by Malooga
lifted from a comment
@Noirette, et al, from previous thread: Evgeny Fedorov's presentations are very good; certainly in communicating the level of threat Russia feels. Also recommended are the various audio and video presentations of Joaquin Flores to be found around the web and on his website – Center for Syncretic Studies. He's quite young and a bit of an odd bird — a former radical leftist from LA, now Dugin acolyte, or so he claims — one never knows just who anyone really is these days on the innertubes. But he is quite humble and he has the big picture of a multi-polar world — something which can unite people over many political persuasions — foremost in his mind. Both give a good sense of what might be expected over the long game, and why Russia is taking things slow. Essential background.
But the most concise and prescient background on the current world situation are two brief articles Christof Lehmann, proprietor of the nsnbc website, wrote: first, "Russia – E.U. Meeting in Brussels: Risk of Middle East and European War increased," way back on Dec 22, 2012, and the second, "The Atlantic Axis and the Making of a War in Ukraine", written last week.
In the former article he begins: "On 21. December 2012 the political leaders of 27 E.U. countries and Russia´s President Vladimir Putin met in Brussels. On the top of the agenda were problems which are directly related to the ongoing war in Syria. Russian control over major parts of the energy which the European Union will require over the course of the next 100 years, Russian-Iranian dominance over the most competitive gas resources and pipelines in the Middle East, US-American and British initiatives to change the energy-dynamics militarily and a European dilemma between Trans-Atlantic allies who are pushing Europe toward a war with Russia to save the Petro Dollar and greater integration of Russian and European energy sectors and market economies."
He begins the later article thusly: "The war in Ukraine became predictable when the great Muslim Brotherhood Project in Syria failed during the summer of 2012. It became unavoidable in December 2012, when the European Union and Russia failed to agree on the EU’s 3rd Energy Package. The geopolitical dynamics which are driving the war in Ukraine were known in the early 1980s."
Remember that the real game is the breaking of the PetroDollar, not the back of poor "Chocula" Petrodollarshenko, and so every day that a major conflagration can be forestalled is a day closer to the real goal; and also that what we are witnessing in the Ukraine is cutting-edge 4th generation warfare — sort of a quietly lethal pas de deux. One should not be so naive as to believe that this conflict has taken any of the world powers by surprise — They all have had close to two years notice, at minimum. In a sense, we are still in the "chess opening" stage, where the majority of the moves have been charted out by both sides. But the middle game is very close at hand. And, yes, it is theoretically possible for the three sides to come to a backroom agreement before the deadly endgame closes in upon us.
All the players are aware of the solemnity of the moment; certainly, there is far more action going on behind the curtains than we can possibly know. All Western actions — from Nuland's doughnuts and raving expletives to Ashton's "Gosh!" now-forgotten investigation, from the barbarities of Maidan medieval siege warfare replete with Trebuchet to the various levels of massacre — at Maiden, in Odessa, Mariupol, behind the lines, including Israel's atrocities, to the false-flag downing of MH17, and so on down the line — beyond the piteous human cost — are simply meant to incite and humiliate Russia into the pre-layed trap of overwhelming dollar dominated retaliation.
As I said above, we are witnessing a kind of 4th-generational street theater where "all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players." Same goes with the almost inexplicable: Bidens's "fractious" son, and Rothschild's drilling in the Golan. We are watching a continually escalating rollout of "Shock and Awe" twisted into a kind of Captagon addled "Ground Hog's Day" macabre mobius loop. Debord and Baudrillard and Stockhaussen must be dancing on their graves at the sheer spectacle of it all: Shock and Awe as daily fare. The Empire of Chaos as Russian Roulette with punk piercings, khokhol hairstylings, and wolfsangel tatoos. Its enough to give one a chub.
Expected reality is turned on its head: To "sanction" is to give permission, but "sanctions" are a penalty. Karl Rove's famous quote has been updated: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own hyperreality. And while you're studying that hyperreality -— judiciously, as you will -— we'll act again, creating other new hyperrealities…" The wanton destruction of Slaviansk as Bizarro version of Sim-City. Bloodless Sims on MH17. The only predictable is the unpredictable. Through the gnostic machinations of empire, the "banality of evil" has been spiritually transmogrified into a transcendent celebration, an entertainment, a celebration: "The Ravishment of Evil" — and served up to western tastes as a form of exotic entertainment.
In Egypt, during the so-called "Arab Spring" modern day Lawrence of Arabias galloped through the set on camels, In Iraq, "I Dream of Jeannie" plays the role of sex jihadi, and now in the Ukraine, we consume daily re-runs of post-punk "Combat." One wonders if Phillip Zelikow will one day receive credit for the script, which is surely worthy of an "Oscar."
Baudrillard's "The Spirit of Terrorism" in particular merits a close re-reading. He muses, "War as continuation of the absence of politics by other means." The spectator, once an actor, is shocked into passivity. Performing the "détournement" implicit in Debord's text where the powers that be are the real terrorism, we find that "Another aspect of the terrorists' victory is that all other forms of violence and the destabilization of order work in its favour. Internet terrorism, biological terrorism, the terrorism… of rumor — are all ascribed to (the other). He might even claim natural catastrophes as his own. All forms of disorganization and perverse circulation operate to his advantage. The very structure of generalized world trade works in favour of impossible exchange."
Poor, pathetic Viktor "Yorick"ovich was in way over his head, thinking he could play the two opposing forces of human civilization against themselves and come out unscathed and ahead; indeed, he is lucky to come out of this with his own head. Putin has nothing but contempt for the fool. He reminds one of the Zen koan where the Abott comes upon two monks fighting over a cat. He seizes the cat, and in some versions only threatens to cut it in half until the monk who really own's the cat relents and shouts "Stop!", in others he actually does that which Thomas Merton refers to as "the unspeakable." In our own hyper-real version, Yanukovich does cut the cat in half, only to recoil in horror when he realizes that it is HIS cat that now lies dead before him. The moral is instructive, for in reality Putin offered to divide the cat fairly, only to be refused.
In hyperreality, the bedraggled Ukrainian cat, shambolically and symbolically, has been elevated to human existence itself. To quote Baudrillard, ‘by seizing all the cards for itself, [the west] forced the Other to change the rules.’ The west asserted moral, cultural and economic dependence. Violence was then left as the only option for the Other to pursue.
I certainly do not claim to be able to predict the future here — but I am sure that we have not been in such dangerous territory since the Cuban Missile Crisis — although with time less of a crisis factor. And I have NEVER in my lifetime heard a President of the US trash talk a major power, much less two of them at once, to their faces, as Obama did this past week in the Rothschild rag to Russia and China: Russia, who couldn't even land a position as one of Santa's elves because it doesn't know how to "make anything," and China, the inscrutable Oriental who is not "sentimental, and … not interested in abstractions." Well, he never claimed to be Malraux at work upon "Man's Fate!"
Clearly, the US is doing everything possible to provoke and spark a fire in the heart of Europe, which the world — should it survive — will never forget. All the world's a stage… Shakespeare could not know how predictive his poem could be, when he ended it thusly: "Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."