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Ukraine – U.S. Deceives Allies To Keep Them In Line
The Biden administration launched a make-believe campaign that is supposed to calm those European 'allies' who press for peace talks over Ukraine.
But, as the Washington Post provides, the alleged Biden push towards negotiations is a sham:
The Biden administration is privately encouraging Ukraine’s leaders to signal an openness to negotiate with Russia and drop their public refusal to engage in peace talks unless President Vladimir Putin is removed from power, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The request by American officials is not aimed at pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table, these people said. Rather, they called it a calculated attempt to ensure the government in Kyiv maintains the support of other nations facing constituencies wary of fueling a war for many years to come.
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While U.S. officials share their Ukrainian counterparts’ assessment that Putin, for now, isn’t serious about negotiations, they acknowledge that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ban on talks with him has generated concern in parts of Europe, Africa and Latin America, where the war’s disruptive effects on the availability and cost of food and fuel are felt most sharply.
If Zelensky will now start to offer talks we know that it will not be serious but just for show.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has just visited Kiev. He is likely the one who has put up this scheme. It would be consistent with another recent story planted in the Wall Street Journal about talks between Sullivan and some Russians:
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has in recent months held secret talks with high-level Russian officials, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing unnamed US and allied officials.
The officials said that the talks were aimed at reducing the risk of the war in Ukraine turning into a broader conflict and that Sullivan warned Moscow against using nuclear weapons. They said Sullivan held talks with Yuri Ushakov, a foreign policy advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev.
The reason to plant that story is likely the same one as above – to calm down allies who are getting nervous about an endless war.
It is obvious that the U.S. does not want the war to end anytime soon:
The U.S. is sending Ukraine $400 million more in military aid and establishing a security assistance headquarters in Germany that will oversee all weapons transfers and military training for Ukraine, the Pentagon announced Friday.
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The new command post, called the Security Assistance Group Ukraine, signals a more permanent, long-term program to continue to aid Kyiv in its fight against Russia, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters at the Pentagon.
The new command post that will oversee this aid will be led by a three-star-level senior officer and have about 300 personnel based in Germany who will monitor the weapons assistance and training programs, said U.S. Army Europe spokesman Col. Martin O’Donnell.
Such a command points to an effort over multiple years. Likewise some of the weapon systems the U.S. has promised to Ukraine have not yet been produced. They will reach Ukraine only 2023 or 2024 – if ever.
But I doubt that this plan for a years long war can work. Russia's recent attack on the electricity systems of Ukraine has shown that it has the escalation dominance, that it could do much more to destroy Ukraine and to make it incapable of further pursuing the war.
The U.S. is also pushing Ukraine to attack the Russian positions on the right bank of the Dnieper river:
Ukrainian forces can retake the strategic southern city of Kherson from Russian troops, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Thursday, in what would be a major defeat for Russia in its invasion of its neighbor.
Austin’s remarks coincided with a Russian-installed official in Kherson region saying Moscow was likely to pull its troops from the west bank of the Dnipro River, signaling a significant retreat, if confirmed.
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“On the issue of whether the Ukrainians can take the remaining territory on the west side of the Dnipro river and in Kherson, I certainly believe that they have the capability to do that,” Austin told a news conference at the Pentagon.
“Most importantly, the Ukrainians believe they have the capability to do that. We have seen them engage in a very methodical but effective effort to take back their sovereign territory.”
There are also rumors from Ukraine that Sullivan has pressed Zelensky to launch a Kherson campaign as soon as possible. Zelensky is said to have agreed to do so.
But the Ukrainian army does not want to do that – at least not now. The Russian troops in the area have been reinforced. The fields are muddy and can not be crossed by heavy vehicles. Russian artillery attacks destroy equipment pre-positioned for the attack before it is ready to come near the front line.
The Ukrainian military has for weeks tried probing attacks in the Kherson region. These had no significant results while the attacking units had high losses. The units deployed around the region have been there since early October or longer. The Military Land deployment map shows only one unit that arrived just five days ago. The 98th Azov battalion, one of the fascist volunteer forces, has been positioned in the back of 128th Mountain Assault Brigade which, in recent weeks, has had some of the most serious losses.
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The use of such 'nationalist' forces to prevent the retreat of exhausted front line units has been a regular occurrence in this war.
Ukraine has for weeks had no success on the battle field. Washington wants it to show such a success so that it can tell its allies that the war can be won by the Ukrainian side. The push for an attack on Kherson is again part of the overall campaign to convince Europeans that they should sustain the efforts to arm and support Ukraine.
The campaign is misleading. Ukraine is losing the war badly. But the U.S. wants to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian – and down to the last Euro.
Frank Herbert got it right, Dune is chilling, cynical and hopeless as it posits a humanity 10,000 (!) years in the future that hasn’t made one bit of progress other than technological from the previous 10,000 years! Humanity in an eternal rut in a self defined universe bounded by vice, pettiness, treachery, violence, domination, and mindless, thoughtless, relentless greed. That rut is the conspiracy.
Posted by: LightYearsFromHome | Nov 8 2022 9:44 utc | 188
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Good one. I’ve always been fond of the old Hindu and later Buddhist notion of the ‘six realms’ which basically divide into 3 lower and 3 higher with the lowest being intense pain and the highest being the most delicious pleasure and four in between. It goes: hell, hungry ghost / preta, animal, human, jealous god / asura, god/deva. The ones always fighting in your post are called asuras, sometimes translated as titans.
In the iconography jealous gods are usually depicted as warrior types standing on corpses of those they have just slain in order to get a leg up on storming the upper levels of a castle in which dwell the gods who they yearn a) to overthrow and b) to become. The twist is that the ones on to aiming arrows at the ones climbing up from below are not gods, as the asuras below believe, but just higher-ranking asuras. The gods are elsewhere and wouldn’t have anything to do with such open conflict. They dwell in quasi-immaterial realms endlessly relishing sounds, smells, tastes, touch. A Milky Way of infinite pleasures, sort of like quiet, happy millionaires in the suburbs and country.The dominant emotion of asuras is paranoia-envy. They are extremely intelligent and always looking to move ahead, often by pushing rivals down.
All societies have all six realms (just as all individuals) but I believe that the way systems manage the asura quotient, always a minority, is key. If they are well managed they can help propel the polity to a high civilization phase; if poorly managed they will take over everything and turn it into hell since they are psychologically incapable of the sort of ease and satisfaction with unchanging bliss that is the preferred modality of god realm types.
Animals are bounded by the bodies they are born into. Human animals are similar, often their lives are determined by the situation they are born into. They struggle to survive and have little humour or spark. They rut but are not romantic. Humans are tricky, foxy, they experience highs and lows constantly, they lie, the love, they laugh, they mess up, they achieve extraordinary heights and can literally shape no end of different realities whereas other realms are much less flexible. It is said that only humans can fully enlighten, which means becoming aware of the true underlying nature of reality, which esoterics believe is no different from the nature of Mind which is no different from the nature of Space.
Anyway, the six realm paradigm with the asura family within seems to fit well with reality as it plays out over and over. And so I think you nailed the nature of the elites really well. I try to avoid thinking in terms of organized groups at the top – though no doubt some exist – and think of it more as a tendency or mentality – again like asuras.
If you shake a jar of earth the heavy stuff will go to the bottom and then sedimentary layers will soon form. Every time. Some earths have greater quotients of rock or clay or fine silt than others but all have the same basic structure. So it is with societies, all of which have higher and lower classes and various types of mentality, including extremely intelligent, though often vicious, asuras who, left unchecked, will cause the ruin of all with their endless fighting and will to overthrow the existing order in favor of themselves.
It is always thus. Attempts to create classless societies are doomed to fail because they counter the nature of multiplicitous societal reality of human beings, each of which is unique and quirky and all of whom are kaleidoscopically re-arranging themselves moment by moment! Moreover, even if all asuras were magically disappeared from society today, in no time a new crop would pop up in no time.
So: no perfect systems and thus no easy answers!
Posted by: Scorpion | Nov 8 2022 16:21 utc | 207
But all sovereign-state-type societies are made that same way, by a group of elite mythologists capturing laborers and natural resources in a durable mythical envelope. The mysticism and spookiness of the cabal are deployed to hinder understanding of what is, at the end of the day, just another bureaucracy high on its own supply. The competing interpretations of Christianity didn’t need to correctly infer the bureaucratic structures and forms of the spiritual plane to have effects on the mundane world. The High Cabal phenomenon strikes me as simply be a personification of a value system, an eldritch High Name for capitalist relations flowing from neo-Platonist hierarchism (which it seems you believe is natural, and not ideology). In other words, just another god from the eternal pantheon.
Also, I dispute the proposition that human nature is to obey.
Posted by: sippy the shot glass | Nov 8 2022 15:44 utc | 208
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First, thanks for the post. Second: well, this is getting pretty deep for a comment section. Third: am not sure I understand you all that well but I think you are objecting to the notion of a self-existing class system, no?
If so: the system part may well be tethered or spawned by ideologies arising from within the culture/times, granted. But that there will always be classes, like different sedimentary layers, I think that’s an existential, observable truth. Put another way: do we have any example anywhere of an entirely classless society, from small tribes to humongous polity like China without multi-faceted classes including hierarchical conventions? I very much doubt it and have certainly never encounted such a thing myself.
There is underlying dynamic and then societal convention/overlay. The latter gets confused and confusing as situations evolve rendering previous mores out of sync so human societies are kaleidoscopes in continual motion but most social institutions fail to keep up with the flow.
The other thing have been playing with in this series comes from esoteric notion of mandalas – which are poorly understood these days and in any case rather arcane. But I like them as a framework or filter. The original concept is that of sphere (literally anything with with both center and fringe) but it does not so much describe a material object or setup so much as a perceived-experienced zone.
Examples are things like: body mandala, sacred-church mandala, kitchen mandala, workshop mandala, national mandala, football arena mandala, inner (psychological) mandala, outer (societal) mandala and so forth. So they are recognizable spheres or zones comprising (usually) both outer and inner elements, or mind and body aspects. They are individually recognizable but also interpenetrate. The boudoir mandala exists within Louis XIV’s personal mandala within the Versailles Palace mandala within the mandala of the Kingdom of France in the mandala of Christian Europe, not to mention the inner mandala of his personal feelings about Madame de X during their private session together after exiting the Cabinet mandala earlier that day when War – another type of mandala – was decided upon with the pesky Dutch (mandala)!
Classes are similar to mandalas in that they have particular perspectives and styles which can be perceived by others and also affect how one perceives others. (Boss-employee, parent-child etc). This is why as much as intellectuals and totalitarian regimes might try there is no one truth in political-social spheres/mandalas.
The whole thing is not complicated or profoundly meaningful but it is interesting because often the way the mind works, cognitively and knitting together various concepts into meaning and narrative, we tend to look for end points, conclusions, definitions and in so doing-freezing-stopping ignore ongoing dynamic processes ever in flux. This dilemma, or tendency, is addressed for example in the world’s oldest text (according to some) the Yijing usually translated as the Classic (yi) of Change (jing). It might also be called Process Theory Manual.
But it assumes a worldview that assumes we live in an experiential universe, not one that separates objective and subjective realities. That sort of notion (objective) is anathema to nearly all traditional spiritual-contemplative traditions because it posits a theoretical abstract as reality (the objective) which can never be proven as such due to the always subjective nature of individual and collective experience. The quantum crowd bumped up against this in modern science finding that mind and particles are eternally relating and they cannot find one without the other. It’s an accurate discovery but it gives many cognitive dissonance and so often produces brain melt! The problem is not the finding but holding onto fixed preconceptions – the freezing-concept principle above.
And experientially one of the problems we face as humans with tendencies to just about always make messes of everything (which might be regarded as one of our more endearing tendencies) is to freeze reality (mandalic experiences of all sorts) into neatly tied-up conclusions at which point they lose their dynamism. This happens on very simple level with basic concepts like ‘tree’ or ‘river’ both of which are continuously living, breathing, changing matrix of phenomena (a mandala) but have no inherent existence as the end point concept itself. There is no such thing, really, as a tree or river since they vary from moment to moment and are never the same thing twice. This might sound like splitting hairs but the process of fixing things with concept leads to many stumblings on the journey because they tend to hinder authentic improvisation which keeps pace with the ongoing dynamic change-process unfolding with all and everything so-called object and so-called subjective. This is why new generations, even in stable, sane societies, are continually injecting new fashions and ways into the societal equation. It must be so.
The Yi tries to present 64 fundamental types of change-process which can be observed and contemplated, all derived from eight original trigrams (the maximum number that the trigrams comprising various combination of solid and broken lines can create). But eight was felt by some to be too few to encapsulate all experience so they made hexagrams of two trigrams which come to 64 in total which is both small and large enough to work with. They have no inherent existence or meaning but offer a range of patterns of relationships with which to develop a vocabulary of styles of change-process that one can use to identify what sort of dynamic is unfolding in any given situation and what sort of permutation is most or least likely given that basis or character. Although often used as an oracle, the real art-science in the Yi is to study the various patterns during a life and see them reflected in no end of mandalic manifestations both individually and societally. Advanced yi practitioners see the trigrams and hexagrams in no end of situations, be it the shape of a plant or the way a political debate is unfolding. So they are a viewing and contemplating template not anything self-existing per se in themselves.
Class structures definitely happen (I believe always) between humans (and animals) but how they are worked with and interpreted varies greatly from people to people and culture to culture. High civilizations have wise and adaptive ways of playing with such things and low civilization or cultures do not. Confucianism is an attempt to perceive order within spontaneity and structure society in a way that will promote harmony of the different levels and layers that exist so that they resonate well following the underlying patterns of change-process-dynamics-realities-mandalas.
You mentioned such a layer in terms of the hidden hand directing all from above which is mysterious and spooky. There are always things we cannot see clearly in contrast to local situations we see (perhaps too) directly. All societies have no end of such layers and levels. But in a good society they all feel part of the same ‘we’ and that we has a goodness and sanity to it wherein all are leading productive, meaningful heart-full lives.
Ultimately it’s all based on common sense but that is often very hard to perceive through the fog of societally constructed confusion, not to mention strife and malice.
Or some such. Anyway…
Posted by: Scorpion | Nov 8 2022 20:52 utc | 210
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