I respectfully but strongly disagree. Zelensky, in my view, is a puppet.
NATO and the genocidal IMF are flip sides of the same coin, prodding Zelensky to bleed Ukraine to death against Russia and providing open-ended support as long as Ukrainians bleed, bleed, bleed!
I respectfully but strongly disagree. Zelensky, in my view, is a puppet.
NATO and the genocidal IMF are flip sides of the same coin, prodding Zelensky to bleed Ukraine to death against Russia and providing open-ended support as long as Ukrainians bleed, bleed, bleed!
I can only point you to the people of Ukraine. It is their decision to carry arms against Russia. They could and did flee to freedom across their borders to other countries. But some stayed to fight for their land and some returned to fight for their land. They don't fight for Zelensky. They are not puppets. They fight for themselves, no one is making them. They couldn't continue against the onslaught of Russian brutality if it weren't true that they fight for themselves. We saw the same behavior in World War II in the occupied nations. Little people with nothing to gain but a return to what had been, stood against the invader and many died. They died then and the Ukrainians are dying now. They died for the same thing the right to decide who chooses what their life will be. Do not be fooled by logic and rhetoric. This fight is about the soul and the heart of the Ukrainians. If not, it would have been Afghanistan all over again. Korea all over again. Vietnam all over again. Iraq all over again. When the people fight as the Ukrainians fight, as the Russians fought in World War II, as the French fought in World War II, they fight for themselves and no others.
Very well said. Ukrainians are free agents, and are fighting for themselves and for their land; unlike Russia, no one is holding a gun to their heads to force them into that defense. As in this country, there are reprehensible people there, and some of them want to control others with violence; I'd argue that while there is very little to choose between Azov and Wagner, in Ukraine's extremity and fight, yes, to the death if necessary, Azov guys can fight just as well as other Ukrainians.
My assessment differs starkly from yours. We could compare notes and sources, or not.
Ukraians have been victims of a right-wing terrorist thug regime. In cases like that, people lose their autonomous will, although it does come out in socially-approved expressions of fanatacism.
And then there is the split in Ukraine between the largely Russian-speaking, Russia-friendly southeast, and the NATO-oriented, Ukrainian-speaking northwest, with the neo-Nazi stronghold being in the extreme west in eastern Galicia, which was part of Poland gobbled by Stalin at the beginning of World War II.
There was an oligarch named Kolomoysky, who funded both Zelensky and neo-Nazis. Poroshenko referred to Zelensky as "KolomoyskyтАЩs puppet." Zelensky won an overwhelming majority on a platform of bringing swift peace to the Donbass. But he reneged on his campaign promise to the Ukrainian people and followed the will of the neo-Nazis and the International Monetary Fund and NATO toward reigniting the "frozen" civil war in the Donbass.
As Zelensky built up forces to invade, the Russians recognized the independence of the Donbass republics and gave them security guarantees. Zelensky began his pre-invasion bombardment and publicly mused about reacquiring nuclear weapons just before Russia invaded.
I noticed. I provided a list of historical documents that the Russians signed and Putin violated. More than a hundred countries found him in violation of the UN Charter for his annexation of Crimea in 2014. In 2022, once again the majority of UN member countries found the invasion unjustifiable. The International Court of Justice found the Russian evidence supporting the invasion lacking and instructed them to withdraw. I am not concerned with Ukrainian internal politics. That's their responsibility to sort out. We've got our own to deal with. The issue is sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is basic rule of law. You cannot come into my house and kill me and get away with it. If you did, no one would be safe. That's the point. Countries cannot be allowed to continue to attack one another simply because they feel they're justified. That behavior has to be in the rearview mirror for all countries. We are all too interdependent. You're living in a past that is being abandoned.
You only see their failures and it seems to blind you to their intent. It is difficult to make and stand by a decision with only the information and understanding within your access at the time. I think of the poor schmo who doesn't know you can't drive on ice and ends up where his trajectory and terrain take him cursing his luck.
I tried. Then I stopped, because people didn't want to know or were afraid to talk about it. Then I tried again, over and over.
Now they're doing it again, in a whole new way in Ukraine...
--
--
"In guilt and self-realization of my own worthlessness as a human being, what I would like to do most of all is to so propel myself that I can get the man-in-the-street of North and South and East and West and First and Second and Third and Fourth and All Other Worlds to take an interest in what is happening to his single planet, his single habitat, because our institution was allowed to evolve in a particular way in late twentieth century international society, and allowed to become the supra-national authority that controls the day-to-day lives of hundred of millions of people everywhere."
I don't think the world is reacting to Ukraine in the same way it has historically. I feel it is not a great power dictated war. In some ways I think it would be over faster, the cost in human life less. But I think the western playbook is new.
You might have seen the following assessment before, but I'll share it here just in case:
The IMF, as a loan condition in 2014, demanded that Ukraine re-conquer the breakaway Donbass republics. The NATO countries have voting domination at the IMF. Starting around 2015, the NATO countries built up Ukraine's army after it failed miserably against the Russian-supported Donbass soldiers.
The Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015 "froze" this Ukrainian civil war, but they were never fully implemented and both Macron and Merkel stated that the Minsk Agreements weren't serious, but rather a ploy to gain time for Ukraine's military buildup (so it could honor its obligation to the IMF and re-conquer the Donbass).
Biden and others want a protracted conflict, using Ukraine to weaken Russia.
The result is that Ukraine has been turned into a zombie slave, giving up pounds and pounds of bloody flesh on the endless battlefield to satisfy the condition of the IMF loan.
Russia, on the other hand, faced a dilemma: The prospect of Ukraine in NATO would be like a Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse for Russia. Russia had to act before it was too late, in addition to protecting the Donbass republics from the coming Ukrainian attack.
Would the United States have attacked the Soviet ships carrying missiles to Cuba if they hadn't turned around? Would that have been justified?
I don't agree. Biden has left the decision to Ukraine and all the NATO members have echoed that stance. I do not share your opinion regarding our country desiring a protracted war in Ukraine. I have study Russia quite a bit and had a working knowledge of the language. The US has not supported Ukrainian membership in NATO. Putin is using that as justification in public but he knows it wouldn't have happened. His unwillingness to accept Biden's repeated assertions that Ukraine was not joining NATO nor will they anytime soon, I believe is because he wanted this war and he thought he'd pull off a Shock and Awe. We could have come to the aid of Ukraine and sparked a NATO war but we remain as noncombatants. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a unique situation neither leader had ever faced this issue before. Either man could have blinked. Whether attacking the Soviet ship would have been justified then or if it had occurred whether it would have been justified in the history books I don't know. But if the Chinese listening post on Cuba changes it stripes, we may get to play that through again. I have no love for either the Soviet or Russian governments. Both did not take care of their people. That is my redline for any government.
"The United States aids Ukraine and her people," Adam Schiff declared in January 2020, "so that we can fight Russia over there, and we donтАЩt have to fight Russia here."
Part 2 of this article has a fascinating statement about Obama:
"When it became undeniable that US-backed shock troops for the Ukrainian counteroffensive included the "openly neo-Nazi" Azov battalion, President Obama began getting cold feet. Obama worried that sending more arms to a Nazi-infested military "would only escalate the bloodshed," in Ukraine and possibly "[end] up in the hands of thugs," the New York Times reported in 2015.
"Inside the White House, Obama was virtually alone. His concern that flooding Ukraine with weapons "would escalate the crisis" and give "Putin a pretext to go further and invade all of Ukraine," Senior Pentagon official Derek Chollet later recalled, marked a rare situation "in which just about every senior official was for doing something that the president opposed."
--
--
I don't think that Putin thought he'd pull off a "shock and awe," but he probably thought it was possible. His early attack toward Kyiv, for example, was clearly a feint, forcing Ukraine to tie up troops near the capital while Russian forces swept through the South.
Next come the crimes against humanity of the Obama administration. First of all was the dismemberment of Libya, with regime change going far beyond the U.N. mandate. Hillary the blood-soaked Butcher of Libya pressured Obama into going along with the plan.
Then there was the rape of Syria, which used to be self-sufficient in both food and oil.
Next came the U.S. cultivation of the rise of ISIS as an agent of chaos in both Syria and Iraq.
The context for this is given in Chapter 1 of an earlier book, "The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf War" by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, online at https://archive.org/details/firethistimeuswa00clar
And finally there was the "color revolution" in Ukraine, with U.S.-supported right-wing extremists ("neo-Nazis") doing the heavy muscle work.
Joe Biden was Obama's point man on Ukraine.
I also wrote a song, about the Powers That Be behind the middle-level managers who fill the Oval Office:
High above the wreckage of this world that you destroyed
You're safe inside your air-conditioned tower
There's not a one among us who has managed to avoid
The consequences of your awesome power
You tell the captive nations that the caring of the poor
Is a luxury they simply can't afford
They're not allowed to make their own decisions anymore
I don't know what to say. What I hear in my heart is profound desolation. A person whose hopes have fled and whose heroes have all fallen leaving only anger. I wish you a moment of peace and a glimmer of hope.
I suspect that you missed the mark in your assessment of where I'm coming from. It is important to stand FOR something, and I put my agenda online here:
I too believe in standing for something. My fundamental beliefs color everything I say and write. I have hope for humanity and caution for human behavior. I believe governments begin in the basic foundations of the family, the core and the extended. They are shaped by the rise of some and the fall of others. I believe empathy and compassion serve a basic building block to understanding, "a walk in someone else's shoes". A leader with these values, values us all. I accept the limitations of my education and seek more. I believe an educated electorate with critical thinking skills is fundamental to the survival of democracy. I believe the human tendancy to want to prove they are better and righteous shows our failures at introspection. The old mote story. I stand carefully on cherished beliefs and I stand for the hope of a better and yet undefined future.
I enjoyed and agree fundamentally with everything in that post. Have you read Ishmael? I loved that book. Leavers and takers, a truly profound description of humanity. It changed how I viewed my life and my priorities, how I categorized people.
This is actually leading toward my assessment of Russia and Ukraine.
George H.W. Bush was at the pinnacle of power through the Reagan years and into his own four years as President. Reagan, sidelined early on with a gunshot wound, was not a policy wonk, and Vice President Bush was. Later, Reagan started going soft in the head, leaving Bush in charge.
Bush's father, under Averell Harriman, managed a bank that helped finance the Nazi military industry before and during World War II.
Crimes of the Establishment with Bush on top include the IMF genocide (starting in 1982 and extending through the 1990s), the invasion of Panama (a holdout against IMF domination), the invasion of Iraq (another holdout against IMF domination), and the "Shock Therapy" genocide against Russia that killed off all the old people.
It is my assessment that Biden is vile. He is an abomination. He has been thoroughly assimilated by the genocidal, imperialist Establishment. He is worse than Trump.
As an Establishment minion, Biden is comparable to the absolute worst President, George H.W. Bush, who was born into a family of high-level servitors of one of the leading Establishment Families.
Thank you for continuing to share your view. Before sharing my response to your particulars, I will explain a bit where I am coming from.
I am well educated, with a Master's degree in History. I work as a truck driver. That is my only source of income or monetary support. I do not have a mortgage or car payment. I am in excellent health and my job has good enough benefits. I have no underage dependents.
In other words, the risk for me to say exactly what I think regarding sensitive issues is much less than that of many others. I am inclined to share my assessments freely and openly.
EDIT: I also have a very long baseline of observing current events, going back to my childhood watching the nightly news ("That's the way it is") with my father, a Catholic Democrat and vocal opponent of the Vietnam War.
I respectfully but strongly disagree. Zelensky, in my view, is a puppet.
NATO and the genocidal IMF are flip sides of the same coin, prodding Zelensky to bleed Ukraine to death against Russia and providing open-ended support as long as Ukrainians bleed, bleed, bleed!
I can only point you to the people of Ukraine. It is their decision to carry arms against Russia. They could and did flee to freedom across their borders to other countries. But some stayed to fight for their land and some returned to fight for their land. They don't fight for Zelensky. They are not puppets. They fight for themselves, no one is making them. They couldn't continue against the onslaught of Russian brutality if it weren't true that they fight for themselves. We saw the same behavior in World War II in the occupied nations. Little people with nothing to gain but a return to what had been, stood against the invader and many died. They died then and the Ukrainians are dying now. They died for the same thing the right to decide who chooses what their life will be. Do not be fooled by logic and rhetoric. This fight is about the soul and the heart of the Ukrainians. If not, it would have been Afghanistan all over again. Korea all over again. Vietnam all over again. Iraq all over again. When the people fight as the Ukrainians fight, as the Russians fought in World War II, as the French fought in World War II, they fight for themselves and no others.
Very well said. Ukrainians are free agents, and are fighting for themselves and for their land; unlike Russia, no one is holding a gun to their heads to force them into that defense. As in this country, there are reprehensible people there, and some of them want to control others with violence; I'd argue that while there is very little to choose between Azov and Wagner, in Ukraine's extremity and fight, yes, to the death if necessary, Azov guys can fight just as well as other Ukrainians.
Lynn Spann Bowditch,
I suppose my reply to Paula can go out to you, too:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-24-2023/comment/21325650
Paula Dufour,
My assessment differs starkly from yours. We could compare notes and sources, or not.
Ukraians have been victims of a right-wing terrorist thug regime. In cases like that, people lose their autonomous will, although it does come out in socially-approved expressions of fanatacism.
And then there is the split in Ukraine between the largely Russian-speaking, Russia-friendly southeast, and the NATO-oriented, Ukrainian-speaking northwest, with the neo-Nazi stronghold being in the extreme west in eastern Galicia, which was part of Poland gobbled by Stalin at the beginning of World War II.
There was an oligarch named Kolomoysky, who funded both Zelensky and neo-Nazis. Poroshenko referred to Zelensky as "KolomoyskyтАЩs puppet." Zelensky won an overwhelming majority on a platform of bringing swift peace to the Donbass. But he reneged on his campaign promise to the Ukrainian people and followed the will of the neo-Nazis and the International Monetary Fund and NATO toward reigniting the "frozen" civil war in the Donbass.
As Zelensky built up forces to invade, the Russians recognized the independence of the Donbass republics and gave them security guarantees. Zelensky began his pre-invasion bombardment and publicly mused about reacquiring nuclear weapons just before Russia invaded.
I noticed. I provided a list of historical documents that the Russians signed and Putin violated. More than a hundred countries found him in violation of the UN Charter for his annexation of Crimea in 2014. In 2022, once again the majority of UN member countries found the invasion unjustifiable. The International Court of Justice found the Russian evidence supporting the invasion lacking and instructed them to withdraw. I am not concerned with Ukrainian internal politics. That's their responsibility to sort out. We've got our own to deal with. The issue is sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is basic rule of law. You cannot come into my house and kill me and get away with it. If you did, no one would be safe. That's the point. Countries cannot be allowed to continue to attack one another simply because they feel they're justified. That behavior has to be in the rearview mirror for all countries. We are all too interdependent. You're living in a past that is being abandoned.
(Part 6)
This verse of "Burn in Hell" goes out to that fake Catholic Joe Biden, with a prayer for the people of Ukraine:
You're the hidden instigator of a host of bloody wars
As tortured nations writhe in your control
You set it all in motion, let the evil run its course
As the slaughter of the Horsemen takes its toll
Chaos and destruction with you ev'rywhere you go
You live corruption, malice, lies and fraud
Your sordid deeds of evil stink to Heaven, don't you know
Abomination in the eyes of God
They used to have a saying for an evil man like you
Words that I remember well
Back when what they said the Bible said, they said was true
You're gonna burn in Hell...
You only see their failures and it seems to blind you to their intent. It is difficult to make and stand by a decision with only the information and understanding within your access at the time. I think of the poor schmo who doesn't know you can't drive on ice and ends up where his trajectory and terrain take him cursing his luck.
Dear Davison Budhoo,
I tried. Then I stopped, because people didn't want to know or were afraid to talk about it. Then I tried again, over and over.
Now they're doing it again, in a whole new way in Ukraine...
--
--
"In guilt and self-realization of my own worthlessness as a human being, what I would like to do most of all is to so propel myself that I can get the man-in-the-street of North and South and East and West and First and Second and Third and Fourth and All Other Worlds to take an interest in what is happening to his single planet, his single habitat, because our institution was allowed to evolve in a particular way in late twentieth century international society, and allowed to become the supra-national authority that controls the day-to-day lives of hundred of millions of people everywhere."
--Davison Budhoo
I don't think the world is reacting to Ukraine in the same way it has historically. I feel it is not a great power dictated war. In some ways I think it would be over faster, the cost in human life less. But I think the western playbook is new.
You might have seen the following assessment before, but I'll share it here just in case:
The IMF, as a loan condition in 2014, demanded that Ukraine re-conquer the breakaway Donbass republics. The NATO countries have voting domination at the IMF. Starting around 2015, the NATO countries built up Ukraine's army after it failed miserably against the Russian-supported Donbass soldiers.
The Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015 "froze" this Ukrainian civil war, but they were never fully implemented and both Macron and Merkel stated that the Minsk Agreements weren't serious, but rather a ploy to gain time for Ukraine's military buildup (so it could honor its obligation to the IMF and re-conquer the Donbass).
Biden and others want a protracted conflict, using Ukraine to weaken Russia.
The result is that Ukraine has been turned into a zombie slave, giving up pounds and pounds of bloody flesh on the endless battlefield to satisfy the condition of the IMF loan.
Russia, on the other hand, faced a dilemma: The prospect of Ukraine in NATO would be like a Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse for Russia. Russia had to act before it was too late, in addition to protecting the Donbass republics from the coming Ukrainian attack.
Would the United States have attacked the Soviet ships carrying missiles to Cuba if they hadn't turned around? Would that have been justified?
I don't agree. Biden has left the decision to Ukraine and all the NATO members have echoed that stance. I do not share your opinion regarding our country desiring a protracted war in Ukraine. I have study Russia quite a bit and had a working knowledge of the language. The US has not supported Ukrainian membership in NATO. Putin is using that as justification in public but he knows it wouldn't have happened. His unwillingness to accept Biden's repeated assertions that Ukraine was not joining NATO nor will they anytime soon, I believe is because he wanted this war and he thought he'd pull off a Shock and Awe. We could have come to the aid of Ukraine and sparked a NATO war but we remain as noncombatants. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a unique situation neither leader had ever faced this issue before. Either man could have blinked. Whether attacking the Soviet ship would have been justified then or if it had occurred whether it would have been justified in the history books I don't know. But if the Chinese listening post on Cuba changes it stripes, we may get to play that through again. I have no love for either the Soviet or Russian governments. Both did not take care of their people. That is my redline for any government.
Perhaps we will just have to agree to disagree.
"The United States aids Ukraine and her people," Adam Schiff declared in January 2020, "so that we can fight Russia over there, and we donтАЩt have to fight Russia here."
See https://mate.substack.com/p/by-using-ukraine-to-fight-russia
Part 2 of this article has a fascinating statement about Obama:
"When it became undeniable that US-backed shock troops for the Ukrainian counteroffensive included the "openly neo-Nazi" Azov battalion, President Obama began getting cold feet. Obama worried that sending more arms to a Nazi-infested military "would only escalate the bloodshed," in Ukraine and possibly "[end] up in the hands of thugs," the New York Times reported in 2015.
"Inside the White House, Obama was virtually alone. His concern that flooding Ukraine with weapons "would escalate the crisis" and give "Putin a pretext to go further and invade all of Ukraine," Senior Pentagon official Derek Chollet later recalled, marked a rare situation "in which just about every senior official was for doing something that the president opposed."
--
--
I don't think that Putin thought he'd pull off a "shock and awe," but he probably thought it was possible. His early attack toward Kyiv, for example, was clearly a feint, forcing Ukraine to tie up troops near the capital while Russian forces swept through the South.
(Part 5)
Next come the crimes against humanity of the Obama administration. First of all was the dismemberment of Libya, with regime change going far beyond the U.N. mandate. Hillary the blood-soaked Butcher of Libya pressured Obama into going along with the plan.
Then there was the rape of Syria, which used to be self-sufficient in both food and oil.
Next came the U.S. cultivation of the rise of ISIS as an agent of chaos in both Syria and Iraq.
The context for this is given in Chapter 1 of an earlier book, "The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf War" by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, online at https://archive.org/details/firethistimeuswa00clar
And finally there was the "color revolution" in Ukraine, with U.S.-supported right-wing extremists ("neo-Nazis") doing the heavy muscle work.
Joe Biden was Obama's point man on Ukraine.
I also wrote a song, about the Powers That Be behind the middle-level managers who fill the Oval Office:
High above the wreckage of this world that you destroyed
You're safe inside your air-conditioned tower
There's not a one among us who has managed to avoid
The consequences of your awesome power
You tell the captive nations that the caring of the poor
Is a luxury they simply can't afford
They're not allowed to make their own decisions anymore
In this New World Order you're the lord
(Part 4)
Next came the younger Bush, who doubled down on one of his father's crimes against humanity.
My brother wrote a song about the second Iraq War:
"I'll apologize
For my country's lies
Now that all our enemies
Have been cut down to size..."
I don't know what to say. What I hear in my heart is profound desolation. A person whose hopes have fled and whose heroes have all fallen leaving only anger. I wish you a moment of peace and a glimmer of hope.
I suspect that you missed the mark in your assessment of where I'm coming from. It is important to stand FOR something, and I put my agenda online here:
http://earthwarning.org/index.php/what-should-we-do/
I too believe in standing for something. My fundamental beliefs color everything I say and write. I have hope for humanity and caution for human behavior. I believe governments begin in the basic foundations of the family, the core and the extended. They are shaped by the rise of some and the fall of others. I believe empathy and compassion serve a basic building block to understanding, "a walk in someone else's shoes". A leader with these values, values us all. I accept the limitations of my education and seek more. I believe an educated electorate with critical thinking skills is fundamental to the survival of democracy. I believe the human tendancy to want to prove they are better and righteous shows our failures at introspection. The old mote story. I stand carefully on cherished beliefs and I stand for the hope of a better and yet undefined future.
I enjoyed and agree fundamentally with everything in that post. Have you read Ishmael? I loved that book. Leavers and takers, a truly profound description of humanity. It changed how I viewed my life and my priorities, how I categorized people.
I saw the book once and thought of reading it.
These days, along with seemingly everyone else, I just don't read books anymore -- not enough time...
It's also an audible book.
(Part 3)
This is actually leading toward my assessment of Russia and Ukraine.
George H.W. Bush was at the pinnacle of power through the Reagan years and into his own four years as President. Reagan, sidelined early on with a gunshot wound, was not a policy wonk, and Vice President Bush was. Later, Reagan started going soft in the head, leaving Bush in charge.
Bush's father, under Averell Harriman, managed a bank that helped finance the Nazi military industry before and during World War II.
Crimes of the Establishment with Bush on top include the IMF genocide (starting in 1982 and extending through the 1990s), the invasion of Panama (a holdout against IMF domination), the invasion of Iraq (another holdout against IMF domination), and the "Shock Therapy" genocide against Russia that killed off all the old people.
The Russians have not forgotten.
(Part 2)
It is my assessment that Biden is vile. He is an abomination. He has been thoroughly assimilated by the genocidal, imperialist Establishment. He is worse than Trump.
As an Establishment minion, Biden is comparable to the absolute worst President, George H.W. Bush, who was born into a family of high-level servitors of one of the leading Establishment Families.
(Part 1)
Thank you for continuing to share your view. Before sharing my response to your particulars, I will explain a bit where I am coming from.
I am well educated, with a Master's degree in History. I work as a truck driver. That is my only source of income or monetary support. I do not have a mortgage or car payment. I am in excellent health and my job has good enough benefits. I have no underage dependents.
In other words, the risk for me to say exactly what I think regarding sensitive issues is much less than that of many others. I am inclined to share my assessments freely and openly.
EDIT: I also have a very long baseline of observing current events, going back to my childhood watching the nightly news ("That's the way it is") with my father, a Catholic Democrat and vocal opponent of the Vietnam War.
(to be continued)
Another very well written response. Brava.
Pushed by the USA
Schpekle,
All paid trolls of Putin seem to say the same things. Don't you guys get bored collecting pay without being original?
...said the IMF Holocaust denier.
"The blood is so much, it runs in rivers..."
--from Davison Budhoo's 100-page resignation letter from the International Monetary Fund