It’s far more than sheer imperial hubris that drives Washington’s neocons and the progressive cultists to dance in the shadow of Armageddon that has fallen across Ukraine
By Mark Cromer
As Russia’s troops, tanks, warplanes and warships stand ready at the jump lines awaiting Moscow’s order to ‘go,’ unleashing a blitz into Ukraine for what may well be a bloody fight but one whose outcome will not be in question, it’s worth considering just how Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the United States and its continental front group NATO came to this moment when the fate of the world may well be decided by a collective miscalculation quickly turned misstep that slips into a globally fatal mistake.
No doubt Russian President Vladimir Putin has pondered this mightily, ruminating on it long before the current crisis has arrived at its present potential flashpoint. Ukraine is on Russia’s front porch and Moscow has far more national interest at stake in its geopolitical position than Washington or any of the neocon think tanks and their aligned media outlets are ever willing to acknowledge.
With a now largely historically illiterate populace in the United States, they apparently don’t have to.
But beyond considering the geographic realpolitik now unfolding in Eastern Europe, one may hope that Putin peeks behind the curtain for a glimpse of what is fueling the American war machine, something he may not be able to fully discern or comprehend from the empty utterances of the American diplomatic corps or even the Russian intelligence services analysis of the political machinations unfolding inside the beltway and its distillations of Washington’s state-issued media narratives.
To that end, it’s worth noting that the recycled comparisons to the dark October of 1962, when the world held its breath over the Cuban Missile Crisis, are not only overblown but on a factually relevant basis almost non-existent—specifically as it relates to the adversary that Moscow now faces in an antagonistic Washington.
The world is indeed much closer to midnight than most of its inhabitants apparently perceive and perhaps even fundamentally closer to the atomic abyss than it was during the apex of the October 1962 standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States.
It may be true that Washington and Moscow have not dramatically elevated their nuclear posture, nor has either government cancelled military leaves, ordered mobilization or declared a naval blockade.
Yet the lack of such crude warning light indicators is deceiving.
The real danger underlying the present crisis is not only the composition of the American leadership—to the extent you can attach an actual national interest to the governing body in the United States—but the composition of the people currently populating the American landscape today.
All of which is to say: the America of 1962 simply no longer exists in 2022.
It no longer exists from the men who once held its highest echelons of power to its average Joe toiling away earnestly for a family-supporting salary and a firmer foothold in the American Dream of a single-family home, a comfortable pension and a fair chance at a bright future for the next generation of his family. That nation and much of its people are gone, despite the odd relics and occasional heirlooms they left behind that can still be glimpsed across various landscapes that stretch from its crumbling cities to the empty storefronts of its heartland small towns.
This is crucial to grasp because it goes to the very root of why Russia has been so ritually defiled and Putin personally so fervently reviled throughout the power centers that have emerged as legacy Americans and their culture have been replaced and the republic that they built and once governed (too recklessly, as it turned out) have now been refitted to the psychotic whims of a progressive death cult in which the neocons see further opportunity as their odd bedfellows—no condom required.
What Russia faces today is not merely the latest chapter in a long contest waged by two world powers for geopolitical advantage in a particular continental theater, quite to the contrary. Despite repeated assurances made by the White House over multiple administrations in the 1990s and 2000s that America would not attempt to fill the vacuum of the Soviet Union’s implosion, in fact Washington did just that, marching NATO’s banners ever eastward as it absorbed Russia’s old Warsaw Pact satellites and created its own ‘Baltic balcony’ by folding Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia into the Atlantic Alliance.
It was an achievement not seen since the Wehrmacht stood at the gates of Moscow in the cruel winter of 1941, except this time it was achieved without a shot fired but instead obfuscated by relentless American platitudes about ‘partnerships in peace’ and empty assurances that ‘a new era of cooperation’ for global security had dawned, all topped off with Vaudeville shticks complete with cheap prop ‘reset’ buttons.
Meanwhile the American Empire’s war machine was spreading its tentacles everywhere around the globe through a vast constellation of military bases, outposts, naval ports and airfields, creating a web that would commit the United States to conflict whether by formal treaty or merely presence alone—what’s known as ‘facts on the ground.’
Even former Secretary of State James Baker finally admitted that America ran a long con on Russia—albeit one aided and abetted by a drunken, depressed and disoriented Boris Yeltsin—as it rolled ever deeper into Eastern Europe and the Balkans. It was a scam that has now brought the globe much closer to nuclear war than it would ever have been without NATO’s long march to Russia.
The head-spinning hypocrisy of Washington & Co. and their projectile political puking of increasingly insidious allegations that Moscow in the main but Putin in particular are on the warpath must being most nauseating for the Kremlin.
From the spectral ‘incident’ in the Gulf of Tonkin to the even more ghostly Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq; from the nation-building exercises in Afghanistan to the liberty-spreading operations in Syria and Libya—to name but a few of Uncle Sam’s greatest hits—Washington and its operational Death Star (known in this galaxy simply as The Pentagon) has established an unassailable record as an agent of absolute chaos.
Washington’s pompous veil of peacemaker, provider of freedom and protector of liberty around the world has worn so thin that Moscow can see right through it and it is equally transparent to the remaining American populace that is even half-cognizant of what is now unfolding in Eastern Europe.
Which is to say, unfortunately, not that many people at all.
When President Kennedy addressed the nation on October 22, 1962, detailing the presence of the Soviet’s nuclear missiles in Cuba and underlining Washington’s intent to see them removed from the island nation just 90-miles off American shores, the American people were riveted by the peril and much more importantly, they understood the legitimacy of the existential threat that Kennedy spelled out for them on a very fundamental level.
In 1962, most Americans from junior high school on up could identify Cuba on a map and had a solid understanding of the threat that communism posed to free people everywhere, but in 2022 most people in the United States would not be able to find Ukraine and would have difficulty locating even Russia on a map, despite the fact that it spans 11 time zones. Even fewer would be able to articulate even a semi-comprehensible rationale as to why the Russian government’s position in Eastern Europe now poses a legitimate national security threat to the United States.
What do most people in the United States today know of Ukraine, Belarus or the Baltic States? Well, they know that whatever they are, they are not entrees on the menu at Applebee’s.
Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, the Baltics, the Balkans and NATO? Meh. Most of the population living in America today is waiting for their next fix of a mega-spectacle like the Super Bowl, as gladiator-scale sports, consumer credit card fantasies and cheap-if-deadly dope are the sedative cocktail being administered to the masses by Washington’s policies to keep them as compliantly addled as possible.
In 1962, most Americans had a firm and at least somewhat nuanced grasp of what was at stake in the Cold War and the broad strokes of the clash of ideologies that pitted a largely free Western world against the state-operated lives of those living grimly behind what Winston Churchill had rightly declared to be an Iron Curtain in the East.
In 1962, the United States was populated largely by a culturally cohesive people, diverse in many respects but bonded fundamentally through shared value systems, language, religion and a way of life.
Again, that America simply no longer exists, not just generationally but in its cultural genetics that have been aggressively erased—or ‘transitioned’ in the progressive parlance of today—through carefully orchestrated but unrelenting waves of mass immigration and in 2022 precious little appears to be deeply shared among the polyglot population that now resides in the United States.
The long spoken promise of cultural assimilation in America has been revealed as the lie that mass immigration advocates clearly intended it as, for today cultural assimilation is now derided as nothing short of racist criminality. Today, the mere mention of assimilation in America is met with either a cynical chuckle or a disgusted rebuke even as tens of millions of migrants from foreign shores flood into the United States to set up shop as little more than an overseas annex of their home countries; maintaining not just their language at home or benign traditional customs to honor their heritage but rather as something more akin to a garrison.
And most every dysfunctional cultural aspect has come with them.
From foreign flags flying over their homes and emblazoned on their vehicles to not-so-underground markets that bustle in full public view without permits, labor regulations or taxes. And more often than not the American taxpayer funded subsidies such as the earned-income tax credit (easy to qualify for when most of your income is off the books) to no-questions-asked relief monies doled out through ethno-political patronage that has deep distribution rackets across the United States.
In spite of all the cynical appeals to unity and declarations that civic and racial divisions must be ‘healed,’ the multiplatform power centers in the United States that have congealed into a globalist operation over the past half-century continue to spew a virulent loathing of America’s history and a terrible blood libel has been codified against its majority white population as a means to control and direct its current and future populations of people who are not white.
This highly organized, vastly financed and systemically dispensed hatred of white Americans cannot be overstated in any respect.
It pollutes the schools from kindergarten to post-graduate studies, it pervades the professions from banks to commercial airlines and it chokes the airwaves, digital empires and cable networks. The sheer totality of this progressive pogrom has not been witnessed on such a well-oiled scale in a First World nation since Nazi Germany’s theology of anti-Semitism was unleashed against the Jewish people in the early 1930s, a state-sponsored horror show that culminated in the frenzied Satanic apex of the Holocaust.
Understanding this state sanctioned and corporately financed hatred of white Americans, one can better understand the fanatical hatred of Russia that has bonded the progressives that are now the dominant ideological force of the Democrats and the plus-ones that are the neocons that own and operate the corporate Right.
In the starkest of terms, Russia represents—and Putin personifies—everything progressives in the United States hate with the full freight of their evangelist fervor.
Russia is a nation that is not intoxicated to the point of delirium with a strange brew of national self-loathing and historical desecration, unlike the United States. Russia is a nation that believes in the sanctity of its sovereignty and defends its national borders accordingly, unlike the United States. Russia is a nation that believes in the obvious truth of natural biology that one need not be a scientist to understand: a man is a man and a woman is a woman, unlike the United States.
Russia is a nation that will not sexually groom its elementary school students or preach chemical castration to prepubescent boys or suggest preemptive radical mastectomies to junior high school girls, unlike the United States.
One need not be a Kremlinologist to understand that for all the ills and corruption that does indeed plague Russia, it comes nowhere near the fundamental cultural rot, the diseased corrosion and the progressive psychosis that has indisputably devoured the American experiment.
When Russian troops march through Red Square each May 9th in honor of the Soviet Union’s blood-soaked sacrifice in defeating Nazi Germany—a staggering death toll of well more than 20 million people amid the utter destruction of many if not most of its major population centers west of the Volga—the progressives in the United States today see little more than a powerful and primarily white military whose soldiers carry a weapon and stand a post for a powerful and primarily white nation that are filled with a patriotic pride and love for their nation, their people, their history and their culture.
And the progressives burn with phosphorous-grade hatred at the very sight of it.
Distilled to its molecular level, the homicidal hatred the progressives harbor for the Russian people springs from the nuclei which every other element of their world view and life meaning emerges: a politically cultivated hatred of white people.
Progressives today have shed their veil and angrily declare that everything in the United States is about race, which in shorthand means the genetic evil of white people. And no matter who else believes that despicable lie, they do. They didn’t get there yesterday and they’re not leaving it tomorrow or, actually, probably ever.
They are the Jonestown crowd and they are now legion.
And the accelerating confrontation between the United States and Russia ostensibly over Ukraine is no exception to their worldview. That Ukraine is also an overwhelmingly white country and also nationalistic is of no matter, for now, to progressives in the United States. Ukraine is relatively small and comparatively weak when set against the other powers involved. Russia is a nationalistic superpower that is a white country.
And that’s really the core issue for progressives.
For all the ridicule that Putin has been targeted for among Washington’s media assets, it’s not by chance or accident the bitterest scorn has been reserved for his displays of unvarnished masculinity: a shirtless Putin striding about the beautiful wilds of Russia with a gun, Putin riding a horse, Putin fishing a lake or river, Putin marveling and celebrating Russia’s monuments.
What appears to be benign to those outside the progressive cultist’s orthodoxy is a global hate crime in progress to those within the Jonestown v.2 that the Democrats have built.
Yet it’s worth noting exactly just who Putin’s He-Man poses for public consumption that inspire such unadulterated rage contrasts with in the White House today: a 79-year-old man whose dentures came loose during one primary debate and whose eye literally filled with blood during another, a president who despite his cocoon of handlers and the rumored regimen of injections necessary just to get him through his abbreviated daily schedule still slurs his way through a fog of dissipating thoughts and confuse his fading fix on the teleprompter during his extremely managed appearances and what remains of his intellect disintegrates as his brain plummets past angry senility and into the approaching abyss of undeniable dementia.
Despite the nationally embarrassing sulfuric neutron bomb that President Biden let loose amidst royalty, not one reporter has yet to muster the courage to ask if the continuing mask mandate at the White House might have less to do with COVID and perhaps more to do with Biden’s losing battle against uncontrollable flatulence that is so acrid even the coal-lined diapers he has been fitted with cannot contain.
It’s a fair question.
Regardless, a 69-year-old white Putin behaving like a healthy man in Russia of the very sort the progressives have been hell bent on exterminating in the United States for decades is simply untenable for them.
For progressives, Russia’s very cultural existence can’t go unanswered or unchallenged any longer and over the past six years they, along with the neocons, have orchestrated a smear and fear campaign against Russia that in many respects surpasses the Red Scare of the 1950s.
The abruptness and the aggressiveness of the progressive pivot on Russia could be glimpsed quite clearly in the quiet college town of Claremont, California, which has a long history of liberal activism that is as old and organically ubiquitous as the deep sea of trees that also define the upscale and decidedly white enclave. For years many among the fashionably liberal set sported CCCP window stickers on their Volvos, ostensibly as an acronym for ‘Claremont Cross Country People,’ but in actual fact a sly tip of the hat to the Cyrillic translation for the USSR.
These are people (including this writer) who grew up during the Cold War period of the late 1960s through the 1980s and though fraught as it was with the menacing communist goal of world domination and the prospect of total nuclear annihilation still harbored some fond memories of Leonid Brezhnev, the old Soviet leader from Ukraine who like the longstanding and formidable adversary Nikita Khrushchev before him was a generally deliberate head of state not terribly eager to plunge the planet into a nuclear winter.
These are people who remember men like Andrei Gromyko and Anatoly Dobrynin, two veteran Soviet statesmen who frequently appeared in American newspapers and on the American broadcast networks and through their longevity at the very least provided Americans with the comfort of the devil you know variety.
With the passing of Brezhnev in 1982 the politburo burped forth Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko in rapid succession—those two old-timers lasted less than three years in office as General Secretary between them, an unnerving succession of turnovers for a nuclear superpower—before landing on Mikhail Gorbachev. An unassuming but sharp bureaucrat, Gorbachev electrified many in the West with his policies of Glasnost and Perestroika, and ultimately served as the undertaker of the Soviet Union but bagged a Noble Peace Prize on his way out the Kremlin’s door in 1991.
Thus the CCCP window stickers that sprouted across Claremont were a collectively raised figurative glass of Russian mineral water (more commonly known as Stoli) to that era—but one that vanished virtually overnight as Donald Trump began his run for the presidency and the progressives dedicated themselves to the black-ops offensive that started with a fantastical dossier and quickly went viral in an all-out effort to falsely diagnose any opposition to the progressive agenda as Russian in origin.
To the progressives, Putin has become a walking drop of Polonium-210. They try to sprinkle him everywhere they feel threatened.
The New York Times, once a formidable and reputable newspaper that transitioned itself into a hard-Left agitprop publishing house that is closely aligned with violent shakedown operations such as BLM and radical Left terror organizations such as Antifa, has served as a wellspring of incitement for the United States to geopolitically kneecap Russia as prelude to exterminating its national culture.
On Super Bowl Sunday, The Times ran a series of stories that began above the front page fold and jumped inside the agitprop broadsheet that deployed a bevy of Beltway players to praise Biden’s purported release of intelligence that proved Russia was preparing a ‘false flag’ operation complete with ‘crisis actors’ as a cover to trigger the invasion of Ukraine. In an effort to explain away the massive false flag operation that Washington employed in 2003 to unleash its invasion of Iraq on the pretext of destroying a mercurial Weapons of Mass Destruction program that an already bludgeoned Baghdad was allegedly preparing to use against the United States, The Times quoted— without even the faintest whiff of irony—Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan who belched forth the bizarre deflection of: “In Iraq, intelligence was used and deployed from this very podium to start a war. We are trying to stop a war.”
Apparently Sullivan was not asked if the U.S. was seeking to stop a war in Eastern Europe, then might not a fast-track to that goal be an open and official declaration, one committed to writing, that Ukraine and the former Soviet state of Georgia will never be eligible to become members of NATO. That would be an immense step toward de-escalation that could produce immediate results without any sacrifice whatsoever on behalf of the United States or the West.
But Washington is not seeking a de-escalation in Ukraine at all, rather it seeks a wider and deeper destabilization that it is gambling can break its way and either severely weaken Putin’s leadership in Moscow or overturn it completely. It’s an intoxicating prospect for progressives that dream of the day when a rainbow flag flutters over the Kremlin and Russian school children are taught to either change their gender or erase it altogether as they learn to hate their parents, their country and their cultural heritage.
This potentially deadly gamble is lauded at The Times, which on Sunday published a companion story on the Ukraine crisis that painted French President Emmanuel Macron as the European leader of consequence that’s trying to thread the needle of maintaining NATO’s eastward trajectory but slipping Moscow a Mickey that convinces the Kremlin that all will be well in the end. The Times characterized Macron’s diplomacy as a profile in courage: “To turn up at the Kremlin, facing a man who has put a gun to the head of the West…”
Those twenty words neatly capture where the progressives’ perspective dovetail seamlessly with the neocons’ aspirations.
For the neocons bristle at a resurgent Russia that is committed to defending its clear and convincing national interests in its natural geographic sphere of influence. Moscow’s leadership, at least as presently comprised, poses an existential threat to the globalist agenda that Washington’s neocons have long sought to cement, if only Yeltsin would have held on for another decade.
While Russia, under Putin, has spent the past two decades vigorously reinvigorating the Russian military after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the drunken debacle of the Yeltsin era that followed, the United States has rapidly accelerated the transformation of its military forces through the sociopolitical reeducation of its troops with an escalating focus on the tenets of progressive racial, gender and sexual identities.
While the Russians were busy buttressing their ground forces with increasingly sophisticated, large-scale joint-force exercises, combat deployments and elevating its physical training requirements all while developing first generation hypersonic weapons that are impervious to the current defensive umbrellas any nation can employ, the United States was busy building a faux national government in the tribal lands of Afghanistan while supplying and training Kabul’s ghost armies that disappeared or defected in a matter of days if not hours as American troops pulled out.
After two decades of war, the Taliban defeated the United States and its new but not improved ARVN stand-ins with what effectively was a scratch guerilla force armed with field weapons dating to the 1960s.
Naturally, the Pentagon’s takeaway from this total defeat in the hellhole quagmire of Afghanistan, one that exposed Washington’s web of assembly line lies in a far more damning fashion than the Viet Cong’s 1968 Têt Offensive had laid bare the Bandini Mountain that Gen. William Westmoreland and his crew of brass-grabbing ‘Yes Men’ had dutifully shoveled into the Oval Office for LBJ to spread over the American people, was that it needs more taxpayer money for more weapon systems and a firmer commitment from the White House to wage war truly without end.
For if the next war in [fill in the blank/s] never ends, then the United States can’t ever be seen as losing no matter how transparently grim and pointless the carnage is—because it’s never over.
It is perpetual war for the sake of global positioning and power.
War without end puts the United States combat forces virtually everywhere, all the time, while the Pentagon’s foie gras budget makes the Mexican narco-cartels’ nation-state revenue streams look like chump change.
Supplementing this subterfuge, the neocon’s brass assets have also been busy on what remains of the home front, assigning the radical racialist screed of pseudo academic Ibram X. Kendi, (his real name is Ibram Henry Rogers, but his racial racket required a nom de scam that at least obliquely references Malcom X) and instructing American troops to submit and submerse themselves into Kendi’s manifesto denouncing white Americans.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley has worked hand in glove with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in creating a more politically reliable military, one that is imbued with a progressive worldview, or at least feminized into a submissive role to it, but also committed to carrying out the corporatist agenda in combat zones across the globe.
Biden effectively eliminated the southern border of the United States with the stroke his pen on his first day in office and has since shepherded close to 6 million migrants* across its southern frontier (*standard rule of thumb when considering immigration in the U.S. is to triple any figure the government reports, provides or projects), all while steadily expanding the infrastructure that transports and seeds the migrants around the country in a sociopolitical planting pattern that will yield a fine electoral crop in the years ahead.
The progressives’ long march is an ethno-sectarian jihad from which they will not relent, they will either be decisively defeated and driven back into the shadows or they will reign triumphant, the latter an outcome that will like resemble Yugoslavia or Lebanon at one stage but ultimately provide a grisly echo of Rwanda only on a much larger scale.
The neocons’ campaign for eternal war is indeed a religious crusade of sorts and likewise one in which they will not stop nor will they ever be satiated. They will either be exposed, confronted, discredited and driven from their power centers or they will indeed come to savor a rule without end alongside their progressive bedmates. At some point in the future, the differences between a progressive and neocon may well become indiscernible.
But for now there remain significant obstacles for the progressive and neocon world agenda.
And perhaps at present no bigger one than Russia.
That is what the ‘crisis’ in Ukraine is ultimately all about and it is the prime reason that the progressives and neocons are willing to risk plunging the planet into the nuclear abyss.
Knocking Russia out for the count is critical to their mutual agenda and they believe they see an opening to act.
It has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with power.
