Russia Unleashed, Meltdown, or Countdown to Zero Hour?
At 03:00 GMT Russia’s Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine and by 3:46 GMT explosions were being reported in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine.
The West predictably responded with sanctimonious platitudes of standing with the people of Ukraine in their hour of need, suggesting they were about to unleash devastating sanctions on Russia should it not withdraw immediately from Ukraine.
The response would be laughable if the situation was not so serious. It is a common saying that History repeats itself, yet one of the obstacles to a proper appreciation of the values of history is the difficulty of recognizing the tendencies of our own era. We are prone to allow ourselves to be startled by the apparent suddenness of events in our own day because we have not followed the sequence of less evident causes that have led up to them. Well, the Ukraine Russia conflict has many underlying causes many of them would give the present the semblance of necessity or inevitability. We will leave addressing those causes to another day.
In the meantime what’s to be done now that the genie is out of the bottle. What the West does now is of more immediate significance. The time for empty platitudes is over the time for resolute action has arrived. Putin and his triumvirate + one Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey are on the move. The way of the psycho-analyst with the individual must be the way of the political analyst with events, and an analysis of antecedents will more than not shed light on the direction events will take.
China stands ready to invade Taiwan and turn the South China sea into a Sino lake while Iran is on the verge of going nuclear and determined to use those weapons to achieve their strategic and ideological goals for the Middle East and beyond leaving Turkey to pick the bones of their victims.
Russia sits on the northern borders of Israel with every intention of imposing its hegemony over the Levant and Northern Africa, the tiny state of Israel is all that stands in its way to fulfilling its territorial ambitions. The Mediterranean long the preserve of Great Briton and later dominated by the U.S. sixth fleet is fast becoming a Russia / China sphere of influence like a dagger pointing to the very guts of Europe and back to Ukraine on Europe’s eastern border not to mention the energy reliance on a hostile Russia and the markets of the economic powerhouse that China has become in the short space of the last forty years.
And what is the West’s response to the warning signs so obvious to any casual observer? Incredibly to revisit the Munich playbook of September 30, 1938. Appeasement, appeasement, and more appeasement hidden behind empty tough rhetoric. Guaranteed to unleash the ‘dogs of war’.
One fact, however, emerges from the current upheavals, and that is the process of change has itself undergone a change. There will be no return to the past as the current crop of emerging powers and fading powers wrestle for leadership of the coming new order.
Be in no doubt you are witnessing the disintegration of an old world. It is in this sense, that the present civilization has reached a turning-point with the conflict of ideologies, the lawless lusts of decadent wills, and the painful birth of degenerate moralities creating havoc and turmoil wherever they become the accepted norm.
We are at a crossroads our lives depend on the direction we take.
