Botticelli The Calumny of Apelles 1495
Dr. D again: “Russia is going to crush the whole West. But that’s not Russia’s fault: the entire West is so rotten it’s barely been standing for decades now, and certainly since ’08.”
Dr. D: Coverage of the war in Ukraine is very spotty and polarized. The news has been shut off, universally censored in the West, and expelled within Russia and Ukraine. Nevertheless there has been much commentary on it, from The Atlantic, “Foreign Affairs”, CNN, BBC, as well as Wall Street and London traders, geopolitical historians and commentators, and others, but like birds, all following a similar flock with a similar turn. Robert Gore is one such article, and better than most, covering Alistair MacLeod’s “Inside and Outside Money”, the mentally-ill childishness of the West, and that regardless of events right now, the outcome is certainly more chaos. https://straightlinelogic.com/2022/03/16/bonfire-of-the-governments-by-robert-gore/
What’s interesting to me with even smart writers like Gore is that they can’t see the most fundamental background shift. To me, this takes some reading, but these authors have all done the reading and are better informed than myself. It’s not like they’re older or younger, and it’s not that they don’t know it. I’m sure in other articles they describe the fragility of Western Banking, debt-printing system. He does so to some extent within the article. Yet somehow Gore – and all the other articles I’ve read these last 4 weeks – miss the most basic item. They believe “Putin made a mistake” and this is not just knee-jerk propaganda, it’s “Our War”, “Ukraine is the 51st State” “Putin is bad M’kay” stuff. They really believe it. Either because of the West’s response, or because they see the West promising to Mujaheddin Ukraine with unlimited weapons and rubbing their fists in glee.
That certainly is the plan, and a good one. It worked in Afghanistan 40 years ago, even as it never worked at all in Syria last year. These NeoCons behind Nuland and Kagan are now all so old they probably didn’t notice and are proceeding anyway. However, none of their plans in Ukraine will happen for very simple reasons. In addition, Putin knows that was their plan for 10-20 years, as well as to take Ukraine and use it to attack and crush Russia going back to the CARTER administration, i.e. Brzezinski. I mean, really? For the love of Christmas, here? That is to say, Putin and the Russian thinkers happily take the West’s open, public, transparent, unchanging plan and figure out what items must be in place to successfully and safely respond to it. And although they are winning in Ukraine (what else? They have an army 3x their size) that’s not the Russian true field of battle. Nor the tactics the West expected. I don’t know why this is so hard to understand.
Normally, I’d say Russia thinks differently. They are half Eastern, half Western they say, and when interacting with Europe LOOK like a Europeans, but then respond softly and go around. This makes them appear weak to us even as they talk tough. Maybe that’s why we constantly think they’re bluffing, the way we would, when really Russia could hardly be more straightforward if they tried. Indeed Lavrov’s top complaint in Turkey last week, but going back years now is that he’s telling them directly how things are and what will happen and like goldfish the West, the media, forget a second later and cannot hear, reporting a different, unrelated thing they fabricated, writing what “he thinks” and “what he meant to do” using their Putin-telepathy.
It’s like this: Russia is going to crush the whole West. But that’s not Russia’s fault: the entire West is so rotten it’s barely been standing for decades now, and certainly since ’08. If not; well, Russia dies. They know this. But Russia will not die because they have been patient and careful and picked a time where the West is badly over leveraged and incredibly past their time. So yes, the West spent billions, possibly trillions at this point to subvert Ukraine and Russia had to respond to them, the West’s armed invasion and takeover of Ukraine, and that’s fine. It’s a ship you can see coming a mile away.
“Russia responds” means the West’s propaganda will kick in and they will want to start WWIII on them, a total war which Russia probably cannot survive the combined forces of all NATO countries worldwide. So that’s a consideration, and unlike the West, who wants war anyway? Like Britain, Russia essentially has one city, Moscow, and a war will erase it, so there is no reason to take that path.
Russia is not fighting a “war” they are not “fighting” in Ukraine, it’s merely a minor police action, and that’s the first of things the West doesn’t understand. They think all Russian attention is on Kiev. They wanted all Russian attention and invasion locked in Kiev, and the West was depending on all the camera shots of destruction and dead civilians. I don’t think Russia even wants Kiev, or they would make at least some attempt to approach it. 500 civilians killed I’m hearing? THAT’S NOT A WAR. It’s hardly a police action. Maybe they don’t understand war material in the 21st century, but Russia could have leveled Kiev an the other cities in under 30 minutes including all their 5 million people if they wanted. Russia’s attention is on the real war.
As the WHOLE WEST, that is, the Anglos running NATO, are fully engaged in attacking Russia and economically conquering it, as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi say daily “Our War”, to safely stop the war Russia can only attack and disable the WHOLE WEST and NATO in return. Nothing else will do. It’s possible to detente at some point, freeze the conflict, but if the West does not fall, Russia is in danger and will be overrun. So they have to attack the West, a combined UK, Germany, Europe, and America. It appears they do not intend to do this using sabotage, attacks on rails and substations, EMPs. That would merely anger the U.S. for instance and galvanize a deeply reluctant population to support the war no one wants. It’s off the table. Instead, they are merely going around the whole West, in Eastern style.
What is the West? As Gore says, it’s a CONSUMER. Of everything. They print debt and consume things, net producing nothing. So Russia is passively embargoing them. That’s it. And with some help from China, that’s the whole plan. And it’s worse than that, Russia isn’t even trying to embargo the West. There is no need; the West is using the war to embargo themselves. This is the highest moral good, as Russia can remain completely clean of the matter, being the good guys, offering and having tried everything they could. When wheat, fertilizer, oil, metals, electric, are all shut off across Europe, citizens will ask their governments what happened. Those governments will point to Russia, but it will be no use: it will be plain to see that Russia was selling these life-giving goods to Europeans, and is still trying to sell them to Europe now. It was the European LEADERS, the bankers, billionaires, who refused to BUY them. This will not wash with a cold, hungry public.
The West is also LEVERAGED. In fact that is the key takeaway from the West, their power, and their Central Banks. They can win wars because they can produce more “gold”, that is, more “money” to throw at an ongoing conflict. But leverage goes both ways. On the way up, 10:1 gets you ten wins for a single ante, a golden goose. On the way down however, the removal of a single ante, one underlying asset, leads to a 10-fold loss. And the West is leveraged not 10:1 but 300:1 and more as Jeffrey Christian points out in a single market such as gold. But this is true as mortgages become MBS as in ‘08, in bond derivatives, in stock market margin levels, in credit cards, car loans, and everywhere else, right down to borrowing, that is, “leveraging,” to buy a cheeseburger and fries in Muncie, Indiana.
What is leverage? To borrow more than the value of your collateral. What is collateral? Real Stuff. But the West doesn’t make Real Stuff. The Real Stuff comes from others, and to an outsized level, from Russia. To a great extent, Russia is the collateral for the West. The prosperity of Germany, France, BP, Tesla’s Gigafactories, rest on Russian oil, gas, and aluminum. No gas or aluminum, no Gigafactory. No Gigafactory, no $1 Trillion dollar market cap. No $1T market cap, no 36,000 Dow. Poof. And that’s true of Volkswagen, Bosch, Bayer, Jaguar, and the banks that rest on them: DeutscheBank, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Lloyd’s. And the loss of those markets, companies, banks, would not leave New York standing. Morgan can hardly prosper if London, Hamburg and the commodity exchanges fail and stop trading as the LME did this week. They cannot make margins on the Russian banks and Russian trade they are no longer facilitating. They too will fall into a spiral of counter-leverage.
What is leverage? Let’s say the leverage at 300:1 makes NY and London appear 300x stronger than they actually are. So the end of that leverage makes them 300x weaker than they appear at present. And as we’ve said the bank leverage is what makes them able to field armies and pay for wars. So the end of leverage makes them UNable to field armies and pay for wars. Especially when they themselves refuse to receive all the raw commodity supplies that let them do so. In this structure they are planning to maintain a conflict with no coal, oil, gas, steel, aluminum, titanium, uranium, palladium, neon, and so on.
So what is Russia doing? Like all colonies, they are the raw material producer to the Imperium; the Empire, and the Empire’s Army. If, like America, they wish to rebel against that Empire, they will shut off the raw materials to the Empire, who then cannot run an effective army. This is why they behave as they do. They must go to Ukraine as Biden said in 1994, and as Biden insured with arms, arranged with his policy, and permitted in his words, saying as they did in Kuwait, a small incursion would not be met with force. And should the world remain as it does today, indeed the West would keep the conflict running indefinitely, bleed all of Russia, and kill all the Slavs, of which there are already too few.
But the world will NOT remain as it does today. In withdrawing, Russia has erased the collateral for the entire West and their banking system. As that echoes through the Western financial system there will be great disorder and disruptive bank and corporate failures. Likewise, they will not have commodities to re-build their own structure as they once did in 1930, or not for a long time. The West has positioned themselves to refuse to buy from Russia, come what may. For their part, and being a small country, Russia could not have withstood this lack of commerce, or at the least would have grown a lot weaker, too weak to resist more Western forays into their territory and sphere of influence. That is what took so long. But now, they will not have such a loss of commerce, as they merely sell all the same goods to China, weakening the West even more.
You see, if Europe doesn’t want, won’t accept raw goods, they get weaker of course. And also the opposite, where if China DOES get them, and at an enormous discount to today’s disruptive prices, obviously China will grow far stronger. How can Europe compete with $3,000 aluminum – or having no aluminum – when aluminum in China is $2,000? They already couldn’t compete before. How can Germany fill their factories with employees eating $20 wheat when China is well-fed and eating wheat at $9?
It’s the West that is going to bleed with the Mujaheddin, not Russia.
Going back to Ukraine, if the West wins, all is lost, nothing matters. However, if the West weakens due to worldwide shortages, hardships, banking failures, corporate bankruptcies, currency collapses, then they cannot arm Ukraine as they believe. They won’t have the time, money, or attention to do so. American soldiers will have to return home on a city bus, and not from palatial airfields. In any case, the 100,000 men America has there will be of little use with no food, no supplies, and no supply chain to back them. And if this is so, Ukraine will become Russian, or at least solidly within the Russian sphere of influence again, because will Ukrainians wish to eat, grow crops, have aluminum? Yes, and Russia will look prosperous compared to London at that time, with access to all Chinese goods while the West will not.
So why would you destroy Ukraine? Or even their people? It’s your own country, and your own people.
This is what the West doesn’t understand, as we are required to have a blitzkrieg, a Schwarzkopf rush to the great capital, a surrounding army destroying radio, electric, roads, water. Why would Russia ever do that? To win, they will have to “own” Ukraine or be merged with them in some way and would simply have to rebuild it. Same with the people. You need Ukrainians to be for Russia, not against it. So killing civilians – or even the valuable army – is strictly counter-productive. If it were possible, they would be best to harm nothing and kill no one, “The Art of War” writ large, but of course in war that is not possible. However, 500 civilian deaths in 4 weeks of modern war is as close as possible to killing no one, and demonstrates their goals and values.
This is the cause for the West to say Russia is “bogged down”, they’re losing. They’re not losing, they’re winning. They are saving the lives of fellow Russians, brother Slavs, while nevertheless gaining control of the country. And this without hardship, as the power is on in Kiev and elsewhere, and people are driving, shopping, and going to work. No unnecessary Ukrainians have been inconvenienced. The trains are running on time to Poland and elsewhere. Why would taking a fully intact country be considered a “loss”?
This is the situation we find ourselves in, and the Russians have been very clear about it. About their needs, their goals, their approach.
The West is being boycotted. They have embargoed themselves. They are a stark minority on planet earth, taking too much and making too little. The embargo they have placed on themselves will collapse their banking and financial system even as their manufacturers cannot function when lacking raw materials. They cannot rebuild for many years and will go hungry. They cannot prosecute a war in this state, and in any case the people are not in favor of it and will not let them. But there is good news! The West can behave honestly, buy from Russia again, and end their unnecessary war and their own hardship at any time. Both the realization, and the reversal may take some years however, and we’ve only just begun.
This is what Russia is doing, and why they aren’t worried about Ukraine.
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