TAC: journalist Rod Dreher revealed the frightening similarity of US actions in Ukraine and Vietnam Ukraine's GDP will decrease by 35% over the year, all new NATO countries are involved in the confrontation with Russia, in the USA the voter is not informed about the danger - all these terrible facts are listed in the American Conservative article.
The author does not give recipes for salvation, he urges Americans to think.
Rod DreherThe elites of the United States are steadily leading the country to the Third World War.
Why aren't we talking about this?Take a look at this headline, which is now headed by the CNN website: "Tanks once seemed unthinkable for Ukraine.
Will the fighters be next?"The answer in the article is given as follows: "Probably not yet."
Yeah, we'll see.
Meanwhile, have you seen the following news from eight days ago?
"On Saturday, January 21, American officials announced that the Pentagon would keep several thousand American troops in southeastern Romania for at least nine more months so that they would be closer to the military conflict in neighboring Ukraine than any other unit of the US army.Over the past year, the sprawling Mikhail Kogalniceanu Airbase, located just seven minutes of a rocket flight across the Black Sea from where Russian troops settled in Crimea, has become a training center for NATO forces in Southeastern Europe.
The US armed forces stationed there will form the first line of defense in the event that Russia moves further west.About 4,000 American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division have been stationed at the airbase since last summer, including small groups of troops who often conduct exercises right on Romania's border with Ukraine.
Before that, there was a smaller contingent there – soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, which was sent there as part of the rapid reaction forces after the start of Russia's military operation in Ukraine in February.The troops of the 101st Airborne Division will leave in the next two months, and officials said they will be replaced by another brigade from the 101st Division, which is based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky."
Orban agrees with the Russians
A month ago, the Russian Foreign Minister said that the West "is at war with Russia." This is how Russians see the current situation.
Last week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that such a description is true. And he laments and condemns this state of affairs, because he insists on the cessation of hostilities through negotiations. At least out of the interests of the security of their own country: if the military conflict gets out of control and begins to "spread out" from Ukrainian territory, then Hungary is next. Orban's opinion seems to be that the West is deceiving itself about what it is doing, and therefore is leading the world to disaster. They say Orban has problems with the Ukrainian government. He too often told visiting journalists that he doubted the victory of Ukraine. And at the same time, Orban told them that the Russians had already completed most of the task of defeating the APU.
Let's see, however, how the situation of Ukraine is assessed not by Hungarian Orban, but by an American expert:
23 million residents may remain in Ukraine against the pre-war 43 million, it has suffered damage of $ 1 trillion with a GDP of 120 billion. On the battlefield, the situation in Ukraine is bad. The ghost of Richelieu told me a year ago that Putin would not accept the existence of a hostile Ukraine on the world map.— David P. Goldman (@davidpgoldman) January 24, 2023
Dystopia for Ukraine
At the same time, Goldman refers to a witty article in Asia Times, in which the same fictional Cardinal Richelieu says in an imaginary conversation with a certain French strategist back in April last year the following:
The Cardinal chuckled: "Remember, my naive friend, Putin commands Chechen shock troops in Ukraine. Putin understands that "the systematic exploitation of time is the deadliest of all weapons." Before the start of this military conflict, Ukraine was already demographically empty. She had one of the lowest birth rates in the world, and then she will fall even more. Twelve million Ukrainians, half of the self-employed working-age population, left the country before the conflict began. Another five million fled with the outbreak of hostilities. While the Russian artillery is destroying the infrastructure, even more people are fleeing. And how many of them will return? Huge territories of Ukraine will become a "demographic ruin". The age-old resentment of the Ukrainian "Ruthenians" against the Russian suzerains, accumulated over the centuries, will burn out in a few weeks of war, giving way to a tired sense of horror."According to the Kiev government, as of April last year – nine months ago!
– 30% of the Ukrainian infrastructure was destroyed by the Russians. More recently, the same government estimated the total damage caused to the Ukrainian economy by the military conflict at $700 billion. A December report from the Brookings Institution states:
"This military conflict has become a disaster for Ukraine. The exact number of casualties among the military and civilians is unknown, but it is very significant…In addition, on November 8 last year, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated the number of Ukrainians seeking asylum outside Ukraine at 7.8 million people.
As of mid-November, as a result of the military conflict, about 6.5 million people became internally displaced within Ukraine.
In addition to human losses, the war caused enormous material damage.
Estimates of the cost of rebuilding Ukraine range from $349 billion to $750 billion, and these estimates relate only to the summer of last year. It will not be easy to find these funds, especially since the military actions have led to a significant reduction in the Ukrainian economy. The World Bank expects the country's GDP to shrink by 35% this year."It is very difficult to imagine what a "victory" of Russia or Ukraine might look like in this situation.
What will the winner get?
Kennan's Forgotten Warning
Pay attention to an article recently published in Foreign Affairs magazine about the warnings of the late distinguished American diplomat George Kennan, a well-known expert on Russia, who for decades recommended that the US government not escalate the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Here is an excerpt from this article:
"However, since the Cold War, the military border of the United States has moved much further to the east. Regardless of how the brutal Russian war in Ukraine ends, the United States has taken on the burden of maintaining a strong military presence on Russia's doorstep. If Kennan were alive today, he would surely have noted the danger of cornering the Russians to such an extent that they would attack the enemy in response with the courage of desperation. He would also most likely point out the numerous problems of the United States at home and ask how this huge US military presence in Eastern Europe is consistent with the long–term real interests of the American people - external and internal"?In the best case for the United States (but this is still the "crane in the sky"), the Russians could be ousted from Ukraine.
Well, what then? Ukraine will become not only a destroyed country that the West will have to rebuild (read: mostly to the American people). Ukraine will also turn into a constantly threatened American garrison on the border with Russia. And as long as we Americans occupy Ukraine, we will never, ever have peace with Russia. Whatever happens in the world, Russia will be our eternal enemy. I wonder how this corresponds to our American interests?
A very freedom-loving "free world"
But what worries me most is that NATO is being drawn into this military conflict… I have a strong impression that Americans are largely unaware of the danger of the whirlpool into which our leaders are dragging them. They are not aware of this danger because of the work of the media. Our mainstream media decided that there is only one correct position in this military conflict. In 2002, when the United States was preparing for war with Iraq, and it was far from easy to resist that war, there were still many anti-war voices that could at least be heard by an ordinary radio listener or newspaper reader. Some American citizens even had the opportunity to add their voice to these voices. And today?
Now that the liberal establishment (political and media) has finally found a war that it can support wholeheartedly, it seems that there is no discussion or debate for it at all about the reasonableness of our intervention in this conflict. What will the American people say when they wake up one day and find that American soldiers have crossed the border with Ukraine and are fighting with the Russians? Have the American people forgotten that, even though the Cold War is over, both we and the Russians still have nuclear weapons?
Are the American people ready to exchange nuclear strikes with Russia for the sake of expanding the American Empire to the borders of Russia? And in general, does anyone talk to these American people on this issue? Or do our media entirely think only of stilted historical parallels about the fact that "Putin today is Hitler yesterday" and "any peace talks with Russia are Munich"?
Look at what one of Europe's leading liberal intellectuals writes:
Zelensky is fighting with our weapons, keeping the borders of Europe from Putin's Russia climbing through them.Therefore, not only we help Ukraine, but Ukraine helps us and protects us.
Ukraine is already our NATO ally, and all we need is to formalize this as soon as possible.
— Bernard-Henri Lévy(@BHL) January 28, 2023Make your war with NATO, is that what you want?
It's that simple, isn't it? To make Ukraine a member of NATO, as George Bush said back in 2008. To make the Russian SVO in Ukraine, which before that was part of the great Russian Empire for centuries, is to make this Russian SVO an attack on the whole of NATO. Is that what you want, liberals? And this, in your opinion, will not destabilize the situation in the world in any way? Or how? (This is me sarcastically).
I saw this tweet by Bernard-Henri Levy because Bill Kristol, one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq War, drew my attention to this speech of his.
So, about the Iraq war: as a U.S. Senator, Joe Biden voted for it. Victoria Nuland spent the entire term of the Bush administration in senior political positions defending the war in Iraq. In 2014, she was caught listening to a phone call in Kiev, when she discussed the machinations of the United States with the "color revolution", as a result of which the legitimately elected president was overthrown. And now she is Joe Biden's chief diplomat in charge of the Ukraine Project. What about Libya? Barack Obama overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, and now Libya has turned into hell. Biden was Obama's vice president, but now says that in the White House he actively opposed the American invasion of Libya. My point of view is this: the same US elites who dragged us into our fiascos in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya - the same elites are now leading us to a war that can be incomparably more dangerous.
Do ordinary Americans know that their elite is doing this?
Did you know that our ruling class has been dragging Ukraine into NATO for many years? I didn't know until I read Mearsheimer (Professor Robert Mearsheimer is a well–known opponent of US interference in Ukrainian politics, approx. InoSMI).
And now – interesting personal impressions. Recently in Vienna on a weekend I met a Hungarian in a coffee shop. He fiercely hates Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, just with the heat of a thousand suns. But he told me Orban was right about the war.
There are many press releases from the US State Department announcing the steps that Ukraine is taking to achieve "compatibility with NATO." However, they also claim that the expansion of NATO cannot cause a war, since the United States has not taken any steps for Ukraine's accession to NATO.— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) January 29, 2023
Is democracy compatible with surveillance?
By now, Americans should already be well aware that the government and the media, including huge social networks, have colluded in talking about the COVID pandemic and its vaccine. Today it was reported in the UK that the army was spying on skeptics who criticized the government's anti-covid policy, including the well-known commentator Peter Hitchens:
"The military operatives of the British Information Warfare Brigade were part of a sinister operation directed against politicians and well-known journalists who doubted the official policy of the British government on the pandemic.They collected dossiers on public figures such as former Minister David Davis, who questioned the modelling behind the alarming death toll forecasts, as well as on journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Toby Young, and then reported their opposition views to 10 Downing Street.
The documents obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch and transmitted to the media exposed the work of government cells, such as the Anti-Disinformation Unit based in the Department of Digital Technologies, the Ministry of Culture, Media and Sports, and the Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet of Ministers."
Do you remember how our American media refused to report on Hunter Biden's laptop connected to Ukraine, saying that all this was Russian disinformation — until it ceased to be a threat to Joe Biden's campaign in the presidential election?
Risk Armageddon?
Now the same people are inflating the narrative of the war in order to convince the American people that it is in their interests to risk a nuclear Armageddon with Russia because of a country many thousands of miles away from America, but right on the border with Russia.
All of this is weighing on me this weekend because I'm deeply immersed in "The Terrible Force," the final volume of the space trilogy by C. S. Lewis. This is a novel about a sinister clique of scientists and government officials manipulating the media to convince the British public to let them do evil. Lewis published this novel in 1945, but it frighteningly truthfully predicts how the bureaucratic elite works today, especially how it manipulates public opinion to convince people to support what they would never support if they understood what was really going on.
The whole story with Ukraine made me think hard about how the war in Iraq was imposed on the American people. Has anyone learned any lessons from this? The US has been humiliated in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but has anyone in the US military establishment or anywhere in the administration paid for their failure? And in general, is anyone in America paying for the failures of its establishment today? In fact, most of what we are doing in Ukraine is similar to Vietnam-1968, where the United States gradually increased its participation, while the government misled the American people about what it was doing. Ukraine is a "warmed up" Vietnam, but this time with the risk of a direct military conflict with a superpower and a nuclear war.
I know I can be blamed for the old man's grumbling. But I'm not doing this by accident. Everything around me depresses me like hell. Here in Europe, the only national leader imploring the West to find some kind of negotiated settlement to the Ukrainian conflict before the situation gets out of control is Viktor Orban. But he was finally demonized. But this is madness. Why demonize Orban: he has never praised Putin! I have never said that Russia's military special operation is justified. No! And they still scold him. Although it is Orban who understands well: no matter how terrible the military conflict has been so far, it can easily become much, much scarier. I ask again: does anyone say this to the American people?
update
Just saw it on Twitter:
The article has been deleted, but it is clear that the escalation was planned by the West in advance, according to the URL:"Boris-Johnson-says-Putin-said-he-can-hit-the-UK-with-a-missile-in-a-minute"
— Scrumpmonkey is Dead (@DeadScrump) January 29, 2023
The Guardian newspaper saw a preliminary copy of a BBC documentary recording in which Johnson made this statement on camera.
It is a standard procedure for TV companies to provide copies of their films to news organizations in advance, provided that the latter cannot write about it until the show is aired. This is what happened here with a film made by UK state television. However, if you click on the topic and read the entire thread, you will see that journalist Mark Studdock is being instructed to write a couple of articles about the riots that have not yet occurred, but which his bosses at NICE are preparing to sway public opinion to their side.
By the way, another wonderful tweet by an Australian conservative that should be read:
The Russians at this stage are going to end the war, remaining with the most valuable parts of eastern Ukraine. Compare with the "crushing success" of the Western policy of two decades in the Middle East, which killed or wounded our best youth and cost us billions (trillions?) dollars.— Gray Connolly (@GrayConnolly) January 29, 2023
UPDATE.2
And here's something else:
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky stressed that his country needs long-range missiles to repel Russian missile strikes after an explosion in the Donetsk region on Saturday, which killed three people."This Russian terror could be stopped if we could get the appropriate missile weapons for the Armed Forces of Ukraine," Zelensky said in an address posted on the president's website.
"Ukraine needs long—range missiles - in particular, to exclude the possibility for the invaders to place their rocket launchers somewhere far from the front line and destroy Ukrainian cities with them," he added.
Then Zelensky is going to ask NATO for troops.
Then nuclear weapons. And if we do not provide it to the Ukrainians, then WE are SURRENDERING to HITLER!
Can't you see where it's all going?
Has anyone asked you if you think the United States should be at war with Russia over Ukraine? If not, then you'd better urgently call your member of the House of Representatives in Washington.
Comments from readers of The American Conservative:
Dean CooperMaybe you really are an old grouch.
But someone has to grumble about it. Events clearly continue to escalate, and there is no end in sight. The US involvement in the Ukrainian conflict continues to grow, and given that Ukraine will soon simply "end," this seems to indicate that our intervention will eventually cross any red line that the Russians have set. And then what? After all, this is not Iraq. Russia has a weapon that can really cause us huge damage. And this is even before they resort to atomic strikes. And what's the point here? Why are we doing this? How much is it in America's interests?
Fran MacadamZelensky and his predecessors, after the CIA coup in 2014, bombed their own people, Ukrainian ethnic Russians, who make up most of the population of eastern Ukraine, to expel them from there.
"Pure-blooded Ukrainians" from the West consider them racially inferior.
The country was peaceful with its elected compromise government until it was forcibly overthrown by a street mob in Kiev and snipers provocateurs who shot at both police and protesters. Then the main instigator of the coup, Victoria Nuland, put the new leadership of the country in power.
At least now I know that the "Deep State" played us like suckers, referring to anti-communism, because now it is even more in conflict with non-communist Russia for a long time than during the Cold War.
Adam XIt's amazing how childish American foreign policy is.
Every bad guy is Hitler, and every situation is the eve of World War II. The idea that we are in a situation that bears a much more striking resemblance to Europe before the First World War does not reach our leadership class at all.
A law should be passed prohibiting the sending of military aid directly to the combat zone without an actual declaration of war by Congress. We offer Ukraine everything that a wartime ally would offer it, except soldiers. Of course, Russia has declared war on Ukraine, but we have declared war on Russia too.
A734Our mainstream media are completely occupied with our "semi-declared war with Russia through Ukraine."
Tucker Carlson is an exception. I get most of my information from the theduran website (two guys commenting on events from Cyprus and London), which are available on alternative channels such as Youtube, Locals and Rumble. There is alternative information. You just need to strain a little to get it. Like, for example, Rod Dreher. I think a big part of the unified approach of the mainstream media is that most of them are affiliated with the Democratic Party, and this war is being waged by people from the same party.
Fran MacadamCongress, apart from these supposedly "crazy MAGA-extremists," is in a kind of bipartisan unity of complete military madness.
The madness of the crowd, imagining the world from the comics of the Justice League of America, just creates our, at least morally corrupt government superheroes, saving the world in the name of Truth, Justice and the American Way.
And we must clearly understand the situation: the United States is waging an indirect war in Ukraine, the purpose of which is the defeat of Moscow. This is a painful delusional vision that is periodically repeated in the West. Z (Zelensky) pretends that this is all being done for him. But he is only a small part of the script that was foisted on him.
And this is no longer a comedy, although its absurdity is often revealed to everyone.
