David Craig, on March 6th, 2022Monday/Tuesday blog
Humiliating your enemy
British Treasury official, John Maynard Keynes was so disgusted by the punitive conditions being imposed on Germany at the Treaty of Versailles, that he resigned from the negotiations and began work on�The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The first print run of 5,000 copies was published in December 1919 but the book went on to sell over 100,000 copies. In the book, Keynes made a grim prophecy that would have particular relevance to the next generation of Europeans: �If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the later German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.�
French general Ferdinand Foch, who wanted harsher terms imposed on Germany, went further when he�declared: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years”. He was almost right – just over 20 years later WWII broke out.
After WWII, the Allies understood that impoverishing Germany once again would be a recipe for a new disaster and so launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany and other European countries. And, instead of humiliating Japan, the US allowed the Emperor to stay and helped rebuild that country’s economy.
However, the lessons of Versailles – if you humiliate a country, it will recover and it will eventually strike back to avenge its humiliation – seem to have been lost on the new generation of useless, shallow, historically-challenged European and US leaders.
Humiliating Russia
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the victorious West could have tried to reach an accommodation with Russia which took account of Russia’s concerns about its own security. But instead the West sought to humiliate Russia by expanding NATO ever further eastwards encouraging former Warsaw Pact countries to join. This went a step too far for Russia when NATO invited Ukraine and Georgia to join the supposedly “defensive” alliance which had bombed Serbia and Libya even though neither country was anywhere near the North Atlantic and neither country had ever attacked a NATO member.
In January 2022, for example, the US presented its written response to Russian demands on Ukraine not joining NATO and on NATO troops being withdrawn from Romania and Bulgaria, but made clear that it did not change Washington�s support for Ukraine�s right to pursue NATO membership, the most contentious issue in relations with Moscow.
The reply, which was delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry by the US ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan, repeated the US offer to negotiate with Russia over some aspects of European security, but the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said the issue of eventual Ukrainian membership of the alliance was one of principle.
Blinken was speaking hours after his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, threatened �retaliatory measures� if the US response did not satisfy the Kremlin.
�Without going to the specifics of the document, I can tell you that it reiterates what we said publicly for many weeks, and in a sense for many, many years. That we will uphold the principle of NATO�s open door,� Blinken said, adding: �There is no change. There will be no change.�
Fools. Arrogant fools. They learn nothing and repeat the same disastrous mistakes.
Well, you all know what happened next!
Even worse, some Western leaders – Johnson, Macron, Biden – appear to see the current dispute with Russia as a welcome distraction from their own incompetence in managing the Chinese lab-leaked plague and their cowardly failure to confront our real enemy China for the havoc wreaked by the Wuhan lab leak and the Chinese Communist Party cover-up.
How did there suddenly become only one accepted narrative?
While almost all the UK mainstream media has been enthusiastically beating the drums of war and declaring Putin barbaric and insane, Peter Hitchens is the only journalist I have seen who has dared present another narrative – one that I have also tried to explain – that much of the blame for the current Ukraine crisis lies with the arrogance and stupidity of Western leaders, in particular their failure to learn from history:
In his article, he writes about being called a Putin shill because he wasn’t afraid to question the official narrative – everything the West does is justified and morally perfect and everything Russia does is evil warmongering.
That brings us to the wider issue of how in our supposedly “free” societies, anyone who dares question the official narrative is increasingly considered an outcast and a pariah.
Suggest that the Chinese plague was accidentally leaked from a Wuhan lab and you’re a crazed conspiracy theorist. Worry about the increasingly obvious side effects of the vaccines and you’re an ignorant, anti-science anti-vaxxer. Say that there are only two genders – male and female – and you’re a Terf or something even worse. Oppose vaccine mandates and you’re a science-denier or a fascist or even a Nazi. Cast doubt on the cult of catastrophic man-made global warming and you’re morally as reprehensible as a Holocaust denier. And so on and so forth.
Here’s the excellent Neil Oliver on our society where questioning the progressive, woke, official narrative automatically makes you an untouchable – a non-person:
Category: 
Isn�t humiliation used everywhere by humans? Look how often it happens in the treatment of prisoners, it features heavily in entertainment and children learn about it at a young age. In the early stages of the Nazi oppression of the Jews they rounded up a group and took them to a stadium where they made them cut the grass with their teeth and eat it. The son of one of the men said his father never spoke about it and it was through others that he found out.
It tells us everything we need to know about our politicians and their bureaucrats. What is pointless mask wearing about if not humiliation and control, and look how ready we are to comply. Humiliation is not just limited to tyrants and dictators.
I haven�t read any of the treaties but it seems obvious that they did not contain any conditions for enforcing the treaties. Doesn�t that make them ultimately pointless? The politicians only want to appear to be doing something; they impose conditions on others but never on themselves. It is just the same with election promises. They can be broken and other actions taken that were never voted on. They suffer no consequences. Hitler famously said he did not make promises in his speeches because he did not want to break them. A pity people did not see the significance.
It seems the West can invade other countries without a care about the consequences. Blair, in the Blair-Brown documentary said he stood by his decision to invade Iraq but his failure was that he did not understand the politics of the region. He is a a politician and that is what he should have understood.
Here is a link to a recent UnHerd article which offers an explanation. It is a subscription service but there is a free read of a few articles.
https://unherd.com/?p=374995?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5b0%5d=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=a4194cefba&mc_eid=314417b8bf
This quote gives you an idea about it: �what we are experiencing is the
psychological weaponisation of war � and its exploitation as a tool of indoctrination and statecraft in the hands of the establishment�.
This is a special game.
Once upon a time there was a Khazar Khaganate on this territory and these are very tasty prosperous lands. The Slavs living there really bother someone. Remember the covenant of Abraham: you give me a piece of foreskin, and I give you in return – the territory where other peoples live.
Some people have a big score with Ukraine. Otherwise, for some reason, here and there in American films, a line of Jewish pogroms pops up. I think no one has forgotten how the Ukrainians turned their backs during the German occupation, when the Jews were herded to Babi Yar.
Interestingly, the United States is also trying to draw Poland into this story – so that it is this country that supplies military fighters. Yes, what about reparations to God’s chosen people?
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said today the country is in talks with Poland to arrange a deal that would allow Ukrainian Air Force pilots to fly Polish fighter jets to combat Russian air superiority.
It is curious to add: US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is from a family of Hungarian Jews. His stepfather was from Bialystok, he went through both Polish pogroms and Nazi concentration camps.
This is a very dirty game. And yes. Sorry – I don’t speak English. I write via google translate.
And yet – I’m not Putin’s troll. I believe that he is fulfilling someone’s order to clean up the territory.
Destroys two countries in one fell swoop.
I have just read Peter Hitchens – very similar to the reference I gave but a much easier read. Whenever I read about the White Feathers, I always wonder what the women thought when their brothers, husbands and friends did not return. Strangely, documentaries never tell us about that, but we do know that the returning soldiers were ostracised.
Elena refers to the treatment of Jews in Ukraine. It was the same in Hungary. The Hungarian army just obeyed the Nazis and rounded up the Jews. Kill or be killed. There is an excellent documentary about this – The Last Days. The biblical quote from Hitchens is appropriate.
Well, the Hungarians are a special case. At the moment they are being very reserved. I suppose they are interested in their historical piece of Ukraine.
And as for World War 2, they were the most important monsters. They were not even taken prisoner.
Elena – an interesting comment. The documentary I mentioned features a few Jewish people talking about their experiences in the concentration camps. One woman went back to her village, and it is now in Ukraine.
The war threatens to turn into a religious one.
Ukrainian Sheikh Said Ismagilov called on Russian Muslims to use the situation and self-determination.
https://risu.ua/ru/shejh-said-ismagilov-prizval-musulman-rossii-ispolzovat-situaciyu-i-samoopredelyatsya_n126860
Use google translate and read the full article
This is a French documentary (with English subtitles) about the thuggish, murderous reality of Ukrainian internal politics. It’s an hour long, and not for the faint-hearted, but it gives a very clear insight into why, five years or so later, things have ended up as they now have.
The last ten minutes of the documentary, showing the US government officials and politicians who have chosen to attempt to influence Ukrainian politics, is particularly instructive, but if anyone’s serious about seeing what really went on there I urge you to watch the rest.
I can’t watch the French video because Google wants proof of age to watch it – credit card number or ID such as passport or driver’s licence. It says that it may take up 3 days to verify your age.
Google wants all of your information – address, telephone number, passport, driver’s lice. It can go xxxx itself. That is for vaxxholes and Remainers.
You still have to sign in when using a VPN that uses IP addresses from several different countries.
Paul Joseph Watson has been demonetised by Google due to a video on the Ukrainian war that he put out on his channel.
Brenda Blessed – that’s weird because I’ve watched it several times on youtube.
If you google ”’Masks of the Revolution’ by Paul Moreira” you should have no problems getting to it. I’ve got to it twice just now using that method, and have not been asked for any ID or proof of age.
Thanks Jeffrey, but no success for me. On some websites it says that the video has been removed. But YouTube still requires age verification from me when I click on your link on this blog.
Maybe you have paid for Google’s no-advertising option and have exemption because YouTube already has your credit card information.
No, I’ve never given Google any of my hard-earned, and neither would I helpfully supply the blighters with any of my card details – I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them.
A mystery, then. One of the wonders of the net. Or a form of ‘Shadow Banning’.