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Post by Wayne Hall on Apr 23, 2023 4:21:12 GMT -5
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Post by Wayne Hall on Apr 23, 2023 9:50:58 GMT -5
Is "the West" thinking coherently about nuclear weapons?
Wayne Hall
The 1980s were the decade of the Non-aligned Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movement. The Non-aligned movement's political line differed from that of the Communist-Party controlled anti-nuclear movements, which took their lead from Soviet diplomacy. The Non-aligned current had some party-political cover from Eurocommunist parties. It said "there are no good and bad nuclear weapons". Implication: Soviet nuclear weapons are bad. To be consistent the movement should have called for Soviet nuclear disarmament when the USSR disintegrated, particularly because it was not clear at first whether Yeltsin would be better or worse than Gorbachev. Some of us did indeed call for unilateral Soviet nuclear disarmament.
NATO policy was for removal of Soviet nuclear weapons from Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine. But not from Russia. Why not from Russia? Well, for a start, that would mean abolition of the Russian nuclear bogy. What justification could there then be for NATO's nuclear weapons? The Non-Aligned Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movement was clearly confused. Why were they not raising the demand for nuclear disarmament of Russia? They had spent the nineteen eighties ridiculing ideas of "nuclear deterrence".
Yeltsin turned out to be (or at least to appear) even more open to ideas of nuclear disarmament of Russia than Gorbachev had been. The Non-Aligned Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movement had called out NATO for fraud. Even official spokespersons had acknowledged that nuclear weapons were "more of political than of military utility". In other words they were useless, except for politicians (and journalists). The Swedes had recognized the uselessness when the nuclear hawk Olof Palme changed his stripes and became an anti-nuclear activist, presiding over unilateral nuclear disarmament of Sweden. A demand for unilateral nuclear disarmament of Russia would have been a brilliant poke in the eye for the Tory smartypants who were always jeering: "If you want unilateral nuclear disarmament, recommend it to the Soviets!" Instead of raising the demand, some anti-nuclear activists simply started pointing out to each other that the Cold War is over and this should be recognized. Others didn't do even that.
Since March 2023, the unnecessary character of Russian nuclear weapons has been confirmed. In March a provocation was staged inside Russia (by Ukraine? By NATO?) with civilians including children being killed and injured. Putin declared that there would be retaliation, and indeed, there was, within days. A command bunker in Ukraine four hundred feet underground (too deep then for run-of-the-mill bunker-busting technology) was hit by a Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missile and hundreds of dignitaries and high-ranking NATO personnel were allegedly killed. The media were pretty silent about it. And pretty soon the gaslighting started.
If this Kinzhal strike typifies the code of ethics that Russia intends to follow in its war making, the superfluous character of Russian nuclear weapons is confirmed. Attacks on civilians are punished by attacks on the top leadership of the side that resorts to them. The media propaganda machine is now bending over backwards to scream that the Kinzhals are "nuclear capable". So what? Is a nuclear weapon needed to wipe out political leadership in a bunker? It is said that the United States has begun testing its own hypersonic missiles but the tests so far have failed. Will this failure be the prelude to a new arms race, or to abandonment of the 20th century mode of conducting wars particularly from 1914 onwards? The twentieth century mode of mass politics and mass slaughter of civilians?
Factor in Eric Zuesse's views.
When one studies the ideas of Hitler apologists it is easy to come to the conclusion that Hitler's key intellectual mistake was to assume that the category "white people" includes Germans. The Boers had to learn the same lesson in South Africa, I suppose.
Given this and given the assumptions of "nuclear deterrence", which is an acceptable doctrine for the white people of NATO but not for the white people of Russia unless they face the "fact" that they too require to be "deterred" from destroying all life on planet earth, WOKE notions that "only white people can be racist" become comprehensible and the Hitlerian misreadings of the Coudenhove-Kalergi prediction/recommendation(?) of a world of mulattos following the extinction of "white people", elevatable into a praiseworthy program for the future of this world.
If racism cannot be overcome intellectually there is obviously no alternative to overcoming it, or "trying to", biologically. Is there?
It seems to me that the logic of Russia's development of hypersonic missiles, particularly given the way they appear to be using them, is the opposite of the motives according to which nuclear weapons were initially developed: i.e. elaboration of a mass "shock and awe" effect. Hypersonic missiles apparently aim at introducing military precision: graduated retaliation, which so far has been used to retaliate for attacks on the civilians of one's own side. But the retaliation has been strikingly disproportionate, suggesting that one is planning to really stigmatize cowardly attacks on unarmed civilians. In effect stigmatize modern mass destruction warfare.
If it is true that "the West" is behind in this hypersonic missiles technology, how is it going to respond? Through embarking on a hypersonic missiles arms race? If it does to Russia what Russia has just done to it in Ukraine, there is a widespread view that this will trigger generalized nuclear war, which "the West" claims not to want. So what would be the purpose of getting ahead in hypersonic missiles technology? Public relations? Being first for the sake of being able to say that one is first? It is said that nuclear weapons serve political more than military purposes, but those political purposes have to do with the "shock and awe" effect, not the ability to launch a precision strike at the nerve centre of the enemy (and so trigger the nuclear war one supposedly seeks to avoid). Will "the West" think this through or will it just go ahead anyway and "try to catch up and overtake"? Is "the West" thinking coherently about nuclear weapons?
James Freeman: In early March, two Russian hypersonic missiles penetrated an underground bunker, killing a large number of senior NATO & Ukrainian officials who were coordinating the war effort' says Gilbert Doctorow.
What we are talking about goes back to the first weekend in March. On the 2nd March Ukrainian saboteurs crossed the border into Bryansk, which is a region of the Russian Federation, of the pre-war Russian Federation, and they murdered several people. Russia then responded with a revenge attack on Ukraine on 9th March. We were told that at least six of the hypersonic missiles that Russia has, that they have only used once before in the Ukraine operation were - I believe on 9th March - fired on Ukraine. We were told by a little-known Greek online news portal that this missile succeeded in penetrating 130 metres underground into a bunker, a steel-reinforced bunker dating from the Stalinist period which was being used by several hundred NATO and Ukrainian senior officers to co-ordinate the war effort. This was then later denounced by various sources in the West as being disinformation, unverified, and not to be taken at face value. Now I commented on this when it was still at that level of unknown, little-known, sources. However, it's a couple of weeks ago, or not even a couple, more recently, this question of an attack on an underground bunker and the death of all of the occupants came up in a source which is impeccable. It's Komsomolskaya Pravda. That is a leading Russian newspaper. They don't market rumours. And they gave some additional information, that it wasn't one hypersonic missile but two that did the job, that the location was being used by serious people for their conferencing and running the war was due to the carelessness of the NATO personnel, who parked their cars just outside the entrance because they were so certain of the invulnerability of this bunker. And why so? Because it had been built by Stalin's people to be nuclear bombproof. Nuclear bombproof, yes. Kinshalproof, hypersonic missile-proof, no. So why has this not come out in the news? Well it really is not in the interests of the United States to publicize this because it shows the invulnerability and the devastating power of Russia's latest generation of weapons, which Mr. Putin announced three years ago and people in the West thought it was a big joke, and the Russians, you can't take them seriously. And here it is. It is very real, and it did the job.
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Some thoughts (W.H.): What does it mean to say that nuclear weapons have a political more than a military function? It means that they are of use to politicians and journalists more than to military people. This must be because it gives them the ability to deceive: they know what others do not know. The March incident in Ukraine indicates the falsity of this view: the politicians and officials were deceiving not only others but also themselves. They had evidently assumed that sheltering in an anti-nuclear bunker ensures their safety. It is now evident that it does not.
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Post by Wayne Hall on Apr 24, 2023 13:02:41 GMT -5
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Post by Wayne Hall on May 3, 2023 22:11:15 GMT -5
Andrew Korybko:
Russia blamed Ukraine for Tuesday night’s attempted assassination of President Putin after two drones attacked the Kremlin but were disabled by the security services before they harmed anyone. Kiev rejected the accusation and lied that the incident was a false flag per the innuendo pushed by Zelensky’s spokesman Nikiforov and senior advisor Podolyak. US Secretary of State Blinken echoed their claims by advising to “take anything coming out of the Kremlin with a very large shaker of salt.”
The Kremlin’s predictably declared right to retaliate “anywhere and anytime it deems necessary” guaranteed that neither of those two would admit to any knowledge of the attack, but it wasn’t foreseen that they’d both collude in concocting a false flag conspiracy theory. Their credibility was already shattered after Russia failed to go bankrupt and subsequently collapse over the past year like they predicted, so it takes a lot of chutzpah to still lie about this attack in spite of their track record.
It’s unclear who their targeted audience even is anyhow since few are expected to fall for this fake news, though there’ll of course be some who play along since they’re reacting to those officials’ dog whistles and think they need to do their part in laundering this disinformation narrative. Nikiforov said that “What happened in Moscow is obviously about escalating the mood on the eve of May 9. It’s a trick to be expected from our opponents”, but that actually doesn’t make much sense if one thinks about it.
Russians are already very patriotic ahead of this practically sacred commemoration of their people’s victory over Nazi Germany so there’s no reason for the government to stage a false flag attack against President Putin for that purpose. As for Podolyak’s claim that “This would allow Russia to justify mass strikes on Ukrainian cities, civilians and infrastructure facilities”, that also doesn’t equate with objectively existing reality either.
Leaving aside his description of these strikes as “large-scale terrorist attack” that he added at the end of his relevant statement, Moscow has already been striking military-relevant infrastructure for months without having to fake an attempted assassination of the country’s leader to justify this. Moreover, these precision strikes have been applauded by the population, many of whom believe that they’re still too low-scale for their liking.
Honestly speaking, a significant share of the population can be described as members of the “patriotic opposition” in the sense that they’re displeased with the scope of the special operation and sincerely believe that it should have been expanded long ago, especially after the Crimean Bridge bombing. That’s not even to mention the pullbacks from Kharkov and Kherson Regions, let alone Kiev’s drone strikes deep inside Russia late last year, all of which they felt should have been much more fiercely responded to.
The way that they see it, Russia’s so-called “red lines” keep getting crossed without Kiev being taught the relevant lessons to deter it from ever doing so again. Something worse seems to happen every time, but the cycle of bombastic rhetoric from the Kremlin, resultantly high hopes among Russian patriots, and their inevitable disappointment continues indefinitely and appears impossible to break. It’s little wonder then that some are cynical after the latest incident and worry that there won’t be a befitting response.
These sensitive observations about the true state of socio-political affairs in Russia nowadays are being shared not for the purpose of saber-rattling, but simply to point out that there’s literally no reason for the authorities to stage a false flag incident like Kiev and Blinken ridiculously implied. Many folks have wanted the scope of the special operation to expand for a while already and some have even gone as far as lobbying for their country to enter a formal state of war in order to fully mobilize all aspects of society.
These people had been warning for months that the authorities’ prioritization of political goals over military ones, which they believe is responsible for Russia not overwhelmingly responding every time its red lines were crossed, would inevitably embolden Kiev to go even further. No patriot is happy about what just happened, but quite a few are convinced that it might have been avoided had the Kremlin reacted much more muscularly to its opponent’s prior spree of provocations up until this one.
Returning to the false flag conspiracy theory that Kiev and Blinken are propagating by innuendo, there’s no credible reason to believe this blatant lie. Considering that few are expected to fall for this fake news, it can therefore be interpreted as them provoking the Kremlin by way of mockery since nobody in their right mind would ever believe this. They both seem convinced that Russia won’t overwhelmingly or at least reciprocally respond to this assassination attempt, but patriots hope that it’ll finally surprise them.
Comment from W.H.: This response does effectively undermine whatever political advantage was gained by Russia from its disproportionate and courageous response to the provocative attack against unarmed civilians in Russia. A similar response to the attempted attack on the Kremlin would not be courageous. The moral advantage is lost.
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Post by Wayne Hall on May 3, 2023 22:22:23 GMT -5
I don't know why so much of the above text is struck out and I can't eliminate it.
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