War Is Horrible

Heartbreaking.

I am about to post a very interesting conversation with Riley Waggaman on “COVID Russia” (will send in a second) but before I do that, I want to emit a scream and talk about the war.

Several things to say.

One, this situation is terrible.

Two, I am pretty sure that, unlike the people on the ground who are mostly sincere on every side, Putin is a typical cynical president who is using this whole “anti-Nazi” rhetoric to enrich himself and his family, play with food and oil prices, and “build back better.” And so are the Western leaders who are hypocritically shaking their fists at him. All cynical maniacs!

(Here is a very moving and non-partisan article by Riley about the cynical rhetoric and the poor life standards of the Nazi-defeating World War II veterans in my old homeland, which is a personal topic to me because I remember how at one point, after the collapse of the USSR, when the new cultural values rolled in, it became common for teens to laugh at war veterans and their medals, which was frankly disgusting. And so those old funny veterans, with their medals, in need of love and respect, were just booted off the stage like empty shells of human beings. Completely despicable. And yes, I hear that Putin uses them as props nowadays (while letting them rot in poverty and forcing the vax on them, whether they want it or not). All of it is despicable!!!)

Three, anyone who claims to understand exactly what’s going on on the ground in Ukraine, among common people, in terms of obvious good guys and obvious bad guys, is oversimplifying things, in my opinion. There are people whose entire focus is on what horrible things Russia did to Ukrainians, and there are people whose entire focus is on what Ukraine did to Russians. There are men, young and old, who are now willing to give their lives defending their motherland from “Russian murderers,” and there are men, young and old, who now are willing to defend their motherland from “Ukrainian Nazis.” Both are sincere and very understandably uninterested in nuance and complexities.

So, as far as “analysis,” it is hard enough to objectively sort through a situation when your friends are getting a divorce—and I admit to having no idea what’s going on on the ground. But I am pretty sure that there is zero noble feeling in the hearts of either Putin or his Western colleagues, and I register my strong contempt for all of them for playing with people’s lives.

Some of my friends have family in Ukraine, and frankly, theoretical geopolitical chess matters a lot less to me than the safety of my friends’ families. Theories feel strange when there is war between neighbors, and when people are suffering. At one point, Ukrainians and Russians did not exist and were one people. It is possible that many thousands of years ago, the ancestors of today’s competitors were literal relatives! So this war is crazy.

My gut feeling is that the Ukrainian people are being thrown under the bus by both the Russian and the Western oligarchs. And I am sure that the members of each group of the superrich have their individual sub-goals—but I think that they are mainly after a shared goal on which they agree (a shakeup of oil and food prices leading to global 4IR)—and the people on the ground pay the price, which is just terrible.

In existential terms, despots, on purpose, create bad energy. They disrupt peace, drag people into war, create suffering, brings death and destruction to common people, and create an environment that fosters trauma and anger in the people on the ground for generations to come. Completely dishonorable. And then of course, people have to work very hard to overcome that bad energy, and focus on love and camaraderie in the face of adversity—which teaches us an important skill in the end, but the cost is so high!

The despots theatrically point fingers at each other as their marketing suits them—but all of them have no problem killing other people’s children so that they, the despots, can take care of theirs in a fancy way. There are no heroes among the despots!

As far as theories, all I know is that the Russian higher-ups, just like the Western higher-ups, are super tight with Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. I find it impossible to believe that “the Russians” are in a real conflict with the West, beyond the usual.

Yes, like any betrayers, the Russian higher-ups probably hope that they can eat more peasants than their competitors—but there is just no way that they are not in agreement with the West on the goal of restructuring the world’s economy and installing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

So I think that we are looking at a continuation of the deliberate destruction of the economy in order to bring the world to its knees and help Klaus Schwab and his accomplices build back better. In the process, both Putin and his Western colleagues hope to steal the most, at the expense of Ukrainian people, treated as collateral damage.

(I have seen theories about the Russian military bombing U.S. biolabs in Ukraine to save us from the next pandemic but I think that, regardless of the existence of the U.S. biolabs—that do exist all over the former CIS—bombing them would be a very stupid way to prevent a pandemic because what happens when a biolab is bombed? Lab leaks?)

So I think it’s just a cruel geopolitical scam that is supposed to kill several birds with one stone: boost military profits, help individual oligarchs rob and steal, drive oil and food prices up, distract people from thinking about how badly we’ve been scammed with “health response” by all of our leaders—and ultimately, “build back better” all over the world. Ukraine has amazing soil and is a major producer of wheat and corn, so destroying it will likely drive the international food prices up quite a bit.

And the people? When did the leaders care about the people? Tragic and cynical.