PUTIN: NO HOSTILE NATIONS JUST HOSTILE ELITES
For some time I've been trying to warn that the current course of the West vis-a-vis its relations with Russia are on exactly the wrong course, and that the western leadership is seriously misunderstanding (1) the nature of the current situation, (2) how Russia views it, and (3) how it will respond. To to point number (1): Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, I have been among those in the West who believe that the power(-hungry) oligarchs and plutocrats in control of it have struggled to replace it with a "Most Favored Enemy" status to be conferred on some other "worthy" opponent. The trouble is, no other such "Most Favored Enemy" could be found, try as The Project for a New American Century might to find it. You may remember them. They were the Neo-Con knuckleheads calling for a "New Pearl Harbor" to galvanize American public opinion into a vast national-building and military-power-projection project in the Middle East. The objective was, of course, to secure American dominance and control over the world's energy supplies, and to maintain a monopoly on access to "archaeological sites of interest" to said oligarchs and plutocrats. The trouble was (and is) that terrorism just didn't have the same panache as the Soviet Union with its gigantic ICBMs crawling through Red Square on May Day. The trouble was Islamic terrorists were...well... Islamic, and the culture was just too strange and mysterious for most Americans to wrap their heads around. It was and is "too different." The same problem held to a certain extent with China. With Russia one had an enemy one could identify with: it was both European, but Asian; it was Christian, but with some sort of "weird difference", and it had and has an alphabet that is both recognizable, and isn't. So there was always an element in the western
oligarchy - think, for a moment, of Hillary Clinton and her "Russia reset button" - that wanted to restart the Cold War.This brings us to point number (2): The trouble, of course, is that things have moved on since the Cold War. Russia has made new friends and expanded its economy dramatically. Old Cold war animosities with mainland China have been tabled, and it has strengthened old ties with India. Most notably, it reached out to its old Axis enemies, Germany and Japan, with major trade deals (in Germany's case) and agreements with Japan's Shinzo Abe to allow Japanese to live on Shakalin island, which both the Russian and Japanese leaders agreed to view as a kind of free trade zone. In Germany's case, the effort was not successful, as the USA blew up the Nordstream pipeline, and Chancellor Scholz appears to be the latest European incarnation of the American lap-poodle. In any case, Russia has also updated its military capabilities to an extent that the old Cold War confrontations of the imagination are no longer the only way it has of dealing with the West. It has deliberately expanded its range of response mechanisms and capabilities as it speaks now of "horizontal escalation", and warns the west that it is "updating" its nuclear doctrine. These capabilities have been on display with the West's proxy war with Russia via the Ukraine. Try as the West's Mighty Wurlitzer propatainment media might, a losing and increasingly disastrous military situation for the latter just cannot be spun into success.
This brings us to point (3). In looking back at the warnings emanating from the Kremlin over the past two decades, I've been arguing that the Russian government viewed itself as not being at war with "the West," but rather with the western leadership and oligarchical class. This view of things was sparked by the curious remarks made by economist Sergei Glazyev shortly after the Maidan coup in the Ukraine that brought the current cabal of misfits into power in Kiev, thank you U.S. State Department. Glazyev said - in what may surely be taken as an informed warning - that Russia's problem "was not the Nazis in Kiev, it was the Nazis in Washington." In other words, it was a problem of a hidden ideology of fascism and the partisans adhering to it, that controlled American policy. The warnings over the years since have been startk and unequivocal: target us, and we will target you. The warnings, in other words, were and are to the leadership class of the West, not to the nations themselves. The warnings are to the George Soroses, Klaus (Bloh)Schwabs, Boris Johnsons, Lindsey Graham(cracker)s, and other incorrigible blowhards of Neocon western policy. (Yes, this means you, Victoria.) We are dealing with a thermonuclear power (the world's leading thermonuclear power, in terms of numbers of warheads), with the capability of dropping warheads or drones to within a few meters of its target. These warnings, you might also recall, increased ion frequency and number after the abortive Ukrainian attempts to fire drones at the Kremlin. The Kremlin was not buying the idea that the Ukraine did it entirely on its own. Such precision attacks would have required absolutely the covert participation of western military powers with space-based targeting capabilities. Think the usual suspects here,
What most people forget are those stories of drones appearing over restricted American military airspace in this country that also occurred within the same temporal context. There was no doubt in my mind then, and is not now, that these events and incidents were "return to sender" messages from Moscow," just as the ammunition plant explosions in the UK and Germany are also probably examples of "horizontal escalation," grim reminders that Russia maintains on the ground human intelligence capabilities.
To drive all these points home once again, Mr. Putin just recently addressed Russians and made it clear that the Russian government views its opposition not as Frenchmen, or Germans, or even Britons, but as the elites running (and co-opting) those countries (article shared by L.G.L.R. with our gratitude):
There are no countries hostile to Russia, there are hostile elites — Putin
Mr. Putin's language is clear and unequivocal:
KYZYL, September 2. /TASS/. There are no languages or countries hostile to Russia, there are hostile elites who want to weaken and split it; they think that such a big country as Russia threatens them, Russian President Vladimir Putin said while speaking at an open lesson Talking about the important at Kyzyl’s school No. 20.
"We do not reject anything: we don't have hostile languages, we don't even have hostile countries. We have hostile elites in some countries that have been fighting against Russia for centuries in order to weaken our country because they think it is too big. They think that they are threatened by a big country like Russia, and they try to slow down our development," Putin said.
He added that hostile elites were obsessed with the idea of dismembering Russia. In reply to a schoolgirl's question about the development of relations with China, Putin said that the People's Republic of China had no such intentions toward Russia.
Of course, Mr. Putin knows as well as anyone else that mainland China, with a population almost ten times as large as Russia's, is a potential threat to the vast and open spaces of resource-rich, but sparsely populated, Russian Siberia. And of course, Mr. Xi knows that any step in that direction on China's part would be met with an overwhelming Russian response, probably nuclear. It is a classic standoff which both countries have decided to turn into an alliance. But with the West, Mr. Putin notes that Russia has been fighting those elites "for centuries," and in saying this, he is clearly targeting the usual suspects: the anti-Orthodox Vatican, and the western plutocracy in the form of its central and international bankers.
So what has changed? In one sense, nothing, but with the Ukraine's increasing military "misfortunes," everything. For the moment Russia will content itself with dealing with the Ukraine. Having rejected peace proposals and continued to manifest its almost American-like enstupidation, the Ukrainian government will go the way of the "independent" Hettmanate of the Ukraine carved out of Russia by the Central Powers at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Depending on how the west responds to what Russia does to and with the Ukraine, Russia's next steps will be perhaps to mirror any western escalation. Perhaps another attempt will be made on Mr. Putin's life... remember the strange car accident a few years ago involving his chauffeur?
A desperate West will do almost anything. But the Russians are patient. Just because they don't respond immediately, doesn't mean they won't respond....
See you on the flip side...
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