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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
Was the Last Chance for Avoidance of Nuclear Armageddon Lost?
Was the Last Chance for Avoidance of Nuclear Armageddon Lost?
Paul Craig Roberts
Russia’s Ukrainian intervention in behalf of the former part of Russia known as the Donbass region consisting of two Russian recognized independent republics, Donetsk and Luhansk, could have served as a warning to the West and ended Washington’s provocations of Russia that are leading to nuclear armageddon. But the Kremlin dropped the ball.
The Russians could have conquered the entirety of Ukraine in three or four days, hung the entirety of the government with or without war crimes trials just as the Americans hung Saddam Hussein, destroyed the entirety of the Azov neo-nazi force, and installed a puppet government that declared itself to be a demilitarized neutral state that will never join NATO or the EU.
Instead, what did the Kremlin do? It committed itself to a limited operation that would drag on and provide endless opportunities for demonizing Russia and her leadership and placing Russia beyond the pale.
The first thing that the Kremlin did was to announce that it had limited intentions and forbade the Russian military from using heavy weapons in civilian areas. Once the Ukrainians heard this, the neo-Nazis ensconced themselves with their heavy weapons in the midst of civilian populations. Behind these human shields granted freely by the Kremlin the Ukrainians inflicted casualties on the Russians who couldn’t fire back except with small arms. The Russian casualties sustained the Ukrainian resistance and the West’s psyops war against Russia. Instead of presenting as a formidable military opponent, Russia was presented as barely capable of holding its own against the US and UK equipped and trained Ukrainian army. Some Western commentators predicted Russia’s defeat.
The second thing the Kremlin did was to constantly put its war on hold while it negotiated, pointlessly, with a government that did not control the country and could not act independently of Washington. The Western presstitutes presented the negotiations as Russia trying to find a way out of the war and sanctions.
What would more serious leadership have done to put a permanent end to Western provocations of Russia and, thereby, move nuclear war off the agenda? The Kremlin would have cut Ukraine off from the West and quickly conquered the country, and the Kremlin would have anticipated the sanctions and would have been proactive, rather than reactive leaving initiative with the West.
The Kremlin would first have transferred its foreign reserves out of Western hands. It would have simultaneously cut all energy, mineral and food deliveries to the West. The Kremlin would have nationalized every Western investment in Russia. The Kremlin would have repudiated all debts to the West. The Kremlin would have withdrawn every representative from every Western country.
Instead, the Kremlin pissed down its own boot, and, consequently, no one is afraid of Russia. Even helpless Finland is brave enough to declare its intention to join NATO, which means another missile base on Russia’s border, the avoidance of which will require another Russian intervention. Indeed, Finland is not even scared of seizing, as Finland has done, priceless Russian artworks returning to Russia from shows in Italy and Japan via Finland where they were seized with Washington’s sanctions as the justification. Instead of appropriate retaliation, the Kremlin made the usual useless protest. https://www.rt.com/russia/553464-art-finland-return-russia/
The Kremlin presents such a Russian posture of weakness that NATO secretary, Stoltenberg, a man without a functioning army, sees an opportunity to break China from Russia. Stoltenberg, Washington’s puppet, says China faces a more militant response from the West for refusing to obey the West and condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. Stoltenberg threatens China with “problems” for not standing with the West against Russia.
Meanwhile Washington, which owns the UN because Washington finances the organization, has had Russia evicted from the human rights council. None of these things happened to Washington and NATO when they left Iraq and Libya in smoking ruins and murdered the leaders.
As a reader said, “Let’s get this right. The US and Britain start wars and invade illegally Iraq, Libya, and Syria pretending these are democratically liberating wars, but cause the deaths and injury of millions, resulting in the largest migration movement since WW2 into Europe. Washington, which kills without thought, now accuses Russia of human rights abuses and has Russia suspended from the UN Human Rights Council.”
What makes a country powerful? A sense of itself, a belief in itself.
In America the belief system is almost completely destroyed. In Russia belief is compromised by intellectual and financial links to the West. The isolation of Russia from the West should strengthen Russia by breaking these links.
In the US the Founding Fathers and traditional heroes are exposed as “racists,” and white citizens are taught in schools and universities that they are racially guilty. White soldiers and corporate employees have to take “sensitivity training” where they are taught to accept preferential treatment for “people of color.” This sensitivity training is now expanding into requiring accommodation of the traditional sexual perversions and the new one of transgenderism. The goal is the breakdown of societal norms and the replacement of white majority leadership with minority rainbow leadership. History is being “cancelled” with the removal of statues, and street, town, city, school, sports team, river, and mountain name changes. Real history has been replaced by fictional history such as the New York Times 1619 Project. White people are disappearing in advertisements, movies, and children’s stories. Even Snow White is to be black.
Some upper class and intellectual Russians, susceptible to America worship because of the decades of communism, see their country falling short of America. They seek association with the West. Consequently, they do not comprehend what is necessary for their own country’s independence. Indeed, they don’t want independence. They want inclusion into the West. These Russians constrain the government and make Russia an easier target for the West.
The Western world is too fearful to confront Russia militarily, understanding that the confrontations would mean the end of the West. Instead the West relies on shaming tactics. Putin is insulted and demonized. The US president declares Putin must be tried as a war criminal. Putin’s daughters are sanctioned. The wife of the foreign minister is sanctioned. The hoped for effect is to make Putin and Lavrov look powerless and unable to protect their own family from Washington’s punishment. The West’s media reports the Ukraine conflict propagandistically. Russia has no right to security concerns on her own borders, but the US had legitimate security concerns thousands of miles from her borders that required the the destruction of seven countries in five years.
Curiously, Russia’s shaming by the West proceeds hand-in-hand with the West’s shaming of itself. Western countries are too full of guilt to defend their own borders and are being overrun by alien cultures. Yet the West pretends to be concerned about Ukraine’s borders.
Nowhere in the Western world today, not in universities, not in media, not in public education, not in churches , not in arts and entertainment, not in NPR broadcasts or Disney movies is any moral value associated with the United States and Western civilization. In the US and UK students are directed away from reading the classic literature that taught character and moral behavior. Sterling University explains why it removed Jane Austen from study: To “decolonize the curriculum” at Stirling University, African-American writer Toni Morrison will replace Jane Austen. When a country discards its own literature because of false claims of nonsensical wokeism, that country’s culture is dead. https://www.rt.com/news/553378-university-removes-jane-austen/
The civilizational values that once defined the Western world have been replaced by the desire for money and the hegemonic right to loot it from others. Russia and China are in trouble because they are constraints on Western hegemony. Washington is using Ukraine to isolate Russia as a way of destabilizing the government. Finland will be the next sacrificial lamb, and the process will move on from there. Russia missed the opportunity to stop these provocations with a quick success in Ukraine and proactive rather than reactive measures on the sanctions front. The Kremlin could have turned the sanction issue against the West by being the first to strike, but lacked the confidence. As Russia lacks the hegemonic ambition of the West, Russia is confined to responding to the West’s initiatives. Sooner or later these initiatives will set off nuclear war.