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.
Posted to YouTube by The Guardian, February 24, 2022.
Guardian News, February 24, 2022.
11Alive, February 24, 2022.
“War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Bliss” plus Putin’s own additions: “Chaos is Order / Life is Death”.
Early today, Vladimir Putin AKA “Vladolph” AKA “Putler”, Russia’s President by way of assassinations, defenestrations, detentions, and rigged elections, launched his invasion of Ukraine, a young democracy on its western flank, turning back the clock to the 1930s and and further to feudal-medieval barbarism.
President Biden, February 24, 2022.
PBS NewsHour, February 24, 2022.
Ukrainians flee to Romania via border crossing in Chernivtsi Region in Western Ukraine
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.
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)?
***
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?
Herewith the response to a lengthy chatyped lecture on FB involving Russia’s disingenuous “justification” for further brutalizing and dominating Ukraine, her businesses, and her people.
1) three-way “superpower” hypersonic missile race between China (Totalitarian), Russia (Autocratic Mafia State), and the United States (Democracy in Disarray);
2) serious East-West Rivalry for global influence and control of other states, whether criminal, elitist, and thuggish or rooted in democratically distributed power and reliably humanist, lawful, open, and secular;
3) Ukraine invaded and now threatened again by blunt Russian force and related brutish and corrupt business and political practices;
4) A test of the strength of the the West’s civilizational commitment to democratic, egalitarian, secular ethics, principles, and values against corruption and dictatorship, whether communist, fascist, nationalist, or socialist.
The post-WWII order has been weakened by decades of nefarious effort on Moscow’s part to destabilize EU/NATO with every disingenuous and, frankly, evil method at its disposal, Active Measures (agitprop; cyberwarfare; disinformation; infiltrations of spies online and off; etc.) and broadest spectrum Hybrid Warfare (starting with False Flag Operations and Little Green Men) but moving also to dominance in Energy and political leverage through it, control of a North Pole air base and related potential threat projection. Moscow’s presence in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and its innumerable “Frozen Conflicts” plus its relations with Iran and Syria and terrorist enterprises (see “Mikhail Bogdanov, Hamas” or “Russian arms, Taliban”) tell of the kind of world Moscow runs already and would love to sustain with Western complicity.
Well, score one for the British breakthrough and deployment in the Hypersonic Missile arena — and for Great Britain’s possession of a still strong spine.
“The U.K. is very clear: any military incursion by Russia into Ukraine would be a strategic mistake,” she said. “The Russian government should expect significant strategic consequences. The cost of an invasion would be catastrophically high.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson last night held a video call with U.S. President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi as Western fears grow.
The videoconference sought to present a “united front” among NATO leaders before Biden holds a call with Putin later Tuesday in which he will warn him against starting another war in Eastern Europe.
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