Keith Sanborn on Thu, 10 Mar 2022 02:05:47 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> The War to come ...


It seems the matter is now resolved.

Here’s the link:

https://vimeo.com/user5077443/the-beauty-of-force

Keith

On Mar 9, 2022, at 7:57 PM, Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com> wrote:

Hi nettimers,

For some reason my vimeo account has been “automatically flagged” making all my videos suddenly private. Who knows why? Perhaps because there are Cyrillic characters in the title of this one? Very odd.  I have submitted a ticket to vimeo support. I’ll post if/when my account matters are resolved.

In the meantime anyone interested in the video can download a low rez version here:


pw:gloom2008

Apologies to anyone reluctant to download.

Keith


On Mar 8, 2022, at 3:12 PM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

Patrice, you have put into words the bitter assessment of many many people.

But you should be checking the twitter status of Andrei V Kozyrev (former Russian foreign minister) more often!

March 6: "Russian military. The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to the President. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military"


The fearsome Russian fighting force is a cardboard bear in the mud. The Ukrainians are well armed, they have been training for this since 2014, and so far they have humiliated their opponent and inflicted an historic defeat insofar as any future military prestige goes. The Russian capacity to intimidate Eastern Europe is plunging. They've lost a staggering quantity of tanks and vehicles of all kinds, along with the soldiers driving them, and they still have not established air superiority with all the combat-support capacity that entails, to the point where analysts have begun to wonder if they are simply incapable of coordinating and flying complex missions:


It's uncertain if they have actually used their thermo-barbaric weapons yet, and you would think that if their fearsome hypersonic missile is not a dud, they would have already blown up Zelensky's presidential office where he sits at a precisely known location (the missile is supposed to arrive in seconds). Who knows? It may be that Nato support before and during the conflict has included communications-jamming capacities of some hitherto-unknown sort, or maybe the armed drones the Ukrainians got from Turkey are the only real superweapons of the war (so far, they definitely are). In any case, the performance of the Ukrainian David against the Russian Goliath doesn't suggest any immediate attack on the Nato mega-Goliath (including its little fingers, the Baltic states), or even on Moldova. As for the probability that the Nato countries will seize the occasion to jump the nuclear tripwire by rashly launching their own massive attack, well, their 75-year adherence to deterrence doctrine makes that hard to imagine. I don't think Nato will make the nuclear mistake. Concerning the other side, however, apparently anything is possible.

Nato has a lot of experience with Just Watching (remember the drawn-out atrocities of the former Yugoslavia, where there wasn't even a nuclear threat). I think they're gonna just watch while Russia starts indiscriminantly dropping bombs from high up in the sky, and the whole thing will continue to be even more horrible than it already is, until some point at which Putin can claim to have broken the Ukrainian state (maybe through the use of tactical nuclear weapons to make their own strategic deterrence credible). By that point the Russians will be so weakened that they will fall back to some arbitrary cease-fire line in Eastern Ukraine, which they will have a hard time defending. After that a remilitarized Nato, a remilitarized Europe and a host of other allies will use the now standard whole-of-society methods, including every embargo imaginable, to reduce Russia from a third-rate economic power and false military giant to a failed state on a mammoth scale. No problem, the Chinese will manage them for their oil and gas.

These projections are absolutely no better than yours, Patrice, but I thought I'd try devil's advocate!

Brian


On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 6:21 AM patrice riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:
... has already arrived .

Aloha,

Even though the last two posts on the list are mine, I have no intention to become (again) nettime's #1 poster! So this will be my last one for now.

This said I still wanted to share my thoughts  - was it only to be relieved of them -  about 'the situation' with fellow nettimers. 

ExecSum: I think that war in Western Europe is now inevitable, and it will descend on us sooner than we all would wish for. 



In my mind, there are three options about when NATO will actually go to, or be dragged into a war against Putin's Russia. 

Option Zero: There will be no war. Putin will enslave Ukraine after having laid it to waste, annex part of it, and transform the rest in a vassal state, or whatever 'solution' he has in mind after achieving 'victory'.  And 'we' in the West, will accommodate with the new situation and try to make the best of it, even if it won't be fun at all on many front.  And yet I would feel insanely optimistic if I gave it half a chance of happening - or even less than that.

Having put his war machinery in movement, there is no turning back for Vladimir Putin, save a number of scenarios for his demise that have been discussed here and there and which are all entirely speculative. So by keeping it strictly to the current state of the situation, I see only three possible outcomes, all based on the assumption that the political and military deciders in the Western alliance (but also outside of it) have by now concluded that a war can no longer be averted, the only question being when it will start 'for real'. 

So there are in my mind three 'moments' when NATO will become involved in an armed conflict with Putin's Russia:

Moment 1: The situation in Ukraine becomes so dire, the 'Grosnyfication' of Ukrainian cities so blatant, the masses of refugees into Ukraine's neighbours, fleeing the violence under the bombs so colossal, that 'in the West', populations, politicians, media, and even the military brass get so agitated as to decide that enough is enough - and that 'we will be next' any way. So there will be more and more support pouring into Ukraine that will less and less distinguishable from direct military intervention, a stage that in the eyes of Putin has been passed long ago in any case.  

Moment 2 happens if Putin indeed achieve his goals in Ukraine, at whatever cost to the Russian and to the Ukrainian people without NATO actually intervening, it having be paralysed by the fear of consequences Putin has repeatedly, and unequivocally threatened with. In which case there is no reason whatsoever to assume he will stop at that and now will go to menace, and, if unsuccessful,  attack both ex-Soviet, but not NATO members Moldova and Georgia. Russia annexing Moldova will make Romania very angry and very anxious, doing the same with Georgia will rattle Turkey to an even larger extent, and greater consequences. And both Romania and Turkey are NATO members. At which stage the same 'we'll anyway be next'  conclusion might prevail after all ...

... or not. Moldova and far-from-Europe (if not from Turkey) Georgia will be left to their fate of post-Soviet & pre-Imperial vassal states, whether they have resisted invasion (& be destroyed in the process) or not. Moment 2 in any case represents a 'between-in'  scenario that could be triggered by the outcome of Moment 1, ... or not, or might just as well merge with ... 

Moment 3 which will happen when Putin's Russia will directly threaten NATO countries, arguing yet again that NATO, not Russia, is the 'structural' aggressor. Unfortunately, the trigger to make it is there, in plain sight, on the map: it is called the 'Suvalky gap' and it consist in the 90km long borderline between Poland and Lithuania that separates the Russian (semi-)exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast from Russia's vassal Belarus - by now, and surely by then, a nation in name only. No doubt Putin will demand a 'corridor' to put an end to this insufferable situation, itself the result from the evenmore insufferable existence of the formerly Soviet Baltic states as independent countries. And all NATO members, just as Poland.

There will be no Czechoslovakia 1939. Having gone that far, the analogy with the precedent of Nazi Germany will have become too stark. NATO will go at war. What happens next is for any one and everyone to imagine.

I am aware that there are a lot of holes that can (and will) be shot in my presentation. The most obvious one being whether Putin can hold Russia together as it is dragging it into a fratricidal annihilation war with Ukraine - with the economic disaster that it entails. And whether he can hold his power (and even his life) in the face of possible (probable?) mounting discontent, both of the Russian people and of his own clique. Beware of the Ides of March (in 6 days time!) and the 'Tu quoque' bit they say ... but this wishful thinking is surely part of my sentiment, but not of my reasoning. 

Conclusion: We - and this time without speech marks - are toast. Sorry.

Cheers all the same,
p+7D!




   
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