--We should thank John Whitbeck for bringing to our attention a very cogent European analysis of the Ukraine issue and for providing an English translation of the original French.Ukraine : Evidences and Consequences
Cambrai (France), Université du Temps Libre, January 3, 2023)
By Jean-Pierre Vettovaglia, former Ambassador of Switzerland, former Personal Representative of the President of the Swiss Confederation for the Francophonie, Bank Administrator in Geneva.
"The bad guys have probably understood something that the good guys don't", Woody Allen
Introduction
In recent years, in numerous articles and conferences, I have, without any particular merit, drawn the attention of my readers and listeners to the factor that most threatens our security and world peace, namely the expansion of NATO towards Russia. NATO is now at war with Russia since February 24, 2022, without saying so, while doing it through the Ukrainians. Russia has invaded Ukraine. We are there, both surprised (because no one had really foreseen it) and overwhelmed by the events (because we do not know where it will lead us).
Yet everyone knows that the chaos of the world is not born from the souls of peoples, races or religions, but from the insatiable appetite of the powerful.
I am not here to influence your opinions. I am simply here to give you elements of judgment that you may or may not integrate into your opinions on the matter. The only thing that interests me here is to provide you with unfiltered information, not always easy to find, to the best of my knowledge and research, away from the official propaganda. As a good Swiss, that is to say in all neutrality!!!
1 - Reminder: men make politics
People often think that their governments run the country in a Cartesian and realistic way. The fact is that this is not the case.
In reality, a government often finds itself in the midst of irrationality and passions. As Blaise Pascal said in his "Pensées", "I look on all sides and see only darkness everywhere". Recently, Michel Houellebecq said: "What we call a statesman is generally a particularly lying and cynical politician." Even totally irresponsible. A recent example is the Ukrainian President who, alone in the world, insisted that the missile that hit Poland was Russian, which would lead to war, NATO intervention and an increased risk of nuclear war. Passionate perhaps, but irrational and dangerous.
The narrowest or most selfish interests, political, financial, economic and military, dominate the scene and prevail over the logic of good government.
Once again, we return to the prediction of the brilliant Raymond Aron in "Les désillusions du progrès" (1969). Referring to the federalist tendencies that were emerging in Europe, the great political philosopher wrote: "The dimension of the new European market...favors economic expansion but not the quality of government...". We can see this today with governments that are fairly disconnected from concrete realities and devote most of their energy to ideological battles.
The American Democratic government wants to continue the war, Zelensky wants to continue the war, Putin wants to continue the war. The Secretary General of NATO, who is still irresponsibly pouring oil on the fire, has already said that a defeat in Ukraine would be a defeat for NATO and that NATO cannot afford to lose the war.
And we Europeans are pushing at the wheel, indirectly causing more and more deaths in this mad march towards the suicide of our societies. If we knew that Ukraine loses several hundred men every day under the blows of Russian artillery and drones and that its army of spring 2022 reinforced by 8 successive mobilizations has lost nearly 70% of its strength, that Ukrainian NGOs estimate the number of dead and wounded at several hundred thousand, you would all say to your government: please, let's stop sending weapons to Ukraine, it kills too many people. Ukrainian pride will always prevent Zelensky from stopping his headlong rush. He will continue to make unrealistic proposals that effectively rule out any proposal for peace negotiations. On LCI, he tells journalist Darioush Rochebin that he will be swimming on the beaches of Crimea in the summer of 2023...!?
Threatened by a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, less favorable to Ukraine, Biden preferred to take the lead. On December 20, 2022, during Zelensky's reception in Washington, the frenzied applause of the members of the House will simply tie the hands of the Americans and put an end, for a long time, to all hopes of seeing the death and destruction stop increasing in Ukraine. For the Russians, this applause will dramatically confirm the fact that they are at war with the US and NATO.
In an article published on August 8, 2022 by the "Journal of Conflict Resolution" in the United States, two researchers from the Center for Strategic Studies of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy demonstrate that the United States has intervened some 400 times abroad since its creation in 1776, that is to say in 250 years. And the period since 9/11 has been the most militarily aggressive in U.S. history.
America's history started with a fairly radical foundation. In 1823, the Supreme Court of the United States of America declared: "The right of conquest is acquired and maintained by force". That says it all.
Pascal Boniface, the director of the Institute for Strategic International Relations in Paris (IRIS), an independent French think tank, says it without ambiguity: "The United States is a strategic danger for the planet." Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist, says it even more violently on American TV: "We are the most dangerous country in the world". Biden, Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan, Lloyd Austin, Stoltenberg and so many others are irresponsible politicians of the end of the world.
John Whitbeck, an American lawyer in Paris, calls the American capital, Washington D.C., the world’s largest open-air insane asylum. Paul Craig Roberts, who was Ronald Reagan's White House advisor, says that at the time (the late 1980s) there were still intelligent people in the American administration. “Today, there are none," he adds. And to think that we have never been so close to a nuclear war! Humans are too often emotional and stupid. To err is human, they say.
That's really not reassuring. In fact, the recklessness of Washington and its European allies in the face of the extreme danger of the situation is frightening. There have been nuclear alerts in the past when the world came close to catastrophe, but in a less deleterious context than today, when nobody trusts anyone. A false alarm, a wrong interpretation, and we will all be vitrified. There is no longer a JFK to prevent the American generals from using their arsenal as he did in 1962 during the Cuban crisis.
2 - The disappearance of truth and a problem of narrative
2.1 The disappearance of the truth
Whoever controls the narrative of events dominates the world. The dominant narrative, even if it is a lie, erases reality, and the new reality becomes the truth.
Already in the 1980s, UNESCO highlighted the "imperialism of information", that is to say this way of imposing a single perception and denying all others. We have a multitude of media as never before but no pluralism among them. They all refer to the same sources that convey the same vision of the facts.
And to think that the sovereign States in their resolution 819 of December 11, 1954 of the United Nations General Assembly agreed "that war can only be fought by ensuring the free flow of ideas". In recent years, we have been seriously disappointed, and we are witnessing an extraordinary backward movement which exposes us to war propaganda and deprives us of the thoughts of many great independent minds. The thought of others is now only a poison that threatens us.
Edward L. Bernays, nephew of Freud, already called the great principles of mass mental manipulation the "consent factory". In his first lines written in 1923, devoted to propaganda and invisible government against democracy, in the first chapter entitled "1. Organizing chaos", he explains that "the conscious, intelligent manipulation of the opinions and organized habits of the masses plays an important role in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this imperceptible social mechanism form an invisible government that actually runs the country.”
Admit it, this is downright frightening.
It is the slide into a dark and dangerous abyss whose rulers (i.e., the intellectual, military-industrial and political élites) can effectively exercise total authority over global policy and unconstrained citizens without free will.
The public is made up of superficial generalists who depend on easily accessible sources (TV news, oriented debates, internet and social networks, newspapers, cell phones) that they trust. In the United States, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN or Fox News. In England, the Guardian. This situation is toxic. It is easy to create a hostile environment. Twitter's favorite environment, its basic product, is often hate. Man has a gregarious instinct and loves to blend in with the herd...mass audience, mass products, mass media. There is no stopping a herd of buffalo that is being driven forward.
Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden in particular have destroyed freedom of speech in the West. All three have succeeded in turning the major American media into supporters of their ideology. In two decades, the press has turned a blind eye to anything that contradicts the official Washington discourse and has become converted to its nonsense. It's funny how Donald Trump made the restoration of free speech the focus of his 2024 campaign.
This is a debate that was thought to be over. Westerners had claimed that freedom of _expression_ is a prerequisite for democracy and that it would never be violated again. However, in addition to the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Poland, the European Union has gone a long way towards censorship.
I would also like to mention Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992), professor at the London School of Economics, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974.
What does the most famous economist of the 20th century, together with John Maynard Keynes, say in his book "The Road to Serfdom", published in 1946, in chapter 11 entitled "The End of Truth"? He writes that the most effective way to direct everyone's efforts toward the goal is to get everyone to believe in that goal. You have to designate a goal, impose it on people, but you also have to make it an article of faith, a general belief that will make people act with all the spontaneity they desire. One can succeed very well in making the people think in the way that suits the rulers. This can be achieved by various propaganda methods with which we are sufficiently familiar. The die is cast.
Each government has a monitoring body. They have set up bodies responsible for correcting information that is considered falsified.
In Germany, the Minister of the Interior, the social democrat Nancy Fraeser, has set up a monitoring body to harmonize news in the media. For several months now, she has been meeting with the major media executives in secret and telling them what should not be published. When the Nordstream 1 and 2 gas pipelines were sabotaged by underwater drones, the German press was silent. In Germany and Sweden, all information about this attack is a "state secret".
Before it was dismantled, the USA had a "Disinformation Governance Board". It was headed by a woman named Nina Jankowicz, an employee of Madeleine Albright's National Democratic Institute, who was responsible for defending Biden's interests in Ukraine. She had worked in Zelensky's team with Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. She had opposed the Minsk agreements even though they were endorsed by the UN Security Council. She had spent her time in Ukraine using the Ukrainian association StopFake, subsidized by the National Endowment for Democracy (one of the long arms of the CIA), the British government and George Soros to make believe that the coup d'état in Maidan Square was a popular revolution. You can see videos of her praising the Nazi nationalist militias Aidar (whose practice of torture was denounced by Amnesty International), Dnipro-1 and C-14 and the Azov battalion of sad memory. This council has been dissolved but persists in other, more discreet forms.
In France, the Secretary of State for Citizenship, Sonia Backès, also tries to discredit non-conforming opinions. She equates them with sectarian aberrations. The State, she announced, will organize "conferences on sectarian aberrations and conspiracy".
In short, the major Western states no longer hesitate to use modern means of propaganda, including social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, not only against their enemies but also to set up programs to deceive their own citizens. One last example: the Ukrainian authorities are proud to announce in their speeches "the very high morale of Ukrainian troops". This information is taken up by the major Western media. Mark Kouptchenenko, a military chaplain in the Bakhmut region says: "I try to answer difficult questions that men in such inhuman conditions can ask. They are subjected to incredible moral and physical fatigue. In this endless war of attrition, some end up seeing themselves as meat, just to be sent to their deaths.” It is not included anywhere.
The British use an association, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, to do for the government what it wants to do without taking responsibility for it.
In Italy, the "Corriere della Sera" revealed a government surveillance program for people labelled as pro-Russian.
2.2 A problem of narrative
The dominant narrative in France and in Europe is simple and does not do half measures: you are asked by your governments, your press and your television to consider that Vladimir Putin is a madman, drunk with conquests and nostalgic for the Russia of the Tsars and the USSR of Stalin. Without being provoked in the least, this vile character has invaded Ukraine and is about to swallow other European countries. Moreover, he is ill, suffering from a terminal illness which has not yet been identified. Russia must be rejected as a whole, including the Russian cats that are banned from exhibitions. There is only one attitude that holds: the most unbridled and thoughtless Russophobia. Please do not listen to any other narrative.
It is devastating in France, even more so, curiously enough, than in the United States, where dissident voices of the best professors, independent journalists and other free-spirited intellectuals are heard, even on television sets.
What is this other narrative?
It is true that Putin took the serious decision to invade Ukraine, but many authors in the United States, again the best university professors, the most followed independent minds, who have kept their critical spirit, do not fail to point out, in any case and to say the least, an obvious sharing of responsibilities between NATO and Russia. NATO, which since 1991 has been advancing its pawns in the direction of Russia, provoking it, crossing the red lines indicated by Putin in a famous speech in Munich in 2007.
It is interesting to note that Chinese authors writing in magazines are even more severe in the name of an interesting logic. They tell us that many young Chinese see the extension of NATO to Ukraine as the direct and essential cause of the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Without the first step, there would not be the second...Without A, there is no B. So, they tell us, when criticizing Russia, we must not forget to emphasize that it is a reaction of a sovereign country to a threat directly affecting the security of the nation.
Why don't we want to understand this? We should attack what the English essayist Douglas Murray calls the "madness of crowds". For him, in public and in private, on the Internet and in life in general, people's behavior is increasingly irrational, feverish and gregarious. It is an unreason, a collective madness, in this case an anti-Russian hysteria, a phenomenon that overwhelms us ...
Gad Saad, a university professor in Montreal, points out that "the West is currently suffering ... from a disease that is destroying people's ability to think rationally.” Humorously, he calls it "the parasitic ostrich syndrome", a disease of disordered thinking that robs people of their ability to recognize truths "as obvious as the existence of the sun”.
The wildest ideas and the biggest lies are often the most influential. So said Goebbels, Reich propaganda minister. George Orwell wrote in his famous book "1984" that "the obvious, common sense, the truth should be defended." They are no longer defended, replaced by lies, popular hysteria and manipulation of opinion. Nothing new under the sun.
Some examples:
Before the war in Ukraine, in The Guardian:
"Welcome to Ukraine, the most corrupt nation in Europe"
After the crisis began, again in The Guardian:
"The fight for Ukraine is a fight for our ideals of freedom"
Before the war in Ukraine, in the agency Reuters:
"Ukraine's neo-Nazi problem"
After the beginning of the crisis in Ukraine, in the agency Reuters:
"For foreign fighters, Ukraine offers a goal, camaraderie and a cause".
Before the war in Ukraine, on CNN:
"Ukrainian comedian turned president involved in impeachment imbroglio of US President Trump".
After the crisis began, on CNN:
"Ukrainians give lessons in democracy that Americans have forgotten".
Before the war in Ukraine, in the Washington Post:
"Ukraine's president is becoming increasingly corrupt and authoritarian".
After the war started in the Washington Post:
"Zelensky: the television man turned into a hero".
If you take the official correspondence of the European Union with the Ukrainian authorities in the years before February 24, 2022 devoted to the association agreement between Ukraine and the EU, you will see that they talk about inveterate corruption in Ukraine (the most corrupt country in Europe), pervasive nepotism, the role of oligarchs, pro-nazi tendencies of some groups and militarized ensembles.
On February 24, by a stroke of the magic wand, President Zelensky became the unlikely cross between Joan of Arc and Mother Theresa.
These few observations make it possible to identify several obvious facts about the occurrence of the war in Ukraine. I will not dwell for lack of space and time on all that the CIA and NATO have been doing in that country since 2014 and even before to prepare it for war, training its army, equipping it with American materials and granting it access to the 500 or so American satellites that are over Ukraine.
The truth came out of Mrs. Merkel's mouth in December 2022 when she confessed that the Minsk peace agreements guaranteed by France and Germany had had no other objective than to gain time for the best preparation of Ukrainian troops and that Ukraine had never had the slightest inclination to respect them. Hollande has just confirmed this on December 30, 2022. The word of the German and French heads of government is therefore not worth much.
Such duplicity on the part of the guarantors made Putin say that he could never trust them again. It is true that history does not provide many examples of such deception, except for the German-Soviet agreement in 1939, a ruse by Hitler to defeat France without having to open a war on a second front in the East too soon.
On December 20, 2022, in Washington while receiving Zelensky, President Biden noted the fact that he had helped consolidate the Ukrainian army since 2014. Putin should have acted long before 2022, because the Ukrainian army is now well trained, well equipped and well advised. He stayed eight years without doing anything! Either he misjudged the danger, or he was not ready either on his side.
Pierre Conesa has just published a book devoted precisely to "this European warmongering, but above all not fighting, the home of elections of pseudo-experts or so-called philosophers, all active propagandists of just wars on television and in the major press of opinion. All of them want to make the West an international policeman, by giving media coverage to this or that crisis at the expense of another one that is less publicized and more remote, pointing out the villain, castigating the inaction of politicians and convinced that such and such a war is legitimate and winnable.” Overnight, an army of civilian and military experts, all specialists in the Ukraine and viscerally anti-Russian, rose up. The French university is itself composed of 90% of fierce opponents of Putin's Russia in its Russian studies departments.
Any opposition to the prevailing idea that Putin is a criminal madman and that the Russians commit the worst atrocities in their fight against poor, innocent, civilized Ukrainians casts you into complete ostracism. Information, concern and search for the truth and measured judgment are replaced by visceral hatred. It is serious when the lie becomes the truth. As Friedrich W. Nietzsche said: "People often do not want to see, hear and speak the truth because they do not want their illusions to be destroyed".
To Nietzsche, they probably prefer Mike Pompeo, who admitted on April 15, 2019 before an audience of businessmen at Texas A & M University that "the CIA trained its employees to lie, cheat and steal ... and that this was the glory of the American experiment".
3- Evidence
The modus vivendi or operandi is the same, always and again.
In an extraordinary book - the word is not too strong - Anne Morelli, professor emeritus at the Free University of Brussels and Belgian historian, draws up in 2001 a decalogue of the elementary principles of war propaganda (Anne Morelli, “Principes Élémentaires de Propagande de Guerre”, Quartier libre editions).
In fact, it is a retelling of Lord Ponsonby's "Falsehood in Wartime", 1871-1946, condensed by Anne Morelli. He wrote it during the First World War.
And America has made a mind-boggling copy and paste of it since then by totally extending the use of these ten commandments, which are worth quoting, to the Gulf War, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Yugoslavia and Libya, to Ukraine and to Taiwan.
"1) We do not want war.
2) The enemy alone is to be blamed for the war.
3) The enemy is inherently evil, resembling the devil.
4) We defend a noble cause, not our own interests.
5) The enemy commits atrocities on purpose; our mishaps are involuntary.
6) The enemy uses illegal weapons.
7) We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
8) Artists and intellectuals back our cause.
9) Our cause is holy; it has a sacred character.
10) Whoever doubts our propaganda is a traitor.”
All international news agencies working for the United States, Great Britain and Ukraine operate according to this apparently unchanging pattern, applied daily to Europe as a whole.
Let's take up the ten commandments, in today's translation:
1) NATO is a work of defensive peace exclusively, without an ounce of aggressiveness.
2) Russia has declared war without being forced to do so.
3) Putin is the devil himself.
4) America supports Ukraine without any particular interest to defend, even after having invested billions of dollars there, provoked a coup d'état and acquired agricultural land for its big companies in direct violation of the Ukrainian law in force at the time.
5) Russia commits the worst atrocities while the Ukrainian army is composed of choirboys.
6) That's why America is always accusing Russia of using or wanting to use chemical weapons. Or nuclear weapons.
7) Russia has lost so many soldiers that it is bled to death, while Ukraine is counter-attacking with all its forces intact or almost.
8) That's why all the VIPs, Hollywood actors and actresses and other BHLs are in the combat zone.
9) That's why the opponents of these theses are carefully ostracized and kept away, especially from the main media under political and élite control.
10) Traitors to the nation who are to be denounced for conniving with the enemy. You become a "Putinist" in no time.
Once again, nothing new under the sun.
Indeed, Benjamin Constant, born in Lausanne (Switzerland) in 1767, a French politician and intellectual, wrote in his "Cours de politique constitutionnelle": "Some governments, when they send their legions from one pole to the other, still speak of the defense of their homes; it seems as if they call their homes all the places which they have set fire to". Constant was, of course, referring to Napoleon. But this applies today to America.
Anne Morelli's analytical grid can be applied without difficulty to all contemporary crises.
4 - Stories of ignorance
4.1 Ignorance of the Russian world
Let me give you an example of a lady who writes for Le Figaro. Her name is Laure Mandeville. She is very inspired. This is how she presents things: "Putin's Russia, this strange dragon which combines the criminal methods of national Bolshevism and a desire for imperial revenge with messianic mysticism as destructive as it is sickly." This gibberish completely undermines her credibility. Nothing is right, everything is exaggerated. And this is called news journalism. This is what we have today. This is what she calls "decryption".
If you want to know (almost) everything about contemporary Russia, read "The Magician of the Kremlin", the almost Goncourt Prize winner by Giuliano da Empoli. As Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, perhaps the best specialist in France on the Russian world, says, "Giuliano da Empoli is a specialist of nothing at all but, intuitively, what he wrote is of an incredible political accuracy. It is a novel ... but it allows one to understand a lot of things".
The current Russian elite is very similar to the old tsarist nobility. They have the same sidereal distance from the people, the same propensity to arrogance and violence. Even though they have gone through a proletarian revolution (1919-1991), an unbridled liberalism (immediately after 1991, Yeltsin's period), the result is always the same: at the top, there is always a tsar surrounded by his guard. There has never been much room for democracy and human rights.
Vertical power is the only satisfactory answer capable of calming the anxieties of the majority of the population. And then Putin punished the oligarchs, that is important. He has shown that he knows how to deal with thieves and traitors. The vast majority of Russians demand two things from the state: order at home and power abroad.
The new elite is ready to do anything to defend Russia's independence. From now on, it will be a matter of mobilizing all the elements of strength to regain Russia's rightful place on the world stage, namely a great power and not a negligible quantity as the Americans would like. The new élite concentrates a maximum of power and a maximum of wealth. Between a Russian and a Westerner, there is as much difference in mentality as between an inhabitant of the Earth and a Martian, hence certain misunderstandings.
The big American multinationals that wanted to establish themselves in Russia as early as 1991 and get their hands on its wealth were rejected, which Washington has never been able to admit, as they only saw Russia as a big gas station and nothing else. The Americans can only stand a Russia on its knees. They do not accept that anyone can oppose their hegemony.
Russia realized then that the frenzied imitation of the West (the years after 1990) was not the right way. The symbols of Russian greatness are imperial eagles, Christ-kings and portraits of Stalin, winner of the Second World War (more than 20 million soldiers killed in the war against Hitler against only fewer than 400.000 dead on the American side).
Brotherhood and strength, Faith and country. Compared to these values and seen from Moscow, those of Western society are no longer worthy of admiration: individualism, whining and victim society, abandonment of religion, wokism, "nonsense bleating of ecologists" (as Olivier de Kersauson says), decline of the society into LGBTQIAA+... For the Russians in power, the West is decadent and promotes only false values. For the Russians, the woke movement attacks the very intellectual matrix of the European soul.
In Russia, it was therefore inevitable that the opposition would be made up of human rights Muscovites, oligarchs who had survived the 1990s, professionals of Western-style democracy, feminist passionarias, ecologists, vegans and gay activists. Each time they speak, they increase the popularity of the leader.
And they are the delight of foreign journalists, the only ones who give them any credibility. The Russian sovereign democracy is adapted to the Russian political culture. Parliamentary democracy is a luxury of a rich and developed country. That is why at least 70% of the Russian population is on the side of power.
Nobody in the West wants to understand the obvious: for Putin, war is also a process whose goals go beyond the simple military success of the conquest of Crimea and some Russian-speaking oblasts. More than the conquest, the goal is the fight against chaos. Everyone must see that the Orange Revolution wanted and prepared by the United States has plunged Ukraine into anarchy and destruction. The Russians want to show that when you make the mistake of trusting the West, it ends up like this: they let you down in the long run and you are left alone in a completely destroyed country. The warning applies to Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan. That is to say, wherever the Rand Corporation advises the Pentagon to foment Orange revolutions. This is infinitely important.
All the criteria used on the French channels to gauge the success or failure of the Russian army do not see the essential. Ukraine is about to be destroyed, but they still talk about the tremendous success of the Ukrainian offensives and the possible recapture of Crimea and some oblasts.
Even the American Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, admits that none of this is likely to happen in the near future. The "denazification" (actually the elimination of extreme nationalists) and dismemberment of the Ukrainian army are well underway. The bulk of the independent far-right groups with German iron crosses and Nazi emblems, not directly attached to the army, have been eliminated. Without American help, the Ukrainian army would not last a week, according to its chief of staff.
This war is being fought for the stability and greatness of the motherland. In the minds of the Russians, the Ukrainians must realize that the war brings them anarchy and endless violence. Russia will remain the West's nightmare factory for a long time. Today in Russia, the only solution is power returning to its primary origin: the pure exercise of force.
But what are the Russians talking about in their TV debates and the press? We don't know. Why not? Because, as in all wars, the governments of the countries involved in the hostilities take great care to ensure that their citizens are exposed only to their own perspectives and propaganda. The news from Russia (text and images) in French language from "Russia Today" is blocked in France.
The only news that we receive in France in the written press or on television come from journalists, each one more Russophobic than the other. They investigate only on the Ukrainian side, show only the Ukrainian side, consult and talk only to Russians of the liberal opposition which has no more say in Russia. Ukrainian successes are always phenomenal. Russian defeats are always humiliating.
Yet, knowing what the others think, i.e., the enemy, is crucial for rational behavior and careful planning of one's own actions. Two worlds ignore each other.
What do we see on the Russian side? First of all, their reactions every time NATO and Ukraine cross new red lines. And each time, Russia carries the destruction further. The city of Kiev is no longer spared. A Ukrainian drone strikes Russia and the day after, some 70 missiles fall on Ukraine. The most excited want to bomb London.
What the West doesn't want to see is that its friends advocating freedom and democracy in Russia no longer have a voice. Russia's love affair with Europe is over. The debate is no longer between Western-oriented liberals and conservatives. It is now only between conservatives divided between centrists and ultra-nationalists. Among them, Putin looks almost innocent.
You do not want to see what these nationalists would prefer, namely a mobilization of the whole Russian nation around national defense and the long war against NATO and the United States. They talk about the need to establish military training for all able-bodied men so as to envisage an army of three million men. This is a return to the USSR: they don't care about the market and want to establish state control of the economy and industry. If you don't like Putin, you will hate his successor!!!!
The United States made a major mistake: it thought that with the collapse of the USSR, Russia would disappear from the international scene as a strategic, historical and economic entity. And would remain at most a humiliated, minor and docile entity, a defeated nation in the Cold War.
The Americans had a choice. Either they accompanied the evolution set in motion by Gorbachev, providing him with economic, political and financial support to facilitate the difficult transition. Or they could take advantage of the obvious weakening of the opposing power to definitively defeat it and get rid of it once and for all. The latter option was, unfortunately and without surprise, adopted, and the USSR was allowed to dissolve in order to better dismember it and to integrate some of its former components into NATO. All American presidents have systematically ignored the numerous attempts to reach out of the Russian leadership. The last time was in December 2022 in Geneva.
George H.W. Bush and his entourage, Brent Scowcroft and Marlin Fitzwater, declared in February 1989 that the Cold War was not over and that it was rather a matter of "testing the Soviets" and letting Moscow "stew in its own juices." Gorbachev hoped that the goodwill he showed would be enough for the Western world to accept the USSR as a trusted partner.
"We have let it down", Roland Dumas, former French Foreign Minister under the Mitterrand presidency, has rightly said.
1989/1991, like 1919, will prove to be a failed peace that will bring new tragedies. Western leaders did not want to consolidate and organize peace. They did not understand that their hegemony bore the same mark of sin as the Peace of Versailles in 1919: the exclusion of the defeated, starting with post-Soviet Russia.
As Hubert Védrine, former French Foreign Minister under the Chirac presidency, also points out: "The Westernist vision of the world after the Cold War did not take into account the feelings of 'the rest', that is to say, of all the others.”
A few rare voices were raised in this sense in Washington, including that of George Kennan, a living legend of American diplomacy. He said: "We wanted democracy to triumph over dictatorship and we succeeded. We have to learn the consequences. We cannot continue to treat yesterday's enemies as if they were to remain enemies forever.” He repeated that humiliating the Russians would encourage the rise of nationalist and militarist currents and delay the country's march towards democracy. He was called weak and naive. An adviser to President Clinton told him that he was wrong and that the Russians would end up accepting whatever was imposed on them, because they had no choice.
I think it is essential to reread an excerpt from "The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age" (1982) by George Kennan:
All you have to do is replace "Soviet Union" with "Russia" to think the text is contemporary.
"I believe that the view of the Soviet Union that prevails today in much of our governmental and journalistic establishment is so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober examination of external reality would reveal, that it is not only ineffective but dangerous as a guide to political action.
This endless series of distortions and oversimplifications; this systematic dehumanization of the leaders of another great country; this routine exaggeration of Moscow's military capabilities and of the alleged unfairness of Soviet intentions; this monotonous misrepresentation of the nature and attitudes of another great people, and still a long-suffering people, hard-pressed by the vicissitudes of the last century; this ignorance of their pride, their hopes - yes, even their illusions (for they have their illusions, just as we have ours, and illusions, too, deserve respect); this thoughtless application of double standards in judging the behavior of the Soviets and ours, this inability, finally, to recognize the commonality of many of their problems and ours, as we move inexorably into the modern technological age. These are signs of an intellectual primitivism and a naivety of cynicism and suspicion unforgivable in a great government”.
One cannot better describe the ignorance of the Russian world that from 1982 to today has subsisted, perhaps in an even more exacerbated way.
4.2 Ignorance of the Ukrainian world
President Zelensky has just been named "Person of the Year" by Time Magazine. He was mocked as a comedian and admired late on February 24, 2022. He now embodies the infectious courage of a man who enables his people to resist the Russian invasion. He concentrates on his function as spokesman for the regime and leaves the management of the country to his deputy chairman of the National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov. But Zelensky is anything but a blank slate.
Between the two of them, they have established a regime of iron, ignored by the Europeans.
Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine before the war, said that Zelensky had seized power, all power, under the guise of reform.
The Prosecutor General of Ukraine has gone under the knife, as has his childhood friend and head of the security service, Ivan Bakhanov.
So, who is he?
In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected after playing in the TV series "Servant of the People", a fictional, incorruptible president, fighting against the oligarchs and the forces of money.
But on the basis of the "Pandora Papers", in which more than 600 experts and journalists collaborated, and based on nearly 12 million documents that uncovered 29,000 offshore companies, journalists from Slidstvo Info, a Ukrainian investigative media, proved that for years Zelensky and his friends hid their wealth in a dozen shell companies in Cyprus, Belize and the British Virgin Islands. Anna Babinets, editor-in-chief of Slidstvo Info, writes that Zelensky is just another businessman who hides his money outside Ukraine through an opaque tax evasion system.
So Zelenski is not just a simple guy who wants to be different, the people's president, she says. There are a lot of shenanigans and questionable things. He owns apartments in London, the addresses of which Slidstvo Info knows. One of them is opposite 221b Baker Street, the address given by Conan Doyle to the home of Sherlock Holmes!
For the sake of modesty, nothing will be said about the recent sale of a villa in the best part of the Italian coastline, nor about the acquisition of a vast property in Israel where his parents are sheltering.
Zelensky was elected in 2019 with 73% of the vote on a program without concession: fight against corruption, against inequality, the end of the oligarchic system. Peace in the Donbass was the other priority. None of this has been achieved, but he did manage to embody a hope for change.
On the contrary, his army killed more than 10,000 Russian Ukrainians from 2019 to February 24, 2022. The OSCE even had to leave the border area on Moscow's orders due to its total inefficiency in preventing this killing. The OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), located in Vienna, had actually reported nearly 14,000 deaths by shelling and killings in the Oblasts populated by Russian-speaking Ukrainians. These are the reports of the OSCE observer missions on the spot, very reliable sources.
This is in fact the main reason for Vladimir Putin's special military operation: the urgent protection of Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
Assassinations of political opponents have taken place without it being known who committed them. Some were abducted, disappeared or were executed in the street in full view of everyone, as were journalists and elected representatives of the opposition. These killings have punctuated the civil war since 2014.
The 12 opposition parties have been banned one by one, the last one on October 22, 2022.
The official negotiator for Russian Ukrainians living in eastern Ukraine, Denis Kireev, was killed in the street on his return from Kiev on March 6, 2022. He had dared to mention the historical ties between Kiev and Moscow. Ukrainian political leaders say that the country must be cleansed. Anyone who carries Russian culture or recognizes the value of this culture must disappear. Like MP Oleg Kalashnikov, killed in front of his house in 2015.
Let's listen to the regime's No. 2 himself, Oleksiy Danilov after his chief Zelensky signed a decree on October 4, 2022 forbidding any further negotiations with Russia. He said this on December 1, 2022, calling for the "destruction of Russia": "They just need to be destroyed so that they cease to exist as a country, within the borders in which they now exist. They're just barbarians." This is whom we are dealing with: Zelensky and Danilov have two faces. At home, they are real psychopaths. Abroad, they are innocent people.
Another example of current policies: the Minsk II Agreements of February 12, 2015 stated that the Donbass regions should be able to determine their official language themselves. On October 21, 2022, Danilov states. "The Russian language should completely disappear from our territory as an element of hostile propaganda and brainwashing for our population". And he adds: "We are not holding anyone back".
In other words, the Ukrainian leadership is complying with its constitution in Article 16, the only openly racist constitution in the world: "to preserve the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people". This is ethno-politics, the exact opposite of what is practiced in France in the name of cultural diversity, the melting pot of all mixtures.
Zelensky controls all the media, audiovisual and internet. All media have been purged and are under close surveillance. Many television contributors have been sent back "to their swamps where they can croak in Russian", says Danilov.
Zelensky had the Russian language banned as a written medium in his country. The Ukrainian Book Institute had one hundred million books in Russian destroyed (all books by Russian authors Tolstoy, Pushkin, cookbooks and sewing books, all books printed in Russian language or books printed in Russia). Have you ever heard anyone point out this crazy paper holocaust, probably unique in the world for its stupidity and magnitude? Has a single Western journalist reported it?
Many assets of oligarchs have been confiscated (86 citizens with at least 80 million dollars participating in political life and exercising great influence on the media), their factories nationalized without compensation, the assets of Russian investors and companies (4000 in number) nationalized without compensation (shameless plundering), and finally the Russian Orthodox Church forbidden to operate in Ukraine as of December 1st, 2022.
Zelensky is no friend of workers and trade unionists either. He passed a law last summer designed to satisfy the EU and the multinationals that are preparing to swoop down on Ukraine as soon as peace returns: statutory weekly working hours, 12 hours; dismissal, authorized without giving any reason; no minimum wage, this is determined by the boss (currently 180 euros per month).
The Mayor of Kiev, boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, has commissioned the neo-Nazi group C-14 to hunt down and kill "saboteurs" among Ukrainians of Slavic origin. A real ferocious beast.
Numerous criminal proceedings have been opened against former state officials. The purge spares no one, not even former President Petro Poroshenko. Many civilians are arrested by the State Security Services, accused of having collaborated with the Russians
5 - Consequences
There are five obvious ones after Zelenski's visit to Washington in December 2022:
1.- More and more Ukrainians and Russians will be killed or injured. Washington and Kiev have decided without the slightest qualms to prolong Ukraine's suffering (the suffering of others is more convenient) by refusing to propose or negotiate an agreement that would recognize Russia's security interests.
2 - Ukraine in general and its infrastructure in particular will suffer further destruction. It has already lost nearly 20% of its territory and most of its mineral wealth is now under Russian control. Its main electrical and industrial installations have been destroyed. Its access to the Black Sea is severely hampered.
Its armed forces have been fairly well wiped out. The Ukrainian government is beginning to admit to heavy human losses. Every day, several hundred people are killed. The government can no longer meet its current expenses of 5 to 7 billion per month, it has to borrow all of its operating expenses. Its debts are already and will be immense and grow every day. The country is nothing but desolation The soldiers of Sparta who fought at Thermopylae against the Persians were brave; they are all dead.
The victims do not live in America. They live in a region that Americans can't place on a map. According to a recent poll, some Americans put Ukraine in Africa, others in Greenland, or in Europe without any other precision. It is a human tragedy caused by thirty years of NATO expansion towards Russia's borders. The Americans and Boris Johnson asked the Ukrainians to fight when an agreement seemed within reach last spring in Istanbul. Now America should ask Ukraine to stop. It has already suffered enough.
But this is not the way to go. Going to war with Russia is the crazy dream of irresponsible and psychiatrically disturbed American ideologues, opportunists devoid of any reason and the arms industry more voracious than ever.
Without foreign military aid, the Ukrainian army would not last a week. But the Americans cannot consider this after the loss of Afghanistan. They would lose all prestige. They are left with nothing but the worst choice: going ahead blindly.
Unless Zelensky disappears, which would allow many to save face and foresee his replacement by a general ready to negotiate...
3 - The profits of the American arms industry will continue to grow in a very beautiful way. Hundreds of millions of dollars are literally raining down on the American arms industry. The annual U.S. defense budget, the equivalent of the next eight countries (China, Russia, France, Great Britain, etc.) exceeds $800 billion annually. And of the additional funds allocated for armed support to Ukraine by the House of Representatives and the Senate, some 70% goes directly to it.
The Second World War was not over when Charles E. Wilson, the future "Defense Secretary" and CEO of General Motors, advocated a permanent war economy for the United States because war production led to a dizzying rise in profits. "War is good for business," he said. Arms exports are by far the most profitable.
Hence the nickname "Pentagod" given to the Pentagon and its five main tentacles, Raytheon, Lockeed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Electric. This arrangement seems to be totally unmovable for a long time to come.
The American ruling élites see no reason not to perpetuate the significant financial and geopolitical benefits that flow from war. Moreover, Europe is under America's thumb, especially since it is economically and industrially weakened.
4 - The European economies and the citizens of European countries will continue to suffer seriously from the effects of the crisis. No one questions the wisdom of sanctions decided by governments without consulting the people and without much idea of the scope of the decisions they were making. Bruno Le Maire spoke of reducing the Russian economy to ashes and of total economic war. He forgot to look at the desolation in his own garden.
5 - The so-called Western world (i.e. the United States and its European and Asian allies (South Korea, Japan and Australia) is cracking and heading towards a great schism, a world where the United States will be opposed for the first time to the Russian and Chinese tandem, accompanied by all the non-aligned countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
All grouped in new international organizations that exclude them. Europe can say goodbye to Russia, and to a lesser extent to China, at least for a long time, as long as its current rulers have not handed over the reins. Moscow's capital of trust in them is definitely exhausted. Russia is turning completely to the continent of the future, Asia ,with China, India, Iran and the new allegiances in the Middle East. Apart from America and its Western allies, the whole world did not want to get involved in this quarrel, rejecting instead American interventionism and its sanctions regimes.
At the G20 meeting in Bali in November 2022, all the Latin American, African and Asian participants said that the world was now multipolar and that US domination was coming to an end. Zelensky was allowed to address the heads of state. He caricatured Moscow's action, called for Russia's exclusion from the G20 and made a fool of himself. What does Ukraine think it is doing? It thinks it is telling the world's big boys how to behave. Zelensky's sponsors are no longer the absolute masters of the world and may one day realize that things are not turning out to their advantage.
Let's summarize:
Russia cannot lose the war. It would lose face.
America cannot lose it either. It would lose face.
To remake Kabul in Kiev is politically impossible. But America has no exit scenario, no plan B. It can only choose to flee forward. The American neoconservatives had no idea where they were going in Ukraine, how far it would take them and how to get out of it if necessary. That leaves the "hardliners" and other blasters!
Ukraine can lose the war but does not want to either. Zelensky would lose face.
It cannot however derive any benefit from the perpetuation of this war. It would be a serious mistake to think or hope the opposite. But at the moment she is living in a complete delirium maintained by her leaders. I don't know if Zelensky's bruised compatriots will ever forgive him for having so heavily deceived them.
Therefore, to expect negotiations today is not realistic. Zelensky does not want to lose even an inch of Ukraine's territory, and Russia will never voluntarily return Crimea and Donbass.
A question will have to be asked of Ukrainian and European citizens: Is Zelenski's desperate and utopian quest to maintain the authority of the Ukrainian state in territories with a large Russian majority in the east and south of the country worth causing a few hundred thousand more Ukrainian deaths and terrible destruction in bombed-out Ukraine?
Why is it worth it? With what objectives? To let Ukraine martyr the Russians of Donbass a second time?
There is no sensible answer from the West other than the demand for an immediate cease-fire. And the acceptance of the cession of Crimea and the Donbass. And probably the replacement of Zelensky by a less "hard-line" leader. There will be no return to the status quo ante.
The European architecture of mutual security will wait for a very long time for the beginning of its realization.
Yet I see neither wisdom nor realism on the horizon. I hope for once I am wrong.
Newsweek published an article in September 2022 that alluded to a plan by members of the Pentagon to carry out a "decapitation action in the heart of the Kremlin" to kill President Putin. Liz Truss, very briefly Prime Minister of Great Britain, made no secret of the fact that she would not hesitate to press the button for nuclear war. All these sickos are on the loose.
On November 29, the Polish Deputy Minister of Defense announced the mobilization of 200,000 reservists in 2023 for maneuvers that could lead to a national mobilization.
In this case, there are big powder kegs, already lit flags and sparks. Ukraine, Poland and the three Baltic States love to produce sparks in the immediate vicinity of the powder kegs.
The longer the war goes on, the greater the risk of it getting out of hand. It is almost certain that the situation will get even worse and that a deterioration of the situation will not be avoided. A catastrophic escalation cannot be ruled out.
When things go wrong for Washington and its foreign policy, the last true believers in their great and strong cause fall victim to their own illusions. The U.S. foreign affairs and military establishment, along with the rest of those who want war in Washington, will continue to promise eternal support for Ukraine no matter what the cost.
They are willing to sacrifice all realism in favor of wishful thinking, limelight, self-promotional efforts, media visits to Kiev. Just like at the end of the Vietnam War. Then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk said as the Biden White House did. "We don't pull out until the war is won". We know what happened then, as in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, as in Syria, as in Libya, as in Yemen, as in Somalia. America has never learned anything from the history of its recurrent defeats.
In the spring of 1965, General Westmoreland reported to Lyndon B. Johnson that American aid would not prevent the fall of South Vietnam and that North Vietnam would begin the final battle. The American situation in Ukraine is beginning to look like the same turning point in history.
Irresponsible Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian and Latvian hawks, assisted by Poland and Romania, should not dictate the European Union's policy towards Russia.
Indeed, Europe has made a fatal mistake: letting the American cuckoo come to European nests, in France and Germany in particular, but also in the Baltic countries and in Poland. This bird has a solid reputation as a parasite. Its female takes advantage of the absence of the owners to lay eggs one by one in the nest of various other birds, not cuckoos. As soon as it hatches, the young cuckoo eliminates the other occupants of the nest in order to be the only one to receive food from its forced adoption parents. The cuckoo is a klepto-parasite because it lives at the expense of its host of which it appropriates the lodging and the food. The nests are European and the American cuckoo has settled everywhere, with bases, military and missiles. And a provocative policy towards the ultra-risky and dangerous Russia.
By the way, "the only thing we learn from history is that men never learn anything from history", says the popular adage. Let us hope that the masters of the world who hold our fate in their hands do not do the same.
Let's listen to Kissinger anyway:
Kissinger, 99 years old, reappeared on August 13, 2022 in the "Wall Street Journal" and made some interesting statements: "The United States is on the verge of war with Russia and China". The cause is multiple according to him: "The United States no longer has visionary politicians, nor leaders. It has rejected the idea of traditional diplomacy and is leading the world to the brink of war.” He describes Russia's decision to send troops to Ukraine as motivated by its own security.
And he is joined by dozens of America's top professors of contemporary history and international relations at America's leading universities, as well as many independent minds. Having NATO 480 km away from Moscow is in fact totally unacceptable. It would be just as unacceptable for America in an identical situation. Let's remember the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 when the distance was twice as great and the nuclear missiles very much slower.
"Moreover, the whole of Ukraine cannot fall under Moscow's control. Europe's historical fears of Russian domination must be allayed," says Kissinger.
Yet it was Napoleon who invaded Russia and the Nazis who followed. France and Germany invaded Russia, but Russia never invaded either France or Germany, except to push the Wehrmacht back to Berlin.
Kissinger goes on to say that politicians and diplomats in Kiev and Washington should have respected the balance. He considers the current conflict to be an outgrowth of a failed strategic dialogue. He insists that the Americans should have taken seriously the security concerns of President Putin, whose written proposals were flatly rejected in December 2021 in Geneva.
He argues that it would be in America's best interest to seek a balance between itself, Russia and China, namely a kind of equality of powers involving the acceptance of the legitimacy of the other's sometimes opposing values. And Kissinger concludes: "If the goal is the imposition of one's own values, balance is impossible.”
These words are surprising. Kissinger has a lot of blood on his hands and is responsible for so much death and destruction. And now, late in life, he is demonstrating that it is possible to conceive of a realistic policy in foreign relations that puts everyone's practical interests first. Has Kissinger become "reasonable"?
Certainly not, not only has he not changed, but he does not regret any of his often sordid undertakings, which had only one goal: to ensure the hegemony of the United States. Kissinger's warning is all the more serious because it comes from a proven warmonger. He did not become a peace activist late in life. He has never reformed or apologized for his excesses.
So what happens? It is quite simple: the American war machine has become considerably more aggressive since 2001 and the attack on the World Trade Center. Kissinger argues that the war in Ukraine is partly an American creation, a creation without the slightest concept of where it was going to go, how it was going to end and where it might lead. But that would require goals, he adds.
The very imprudent and above all extremely dangerous policy followed by the United States and therefore NATO has led to the Ukrainian crisis. The choice was made to have a coup d'état (in Ukraine) and to permanently provoke Russia. Not taking Russia's security interests seriously is simply irresponsible on the part of the West. The role of Ukraine had to be finalized and used as a buffer zone.
So if Kissinger has not changed, the American Empire has degraded into a crazy war machine. These transformations for the worse can be dated to the beginning of the 21st century with the arrival of neoconservative hawks in the White House, combined with the revival of chauvinism that accompanied September 11, 2001. This ushered in an era of expansionism with a brazenness and shamelessness that surprised many in the old guard.
The final word
Well then, let's "dance on the volcano", because we are all metaphorically in Naples near Vesuvius. Gustave Flaubert used the formula in a letter to Eugène Delattre on January 10, 1859: "They said we were dancing on a volcano! Not at all! We are stumbling on the rotten board of a vast latrine. Humanity, for my part, makes me want to vomit, and I would have to go hang myself if there were not, here and there, noble spirits who disinfect the atmosphere".
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