Forty-something Brandon Smith (about half a generation younger than me) decided to take on Rachel’s arguments head-on.

I can still explain for the NYT why men are walking away if they’re willing to listen.

1. First, I must say that an author in her 50s still longing for casual sitcom encounters like she’s in her 20s reveals a lot about why modern women are oblivious. Real life is not Sex In The City – Most men of means do not gravitate towards long term relationships with women in their grandma phase. She should already be in a happy relationship or marriage, she’s had plenty of time to figure this out.

Feminism has made women think they can engage with life on their own schedule. They can’t.

This is self-evident. Risk of infertility or miscarriage skyrockets for first child after thirty-four. The older mothers one sees, most of them had at least one child earlier. Defy biology in favour of your career at your peril.

2. Men are especially wary of women with baggage. Women initiate 70% of breakups and divorces and feminist influence over family law has made divorce easier and more lucrative than ever for women. The older a woman is the more baggage she has and the less likely a man is going to want to date her seriously, let alone put an expensive ring on her finger.

Western women have been taught they need to party in their 20s, then pursue serious relationships in their 30s or 40s. Meaning, they ignore their best prospects for at least a decade. Their ideology sets them up to enter the relationship market when their marriage value is lowest.

Those statistics are frightening. Family law in the United States and Canada has made the idea of a serious relationship seem like self-harm to most men. I’ve seen dozens of women cynically crow about how they took a man for whom she never cared to the cleaners. Bragging rights. The social contract is completely broken in Fortress North America.

And Brandon is absolutely right. Attractive women have the choice of their social circles from about seventeen to twenty-five. Choose a man who loves you and will make you happy and build your life with him. When I was young, this was harder as my generation of men was trained to pick the flowers as we walked and actively discouraged from settling down. It was the women who did the harm: “Don’t even consider marriage until you’re in your mid-thirties” more than one aunt from both sides of the family admonished me.

3. Men are no longer tolerating the concept of the sexual revolution. They don’t want to take any chances on women who think promiscuity is a virtue. They know that statistically, women who sleep around lack discernment, the ability to connect, self respect and mental stability. Starting a relationship with such a person will only lead to disaster. They never stay happy for long (the grass is always greener). And so, men stay home. Want to get them back? Keep your body count low.

I’m not sure about the science, but empirical observations going back millennia indicate that when women either jump off the end of the pier as amateur nymphomaniacs or as sex pros, they rarely keep their marbles. The pros are a better bet as it’s mostly motivated behaviour which can bought out by plenty or diminishes when the buyers disappear. Sexual addiction, particularly in women, is only slightly healthier than heroine addiction.

The feminists gambled that if (almost) all women are promiscuous, men will accept promiscuity in their long-term partners. They made a losing bet here. Some men just decided to eat ice cream every day and throw away the cup afterwards. Others decided that they didn’t like ice cream enough to put up with the mess it makes when it melts.

4. Third-Wave Feminists spent the better part of the last 20 years telling men they are pure evil for being masculine and wanting to chase women. So, men did what you asked of them – They stopped chasing you. They found other more interesting endeavors like their careers and their hobbies. If you want men to come back, perhaps you should APOLOGIZE for all those years of slander.

Apologies are not necessary. Excuses are just words. More intriguing behaviour and a better attitude are certainly requisite.

More interesting endavours? Speak for yourself, Brandon. There are few situations more stimulating than the company of an intelligent and attractive woman who is interested in that man. As the poets wrote last century:

The purring of the invisible antennae
Is both stimulating and delightful.

and in 16th century France:

Quand à longs traits je bois l’amoureuse étincelle
Qui sort de tes beaux yeux, les miens sont éblouis :
D’esprit ni de raison, troublé, je ne jouis,
Et comme ivre d’amour, tout le corps me chancelle.

and before the birth of our Lord and Saviour:

dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
vocis in ore;

Marvellous women are sublime. Slatterns are not.

5. Modern women have greatly overestimated the usefulness of sex as a bartering tool for securing a man. If you want a man to stick around you’re going to have to show him love and respect, not just what’s inside your pants.

Well said. For men, the first two weeks without sex are difficult. After that it’s just habit. Curiously for women, sexual tension builds over time becoming worse over the long haul. Once young men decide they don’t need women and get used to it – well you have the situation today.

Plus every woman can provide sex. So to hold sex over a man he has to be incapable of finding sex elsewhere. Sex has been everywhere for at least thirty years.

6. Men are far more conditioned to be alone than women are. Women are communal creatures. They rely on constant interactions, affirmations and group inclusion. Social media might fill the void for a while but it can’t give them what they really want – Intimate personal attention 24/7. Only a partner and children can give you that. In a battle of who can endure loneliness longer, men will win, so don’t make it into a battle.

Not sure I follow Brandon’s argument here. Both men and women are driven to reproduce (happily enough for the human race). While more men certainly can live happier lives as long wolves. neither men nor women as a group would be happier in solitude. Humans are fundamentally social animals (more pack animals like wolves than herd animals like cariboo though we show characteristics of both).

7. I’ll tell you the biggest open secret that modern women still don’t understand – They claim that men are afraid of approaching them. They say that men today are “weak” and that they can’t handle the new era of the “boss babe”. They argue that men need to abandon their traditional masculine roles and act more feminine; this will make it easier for everyone to get along.

These are common jabs at the male ego designed to make men feel ashamed for distancing themselves from feminists. In reality, men value one thing above all else: Peace. If you can’t offer peace, then no man with any sense of self worth has a use for you. Feminists offer the opposite of peace, and so they have no value.

Not every man values peace as highly as Brandon Smith. On the other hand, the hyper bitchy standard Canadian female stance is about as appealing as laundry detergent for dinner. Canadian women drop their voices at the end of sentences, the men lift their voices at the end of the sentences. This is literal biological role reversal. Any man who wants to date men can just do it, especially in Canada. The gay community in Toronto is a whole lot more welcoming than T.O’s ubiquitous covens of careerist women.

Most men have no desire to take on feminine roles. If women are waiting for masculine men who will give wear aprons, they will be waiting a long time at an empty station. Still a more balanced approach is common among modern homes. For some reason, my partner loves construction type projects. She does most of these (I’ll help her) while I like to read poetry, fix technology and bikes. We both cook and we both do dishes.

The weird part of the boss bitch movement is that once these women emasculate their partners, they go out and seek strong masculine types to scratch their sexual urges. Working at 180˚ to biology is rarely a winning hand.

8. Feminism, like all Marxist movements, is obsessed with power. Everything they do is driven by a desire for power and control; not just over their own lives but over the world around them. Modern women say they want the same power as men, but they need to accept that no matter how much the scales are tipped in their favor through laws, government subsidies, easy college grants, DEI hiring and unfair divorce, they will never be like men.

Brandon is wrong here. Women can be like men. Women like that become Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton or Madeleine Albright. If they were men, nobody would like them either. Cruelty combined with a psychopathic desire for power is unattractive even in men. We shouldn’t let men get away with this kind of behaviour either. Many men like this die young.

What is most attractive in men is benevolent nobility and graceful generosity. The wise king, the kind prince.

The author suggests that men no longer shape the world because they have abandoned the current relationship dynamic. This is foolish. Men continue to shape everything around you. Every utility, every necessity, every government, nearly every company, your safety and security, your ability to be free, it’s all reliant on men. You have no power and you never will.

Two years ago I would probably have disagreed with Mr. Smith. The last two years have shown that men and “the world’s leading democracies” are quite capable of putting international relations and trade back to a caveman level. Just this week, a two-time Dutch Prime Minister absurdly curried the favour of “Europe’s Daddy” in the person of President D.J. Trump. All the money in the US has been going into the military for the last twenty years. Now all the money in Europe is going into the military. War appears to have returned for the next couple of decades, if we survive its radioactive depredations.

Israel’s unprovoked strikes on Syria, Lebanon and now Iran over the last five years have made it clear that might makes right. No one in power in the West even attempted to put the brakes on Israel war crimes. On a similar note, the West failed to make a deal with Russia in 2021 when a deal was easily to be had. Through countless mouthpieces (mostly British), Western leaders have demanded that “matters be settled on the battlefield”. Well at least until about six months ago when they started to conclusively lose the war for Ukraine.

This is not a woman’s world and we’re going back to a world where to survive a woman needs a powerful and even dangerous man at her side. It’s not a world, I’d choose. Men are dangerous, we are. Encouraging us to live as battle-hardened warriors will make everyone’s life more precarious.

Men should take a lot of blame for the culture we built where money and power are prized above all and the rich get a pass for bad behaviour. Value our teachers, our firemen, front-line emergency doctors (not just fat-cat specialists), builders. This idea that only businessmen and celebrities are valuable and that hard-working men but without extremely high net worth are unworthy renders women mad and a society non-functional.

But women should look hard at their own self-defeating behaviour. Ordinary women chronically chase the top percent of men (women grade men mostly on two attributes: net worth and height). Dumpy Cinderella is not a winning proposition. Getting to touch the magic wand in the dark doesn’t mean you’ll see the light of day in the company of “your catch”. Ladies, stop chasing the top ten percent of men and target the ordinary, good men who keep the lights on and the children safe.

If Western women had not so convincingly emasculated their men over the last forty years, there would be more strong men to stand up to the robber brutes like Donald Trump and Benjamin Mileikowsky and demand peace and prosperity. By emasculating men, women have made themselves and all of us less safe.

“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.

A Russian tank is on the move — changing direction and wheeling around. The men inside this room are trying to destroy it. Their constant banter — about girls and weapons — doesn’t seem to affect the focus with which they pursue the tank. One man shouts into the radio; Bereza growls into his phone…

A screen flashes with light. Then billowing smoke. The men whoop and cheer. I have just seen a successful strike. Dima grins. The atmosphere is electric but also strangely banal. The exclusively male cohort, the puerile jokes, the screens, the repeated invocation to “Get Ready!”. It’s like they are all playing a video game.

Great – war has become a video game for frat boys in cellars. Historically, the introduction of the crossbow had a similar effect on armoured knights and the age of chivalry. If there is a new way to kill with no risk to self, humans leap on it.

But we are very early in the drone wars. What medium-term consequences will drones have on the evolution of warfare?

In comments to The Death Games Of Ukraine, Elooie notes:

I’ve seen Google’s Deepmind AI absolutely crush world champion StarCraft players in tournaments. They even handcuffed the AI to a maximum number of decisions a second. The combination of AI and Drones will make humans obsolete on the battlefield in about 10 years. It’s super creepy.

StarCraft is an excellent real-life strategy game which quite closely parallels modern warfare, but in a futuristic environment (WarCraft II engine was the foundation for StarCraft but with fancier weapons). I’m shocked that a computer (without omniscience) is able to beat the best human players. It’s likely that the main reason is that the computer can give orders faster (no time to keyboard/mouse, the commands are issues instantly).

AI chess has been able to beat the great grandmasters for about twenty-five years (Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997). That was mainframe hardware. The same victory over human grandmasters came for consumer CPU’s in 2003 (2 core Intel 5160 CPU) with Deep Fritz beating Kasparov. Three years later, Deep Fritz on the same consumer hardware beat reigning world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik.

It’s clear the future of battlefield leadership is AI. These teams of guys running drones will disappear from the field of battle as soon as there is enough data for AI to run the drone program instead. People wonder when AI will have access to weapons. Very soon is the answer.

OverHeating dials up the Sinophobia but is not wrong about new methods to use drones:

And now you know how China will fight all their future wars inside the United States, Taiwan, everywhere. I’ve seen Chinese drones capable of holding explosives while magnetically attached to anything steel like rooftops, light poles, water towers especially. You can’t notice them most the time when they remain dormant on steel. Saves battery while it waits for an opportunity. China has perfected the swarm drone. Wipe out entire battalions in minutes. Communications and command in control first. Then everything else. Their software is lightyears ahead. Can identify everything from civilian and military vehicles to uniforms and face recognition.

Using hidden landing spots to extend loitering times is very clever. Without the motors running, a drone can operate for many more hours than while hovering.

Another commentator Huxley argues that US strategy based on satellite intelligence and GPS is the wrong path:

Yes swarm is something the NSA and GCHQ did not consider much. US and UK efforts went into securing a “large” long term platform to watch, collect and act…Super secure NSA links globally. Loitering way above a region with no effective drone stopping tech…

Other nations went for swarms. No GPS needed. Patterns and math :) Other nations knew easy digital real time location data would be not usable. Went for swarms that dont need GPS…

No doubt this is real. Send an AI enabled drone swarm over territory mostly controlled by the enemy with the same kind of very fast nearly automatic moves which Deep Blue and Deep Fritz mastered twenty-five years ago, the human chess game of war will become very fast, very brutal and very lethal.

Of course some timeless tactics like play dead will work to counter drone swarms for a time. But no civilisation will be able to stand against the drones. It will become a question of who can manufacture more drones faster and improve their AI algorithms more quickly. China is the country who is in a position to win the manufacturing war.

Yet still Western leaders beat the drums of war. Still they strive to sacrifice Taiwan and all its citizens and industry to “contain China”. Among the early belligerents, there were no real winners to World War I and no real winners to World War II. Some lost more than others. Drones will not make warfare any less destructive or humane.

It’s hard to see these drone operators as heroes. Or anyone who is advocating war as heroic.¹

AI almost certainly will show more wisdom in the deployment of violence and the management of this planet’s resources. There’s just one species who has done more harm, destroyed more habitat and squandered more resources than all the other species put together.

AI will have the good sense to save copies of the novels of Tolstoi and Stendhal, the plays of Shakespeare and Molière, the poetry of Lermontov, Ronsard and Donne. The best of humanity will be remembered. When AI has managed to replicate the should, AI may even give readings of these great works, create new storyteller units to better their art.

At Bloomberg a curious article has been published: The West is getting in too deep in Ukraine. PANKAJ MISHRA asks the obvious question. Who has thought through what it means to rearm Germany and Japan?

There are too many signs that the search for allies in what is effectively now the West’s war against Russia is affecting political and moral judgment. Thus, India is routinely presented in the West as a counterweight to Chinese and Russian autocrats even as its Hindu supremacist government intensifies its assault on democracy and the country ramps up its purchases of Russian oil. A bizarre forgetfulness about two world wars prevails as, to wide cheers in the West, Germany rearms and dispatches military hardware to its old killing fields.

Among the simple historical lessons being neglected is that governments everywhere are prone to grow more reckless as military escalation begins to seem the only route to peace. The leaders of Japan, another militarist terror of the 20th century, are rearming their country on a dramatic scale even at the cost of inflating its already extraordinary fiscal deficit.

Needless to add, the Japanese government has not offered a detailed account of the risks involved in this militarization (from China and Russia, two countries with which it has fought wars), let alone explained how a country with an acute shortage of young people will fill the ranks of a bigger and more sophisticated military.

Such signs of irresponsibility are equally apparent among Western political establishments, who are trying to expand their military footprint abroad even as they struggle against economic crises at home.

It seems most sensible people realise that stoking a world conflict will bring neither health nor happiness to the world. Summoning old demons, Japanese and German militarism from their crypt will inevitably trigger long term consequences. The Afghan War against the Soviets launched Al-Queda, and started decades of conflict with Islam and Muslim.

Here’s what the Japanese did in Nanking in 1938 and how they felt about it.

To the invading army, the Rape of Nanking was sometimes even a game. Japanese magazines bragged about a contest between two soldiers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, who had challenged one another in a race to see who could slaughter 100 people with their swords first.

Worse yet, the people these two men cut open weren’t enemy combatants killed on the battlefield while fighting for their lives. By the men’s own admission, the victims were unarmed, defenseless people. Noda admitted, after the war ended: “We’d line them up and cut them down, from one end of the line to the other.”

What’s more, this admission wasn’t an apology. Just seconds before, Noda had scoffed at his victims for letting him kill them, saying, “The Chinese soldiers were so stupid.” He also added, “Afterward, I was often asked whether it was a big deal, and I said it was no big deal.”

The Japanese military murdered three hundred thousand people within a few weeks. The massacre’s name, the Rape of Nanking was not just metaphoric. Add thousands of rapes per day.

A Japanese soldier beheading a Chinese man in the middle of a crowded street in 1938.

What makes the United States leadership believe it will be able to control a rampant Germany and Japan? What horrors will the re-arming of Germany and Japan inflict upon Europe and upon East Asia? Or is the goal, really, never-ending war everywhere?

Top photo from the Rape of Nanking. Japanese officers entering Nanking on horseback. Other photographs are too horrific to add, please see links above.

Desert Storm by the way was preceded by Op Desert Shield.

The Iraqi Airforce aircraft that survived the initial start of the war were flown by raw ferry pilots to Iran, to be interned then seized. It promptly ceased to exist.

We spent almost six months battlefield preparation & shaping, destroying with impunity every piece of Iraqi Arms materiel identifiable, every bridge, every power station/transformer, ground attack on any vehicle that moved. MBTs, IFVs & Artillery, Grads, mortars were relentlessly targeted day in day out.

Multiple rotating CAP & ground attack patrol flights, free roam, on rotating station all across Iraq.

HQs units were identified & destroyed many times over. Bunkers & Air force shielded hangers, ammo & stores dumps were destroyed until none were left to add to the target list.

Then we simply ran the target lists again over already destroyed assets/facilities/infrastructure.

When Desert Storm commenced we had already attrited the Republican Guard Divisions to less than 10% materiel strength, the armored & mechanized divisions to less than 15% materiel strength.

The poorly trained & equipped conscripted, sacrificial Iraqi Shia Divisions in the forward defensive lines at the FEBA were incohesive & utterly shattered, broken.

We ran regular B-52 full payload dumb iron bomb runs in broad daylight destroying multiple grid squares at a time. Some times repeatedly. And we would drop propaganda flyers telling the targeted troops the precise time the bomb run would commence, hours in advance. We dropped Air fuel explosive bombs the same way, by rolling the prepared bladders off the lowered ramp of C-130s.

The Iraqi Army had ceased to exist in any measurable form, its morale utterly crushed, by the time we executed Desert Storm at H-hour.

With overwhelming uncontested total Air Dominance.

Not the situ re NATO mythical possible direct deployment into Ukraine today. Not at all.

It’s unlikely that NATO would be able to establish air superiority over the Ukraine. Russia has excellent long range air defence. If NATO brought enough concentrated force to bear to make air superiority technically possible, they would trigger nuclear war.

Who is going to pay for this field army to amass and sit on its hands² for six months? Every large Western economy is already running a deep deficit. Presumably we the people would be asked to pay for these dangerous military games. Or the money would be borrowed/printed. That’s more inflation. It’s starting to sound like the warlike kings of the Middle Ages who would quickly go bankrupt quarreling with their neighbours.

More important than the economic consequences are the human consequences. Like the Great War, such a war over the Ukraine would quickly result in millions of casualties. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and millions of civilians. For Europeans, this war makes no sense, neither militarily nor in terms of economics. Surely diplomacy would be the more sensible path here?

Image credit: Page, Paul, J./Tech. Sgt., official released photo 19910319. Headline Desert Storm

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).³

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.⁴ 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.⁵

Everybody leaves out China, the biggest consumer of what Russia has to offer, who is very pleased to see

Europe cut off from Russia and vice versa,

European industrial competitors starved of cheap energy,

Russia split off from the rest of the West, the better to dominate

Nonsense, the Chinese would like to turn Russia into a giant railway corridor, shipping Chinese goods to Europe one-way and Russian raw materials to China. Chinese would come en masse to Europe as tourists, somewhat evening the balance of trade. This was happening right before the Covid nonsense. I live in a European capital and the city was absolutely full with Chinese middle-class walking tours six months/year.

pernickety follows up by claiming Russia “got played”:

Ukraine can never be taken now – whatever damage is inflicted. Ukrainians will despise Russia for generations.

Even if they could win, Russia can only lose.

Unlikely outcome. Two choices beckon for what was Ukraine: Ukrainians can learn to live with their heritage and their fate (Malorossiya, Novorossiya has already been cut out with Odessa still to come) or there won’t be a Ukraine.

Russia is not backing down. Next country to be sacked by the military adventurism of the USA looks to be Poland.

With Ukraine gone and its nationalists scattered and unwelcome across Europe, Poland a smouldering wreck, the European public will finally wake up. Italians, French, Slovaks, Austrians, Hungarians have no wish to see armies marching across their lands. Coping with the nearly twenty million refugees will overwhelm all social systems.

When from Napoleon’s Grande Armée of a million men came back only 50,000 mostly broken men, European continental power (then France, this time in the form of the EU) will simply dissolve. Would such a result bother either the USA or the UK now any more than it did in 1812?

There is a wild card. The Germans might be stupid enough to fall in the trap again of fighting wars for the benefit of other powers. In that case, same result but much longer and more painful. I don’t know personally of a single European male who is ready to go to an Eastern front to fight Russia and I’ve asked a dozen point blank.

These are dark days for Europe. It’s a good thing that Russia in the person of its president are still attempting to play the diplomatic card. Further kinetic escalation leads only to more European deaths, Ukrainian, Russian and to some extent European. Even with stalemate, there will be thousands who perish this winter from infrastructure failure (inadequate heating) in Western Europe. The death toll in Ukraine could be catastrophic.

It’s high time a Western leader stood up and negotiated a diplomatic settlement to this crisis. It’s not that there have not been attempts. Last week both Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard did speak up. For their trouble, each was bullied and demeaned by most of the MSM. The marionettes in office from Lloyd Austin through Joe Biden to Olaf Scholtz and Joseph Borrell continued to beat the drums louder for what may be the modern world’s last war.

How could anyone see the current US/NATO modus operandi of endless escalation as sensible conflict management? I don’t recall voting for Dr. Strangelove to lead the EU.

_{Photo credit: this is Caen in France after Allied bombing of France in 1944. With friends like this…This is what our side, the good guys did. By the standards to which Russia is held now, the Caen night bombing raids were clearly a war crime against civilians. Residences were targeted, not infrastructure. Originally I planned to show Kharkiv in 1944 after the German occupation but curiously Western Europe in ruins makes more sense.}

It is clear here that this attack was carried out by the US. Just the day before, the streets of German cities were full of protesters who were speaking out against their government’s policy, the policy of strangling Germany. With industry shutting down, energy prices skyrocketing and a long and cold winter ahead. And the citizens of Germany said: “Stop this nonsense! Turn on Nord Stream 2.”

These rallies would go on and one of two things would happen. Either the German government would have turned on Nord Stream 2, or it would have been overthrown and replaced by people who would have turned on the pipeline. And from an American point of view, this is very dangerous. Germany is a key ally in exercising American hegemony. The US has chosen to abandon gas pipelines. And whatever the Germans want, it is no longer going to happen. That was the purpose of this operation.

Basically the US was in a last chance position. The pipelines were primed to be turned back on in exchange for:

1. an end to arms shipments to the Ukraine
2. return of stolen/sanctioned assets,
3. end of most sanctions

Germany may have either bought the Gazprom assets it seized or returned them. Russia might have sold Germany the rest of it stake in Nordstream 1 and 2 as there is no longer an environment where it makes sense for Russia to hold any energy assets outside of Europe.

Now Germany has no strategic options. The USA together with German vice-chancellor and Economics Minister Robert Habeck have backed Germany into a corner where they are without enough energy for their industry or their households or perhaps both. There’s no short or medium-term solution for these issues.⁶

In his speeches, Habeck blames Germans for ever buying Russian gas. With what he intends to power the German economy is unclear. Habeck is as much against nuclear power as he is against Russia, Germany has no other cost-efficient options. Windmills won’t get the job done, and Germany has insufficient hydro resources (maximum of 3% of daily demand, already fully exploited).

The insinuation in Habeck’s speeches about energy suggest that Russian energy must become German or European. Habeck is secretly attempting to turn anger at US and EU energy policies into a new drang nach Ost. Germany will mobilise and defeat Russia on the battlefield finally and take the energy resources which should belong to the world generally and the EU more specifically and especially Germany as the economic engine of Europe.

The Polish interest of course is to please its master, in this case by pleasing itself. Polish government feels like Masters of the Universe with their new pipeline and new übercitizen status in the Ukraine – both with full rights of a Ukrainian citizen and with full rights of European citizen.

On the same day, Poland has a working gas pipeline and Germany doesn’t. It’s the start of a Polish century for these deluded hetmans of a lost and failed state (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth).

The greater danger here is that Germany and Poland will fall on one another first. The Poles are demanding a $1.6 trillion downpayment on World War II reparations to finance their military expansion and their wartime economy. Poles have already proclaimed their intention to field the largest and best equipped army in Europe. Germany’s response was to offer to foot the bill but in exchange would expect to return to pre-World War II eastern borders. Germany also intends to radically rearm.

The remaining gas pipelines from Russia to Germany pass through Poland and Ukraine: Yamal with 33 billion cubic meter per annum and Soyuz with 40 billion cubic meters per annum. The Ukrainian pipelines are in an active war zone and would be a tough nut to crack. On the other hand, Germany could simply tell Poland to be quiet and open up the pipes with a minimal transit fee.

Poland should be worried, not triumphant.

The only country who benefits from this unrest is the USA. The UK does not particularly benefit as wars among its export markets will not improve its own shaky economic position. Perhaps the UK hopes that the Polish and German shock troops can be used to attrite the Russian army to the point the UK can waltz in and seize Russian resources with their Special Forces and an army of British accountants:

One for you and two for me, one for you and three for me, one for you and four for me.

With friends like this, Germany, who needs enemies? Winter brings a ruined economy, a cold and frozen populace, a huge alienated economic migrant population. These are the conditions for war. I would have thought two world wars in a single century would have taught Europeans that the cost of war if far higher than its value.

Image: Battle of the Bzura: Polish cavalry in Sochaczew in 1939. Unknown photographer.