Summer Of Suicide 2023

“Yeah, That’s Called World War III!”

Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan are quite aware of how devastated and depleted the Ukrainian army is and has been since this past winter. This is why President Biden continues to renege on more and more of the promises he made in March of 2022. These promises had to do with preventing the potential global catastrophe that getting the US and NATO involved in a hot war with Russia and, ipso facto, China, would cause. (1)

It was Joe Biden who condescendingly quipped, “Yeah, that’s called World War III!” when he was asked about the possibility of sending tanks and fighter jets to Ukraine in the Spring of 2022. Alas, here we are a year later and the US has allotted almost 140 Billion dollars to Ukraine, it has imposed eleven rounds of economic sanctions against Russia (none of which have been effective) and it has committed to giving Ukraine one hundred F-16 fighter jets along with the M-1 Abrams tanks that Biden promised them this past February.(2)

Add to this a pledge by the US and the UK the other day to send depleted-uranium tank rounds to Ukraine. The fact that depleted uranium will be potentially highly toxic to the Ukrainian landscape for years to come and that it was banned by the UN in 2022 seems to be of no concern to the neocons in the White House.

A Face-Saving Mission

There appears, so far, to be no level of escalation that the Biden administration will not ascend to in order to keep this war going. The looming question is, will they go all the way? Will NATO and/or US troops be (officially) sent to fight against Russia in Ukraine? Will Biden, Nuland, Blinken and Sullivan opt to push the human race into World War III? Will they risk a full-on nuclear exchange with Russia?

As of now, there is no indication that these four neocon ideologues and their cohorts in the White House and the Pentagon (Former General Lloyd Austin, General Mike Milley and co.) will stop escalating if Russia continues to repel Ukraine’s current offensive.

Does this sound to you like a contingent of people who are confident of victory or does it sound like an administration that is scurrying to save face by prolonging this war until November of 2024? The fact that well over 200,000 Ukrainians have died over the course of the last sixteen months and that tens of thousands more will die this summer is also of no apparent concern to the Biden administration. Nor does it seem to be of any matter to the vast majority of politicians in both the Democrat and Republican parties.(3)

As President Biden’s Republican neocon colleague Senator Lindsey Graham pointed out in mid 2022, “I like the structure of this war. We get to hurt Russia without losing any of our own manpower.” Also in 2022, both President Biden and Senator Graham mentioned the need for regime change in Russia, again apparently forgetting that Russia is the world’s number one uclear power and that “hunting Putin to the ends of the Earth”(4) would almost certainly have consequences of nuclear proportions. Needless to say, both political parties walked the aforementioned absurdly reckless comments back in the days that followed their being broadcast. (5)

The Ukrainian Summer Counter-Offensive So Far

The first two weeks of Ukraine’s “counter-offensive” have been a disaster from just about every conceivable point of view. Firstly, as of June 18th, Ukrainian forces have failed to reach even the first of three heavily fortified Russian defense lines along any portion of the Russian fortified line of contact. Secondly, in their so far repelled attempt to push through the “gray zone” (a stretch of months ago evacuated Russian-held land) that lies between their army and that of their Russian opponents, Ukraine has lost upwards of 7,500 men over the course of a fourteen day period, whereas Russia has lost less than a thousand. (6)

Put in the simplest terms, this counter-offensive has so far been a turkey shoot for Russia, who have a massive artillery and air power advantage over Ukraine.(7) The current Ukrainian ground charges in the south have had no air cover. None. This is due to the fact that Ukraine’s air defenses have been wrecked by Russian missile strikes over course of the past several months.

A majority of the Ukrainian soldiers who are carrying out the current offensive are undertrained, undeniably brave, mostly young troops. These troops are being blown to bits by Russian air defenses and air-dropped mines before they even have a chance to engage their enemy in combat. (8)

All of this bloodshed is a product of Mr. Biden, Mrs. Nuland, Mr. Blinken, and Mr. Sullivan’s unwillingness to own up to the fact that they have, since mid-March of 2022, completely miscalculated and/or misrepresented Russia’s military game plan. They have also massively underestimated Russia’s military capabilities, which are currently as formidable as any country’s on the planet.

The Power of Western Propaganda

The Biden administration’s ineptitude and duplicitousness in its handling of the war in Ukraine is continually circumvented in the mainstream press. The Western media remains glued to its narrative that this is an unprovoked war that was motivated solely by Vladimir Putin’s insatiable need for conquest.

This cartoonish, one-sided interpretation of the current conflict and what happened during the ten years that led up to it is not only anti-historical it’s very dangerous. Most people don’t see how what is going on in Ukraine is directly connected to the inflation here and the huge inflation and recessions that are taking place in many other countries in the West and around the world. They don’t see how dramatically the world has changed over the course of the last twelve months because the corporate media simply doesn’t report on it or barely reports on it.(9)

There has been a lot of talk about Russian propaganda and Russian infiltration over the course of the last seven or eight years. What many Americans fail to see is how hugely propagandized we are here in the US. When we’re confronted with the possibility that we, as much as the people in almost any other country in the world, are the victims of propaganda, our response is very often that of a fish being told that it has been swimming in water. “What water? I don’t see any water?!” This is how effective Western propaganda has been.

“To Be An Enemy of America is Dangerous, But To Be A Friend Is Fatal.”

This statement sounds like a remark that Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping might have made over the course the last 16 months, no? Actually, it’s a quote by former US Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is a person that knows a thing or two about the rudiments of US foreign policy. Whatever the original context of Kissinger’s quote was, the statement rings as true as ever today in the context of this article.

By destroying the Russian pipelines that allowed Europe to access cheap energy, which is the motor of any thriving industrial economy, the US has plunged Germany, Europe’s number one economy, into recession.(10) Meanwhile, the myriad costs of maintaining the war in Ukraine have generated a domino effect that has resulted in massive inflation all over the European continent.

Make no mistake about it, Biden, Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan and crew were not going leave any options open for Europe. Under no condition will Europe, most of which has become a vassal to the US over the last twenty to thirty years, be allowed to opt out of this war. Even if it requires the destruction of their economy. (11)

US Generals Milley and Austin Are War Criminals

Rather than giving you my synopsis of the transgressions undertaken by the two military men mentioned above, I’ll defer to the opinion of former CIA officer and director of the U.S. State Department Larry Johnson. Johnson went on record on June 16th of 2023, speaking about General Milley’s criminally false declarations regarding the readiness of the 6,000 NATO-trained troops who will soon be prematurely deployed to Ukraine: “It’s criminal military malpractice. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s clear that they (Milley and Austin) are both in agreement and that they are lying. They know better! And if they don’t know better then it’s a shocking exposition of their incompetence … There’s not enough lipstick in the world to paint this pig, and to make it look good.“(12)

Lloyd Austin, who is now the US’ Secretary of Defense, has also lied under oath several times over the past year in his reports about the condition of the Ukrainian military. (13) Milley and Austin have acted criminally. There’s simply no way around it.

How Long Will This War Go On?

According to a fair number of war analysts, this war will most likely go on for several more years, quite possibly until the end of this decade. In their opinion, this conflict’s trajectory is similar to the trajectories of the US’ invasions of Afghanistan and Syria.

I personally don’t think that this will be the case. In my vastly less credentialed opinion, this war will be essentially over by early 2024. There is, from my point of view, simply no way Ukraine’s forces can hold out until mid-2024, even with the assistance of NATO. After that the political/optical aspect of the battle may squeak on into early or mid-2025, but not any longer than that.

There are a fair amount of analysts who hold this second position as well. Two of them being former US Chief Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and former US Army Colonel Douglas McGregor.(14)

Of course, there is always the third possibility that the US/NATO will officially send troops into Ukraine and, well, then we’ll be in WWIII.

Did You Vote For This?

Ukraine has no chance of victory. Absolutely none at all. We in the West must face this fact now. The other 75% of the world is already aware of it.

We, now, must do all we can to challenge the sociopathic escalation of this war. We, now, must do all we can, however small, to help save as many lives as we can. We, now, must do everything in our power to prevent the clique of neocon careerists in the White House from pushing our world into nuclear annihilation. There will be nothing left if this war escalates to the nuclear level. Nothing.

Did you vote for this insane, pointless escalation? Did you vote for World War III and/or potential nuclear destruction? Did you vote to give away hundreds of billions of your tax dollars to assist the suicide of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians?

Where, Now, Do We Stand?

Where, now, do we stand? Are we on board for this potential US-led Summer of Suicide? Are we going to let our allegiance to Team Democrat or Team Republican blind us to what these neocon fundamentalists are setting in motion, on our watch, using our money? Have we all gone as mad as they have?

There are other options besides the ones that the corporate media says we must choose from. There are other ways we can proceed, other candidates, other methods of interacting with each other, other ways to live our lives. Are we going to keep believing that we are forced to choose between the bad and the terrible? We are not their slaves. We are grownup Human Beings who can make grownup choices. We can choose Real Democracy or we can stick with what’s left of this formalized shell of Democracy that is owned by corporations who use bought-off politicians to coral us and keep us afraid and divided.

So what’ll it be? Where, Now, Do We Stand?

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