By now, it should be abundantly clear to all that the official US regime narrative on Ukraine is that one is supposed to be in favor of Ukrainian political independence. That is, we’re supposed to support the idea that Ukraine is a separate state that is politically independent from the Russian state. By extension, of course, the idea that Ukraine is a sovereign state also implies it is separate from all other states as well.
African politicians tend to blame foreign actors or external factors for the problems at home. This is nothing new nor is it unique to African politicians. Across the world, rulers and politicians do not miss a chance to blame domestic woes on local or foreign scapegoats, thus shielding themselves from their own policy failures.
How can we explain that the currency whose issuer has made the biggest inflationary mistake of all during the pandemic is the strongest (the US Consumer Price Index is up over 8 percent year on year), while that where the inflationary mistake if any has been the smallest (the Japan CPI is up less than 1 percent year on year) is the weakest? There lies the puzzle of the present dollar-yen rate.
University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer gave a lecture to a group of university alumni in 2014 entitled “Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault,” essentially predicting the Russo-Ukrainian war. The lecture has over 24 million views.
An old joke expresses one of the most common criticisms of the free market. “What is the most beautiful word in the English language? Cash.” The free market, it is alleged, has no place for values that have no price in money. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto offer a classic statement of this point of view:
The US government today likes to pretend that it is the perennial champion of political independence for countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain. What is often forgotten, however, is that in the days following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington opposed independence for Soviet republics like Ukraine and the Baltic states.
Politicians thoroughly enjoy times of war. Periods of bellicosity are when the most power-hungry members of the political class indulge in their most depraved political fantasies. The Russo-Ukrainian War has been no exception to this trend.
Western politicians have been taking advantage of the largest conventional military conflict on European soil since World War II to crack down on civil liberties at home and drag their countries closer to an open conflict with a nuclear power. The domestic measures Western governments have pursued have been particularly breathtaking.
Elon Musk’s bid to take over Twitter and turn it into a private company has apparently been successful. Now the real action begins. Musk’s buyout exposes the Big Digital media complex to unwanted and unwonted competition, while threatening to loosen its near-total control of information and opinion. Twitter has represented a vital component in an information configuration that has barred competitors and participants from the digital sphere by means of progressive criteria, including wokeness, political fealty, and obedience to official state dictates and narratives.
