Author Archive for patrickm

Jacinta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVG79xHHu1M
A new rightist leader has stepped up! She evidently has still to learn about the concept pseudoleft!

Theory

There is a BUT that follows my ‘throat clearing remarks’ that are otherwise in furious agreement with this link. (Nolan Peterson – Reporting from Ukraine Since 2014 and Countering Russian Propaganda Narratives.)

Much of this interview is simply clear headed ‘outsider’ observations that point to why Putin’s Russia will lose and Zelensky’s Ukraine will win, provided the west keeps up material support that is required, which I think they will. I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment, other than saying as Zelensky does, the west ought do much more and do it faster!

I think 100% of Ukraine must – and I believe will be liberated, and over the next few years Ukraine will become a ‘normal’ western country, and a crucial and militarily strong member of NATO. But the Ukrainian masses will be coping with a shattered economy, and it will be massively impoverished and contain more traumatized people than any other European country. Green policies will not just be a slow up to further development but will if not opposed and defeated cost lives. This war is only a first step forward towards the bright future that I am currently enjoying in the advanced industrialized ‘lucky country’ of Australia.

Yet we only have to consider the corruption of the likes of Berlusconi (who was born in 1936 in Milan Italy) and that is important to remember to understand how trivial that small yet important (massively costly in lives and suffering) first step actually is. We ought to reflect on the history of struggle in Italy to prepare our mindset for the coming struggle in Ukraine because quite blatant frauds and self-serving phony ‘leaders’ are also going to sprout like mushrooms in Ukraine. Oligarch scum like Berlusconi rose to the top in Italy and these types will continue to do well in Ukraine as well. The elites will always try to grab the wealth of a county liberated by working class blood. The oligarch class are not just going to vanish!

But as is correctly said, a journey of 1,000 miles always begins with the first step, and to drive that point right the way home, we can all recall the Irish farmer advising the US tourist “Ah Yes, well now if I was going to democracy, I wouldn’t be starting from here!” So, working class people had better keep a sharp eye open for our own class interests. Class interests may be a currently unpopular theoretical issue, but that won’t be the case when the scramble for ownership rights takes off after the war.

In this interview one glaring point slips by and is genuinely muddle-headed thinking as soon as we reflect upon it in the Ukraine war context.

This blind spot is so ubiquitous in liberal, conservative and (thus) pseudo-left circles that the interviewer who shares the bias can’t even spot the elephant as it enters the room. But it is an elephantine problem for pro-democracy people of all stripes.

2014 WAS far more serious than many western people realized and those of us pointing to it at the time were quickly ignored, and told we were war mongers and did not understand how powerful these ‘unpleasant’ Russians were etc.. The supposed adults in the room understood that concessions had to be extended to the obviously imperialist aggressor country. The limp response of the western liberal elites pointed DIRECTLY to a failure to make revolution for democracy! Too little too late was the inevitable result. Western leadership was zero and the Putin type fascists drew their lessons and as a result became both emboldened and deluded!

So IMV back in 2014 an unnoticed political bankruptcy fell on those liberal, conservative and pseudo-leftists who had agreed with a view they shared with Putin. Putin, like all tyrants wants stability and predictability in a world where they and their sort can get on with their aggrandizement and exploitation in (for them) peace!

Both the interviewee and the interviewer are obvious and determined current opponents of Putin. Both will I believe now firmly stick with the Ukrainians no matter what happens. And that is the very good news! I also believe this attitude of solidarity and unity of purpose will spread no matter what horrors unfold over the next few years.

But in this interview at about the 7:30 point, the well-known Putin viewpoint gets blurted out. After pointing out that the brave Ukrainians are fighting for their democratic revolution, Nolan Peterson says; “Some people just can’t compute that. Maybe they’re so jaded by the misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

So, all right-thinking people can nod away at yet another repetition of this semi-religious trope. But it is bankrupt and always has been. It is a failure to understand how democratic revolution does require armed struggle and is nothing if not protracted and ‘costly’. Failure to even understand the requirement for revolution is at the very heart of this western liberal foolishness.

Failure of the west to keep going with protracted democratic revolution and develop and expand that revolution led directly to Putin, and his kind all round the world being emboldened by the feeble west of the Merkel and Obama types! They did bugger all in 2014! How many times did we see these sick liberals shaking Putin’s hand while he continued to spread his anti-democratic gangster conduct right round the planet!

Obama abandoned the people of Syria as the classic example of his most egregious anti-democratic failures. Merkel funded Putin with huge gas pipeline income and did so while the Ukrainians were fighting against Putin’s anti-democratic invasion. All western leaders did almost nothing while the cancer spread! Instead, they held dopey conferences about the F…ing weather! They economically crippled western countries and strengthened anti-democratic forces and countries!

These and other pseudo-left leaders did not increase the required military spending. They did F…all to drag the people of Africa out of their poverty by a rapid industrialization program. Leaving the door ajar for the anti-democrats like the Russians and Chinese to spread their poison and meddle on that continent, which they have. Naturally the refugee flows from around the world are not flowing to Russia or China and all the other non- democracies as a rule though for example a North Korean may flee to China.

It’s my contention that the west has now no credible theory to move forward with but almost universally bleats a false understanding of what democracy and the democratic revolution is all about. The tyrannies are openly returning to what they have always known and that is czarist like ‘stability’ and the required suppression of lower-class peoples and anyone else that stand in the way! But the west is all at sea and has been for decades and now constantly battling woke madness is the current depth of the obvious idiocy any genuine leftist and rightist democrats are forced to be dealing with on an almost daily basis.

Over these directionless last few decades, the western media and ruling elites have lost their collective marbles. For just one example they have given distractive attention even to children like Greta Thunberg when by rights she had earnt no right to speak and ought to have been doing some study. The dominant western ruling elites have been the liberals and simply could not deal with the complexity of the real struggle of people like Malala Yousafzai, Ayan Hirsi Ali, who both had earned rights to speak as had others who had real skin in the game but were simply not woke enough. These two were slowly pushed to the back by the weight of the liberal -BBC type- bias. While those with the bias had and have, no answer whatsoever to the big issues of our times. Issues like refugee flows as a result of the ongoing ‘natural’ or organic development of a industrial world as it moves through its capitalist stage. Refugees are also flowing as pure Putinesque imperialist or fascist policy, an there is no direct answer to that either!

The western ruling elites -in Dr. Frankenstein manner- lost control and became overrun with the current pseudo-left dominated ‘woke’ nightmare that had been on its ‘long march’ through the universities and hence slowly through the bureaucracies! The anti-democrats across the world drew the appropriate lessons and their long ‘soft’ and very minor retreats were aggressively reversed. Democratic progress stalled yet again.

The western liberal elites now dominated the cultural high grounds and -for example- have of late constantly attacked Erdogan as he struggled to both keep democracy in Turkey, and deal with the western failures all around him. Erdogan has had to deal with millions of refugees! They are the product of the anti-democrats. The big issues such as the wind back of fascism and Islamofascism especially in the swamp of the Middle East and North Africa fell to Erdogan! The ball picked up after the attacks of 9/11 by the US was now fumbled and dropped by the directionless western ruling elites. The handful in the US war cabinet of GWB who changed policies failed to even draft ‘the memo’ explaining to the world what they were really up to and failed miserably to spread the reasoning behind this change of direction far and wide. Being directionless and without the theory of and for the democratic revolution the next lot that took charge retreated and almost tried to revert to the old policies but found they couldn’t; so then they distracted themselves and easily fell into the anti-carbon dioxide climate fad popularized by their defeated champion Al Gore no less! True believers of utter rot!

Where are the current crop of Hitchens to speak up and in doing so shame all ‘good liberals’ into bleating even more excuses? That is what they do; bleat excuses for the constant sell outs of all the world’s people’s struggling for democracy AND industrial development! A development necessarily fueled by fossil fuels!

As obvious as Putin’s anti-democratic crusades is the bastardry of the ‘realists’, who would now and have always sold-out real democracy. But so too do the woke and others in these ruling elites be they dopey greens, open liberals, conservatives (neo or not) or painted ‘red’ in the pseudoleft.

That ‘war is tragic’ is not at issue – of course it’s tragic, but the reality that Baathism and all manner of fascism -like Putin has put on display in Ukraine since 2014- will not cease until it is stopped IS at issue and the world’s leading liberals have comprehensively failed to respond to this reality. For eight long years they did not much more than sit on their duffs and pretend to be the adults in the room! While talking twaddle about the weather!

Genuine leftists maintain that fighting back is not tragic.

Nolan Peterson has now gotten very real and knows that there is a pseudo-left bleating about peace and calling for negotiations! He knows they must be opposed! Consider Scott Ritter! How revolting can you get? But the west must be prepared to fight and that means an ongoing capacity to fight! We can’t just magically have the capacities required! Who can bear to watch the likes of ‘Democracy Now’ or Chomsky drone on in his venerated dotage? Clueless is just not strong enough a term for what is going on in 2023!

We democrats in 2023 require most of all an understanding that the west is all in for the genuinely democratic revolution! So that requires an understanding of what that means because it is not the simple vote that some people seem to think it is.

So, when set against Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus or the neighbors in Iran; Syria; Egypt; Palestine; Saudi Arabia; Bahrain; and so on (Especially where either Russia or China or where western ‘realist’ policies still hold sway) Iraq’s democratic revolution is clearly well along the always twisting and turning path that the democratic revolution follows. All these other places will travel a similar path even if they have currently hardly started! So ‘cast aside all illusions and prepare for struggle’ is the motto to cling to! The liberation of Iraq is now so stark as the various elections roll on cycle after cycle, yet this liberal trope still gets thrown around by our new democratic revolutionaries!

How can good liberals not notice that these anti-democrats hold exactly the same view over this recent Afghanistan started Iraq centered western war-making as they do themselves? It is well known that Putin and Assad (two blatant examples of the type abounding to the point of being almost ubiquitous in ruling class circles) were opposed to the war to liberate the various Iraq peoples from their lawful tyrant Saddam Hussein. Good liberals even called it illegal to liberate them! They jumped up and down like the Geoffrey Robinson types demanding accountability no less, before shrugging their shoulders and dropping the whole matter as if they were powerless. As Arthur reminded us; Yes of course it was illegal! Revolutions make laws, laws do not make revolutions! All revolution is illegal! Who among these liberals have not chanted ‘no blood for oil’? Yet many years on, how could they not have noticed that if an invading force doesn’t install puppets but instead enables free and fair elections then they couldn’t possibly steal oil! They are left with no functional theory and so they bleat that therefore the war was lost! How idiotically circular can you get?

Because it’s a big blind spot that slips by unnoticed (yet if seen can’t be unseen) IMV we have to go back to some very basic issues to reveal why it’s almost ubiquitous among otherwise clearly intelligent pro-Ukraine, pro-democracy people.

Vlad ‘the lar’ is a tyrant behaving as any previous Czar! He is an anti-democrat and will not disappear without a protracted armed struggle that will see him eventually defeated and the sooner the better. Nevertheless, his surviving supporters WILL simply go underground and continue their ongoing struggle against democracy. That is the nature of political opponents. So we must remind ourselves as the protracted war goes on that, ‘Where the broom does not reach the dust will not disappear of its own accord.’

Eventually there will be no open enemy, instead the enemy will regroup underground and pretend to be a democrat by day and operate as a gangster by night! That is how it works in the real world. Revolutions proceed as two steps forward and one step back. But after another century or two has passed there is no going back and now almost no one wants to reinstate the Kaiser or the Czar etc.. But this can’t be a good enough answer for us!

I would go further and say that no matter what the west does now (after all just think how revolting this ‘leadership’ is from Macron to Trudeau and so on as they prattle their green poison) this revolution will roll on. It will roll on and into Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Syria, Iran etc etc. But the point is this is what a democratic revolution ALSO looks like.

A great many westerners having no understanding of their own history and the role played by quite conservative religious types in their own democratic struggles could not see it when it was infant like and swaddled in middle eastern garb. That was after the events of 9/11 declared to even the blind that there was a world-wide Islamo-fascist movement that had and has to be fought! Thus, a credible strategy had and has to be devised to win that war that was declared ready or not on that never to be forgotten day of infamy.

Some, like the Thatcher’s and Reagan’s of the world couldn’t, only a few decades back, even see the real struggle in South Africa just a few years earlier than 9/11! Our ruling classes carried on life while Mandela sat in prison just as Marwan Barghouti still does today! Thatcher could see the problem when it sprang from Argentina and tried to swallow the Falkland Islands, but she could not see it in Ireland. After the Irish armed struggle spread to the financial center of London, Blair managed to break that historical log jam and peace has come to Ireland, even while the British continue to lie to themselves.

Reagan, in pre-Obama style, tried to sell the British out over the Falklands, and US General Haig was shown the door by Thatcher in no uncertain terms and Reagan was THEN forced by reality to come to his senses! But these conservatives were democratically blind to South Africa and the war for greater Israel still bumbled along as it does to this day.

Contagion

Social contagion is rife! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbuGMbqjsSw

Phase 3!

The next big Ukraine push back is still to unfold and could still be weeks away but I don’t think so. I think this is now days. But events are unfolding that have caused me to pause and rethink what might be delaying this ‘long awaited’ counter offensive.

How devastated Russian troop morale is, and how ‘evident’ it is, could be the big issue that further delays the big push. Shaping operations for the Russian morale structure is also important and delay may save a lot of lives.

We are about to see that it is the masses that make war, and the mass of Russian soldiers just don’t want to be killed or injured! They will again donate large quantities of heavy ‘stuff’ when they turn and run from the swift moving hard hitting Armed Forces of Ukraine. (AFU)

Anyway, my money is still on almost ‘now’ and I expect to see quite a bit of ‘Market Gardening’ activity about to get underway (with naturally the appropriate lessons drawn from that historical over stretch). BTW I always thought Montgomery has been over rated but as usual I digress.

What is going on in Bakhmut is now doing huge damage to the Russian war fighting spirit. It amounts to a serious point of infection and could become the issue that provokes a more wide spread surrendering from these pitiful trenches. Russian troops surrendering in very large numbers is quite obviously the best hope of solid progress when this push finally does get fully underway.

It’s a realistic hope that a mass bolt from the front lines (in any car that’s to hand and that is how a rout will begin till the last ones grab the nearest bike) will smash what is left of Russian morale. The Russian high command would be terrified of the example set last time, particularly in the north and this time the AFU come calling they are going to be far more deadly than last year. The coming hard fought and costly victories will smash the Russians.

There will undoubtedly be some small areas where a rout quickly sets in and when it does the exploitation of those weak points will cause this long front line and the vast in depth defensive networks to then turn into a Russian Maginot Line.
These defensive structures are in essence all a delusion. All that effort will have produced a replay of the attack through the ‘impenetrable’ Arden.

Those that remain on the long front line will either retreat in good order or they will do so in bad order. But retreat they will, and it is only a question of how far and how fast before they get caught up with! Then they won’t be defending troops holding any sort of advantage but rather a series of badly organized columns running out of everything that had made them an invading army. Most that make it back to Crimea and the northern retreat will do so without any heavy weapons systems or any supplies at all. The Italians being routed in Nth Africa is the ‘look’ that I am fully expecting but there are plenty of other examples. Everything calls for momentum! The big MO is everything for the next 3 months.

IMV the rate of artillery loss by the Russians is going to become the most important of the various KPI’s and this is because the AFU out-range and are far more accurate (and that is a devastating combination) and the Russians are an army built on the power of their artillery. Break the artillery and you break the back of this beast. Once a couple of thousand fighting vehicles and their supporting infantry etc are across the mighty Dnipro river the attacks will be swift and significant territory liberated.

I would take a bet that Crimea will be in range of artillery and HIMAR’s etc by the end of June! Even if it’s not there are now Storm Shadow and other long range missiles that will be able to destroy what has to be destroyed in that most crucial of all target territories!

I think the lack of F16’s to deal with the Glide bomb menace is very unfortunate but other Ground based air defense -GBAD- will have to do for now, but at least some western political leaders NOW get it! Well done by the British!

The momentum that the breakthroughs (my guess is there will be ‘1’ across the river and ‘2’ from the Zaporozhye front) will generate, make this phase of this bloody war predictable and so Putin could 3 or 4 months down the track face a revolt and/or he could do something unexpected. But whatever he does now he is a dead man walking! How many further deaths he brings is the only issue. He is slowly turning into a paper tiger and this process will pick up speed.

The Russian defense trenches do not stand a chance. We can hope and even expect thousands of prisoners to be swept up and a vast liberation in the next 100 days and it will soon be time to try to sink every ship in the Sevastopol Harbor!

I think the process of this war in however many phases it takes, will change the way the world works for the rest of this century but that is another story for those that follow us, it is certain to change the next twenty years!

Glory to the Ukrainians. Onward to phase 4 and the liberation of Crimea! But first…

Kaboom

‘It’s not that you love the planet, it’s that you hate humanity ‘: Dr Jordan Peterson
Russian false flag operation gas pipes go bang. What’s Putin doing here? Gazprom hasn’t broken any contract now, have they? Putin is now desperate and moving on all fronts. He will try to mobilise 1,000,000 men so announces 300,000. But they can’t really be re-trained and they will be trying to do so in winter! How long before he blows up the polish pipe?  How about Christmas day? Under these obvious threats, coal is the only secure method for fighting the Russian hybrid and undeclared war.  The annual climate scare-fest set for Cairo this yr will sound a lot different to Glasgow! I hope!

Undoubtedly Lidia Thorpe is not fit to be in parliament but would fit right in at either Glasgow or Cairo but I think that if she could get 1 per cent of the vote she ought to have 1 in 100 of the seats. We have a 2 party dictatorship like almost all the anglo world. But IMV a proportional vote would see her right out the door! Green sharks will circle her soon enough. I doubt she will get a second term.  The obvious poison of the wokest of the woke!

And the ‘reply’ from Peterson comes up next he makes a great deal of sense from what I would say was a Marxist standpoint where he forcefully attacks the pseudolefts but seems utterly unaware of the Hitchens-type Marxists let alone the Maoists in the government of Nepal say or Australia’s own couple of individual theorists (but that is fair enough for we rarest of all breeds of social theorists have not shown up for many years outside of the tiny debate circles and a couple of newspaper articles etc). If it were not for Hitchens I would say he had a right to such ignorance as the world has long been swamped in left in form right in essence pseudoleft drivel. But Hitchens did exist as a well-known public Marxist dissenting from the pseudoleft and what is more anti-Stalin and anti-Mao to boot! So his rabid Solzhenitsyn (a Putin supporter) anti-communism is only less inexcusable than Steve Owens. As a historian, he makes a very good psychologist! I don’t know that he has ever made an attempt to even understand the US civil war to ww1 period across the world let alone what was to be done about such an appalling era. His murdering Marxists just drop from the sky….but anyway this is good

Epstein presented 6 graphs.  Each shows that the power supplied from the parasite unreliables had several periods when they were ‘totally out to lunch’ or very low. So zero or negligible power was coming in from these unreliables when they were desperately required. 100% backup was and is required from reliable energy producers who thus ALSO failed when so stressed. They ought not have been stressed in this manner. Parasite unreliables are what people like Obama, Biden and Albanese describe as renewables. They are an additional cost burden that the western woke are insisting is a wonderful investment that will save the planet from a problem that only exists in their green minds. These parasites rob the self evidently actually always required reliable power producers that MUST be invested in, of income. That income robbing for religious purposes has the same value as a tithe to the religious authorities in power in Iran or the Catholics back in the day when they were in the same blockage position in the western world. Your views are those of a religion hiding behind the word science. Nothing more.

The solution to all power shortages and grid failures is to build (invest scarce monies in) more reliable producers and ensure they are not as stressed as they have become under current policies; governments ought not to permit such scary margins to develop and also incidentally ought not even to permit the funding of the Chinese or the Russians fascists! As we see this will require coal-fired power stations and all the rest of the fossil fuels. But the fools who ‘follow’ Greta and King Charles want to put more Chinese unreliables into the systems that are currently unstable as we shun the Russians!

Epstein is obviously correct in his diagnosis of the underlying problems the western world is now up against. He is correct in what he says must be done to create a stable and cost-efficient energy expansion for peoples right across the globe. What level of foolishness is Steve Owens prepared to descend to in order to paint Epstein as a non-expert not worth listening to, while recommending that people vote for Al Gore etc? He is clearly an expert in this field as I suppose I am over the Pell issue. He has done the work for about 2 decades. I did the work for less than a year. He has solved the problems that other people failed to solve because he started by putting the flourishing of humanity at the base and therefore stood the issues right side up. I knew what he was doing because I had done it already decades ago. He has done it better than anyone else that I have come across. He is thus a very hated individual.  To be attacked by the enemy is a good thing…

The world needs more fossil fuels not less! Just the other day the fracking ban has been lifted in England! It has not been lifted yet in Scotland or Wales. It must be. That gas from fracking is desperately required and greenie fools are preventing the adoption of cost-effective energy policies in order to save the planet from a non-existent climate crisis. There is a real energy crisis and there has always been one for the world’s poor in unindustrialised backwaters where they suffer the real gaps. Closing the gaps is what the revolutionary left insists upon. That is a current massive loss of human life! You say nothing about this real problem and permit children like Greta to be used by people like Albanese and all the rest up to and including Turnbull and Morrison with no comment. It is an either-or choice for the investment of scarce public resources. Your policies are to rob the poor of rapid industrialisation now while allowing the elites of the world to talk twaddle about the future and criticise those who have called this junk science out for what it is. Epstein leads and you like all the other idiots from your trot background get in the way. You keep working with the ALP stalking horses like the Professor Chubb types of this world as you stay silent about what they are up to. You don’t dare write up the ‘glories’ of your past activities. You are the blank stare for a very good reason. What could you possibly say? I have seen this conduct for over fifty years and it always starts with a nitpick and ends with the blank stare of the CPA-ML types. When the Ukrainian masses sought greater freedoms and took the Maidan you looked for the fascists in the ranks and when you supposedly found them you backed Putin. What Russian leader would not take over Crimea was how you reasoned! The Donbas and Crimea were not worth pointlessly losing lives over you reasoned. The Russians would win in the end anyway was your conclusion.  NOW you have a big problem on your hands. When is the right time to betray the Ukrainians? When do you have to go quiet and move on?

Most of the world is still an undemocratic swamp and no part of the swamp will progress without an armed struggle.  That is the very nature of the long road to any democratic future.  We live in hope but are not in a state of delusion.  When Libya turned into a protracted struggle as I thought it would Steve Owens realised he had made an ‘error’ and jumped into yet another almost silent life raft. From that powerless drifting spec on the ocean of theory, he again returned to the usual ‘left’ ALP/green anti-communists anti-imperialist drivel Steve is renowned for.

What a terrible speech to the UN by Biden,  a genuinely wasted opportunity at a crucial moment in history. Instead of explaining why the world must come together to undo Putin’s aggression and staying focused on that Biden rambled about his election near 2 years ago and his wonderful woke policies, particularly his stupid climate religion; he just grazed over the whole paddock of wokedom. Utter rubbish; a woke moron boasting about his new religion.  Steve supports the King and this worldwide woke moronic junk that does and ought to divide people.  Then he attacks Epstein as a matter of course.  Steve is as incapable of honestly reasoning these issues through as he has been over Ukraine or Pell or any other of the numerous issues that he can’t make any progress with.   He held a now blatantly discredited position over Ukraine from 2014 when he was an apologist for Putin!  He is going silent about Ukraine now because he knows where the reasoning will lead him.  He bankrupted himself over Libya. All his ‘anti-war’ fellow travellers had no problem pointing out the glaring inconsistencies in not allowing 1 tyrant to roam around his own country and slaughter who he wanted but accepting others who roamed into other countries and enslaved other peoples with only a shrug and instead opposing a military response from evil western capitalist countries. Now Steve Owens only support the ALP types around the globe but with their ‘socialist policies’ as exemplary presented by Bernie Sanders.

I would have hoped he had risen to at least this level of stupidity but you haven’t!

I wonder if Steve NOW concedes that this (the biggest war in Europe since WW2 and that’s where both WWs started) IS the most serious situation that he has seen in his life? I still think it is; after all the nuclear threats are being made in the context of an army run by a fascist or gangster tyrant being defeated in the field!  Vlad says he is not bluffing and I recon he ought to be taken at his lying word! This is not a partial mobilisation at all! This is Putin ordering up all that he can manage! It looks to me in the context of China and others a lot like the start of a slow slide into WW3 in some respects at least. At any rate, I think an EMP air burst is very realistic.

A very big war is on and an energy crisis that Biden and his fellow travellers’ own policies have only made worse is breaking out as a direct part of that war but Biden is not explaining his plan to fight because he has not really got one!

There is Biden mostly reprising his old green shit as if nothing has changed. Shellenberger, Epstein and Lomborg etc are absolutely vital for seeing where the errors in logic are located.

What a surprise! Cancel culture is much more than just off and running it is right out of control!

Then this pops up welcome Australia to energy poverty!

This is pure idiocy from a hopeless green dope!  Give Putin a golden bridge no less! The founder with Berni Sanders no less!  Yanis Varoufakis had to say nothing but smilingly implied what his fellow rats at Democracy Now! also think but also can not say. That is he was for the ‘resistance’ in Iraq! But he can’t even now say so!! He knows that it is unacceptable to be on the side of the Islamofascists of ISIS / Al Qaeda or the plain fascists of Saddams Baathists! He knows that democracy was brought NOW to a country that had never before had the free and fair elections that have been held on a regular basis ever since. He had to smile with the implication and nothing more could be said. Nothing! Zero!

Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis 20 yrs ago progressives were warning that the neocons’ ruinous escapades in Afghanistan & Iraq would only strengthen the worst of the radical islamists – to the detriment of women and local progressives. Tragically, there is no longer the slightest doubt of that. 7:45 am · 16 Aug 2021

Or this shit .

This interview with Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer, provides an excellent addition to Alex Epstein’s work. Given the current pitts that western humanity has plumbed, there’s plenty of ‘poison to drain’ from the infected ruling classes and the currently brain-dead Inteligencia before any theoretical turnaround can generate a credible left capable of speaking to the interests of the working classes!

You can’t imagine how someone of Joe Biden’s age can function in the role, yet you can support Berni Sanders 15 months his senior; I suppose that’s to be expected given what was on offer and that you suffer from similar lunatic -peacenik and greenie- views. These are now dangerous views that quite evidently now stand directly blocking the path of human flourishing. Delicate natural balance; sustainable; net zero; all garbage!

Reliable electricity or unreliable plus the reliable is a choice but the cost burden that Steve’s fellow travelling mental midgets want to impose to fix the climate that is not broken will not be able to inflict this rot on a desperately poor smashed-up Ukraine. No such burden was even imagined at the time that Germany, Japan and Italy plus all the others were in a similar state when Bernie was a 5-year-old! Steve pretends to think ‘reports of Biden’s mental impairment are just propaganda pieces’ but then after 40 years of experience in mental health, he could not spot that witness J had a mental health issue that was being explained away as some survivor trauma issues, by the darlings of the ABC!

The speculation over Biden is simply an educated response to presented symptoms that had Joe sheltered from the pressure in the election, they are not all coming from propagandists! Just because ‘he has a stutter, always has’ didn’t stop him ever including being picked by Obama 12 years earlier. What happened was that 12 years passed, and cognitive issues often develop with advancing age. Facts on this will eventually come out but we won’t be around for me to boast about it.

By Steve’s foolish reasoning once a fascist power emerges a functionary of the system who consolidated power within the system, rather than someone who overthrew the system’ is then a non-fascist! How silly.  By my definition, the revolutionary USSR had transformed into its opposite.

Petraeus after the Ukrainian victory NATO membership must be delivered!

Junk File

Steve Owens posted the following

 

A couple of things. You really want to hitch your wagon to this guy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPfWThToClo

Coal is stone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ

New ideas can be hard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkEdyzEFHPs

January

I was writing about what Putin would do as far back as November.  This is from 20 Jan.  In the Minsk thread.  I would love to know what I got wrong.

**************

The best way to think about the current enemies of all progress is with direct reference to fascism. For example, rightists like Bolt will refer to the current Chinese leadership as running a ‘communist party’ and all that does is speak volumes about the rightist’s ignorance of the struggle against the revisionists and those in power taking the capitalist road.

Naturally, at the time of the Chinese coup, the western rightists called the people whose basic dishonesty precluded them from ever after being taken seriously, the moderates! But they were indeed (as Mao insisted they would turn out to be if they were to come to power) fascists.

For the democratically-minded individual who wants to end any tyranny at all, ‘fascism means war’ is not a slogan but rather the reality they must grasp. Anti-democratic individuals can’t (in any long-run sense) hold power any other way than through the use of force and that direct force of the few on the few is the terror relied on to intimidate the masses; so a fightback against terror must evolve from few to many as the violence escalates; war is the inevitable result.

It isn’t just Assad who becomes a murderous fascist through this process.

The problem with your very first sentence when you say ‘he won’t invade Ukraine’ is that the anti-democratic dictator of Russia (forget the form and deal with the reality) already did that whole invade thing some years ago. That’s when he was in a barefaced manner telling the world that he was doing nothing of the kind. Consequent to his singular decision and all his subsequent lying 1.5 million people have now been displaced with 14,000+ killed.

Now the thing is that though opposing troops have been pot shot shooting at each other from their ‘trenches’ for over 7 years this almost frozen conflict is not resolving itself in a satisfactory manner for the Russian invaders. So the ball has returned to Putin in our new post mother Merkel, Sleepy Joe context.

Perhaps mother Merkel who helped him get a gas pipeline built was trying to tell him that if he did things a little differently and promised to play nice then all could return to normal and even get better! I don’t know but that pipeline is not delivering gas yet!

Putin does bluff and will again, but all along he kept sending out his boys to kill people on the streets of Europe and even started to play with US elections. He bombs hospitals and drives out refugees, and has launched many more acts of war since 2014 especially in what was formerly Syria.

Right now, for example, the disruptive cyber-attacks are underway directed against Ukraine as no doubt are the stealth preparations to match the open sabre waving he has conducted over the last year; more or less ever since Belarus imploded for Lukashenko. Russian state-run cyber-attacks are in truth acts of war and at some point will cost lives as well as ‘treasure’ so the invasion and general war-making are hotting up.

So Putin’s options as far as I can see are to;
1/ concede and withdraw from his Ukraine adventure, (and there is not much chance of that methinks) or;
2/ do nothing in the face of this unsatisfactory current freeze which is not currently working to his advantage. But this choice would over time only give further advantage to Ukraine. That’s because there is wide support for western powers pumping in special forces, more arms and training etc; even the sentiment for calling Putin’s bluff by making Ukraine a member of NATO might grow. So time is most probably on Ukraine’s side and not Russia’s and this is thus a bad choice for Putin or;
3/ he must unfreeze proceedings and resume the large scale killing! He must in short choose (as simply the best from a bad lot) the most unthinkable and audacious choice and count on terror to carry the next stage forward before western economic strength alters the military situation.

What you are saying won’t happen now, already did, and the only question for Putin is what to do NEXT from these 3 choices for this ongoing area of conflict, in his world of constant military deployments. All his options are predictably bad for all concerned but they stem from his original choice to make an aggressive counter-revolutionary war after Ukraine made the first stage of a democratic revolution to rid itself of its anti-democratic, pro-Russian Oligarchs.

Many people in the west were at that time painting the Ukrainian revolutionaries as some form of a reboot of the old Ukrainian fascist nationalists, but I took the view that things had turned into their opposites.

Meanwhile, down south beyond the Black Sea in what used to be the country of Syria, Putin has NOT done so well with his HIRISE war-making once he was pitted against the Erdogan run, NATO number 2 giant Turkey at about 86million strong. Turkey is not just strategically better placed either, it is well led by a democratic Islamist, who has had to fight for his life. But note well that the western MSM like the ABC/BBC is hostile to the conservative and Islamist (totally un-woke) Erdogan government! Of course, the PKK war is the backdrop for much of the confusion on this front as has been amply demonstrated by not just my former ‘comrades’ in Melbourne but by almost all of the world’s ‘progressives’ as with Steve Owens. But ALL are clearly being blindsided by events now progressed a decade further on from when I first began to write during that long ago Arab Spring about the big war coming. You even proclaimed some time back that the war that came -where you at one time supported the FSA- was some years after Putin’s intervention lost! In short, you proclaimed that Putin had won. But I know I would much rather be an FSA fighter now than in 2012. No hesitation. I adopted the Maoist longer-term revolutionary perspective and events have not proved me wrong.

In the interests of preventing the spread of not quite latter-day western-oriented democracy, just very basic democracy, Putin has caused all manner of astute political analysts to get ‘it’ totally wrong. Putin pushed back in support of tyranny!

I thought about his actions in a far less sophisticated manner and consequently ‘knew’ who he intended to bomb and where his fighting strength would come from as it unfolded. The Turkish backed FSA was the main target. Putin worked in a ‘coalition’ and sent forces to fight the very complex revolution that was underway.

Civil and regionally influenced war in Syria had kicked off at this time and in this Friday’s prayer manner as part of what was called the Arab Spring. But this was a Spring fully predicted by we few Australian communists and less clearly but more publicly by people like Hitchens; Arthur most coherently put the case, even if with some very big blind spots as are inevitable and to be expected in all advanced theory. I and several others made more modest contributions but we all followed the same basic revolutionary communist logic. The Arab Spring was predicted from 2002. That is when we advocated ripping the fascist heart out of the ME by liberating the three peoples of Iraq from the Baathists.

Who on earth but fellow fascists can side with the ‘resistance’ now!! Some prominent ‘leftists’ did in the past; yet what changed?

At least you won’t deny that Saddam Hussein was leading a very powerful regionally dominant fascist regime who had killed millions in his totally unnecessary war-making activities designed to either enslave more people on every occasion that he made war or preserve his murderous power. You won’t try to paint that fascist as just a nasty nationalist as you are now trying to paint Putin and I assume the Chinese fascists. I know what is currently waging war on the masses across the world and it is not reactionary nationalism as the Ukrainians were painted in 20014.

When -after several rounds of free and fair elections in Iraq and with the liberated Islamist revolutionaries fighting from the front foot against the underground enemies of all progress- the democratic spring finally did come, you -being totally familiar with our anti-fascist (not necessarily communist) theorising- were no more surprised by this regional yearning for democracy turning into action than I was!

Western ruling classes plus their elites of the MSM and intelligentsia are 20 years on from 2002 still clueless as usual but even they can spot the coming spread of warfare in Belarus and Ukraine! Yet you cant.

The regional revolution in the MENA had morphed into the protracted struggle that Mao had told the world to fully expect if they wanted to achieve an overthrow of their armed oppressors. Assad’s tyranny constitutes well-armed and murderously intentioned oppressors that will not give up without a fight to the finish and Putin is on the same trajectory. How could I be surprised by the protracted nature of developing effective peoples armies to progress the worldwide trend? How could I deny the strength of the fascists? Whenever was it not so?

After the Turks shot down the Russian jet the 2 leaders managed to avoid a direct war and yet the Turks HAVE subsequently advanced thousands of elite mechanized troops into Syria and positioned themselves to shoot down more jets and barrel bombing helios etc The No 2 military power in NATO has created more no-fly zones that HIRISE makes future war in at their peril!

Now the reality is that in this expanded footprint an army of the Syrian peoples is growing under the supervision (if you like) of the democratically-minded Turkish Islamists. These peoples and this Turkish government are by western standards very conservative but they also had to fight off their own murderous military sorts just a few years back!

It was, you recall, the ragtag army that had grown over about 4 years from a core of army deserters and civilian refugees into the army that was winning the war, until Russia and the rest of HIRISE stepped in back in September 2015 and despite the ½ theorists scoffing, reversed the flow of the fighting! But they are not really winning this protracted war. Peoples war is nothing but protracted. The peoples’ army continues to be built!

Nevertheless, Putin is meddling even further south with a footprint in Lybia where the Egyptians play the larger role on the anti-Islamic and thus anti-democratic side with Erdogan led Nato no 2 leading the Islamist and thus more democratically minded side! And yes there are Islamofascists who hide among the ranks of the democratic Islamists as we all ought to suspect they would and will. Nevertheless, the choice for westerners is between allowing the Islamically minded peoples to elect their own governments or we return to the rightist ‘realist policies’ and back the military coups that Abbott for example was so glad to see come to power with Sisi. This is no real choice for a genuine democrat.

In further partnership with Eygpt, Putin meddles in other parts of Africa; and so do the Chinese. All this meddling is clearly against the interests of any democratically minded individuals who live on planet earth!

Putin is undoubtedly going to intervene further in Belarus and large scale military ‘exercises’ are already underway even though they are scheduled for February. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/17/russia-moves-troops-to-belarus-for-joint-exercises-near-ukraine-border

I’m pleased to hear that you think NATO ought to sign Ukraine up but as you know that is NOT currently even on the table and we could guess that the remnant ‘Stoke the war coalitions’ types are opposed to NATO growing larger so glad to hear you are not. You may before very much longer regain your cruise missal status. We may get you to the missile stage yet. Some say prayers are better than nothing; I don’t.

The Russian dictator who just for the sake of current comparison (for example) poisons his political opponents and assassinates investigative journalists etc; runs a terror police state! That is who he is and what he does whatever the nationalist background that he claims motivates his decisions but what’s in his interests as he sees it, come well ahead of what’s in Russia’s national interest.

Putin’s troops are not really going to go home from Belarus!

Ukraine will face a large scale Russian invasion it is only a matter of when. I guess it will be soon but it might come next year after Putin swallows Belarus.

But more war will come to Ukraine and in this sense fascism is a one-trick pony.

BTW
‘US attacks Iraq’ ought to read US-led international coalition in conjunction with the Kurds directly liberated the 3 peoples that constitute the Iraqi masses from the Iraqi fascist tyranny.
‘US attacks Lybia’ must read US saves Libyan revolutionaries from a fascist slaughter.
‘US attacks Serbia’ could well read; an exasperated US government finally forces Serbian Fascists to desist from their vicious war-making!

‘UK attacks Argentina’ must-read; Argentinian fascist military Junta attacks the UK and many thought the UK would be defeated but after the heavy effort and loss of so many ships and men the fascists were defeated instead.

Iraq attacks Kuwait and Russia attacks Georgia are accurate; and in the end, in the evolution of the democratic revolution both invasions will not stand!

Syria 6yrs

Syria 6yrs further on!
I wrote this back when Putin and Lukashenko were sending refugees into Poland so I may as well post it now that millions are on the move from a fascist invasion of Ukraine.

***************************

The handful of Australian communists who years ago commented at Strange Times fell out about what was happening in Syria in 2015 but now it’s happened.  The issues in dispute were resolved.  So why has there been no reconciliation?  What became of the former commentators?

The refugee stream into the USA is currently being crowded out of the international news reports.  Even within the US, the mostly Democrat biased MSM (still traumatized with the incurable version of the Trump Derangement Syndrome) is turning a blind eye to the smouldering wreckage of a human tragedy that this reality of modern global capitalism is.  Yet despite the variable interests of the liberal elements and the obviously non-solutions of their more ‘woke’ pseudo leftist brethren, that ongoing refugee problem remains the ongoing life-impacting issue for the more precariat masses on both sides of the US border.

The problem will undoubtedly explode again and especially so after the covid pandemic gets to be a rearview mirror issue over the next 1-2 years.  Trump or his chosen successor will thus be marked up by the ‘returning’ voters in the crucial swing states.  The widespread buyer remorse is well deserved so, despite the best efforts of Border Ctzar history maker Kamala Harris and the autocue Reader of the FreeWorld Jo -what’s my name oh yes- Biden, nothing is actually working on this front of what is transparently a world wide phenomena.

Currently, the refugees all over Europe are back in the news reports as the bodies are currently being gathered up in the cold forests of Poland and the English Channel rather than in the usual Mediterranean or now more rare -as a result of the massive efforts of the Turkish government- Agean seas.

What to do about this permanent feature of the 21st century is brutally thrown before us.

Putin policy is blatantly involved in feeding this steam of people into the west!  Lukashenko would not now act against the interests of Putin.  The dramatic events on the Belarus borders with its neighbors -principally Poland but this involves  ALL 3 neighbours.

So; 6 years after its posting, I want to remind people of this post; ‘Syria: the facts and figures – the Syria Campaign’.  Posted on September 25, 2015 by c21styork

‘As Europe struggles to deal with a surge in refugees, attention is now shifting to Syria where most people are coming from. But what is the violence they’re fleeing?   …

It’s crucial that we get the story right.    James Sadri – The Syria Campaign’

Barry posted this just after Putin had in a surprise move sent the first deployment of his air power and special forces into Syria.  At the time, Barry, myself, Arthur, and all the relevant western leaders understood who was doing the vast bulk of the killing in Syria.

Whatever were the delusions that were about to befall Arthur and Barry over the purpose of the Russian deployment, western leaders were like the comrades just not suffering a delusion on that more fundamental starting point either. They knew the Assad regime was a murderous regime standing in the way of the democratic revolution and that it was responsible for the vast bulk of the killing!

But there was clearly a dispute in western ruling elites and in leftist and pseudoleftist circles over what a ‘level one’ democracy would bring forth in Syria.  There was by late 2015 an open worry that now that the complex Syrian civil war had unfolded in the manner that it had the Islamofascists would win out and so a level one democracy would not be achieved!  So a large (even dominant) faction of the western ruling elites held that it was better to leave Assad in power!  With this view if not dominant at least very significant, Putin had more than just something to work with!  He opened his mouth and out came the lies, but all he wanted to do was credibly play for time; so he simply told people what they wanted to hear and then as time went on explained his various ‘problems’ that he would like their understanding over when ‘delays’ emerged.  Some people wanted to believe the lies but others knew it was a lie and cared not one bit that it was.  That is the way of the realists (right or ‘left’).

Our own half theorists were so full of their own genius in working out what the real purpose ‘MUST BE’ that they just left planet earth behind and ‘cancelled’ anyone like me who disputed the very notion they had any fucking clue what was going on!

Putin’s move was just one slice of what had to be understood about the complex war in Syria.  The war that had now dragged in the Russians directly and had already indirectly and directly involved the Turks was becoming clearer as the enclaves were solidified and the rubble spread.  Creating refugees was both an Assad and a Russian policy and -as is now clearly being demonstrated-  refugees remain a central part of the policy mix.

ISIS was the MSM focus at the time so the essence of events in Syria was very often not understood by all manner of people on the left and right.  Instead ‘surface issues’ like ISIS dominated the MSM and the western ruling elites thinking and in the tide that rose Islamic democracy was of course just scoffed at.

Attitudes to the Russian revisionists’ invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 point to the bigger issues of what is often referred to as the western left.  I won’t call it the Soviet invasion for obvious -Maoist- reasons despite the formal existence in a zombie form of the USSR and the inclusion of all manner of nationalities in the troop mix.

8 years later (in 1976) communists who were then known as ‘Maoists’ called the current Chinese regime fascist when this regime first emerged via a coup just when Mao died.  At that time our western ruling elites and their MSM ridiculously referred to those that made the coup as the ‘moderates’.  These days -no surprise- these viciously anti-communist Chinese bureaucrats and elite business owners are proclaimed not as the wonderful moderates but as the dreaded communists!  What do ya know!  Once again ‘totalitarianism’ will get its run in the propaganda of the anti-communists.  Mind you it didn’t get much of a run in the MSM when Sissi took power in Eygpt!

Actually, people like Tony Abbott were glad that the Muslim Brotherhood had been overthrown by Egyptian fascists.  So rather obviously he never got the memo of what the drain the swamp strategy was all about that had been proclaimed over Iraq when he was right in the thick of the Howard government.  So that memo was never ‘sent round’.  The theory was self evidently not understood or accepted.

Sisi is one thing but ‘dictator’ and ‘authoritarian autocrat’ are terms regularly hurled at Erdogan even months after people tried their best to kill him and run a coup of their own!  Go figure.

Putin probably won his elections but they are not free and fair so who cares!  At any rate, Alexander Lukashenko did not win his!

2001 is a long time ago.  By 2015 without the ‘drain the swamp’ theory as a foundation total confusion was the order of the day right across the western ruling elites.  An explanation for why the Arab Spring broke out and what (if there is to be any democracy now for the people of the MENA) is the role of the religiously minded masses is of little interest to these people when set against Islamic terrorism as the western problem that they place 1st on the worry tree.   So there was little hope in western mainstream politics and in their MSM of getting the ducks to line up. Evidently, these people who contest for dominance in two-party dictatorships don’t do theory very well!

So the people at Strange Times had a grasp of the basics and something to contribute and in the washup did fuck all.

Without a Maoist attitude to the democratic revolution and an understanding of the requirement for a people’s army (or the people will have nothing), people were bound to fall into profound errors and they did.

What is real and what is formal but not real is often an issue.

‘Totalitarianism’ as a start or finishing point is not going to cut it when there is -during armed revolutions- life or death at stake for the revolutionaries.  There is nothing more total than death to your enemies and the revolutionary left has always believed in the slogan ‘death to fascism’.

The issue that stands out starkly in 2021 as it did in 1921 is that ‘bourgeois democracy is a fraud’ not democracy is a bourgeois fraud as the fascists have it.

The revolution for the whole MENA would suffer what was to unfold because the Syrian people did not have a people’s army nor a liberating army to invade.  Iraq like Germany, Italy and Japan all those years ago had that liberating army.  The difference is both obvious and yet hardly understood right across the spectrum of humanity. Self evidently, more than just political players in the west don’t do theory very well.  No surprise that Australian Marxist theoreticians did do theory very well; it is exactly what we have been doing for more than 50 years!

Obviously, the people of the whole MENA are by my standards extremely conservative; but so many issues were not understood and causing further errors across the western world (Kurdish issues, Zionism, the national question, the great Shia V Sunnie schism, green issues V oil, globalization, refugeeing issues, on it goes…) but the interests of actual existing western democracies in being required to pitch in the real boots of armed revolutionary forces -if this revolution was not to suffer huge casualties and massive long-term setbacks- was the key strategic error.  That strategic interest was never firmly grasped.  So when the pressure was on it was not grasped at all.

Because of the usual claptrap from liberals, what was an obvious success in the liberation of the peoples of Iraq from the monstrously fascist ‘totalitarian’ Baathist regime of Saddam Hussain was seen instead as a disaster that ‘must not be repeated!

Yet within days of this post by Barry, (‘Syria: the facts and figures – the Syria Campaign’) we Australian communists fell out over the issue of what was Putin’s small deployment sent there to do!

Soon it will be 6 [7] years since Arthur would not be told he was not making any sense and that what he a few months later was waving about as the peace in our time document was a worthless Munich-style piece of paper from Putin.

But as we see, even the decency of total silence would not be forthcoming!

We know that Arthur said the Russian forces were sent to end the regime and thus end the war by bringing on elections and consequently the rebels to power and the sort for basic democracy and so on.

I said the Russian forces were there to kill the rebels then known as the Free Syrian Army that I was supporting.

History has unfolded and we can now say definitively that the Russian forces were sent there by Putin to kill the rebels and not to escort Assad out of the country etc!  We know Assad is still at least titularly heading up the regime that is in control of the big chunk of what used to be Syria but is now just the biggest of the various enclaves that have solidified from the fighting.  The Syrian enclaves – predicted and scoffed at 6 years ago- have become real and are currently -as Putin directs his attention closer to home- in a typical frozen ‘season’.

6×365=2190 the same length as what most people regard as the timespan of WW2!  But ‘civil wars are like that.  Consider for a moment the length of effort of the democratic revolutionaries in China and by that, I focus mainly on Mao and the revolutionary CCP but Sun Yat-Sen before that.

As all communists know the Syrian enclaves won’t stay frozen.  For example, the millions of Syrians living under a democratic regime in Turkey are continuing to build their revolutionary army.   As we saw without a revolutionary people’s army the people had nothing and were bombed into refugees; the fleeing soldiers who would not shoot down unarmed demonstrators that instead formed the FSA started from scratch and were, despite their very great sacrifices over those first five years slowly winning.  Then Putin’s thugs turned up with their mates from Iran and Hezbollah and reversed the direction of the war.

Erdogan has stood firm against the audacious informal Czar as the US is pretending to in the case of Ukraine while Mrs Biden as chief reminder prompts Joe to focus on the autocue.  (Good news for Biden as a new treatment for Alzheimer’s has been approved the other day!)

But at this time last year [2020], Arthur noted that the ‘EU response (presumably to the whole period of the Syrian revolution Arab spring and all the way back to the liberation of the Iraqi peoples from the Saddam Hussein Baathists) is as disgusting as the pseudoleft.  Erdogan is not “blackmailing” them but exposing their stupidity.’

‘I suspect media focus on Erdogan and Putin as bad guys mainly reflects Western desperation to not get involved.

It it is clear enough now that NATO actually wanted Putin doing what he is doing. It cannot save Assad regime or enable a long term Russian presence. Even Iran cannot stay long term.

I think the Turkish-Russian coordination and the Turkish-Kurdish conflict both reflect correct belief among all three parties that Assad regime is ending and they have to settle the outcome of that.

Western media pretends Assad has won but I don’t see it.

The Turks and Russians are on good enough terms for the Turks not to have closed the Dardanelles, but the difference is Turkey will always be there and Russia cannot and both know it.

EU response is as disgusting as the pseudoleft.  Erdogan is not “blackmailing” them but exposing their stupidity.’

Arthur is in effect saying that nobody, like say John Kerry or David Cameron got fooled by the Russian diplomatic efforts.  He says clearly, they wanted what unfolded!  Bullshit they did!

The reality is that Turkey has systematically in three tranches deployed massive numbers of well-equipped troops that will now shoot down anything that flys in any threatening manner to drop bombs near them or the civilians that they are protecting!

Turkey is caring for 3.6+ million refugees that are sheltering within its borders.

Turkey fronts Russian forces in the Azerbaijan / Armenia conflict as it does in Libya as well.

Turkey just for starters has not wanted what unfolded!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQvZ6ct6iLM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaBIDUYWKzA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb5dvXwDL3Y

 

 

 

Hagia Sophia

Around WW1 the industrialized empires of Britain and France with their very powerful navies smashed up much of the backward Ottoman empire.  But those naval forces were not very important in the final analysis. In the 4 decades leading to WW1 the Ottoman empire had often been the target of the equally vicious and murderous European imperialists.  An ongoing and massive dismemberment of its once vast empire was both historically important and was achieved during and after the world war by the land forces sweeping in from the deserts, from Greece and up from Egypt etc. Even Italy had jumped in with the support and encouragement of the British and the French, creating Libya from two of the Ottoman empire’s territories.

The pre-war activities and the success they had met with, was I think what lured the ‘believers’ like Churchill into the overreach disaster of the Gallipoli campaign .

It turned out that the big ships were a vast waste of effort when countered by the, mostly German-made, big guns on the land.  This was the period when the dreadnoughts were still thought to be the apex beasts and it was soon to be proved that they were no such thing.  Like the dinosaurs their time was coming to an end and yet even the upcoming military powers did not foresee this and expended huge effort on building and manning these massive money pits.  The new era required a new navy.

What all actually needed particularly the central powers, was U and E boats and lots of little aeroplanes.  The era when aircraft carriers were queen of the seas had arrived.

In the end, the Turks were pushed back by the army that did the work coming out from Egypt and then mostly with T E Lawrence mobilizing the locals and using them to do the bulk of the killing and dying or so the story goes.  The truth is a bit different as the conventional army pushed up the east coast of the Mediterranean.  But even the colonial cannon fodder Australians, New Zealand and Indian soldiers did much of this work for nothing but the ‘glory’ of allowing the wealthy English and French imperialist minded ruling elites to map make at the end of the war and carry on with their colonial claptrap for another few decades!  An era now so thankfully gone with the wind.

The Ottoman Empire was reduced to a country that was made ‘secular’ by a modern military man’s diktat.  The leader that began the transformation of what remained of the collapsed Ottoman empire and so modernized the Turkey that emerged, was a general, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.  After a few years at the helm, he turned the Hagia Sophia into a museum.  This doing has now been undone by the Islamist Erdogan and it has been returned to the -second hand- religious function it once had.

Hagia Sophia was once the greatest cathedral in Christendom and that’s not been forgotten by some prominent Christians! But there we were in 2020 and a Turkish court (not to be confused with a puppet Egyptian court mind but not a fully western court either) and then a democratic Islamist leader (who continues to modernize Turkey and again not to be confused with an Egyptian military coup leader but who is both a democrat and a conservative) took quite predictable steps.

Whingers the world over like the inbred journalists of the ABC/BBC started carrying on as if this was some kind of outrage! It wasn’t. I say it’s a TINA issue for democrats!

Islamist’s have control of a country as a result of peaceful democratic contest and they wanted the building back.  The democrats that run Turkey have said that it will be treated by the Turkish state just like Europe’s great cathedrals.  How good is that compared to the KSA or IRAN?  Compare Turkey to Pakistan.

100 years on and after a huge struggle it’s not run by a military man’s diktat anymore! Democracy has taken root and naturally conservative Islamists win the vote and form the government.  But we all recall that the struggle against the military taking over in a bloody coup is still a real, life and death struggle.

If you were wanting to go to 21stcentury western style democracy you wouldn’t want to start from anywhere else in the MENA.

This building has been subjected to a legitimate bourgeois legal process and so the outcome is obviously good news for democrats!

Democracy continues to unfold in Turkey.    The Islamist peoples that vote for Erdogan continue to insist that they can believe what they want AND systematically undo the work of others!   Now that’s the way to ‘pull down’ a statue!   Put a whole museum under the microscope.  How did ‘their’ building get taken over for a museum?  If democracy now is to mean anything why are they not to have it back!  Court cases are decided that don’t please everyone.  After all, they stole it fair and square in the first place.

In the corporate liberal media off we go on a wild romp of but-what-a-bout and quite a bit of sympathy for the military and others caught up in the coup.  The struggle goes ever on.

There is -for just one glaring example- no gay marriage in Turkey!  Just like there wasn’t under the Australian government of Julia Dullard (don’t you love spell check)!  But then gays are not thrown off high buildings like they were and are by gangs in places like Libya and Syria!  That is how the Islamofascists in Iran have carried on for all my adult life.  In Syria and Libya they are not thrown by the government’s laws!  But they are ‘thrown’ and are as dead as those at the foot of the Sydney cliffs 3 and 4 decades ago!

The Islamists defeat their islamofascist foes in Syria and Libya and in their home base of Turkey not by becoming secularists but by declaring that -just like the great Western churches- their world-class church will be open to all even as it is used as the religious building that it is.

Naturally, the BBC/ABC has a vastly different spin on how decisions taken by ‘secularists’ can’t or at least ought not to be undone!  No surprise that some secular-minded people don’t like religious services resuming in this old religious building.  But TINA for democrats!

I wonder what the 1/2 theorists make of this demonstration of what a democratic country looks like in action.  Being a persona-non-grata among my old crowd what the almost silent Australian Marxists think is unknown to me.

From the mess that emerged from a defeated WW1 Ottoman Empire, a modern state was created.  Like the USSR that emerged from a VERY similar mess, it was born and carried on in grand style with more than just a few glaring blemishes.   The sight of these blemishes to any 21st C western liberal is of course disturbing, but though shocking to say yet it’s true that by Ottoman and Czarist standards even Putin’s Russia is progress! That is just not much to write to another continent about! So western liberal democracies are currently with no peers! That might be pathetic but that is where humanity is at.

So along comes yet more struggle for democracy!  2 forwards 1 back goes our little dance and here we are with Russia and Turkey in a ‘proxy’ war again.  The fascists make war every day and the democratic Islamists fight back every day but the Australian Marxists are silent.

What strange times we live in!

‘Why bother?… because I believe in a bright future and want to help make a difference. And I refuse to allow the likes of John Pilger, Tariq Ali and Tim Flannery to be seen as leftists.’  Good oh!

Maskirovka

To add to my off used military saying of ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast’ I just picked up on this old Russian army saying that goes ‘never send a soldier somewhere that an artillery shell can go first’. Yet that is essentially what Putin’s fascist army has been doing for these first 3 murderous weeks.

But there’s always the particular for us to consider. In this case the peculiar envelope this internationally isolated second rate mostly old fashioned and joylessly unmotivated steam roller of an army has had to work in.

The working envelope in the pre-launch marshalling period, was the displayable limit of Russian resources in both men and ‘shells’. Yet even though it did not suck me in, it has to be said that Russian deception mostly worked. Further, I think it has also worked for the first-month requirement to hide what the fascists were and are up to for their next move.

It’s been very common (after week 1 or 2) to hear how Putin can’t win! But we all recall how little time Assad had left as the Syrian tyrant back in September 2015! That short time will be seven years this September! Perhaps it may be best to cast away all these soft headed illusions and prepare for the hard reality of struggle.

Putin’s fascists have had to do this massive invasion while they remain in plain sight under US spy satellites. Yet despite the size of the aggressive warfare they’re tasked with they have in these three short opening weeks achieved a lot. All of the Russian generals know that they are fighting a long war and also that it’s only ultimately directed against the spread of democracy into Belarus and Russia. Their job is to deal with the Ukraine issues and let Putin deal with the ‘ultimately’ bit down the track. Not that that will work mind!

So basically they have been pushing forward into the positions they actually require just in order to get started on their current main job! That job is a process. The drawn-out process is well known from Syria where as a result of the closure of the Bosphorus supply route I suppose Egypt might now be expected to step up to the HIRISE ‘leadership’ role. (HIRISE is my own acronym for the loose coalition that is involved in stopping the spread of democracy in Syria, it consists of Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, Iraqi Shia militia, Assad’s own Syrian ‘Government’ forces and a token commitment from a regional giant Egypt)

Apparently ‘There’s a Russian word maskirovka which means military deception.’ Perhaps the first case of maskirovka was in the logistic train that was absent. ‘It must be a bluff’, most of the experts shouted in unison, because ‘they haven’t got the logistics in place to do it’. But the question was what was it? The ‘it’, turned out to be no more than deal with stage 1 and then set up the new logistics that are required for stage 2. These are very different logistical issues than were the so-called ‘disaster’ of stage 1. I’ve been informed that 60% of the Ukrainian masses were of the view that Putin would not launch this war and if that is true and I have no reason to doubt it, then the first maskirovka was remarkably successful.

At stage 1 the job appears to have been to funnel the troops forward despite the costs and ‘quickly’ get the artillery into position to pour fire on the cities where there is a strategic purpose for the war. The infantry is only now deployed to protectively screen the artillery and the -so far substantially held back air power- can now both screen the infantry and be the main general terror bombing instrument beyond!

Airpower does not win wars but terror bombing is a big part of what Russia has shown in Syria over the last decade. The cheapest method to drive the civilians out and into the democracies is the Assad barrel bombing process. All this is just one form or another of artillery.

Now we know from Napoleon that artillery conquers but only if infantry can and does occupy; otherwise, it simply drives off the people from the territory that’s been for the time being laid waste. Without infantry occupation, it leaves those that manage to somehow remain living in the zone in abject poverty but still randomly in the fight. In these enclaves, the defenders are subject to constant threat and intermittent terror attacks. These zones become too dangerous to report from and regions for the plausible denial of the various Putinesqe atrocities such as chemical weapons use; even extermination drives become ‘expected’. The Putin method is to establish what is then recognized as nothing less than a free-fire zone! The fascists then kill who they want when they want or can.

We have seen this process play out over many years in Syria. Vast tracts of territory were cleared by the barrel bombing of everything that sustains civilian life. Medical facilities, breadlines all are vulnerable and systematically attacked, until finally, the troops kill at close quarters as they occupy the territory.

The woke world looked on and after a time it was all normalized especially so after some well respected public intellect would point to the US ‘crime’ of illegally liberating the Iraqi people from Baathism! Then every good liberal can tut tut in unison and note that ‘they all do it’ and are ‘all as bad as each other’; so we see a modern fifth column is in this way working just as effectively as if they were paid to disrupt a useful enquiry into how any legitimate struggle for democracy is ever to be fought and won.

I don’t know the exact numbers but about half the Syrian population has in the course of a decade been displaced. At least half of those were driven out of the country altogether and if it were not for the intervention of a massive Turkish ground force the ‘Putin plan’ would have continued. Turkey the NATO no2 giant did the required job and the ½ theorists can’t even talk about it! Anyway I still do. But I digress.

The strategic purpose of this stage of the Putin plan is to terroristically level all the cities that are part of the currently unknown plan; they will be leveled over time to whatever extent is required to take control of them. The shelling required for that task has now started. So supply lines war is the answer and the Turkish and Israeli drones a big part of the effort. The putin plan is for murder in the countryside and mass refugee flows from the selected cities. Ukraine is going to be brutally ‘forced to sue for peace’.

Putin has real form and he does not play. It turns out he doesn’t really bluff either! The shelling will go on for as long as it takes to get the map looking like and also populated as the tzar of all the russians desires it. Make no mistake, as the fascist supply lines get disrupted and Putin’s demoralized troops get bogged down against a growing resistance to these occupation forces, the use of chemical weapons will come up. At some point we can be sure that he will escalate; he is that predictable! Just look at his form and how people got him wrong again and again!

The first 3 weeks of the resumption of this war was about positioning for the next 30 weeks. By about next September I wonder how Biden’s dementia will have progressed. That’s worth thinking about given who is ‘the leader’ and who’s the alternative leader of the free world! My giddy aunt, just how bad does this get?!

But for now the fascist army of Vlad Putin the Audacious is positioned to start driving the mass of unwanted Ukranians out of the territory that IS according to him in play. The rate they have achieved up to this point is 1,000,000 per week for a grand total of 3million. That rate is far in excess of what can be achieved for the next 10,000,000 that Putin wants to be rid of but he has shown what he has the stomach for and we can all recall the time spans that this takes. Syria has already resulted in more than that number of refugees! The fascists must be extraordinarily pleased with the rate of refugee generation at over 1 million per week when less than a month ago 2 out of 3 Ukrainians didn’t know this war was restarting in a big way!

The western world is now in a similar delusionary drift. I doubt that is true in the front line states of Poland, the Baltic 3 and so forth. The Turks under Erdogan will not be so delusionary! They know why they have all those millions of Syrians that the Europeans never wanted and did fuck all to stop being generated. Thank you mother Merkel for all your failed policies! Anyway we ought to know now that the fight is only starting in Ukraine but because it’s ultimately directed at preventing the spread of democracy it won’t stay there. So western democrats out of nothing more than long term self interest are in this fight and in it to the finish.

Comfortingly for me a majority of western generals I’m now hearing in my wide media wanderings are catching on to what’s at stake in this war and more often as not also beginning to express some measure of confidence in the West’s capacity to eventually prevail. Even the Americans! Consequently in the lower ‘ranks’ of the comentariate the will to fight spirit will soon begin to step over the pile of surrender monkeys of the realist right, pseudoleft and the hopelessly woke that have for virtually the entire 21stC dominated in western mainstream media.

The first problem was the phony pacifism snark complaining that the Western world would fight to the last Ukrainian often followed by the demand for a declaration of war against the Russians and declaring a no fly zone is declaring war! The notion that not only can the west help the unfortunate Ukrainian victims to resist until they eventually have to surrender, is however giving way to the view that the west can more slowly enter the fight and we can and will prevail provided we take the path of protracted war! There is no short term solution and there is nothing other than a military solution. It’s the Russians that want to talk while they terror bomb and drive out refugees. The sheer horror in the notion of surrender to what the MSM are now calling the ‘autocracy’ that is attacking them is what has stopped the rot. The ‘autocrat’ is demanding new maps and setting disarmament conditions while his people are not even in support of his adventure. That’s what it is, adventurism writ loud. He’s got more than enough rope now so I hope I live long enough to see him hang with it.

The west is not yet fit for the fight but at least we know we are in one on both sides of the world and we are capable of winning both!

War?

Belarus en passant as war resumes in Ukraine. Nothing is no longer an option.

Molnupiravir.

A proven anti-viral!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVW2QqHUJUw

Game changer!!  Just the first cab off the coming rank, so the price will drop very quickly.

and possible eradication if…  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bamaEMftg4

where we are now  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt7T-26qQH8
update 2nd cab of the rank!  Paxlovid.  (less than a month) Both treatments are very effective if given in the first few days after testing positive.

All that really remains of this pandemic is to get the world’s people fully vaccinated and treated as required.  Aboriginal leaders (who did so well early on with the shutdowns have self evidently gone missing over the vax rates right across the remote parts of the country.)  These ‘leaders’ are the problem!  Time for some new leaders.

It looks like the 1/2 theorists at 21stC will not be saying much more on this issue either!

World mad.

World gone Mad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3fpnZSXWjA worth a listen,
just to start a conversation!  Brendan Oneil talking to Julia Hartley-Brewer.  Refreshingly open honest and above board conversation.

Dark Emu

https://www.skynews.com.au/business/media/paul-barrys-failure-to-apologise-for-lack-of-journalistic-integrity-shown-by-abc-over-pascoe/video/a97395bd80a2e6e3c7824046fb4dd4e1
Bolt is spot on in this example!

Trump gone.

The nature of the 2 party dictatorships across the Anglo world is that luck plays a very big part. It has to be said that were it not for Covid19 Trump would have romped it in, but if my sister had balls…Covid19 was the only thing that stopped Trump from romping it in!

But now a divide and rule situation has arisen in the US.  Whatever was the situation prior to the Capital Hill fiasco, it no longer matters. Disunity is death, is one of the great working maxims to anchor our thinking when pondering what ‘next’ for the Trump show.

If Trump were to run in 2024 then the GOP would not be fit for purpose.  He is still very popular but he also unites the democrats and mobilises the woke.  The GOP is now his party and there is some buyer remorse over Biden who is so clearly suffering from a cognitive disorder that renders him unfit for the job.  The ‘liberal’ mass media are carrying him and it has reached joke level!

But the GOP is now in a state of disunity that’s way past the ‘normal’ bounds of parties being taken over by a different faction or swapping radically different leaders and taking a very different path as a result. It can’t revive with Trump and it probably can’t revive without him so he will have to play kingmaker for the GOP to get anywhere on this cycle -all things being equal and I suppose they won’t be.

If a credible ‘new leader’ were to emerge and Trump swung his supporters behind such a person then the GOP would be fully competitive. On the other hand, if Trump were to take on all comers in the primaries and wipe the floor with them to the point that the party had to put him forward against Harris then even though this election was close and he was well-positioned for another tilt in 2024 it would not now work!

In Australia, Howard was again made leader a ¼ century ago by the Liberal party for a good reason, and he became PM in drovers dog style simply because the voters were going to throw out Keating in 1996! Howard then did a good enough job to win a second term when he took an actual policy to the people in 1998 (and people knew that Keating had also wanted this policy anyway). But then fate stepped in and he became a wartime leader in 2001, (and there were difficult refugee issues) and finally, the people elected him again when the complexity of war got thrown on the table for his fourth electoral win in 2004.

But times up came along and ‘Kevin 07’ saw the end of Howard in a predictable and unavoidable exhaustion of Howard’s luck.

Anyway; Australians saw what a return of disunity meant from both sides when the Howard era ended! The country went through a farcical period of PM swapping Rudd – Gillard – Rudd – Abbott -Turnbull – Morrison; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Australia_by_time_in_office and we ended the period with Scotty from marketing who is however up against Albanese, and so is IMV despite the best efforts of the ABC / ALP / Greens ‘destined’ to win the next election.

So the ALP is looking for a new hope right now!

Trump got lucky in 2016 and won against a hated alternative who had insulted GOP supporting workers across America as ‘a basket of deplorables’. His luck has however just run out and from his own actions!

It’s only the fact that it is the looming woke madness of Harris and sleepy Joe that is now underway that could even potentially revive him.

 

The Dems… well they now have at least enough rope to hang themselves with – president sleepy, plus control of both the House and the Senate. So even though they would get a honeymoon period from most swingers and swingers are all that counts in this game, they also have the women’s vote and color card to play to hold the battleground 3 or so states that count.

But the enemy for the GOP is only theoretically the Democrats.

Trump has however by his own mistaken actions -in pushing beyond what was reasonable to end up in the 5 deaths in the Capital Hill fiasco – despite all the other issues involved buried himself past where a revival is now possible! The GOP will not after a few years struggle again unite behind him. It is split.

It’s far too soon to work out what will emerge from this mess with the GOP and the Trump rump and if that reunified effort can win in 2024 but the Obama style rubbish is going for another four year run and Joe despite all the minding by his wife and family is not going to be there in 3 years time! Harris is on the way! So the question of who will win when the fight is X v Harris is wide open -IF- Trump does not split the vote!

 

But Trump is NOW not going to win in 2024.

*************

Still no sign of sense from the ½ theorists about Syria, Erdogan, Libya, Ukraine or even Nagorno Karabakh and plenty more besides like Brexit!

The MENA notably is off the comment about list of topics and Trump is about all that’s left and there’s not much sense there either!

Covid19 comment has also been a bit silly and even the Premier of NSW makes more sense on reflection.

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6224016703001

And as I have pointed out this is worth a read.