Something To Talk About

I just found something to talk about, but I think I will let Jim Kunstler do the talking for me.

We haven’t heard much at all in the news about Ukraine and what those nasty, interfering  Russians are doing there, and how NATO is standing ready to save the day, lately, have we?  There’s a good reason for that, and Jim Kunstler has expressed it quite admirably.

There is peril in building your story on lies, and that revolves around the truth eventually being brought to light.  Just as in the ‘Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction’ saga of falsehood which many rash western nations bought into a while ago.

By the way, the ‘barbarism’ part in the title of this fine Kunstler piece, in my opinion, is a reference to the work of ISIS/ISIL.  See the full version at kunstler.com (I have included just an extract here).  But the ‘stupidism’ in the title is pointedly and accurately directed at recent US foreign policy.

Jim Kunstler says: 

Barbarism Versus Stupidism

In my lifetime, the USA has not blundered into a more incoherent, feckless, and unfavorable foreign policy quandary than we see today.

The US-led campaign to tilt Ukraine to Euroland and NATO — and away from the Russian-led Eurasian Customs Union — turned an “intelligence” fiasco into a strategic humiliation for the Obama White House. Notice that the story has vamoosed utterly from the American media headlines, even when the Russian Engineers’ Union issued a report last week asserting that the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was most likely shot down by 30mm cannon fire from Ukrainian military aircraft. The USA State Department didn’t deign to refute it because doing so would have drawn attention to the fact that it was the only plausible explanation for what happened.

Likewise, the campaign to paint Vladimir Putin as Stalin-in-a-judo-robe never really reached take-off velocity, since by all appearances he was the most rational and cool-headed actor on the geopolitical stage, following logical and long-established national interests. If the West had just left Ukraine alone, and allowed it to join the Eurasian Customs Union, that basket-case nation would have been Russia’s economic ward. Now the US and the EU have to support it with billions in loans that will never be paid back. Meanwhile, our European allies have been snookered into a set of economic and financial sanctions against Russia that guarantees they’ll be starved for oil and gas supplies in the winter months ahead. Smooth move.

So, the reason that all this has vanished from the news media is that it’s game-over in Ukraine. We busted it up, and can do more with it, and pretty soon the rump Ukraine region run out of Kiev will go crawling back to Russia begging for a little heating fuel.           read more

I will just add this link to the Russian Engineers’ Union report as mentioned by Kunstler.  The Automatic Earth also linked to this report and included a useful extract of part of the summary if you don’t wish to download the complete document.