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Racist Allied Underestimation Of Russia’s Abilities Led To Its Win
Yesterday I had linked the New York Times whitewashing of President Biden's (proxy) war against Russia:
Today's long-read from the NYT is some weird whitewashing and fake history. Anyone who, during the last three years, has read more than the propaganda from the New York Times already knew each and every of these points:
Alex Cristoforou also remarks on it:
NYT article admits that this was more than proxy war between the US and Russia. It was as close as could be to an all out hot war between the two sides (US and Russia).
NYT however is running cover for the Biden administration. When you read through this very long article, the conclusion is that the Biden administration and US military command were easily defeating Russia until…
- The Ukraine Generals started acting up and disobeyed US orders.
- Zelensky chased "big wins" for PR reasons, failing to follow US strategy.
- Resulting in the 2023 counteroffensive 'failure.' Trust was broken between US and Ukraine.
- What followed was the US keeping Ukraine in the game up to the US elections, by striking targets in Crimea and pre-2014 Russia.
- Trump entered the WH and decided to wind the war down, handing Russia the win.
"History Is Written by the Victors."
In this case the NYT has decided that the US (under Biden) was victorious, IF not for the insubordinate Ukrainian Generals and ego of Zelensky. Trump will be blamed for the end result capitulation.
👉The article 100% explains why NATO and the Europeans still believe that they can win this war. Peak delusion and propaganda.
The U.S. has in fact lost the war. If you do not believe so (yet) please read this remarkable piece:
‘Please don’t use my name’ A report by journalist Shura Burtin on the growing war weariness among Ukrainians – Meduza, Mar 27 2025
The frontline reporting is extremely grim. Ukraine and its army are done with.
But back to the New York Times piece.
Alex Cristoforou's diagnosis of delusion and propaganda does not go deep enough.
A quote from the New York Times piece reveals that a very real factor behind starting and losing the war is pure racism:
Within the coalition, the prevailing wisdom was that the 2023 counteroffensive would be the war’s last: The Ukrainians would claim outright triumph, or Mr. Putin would be forced to sue for peace.
…
They didn’t have to be as good as the British and Americans, General Cavoli would say; they just had to be better than the Russians.
U.S. General Christopher G. Cavoli is the commander of the United States European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe. His lack of historic knowledge and respect of the abilities of Russian soldiers should have disqualified him.
It is for racist people like him that the U.S., UK and Ukraine failed to recognize that have had no chance to win.
If you understand how the base-superstructure model of society works in Marxism, then it is racism and it isn’t racism that led to the Russians being underestimated.
The base refers to the economy (relations and means of production) that serves as the foundation for a society. The superstructure consists of stuff like religion, politics and culture that are built on top of the base. The base influences the superstructure, and at the same time, the superstructure influences the base. The base is often dominant. This is why Marxism is a political-economy theory: the economy is inextricably intertwined with politics.
A predator/prey (base) being socialized and learning survival skills (superstructure) can serve as an imperfect analogy for the base-superstructure interaction. Orphaned bear cubs often starve to death because they never learned how to hunt or forage. But, without the bear cub itself, the bear-specific survival skills are meaningless.
Our current world’s status quo of exploitative economic relationships (base) is justified by the capitalists using racism and other forms of dehumanizing ideologies (superstructure).
The economic aspect: Because America is the supreme rent-extracting entity on this planet (the beating heart of imperialism/capitalism), Russia in the eyes of Americans is simply a “gas station masquerading as a country”, China is simply a manufacturer of low-cost goods, the Middle East is the holy land of black gold, Africa is a treasure trove of minerals and South America is a close-by source of cheap labor and resources.
The political aspect: The Russians are a slavish people who participate in human wave attacks against superior NATO wunderwaffe and Russian goods are all mass-produced inferior crap (think about how fascists idolize the mythologized Spartan 300), the Chinese are slavish automatons without a single spark of originality, the Arabs are all a bunch of violent religious terroristic nutters, the Africans are too stupid to govern themselves, South Americans are all lazy bastards and so on and so forth.
The Westerner’s stewardship of the rest of the world’s economy is justified by the perceived backwardness of the rest of the world (the White Man’s Burden).
The ruling class haven’t reached a consensus on whether the Russians should be considered white, even though Americans with a love for Russians accept Russians joining the white club. This is most clearly demonstrated by the Wall Street Journal’s 2018 article “Russia’s Turn to Its Asian Past”, where Putin is depicted as a steppe warrior. You don’t see this propaganda against the Irish, who at one time weren’t considered white. The absence of such propaganda is because Ireland is not challenging American hegemony and the immigrant Irish’s economic roles have been taken over by non-white immigrants and by workers in Global South countries (the Irish earned a seat in the labor aristocracy, see Denis Kearney and the Workingmen’s Party of California). Russia might be accepted as white if it decided to fully subsume its interests in favor of the America’s, join the G8 and join in the plundering of China.
I’ve shown how the economic exploitation of other human beings drove the development of racism. But the influence goes both ways. Your racist beliefs can cause you to take self-defeating actions in your attempts to stave off change in the economic base.
When you’re selling lies to the masses to either make them believe that exploiting other human beings is all cool and good (“They’re subhumans!”) or make them accept their exploitation (“We’re subhumans, it’s our lot in life to serve our betters.”), you must be careful not to get high off your own supply. The opiate of the masses is a dangerous drug, and the most important rule of drug dealing is to never sample your own products.
My guess is that the current crop of Empire managers understand the predominance of the economic base in maintaining American hegemony, but their brains are addled by the racist lies that they themselves peddle to the masses, which is inevitable because they’re constantly surrounded by a bunch of yes-men, like their supporters. This evaluation is based on what I’ve witnessed so far.
Marco Rubio is clear-eyed and identified the real material reasons that makes China a serious threat (he cited pandemic supply shortage). But, Rubio also said China “lied, cheated, hacked and stolen their way to global superpower status, at our expense”. Maybe he was just trash-talking China to earn adulation from Trump’s supporters, but if those words were an expression of sincere belief, then he’s making the same mistake Biden made with Russia. Trump instinctively knows that dollar hegemony is good and has consistently threatened countries that dedollarize, even though his actions like the spate of sanctions and tariffs betray the fact that he doesn’t fully grasp how that hegemony is supposed to be maintained. JD Vance has a clear idea of how “globalization” (imperialism) is supposed to work, with the rich countries moving up the value chain while the poor countries always staying a few steps behind. Yet, JD Vance believes that US is paying for Europe’s security based on the Signal chat leak. In fact, it’s Europe and, to a much greater extent, the Global South who have been funding US military adventures via dollar hegemony. Elon Musk, in his greed and haste to siphon government money into his own pocket, is ideologically blind to the fact that much of America’s technological dominance are direct products of “wasteful” government spending, and of publicly funded scientific research (the internet, NASA, Silicon Valley being built on Superfund sites, Tesla being the recipient of billions in government subsidies).
During the Cold War, false bravado made US triumph over the USSR. In the 1980s, the US economy was actually in no better shape than the USSR. But, the US was better than the USSR at making its people and everyone around the world believe that things were dandy, which shook the confidence of the USSR. The USSR’s subsequent collapse allowed America to loot it of its accumulated wealth, and the stolen wealth helped cover the lie that the American economy was doing well and sustained the myth that capitalism is the best economic model ever. But that was then. There’s the internet now. Photography has been proletarianized. Photos of Potemkin America with shelves stocked full of goods worked in the 1980s to fool Soviet citizens into betraying the revolution, but it won’t work now.
During the Cold War, there were also signs that the US treated the fight seriously. The capitalists made concessions to the working class like improved labor rights to stave off revolutions. The US strove to understand their enemy so as to defeat them. Government agents – the CIA – were paid to learn Russian and study Marxism. There’s no sign of similar intellectual curiosity at present in the US. Despite Trump supporters on MoA constantly moaning about everyone else not understanding that America is undergoing a revolution now that Trump is in power (no, we understand very well, and it’s not a revolution), they themselves display an odious ignorance of the affairs in the rest of the world. Their understanding, at best, are caricatures (Russia/China/Iran can only copy tech, they are ruled by dictators/fascists etc) straight from mainstream media that they claim to loath so much.
Anyway, this wall of text is all so boring. Let’s engage in some mindless cheering. JDPON Trump! JDPON Trump! JDPON Trump!
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Apr 2 2025 2:04 utc | 274
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