The Chris Moeller Archives

And it is precisely the moment in history that our Cold Warriors have been waiting for-- playing out to perfection. We’ve been wooing Eastern European nations and arming them essentially since the thaw of the original “cold war.” It’s just too lucrative an area of economic growth for us not to slip our guns into former Soviet countries-- even though the promise that NATO would not expand eastwardly was a promise made to Russia as a condition of Germany being reunified in 1990. 

As per usual, you can’t trust a damn thing that America promises. We told Muammar Gaddafi that we wouldn’t attack him in Libya if he chose to abandon his pursuit of nuclear weapons. He believed us and complied. We took him out anyway. Cute trick by us. You lose, loser. Except that Kim Jong-un, among others, looks at international betrayals such as these and recognizes an objective foolishness that would come with abandoning his own nuclear weapons program. An escalation ensues in his region instead and our oligarchs shed no tears over it because that escalation is highly profitable. We’re not an honest player upon the world stage and we don’t seem to even care if we’re perceived as such. 

This is the world that sits in front of Vladimir Putin. Our intelligence state invented evidence that he manipulates our elections. There were phony dossiers, fictional pee tapes, manufactured stories that his agents met with Julian Assange during his asylum with Ecuador in London and with Trump representatives in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Vlad is a “Hitler” because our motive requires a Hitler. The military industrial state needs one at all times to justify its very existence. We can’t be permitted, as Americans, to understand that we are the 600-pound gorilla sitting astride the world-- with military bases in each of over 200 countries but no actual enemies of any formidability anywhere in the world. Instead our dangerous opponents lie secretly in wait supposedly in Asian rice paddies, Central American jungles, and Middle Eastern sand bunkers. You can’t see them, but oh, my goodness, they’re out there. Believe you me. 

Trust me on this. If you give one damn about the people of Ukraine, there is only one thing you can do now-- and it’s sadly not very much when matched against the immense power of the bipartisan, consensus war state of the American executive and legislative branches and its complicit media outlets. That one thing is to demand that your leaders-- who control the actions of most of the major players in the world-- engage in cease-fire negotiations with Putin and the Russians. There needs to be a peace agreement and it has to be negotiated, like all peace agreements. If you’re not demanding this, but instead promoting on social media, and/or literally supporting with your financial assets the arming of the government of Ukraine, you’re giving the war pigs exactly what they want from you-- the only thing they want-- the opportunity to present Ukraine to the world as the new Afghanistan. 

The last Afghanistan was Afghanistan itself, but that turnip has been squeezed of all its blood over the course of more than two decades. The hope for more profitability there grinded to a halt, along with its entire civilization, and albeit about a decade and a half after American military and political leaders privately admitted to each other that a war there could never be won. (Thanks to Assange and WikiLeaks for revealing this hidden piece of intelligence.) Bully for us, I guess, that we could keep stretching out the bloodshed so long even after all was knowingly lost. 

Ukraine is the next best hope for the profiteers. Its most well-heeled opponent, Vladimir Putin, has already been falsely blamed in the U.S. for Hillary Clinton having been soundly beaten by the least-popular major presidential candidate in U.S. polling history. He’s a well-established enemy, a bogeyman, Slenderman. Putin’s invasion of his neighbor is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for-- and, indeed, vigorously attempting to provoke. Thanks to Assange, we know that our government has anticipated this scenario since at least 2008. Leaked diplomatic cables presented to us by WikiLeaks and making Assange a permanent enemy of the state revealed that we have long known that continuing to push NATO into Ukraine was a major sore point, not only for Putin’s government, but even for the many liberals that live in Russia. It’s long been perceived by them as a threat to their regional sovereignty when up against the 600-pound gorilla. 

That’s the reason that President Obama, alone among the last three of our presidents, refused to allow weapons sales to Ukraine. But Trump lifted that moratorium and then Biden fell in line behind him-- since the claim of a two-party political system in the U.S. is a myth. Selling weapons to Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc countries has become a multi-billion dollar industry for western states. There are missiles in silos in Poland aimed at Russia less than a hundred miles from its border. (Imagine the reaction here if Canada permitted Putin to have missiles aimed at the U.S. from Calgary, Alberta. Actually we don't have to imagine it. The provocation can be thought of as the ongoing eastern hemisphere version of the Cuban Missile Crisis.) 

Since our leaders have long viewed this assault by Russia upon Ukraine as inevitable if we continued down our path of heightening tensions, we have to also assume that we now welcome it. There have never been any attempts at negotiating with Putin over this issue, not during the last seven years anyway. And there still haven’t recently-- not even since bombing started. The joint chiefs and the CIA command might actually be wondering-- what took the man so long? They've been working their ass off for years trying to politically justify a weapons build-up, and, in the meantime, have had to fuel instead a major escalation in the pretend-fighting between “liberals” and “conservatives” over strawman issues at home. 

Finally, we’ve got an overwhelming Washington consensus in support of war-- Putin is Hitler and we’ve got to unite as one to shed the blood of some more people that live in countries that aren’t this one. That’s the only way you can deal with a Hitler-- meeting might with might, but always meeting in a road game or a neutral site, never at home. We can’t negotiate with him. He's a tyrant. We can’t even be permitted to hear what he has to say about it. He would only speak in lies. Ukraine is an even better Afghanistan than Afghanistan was because it’s located in Europe. These people are white. They're not Somalis, Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Yemenis, or other mud peoples. No, these people "look and live just like us"-- something Richard Barrons, a retired British general and one-time head of their joint forces of command, actually said on BBC Tuesday. There's no luxury of political correctness any longer, only the need for simple truths.

“Consensus” is always the political goal in war because it’s the most profitable version. We've attained it now. There's no difference anymore in the rhetoric of the "left" and the right. The applause lines in regards to Ukraine were the big winners at Tuesday's State of the Union. In fact, they brought down the house. Who would now dare dissent at home above and against the din of the drumbeat of war? Who has the courage to do it?