War drums beat to a pattern
Is this beat familiar?
The point of this updated article is to explore possible parallels in perception management of populations by comparing narrative patterns of past and present wars, and also the Covid narrative.
The Ukraine war is, in our opinion, in a terminal phase that is reflected in the Western narrative and on the battlefield. Looking back to the start of the invasion, and to the Iraq war, we believe that it is possible to identify repetitive patterns within the West’s conduct of Forever War.
Iraq
The West supported Saddam Hussein throughout the Iran-Iraq war - by some accounts a choice of lesser evils - but also played both sides. The US provided Iraq with intel on Iranian positions that, in their opinion, swung the war in Iraq’s favor. It may have knowingly allowed Iraq to fight with banned chemical weapons without sanction and was late to admit what it knew.
The Kuwait war, prior to which Hussein contacted the West objecting to Kuwaiti slant drilling into Iraqi oil, was not what was presented to the public. There were questions about Iraqi-Kuwaiti debts being affected by the supply rate of oil to markets by Kuwait, which may have been enabled via that Kuwaiti slant drilling into Iraqi oil.
According to the linked write up, Hussein conferred with the US about his interpretation of issues with Kuwait:
There is no dispute about one crucially important point: Saddam Hussein consulted with the US before invading, and our ambassador chose not to draw a line in the sand, or even hint that the invasion might be grounds for the US to go to war.
By that account the Kuwait war was predicated on lies and propaganda from the West. The US effectively green-lighted Hussein by standing off, then had a false pretext to launch its war machine and test all its new weapons. Then Iraq was kept in its box until the next time the US wanted to play with it. After the Kuwait war Iraq was subject to sanctions and no-fly enforcement that the British helped actively police in country.
The world was later told that Iraq had WMD and a 45 minute strike capability against British interests. Despite supposedly possessing that capability, Iraq had never used it.
The resulting Iraq war was more of the same, but with fewer international players, bigger lies, more expansive and visible corruption and wealth transfer, and greater long-lasting global damage.
The Iraqi government’s denials of possession of WMD were mocked in Western press. Turns out, it was telling enough truth. Today it would be blocked from Twitter, de-platformed and still destroyed. Although Hussein was captured, he was not tried in the ICC or elsewhere. He was not allowed to testify or defend himself. Despite surviving the shock and awe he was summarily executed to stop the narrative collapsing. Given the scale of the crimes he was accused of - real and invented - Saddam Hussein was someone who should have been tried. Instead he was quickly strung up and took his version of events and his secrets to the grave while Haliburton poured concrete.
The patterning of the above two wars share similarities:
Pretext - Polarize - Gang - Money
Acquire a pretext by:
letting events happen and spinning them; or
actually making them happen; or
lying about them (whether they have happened or not).
Magnify and polarize those lies and spin in the public sphere and weaponize them by any means possible, thereby creating a false legitimacy by using the press to repeat and reinforce that there is public need and even support for war.
Build a gang so you are not alone, then invade and kill ‘em all.
Make money on the upside and the downside.
What did Russia want?
In short:
that the US, NATO members and Russia recognize that they are not adversaries;
pull back NATO expansion and reset it to 27 May 1997 configuration;
keep weapons out of strike range of each other’s territories;
don’t interfere with each other’s internal security and affairs;
maintain direct communications and share information on threats and security issues;
pull back all nuclear weapons to national territorial limits and do not help to train or equip “any non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons”;
respect primacy of existing UNSC and UN Charters.
Russia published:
Compare the above to PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses that sought to maintain US global dominance primarily via increased military spending, which implied global US military expansion (including NATO), to suppress all other competitors. The US has fully implemented and pursued the PNAC strategy.
Compare Russia’s demands to the Council on Foreign Relation’s own précis of Matthew C. Waxman’s 2009 Special Report, “Intervention to Stop Genocide and Mass Atrocities” (full report here).
Another important part of this debate concerns the international legal system governing the use of force in situations of actual or potential atrocities. Waxman asks whether this legal regime is effective in preventing and stopping such crimes. International legal practices constrain swift action and require extensive consultation, especially in the United Nations Security Council, before particular steps can be taken.
He therefore opposes wholesale reforms but recommends more modest steps the United States could take to improve the current legal regime. These measures include expressing strong but nuanced support for the responsibility to protect and working with other permanent members of the UN Security Council to discourage the use of vetoes in clear cases of mass atrocities. But the report also argues that the United States must be prepared to act alone or with others in urgent cases without Security Council approval.
Note, the above explicitly references steps the US could take. This emphasis makes sense considering that the CFR is a US body and the report is written from that perspective. However, the final quoted sentence impresses the need for the will and ability for the US to take unilateral action regardless of UN Charter, the Genocide Convention or the determination of the UN Security Council. The CFR itself espouses “rules for thee and not for me”.
If the US determines that it should be able to exercise its sole judgement and act unilaterally without consequence, why shouldn’t any other UN member nation be able to do the same?
Russia could simply state “we are following Waxman’s position on Ukraine and choosing to act unilaterally because of our independent assessment and our determination of the need to act outside of the shortcomings of the present legal regime.” In doing so, would it have legitimacy in the eyes of Waxman and the CFR? If it is following Waxman’s recommendations, why wouldn’t it have legitimacy if the CFR thinks Waxman is legit?
Waxman himself lays out US centric recommendations that could apply to any Permanent Member of the UNSC, who all wield vetoes. Excerpts:
Force or threat of force may be used in cases of genocide and mass atrocities to, among other things, protect vulnerable populations, guard relief efforts, degrade perpetrators’ capacity for repression, and signal a willingness to escalate further if necessary. Military operations short of major invasion could include:
securing/controlling transportation routes and borders;
reinforcing peace operations;
enforcing no-fly zones, safe havens, or arms embargoes;
jamming broadcasts and other communications;
precision-targeted strikes; or
demonstrating presence.
Second, although military threats and force are rarely the primary tools for stopping mass atrocities, they remain important ones. Threats of military force can help deter systematic atrocities before they occur. Military measures can help stop ongoing atrocities by, for example, interposing forces between conflict factions or degrading a state’s capabilities for repression. And intervention or the threat of it may be needed to back up other tools, such as international criminal law, diplomatic efforts, or economic sanctions.
Third, nonmilitary mechanisms are critical to stopping mass atrocities, and nonmilitary means are almost always a preferred option when effective. None of this is to deny that military intervention carries risks, including the possibility of spurring dangerous backlashes or causing its own direct human toll. Nor is it to assert the primacy of military over nonmilitary means. Rather, this report takes as one of its premises the UN secretary-general’s recent counsel that mass atrocity crises require “early and flexible response[s] tailored to the specific circumstances of each case,” and that any sound strategy will combine many elements, most of them nonmilitary.
Recommendations
To best combat the threat of mass atrocities consistent with other U.S. foreign policy interests and priorities, the United States should take independent steps and work with allies to improve the responsiveness of the existing UN Security Council and simultaneously prepare and signal a willingness, if the UN Security Council fails to act in future mass atrocity crises, to take necessary action to address them. This requires a careful diplomatic balance asserting strong support for a normative framework that facilitates timely and decisive intervention but not provoking backlash among states already hostile to existing or emerging norms that limit sovereignty.
In supporting the responsibility to protect, the United States should emphasize appropriate limits on Security Council vetoes.
China and Russia are especially unlikely to disarm themselves of the veto power. The United States, too, should be wary of ceding its veto power given the propensity of other blocs of states to invoke the responsibility to protect in unduly politicized ways.
The United States should prepare to operate in cases of urgent necessity absent UN Security Council authorization. The strategy laid out in this report emphasizes improving the Security Council’s functioning through unilateral and multilateral efforts that help raise the costs of actions that slow or thwart its responsiveness. That said, the United States should be prepared to act outside the Security Council if necessary. Although it should not go so far as to declare in advance an explicit intention to do so, the United States should not completely hide its willingness to do so either. For policymakers, this means being prepared to act within a legal gray zone when the moral calculus so dictates. Military and civilian contingency planners should actively consider scenarios for which Security Council action is neither present nor immediately forthcoming. Operating in an international legal gray zone will require tremendous investments of political and diplomatic capital, especially with respect to allies reluctant to act without clear legal authority. But the potential payoff can be high not only in terms of immediate humanitarian imperatives but also in shaping the future legal environment in ways more responsive to such needs. As the Kosovo crisis shows, operating this way in cases of urgent humanitarian necessity inevitably shapes the future normative terrain, especially as international bodies react ex post facto and the precedential value of actions are debated. For the United States, this means it must conduct its diplomacy and justify publicly its actions in ways to promote long-term a more protective regime. Meanwhile, those states sceptical of or hostile to a more human rights– protective regime must come to see it as in their own long-term interests to facilitate rather than undermine timely and decisive action.
Take all of the above, replace “United States” with “Russia” and consider what Russia has done and said not just since 2014 but since the day James Baker told Gorbachev “not one inch further east”.
The boy who is going to cry wolf?
In an interview with RT on Thursday, Eduard Basurin, a spokesperson for the forces of the unrecognized Donetsk People's Republic, outlined details of an alleged plot to conduct a false flag operation in Ukraine's two breakaway eastern regions. Without providing evidence to back up the assertion, he claimed that commandos under the control of Kiev are planning to wear the uniforms of the Russian special forces as well as those of local fighters.
A report on The Vineyard of The Saker dated January 31, 2022 claimed that the same “top level Russian LDNR military official, Col. Edward Basurin”, stated that the US was preparing false flag propaganda footage of a Russian invasion of Ukraine that would serve as a pretext for US NATO offensives against Russia. Check the link in The Saker article then go right down for info on the false flag footage and sourcing related to it.
Next, the US came out and said on February 3, 2022, the same thing about Russia i.e. it could and/or might make a false flag propaganda video of a Ukrainian attack as a pretext to invade Ukraine.
RT* also carried an article by Paul Robinson on February 5, 2022, which questions the veracity of the intelligence process.
The Daily Mail carried a lengthy article about Basurin’s claim on February 7, 2022 and there are reports of it in other British news outlets.
There might be a subtle difference between the reports of Basurin’s claim and the US State Department’s claim in that Basurin is reported to have said in slightly greater detail who is making the false flag footage, roughly where and how, and provided a code name. The US State Department vaguely said the Russians “could” and “might” make one but whether they will or not the US doesn’t know. You have to listen to the language as Matt Lee did.
Who was telling the truth, if any was being told?
There's a saying, “I'd rather be first than be right.”. Modern corporate journalism is propaganda, and there's practically nothing to lose for being “not right” and everything to gain by being first.
If you cannot be first, you can always look like you're first by stopping someone else's scoop from entering your reality bubble. In this case, the US has been neither first nor completely censored the Russian false flag announcement before seemingly aping it.
On one level, in the absence of solid evidence it’s almost like children pointing fingers at each other and saying, “he’s going to do it, not me!”, which is one step away from full-on thought crime. These are state actors making accusatory statements for political reasons with potentially maximal consequences. At the extreme, it is only Russia and its allies that will hold the US and its allies to account, or vice versa and all the players have nukes. That’s the worst kind of accountability. What about an arm-wrestle, huh? Loser buys the beer.
Both sides are effectively unaccountable in international law, as shown over the last 40+ years. The US, Russia and China have not ratified the Rome Statue so do not recognize the ICC. Despite having ratified the Rome Statute, the UK has not been tried for crimes in the illegal invasion of Iraq. None of a handful of soldiers charged with offences were convicted.
Moreover, there is a problem with “evidence”. The US has shown that it is willing and able to cry wolf. It has repeatedly presented fake evidence to the UN in order to conduct illegal invasions and it does not present any evidence to anyone when it executes a drone strike wherever it wants. It also lies about evidence of its own war crimes (see Collateral Murder) then it will hunt down and slowly kill the publisher of that evidence and try to do similar to its source. The problematic MH-17 shootdown is difficult to pick apart for many reasons, partly because there is plenty of disputed “evidence” from all sides.
The pre-emptive declarations of impending false flags were made before the Russian invasion. Since then, this tactic has remained in play but on a net basis, it looks to us like Russia has made more accurate calls and done less of the big bad things.
Russia has been blamed for Nord Stream (but quickly cleared), Bucha, stealing a lot of children, and blowing a dam, as well as being accused of intending to destroy a nuclear powerplant it occupies using means the IAEA itself refuted.
Ukraine has been blamed for Nord Stream by its allies, faking Bucha i.e. executing a murderous false flag, hosting biolabs doing illegal work, being involved in heavy corruption with the US administration, committing massive theft and fraud of money, weapons and supplies, blowing a dam, blowing civilian ammonia caches, and attempting to acquire caesium-137 for a dirty bomb. It has also admitted to duplicity over the Minsk agreements and to various terrorist attacks and assassinations since the war started. The US has been involved with most of these actions, especially the bigger ones, which strikes us as the same or worse than letting Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran.
Overlaps with the past?
How much overlap is there between Iraq and Ukraine?
Pretext became fact. The Russian invasion happened for reasons that were clearly articulated by Russia and which it hasn’t radically changed.
A Western narrative has been aggressively spun up into polarizing “us vs them”, “one for all and all for one” NATO-based sloganeering supported by a corporate media stance of “with us or without us” messaging. The Russian counter narrative straddles its individual sovereignty and what it determines to be existential threats, and principles of multipolarity that unite its allies and strategic partners in BRICS+, CSTO etc.
The gang was readymade via NATO, even if some of the EU gang members were and still are squirming and looking for other doors, just like in the Iraq run up. The Western gang pre-existed the invasion and was actively involved in setting up the conflict through political and military activities in Ukraine since before 2014.
War is business. The Western war economy has hit another gold mine and expansion of NATO is good business in many senses (unless you’re not in NATO).
Overlaps with the Covid narrative?
As Covid narrative became locked in a tailspin of its own making, the War On Russia narrative was a handy replacement. Personally, I doubt that is a coincidence on either side, but the rationales are not necessarily the same. An apparent global insanity was replaced by another global insanity that this time carries a real existential threat potential. So we’ve really got something to fear now, haven’t we?
In terms of the pattern of the War on Covid and the past and possibly upcoming actual wars:
The virus pretext stemmed from Chinese lockdown in the absence of any evidence and was increasingly contradicted as time went on. This is akin to almost every Western war of the 20th and 21st century.
The narrative aggressively expanded across political, financial and legal spectra, spun up into polarizing “vaxed vs unvaxed”, “one for all and all for one” WEF lockstep sloganeering and is supported by corporate media.
The gang is obviously any nation that has signed up for gene therapies and tries to get them into its people, but it is also any gene therapy evangelist including individual vaccinators, such is the extent of the gang this time around.
Health and fear is great business running in an unvirtuous circle. Citizens are simply the feedstock of the pharma money machine and the consumers of junk that puts them in that position in the first place. Are you buying a cure or treatment for that medical issue? When’s the end point for your issue management? What was its cause (so others can avoid it) and what is the real fix (if one exists)?
Equally, war is an unvirtuous circle that creates enemies amongst its survivors. Thus, as pharma makes most money from treatments and not cures, bombs are war treatments for political disagreements and not cures that bring about world peace.
The Forever War on Everything
Russia and China issued a joint statement that essentially states that the American Empire is over and that the world is now and should continue under a multipolar power paradigm. Superficially, what Russia was proposing in its treaty was for this to be agreed and for what it characterizes as the perceived, one-sided, threatening over-reach of the US hegemony to stop. It has made such calls for many years and now it does so in explicit terms, with reversion to the UNSC and UN Charter as the backstop to cooperative development under a Balance of Power (BOP).
The US and UK are in lockstep presenting a single message that “Russia is evil and we are trying to stop it the right way”. The EU has been radically coerced to remain onboard. NATO appears to have problems staying on message. Stoltenberg recently recognised Russia’s version of events leading up to the invasion, having previously ignored it. Whether the situation today is actually good for Europe, NATO and the world is highly debateable.
The early failure to fully reflect Russian diplomatic communications in official statements from the US and UK grew to near total diplomatic collapse. Germany and France were not even “sovereign enough” to keep going against the US hegemony and actually stop war when they were trying in the early days.
It grows increasingly clear that Ukraine and the present administration is being cut loose. The mood towards Zelensky has soured, the money’s drying up and the weapons are running low. Progress is insufficient. Corruption exposures and contradictions of Ukrainian claims and declarations about aspects of the conflict continue to be seeded throughout the Western press.
There is a major obvious difference between Cold War 2.0 and Cold War 1.0. The globalization that the US hegemony and the G3P has pursued since Cold War 1.0 has effectively integrated Russia and China into the power structure in political, financial and broader economic terms. Without the Chinese sweatshop, American society will falter despite pockets of onshoring and the necessary lead time to onshore more, which inherently drives inflation due to higher US labor costs and supply switch outs. The narrative about the Russian economy and its exports in a post sanctions world is false. Russian exports are still being bought by the West, notably energy and fertilizer. Russian economic information shows it is in growth and bypassing sanctions through its strategic and trade relationships who are all increasingly de-dollarising to maintain and grow their relationships.
America is largely a war economy that is integrated by the nature of its hegemon, but it is not independent of that hegemon nor is it independent of its competitors. In practical terms, as the dominant power, it is free of the constraints of international law. These dependencies and that freedom have been frequently exposed but by none more so than Wikileaks, whose publications of secrets have never been shown to be false. Wikileaks exposed to the greatest extent, the scale of the US hegemon’s mechanisms of power and also its corruptions and therefore its freedom and independence from moral, legal and ethical constraints.
Why does Western political leadership constantly adopt war footing and war language on most major issues?
The War on Poverty, Hunger, Drugs, Terrorism, Covid, Climate Change and any adversary the West selects for whatever reason puts populations into a constant cycle of endless war against some enemy.
Setting aside their global integration and dependencies, assuming that Russia and China are actually enemies of the West, what kind of enemies are they? They are not overt military economies in terms of force projection - the US hegemon checked their ability to project for a while - but they are the world’s second and fifth global arms exporters and wield effective nuclear deterrents that underpin a de facto military BOP. Both Russia and China spend less on defence but are clearly more than a match for the USA, especially with hypersonic missiles.
Without nuclear weapons, the US couldn’t win an invasive war against Russia or China. With them, what’s left to win? NATO expansion theoretically provides a gang close enough to Russian borders to contain Russia until those gang members bottle it and lose motivation or belief. In reality, this means nothing if Russia never intended to take over Europe. In practical terms, Russia is ahead on the arms race and militarisation curve so NATO nations are now committed to pissing their dwindling money up the wall on weapons and armies at the expense of every other aspect of their societies.
The Ukraine war has tricked NATO nations into waging economic and sociopolitical war against themselves to the point that EU members are in increasing conflict with each other about immigration, refugees, resources and monetary support for Ukraine. Russia does not appear to have such internal strife as long as the Putin administration can maintain sufficient support for its strategy over whatever timeframe is required, which is likely to be less than NATO is telling itself.
Controversy Erupts After Ambassador Says Ukraine 'Flexible' On Joining NATO
Russia using Nord Stream 2 as ‘geopolitical weapon’, Zelensky warns Germany’s Scholz
China and Russia, it could be argued, are managing to effectively compete on a Full Spectrum Dominance basis via soft power on economic, intelligence, espionage, information and financial fronts while efficiently maintaining sufficient hard power to redress a BOP that diminished at the end of Cold War 1.0. Hunter Biden’s laptop contains evidence of financial ties between the Biden family’s personal wealth, Ukraine and China. That information alone is a weapon wielded against the minds of the US population in ways that are directly undermining the US political system. Simultaneously, Russia and China construct a global network to compete with the US hegemon through means that are not overtly, conventionally militarized. Bypassing the SWIFT payment system and doing bilateral deals with each other and their Eurasian “partners” is a bypass of US power.
What does fighting that threat look like? Why has the US fomented that threat by building up China into what it is today, if it wanted to remain unopposed on the global stage? You might not be able to buy Russian natural resources from anywhere other than Russia, but you can outsource manufacturing capacity across the globe to even out your competitors’ economic development if you have a long-term, balanced view of power and wealth distribution. If you maintain a short-term greed-based view of next year’s profits, you might just dump all your business into the one country that will do whatever you want, whenever you want. Thirty years later and what has China become? Why? If China has become your enemy today because of you, are you your own worst enemy of all time?
Cold War 2.0 could, to some extent, continue a bigger picture pretext: the world’s supposed continuing need for the US hegemony’s war machine economy as an essential counterbalance to threats from the East, so the fear and threat narrative will be persisted even if it must be inverted. This is the China narrative. China is supposedly acting aggressively but remains within its borders while the US grows its presence in the South China Sea and the vicinity.
Whether mankind can discern between truth and lies depends upon each person’s capacity to question what they are being told or shown, hence why the US, EU and UK have all implemented the most totalitarian information and online access legislation ever seen.
In order for an all-encompassing war economy to exist, there must be war. On Everything.
The China war narrative will be used to drive “recovery and rebuild” after Ukraine. But War against China cannot be won and will be a war against China and Russia. VST expects that instead, the USA will actually open the war front against Mexico under the pretext of excessive cartel activity. This will be the perfect war to control - on its doorstep, against a far weaker nation, with massive room to take control of assets and the drugs trade, then rebuild the nation afterwards.
Ukraine: Mission Accomplished
George W. Bush declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq before it descended into a full blown insurgency and national collapse because of the USA’s actions in theatre that involved indiscriminate shock-and-awe air campaigns, the alienation and total dissolution of the Ba’ath Party and the entire Iraqi army, and the total failure to understand what that meant or prepare adequately ahead of time.
How will the West declare “mission accomplished” in Ukraine, especially if it does not militarily win?
It will simply say that the objective in Ukraine was never to win, but to just harass and extend Russia, per its printed strategy. That the USA has done that is victory on its terms, irrespective of the state of Ukraine and the West afterwards. That will be a pure inversion of truth but 60% of people will believe it because they will be told to believe it before the narrative switches back to Covid 2.0 and then full on China.
Meanwhile, the war economy will continue to collapse for those who are not employed or invested in the business of war, but the drums will keep beating the pattern of war to drown out the screams and objections.
But who is trying to transition to a peace economy? What does such a thing look like?
What do the beats of peace sound like?
Just as my fingernails are painted with the pigment from the balsam flowers,
my heart is painted with the teachings of my parents.Although the galaxies in the sky are countable,
the love and wisdom of my parents are not.Just as the ships that run in the night are guided to safety by the polestar,
I am guided by the parents who birthed me and watch over me.Just as there's no point in owning splendid jewelry if you don't maintain it,
human beings who maintain their souls will live life wonderfully.The wishes of he who lives sincerely always come true and he prospers.
You can do anything if you try, but you can't if you don't.
Spotify: Tinsagunu Hana - Takaesu Shohei
2015:
2019
Good stuff
Thank you.