The shit is getting real again in Ukraine and every neoliberal and his lobbyist seems super stoked about the carnage. After months of pulverizing battlefield gridlock and mounting global war fatigue, the Western warmongers finally have a tangible victory to point at while they're robbing us all blind of our pocket change for Raytheon Boom-Boom Bucks (TM). Their sweeping propaganda campaign promoting an inevitable epic counteroffensive to end all counteroffensives has finally bore fruit with the Ukrainian Military taking back roughly 2,300 square miles of Russian occupied territory in the northeastern Kharkiv region, pushing Putin's boys back to the border and capturing the strategically important logistics hub of Izyum. It was indeed a humiliating defeat Vlad the Failure, but it was one that came at a very steep and telling price that Volodymyr Zelensky's bombastic cheerleaders on cable news haven't bothered to mention during their long-anticipated pep rallies.
While the reports on Kharkiv have been nothing but flowers, few have mentioned that this counteroffensive actually began days before a shot was even fired in the region with a massive campaign against Russia's southern stronghold of Kherson that resulted in a bloodbath of upwards of 5,000 Ukrainian casualties. A heinous slaughter by any morally sane sentient being's standards but a sickeningly necessary one when you prize giving Putin a blackeye over the sanctity of human life. It was only with flocks of Russian troops redirected from the relatively low priority territory in the north to protect the high priority territory in Novorossiya that the Ukrainians were able to outnumber the Russians in a region that Putin has been slowly abandoning since he declared the beginning of Phase Two of his Special Military Operation (TM). Meanwhile, Russia has continued to make gains in Donetsk as the Ivans slowly march towards the rebel oblast's centrally pivotal city of Slavyansk.
Thousands of Ukrainian peasants, conscripted into Zelensky's army by the barrel of a gun were mercilessly fed into a Russian buzzsaw just to gunk up the gears long enough for a popcorn headline and this is supposed to be a victory for Ukraine? No, this is a victory for NATO and their bloodthirsty vendetta against Putin's Russia and it only comes at the tragic expense of Ukraine. It also comes at the expense of tens of billions in American and Western European tax dollars that have been dumped into remaking Ukraine's already decimated armed forces in Washington's and London's image.
The war in Ukraine has become a defacto NATO operation from top to bottom, with Ukrainian soldiers trained, armed, fed and led by the same Russophobic death cult that promised those people membership in their little cool-kids club only to leave them hanging like a red flag before a Kremlin bull. Russia sees this. They've gotten the message loud and clear and they're more than prepared to obliterate even more impoverished Ukrainians with their own slave army of impoverished conscripts just to prove that their dicks are still big enough to swing with the Western superpowers and if all else fails, they can always just strap on a nuclear marital aid for the same effect.
The New Cold War is a class war and oligarchs on both sides are waging it against the poor, not just in Ukraine but across the world. America's sweeping sanctions regime, directed at fomenting Russia's growing poor into conceding to Western regime change, has tanked the entire world's economy and put us all in the grips of catastrophic economic peril. Europe is already in the full throws of an epic recession and staring down the barrel of a very bitter winter. Russia has responded to Western price caps on its natural resources by turning the tap off on the Nordstream pipeline and sending the electricity and heating bills of everyday Europeans skyrocketing into the stratosphere. Working class people from Walloon to Warsaw have found themselves dipping into their own meager savings and even skipping meals just to keep the lights on and all the weathermen with their heads screwed on straight are predicting a similar forecast across the Atlantic.
Naturally, the results of this global class war are set to be far more lethal for the people of the Third World who still depend on Russian and Ukrainian grain for their very survival. Even with Turkish brokered deals to allow shipments of food and fertilizer to leave the bombarded Black Sea ports, nations like Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan are still facing famine thanks to another senseless pissing match between rich white assholes and those rich white assholes on both sides of this proxy abortion are doing just fucking dandy while they burn the rest of the world around them to the fucking ground.
While the Military Industrial Complex is practically printing their own goddamn money at this point, the oil industry is using their latest imperial rampage as an excuse to jack their prices up sky high. BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron are all making record shattering profits while their captive customers teeter on the brink of economic oblivion. Meanwhile, their fellow oligarchs in Moscow are doing just smashingly as well. In spite of a colossal embargo the likes of which the world has never seen, Russian banks have already bounced back to profitability as Gazprom reports a 100% increase in profits over the first half of the year and the Ruble reaches a five-year peak. The only winners in this sick fucking charade of a world war are the rich while the rest of us are expected to just grin and bear the brunt of what essentially amounts to their twin campaigns of class terrorism.
This is a world war alright and it is a world war against all of us. Every single one of us have become proxies in this twisted game of thrones. Perhaps the only good news is that I'm not the only prole kicking over the TV set and growling 'fuck this shit' between clenched teeth anymore. There is a growing discontent percolating across multiple continents, and it isn't directed at either side of this war's prescribed boogeymen either. It's directed at the very nations those people live in who all conspire against the will of their own people in the name of imperial conquest. Protests against the global class war over Ukraine have been growing in both size and ferocity in places like Austria, Germany and Serbia. Just last month, the Czech Republic saw no fewer than 100,000 working class people marching through the streets of Prague while NATO's Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, has been blowing the whistle on a coming wave of civil unrest set to rock the Western World like a hurricane.
This is precisely what the Antiwar Movement needs to reclaim the lethality that empowered it to shut down the Vietnam War. Back then poor people on both sides of the aisle were incensed over being drafted to fight and die in a rich man's bloodbath. This is why America had no choice but to freeze their military slave trade in carbonite in a sadly successful attempt to disconnect America's working class from the slaughter of our comrades in the darker nations. But with our rapidly disintegrating Atlantic empire's global jihad for full spectrum domination finally reaching the doormat of the Eurasian Century that has long inspired our backwoods crusades, we have all been drafted into what is quickly shaping up to be a downright apocalyptic final showdown between East and West.
Every war is a class war. It's only ever the poor who have to die for rich men's lies. But much like climate change, the wreckage has finally reached proportions too massive to cover up with jingoistic propaganda and bald-faced racism. It isn't Putin's name alone on the pump where working class stiffs get fiscally raped twice a day. It's Exxon, Shell, Biden, NATO, Raytheon. And these motherfuckers would be wise to watch their backs while they're cashing our paychecks because history has a cruel tradition of coming back around again like a boomerang.
The First World War was an eerily familiar blitz of dying empires firing poor people out of howitzers into castle gates and feeding the unobliterated increasingly incoherent excuses for a rapidly expanding global clusterfuck. Millions died without ever understanding why and the impoverished survivors finally got fed up with killing each other and turned their rifles around to bring the war home where it belonged. The result was a Peckinpahesque shooting spree of popular revolutions destabilizing the capitols on both sides of this twisted international holocaust. Slaves in uniform turned their guns against their masters in the officer corps and beyond and began blowing away the real enemy. The biggest cataclysm to come out of this global mutiny was the Russian Revolution in which the Bolsheviks were powered to an unexpected victory after decades of failure by a lethal working-class antiwar movement to shatter one of the biggest empires on the planet.
It could happen again. 2023 could be the year of the boomerang and I for one am counting on it, but if we foolishly follow the same path as the Soviets our best-case scenario will be replacing bankers with politburos like the last time, and we'll just end up repeating this same cycle of bloodshed in another century. Frankly, I'm not convinced that we have another century of this bullshit left in us. Poor people across the globe must not only realize that imperialism is a tax on human life that only ever falls on our broken shoulders but that this industry of violence only exists at the behest of the state and that this madness only ends with the states destruction.
There is no end to war without anarchy and there is no time left for half-measures on a dying planet. We can end this Cold War today by ending the rich, but we can only prevent the next one by ending the state. Now let's stop talking and fuck some shit up for peace.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post
* Raw Power by the Stooges
* Speeding 72 by Momma
* I Gotcha by Joe Tex
* The Seether by Veruca Salt
* (Nothing but) Flowers by Talking Heads
* Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells
* Candy Sam by Ty Segall
* Year of the Boomerang by Rage Against the Machine
* The Inside Game by Royal Trux
Throughout all of recorded human history the major social systems have permitted a small group of people who have no commitment to social decency to control the very large number of the rest of mankind and our current organizations are not only very much of the same, but intensively advanced technology has put these small brutal sectors in tight control of actuality to prevent general understanding of this very miserable situation so that any real and permanent remedies can be generally realized and applied. This reality is deeply embedded in all governments, the bulk of religions, the necessary functions of the more powerful businesses and even in those organization devoted to much of intellectual development and dispersion of socially accepted personal relationships. The police and the military are especially devoted to maintain this horrifying status quo although both of these sectors pride themselves in believing that their brutalities are vital to human existence. The immense increase in human power has freed humanity to violate the most necessary relationships necessary to permit life to exist on the planet and the most obviously stupid and brutal sectors have exhibited no restraint for maintaining their overall control. We are very much on the edge of a situation wherein in a matter of a very few years a small group can initiate natural forces to ensure that very little of life on the planet can continue to exist. Very many aware and skilled people are investigating ingenious methods to reverse this overwhelming stupidity but time is very short and the suicidal status quo remains highly resistant to change its ways. It is still very much of a toss-up as to whether we shall survive. Life itself has proved itself very resilient through many horribly threatening times and probably will continue but humanity is furiously guaranteeing that it fundamentally will not modify itself quickly enough to survive.
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