What are the obligations–ethical, moral, and legal–attending the watching of a crime in process that may be stopped by main force followed by extraordinary strength in defense?
First, the rescuer must survive the disaster too! 🙂
Then comes the business well known to those for whom the preemptive strike has been a requirement, not an option.
As I chatype and type, Russia’s invading assets would seem to be racing toward NATO on rails in Belarus and out on the highways and streets of Ukraine . . . in other words, out in the open.
For all intents, post-Euromaidan Ukraine has demonstrated steadfast devotion to becoming part of the western assembly of open democracies bound beneath credible constitutions and related rule of law while Putin’s Russia has chosen the stance opposite, i.e., a state devoted to a capricious dictatorship and rule of force.
Marina Agaltsova, a lawyer with the Russian human rights group Memorial, said those who did protest were extremely brave, adding that “Russians are deeply terrified of arrests and court trials over rallying people to go out and protest.”
Human rights activist Marina Litvinovich urged Russians not to cry and “not to be afraid, but to just come out and say that they are against the war,” in comments on social media. Calling on people to protest is an offense under Russia’s restrictive laws.
Perhaps I urge fools to rush in, and NATO is no collection of fools, although one may one note the post-9/11 turns toward authoritarianism or polarization in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and the United States. Nonetheless, as Putin’s Push comes to shove, the reaffirmation of the security compact appears accomplished. The question at hand would seem to be not “If” but “When” as regards the timing of an engagement. BackChannels may assure readers of this much: Putin, as often as he may get away with this simple dance, will offer NATO hope as regards relief from attack–and then he will take it away. Brutally. Time and again.
So why wait for the monster to finish ravaging Ukraine and positioning his forces on NATO’s eastern flank before stepping into to end that dark carnival of carnage and destruction?
Putin practices treachery, he deceives, lies, and steals through the betrayal of trust: would it not be fit, would it not be best, to play him in kind?
Brest, #Belarus, a few kilometers from the border with Poland, the NATO country. All equipment is marked with the letter V. We are asking Belarusians to send us information🇷🇺 troops.
By deploying the troops on the border with Poland, Putin also wants to threaten NATO pic.twitter.com/AiqSifZQOZ
Я обращаюсь к вам, люди #России. Еще не поздно. Хотя много зла уже сделано, еще не поздно все это остановить. I appeal to you people of #Russia. It’s not too late. Even though much evil has been committed, it’s not too late yet to stop all of this. pic.twitter.com/1PLBSAROPg
"There are no NATO troops on the ground… that causes some bitterness here…the President has often said, when it comes to this fight it is the Ukrainians who are doing it. So you have the most advanced of NATO weaponry and the most basic of patriot resolve" @bbclysedoucetpic.twitter.com/24dvGW3Up3
Putin has cause to believe he has the edge in defense and energy assets as well as global positioning and latency or staging (as global defense assets existing in peace may be turned toward war with an order). As “gifts” to the developed world, Putin also has 2000 tactical nuclear weapons and a number of hypersonic (hard to hit) missiles, and at the very least, he will plant those assets on NATO’s border to sustain his program of intimidation.
By the west’s measured response to Putin’s aggression, it is merely enabling the same while giving up on its principles and values by keeping itself in the respondent mode when the more powerful option, which will come due, will be to seize the initiative and take Putin’s power from him–and, frankly, that for the sake of the Russian People too who have been deeply subjugated by Putin’s governance.
Blackmail/Kompromat, brutalization, espionage/infiltration, frozen conflicts, international kleptocracy, mass perceptual control, reflexive control, terrorism | x Russia or x KGB x FSB or x Vladimir Putin–you get the idea regarding the dimensions and evils faced by the world’s authentic democracies–and aspiring ones–and their constituencies in relation to Russia’s international character and operations.
The following and very few references may promote greater general curiosity (so one may hope) about Russia’s–and Putin’s Russia most of all–and its avaricious, barbaric, and generally ignoble role in international affairs.
The late historian Richard Pipes noted that Russia sustained a definition and test in sovereignty from which Europe chose to depart as it worked its way out of the medieval zeitgeist. While reading (most likely Russia Under the Old Regime), I did not take the note for citation, but it came down to this: the test of sovereignty in Russian absolute terms involved the ownership and treatment of property and persons as alike, and proof of that power could be found in the sovereign’s ability to destroy either at will and with impunity (my words, not Pipes’).
In Reference, A Glance Into Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its Black Soul
“Moscow will be happy, of course, to host dozens of international conferences, and will periodically suggest that a solution is within reach. But at the end of the day, its interests are best served when Iran, Hezbollah and Assad are in power to make mischief in the region, because that’s when Russia’s influence with the Europeans, with Israel, and the Gulf States is at its peak,” he said.
Narcissistic Mortification: diminishment or humiliation –>
Narcissistic Covering/Splitting: covering the diminished, humiliated, or shamed damaged self / splitting off a courageous and heroic persona to be presented and sustained before the world –>
Narcissistic Manipulation: manipulation of the behavior and perceptions of others with behaviors ranging from gaslighting and lying to framing others and leveraging their behavior through various strategies –>
Experience of Unlimited Narcissistic Supply: experience of the sustained adoration, adulation, admiration and love of others en masse and without limit.
Related Online
Regarding the ideas represented by terms such as “Malignant Narcissism”, “Reparative Narcissism”, “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”, I’ve chosen to select reference both according to convenience and in response to my own experiences, ideas, and thinking (especially as regards the cited “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” that is my own). Whether bullies on the streets, dictators in families, and imperious personalities in politics, the idea that the display of power, whether obviously malign or disingenuously protective (as our Lt. Colonel President Emperor and Tyrant Vladimir Putin so well presents), the relationship between the display of awesome destructive capability coupled with unparalleled wealth belies the heavy armoring and compensation needed to cover a much challenged and derided personality at an earlier stage. “I’ll show you!” and “I’ll show them” and “I will make them pay” suit the outlook of a tyrant whose damaged psyche may never be sufficiently appeased, placated, or repaired. History may come to regard the present Russian president as a man who could master associates, investors, mafia, and military but not himself.
Vovo has no power — nor talent, actually — to build wealth himself although, to be fair, he has asked Big Capital to return to Mother Russia although much of it would rather stay in London–and with democracy and the rule of law–than reside in Moscow and the rule of mafia (and Putin the Pirate).
I would like to make something clear to Christians, Muslims, Palestinians, Europeans, and North Americas (not that I have forgotten Asians or Africans or anyone else): Welcome to the 22nd Century (I’m just a little bit ahead of my time), and we should all be fighting about and for improved Qualities of Living.
And add this ingredient: INTEGRITY!
Oh, Palestinian–may at least one soul recap the historical truth with you–and not against you: for you.
What is Herr Trump’s America’s Grand Old Party of Greed (GOPoG) doing about its very bad case of Greedosis? And what has every European to say about Putin’s “Medievalitis”?
Come 1992, the Cold War was over, according to the United States.
The Soviet Union had dissolved in bankruptcy on December 25, 1991 (I’m seeing a lot of opting for December 26, so, undoubtedly, as to move the west’s “Christmas Day”, a pagan holiday I myself refer to as “Solstice” — a few days late — off the political dates-in-history map).
So the KGB had a nice talk with Ayman al Zawahiri a few years before he and Osama Bin Laden had air crews learning how to fly (not land) big jets.
In diagram–>
KGB-Zawahiri->9/11->(x Reflexive Control) EU/NATO “New Nationalism” & BREXIT + “blood-and-soil” popularity in Hungary, Italy, and Poland + Full Feudal Retreat in Turkey + You-Know-Who (rhymes with “Dump”) in the New Populist United States.
Hmm.
It turns out that was a pretty good strike for the KGB/FSB sons of the Okhrana.
Kraft’s ring now appears on display in the Kremlin’s library, quite a trophy brought home to Moscow by Russia’s Boss of Bosses.
From CNN:
The 4.94-carat ring is in the Kremlin’s library, where all official state gifts are kept, he said. It is worth more than $25,000, according to multiple reports from 2005.
A Kraft spokesman said Sunday the story is a humorous anecdote that Kraft “retells for laughs.”
“He loves that the ring is at the Kremlin and, as he stated back in 2005, he continues to have great respect for Russia and the leadership of President Putin,” said Stacey James, a spokesman for The Kraft Group.
Putin the Pirate has done a few things under the table upside-down and sideways over decades to weaken western political coherence, cohesion, and resolve. Start with the KGB’s handling of Zawahiri over the winter of 1996/7. In connect-the-dots fashion, I believe that stay led to the attack by jet hijacking Islamists on 9/11 that in turn goosed the pride of western states in their Christian and independent political cultures and led to what has been referred to as the “New Nationalism”.
When bees sting and flesh swells, the response has not been called “proud flesh” for nothing.
The popular western response in enmity and fear regarding Islam has not been misplaced in relation to Islamic Extremism and related Islamist Terror, but the same has given rise to blood-and-soil nationalism, authoritarianism, and actual autocracy in some EU/NATO states. Hungary, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and the United States (one nation under Trump for a while) have each seen their open democracies challenged by demagoguery or political perversion.
We may also take note of the “01s” in dates: 1991-dissolve of the Soviet Union in bankruptcy following American intercession opposite the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (from which Russia was forced to retreat in 1989); 2001-the September 11 attacks took place on Felix Dzerzhinsky’s birthday, quite a gift for a Moscow bent on revenge for its losses in Afghanistan-and, no, Putin didn’t do it–it was obviously radical Muslims assembled and deployed by Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden; 2011-The Horror taking off in Syria that would send millions of refugees into NATO (Turkey, which today hosts about 3.68 million Syrian refugees), the European Union (0.7 million-Germany), and Scandinavia (0.3 million), another goad for the defense of the rightly ethnolinguistic state cultures settled and enjoying the benefits of, well, being themselves, the only problem being a concomitant drift toward the same feudal-medieval worldviews and fascination with authority held by Bashar al-Assad, Ali Khamenei, and Vladimir Putin; 2021-Russia’s repeated threats by military feint against Ukraine, a young democratic state seeking NATO accession, and, by extension, NATO itself, but not quite as Ukraine remains without accession.
So hey, Bob (Kraft), George and George, Jr. (Bush), where are you today with Putin (the thief)?
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Where and when are dictatorships to be stopped?
Is it when one or another has engaged in political repression and breathtaking plunder at home?
Should it be when the security service agents and agent provocateur show up within the borders of one’s democratic state?
Should it be when the tanks roll into a neighboring state struggling for its own sovereignty against barbaric force and the possibility of a return to corrupt, kleptocratic, and tyrannical governance?
Miami Herald journalist Julie Brown noted the presence of countless unanswered questions in association with her research into Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita industry. The full accounting of who, what, where, and why would today seem largely absent and sealed by Epstein’s own hanging, but perhaps there’s one aspect that bears further attention in this most distracted age: Epstein’s Russian interests. The powerful personal brands associated with the Epstein vortex range from Alan Dershowitz to Prince Andrew — so how deep and how wide the damage done?
Whether by way of fear of being found out or found guilty of one crime or another, when have the business and political leaders of a nation been compromised enough to accept bridling by the state’s foremost enemy?
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Should you pick up American Kleptocracy by Casey Michel, you will learn (here cribbing direct from the book’s title) “How the U.S. CREATED the WORLD’S GREATEST MONEY LAUNDERING SCHEME in HISTORY”. Forget expensive cars and real estate, at least until one has established sufficient anonymous businesses- as-persons courtesy of Delaware, South Dakota, Wyoming, for a start.
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Before Maria Butina, the “illegal”, got caught, American Administrations, including Trump’s, had given the boot to Moscow’s spies-under-diplomatic-cover. The question to which only the state, actually the CIA and FBI, might respond would be “How many more Maria’s might there be?” Doing what? How? And where?
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With respect to East-West Rivalry and Moscow-Washington Relations, just how bad might compromise, corruption, and infiltration serving Russia’s defense and promotion of political absolutism and kleptocracy be here in the United States?
Whatever Washington’s true state of affairs might be with Russia — and a kleptocratic Russia unrelenting in its will to confuse and degrade EU/NATO cohesion and coherence — one may hope the open democracies of the west and their allies will renew their vows (for Americans, see “Basic Training” on this blog) and rediscover and reaffirm their commitments to American and modern civility, ethics, principles, rights, and values without compromise and, always, with compassion, humanism, and reason.
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