Club OrlovSunday, May 04, 2014Statecraft or Witchcraft?
What has the US State Department been doing in Ukraine? It has been busy, and has succeeded in pushing the hapless nation, left destitute by 22 years of
freedom and democracy oligarchy, to the brink of civil war. (Keep in mind, Russia came close to collapsing altogether by just nine years of
freedom and democracy oligarchy.
Instead of offering you a rational and reasoned (and boring) geopolitical analysis, allow me to temporarily leave the modern world behind and retreat into the mindset of the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth rock. Why don't we have us a good old-fasioned witch-hunt! After all, the people who have been pushing Ukraine in the direction of civil war while risking a nuclear confrontation with Russia are clearly doing the Devil's work, and so that makes them witches, correct? To find out who these witches are, we have to become expert witch-sniffers. (It's easy; you'll see.) Then we can make effigies of them and burn them at the stake. (No actual witches will be harmed in the process, of course.)
There are three witches, the story goes, three weird sisters. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” the weird sisters croak in unison, as they hover through the fog and filthy air. Eventually they settle down around the steaming cauldron:
First Witch Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and owlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Third Witch Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches' mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silver'd in the moon's eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.
ALL Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
And then the three witches reach into the bubbling cauldron, and out of the rancid muck they mould a figure.
They hold it up, cristen it “Yatsenyuk,” place a crown on its head, and pronounce it Prime Minister of Ukraine.
And here is Yatsenyuk in real life; see the uncanny resemblance?
Who might these three witches in real life. The first, of course, is Victoria Nuland of the US State Department.
She is the one who, in a now famous leaked telephone conversation, dictated that Yatsenyuk should head up the Kiev junta. She also dropped an f-bomb on the EU. She bragged publicly about the $5 billion of taxpayer money she dumped into the steaming cauldron of Ukrainian politics, from which Yatsenyuk and the rest of the junta eventually emerged.
The second witch is Hillary Clinton, who appointed Nuland. I hope that this choice is uncontroversial. By the way, she compared Putin to Hitler, and this alone tells us that her mind has snapped.
And the third witch? Samantha Power, the US Ambassador to the UN, perhaps?
She once called Clinton a “monster,” but later apologized, perhaps realizing that she herself is a monster. She certainly behaves like one. One one recent occasion she accosted Russia's UN Ambassador, spraying him with saliva while screeching like a woman possessed. One of the funnier things she spewed forth: she is insulted by Russia's nuclear deterrent. (What else might she find insulting? The tilt of the Earth's axis, maybe?) She had to be taken by the elbow and escorted to her seat.
Witch-sniffing is easy, you see. Witches are hard to spot while they are casting their spell, but as soon as they realize that their spell is broken they begin to look very, very ugly. All of that demonic energy rises to the surface for all to see. A witch whose spell has been broken is invariably a hissing, screeching, spitting witch.
Mind you, not everyone involved is a witch. President Obama, for instance, is just a claymation figure that reads from a teleprompter, while the Secretary of State John Kerry was at some point replaced with a cardboard cut-out of himself, and, sadly, nobody even noticed. Nor are all the witches female; it's a gender-neutral pursuit.
There are even some Russian witches: Gary Kasparov, for instance. He is in the Putin=Hitler camp, but, paradoxically, also a poster-child for Russian freedoms, being able to come to the US, openly talk about overthrowing the Russian government, and then fly back to Russia without any problems. If an American were to do the same, he would be charged with terrorism and left to rot in indefinite detention. There is also the wannabe politician Alexei Navalny, who recently committed political suicide by doing the Putin=Hitler thing—on Ukrainian state television, no less.
How was the spell broken? Nothing stings quite as well as a resounding defeat on the international stage. Those who thought they were in control have just suffered a major defeat. On Ukraine so far, it's Russia 1, US Oligarchy 0: Crimea is once again Russian, the transfer of sovereignty happened peacefully and in accordance with the internationally recognized principle of self-determination, and this defeat is so embarrassing that nobody even wants to talk about Crimea any more. It's a done deal.
More defeats follow, as the boomerang effect of sanctions imposed on Russia. The US will not be able to withdraw from Afghanistan via the safe northern route that runs through Russia; instead, the endless convoys will have to run the gauntlet through Pakistan where the locals, incensed by endless drone attacks on their weddings and funerals, will do their best to blow them up. The US will not be able to launch military satellites, because the Atlas V rockets won't fly without the Russian-built RD-180 engines, for which there is no replacement. Nor is it likely that, as things escalate, US astronauts will still be able to get up to the International Space Station, since that requires a trip on the Russian Soyuz.
Not that the Russians have a lot of time for this nonsense. They are busy negotiating deals, like the oil barter deal with Iran which neatly circumvents the sanctions; like the long-term natural gas supply deal with China; and quite a few others. For example, Russia and China agreed to build a canal through Nicaragua, which will supplant the Pentagon-controlled Panama canal. Nicaragua will also get a GLONASS ground station (Russian-Indian replacement for the Pentagon-controlled GPS system), plus a Russian military base, to make sure that the US doesn't decide that it can do something about any of this. Nearby, Russia forgave $90 billion of Soviet-era Cuban debt, reestablishing close relations between Russia and Cuba and opening up Cuba to large-scale Russian investment. Russian companies will be developing Cuba's offshore oil and gas fields.
No doubt, the US would love to counter these moves, but it can't because it doesn't have the talent. Most of the experienced, professional diplomats quit in disgust during Bush Jr.'s reign, when they were forced to continually lie to the whole world about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the diplomatic corps is loaded with incompetents whose only credentials are that they raised lots of money for Obama's election campaigns. At the next changing of the guard they will be replaced with the next crop of amateurs. It is little wonder that they are losing.
But these people are unaccustomed to being defeated, and defeat makes them livid and hysterical, and then they go and wax apoplectic in public, yelling and screeching and spraying saliva. You can tell that their minds have snapped when they start comparing everyone to Adolf Hitler. And you can see it all right on television. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the population in the US is perplexed. Except for the Lost Plane Channel formerly known as CNN, commentators on all the major news channels, even the super-blockheaded Fox News, are wondering aloud: “What the hell are we doing in Ukraine?” Well, we are trying to safeguard the interests of the Rockefellers and the Rothchilds, to be sure, but how does knowing that help you?
“How well is that going?” you might ask. Well by now all of eastern and southern Ukraine is in open revolt against the US-appointed junta in Kiev. The neo-Nazi “Right Sector” initially supported the junta and helped with the putsch that overthrew the democratically elected government. But then one of the “Right Sector” leaders, Sashko Bily got shot, most likely for opposing a plan to import a trainload of nuclear waste from the EU and dump it on the ground near Chernobyl. That train is still stuck on the Ukrainian border. Now the junta leaders are shaking in their boots because the “Right Sector” could stage another coup, this time against them.
How does the US react? It sends CIA Director Brennan to Kiev. Brenner orders the junta to attack their own citizens in the east, in an “anti-terrorist” operation.
“Kill them! Kill them all!” says Brenner, but Ukrainian soldiers refuse to fire on their own people and defect in droves.
Next, the US sends in their secret weapon, VP Joe Biden.
“Kill them! Kill them all!” says Biden, with similar results. What is the US to do? I think that only one choice remains: send in Senator John McCain.
If there is anyone who can scare the Ukrainians into fighting a fratricidal war, it's McCain. But what if that too fails?
Well, then the people in eastern and southern Ukraine may get their way. They are just some Russians—millions of them—who got stuck on the wrong side of the Russian border for over two decades. They aren't sure about everything—such as whether they want to join Russia. (They probably do simply because the pay is so much better on the Russian side.) But they are sure about one thing: they don't want to live under a foreign occupation run by a US-appointed junta for the benefit of a bunch of oligarchs.
And I bet neither would you. Maybe you can't help yourselves, the US not being a democracy and all, but maybe you can still do something to help the Ukrainians, by subjecting these warmongering witches to public ridicule. This ought to degrade their effectiveness by a notch or two. As I said, witch-hunting is easy. All you have to do is turn on the TV and see who else today is hissing, screeching, pounding the table, spewing vitriole and dropping the name “Hitler” gratuitously. Then you can go, get a bonfire permit, and burn them in effigy. That automatically makes for good visuals. All you have to do is add some interviews and commentary, and next thing you know you got yourself your own very popular witch-hunting Youtube channel!
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3 of 5 comments: (so far)Scott Supak said...
"But they are sure about one thing: they don't want to live under a foreign occupation run by a US-appointed junta for the benefit of a bunch of oligarchs."
I guess if you have to live under Oligarchs, better to live under the ones you know (and who pay better) on the Russian side.
Sunday, May 4, 2014 at 12:06:00 PM EDT
Castus said...
I think the situation is vastly more complex and two sided that you've been portraying it as. I'm certainly no fan of the idiotic and almost comical missteps that we in the West have gotten ourselves into in this conflict in Ukraine. But let us be completely honest; Russia has been behaving in an extraordinarily authoritarian manner and has been just as inappropriate as the US. Shilling for one side against the other is not particularly becoming of you, Mr. Orlov.
Sunday, May 4, 2014 at 1:36:00 PM EDT
Dmitry Orlov said...
Supak -
The oligarchs in Russia are at this point well in hand. Berezovsky, the worst of them, is dead, Khodorkovsky has been amnestied but is excluded from politics, and the others may be rich but they have no political ambitions, given to what happened to Khodorkovsky. If you want to know who's really running Russia, look at teachers' salaries, old age pensions, free pre-natal and post-natal care, support for large families, etc.
Castus -
What do you call "extraordinarily authoritarian manner"? Does Russia have military bases in over 100 countries? Drone strikes? Indefinite imprisonment without trial? How many countries has Russia invaded? Is Russia trying to bankrupt the world with its debt? How many countries has Russia destabilized? Putting the same shoe on the other foot isn't going to work for you, I am afraid. Do some more reading and thinking.
Sunday, May 4, 2014 at 2:45:00 PM EDT
