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How To Start A War, And Lose An Empire
Submitted by Dmitry Orlov via Club Orlov blog,
A year and a half I wrote an essay on how the US chooses to view Russia, titled The Image of the Enemy. I was living in Russia at the time, and, after observing the American anti-Russian rhetoric and the Russian reaction to it, I made some observations that seemed important at the time. It turns out that I managed to spot an important trend, but given the quick pace of developments since then, these observations are now woefully out of date, and so here is an update.
At that time the stakes weren't very high yet. There was much noise around a fellow named Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer-crook who got caught and died in pretrial custody. He had been holding items for some bigger Western crooks, who were, of course, never apprehended. The Americans chose to treat this as a human rights violation and responded with the so-called “Magnitsky Act” which sanctioned certain Russian individuals who were labeled as human rights violators. Russian legislators responded with the “Dima Yakovlev Bill,” named after a Russian orphan adopted by Americans who killed him by leaving him in a locked car for nine hours. This bill banned American orphan-killing fiends from adopting any more Russian orphans. It all amounted to a silly bit of melodrama.
But what a difference a year and a half has made! Ukraine, which was at that time collapsing at about the same steady pace as it had been ever since its independence two decades ago, is now truly a defunct state, with its economy in free-fall, one region gone and two more in open rebellion, much of the country terrorized by oligarch-funded death squads, and some American-anointed puppets nominally in charge but quaking in their boots about what's coming next. Syria and Iraq, which were then at a low simmer, have since erupted into full-blown war, with large parts of both now under the control of the Islamic Caliphate, which was formed with help from the US, was armed with US-made weapons via the Iraqis. Post-Qaddafi Libya seems to be working on establishing an Islamic Caliphate of its own. Against this backdrop of profound foreign US foreign policy failure, the US recently saw it fit to accuse Russia of having troops “on NATO's doorstep,” as if this had nothing to do with the fact that NATO has expanded east, all the way to Russia's borders. Unsurprisingly, US–Russia relations have now reached a point where the Russians saw it fit to issue a stern warning: further Western attempts at blackmailing them may result in a nuclear confrontation.
The American behavior throughout this succession of defeats has been remarkably consistent, with the constant element being their flat refusal to deal with reality in any way, shape or form. Just as before, in Syria the Americans are ever looking for moderate, pro-Western Islamists, who want to do what the Americans want (topple the government of Bashar al Assad) but will stop short of going on to destroy all the infidel invaders they can get their hands on. The fact that such moderate, pro-Western Islamists do not seem to exist does not affect American strategy in the region in any way.
Similarly, in Ukraine, the fact that the heavy American investment in “freedom and democracy,” or “open society,” or what have you, has produced a government dominated by fascists and a civil war is, according to the Americans, just some Russian propaganda. Parading under the banner of Hitler's Ukrainian SS division and anointing Nazi collaborators as national heroes is just not convincing enough for them. What do these Nazis have to do to prove that they are Nazis, build some ovens and roast some Jews? Just massacring people by setting fire to a building, as they did in Odessa, or shooting unarmed civilians in the back and tossing them into mass graves, as they did in Donetsk, doesn't seem to work. The fact that many people have refused to be ruled by Nazi thugs and have successfully resisted them has caused the Americans to label them as “pro-Russian separatists.” This, in turn, was used to blame the troubles in Ukraine on Russia, and to impose sanctions on Russia. The sanctions would be reviewed if Russia were to withdraw its troops from Ukraine. Trouble is, there are no Russian troops in Ukraine.
Note that this sort of behavior is nothing new. The Americans invaded Afghanistan because the Taleban would not relinquish Osama Bin Laden (who was a CIA operative) unless Americans produced evidence implicating him in 9/11—which did not exist. Americans invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein would not relinquish his weapons of mass destruction—which did not exist. They invaded Libya because Muammar Qaddafi would not relinquish official positions—which he did not hold. They were ready to invade Syria because Bashar al Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people—which he did not do. And now they imposed sanctions on Russia because Russia had destabilized and invaded Ukraine—which it did not do either. (The US did that.)
The sanctions against Russia have an additional sort of unreality to them, because they “boomerang” and hurt the West while giving the Russian government the impetus to do what it wanted to do all along. The sanctions infringed on the rights of a number of Russian businessmen and officials, who promptly yanked their money out of Western banks, pulled their children out of Western schools and universities, and did everything else they could to demonstrate that they are good patriotic Russians, not American lackeys. The sanctions affected a number of Russian energy companies, cutting them off from Western sources of technology and financing, but this will primarily hurt the earnings of Western energy companies while helping their Chinese competitors. There were even some threats to cut Russia off from the SWIFT system, which would have made it quite difficult to transfer funds between Russia and the West, but what these threats did instead was to give Russia the impetus to introduce its own RUSSWIFT system, which will include even Iran, neutralizing future American efforts at imposing financial restrictions.
The sanctions were meant to cause economic damage, but Western efforts at inflicting short-term economic damage on Russia are failing. Coupled with a significant drop in the price of oil, all of this was supposed to hurt Russia fiscally, but since the sanctions caused the Ruble to drop in tandem, the net result on Russia's state finances is a wash. Oil prices are lower, but then, thanks in part to the sanctions, so is the Ruble, and since oil revenues are still largely in dollars, this means that Russia's tax receipts are at roughly the same level at before. And since Russian oil companies earn dollars abroad but spend rubles domestically, their production budgets remain unaffected.
The Russians also responded by imposing some counter-sanctions, and to take some quick steps to neutralize the effect of the sanctions on them. Russia banned the import of produce from the European Union—to the horror of farmers there. Especially hurt were those EU members who are especially anti-Russian: the Baltic states, which swiftly lost a large fraction of their GDP, along with Poland. An exception is being made for Serbia, which refused to join in the sanctions. Here, the message is simple: friendships that have lasted many centuries matter; what the Americans want is not what the Americans get; and the EU is a mere piece of paper. Thus, the counter-sanctions are driving wedges between the US and the EU, and, within the EU, between Eastern Europe (which the sanctions are hurting the most) and Western Europe, and, most importantly, they drive home the simple message that the US is not Europe's friend.
There is something else going on that is going to become more significant in the long run: Russia has taken the hint and is turning away from the West and toward the East. It is parlaying its open defiance of American attempts at world domination into trade relationships throughout the world, much of which is sick and tired of paying tribute to Washington. Russia is playing a key role in putting together an international banking system that circumvents the US dollar and the US Federal Reserve. In these efforts, over half the world's territory and population is squarely on Russia's side and cheering loudly. Thus, the effort to isolate Russia has produced the opposite of the intended result: it is isolating the West from the rest of the world instead.
In other ways, the sanctions are actually being helpful. The import ban on foodstuffs from EU is a positive boon to domestic agriculture while driving home a politically important point: don't take food from the hands of those who bite you. Russia is already one of the world's largest grain exporters, and there is no reason why it can't become entirely self-sufficient in food. The impetus to rearm in the face of NATO encroachment on Russian borders (there are now US troops stationed in Estonia, just a short drive from Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg) is providing some needed stimulus for industrial redevelopment. This round of military spending is being planned a bit more intelligently than in the Soviet days, with eventual civilian conversion being part of the plan from the very outset. Thus, along with the world's best jet fighters, Russia is likely to start building civilian aircraft for export and competing with Airbus and Boeing.
But this is only the beginning. The Russians seem to have finally realized to what extent the playing field has been slanted against them. They have been forced to play by Washington's rules in two key ways: by bending to Washington's will in order to keep their credit ratings high with the three key Western credit rating agencies, in order to secure access to Western credit; and by playing by the Western rule-book when issuing credit of their own, thus keeping domestic interest rates artificially high. The result was that US companies were able to finance their operations more cheaply, artificially making them more competitive. But now, as Russia works quickly to get out from under the US dollar, shifting trade to bilateral currency arrangements (backed by some amount of gold should trade imbalances develop) it is also looking for ways to turn the printing press to its advantage. To date, the dictat handed down from Washington has been: “We can print money all we like, but you can't, or we will destroy you.” But this threat is ringing increasingly hollow, and Russia will no longer be using its dollar revenues to buy up US debt. One proposal currently on the table is to make it impossible to pay for Russian oil exports with anything other than rubles, by establishing two oil brokerages, one in St. Petersburg, the other, seven time zones away, in Vladivostok. Foreign oil buyers would then have to earn their petro-rubles the honest way—through bilateral trade—or, if they can't make enough stuff that the Russians want to import, they could pay for oil with gold (while supplies last). Or the Russians could simply print rubles, and, to make sure such printing does not cause domestic inflation, they could export some inflation by playing with the oil spigot and the oil export tariffs. And if the likes of George Soros decides to attack the ruble in an effort to devalue it, Russia could defend its currency simply by printing fewer rubles for a while—no need to stockpile dollar reserves.
So far, this all seems like typical economic warfare: the Americans want to get everything they want by printing money while bombing into submission or sanctioning anyone who disobeys them, while the rest of the world attempts to resist them. But early in 2014 the situation changed. There was a US-instigated coup in Kiev, and instead of rolling over and playing dead like they were supposed to, the Russians mounted a fast and brilliantly successful campaign to regain Crimea, then successfully checkmated the junta in Kiev, preventing it from consolidating control over the remaining former Ukrainian territory by letting volunteers, weapons, equipment and humanitarian aid enter—and hundreds of thousands of refugees exit—through the strictly notional Russian-Ukrainian border, all the while avoiding direct military confrontation with NATO. Seeing all of this happening on the nightly news has awakened the Russian population from its political slumber, making it sit up and pay attention, and sending Putin's approval rating through the roof.
The “optics” of all this, as they like to say at the White House, are rather ominous. We are coming up on the 70th anniversary of victory in World War II—a momentous occasion for Russians, who pride themselves on defeating Hitler almost single-handedly. At the same time, the US (Russia's self-appointed arch-enemy) has taken this opportunity to reawaken and feed the monster of Nazism right on Russia's border (inside Russia's borders, some Russians/Ukrainians would say). This, in turn, makes the Russians remember Russia's unique historical mission is among the nations of the world: it is to thwart all other nations' attempts at world domination, be it Napoleonic France or Hitleresque Germany or Obamaniac America. Every century or so some nation forgets its history lessons and attacks Russia. The result is always the same: lots of corpse-studded snowdrifts, and then Russian cavalry galloping into Paris, or Russian tanks rolling into Berlin. Who knows how it will end this time around? Perhaps it will involve polite, well-armed men in green uniforms without insignia patrolling the streets of Brussels and Washington, DC. Only time will tell.
You'd think that Obama has already overplayed his hand, and should behave accordingly. His popularity at home is roughly the inverse of Putin's, which is to say, Obama is still more popular than Ebola, but not by much. He can't get anything at all done, no matter how pointless or futile, and his efforts to date, at home and abroad, have been pretty much a disaster. So what does this social worker turned national mascot decide to do? Well, the way the Russians see it, he has decided to declare war on Russia! In case you missed it, look up his speech before the UN General Assembly. It's up on the White House web site. He placed Russia directly between Ebola and ISIS among the three topmost threats facing the world. Through Russian eyes his speech reads as a declaration of war.
It's a new, mixed-mode sort of war. It's not a total war to the death, although the US is being rather incautious by the old Cold War standards in avoiding a nuclear confrontation. It's an information war—based on lies and unjust vilification; it's a financial and economic war—using sanctions; it's a political war—featuring violent overthrow of elected governments and support for hostile regimes on Russia's borders; and it's a military war—using ineffectual but nevertheless insulting moves such as stationing a handful of US troops in Estonia. And the goals of this war are clear: it is to undermine Russia economically, destroy it politically, dismember it geographically, and turn it into a pliant vassal state that furnishes natural resources to the West practically free of charge (with a few hand-outs to a handful of Russian oligarchs and criminal thugs who play ball). But it doesn't look like any of that is going to happen because, you see, a lot of Russians actually get all that, and will choose leaders who will not win any popularity contests in the West but who will lead them to victory.
Given the realization that the US and Russia are, like it or not, in a state of war, no matter how opaque or muddled, people in Russia are trying to understand why this is and what it means. Obviously, the US has seen Russia as the enemy since about the time of the Revolution of 1917, if not earlier. For example, it is known that after the end of World War II America's military planners were thinking of launching a nuclear strike against the USSR, and the only thing that held them back was the fact that they didn't have enough bombs, meaning that Russia would have taken over all of Europe before the effects of the nuclear strikes could have deterred them from doing so (Russia had no nuclear weapons at the time, but lots of conventional forces right in the heart of Europe).
But why has war been declared now, and why was it declared by this social worker turned national misleader? Some keen observers mentioned his slogan “the audacity of hope,” and ventured to guess that this sort of “audaciousness” (which in Russian sounds a lot like “folly”) might be a key part of his character which makes him want to be the leader of the universe, like Napoleon or Hitler. Others looked up the campaign gibberish from his first presidential election (which got silly young Americans so fired up) and discovered that he had nice things to say about various cold warriors. Do you think Obama might perhaps be a scholar of history and a shrewd geopolitician in his own right? (That question usually gets a laugh, because most people know that he is just a chucklehead and repeats whatever his advisers tell him to say.) Hugo Chavez once called him “a hostage in the White House,” and he wasn't too far off. So, why are his advisers so eager to go to war with Russia, right now, this year?
Is it because the US is collapsing more rapidly than most people can imagine? This line of reasoning goes like this: the American scheme of world domination through military aggression and unlimited money-printing is failing before our eyes. The public has no interest in any more “boots on the ground,” bombing campaigns do nothing to reign in militants that Americans themselves helped organize and equip, dollar hegemony is slipping away with each passing day, and the Federal Reserve is fresh out of magic bullets and faces a choice between crashing the stock market and crashing the bond market. In order to stop, or at least forestall this downward slide into financial/economic/political oblivion, the US must move quickly to undermine every competing economy in the world through whatever means it has left at its disposal, be it a bombing campaign, a revolution or a pandemic (although this last one can be a bit hard to keep under control). Russia is an obvious target, because it is the only country in the world that has had the gumption to actually show international leadership in confronting the US and wrestling it down; therefore, Russia must be punished first, to keep the others in line.
I don't disagree with this line of reasoning, but I do want to add something to it.
First, the American offensive against Russia, along with most of the rest of the world, is about things Americans like to call “facts on the ground,” and these take time to create. The world wasn't made in a day, and it can't be destroyed in a day (unless you use nuclear weapons, but then there is no winning strategy for anyone, the US included). But the entire financial house of cards can be destroyed rather quickly, and here Russia can achieve a lot while risking little. Financially, Russia's position is so solid that even the three Western credit ratings agencies don't have the gall to downgrade Russia's rating, sanctions notwithstanding. This is a country that is aggressively paying down its foreign debt, is running a record-high budget surplus, has a positive balance of payments, is piling up physical gold reserves, and not a month goes by that it doesn't sign a major international trade deal (that circumvents the US dollar). In comparison, the US is a dead man walking: unless it can continue rolling over trillions of dollars in short-term debt every month at record-low interest rates, it won't be able to pay the interest on its debt or its bills. Good-bye, welfare state, hello riots. Good-bye military contractors and federal law enforcement, hello mayhem and open borders. Now, changing “facts on the ground” requires physical actions, whereas causing a financial stampede to the exits just requires somebody to yell “Boo!” loudly and frighteningly enough.
Second, it must be understood that at this point the American ruling elite is almost entirely senile. The older ones seem actually senile in the medical sense. Take Leon Panetta, the former Defense Secretary: he's been out flogging his new book, and he is still blaming Syria's Bashar al Assad for gassing his own people! By now everybody else knows that that was a false flag attack, carried out by some clueless Syrian rebels with Saudi help, to be used as an excuse for the US to bomb Syria—you know, the old “weapons of mass destruction” nonsense again. (By the way, this kind of mindless, repetitive insistence on a fake rationale seems like a sure sign of senility.) That plan didn't work because Putin and Lavrov intervened and quickly convinced Assad to give up his useless chemical weapons stockpile. The Americans were livid. So, everybody knows this story—except Panetta. You see, once an American official starts lying, he just doesn't know how to stop. The story always starts with a lie, and, as facts emerge that contradict the initial story, they are simply ignored.
So much for the senile old guard, but what about their replacements? Well, the poster boy for the young ones is Hunter Biden, the VP's son, who went on a hookers-and-blow tour of Ukraine last summer and inadvertently landed a seat on the board of directors of Ukraine's largest natural gas company (which doesn't have much gas left). He just got outed for being a coke fiend. In addition to the many pre-anointed ones, like the VP's son, there are also many barns full of eagerly bleating Ivy League graduates who have been groomed for jobs in high places. These are Prof. Deresiewicz's “Excellent Sheep.”
There just isn't much that such people, young or old, can be made to respond to. International embarrassment, military defeat, humanitarian catastrophe—all these things just bounce off them and stick to you for bringing them up and being overly negative about their rose-colored view of themselves. The only hit they can actually feel is a hit to the pocketbook.
Which brings us all the way back to my first point: “Boo!”
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Kind of humorous to hear the "Angel of Joy" rooting for the Empire of Evil but we live in what many people find to be rather confusing times.
The score is still Gipper 1, Empire of Evil 0 and it looks like it's about to be Obama 1, Empirette of Evil 0 to keep the streak alive.
But let me buy you a drink, oh Joyous Angel.
http://youtu.be/_Z16jVKrk2s
You obviously know nothing about the 900-day Siege of Leningrad.
Very little about GSP, jr's accident and eventual death.
And even less about what a softie Hitler, of all people, was.
Apart from those minor details, you're batting 1.000. (It is World Series time, you know)
Your delusional. Get over yourself. Only a psychopath would desire or could cheer for the death of millions of innocent people, get some help.
Bullshit. The Russians likely would have beat the US after WWII. The Battle of Kursk turned the war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kursk
The Russians essentially beat the Germans. Their total population losses (civilian and military) were MORE than 100x the US military only (27 million vs 250 thousand). The Russians would not have stopped, even if the West withdrew all support. Shit, Stalin begged FDR for lend/lease support, which was slow in coming and dysfunctional when it arrived (crate equipment missing parts, broken, etc). It got to the point where Stalin thought FDR was doing it on purpose in an effort to use the Russians to wear the Germans down (which is probably what FDR was doing, but it could also be that it took the fat Americans awhile to get organized and productive). In spite of this, they stuck it out, got their asses kicked on paper, but didn't give up and ultimately wore the Germans down.
The Russians were the boots on the ground. We were primarily the air campaign and peripheral on-the-ground mop-up.
The US brags about how great we were tooling up for the war. Shit, the Russians moved entire factories hundreds of miles while under direct German attack in order to keep production going. Under these conditions, they produced enough hardware for the Battle of Kursk (bigger than all US ground fighting in WWII combined) and rolled out a new tank model in the process (some aircraft upgrades, too, i think).
Few US soldiers have ever seen what Russian soldiers experienced consistently in WWII. Huge numbers of Russian soldiers ran into battles with only a 5 round stripper clips of 7.62x54R, or were shot for desertion because they stopped to shit out from disentary.
I'm not even taking sides here, these are just the facts.
Had the US tried to take out Russia as the final engagement of the war, we'd have had our first experience at losing a million men in a single battle as we charged deep into Russian territory--right before winter.
The US has been gloating ever since WWII in spite of having a fairly minor fighting role in Europe. Given their track record I'm not sure why.
Fascinatingly ignorant of reality. Too many terminological inexactitudes to bother refuting but everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one, and most of them stink!
Big words spoken from your ass is still talking out of your ass
I'm not writing a fucking thesis and don't really give a shit about the meticulous details.
My point is this--the US likely did not have the capability to defeat Russia during or immediately after WWII. Think about it; the Germans invaded Russia as the most technically advanced and well-equipped military force the world had ever seen. The Russian military was using WWI hardware and had a decade of purges that gutted tens of thousands of their most experienced fighters (the leadership being the hardest hit).
Yet the Germans still failed. Sure, the West assisted with the destruction of their air power, but before this was done the Russians were under those aircraft--and didn't succumb. In fact, they improvised and eventually advanced.
One big mistake the Germans made was assuming that defeat would be measured in material and personnel destruction. That's not the case, as the US is learning the Mid East. The Russians lost more of everything than any other participant in the war, but still emerged victorious. If the West didn't assist, the Russians would have hacked foxholes in the permafrost of Siberia and had old ladies lie in wait to pitchfork German soldiers to death, if that's what it took to win, or lose--but they didn't lose.
Fucking Machiavelli and Sun Tsu understood that to defeat determined enemies, one must anihillate them. Men, women, and unfortunately lots of children. The Germans didn't get it. That's what the US fails to understand with it's Mid-East strategy today.
What makes me edgy about this subject is the pedestal that the US places itself upon in regard to WWII victory. Sure, our material assistance was signficiant. Our personnel were beneficial, too. But by the time we got there, the worst of the fighting was over. Otherwise, we'd have lost a few million men. It was the Russians that took those hits.
Yet, we've pandered to the American WWII generation for 'saving the world'. This misplaced hero worship might help the propaganda component of a war machine, but it's abuse has built a social welfare state that's bankrupted the nation already. It's the same sentiment, now a deeply engrained characteristic of American culture, that resulted in cop-worship after 911 and gave us a police state.
What we need is legitimate perspective and I fear we've permanently lost it.
My only dispute is with this: the US likely did not have the capability to defeat Russia during or immediately after WWII.
US had a bomb that could take out Moscow and every other Russian city at that time. It took months after the war for Russia to come up with her own deployable nuke. Not that the people in charge back then (thank god) would have used nukes on Russia, but the ability was there. Today, these psychos in charge would likely have no problem with it. (That is, the US as the only nation on earth with nukes.)
Land war - you are correct. Drop nukes over Russia before they had developed them, that was the only way US would have beaten Russia.
I see your point and would agree, but the US didn't have the raw materials. It took a couple years to refine the uranium required for the two bombs used in Japan. That was all we had. It would have taken another year--maybe more-- for the US to produce another bomb or two.
Were that year to have started, the US would have been wintering in Russia just as Napoleon and the Nazis did. Imagine a scenario where the Russians were pushed back to Moscow by the Americans--think Leningrad was a mess? Moscow likely would b worse. Or, the Russians would scorch it and leave, baiting the US deeper into their territory.
By the time the US had bombs ready, they'd have lost a million men. The rest of Europe didn't have the resources or manpower to assist, either. In fact, they may have turned against the US for prolonging everything.
The US had lots of hardware but no stomach for the blood. I don't think we'd have weathered any sort of prolonged war against Russia.
You won't refute because you can't refute. Truth is the truth. You have swallowed one of the biggest of the lies of WWII, hook line and sinker.
That's idiotic. Aside from the fact they would have had to face an opponent possessing several atomic bombs, the Russians were essentially tapped for fighting age men. 88% of the males born in 1922 in Russia were killed in the war and on either side of that cohort out several years the casualty rates were over 50%.
Russians were able to devote a significant fraction of their industrial capacity to AFVs specifically due to the fact that the US was supplying them with a huge percentage of their ground transport, not to mention about 20% of their AFVs and 30% of their combat aircraft.
Russia at 1945 had essentially zero strategic bombing capability.
By 1945 we had approximately 2 dozen fleet aircraft carriers, 11 light and around 75-85 escort carriers in service. Devotion of even a fraction of this force would have erased Russian naval and shoreline operations in a few weeks.
And what pray tell does the Battle of Kursk have to do with anything? If you have freakin' MONTHS to prepare a defense in depth for an attack you know is coming and your opponent is stupid enough to pursue it even after they noodle it out after starting, you could extract a bloody price defending that area with 3rd graders.
I have GOBS of respect for the Russian fighting man, and for Russia's contributions to WWII AND for helping keep the French and British off our asses in the Civil War, but sheesh, get real on the beating the west immediately after VE day...
I completely see your point on all of this. The Russians were spent after the war (however, the US exhausted it's A-bomb supply and would have required a year or so to get more).
I misstated that the Russians would beat the West at the end of the war. I dont think they'd beat the West, but they wouldn't have been defeated by the West. That's my point here; had the US attacked after the war, victory for the Russians would be not letting the US win, even if it meants resisting for a decade. The US, on the other hand, would be in the situation it's in now with the Mid-east--fighting Russian civilians in distant Siberian outposts for no apparent reason wouldn't have gained us many supporters.
The US would have to exterminate the Russians to win. Americans weren't willing to do it. US airpower wouldn't have done it. Shit, look at the Mid East--we've unleashed airpower that is 100x better against an enemy that isn't as well equipped as the Russians at the end of WWII, and twenty years later we still aren't victorious!
Kursk illustrates what would be required of an enemy to defeat Russia. It would take complete destruction of the Russian population. Even if the US had the hardware to do it, they didn't have the will. And air power wouldn't have been sufficient then like it isn't sufficient now.
The effect of a-bombs is theoretical since they've never been used in a full scale war. But look at the Japanese situation--95% of their major cities--scores of cities--were firebombed and destroyed as thoroughly as the A-bombs destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, yet they still hadn't given up. And shit, they are a fucking ISLAND for fucks sake. Russia wouldn't be so easy to destroy, even with A-bombs (which we didn't have a supply of).
Hey Dmitry, you forgot one small point: When your comrads enter my house I will show you a flash of light from my personal hunting only lead launcher & once they hit the porch I'll go about my business of counting the cattle & getting the eggs because I always win motherfucker...
Russia is engaged in an economic war with the West, regardless of who instigated it or which side is in the right. It has a GDP of about 2 T, US/EU GDP 17 + 14 T = 31T m/l. There is really no question of which cat has the longer tail or which economy can finance the people's pain for longer. There is also no question of which contestant truly needs the revenues that come from trading with the enemy.
The odds against Nazi Germany were once calculated at about 9-2 against. Putin is playing a much weaker hand against a respectively much stronger counter alliance.
Russia is also engaged in a simultaneous petro-war with Saudi Arabia. They aren't even winning against the JV squad, to quote someone we all know.
When the collapse comes, it will occur in much the same way as the original Empire of Evil disintegrated. Everything seems strong and menacing right up until the last day and then poof. The same goes quadruple for the distaff side of the Axis of Parvenus (China). When it goes bang, boy howdy.
While I'm thinking about it, how's that Russian PPT working out for ya? Russia is already paying more for its bonds than such paragons as Greece. Capital is fleeing. The state is seizing the monies in pension funds. Even Sweden is on their case.
Yeah, things are going great. Enjoy the war, as the Wehrmacht used to say, because the peace is going to be terrible.
Tarabel, you compare paper GDP with BTUs you dumb fuck you. I rly hope you are gov/hasbara troll, otherwise you are plain dumb and there's no cure for that. I won't go into refuting your other cheap propaganda points you got there as there's no ROI in that from my part.
Some war. US has around 1000 military bases overseas.
Russia has around 10,all on her own doorstep.
Guess which one is the global threat.
Analysis of the current international situation by using nonlinear models with critical limits showed that the world is in a similar situation as the imminent start of the 2nd World War. Making arms on debt as a way of solving the economic crisis and unemployment exports are similar to those in the 30s of the last century. As global trade especially in the area of commodity rises and falls with the petrodollar, there is an attempt to completely eliminate any exceptions. Today's gradual transition BRICS countries on gold- ruble standard accelerates crisis, the trend in Western countries, and reveals the greatest weakness of their prosperity -life on debt, which in many world powers have achieved more than 60% of GDP (France, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Japan, Canada, Germany, UK, USA, Spain, ...).
Most important, however, seems to be finding that most of the "developed" countries (especially the USA) wants to solve its economic problems in a similar way as Hitler in the 30s - gradually sparking local and global conflicts.
In other words, history repeats.
"Saddam Hussein would not relinquish his weapons of mass destruction—which did not exist." This kind of mystery for Scooby-Do where are those WMDs which USA provided to Iraq, and Saddam use them, for war with Iran? The most likely thought they will find own WMDs so that should be proof.
I love Washington's unlimited fantasy, edging with paranoia. Acording to Washington Saddam had mobile labs for producing WMDs.
But I do not know if Washington set stakes too high with Afghanistan. They were showing on TV sophisticated underground web of tunnels with power generators, A/C etc. It was Rumsfie. I know that money and power have huge gravity, but making idiot from itself...
This one was also good one, fresh. Idiots British prestitutes had seen Russian column crossing UA border. Next day idiots from Kiev reported that they destroyed it. Some 20 tanks and assistance vehicles vaporized because no nut was left. And what about stupids in Kremlin? They did not sent any rescue mission...
Psychiatrist is right person to help them get out of halucinations
"...the US must move quickly to undermine every competing economy in the world through whatever means it has left at its disposal..."
Start by getting rid of your adversaries that are supposed allies:
“Anti-Petrodollar” CEO Of French Energy Giant Total Dies In Freak Plane Crash In Moscow" https://geoffmoyle.com.au/news/?p=8033As an American, I really hate to agree with a guy named Dimitri, but I think he hit the nail on the head there. I started to become aware in my late teens, but didn't finish the trip until my late 30's (early 1990's). Now I'm 56. Everyday, with each new propaganda piece from the MSM, I get sick to my stomache. To stop the pain, I even tried to drink the koolaid again, to no avail. Try as I may, it no longer works on me.
I walk the streets, surrounded by the inflicted, much like Chaleton Heston in the Omega Man, where the masses follow some psychotic leader. I see the blank stares and empty minds, left that way by a public education system riding on a parallel street to the MSM propaganda wagon. It sure is lonely out here. My only joy is to find, like the Omega Man, that there is a small group not inflicted. My thanks to everyone here at ZH. I guess the koolaid doesn't work on you either.
I tells ya, these Neocons and banksters have got to go, and take the entire MIC and MSM with them. Can you imagine a world without them?
I feel the same. Sometimes I think " No - it can't be this bad - my mind must be unglued". Then another day of lies , deception cliches and stale rhetoric starts up. The realy is no intelligent life on this continent. Beam me up. My mind is not unglued - I have grown up and the scales have fallen from my eyes.
No you are not alone, and ZeroHedge is not the only place, altho it is a nice one. The American koolaid was toxic to me for years before I glimpsed an alternative life. It was not a happy way to live, but things are looking up now that I can envision a different sort of world. Who knows, America may even survive the correction, albeit in a slightly different form. I will not miss the Empire.
Good luck to you, fellow wanderer.
plain delusional. russia is getting itself out of the civilized world, not the US dollar. money in the present state of the world - like it or not - is essentially a contract. russia has breached every international treaty it has entered into, ergo the RUR is essentially worthless...
Will the new york times book review be included in the civilized part?
If Russia looks east instead of west, is that "getting itself out of the civilized world"? Sounds very parochial. Check out Said's old book, Orientalism.
World power does not stay in one spot just because we are comfortable with it there.
It's a nice idea that every move is pre-planned but it's simply not true. The U.S. is losing its grip.
The problem is , if you are at the top , you can only run down .
https://www.academia.edu/8899526/How_to_run_faster_and_why_
What did the man think when he cut down the last big tree on Easter Island ?
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2010-04-08/easter-island-case-study-re...
Credit is treated like a limitless resource , until suddenly it is'nt .
The US knows one direction: Straight Forward. Damn the results or what's left in the wake. They will keep their eye on the prize until there is nothing left of themselves. Or possibly anyone else.
1) I don't disagree with the main thrust but disagree it's America vs Russia. It's banking mafia vs Russia using America as a tool.
Now from the Russian point of view that comes to the same thing - which is fair enough. However from the point of view of someone who isn't on either side and just sees WW3 as a tad sub-optimal it matters a great deal because if the banking mafia can be taken down then US policy would turn on a dime to a more Buchanan-esque policy of rebuilding the US' real economy which would reduce the dependence on the currency to pay the bills.
So for neutrals it's the banking mafia vs Russia (or the BRICS really with Russia as point man).
2) As an aside WW1 was also banking mafia imo i.e. getting Germnay to attack Russia because they wanted to spread their central banking scam to Russia but the system of european alliances turned it into a world war as an unintended consequence - with WW2 resulting from the consequences of WW1 so basically one war with a lull in the middle.
3) As a second aside the strength and weakness of the neocons running the banking mafia's foreign policy is the same thing - they are hyper-aggressive psychopaths. It's a strength in that it makes them relentless - they won't stop until they win or lose power - but at the same time it's a weakness because they are predictable - they will always chose the most hyper-aggressive psychopathic option available.
In these efforts, over half the world's territory and population is squarely on Russia's side and cheering loudly. Thus, the effort to isolate Russia has produced the opposite of the intended result: it is isolating the West from the rest of the world instead.
I'd say that estimate of "over half" siding with the Russians is pretty damn accurate. Including the ethnic Yids living inside Russia, especially the ones with "lots of money" that got rich when team America showed up around 1991 that are quite panicked and living uncomfortable lives inside it's borders these days.
Orlov nailed this one beautifully especially on the issue of Nazification of the Kiev government that has the tacit approval of the "Vicky Nuland/Robert Kagan/George Soros" camp, which only shows their outright hypocrisy to the Holocaust and has irreparably damaged the last vestiges of that memory most likely forever for the Zionist State of Israel!
Bravo!
Thx for this post ZH
Want something done? Hire a Russian. Examples: WWII, Chernobyl, etc., etc......
Want something done? Hire a Russian. Examples: WWII, Chernobyl, etc., etc......
As opposed to?... Not getting anything done?!!...
And while you're at the top of your game at "doing nothing" destroying every vestige of what once made you prosperous most important among them in doing business both foreign and domestic -your rule of law!
P.S.
The chapter on what really happened in Ukraine all those years ago hasn't been fully written yet... But the Russians are certainly making themselves the envy of that technology with stuff like this... Oh and who has the resources on the globe for all that uranium enrichment moving forward???...
Not sure what you were intimating with Chernobyl, but if you want to look at that most excellent of commercial reactors built in the stone age look no further than the Mark I's in Fukushima Japan! Yes indeed!! Made cheap, dirty and dangerous by the folks at GE!!!
It must be nice to have such a simplistic POV, unsullied with knowledge, wisdom, and experience.
Time to start rounding up these USSA Neo-Bolshevik Punks.
Captivating article...
Good article except the Nazi-clichees, invented by the same forces that wage war against Russia today. But doesn't matter.
The above is an understatement. Because the state terrorist in the White House has spoken at the UNO. And while all ziomedia are quite silent about this incredible speech, it doesn't mean that Russians have not recognized it or are as uninformed as the sheeple under ZOGs. It was a de facto declaration of war against Russia from the peace nobel laureate (another one I might add).
To get an impression how Russia is judging the developments and where it's discussion is going along, I can highly suggest for every non-Russian to watch this discussion of Russian geopoliticians: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDfpMrgnVf4
I find it also interesting to observe the high level of discussion culture compared to the level of plebs-disinfo in ziomedia.
If this is a representation of Russia's government advisors and politicians, then I'd say the Zionists with their extremely successful dumbing down of the nations could face severe problems in the not too distant future. Asian nations are already among the top educated nations, while the ZOGs education systems are falling apart (as intended).
But if also Russia, as the biggest European country begins to understand so clearly the poison for the societies that is spread from New York and the City of London over the people in the world, how people and cultures are intentionally destroyed and begins to look at it's own weaknesses as the source of the problem for the parasites to flourish, and it strives to become better by developing virtues and also offensively begins to explain to the Russian people the Western regime and how it works and if it develops an alternative system to the Jewish smoke and mirrors casino economy, an economy based on the revival of traditional European values and honest productive labor, while removing the influence of the international banking cabal within Russia, then after Adolf Hitler's Germany the enemy of mankind maybe is finally facing a force, that could successfully stop the perpetual aggression of the enemy of mankind against all other nations.
For some sinister reason the up/down arrows are not working only on your comment. So here is my endorsement.
Run a little faster .
https://www.academia.edu/8899526/How_to_run_faster_and_why_
Good and bad rap and roll
.
theres a big difference bitchez
(Yet) another thought provoking thread on ZH.
I've developed a metric formula for Depths of Ignorance; ie, I've quantitized it. Without posting the long, boring math, this article and comments to it have a DoI index of -1,451.2. As reference, the DoI index to "Obama is a good President" is -1.865.6
I decided to peruse Dmitri's blog at Club Orlov, read an article or 3 of his, and skim some of the Amazon customer reviews of his book The Five Stages of Collapse. all this is an attempt to derive a quick snapshot of who Orlov is.
What did I find? Well, while any attempt to distill a published author's work down to a few sentences sucks crocodile cloaca, let me cite from his blog entry In the US, democracy is now a sham: "What they are really trying to spread is not Democracy but Predatory Capitalism ... (America) is far down the road to becoming a full-blown Corporate Police State."
I now know who Dmitri is. Do you?
As to the article itself. It is a pastiche of fey, boutique quanta of propaganda, the quanta ruthlessly and jarringly disconnected from each other. The article is remarkably devoid of logic or order; ie, its form is juvenile. Again, stream of consciousness substituting for substance, substance being what the article lacks.
Compliments to Orlov's always perceptive and well organized essay.
How did we in the US ever get ourselves into this mess? We are a country born in revolt from empire, and yet we have proceeded to impose our own empire, forgetting our history and constitition. I attribute a lot of it to the simple-minded and jingoistic nationalism taught in our schools and constantly reinforced in our media. The other part is the economic influence of the military-industrial complex which has been steadily expanding since the end of WWII. Congressmen compete for the placement of military bases in their districts as though they have completely forgotten that there are other forms of economic development. Health and education are neglected, while the Pentagon eats up hundreds of billions of taxpayer money, and pushes aside all other programs.
You've got the agitprop down pat. Thought, not so much.
Romney is the current R front runner by huge margin. All other R's register less than 5% approval among Rs, while Romney registers over 30%. (I want both major parties banned for 50 years for all national office.)
Romney's excuse for last election's "47%" gaff is to say he only said what the millionaire questioner wanted to hear.
What he should instead say is: "I challenge anyone to prove my statement wrong. Beyond that, I apologize for how offensive this is to the 47%, who are my fellow Americans. Even more, I apologize for not highlighting something far more critical and desctructive: the top 10% suck the remaining 90% dry, including the 47% previously mentioned, with the common practice of 'crypotcracy' which is a fake and corrupt form of capitalism which no longer exists when the government picks winners and loosers."
Of course, Russians courageously defeated the Germans in WWII; what i meant about Chernobyl was that they contained the catastrophe, evacuated the people out immediately and generally handled the tragic accident in an appropriate manner, unlike the Japanese at Fukushima...