Weekend Links and Commentary #1
Ukrainian escalation, German energy apocalypse, and Panda proposes a theory of lockdown deaths
Once a week I will aim to provide you with links and commentary to important news and stories from around the world. This will be available to free subscribers for now. This type of post is necessarily longer, so carve out some space and time over the weekend and enjoy some global analysis over a cup of coffee.
Summary:
Rapid escalation, perhaps even nuclear, in Ukraine is a possibility. What's worse, this historic threat is predicated upon western irrationality towards post-Soviet Russia that is now being pushed ever closer to the real threat, Communist China.
The fall-out from Ukraine has seen economic problems for Europe. Germany faces an energy crisis this winter, which will lead to the perpetuation of governance by crisis as in covid. Germany's green folly is also being exposed.
Why did death rates generally spike simultaneously around the world as countries locked down? Is that how a virus is meant to work? Panda, the organisation which did more than any to expose the madness of covid policies, is proposing a compelling and damning theory.
Playing With Fire In Ukraine
This week brought news of the assassination of the daughter of Russian philosopher, Aleksandr Dugin, in a car bomb on the streets of Moscow, apparently intended for Dugin himself. He was on the scene, however, staring at the burning car in disbelief.
Whilst Dugin’s apparent intellectual influence over Putin is entirely overblown, the attack signals potential escalation in the Ukrainian war. Terrorism and assassination have often done so in the past.
Besides the fact that Russia is a nuclear-armed nation, and that the US is so heavily involved in Ukrainian defense that it is now considered their proxy war, the economic fall-out from Russian sanctions is set to have an enormous impact on Europe and the world this winter and beyond (more on this below). It is therefore useful to have a more nuanced understanding of the conflict beyond placing a yellow and blue filter on one’s profile picture.
I would first point you to Playing With Fire in Ukraine in Foreign Affairs by John Mearsheimer, a renowned American political scientist who has consistently warned of American overreach for decades.
Mearsheimer cautions that rapid escalation is a potential scenario currently being ignored by the West:
Washington and its allies are being much too cavalier. Although disastrous escalation may be avoided, the warring parties’ ability to manage that danger is far from certain. The risk of it is substantially greater than the conventional wisdom holds. And given that the consequences of escalation could include a major war in Europe and possibly even nuclear annihilation, there is good reason for extra concern.
Mearsheimer points out that both sides’ war aims have already escalated, and that it is by no means certain that the US would not commit their own ground forces or that Putin would not go nuclear if he believed defeat was at hand.
There are three circumstances in which Putin might use nuclear weapons. The first would be if the United States and its NATO allies entered the fight. Not only would that development markedly shift the military balance against Russia, greatly increasing the likelihood of its defeat, but it would also mean that Russia would be fighting a great-power war on its doorstep that could easily spill into its territory. Russian leaders would surely think their survival was at risk, giving them a powerful incentive to use nuclear weapons to rescue the situation…
Controversially for an American thinker writing for a magazine published by its foreign policy blob, Mearsheimer blames Biden, or at least believes Biden could have prevented this potentially apocalyptic scenario:
The Biden administration should have worked with Russia to settle the Ukraine crisis before war broke out in February. It is too late now to strike a deal. Russia, Ukraine, and the West are stuck in a terrible situation with no obvious way out. One can only hope that leaders on both sides will manage the war in ways that avoid catastrophic escalation. For the tens of millions of people whose lives are at stake, however, that is cold comfort.
To understand why Mearsheimer believes such a claim can be made, I turn to Christopher Caldwell, an American journalist, writing for the Claremont Review of Books - namely, his essay, Why Are We in Ukraine?
Caldwell provides important context for why Biden never attempted a diplomatic solution, or why a lackey like Boris Johnson actually flew to Kiev to dissuade/bully Zelensky from negotiating his country out of a no-win conflict.
On March 24, a month after Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine’s borders, the Biden White House summoned America’s partners (as its allies are now called) to a civilizational crusade. The administration proclaimed its commitment to those affected by Russia’s recent invasion—“especially vulnerable populations such as women, children, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTQI+) persons, and persons with disabilities.” At noon that same day, Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted about the “massive, unprecedented consequences” American sanctions were wreaking on Russia, and claimed Russia’s economic “collapse” was imminent.
Yes, nuclear war is on the cards because we need to risk civilization to protect the intersex people. But this cultural and economic onslaught is failing, despite the Ukrainian army’s integration with US systems and advanced weaponry:
It would be foolish to bet against the United States, a mighty global hegemon with a military budget 12 times Russia’s. Yet something is going badly off track. Russia’s military tenacity was to be expected—bloodying and defeating more technologically advanced armies has been a hallmark of Russian civilization for 600 years. But the economic sanctions, far from bringing about the collapse Blinken gloated over, have driven up the price of the energy Russia sells, strengthened the ruble, and threatened America’s western European allies with frostbite, shortages, and recession. The culture war has found few proponents outside of the West’s richest latte neighborhoods. Indeed, cultural self-defense may be part of the reason India, China, and other rising countries have conspicuously declined to cut economic ties with the Russians…
Should Ukraine prevail in this proxy war the U.S. will have succeeded, in a way. But it will have done so at an almost unspeakable price... It will have carried out a shotgun wedding of Russia and China, forcing the most natural-resource-rich country on the planet into the arms of the West’s most dangerous adversary.
Caldwell then turns to Mearsheimer to explain why this can be considered America’s blunder insofar as it was entirely predictable ‘a civilizational crusade’ would provoke Russia:
The key moment, in Mearsheimer’s view, came at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, when the American delegation put forward a statement that both Ukraine and Georgia “will become” NATO members. Both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned the Bush Administration of the consequences. “I was very sure…that Putin was not going to just let that happen,” Merkel later explained. “From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.”
More Americans than dared to say so felt the same. Mearsheimer cites William Burns, then-U.S. ambassador in Moscow, now President Biden’s director of central intelligence. Burns wrote a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
Read the rest of the essay to understand why Ukraine and its east, in particular are so important for Russia - where most consider themselves not Russian but Ukrainian and why therefore the US-backed Ukrainian coup of 2014 was the hinge of the entire conflict. Ukraine rapidly changed as a society after that point, becoming far more dominated by a power bloc of “globalizing oligarchs, Western-funded progressive foundations, and Ukrainian nationalists.”
Of course, the classic response to those in critique of American action in this regard, is that if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he will keep moving further west.
This is incredibly unlikely, he simply does not have the military means to do so. And he knows this. The idea of NATO encirclement to protect Europe against Putin is an imaginative invention, in which every leader not on-board with the West is seen as Hitler, and not attacking him as Munich-style appeasement.
There was simply no reason for the West to provoke Russia, after they had dismantled communism, whilst they welcomed Communist, and the far more repressive China into the global order and their own economies.
When in history has a Great Power so actively aided and abetted the rise of their greatest threat?
Meanwhile, the world, and in particular, Germany, is set to bear the brunt of this bizarre behaviour.
In Germany, “the continuation of Corona policy by other means”
An indispensable writer during covid times has been the pseudonymous German, Eugyppius.
Eugyppius has been covering not only covid, but the next looming government-by-crisis in Germany, namely its coming winter darkness:
Germany’s second most important source of energy is natural gas. We produce almost none of it ourselves, and yet it is crucial for electricity generation, for our industry, and to heat our homes.
Prior to the Ukraine war, we got about half of our natural gas from Russia. Since the imposition of sanctions, the Russian regime has retaliated by reducing supply drastically; right now, the crucial Nord Stream 1 pipeline is operating at 20% capacity.
And the German government has placed itself in a massive bind. They have committed to ending clean nuclear power in their country, and have shut themselves from a range of other options:
Robert Habeck, our Economic Minister, meanwhile refuses to even consider opening the fully functional Nord Stream 2, because that would be giving a victory to Vladimir Putin. Nor can Germany contract with the Norwegians for more natural gas, because they demand long-term contracts, while German energy doctrine regards fossil fuels as a temporary transitional step on the way to renewables…
What awaits us, as a consequence of this multidimensional folly, is another winter of economic destruction: Our lockdown-battered economy will face serious contraction as industrial production plummets, many Germans will have problems heating their homes, and municipalities will be forced to curtail basic services like outdoor lighting. But, at least we’re hurting Vladimir Putin, somehow.
Germany is an object lesson in the follies and ironies of the Green Movement. In order to end nuclear, and reduce dependence on fossil fuels, they are cutting down ancient forests to fill the space with disgusting wind turbines. The Black Forest is disappearing and woodlands in the Reinhardswald, made famous by the tales set there by the Brothers Grimm, is the next target.
Conservation should be about preserving beauty, one’s homelands. Instead it has turned into vicious virtue-signalling.
As Eugyppius notes, it is ultimately “the continuation of Corona policy by other means.”
The restrictions on energy will be much the same as the restrictions on normal life during ‘covid’.
Workspaces where hard physical labour is performed are not to be heated above 12 C, under the new rules. Those involving moderate labour while standing will have their temperatures capped at 16 C, and moderate labour while sitting at 17 C. Places where light labour is performed standing, will be permitted temperatures as high as 18 C, while white-collar office spaces where everybody sits and types will be permitted nothing warmer than 19 C…
While some doubt that these rules can be enforced, German police have already proven effective at enforcing pandemic-era contact limits in private homes… Meanwhile, some of the very same spaces recently commandeered for excess hospital capacity and mass vaccination will be repurposed as heated shelters for the old, the sick and the poor.
Eugyppius predicts darkness in cities, the closure of municipal pools, and de facto curfew as a result.
We surrendered so much in the lockdowns, mask, and vaccine madness. Governments around the world intend to retain this power, strengthening bureaucratic control, and the continued suffocation of normal life and human endeavour.
Meanwhile, in France too, Macron has essentially declared national surrender:
Lockdowns killed
When I spoke to Nick Hudson recently, the chairman of Panda, he proposed a thought experiment. Imagine there had been no virus. Economic shutdown, massive loneliness, disruption of medical care. But no virus. Would there have been an increase of death?
It has long been a curiosity how countries around the world, despite covid circulating in their countries from late 2019 and possibly even earlier, all experienced massive spikes in death as they locked down.
The indispensable Panda has looked into this question closely and propose a damning, and convincing, theory, by looking closely at lockdown ground zero, Lombardy in Italy and its surrounding regions in terms of their daily deaths:
Such a rapid rise and descent cannot be explained naturally, or by a pandemic suddenly circulating and spreading through a population (and it was already there anyway as research has now shown us). It is impossible for a virus to cause death at the same time in different places as it moves through the country. Thus it was not the virus killing these people.
Jonathan Engler of Panda has found a correlative event:
But an inquest into this spike of deaths revealed that it was not, in fact, the heat alone that caused the spike, but the simple lack of care for the elderly and frail, who were not dressed in cooler clothes or moved from sleeping near the roofs of buildings.
The implications are obvious.
As I have written before, many times, isolating the elderly, stopping economic activity and daily life, and closing hospitals, was deadly.
And as Alex Berenson points out, the deaths keep piling up.
You suggest blaming biden is "controversial." Actually, everything in America is controversial these days. It's also controversial to say we're on the brink, or already engaged in civil war, but the lines are clearly drawn and bitterly defended. Should be entertaining for the rest of the world, unless you're dependent on our financial system, or vapid entertainment, or tourists, which are likely to be disrupted.