(LifeSiteNews) — In recent videos undertaken on YouTube, former weapons inspector and U.S. Marines Officer Scott Ritter makes some shocking remarks. He claims the war was never fought for the sake of Ukraine, but only prolonged as a means to destroy Russia. The role of NATO, far from securing peace in Europe, has been to prepare for and provoke a conflict which is seen by the war faction of the West as a mere stepping stone to fighting China.
Ritter argues that the war aims stated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy and echoed by the EU Commissioner and the Biden administration will, if satisfied, lead to the outbreak of nuclear war.
If he is correct, then what he has to say deserves a far wider audience than that granted by a small online community of the interested. If these matters are as serious as he claims, the fact his claims are not news is news in itself.
Why are we relying on YouTube videos for information on the likelihood of a “general nuclear exchange”? Why is it that no one from the current crop of establishment figures is willing to discuss the matter? Why does our press not inform us of the obvious? There is a factional struggle taking place right now, and the manner in which it has played out reveals much about the mechanisms of state power in the West, as well as the ends towards which it is routinely directed.
The narrative breaks down
The news in recent weeks suggests that a shift in U.S. military and strategic policy came about in the closing months of 2022. It began in November, with the announcement by the U.S. chief of Staff General Mark Milley that the war in Ukraine had reached a stalemate and must be brought to a negotiated end.
This came after the mysterious detonation of the Russo-German Nord Stream gas pipelines. The Swedes, Danes and Germans all refused to share the results of their investigation into this act of war on a piece of strategic European infrastructure. According to a recent article by renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and brought the Pentagon Papers to the public, the United States was responsible for sabotaging the energy network of one of its closest NATO allies.
READ: In blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, the US also blew up its last shred of trustworthiness
Hersh appears to have begun his investigation into Nord Stream at the same time as Milley announced the war should be stopped. Meanwhile, it was at that time the RAND Corporation was ordered to draw up a summary report on the war in Ukraine which emerged last week to recommend a swift negotiated settlement to best serve the national interest of the USA.
What does all this mean? The timing of these reports indicates that there is serious concern in the U.S. military and national security circles over the actions of the Biden administration. Whilst the dedication to the policy of Forever War certainly remains, the concerns seem rooted in the conviction that the Biden administration is reckless and out of control, being willing to take actions for whose consequences it has no plan.
In brief, the generals and spies know the war is lost and that the West has failed in its chief aim of causing regime change in Russia. Added to this is the striking fact that, after a month in which Biden himself has been investigated at home, persons deep within the U.S. secret state decided to talk to an award winning journalist about a top secret action abroad.
READ: Do Biden’s classified documents cover up his family’s corrupt dealings in Ukraine?
The fact that Hersh was given the information to write his article is also news. It shows there is a division in the U.S. state between the Biden administration and those in the permanent military and national security bureaucracies. The actions of Biden, Nuland, Sullivan and Blinken are seen as reckless and inimical to the security not only of the USA but of the integrity of its alliance with its NATO partners.
Why risk nuclear war for Ukraine now?
Ukraine is admittedly corrupt. This was conceded by the Washington Post shortly after the U.S. had agreed to sending billions more to Ukraine.
That Ukraine is corrupt was once news. As late as November 2021 the Guardian newspaper published extensively on the Pandora Papers, which revealed Ukraine as the foremost destination for the ill-gotten gains of over a hundred former heads of state. Zelenksy himself was personally implicated in financial scandals. This was swiftly forgotten, and any mention of the endemic corruption of Ukraine became Russian propaganda.
The fact that no amount of war funding by the West could secure victory was unspeakable – but has been true since the beginning. It is a fact known to our leaders before they embarked on this escapade. The Obama administration saw the emergence of Russian “escalation dominance” in warfare capability. Obama himself admitted in 2016 that Ukraine was not “a core interest for the United States as it is for Moscow.”
Feb. 10 Judge Napolitano interview with Scott Ritter
The Russians will see, and would have always seen a conflict in Ukraine as of existential significance to the preservation of a sovereign Russian state. It is for the Russians a conflict they must win at all costs, because Ukraine is their direct neighbour and its gas transit and coastal trade corridors are of strategic importance to the Russians. Russia cannot survive the loss of Ukraine. For seventy years of cold war, including the febrile times of the missile crisis and of Able Archer, Ukraine and the Donbass were not sufficiently important to the West to risk a confrontation that may escalate to nuclear war.
The Soviets fought a brutal civil war in Western Ukraine around 1950-1952 to suppress pro-Western and largely Banderite rebels. They were successful in doing so. This was at a time when the United States enjoyed escalatory dominance in the region, with masses of NATO troops still present in postwar Europe. An intervention then, to halt a vicious civil war, did not come. Why has Ukraine become so important now? It has not. It is simply the site of a plan to destroy Russia at any cost.
Reality as propaganda
The technique of stigmatizing reality as enemy propaganda has proven very useful to the war faction. Let us consider a few more things which were dismissed as Russian propaganda, or cited as Russian influence, whose deployment can only be understood in retrospect.
READ: The West is waging an information war against its own citizens
It was the U.S. State Department under Hillary Clinton which manufactured Russiagate. This was the groundless contention that Donald Trump was an asset of the Russians. There is no evidence for this, nor has there ever been. It is a charge which has nevertheless entered the historical record, the term featuring in journalism as a “scandal” and appearing in historical accounts. The distinguished Russia specialist Robert Service relies on this utterly discredited premise to underpin his notion of a pro-Putin U.S. president which reveals his suggestibility and provides a timely reminder that the most august of minds are not immune to manipulation.
The Durham investigation revealed the basic facts about Russiagate, which was instigated at the personal behest of Hillary Clinton to destroy Donald Trump. This was not simply an act of personal vengeance, although each neoconservative attempt at destruction appears to be somewhat inflected with malice. It was a skirmish in the wider conflict of one ideology with another. It demonstrates the absolute degradation of the media, whose complicity in this and other transparent falsehoods is but one further addition to a campaign of lies directed at the populations of the West.
READ: Neocon escalation in Ukraine will destroy what little credibility the West has left
The reason Donald Trump had to be destroyed was simple. From the neoconservative point of view he was a threat. Trump argued loudly for the repatriation of U.S. industry and an end to pointless, endless wars. Forever War is the core belief of the neoconservatives. It is their business model. Trump threatened both their projects and their paychecks.
The neoconservatives – the permanent war faction of the West
The neoconservatives were given a new lease of life following the attacks of September 11 2001. They were a fringe group on the wane, but after September 12th their creed of exporting democracy through national demolition became so influential that it captured the mechanisms of state.
READ: The best honor for our Veterans is opposing all neocon-orchestrated wars, beginning in Ukraine
This is the war faction to which Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland belong. Biden himself supports it, as do Senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham together with a very long list of professional politicians wearing both colors of necktie. Mike Pompeo gave an overview of the aims of the faction in his infamous “three lighthouses” speech, which identified Russia, Iran and China as the targets for designated destruction. It is arguable that the next war will be with Iran and not China, but that there will be a next war is beyond question – for as long as the war faction retains their influence.
It is an influence which far exceeds the capture of the U.S. instruments of state power abroad. It is an ideology which directs the foreign policy of the United Kingdom, despite its having a paltry army whose total combat estimate is equivalent to a quarter of one Russian tank division. The stark departure from reality presented by British war policy is underlined by this fact better than any other. Britain no longer has an army capable of defending the nation, let alone of fighting a long war abroad. Its ammunition is said to be sufficient to last one day in the field against Russia.
Why is it not news that the United States is dedicated to a policy of permanent war? Where is the investigation of the motives for this policy? It is astonishing that apart from Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and the formerly credible Tucker Carlson, there is little noise made at all about the fact that the values of freedom and democracy are invoked to prosecute wars which the U.S. goes on to lose at tremendous cost, every single time.
Instability as a policy in practice
The goal has nowhere been denounced – it is the means by which the aim of regime change in Russia has been pursued which causes concern.
This objective has resulted in
- the criminal seizure of Russian foreign currency reserves
- the criminal seizure of Russian private and corporate property
- the fabrication of charges of treason against a sitting US president
- the suppression of damning information pertaining to the next president
- the labelling of this information as ‘Russian propaganda’
- the destruction of the major European gas supply pipelines
- the resultant deindustrialization of Europe
- the worst economic crisis in Europe since WW2
- the flooding of Ukraine with weapons, 2/3 of which have gone to the black market
- the deliberate prolonging of the slaughter of Ukrainians
- the endorsement of war aims which will involve NATO
- the certainty of a nuclear exchange should these aims be met
These are the main points of a war policy which has been prosecuted in the most irresponsible manner imaginable, to the detriment of longstanding allies, and which has compounded the deliberate, historic diplomatic failures and deceptions of the West with a challenge to the very existence of the world’s foremost nuclear power.
Why is this madness taking place?
The neoconservatives are not the only faction which desire the destruction of Russia. George Soros denounces Russia as a “closed society,” which has marginalized the actions of his Open Society Institute as an obvious attempt to undermine the authority of the Russian state and eventually replace it, with one more to Soros’ liking. I recently reported on the work of Soros’ Russia Project, which began its work to transform Russia along Sorosian lines in 1986.
READ: George Soros’ ‘Russia Project’ aims to capture nation states in the web of globalism
George Soros seeks the destruction of Russia and its replacement with the kind of regimes his project funded in Georgia in 2003 and in Ukraine in 2004 and in 2014. “Western” oriented, managerialist, willing to inflict harsh economic measures on their own populations. His NGOs work to subvert the democratic process through propaganda, protest groups and lawfare, effectively rendering the electoral machine a pantomime to distract the people from the fact that their popular will has been advertised into annihilation. Soros’ actions isolate and diminish the power of national politicians and institutions in their own countries. He has been ejected from Hungary for these reasons.
The World Economic Forum has bewailed its receding influence, at a sparsely attended 2023 Davos summit. Klaus Schwab admitted that the current instability in world affairs presented a serious obstacle to his global program of technocratic managerialism. It is ironic that this comes about due to the reckless actions of people who share his vision of a posthuman future in which the management problem of humanity is ironed out by a global surveillance state and the complete abolition of freedom, along with everything else of genuine human value.
READ: Globalist detachment from reality: a review of last week’s World Economic Forum summit
The IMF and the World Bank are seeing their influence recede due to the emergence of a rival global power bloc in the Chinese-led BRICS. Composed of Brazil, India, Russia, China and South Africa, this is a parallel structure to rival any of the Western globalist vehicles seeking complete control of the personal, political and economic sphere.
The actions of the United States government, some of them overtly criminal, have succeeded in making the Chinese and the Russians look more appealing than the West. This is a major disaster in diplomatic and strategic terms, as former allies Saudi Arabia join a group of ten nations seeking deeper ties with BRICS, and thereby looser ones with the West.
In summary, those in charge of U.S. foreign policy, and their agents abroad, will be managed out of the picture owing to the damage they have dealt to the project of global power projection. It is not their objective but their methods which will lead to their political demise. The project of Forever War, and the aims of the managerial technocrats remain unchanged.
Why is Biden going under the bus?
Joe Biden is obviously being managed out of his capacity to harm the strategic interests of the West. He has chosen to go to Poland and not to Ukraine. Zelensky is being systematically isolated, his aides being replaced by “anti corruption drives” and mysterious helicopter accidents. He will be next to go. His war aims require an escalation to nuclear war with Russia, as he demands the return of four regions of Ukraine now claimed by Russia as well as the reconquest of Crimea.
READ: It’s beginning to look like the establishment will throw Zelensky under the bus to save face
No one in military circles in the West thinks this is possible. If it were, however, it is Ritter’s contention that the Russians would respond to the loss of Crimea and Southern Ukraine with attacks on Polish, German and even British supply lines. This would lead to the triggering of Article 5, securing a collective response from NATO.
Ritter is correct in saying that this would inevitably lead to a nuclear exchange, as the likelihood of keeping such a conflict below the nuclear threshold is well documented. It is for this reason Milley advised Biden to contain the war within Ukraine and to avoid a direct confrontation with the Russians.
A range of opinion on the war in Ukraine
From the inception of this latest phase in the conflict we have been told that basic facts about reality are Russian propaganda – just as basic facts about the ambition to replace democratic nations with a global surveillance state is a conspiracy theory.
READ: Pseudo-Soviet world: An honest evaluation of Western liberal democracies
Leading neoconservative and husband of Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan seems an unlikely Putin apologist. He has conceded that the Russian invasion was not “unprovoked.”
John Mearsheimer argued as early as 2014 that NATO expansion is to blame for the war in Ukraine, citing warnings of the same going back to 1998. Further, he dismisses the caricaturization of Putin as Hitler:
As if on cue, most Western o2cials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine predicament. In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was “in another world.” Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no evidence supports the charge that he is mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy.
Mearsheimer’s hypothesis that Western actions left the Russians facing an existential threat is a sound one and one which inspired 70 years of Cold War détente.
The demonization of Putin has been denounced by notable Russian asset Henry Kissinger, who also noted the danger of pushing Russia closer to China. He also warned that Ukraine must surrender land to Russia in a postwar settlement, repeatedly signaling the perils of nuclear escalation.
“The demonization of Putin is not a policy but the absence of one,” he remarked, underlining his position that to make Ukraine choose Russia or the EU was to force a conflict.
Noam Chomsky, perhaps the most consistent critic of United States Forever War policy, believes that due to a democratic deficit and a decline in rational leadership the war in Ukraine may precipitate a global catastrophe. He is scathing about the mismanagement and cynical waste of human life which typifies U.S. foreign policy. Since his interviews often appear on Russia Today, however, every sane warning he issues of the dangers facing humanity can be comfortably dismissed.
Finally, bearing a closer resemblance to Ritter in sharing a military background, there is former Swiss Army officer Jacques Baud. He argues that Putin was provoked, noting the widespread nationalist – Banderite – ethos of the Ukrainian military and state. Perhaps most controversially he maintains that the economy and stability of Europe is being “sacrificed” in order to weaken Russia.
Conclusion – Ritter, friend or foe?
Ritter is not alone in his assessments of the war and its motives. He is not the only person to note that Putin is a capable statesman. His remark that we had better hope for a Russian victory does not make him a traitor. This is the only outcome which removes the likelihood of nuclear escalation from the scene.
If the war aims of Zelensky are satisfied, the West will enter the war directly. If the four regions Russia claims, along with Crimea, are taken from Russia, the war will escape the borders of Ukraine.
What Ritter means is that the best outcome for avoiding nuclear war is a Russian victory. A frozen conflict simply postpones a repeat performance. His remarks are shocking and blunt, and in the current febrile environment will be interpreted as pro-Putinism by a media as detached from reality as the leaders they serve.
Disaster is a policy model for these people, whose motives in risking everything to wreck Russia remain the only question to be examined. A pattern emerges when the aims and ideology of the major supranational agencies are taken together with the neoconservative program. A common theme unites the WEF, the many NGOs of Soros, the World Health Organization, the IMF and the World Bank, with the stated aims of the U.S. war faction. Russia is not compliant. It is not willing to cede its national sovereignty to these internationalist bureaucracies, each in their own way dedicated to supplanting the authority of nations and their peoples with their own.
Ritter’s appeal is not one to defend what Noam Chomsky called the “criminal actions” of Russia in mounting an invasion of Ukraine. To point out that the same crimes are acceptable when committed by the USA is not sedition, either.
The fact that we cannot argue against insane policies which will lead to disaster without being labelled lunatics and enemies indicates the parlous state of our discourse and the politics and journalism which shapes it.
The catastrophe facing the world is not only an avoidable nuclear exchange. The people who have driven diplomacy beyond its limits and to this war are themselves inspired by the creation of a world unworthy of being lived in. It is Russian – and Chinese – resistance to assimilation in this model which is fracturing the proposed world order.
This is not to argue that the Russian or Chinese system of mass-scale managerialism is desirable. It is only their reluctance to surrender their control to the would-be masters of the future which prevents a global authority from consigning basic liberties to the dustbin of history. This is not an argument of merit, but an observation of reality. To make such basic observations these days is all it takes to be a dissident.
A swift end to the war is to be welcomed by all. With an end to needless slaughter and the danger of escalation will also come the humiliation of some of those who for so long have insisted that their total victory is inevitable. This debacle shows that those in charge have wicked plans, but are thankfully incapable of materializing them. The result is an opportunity to recalibrate our politics, and our institutions, to a human-scale world in the sight of God, rather than a Potemkin democracy dedicated to warfare, plunder and the extirpation of everything beloved by the decent and the sane.
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