Gilbert Doctorow
gilbertdoctorow.com

It has been my rule not to join the vast majority of my fellow political commentators at the scrimmage line in sterile debates of the one subject of the day, week, month that has attracted their full attention. Their debates are sterile because they ignore all but a few parameters of reality in Russia, in Ukraine. For them, ignorance is bliss. They do not stir from their armchairs nor do they switch channels to get information from the other side of the barricades, meaning from Russia.

I will violate this overriding rule and just this once join the debate over how Russia’s ‘special military operation’ will end.

Nearly all of my peers in Western media and academia give you read-outs based on their shared certainty over Russia’s military and political ambition from the start of the ‘operation,’ how Russia failed by underestimating Ukrainian resilience and professionalism, how Putin must now save face by capturing and holding some part of Ukraine. The subject of disagreement is whether at the end of the campaign the borders will revert to the status quo before 24 February in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality or whether the Russians will have to entirely give up claims on Donbas and possibly even on Crimea.

As for commentators in the European Union, there is exaggerated outrage over alleged Russian aggression, over any possible revision of European borders as enshrined in the Helsinki Act of 1975 and subsequent recommitments by all parties to territorial inviolability of the signatory States. There is the stench of hypocrisy from this crowd as they overlook what they wrought in the deconstruction of Yugoslavia and, in particular, the hiving off of Kosovo from the state of Serbia.

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Danijel Turina

I’ve been thinking about something for the last few days: it’s incredible how the people in the West make counterproductive moves because they start from bad premises, and when the evidence starts showing their errors, they stubbornly insist on their original course, and use their own lies and fallacies as inputs “proving” how they are right, and dismiss facts and evidence as “enemy propaganda”, and all the “official authorities” spew ideological nonsense that is completely out of touch with any kind of reality perceivable “on the ground”.

I’ve seen that mentality before, in the Soviet Union. They fought reality with ideology, and when ideology produced disasters, they attributed that to “sabotage” by “foreign agents” and “counter-revoutionary forces”, because their ideology was unquestionable, it was axiomatically assumed so the problem must, obviously, lie elsewhere. Interestingly, I also saw this mentality in various religious cults, where it’s obvious to the impartial observer that their problems follow from faulty ideology that doesn’t interpret facts and reality properly, and then they have problems which they don’t acknowledge and handle properly, and instead of that they double down on their ideology which of course is correct and is the answer to all of world’s problems, which in turn increases their problem until everything falls apart. – Basically, the West is a cult, and it lives in a similar kind of a false narrative that we find ridiculous in North Korea, but are completely oblivious to the one we live in, because we don’t know the actual facts, and instead we work with the false facts created by the cult we live in.

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