The Azov battalion continues to hold out in the Azovstal steelworks, desperate to protect its dirty secrets. Conditions are now reported to be worse than on the Beltway at rush hour, with bodies piled up everywhere. They can’t hold out for much longer. I hold no more brief for the Azov battalion than I do for the Waffen-SS but they are brave men and should be treated as such when they finally surrender. There’s been nothing like it since World War II.

NATO strategy is to get as many Ukrainians killed as possible by prolonging the war for as long as possible. So far as I can tell NATO is not trying to start World War III, but they might want to think twice about accepting Finland and Sweden into membership. If the Russian Government goes public on the intelligence yield then support for Ukraine in the West will fall away.

At the moment we are close to what NASA might term ‘Max Q’. The venom and lies being directed at Russia have understandably angered her elected president and government. Western precision weapons have dramatically increased Russian casualties. Anglo-Russian relations haven’t been this bad since the Crimean War.

Russian troops are now being accused of carrying out mass rapes, in what is undoubtedly intended to be an echo of 1945. There is no doubt that Russian soldiers raped a great many German women, sadly, at the end of the last world war, but the rapes were sanctioned by the notorious German agent Josef Stalin, who was not of course Russian.

Stalin’s intent seems to have been to damage the reputation of the Red Army. I doubt that he was anxious to let the boys get their leg over, as it were, or desirous of getting back at the Germans for the mass rape of Russian women. Rape is wrong of course and never justified, either in peace or war.

However I sense increased scepticism about Ukrainian claims of Russian war crimes, which are starting to assume the proportions of a blood libel. Thankfully the Russophobes Boris Johnson and Simon Case aren’t likely to remain in power in London for much longer. Their resignations should pave the way for a UK climbdown on false claims about GRU officers poisoning the Skripals in 2018 in Salisbury and Lt-Colonel Litvinenko in 2006, and of Russian involvement in the murderous shoot-down of MH17 in 2014.

Revelation of the German GO2’s role in poisoning and probably murdering the Skripals would considerably ease tensions between London and Moscow. (Litvinenko poisoned himself of course, being killed by the antidote which he swallowed at the same time as the polonium.) It’s unlikely that the fanatically anti-Russian Liz Truss will continue to serve as Foreign Secretary, thankfully.

Will the Ukraine survive?

It’s now clear that when President Zelensky rejected President Putin’s fair peace terms back in March he bet the farm. There is now reporting that Poland is planning to participate in the dismemberment of the Ukraine, which would reflect the historical position, Western Ukraine being incorporated in the Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Poles of course participated in the break-up of Czechoslovakia after Munich.

I imagine that Russia will want to incorporate the whole of the Ukraine east of the Dneiper into Russia, along with a land bridge to Transnistria. Ethnic Ukrainian hatred for Russia and Russians is such that a negotiated solution is unlikely to work. Moscow will want a deep buffer zone around the Donbas.

Incorporating Western Ukraine into Poland is likely to prove more stable in the long run than having a rump Ukrainian republic endlessly plotting revenge against Russia. I fail to see how Russia could ever trust the Ukraine again.

I learned this in 1979 in a course on American Economic History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. According to the professor, it was an open secret that every president tries to strong-arm the Fed into juicing up the economy prior to his re-election campaign, usually with some success.

The 2020 election provided a classic example of the power of current economic trends over national election results. As of late 2019, the US economy was booming and Donald Trump was cruising toward an easy victory. Then COVID-19 hit, the economy imploded, and suddenly Trump no longer looked like a “very stable genius” to the crucial tranches of undecided, uninformed, and/or independent voters. Also, thanks to COVID and the economic implosion, Democrats could be whipped into a much more hysterical anti-Trump frenzy than would have been otherwise possible, leading to frenetic and heavily-funded get-out-the-vote efforts. So whether or not Trump is correct about alleged vote padding in swing states, he is certainly right that absent the COVID pandemic he would have won easy re-election.

Now that we have established the crucial connection between economic trends and incumbent parties’ prospects in national elections, it’s time to ask the million-dollar question: What the @&# are the Democrats thinking?! The Biden Administration, facing very tough midterm contests this year and at least equally monumental challenges in the 2024 presidential race, has made the apparently idiotic decision to blow up the US and global economies by provoking war with Russia.

As I write this, stocks, crypto, and even the bond market aren’t just swirling around the porcelain bowl, they’re plunging through the pipes and well on their way to the sewage treatment facility. The worst inflation in 40 years, driven in part by higher food and energy costs from Biden’s war on Russia, has forced the Fed to start ratcheting interest rates upward, pushing America towards 1970s-style stagflation at best, or a 2008 or even 1929 scenario at worst. Biden’s ever-escalating giveaway of US tax dollars to Ukraine is contributing to the economic as well as military mayhem.

Is Biden senile? Is Harris an idiot? Are the Democrats suicidal? Though the answer to the first two questions is undoubted “yes,” I’m not sure that the Democratic Party leadership and the oligarchs who own it are entirely bent on political self-destruction. There must be some sort of method in their apparent madness. And I think I know what it is:

“It’s the war mobilization, stupid!”

The oligarchs who own the Democratic Party (who may overlap somewhat with the ones that own the Republicans) aren’t going to seek success in 2022 and 2024 by riding a strong economy. Instead, they are hoping to win by dragging us into war and pounding their chests and telling us to support our fearless wartime leaders—and if you don’t you’re a treasonous unpatriotic Russia-loving Putin-loving Trump-loving transphobic white nationalist conspiracy theorist scumbag.

If the war gets bad enough, and the propaganda gets loud enough, people will put up with just about any amount of economic devastation. Consider World War II. Even though the US didn’t enter the war until more than two years after it started, and never experienced the level of combat and losses other nations suffered, the American people were quickly convinced to endure draconian rationing, forced conscription, virtual slave labor in war factories, and various and sundry economic unpleasantness, all in the name of defeating the evil racially-inferior slanty-eyed Japs and the evil white supremacist Adolf Hitler. FDR, who had cruised to re-election in 1940 by promising to keep America out of the war, had no problem winning in 1944 despite his broken promise (and his Pearl Harbor treason). When the nation is on a total war footing, people snap to attention and salute and do what they’re told and don’t ask questions, and the incumbent party and president enjoy almost godlike status.

My parents were children during World War II, and they (and my grandparents) experienced food rationing, gasoline rationing, and the near-total unavailability of all sorts of consumer goods, from appliances to automobiles. Sounds familiar? It’s like what we’re heading into now—only in 2022, we’re merely facing de facto rationing as many people can no longer buy their customary allotments of food, gas, and goods. Fortunately, the authorities probably won’t start issuing ration coupons until the war really heats up.

And heat up it will. Biden’s seemingly crazy policies, foreign as well as domestic, make sense only on the assumption that we’re heading into all-out World War III. Why would the US refuse Russia’s repeated entreaties to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality and cap NATO expansion, thereby provoking a ruinous war? Why would US leaders refuse Russia’s (and Zelensky’s) overtures for a negotiated solution? Why would they create what will soon become a 100-billion-dollar arms pipeline to Ukraine, while pushing Finland and Sweden to join NATO—a move that Russia will inevitably greet with military strikes?

The real rulers of the US empire, the neoconservatives who overthrew the Republic on 9/11/2001, are bent on world conquest. A decision has apparently been made behind the scenes to fight World War III sooner rather than later, in service to the Wolfowitz Doctrine that the US will tolerate no challenges to its global hegemony.

The neocons have made their position clear: They will either rule the planet unilaterally or destroy it. That is why the Empire and its vassals are inflicting economic devastation on their own people, and the people of the world, as they frantically mobilize for the biggest and most destructive war in human history.

If we are going to stop it, the time is now. Once NATO is officially at war with Russia, dissent will be ruthlessly quashed. And once the nukes start flying, we will spend whatever is left of our lives wishing we had done more to stop the neocon Strangeloves from pursuing their mad dream of world conquest.