This essay is about the central topic for this ‘In English’ extension of my blog, the developments in Ukraine, but I need an introduction to clarify my thinking on the topic of ‘Mistakes’.
Mistakes were made, now heads must roll. This is a rather simplistic impulse, and a direct threat to democracy as the better way to run a country. Allow me to illustrate the problem. You are probably aware of the ‘Solitaire’-card game, called ‘Patience’ in Europe. It is a rather uninspiring single-player game when played with a real deck of cards, used to ‘kill the time’, or to relax an overburdened mind. Now add a memory, and ‘reset’ option, and you end up with the possibility to find the correct strategy to conclude the game. More often than not, there are multiple strategies which are successful, but some require more ‘moves’ than others. And as you think things over, to avoid dead ends which revealed itself in an earlier attempt, some strategies may consume more time than others.
In war and peace decision makers are not playing a game of ‘Solitaire’, since the ‘Game’ they are in has multiple ‘Players’, and an almost endless number of ‘Levels’, interacting, or not, but still requiring ‘Simultaneous’ decisions, under time constraint. Now what a country, or company needs to prosper, is a leadership which is capable of absorbing all the relevant ‘Games’ being played, while avoiding the temptation to add more ‘Games’, overloading the leadership and reducing his or her choices to chance. Which is why the government should be kept at bay, and leave most decisions to ‘Market Forces’. Likewise, companies are bound to fail when they grow too big, adding ‘Games’ which are a diversion from the core business. This is not a recent discovery, but the core of what Adam Smith found to be the best path to wealth creation on a national scale. Don’t overdo it! Stay away from magicians, and people using force to change the rules as they spread their wings to conquer more territory, and anoint themselves ‘Master of the Universe’.
The force which is spoiling the logic within the concept of a ‘Free Market’, supported by a solid and reliable base, maintained collectively by chosen leaders, is ‘Fiat Currency’. Money ‘flowing’ to places offering the highest ‘return on investment’ by suppressing the cost of labor, and jumping ship the moment wealth is reaching laborers and entrepreneurs, serving a ‘management class’ and banks (‘Financial Capitalists’) who buy politicians to do their bidding, printing more money when needed to solidify their grip on society. The politicians are no longer leaders within this ‘Game’, and interchangeable, while they are encouraged to promise ‘Heaven on Earth’ to the workers and entrepreneurs, but failing by design. Whenever they become ‘spent currency’, no longer capable of attracting votes, they are retired from service and rewarded with plush jobs, or ‘gigs’, like Obama and the Clinton family, carrying the weight for Joe, who has lost his bearings, but cannot be withdrawn just yet.
Friend and foe of Putin are saying that the need to evacuate the westbank of the Dnieper river revealed a mistake. And his foes in the NATO-aligned world are urging his critics in Russia to call for his head. His friends in the western world offer free advise ‘after the fact’ of which moves would have precluded this, and you may be tempted to understand my previous essay as something along those lines. ‘If only he would have appointed this ‘Bully’ Surovikin from the very start, Russia would not have been in this mess’. But that was not what I was implying. I may be the last commentator alive who thinks that Putin and his team are in control of the situation, and made all the right choices, although I readily admit some developments ‘look bad’, yet they were not the consequence of any ‘Mistakes’ made, because previously those choices which would have precluded certain developments were not on the table. Only after the ‘first round’ in this ‘Game’ of geopolitical ‘Solitaire’, the cards are revealed, and choices become available.
Sure, this is a somewhat ‘childish’ oversimplification of a very complex ‘Game’ which didn’t start with Putin’s decision to come to the defense of the ‘Donbas’ region and its people earlier this year, in their conflict with NATO (‘Kiev’), but initially there was a realistic possibility that the use of military force could be contained. Recall that Russia emphasized that it was prepared to talk, if ‘Kiev’ was capable of making its own choices, and that Russia kept saying they were not ‘at war’ with Ukraine, but engaged in a ‘Special Military Operation’. They most certainly understood that NATO wanted them to take all of Ukraine, leaving Russia exposed to the prepared ‘Stay Behind’ forces, with the NATO-countries themselves unleashing all out economic warfare, after ‘sanctioning’ Russia to the hilt previously, without much success. From Russia’s perspective there was a very real chance that ‘Kiev’ would come around as it came to understand NATO’s ploy, and if that didn’t happen, surely Europe would balk at being thrown under the bus the moment they understood that this economic warfare would hit them harder than Russia, and that they were about to commit suicide if they kept going.
With hindsight you may say that expecting Zelensky to opt to save his people and country, and Europe to save itself, were mistakes. But if so, they were honest mistakes, and not some kind of failure. Contrary to this ‘Stay Behind’ ploy, and this suicidal economic warfare NATO prepared, which were failures of epic proportions, and it remains to be seen if NATO will be able to recover from these blunders as they now escalate towards ‘total war’, committing NATO military and sacking their own economies to save themselves from going under militarily, resorting to terror in order to leave Europe with no viable option but to prostitute itself to this imperialist, globalist, ‘One World’-dream coming out of ‘Davos’ and the NATO-headquarters. Prematurely mobilizing Russia, and handing the keys of the ‘Ship of State’ to the military, to the ‘Bullies’, to ‘General Armageddon’ as Sulovikin is called, would have been a strategic mistake since it would have delivered Russia to the prepared NATO-strategy, with a military win, but no feasible option to win the peace.
The only remaining question at the moment, is whether or not Sulovikin will be able to deliver a military win over the combined NATO/Ukrainian effort to defeat Russia on the battlefield? But consider that the ‘Pentagon’ expected that this military evacuation would take weeks, and offer NATO/Ukraine a great chance to increase the pain for the Russians, but they took no more than a day to complete a flawless execution of a clearly well prepared plan. Yet I do not have the answer to this question, but I must admit that I trust these ‘Chess-players’ in Russia to know what they are doing, while our magicians fall short in every possible sense. I fail to understand the logic behind their ‘Hocus Pocus’, and how their spreading of chaos and destruction is going to bring victory. This is much too serious a ‘Game’ to invite you to sit back and relax, bring out the popcorn and pop a bottle of beer to watch the show. You are not invited as a spectator to this circus, but as prey for the lions and practice for the gladiators, much like the early Christians when they relied on their faith to save them. I wouldn’t recommend that strategy under the circumstances. ‘Davos’ and NATO are no Gods, and they gladly watch you being torn to pieces, as long as it serves their ‘Bottom Line’ for as long as their Empire will last. They don’t have to work for a living, nor are they bonafide entrepreneurs. They are ‘Entitled’ because they own the ‘Printing Press’ and the military in our part of the world, with Secret Service ‘tricksters’ doing things nobody expected, like stealing every penny the Russians invested in our part of the world, and blowing up Northstream. As such I do understand the rumors that Russian security services told Putin to stay away from the G-20 summit, since there was a very real chance that he would not be allowed to return to Russia afterwards. Our magicians are quite mad, and capable of anything to save their ass. Which is a ‘Bottom Line’ you and I should not kiss.