Serfs and Artisans, The Wagner Factor and the Fairness Principle, Alexander Dugin (Alexander Dugin is not "Putin's brain", but is an influential Russian political philosopher. His daughter was recently murdered in an attempt to kill him. He is a Russian at war, completely at war. He wrote this for western Europeans, but also for Russians.)
May 3, 2023·edited May 3, 2023Liked by John Day MD
I know: Dugin's daughter was murdered. Speech has its price. Nothing like killing someone just cuz they've been conscripted and maybe even believe in their country (Ukrainian Lives Matter). Becoming a murderer is the ultimate curse.
We call them heroes, and tickertape parades help a bit.
But what we should really say to any soldier, Nato, Ukrainian, Russian, Wagner mercs, is: "I'm sorry we did this to you." Not that I believe that we are ever politically capable of preventing our tribe, clan, city-state, kingdom, nation, or empire from fomenting wars and shoving younguns into a sausage machine that encases your best buddy's guts in departed soul casing, but I do believe that "We're sorry. How can we help the hurt?" is appropriate.
Aleks at Black Mountain Analysis has a good read of the strategic dances between NATO, Russia and Ukrainian dead-men-walking. Wagner's role addresses your comment about conscripts dying, by making sure that volunteers do the heaviest killing and dying, on the Russian side. NATO is slaughtering Ukrainians as long as they exist.
May 3, 2023·edited May 3, 2023Liked by John Day MD
I'm all for convicts redeeming their sense of self a la The Dirty Dozen, but I think Putin/whoever is wise to stop arms flow to the Wagner Group as the operation winds down.
Also, the moralist in me wants to make one thing very clear: war is in no way a meritocracy. War takes decent men, makes them violently insane, then sends them back home to add to homeland insanity and violence. War takes men who are already disposed toward violent insanity (hardened criminals) and makes heroes of them.
LIke any returning vet will tell you/us if you/we get to acting like you/we know something about war, especially what's martially "right and wrong": "You don't know what you're talking about."
We can't stop our nation from constant incessant war. I doubt non-USNATO folks want to hear what we think about the bravery or competence of this or that soldier/division/leader. I wonder how much Russians want to hear from Dugin these days. (I like him, but he's just.a.philosopher. No skin in the game.)
Yeah, if I were Putin I'd steadily defang Wagner and watch. If they go hunting elsewhere for weapons outside the Russian protective sphere, I'd revoke their authorization and demand full and immediate surrender to the Russians, not as POWs but as (oh what are we calling them?) 'brave soldiers who've earned a nice Russian retirement'.
Wagner is impressive but so are rogue elephants.
War is most of all not about justice or anything remotely related.
It's about winning some kind of political condition by murdering enough of the other guys and destroying enough of their materiel that they have to stop unless they really want to run their bodies through a military blender.
War is a meritocracy for generals and colonels. Heroes don't last long on the battlefield within the enlisted ranks.
I don't know what is going on with under-supplying Wagner.
Is it a feint, a ruse to keep feeding Ukrainian men into the Artemovsk meat-grinder?
"Keep coming, we're running low on ammo!"
I was thinking about how amost everything about war has to be lies as I gardened this afternoon. Lots of time to think. I grew up on USMC and USN bases during Vietnam, which Dad attended in 1967, getting back just before the Tet offensive.
I know that I don't know war, so none of my vet friends ever felt the need to tell me that I didnt know what I was talking about, because I didnt say the things that prompt that response, ever.
There is a lot to know about how and why these things are done, so we can appropriately comprehend the motives of those who drive society to this.
I hope we can stay out of their way, be less than helpful to them, and potentially do other things that feed us and don't feed their lust for control of all that lives.
"I don't know what is going on with under-supplying Wagner."
Wagner speaks of "undersupply" but *everyone* is feeling the materiel pinch.
As for studying war in order to end it: I have zero hope in such endeavor. We're a violent species, with males especially predisposed toward "male coalitional violence": gangs, armies, etc.
As for feints and ruses: I think Russia has been playing its hand straightforwardly all along: mop up the Nazis, do so with minimal collateral damage, with compassion for Ukrainians and hope that they'll allow Russia to be their brother/helper when the dust settles, but fuck 'em if they can't take a hint.
There was never a chance that Ukraine would win unless Russia hoist itself on its own.petard. The only way Russia could lose is via nuclear conflict, and even there they would prevail but more pyrrichally than not.
The people who drive society to this are not our rulers. It is us. Only our unwillingness to accept personal responsibility creates the illusion that powerful bad people drive us to this. That is simply, in my hard-assed opinion, so much self-excusing delusionary bullshit.
As Bilbo's Bitch asked: who is the enemy of humankind? Aside from possible malevolent demiurges and such ('Get the behind me, Satan), the enemy of humanity is humanity, period.
My goals were more modest than "ending war". Every guy who figures out not to believe what they tell him about 'the war", and finds ways to avoid it out of good knowledge, is a life not ruined by becoming a murderer or a murderee.
I understand and agree with the modestly of your aims. However, such aims are why I avoid reading about the war. We saw it start in 2014, saw Russia bitch-slap USNATO by flying aerial missions in what UWSNATO considered its personal air pond.
It's a war. When people get caught up in "understanding" it via punditry, it strikes me as a way of validating the war.
If Ukraine launches a major counter-offensive, I suspect I'll hear about it. Here in the States, I don't know anyone looking to enlist.
So I increasingly don't "study war" no more. War seems to be studying me and most everyone on the planet, but that's it's business, not mine.
"The war is a bore" to quote a character from A Separate Peace which was probably in your high school recommended reading list too. This quote from that seems apt:
"And now when we were served chicken livers for dinner I couldn’t help conceiving a mental picture of President Roosevelt and my father and Finny’s father and numbers of other large old men sitting down to porterhouse steak in some elaborate but secluded men’s secret society room.… And when in chapel day after day we were exhorted to new levels of self-deprivation and hard work, with the war as their justification, it was impossible not to see that the faculty were using this excuse to drive us as they had always wanted to…"
and this:
"A Section Eight discharge is for the nuts in the service, the psychos, the Funny Farm candidates. Now do you know what I’m talking about? They give you a Section Eight discharge, like a dishonorable discharge only worse. You can’t get a job after that.”
I remember reading it in high school but it didn't speak to me. (Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five kinda stole itsd thunder.) reviewing it via online quotes, I see why it was a book of note back then:
“I could see both of them clearly enough because the sun was blazing all around them… and the rays of the sun were shooting past time, millions of rays shooting past them like—like golden machine-gun fire…. That’s what it was like, if you want to know. The two of them looked as black as—as black as death standing up there with this fire burning all around them.”
But thanx for recommending the articles.
fwiw, the war I ponder is the war at home, growing worse every day but, being disguised as it is as mere 'daily events', is still mostly invisible as a war. Obviously, the global world order is coming down and we'll be very very very lucky, imo, if we avoid more or less Armageddon.
Oh, I look in the mirror often. That's where 99% of personal danger comes from. As my own worst enemy, I try to make peace but sometimes, often, daily, hourly, war breaks out. But then, what are best friends for?
Yep, there are just too many layers of 'obfuscation' for any moron to even fathom, but all is certainly hopeless, for the simple fact that its hard enough to get rich to even play the 'great game', let alone keep your money which a JP-Morgan said "It's not what you make, its what you keep"
Little people are fucked by birth may 2-3% become wealth&aware, maybe 0.01% keep their wealth generation2generation into perpetuity; Maybe 0.001% even get 'real education'.
It's not so much 'globalists' like I always say most can't even define the 'enemy'
...
Problem is like Casey so well defined, "When all the public believes is a LIE", where do you even fucking begin in terms of an organized revolution???
...
The PLAN was explained long ago to me by a patriarch in a family, one of my family's married into, at some point the billionaire patriarch took me aside and said 'would you like to ivest in a fund that would ensure your children are rich forever', I said no thanks, I would prefer my children be born poor and have work for their wealth forever;
But I did dig deeper, it turns out there are these 'actuarial' companys in London that for an 'investment' will guarantee that all offspring get say $1M USD/year for life from 18 to death; Forever for all spawn; This family in particular made its wealth in Shipping from Seattle to the Yukon the 1898 gold-rush, they had invested in these UK wealth-funds and now 4th generation 100's of grand-kids were all getting $1M/USD year, and $5M USD at 21 to do as they wished; Forever;
Now to make this all happen, one must plan out 2-4 generations, this is why we say "All wars are banker wars", but that is not true the Bankers are not the planners, or the actuarial investors; But these men do plan the wars, and decide which countrys land collapse in value (ukraine today), and which don't, the old BUY-LOW, SELL-HIGH scam, and they always win every bet;
China & Russia are leading a 'jailbreak' of nations to create an alternative system to the petro-dollar. They've 'shown their cards' and now it's our turn to respond. I wouldn't be surprised if the USA found a way to link North, Central & South America into one entity. Not the USA... but the United American States ? UAS ? Venezuela & Mexico have oil. All the American Countries combined could be a serious 'power block'. Who knows ?
AMLO in Mexico is already moving forcibly against that. He sees US weakness, as Cardenas did just before WW-2, when FDR was secretly preparing to go to war in Europe, and Cardenas nationalized oil and railways.
I know: Dugin's daughter was murdered. Speech has its price. Nothing like killing someone just cuz they've been conscripted and maybe even believe in their country (Ukrainian Lives Matter). Becoming a murderer is the ultimate curse.
We call them heroes, and tickertape parades help a bit.
But what we should really say to any soldier, Nato, Ukrainian, Russian, Wagner mercs, is: "I'm sorry we did this to you." Not that I believe that we are ever politically capable of preventing our tribe, clan, city-state, kingdom, nation, or empire from fomenting wars and shoving younguns into a sausage machine that encases your best buddy's guts in departed soul casing, but I do believe that "We're sorry. How can we help the hurt?" is appropriate.
Aleks at Black Mountain Analysis has a good read of the strategic dances between NATO, Russia and Ukrainian dead-men-walking. Wagner's role addresses your comment about conscripts dying, by making sure that volunteers do the heaviest killing and dying, on the Russian side. NATO is slaughtering Ukrainians as long as they exist.
:-(
https://bmanalysis.substack.com/p/operational-update-4
btw, I typoed. 'murderer' not "murdered"
"Becoming a murderer is the ultimate curse."
Worse than being murdered, I also suspect.
I'm gonna hit the road back to Austin now...
I'm all for convicts redeeming their sense of self a la The Dirty Dozen, but I think Putin/whoever is wise to stop arms flow to the Wagner Group as the operation winds down.
Also, the moralist in me wants to make one thing very clear: war is in no way a meritocracy. War takes decent men, makes them violently insane, then sends them back home to add to homeland insanity and violence. War takes men who are already disposed toward violent insanity (hardened criminals) and makes heroes of them.
"Got in a little home town jam..."
Born in the USSR:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDCP8m78FhQ
LIke any returning vet will tell you/us if you/we get to acting like you/we know something about war, especially what's martially "right and wrong": "You don't know what you're talking about."
We can't stop our nation from constant incessant war. I doubt non-USNATO folks want to hear what we think about the bravery or competence of this or that soldier/division/leader. I wonder how much Russians want to hear from Dugin these days. (I like him, but he's just.a.philosopher. No skin in the game.)
Yeah, if I were Putin I'd steadily defang Wagner and watch. If they go hunting elsewhere for weapons outside the Russian protective sphere, I'd revoke their authorization and demand full and immediate surrender to the Russians, not as POWs but as (oh what are we calling them?) 'brave soldiers who've earned a nice Russian retirement'.
Wagner is impressive but so are rogue elephants.
War is most of all not about justice or anything remotely related.
It's about winning some kind of political condition by murdering enough of the other guys and destroying enough of their materiel that they have to stop unless they really want to run their bodies through a military blender.
So let's have something completely different:
https://youtu.be/4lhKfWs612o
:)
War is a meritocracy for generals and colonels. Heroes don't last long on the battlefield within the enlisted ranks.
I don't know what is going on with under-supplying Wagner.
Is it a feint, a ruse to keep feeding Ukrainian men into the Artemovsk meat-grinder?
"Keep coming, we're running low on ammo!"
I was thinking about how amost everything about war has to be lies as I gardened this afternoon. Lots of time to think. I grew up on USMC and USN bases during Vietnam, which Dad attended in 1967, getting back just before the Tet offensive.
I know that I don't know war, so none of my vet friends ever felt the need to tell me that I didnt know what I was talking about, because I didnt say the things that prompt that response, ever.
There is a lot to know about how and why these things are done, so we can appropriately comprehend the motives of those who drive society to this.
I hope we can stay out of their way, be less than helpful to them, and potentially do other things that feed us and don't feed their lust for control of all that lives.
"I don't know what is going on with under-supplying Wagner."
Wagner speaks of "undersupply" but *everyone* is feeling the materiel pinch.
As for studying war in order to end it: I have zero hope in such endeavor. We're a violent species, with males especially predisposed toward "male coalitional violence": gangs, armies, etc.
As for feints and ruses: I think Russia has been playing its hand straightforwardly all along: mop up the Nazis, do so with minimal collateral damage, with compassion for Ukrainians and hope that they'll allow Russia to be their brother/helper when the dust settles, but fuck 'em if they can't take a hint.
There was never a chance that Ukraine would win unless Russia hoist itself on its own.petard. The only way Russia could lose is via nuclear conflict, and even there they would prevail but more pyrrichally than not.
The people who drive society to this are not our rulers. It is us. Only our unwillingness to accept personal responsibility creates the illusion that powerful bad people drive us to this. That is simply, in my hard-assed opinion, so much self-excusing delusionary bullshit.
As Bilbo's Bitch asked: who is the enemy of humankind? Aside from possible malevolent demiurges and such ('Get the behind me, Satan), the enemy of humanity is humanity, period.
My goals were more modest than "ending war". Every guy who figures out not to believe what they tell him about 'the war", and finds ways to avoid it out of good knowledge, is a life not ruined by becoming a murderer or a murderee.
This really is a useful update on the always-about-to-happen-soon Ukrainian counteroffensive. Very well reasoned and thoughtful. https://bmanalysis.substack.com/p/operational-update-4
I understand and agree with the modestly of your aims. However, such aims are why I avoid reading about the war. We saw it start in 2014, saw Russia bitch-slap USNATO by flying aerial missions in what UWSNATO considered its personal air pond.
It's a war. When people get caught up in "understanding" it via punditry, it strikes me as a way of validating the war.
If Ukraine launches a major counter-offensive, I suspect I'll hear about it. Here in the States, I don't know anyone looking to enlist.
So I increasingly don't "study war" no more. War seems to be studying me and most everyone on the planet, but that's it's business, not mine.
"The war is a bore" to quote a character from A Separate Peace which was probably in your high school recommended reading list too. This quote from that seems apt:
"And now when we were served chicken livers for dinner I couldn’t help conceiving a mental picture of President Roosevelt and my father and Finny’s father and numbers of other large old men sitting down to porterhouse steak in some elaborate but secluded men’s secret society room.… And when in chapel day after day we were exhorted to new levels of self-deprivation and hard work, with the war as their justification, it was impossible not to see that the faculty were using this excuse to drive us as they had always wanted to…"
and this:
"A Section Eight discharge is for the nuts in the service, the psychos, the Funny Farm candidates. Now do you know what I’m talking about? They give you a Section Eight discharge, like a dishonorable discharge only worse. You can’t get a job after that.”
I remember reading it in high school but it didn't speak to me. (Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five kinda stole itsd thunder.) reviewing it via online quotes, I see why it was a book of note back then:
“I could see both of them clearly enough because the sun was blazing all around them… and the rays of the sun were shooting past time, millions of rays shooting past them like—like golden machine-gun fire…. That’s what it was like, if you want to know. The two of them looked as black as—as black as death standing up there with this fire burning all around them.”
But thanx for recommending the articles.
fwiw, the war I ponder is the war at home, growing worse every day but, being disguised as it is as mere 'daily events', is still mostly invisible as a war. Obviously, the global world order is coming down and we'll be very very very lucky, imo, if we avoid more or less Armageddon.
Be vigilant.
Oh, I look in the mirror often. That's where 99% of personal danger comes from. As my own worst enemy, I try to make peace but sometimes, often, daily, hourly, war breaks out. But then, what are best friends for?
https://youtu.be/TLz4TuMxz4w
Who is the real enemy of mankind?
Yep, there are just too many layers of 'obfuscation' for any moron to even fathom, but all is certainly hopeless, for the simple fact that its hard enough to get rich to even play the 'great game', let alone keep your money which a JP-Morgan said "It's not what you make, its what you keep"
Little people are fucked by birth may 2-3% become wealth&aware, maybe 0.01% keep their wealth generation2generation into perpetuity; Maybe 0.001% even get 'real education'.
It's not so much 'globalists' like I always say most can't even define the 'enemy'
...
Problem is like Casey so well defined, "When all the public believes is a LIE", where do you even fucking begin in terms of an organized revolution???
...
The PLAN was explained long ago to me by a patriarch in a family, one of my family's married into, at some point the billionaire patriarch took me aside and said 'would you like to ivest in a fund that would ensure your children are rich forever', I said no thanks, I would prefer my children be born poor and have work for their wealth forever;
But I did dig deeper, it turns out there are these 'actuarial' companys in London that for an 'investment' will guarantee that all offspring get say $1M USD/year for life from 18 to death; Forever for all spawn; This family in particular made its wealth in Shipping from Seattle to the Yukon the 1898 gold-rush, they had invested in these UK wealth-funds and now 4th generation 100's of grand-kids were all getting $1M/USD year, and $5M USD at 21 to do as they wished; Forever;
Now to make this all happen, one must plan out 2-4 generations, this is why we say "All wars are banker wars", but that is not true the Bankers are not the planners, or the actuarial investors; But these men do plan the wars, and decide which countrys land collapse in value (ukraine today), and which don't, the old BUY-LOW, SELL-HIGH scam, and they always win every bet;
China & Russia are leading a 'jailbreak' of nations to create an alternative system to the petro-dollar. They've 'shown their cards' and now it's our turn to respond. I wouldn't be surprised if the USA found a way to link North, Central & South America into one entity. Not the USA... but the United American States ? UAS ? Venezuela & Mexico have oil. All the American Countries combined could be a serious 'power block'. Who knows ?
AMLO in Mexico is already moving forcibly against that. He sees US weakness, as Cardenas did just before WW-2, when FDR was secretly preparing to go to war in Europe, and Cardenas nationalized oil and railways.
Something will manifest and maybe soon ?
interesting interview ...
https://peaceyahoo
Will not open…..