Post Scriptum: Can We Stop Armageddon?
Yes, we can. But to prevent it, more people need to wake up. We all need to do something to prevent NATO's push to start World War 3 and build a global Reich.
I ended my last article with the conclusion that eventually there must be either a total U.S. or a total Russian victory in this conflict. Some of you had questions about that; so, let me clarify.
We’re witnessing an epic clash of civilizations and ideologies. Peace is impossible. Temporary truces might be negotiated, but this would be done in order to buy time to rearm for future hostilities. One of the two opponents must eventually collapse and be vanquished. In the first Cold War, the USSR collapsed. And this current confrontation will also end with one opponent collapsing and in total internal disarray.
Over the past 30 years, the West has repeatedly proved itself thoroughly deceitful, untrustworthy and violent. NATO’s ultimate goal is the destruction of Russian statehood, and the ethnic cleansing of Donbass and Crimea. Russia is fighting for its survival, and sees no point in negotiating with an obsessed and implacable enemy.
The leading war correspondent Chris Hedges aptly describes NATO as “a global war machine” whose members have almost 1,000 bases worldwide that are used to threaten and intimidate any country that tries to act independently.
NATO justifies its global ambitions on the grounds that it acts in mankind’s best interests and that its civilization is superior to others, as top EU foreign affairs official, Joseph Borrell, recently told the world. We’ve heard such specious and racist logic before — in Germany in the 1930s-40s.
In order for Russia (and humankind) to triumph over NATO, the current system of Western totalitarian liberalism must be entirely dismantled and replaced with the classical liberal system that we had prior to 2009. (I peg the birth of totalitarian liberalism to the rise of Barack Obama).
By a Russian victory, I don’t mean an invasion of the U.S. and Europe; its flag won’t fly over the U.S. Capitol like the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945. But without outright conquest, how might Russia secure victory?
A Russian victory would be possible in the wake of an epic financial and economic crisis that brings the West to its knees, giving pro-freedom groups an opportunity to regain power. The war in Ukraine is precisely a quagmire draining NATO resources, leading to a rapid rise in energy prices, interest rates and inflation.
I suspect Moscow is deliberately conducting the war in such a way as to eventually precipitate a financial and economic crisis in the West. I first raised this idea a year ago, and in the coming weeks I’ll return to this and give it a fresh analysis.
Also, there’s been much talk about how the rise of BRICs could ignite such a crisis. De-dollarization is a crucial policy of BRICs, whose membership is expanding. As more and more countries ditch the dollar, the U.S. has to further increase interest rates, which in turn fuels economic instability in the West.
Yes, a financial and economic crisis is highly likely. But when? Next month, or in five years? Hard to say. I’m always amazed at how the financial wizards in New York and London can dig themselves out of a pit, often by printing more money and devising slicker scams. So, the NATO beast might lumber on for quite a few more years.
I came of age in the late 1970s, in the wake of the brutal U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, growing up in the family of a U.S. government worker. Foreign policy was always discussed at home. Like most Americans, we said “Never again” to foreign wars and mass murder. Our hope was that the U.S. would atone for its wickedness and finally be a force for peace.
Then, in 1991, the Cold War ended with the USSR’s disintegration. We were told that it was “the end of history”. No more wars. The U.S. was the sole superpower and we’d all benefit from the “peace dividend”. A new era had begun. Indeed, the period 1992 to 2020 was an era of rapid economic growth for the global community. But it was also a time of troubling geopolitical developments that set the scene for today’s tragedy.
Starting in 1990, a small group of powerful people in Washington and London began to plot a “New World Order”. When I first heard those words uttered by George Bush Sr, I was deeply troubled; we knew it was code for a veritable Fourth Reich. In 1990, the Bush administration promised the Kremlin that it wouldn’t expand NATO eastward as the Soviets pulled their troops out of Eastern Europe. In fact, such expansion was secretly the goal from Day 1 after the Soviet collapse.
Fast forward to 2022-2023. Today’s war in Ukraine is entirely due to NATO expansion. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or grossly misinformed. Bringing the world’s most powerful and aggressive military alliance (NATO) right to the Russian border was naturally going to provoke a forceful response from Moscow.
“How dare those Russians have the world’s largest country, with so much natural wealth! It should all be ours.” I imagine this is what Western oligarchs and leaders say behind closed doors. The malevolent Western ambition has always been to seize the Eurasian landmass, and we’re now watching that plan unfold.
No matter how heroic Russian soldiers defend their people and land, this epic war can only be won in western capitals. And for that to happen, the people of these countries must snap out of their stupor and overcome their fear. They’ll need to rise up to topple the totalitarian liberal regimes, and then build a new Western world that will engage the global community as an equal and not as a predator.
Bravo! A great clarification of your previous post, "How will Biden start a full-fledged war with Russia?" It fully expands on what I tried to hint at in my comment there.
As if saving the world from WWIII isn't reason enough, "Americans waking up," as you say, is actually very much in our own best interest. Why? Chalmers Johnson explains this best in his "Sorrows of Empire" series of books. In short, no country in history has ever remained for long, both an empire abroad and a democracy at home. Our domestic decline, and fading democracy, is very much in line with the consequences of empire he predicts.
So if "We all need to do something," then what is that something? The first step, of course, is that Americans must see through elite propaganda and fully realize that Russia is not a threat to them. This is the essential work you are doing. Knowledge is imperative, but then what do we do with it? There needs to be general consensus on the answer to this question. In the past, organized labor was a big part of the answer, but the power of labor has been both crushed and co-opted. Look at what happened to the railroad strikers last year: Biden simply used the power of the state to outlaw their strike!
I have an idea of what needs to happen, but a critical mass of people must agree.
"The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside." - Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987.
Harry Truman who created the CIA, regretted it in an Opinion piece in The Washington Post December 22, 1963 essentially saying the CIA went rogue.
Luckily I copied it years ago because no matter what search terms I use, Google can't find the original Washington Post article, and searching The Washington Post internal search machine, it still doesn't come up.
The Washington Post December 22, 1963 – page A11
Harry Truman Writes: Limit CIA Role To Intelligence
INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.
Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its “natural raw” state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism,“ ”exploitive capitalism,“ ”war-mongering,“ ”monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.