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.
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