Open Thread

Really interesting article on possible long-term Russian plans. They are proofing out how to create and enforce a large-scale one-sided DMZ. I suspect this will be used as part of the strategic arsenal for managing their sector of Ukraine, rather than just creating a giant DMZ out of North-Western Ukraine.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/11/ukraine-armistice-how-the-ukraine-demilitarized-zone-of-2023-will-separate-the-armies-like-the-korean-dmz-of-1953.html

Putin likes to create “frozen conflict” where he can kick the can down in the general direction of an imaginary road presumably waiting until there is a road. The Americans like a prolonged, preferably perpetual war that generates incomes for people in the Washington beltway. Does Putin strike an implicit bargain where he gives the beltway vampires what they want, somehow? Helmer seems to be trying to find a scenario where Putin does.

There’s a certain sort of fantasist who becomes a “journalist” or news junkie and likes nothing better than applying their limited knowledge of world affairs to pretending to be Lord Curzon with a map. Russian media, with a war underway in “brother-country” Ukraine (that no doubt makes many, many Russians anxious about a lot of issues — “how authoritarian is Putin and what will his extreme-right allies demand in the culture wars?” among them), is full of speculation and cheerleading unopposed by sense (because expressing more than a modicum of good sense, empathy or humanitarian concern will get you fired if not jailed and the authorities make them very, very clear). John Helmer, who as far as I know hasn’t been anywhere near Russia in more than a decade, and figures like Gilbert Doctorow, are drawing from that mad milieu.

It is impossible to know what is going thru the minds of Putin and Lavrov and others. Putin, characteristically, has apparently made an implicit bargain with fairly unsavory actors like the Chechen Ramzon Kadyrov or the mercenary Wagner Group — maybe on the theory that it takes a neo-Nazi to de-nazify a neo-Nazi.

What one sees in public and official utterances is disgust at the agreement-incapable West. Without a wholesale change in personnel with power in the U.S. foreign policy establishment or German political leadership or EU or NATO political leadership, it is genuinely difficult to see a way forward to a cessation of hostilities. Up to now, in those places, some conservative resistance to the moralistic crazy has put limits on what the U.S. and its vassals in Europe have been willing to do. But, Ukraine fatigue is setting in — what does Ukraine fatigue portend? does it wear down the impulse to use perpetual war to get at Russia? or does it wear down the acceptance of sensible restraints placed on Ukrainian proxies or NATO principals and make escalation to rescue a losing position plausible?

If I were Russian, I think I know what I would hope for: a Ukrainian patriotism (encompassing a Slavic kinship for Russia, natch) and a sense of national self-interest that would want to supplant Zelensky’s regime with one focused on rescuing a rump with a future. To my mind, Putin seems to be implicitly offering a bargain that would permit that. The destruction of the electrical system, with its focus on transmission and distribution facilities — leaving generation alone — creates a situation in which Russia is the only conceivable source of rapid reconstruction (being the only source of 330v equipment in quantity). Leaving Odessa alone for the time being is also an offer in a way — a rump Ukraine with Odessa is economically viable.

What is to be feared, of course, is what Helmer is speculating about: a revanchist rump dominated by crazy neo-Nazi’s with nothing left to lose. (Having nothing-to-lose is a big part of the foundation of Ukrainian extreme right-wing nationalism as it is.) Continually supported by the perpetual war lobby in the U.S., of course.

I do not know if the Russians can do anything to create a Ukrainian regime willing to concede vast territory for peace. The West, presumably would cut such a regime off from economic aid in a heartbeat and finance counter-revolution lavishly as they have the past two color revolutions. We are here because that is not a game Russia has been winning.

Are the Russians waiting on regime change in Europe? The Polish government is openly hostile to Germany — that’s not going to go down well in Germany and is likely to drive a relatively rapid and radical reassessment of Germany’s political self-image, at the same time that de-industrialization is destroying its economic foundation and the weakness of its military has been made embarrassingly obvious. The long-anticipated Italian banking / public debt crisis will come to a climax eventually, undermining the EU even as it weakens. The UK seems on the verge of meltdown and breakup as one Tory coup follows another — next up is the Labour-Tory Keir Starmer — that is surely not going to go well. Especially if their idea of rescuing the UK from the terrible consequences of a mismanaged Brexit is to again tie Britain to the EU, just as the EU sinks like the Titanic after hitting the iceberg.

The Hilbots went nuts when Comey reopened the investigation based on Weiner’s laptop. The DNC put a total media wide suppression on the eventually-determined-to-be-true Hunter laptop story, and Twitter censorship was a large part of that. And to their lasting discredit, the NYT and the Bezos Shopper went right along. (Democracy dies in Darkness–a little ironic, that!) And then there was the 30 “defense and intelligence analysts” dissing it (based on no information at all).

Pretty stunning, the entire media galaxy revealed to be nothing but a propaganda tool of the DNC. And watch the new tweetstorm–about 95% of them use the exact phrase “Doing PR for the richest man in the world.” Almost as if the memo came down from the Ministry of Propaganda, or something

Journalism, it aint. I used to think Mass Formation Psychosis was a joke. I’m not laughing anymore.