Vladimir Putin

Source: Bigstock

The good old USA may have some terrible handicaps like its left-wing female media types (those hatchet-faced, man-hating, Nazi-like maniacs give me the creeps), but with the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other, plus two rather feeble neighbors north and south, people sleep easy, without worrying about rampaging Mongol hordes or their like. (Native criminal gangs are another thing altogether.)

Which brings me to the war on the other side of the world, in faraway Russia, its neighbor Ukraine, and a European defense mechanism called NATO that was conceived some 75 years ago to stop Soviet tanks from overrunning Europe. NATO’s slogan was like that of the Three Musketeers of Dumas fame: One for all and all for one. It worked for a very long while, until the Soviets imploded, and the good old US of A decided to run the world.

Phony tough-guy commentators in Britain (an island whose surrounding seas kept the Brits speaking English rather than German eighty years ago) and in America egg on the war parties daily, some of these armchair heroes sounding like George Patton. War is hell, but you’d never know it from the safety of the TV studios in Los Angeles and old New York. Nowadays these phonies are exulting over the Ukrainian army’s foray into Russia, bragging about British missiles and American tanks leading the way against the monster that is Putin. Take it from Taki: It’s bullshit and proof to those like myself who have insisted all along that this war was planned and executed by the Anglo-American cabal that saw half a million Iraqis die over the big lie of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Plus ça change, as they say in the land of cheese.

Let me explain: The Kursk offensive conjures up unwelcome ghosts from the past, especially for the Germans. In July 1943, the biggest tank battle in history took place in Kursk, and it only ended when Hitler was forced to pull two armored divisions from the area in order to defend against the American invasion of Sicily. Von Manstein’s Panzers were actually inferior to Zhukov’s T-34s, but the Luftwaffe had kept the two-week-long nonstop battle even, with the German side slightly favored. Today’s fighting is mere shadowboxing compared with the real thing. The undisputed winner of this is Vladimir Putin, something the armchair war lovers and profiteers back in Washington and London have yet to grasp. These greedy types have yet to understand that by Ukrainian tanks trundling though Russian villages, they are handing Putin the greatest propaganda victory since the death of Hitler. Putin has for years insisted that eastward expansion of NATO was a hostile alliance’s plan to intimidate and threaten Russia. Putin’s warning to the Russian people that the West was out to subjugate Russia has handed him unexpected proof.

The great George Kennan, an American diplomat, sent the most famous of telegrams back in the 1940s—it was 5,000 words—advising the Truman government to practice containment of communism, rather than confrontation. Secretary of State James Baker, an honest broker and gentleman, promised Gorbachev upon the collapse of communism in 1990 that NATO “will not move one inch eastward.” You take it from there, dear Takimag readers.

The only man who has grasped the foolhardiness of Ukrainian forces going into Russia is a Brit, Peter Hitchens. He wrote that the Russian word for safety is “bezopasnost,” and it translates as “without danger.” In other words, in Russia, danger is the normal default position. Western politicians and phony tough-guy journalists have no clue about Russia and simply parrot each other. They forget, or rather choose not to think about the fact, that Russia is a vast country with the world’s greatest resources, many of them untapped, and that there are greedy types in the West who would like to get their hands on them. The Russians know this and don’t trust the West. Since modern czarist times, Russia has been invaded twice, both times via the Ukraine by Napoleon and Adolf. This is the third time, and it is proving Putin right for telling his people that we in the West are out to get them.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. Us nice guys also invaded Crimea with our Light Brigade and so on back in 1853. Lucan, Cardigan, Captain Nolan, they even made a big movie about that one. Perhaps Boris Johnson and some other war lovers egging on Zelensky to keep begging for arms and sending men to die think that Hollywood will make another big movie, with Brad Pitt starring as Boris and Tom Cruise as Zelensky. Stranger things have happened. What I know will not take place is that the dying, the wounded, the homeless, the disfigured, the blind, and the poor will not have a film made about them and their condition. Instead, after the war finally comes to an end, big arms will have made yet another fortune, Zelensky will buy a chalet in Gstaad or a house in Palm Beach, Boris will have a square named after him somewhere in Kiev, and the Russian people will yet again have proof that the West is not only out to turn Russia into a puppet state, but to also turn the people into Western idiots playing videogames nonstop.