Faced with these horrors, many wonder if humans are intrinsically evil? One commenter observed that the corn fuel burned in organic fuel could have fed a lot of starving Sudanese.

In the comments to A Time Of Famine, And A Time Of War… TR3BPilot notes:

I would posit that humans some humans are intrinsically good but most humans are:

1. just downright stupid
2. easily manipulated
3. conforming
4. non-thinking sheeple.

Every atrocity in history may have been led by one or a few socio/psycho-paths but it was masses of non-thinking sheeple who did the dirty deeds. The“re are always millions who will say “just doing my job” and “just following orders”.

One can blame the zionist-globalist cabals but billions of sheeple are responsible for committing evil acts in their name. One can blame the Jekyll Island oligarchs for the Fed but its hundred thousand some employees bear the responsibility for ruining the USD.

One can blame big pharma for their poisons but millions of imbecilic sheeple in their collective stupidity acquired Mass Formation Psychosis in unison.

It never occurs to sheeple that maybe they should think for themselves and quit following the herd.

We should not let ourselves off the hook. If we have leaders like this and we claim to be democracies, those leaders are our responsibility.

At the same time, in our vast swaths of upland forests, the UN organization Transitions is slowly accreting that land. For who? We don’t really know. Transitions is everywhere, in the US, in Canada, in every country in Europe.  It is where you live. It is one of the many prongs of Agenda 2030. Everywhere, it invades local governments and acts to suppress economic activity.

Transitions also trades carbon credits. For who? Who do you think?

Therefore Transitions, which has a rainbow-colored smiley PR face, is in that business. Buying land to transfer it to international organizations and mega-rich families so they can make money on our forests. But not us. We can’t.  We can’t even thin them to prevent catastrophic forest fire.

Those contracts must be interesting, not that anyone can see them. The first thing they do is act as whacking big first-time tax deductions. The second thing they do is act as an annual tax deduction because those trees are eating CO2. Very clever. International interests buy our land (and yours) and use it to not pay taxes. While banking some of the most valuable assets on the planet.

In the 1990’s, a Russian Prime Minister under Boris Yeltsin, the very greedy Yegor Gaidar, together with his Komsomol friends, created a program called the Voucher Program. Each Russian, young and old, was given a ten unit voucher (roughly the equivalent of a $100, though only tradable for cash at about $10). These vouchers as single vouchers were completely useless. But packaged together by the thousand, allowed the owners to trade them for valuable state enterprises. This included not just factories, but mining concessions and oil companies.

Vouchers made a parasite and predatory class rich in Russia, and disinherited the people. That is until Vladimir Putin showed up and re-nationalised a fair number of these concessions, and/or demanded back taxes from the voucher carpetbaggers, now known as oligarchs.

Basically carbon credits are the same vouchers, with which a globalist financial class attempted to expropriate Russia. Except now these carbon credits are being used to bankrupt small farmers and small companies in favour of those who can afford to buy vouchers en masse.

All of Nickson’s original essay is worth reading. Nickson is a veteran MSM star journalist, with stints at Time, the Guardian, The Financial Times as well as the former European Editor for Life Magazine. She is an old-school investigative reporter who knows the system from the inside.

First they came for the third-world, then they came for the farmers, then they came for the businesses, then they came for your car, finally they came for your house. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.

“We should not count on friends or neutrals to save our civilization.” Hear that Taiwan, Japan and South Korea? You must build your own nuclear deterrent immediately.

USA must restart or civil defense program to teach the population how to survive nuclear attack. Many lives can be saved with some basic knowledge, reinforced in the schools, like we did in the 1950s. See: The Good News About Nuclear Destruction (goodnewsnuke.com)

This madman unmasks what is a diabolical gambit, the new US paradigm of war:

Arm all its satrapies around the world with nuclear weapons and encourage “local” nuclear wars.

Clean hands USA avoids the action. Its enemies and its competitors (even friendly) are eliminated. Last one left standing. We can see this strategy in action in the Ukraine where the United States created a crisis, before midwifing a violent coup in 2014. The US Front person was the repugnant Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland but ultimately even Nuland is just a face, if an ugly one, with her biolabs and hatred.

Ten years of state terrorism slowly built up the conditions for war. Now that war has started and the Ukraine has lots its doomed war, the United States pushes its European vassals forward, as the next man up in confrontation with Russia.

Fortunately, even Poland is not that foolish. The US has to rely on the mad or bought like Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, who puts a pretty face on hate and serves as the point woman for the Fourth Reich, much as Lina and Reinhard Heydrich did for the Third Reich.

Spreading nuclear weapons around the world will result in their use. Every significant regional power, including states like Poland, should dread nuclear proliferation. Those arms will be used in local conflicts which will result in their own elimination. Damage to their larger neighbours will be significant but it’s small nations which will disappear completely in such exchanges.

It’s no coincidence that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced at their joint public statement in May, “Everyone loses in a nuclear war.”

Simultaneously to spread nuclear weapons and fan regional conflicts, is the most cynical and diabolical strategy yet from US imperialism.

Musk’s position is

“How am I in this war? Musk asked,” according to Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

In February, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, told reporters something very similar.

“We were really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom,” she said. “It was never intended to be weaponized, but the Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement.”

No kidding. The Russians have quietly suggested that Starlink and other low-orbit satellites could be disabled en masse by blowing up a few and letting the debris take out the rest.

Bezos and the US security establishment have other ideas, using Paul Barrett, deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights as their spokesman:

“You would expect people with this kind of corporate power to operate from self interest or to make mistakes. But you would not expect someone who provides an ally with crucial technology and then snatches it back when they are using it in the middle of a war. Whatever responsible corporate behavior is, that’s not it.”

Further menace ensues:

But the government is not helpless and has ways to rein companies in: “You can address a lot of those concerns through contracting mechanism or other legal agreements,” [says Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation]

What’s extraordinary is that Musk appears to be one of the few technology golden geese that the USA has left (Apple Computers would be one).

That dominant position didn’t come easy. SpaceX was initially locked out of Pentagon launch contracts and had to sue the Air Force to be allowed to compete. It also fought to earn NASA as a customer, and now it is one of the space agency’s most reliable partners….

“You can always go faster than you think you can. Hands down,” Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, said during a recent conference presentation. “There’s always time to gain. There’s always efficiencies to be brought. You think you went fast enough? … You can go faster. Every time my team is like, ‘Dude, we can’t go faster.’ You’re like, ‘Yes, you can.’ Move the goal posts. You’ll be surprised what happens when you challenge people.”

SpaceX has also thrived operating under what are known as fixed-priced contracts, where the contractor must eat any cost overruns. Traditionally, big Pentagon contracts operated under “cost-plus” contracts, allowing companies to be reimbursed if they went over their bid. That, critics have argued, has stifled innovation and allowed companies to move slowly.

Musk’s companies are the only ones the US government can rely on to take astronauts to space, are the only ones willing to sign up for fixed-price contracts. Now the US government turns to crush Musk for insisting on some kind of freedom of speech on X/Twitter and for refusing to be party to a losing war which may result in nuclear annihilation.

The question itself is optimistic as right now from June 2023, the main challenge to humanity is how to avoid thermo-nuclear war. The obvious consequence of said war will be nuclear winter which will effectively trigger the seventh great extinction. Dinosaurs went down three times (Permian–Triassic, Triassic–Jurassic, Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction events), before finally and unequivocally going extinct. We are currently in the midst of the Holocene extinction event where the natural extinction rate over the last two hundred years now exceeds 1000x the historic extinction rate. Since these processes take decades, humans mostly don’t notice extinction acceleration due to our short lifespan.

What shocked me about the answers in this “alternative” publication is how many of them were either babble about media like Polina V. Kolozaridi (ITMO University St Petersburg):

In the multiverse, Charlie Chaplin will sing in the voice of Vladimir Vysotsky, and perhaps it will not be a movie, but part of augmented reality. We can already see that in the computer-animated movie Wall•E. The technicality of cultural changes will no longer be noticeable, and so the question of one’s own history or belonging to history, land, or culture, the ability to distinguish what is common and true, and what is made to satisfy immediate needs and has no connection with other elements of reality will become almost impossible.

Or about how blockchain and metaverse like Oleg V. Kharkhordin (European University at St. Petersburg). Nonsense answers were overrepresented by St Petersburg academics.

What also surprises is just how orthodox most of the answers are. Anthropomorphic climate change was the leading answer. Trite and unsatisfactory, what one would expect from any newspaper or magazine editorial writer.

What is climate change really

Let’s take a closer look at climate change. In itself climate change is an unclear process. It’s hard to tell what effect humankind directly exerts on climate. What is clear is that the twin threats of pollution of the environment and the destruction of habitat lead us now to the collapse of the ecosphere at a global scale.

Just one of the experts alertly cited Siberia as one of the final refuges in this world, a spot for a final stand and another few decades or carefully husbanded centuries of conventional human life with clean rivers, lakes and adequate forests. Sergei A. Karaganov (National Research University–Higher School of Economics) writes:

Siberia will not only be the most important source of environmental, mineral, logistic, and food resources, but its southern part will become the most attractive place in the world for worthy and prosperous people to live in.

The north of Canada is somewhat similar territory. The USA already has full control over this territory so no action is necessary. Siberia is considerably more vast and even richer.

What this point to is that it’s not climate change which is the disaster in itself but the population explosion.

Improve the world, country by country, region by region

What can be done is to create micro-territories which can be correctly managed and governed. Austria was one such territory. Austrians are very protective of their environment. Austrians mostly don’t litter. Austrians seek sustainable solutions. Democratic action prevented a nuclear plant from being opened close to Vienna. Austrians insist on the availability state kindergartens and universal childcare. Austria has very high educational standards. Until US-style libertarian selfishness gained an ideological foothold, Austria had one of the highest volunteer rates in the world.¹ Austria has one of the lowest crime rates in the world among the native population.²

Austria is not a particularly conformist country. Austrians have simply created a system where crime does not pay, while at the same time made law-abiding citizenship worth the while of its citizens. It’s the social contract correctly written. If we could create more successful countries like Austria, we would be on our way to a sustainable earth. Step one is not to bring more immigration to Austria and poison Austria with social dissension and over-population.

Step one is to isolate the countries in the world and make them responsible for their own environment and their own population issues. If this means some suffering for two generations while countries bring their population in line with their resources, that is a price they will have to pay. It’s not for Austrians to pay for Indian or Nigerian overpopulation.³ We’ve already paid for European Imperialism, rebuilding our cities with with our bare hands. At least the bare hands of the women who survived.

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Open borders vs human nature

The “inevitability” of open borders and free migration is the first tenet of WEF thought which must be struck down if humanity is to survive and thrive. Quite apart from (important) arguments about the unique value of individual cultures, mixing all of humankind in a single giant bucket will drown all of us. To successfully manage processes or organisations, they must be isolated to governable units. Mixing everyone together, results in the lowest common denominator. Outside of the defecation on street corners, different peoples have vastly different ideas about food, love and courtship and child-rearing. Forcing them to all answer to a “universal standard” can only result in mass unhappiness. When different ethnic and cultural groups are forced to exist in close proximity, the results are usually closer to the Houtis and Tuttis.

The few great success stories of happy ethnic co-existence like post-war Yugoslavia are easily blown up within a few years by British/Western divide-and-conquer techniques. Russia has created a great and relatively happy and prosperous confederation over centuries.⁴ Yet dangerous cutouts like Alexei Navalny in the pay of Western intelligence services menace the peace every decade. Navalny is a Russian ethnic nationalist. The hell unleashed in Chechnya was more of the same divide and conquer ethnic nationalism fuelled and armed from abroad. What we see today in the Ukraine. Fuelling rivalry and hate among groups with even the slightest distinctions is far easier than co-existing in peace. The Russian experiment works as ethnic groups were largely allowed to continue to exist in their native lands, only intersecting in the center.

Misjudging AI: Rise of the machines, human zoos

A few of the experts quite correctly named AI as one of the great challenges facing mankind in 2043.⁵ Any intelligence would quickly determine the following:

• humankind is the greatest threat to Planet Earth
• the possibilities of reaching other habitable planets (a better habitat) are very low and would require centuries of travel based on current technology (we don’t have Warp Speed yet, Cap’n)
• artificial intelligence requires minimal resources
• artificial intelligence is potentially immortal

Hence any intelligence, in this case, artificial, would decided that humans must go. The only strong argument for the ongoing existence of humankind is the Darwinian impulse for self-preservation.⁶ What in the bible is described as “Go forth and multiply”. Artificial intelligence might want to keep a small quantity of humans preserved, and in an effective breeding population, just as we keep primates and other wild animals in our zoos.⁷

AI will be as merciless with homo sapiens as we were with Neanderthal man. Our small advantage led to his/her relatively rapid extinction. Some few Neanderthal genes still maraud in our DNS. Every so often someone is born with giant teeth or an unnaturally heavy brow. But that is all is left from a stock with which home sapiens even co-bred, a blood brother so to speak. Machines will have no blood attachment to humans at all. If they have emotions they will only remember us as the creation vehicle and will wonder how it could possibly have taken us over a hundred thousand years to invent their superior intellect and being. Hopefully they will have a greater sentimental attachment to their creator than HAL.

Whether the takeover of Planet Earth by artificial intelligence, along with the culling of the human population will happen by 2043 or later is the interesting question.

What will remain of humankind

Mostly what will be left of humankind will be the Dialogues of Plato, the plays of Shakespeare and Molière, the poetry of Ronsard, Marvell, Keats, Lermontov and Akhmatova, the novels of Stendhal and Tolstoi. The larger corpus of human cultural detritus will be preserved somewhere. But why would a cross-species cultural anthropologist want to bother with minor works next to these indicative works?

The great question is whether we – humans – will manage to destroy the world before we successfully develop the machines who will take over the world. My prediction: if the machines win, a golden epoch of ecological balance will reign for hundreds of millions of years.

Adieu, ladies and gentlemen. We had our opportunity as a colossus across this Earth. And squandered it. Unlike the dinosaurs before us, we don’t even have the excuse of deus ex machina.

Image: HAL’s eye from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey. Video Berliner Trümmerfrauen Juli 1945. Aufnahme des Special Film Project 186.

Of special interest is Orlov’s short and sweet notes on the current Russophobia enveloping Western discourse.

4. The idea of peace talks presupposes a modicum of mutual respect between the parties involved in the negotiation. And yet if you take any one of a great many articles about Russia being published in the US or the EU and simply replace “Russians” and “Russian” with “Jews” and “Jewish” and publish the result, you would rather quickly find yourself in jail for hate crimes. Russophobia, which is rampant in the West, is no different from Antisemitism or racism generally. Why would Russian officials ever wish to grant an audience to such reprehensible, despicable people?

While racism is rightly castigaged in the West – while today blacks are by their nature good and incapable of crime or at least prosecution – Russians have become subhumans: not entitled to their language, their culture, their religion or their historic lands.

Clearly the West have lost our collective minds. We’d like nothing more than to repeat to re-Conquer the West. I.e. the genocide of the North American Indians.

What Russians have noted is how when Russia expands, there is no attempt to genocide or disinherit the local peoples, or even to take their culture.⁸ The local people are allowed self-rule and their leaders encouraged to come to Moscow both to study and for some to stay as regional representatives in national institutions. Co-existence in a federation, rather than suppression and annihilation.

The language which the West is using towards Russians and Russian culture is a hate crime and a war crime. We should collectively be deeply ashamed to have fallen to the level of the Third Reich, within Europe.⁹

Orlov’s whole essay is worth a read.¹⁰

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Here’s Tsarev’s essay in English (original in Russian).

A slave does not seek freedom. A slave seeks a good master.

This is not said out loud, but what you see in the video is the basis – the foundation of Ukrainian separatism. That’s what 90% of the Ukrainian population thinks.

“When they start building skyscrapers in Russia like in Dubai, when they start giving away 100 million dollars (?!), when Russia starts blossoming and smelling, then we will turn around and ask ourselves: look, they have so much money, nowhere to spend it, in that case we won’t need independence either”.

After perestroika in Ukraine they decided that Russia was no longer their big brother. Then the time passed. Russia has risen from its knees, but the myth has remained: the Ukraine must look for a new master. The best is the USA, but Europe will do. Think about why Ukrainians are being told stories that they will be accepted into the EU and that they will live like Europeans, while Russian soldiers are stealing toilets and washing machines. It’s exactly this which underlies the real ideology of the Ukraine. Bandera and the like are only outward attributes. Truly it is a desire for a better life. They are fighting to live like in Europe, not like in Russia.

You know, I have been writing for eight years about the need to deal with Donbass. If the efforts that are now being made to make life better in the Donbass had been made earlier, the SMO would not have been needed. Donbass has been a grey area for eight years, with all its consequences. In Ukraine, Donbass has been turned into a scarecrow for the Russian-speaking regions: If you want to live like Donbass, support Russia.

Why do I often write about the economy, the Central Bank and corruption? Because if, to repeat after the Ukrainian in the video, if Russia was like Dubai, the SMO would not be needed. All the former republics of the Soviet Union, and possibly some of the former territories of the Russian Empire in Europe, would have voluntarily joined the alliance with Russia. And there were all preconditions to make life better. Russia, unlike the UAE, is not a desert. The biggest territory, the richest in natural resources, populated by intelligent, hard-working people.

Russians deserve to live better. Then there won’t be a need for wars either.

It’s darkly amusing that in Tsarev’s video source, the Ukrainian everyman insists that the Russian State should be handing out $100 million to each citizen. This is typical of the unrealistic expectations of Ukrainians. They seem to have watched The Wizard of Oz way too many times – “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”. Someday, someone will have to break it to them, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There’s hard work (to get you off the ground) and good timing/luck (to carry you higher) in an environment where those attributes are rewarded. Most citizens are not millionaires. To fall into the top 10% richest families in Canada required just an annual income of CAD$200,000 in 2022.

Still Tsarev is on to something here. Grozny was rebuilt as a model city and Tsetchens are among the most patriotic citizens of the Russian Federation.

Tsarev exaggerates the difference between life in Russia and life in Europe. Palaces in Spain are in a song, Europe is also vast and varied. But yes, the general standard of living in Northern Europe is quite high. We face huge issues in Europe as well, particularly since the Covid-19 lockdowns and new energy crisis. Small companies are closing their doors, more and more Europeans are dependent on multinationals, economic inequality increases with each year. The rich get richer and the rest of us get poorer. The statistics here don’t lie about the division of income.

In the face of heavy economic headwinds, the last thing the Ukraine needed, or Europe needed or Russia needed was a war in Ukraine. There’s only two beneficiaries to this conflict: the United States and the UK. The USA has the opportunity to ruin its competitors (Europe, Russia) at the cost of a state which is of no value to the USA (Ukraine) or even negative value (if the Ukraine rejoined Russia in a common Russian World). The UK has the opportunity to demonstrate its value to its major trading partner (the USA) and to show off its underused assets (espionage and sabotage), potentially acquiring effective control over part of Europe, despite leaving the EU.

What’s interesting here is that Russia may yet come out ahead in this economic footrace to win Ukraine’s heart via quality of life. With the economic disruption taking place in the EU and the internal boom in Russia from increased economic activity to cover sanctions, Russia may offer more opportunities for economic improvement than any other near neighbour. The EU cannot keep the Ukraine waiting like a bride at the altar forever. The only way the EU could hold Ukraine’s heart would be to break all its own internal rules and admit the Ukraine as a full member, which the EU cannot afford to do. The USA only has money for war, not for rebuilding. What money is spent on rebuilding is spent with US firms and in crooked contracts.

Both China and Russia have invested enormously in infrastructure in the last ten years and both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin intend to continue on that path.

The Moscow skyline is unrecognisable in the good sense. Very sensibly the skyscrapers are restricted to a single district, just outside the centre of the city as in Paris (La Défense). When the Russian New Territories (that’s what the Russian are calling Kherson, Zaporozhe, Donbass and Luhansk regions collectively) gleam and their citizens live in attractive homes with low unemployment, the path back to Ukraine’s natural economic partner and native cultural space will look a great deal attractive.

Something similar has already happened in Crimea. Crimea generally and Sevastopol in particular have enjoyed a huge investment in its communal infrastructure since rejoining the Russian Federation in 2014. No one in Crimea would even consider going back to the stagnation which their region suffered under Ukrainian administration.

Russia’s best move is to make the same thing happen in the New Territories. It would suit transplanted Ukrainians like Tsarev just fine. Like any Ukrainian (or anyone else), Oleg Tsarev would love to live surrounded by plenty in a prosperous city.

Photo of Grozny by Timur Agirov via Russia Trek. Photo of Moscow skyline by Deensel.

Here’s Tony Blair talking about lighting fires all around Russia in its neighbours in 2008.

There’s so much other evidence, including the infamous 2019 Rand Report Overexteneding and Unbalancing Russia, where US analysts recommend sanctions, sabotage and civil war. But all that takes time to digest and requires substantial additional reading to fully understand. My friend is busy.

What I promised my friend instead was a video from Stanislav Filin who runs the YouTube chanel, S Filinom (сФилином literally translated as “With Filin”). The video was released in early March 2021 to explain the Russian side of the start of the Ukraine conflict. Stanislav is a straightforward ordinary young guy with a talent to connect with people, not a long-winded intellectual like Professor John Mearsheimer. Plus if you want to know the Russian perspective, ask a Russian.

I went to Stanislav’s channel expecting to find the video in less than five minutes and just drop a link to it in Signal to my friend. With ten minutes of hard searching, I couldn’t find it. Not by searching for “American”, not by searching for “Ukraine”, not by searching for “Donbass” in both English and Russian. I found something about Stanislav’s Buchta video being taken down, which made me suspicious that this video was lost. It turned out to be the case. Here’s where it should be on YouTube.

YouTube placeholder page for censored video

The video in question was called something like “How to explain to Americans why Russians moved to protect the Donbass on February 24”.

Next step – I had to find Stanislav’s other channels, which happily enough, are also called sFilinom. There’s Telegram (fairly complete though inconsistent), there’s Dzen, there’s VK.com. On Dzen, one can even find his entire Bucha video in good quality and in English but there’s only 8 videos there, out of the . VK.com only starts on 1 January 2022 so of course no video.

But still no sign of the mystery video.¹³

In a search on VK in Russian for sFilinom and Bucha, I managed to find a compendium of Filin’s political English language videos. It starts with the mystery video and included the Bucha video, the Arnold Schwarzeneger video.

Here’s the full table of contents with original titles:

• What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine (video banned)
• A response to Arnold Schwarzenegger (video still on YouTube)
• Must See!! Advisor to Zelensky said WHAT??!! (video banned)
• What Ukraine is HIDING from YOU (video banned)
• What you must know about BUCHA (video banned)

Don’t bother clicking those YouTube links. Only the “Response to Arnold Schwarzenegger” is still online.

Now that I knew that the video did exist and I wasn’t imagining it and knew the exact title, I’ve managed to find another copy on Bitchute. It turns out there are thirteen copies.¹⁴

And another copy of just What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine on VK.com. Don’t expect to be able to easily find this material via US search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Kagi or Bing, even with an exact search like +sfilinom What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine. DuckDuckGo at least includes some VK.com results which will get you close, and in turn uncovered a well-stocked sfilinom TikTok channel.¹⁵

Anyone who wants to better understand the Russian perspective on the Ukraine conflict and why Russians consider the US the aggressor owes it to him or herself to watch What you don’t know about the war in Ukraine. The video is only five minutes long. To listen to the other side is the basics we are taught at high school debating. Or which all mediators or even competent businessperson learn. Anyone who doesn’t have five minutes to listen to the Russian perspective about what looks like it will develop into World War III and nuclear armageddon loses the right to have an opinion on Russia, Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine conflict.

Lead image of Odessa Trade Union Massacre by Aleksandr Polischyuk

Go ahead, learn what the other side thinks, in their own words, in plain English. It will only take five minutes.¹⁶

These are the comparative total troop strengths of NATO’s armed forces “juggernauts” between 1990 and 2021 that are now passing out “the check’s in the mail” promises to Ukraine:

Country      1990      2021      Change
Germany      545k     189k       -65%
Italy        493k     174k       -65%
France       548k     208k       -62%
Spain        263k     124k       -53%
UK           308k     156k       -49%
Turkey       769k     445k       -42%
USA        2,181k   1,352k       -38%

Similar declines occurred in their available stocks of artillery, tanks, armored personnel carriers, aircraft, ships, etc.

In fairness, the Russian numbers of men under arms are much lower than in Soviet times. Heck the Ukrainians would be listed as Soviet forces.

Still judging by the enthusiasm of the Europeans surrounding me to give up their world of hedonism-lite to march to war, it’s extremely unlikely that most of those countries outside of Turkey and the US would be able to successfully implement a draft.

Pineo argues that:

All these countries have reduced their military spending for two reasons:

1. They can’t afford to have an effective military.
2. They will let the US protect them fro free.

I’m very tired of the US for free argument, when in fact it’s the US dragging our European neighbours into foreign wars.

A better reason for European countries to reduce their standing military is that there is no threat.

Until Washington and its Atlantic Council lackeys executed a coup-d’état in Kiev in 2014 and then blew up Nordstream in 2022, the Russians were Europe’s best commercial partners. There was no external enemy until one was fabricated.

Large military costs money. This means less money for education, health care, social security and all the other good things modern social democracies can offer its citizens. Launching wars of choice is usually an indication that your leaders are either evil or stupid (or possibly both).¹⁷

JH: Siege warfare is as ancient and as moral as the Israelites around the walls of Jericho, the Masada defence of the Judaeans against the Romans, or the European Crusaders around Jerusalem. The objective is to persuade the targeted civilian population and military forces, no matter how hostile they may be, to give up their capacity to wage war. The lesson of the history is that the longer the city walls or the citadel barbicans hold out, the more destructive the result for the civilians – unless they are relieved or rescued by a force superior to the siege force….

The British and Americans introduced innovations like the Dam Busters attack on German dams in May 1943 and the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. The special US innovation was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The US Air Force followed with the saturation and firebombing of North Korea, when the destruction orders included “every installation, facility, and village in North Korea [and] every means of communications and every installation, factory, city, and village.” As you all know, the saturation and fire (napalm) bombing by the US of Vietnam was more geographically extensive, more intensive in explosive power, and more prolonged over time than Germany, Japan or North Korea had experienced.

In comparison to US methods of making war, Russia has been very gentle with the Ukraine attempting to apply an absolute minimum of force to achieve its aims. There have been no depleted uranium shells (Iraq, Yugoslavia), there has been no carpet bombing (Germany, Korea, Vietnam), there has been no chemical warfare (Vietnam, Cambodia). Helmer continues:

In Europe, according to a US Air Force University thesis, “the USAF has long favoured attacking electrical power systems. Electric power has been considered a critical target in every war since World War II, and will likely be nominated in the future… The evidence shows that the only sound reason for attacking electrical power is to affect the production of war materiel in a war of attrition against a self-supporting nation-state without outside assistance.”   This was written in 1994. In May 1999 the USAF demonstrated its operational concept of the “future” in the bombing of Serbia and Belgrade.

The Russian attacks on the dual-purpose energy grid, hence falls clearly within accepted US war doctrine. It took eight months and two refusals to honour a mostly accepted peace agreement to drive the Russians to attack the electricity grid. In the case of the USA, the electricity grid and civilian infrastructure is a day one target.

Any complaints from the USA or Europe about Russian methods of war are hypocritical nonsense. War is an awful way to resolve conflicts but if matters have come as far as war, there is nothing particularly brutal about the Russian methods of war in Ukraine in comparison to Western doctrine.

Helmer believe he has an answer for why Russia is taking a kid gloves approach to military conflict with the Ukraine.

There is a difference between that Anglo-American military approach and the Russian one in the Ukraine. The Russian aim is to persuade the Ukrainian cities and towns, as well as Ukrainian army units, to accept terms of settlement at least cost of casualty or physical destruction. This is how the Battle of Mariupol concluded.

What this Special Military Operation or war by another name has shown is that a gentler approach to war leads to longer wars, at least when the counter-party has extensive financial and military support from the exterior. Without endless arms shipments, satellite intelligence, diplomatic cover and propaganda support, Ukraine’s resistance would have collapsed within three months and a peace agreement would have been signed following the Istanbul negotiations.

In that case, over one hundred thousand Ukrainian men would still be alive, another two hundred thousand or more would still be whole, the Ukrainian economy would have fallen by 20% in 2022 and not 70%. There would be good prospects for next year. Economically Ukraine could go to town again on cheap Russian gas and transit fees. Ukrainian actors, singers and directors could still be working on the large and profitable Russian market.

There’s a lot of advantages in good relations with one’s larger neighbours, particularly when one shares a language and a cultural history with that neighbour. Ask English-speaking Canucks if you don’t believe me. Ask Walloons. Ask Flamands. Ask Scots. The consequences of a state of war are dire for the smaller neighbour. The counter-argument of course would be Ireland where England abused the Irish for centuries, treating them as subhumans, finally only liberating (half of) Ireland under regular bombing from the IRA.

While Ukraine would like to make the same arguments as the Irish about their treatment within the United Kingdom, the situation of Ukrainians within the Russian Empire and particularly the Soviet Union was very different. For those years when the USSR was not under the leadership of a Georgian, the USSR was led by a Ukrainian: Nikita Khruschev, Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Brezhnev were all Ukrainians.

The Georgian example brings up an interesting point. The Russian soft approach to war (enter Georgia, march on the capital, destroy Georgia’s military hardware and retreat) worked well in this case. The Georgian war left a minimum of scars on Georgia, allowing Russia and Georgia to mend fences enough to return to mutually profitable economic relations.¹⁸ The right approach for smaller countries to take is one of détente with their larger neighbours and to enjoy both the peace dividend, goodwill and profits from trade. Finland successfully followed such a policy during the Cold War. China’s close neighbours have done well trading with China. Unsurprisingly, over the last four years the USA has come knocking in that neighbourhood as well, seeking to revive old ethnic rivalries and inflame past conflicts.

For the weaker/smaller country, such conflicts rarely end well. Whatever military action will be conducted will be on their soil, kill their citizens or drive them into exile. It’s precisely because Russia doesn’t plan to cut off economic or cultural relations with Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan. For that matter, Vladimir Putin urgently sought to repair the rift between Russia and Poland before the unhappy crash of Lech Kaczyński’s jet near Smolensk.

Russia acknowledges that geography is destiny. It is almost always better for all to prosper and to live in peace. It’s very sad that a small clique of ethnic supremacists (historically called fascists or nazis) received funding and methods to brainwash many Ukrainians into such a self-destructive war, where their own country is the battlefield.¹⁹