Every credible military analyst maintains that the collapse of an army, when it occurs, typically occurs suddenly. The morale of the men on the front can no longer be sustained and resistance simply evaporates over night. Doug Macgregor and Danny Davis have been sounding more and more certain that a moment of that sort is approaching in Ukraine. The Russian advance is picking up pace, Ukrainian casualties are at unsustainable levels. Russia appears now to be enforcing a no-fly zone over the Black Sea, which means targeting of Russian positions is increasingly haphazard at best—the NATO supplied weapons systems rely not only on NATO crews but on NATO ISR mediated through those drones.
Today, at the very end of a lengthy video (beginning about 1:12:00), Alexander Mercouris addressed this situation in the context of the NATO self congratulation fest currently being held in the Imperial City on the Potomac.
Macron Chaos France Hung Parliament: Rus Strike Rocks Kiev, Rus Takes More Key Villages, NATO Denial
Alexander had been providing a sitrep, discussing the rapid Russian advances in obscure towns and villages. But then he moved on to the last topic above: NATO Denialism even as the prospect of a complete Ukrainian collapse is appearing on the horizon:
None of [these villages] are bigname places but, if we look at these villages as pieces on the board, they are important pieces in themselves and the Russians are scooping them up at an ever faster pace. Increasingly, Ukrainian defenses are starting to look like they're losing strategic depth.
I discussed the NATO Summit meeting before and I said that the Western Powers seem to be determined to lock in support for Ukraine, disregarding whatever Donald Trump might say or think or do when he is elected president--if he is elected president of the United States in November. What the West is doing is, it is depriving itself of maneuver room—of freedom of action—immediately prior to the collapse that is now starting to appear over the horizon. I've said in previous programs that I don't think many people in the West fully understand how brittle the situation for Ukraine has started to become, how the situation in Ukraine is now increasingly acquiring the the quality of a prospective collapse by the Ukrainian military--perhaps even sooner than anyone expects. It's not impossible that, even as the West strategizes on how to continue the war, they will find that they're facing a sudden collapse on their hands and that they have done nothing at all to prepare for it.
But there we are. As Yves Smith once correctly said, the West spends so much time discussing things with itself that it loses sight of the thinking and actions of the other side. She was talking about negotiation strategies. The West negotiates with itself about what proposal to put to the other side but it doesn't consider whether or not the other side is going to be interested in accepting this proposal. The West is making the same mistake in terms of its military strategies and political strategies. It is a year behind actual developments in the war.
We will see how the West does react to a sudden collapse in Ukraine--a collapse which, in my opinion, all the signs are that it is coming, and coming faster than I think pretty much anyone in government in the West expects.
I liked that part about how the West is making the same mistake in both military and political strategies. What has always been so striking since this war on Russia began—and you can go back to the beginning of the Russia Hoax, the hoax assassinations in the UK, and so forth—is the revelation of the Globalist West’s Manichaean worldview of both politics and warfare. The similarity of rhetoric is remarkable. It’s always a struggle of absolute good against absolute evil—there is no room for discussion, for trying to understand the other side. Not at all coincidentally, the same is true of the Zionist vision of their genocide in the Middle East—the other side is absolute evil, there’s no point in discussing history, the only way to deal with The Other is to exterminate them.
Think about it. Trump is literally Hitler. Paradoxically, so is Putin—identical twins. There is no room for understanding. One must be jailed, the other eliminated. The war we started against Russia is existential—if we hadn’t started the war Putin would have invaded Europe (never mind Intel Comminity assessments to the contrary). The election is one to Save Our Democracy—but, wait, who was it that staged the military occupation of DC? Now it’s Trump who will make himself dictator if he wins. It’s all of a piece. An hysterical, Neo-gnostic/Manichaean psychosis.
We’re at a dangerous point in time—a psychotic empire facing defeat could well lash out irrationally. I think Putin realizes this, and that this realization explains both his resolve as well as his cautious conduct.
Thought Experiment
Is America a Fascist State?
We’ve been taught since birth that Fascist governments are a terrible thing which germinated in Europe under the leadership of Hitler and Mussolini and other satanical dictators and which metastasized into the horrors of WWII. It was only after the intervention of the democratic and freedom-loving United States that the Fascist states were defeated, leading, according to our national mythology to a golden age of US-led benign global hegemony, which thirty-five years ago was forever cemented into place following the fall of the Soviet Union.
Given the cognitive dissonances and propaganda assaults of our present age, I have been wondering what this terrible fascism really was and how it explains or differs from what we are living through today. Are we living in a Fascist State?
According to Wikipedia, ‘Fascism’ is a “far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”
Fascism is described as opposed to other political ideologies such as anarchism, democracy, pluralism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism. It is placed on the far-right wing within the traditional left–right spectrum.
Wikipedia describes Fascism as having risen to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. Fascists saw World War I as a revolution that brought massive changes to the nature of war, society, the state, and technology. The advent of total war and the mass mobilization of society erased the distinction between civilians and combatants. A military citizenship arose in which all citizens were involved with the military in some manner. The war resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines and providing logistics to support them, as well as having unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens.
I don’t and can’t pretend to be a political scientist or any kind of expert in the definition or terminology of political regimes, but please allow me to simply bumble forward. Let’s assume for purposes of this thought experiment that the Wikipedia definition is useful for the purpose of this exploration.
My question is: can America be characterized as a fascist regime under the Dems and Joe Biden (I’ll call their movement ‘Bidenism’), at least as the term is defined by Wikipedia? (I won’t try in this thought exercise to consider whether Donald Trump presents a Fascist alternative, although the question is a good one which also merits exploration.)
At first glance it would appear that Bidenism fails to meet the requirement of being a ‘far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement’. But what’s far right and far left these days is more than a little confusing. How ‘authoritarian’ in fact is Bidenism, for example, in light of its invocation of mandates enforced by criminal penalties during Covid, and its apparent advocacy for suppression of freedoms once thought to be inviolable in the US, such as due process of law, freedom of speech and assembly and the right to bear arms?
I will concede that Joe Biden appears not to be in sufficient control of the blob to be characterized as a dictator, but isn’t there something dictatorial about a faceless Deep State which increasingly imposes its will on the People without public vote or debate or even a nod to bipartisanship? Maybe it feels more like a Soviet-style system of a nameless, faceless bureaucracy imposing its authority on a population than a dictatorship?
We are also told that Fascism is also characterized by a “centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”
I think many of us might find a reflection of these concepts in present-day Bidenism. It seems that political power is increasingly centralized in, as Mark calls it, the Imperial City on the Potomac. There is no question that militarism is ascendant in the US. Even though we have no troops on street corners in the USA we have hundreds of military bases around the world (nobody seems to know exactly how many), a foreign policy characterized by a willingness to go to war (and not to diplomacy) and a recent track record which can fairly be characterized as one of Endless War. Interestingly, there seems not to be any meaningful anti-war movement associated with Bidenism.
As for suppression of opposition, I don’t know whether one can characterize it as ‘forcible’, but the frequent use by Bidenism of censorship, intimidation and lawfare against ordinary citizens certainly counts as suppression, doesn’t it?
As for belief in a natural social hierarchy, doesn’t Bidenism promote a hierarchy, both social and governmental, which has an all-knowing and self-Chosen Ivy League-educated elite at the top running downhill to a smelly Walmart shopper, gun and Bible-toting deplorable mass at the bottom of the hierarchy? Isn’t this class hierarchy inherently anti-democratic?
Moving to “subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race”, isn’t this what suppression of historically cherished American freedoms is all about? Isn’t this what the covid lockdowns and vax mandates were all about? Isn’t this what suppression of freedom of speech in the name of ‘democracy’ is all about? There are dozens more examples.
Now lets go back to Wikipedia and see how the definition actually works.
According to Wikipedia, aspects of Fascism include (1) rejecting the assertion that violence is inherently negative or pointless, instead viewing imperialism, political violence, and war as means to national rejuvenation, (2) advocating for the establishment of a totalitarian one-party state, (3) advocating for a market economy in which the state plays a strong directive role through economic interventionist policies, with the principal goal of achieving national economic self-sufficiency, and (4) extreme authoritarianism and nationalism often manifesting as a belief in racial purity or a master race, usually blended with some variant of racism or discrimination against a demonized "Other", such as Jews, homosexuals, transgender people, ethnic minorities, or immigrants, and (5) use of violence, including massacres, deportations, and genocides, causing the deaths of millions of people.
My simplistic responses are (1) Bidenism is ok with the use of violence, both for extensive military operations, as well as in domestic politics, as seen for example in the street violence practiced by groups such as Antifa, (2) in its crude rejection of MAGA Trumpism, Bidenism implicity endorses a one-party state, (3) Bidenism is more than a little bit willing to insert itself into the operation of free markets, examples being the use of the government money printing press and legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act, (4) while Bidenism hasn’t targeted historically oppressed minorities, it has ferociously attacked white, straight, male, European, and Christian citizens in a kind of perverse reverse discrimination, and (5) while Bidenism has not used violence extensively within the US, its policies certainly have used violence around the world, leading to the deaths of tens of millions of people over the last thirty years.
In summary, it would appear that a persuasive case can be made that Bidenism incorporates many of the defining features of Fascism.
Its worth thinking about.
First, an explanation. We had a power outage last night and didn't get power back until 10:30am--so I'm playing catchup today.
Regarding comparisons of the current war to WWII on the Eastern Front ...
In fact, during WWII their were plenty of instances of collapse--on both sides. The differences between then and now ...
The Russians ended up falling back into a vast country with intact manufacturing and vast human resources. They took terrible losses, but the war was largely lost for Germany by 1942.
The German military leadership were masters of tactical defense, as they showed time after time. However, the Russians achieved breakthroughs that led to collapses of the German defensive lines and withdrawals over vast territories. Operation Bagration is only one example.
IOW, both the German and Russians--when either side was on defense--were able to trade area in large amounts to maintain cohesion. Each side also, on offense, at times had to rest and regroup before resuming the offense.
In Ukraine today the Ukrainian military is being destroyed largely in place--in their fortified front lines. If the Russians eventually force a large scale collapse Ukraine has no heartland to fall back to that offers either an intact manufacturing base and energy/transport infrastructure (even Germany maintained much of that until virtually the end) and lacks trained manpower.
The other factors make all this worse--morale is collapsing not only because of casualties but because of bad leadership, large elements of ethnic kinship and history, corrupt government.