Everyone who acts like it's a new and unprecedented horror whenever Putin reminds the west that Mutually Assured Destruction still stands is just admitting that they never understood what's at stake in this proxy war and always thought this was some kind of fucking game.

"Oh my God, he's saying he might use nukes!" Yeah that's what happens when you start a war with a fucking nuclear-armed nation, dipshit. That's why you're a fucking moron for yelling at those of us who've been calling for de-escalation and detente. Change how you are. Stop cheerleading this insane game of nuclear chicken and begin calling for de-escalation.

It's so crazy how people pretend the US wouldn't use nukes in response to the exact same type of attacks that Putin is warning against. Like we all know this isn't some weird new threat that Vladimir Putin invented, right? Do we understand that this is the very reason antiwar activists have spent years warning against this exact confrontation and calling for detente instead?

This shouldn't scan as something new for you. If Putin reiterating the longstanding principle of Mutually Assured Destruction makes you freak out like something new is being said, it's because you didn't pay attention in history class. If you were previously unaware that the threat of nuclear annihilation was baked into this proxy war from the very beginning, that just means it's time to reassess your support for this proxy war.

Yes this situation is insanely dangerous. No that's not because of anything Putin has been saying.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Idiots Are Just Discovering That This War Is Dangerous

A nuclear conflict could be sparked by either side making a calculated decision to use nuclear weapons (and you're fooling yourself if you believe the US is any less trigger happy in that regard than Russia), but it can also be sparked by either side due to a mistake resulting from a technological malfunction, miscommunication, misunderstanding or miscalculation, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war. The more things escalate, the more likely both such possibilities become.

And, clearly, things are escalating.

And that's just Russia; tensions are rapidly escalating between the US-centralized empire and China as well. In an article for Antiwar.com titled "There’s Little More Washington Can Do To Convince China To Invade Taiwan," Andrew Corbley describes the frighteningly extensive provocations the US has been pouring into another massive geopolitical powderkeg just in the past few weeks.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The US Empire Is Accelerating Toward Global Conflict On Two Fronts

At the risk of upsetting the entire internet, the annexation of those four Ukrainian territories seems like a great time to end this war to me. Does anyone honestly believe a significant percentage of the people who live there want a massive counteroffensive on their doorstep? I don't.

The west knowingly provoked this war, the thing experts warned for years would happen did happen, and now Ukraine lost some territory. Rather than risking millions or billions of lives escalating this conflict, it seems sensible to draw a line under it. You can yell "Putin bad!" and "International law!" all you want, but it's just a cold hard fact that after the annexation the US/NATO/Ukraine tandem is going to be presented with the choice of either ending the bloodshed or massively, massively escalating it. Pretty easy choice, in my opinion.

Reading by Tim Foley.

This Would Be A Wise Stopping Point For This War

So are you ready for my brilliant strategy on how to defeat Putin? Here it is: simply stand back and wait for him to explode the rest of Russia.

This is after all the same madman who the New York Times informs us has been ordering his troops to shell a nuclear power plant they already control. If Putin is a gibbering, irrational lunatic who enjoys blowing up his own stuff for no reason other than to act crazy, surely if we just stand back and leave him to his own devices he will soon turn the Russian Federation into a steaming pile of rubble.

Reading by Tim Foley.

How To Defeat Putin

The moronic narrative that the invasion of Ukraine was "unprovoked" poses a massive obstacle to peace, because if Putin is just attacking and invading countries solely because he's crazy and evil it means detente is impossible and he won't stop until he's decisively crushed. If it's accepted that the US empire has played no role in provoking Putin's actions, that means there's nothing the empire could do to make continued Russian aggression less likely apart from regime change, or at least severely crippling and punishing Russia militarily.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Narrative That This War Was "Unprovoked" Prevents Peace

Back in 2013 The Atlantic published a solid article titled "The Real Cuban Missile Crisis," subtitled "Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong." Its author Benjamin Schwartz details how the crisis was peacefully resolved not because JFK was on the phone yelling "Try and die" at Nikita Khrushchev, but because he secretly cut a deal to remove the Jupiter missiles the US had stationed in Italy and Turkey which provoked the 1962 incident in the first place.

Moscow perceived that the only reason why that type of midrange weapon would be placed in such a way would be if the US was planning a nuclear first strike to disarm Russia, and Schwartz writes that that suspicion was entirely well-founded: the Kennedy administration had indeed strongly contemplated such a strike during the Berlin crisis of 1961. In response to this threat, as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Khrushchev moved ballistic missiles to Cuba, whose discovery led to the tense standoff which brought us far closer to nuclear annihilation than most of us care to contemplate. A secret deal was struck whose nature wouldn't become public knowledge until decades later, resulting in both sides removing their offending missile placements.

Reading by Tim Foley.

We Survived The Last Nuclear Standoff Through Compromise And De-Escalation

Everyone has lost their fucking mind. Propaganda has made madness look like sanity and sanity look like madness, has normalized cheerleading for nuclear world war and abnormalized calls for de-escalation and detente. It's truly as bat shit insane as anything could possibly be.

Over and over again we're being fed the message from the US and its proxies that this game of nuclear chicken can only escalate and never de-escalate. They are lying. They are playing games with all our lives in service of a dark god named unipolarism, and we gain nothing from it.

The only positive I can see in this mess is that any further movement toward madness will have to be a move into sanity, because we've taken madness as far as we can possibly take it and we'll necessarily have to circle back round again. You can only turn 180 degrees away from the light before you're turning back toward it again. You can only run halfway into the woods before you're running out of it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Opposing Armageddon To Trigger The Libs

The arrival of the human brain gave the universe the ability to experience itself through not only sensory organs and nervous systems but through thought and through science. Suddenly the stardust was able to not just look at itself but to think about itself. To philosophize about itself. To meditate on itself. To explore itself. To run experiments on itself. To know itself with greater and greater intimacy.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Once Upon A Time

Normal person: I think it would be good if everyone didn't die in a nuclear holocaust.

Crazy person: That means you love Vladimir Putin.

Normal person: No I just think it would be a good idea to try to prevent the horrific death of literally everyone.

Crazy person: How much is the Kremlin paying you to say that?

Fucking lunatics.

Resisting nuclear armageddon is the least partisan position that anyone could possibly have. The least one-sided. The least "campist". It's just being a normal human organism with the most normal human impulse you could possibly come up with. It's absolutely insane that anyone tries to spin it otherwise.

A society where opposing nuclear armageddon is treated as freakish and evil is the most backwards and insane society imaginable. Seriously, try to imagine anything crazier and more backwards than that. A society where everyone walks and drives backwards? That's less crazy and backwards. A society where the dogs own the people? That's less crazy and backwards.

This is it. This is peak crazy. A thinking species which regards as outrageous heresy any opposition to brinkmanship that can cause its extinction cannot get any more crazy. It's turned as far away from sanity as any thinking creature could possibly be.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Evolving Big Brains Only To Go Extinct From Stupidity

For one mother, a brief meeting with Bill Gates leads her to conduct a dedicated investigation of the Global Biodiversity Assessment; circa 1,000 pages detailing a dystopian plan for the world. Join Sandi Adams as she exposes this world plan, now better known as Agenda 2030 and hear why she warns it must be stopped.

Sandi Adams Agenda 2030 Part 1

Michael Parenti has said that "Poor countries are not 'under-developed', they are over-exploited." The west tends to look down on the rest of the world for reasons that either directly or indirectly relate to the poverty in those nations, which is silly because that poverty comes largely from western theft and exploitation. It's like mugging someone and then scorning them for their empty wallet.

If you boil it right down and get real about it, most of the pride in western civilization is ultimately pride in being better at killing and stealing than other people. We're still morally at the level of invading and plundering nations while claiming it's justified because we are stronger than them, it's just procedurally a few clicks removed from doing that directly.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Robbing The Global South, Then Scorning Its Poverty

Readings of all Caitlin Johnstone's articles, usually by her co-writer Tim Foley.

Opposing Armageddon To Trigger The Libs

Caitlin Johnstone

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