Open Thread

Where can you get up to date news and maps of control for Mariupol?

Saker, as this is an open thread, how easy or hard would it be for Russia to attempt to turn the citizens of western nations against their corrupt governments?

Yes, I know that the Russians wouldn’t normally lower themselves to resorting to smear campaigns but events like 911 surely would have civilians demanding answers from the establishment.

All Russia needs to do is supply evidence of a self inflicted event in which the government was prepared to kill over 3000 of its own people and identify which individuals and organizations benefited financially…. to cause massive distrust and disobedience of the West’s citizenry.

Or will the western governments and media deflect/invert/blame/lie as is par for the course that the tactic would simply not work ?

Where does the Russophobia in the UK originate?

Probably from one person; the Head of State; the Queen. Hence Russophobia in UK, Australia, Canada, NZ. etc.

There was a fuss at one of the Royal Weddings, when they realised the Tiara due to be worn by one of the Royal females was embellished with emeralds “ mined in Russia”. Cue shock, horror and fits of the vapours; unthinkable!

The UK Government is the Queen’s servant.

The fish rots from its head.

The European Parliament on Thursday approved a resolution calling for an absolute ban on fossil fuel imports from Russia.

Europeans are about to wake up to a pretty nasty nightmare.

What will follow? Civil unrest? Maybe they’ll hang the bastards from the European Parliament from the lampposts themselves.

Putin’s denazification and demilitarization plan isn’t going to end.

Whether you believe there are Nazis in Ukraine or not, Putin and his army do. Whether we call them Nazis or resurrected members of the OUN, or Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the old Stepan Bandera group, the Russians and Putin call them Nazis. To Russians and Putin, any group that is racist against Russians and Slavs, as was Hitler, they are Nazis.

The OUN fit that bill from the beginning and sought to unite with Hitler in 1943, but Hitler had them marked for genocide, as well as all Slavs, for Lebensraum, under Generalplan Ost , where 100,000 Slavs would be immediately marked for death, so ethnic Germans could take their land. The Nazis rebuffed any idea of an alliance, no matter what Bandera wanted. That was the obvious extension of Hitler’s doctrine written in Mein Kampf, to destroy the Slavs, and especially the Poles.

“Generalplan Ost was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Central and Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale to be undertaken in the European territories occupied by Germany during World War II. It would have included the extermination of most Slavic people in Europe.”
Wikipedia

Stalin and Russia stopped them at the cost of about 27 million dead. If Russia and Stalin had quit, and given up, and chosen not to fight, that genocide would have happened. There would be no eastern front for the Nazis so the Normandy invasion could never have happened. Germany would have had no two front war.

We think of Nazis as those that conducted the holocaust. Russians take it personally, as they were marked for death, and had to fight to the death, no matter what the sacrifice. The Germans gave them no quarter or mercy. Every Russian learned that they were marked for death.

It’s not that Putin is prejudiced against Germans. He has no such prejudice. It’s not that he wants to reestablish the USSR, as many think, based on quotes out of context. He is a genuine patriot and devotee of Russian security.

Quote by Czar Alexander III of Russia: “Russia has only two allies: the army and the navy”.

Putin has seen the full extent of the hatred, anger, fear, contempt, arrogance, racism, slander, propaganda, lies and calumny of the west against Russia and his leadership. So he took it to the next level.

But he has energetically sought peace with all the world. The collective of nations that have the majority of the population won’t knuckle under to US bullying any more because they know they are next. All the poorer nations have bad experience of US foreign policy. They may have reservations about Ukraine but they will abstain or support Russia, when it comes to a vote. If there appears to be any majority in the UN, that’s only an illusion. There are a lot of small nations that get one vote and there are a lot of very large nations that only get one vote.

“A superpower is a cold war term. When people today say that Russia aspires to have this status, I interpret it in the following way: they want to undermine trust in Russia, to portray Russia as frightening, and create some kind of image of an enemy. … Russia is in favor of a multipolar world, a democratic world order, strengthening the system of international law, and for developing a legal system in which any small country, even a very small country, can feel itself secure, as if behind a stone wall. … Russia is ready to become part of this multipolar world and guarantee that the international community observes these rules. And not as a superpower with special rights, but rather as an equal among equals.”
Vladimir Putin – Wikiquote

This analysis is based on what he says, and it’s based on the premise that he generally says what he means.

As such, it is predictive of what he will do next, if I am correct.

I happen to agree with him that there is extreme prejudice among many Ukrainians against Russians. The ‘special action’ is unlikely to solve that issue among Ukrainians because they don’t care about the security of Russia, too many of them have despised Russians, and even if Putin and the Russian Army has spared as many civilians as they could, many Ukrainians will have a hard time accepting that that is necessary for the security of Russia. There may be better ways and methods than those that Putin is using to win Ukrainian hearts and minds, but I can only guess how it is working now, because of the fog of war, and the smoke and mirrors of propaganda

In his eyes, it’s probably the Nazis who say they will never forgive. Their names go on a list.

In my analysis of Putin, it doesn’t matter what you or I think. It matters what Putin thinks, and what his actions are, based on what he thinks. Our morals are not pertinent to his actions except as insofar that we share his values.

Putin’s security argument is made elsewhere, when he decries the abolition of the INF missile treaty and the ABM treaty. He foresees a Russia surrounded by hostile missile bases in the territories of his Eastern European neighbours, where the bases are heavily defended by NATO forces, foreign and domestic, filled with pernicious hatred, fear, anger and prejudice, based on age old historical animosities, constantly inflamed by NATO propaganda, with a seething devil’s hell of neighbours, proxies or members of NATO. To me that explains his expression of desperation, when he said he was totally backed into a corner.

Putin’s Warning to the West → Nuclear Famine
https://nuclearfamine.org/war-consequences/online-references-for-war-with-high-yield-nuclear-weapons/

Then he was thinking about invading, but Lavrov was talking to the animals, and he still had a faint hope of some respect, and that he and Russians might be accorded some dignity above a consistent subhuman status in western eyes. I think that the special action plan was there, but he couldn’t decide to pull the trigger on the special action, right to the moment when he decided that the subhumans must act, no matter what the exceptional nation, it’s leaders and it’s NATO allies might do. It was a message to NATO and it’s leadership, fraught with risk, risking nuclear war, but he saw no other way of getting the message across that he was serious about NATO expansion.

He saw NATO missile bases on his border, and the militarization of all his European neighbours by NATO, to such a degree that these bases could some day be used by supercilious racially hostile highly militarized NATO allies and their proxies for a first strike on his missile bases.

They needed delivery systems on his border and possibly dial a yield neutron bombs if any of the Pentagon crazies had any fear or knowledge of nuclear winter, but he doesn’t underestimate the budget, science, technology or innovation of North American military science establishment. Some few in the US Defense establishment contemplate a preemptive nuclear war against Russia. If they’re not in power now, they soon could be, and the present crop seems to have little or no clue about the realities of the Cold War or nuclear war, so he pulled the trigger on the Ukraine invasion.

As he picked the petals off the flower of his Russian desperation, it wasn’t ‘they love me’, ‘they love me not.’ It soon became very clear that they hate us, they hate us all, every petal, and the flower ran out of petals, so he pulled the trigger of denazification and demilitarization.

But there are no Nazis NATO says, and we are purely a defensive organization?

There are such people in every country. Their denial comes from their greed, conceit and false sense of power. It’s naive to think otherwise.

So he will continue with his ablation of Nazis and their military equipment as fast the democratic Nazis in Washington and Europe can send them, and if he has to use thermobaric weaoons or nuclear weapons he will. Eventually he might use tactical weapons, nuclear or otherwise, against Poland and other states that supply these weapons to Ukraine, especially if he sees missile bases go in and he thinks they are becoming a real threat to his nuclear deterrent. Once he does that, every Cold War simulation indicates that the conflict very likely will escalate and become full scale nuclear war.

Wilkerson’s experience tells him that that’s the outcome of using tactical nukes, so that’s my prediction, given continued NATO militarization of Ukraine, but once that happens, it won’t matter. No prediction after that can save anything or anyone. There will be nobody left to listen.

Once the nuclear shooting starts, it’s all over.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson on Biden’s China Ad and Nuclear War
https://theanalysis.news/col-lawrence-wilkerson-on-bidens-china-ad-and-nuclear-war/

Larry Wilkerson
. . . ‘So what do you do? Well, you sit down in these war games and you start thinking about nuclear weapons.
Let me just relate one I remember vividly from Maxwell Air Force Base, a joint war game. Here’s the U.S. side with the civilians being played or the civilians like the president, vice president, so forth, being played by former diplomats, former secretaries of state and so forth, making decisions. To get down to this point. I told you about where we have both treated each other quite badly. OK. Here’s the U.S. side. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says, well, you know, we do have these Tee Lamb Dee’s
And at that time they were Tomahawk launched missiles, cruise missiles with a small nuclear warhead. I recommend we shoot ten or twelve of these at Chinese military facilities along the southern coast. They’ll stop and everything will stop. And we’ll get to the negotiating table. We’ll get what we want. Taiwan back or whatever. Oh, right, says a civilian. Who’s this guy happened to have been a former secretary of state, right? Right. They won’t shoot nuclear weapons back at us?
Then you get this kind of fuzzy looking face on the US general and then the civilian invariably says, okay, war game’s over. We’re not going there. In other words, every game I have ever simulated with China, every war game has wound up with the contemplation of using nuclear weapons because we can’t do it any other way. That is not a denouement that that anyone with any sanity should be seeking. And yet that’s where you head. That’s where you’re going If you start talking about fighting China.”

Ukraine: Russian Crimes, American Hypocrisy – Wilkerson and Jay
https://theanalysis.news/ukraine-russian-crimes-american-hypocrisy-wilkerson-and-jay/

“Larry Wilkerson
When we were briefed on this the very first time, it was some time ago, it was right after their 2012 maneuvers, I think they were core size maneuvers, the Finns and the Swedes that have been observers, and they were the centre for Naval Analysis in Washington. They were briefing us on what they’d seen. They were predicting that it would be the next year it would go into actual published doctrine. That was the reaction of everybody in the room. Where did we lose this knowledge we gained during the Cold War, that if you use them, you’re going to go all the way. You don’t do a [Robert] McNamara gradual escalation with nuclear weapons. You shoot one. They’re gone. You’re going to wind your way all the way down to the end, and it is going to be truly the end. We’ve lost that knowledge. We’ve lost that kind of— I’ve got my feet in the Cold War, and I understand the nuclear theory, especially installation theory.
We had to lecture Delhi and Islamabad on that in 2002 because they didn’t know. They hadn’t been through a Cold War. They didn’t know the kind of thinking that we had gestated over those years from very smart people about how a nuclear exchange would wind up ultimately. I think it’s sobered [Pervez] Musharraf, and it’s sobered Delhi too, especially the civilians, I think. Maybe not so much the military, but they had not thought this through. They didn’t understand. If I shoot 20, he’s going to shoot 40, I’m going to shoot 100, and then the stockpiles are gone, and we’re all burning, and by the way, we wiped out all the agriculture from Washington to California, too, with the nuclear winter that comes from that. You’ve seen the studies of what would happen if Pakistan and India—“