Without a doubt, the most disgusting photograph I’ve ever seen:

The idea of that vile Nazi rag and that filthy degenerate tyrant being honored by the so-called government of my country is beyond nauseating. And as propaganda, it has a decidedly contrary impact on me from what I suspect it’s intended to have. Where I was formerly vaguely distressed at the suffering of the average Ukrainian, now I’m eager to see the country devastated and conquered, as long as the end result is this verminous weasel’s head ending up on a pike somewhere.

And wow, man, remember when they said that the Q-Anon Shaman was “disgracing” the capitol chambers? What absolute sociopathic scumbags. Hell, I’d vote to enter the war on Russia’s side at this point. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

OK, let me get this straight:

Dude attacks his political rivals with the state’s secret police force, flexes about how he can crush resistance with “F-15s” (how’d that work out for you in Iraq, bubba?), allies himself with violent nationalist extremists in Eastern Europe, and then gives a speech about “MAGA forces” in front of a red white and black background with soldiers at attention as props, but I’m the Nazi????

The woodchipper is obviously getting closer by the day. I really don’t want to be the one going into it, what about you?

In my last two posts I made a bunch of comparisons between the Russia-Ukraine war and various other conflicts big and small. Some of the comparisons were good, some were hilariously bad (hence the rankings). There was one that I originally put on my list, however, that I ultimately decided to remove. Not because it’s a bad analogy, but because Ukraine plays such a miniscule role in the comparison that it’s really not a Ukraine analogy at all — more like an analogy of Current Year more broadly.

Honorable Mention: The Peloponnesian War

People often like to compare the Global American Empire to the Roman Empire, and it’s not a wholly bad analogy. No empire since Rome has been so fully hegemonic or militarily dominant over the entire known world as has the GAE since 1990. But in other ways it’s a really bad analogy — one big difference of course is that the GAE doesn’t admit it’s an empire, whereas Rome reveled in it, going so far as to deify the emperor and his government and make them the centerpiece of national religious observation. The US also doesn’t fully assimilate conquered territories as Rome did, but rather maintains them as auxiliaries with nominal (but not actual) political independence.

For a long time I’ve found the best historical analogue of the GAE to be the Athenian Empire of the 5th century BC. Athens’ Empire was held together by a combination of strong economic incentives to favor Athens along with Athens’ incredible naval superiority over any other power in the region. Like the GAE, Athens was able to “project power” on short notice anywhere in the Aegean, making it very difficult for any would-be power to get off the ground. In the same sense, its naval power gave it unprecedented ability to facilitate trade throughout the known world, making it (and its allies) fantastically rich — but at the same time, also immune to siege warfare, sanctions, and the like by potential rivals.

The Athenian Empire famously destroyed itself through the Peloponnesian Wars, fought against Sparta and its allies. I first got to thinking about this analogy during the Iraq War, which to me resembled in many ways Athens’ ridiculous attempt to conquer Sicily in the latter stages of the war on Sparta. Like Iraq, the Sicilian Expedition posed no clear benefit for Athens, was directed at a target that was unlikely to matter much to the real enemy Sparta, and was enormously expensive in terms of manpower and money. On top of that, Athens failed to take Syracuse and had to retreat with its tail between its legs, severely depleted and ultimately unable to continue its resistance against Sparta. Likewise, our failure to democratize Iraq was the beginning of the end for the GAE — it’s been all downhill since then in terms of our ability to project power in the world, culminating in our recent humiliation in Afghanistan and our impotent struggling against Russian military action in Ukraine.

The big problem with the analogy between the US and Athens, though, was always that I wasn’t sure who worked as the Sparta in the analogy. But it’s clear now that it’s Russia; the analogy is just too perfect. The US is a mercantile power whose military might stems from its dominance of the oceans that also protect it from retaliation; Russia on the other hand has always been a land-based power, like Sparta. Soviet communism also had similarities with the ideology that drove Spartan society in its heyday, e.g. the focus on individuals’ duty to the state and the paranoia about foreign aggression. So the idea that America and Russia are heading toward a replay of the Peloponnesian War is pretty appealing.

Athens started out the war vastly more powerful than Sparta, such that anyone with any sense would have surmised that Sparta was doomed, it was just a matter of time. But Athens was then hit with a number of setbacks, chief among them a nasty virus that shut the city down for a few years — sounds unfortunately familiar, no? Ultimately a combination of natural disaster and military/political incompetence turned the tables and resulted in Athens’ ignominious defeat and disappearance from history as a particularly important city. Which certainly seems like the direction the US is heading, if we’re going to be completely honest.

The reason this fails as a Ukraine War analogy, though, is that there really isn’t an obvious Ukraine in the story. Sure, there were a lot of little city states that could be pushed into the role for the sake of analogy, but none of them stand out as particularly important. But maybe that’s the real wisdom to be gained from this effort of comparison — Ukraine just isn’t that important, it’s merely the current tripwire in the looming great power war between the US, Russia, and probably China that is going to explode at some point in the next few years into a third World War.

As always, I strongly hope that I am wrong! But if not, remember you read it here first, folks.

It’s been a long time since my last blog post, and I left y’all on a cliffhanger eagerly awaiting my top 3 picks for best Ukraine war analogies.  Many apologies for the long delay!  In my defense, I am moving no more slowly than the Russian Army.  Fortunately, nothing has changed about that conflict, so my top three picks ring just as true today as they did a couple of months ago when I made the list.  Without further ado:

3.  The Texas Revolution/Mexican-American War

This is a great moment in American History, because it’s really the first time that we embraced the imperial ambitions that made us, for better or worse, the most powerful nation on Earth in the 20^th century.  For those of you who are not from either the US or Mexico, or whose history is a little rusty, the Texas Revolution was fought by a growing population of Texas settlers – mostly from the United States – against the government of Mexico, led by President/General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.  The Revolution is most famous for the high-profile victory of the Mexicans against the settlers at the Alamo, but was ultimately a loss for Santa Anna, who was humiliated in defeat by Sam Houston’s forces at the Battle of San Jacinto, leading to the creation of the Republic of Texas in 1836.  Later on, the annexation of Texas by the United States led to a broader war that ended with a complete Mexican defeat including the occupation of Mexico City by the US Marine Corps – the famous “Halls of Montezuma” mentioned in the USMC’s theme song.

So how does this conflict compare with the Russia-Ukraine war?  It’s pretty straightforward, really.  You’ve got a situation where a sizable chunk of the population of country A (Mexico/Ukraine) identifies more with people in neighboring country B (America/Russia) than it does with the ruling elite that theoretically governs them.  On top of that, Mexico’s government was becoming increasingly concerned with the non-Mexican character of the Texas population and became pretty solidly anti-Anglo, adopting a type of ethno-nationalism centered around, basically, speaking Spanish.  Just like the efforts of Ukro-nazis to astroturf “Ukranianness”, Mexico was only nominally a thing at this point, having only recently gained its independence from the Spanish Empire, and being comprised (as it is today) by wildly different ethnic groups that don’t mesh very well.

So Santa Anna’s government really disliked the white settlers in Texas and made their lives fairly miserable, and they hated him for it.  Ultimately this set the stage for a conflict with the United States, just as Kiev’s abuse of Russian-speaking Donbass inevitably led to conflict with Russia. Just like Donbass, Texas had a long and very ambiguous history of occupation and settlement, leading to neither side having a particularly strong claim on it, so Mexico City didn’t have a strong case for holding on to it when the locals demanded to leave.  We’ll revisit this again in a moment, but one has to ask, if Santa Anna hated the settlers so much, what was the point of forcing them to continue to be Mexicans?  Was it worth getting his country into a war with the much more powerful nation to his north just to hold onto a territory that hated him?

Ultimately, Mexico suffered the same fate that Ukraine will suffer – total defeat, massive destruction of its cities from enemy shelling, and loss of a greater chunk of his country’s territory than would have been lost if they had just let the settlers go to begin with.  The only question is, will Zelensky end up fleeing in stolen civilian clothes to avoid capture after blundering his army into a totally disastrous defeat like Santa Anna did?  You’d hate to see it.

2. The Iraq War

I’m surprised you don’t see this comparison made more often, because it’s the only one that really puts Russia in a bad light that isn’t a “everybody I don’t like is Hitler” meme.  If one wants to reject all of the historical claims Putin makes about the Russian-ness of Ukraine, the emptiness of so-called Ukrainian nationalism, and the desires of the people of Lugansk and Donetsk, then what you’re left with is a good old-fashioned pointless imperial adventure, with a stronger country invading a weaker one on trumped-up humanitarian justifications that nobody actually believes.  And of course, the obvious analogy is to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.  After a handful of gangsters blew up the World Trade Center towers in 2001, the US went nuts, launching wars against whole countries instead of, you know, against the tiny group of miscreants that actually did the attack.  If you weren’t alive back then you just can’t appreciate how thoroughly the US fucked itself up over 9/11.  But the crown jewel of the fuck-ups was the invasion of Iraq.

Iraq literally had no connection to 9/11, and was a bulwark against Islamism and terrorism in the region for decades.  Whatever Saddam Hussein’s flaws, he was an avowedly secular leader, and his Ba’ath party was vehemently opposed to the religious rule, fatwas, jihads, etc that led to 9/11.  The destruction of his government – achieved at great expense in blood and treasure by the US government – was like manna from Heaven for Muslim terrorists, who rapidly filled the vacuum left behind, later creating the multinational ISIS caliphate that persisted until President Trump destroyed it in 2017.

But let’s not focus on the consequences of invading Iraq, let’s think about the justifications for doing it.  The US accused Hussein of stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction” – specifically chemical and biological weapons – in abrogation of the agreements that ended the first Gulf War.  They presented all sorts of evidence of this fact to the United Nations, and declared that the US had the absolute right to unilaterally invade Iraq to confiscate or destroy these weapons before they ended up in the hands of our terrorist enemies.  Of course this was all bullshit; there were no weapons, as multiple inspections proved long before the invasion occurred.  The real reason for the invasion was likely some combination of a personal vendetta by the Bush family against Hussein, a desire to secure Iraq’s oil reserves, and just rank corruption on the part of US elites who held financial interests in the companies who made bombs and the construction contractors who re-built the things those bombs blew up.  The whole world was aghast at our invasion of Iraq, but we didn’t care, we just powered on ahead.

Sound familiar?  The most ungenerous interpretation of Putin’s motives for invading Ukraine are no worse than our motives for invading Iraq.  So perhaps beyond anything else, what rustles my jimmies about the Biden regime’s scruples regarding Ukraine is that they are so deeply and completely hypocritical.  It’s a disgusting sin that nobody ever paid a price for what we did to Iraq – or what that war did to our country and its soldiers, for that matter.  But the line Biden takes toward Russia just highlights that nobody in DC has even internalized that what they did was wrong.  These people pretending that the US government is somehow morally superior to Russia‘s make me want to vomit. It should not be lost on you that the one political leader in the United States to call out his predecessors for their rape of Iraq was mercilessly attacked for doing so. Biden wants to say that Putin is a mad-dog killer — but the actions of the Global American Empire over the past two decades dwarf anything Putin has ever done in terms of pure cynical brutality, and damn near everybody on Earth outside of the US politico-academic machine knows it.

And now for the #1 best Ukraine War comparison –

1. The (First) American Civil War

The great irony of the Russia-Ukraine war is that it’s being fought over the idea that Donbass has no right to secede from Ukraine – which itself seceded from the Soviet Union only a generation or so ago.  It’s like if the South had won the US Civil War, and then fought a second war to keep Florida from seceding from the Confederacy.  But more to the point – the current United States of America is built around the notion that its constituent states absolutely do not have the right to leave the Union.  Abraham Lincoln killed three quarters of a million people to illustrate that fact.  To Lincoln, the US was a natural whole, its people united by the ‘mystic chords of memory’, connecting all the states together in a single, historically inviolable whole.

Well, some of us don’t think much of Mr. Lincoln’s attitude there – the argument is strong that the North and South represented (at least) two completely separate ethnic groups in 1860, and still do today.  My own feel is that the US Civil War was on some level a continuation of the English Civil War two centuries prior, since the two sides in both those wars largely formed a single dichotomous bloodline who never stopped hating each other for even a moment.  If it hadn’t been slavery, it would’ve been something else that sparked the conflict, because the South and the North were obviously two separate nations trying to share a single government, which never works out in the long run.

But let’s put aside my neo-Confederate revisionism and just take Mr. Lincoln at his word: the US is an inviolable whole, united by its common history, and it’s worth massive sacrifice and warfare to preserve it even when parts of it are temporarily deluded into thinking they can leave it.  This is nearly identical to President Putin’s long historical explanation arguing that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people. In Putin’s telling, Ukraine is purely a political invention from Soviet days, and Russian and Ukrainian peoples are a single ethnic group going back to the Viking age.  He sees the current incarnation of Ukrainian nationalism as goofy and artificial – and worse, as a cynical tool to try to break Ukraine away from their natural allies to benefit the Global American Empire.  Sure, there are reasonable national security concerns for Russia if Ukraine joins the GAE – and America’s founding fathers reasoned that the Union had to preserved to avoid North America suffering the constant strife that characterized European history.  But beyond those temporal concerns, Putin outlined much more ancient and deep issues at play, positioning himself as the preserver of a Slavic nation that is older and more important than any particular political concern of the present day.

Of course the big difference here is that Lincoln prevented the splitting of the US before it really happened, whereas the USSR disintegrated 30 years ago.  But the circumstances were quite different of course – Russia of the 1990s was a miserable, impoverished nation thanks to 80 years of rule by leftists (just look what they’ve done to the US is less than two years!), and was in no position to prevent its disintegration.  And in one of the great geopolitical blunders of history, the US and the rest of the GAE just let the Soviet Union disintegrate, instead of helping to hold it together just under a more liberal government.  But it’s not that hard to imagine scenarios where the CSA could have succeeded in seceding – i.e., Lincoln could have lost the 1864 election – only for the war to reignite decades later to prevent the South from signing on with some foreign alliance of one kind or another.  Would Lincoln II have been justified in bringing the South back into the Union by force?  If Lincoln I’s positions are sound, then surely Lincoln II would be so justified – and so would Vladimir Putin be justified in bringing back the natural Russian lands of Ukraine into political union with Russia.

But it’s really incumbent here to ask whether Lincoln was right or not – are mystical notions of nation-hood worth holding on to?  What did Ukraine gain by trying to hold on to Donbass besides destruction?  And if Russia wins the war and ends up seizing all of Ukraine, what will it gain by trying to force the Western Ukrainians — i.e., the Ruthenians and Gallicians — to give up their notions of Ukrainian statehood?  Trying to maintain a political union between factions that despise each other is a thankless, rewardless game – a fact that the United States of 2022 should think about very seriously as we contemplate what will happen if Donald Trump runs for president again in 2024.

As is typical when it comes to geopolitics, the Russo-Ukrainian War has prompted a lot of people to make comparisons between that conflict and wars of the past. Sometimes this is done to try to understand what is going on, and what its likely outcomes might be. Other times, it’s done in bad faith, to make spurious moral claims about one of the combatants (in this case, almost always to throw shade on Putin’s Russia). So I’m going to go through a few comparisons that I’ve either gleaned from the voluminous Internet commentary about the war, or else come up with all by my lonesome. They are ranked, from dumbest to most apt (based on my own feelz exclusively, of course).

10. World War II, beginning

The absolute shit-tier comparison is to the days immediately preceding the outbreak of hostilities between Nazi Germany and what would eventually be the Allied Powers. In 1938, just months before WWII proper began, Hitler annexed the “Sudetenland”, or the portion of Czechoslovakia primarily occupied by native German speakers, into the Third Reich. This occurred legally and (mostly) peacefully, following the Munich Agreement where the powers of Europe, led by the infamous British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, agreed to Hitler’s demands for the territory to avoid a repeat of WWI.

What makes this comparison appealing is that one of Hitler’s stated goal upon taking power in 1933 was to reunite all the German speaking lands into a single Reich, to restore the nation that had been vindictively dismembered by the victorious Allies in the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI. Similarly, one of Vladimir Putin’s objectives over the past decade has been to establish the security of Russian-speaking populations in former Soviet Republics — and he has made noises about “Gathering the Russian Lands”, e.g. reuniting the Russian Empire of Catherine the Great. The problem with this part of the comparison, though, is that this goal is pretty sympathetic, and to be frank, when Hitler stuck to it, he had the widespread support of Western populations (much to the chagrin of their leaders). Nobody wanted to ignite another world war over Hitler’s fairly reasonable claim to those German-speaking lands; and prior to 2022 most sensible people (like Barack Obama for instance) didn’t want to risk WWIII over Russia annexing Russian-speaking countries.

But of course Hitler’s ambitions didn’t stop with reuniting the German-speaking peoples, and by the end of 1939 the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, and war started anyway. PM Chamberlain went down in history as a total coward for letting Hitler get away with moving the Wehrmacht past Czechoslovakia’s southern defenses — you constantly hear warmonger politicians mocking antiwar figures as “Neville Chamberlains” as a consequence.

So what makes this a terrible comparison? First, there’s no reason at all to think that Putin’s ultimate goals extend beyond the historical boundary of the USSR. Unlike Germany, Russia is naturally defensible due to its immense size and inhospitable climate; compare with Germany’s completely open eastern and western borders, which has made it politically and militarily unstable since Roman times and has led to its highly militaristic culture and history. Putin also isn’t Hitler — however you want to describe his position, he doesn’t have any kind of crazy millenarian belief system like Hitler, and his regime is basically throne-and-altar conservative pseudo-monarchism, the diametrical opposite of Hitler’s wild-eyed movement to reorganize all of society along patently crazy lines.

But in my opinion, the best reason this comparison is bad is just this — what should Chamberlain have actually done at Munich? It seems to me that the argument is that he should have told Hitler to shove the Sudetenland up his kraut ass, and launched a preemptive war against the Reich, assuming that Hitler would eventually move against the West. Which, my friends, is exactly what Putin did — assuming that the American Empire/NATO was moving to fortify and arm Ukraine as a forward operating base for the eventual invasion of Russia, he launched a preemptive attack to protect his country. Putin did exactly what the warhawks think Neville Chamberlain’s government should have done.

And given the history of the American Empire in terms of belligerence, violation of international law and customs, and wartime brutality over the past sixty years — not to mention the wall-to-wall Russophobic propaganda deployed against President Trump — who can honestly say Putin was wrong to think we would eventually do to his country the same thing that Hitler did to it?

9. The Cold War

A lot of people keep bringing up the Cold War, when the US and USSR squared off against each other with nuclear missiles for fifty years. One similarity is that the only thing preventing the hawks in the US from launching a full scale counterinvasion of Ukraine to fight Russia with US power is the threat of Putin’s nuclear arsenal. But it’s a bad comparison — there is no way one can see the world of 2022 as split between two camps anymore. In the Cold War there was the “free” West vs. the communist East, with the so-called “Third World” acting as a periodic proxy battleground between the two. But that all dissolved with the collapse of Soviet communism in the 1990s. Now, we are witnessing a return to a world of Great Powers (e.g., the US, EU, Russia, and China) with more or less equally reprehensible political systems, all vying against each other in varying degrees of intrigue and cold and hot combat. There are no good guys vs. bad guys here — or at least, if there are, they are fighting each other inside each of the powers, leaving the interpower conflicts without a moral dimension beyond the obvious one — that war is always, everywhere, horrible.

8. The Cold Civil War

I’m not sure if her originally coined the term, but Angelo Codevilla famously used the term “cold civil war” to describe the culture war that has been tearing the US apart for the past decade or so. It refers to the fact that our most contentious political issues are increasingly settled by fiat, outside of any possibility of electoral review, by judges or executive orders or general bureaucratic skullduggery, leaving no political solutions to the biggest problems we face. While I’ve made the case before that this conflict is truly global, taking place in every civilized country on Earth, it has a very different character in the US. It’s a cold war here because the only thing that has preserved any semblance of traditional life in the US is the fact that the Right is armed to the teeth, and there are pretty clear red lines that Washington can only cross if it’s willing to use violence in the Red States to enforce them.

I’ve seen commentators compare the war in Ukraine as linked to our cold civil war, because the US left hates Putin because of his opposition to their crazier demands, like transgender ideology. Indeed, if you see the world as polarized between a traditional right and an insane left, Putin’s government is the only stable power center representing the right; everything else is grassroots insurgencies that are hopelessly vulnerable to the worldwide ascendant leftism. A Putin victory is certainly a blow to that leftist globalist order. But it’s a bad comparison, because i) it’s not even a little bit cold in Ukraine in terms of war, and ii) nothing will really change in the lives of oppressed traditional groups in Western countries once Ukraine is defeated. If anything, it will make things here even worse as the regime circles its wagons against us. Putler is not coming to save us, folks; we’re on our own.

7. The War on COVID-19

Kind of a silly comparison — one is an actual war, the other is a fake war against a virus. But what makes this comparison somewhat effective is that both of these “wars” were 90% bullshit propaganda, and trying to tell what was actually happening at any given time required triangulation between many mostly untrustworthy information sources with the hope of gleaning something real out of the noise. I’ve discussed COVID propaganda extensively on this blog, but just consider the kinds of crap we’ve been told by the mainstream media about the war in Ukraine. How many people you know are convinced Ukraine can win? How many think we could successfully intervene? How many believe that the Russians massacred people at Bucha? How many don’t question the insane statistic that 30,000 Russians have already died in Ukraine? How many don’t believe that Ukraine is enthusiastically supportive of Nazi terrorists? It boggles the mind — just like all the people who believe that COVID kills 25% of the people it infects, or that the vaccines are safe and effective. Rinse and repeat.

I’ve gotten much of my news about the ‘other side’ from the guys that run the Russians With Attitude podcast, and they have made a prescient observation several times. The big difference in terms of propaganda between Russians and Americans, they say, is that Americans are dumb enough to think their government and media outlets are telling them the truth most of the time. Nobody in Russia is that gullible.

6. The Fall of the Roman Empire

Well, actually, the centuries immediately following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. This one comes from Putin himself who has alluded to the idea that he believes modern Russia is the natural heir of the Roman Empire, and by extension he is the legitimate modern-day Roman Emperor. It’s not entirely crazy, to be honest. Even before the sack of Rome proper, the true capital of the Empire had already moved to Byzantium (later Constantinople, later still Istanbul) in what is modern-day Turkey. The Byzantine Empire carried on the legacy of Rome for a thousand years after various Germans swamped the Western Empire and split it into dozens of squabbling tribes It was still powerful for centuries after the rise of Christianity, and was one of the poles in the Great Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. After the conquest of Constantinople by Muslims in the 15th century, though, one could scarcely call that city the seat of Eastern Christianity any more. In the modern world, the clear center of the Eastern Church is Moscow, and Vladimir Putin sees himself as its greatest defender. So if you hold that Eastern Christianity was what gave legitimacy to the latter-day Roman Empire, then it is somewhat reasonable to think that the Empire just migrated to Moscow after the Islamicization of Constantinople

One doesn’t have to be a crazed dictator to see that Western globalist ideology is vehemently opposed to Christian orthodoxy, so there is obviously an inherent conflict between Russia and the ascendant leftist regime of the American Empire in that regard. It also make some kind of sense that Putin would feel a religious need to “save” Ukraine from being corrupted by the Americans, by force if necessary. Where this comparison fails, though, is in its grandiosity — as much as we might love to see it, the Roman Empire is not coming back, certainly not under Russian rule. The gap in Weltanschauung between Augustus Caesar and anything that has ever lived in Russia is wider than the gap between Rome and Constantinople by a long shot. And regardless of Putin’s own religious faith, the idea that the Church can be raised back to prominence over an Empire that suffered a century of Communist-enforced atheism is over-the-rainbow optimistic. Ironically, the religion that probably has the best shot at creating a new Russian imperial identity is the pan-slavic paganism of the Ukrainian Nazis, which Putin is actively annihilating. So count me as skeptical that Putin, or his successors, will be crowned Holy Roman Emperor any time soon.

5. World War I

This one has moved up the ranks somewhat since the Russians and Ukrainians have been fighting literal trench warfare for the past few months. But that’s not the real reason this comparison makes it this high in the rankings — those Cold War era trenches have already been overrun at key points, and I suspect the Russians will be rolling over the rest of Eastern Ukraine much faster than the French rolled over German positions in the Great War. No, the WWI analogy is apt because of the importance of secret — dare I say Byzantine — alliances in keeping the war going. Who, exactly, is allied with whom? Clearly the world is split between the American Empire and Russia in this conflict, but who is on which side? Eastern portions of the EU seem to be wiffle-waffling, torn between the anti-Rus sentiment of Western elites, mistrust of the West’s cultural insanity, and addiction to Russian fossil fuels for energy. NATO can’t even keep its house in order, with Turkey opposing expanding the alliance to Sweden and Finland. And what about China — or the other “BRICS” nations, as they are sometimes called — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa? Is BRICS a thing? If so, it would represent roughly half the worlds population and land mass arrayed against the American/EU axis. But none of this is taking place above board, so all geopolitical moves are taking place in an environment of intense uncertainty, just like in the years preceding World War I.

Perhaps it’s better to say that the Russia-Ukraine conflict reveals a world situation similar to the run-up to World War I — which should give people a pretty good reason to step back and defuse things before some Archduke gets capped and the nuclear fuse gets lit…

4. World War II, end

When most people think about WWII, they think about it like a Star Wars movie, with good guys and bad guys slogging it out on roughly even footing right until the very end. But that’s not how it was, at all. The outcome of the war was near certain after the German defeat at Stalingrad, which happened almost three years before VE Day. Everything after that was just a brutal slog, with the Germans continuously losing ground, but making the Allies pay dearly for every inch they took. So in one sense, the Ukraine war is quite like that — the outcome of the war is certain, a crushing Russian victory, but the Ukrainians, driven by stubborn nationalism and propaganda, are apparently willing to die by the scores of thousands to make the Russians pay for it. The utter stupidity of it boggles the mind, but I suppose the call of Valhalla remains strong in the Slavic heart.

By 1945, the sensible move for Germany would have been to negotiate a surrender to the British and Americans with the stipulation that they protect the Deutches Volk from the Soviets and not wholesale execute the Nazi leadership. The sensible thing for Ukraine at this point is to just give up, negotiating some kind of peace treaty that preserves some amount of territory for Ukrainian nationalism to keep doing its thing (just without heavy weaponry). But just like the original Nazis, the Ukrainians won’t do it, and so they will end up with their entire country laid waste, conquered completely by their enemy, and their way of life ended in perpetuity.

But another way that the Ukraine war is like the WWII endgame is in the cynical power plays being made by the Americans. In 1945, WWII wasn’t about the Allies vs. the Axis, it was already about the US vs. Russia, and both sides were maneuvering against each other with poor central Europe as the chessboard. And that is certainly what is going on today in Ukraine. This was never a war primarily between Russia and Ukraine — it is a war between Russia and the American Empire, which the American deep state has been angling for since about 2014. Were it not for Donald Trump, this would have happened in 2017, shortly after Hillary Clinton and her NGO apparatchiks took power. They literally impeached Trump for balking at arming the Ukrainians and facilitating their war in Donbass (and bullheaded provocations of Russia). What is happening in Ukraine today is a tragedy created by the American Empire to try to bleed Russia before finally destroying it as a rival. Just like in the end stages of WWII, the utter destruction of the middle man is guaranteed because the real powers at war with each other have to set themselves up for the next war. And just like Germany and Poland in the end stages of WWII, the result will be utter destruction for Ukraine and its unfortunate population.

We’ll continue this list in a few days folks, with the TOP 3 UKRAINE WAR COMPARISONS… need to keep you in suspense, because the best comparisons are still to come!