NATO Keeps Rubbing the Lamp, Hoping Victory Will Appear.

Uncle Volodya says; “We are not rich by what we possess, but by what we can do without.”

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality even where we will not.”

Cormac McCarthy, from “All the Pretty Horses”

“I dreamt I was whole once. I flew above the world on wings of snow and sugar and everything was beautiful and I was flawless and perfect.

When I woke my pillow was wet.”

Colubrina, from “Sublimation”

It’s up to each of us, of course, to set and maintain our own social comfort level. But I don’t think I am comfortable with journalism that lies to me all the time, or governments who pull their own stories – upon which they base the formulation of national policy on this or that- from journalistic products which are mostly if not all lies, or to falsely project the state of the world upon statements which are lies. And journalists who uncritically quote those who have an established record of lying are only one step removed from liars themselves – shadow liars, if you will.

I suppose you could just assume everything in the news which is the product of certain journalists will be lies, and safeguard yourself from it by a kind of pre-disbelief. But an unconscious something inside you will wonder if others believe it, and to what extent the bullshit generated is receiving uncritical acceptance – you can’t help yourself.

It’s just possible that some people tell you things they actually believe are true, but they’re not, because the speaker is an idiot – as it happens, I have an excellent example; Hamish de Bretton-Gordon’s “Putin’s nuclear arsenal is crumbling. Ukraine can take it out for good”. I don’t want to get into this concept too deeply, because it’s not the precise journalistic technique I wanted to highlight here. But my God; it simply cries out for someone to challenge its foolishness.

You probably know Hamish de Bretton-Gordon from such warfare classics as “British-made tanks are about to sweep Putin’s conscripts aside”. Here’s a short teaser; that’s all we can afford, because this author’s overconfident swaggering is so prolific that we could easily spend all day and thousands of words creasing ourselves up over his ignorant havering.

“As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: Putin’s demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines. Ukrainian armoured formations are beginning to meet Russian forces in battle, and they are going to pulverise Russia’s defensive lines. I am confident for one simple reason: Ukraine will follow the Western ideology of manoeuvre warfare in a combined arms context, while the Russians will follow Soviet doctrine, relying on attrition and numbers. The Russians will find that the armour of Western tanks is far more resilient than flesh and bone, they will die in great numbers, and they will lose.”

Dear me; is that what’s been happening? It sure as fuck is not. There are so many things wrong with it, it’s hard to know where to start, but we can start with ‘Putin’s demoralised conscripts’. There is no evidence at all to date which suggests the Russian army in Ukraine is ‘demoralised’, and no conscripts as we know them have been fighting since the early days of the war more than two years ago, when a handful of conscripts were mistakenly sent straight into action. As soon as it was pointed out the error was rectified, and it has never been repeated. Fresh conscripts go straight into progressive training cycles, and the 300,000 ‘call-ups’ were all previous-service military personnel who were recalled because their areas of specialization were needed. Since that time there have been more than enough volunteers to replenish the ranks.

There’s Never Been a Better Time for NATO to confront Russia. As Long as You are Russia.

Uncle Volodya says, “All my misfortunes come of having thought too well of my fellows.”

Masquerading as a man with a reason,
My charade is the event of the season;
And if I claim to be a wise man, well
It surely means that I don’t know…

Kansas, from “Carry On Wayward Son”

“I ended my time in Intelligence convinced that my country’s operating system—its government—had decided that it functioned best when broken.”

Edward Snowden, from “Permanent Record”

There are no great thinkers left in the west.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely accurate – but if there are, they are not in national leadership positions. Instead NATO nations are led by simpletons like Liz Truss, who did not know that Rostov and Voronezh are part of Russia, or perhaps thought that if Britain did not recognize Russia’s sovereignty over these regions the Russians might become confused, and give them up. This issue came up in February 2022, when Truss was Britain’s Foreign Secretary, and showing off her talking-tough chops by ordering Moscow to pull its forces back from Ukraine’s borders. The forces which were the subject of their discussion were inside Russia, which is a completely unsurprising place to find Russian forces.

Or Annalena Baerbock, who insisted Putin could completely change the unfolding of events in Ukraine if he would ‘turn by 360 degrees’ from his present course, which would of course put him exactly back where he had been.

Or Jens Stoltenberg, who claims it is ‘still not too late for Ukraine to win the war’ when Russia is pounding it with as much as a ten-to-one advantage in artillery and has more than three times the population. I don’t suppose I have to tell you that Jens Stoltenberg not only was never in the military, but never made any serious study of military history, or he would know that none of the realities of Ukraine’s present military situation argue in favour of anything that might look like success. But when reality might be too scary, you can always listen to the patter of happy talk coming from the Ukrainian government, which convinced US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo that Russia, in the opening stages of the war, had fallen so short of the semiconductors used to build precision-guided missiles that it was taking them from dishwashers and refrigerators. She heard that from the Ukrainian Prime Minister, Denis Shmyhal, who must have laughed his ass off to see such evidence of gullibility.

“She said she has heard anecdotes from the Ukrainian prime minister that some of the Russian equipment left behind contains semiconductors from kitchen appliances because the defense industrial base is having a hard time producing more chips on its own and is facing export controls that limit its ability to import the technology from other countries.”

Electronics at the level of precision-guidance systems is fairly exacting, which leads us naturally to the question of how the Ukrainians knew semiconductors in Russian military equipment came from kitchen appliances. Was ‘refrigerator’ coded into the circuit board somewhere? If not, are certain semiconductors perhaps common to both? The whole concept is bizarre – if high-level and hard-to-find chips needed to build missile-guidance systems are contained in home refrigerators, how are sanctions ‘working’? Couldn’t Russia simply import hundreds of thousands of refrigerators and dishwashers? They’re not sanctioned. Listen to what is coming out of your stupid mouth, how about? And while you’re being quiet, think about next time picking allies who are not clowns from a comedy show, although that doesn’t necessarily imply you need to repeat whatever they say without reflecting upon whether it might sound as if you are suffering from early-onset dementia.

Whatever You Have to Tell Yourself

Uncle Volodya says; “You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.”

“We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.”
― Alain de Botton, from Religion for Atheists

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
― Jane Austen, from Pride and Prejudice

A Captain I occasionally work with uses the title phrase to suggest the person he is speaking to is getting a little above himself – that he might be getting an inflated view of his importance and worth. An updated version, I guess you might say, of Pascal’s “Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself”, although I think we can agree that would be an unwieldy phrase in an era where nobody talks like a 17th-century French philosopher. But in that context, it is an extremely useful and utilitarian means of conveying subtle mockery without being openly insulting. And on a national scale, the United States – or at least its government – has elevated getting above oneself to an art form.

Consider this recent example: on the occasion of the ‘retirement’ of Victoria Nuland, principle neoconservative architect of The Glorious Maidan and the Revolution of Dignity – and, to a large extent, the subsequent hot war between Russia and Ukraine – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered this tribute via X:

“Russia is weaker militarily, economically and diplomatically. NATO is bigger, stronger, and more united than at any time in its nearly 75-year history”

All, presumably, attributable at least in part to the selfless pick-and-shovel work of Victoria Nuland, who made it a lifelong project to fuck over Russia by any means necessary, at any cost and using every resource at her disposal. Including, obviously, the lives of Ukrainians, the American government’s proxy army. By Mr. Blinken’s reckoning, her tenure as the US Department of State’s Big Anti-Russia Boxing Glove has been a rousing success.

Has it?

We Come Not to Praise Zelensky, but to Bury Him.

Uncle Volodya says, “Some people are in such utter darkness that they will burn you just to see a light. Try not to take it personally.”

Old adversaries, when they meet again,
Are as familiar as two old friends…

Wide Mouth Mason, from “Sugarcane”.

“I hate stupidity, but what I hate even more is when people actually brag about it.”

Bill Maher, from “When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden”

There’s a sort of stink that surrounds Volodymyr Zelensky these days, and follows him wherever he goes. The miasma of failure, surely, since The Great Counteroffensive of 2023 turned out to be a military success like…well, like playing the President on television is like being the President in real life. Which is to say, not at all like a military success. But it’s more than that. What accompanies Zelensky these days is the stink of the walking dead, politically speaking.

And you could actually see it coming pretty far out; first there were gentle criticisms of what a grifter he is, not only always asking for money but downright acting as if he was entitled to expect it from you, as if he believed that guff about Ukraine being the front line of defense of western democracy. Ukraine is actually about as much like a functioning democracy as a…I can’t actually think of an appropriately ridiculous comparison, but suffice it to say a country that puts off elections with the absurd excuse that elections inspire disunity and the country really needs unity right now, even s’posing it is enforced unity, is not a democracy. That’s not really as stinging a criticism as it might appear, because the western countries which are supposed to be the models of modern democracy are actually not much like democracies, either, to be fair.

Anyway, after another of his public appearances, in which he grunted like Vin Diesel with a speech impediment and demanded more money and ever-more-exotic weapons, a few skeptics might say, “You know, every time I see that guy, he’s demanding more money. You’d think he would be a little bit grateful for the billions we’ve already given him.” But the mainstream media continued to lavish uncritical attention on him, and his critics mostly held their tongues.

Just as an aside, Zelensky comes across as a steroid muscle-head for a couple of reasons; one, he’s an actor, and he’s playing a role. Two, his English is laboured and not very good. He was not only eloquent, he was compelling when he spoke Russian – would you like to see? Here he is, introducing a couple of guys from the popular Russian TV series ‘Kadyetsva’, singing a completely forgettable pop song while accompanied by leggy eye-candy girls pretending to play guitars. Russian is Zelensky’s mother tongue, although now he affects to hate everything Russian. And leaving your roots behind is perfectly okay, provided you are successful at reinventing yourself. Zelensky is not.

Anyway, let’s not wander too far. So, first gentle criticism. Then, a dramatic drop in public appearances with foreign leaders. Zelensky was the public face of Ukraine, and apparently willing to travel anywhere, anytime so he could get hold of the microphone and advertise the country’s need for more money to thrash Russia. The I’m-so-over-Zelensky moment most remember is that photo from the NATO summit, in which Zelensky was left completely alone by all the dignitaries, standing around in his Fidel Castro fatigues and looking like a spare prick at a wedding. I’m still trying to be fair, and it’s likely he was just unoccupied for a minute or two while his missus was chatting with some other dignitary’s wife about where to buy a diamond-crusted back-scratcher or some other essential item. But there was definitely a backing-away from the previous Zelenskymania, in which he was compared favourably to Churchill and his countrymen were rated the fiercest warriors since the Aztecs, and venues such as the UN General Assembly, the US Congress and the UK Parliament vied for the honour of being addressed by his anthropoid monotone, washing him in the comforting waves of ovation after ovation. How are the mighty fallen!