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https://tapnewswire.com/2022/02/fake-war...-pandemic/
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The FAKE War in Ukraine
by Miles Mathis
First published February 27, 2022
You may think I am way out on a limb with that title, but I send you here to see I am not the only one
saying this is a psyop. That’s an anonymous author reprinted at Zerohedge, and he only gets you
started, but he is absolutely right. And it isn’t just the photos, film, and dialog that is being faked. It is
the whole kit and kaboodle, from the top down and the bottom up. Putin is just the Hollywood bad guy
and he needs to grow a mustache he can twirl while he is cackling evilly. Someone buy him a fluffy
white cat and a Mini-me. Oh, wait, he is already his own Mini-me.
We even have mini-me Sean Penn involved, to prove this is Hollywood. Although Penn is a cousin of
Putin, he is being photographed with Zelensky for some reason. I guess Zelensky is another Jewishactor mini-me cousin.
I knew this was a fake even before it started. We have been predicting they would start a fake war in
order to cover up the Covid and vaccine crime against humanity and the upcoming Trucker-led
revolution in the US. This is a obvious wag-the-dog moment, and Robert DeNiro must be chuckling
softly to his mini-me self somewhere in Malibu.
Besides the two reasons I just gave, there is the usual third reason for this latest fake war: to bill the
treasury for billions in deployment costs, new weapons, etc. All one more scam, since nothing is really
being deployed and the weapons have been marked up by 10,000%. And remember, it comes right out
of your taxes. If the Phoenicians can’t soak you for deadly vaccines or stimulus packages that stimulate
only the rich, they will soak you with a fake war and inflated prices across the board. Then, because
the wealthy are getting wealthier, they will tell you the economy is booming. And it is: the economy of
rapine by the top 1% is booming like never before.
And of course the “alternative press” like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Mike Adams, and Gateway
Pundit are selling the war as real. I also predicted that. They have been instructed to spin it red and
anti-blue, but otherwise are letting it ride. They are also drumming on the old nuclear war fear—the
same fake beat we have had playing in the background since 1945. And this time adding to it with fear
porn about Chernobyl, as if that is still hot and ready to blow. So now that your Covid fears are
subsiding a bit, you better start practicing your old duck-and-cover routine again.
Just to be clear, there are no nukes and never have been. So stay calm and tell the Phoenicians to
phoeck off.
http://mileswmathis.com/minime2.pdf
This extract from Jim Stone www.jimstone.is
goes quite well alongside Mathis’ take, although he thinks the nuclear war threat is real.
NOT GUESSING: Russia totally obliterated Ukraine’s air force in the first hour and they only had ONE plane left that flew to a neighbouring country to land because all airstrips in Ukraine were destroyed in the FIRST HOUR. It was so bad that Ukraine only got ONE plane in the air, the rest were destroyed on the ground. Therefore, NOT GUESSING: Russia is in fact kicking ass. NOT GUESSING: Russia also sank Ukraine’s entire navy in the first hour. That’s also kicking ass. NOT GUESSING: Therefore, idiots in the western media calling Russia toothless can’t really be idiots, they are lying and they know it. THEREFORE: NOT GUESSING: Take the entire diatribe from the western press and toss it.
Drumbeats of war, testicles of strength, Orwell of television
by Jon Rappoport
Something is wrong. And I’m not talking about the screenshots going around purporting to show cardboard weapons in the hands of Ukraine civilians or the death of someone a few years ago dying again in the Ukraine; I’m talking about major in-your-face news outlets working overtime on WAR.
I’m writing this Sunday night (2/27), so who knows what new gobs of insanity will be spit up by tomorrow morning, when we post.
These are notes. The news is coming too fast and furious—each proclamation more preposterous than the last.
Bottom line: I’m not buying what they’re selling. I’m not buying what I’m seeing. I’m not buying what I’m not seeing.
Drumbeats of war. You must support America. And that means you must declare Putin is far more evil than Hitler. So say all. So say Democrats and Republicans foaming at the mouth. Keep our planes in the air. Ready the nukes. It just so happens our great Commander-in-Chief is coming on Tuesday night, to deliver his wartime State of the Union to the Congress.
The timing is perfect.
Spray the hall with meth. Members on both sides of the aisle will be standing every twenty seconds to roar with approval as decrepit old Joe—himself pumped full of every drug the docs can think of to keep him on his feet and his mouth working in coordination with the teleprompter—old Joe hurls angry Commander-in-Chief slogans of USA power…and the news heads will be ready to give him HIGH MARKS in the aftermath and try to shove his poll numbers, for the moment, through the roof…and turn around the mid-term elections…
“The old man had it in him. Wow. He rocked the house. This was quite a night, Bob. This was Presidential. Both sides of the aisle were screaming at the tops of their lungs. And now we have reports of biker gangs and possibly truckers who want to go to the Ukraine and help the people fight Putin…”
COVID? Vaccines? Vaccine deaths and injuries? New CDC lies exposed? Mandates? Freedom convoys? Inflation? Never heard of them. THIS IS WAR. Clear the decks. Battle stations, everyone. The Russians are coming.
Speaking of which, where are they in the Ukraine? 150,000 troops have invaded the country?
18,000 auto weapons have been distributed to Ukrainian citizens in Kiev/Kyiv?
So tell me this. Have you seen any video footage of actual armed clashes between Ukrainian civilians/soldiers and Russians? Actual back and forth prolonged shooting? (Not aftermath stuff.) I haven’t.
With the Ukraine press on high alert, and with a zillion cell phones active in the country, I should have seen MANY gun battles, live, by now. If there are any.
Have you heard the word DRONES?
I haven’t. I’d think the Russians have some drones. But no. Seems like all the reported air battles are happening between planes with pilots in cockpits. Do it the old fashioned way.
Did you see the extraordinary footage of a line of Russian tanks and armored vehicles all blown up and twisted on a quiet road in broad daylight?
Who destroyed them, and how? And in or around those vehicles, did you see any DEAD RUSSIAN BODIES? I didn’t. I would think there were quite a few. Where did they go? Who took them away, and why? Were these Russian vehicles operated by remote control from Moscow?
One retired US general claimed on FOX/CNN: these Russian vehicles were sent into the Ukraine with absolutely no thought of what their drivers would do when they quickly ran out of fuel after a few hours—since there are no supply lines. And that was the Putin battle plan. “Drive as far as you can, fire your weapons at tall buildings, empty your fuel capacity, and then just sit there.” REALLY? THAT’S WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING? SOMEBODY FORGOT ABOUT SUPPLY LINES? We’re supposed to buy that scenario?
Of course, as in every recent war, US TV reporters, “on the ground” in the Ukraine, are doing stand ups in stone quiet areas where nothing at all is happening, and these “reporters” are relaying press updates originating from New York and Washington. That’s standard. “We’re sending you to Kiev/Kyiv on the midnight flight, Fred. Don’t forget your helmet. We’ll feed you AP dispatches through your earpiece and you just repeat them…”
Meanwhile, NATO is on high alert, international payment processors have shut down certain Russian banks and accounts, some government (I missed the country name) is sending jet fighters to the Ukraine. Really? Who’s going to pilot those planes? Ukrainians? “Where’s the brake and the ignition? What are these buttons for?”
Possibly the supplying country will also provide its own pilots? That could get messy very fast. “French pilots shot down a Russian plane this morning. President Macron denied it was an act of war.”
Some Congressman said we should do WHAT? Send people to the Ukraine to enforce a NO-FLY-ZONE over the country? Was he drunk out of his mind? Exactly how do you enforce that? My guess would be: WEAPONS. PLANES.
“Goddammit, it’s about time we stood up and fought those Ruskies. Enough posturing. Break out the old films showing schoolkids how to get down under their desks when the nuclear bombs fall on their heads.”
Of course, it would have been too easy, a few months ago, to tell Putin the Ukraine will never be a NATO member. But diplomacy never works. Disband the whole State Department.
We need a good war. Cleans the pipes. Reinvigorates the blood. Improves sperm count.
“Phil, I want at least one Kiev/Kyiv refugee or displaced person or whatever you call them when they hide underground—I want at least one of these WOMEN per hour on our national broadcast telling her story, like in Wag the Dog, BECAUSE WE DON’T HAVE ANY GODDAMN FOOTAGE OF THE ACTUAL WAR GOING ON AND WHY IS THAT? CAN SOMEBODY AROUND HERE TELL ME? I WANT TO SEE STREET BATTLES THAT LAST FOR MINUTES AND PEOPLE FALLING DOWN.”
“Jack, we don’t have footage of the war because we’re sending our reporters to places where nothing is going on.”
“Is that so? Well, wherever the war IS going on, there are people with cell phones. Where is their video?”
“I have no idea.”
Dear reader, there IS a war. Some kind of war. But the shape of it and who’s doing what to who, and how it’s being shaped for public consumption…and whether the shaping IS the war…and exactly what the word WAR means in this case…these are questions whose present answers I’m not buying. I’m not buying what I’m seeing. I’m not buying what I’m not seeing.
If you or I were the head of FOX/CNN, we’d do this:
“Mike, get your ass in here. You’re our top analyst on this. See this map of the Ukraine spread out on the table? I want you to circle every little area where battles on the ground are happening. And then sign your name under each area. Because THOSE PLACES are where we’re going to send our people. They’re called WAR CORRESPONDENTS. That’s what they’ll do when they get there. Correspond about the war. I want to know what’s actually happening. And we’ll show it to our audience. I don’t want to see any more footage of what already happened. It makes us look stupid and inattentive, and quite possibly, liars. Are we a bunch of liars? Why do I have to ask that question?”
You know, REPORT THE NEWS. Rather than BEAT THE DRUM.
http://mileswmathis.com/minime2.pdf
Jim Stone: NOT GUESSING: Russia totally obliterated Ukraine’s air force in the first hour and they only had ONE plane left that flew to a neighbouring country to land because all airstrips in Ukraine were destroyed in the FIRST HOUR. It was so bad that Ukraine only got ONE plane in the air, the rest were destroyed on the ground. Therefore, NOT GUESSING: Russia is in fact kicking ass. NOT GUESSING: Russia also sank Ukraine’s entire navy in the first hour. That’s also kicking ass. NOT GUESSING: Therefore, idiots in the western media calling Russia toothless can’t really be idiots, they are lying and they know it. THEREFORE: NOT GUESSING: Take the entire diatribe from the western press and toss it.
https://thefreeonline.com/2022/02/28/the...-the-fire/
https://www.henrymakow.com/2022/02/vladi...isnt-.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTHUok0iQ-M
Putin -- "Making an enemy out of Russia just proves that the people running Washington are megalomaniacal,
and have no desire for peace, and that they've been trying to overthrow Russia since the end of the cold war."
Makow- The central bankers put their covid hoax on hold and started us on a path to world war. The MSM are beating the war drums! The vilification of Putin and Russia reminds me of how Hitler was portrayed. God knows how many crimes a nuclear conflagration would cover up, COVID being the biggest.
Source- Unz Report (Feb 22, 2022)
by Andrew Anglin
(excerpt by henrymakow.com)
Putin's speech was historic in a way that nothing has been in my lifetime.
It's really worth watching the whole thing.
It's all just my talking points, actually.
Last week, before he ordered Russia's military to silence the 8 years of bombardment of Donesk and Louhansk which he formally recognized as Russian last week, PUTIN went through the entire history of the Ukraine, and the fact that big parts of it have always been Russian. He also said parts of it should belong to Poland and Germany, and that it isn't a real country.
Here are his points:
Ukraine isn't a real country today, it is completely run by foreign powers.
It is not controlled by the Ukrainian people, but by foreign powers, and also by oligarchs chosen by foreign powers.
Both groups have robbed the Ukrainians of their country for their own purposes, primarily using Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia.
Stalin and Krushchev gave Russian territory to the Ukraine for political administration reasons that were practical at the time but irrelevant to geopolitics because it was all the USSR. (He didn't really make any bones about the fact that he thinks the USSR was an economic and administrative disaster.)
The Ukraine is a "colony with a puppet government."
The Ukraine government is now saying that they are going to start building nuclear weapons, an ability that they have because they were a part of the Soviet Union.
NATO made promises in 1992 that they would not expand NATO eastward, and yet they started doing so immediately.
He asked Bill Clinton if Russia could join NATO in 2000, and Clinton blew him off and chuckled at him, proving that the plan was always to break apart Russia even further via war methods. (He said this is the first time he's revealed he had this conversation with Clinton.)
He says making an enemy out of Russia just proves that the people running Washington are megalomaniacal, and have no desire for peace, and that they've been trying to overthrow Russia since the end of the cold war.
He laid out the details of the "Maidan" coup, which was not a "revolution," but a violent overthrow of an elected government by foreign powers.
He explained that the Ukraine is not a "democracy" and that Russian-speakers are being physically attacked, economically disenfranchised, and banned from speaking their own language not just at schools but also in shops and other public places. He says that the Ukrainians didn't harbor this kind of hatred before, it was a "brotherly" nation, and that the West has trumped up hatred via their control of the Ukrainian government, and their connection to the oligarchs.
He said that like every country, Russia has a right to protect its interests, and this is exactly what they plan to do.
The West is not offering a peaceful solution. They pretend like they are, but then refuse any form of concession, and just start making more threats.
Finally: Russia will officially recognize the independence of the two declared breakaway republics in the Donbass.
After the speech, he went directly to a signing ceremony, signing orders officially recognizing the breakaway republics, just as he did with Crimea in 2014.
Really America doesn't have "a dog in the fight." It's time to withdraw from NATO and protect our own southern border with Mexico. I STAND WITH TEXAS. We must let Europe sort out their own business.
Hedges: Chronicle of a War Foretold
https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/hedges...-foretold/
After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.
https://i0.wp.com/scheerpost.com/wp-cont...C683&ssl=1
Svyatoslav, 6, plays with his tablet in a public basement used as a bomb shelter in Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022. Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, unleashing airstrikes on cities and military bases and sending troops and tanks from multiple directions in a move that could rewrite the world’s geopolitical landscape. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.
There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War.
How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.
There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.
The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.
In a classified diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.
“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . . Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . . Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”
The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow.
The United States and its NATO allies have no intention of sending troops to Ukraine. Rather, they will flood the country with weapons, which is what it did in the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia.
The conflict in Ukraine echoes the novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the novel it is acknowledged by the narrator that “there had never been a death more foretold” and yet no one was able or willing to stop it. All of us who reported from Eastern Europe in 1989 knew the consequences of provoking Russia, and yet few have raised their voices to halt the madness. The methodical steps towards war took on a life of their own, moving us like sleepwalkers towards disaster.
Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie. Then in 2014 the U.S. backed a coup against the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who sought to build an economic alliance with Russia rather than the European Union. Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO. Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in Ukraine became unstoppable.
https://www.nato.int/cps/su/natohq/offic..._25468.htm
The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader.
I don’t know where this will end up. We must remember, as Putin reminded us, that Russia is a nuclear power. We must remember that once you open the Pandora’s box of war it unleashes dark and murderous forces no one can control. I know this from personal experience. The match has been lit. The tragedy is that there was never any dispute about how the conflagration would start.
https://i0.wp.com/scheerpost.com/wp-cont...scaled.jpg
Traffic jams are seen as people leave the city of Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday announced a military operation in Ukraine and warned other countries that any attempt to interfere with the Russian action would lead to “consequences you have never seen.” (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
‘Revisionist Power’, Russia & The New Art Of War
https://rielpolitik.com/2022/02/25/realp...rt-of-war/
SM:…The trick to defeating an army of Pet therapists, Yoga & Pilates instructors is to strategically target & destroy the local Starbucks – disorientation & brain functions start to diminish exponentially…from there, it’s just like shooting fish in a barrel….
Russia Is Showing Us A New Kind Of War In Two Ways
By Michael Every
“Si vis pacem para fallacia”
US equities initially tumbled yesterday as Russia initiated a full invasion of Ukraine to “denazify” its government, led by a Jewish president, and to “demilitarise” its 250,000-strong standing army, its 300,000 reserves, and its millions of armed citizens being urged to defend their country to the last; all while implying strongly that anyone who helped Ukraine fight back would face Russian nuclear attack. It appeared the wolves of Wall Street realized the gravity of an angry Russian bear.
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As we all saw terrible images Europe has not seen in decades, the West’s politicians stepped up with their next attempt at sanctions that would show Russia the price for finally shattering the liberal world order for good: and it was again too low.
UK PM Johnson offered: an asset freeze on all major Russian banks; new legislation to prohibit Russian companies from raising finance on UK markets and the state from raising sovereign debt; sanctions on over 100 companies and oligarchs; limiting the amount of money oligarchs can deposit in UK banks; suspending export licenses on some goods and services to Russia; banning Aeroflot from landing; extending sanctions to Belarus; and plans to clamp down on Russian money laundering.
US President Biden –who warned Putin wants to rebuild the USSR (actually, parts of the Russian empire, but the point stands)– imposed: export controls on critical technology; debt-equity restrictions on Russian firms in mining, metals, energy, transportation, and logistics; VTB bank fully blocked; and Sberbank, Russia’s largest, cut off from transacting in dollars. However, energy and food exports were not touched because the US does not want higher energy prices. (Though it won’t pump more shale to do so, or look at the Keystone pipeline again: it imports from Russia instead.) Food exports were also untouched for the same reason.
The EU still hadn’t managed to come up with a sanctions list at all at time of writing, but apparently is ‘serious’. Yet Biden said Europe was blocking a total SWIFT ban on Russia (allegedly, it is Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Cyprus who refuse to go along with it).
Markets loved it, and equities managed to rally all the way back to a green close. War in Europe is bullish, it seems, even if part of that action was probably due to options expiry rather than underlying confidence. After all, no real sanctions and less Fed hikes, perhaps.
Putin probably expected this Western weakness given an unalloyed record of vacillation and empty rhetoric for most of the past two decades. Indeed, building on a point made by Bloomberg’s Javier Blas, the West just sent Russia the funds to pay for all its initial salvo of bombs and missiles via the commodities they have bought from it. That’s a point I raised more broadly in a Clausewitzian sense when noting the US paid for China’s military spending via its imports and China paid for that of the US by lending the dollars back to the Treasury, which is not the mythical win-win free trade most free-traders think of.
Indeed, of the three scenarios we put forward in our recent report on ‘How We Would Pay for the War’ –war (A); war and sanctions (B); war and primary and secondary sanctions ©– we are still closer to A than B. Ask Wall Street.
As such, energy prices came off to below $100 – but wheat, which feeds hundreds of millions worldwide, continues to soar. The fear is not sanctions but war itself. Historically, most people who died in wars didn’t do so from sword or axe or arrow, or bomb or bullet, but from the starvation or disease the war inadvertently created. We saw three cargo ships in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov bombed or struck by missiles yesterday; and Russia troops are rolling across key Ukrainian grain ports and, it seems, corn, barley, and wheat fields. The risks should be clear when markets are so tight and stocks so low.
On which, the current state of the war is unknown, but Bloomberg reports Western analysts feel Kyiv could fall within hours. Of course, the defense experts could be wrong, just like the many commentators who said there would be no invasion. However, with no air power Russian victory always seemed inevitable. The White House says it is prepared to again accept refugees, this time from Ukraine, which flags defeat not victory.
If so, commodity markets can ‘relax’ about the war. But then we find out if the relatively small number of Russian troops vis-à-vis the local population can hold the country, or if there is violent resistance that makes this an ulcer in the Russian underbelly for years – including in the grain belt. The focus would also turn to sanctions again: would occupied Ukrainian output be accepted globally? If yes, what message does that send? If no, what price will be paid by innocents?
Yet even if Russia wins quickly, global markets need to worry, as I said after Afghanistan fell – and Wall Street immediately forgot “because markets”.
Kabul and Kyiv: what a geopolitical track record for Western hegemony that would be within 12 months. The world is already asking ‘Where next?’ – because there will be a ‘next’. That point was partially underlined by John Kerry giving a TV interview in which he placed greater emphasis on the carbon emissions of the invasion(!), and that it may distract Putin from ‘going green’. He stressed the Arctic was thawing: yes, Russia sees that as a huge geostrategic opportunity for itself!
What John Kerry and the wolves of Wall Street alike fail to see is that Russia is showing us a new kind of war in two ways.
First, defense analysts argue Putin is demonstrating the stability/instability paradox that knowing he has nukes, and so does the US, the door is opened, not closed, to conventional warfare. Hypothetically, as military planners have long done, imagine Putin were to roll towards the Baltics or the Suwalki Gap between Poland and Lithuania to carve a path to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Could NATO stop him on the ground? No. Could the US nuclear umbrella, or that of France? Yes. But what if Putin threatened to nuke New York or Paris? Who would blink first: America and France, over the Baltics, or Putin – who also seems to be doing a good version of the ‘madman’ theory. I stress this is hypothetical – but the EU cannot even agree on sanctions. Do you really think they would agree to bleed, or risk nuclear attack, for smaller members? This is repugnant world of our scenario A: dog eats dog; all against all; rely only on yourself. It gives me no pleasure to think that, or write it, or see the EU unable to act on it. It should give no one pleasure to try to trade it.
Second, look at it this way. The West has rich digital economies based on the ‘output’ of on-line influencers, pet therapists, yoga and Pilates classes, mobile gaming, YouTubers, lifestyle planning, Marie Kondo helping people get rid of their too-much-stuff, asset bubbles –and selling tranches of said bubbles to each other– all book-ended by endless central-bank liquidity. It’s a society where the middle-class lives in a comfortable bubble, never wondering where things like food and electricity, or physical goods, actually come from. Yet for now they still control the ‘rules of the game’, such as finance; hold the commanding heights of technology, despite terrible education systems and not paying engineers or scientists a decent wage; and collectively still have the world’s largest military – albeit very unevenly distributed and fading in relative power terms where it matters most.
The ‘revisionist’ powers like Russia are much poorer, more physical economies driven by raw materials (energy, metals, agri commodities), or, in China’s case, taking those materials and transforming them into too many goods – in short, controlling industrial supply chains. Yes, there are also pointless asset bubbles book-ended by endless central-bank liquidity; but parts also run like a 19th century gold standard (i.e., fiscal prudence, mercantilism, and militarism). It’s a tough, ultra-competitive society. Their collective financial power is rising, aided by the West; their technology is improving, aided by the West; and their military power is rising, aided by the West.
Logically, if the West won’t use its financial power and hold back its technology, and try to get some physical control of resources and supply chains back, and revisionists will use control of physical resources and/or supply chains, and don’t care so much about finance, then we don’t have to think too hard to see which triumphs over time, and especially if things get kinetic in the geographies closest to said revisionists. Which changes things on the ground, as we see in Ukraine. It was hardly a model Western free market before the war, but if Russia wins, what do you think its economy will look like? (And perhaps expect to start hearing about ‘The Ukraine’ again, as it was dubbed in English by Russia in the past, to make it into a territory and not a state: Russia may become as twitchy about the definite article as China is about the use of some nouns around Taiwan.)
Logically, under a ‘revisionist’ economic system, although Western oligarchs will be fine, the wolves of Wall Street will become state-leashed puppy dogs; or rugs. Logically, the only way for those wolves to keep howling is within a smaller territory. And this crisis is driving just that deglobalisation – and one side is fine with it. For example, Russia is effectively being removed from global financial markets and its stocks slumped 33% yesterday, and the Ruble moved past 90 at one point – and Putin did not flinch at all. Russia was prepared for the limited sanctions thrown at it. Rebuilding an empire it can control matters more – and we are paying for it to do so. Even if we throw it off SWIFT, the West loses its one-world dream, and commodity prices soar to destabilizing levels.
So, no, I am not cheerleading one system over the other, or ‘strongmen’. But I am pointing out that the existential ‘virtual-financial’ vs. ‘physical-military’ political-economy dynamic here should matter to ALL markets. That it doesn’t seem to worries me deeply.
And I know it isn’t seen as mattering to most. In conversations with different parts of the buy- and sell-side in Asia, I hear that rather than grappling with the issues above or admitting that war in Ukraine shows they have been fundamentally wrong for years and, the late rally yesterday aside, are positioned wrong for what logically lies ahead, the choice is still to switch the conversation to irrelevant technical discussions to avoid this all. “Is it time to go long sector X or Y?” “How do you feel about name Z?” That is the self-deluding intellectual gruel being served.
Si vis pacem para bellum has lasted the test of time: si vis pacem para fallacia will not.
Happy Friday – if you can
‘Checkmate?’, Putin Ushers In The New Geopolitical Game – By Tom Luongo
https://tomluongo.me/2022/02/25/putin-us...ame-board/
https://i0.wp.com/tomluongo.me/wp-conten...614134.jpg
Up until February 23rd, 2022, the powerful countries of the world played a very rarified game.
Too many people try to analyze geopolitics like it is a game of chess. Move, counter-move. Push a pawn? Threaten a knight, that type of thing. It’s easy to understand and makes for good copy.
In the past I’ve tried to liken it to a multi-player version of Go, with anywhere from four to 6 different colored stones on the board trying to take territory. It was a better metaphor but nearly impossible to describe adequately. In fact, at times, it was exhausting.
The reality is that neither of these metaphors are explanatory.
Because the only accurate model for geopolitics is actually Calvinball.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/09/12
You know that game. That’s the one from Calvin & Hobbes.
Contrary to your memory of the legendary comic strip, there were rules to Calvinball that went something like this: Calvin got to make the rules up as he went along.
In geopolitics it pretty much comes down to whoever is the strongest player got that power.
Here’s the thing. Up until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and yes, it is an invasion, justifiable or otherwise) there was something called the ‘rules-based order’ promoted mainly by the US but also supported directly by the European Union and the Commonwealth.
The rules of the ‘rules-based order’ were simple. We make the rules, you follow them. We reserve the right to change the rules whenever we want to suit our purpose.
It was the geopolitical equivalent of Sam Francis’ idea of ‘anarcho-tyranny,’ which boils down to, “rules for thee, but not for me.”
We’ve heard the Russian diplomats complain about this for years. Why have these rules if they are not ever enforced?
As I point out all the time when talking about leftist ideologues purity spiraling towards self-destruction, we have these rules because only others’ hypocrisy counts. Sub-humans are not allowed to talk or even be a part of the conversation.
And in the world of diplomacy as practiced by the collective West, the Russians are definitely sub-human, just like the unvaxxed, anyone to the immediate right of Karl Marx and who isn’t a furry.
All that changed when Russian tanks crossed the border, stand off missiles hit anti-aircraft and artillery batteries, and marines came onshore in Ukraine.
For months we’ve been treated to the dumbest and most infuriating facsimile of diplomacy I’ve ever witnessed. It beggared belief listening to the nauseating virtue signaling of US ‘diplomats’ who refused to engage Russia’s concerns in even a half-serious manner while blaming them for every issue on the planet.
It was as clumsy as it was stupid, to quote Darth Vader.
It was clear that Putin and his staff would be given this ultimate option, invade Ukraine and face global opprobrium or kneel before Zod.
Their miscalculation was in thinking that Russia actually cares one whit about that global opprobrium at this point. By their actions in Ukraine this week, it is clear they do not.
They weren’t afraid of NATO’s posturing, Biden’s threats of sanctions or of Liz Truss’s difficulties with basic geography. The longer this standoff over Ukraine went on the more it was clear that most of the people in positions of power and their support staff have less than zero understanding of the parameters of their jobs.
Because of this their constant invocation of the ‘rules-based order’ rang more and more hollow since they were simply acting like a precocious six-year old boy playing with his stuffed tiger.
Pronouncements of consequences and ‘sanctions from hell’ and threats of holding our breath until we pass out were rightly ignored by Putin and his staff.
For decades NATO enjoyed the luxury, thanks to US military primacy, of making up the rules and forcing everyone else to react to them.
It goes back to the statement, most likely made by then Vice-President Dick Cheney, on the ‘reality-based community,’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’“
What’s been clear to me is that those placed in positions of power by Klaus Schwab and the rest of The Davos Crowd they still think we live in this type of world. That no matter what the people want or other countries need, they will dictate the time, place and parameters for any and all confrontations.
However, the longer this went on the more it was clear that Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, were inching towards that moment where they would change the rules. I wrote back in March 2018 that Putin’s State of the Union address where he unveiled new weapon systems was a major turning point.
https://tomluongo.me/2018/03/02/putins-u...f-the-war/
For the next four years we have seen a steady escalation of neoconservative insanity in a vane attempt to push US missile systems closer to Moscow, contra to all signed international agreements, UN resolutions about resolving the breakaway republics of Ukraine and, frankly, common decency.
After a 2021 where things in Ukraine kept getting hotter and hotter, Putin and Lavrov, having backed Biden down over the summer with June 16th’s summit, knew the time had come to change the rules of the game.
If they didn’t Russia would cease to be.
The old game entered its spiral towards conclusion when Russia sent and published publicly its draft proposals for a new security architecture concerning Russia and NATO’s relationship in Eastern Europe.
Russia acted, setting the operational tempo from that moment forward. It forced the US and Europe to react to them as they created a new reality, set new rules.
The US was now the rule-taker rather than the rule-maker. You knew this because it prompted multiple rounds of scurrying to Moscow by officials from all over the West trying to talk the Russians off their new game.
To zero avail.
As The Saker pointed out in his initial thoughts on Russia’s recognition of the breakaway republics of the Donbass, this operation in Ukraine was a long time in the planning. This was not an action that was taken lightly.
http://thesaker.is/russia-recognition-of...-thoughts/
Again, I will repeat here what I wrote above: this recognition should NOT, repeat, NOT, be seen in isolation. It is just ONE PHASE in a PROCESS which began at least a year ago, or more, and there is much more to come.
Truer words and all that.
For months I’ve been telling you that Nordstream 2 would eventually be turned on and that Russia would not be kicked out of the SWIFT telecommunications network regardless of what happened.
The former is still on the table, as Germany was the most vocal about not doing the latter.
Even I missed that Russia was planning to change the game this radically, thinking there was always a Davos-approved solution which didn’t involve extensive use of the Russian military, but still ended with the US looking foolish.
In retrospect, it was obvious we were always headed to this end-game because Russia saw the opportunity to change the rules.
Less than a day after Russia wiped out both Ukraine’s military power and political architecture, President Sundowner confirmed that all the West’s threats were as empty as the heads of the Millennials running the propaganda desk at the State Dept.
https://twitter.com/ClintEhrlich/status/...9781442563
After months of threatening Russia with expulsion from the SWIFT financial messaging system, Europe complained and someone finally showed some sense.
Cutting Russia out of SWIFT would mean the end of the EU as anyone has known it or wishes it could be in the future. It would mean the end of the petrodollar system.
Russia is too systemically important to the global commodity trade that goes far beyond energy. It supplies not only the marginal barrel of oil and BTU of natural gas, but pound of nickel, palladium, titanium, enriched uranium and tungsten. It’s a major supplier of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, potash, and urea.
Do this and Europe not only freezes to death with their three days of gas reserves but starves once the global food supply is disrupted. Do this and Biden enters the mid-terms with $8/gallon gas, and 20% real inflation.
The Fed raising rates will be the least of anyone’s worries.
Russia held all the cards in the negotiations over Ukraine and we recklessly pursued a policy of insults and amateurish propaganda, refusing to believe Russia wouldn’t make her final stand.
By putting boots on the ground, planes in the air and missiles up the ass of every Ukrainian military installation across the country, Russia turned the ‘might makes right’ argument of the US and Europe on its head.
The game has changed because the rules have changed. It’s no longer a game of rhetorical chicken and virtue signaling.
Realpolitik doesn’t matter a bit when missiles are in the air. This is the point that was lost on so many in the professional commentariat for the past few months. They’ve never contemplated the idea that someone could do this, no less did it.
They are now confused and angry, working through their ‘cope’ in public. If it wasn’t so pathetic it would almost be hilarious.
For nearly a decade the West poured billions into Ukraine to arm it and prepare it for this week. Those billions were essentially wiped out in a matter of hours. It took a day to expose all of NATO’s posturing as nothing but that, posturing.
We now have to come to terms with this new game. It’s a game where the rules will be far more equitable because the unthinkable alternatives are no longer theoretical, they are real.
It’s real because the threats to Russia posed by NATO’s designs on Ukraine were always real no matter what was said.
So Biden and Davos got the war in Ukraine they’ve been begging Russia for. The problem for them now is Russia isn’t playing their game anymore and they are wholly unprepared for the next one.
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ORGONE ENERGY WITH CODY TALLANT (ORGONE PRACTITIONER)
