Eurasia Note #17 - Talk of War and Exit

External forces try to manipulate Russia and Ukraine into conflict; door remains open

Biden’s “minor incursion” comment sparks Ukraine apoplexy.
NATO inscrutable, like Confucius.
Nations are not immutable, nor people trapped by history.
Yet history is our sternest guide to present realities.
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Yada, yada.

Jan 21, 2022

The week’s entertainment seemed to be another car crash of a Joe Biden press conference. But is there method in his madness? His off-the-cuff comments tell us more than a dozen hand-outs from the State Department.

His remark, “It depends on what (Russia) does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion and we end up having to fight about we have to do and not do,” reflects divisions among the Atlantic allies or at least the sensitivity of their predicament.

It recalls his magisterial declamation: “We have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics,” just before the 2020 election.

Russia and Ukraine are a test of resilience to outside manipulation — to borrow a favourite word from western European military, particularly the British.

Yes, Russia could annex Donbas but it has neither need nor reason. What it can’t allow is NATO missiles five minutes’ cruising time from Moscow — especially not in a country that has proved politically unstable.

NATO’s policy encourages extremism — exactly the opposite of what it claims to do on its home territories. This is reflected in the state-corporatist media which will direct you occasionally to the “peace at any cost” camp, but more likely into the “party of war,” or those who see Russia as an implacable enemy.

Neither represents the majority of Ukrainians, who one can say with a fair degree of confidence are occupied with the daily struggle to survive, given the vacant promises of European accession. No-one can ignore Ukraine’s political system, broken by corruption, split by oligarchs. Even NATO admits that Ukraine is not ready and, as Biden stated, joining in the near future is “not very likely”.

It is fourteen years since Ukraine and Georgia were promised membership “one day.” As NATO’s think tank the Atlantic Council points out, Ukraine is not just a recipient but an active source of traditional military battlefield and hybrid warfare, which extends from cyber to disinformation. Progress, from the Atlanticist perspective, is step by step.

Just as likely Russia works to destablize Kyiv, as the head of Ukraine's Security Council told the Wall Street Journal, through non-military cyber warfare. Ironically that could be the best option for both sides, if it means the war party is weakened.

Oligarchal models

Moscow states publicly that Ukraine’s issues are internal. As for Ukraine’s factions, there is nothing to gain from conflict except an inscription in the pantheon beside Stepan Bandera.

That suggests the main voices pushing for conflict come from outside. The worsening global economic crisis will make it easier to find individuals with nothing to lose — cheap fodder for some tycoon’s ambition.

The oligarchic model, as in Russia of the 1990s, whence I reported for Reuters, provides a chance to pick a horse. Putin put an end to this “gipodrome” management which encourages the daredevil leaping of oligarchs between horses — though Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov occasionally flies his magnificent stallions to Moscow for the President’s Cup.

What Putin more accurate did was freeze the oligarchical horse-leaping at a moment in time. You still get an oligarchy — someone has to own the assets. At least you don't have a gangsterism in the open and walk past machine guns as you enter every high class shop or restaurant.

That is why a nation must be entire unto itself. If it is open to outside, whipped by the winds of change, it is interconnected to the whims of Rockefeller-backed roving marauders of private intelligence agencies or the CIA.

Two minutes hate

You are not supposed to think like this. Know the enemy. The press is owned and the press will tell you whom to hate. ”Speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.”

The war party, unfortunately, is incentivized by outsiders using any grievance, however ancient.

It is easy to be waylaid by rival camps. Each has its own personal history, enmities and regrets. In the age of philanthropy and think tanks, each is to a degree the tool or servant of another or at the very least is driven by a desire to be a distinctive counterpoint to another.

Neoconservatism is not simply a ploy to sell jets and missiles, or the financialization of Go, USA! imperial ambitions. It is it a complex influence upon foreign policy.

Some would argue that neoconservatism brought geopolitics to the fore in U.S. discourse in the 1950s: that is dubious. The generations who had fought two world wars knew perfectly well where the Caspian was. It is in our later era of dumbing down that the neocons have played the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Black gold

The clue to these fierce anti-communists is that they remained antagonistic to Russia even as the Bolshevik empire crumbled. The second is their bipartisanship does not build consensus but rather sees no distinction between state and corporation, or the U.S. empire or any other. It sees only resources and money.

See: Moneycircus, Jan 8, 2022 — Eurasia Note #14 - Foreigners Meddle, Kazakhs Complicit? It notes that Stalin found employment and financing through the Rothschild oil refineries on the Caspian between 1901 and 1907. The family later helped finance Stalin’s rise among the Bolsheviks. Bankers and oilers work in mysterious ways.

The Trotskyite origins of the neoconservatives is often blamed for their pathological hatred of all things Russian and just as often this is denied — the argument is never settled. While still in their Trotskyite fatigues the Irving Kristol crowd found employment at magazines like Encounter (where he was co-editor) which has since been revealed as a front for the CIA.

Did I mention that Stalin’s legend in the Bolshevik saga is peripatetic newspaper editor and printer? They were just controlling the opposition, and not only back then, for the feminist Gloria Steinem was another of their magazine editors.

As H. Rowan Gaither, then president of the Ford Foundation told Norman Dodd, director of research, from 1952 to 1954, of the House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, known for short as the Reece Committee:

“Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here have had experience operating under directives, either in the O.S.S. or the European Economic Administration, with directives from the White House. We operate under those directives... the substance of which is that we shall use our grant-making power so to alter our life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.”

Should no-one blink an eye that from 2013-17 the FBI and the CIA were simultaneously directed by two former communists, one a committed voter, the other a party comrade? No less a Bolshevik and a muslim like Kim Philby’s father. ”Thank you for your service,” perhaps.

Zoom out a little and we should be able to acknowledge the financing of Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin who resided in those dens of finance capital, New York, Basle-Zurich and Baku (in Stalin’s time, controlled by the Rothschilds). We need not scratch our heads over different Marxist camps. The Trotskyists are, simply, the last team standing — and have always been the closest to Washington.

My Martini-sipping but traditional corporate fellow-travellers should look up the interview of former U.S. ambassador to Cuba Earl T. Smith in which he shows conclusively that Fidel Castro was a U.S. State Department construct.

Back up 30 years and the petro-pharmaceutical combines and finance capital had backed the rise of the Nazis. This should ring more than a Swiss mountain goat bell. Ned Beatty said it best, as the mogul Arthur Jensen in the movie Network (1976):

“The primal forces of nature… one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars… “There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.” [1]

This is economic determinism that says, if the U.S. economy goes down, so be it. The British empire had its day, along with the whole European financier-aristocrat imperial elite.

“Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

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