Topics:
(Hey. This is still a format in progress, so there might be a few kinks to iron out. Still, I hope you’ll find this little exercise useful.)
We stand at a particularly intense crossroads, with multiple phenomena starting to accelerate wildly, and whose outcome is yet to be determined. The only certainty is uncertainty, so to speak; the realization that things simply cannot and will not go on as they have for much longer. As to whether what is to come will be better or worse than what currently exists, we can only hope.
I’ll address each subject in its own subtopic, and make a conclusion in the end. For this first “news breakdown”, I’ll also give my interpretation of major events that happened throughout 2022, and that may or may not still be undergoing.
Also a small note: whenever linking to social media or newsposts, whenever possible I’ll use alternative frontends (invidious, nitter) or archiving websites (such as archive.org and archive.today).
World
The Ukrainian War
I suppose we must start by looking at the War in Ukraine. First of all, I’ll make this clear: I’m against war, for it’s pure horror, made clear in its destruction of people and their livelihoods, its forced conscriptions, its ravaging of the landscape, the mass exodus it causes, to name but a few of its nightmares. War is hell (or, as M*A*S*H puts it: “War isn’t hell. War is war, and hell is hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse”), and cheering on it is distasteful, to say the least. This, though, does not mean we should cloud our judgment in wanting to decry the aggressors, and to punish them, as if we were dealing with a petulant child instead of world powers employing the ultimate geopolitical tool, the “continuation of politics by other means”. I suppose this should already hint as to my stance about this war: I find “Western” russophobia stupid and self-defeating, incapable of producing analyses that are deeper than “Putin is the evil dictator that should be dealt with”. Putin is neither stupid nor cartoonishly villainous, and the war in Ukraine (or “special military operation”, as it is officially denominated) is not some sort of bare-faced landgrab because Putin decided so. I’ll examine this event by parts, and try to build a coherent understanding of it.
First of all, we must look at the situation in Ukraine. People have been talking about the “denazification” business as nothing but the shallowest propaganda, and though it is somewhat overblown (no, Russia’s main geopolitical concern isn’t bargain bin nazis at their border), it is also not untrue. As the collage below shows, it was no secret to anyone that the Maidan events propelled the nazi factions in Ukraine to power.
That being said, “denazification” is by no means the main aim of this war; rather, this is a war between the US and its vassals against Russia, by means of proxy conflict. The protection of the peoples in the Donbass is mere pretext; it doesn’t matter whether Putin and his government really cares about their fate (the eight years of Civil war prove that they were fine with Donbass civilians getting massacred, as is well documented (Amnesty International), through their constant shelling of the region and their treatment of enemy combatants); the point is that this is also not a lie, though not the real reason for the war. The war, in fact, was started by geopolitical and macroeconomic inevitabilities, and triggered by the imminent invasion of the Donbass regions by Ukraine, which was thwarted by the start of the war. This can easily be seen in the fact that right before the start of the war Ukrainian soldiers and equipment were being amassed at the borders (which is easily proven by the fact that said soldiers and equipment were already there when the war started, instead of being mobilized after the invasion; logistics is a complex business and not something that can be done at the snap of a finger, especially at such massive scale), and ceasefire violations were steadily escalating (OSCE report, 19/02/2022). It is, therefore, little more than a truism to say that if the invasion had started as planned there would have been tremendous massacres, given the presence of the aforementioned nazis and the rather weak state of the Donbass armies, in comparison to the Ukrainian army, trained and outfitted by NATO over the last eight years (Wall Street Journal). This begs the question: why would NATO train a non-NATO member? Clearly the war-planners in the US and Europe were expecting, and probably desiring, for Ukraine to fight a war against Russia.
This means that the start of the war was, in fact, reactive instead of being proactive; Russia was reacting to years of build-up, not simply invading poor old Ukraine for no reason. This, of course, does not means the war is therefore “just”, as if that concept had any meaning in this context; but it also does not mean that the war is just an act of pure despotism or irrationality. For all the propaganda may show, Putin is in fact not a dictator, and even if he were one he still would be accountable to public opinion, which is unlikely to have seen with good eyes a massacre of Russian-speaking peoples, which would have put him in a position of looking weak, something he cannot afford without opening up chances to be outflanked by more reactionary elements in his party. As such, domestic concerns surely have motivated this war, as well as dictated its pacing (notoriously mild, given the maximum capabilities of the Russian army).
With this in mind, we have cleared the first problem: explaining why the war started in February of this year. This, though, is an insufficient explanation as to why the US wanted war with Russia at any price; this stems, rather, from an imperialist power in crisis, attempting to fully vassalize the European continent. How can this be the motive for the war? We can reasonably deduce the US’ intentions by looking on what has happened since the start of the war, the way NATO has behaved, and who has benefited and who is paying the price for this war. This is a very straightforward exercise: the great beneficiary of this war, on the short term, is the US economy, especially its petrochemical sector, which now supplies most of Europe’s natural gas demand, whereas the great loser of this war is the European Union and most notably Germany, whose economy has become completely inviable with the current gas prices: the German industry simply isn’t competitive with tremendous markups in energy costs.
Russia, of course, has long-term problems with the sanctions; but those are minimal in comparison with Europe’s future, which, in its current form as a supranational entity, seems to be essentially doomed (having been sustained by the peculiar way German exports became viable by means of importing cheap labor from the eastern countries and having priority access to the whole of the European markets, with their powerful consumer capacity). Overall, this seems to be a catastrophe for the way capitalism is currently structured, with tremendous losses for the established economies of the imperial core, but also opening opportunities for shrewd or just unscrupulous corporations to enjoy the crisis by padding their profits by means of others’ desperation.
This essentially has forced the rest of the world to adapt, and for Russia to finally disengage from its relations with the imperial core. This predictably has resulted in the strengthening of the BRICS ties (not so much Brazil, though, which has been, alongside the rest of Latin America, under severe imperialist meddling recently), with Russia as its central conduit: China and India have unresolved conflict, but Russia and India have historic ties dating to the Soviet days, and Russia and China have been forced to support one another, though as always in an uneasy way, given US hostilities. The world’s economic and political “weight” is steadily shifting eastwards, returning to its former center after being disrupted by the last few centuries of colonialism and imperialism. One is reminded of the classic, 話說天下大勢．分久必合，合久必分 (“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been”—Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Moss Roberts ver.) It remains to be seen what the consequences of this shift will be, but I’d venture as far as saying that we are probably living in the twilight days of Euro-Anglo supremacy; its failures have caused catastrophes of a magnitude never before seen in the world (the Congo horrors, the Holocaust and the climate crisis, to name a few). Perhaps this shift is our only hope out of the current predicaments.
As a closing note, I’d like to examine the current situation of the war. (It’s a good idea to remind readers I’m no military expert; this is just my superficial take on the matter) As it’s well known, Western mainstream media outlets seize any pretext to declare Russia is failing and on the brink of being defeated, and that their retreat from Kherson (note: retreat, not rout) is a tremendous defeat, and that any moment now their willingness to do battle will collapse and there will be “regime change” in Moscow. This is nonsense. Even if we grant there were mistakes in the strategic conducting of the war from the Russian perspective, namely by not committing enough forces to the task (Ukraine is a big country) and stretching lines too thin, (which is arguable), Russia absolutely still holds the upper hand. They have annexed about a fifth of Ukraine—the portion that is economically relevant, with all the industries and mines and gas deposits—have absolutely devastated a numerically much superior foe which is essentially incapable of mounting offensives, given its ungodly supply lines (their weapons at best come from Poland and at worst literally must cross half the world), its complete demoralization, the total collapse of its economy, functioning in the dark and whose population has suffered a mass exodus.
There is no world in which Ukraine wins this war. What remains to be seen is how long it’s going to take for the Russians to finish the job. People have been speculating about a winter offensive in January, or maybe just before spring, but no one really knows. With the effective doubling of the amount of troops in the front lines from the recent batches of conscriptions, Russia has essentially solved its manpower problem on the short term. Given that Bakhmut has become Passchendaele, a true hell on earth, once the Ukrainian lines are broken it’s over (seems unlikely they’ll be able to rebuild any significant defensive lines given manpower and resource depletion), unless NATO intervenes directly. If that comes to pass, then we’re in a whole different ballgame. By then I’d imagine the Taiwan issue would be swiftly resolved, and mankind doomed to a radioactive fate.
Covid-19
In the beginning, that is, in 2020, I suppose we all could be excused from expecting a swift end to Covid. (Though I’ll never forget listening to an episode of Ashes Ashes in which one of the cohosts distinctly said, panicking a little, that Covid was going to stay for a long, long time. Some people did understand it better—Rob Wallace also comes to mind). By the moment we finally understood the scale of the disaster, pretty much around early 2021, I became sure this was going to last for a long time. Here we are, supposedly “after the pandemic” and yet in the midst of its throes. This is not going anywhere soon folks, especially since the Third-World got the shaft and still hasn’t been properly vaccinated; this is just making it certain that variants will continue plaguing the world, always requiring new vaccines.
On that topic, I believe I should make my stance clear: no, vaccines are not a conspiracy. Though one should be very skeptical of Pharmaceutical companies and of medicine in general (on that topic, the Tuskgee experiment (McGill) is always a grim reminder), the fact is that capitalism engenders catastrophic ecological destruction and thus the spread of new pathogens, which then (dialectically) calls for capitalism to try and contain these pathogens whilst maximizing profit. It’s not only in capitalism’s best interest to stop the virus (did everyone forget the economy literally crashed in 2020? (Wikipedia)), it is required to do so; to do otherwise is to fatally put profits in danger. The source of all value is labor; if labor is all dead from the plague, it becomes hard to extract your “fair share”. So no, we still shouldn’t “trust” corporations and the medicine establishment, but to believe the vaccines are actually poison designed to kill you or mind-controlling chips is just nonsense. (Clearly advertising and smartphones are more than sufficient to mind control just about anyone.)
(I intend to include more topics on the next news breakdown; as a first edition, this much will suffice.)