Back in February and March this year, I was surprised, at first, how effective the Ukraine media psy-op was. The war came on the heels of two years of official gaslighting about Covid-19 and so-called vaccines. So I assumed it would be obvious to most Americans that ‘Ukrainian democracy,’ ‘Russian aggression’ and ‘unprovoked invasion’ were just throwaway tropes from the latest Big Lie.
I was shocked, then, at all the Ukie flags and ‘Fuck Putin’ bumper-stickers, even in flyover country, knowing that most who displayed them couldn’t find Ukraine on the map. (Yet another reason we call it 404.) Friends whom I’d regarded as sane and skeptical credulously shared transparent CIA agitprop on social media.
But on reflection, it made sense: Laymen knew a lot about viral respiratory pandemics before Covid, because they (mostly) live through one every flu season. It was obvious from the start to many of them that the so-called pandemic response was disproportionate and irrational. By summer 2020, when the authorities exempted violent partisan rioters from ‘Covid restrictions,’ most realized the lockdowns had nothing whatsoever to do with the ‘novel’ and not particularly deadly virus.
Russia, its leadership, Ukraine, and its ethno-fascist ruling clique are a very different matter. Few Americans know the first thing about them. Worse yet, most of what they think they know is sheer nonsense.
That’s because western officials and their media jackals spent decades creating a fictional legendarium, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or better yet, a ‘simulated reality’ like the AI-generated world of The Matrix. If you doubt me, this 2017 article may not, by itself, be your ‘red pill.’ But it’s an excellent starting point. I suggest you pause, read the whole thing now, and then finish reading my post.
Caldwell concludes, ‘Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism. That turns out to be the big battle of our times ...’ The globalists’ worst crime was not throwing open America’s borders, or even destroying our middle class by outsourcing our manufacturing. (Even unleashing a ‘novel’ virus, then a potentially lethal ‘vaccine’ may prove less dangerous.) No, the globalists’ single most evil and stupid project has been to push a heavily armed NATO relentlessly eastward toward Russia’s border, risking a nuclear war, whose only silver lining would be that it would spare us all their much-anticipated Great Reset.
In 1989, after the Berlin Wall came down, Bush and Gorbachev announced in Malta that the Cold War was over. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, any remaining shreds of NATO’s ostensible raison d’etre blew away on the winds of change.
Russia could no longer menace the West, and didn’t want to. The Russian public would have seen NATO expansion as an overt military campaign to kick Russia while it was down. Western leaders, therefore, sensibly promised Gorbachev that the heavily armed alliance would never expand eastward beyond Germany.
When we broke that promise in 1997, the ‘architect of containment’ called it ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.’ Kennan was much too kind: It was only an ‘error’ if you pretend that powerful westerners aren’t, to this day, itching to loot and dismember Russia, as they had attempted in 1812, 1941 and the 1990s. That required staging grounds on Russia’s border. Hence recent US intrigues in Ukraine and Belarus. Per Rand Corp: ‘[L]ethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability.’
Putin grew up in St Petersburg, Russia’s ‘Window on the West.’ That may account for his undue early restraint vis a vis NATO expansion. His fight against Al Qaeda in the second Chechen war helps explain why he was the first leader to call Dubya after 9/11, and why he granted us overflight and refueling privileges en route to Afghanistan weeks later.
But that counted for little against the enemies he made by crushing the more rapacious ‘oligarchs,’ Russian agents of western banks and businesses, and co-opting the rest. So in the early 2000s, frustrated neocons, spooks and bankers put their heads together with exiled looters like Boris Berezovsky and drafted a story-line for a fiction franchise. They called it ‘Putin’s Russia,’ so that stupid journalists would assume it was about a real person and place. They were not gifted storytellers: Many of their lurid subplots were less plausible than those of a Bond movie.
Today, the franchise’s creators are either retired or very senior: too deeply vested in the mythos to renounce it. Junior members of the Blob actually think it’s real. The Blob’s practice of recruiting embittered emigres and their harebrained children makes everything much worse, just as it did in Afghanistan.
One result: Kremlin decision-making is a big black box to US intelligence. We know this because at every confrontation (Georgia in 2008, our 2014 Kiev putsch, and now the invasion of 404), the Russians surprise, pre-empt and outmaneuver us. But our problem is much worse than mere ignorance: Our analysts inhabit a windowless silo doubling as echo chamber that reinforces their misconceptions. They don’t even know what they don’t know. That’s how Biden & Co wound up arming actual white supremacists in Ukraine while persecuting fake ones at home.
Beyond what I’ve already recounted, I’ll mostly skip the 30-year litany of hubris, bad faith and provocation that has united Russians against the west. But I should point out that, since 2014, the ethno-fascists whom we installed in Kiev have indiscriminately shelled the heavily populated, separatist Donbas region, killing thousands of civilians on our dime. (Donbas revolted in part because our 404 puppet regime banned education in the Russian language.)
For historic background, I’ll refer you instead to a pair of highly qualified veteran Canadian analysts, as well as Reagan’s point man during nuclear arms talks. Trudeau’s Stasi hounded both Canucks into curtailing their blogs after the invasion. But their old posts are still up, for now. You should go back several years and read forward. And here’s a religious angle that might interest you.
Our spies, I mentioned, are no good at actual spying. Maybe they never were. (When I reported from Afghanistan in the 1980s and ‘90s, US officials were hapless dupes of Afghan ‘informants’ paraded by Pakistani officials.) The ‘elected’ leader in charge of our spooks is a feeble sock-puppet. So it seems all CIA does anymore is run domestic psy-ops to promote the latest ‘Putin’s Russia’ plot twist.
The latest humbug: airing preposterous Kiev agitprop as news, while Big Tech tries to suppress dissent, skepticism and alternative media. Western ‘coverage’ of the war in 404 devolved swiftly into a series of transparent hoaxes.
Fortunately nobody has suppressed the many brutally honest Russian-language Telegram channels reporting from Ukraine’s front lines. That means that, in contrast to previous episodes of ‘Putin’s Russia,’ CIA and DoD know exactly how the war’s going, and are lying outright. Remember when US officials didn’t bother to censor Soviet propaganda, because it was so silly? We’re the Soviets now. Here’s what US officials are trying to hide:
In week 1, the Ukrainian air force and navy, and the army’s C4ISR (command, control, communications, computing power, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) were all but destroyed, and Russian forces seized an area the size of Britain in a country the size of France. Their Kiev feint wasn’t ‘defeated’: It worked like a charm, prompting Kiev to bogart key army units around the capital, instead of reinforcing their Donbas front, always the Russian focus.
Russian forces were never ‘bogged down.’ They methodically encircled and destroyed Kiev’s army, the largest in Europe, in Donbas, where most of it was massed and dug in. They did so with a third of their enemies’ entrenched manpower, relying on ‘stand-off weapons.’ The locals are ethnic Russians, so, far from ‘targeting’ civilians, the Russian army has struggled to minimize their casualties. For exactly the same reason, the Ukrainians consistently exploit the locals as human shields. So quite often the Russians must deploy infantry to fight house-to-house. There’s no way to do this quickly. But time is on Russia’s side. They are also rotating units out for R&R every few weeks, to ensure that as many Russian soldiers as possible get combat experience. After Mariupol, even casual observers could see the dire state of Ukraine’s military. So we started to see occasional ‘limited hangout’ from DOD / CIA / MI6, via their media stenographers.
Kiev’s reliance on NATO for C4ISR means Americans are directly targeting Russian troops. If Putin were crazy, as the spooks used to claim, he would already have started WW3. Anyhow, CIA recently renounced the ‘Putin’s not well’ talking point.
A vaunted Ukrainian counteroffensive against Kherson, in the south, was annihilated by Russian defenders in late August, filling the region’s hospitals and morgues. Western corporate media, obeying their spook censors, pretty much embargoed reporting on this catastrophe.
The Kremlin began preparing months ago for the recent referenda in which Russophone areas of Ukraine voted to join Russia. Russian forces quietly redeployed from Kharkov oblast to the south and east to secure the voting. They left behind small local militia forces equipped primarily for peacekeeping, not warfighting. NATO C4ISR exposed this and enabled a Ukrainian ‘offensive’ that has reoccupied perhaps a couple thousand square miles. Western media celebrated the advance, but hid from viewers the fact that the Russians simply pulled their lightly armed forces out, then pounded the exposed Ukrainians with artillery and missiles, killing thousands more. Western officials are obsessed with territory. Russian goals aren’t primarily territorial; they are to demilitarize and de-nazify Ukraine. Every time 404 ‘advances,’ it gets more demilitarized and denazified. In the process, Russia is demilitarizing the west, too: Ukraine uses more ammunition in a few weeks than the US can manufacture in a year.
Legacy media accidentally made one crucial contribution to public insight: They loudly promoted several prominent US warmongers, including Biden himself, who called explicitly for regime change and Putin’s murder. Now the cat’s out of the bag: Neoconservatives have sought Russia’s dismemberment since the 1990s. To do that they must topple Putin. That’s been our real rulers’ real objective probably since 2014, and maybe since Putin’s 2007 Munich speech. (As both Obama and Trump learned, mere presidents have limited say over US foreign policy.) The recent disavowal is too little, too late, and reeks of desperate insincerity.
Now, the following puzzles me. It seems important: American Russophobia – which masquerades as Putin Derangement Syndrome, but in fact, targets all Russian patriots - is primarily a Jewish disease. There are exceptions like Dick Cheney of course. (Zbigniew Brzezinski wasn’t a true exception: Russophobia is also endemic among Poles, who want their empire back.) But Jews, at all levels, appear to be driving it.
Officials like Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland, who implement Russophobic policies, are Jews. Key think-tankers and media figures who promote Russophobic agitprop, like Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, plus radio hosts like Mark Levin and podcasters like Ben Shapiro (with whom they agree on nothing else!) are Jewish.
Alex Berenson was a very convincing Big Pharma ‘controlled opposition’ agent (he fooled me). Throughout 2020-2021, he posed as an edgy Covid contrarian, exploiting his anti-lockdown, anti-vax street cred to promote rigged studies that helped Pfizer & Co suppress cheap, effective early remedies like ivermectin.
After Feb 24, Berenson abruptly turned into an obsessive anti-Putin crank, feverishly upchucking silly Deep State talking points on Substack. For me, it was an epic ‘tell.’
Some of my ordinary Jewish friends air gauche anti-Putin rants on their social media. They have bought into gibes that Putin is somehow a fascist (although he’s fighting a war against actual fascists). Weirdest of all, many Russophobic Jews’ ancestors, like Victoria Nuland’s, came to America from what’s now Ukraine - where the ancestors of today’s ethnofascists carried out the worst pogroms against Jews of the Russian empire.
I haven’t said much about Putin himself. Pat Buchanan put it well: ‘Whatever we may think of Putin, he is no Stalin. He has not murdered millions or created a gulag archipelago … Putin is a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again.’
‘Cold and ruthless’ is a bit much. Putin has commanded a public approval rating above 70% since the invasion. The Blob just doesn’t grasp the most basic feature of public opinion in the real Putin’s Russia: Most who disapprove are old-school communists who think Putin’s too soft, too slow. They think he should have invaded Ukraine in 2014, right after the US-backed putsch, when NATO and the nazis were utterly unprepared. Now they’re upset because he’s taking too damn long. I’m about as far from communist as one can be, but it’s awful hard to argue with that.
Here's a little thought experiment for Ted Cruz, Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro and other conservatives inexplicably towing the Biden line on Russian and Ukraine: Can you say, echoing Pat Buchanan, ‘Biden is an American nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve the United States’ - without bursting into laughter? I wish we had a president like Putin.
Better yet, I wish we had no president at all. I could do with a break from government. I spent the better part of a decade living in a place with no government to speak of, and had a blast (sometimes literally). To make that happen, we need to denazify America, ideally including short-drop hangings of the nazi ringleaders from lampposts and low-hanging branches. (To placate death-penalty foes, I’d settle for life imprisonment at hard labor in a Nicaraguan penal colony.) We could raise money selling souvenir t-shirts to the onlookers: ‘I got a “kick” out of Merrick Garland!’