By Batiushka for the Saker blog
I need somebody,
Not just anybody,
You know I need someone, help!
So much younger than today,
I never needed anybody's help in any way,
but now these days are gone,
I'm not so self-assured.
And now I find I've changed my mind
And opened up the doors.
In, oh, so many ways
My independence seems to vanish in the haze.
But every now and then
I feel so insecure.
I know that I just need you like
I've never done before.
Help me if you can, I'm feeling down,
And I do appreciate you being 'round.
Help me get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me, help me, help me?
The Beatles
The West has lost the Battle of Soledar. 25,000 Ukrainian and western mercenaries lie dead. Artemovsk is about to fall with all its fortifications. Where next?
A limited policing operation all started with the Russian wish to protect its people in two Russian provinces in the far east of the Ukraine. This soon had to be extended to four Russian provinces, two more added from the south-east of the Ukraine, so linking up with the much-persecuted Crimea. That had been Russian until 1954, just as all the east of the Ukraine was Russian until 1922 and the far west Polish, Hungarian and Romanian until 1939 - the Ukraine is a uniquely Communist creation. And then there was the Russian wish to prevent the Ukraine from becoming an American base, specifically for its ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and also to protect the many Russian speakers elsewhere in the Ukraine from hate-filled Nazi persecution of them. The project and the aim were all relatively modest. Then it all changed:
If the West continues to pump the Ukraine full of weaponry out of impotent rage, or a desire to exacerbate the situation...then that means our geographical tasks will move even further from the current line.
Sergey Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia
So it all became an operation, forced on Russia by the aggressiveness of Washington, to take back, directly or indirectly, more or less the whole of the Ukraine. This was not because Russia is fighting against the Ukraine, or against the EU, or against NATO, or against 'the West', or even against the USA, but against the neocons, who pull the money-strings, in Washington. And so now Russia has to demilitarise all NATO ground forces (cowardly NATO naval and air forces are hiding) and ultimately to denazify the whole Western world. It is actually on its way to doing that. Certain types of NATO equipment are in short supply. And despite strict Western censorship, more and more Western people are realising that the Ukraine, the most corrupt country on earth, is simply not worth a penny of their taxes, let alone billions, let alone living in hunger or cold: 'Eat or heat', as they say in the strikebound UK.
What the Western world, which is ruled over by a bunch of neocons in Washington, has never understood, is that this is an existential war for Russia and therefore Russia will fight to the end, if the neocons force it too. And although the neocon elite likes to consider that this is an existential war for the US, it is not, let alone for the peoples of Western Europe. Find a single ordinary Western person who is voluntarily willing to die for the Ukraine. You will not find a single one. (Western mercenaries die only for money, not for the Ukraine). This Western crusade is existential only for the neocon fantasy ideology, that 'The West is Best' and that 'History Has Ended' (with our triumph). And here there is a problem.
This problem is that the only way the Ukraine can survive is through Western (mainly US) subsidies of over $300 million a day (so it has been week in, week out, for the last eleven months so far). The Ukraine is on life support. This is killing the West, or rather the West is killing itself because this money will never be paid back and every day that passes is another $300 million that will never be paid back.
As we have said, it is only elitist neocon supporters who back the Western war of terror in the Ukraine. They are the sort of wealthier Western people who belong to, or want to belong to out of self-importance, who last March began flying Ukrainian flags. They saw in the neocon operation an anti-Russian crusade to extend Western power, that is, to increase their personal wealth by helping to steal the wealth of the Ukraine and Russia. What some are realising, Geoffrey Sachs and Condoleezza Rice among them, together with Heinrich Kissinger on the fringes, is that you cannot do it. This is a bridge too far. You can only spread the Western mentality among those with a Western mentality.
Just as Western religion never had any profound or long-lasting success in China, India, the Muslim world, Japan, Russia, the Ukraine, Serbia or a whole bunch of Eastern European countries which have always been Orthodox Christian (see Toynbee or Huntingdon), so today's neocon religion is not supported by seven-eighths of the world. The seven-eighths, the Global South, East and North, have a different mentality because they have different cultures, indeed, different Civilisations. Even in Latin America and Black Africa, Western religion has been transformed by the local people. Their values no longer resemble the original template, indeed, the original template hardly exists any longer in Western countries, which are today renowned for their atheism. Thus, in Kiev, an atheist Jewish 'President', appointed by the USA, no doubt for his ability to play the piano with his penis, has banned Christianity. Expect blowback.
'These days are gone' for the neocons, they are not so 'self-assured', and now they find they've 'changed their minds', for their 'independence seems to vanish in the haze', and 'they feel so insecure'. We will have to help them 'get their feet back on the ground'. Once you have realised that the nuclear option is unreal, that you cannot afford to pay out £300 million a day for ever, your only option is retreat. But, practically, how can we help the neocons 'get their feet back on the ground', that is, help them to evacuate the Ukraine without their losing face?
Here there is the option of 'withdrawal' to your vassals in Western Europe, building a wall across Eastern Europe on the pretext that you are protecting the 'free' 'civilised' world from the 'aggressive Muscovite barbarians'. 'Not an inch back', can be your slogan. 'It was that or nuclear war', you can (falsely) claim. Of course, you may have to accept the loss of the Baltics and/or Moldova and/or Georgia (but they were never really yours anyway), but such is the price of maintaining your 'purity' for another generation. That is, until the whole Western house of cards and its ridiculous fake 'left-right' Uniparty system, collapses anyway but you can deny that for the moment - that will be someone else's problem. (As the short-termist Keynes said: 'In the long term we are all dead anyway).
The more radical option, already suggested by Trump, is to retreat back to the US, in renewed isolationism. 'Make America Great Again'. 'America First'. This would be very popular with the much-tried American people, who are faced with an avalanche of problems and neocon debt. 'We are leaving the European parasites', to paraphrase Victoria Nuland, 'to build up our great country, from sea to shining sea'. This time all that stuff about 'draining the swamp' could become real. Especially since the swamp was never drained the first time round - in fact it was deepened and extended then. As for the neocons, they could be sent away to Israel, where many of them come from anyway, or at the very least, where they all belong anyway. As for the rest of us, we could all live (relatively) happily ever after. Help!
Orthodox New Year's Day, 14 January 2023