1. You believe that US is the ONLY active player in global geopolitics while other nations are just reactive NPCs. The global events & outcomes are driven by US.
Russia, China, India, Iran etc etc have their OWN foreign policy (& it's actually aggressive & proactive). US is NOT the only active player on world stage. The idea (also peddled by Trump & Republicans) that Ukraine war can be "resolved" overnight if US wants is highly foolish.
2. Biden said that US won't be enforcing a no fly zone in Ukraine because it will lead to WW3. Biden did NOT say this regarding weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Ukraine war (like any war) is evolving in Game theory manner - US has been matching up optimal responses to Russia's actions.
3. I seriously don't understand how you wanna approach Russia with a dialogue at this point. A grave fallacy is that "non-violence" is a solution to everything. Like you can even have a dialogue with Hitler in 1940s & end WW2 through peaceful negotiations. You just can't & you know why. The psychopthology (which is your expertise) of some people/regimes is that you cannot reason with them. Recall how in pre-WW2 period was giving concessions to Hitler but that did not stopped WW2, the appeasement only emboldened Hitler.
4. You cite Nuclear threats by Medvedev, Lavrov & other Russians as a looming threat of doomsday. What should the world do? Should world surrender to threats by Nuclear states against non-nuclear states. So any dictator with Nuclear weapons can issue threats and subdue other countries. If Russia threatens non-nuclear European states, should they just roll over? Or if China threatens non Nuclear states in Asia Pacific, should they just roll over? Please tell, what should be the response against nuclear threats? Should Medvedev & Lavrov given therapy sessions to make them rational & reasonable.
5. You believe that US has sole monopoly over timing of Doomsday clock. You think that if US adopts a different foreign policy, then Doomsday clock will automatically recede. It may not (& it may get even more close to doomsday). There are multiple nuclear powers & their (irrational & aggressive) foreign policy is also driving the nuclear clock.
6. Your analysis on Ukraine situation is based on opinions of people like Noam Chomsky, Jeffery Sachs, Ray McGovern etc as if they are the wisest experts on this topic. They are NOT. You have to expand your understanding & point of view in this area.
7. What motivated Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine? It was NOT the NATO threat - this has been revealed by Russian General Leonid Ivashov even before the war began. Also see Prighozin's confession (sometimes truth comes from unlikeliest channels) - There was no NATO threat against Russia. Russia's war of aggression was solely motivated by Russia's oligarchical ambitions to plunder Ukraine.
Excellent post! Thank you for information. I am currently having a similar problem but on a more personal scale, but the solutions you are describing are exactly the solutions I need to deal with my current situation. Thanks again =] (not quite sure about some of the retorts I scanned here)
The dynamic of war psychosis was notoriously enunciated by Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
No responsible citizen should ever forget this devil’s wisdom. Virtually every informed person involved in international relations in America and Europe warned Washington for nearly thirty years that to expand NATO was pointless, stupid, and would lead to disaster. The intellectual “architect” of post-WWII American foreign policy, George F. Kennan, said in the 1990s that such expansion would produce “tragic” results. Jack F. Matlock, Jr., the US ambassador to the USSR from 1987 to 1991, wrote that the Russian invasion could have easily been avoided by the US through negotiations as late as the beginning of 2002—if the US had wanted to. (Many similar statements by the best-informed people are easy to find on the web.) Now after three decades during which Washington, was repeatedly warned by American and European experts that expanding NATO would inevitably provoke a Russian military response, the machiavellian psychopaths in Washington never stop mouthing the Big Lie that Putin’s invasion was “unprovoked.” The official US positions on the issue have been a farce of terminal paranoia. The USSR, against which NATO was created to defend Europe, ceased to exist in 1991, thereby ending any reason for NATO to continue to exist. In the 1990s and early in the twenty-first century, Russia, under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin, repeatedly asked the US to create with them a security alliance extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But the astronomically wealthy and powerful US military-industrial complex, whose lifeblood is war and which therefore requires an enemy for its existence, succeeded in causing Washington to reject Russia’s requests, and instead to continue to provoke Russia by repeatedly expanding NATO until it has reached Russia’s borders. This was supposedly necessary for the defense of the US (as if the defense of Russia required keeping the Warsaw Pact in existence and extending it to Cuba). The US has officially declared that Russia is not entitled to a sphere of influence, in practice not even to one that extends to not having a hostile power’s missiles planted on its borders (but the US is entitled to a sphere of influence that extends halfway around the world right up to missiles planted on Russia’s borders). This completely unnecessary expansion of what is by far the greatest military power in history over the course of three decades was, according to its authors, purely “defensive.” Putin repeatedly asked the US to stop expanding NATO towards Russia. Common sense tells us that no Russian leader, no matter how saintly, could have accepted this ceaselessly encroaching aggression by the US. (Did JFK accept the USSR’s planting of missiles in Cuba in 1962?) From Putin’s point of view, the invasion of Ukraine was a necessary evil, just as from the western point of view fighting the war in Ukraine is a necessary evil. Evil the invasion was, but the primary responsibility for this evil lies with the machiavellian, blood-thirsty psychopaths in the military-industrial complex in Washington, not with the kleptocratic psychopaths in Moscow. These same imperialistic psychopaths in Washington are also now encircling China around the entire western Pacific with enormous military power, on the same paranoid justification that they are doing so for purely “defensive” reasons. This is the behavior not merely of the military-industrial complex, but of a dying empire—of the US imperial oligarchy and its splendid war machine, struggling like an addict to keep his exhilarating and soothing fantasies of omnipotence, omniscience, and invulnerability going for as long as possible before he runs out of veins to shoot up.
Dr. Lee properly wishes to keep discussion on this newsletter within the domain of psychology. At the same time, she wishes to address the dangers that American psychopathology represent to the world, including the danger that the war in Ukraine may produce nuclear war. Maintaining an appropriate balance between the two goals is difficult: the ego’s integration of superego and id cannot be accomplished without the reality principle. Out of respect for Dr. Lee (and for other subscribers), I wish to emphasize that my point, in making this post on her newsletter, is not to insist that the interpretation of the war in Ukraine I have offered here is correct. My point is that Americans’ understanding of the war in Ukraine is based on complacent, abysmal ignorance; the passive acceptance of war propaganda in place of adult knowledge and thought; childish rationalization; hypocritical, sanctimonious revenge morality; paranoia, together with the unconscious aggression that is the basis of that paranoia; the embrace of domination-submission modes of relationship; the naive acceptance of machiavellian behavior by our own government; pathological narcissism; denial; dissociation; and the grandiose fantasies of omnipotence, omniscience, and invulnerability that characterize the natives of an imperial metropole.
Although some of what Chimes says is hard to follow, he is not saying what you accuse him of. He is pointing out the evils of the West, he is NOT saying everyone else is innocent and justified. Russia is pursuing imperialist fantasy, trying to Make Russia Great Again, and getting bloodied for it. Putin would have this ambition the same without NATO expansion. He first tried by controlling/subverting Ukrainian politics, but when that failed he went to plan B. The US does exactly the same. Both sell it with lies. That does not mean that life in Russia is just like life in America (although try being stuck in poverty in America, it can be tough).
“When the wicked rule, the people groan.” Proverbs 29:2.
Those who believe God exists, and take the Bible seriously, can see things developing as expected, so that the ending will be no surprise to them. No, not a rapture, leaving behind scorched Earth: that’s not what the Bible foretells.
Satan exists too, and God has stepped aside to let him show the universe what independence from the Creator leads to. Satan’s first claim was, “you don’t need God, he is lying to you” (Gen 3:4, 5). Since we followed him, we have the wonderful world of technology--and its doomsday clock--we have today.
God does guide and to a degree protect those who respect him. So His side of the issue is not without representation. But it’s a small minority. Satan confuses the unwary by presenting himself (through men) as an “angel of light.” Hence the politicians and propaganda industrial complex. And the preachers, who almost to a man support their interests, on one side or the other, whichever way the wind blows.
To keep this short, let’s jump to how it will end: Daniel 2:44 says God will smash Satan’s corrupt system and replace it with His rule. Then we can get to work building paradise, as originally intended.
Before then, it will get rather hairy. Be there, don’t miss it, but don’t take the losing side.
Wow! So all psychopaths have accumulated in US military industrial complex. There are no blood thirsty Psychopaths in Russia's Gangster capitalism or Chinese CCCP thugs. Prighozin confessed that there was no NATO threat and real motives of war was Russian Oligarch elites wanted to plunder Ukraine by land grabbing & taking over all Ukraine's assets. But Russian Mafia oligarchs are nice fellows while all psychopaths sits in US military industrial complex.
NATO did not militarily acted against Russia since its inception. Surely, the alliance was a deterrent against Russia but it never waged an aggressive war against Russia or even its satellite states (Belarus, Kazakh etc). NATO was braindead organization which was expanding without any purpose and NATO expansion was NOT for waging any military aggression against Russia. But now Putin has revived NATO with a shock therapy & Sweden, Finland joining the alliance after witnessing the madmen in Kremlin.
BTW, why these countries are joining NATO? These are independent nation states with their own foreign policy. US did NOT force them to join NATO. Take example of Finland & Sweden which were neutral for all these decades. Why did they join NATO? Because they want to live in peace and Russia is always threatening Europe.
The war in Ukraine is not a war between Ukraine and Russia. It is a war the US is waging by proxy against Russia. The US has supplied and continues to supply the great majority of money and weapons for Ukraine to fight the war. Nor are Ukraine’s battlefield strategy, tactics, and operative “intelligence” Ukrainian; they are either directly supplied to Ukraine by the US-led and financed NATO, or have been directly derived from years of military organization and training by NATO. Ukrainians themselves are little more than cannon fodder in a war financed, armed, and directed by the US. This situation should be evident to anyone who has paid a bit of sustained critical attention merely to the accounts of the war that have appeared in the US mainstream media. This situation is in fact official US doctrine: our leaders have instructed the world that the war must and will go on, perhaps for years, or perhaps until it leads to global nuclear annihilation—with no negotiations between Ukraine and Russia permitted by the US—in order to achieve the US-defined goal of “weakening Russia” (however the US military-industrial complex chooses to define this bumper-sticker slogan).
We are told by our leaders that we must condemn Putin as evil—he is the new Hitler—because in 2002 he illegally invaded another country, without provocation, and on the basis of a pack of lies, thereby producing mass death and destruction. By means of the psychopathological mechanism of dissociation (“splitting”), Americans are living in a state of denial about the fact that in 2003 we ourselves illegally invaded another country, without provocation, and on the basis of a pack of lies, thereby producing mass death and destruction. (Is there anyone left in the world who denies this?) In fact, the death and devastation the US produced in Iraq were, in terms of scale, incomparably greater than the death and devastation Putin has produced in Ukraine. Nearly one million Iraqis died as a direct result of our unprovoked, criminal invasion of their country. As bad as things were in Iraq under Hussein, since then the country has remained at war with itself and highly dysfunctional, and life has been far worse for the vast majority of Iraqis. In addition, four and one-half million people in the Middle East have died as an indirect result of the US invasion, and large areas in the Middle East have been plunged into chronic instability and misery. The war has also cost the US eight trillion dollars that could have been spent on sane, human ends. (The Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, expressly stated that one of the most important reasons to continue waging the war in Ukraine is that the endless billions the US is spending on it are actually flowing directly back into the US military-industrial complex.)
Where is Americans’ denunciation of their own leaders, and of their own country, for doing the same thing, on an incomparably greater scale, that we denounce Putin and Russia as being monstrously evil for doing? Where is our recognition that the psychopathic leaders who inflict the mass death and devastation of war on humankind do not rule only in Damascus and Moscow, but also in Washington? In fact, they rule above all in Washington. These American psychopaths have waged—and lost—one stupid, pointless war after another throughout the twenty-first century, killing millions of people, destroying the lives of millions more, laying waste to large areas of the earth and to civil order in those areas. No other country, including Russia and China, has been doing anything like that. Unrestrained by a population sunken in chronic war psychosis, the warmongers in Washington have now regressed into a psychotic withdrawal from reality, stating that they are knowingly risking “limited nuclear war,” as if, being the masters of the universe that they are, they will have everything under control once the nuclear missiles start exploding. (If there is such a thing as criminal insanity, such statements by powerful people in Washington would exemplify it.) The world outside our own narcissistic Eurocentric bubble understands that Washington is now out of control even by Washington standards. The vast majority of the world’s population lives in countries that have not been deceived and manipulated, as Americans have been, by the propaganda of the US military-industrial complex: they want a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. For years, the people of the world, who have long been at the receiving end of American imperialism and militarism, have told pollsters that the country which is the greatest threat to world peace is the US. They laugh (or cry) at the declarations by Washington that we respect the sovereignty and rights of other nations, and want to spread democracy, peace, prosperity, and “American values” around the world. Only pathological narcissism protects Americans from recognizing the vast evil consistently inflicted on the world by our own country. As T.S. Eliot wrote, mankind cannot bear very much reality.
Responsible citizenship requires being as skeptical about what politicians, the bureaucrats of war, and Daddy Warbucks say about their wars as we are about what politicians say about domestic issues. Have we not been consistently lied to by the military-industrial complex about one obscene US war or military action after another throughout the twenty-first century—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria? What is the justification for believing our warmongers about the current war (or rather, one of our current wars), just as Americans believed them about these previous endless, pointless, and lost wars? Responsible citizenship requires one to be as aware that one is being lied to and manipulated by government war propaganda as one is aware of being lied to and manipulated by commercial, consumerist advertising. War is waged by the “state,” but the state that wages war is not the same thing as a democratic government or a democratic country; the state that wages war does not even exist, except in the diseased imagination of a people sunken in war psychosis. The war-loving Romans worshipped that state in the form of the god “Mars,” as we do too in the form of “National Security.” War is always sick and stupid. War is always organized mass murder. The American belief that WWII was a “good war” is sick war propaganda. The best a war can ever be is the lesser of two evils, and in every war evil must be done by every side, by every leader, and by a great many of its unwilling participants. War is always another turn in the endless cycle of paranoid revenge-morality.
What a load of Bull?! Full of what-aboutism on America's aggression of the past. America did X Y Z aggression in the past, American Psychopaths destroying middle east, America being the great evil - That doesn't absolve Putin and his PRESENT war crimes. In fact, all your complains & what-aboutism is regurgitation of Putin's talking points. Nothing new.
There has always been an anti-war movement in US/western world which has condemned American imperial foreign policy & wars of aggression. US civil society has always been skeptical of US politicians and foreign policy. And Foreign policy has to be weighted on its merits. US foreign policy on Ukraine post 2022 is Reactive in response to unwarranted aggression by Putin. So keep your what-aboutism to yourself & don't use them as an excuse to JUSTIFY war crimes of Putin.
And what about Civil society and anti-war movement in Russia. How Putin is treating Russians who criticize 3 day "special military operation" ? They are being sent to Gulag. You try to criticize Putin's war in Russia and they will show you the price of being skeptical of ruling politicians. American society and its political system despite, with all it's problems & decadence is still FAR SUPERIOR than these authoritarian states like Russia, China.
There is no hard & fast rule that dictators can't be negotiated with. Sometimes you can, but mostly you can't. Global geopolitics is highly complex & there are no "one size fits all" policies that can be applied. Let me elaborate.
You can negotiate with Dictators or Psychopaths but under right circumstances. For dictators like Putin, Erdogan etc, they only understand FORCE & POWER. You should use absolute brute force against them and then there are possibilities that windows of negotiations may open (still may not).
US negotiated with Putin & Russia throughout 2000 - 2012. As long as US was in position of strength, Kremlin was talking to US & we had more or less - a stability in Europe. (Now i am omitting stuff of 2012 - 2021). But after Trump regime rule which included an insurrection & massively undermining of US institutions, harming of US alliances and severing of global security standing - Putin got emboldened !! When US appeared WEAK, Putin invaded Ukraine. But it was a MISCALCULATION, the Ukrainians turned out to be a lot tougher and US (under Biden) turned out to be stronger & more competent. Hence Putin invasion failing.
My point is that this is a BRUTAL world full of dictators, gangsters, mass murderers, religious fanatics (see regimes of Russia, India, Iran, China, Turkey etc) and US must navigate through this world from position of Strength. Whatever flaws US have, we are ready to discuss it (unlike China or Russia), we need reforms, we should discuss it, we need to be skeptical of US foreign policy - yes, very much so. But despite all the problems, despite all the shortcomings of US, it is playing a positive role on world stage. I have been a strong critic of US foreign policy in the past. But not so today. When US policy needs criticizing, i do it.
Dr Lee understood what motivated Russian invasion of Ukraine. She knew how Trump's internal destruction & weakening of US was motivation of Putin. But somewhere along the line, Dr Lee adopted the talking points of Jeffery Sachs, Noam Chomsky & RayMcGovern (i don't hold them in high regards).
Dr Lee, there are some fallacies.
1. You believe that US is the ONLY active player in global geopolitics while other nations are just reactive NPCs. The global events & outcomes are driven by US.
Russia, China, India, Iran etc etc have their OWN foreign policy (& it's actually aggressive & proactive). US is NOT the only active player on world stage. The idea (also peddled by Trump & Republicans) that Ukraine war can be "resolved" overnight if US wants is highly foolish.
2. Biden said that US won't be enforcing a no fly zone in Ukraine because it will lead to WW3. Biden did NOT say this regarding weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Ukraine war (like any war) is evolving in Game theory manner - US has been matching up optimal responses to Russia's actions.
3. I seriously don't understand how you wanna approach Russia with a dialogue at this point. A grave fallacy is that "non-violence" is a solution to everything. Like you can even have a dialogue with Hitler in 1940s & end WW2 through peaceful negotiations. You just can't & you know why. The psychopthology (which is your expertise) of some people/regimes is that you cannot reason with them. Recall how in pre-WW2 period was giving concessions to Hitler but that did not stopped WW2, the appeasement only emboldened Hitler.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtDxjVCu56E&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=AmericanExperience%7CPBS
4. You cite Nuclear threats by Medvedev, Lavrov & other Russians as a looming threat of doomsday. What should the world do? Should world surrender to threats by Nuclear states against non-nuclear states. So any dictator with Nuclear weapons can issue threats and subdue other countries. If Russia threatens non-nuclear European states, should they just roll over? Or if China threatens non Nuclear states in Asia Pacific, should they just roll over? Please tell, what should be the response against nuclear threats? Should Medvedev & Lavrov given therapy sessions to make them rational & reasonable.
5. You believe that US has sole monopoly over timing of Doomsday clock. You think that if US adopts a different foreign policy, then Doomsday clock will automatically recede. It may not (& it may get even more close to doomsday). There are multiple nuclear powers & their (irrational & aggressive) foreign policy is also driving the nuclear clock.
6. Your analysis on Ukraine situation is based on opinions of people like Noam Chomsky, Jeffery Sachs, Ray McGovern etc as if they are the wisest experts on this topic. They are NOT. You have to expand your understanding & point of view in this area.
7. What motivated Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine? It was NOT the NATO threat - this has been revealed by Russian General Leonid Ivashov even before the war began. Also see Prighozin's confession (sometimes truth comes from unlikeliest channels) - There was no NATO threat against Russia. Russia's war of aggression was solely motivated by Russia's oligarchical ambitions to plunder Ukraine.
https://theintercept.com/2023/07/01/prigozhin-truth-putin-war-ukraine/
Hi, Bandy and All,
I find that the two most worthy questions are
1) What is Real?
and
2) What is next?
Excellent post! Thank you for information. I am currently having a similar problem but on a more personal scale, but the solutions you are describing are exactly the solutions I need to deal with my current situation. Thanks again =] (not quite sure about some of the retorts I scanned here)
PART 2 OF 2
The dynamic of war psychosis was notoriously enunciated by Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
No responsible citizen should ever forget this devil’s wisdom. Virtually every informed person involved in international relations in America and Europe warned Washington for nearly thirty years that to expand NATO was pointless, stupid, and would lead to disaster. The intellectual “architect” of post-WWII American foreign policy, George F. Kennan, said in the 1990s that such expansion would produce “tragic” results. Jack F. Matlock, Jr., the US ambassador to the USSR from 1987 to 1991, wrote that the Russian invasion could have easily been avoided by the US through negotiations as late as the beginning of 2002—if the US had wanted to. (Many similar statements by the best-informed people are easy to find on the web.) Now after three decades during which Washington, was repeatedly warned by American and European experts that expanding NATO would inevitably provoke a Russian military response, the machiavellian psychopaths in Washington never stop mouthing the Big Lie that Putin’s invasion was “unprovoked.” The official US positions on the issue have been a farce of terminal paranoia. The USSR, against which NATO was created to defend Europe, ceased to exist in 1991, thereby ending any reason for NATO to continue to exist. In the 1990s and early in the twenty-first century, Russia, under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin, repeatedly asked the US to create with them a security alliance extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But the astronomically wealthy and powerful US military-industrial complex, whose lifeblood is war and which therefore requires an enemy for its existence, succeeded in causing Washington to reject Russia’s requests, and instead to continue to provoke Russia by repeatedly expanding NATO until it has reached Russia’s borders. This was supposedly necessary for the defense of the US (as if the defense of Russia required keeping the Warsaw Pact in existence and extending it to Cuba). The US has officially declared that Russia is not entitled to a sphere of influence, in practice not even to one that extends to not having a hostile power’s missiles planted on its borders (but the US is entitled to a sphere of influence that extends halfway around the world right up to missiles planted on Russia’s borders). This completely unnecessary expansion of what is by far the greatest military power in history over the course of three decades was, according to its authors, purely “defensive.” Putin repeatedly asked the US to stop expanding NATO towards Russia. Common sense tells us that no Russian leader, no matter how saintly, could have accepted this ceaselessly encroaching aggression by the US. (Did JFK accept the USSR’s planting of missiles in Cuba in 1962?) From Putin’s point of view, the invasion of Ukraine was a necessary evil, just as from the western point of view fighting the war in Ukraine is a necessary evil. Evil the invasion was, but the primary responsibility for this evil lies with the machiavellian, blood-thirsty psychopaths in the military-industrial complex in Washington, not with the kleptocratic psychopaths in Moscow. These same imperialistic psychopaths in Washington are also now encircling China around the entire western Pacific with enormous military power, on the same paranoid justification that they are doing so for purely “defensive” reasons. This is the behavior not merely of the military-industrial complex, but of a dying empire—of the US imperial oligarchy and its splendid war machine, struggling like an addict to keep his exhilarating and soothing fantasies of omnipotence, omniscience, and invulnerability going for as long as possible before he runs out of veins to shoot up.
Dr. Lee properly wishes to keep discussion on this newsletter within the domain of psychology. At the same time, she wishes to address the dangers that American psychopathology represent to the world, including the danger that the war in Ukraine may produce nuclear war. Maintaining an appropriate balance between the two goals is difficult: the ego’s integration of superego and id cannot be accomplished without the reality principle. Out of respect for Dr. Lee (and for other subscribers), I wish to emphasize that my point, in making this post on her newsletter, is not to insist that the interpretation of the war in Ukraine I have offered here is correct. My point is that Americans’ understanding of the war in Ukraine is based on complacent, abysmal ignorance; the passive acceptance of war propaganda in place of adult knowledge and thought; childish rationalization; hypocritical, sanctimonious revenge morality; paranoia, together with the unconscious aggression that is the basis of that paranoia; the embrace of domination-submission modes of relationship; the naive acceptance of machiavellian behavior by our own government; pathological narcissism; denial; dissociation; and the grandiose fantasies of omnipotence, omniscience, and invulnerability that characterize the natives of an imperial metropole.
Although some of what Chimes says is hard to follow, he is not saying what you accuse him of. He is pointing out the evils of the West, he is NOT saying everyone else is innocent and justified. Russia is pursuing imperialist fantasy, trying to Make Russia Great Again, and getting bloodied for it. Putin would have this ambition the same without NATO expansion. He first tried by controlling/subverting Ukrainian politics, but when that failed he went to plan B. The US does exactly the same. Both sell it with lies. That does not mean that life in Russia is just like life in America (although try being stuck in poverty in America, it can be tough).
“When the wicked rule, the people groan.” Proverbs 29:2.
Those who believe God exists, and take the Bible seriously, can see things developing as expected, so that the ending will be no surprise to them. No, not a rapture, leaving behind scorched Earth: that’s not what the Bible foretells.
Satan exists too, and God has stepped aside to let him show the universe what independence from the Creator leads to. Satan’s first claim was, “you don’t need God, he is lying to you” (Gen 3:4, 5). Since we followed him, we have the wonderful world of technology--and its doomsday clock--we have today.
God does guide and to a degree protect those who respect him. So His side of the issue is not without representation. But it’s a small minority. Satan confuses the unwary by presenting himself (through men) as an “angel of light.” Hence the politicians and propaganda industrial complex. And the preachers, who almost to a man support their interests, on one side or the other, whichever way the wind blows.
To keep this short, let’s jump to how it will end: Daniel 2:44 says God will smash Satan’s corrupt system and replace it with His rule. Then we can get to work building paradise, as originally intended.
Before then, it will get rather hairy. Be there, don’t miss it, but don’t take the losing side.
Wow! So all psychopaths have accumulated in US military industrial complex. There are no blood thirsty Psychopaths in Russia's Gangster capitalism or Chinese CCCP thugs. Prighozin confessed that there was no NATO threat and real motives of war was Russian Oligarch elites wanted to plunder Ukraine by land grabbing & taking over all Ukraine's assets. But Russian Mafia oligarchs are nice fellows while all psychopaths sits in US military industrial complex.
NATO did not militarily acted against Russia since its inception. Surely, the alliance was a deterrent against Russia but it never waged an aggressive war against Russia or even its satellite states (Belarus, Kazakh etc). NATO was braindead organization which was expanding without any purpose and NATO expansion was NOT for waging any military aggression against Russia. But now Putin has revived NATO with a shock therapy & Sweden, Finland joining the alliance after witnessing the madmen in Kremlin.
BTW, why these countries are joining NATO? These are independent nation states with their own foreign policy. US did NOT force them to join NATO. Take example of Finland & Sweden which were neutral for all these decades. Why did they join NATO? Because they want to live in peace and Russia is always threatening Europe.
PART 1 OF 2
The war in Ukraine is not a war between Ukraine and Russia. It is a war the US is waging by proxy against Russia. The US has supplied and continues to supply the great majority of money and weapons for Ukraine to fight the war. Nor are Ukraine’s battlefield strategy, tactics, and operative “intelligence” Ukrainian; they are either directly supplied to Ukraine by the US-led and financed NATO, or have been directly derived from years of military organization and training by NATO. Ukrainians themselves are little more than cannon fodder in a war financed, armed, and directed by the US. This situation should be evident to anyone who has paid a bit of sustained critical attention merely to the accounts of the war that have appeared in the US mainstream media. This situation is in fact official US doctrine: our leaders have instructed the world that the war must and will go on, perhaps for years, or perhaps until it leads to global nuclear annihilation—with no negotiations between Ukraine and Russia permitted by the US—in order to achieve the US-defined goal of “weakening Russia” (however the US military-industrial complex chooses to define this bumper-sticker slogan).
We are told by our leaders that we must condemn Putin as evil—he is the new Hitler—because in 2002 he illegally invaded another country, without provocation, and on the basis of a pack of lies, thereby producing mass death and destruction. By means of the psychopathological mechanism of dissociation (“splitting”), Americans are living in a state of denial about the fact that in 2003 we ourselves illegally invaded another country, without provocation, and on the basis of a pack of lies, thereby producing mass death and destruction. (Is there anyone left in the world who denies this?) In fact, the death and devastation the US produced in Iraq were, in terms of scale, incomparably greater than the death and devastation Putin has produced in Ukraine. Nearly one million Iraqis died as a direct result of our unprovoked, criminal invasion of their country. As bad as things were in Iraq under Hussein, since then the country has remained at war with itself and highly dysfunctional, and life has been far worse for the vast majority of Iraqis. In addition, four and one-half million people in the Middle East have died as an indirect result of the US invasion, and large areas in the Middle East have been plunged into chronic instability and misery. The war has also cost the US eight trillion dollars that could have been spent on sane, human ends. (The Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, expressly stated that one of the most important reasons to continue waging the war in Ukraine is that the endless billions the US is spending on it are actually flowing directly back into the US military-industrial complex.)
Where is Americans’ denunciation of their own leaders, and of their own country, for doing the same thing, on an incomparably greater scale, that we denounce Putin and Russia as being monstrously evil for doing? Where is our recognition that the psychopathic leaders who inflict the mass death and devastation of war on humankind do not rule only in Damascus and Moscow, but also in Washington? In fact, they rule above all in Washington. These American psychopaths have waged—and lost—one stupid, pointless war after another throughout the twenty-first century, killing millions of people, destroying the lives of millions more, laying waste to large areas of the earth and to civil order in those areas. No other country, including Russia and China, has been doing anything like that. Unrestrained by a population sunken in chronic war psychosis, the warmongers in Washington have now regressed into a psychotic withdrawal from reality, stating that they are knowingly risking “limited nuclear war,” as if, being the masters of the universe that they are, they will have everything under control once the nuclear missiles start exploding. (If there is such a thing as criminal insanity, such statements by powerful people in Washington would exemplify it.) The world outside our own narcissistic Eurocentric bubble understands that Washington is now out of control even by Washington standards. The vast majority of the world’s population lives in countries that have not been deceived and manipulated, as Americans have been, by the propaganda of the US military-industrial complex: they want a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. For years, the people of the world, who have long been at the receiving end of American imperialism and militarism, have told pollsters that the country which is the greatest threat to world peace is the US. They laugh (or cry) at the declarations by Washington that we respect the sovereignty and rights of other nations, and want to spread democracy, peace, prosperity, and “American values” around the world. Only pathological narcissism protects Americans from recognizing the vast evil consistently inflicted on the world by our own country. As T.S. Eliot wrote, mankind cannot bear very much reality.
Responsible citizenship requires being as skeptical about what politicians, the bureaucrats of war, and Daddy Warbucks say about their wars as we are about what politicians say about domestic issues. Have we not been consistently lied to by the military-industrial complex about one obscene US war or military action after another throughout the twenty-first century—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria? What is the justification for believing our warmongers about the current war (or rather, one of our current wars), just as Americans believed them about these previous endless, pointless, and lost wars? Responsible citizenship requires one to be as aware that one is being lied to and manipulated by government war propaganda as one is aware of being lied to and manipulated by commercial, consumerist advertising. War is waged by the “state,” but the state that wages war is not the same thing as a democratic government or a democratic country; the state that wages war does not even exist, except in the diseased imagination of a people sunken in war psychosis. The war-loving Romans worshipped that state in the form of the god “Mars,” as we do too in the form of “National Security.” War is always sick and stupid. War is always organized mass murder. The American belief that WWII was a “good war” is sick war propaganda. The best a war can ever be is the lesser of two evils, and in every war evil must be done by every side, by every leader, and by a great many of its unwilling participants. War is always another turn in the endless cycle of paranoid revenge-morality.
What a load of Bull?! Full of what-aboutism on America's aggression of the past. America did X Y Z aggression in the past, American Psychopaths destroying middle east, America being the great evil - That doesn't absolve Putin and his PRESENT war crimes. In fact, all your complains & what-aboutism is regurgitation of Putin's talking points. Nothing new.
There has always been an anti-war movement in US/western world which has condemned American imperial foreign policy & wars of aggression. US civil society has always been skeptical of US politicians and foreign policy. And Foreign policy has to be weighted on its merits. US foreign policy on Ukraine post 2022 is Reactive in response to unwarranted aggression by Putin. So keep your what-aboutism to yourself & don't use them as an excuse to JUSTIFY war crimes of Putin.
And what about Civil society and anti-war movement in Russia. How Putin is treating Russians who criticize 3 day "special military operation" ? They are being sent to Gulag. You try to criticize Putin's war in Russia and they will show you the price of being skeptical of ruling politicians. American society and its political system despite, with all it's problems & decadence is still FAR SUPERIOR than these authoritarian states like Russia, China.
Jamie,
There is no hard & fast rule that dictators can't be negotiated with. Sometimes you can, but mostly you can't. Global geopolitics is highly complex & there are no "one size fits all" policies that can be applied. Let me elaborate.
You can negotiate with Dictators or Psychopaths but under right circumstances. For dictators like Putin, Erdogan etc, they only understand FORCE & POWER. You should use absolute brute force against them and then there are possibilities that windows of negotiations may open (still may not).
US negotiated with Putin & Russia throughout 2000 - 2012. As long as US was in position of strength, Kremlin was talking to US & we had more or less - a stability in Europe. (Now i am omitting stuff of 2012 - 2021). But after Trump regime rule which included an insurrection & massively undermining of US institutions, harming of US alliances and severing of global security standing - Putin got emboldened !! When US appeared WEAK, Putin invaded Ukraine. But it was a MISCALCULATION, the Ukrainians turned out to be a lot tougher and US (under Biden) turned out to be stronger & more competent. Hence Putin invasion failing.
My point is that this is a BRUTAL world full of dictators, gangsters, mass murderers, religious fanatics (see regimes of Russia, India, Iran, China, Turkey etc) and US must navigate through this world from position of Strength. Whatever flaws US have, we are ready to discuss it (unlike China or Russia), we need reforms, we should discuss it, we need to be skeptical of US foreign policy - yes, very much so. But despite all the problems, despite all the shortcomings of US, it is playing a positive role on world stage. I have been a strong critic of US foreign policy in the past. But not so today. When US policy needs criticizing, i do it.
Dr Lee understood what motivated Russian invasion of Ukraine. She knew how Trump's internal destruction & weakening of US was motivation of Putin. But somewhere along the line, Dr Lee adopted the talking points of Jeffery Sachs, Noam Chomsky & RayMcGovern (i don't hold them in high regards).