After the farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, Robert Freeman says the only place for the Ukrainian president to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky presenting honors on the Day of the Defender, Oct. 14. (President of Ukraine, Public domain)
By Robert Freeman
Common Dreams
When the president of the poorest, most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invoked in the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky.
It’s a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media’s shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, “Methinks the media doth hype too much.”
Let’s remember that before ascending to his country’s presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky’s greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I’m not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I’m not joking.
Now, he’s Europe’s George Washington, FDR and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.
Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.
Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn’t want you to know.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.
In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?
Von der Leyen is shrewdly laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the war. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.
Ursula von der Leyen at a NATO defense minister session in 2019. (NATO)
In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine’s electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?
The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.’s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don’t. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?
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On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, “Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo.”
Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.
Volodymyr Zelensky and Nancy Pelosi during a Joint Meeting of Congress with flag of Ukraine signed by the Ukrainian soldiers fighting at Bakhmut. (Office of the House Speaker)
That’s more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn’t even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.
Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.
Europeans Waking Up
The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.’ imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.
French President Emmanuel Macron, second from left, with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Versailles, 2017. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.
Macron suggested in a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. “We need to prepare what we are ready to do … to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.”
Scholz was even more specific. In an interview he declared, “We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe.”
This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.’s maximalist position before the start of the war, that Russia’s security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, left, visits NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, , Dec. 11, 2021. (NATO)
Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In a Wall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, “Our focus is … to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.”
Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.’ earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken’s opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.
Formula for Losing the War
Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.
Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It’s the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: “The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis.” Ding. “Contestant #3?” “Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?”
A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbass and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbass is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn’t have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.
May 9, 2015: Casualties of the War in Donbass. (Andrew Butko, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin’s highest priority and what he asked for — and was denied — in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.
U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland — some of the best in the world — for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.
Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they’ve constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.
Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed — and, let’s be honest, often abused — since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.
Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.
Robert Freeman is founder and executive director of The Global Uplift Project which builds small-scale infrastructure projects in the developing world to improve humanity’s capacity for self-development. Robert taught economics and history at Los Altos High School where he also coached the Speech and Debate team, including producing a national champion in 2006. He has traveled extensively in both the developed and developing world. He is the author of The Best One Hour History series which includes World War I (2013), The InterWar Years (2014), The Vietnam War (2013), and other titles.
This article is from Common Dreams.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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US, CANADA, UKRAINE AND RUSSIA 2022 DISPUTES – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND SEQUEL TO FR. PETER MORELLO’S COMMENTS: (1) US, Canada, Ukraine and Russia are Caucasian-European nations by ethnic majority and nominally Christian nations by religious majority; (2) Ukraine and Russia are also Slavic nations and neighbors with similar laws (limits) on abortion and LGBT; (3) Russia was US’ supporter in the American Revolution at great cost to herself – the island of Menorca; (4) Russia was US’ supporter in the Civil War when US’ opponents were Britain and France, prompting US Secretary of Navy, Gideon Welles to say “God bless the Russians”; (5) US (western Alaska) and Russia are neighbors, and Canada (northwestern Yukon) is closer to Russia than to Britain and France or Mexico; (6) US and Russia were never at war, not counting the Cold War or proxy wars, as compared, for example, with the “G7” nations; (7) US, Canada, NATO and Ukraine have disputes with Russia since the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and militarization of countries neighboring Russia which was invaded over the centuries by NATO members Britain, France, Germany, (Mussolini’s) Italy, Romania, Lithuania-Poland, Turkey and by others including Sweden and the Mongols who inflicted on Ukraine and Russia death and destruction with hardly any parallels in world’s history – Germany also helped Lenin to impose psychopathic and deadly Marxism on Ukraine and Russia in 1917, while Ukraine and Russia, mostly by themselves, prevented Poland’s annihilation by Nazis and saved Europe from Nazi Germany and Mongols; (8) Ukraine and Russia have a border dispute, and a military conflict-war since the violations of the February 21, 2014 all-Ukrainian political agreement in Kiev and the violations of the 2014-2015 Minsk Peace Agreement signed by Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France (in the future, a joint venture by the Minsk signatories in securing Ukrainian segment of “Pan-European” gas pipeline might be a “win-win”) – by February 23, 2022 the war took some 15,000 lives and produced thousands of refugees as well as widespread material destruction in eastern Ukraine; on February 24, 2022 Russia escalated the war and invaded Ukraine resulting in many more deaths, refugees and material destruction across Ukraine; (9) US and Russia can destroy each other and the world with their nuclear weapons in an hour; (10) the irreplaceable way forward for resolving these issues are the eternally-valid biblical principles reflected in President Washington’s Farewell Address in which he called religion-morality the foundation of domestic well-being and peace with other nations and in President Lincoln’s last Inaugural Address “… with malice towards none, with charity for all … among ourselves and with all nations”, as well as in Pope Francis’ 2022 call for prayer and political talks centered on “human brotherhood instead of partisan interests”, all the while keeping in mind the 2022 Lenten message “Remember thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return” and “Repent and believe in the Gospel” which also includes “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” and the parable of “the speck and the log” – moral principles given to us by Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace and the just Judge of the world, principles ignored at one’s great peril.
See also hxxps://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/03/14/expel-evil-spirit-of-war-from-ukraine-with-prayer-and-fasting-urges-catholic-leader & hxxps://paxchristiusa.org/2022/02/24/pax-christi-usas-statement-on-russians-invasion-of-ukraine.
To Joe Lauria, his team and audience, MERRY CHRISTMAS – HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Freeman’s balanced and humourously presented narrative here is quite an accurate portrayal of the needlessly bloody Ukrainian mess and the foolishly arrogant Western alliance that bankrolls it.
What has transpired over the recent years in Ukraine and now in Washington itself should be termed not just as Peak Zelensky but more poignantly as Peak Idiocy. Because the Zio-Cons and the Neo-Cons who have commandeered U.S. foreign policy for well over half a century now have rapidly also conspired to impoverish American citizens, bleed the hard-working middle classes and deindustrialized the U.S. too simply to PRIVATELY profiteer abroad themselves by over-exploiting cheap Third World labor and even sweatshops.
They have also squandered American NATIONAL wealth, industry and finances, both debt-based and sovereign, on serial pursuits of totally COCKED-UP wars to benefit the controlling parasitic cabal of Illuminati and Zio-Con-linked MICs. The economic mess they have thus engineered abroad and in America itself is now also being re-engineered and compounded further across Europe.
The “fuck the EU” Victoria Nuland along with other European “progressives” have taken things now to a Washington climax of sorts too by paying Congressional homage to the penis-piano hero Zelensky who has helped to traji-comically “sodomize” the poor Ukrainians. Imagine a (c)ongressional standing ovation enacted by Pelosi, Kamala and the rest of that ilk for a pioneering prick artiste ? What a command performance this is, indeed !
When will the highly ignorant American publics wake to these clearly woke-driven misadventures abroad ? A line of misadventures in the Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and now Ukraine. What a waste of and for humanity have these bloody cases resulted in ! At this juncture one can’t be sure if it is a long frustrated US that is getting back at an indifferent Europe OR is it an over-burdened Europe that is getting back at a consistantly pestering US ?
Also will the escape hatch being offered by Emmanuel Macron, Alice in wonderland oops, Ursula von der leyen actually and Olaf Scholz offer the incorrigible Neo-Cons an oppertunity yet again to recoil just to fight-on on another day ? Still, if these Congressional commendatory gangbangs eventually result in retaliatory thermonuclear bangs. That would definitly be Peak Idiocy !
Someone pointed out (SF) that the triangular box with US Flag folded 13 times, that Pelosi presented to Zelenskyy at the Congress week, is solemnly reserved for funerals!
Ukraine sure looks like a gigantic funeral!
And then Pres. Biden :
“This guy is ready to give his life for his country.”
To paraphrase the Godfather : “Z, here’s your money, you are a gone bunny” .
Capiche?
Very well stated. Greatly appreciate this author–someone with a memory of events preceding Feb 24, 2022. It has been shocking to me
to witness the drive to war against Putin using Ukraine as fodder for IMF supremacy via NATO. Why don’t my fellow Americans see this? Anyway, thanks to the good people at Consortium News for sticking to their journalistic integrity, reporting on US aggression in its immoral following George F. Kennan and the Wolfowitz Doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance. I am embarrassed for the sheep of this country that have been led astray by a complicit media who parrot the cause of the 1% in their insistence that Russia and China don’t deserve to exist, independently from US Capital.
This is why I voted for the Green Party in 2020. I poked around the Biden/Harris campaign web site and came across the looong list of members of the D.C. foreign-policy establishment, from both GOP and Dem administrations, who joined the Biden camp in opposition to Trump. I thought to myself, this is going to be more of the same old crap – these are the clowns who got us into Afghanistan and Iraq, and boy, that sure turned out great, didn’t it? And some of them at the time were busy getting us into Ukraine.
What next? Replace Z. with someone worse, like replacing Diem with Ky.
Actually Russia has used only a couple of hypersonic missiles. Most of their beyond visual range attacks have been with standard ballistic missiles, drones and cruise missiles.
Has anyone told the various electorates there is not a chance of Ukraine repaying the debt
I think the laundromat working overtime is a form of repayment.
Well, recycling, anyway…
The most bizarre sight I’ve ever seen was John Stewart placing a medal around the neck of a self-described Nazi with the tats to prove it at Disneyland of all places. How appropriate for the latest US marketing campaign for its continued march of aggression across the planet right up to Russia’s border using the latest iteration of the forces that invaded through Ukraine in WWll.
The US is like a Hollywood movie set with street facing building props and nothing behind the props. There’s no there there. That’s why narrative is so important in convincing the public that the nation’s actions are grounded in good intentions. It’s all an illusion. An illusion needed by the ruling class to justify its global criminal enterprise. I believe it’s also why so much of the public clings so tenaciously to the movie created for them by the narrative managers. If they let go of the narrative, they will be confronted with the reality that there’s nothing propping up their core beliefs.
Brilliant article. Thank you, Mr. Freeman, for your work. I believe it dovetails with the previously published piece by Patrick Lawrence.
The expression, “…one cannot get there, doing what was done to get here…” has the portential to end this proxy war. That direction requires a peacemaker, something the west doesn’t have, is willing to contemplate at this point, or not until billions more are laundered through the lives of Russians and Ukrainians paying the ultimate price in blood.
China could assume that role. The Ukrainian people must then remove the western-backed, high-heeled, perverse piano-playing puppet from Kyiv. Stop the war. Implement the Minsk Agreement. Allow the people to determine their future, eastward or westward. Permanently bar Ukraine from NATO membership, and cement a treaty of neutrality for the borderland. The EU is insolvent; Ukraine could apply for BRICS membership.
All simply wishful-thinking on my part.
We are witnessing results of the most brain-dead collection of so-called world leaders in history. The majority of whom appear hell-bent on creating WWIII.
Who goes down faster…fishwife Zelensky or Europe???
I’d venture that the EU goes first. Their bonds went negative in 2014, coincidentally the same year the west backed a coup in Kyiv, and the purposeful murder of civilians began in the Donbas. If the Panama Papers are accurate, then the green T-shirt puppet in Kyiv has already stashed more than $100 million offshore. The Europeans have a financial liquidity crisis in their midst. The perverse piano player, not so much.
At no point in the past thirty years has the United States ever had a vital strategic interest worth risking a nuclear WW III with Russia in any part of Eastern Europe, much less the Ukraine. Not in Poland, nor in Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Lithuania, or even tiny Montenegro. Not in 1992. Not in 2014. Not in 2022. Never.
Yet, here we are today. Led by an age addled POTUS, $31 trillion in still growing national debt, scores of billions of fiat dollars given to Zelensky and his Ukrainian cronies, and above all, a seemingly corrupt US government (i.e. US State Department, NSC, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, DOJ, & Homeland Security) bent on taking enormous risks that so very few Americans can even comprehend. D*mn!
Biden is a neocon, and the next conflict is with China.
Let us hope that the cult of Zelensky has peaked. I will believe it when the legacy media talking heads in Europe and the U.S. begin to move away from their endless cheerleading for Zelensky’s corrupt Ukraine regime and constant demonization of Russia and Putin. The war in Ukraine has been useful for at least one thing. To have demonstrated how willing and eager the citizens of Europe and the U.S. are to be force-fed blatant lies on a continuous basis by a morally bankrupt press and by their gutless heads of state.
Patrick Lawrence’s exchange with his Austin TX companion‘s comment:
“Either Russia prevails on its terms,” came the answer, “or there is a nuclear exchange.”
is realistic and scary! Robert Freeman’s excellent article further exposes the true intentions and the lies!
After having read all the replies so far, I must say that despite the variety of thoughtful intelligence therein, I remain firm in my conclusion realized some time ago that, — “NOTHING WILL CHANGE”. The ruling party owns us and they’re not about to give it up.
The only thing in my opinion that could make a difference is to overturn Citizens United or legislate it out of existence and term limits for everyone. But I’m not holding my breath.
Great point re: overturning Citizens United.
You remind me that Russ Feingold the only Senator who bucked the war fever and voted no against the Patriot Act was also a strong opponent of selling this country down the drain to corporate interests via Citizens United…The hypocrisy in that name alone should have…
I have no evidence for this concern but since Feingold was such an excellent and principled Senator I wonder if there was a silent “coup” against him since he stood courageously, alone at times, for peoples’ interests rather than the greed wagon corporate raiders.
Yes, this is an excellent article by Robert Freeman!
Thanks, CN for publishing it here.
I think you are absolutely right about Feingold – attaching one’s political cart to the D donkey, you have to go where the donkey takes you and the donkey follows the golden carrot in front of his nose – object and you will be tossed out of the cart – the same thing happened to Kucinich …
Indeed – as long as the D/Rs are in power, CU remains the “law of the land” – declaring that Corps are people and money is speech – it serves them both very well … People need to vote 3rd party in large numbers – it is time, past time to “spoil” it for them both …
At this point, normalization of relations with the west may require Poland, Germany & Hungary to leave NATO & declare neutrality.in other words U.S. loss of hegemony in Europe.
Exactly. What the citizenry needs to do is show up on the lawns of lawmakers and not leave. That will get their attention. We have the numbers, but collective action seems far away at this point.
Hear! Hear! So well distilled and unmistakable in correct assessment. If the sane among us prevail.
Thank you Robert Freeman for this elementary perspective on events/issues surrounding Ukraine/NATO/US/Russia. Mainstream corporate ‘news’ outlets entirely avoid (re)publishing any such accounts. The 24/7 propaganda spoon-fed to the public focuses on 2 or 3 easy-to-digest memes. ——> Putin (the latest Hitler) attacked Ukraine ‘out of nowhere’ , proof that he wants to re-constitute the old USSR……..There apparently is NO history between Ukraine/US/NATO/Russia – the only relevant timeline begins on Feb 24, 2022. ——————— Azov and other Neo-Nazi groups have been re-branded as freedom fighters and ‘celebrated fighters’ (NY Times).
I’ve had to shut down online discourse with several friends, who uncritically eat up all the propaganda/narrative control. Good hearted ‘liberals’, all of them. Our ruling elite has managed to obliterate any mass opposition to war. Advocating for peace/negotiations is derisively called ‘capitulation to Putin’,, and worse. —————– And, yes, the next flashpoint will probably be with China over Taiwan, where that island is already being flooded with weapons from the US.
If you think Russia will allow that sort of reduction of its obvious gains and demands, you have not been paying attention. US corporations taking over the farmlands? Klaus Schwab of course “rebuilding Ukraine”!! i snow the latest addition. Larry Fink to the rescue! Read the words of Lavrov and Putin. Russia’s army will not just stop!!
Excellent article. Just a further note. Those hypersonic missiles can also reach the US homeland if that is deemed necessary. Putin outlined Russia’s deterrence posture as 100s of these missiles launched against the American continent in response when a US launch is detected. We should also note that now both China and Iran also have these weapons. Iran in fact has recently unveiled such missiles that can reach America as well. The hypersonic technology of Russia and friends, according to knowledgeable weapons experts is at least a decade ahead of the US. You have to wonder if that is because military spending and US weapon’s manufacture are geared toward personal profit rather than America’s defense. Do you think? Nonetheless, these are the facts on the ground, or if you prefer, inconvenient truths. In an all out exchange between the US and Russia, Russia, Putin acknowledges will be hurt, but America will be destroyed. It kind of makes all this braying about taking out Russia, blah, blah, blah, in reality, a stinking pile of self-serving shit. A purposefully kept ignorant American public should be careful about what it wishes for.
In the meantime, Russia is right where it wants to be toward the outcome of demilitarizing Ukraine and dropping NATO on the scrap heap. It is simply grinding through Ukrainian, NATO and US arms and forces with a constantly adapting, methodical precision while barely lifting a finger. As I mentioned in another comment, it is not Russia that is stuck in the tar-baby. It is America, led by the ignorance and ideological stupidity of its neocons and now apparently all its political leaders who have neglected the the prime point for victory in any conflict, know your enemy. Ray McGovern has described this phenomenon in America’s intelligence services several times. In any case, the US and NATO better hope that Russia does not need to escalate further because it certainly can. An inconvenient truth, but better to understand this than the alternative.
All of the above perspectives can be found in a plethora of reliable journalists and military experts including Ray McGovern, moon of alabama, Alastair Crooke, Col(ret.) McGregor, all the exceptional journalists here at consortium news, and many more. You just have to look.
The alternative to reality is to stick one’s head in the sand which results only in getting kicked in one’s ass. Ignorance, at least in this case, is truly not bliss but rather unspeakable suffering and loss.
Fantastic article … from a man who has seen the world and actually lived to materially improve the world for humans, as a teacher and builder. The contrast to the denizens of the swamp in DC in worldview and vision is palpable.
As the war began, Zelensky received what was in effect a “makeover” (a simple check of photos online demonstrates the transformation).
That is, his physical appearance began to be handled by professional stylists who created a particular appearance via a haircut, trimmed beard, and especially a wardrobe. These stylists are still on the payroll as the “look” has remained consistent for almost a year now, with subtle tweaks for each appearance. This wholly manufactured public relations image is largely what western pols and pundits are responding to when they fawn over Zelensky’s “leadership” attributes.
That’s a joke right: “especially a wardrobe”? (Made me laugh anyway)
Yes, his wardrobe. Having Zelensky appear exclusively in his drab green army-style tee shirt is a conscious attempt to enhance his ‘brand’ , courtesy of CIA psy-ops- as a ‘freedom fighter’.
Hi Val. It’s so obvious that it’s inescapable. The green T-shirt of the faux muscle man. His only claim to fame before his war was being able to play piano with his penis. Liberace could actually play, and his costumes were much better.
I was just about to reply to shmutzoid, so will incorporate you both. Godzilla forbid we begin to see drab green tshirts and apparel with his face displayed. Ernesto Che Guevara he is not. (I saw the video of the piano playing – a bizarre form of humour – slapstick.)
One would have thought that after Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we would have lost our appetite for imperial war. Alas, it is only on sites like this that one can see competing policy points of view that begin to sketch in what is actually going on.
America is in her final throes–a lurching St Vitus Dance that lashes out uncontrollably (now China), and that harms not only the world but our own people as well. The end of our empire and its hegemony is very much desired. Ultimately, it will benefit Americans as well. Our capitalists may be less rich, but it will give us a breather from this self inflicted mania for domination. Perhaps we will even learn to live in the world as an equal and a partner as we solve the greatest problem of them all: global warming. If we don’t get around to that, there’s no point in doing any of this geopolitical stuff. No point at all.
Wow blinken is blinking… Accountability what a quaint old fashioned idea … Interesting point about factions in Ukraine trying to put a stop to the suicide mission…. Looks like before or near the one year anniversary of the invasion we will be seeing the conclusion of this cluster flV€kk… And then onto Taiwan :(
Well said, sir. I personally think that it’s worse than you project and the effects on our European vassals and ourselves will be worse. If you wade through all 6 volumes of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you realize that the Roman Empire of the West was militarily defeated. It wasn’t that they had great defeats in battle but they just couldn’t win. Things got worse and then they couldn’t even successfully defend themselves and then in AD410 Alaric is at the gates of Rome. I’m sure that Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod, our incompetent head waiters, are unfamiliar with Mr. Gibbon and even if they aren’t, I doubt they think that his observations apply to us. But they do. As Mr. Freeman points out it took Russia all of a week to take out the Ukraine’s electrical system and they continue to pick apart Ukrainian infrastructure at will and the promised Patriot missile systems will avail them not.
I said in an earlier response to Patrick Lawrence’s piece of a few days ago, I think that Russia will occupy those provinces that formerly were part of the Ukraine entirely so that they can protect them from the Nazis in the Ukraine and blowing up the dam will be meaningless except for the loss of power as the resultant flooding will quickly freeze solid. And then, they’ll stop. Russia is not the aggressive power that the US portrays it as but the US/UK/EU/NATO are. And I think that they are having their very own Waterloo.
Yes, I don’t see the Russians ever leaving a place like Mariupol, for instance. I suspect Ukraine will get carved up in a way unforseen right now, but Russia is not going to give up territory just to see US sponsored fascists move right in.
Yes Tim, I imagine that Ukraine, as we know it today, may cease to exist. The neighbors smell blood in the water and are circling. The fall of the Z-regime may herald a larger carve-up. There are other ethnic groups in the outskirts of Ukraine that could quickly change sovereignty. Spring will tell.
Re Gibbon, you can get an audiobook version from LIbrivox.org and listen as you lay in bed or do other work. It is in the Grand Style works very well aurally.
Indeed.. Crimea is non-negotiable, and Donetsk / Luhansk were the original additions to the Russian Federation, but Mr Putin has added Kherson and Zap to the list.. The longer Kiev’s nazis continue to shell the Donbas, the more Provinces UA will lose; Odessa & Nikolaev to name but two..
You make me want to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall! I keep comparing us to Rome, but I was not aware of the specific aspects of its fall.
Re Gibbon, you can get an audiobook version from LIbrivox.org and listen as you lay in bed or do other work. It is in the Grand Style works very well aurally.
Great article. Puts everything into historical perspective leading to an inevitable conclusion. Too bad most Americans blinded by government propaganda with complicit media won’t understand how they’ve been duped and where they’re headed. I would only add that hopefully, we’re seeing the “swan song” of a desperate capitalist hegemony. But not to worry, true to its capitalistic nature, there’s gotta be a way to make some money out of this. Thank you Robert Freeman.
Will someone please explain who the neocons are? It sounds too much like a conspiracy theory – like the illuminati. Or is it just down to shortsighted stupidity and greed? i.e. there is no actual organisation, to which a group had actually sworn loyalty, and crosses party lines.
How’s the weather at Langley today, bro?
Anna, Anna, Anna, where have you been woman?
Number one I have no idea of your age, which could be a major contributing factor to your profound ignorance of the American political condition.
Suffice to say you have answered your own question here about who the neocons are.
From all viable apparent information neocons join in lock step to strive to wage constant peremptory war against any who refuse to buy into the “unfettered capitalism is the only good theory” school of thought.. Go read some of the history of our governments intelligence community’s action for the last 70 years. They make up hawkish members of both parties who cater to the corporate welfare state that now runs congress.
Number two, conspiracy theories are only theories if no evidence exists to back accusations. See the above.
As for shortsighted stupidity and greed. See the above, remembering that money now drives All politics in congress. Again the weight of congressional power thrown behind corporate welfare programs. See the defense industry and the blank check they receive each year from a congress groveling at the feet of lobbyists for their piece of the budget pie, an overwhelmingly vast treasure congress provides in an unquestioning fashion.
Number three, see my comment above, the actual organization is the U.S. Congress plus the MICCIMAT etc., the congress subserviently supports no questions asked. (Note the defense budget this year was bloated by an additional $45 billion dollars not even requested, the total was $858 billion – you got that) Congress swore an oath to the American people when elected and have essentially abdicated their responsibilities to all of us, we wouldn’t want them to have to think about what they are actually doing would we. Now if you haven’t figured out that crossing party lines thing, think about what the Turtle, Mitch McConnel has had to say about funding the war in Ukraine. Turtle “crazy like a fox” republican and the POTUS, a democrat.
Take it or leave it Anna, I can explain it to you but I cannot understand it for you.
Remember this my friend I did not make up the term Nazi, which you notice is capitalized but the term refers to a very real threat to the world and has much in common with the term NEOCON. There exists millions who know exactly who and what NEOCONS are, for the sake of dog crack a book or two.
Thanks CN
There are dozens of books and literally thousands of articles on the neocons or neoconservatives — just try a search. But the one I still return to is the one that made me aware of them – Ignoble Liars in Harpers 2004. Worth a read.
hxxp://www.kropfpolisci.com/neoconservatism.shorris.pdf
thanks James for the info
Grumpa Williamson
They are in large part, the descendants of the Trotskyites, they who swung around 180 degrees from the far left to the farthest reaches of the right. Their seminal guidelines and go-to-for reference was their “Project for An American Century,” PNAC. They called for the overthrow and destruction of 7 mostly Muslim countries, but their ultimate goal remains Russia.
The core and the sustaining force for neoconnery in the U.S. is the Kagan family, whose main honcho is Robert, husband of Victoria Nuland. They are quite real and eminently unapologetic for the paths of destruction they have wreaked across Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now the Prize: Ukraine (where much of their ancestry originated in The Pale of Settlement,) in order to presumably “Get Russia back!” and under their suasion.
I’m glad to see someone mention the Kagan clan. I can’t believe how many Americans don’t know Victoria Nuland is married to Robt Kagan. I vote for nominating the Kagan as the number 1 Warmongering family of thr last 25 years. Peace,
The neocons (neo-conservatives) are actually represented by a core group whose Project for a New American Century manifesto in 1997 laid out its belief that the U.S. should be the global hegemon.
This paragraph is taken from the link below:
The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, is a Washington-based think tank created in 1997. Above all else, PNAC desires and demands one thing: The establishment of a global American empire to bend the will of all nations. They chafe at the idea that the United States, the last remaining superpower, does not do more by way of economic and military force to bring the rest of the world under the umbrella of a new socio-economic Pax Americana.
hxxps://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Project-for-the-New-American-Century-tudom%C3%A1nyok/902e1c59e345ab77f36f92e3182d27d4427ce9e9
This link is to a detailed discussion of PNAC that might interest you.
hxxps://vdocuments.net/pnac-project-for-the-new-american-century.html?page=1
Anna, the neocons (neo-conservatives) have their roots in a think tank whose manifesto argues that the U.S. should be the global hegemon.
The paragraph below is taken verbatim from the link that follows it:
The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, is a Washington-based think tank created in 1997. Above all else, PNAC desires and demands one thing: The establishment of a global American empire to bend the will of all nations. They chafe at the idea that the United States, the last remaining superpower, does not do more by way of economic and military force to bring the rest of the world under the umbrella of a new socio-economic Pax Americana.
hxxps://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Project-for-the-New-American-Century-tudom%C3%A1nyok/902e1c59e345ab77f36f92e3182d27d4427ce9e9
The following discussion of PNAC might interest you.
hxxps://vdocuments.net/pnac-project-for-the-new-american-century.html?page=1
Please google “Project for a New American Century”, paying special attention to Richard Perle,
aka the Prince of Insufficient Light. And Robert Kagan, whose wife Victoria Nuland is a major player.
Ms. Tanneberger, You are astute to question the use of the term ‘neocon.’ Neocons, to name a few, were mainly war-mongering, hegemonist, prominent Republicans such as John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Cheney, George W Bush, John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz. A new breed of the same old war-mongering hegemonists include Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and a slew of sniveling, deep state swamp creatures such as Anthony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Samanatha Power, and the likes of former state department paid weasels, Alexander Vindman, Marie Yovanovich and Fiona Hill. Call them the neo-Karens. But the policies are largely unchanged. Using the economic and military might of the United States to cajole and threaten sovereign nations around the world to do their bidding. Or else. Their every campaign is somehow lionized in the press yet always ends in humiliating defeat. Like the feeble Biden Regime they are always wrong and never in doubt.
Well-said.
What an excellent article outlining the facts and necessary possibilities that will follow the Ukraine debacle, one which we helped to achieve by our omissions concerning basic reality. I can think of one caveat to this outcome, however: since our own government can’t say just where the majority of the weapons are which we (and NATO) have sent over to Ukraine, who is stockpiling them? And what narrative will the ones now stockpiling those weapons pursue in using the expensive toys we have thrown over a fence into a sandbox like mindless children? Maybe that was the real end which our unenlightened leaders always had in mind: pursing the further opportunities born of unrelated chaos.
” We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.”
Taiwan ? Iran ?
Back in the 1980s, the Dead Kennedys recorded a track for an anti-war album. Called “Kinky Sex Makes The World Go Round”, it consists mainly of an imagined phone call between the US secretary of state for war and Margaret Thatcher, then UK Prime Minister.
In it, the benefits of war are extolled for their financial, rather than any ideological, benefits. Thatcher appears to be having an orgasm at the prospect. War and profit as porn.
Aside from anything else, this track appears to have been an uncannily accurate prediction of Western international policy over the following 40 years. You can find it on Youtube.
It would really change things in the US if today 1 million Americans wrote an angry letter to their representatives in the House and Senate demanding that the military budget be cut and the money spent here at home to help working and retired Americans. If 5 million wrote today, it might change things quickly. If 10 million wrote, things would change even faster. The sad truth is that Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that complaining doesn’t matter. Tell that to the CEOs and their lobbyists who complain to congress all day every day, and get exactly what they want.
CEO complaints come baked with a whole lot of $$$. That’s why they get listened to.
Exactly. What the citizenry needs to do is show up on the lawns of lawmakers and not leave. That will get their attention. We have the numbers, but collective action seems far away at this point.
I have given up even signing petitions to these corrupt gangsters. As someone recently said, this is the most unresponsive government — and that’s going some! — in our history. They are ignorant, greedy crooks who will lick any CEO’s bottom for a dollar and give not a single damn for their constituents.
As a Kiwj, the saddest moment for me is NZs pathetic trashing of the last vestiges of its dignity to the Empire with its Zelensky matinee at Parliament. The surrender began when Clark splut hef ckalition by deciding to send NZ soldiers to Afghanistan…and ever since then the global respect we gained from Kirk and Lange has been whittled away with almost no opposition. I predict Nuclear free will go soon.