Ukraine and the Zombie Apocalypse, by Sackerson

Thank goodness President Biden is taking on Russia. What would it be like to live in a country where the people are under constant surveillance and their movements restricted, journalists jailed or held without trial, the internet censored… oh…

As to the last, shall we conduct a little experiment? If you use Facebook, try copying and entering this link:

https://orientalreview.org/2021/12/09/putin-rejects-bidens-demand-that-the-u-s-take-control-over-the-negotiations-between-ukraine-and-its-former-donbass-region/

You should get this response from Zuckerman’s Metaverse:

orientalreview.org

Your post couldn’t be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards

If you think that this doesn’t go against our Community Standards, let us know.

Now Oriental Review isn’t about porn, phishing, Trumpism or racism; but it offers a different narrative from the one submitted to us by ‘Tankie’ Liz Truss https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/11/30/liz-truss-ukraine-russia-tank-war-invasion/and newbie Defence Staff Chief Toby Radakin https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10290237/Ukraine-conflict-biggest-World-War-II.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490. Doubtless the Review has its own agenda (a wicked one, natch, never forget that Vlad is ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’), but the point here is that Zuckers has now gone bootheels-up into the rabbit-hole of political censorship. Maybe the time has come for social media and their ‘fact-checkers’ to put our moribund traditional news channels out of their misery, get together and set up their electric neo-Pravda while we’re waiting to go full Matrix.

For there can be no alternative view. This is the age of Möbius-strip https://www.britannica.com/science/Mobius-stripdiscussion, as we see with the Wokeists, whose attitude on all topics is ‘you may think there are two sides to every argument, but in reality there is only one, the correct side, and we’re on it.’ Already Western students are re-enacting the Chinese Cultural Revolution by denouncing their teachers; how long before they invade the parks and begin tearing up the ‘bourgeois grass’? https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/exposing-mao-20050710-ge0hld.html

Wait, what? Surely the Lefties are about material progress; the whole raison d’être of Britain’s Labour Party and the USA’s Democrats is to help the working class prosper to the point where their politicians aren’t needed any more. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice’ https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/31/travel/l-wren-s-epitaph-195156.html- or ‘Job done’ as our Boy Scout Bob-A-Job-Week stickers used to say. Not!

If the Left is good, surely the Commies are gooder? Ah, but the Russians aren’t Commies any more; maybe that’s what’s wrong with them. Hillary put her finger on it during her 2016 Presidential election campaign, according to the NYT last month https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/opinion/hillary-clinton-biden-trump.html– the Russkies are part of a global ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ that prompted Putin to support Trump.

Just not Red enough. Maybe that’s why, after Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ – attempts at reform and international rapprochement (until the CIA just had to go one more nuke-targeting overflight, get Gary Powers shot down and force K into the grisly arms of his Moscow hawks), Nixon and the State Department chose to build bridges with China instead – even as the evil Mao was still in his bed, reading about Chinese emperors for despotism tips when he wasn’t making serial use of starry-eyed Red nymphets; China, which had regarded Khrushchev and his government as despicable revisionists and traitors to the pure Marxism-Leninism they themselves espoused.

Yes, the USA gave its productive capacity to an ideological mortal enemy, the Chinese; feeding the dragon and impoverishing Fred Flintstone was a small price to pay for making the American elite insanely rich; rich enough to buy decommissioned nuclear bunkers in America’s midWest and boltholes in New Zealand for when it all goes very wrong for the plebs.

Meanwhile there is the proximate goal of Democrat wins in the 2022 elections. Western governments have seen how easy it is to corral the people if you scare the pants off them with a nasty but far from apocalyptic viral episode; now for Russia to fulfil its historic role once more: to distract Western voters from their own socioeconomic failures.

For it is ‘the economy, stupid.’ After a decade (the 1950s) in which the Soviet economy had been growing twice as fast as Britain’s, PM Harold Macmillan wrote (December 1960) to President Kennedy:

‘What is going to happen to us unless we can show that our modern free society – the new form of capitalism – can make the fullest use of our resources and results in a steady expansion of our economic strength… If we fail in this, Communism will triumph, not by war, or even subversion, but by seeming to be a better way of bringing people material comforts. In other words, if we were to fall back into anything like the recession or crisis that we had between the wars, with large-scale unemployment of men and machines, I think we would have lost the hand.’

-          Quoted in ‘Macmillan: The Official Biography’ by Alistair Horne (Macmillan, 1988)

It looks as though the West has lost the plot, for the East is beginning to show us up. Mao starved millions by swapping the peasant’s harvests for Stalin’s modern weaponry; today, so my brother says, ‘I just watched an interview with a Chinese industrialist who was educated at Stanford University, who noted that the infrastructure in the US amazed him when he came in the early 1970′s, and now appears to be inferior to much of China’s.’ As for the Satanic right-wingers of Russia, crushed by Western sanctions, they are currently the world’s biggest exporters of wheat, so much so that they have been limiting that trade to keep prices down at home. https://www.world-grain.com/articles/14975-focus-on-russia

My brother, a martial artist, has told me a twisted strategy to use if you wish to attack someone: start hitting them while at the same time calling for help from passers-by. What if those Russian forces massing near the Ukrainian border are actually a defensive posture, a warning? Read the Review if you’d like to learn some of their take on the background to all this; maybe there’s a third side to the Möbius strip. You don’t have to accept it, but at least remove the Zuckergoggles.

Here’s a reading I’ll offer you, as a theoretical perspective: Putin has no interest in European conquest, but wishes to make sure his Western border is secure (and NATO missiles kept more than ten minutes’ flight away from Moscow) so that he can concentrate on a larger project – a Eurasian trade corridor https://en.paperblog.com/trans-asian-corridor-of-development-russia-s-super-canal-to-unite-eurasia-734226/. His gas lines to Germany and other Western countries are vulnerable in the Ukraine, and even Blue Stream (heading for Turkey) passes through the Donbass; the Yamal line is equally a potential hostage in Belarus; so Nord Stream 2, bypassing both nations, sidesteps mischief-making by them and also by third parties that may find such trouble convenient for their own domestic political purposes. Could this explain Biden’s opposition to the near-finished construction? https://www.brookings.edu/research/nord-stream-2-background-objections-and-possible-outcomes/

If we can remove our virtual-unreality specs we may see that this is the age of Four Empires: the US, tearing itself apart under socioeconomic stress and one of its periodic spasms of hysterical Asleepening; the EU, falling apart because it really doesn’t believe that ‘alle menschen werden brüder’, especially the PIIGS; China, ruthlessly emptying the seas of fish and gaining by international loans and bribery what America has failed to do by indiscriminate bombing; and a Russia trying to build an Eastern EU to promote the security and prosperity of the world’s largest and still desperately-underpopulated country (and feeling windy about the tempting natural assets in Eastern Siberia that China must covet.)

Too boring; back to the basement for a few more hours of Zombie Apocalypse.