It’s good to see that Lewis Anselm, AKA “Diplomad”, is blogging again. Anselm, having spent his professional career working for the State Department all over the world, is always especially good on international affairs, and he’s just posted an excellent item on Ukraine. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll quote one longish passage for you:
The big opportunity to repair US-Russian relations came with the advent of Donald Trump to the White House. Trump was the American Putin when it came to foreign affairs. He placed America’s interests first and had no trouble calling out the phony nature of the NATO alliance. Trump insisted on re-establishing America’s energy independence, rebuilding its military-industrial base, and ending needless wars and adventures overseas. Putin knew that Trump was the kind of leader who would pull the trigger but would not be the first to put the gun on the table. The repairing of US-Russian relations, of course, was sabotaged by a relentless four-year campaign by the DNC to label Trump as Putin’s puppet–when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the same people involved in promoting that destructive lie now hold senior positions in the Biden administration, including National Security Advisor Sullivan and the fraud who holds the title of President.
Let us not forget that the Biden family has gotten rich thanks to Ukraine.
This brings me to my reluctance to cheer unabashedly for Ukraine.
We have been lied to and manipulated so much in the past few years that it is now difficult to separate fact from fiction. Let me be blunt: I don’t like or trust many of the people now pulling for Ukraine. I know that might sound childish or unfair, but I am suspicious of the nearly unanimous reporting beaming at us from the networks, right and left. We hear calls from otherwise once sane people for the murder of Putin; never heard these calls for the murder of the head of the USSR.
We certainly don’t hear the Russian side of the story; in fact, the same people who were lukewarm at best on opposing the USSR, promoted the Trump-Putin collusion nonsense, and lied and hid the truth about the rigged 2020 elections are now busy ensuring that we can’t hear or read the Russian version of events.
Just so: the story here is far more complicated than the deafening media Gigaphone would have you believe. Under the Obama administration we ourselves toppled a democratically elected Ukrainian government, back in 2014; the place is profoundly corrupt, and has long been used as a money-laundering facility for powerful interests around the globe (including, as Diplomad points out, the Biden family, coverage of whose Ukraine-related grift was vigorously tamped down by the American media all through the 2020 presidential campaign). Ukraine isn’t even really a natural “nation” at all: there are profound differences of culture and affinity between its western population and the ethnic Russians in the east (who have, as is historically commonplace wherever Diversity becomes problematic, been subjected to stiff oppression).
In short, the whole thing is a tangled, stinking mess — of the sort that seems to happen again and again throughout history — and there aren’t a lot of “good guys” to root for in any direction. Read the rest of Dip’s post here.
4 Comments
Thank you for the link to Diplomad. I agreed with every word, down to the nibs. You are reliable and dependable for a solid comment and link.
It is maddening, nonetheless, to have one’s opinion confirmed, to perceive the folly of media and statesmen alike, causing death and suffering upon innocent, hapless bystanders, and alarm and anxiety throughout the world.
It remains for ‘the dude’ to abide in the ratcheting tension of the moment and continue the search for sense and justification for hope.
Very interesting spin, thanks.
Putin needs to learn from Obama how to topple the Ukrainian government. It was very easy for Obama, who is a rather stupid fool. But even with 200,000 soldiers and massive bombing and artillery, Putin doesn’t know how to do it.
You don’t think the Ukrainian people themselves have anything to do with any of this, do you? I always like to think that it is the leaders of countries who do everything and that the people have nothing to do with it.
Ivan,
I don’t think Putin “doesn’t know how to do it”. I have enough respect for his shrewdness and experience to imagine that he’s doing exactly what he wants to do.
I also doubt that it’s going nearly as badly for him as some would have us believe. It is standard Russian operating procedure to use weaker forces to probe and exhaust the enemy, then only put in the best-equipped, best-trained forces in a second or third wave.
That’s all I’ll say, though, as the fog of war (and infowar) is very thick right now. But I would believe very little that you see or hear, and I would be very hesitant to join the hysteria of holiness that has swept American media and NPCs over this.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/04/11/casualty/
And then there’s the Beltway Bravadeers (Hello Lindsay Graham!) who all, for whatever purpose, can’t get enough of this ‘War war war’ shit rather than jawboning.