Motus Mentis

Philip K. Dick once said that “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

A great many people, including myself, have seen, and said, for a very long time now that there was never going to be any “victory” over Russia in Ukraine. Yet for the last two years we in America have tagged our lawns and social-media profiles with blue-and-yellow flags; have been conditioned to hate Russia even more than we already did; have welcomed the shameless grifter Zelenskyy into our bosoms and feted him in Washington; have sent $73 billion to that most corrupt of nations, without the slightest attempt to keep track of where it went; have sent Ukraine vast amounts of military equipment and ordnance, much of which has later appeared on international black markets, and badly depleting our own supplies; and worst of all, we have prolonged this futile war long enough to reduce much of the country to rubble, and to send hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to pointless and unnecessary deaths. Even now the campaign continues. Not only are women now dying at the front, but new categories previously exempt are now to be conscripted:

1) Missing/blind in one eye, or equivalent.
2) Severe hearing impairment
3) Tracheotomy
4) Jaw defects
5) Dwarfism (>130cm for Males)
6) Missing/non functional upper limb or equivalent.

All of these people are just being sent to die. Those who can are getting out, and they won’t be coming back; Ukraine is rapidly depopulating. Many of those who can’t leave are aged pensioners, now supported by U.S. taxpayers.

In short: between our backing of revolution in 2014, our relentless expansion of NATO despite promises to the contrary, our support of a regime that ruthlessly oppressed ethnic Russians in eastern oblasts, and our insouciant promotion and malevolent prolongation of this useless war, the GAE’s Imperial Court has effectively reduced Ukraine to a failed state, just as we had already done so effectively elsewhere. Meanwhile, we’ve also managed, with all the subtle dexterity that has characterized our foreign policy for decades now, to weaken and alienate our vassal states in Europe, accelerate the de-dollarization of the world economy, and drive our global rivals into closer relations. What we have done in Ukraine will be a bloody and permanent stain on what little remains of our nation’s honor.

But, reality having that habit of not going away, and with Ukraine obviously at the point of total collapse, we seem finally to have reached the point where we give up, find someone to blame, and slink away to find another country to wreck.

None of this had to happen. All of it could have been avoided.

But that’s not how we roll.