Madness at Munich

Starmer full on delusional

I was thinking of titling this piece, “sick, lying bastards”, but you are not supposed to do that. (They will use it against you to discredit you). So, let’s go with ‘madness at Munich’.

First of all let’s consider the comments of UK Prime Minister Starmer.

All of the warning signs are there.

Russia has proved its appetite for aggression, bringing terrible suffering to the Ukrainian people.

Its hybrid threats extend across our continent, not just threatening our security, but tearing at our social contract, collaborating with populists who undermine our values, using disinformation to sow division, using cyber-attacks and sabotage to disrupt our lives and deepening the cost of living crisis

Russia has proved its appetite for aggression, bringing terrible suffering to the Ukrainian people.

Its hybrid threats extend across our continent, not just threatening our security, but tearing at our social contract, collaborating with populists who undermine our values, using disinformation to sow division, using cyber-attacks and sabotage to disrupt our lives and deepening the cost of living crisis [1]

Where to start? And this is just a few lines from the speech. What is absent is any sense of how we, the West, may have, and may be, contributing to this. But this is standard. The West can push NATO up to Russia’s borders, support undemocratic coups, flood the country with weapons, fill it with spy bases – all this before 2022. And, since then, supply copious amounts of weapons and openly gloat about the Russian casualties they are causing, and then express surprise and feign this moral condemnation, because Russia may have run a few hybrid war ops on our soil.

But, the interesting line is about “populists who undermine our values”. Presumably Starmer means the Reform party in the UK? As of today Reform is on 28% in the polls, and Labour on 19%. [2] Does Starmer not realize how this looks? One third of British voters “undermine our values”. A third of the electorate do not have “British values”. In fact they are in bed with our external enemy. He is simultaneously admitting that he runs an unrepresentative regime, and accepting that out main external enemy effectively controls the country!

There is, of course, a truth here. The liberal world order with its ideology of exporting liberalism all over the world, by force of arms if necessary, while, at home, embracing total monetisation of everything, and mass immigration to keep labour costs down, is finally running its course.

Frog poison

Also at Munich there is an intelligence agency op. They have released a story that Navalny who died in a Russian penal colony in February 2024, was poisoned with some kind of extract of a South American frog. Timing release of “information” to manipulate domestic political opinion is a standard operating procedure of British intelligence. Notice, I say domestic. I hope the reader understands the significance of that. Even were there any truth at all in the claim about extract of frog, it doesn’t take 2 years to run a lab test. The story is released now to distract British public opinion from the total embarrassment and disaster, which is the Munich security conference.

As for the story, it is not remotely credible. It may well be total fiction from beginning to end. Or it could be one of those cases where they allow themselves an extraordinary amount of gullibility in relation to their sources. As far as I am aware the supposed samples were provided to private labs via the remnants of the Navalny organisation. [3] Maybe they got hold of some frog juice. And, then, the unlikely nature of it. There is credible mainstream reporting that Navalny had been going to have been included in a spy swap before his death. [4] Why would the Kremlin carefully negotiate a spy swap and then sabotage it at the last moment? It seems unlikely. I cannot rule out that the Kremlin ordered Navalny to be poisoned with frog extract, but the reality is, there is not a shred of credible evidence to support the claim. Which won’t, of course, stop the servile Guardian reporting that the intelligence services have “confirmed” that this happened.

As a sub note to this story consider this:

In it statement the UK said it was clear Russia did not destroy all its chemical weapons as claimed in 2017, and that it has not renounced biological weapons, as it is obliged to under the biological and toxin weapons convention. [4]

So, they have forgotten that Ukraine failed to destroy old Soviet stocks of chemical weapons. [5]

But, the real point is, how despite the debacle, the reality that their world with its arch neo-liberalism and “rules based order” is in tatters they, especially the British, still can’t give up their desire to be morally superior. (Also, they’d have a tiny bit more credibility if they criticised their genocidal partner in the Middle East for using white phosphorus illegally. [6] But I haven’t heard anything.)

(Just as a follow-up, the Guardian writes “Samples from his body were secured before his burial“. This is characteristic of this kind of propaganda. Why are they using the passive voice? Because they want to avoid admitting that the samples were provided by camp Navalny? I would guess so. Obviously, the accuser providing the evidence is not normally regarded as credible, so the media hides that part of the story. This shows the collusion of the media in the intelligence agency propaganda stunt. They work together. It is a double-act).

Other lunatics

The theatre of the absurd continues at Munich.

The German Foreign Minister, Boris Pistorious, thinks that “Russia is driven by raw power, revisionism and egoism.”. Which does not sound like he even made it to the starting blocks in studying International Relations. That is, he has no understanding whatsoever of the background to the Ukraine war, and, apparently no theory of IR or how states act, which could help him. And, yet, he is Foreign Minister of Europe’s largest economy.

The President of Finland, Alexander Stubbs, is another one who thinks that a few bold statements are a substitute for objective analysis:

Putin] doesn’t want to end this war not because he thinks he can advance, because he’s not advancing.

He doesn’t want to end this war because the political and social cost of bringing the soldiers back is too high.

And then we come to the question to what do we do? Number one, increase the economic pressure, sanctions, maritime services, shadow fleet – hit as hard as you possibly can.

And secondly, keep on providing Ukraine with all the necessary means, including Tomahawks.

And then we will bring this home, and Ukraine will win this war.” [7]

The idea about “not advancing” shows no understanding of the war even at the most superficial level. Russia is wearing Ukraine down, eating away at their manpower, to the extent that even Western media now acknowledges the crisis, and making the country non viable. The strategy is obviously working. Zelensky and Europe were, for a long time talking about defeating Russia and are now, quite openly, talking about getting a good surrender deal. The line about Putin not wanting to end the war because he is afraid of the effect of demobilisation is one of those lines that someone just invents, and then they all start parroting it as a “truth”. There isn’t any evidence for it, (e.g leaks of internal documents). It appeals to them in a circular logic kind of a way, because it “proves” that Putin is a monster who would let tens of thousands die to avoid an awkward domestic political situation, and then it must be true because, of course, Putin is a monster. Basically it seems that Stubbs thinks that pumping up the strategy that has failed to “bring this home” for 4 years is going to “bring it home” now. Jesus.

The Danish PM is another one with a one-way memory.

Can you imagine, it’s like, minus 25 degrees [Celsius] and then you attack the energy system?

It’s so crazy that only Russians would do such a thing but this is how Russia is and it will not change

This is the “Russians are uniquely barbaric” line, essentially a kind of racism. But, we can easily expose that one as delusional. Going after civilian or dual-purpose infrastructure is standard Western tactics too. In the Iraq war the allies went after electricity and telecommunication. [8] As Kremlin spokesman Peskov said, “war is severe”. At least the Russians are honest.

And so on. This really is the Ship of Fools.

Notes

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