost of everything. Widespread social unrest will likely follow. In other words – all the shitty things that were already happening will be amplified, except now our leaders can blame it all on Vladimir Putin (who is perfectly happy to be the villain in the situation). How convenient for them all.
You know, it kind of reminds me of something…
Remember when the US and China were working together on gain of function research on bat coronaviruses in that biosecurity lab in Wuhan? And then it just happened to leak out? And then, despite people such as myself saying in February 2020 that we should immediately shut our borders and cut off travel from China, the politicians and WHO decided to go on as if nothing had happened for just long enough to ensure the global spread of the virus before slamming down the shutters at the very moment it became too late? Remember how media outlets even ran ludicrous stories smearing as ‘racist’ anyone who voiced concerns about incoming flights from Wuhan? Remember how they then stripped our civil rights? Abused our human rights? Beat and imprisoned people? Gaslighted us for 24 months about the supposed existential threat of a virus which we now know was only marginally worse than the flu? Remember how they put millions of people out of work? And how they destroyed small businesses, shifting trillions of dollars of wealth from the middle and working classes to the top 1%? Remember how they did all this in the name of keeping us safe and blamed it all on a virus which they engineered in the first place?
This is the same sorry story repeating itself.
It goes like this: Crisis, followed by disruptions and shortages, followed by extraordinary authoritarian measures to ‘keep us all safe’, followed by privation and suffering, followed by civil unrest… followed by a new crisis.
There’s a lot of flag waving going on right now, not to mention a lot of syrupy virtue signalling. On this – I cannot help but voice my contempt for the way many have snapped to attention to genuflect in front of the latest sacred cow presented to them by the corporate media establishment. Do I care what’s happening to the people of Ukraine? Of course I do. I care about all regular, everyday people who become innocent victims of psychotic elites who see us as nothing more than cattle on their great globalist farm. I care about the slave kids who mine the minerals for our gadgets. I care about the Afghani and Iraqi families who got blown to bits so George Bush and Tony Blair could bring ‘freedom’ to their countries. I care about the countless millions who’ve died over the decades in wars of profit and ideology whom we never even hear about because their stories serve no lucrative purpose for the corporate establishment. I care about the Uyghurs in China – the vast concentration camps and the genocide they entail almost completely ignored by our ‘news media’. And I care about the millions of people who’ve had their lives irreversibly scarred or completely destroyed by the global psy-op that was ‘Covid-19’. All these people are pawns in the big chess game of which the only winners are the super-rich and their political puppets.
Right now I see people everywhere, who’ve never uttered a word of protest about any of the innocent victims of tyranny that I’ve noted above, gushing with sanctimonious outage about the plight of the brave Ukrainian people. It’s been really illuminating to watch.
The corporate media and the masters they serve want us to care about this particular war not only because it gives them a new crisis on which to blame their ongoing crimes but because it serves their commercial interests. It’s the same old story, but they’ve pivoted back to the human villain again because the microbial one needs a little rest. Putin replaces Covid replaces Trump replaces terrorism... What will replace Putin? Given the likely disruption to 30% of the world’s wheat supply, it’s not unreasonable to assume it could be famine – check out this scenario which various global elites conveniently gamed out in 2015
But with the arsenal at their disposal now I would not be surprised to see a grand convergence of ‘existential crises’ probably involving some combination of the various knock-on effects of this war (more shortages, consumer price hikes, inflation, currency collapse and poverty), as well as some reinvigorated public health emergency, perhaps involving the next Covid strain or something new (or something old…), and probably a good dash of climate change hysteria too.
Don’t fall for the spin. This isn’t about Russia vs Ukraine, it’s about the ruling elite vs the people. But sure, let’s wave a flag for Ukraine. But if we’re going to wave a flag for Ukraine, let’s pick up a flag for the Uyghurs and wave that too. Let’s pick up a bunch of flags, and perhaps let’s pick up our own countries’ flags while we’re at it and wave them for what has been done to us and what continues to be done in the name of ‘keeping us safe’.
The only things we need to be kept safe from are the people who say they’re trying to keep us safe. Freedom starts at home. And while everyone is distracted, waving their little blue and yellow flags, and wringing their hands about freedom in Ukraine, our own freedom continues to be stealthily siphoned away. But restrictions are lifting… Borders are reopening… Things are getting back to normal right? Sure, for now maybe. But all those emergency powers that were enacted to keep us safe from the virus with the 99.98% survival rate are still in place. And in many jurisdictions, such as Victoria, they have been enshrined into permanent legislation. Vaccine passports have been normalised and the infrastructure is in place for the next crisis.
One popular sentiment among the ultra-credulous right now is: “Hey, all you dickheads out there protesting for your ‘freedom’ – why don’t you take a look at Ukraine and then you’ll see what real freedom fighters look like.” This is going viral in various formats including a slew of dreary memes, obviously created by braindead apparatchiks judging by their complete lack of nuance and humour. Not only is this talking point an obvious establishment ploy, but it is also morally contemptible – the idea that one should not fight for their civil rights because somebody somewhere has it worse than they do, is the very basest of straw men.
By this rational, nobody should ever care about anything because there will inevitably be one singular evil that eclipses all others. But it suits our ruling classes to propagate this fallacy. They want us to care about this war because it benefits them – it deflects from their own tyranny at home, and it makes money for their donors at Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Boeing. They don’t want us to know about the Uyghur genocide because it doesn’t suit them – because they have trillions of dollars of wealth tied up under the boot of the Chinese Communist Party. The fog of war is thick and the machinations behind it may not be known in our lifetimes. But whatever is happening on the ground and behind the scenes, one truth shines through: In times of crisis, it’s the rich and powerful who benefit at the expense of the people.
Does this hold true even when you game out the current scenario to its most unthinkable extremity? By the hawkish way many US officials and pundits are behaving right now one would have to assume so, and that they all have lavishly stocked fallout bunkers with enough mind alerting substances to amuse them for the next couple of decades. Having been unhealthily obsessed with nuclear war from a young age, I have to hope that most of this talk is just brazen rhetoric designed to keep things hot enough to benefit the defence contractors without things escalating all the way to DEFCON1 – or could these folk really be oblivious to the almost inevitable repercussions of a direct US-Russian engagement? To anyone who finds themselves in agreement with these warmongers I recommend watching this film
All of a sudden it is eerily relevant again 40 years on. A scenario such as portrayed in The Day After is, I think, remote. But it’s never been outside the realm of possibility, and anyone who has not studied the likely effects of such an exchange should keep their mouth shut when it comes to military strategy and stick to virtuous flag waving.
As for me, I’ll happily wave a Ukrainian flag for any innocent victims of this war – here’s mine at the top of the page. But I’ll also wave one for all the other victims of the broader ongoing psycho-social war against the people of our planet. And I will not stop fighting for freedom at home just because Russia has invaded one of its former republics.
Let’s wave our flags, but let’s not be hypocrites about it. Let’s not fall for the spin.