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Written by Julian Macfarlane, Tokyo based investigative journalist, writer, author, geopolitical and military analyst
Helmotz Smith & Larry
Larry Johnson has just published a brilliant article by Helmholtz Smith.
Now that the Ukraine war is dragging to a close and NATO is running out of willpower, money, guns, tanks and artillery shells, with shaky economies, unstable politics, too many angry farmers and new wars (domestic and foreign) to worry about, it’s time to remember just how it all began.
Easily, lightheartedly, stupidly –
if you don’t know anything, everything looks easy.
False assumptions and false history explain how Washington and the NATO it controls got into this mess.
The focus is on the war in Ukraine – why NATO has lost; why Russia has won, as I and some others predicted they would in March 2022—not because we were smarter than anybody else—but rather because we weren’t delusional.
Smith concludes thusly.
Russia hasn’t collapsed, run out of weapons, the ruble isn’t rubble and Putin is still there. The Russian economy, says the IMF, grew more than any G7 country last year and its military, says General Cavoli, is stronger and those who were then sure that “Putin is finished”, now tremble for their foundations. And maybe NATO has ruined itself.
Have they learned anything? Let’s ask Victoria Nuland who is just returned to Kiev for the tenth anniversary of gluing the thing together. Nope. Failure.
False assumptions, false history
Smith puts America’s failure down to monumental hubris.
- Assumed Russian economic weakness. They believed that the Russian economy was weak, easily demolished and that Putin’s rule was based on sharing the loot with underbosses. Sanctions would cripple the economy and cut the underbosses’ takings and they would get rid of Putin and that would be that. Maybe Russia itself would break up. “Cripple the economy”, “Ruble to Rubble“.
- Assumed Russian battlefield incompetence. They swallowed the “Three Alibis“. Russians were no good at war and only beat the Germans because Hitler made stupid decisions, it was cold and they had endless manpower resources. The work of David Glantz’s team was forgotten.
- Assumed NATO superiority. They believed that NATO training, weapons and everything else were wonderful, superior and “game changers” – ooh, so powerful! Russian weapons were junk, they were running out of them, superior NATO training and weapons would make the disheartened and untrained Russian oafs run screaming in terror.
- Bad history. They swallowed the postwar falsification of history – captive nations, “communist subjugation of free people” – all Nazis were Germans and Hitler drove the trains. Nazi collaborators became brave freedom fighters who dreamed of the American Way. We knowingly let Nazis into our countries? No way. So when Putin talked of Nazis in Ukraine, they knew he was just making it up.
What Smith does not do, however, is explain why the US makes these mistakes, contrary to easily available fact and all reason.
Juvenile yearning
This “hubris” obviously comes from a sense of superiority. But where does that come from?
We see this in children yearning to be something they are not – in the mirror and seeing himself as an idealized parent, which is not nothing like what their overweight, beer swilling Daddy.
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Back in the 18th century that parent was the British Empire. Now the child has grown up to become….? The American Empire.
And empires by their nature justify their abuses of power through the assumption of superiority— and most importantly the inferiority of those they would bend to their will.
So it is that the American Empire thinks it is the only real “civilization”. White Man’s Burden was Britain’s – but it has been reborn as America’s Burden –“indispensable” as the world’s whitest black man once said. It’s tough – but someone has to do it!
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America’s burden
The US started by “civilizing” the North American continent – following on the efforts of the British.
The Indians had been hard hit by smallpox and the Americans conferred on the survivors the benefits of forced relocation, reservation life, poverty, alcoholism, diabetes, early death and all the other hallmarks of “civilization”. a
The US abolished chattel slavery and substituted wage slavery. It took 55% of Mexico, along with a lot of brown people who were useful in building railroads and working the land – and when they weren’t they had to be somehow gotten rid of. “Repatriated”.
North of the border, the Canucks tried to keep up. They did their best with little genocides, killing kids in residential schools. In the end, however, they were always the US’s adopted little brother.
Or if you like, the horse’s ass.
Canadians have always had to make do with hand-me-downs – first from the Brits; then, since World War II, from the “you-alls” south of the border.
Cognitive dissonance; moral dissonance
Since all empires are predatory and expand through exploitation, theft, and war – always for the benefit of a few and never for the well-being of the many— they have no moral foundation and are inherently narcissistic and sociopathic. But human nature endows most of us with an innate capacity for empathy and care, which generates a kind of natural ethics. That Golden Rule thing.
Oh, I forgot the Gold Standard was replaced by the Dollar.
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How to get the citizens of an empire to comply with their rulers” lust and greed?
How can the Rulers themselves rationalize their own actions, at least to the family beagle? In the end, Hitler, who loved dogs (German dogs!) and passed the world’s first animal rights legislation was not born a monster— just a man gone very, very, very wrong. There but for the grace of God go… You know the rest.
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How did Adolph live with himself? Self-deception, of course — the best way of dealing with cognitive dissonance– for anyone, regardless of intelligence or position.
Truth as strategy
The Russians, however, are not trying to create an empire, just to protect their culture and their country. To them, facts matter, values matter – the truth is the best strategy.
That’s one reason why Putin in his recent interview with Carlson devoted so much time to explaining real history— although he’s done that many times before.
He was establishing a context – a background— against which the truth can be seen. Despite all the talk in the Western press about the interview being “PR” – it was nothing of the kind. For a number of reasons, the main one being that the truth works better in the end, Putin does not do “PR” – or propaganda— which is what PR really is.
Smith’s article implies more than political stupidity— for me, a political pathology, whose symptom is Dunning Kruger on a national and international scale.
While the antidote to this is the kind of truth and reason that Putin tries to express , there’s a caveat — you need a culture that values such things—and allows you to see the real issues— and listen.
Putin has learned from history. The Ukraine is not the war. The real war is elsewhere—a new kind of world war— a civilizational one in which the primary weapons are economic and industrial.
This is also a war between truth and lies—which the US is losing because it lacks not only an economic and industrial base but a moral one, as well. It has only distorted confidence and grandiosity.
It just doesn’t know what it is doing.
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Dunning Kruger Misunderstood
Ironically, the concept of Dunning Kruger is well known and popular in the US—especially in business circles where it is as misunderstood as anywhere else.
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So, Trump is often castigated as an example of “Dunning Kruger” which is reductively misconceived as stupid people — ie other people, not you or me—pretending to be smart. It is not “I think, therefore I am” — it is “I think that I think, therefore I am”.
Yet, reading Smith, it is clear that Joseph Biden outdoes even the Donald for all his bluster.
Creepy Joe, Sleepy Joe, Genocide Joe — whatever you want to call him – is the perfect metaphor for the US and its empire – senile, living in a past that never was, incontinent, and stumbling about semi-aware, imagining he/ it is young and heroic.
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Joe is clumsy. He breaks things. Does stupid stuff. Same can be said of the US of A— which has destroyed Europe while helping Putin rebuild Russia as a world power and a new world order. The Empire of Lies is in the process of destroying itself— and all the allies that serve it. What will they do when Empire dies?
Dunning Kruger as Western culture
Best for them to join Russia and China which are not hobbled by Dunning Kruger delusionality.
They may find it hard to give up their illusions of superiority— their worldview. Dunning Kruger is as much sociological as it is psychological, reflecting Calvinist individualism in which everyone wants to be one of the Elect – the Chosen— since the vast majority of people are damned.
In Asian culture—to which Russia fundamentally belongs—people’s identities are created through social interaction and their individuality connects them to the whole, which is greater than the sum of the parts. In Western culture, “individuation” separates you from all others—it is fundamentally alienative.
When I first came to Japan, I noticed that when the Japanese do “self-introduction” they define themselves in terms of the things they share with others, not the things that set them apart, which would be the case with an American.
Dunning Kruger — and all the psychosocial syndromes that overlap with it—is not therefore just “stupid people” pretending to be intelligent—nor an inherently human failing we all share – it is a cultural pathology peculiar to the West, driving everybody to pretend to be better than they are.
Fake people in a fake culture
Lie artfully and you get ahead. In 2017
To view the conclusion of the article please click here to go to my Substack page.
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mcfarlane as replacement for zeusse? same substance. the uk is responsible for the war, not the usa. their miscalculations: 1. didnt anticipate india would side with russia (hence uk diplomats sent to india at the onset of the war 2. usa was difficult to pull into the war (hence biden issues with justice)
people have been concluding lately that hitler only did one thing wrong ………..lose.
by now everybody knows that the us and norway were behind ns1 and ns2. if russia does not retaliate soon, she will send a ‘weakness’ signal for the west and humiliate herself.
all based on “intel source” published by hersch. russian diplomats mentioned brit responsability at some point, then blamed the “anglo-americains”, never blamed the usa.
moron amerikunty–half ns paid for by eu nations
why, they did russia a favour, weakening nato country economies. in fact, maybe russia did it lol
what do you expect, america is overrun by satans minions, joos running amok with their degenerate behavior. zionist christians who are fake christians. congress is full of these parasites and termites. america is being eaten alive on the inside
lol they only earn between 10 and 15 times more than a russian worker and they can still oppose the government without being arrested, poisoned or killed , the troll today loaded the cheap votka is excited
my clown patient tum sawyer dementia cannot be treated—russian superiority is blamed for his recent stroke and many tantrums
who is this clown? to write an article about the decay in the us or the western world and never mention the jewish supremacists who orchestrated this debacle is quite an achievement.
only weak dumb amerikunt moron blames superior jews for their pathetic submissiveness and failures
if you are looking for fascist nazis, sf is a good place to find them, they come out in droves and then call ukrainians nazis, the typical russian fallacy, they always had the biggest pinocchio nose in the world
we amerikunti vassal clown in land of germs—now medieval economy populated by fools and kumdrops
the only reason they couldn’t cut down putin and xi, other then hussein or gaddafi is the amount of power these autocrats have. it’s easy to through the whole book at people like trump and khan. in trumps case, he even nominated two ag’s out of the swamp into his cabinet (sessions and barr) and tolerated them doing nothing, while his own dod went after him all the time. and then there’s assange…
very wrong thinking. usa military might and army is not stupid at all, even russia know this. aggression or russia conquest and slavement it is the last mission to accomplish after cold war and the urss collapse. so usa empire and all their vassals, lackeys and satellites just follow the cold war tune (nato never were disbanded, nato expansion to the east), russia was in the other side (british empire anglo uk always hated russia since medieval ages and this won’t change).
russia is winning in ukraine, we all knew they will win since february 2022 (but its just a campaign in a huge western aggression against russia), just a campaign in a decades war that we still cannot see were it will end or how it will develop in the future. russia should remember (and guess they are fully aware) russia (150mil pop) is the weakest of the three super power and china (1.5bil pop) and usa (350mil pop at home / usa/uk anglo empire 1bil pop worldwide).
ah …….just more fucking bullshit from another godless journalists. atheists and jesus haters can never put all the pieces of the puzzle together. they can only get so far and then they start making mistakes and wrong assumptions. at the moment america is the muscle for the globalists who are at the core, luciferians.
this article is based in very wrong assumptions, but i wont assume also they are all luciferans (some of them are indeed). won’t argue christianism are forces of good or the light and every else is darkness evil (everyone has their pov).
western civilization will always end where we are now, usa (usa empire) is the culmination of western civilization (could be the german third reich eighty years ago), the biggest spawn and son of the western civ is usa empire with the zionist, reptilians, luciferians, and even christians at the head trying to take everything.
what america did concerning the indians in the 19th century has nothing to do with this dum-dum girl, and if you bothered to read contemporary reports you’d soon realize that there were two sides to the “cowboys and indians” stories.
you watched too much western propaganda, every picture since xx century (first world war, when ‘propaganda’ born and were used by every goverment to their own agenda. after wwii everything was created again deliberately to start a new world from the ashes of wwii. that world were we live now is falling into pieces.