If facts are more powerful than beliefs, the war in Ukraine would have never happened, there would be no fantasies of NATO membership, pushed by the US or demanded by a US proxy in Kiev.
If facts were more powerful than beliefs, Europe, as well as Israel would have disciplined Ukraine, and its US proxy in Kiev, for the encouragement and empowerment of Nazism in Ukrainian politics.
To be fair, if Ukraine wasn’t – in fact – a leading source of cheap labor, neon, coal, gas, graphite, and uranium, not to mention wheat, corn and sunflower oil, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Surely, the fact that Ukraine is today a raw material, cheap labor and environmental wasteland on the eastern edge of Europe and northern shore of the Black Sea means something. From the days of Chernobyl under the Soviet Union, to today’s massive open mining pits and extractive and fertilizer intensive corn and sunflower production, Ukraine seems destined to be a typical tool of greater powers. A central Africa for Belgium, a North Africa for the French. Has Ukraine really been a 21st century colony for the United States?
Money can be made in Ukraine – just not by most Ukrainians. Hence, the debate between emotion and logic.
People who feel that they are used as cheap and expendable labor so that a few may dance and dine in great palaces often organize in angry mobs, unions, and populist parties.
Politics are not ethnically driven as much as they are emotionally driven. Ideas of justice, righteousness, and hatred of a shared enemy, all of this fosters a kind of nationalism, and it creates states. The state of Ukraine is still being created, and would have been long before this if not for the interference of the UK, NATO and the United States.
If not for the emotional projection of a fading United Kingdom, a NATO desperate for legitimacy in an era where most of Europe sees no need for it, and a United States MICIMATT intent on its own survival, logic may have prevailed. Ukraine might have pursued a Swiss model of national wealth, minimizing crony oligarchies and foreign exploitation. Ukraine might have used its national resource wealth and educated population, and history of socialism, to embrace a Finnish model of development, conserving wealth, creating a well- funded welfare state and promoting trade with all.
Ukraine might even have adopted a model, likely one that might have been frighteningly successful, of becoming a private banking and trade center, a lovely and geographically vast financial refuge for the wealthy, a European hybrid of Monaco and Montana.
Ukraine could have chosen any of these options, if it had risen to the challenge of becoming a neutral country, and armed its own populist citizens to the teeth.
Instead, Ukraine has served as a US satrap, applying US models of extractive colonization, and US models of territory acquisition through a state framework – which has resulted in constant Ukrainian civil war against its eastern secessionist “republics” and a backwater surge of fascist agendas across the Ukrainian west.
What a shock it was for many in the US, and the US Congress, as both parties rushed to claim solidarity with Ukrainian patriots besieged by the evil post-Soviet Soviets, only to discover that the Ukrainians had no prior right to own weapons, had limited experience with them, and that so many of its domestic political parties had been banned, their leaders in jail or exile. Sigh. If only we understood more about how colonization works, and evolves.
All this being known, and accepted, we witness the harmful destruction of the remainder of Ukraine’s assets and natural gifts, and a long-postponed transformation of Ukraine into a neutral country, with a smaller geographic footprint.
What a waste it has been.
Yet, the western conversation is shifting. What is driving that shift? Perhaps it is a Germany unwilling to collapse, a United States disastrously poised for its own political and economic breakdown, and the evident failure of financial and trade sanctions, which have rapidly proven what is always the case – sanctions always hurt those who conduct them most.
This conversation melds facts and beliefs, emotions and logic. All real progress and all healing follows this process, and it is important that we recognize that for Ukraine, this process has already begun.
As nearly five million Ukrainians have fled the country to elsewhere in Europe (including a variety of opportunistic non-Ukrainian migrants), a natural decision-making process has occurred. Most of these, well more than half, will not return to Ukraine after the Russians withdraw and the civil wars in the east end. Those who remain have shared suffering, developed a healthy disrespect for their political leadership and that of their neighboring and sponsoring countries, recognized the value of peace and neutrality, and importantly, they are newly armed. Of all these factors, defensive arms in the hands of actual people have a reductive impact on petty crime and domestic bullying, whether by Ukrainian Nazis, their own government, or that of outside governments set on pillage and control.
Foreignpolicy.com, behind their paywall for now, features a new and reasonable article by Anatol Lieven, entitled “The Meaning of Ukraine’s Coming Neutrality.”
The mass western propaganda barrage promoting the heroism and good will of the increasingly annoying, increasingly desperate Zelensky is also showing cracks. His political dependency and collusion with Nazi “Azov” regiment, with Zelensky’s embarrassing and censored admission that they have been completely integrated into the Ukrainian army, and “they are what they are” hasn’t helped. What they are is also a key threat to President Zelensky personally, if things go south – and they are going south. I hope DC and London have plans to extract Zelensky, and soon.
The impact of refugees on neighboring countries, the clear unreliability of an American president in the throes of dementia, the general lack of popular support for a nuclear holocaust or even a long war, and global pressures on energy markets and the US dollar – all point to a collective move forward into a solution for Ukraine.
The solution must embrace both fact and belief; it must satisfy the emotional and logical needs of Ukrainians. Importantly, Ukrainians themselves must choose. Not NATO, not the United States, not international oligarchs, and not Putin’s army. It is ironic, and beyond sad, that of these four influences, only Putin’s Army seems to have a plan to let this happen.
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