Those whom the gods would destroy

 Russian citizens should not have easy access to the EU. At the moment, there is no basis for trust, no basis for a privileged relation between EU and Russia. – Ylva Johansson, EU Commissioner For Home Affairs

Introduction

I’m still trying to make sense of how the Russia-Ukraine war does or does not fit together with the plandemic; is the chaos Out There “all part of the plan”, The Great Reset? Or is it all a confluence of coincidences? If there is a path out of this apparent insanity – whether plan or coincidences –, it would be good to hit upon it before disaster drags us into a downward spiral. 

It’s possible, of course, that a downward spiral is precisely what the doctor ordered, but it would be wise to understand this if true, and prepare fairly solid sketches of what to do next.

The people I find most persuasive regarding developments in the Russia-Ukraine war (The Duran, Brian Berletic, Tom Luongo) persist with their assessment that Ukraine cannot win. The West, on the other hand, does not want to – cannot – permit this eventuality. 

A recent and astoundingly bizarre set of attacks by Ukrainian forces to retake the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) illustrates The West’s reluctance to face reality. The attacks failed in grand style while a team of IAEA investigators were on hand in Ukraine to inspect the plant! Ukraine had been shelling the ZNPP, which has been under Russian control since some time in March, for weeks, if not months, perhaps to create or risk a catastrophic incident that would turn the tide of the war. The West’s mass-media outlets reported on this shelling as if it were the Russians shelling themselves. They have now left the recent attacks on the ZNPP unreported, with the pro-West IAEA declining to blame either side for the shelling in their report (ergo, it was not Russia), which apparently contains not one criticism of Russia (ergo, it was not Russia).

It is apparently the absolute top priority for the West that Russia be routed, cost what it will in treasure and human meat: Russia cannot be allowed to win this war. And yet Russia looks set to win this war. A Russian victory will cause a political, economic, societal and cultural earthquake that will likely break the EU apart, collapse UK and EU affluence, and possibly separate the US from the EU and UK for the foreseeable future. This will depend on how Russia treats Europe after victory in Ukraine, among other factors. In the meantime, one unavoidable interim cost of this war – or rather of The West’s sanctions on Russia and its visceral Russophobia – is an energy crisis in Europe and the UK of unprecedented proportions.

Now we’re cooking on gas!

For a wide variety of reasons, one of which is having exhausted all possible alternatives, the EU has become economically dependent on Russian gas via Germany’s dependence. A deal was struck with Russia in the early 2000s by then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The deal brought cheap gas to Germany and the EU via Nord Stream 1. Then, after Fukushima, Germany resolved to wind down its nuclear power plants. The consequent additional energy required by then Chancellor Angela Merkel to keep Germany, and thus the EU, globally competitive, led to lengthy, one-on-one conversations between her and Putin. The upshot was Nord Stream 2. 

Next came the Maidan ‘revolution’ in Ukraine, and with it Germany’s and the EU’s refusal to help enforce the Minsk Agreements Russia so urgently wanted upheld to keep the peace between it and Ukraine. Relations between the EU/UK and Russia, already awful, have soured considerably since then (2014). And of course the US has many fingers in Ukraine’s geopolitically pivotal pie.

For whatever reasons (self defence seems likely), Russia began what it calls its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in late February 2022. The EU/UK/US axis initiated harsh sanctions against Russia in response, has gifted Ukraine with treasure and weapons in eye-watering amounts, and demonised Putin as never before. To the EU’s and UK’s apparent shock, Gazprom recently switched off Nord Stream 1 completely, having been progressively reducing the volume of gas flowing through it for maintenance reasons. Nord Stream 2 has been all but abandoned. No doubt the nasty calculations of war played a significant role in shaping Russia’s decisions, but either way the EU’s and UK’s suicidally ill-considered posturing in this war against a country they depend on for their economic survival is hard to fathom. There is such a thing as pragmatics, and politicians are expected to be masters thereof. The current crop, with very few exceptions, are spineless careerists.

(If this really is indeed all part of the WEF’s Great Reset, it looks to me like a plan as boneheadedly violent as it is possible to conceive. I find it impossible to imagine – which does not mean my imagination is correct! – that Russia et al are explicitly now at war with the WEF’s and the Davos crowd’s ‘master plan’ while secretly advancing it. What seems likelier is that the latter’s global ambition is a horribly ordinary case of deranged overreach unleashing incalculable damage and suffering.)

Whatever our morality regarding war and Realpolitik, I cannot see The West’s strategising as anything other than infantile. The fact of the matter is that there is no obligation on its part to defend Ukraine “to the last man”. We are watching Ukraine lose territory and men, the Ukrainian economy implode, while simultaneously encouraging that poor country to carry on taking this nation-destroying beating to what end, exactly? Breaking Russia? Are we in a position to accomplish that?

Russia is doing well. The West is withering. Ukraine is being bled dry, literally and figuratively. Idealistic fervour and media optics are one thing, brutal life on the ground quite another. But if the economic demand The West represents implodes, what good is all this misery to the economic supply of the BRICS++ bloc (soon to include Saudi Arabia? Petrodollar and Eurodollar collapse??)? 

Perhaps this is the price they feel they must pay to be neutralise the unpredictable threat The West has become, to itself and others.

The morality of pragmatics

Again, regardless of our ideological position here, there is the far more important morality of facing hard facts as they are. I think it safe to say that The West is led by grossly over-ambitious incompetents. It is having its arse handed to it, naked and soiled, by a Russia in the ascendancy, fighting off everything thrown at it with one hand, while hosting war games with India and China with the other, watching its food prices fall and its tax revenues and balance of payments strengthen. 

Warm blood is being spilled by the gallon, real agony and real destruction of lives are happening at mass scale because The West refuses to see the world as it now is: multipolar. This is the hubristic incompetence typical of a civilisation in steep decline.

To turn this obscene tragedy to a matter closer to Econosophy’s heart, what appeal does The West exude? As far as I can tell, it’s consumerism, Hollywood soft power, and endless varieties of pleasure sliding into hedonistic mooching. The days of Western high culture are behind us until further notice (though we do still produce the odd wonder). Our legacy does seem to be dominated by consumerism, though it makes no one healthy or happy. Here our leaders are, gambling it all in mad-bull defence of trifles and addictions.

We have been faced with the problem of how to prepare for a future after cheap energy for decades. For a wide variety of reasons, not least of which being the exquisitely frustrating reality of becoming increasingly constrained by previous decisions, we chose collectively not to grasp the nettle and plan for a non-consumerist future, refused repeatedly to take steps to build a low-cost, low-energy societal and economic infrastructure that could afford such a thing. We squandered our apparent superiority on keeping our world nicely as is. 

(I suspect there was simply no other way. Perhaps we are as blameless as the weather.)

This is the challenging terrain of pragmatics: The balance between long- and short-term strategies is extremely difficult to get right. Consequently, the scope to adapt wisely to changing circumstances becomes vanishingly small. The smell of blood from self-inflicted wounds grows stronger, competitors circle for the kill. 

In the not-too-distant future, I suspect that whatever credibility the Davos crowd has left will be vaporised in an eruption of betrayed rage. How will that crowd of super-rich fantasists find trust among the survivors of the smoking ruin that is their handiwork? 

And what future would they want to build for us?

What next?

In truth, it’s impossible to say how bad things are about to get. It’s also impossible to say how much of this is planned and how much is inept mismanagement. But it is worthwhile seriously considering what we might want and what needs to be done to get it.

In my view, we need to consider non-hierarchical – anarchical – modes of governance. This does not mean lawlessness, it means non-hierarchical in the sense of preventing institutionally rigid power accumulations hell bent on ever more power. UK common law captures what I think of as an anarchic – or organic – legal apparatus. The excessive legal complexity built atop it over the centuries proliferated into being as a direct consequence of our money-based value system and the foundational scarcity that is its jealously guarded lifeblood. Add extreme specialisation and rigid hierarchical power to that mix and you end up here.

We need to break this wheel if we don’t want more of the same.

In terms of politics, then, I’d like to see regional polities facilitating self governance in ideology-free, fully transparent fora activated when small, local groupings cannot manage things above a certain scale. Regional groupings should be engaged by local groupings, not vice versa, to avoid nannying interference by those not intimately familiar with local context. I’d like to see such structures designed to be systemically incapable of producing large Power-Over groupings. I’m confident this scales to international levels.

These sorts of structuring arrangements could become desirable to large numbers of us if, before and while things disintegrate in the UK and EU, there is a sufficiently successful campaign to educate ourselves at mass level about how power corrupts and what to do about that pragmatic reality. Because political parties, civil services, justice systems and mass media have failed us in this essential duty – as checks and balances against power –, this will be quite the undertaking. We will need police and army on our side in significant numbers, as well as large sections of the judicial and business worlds. Nevertheless, we either take on that challenge, or leave our future in the hands of insane tyrants. 

Other options are not clear to me. Certainly the Old Normal is gone.

If ‘elites’ have demonstrated anything, it is that they are wildly incapable of wise long-term thinking, for the sorts of structural reasons touched on above; they strongly tend to maladaptive rigidity. To create something that effectively inhibits this dynamic – a dynamic that the BRICS++ nations will face soon enough – we Westerners would first have to leave the consumerist hamster wheel behind us, i.e., no longer want it. For us to desire that daunting socioeconomic vector, those of us who feel as I do will have to succeed in making our case while those who disagree watch their living standards seep into history’s fertile soil. 

That’s my wild hope, anyway.