PUTIN/RUSSIA/UKRAINE: LOVE BOMBS & MASS ATTACKS
An information war is being waged where victims navigate/imbibe a daily propaganda soup served up by dubious politicians and legacy media. What is its recipe and is it failing to appetise these days?
Q1. WHERE HAVE ALL THE ZELENSKY/UKRAINE LOVE BOMB’S GONE?
When Americans, being mostly a soft-hearted and idealistic people who always support the perceived underdog and rail against despots, demagogues and dictators, get spun a story that fits they erupt in full support of the victim. This following the lead of their politicians and the direct channel that exists from them to the U.S. legacy media.Â
Due to the above Ukraine was initially lauded as a snow-white innocent with a Winston Churchill figure leading her. The Russians, of course, were the villain of the piece, led by a modern-day Hitler. The Russians, a demonic force, were said to be purposefully slaughtering civilians and destroying their homes in a wholly unprovoked attack.
There was naturally, for those who heard all this incessantly, no particular need (as ever it seems) to look deeper into events which preceded February 24th 2022 or to question what they were hearing. This suited most as details can be tiring... and searching for them, having to deal with conflicts between them and the headlines on TV or in your newspaper of choice entailed much work. Far easier to be a headline surfer, have faith in what you are seeing and hearing, and stick with that.Â
So, for at least a year if not a little more Ukraine was the foremost subject for breast-beating praise and utmost sympathy of most people in the West. And for Russia endless verbal attacks. Zelensky was portrayed as a hero almost beyond compare. Twitter and just about everywhere on social media you could hear the praises of the Ukrainian army and the hatred of the Russians. Ukrainian flags were everywhere and everyone felt fully justified in raising a furore over the subject of Ukraine and advocating as much money as was needed be spent to defend it.
But... what have we seen over the last six months or so? Hardly one trending issue on Twitter/X concerning Ukraine. Nothing on Zelensky either. For whatever reason (most probably some reality emerging through the fog of misinformation regarding both sides) the issue of Ukraine is, and has been for six months at the least, dead among the U.S. population at large. Now an historically easily distracted western audience is now focused elsewhere.
Other factors: In the meantime Russia has won its campaign and rightfully so. The lies told to indicate otherwise have been steadily discredited. Russia had to win for many reasons and was provoked endlessly into doing what she had tried for the best part of a decade to avoid through the Minsk Accords. But others had another agenda... and that agenda was war. So Russia was eventually compelled to deliver.Â
Ukraine is no longer ‘flavour of the month’ and, as Professor John J. Mearsheimer explained all the way back in 2015, the entire blame lies at the West’s door, not at Russia's in any case. Now the easy money flies out a different door. Easy come, easy go?
Q2. WHAT HAS BEEN RUSSIA’S STRATEGY IN UKRAINE?
Russia has a specific strategy that is not about taking territory, at least not to the exclusion of all else.Â
The primary goals are to whittle down the opposition until it is no longer able to fight effectively. At that point Russia can essentially take as much territory as she wishes. Russia is inexorably grinding down the Ukrainian army. The Ukrainians have lost the vast majority of their best, most professionally-trained troops. Now the Ukrainian regime is reduced to sending partially trained conscripts into battle against Russian troops who are regularly rested and replaced by new influxes of replacements and who are in combination now both well-trained and highly experienced.Â
The factors above have resulted in the meat-grinder effect we have seen in recent times, even when Russian troops were facing some of the best the Ukrainians had to offer. What will happen when all the Russian military is facing is a bunch of hapless, untrained amateurs who have no idea really where they are or why? Add to this that the Russian military industrial complex is delivering ever more weapons and new weapons into the front lines. Add to this also that Russians are volunteering at a reported rate of 1,400 per day to join the Russian army.Â
All that is occurring is that the western powers are getting ever more Ukrainians killed to no useful purpose in the hope that they can escape political fallout personally when the whole thing comes crashing down with a massive Russian victory and all the reverberations worldwide that will follow in its wake.
Q3. IS VLADIMIR PUTIN A DERANGED MADMAN?
Commentators in the West lose credibility when they infer that Vladimir Putin is dangerously irrational . On what do they base this assessment? It is one that flies in the face of just about everything we know of the character of Putin based upon both his actions and his public communications.Â
There is a rather juvenile approach to Vladimir Putin among the vast majority of western commentators. Because, after 2007 and Putin's address to the political elites of the West in Munich, the dogs of the media circus were put to work making every claim under the sun about Putin, that he was a thief, a murderer, a despicable despot, thoroughly corrupt and Machiavellian, a modern day Hitler and so on the Putin narrative became the accepted norm for all discourse. This is what we hear reflected across the western political class and commentators hired to speak on western legacy media. It is based on either their own heavy conditioning or simply an attempt to cover themselves against an attack for being 'too lenient' toward Putin, or even of being called a 'Putin Puppet'.
Q4. DOES VLADIMIR PUTIN WANT TO SEE THE SOVIET UNION RESTORED?
It is totally wrong to assert that Vladimir Putin has said "many times" that he wants the Soviet Union back. This is not true. The closest he came to this (and it is not very close when you get his meaning) was saying that the end of the Soviet Union was a 'catastrophe' as it left millions of Russians cut off from their homeland (due to the Warsaw Pact nations gaining independence).Â
Putin’s statement specifically on the Soviet Union went along these lines of this: 'Those who don't regret its passing have no heart. Those who want it back have no brain'. If you go to Moscow and visit the famous G.U.M. mall on Red Square you will find Gucci, Prada and a plethora of similarly high-end shops, and not only in G.U.M. of course. You will struggle to find any sign of communism or communist thought anywhere in today's Russia.Â
Russia's SMO in Ukraine is centred on the region known as the Donbass and also the steady encroachment of NATOÂ toward Russia's border. The kind of sloppy, simplistic thinking that is often displayed on this point is indicative of the black-white, largely prejudice-based, non-factual group think that seems endemic within the western intelligence community and the political and legacy media thinking within the collective west. It will not end well, especially not for those who use these fixed, delusionary views as the basis of western foreign policy, as currently can plainly be seen.
