How The West Was Won: Russia’s Victory (Revised)

Note: In the box or out?

I wrote this before Scott Ritter posted his …umm….Ritterological essay on Consortium News, which is aimed at the so-called "pro-Russian” Western Left. Ritter and this segment of the Left suffer unfortunately from “Westernization”, which means that they struggle to go beyond the basic assumptions they are taught about war and conflict. They are in the box - not out. All they see is the toys in the box.

This is a new era —a new box, if you like — and those assumptions no longer hold. In fact, they are dangerous. I respect Ritter but he is over-rated.

After writing this article that follows here, I also listened to former CIA analyst Larry Johnson’s video on his site where he discusses Ukraine and Russia and world conflict with Gonzalo Lira, Brian Berletic and Alex Christoforou. Larry Johnson’s views reflect his CIA background; Ritter’s his indoctrination in Marine Corps philosophy. They both get details wrong sometimes as everyone does — but Johnson sees the big picture better. I go with Johnson. He is under-rated.

Check out both both urls!

Civilization against Savagery

Remember the classic, “How the West was Won” ? That was white people in the East moving “West” and slaughtering the Indians, who just wanted to be left alone. Now, “West” is the US and Europe and they are attacking the “East” which is Russia and China, who don’t want to be left alone, just want peaceful commerce.

The “East” has responded to this neo-colonial effort. And now it the West which is losing. It turns out that the East doesn’t need all those pretty but worthless baubles the West has to offer.

The Ukraine is just one skirmish in this updated saga — one new episode. But the end has never been in doubt.

The War that Wasn’t

Back in February, Scott Ritter predicted that the Russians would win the war against Western Ukraine in a week.

I figured it would take two weeks.

We were both more or less right.

By the beginning of March (or thereabouts) the Russians had degraded the UAF’s offensive capabilities to the extent that they no longer represented a real threat on the battlefield. After that, the UAF was unable to conduct a single successful counteroffensive, including Kharkov where the Ukrainians took territory that the Russians had first withdrawn from, in a strategic redeployment presaging the referenda in the Donbass, Kherson, Zaporozhe, and Lugansk.

As I said, the “war” ended in March setting the stage for constant Ukrainian defeat.

Then, the SMO began.

This unique Special Military Operation has virtually no precedent in armed conflict!

What “war” can you think of that aimed at preserving civilian life and infrastructure while destroying enemy military capabilities — with as few casualties as possible?

This conflict, moreover, is not just military — it is moral and mental and multidimensional . “Demilitarization” progresses alongside “denazification” and what I call “consolidation”, which means rebuilding and restructuring as you go along.

Already, Mariupol is being rebuilt, with schools opening and new businesses. People are happy. Compare that to Bagdad after the Americans took over.

The movie, “How the West was Won” was a fantasy that played to people’s prejudices and illusions. It conveniently left out greed, lust, and genocide — and all the sundry atrocities committed by the US.

In the same way, most people are locked into illusions about the Russian SMO.

Demilitarization

Take demilitarization. The objective of this is usually understood by Western observers to mean just destruction of the Ukrainian military — aka killing people. It is that, of course — but it’s real goal is to deprive power-mad crazies of the ability to kill innocent people, as they were from 2014 to 2022. The Russians did not “invade” Ukraine — they prevented Banderite Ukraine from invading the DPR and LPR.

Memorial to children killed by UAF shelling

As said, they did destroyed UAF offensive ability in just two weeks. But they didn’t stop there.

There can be only one!

With American and European sanctions on Russia — and also China — setting the stage for economic war with the same goals the U-boat war on shipping to the UK in WWII, the Russians perceived an existential threat.

The billions in military aid to the Ukraine have confirmed a serious commitment on the part of the West to hurting the East.

It is part of a larger “hybrid” war that began years ago, when the US realized it was in decline and faced for the first time real competition from a rising Russia and a booming China.

Dedollarization and a multipolar world were always inevitable. But now they seem attainable within a decade, rather than two or three. Kinda like climate change: things move fast once set in motion.

For the Americans, the Ukraine was just a convenient pivot point to leverage the breakup and dissolution of the Russian Federation as a first step to doing the same in China. Not that they had a real “plan”. The US doesn’t really “plan”, as the sneaky, weaky Russkies and Chinese do — the react. Planning is for wimps.

And, anyway, in the short term, the 500 or so billionaires who own defense companies can afford new islands in the Caribbean, no doubt soon joined by newly minted billionaire Zelensky.

For the Russians, Ukraine was the fulcrum to leverage real change globally. It wanted regional democracy and peace and if it could achieve that on its borders, it would promote a kind of international democracy in which all sovereign states are equal under some form of international law. Putin is a lawyer: he sees law as a way of preventing conflict. But all must be equal under the Law. Nor should justice be blind.

“Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty.”

Thomas Aquinas

Denazification?

Russia is not just de-nazifying the Ukraine, it is denazifying the West where neoliberal fascism masquerades as liberal democracy.

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

Even in the Ukraine, “denazification” is a lot more than just killing Azovs and their ilk. It is anti-fascist — that is, returning the state to its rightful owners.

The “Banderites” are not “Nazis' in the Hitlerian sense — rather they are a species of cultural fascists, with origins in the 1930s, more Polish than German, a natural aberration of classism and predatory capitalism.

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
― Benito Mussolini

Modern fascism is not so much an ideology as a psychopathic “mentality”, a melting pot of biases, prejudices, values and delusions, born of fear, anger, frustration and sheer cussedness — which serves the interests of a few over the many.

American fascism is mostly grooming and seduction. Traditional fascism is just rape. The point of both is domination and control — power.

Banderism is atavistic — hence called “Neo Nazi”. It is violently exclusivist and exceptionalist. All forms of fascism really seen only two classes of people — predators and prey. Stepan Bandera’s form was overt rather than covert.

Stepan Bandera: Mass Murderef and National Hero

So, Banderites consider Russian Slavs subhuman “orcs” who should be enslaved to serve them, driven out or simply exterminated if uncooperative.

The same would apply to Jews, gypsies, non-whites, gays and the like but since the Woke West supports Ukrainian Nazis, these people are safe — in the short term — as long as they toe the line.

Naturally, Banderites feel a certain bond with the Israelis, who are a.) “there” not “here” b.) supportive c.) exclusivist d.) as violent as they are. And the Zionists reciprocate — love, love. “Never Again” ? Really?

Israeli Atrocity

How do you root out something like “neo-Nazism”? Or Fascism?

The Azov Battalion is not the problem —nor even Stepan Bandera — it is the culture behind them You cannot get rid of crab grass by mowing — you have dig out the roots. That’s not easy.

“Patriotism is a gateway drug to fascism. Tribalism is the gateway to racism.” ― Oliver Markus Malloy

The Ukraine is both nationalistic and tribal.

Propaganda: Grooming the Public

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Propaganda is “grooming”.

The Few who own a country see the Many as children — in a huge national family. So propaganda is at once pedophilic incest, seduction, and where there is resistance — rape. One way or another, you’re fucked.

If you want to look at it from a Freudian point of view, propaganda is how national superego vested in elites controls the public ego, as represented by the middle class, drawing on the dark forces of the human Id. To achieve control, one must construct an alternative reality — stories which censor our perception of events.

Bucha is a good example.

When this story hit the news, there were pictures everywhere of dead bodies on the street in Bucha with white armbands.. The white arm bands were a giveaway — these unfortunates were ethnic Russians!

Now, I can no longer find these photos and the “massacre” has been discredited by multiple sources. But for the West, if Zelensky says something is so, it must be so. After all, his picture was on Vogue.

So, today, in Izyum the Ukrainians are claiming something similar despite the fact the graves there are full of dead UAF soldiers who the UAF refused to accept for burial

Ordinary Ukrainians, as well as the average guy in Los Angeles or London or wherever believe the lies they are told and screen out Banderites’ atrocities in the same way that ordinary Americans self-censor their perception of American crimes in foreign countries since 1945 — which have cost the lives of as many as 30 million people. “My country, right or wrong”. Or for the West, “my empire, right or wrong”.

When in doubt blame the enemy — who are foreign, faceless, and some other place. Facts are irritants. They are lies when they contradict your biases.

Yet, when people are forced out of their comfort zone by the degradation of their ordinary lives as a result of the blowback from dishonest narratives and the destructive policies those stories generate, things can change.

It’s simple: if you live a comfortable middle-class life, you love the status quo. Because you benefit from it.

But… when the status quo sucks — when you’re freezing in winter, boiling in summer, unemployed and don’t have a place to live or food to eat — THEN — you start asking questions. And you look for someone to blame. Someone closer at hand than Vladimir Putin or Xi.

In the Ukraine, the so-called “neo-Nazis” are doing a fine job of ruining living standards, whoring the country’s peoples and resources to whomever will send them weapons and make their rich, richer.

The constant lies of the Ukrainian government and the awful atrocities committed in what used to be “Eastern Ukraine” by the Banderites and reported back by UAF conscripts can be ignored until the lights go out. In the dark, you see what is closest to you. Who is the enemy? In the dark, his face, vaguely seen close-up is yours.

The Zelensky's government’s use of terror tactics, the shelling civilian targets indiscriminately and assassination, not to mention those dangerous attacks on nuclear power stations have certainly guaranteed that the population of Eastern and Southern Ukraine will seek protection from the RF, if not actually join it.

And even among those in Western Ukraine who tend to be apolitical, people will become nervous. Universal conscription doesn’t help. What will their children die for?

Propaganda always fails in the end.

Raising the Ante

This Winter, the Russians will raise the pain level.

They have started with attacks on the Western Ukrainian Power Grid and dams. When you are knee deep in water and your PlayStation won’t work, you get pissed off. Oh! And no toilet paper! Bummer!

The DPR and LPR will become part of Russia. They will be defended with a 1.2 percent mobilization in Russia from those who have already served, yielding 300,000 trained troops, which in theory could be used to occupy all of the Ukraine East of the Dniepr.

Only citizens who are currently in the reserve and, above all, those who served in the ranks of the Armed Forces, have certain military specialties and relevant experience will be subject to conscription for military service.
Those called up for military service before being sent to the units will necessarily undergo additional military training taking into account the experience of a special military operation.

Only citizens who are currently in the reserve and, above all, those who served in the ranks of the Armed Forces, have certain military specialties and relevant experience will be subject to conscription for military service.

Those called up for military service before being sent to the units will necessarily undergo additional military training taking into account the experience of a special military operation.

In any case, the DPR and LPR will be safer. And with Russia is prospering thanks to sanctions, they will profit too.

The Russians don’t do propaganda as the West does. In fact, they don’t really do it all. The Russians had enough of that in Soviet times and they are resistant to it.

As a result, the Russian government seeks credibility through credible policies— such as sparing civilian life and infrastructure, and good treatment of prisoners of war. Putin‘s ’narrative is different from that of the MSM — it is not fiction. In the end, the truth always wins.

Even the recent prisoner swap confirms this for it shows that the Russians are less bent on revenge than they are on saving the lives and health of Russian prisoners, who are in danger of being killed or tortured.

That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a maxim that has been long and generally approved; never, that I know of, controverted.

— Benjamin Franklin

The Ukrainians deny allegations of atrocities — but video evidence and reports from their own side are damning. And the Russian action defines their moral superiority.

Western Ukraine sucks at the teat of the EU and the US but as time goes on the tit is dry and inflamed. Western Ukraine is the West’s crack baby — deformed, monstrous, barely human — and doomed to a short, brutal life.

Crack babies come from crack addicts. The West’s crack addiction is energy obtained through violence and bullying.

Crack baby you don’t know what you want
But you know that you had it once
And you know that you want it back
Crack baby you don’t know what you want
But you know that you’re needing it
And you know that you need it bad

Mitski

Julian Macfarlane.

I am a journalist and media analyst. I make no money from these articles, but I need your support to keep going. Please subscribe, share, comment and spread the word. These articles are in the public interest. You may copy, quote or reprint in any form. I need your help as others on Substack do. Let’s all help each other. Then we might all survive.