More data and evidence-free speculation from another Russian useful idiot that KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov expressed limitless contempt for. So, once again, let's shoot down the data-free speculations and Whataboutist useful idiocy:
"all the rest of the world has to do is ship weapons to Ukraine and victory will be ours."--
Mr. Dunn quoted Ukraine army chief Zaluzhny's weapons wish list to me in which Zaluzhny says exactly that. He's also said, "we've taken care of Russia's professional army. Now we'll take care of its amateur army." So, yes. And Kharkiv, Kherson, the Moskva and Makiivka are empirical proof.
Then Mr. Dunn asked me if the western coalition had the resources to fill it. I replied with hard data from Australian defense economist Perun that South Korea alone could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deK98IeTjfY. Then he said I was possessed by blood lust for Russia. When confronted by evidence, he never, ever refutes it and practices remote psychological diagnosis on his opponent instead. I actually prefer the more honest right wing trolls who just call me a Nazi or fascist.
He also never takes responsibility or mentions prior errant forecasts: Feb 26: "the war is a manufactured distraction", "Ukraine should surrender" in April, "Russia is winning, Ukraine can't win" in July, "stalemate just days before Kharkiv in September.
He just deploys a generic conversation stopper--"more complicated than you or I can comprehend"--that makes all debate impervious to the evidence previously requested. This is Bannon-Trump-Fox-RT-tiki-torched Tucker style flood the zone with shit disinformation warfare at its finest wrapped in a faux-peacenik package
Russia's genocidal war against Ukraine is not a conflict impervious to history and evidence-based analysis and expertise, as Tim Snyder, Anne Applebaum, the ISW, Meduza, Michael Kofman, Kamil Galeev, Russia's Nobel Prize-winning co-founder, Irina Scherbakova, have shown.
"destabilize world economies": Inflation and natural gas prices are falling, German gas storage is full and Russia is selling $54/barrel oil to India at $40 or less and its artillery shell use count is down 80% from the peak. GDP of western coalition supporting Ukraine: $70tn+. Russia's GDP: $1.8tn prewar and now at $1.5tn and falling. The implication here: throw Ukraine under the bus for economic stability. 1939-41 version: "don't fight the imperialist war!" on the left and "don't fight the Jews' war!" on the right.
"All we have to do is discipline Russia with a war he can't win. Once he knows who's boss,, we'll have a rules based order."--
The fundamental problem is the huge gap between Russian imperial ambition for parity with the West and real state capacity--Russia as third world petrol station--as Stephen Kotkin has made clear in 8 minutes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMyrb8-Jd3c&t=110s). Kotkin and Emmanuel Wallerstein have clearly explained why Russia is a rogue, resource-cursed extractive commodity-exporting land-based colonial empire on the periphery of the global trading system created by the Dutch and their invention of the bond market, copied by the English and then the Americans. Peter the Great went to Zaandam, not vice versa. Russia's collective narcissistic nationalist inferiority complex that repeatedly drives it to hypercentralized autocratic, personalized, and ultimately incompetent and delusional, state power is an internally generated Russian problem, not the West's. Deimperializing Russia, a half-finished century old process begun in 1917, left half done in 1991, is the only solution to reconciling Russia's ambition and its real geopolitical capacity. Numerous exiled Russian dissidents, from Memorial to Kasparov to Khodorkovsky, recognize this. But this is apparently lost on Mr. Dunn. None of these dissidents would agree with his "this war is more complicated than you or I can comprehend".
"criminal" American foreign policy": Ordering nothing from what's on the menu is not a decision for peace, but support for Russia. Russia's failed army, which just lost the Bakhmut garbage dump for the 4th or 5th time, has as its only hope Russia's useful idiots in the West that undermine political support for aiding Ukraine.
This none-of-the-above-ism makes the perfect the enemy of the least distasteful non-poisonous dish. Here's why American crimes in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and the 1980s, Brazil in 1964, Vietnam in 1964-75, Chile 1973, El Salvador, 1980s, Iraq in 2003, etc are now utterly irrelevant and how human history works to force a choice between the highly distasteful and the utterly poisonous:
1. You’re an Indian in Imphal in 1944. Do you fight for the murderous British empire that caused a preventable famine in Bengal and committed mass murder in Amritsar in 1919, or the murderous Japanese empire? Neither is not a choice. Not choosing is a choice.
2. You’re a Cherokee survivor living outside Atlanta in August 1864. Do you help the Union Army commanded by General William Tecumseh Sherman, the same genocidal army that gave your people the Trail of Tears, or the Confederate slavers?
3. You’re a Crimean Tatar in Kherson in 1943–44. You’ve survived the Holodomor and the Nazis. You know perfectly well what genocide Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin will commit against your people after kicking the Germans out of Crimea. Choose sides. Choosing neither is not an option and doing nothing = collaboration.
4. You’re a Filipino who saw American atrocities against your people as a child in 1902. Now it’s 1942 and the Japanese invade the Philippines. Choose sides. Not choosing a side is a choice.
5. You’re an Indonesian in Java in 1942 who hates your country’s racist Dutch colonial overlords. Do you go with Sukarno’s choice to side with the Japanese invaders and their “Asia for Asians” promises, knowing full well that Japanese behavior in China foretells mass murder by them in Indonesia?
6. You’re a literate emancipated helot citizen of Athens walking in the hills above Thermopylae. You hate your Spartan former masters, but you are still Greek, know what Athenian democracy means and know a Persian conquest would extinguish it and the Athenian intellectual and political freedom you cherish. Do you tell the Persian army how to flank the 300 Spartans in their path? You’re in between two Hot Gates that force you to choose sides.
7. You’re a Latvian in Riga in early June 1944 whose relatives were deported to Siberia in 1940. You saw how the Germans (and local Latvian Arajs Komando) murdered your Jewish neighbors in December 1941 and know what Soviet “liberation” means. But you also know about the Nazis’ Generalplan Ost for the extermination of the Baltic peoples. Do you hope for or dread Allied success in Normandy and the Soviets’ Operation Bagration later that month?
These examples make clear that bad vs worse is a permanent feature of the human history menu. Get over it and grow up. Quibbling over Vietnam and Iraq now would be like tut-tutting over the Philippines, Haiti and Nicaragua the day after Pearl Harbor.
