Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
As readers know, I often make reference to Putin’s forbearance, that is, to his tolerance, patience, and self-control. I admire Putin’s forbearance which persists despite Putin never receiving any recognition or credit for it. My concern is that Putin’s forbearance does not serve him or Russia well. The reason is that the Western world no longer recognizes or values the moral code that once defined Western civilization. Today in the Western world there are only two values–money and power.
It has been a long time since any American or European military leader said anything resembling what Robert E. Lee told the soldiers who comprised the Army of Northern Virginia:
“We make war only upon armed men, and we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all those whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemies, and offending against God to whom vengeance belongs.”
Many of the Union soldiers, especially those under command of the generals, Sherman and Sheridan, who hated Southerners, subjected civilian populations in the South to rape and looting. They would burn down the homes and slaughter the livestock, leaving the women and children unprotected from winter and starvation. The entire purpose of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was to create a slave rebellion in the Confederacy that would cause the Confederate troops to leave the war to return home to protect their women and children. As Lincoln’s own Secretary of State said, the President has “freed” the slaves only in those areas where we have no presence and left them in slavery where we are in command. As no slaves rebelled, Lincoln’s effort to inflict rape and murder on Southern women and children failed.
In those past years when the US still had historians, instead of today’s 1619 Project propagandists, Lee’s forbearance was the basis of his high reputation among US military officers. During Eisenhower’s presidency, Lee’s portrait hung on the walls of the Oval Office. The collapse of American morals has been so total that today Robert E. Lee’s statue has been removed from Richmond, Virginia, the city he protected from rapine and destruction.
World War II as conducted by Roosevelt and Churchill was a war against civilians. The British air force was constructed and used for bombing German residential areas. Once Washington entered the war, the US air force followed the same practice. The British/US bombing of Dresden is one of the worst war crimes in history, as were the atomic bombs dropped on the civilian populations of two Japanese cities while the Japanese were trying to surrender. In the early months of WW II, Hitler prohibited the German air force from bombing civilian areas in Britain. It was the relentless bombing of German civilians that forced Hitler to reverse his policy.
When one considers the massive war crimes the US committed against German and Japanese civilians, it is amazing that these people are so firmly committed to Washington’s will.
Recall Vietnam, the napalm and Agent Orange dropped on villagers, the picture of the naked little girl fleeing the flames, the relentless bombing of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, weddings, funerals, children’s soccer games, the shelling by Ukrainian Neo-Nazis, with support from the American liberal press, of civilians in Donbass. The West conducts war by terror.
Putin told the Russian soldiers before sending them into Donbass that Russia does not fight this way. He prohibited them from using heavy weapons in civilian areas. It was the cowardly Ukrainian military and the Neo-Nazi Azov thugs who took refuge among civilians where they could fire heavy weapons and not be targeted by Russian heavy weapons.
Like Lee, for Putin forbearance is a virtue, a moral principle that you don’t sacrifice for war. Like Lee, Putin told the troops that “we make war only upon armed men.”
Putin has stuck to this policy despite the narrative’s portrayal of him as a war criminal murdering women and children. In other words, Putin is not restraining the use of violence against civilians because he expects credit for his forbearance, but because it is a virtue to which he holds.
When one looks honestly, one sees clearly that the virtue the West claims does not exist.
My problem with Putin’s forbearance is that it is not only no longer an admired virtue in the West but also so foreign to the modern Western mind that it is interpreted as indecision and weakness. Consequently, the provocations of Russia multiply and worsen. In brief, Putin’s forbearance is resulting in red lines being crossed that will end in nuclear war.
Putin’s problem is unique in the modern world. His virtue of forbearance is what is driving the world to nuclear war. His virtue is seen as weakness against which more threatening pushes can be made. The question is real whether Putin’s forbearance will bring on Armageddon.
This is the reason, not bloody-mindedness, that I have said that the Kremlin’s use of military force in Ukraine needed to be awesome and quickly concluded in total success in order to establish in Washington and the capitals of Europe that the policy of poking the bear is a fools game that brings certain death and destruction.
If Russia had delivered blitzkrieg to Ukraine, the governments of Europe would be disengaging from NATO, not trying to join it. Washington would gain recognition that the neoconservatives’ policy of American hegemony was extremely costly. It would be possible for voices to speak in favor of a more restrained policy.
Instead, what we have is a narrative of Russian loss and defeat, and not a single country the least bit scared of offending Russia. Weapons, money, diplomatic support for the Ukrainian Nazis is flowing in from the Western World. Yesterday the national newspaper in the capital of the Western World, the Washington Post, editorialized: “The world must not forget Mariupol’s defenders. They are heroes.”
The “heroes” are the Neo-Nazi Azov thugs, a collection of war criminals, many of whom are likely to be tried in Russian courts for war crimes. This editorial should tell us all we should know about the depraved West. Does it tell Putin anything?
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“My problem with Putin’s forbearance is that it is not only no longer an admired virtue in the West”
Hmm, I see the problem located in a different spot, Paul.
“Today in the Western world there are only two values–money and power.”
The end game of muh Reformation was the total subjugation of Christendom via muh Capitalism wherein the Satan strong eat the de-Christianized weak.
“For the Marxist reviled the man of faith and ideals as bitterly as he did the financial exploiter. It was his creed that nothing existed in the world but matter and that no motive
could animate and man but self-interest. The great-organized institutions and societies based on faith and love and maintained by self-sacrifice though which man had raised himself above the primeval slime were to be ruthlessly destroyed and their adherents liquidated. First, they were to be undermined by criticism repeated again and again until
the corrosive ate into the old State so thoroughly that finally crumbled to pieces. Mob violence was to finish the process. The world would then be ready for an international
order that admitted of neither separate race, nor tradition, nor religion and in which all men would be subordinated as unthinking automatons to a single ruling clique Marxist intellectuals and bureaucrats .
For Hitler was accurate enough to realize that the Marxists did not stand for the freedom they pretended, but for a despotic uniformity, enforced by terror and annihilation of all who opposed them. In this, they differed only in their superior violence from the international financiers and exploiters they professed to supplant. Like Belloc and other earlier modern socials philosophers, Hitler perceived the twin roads down which mankind was being herded toward the servile state. First came the economic development which changed the social structure of the nation and substituted for its old feudal rulers, who at least had a certain sense of responsibility and noblesse oblige, the financier and the middle man who had none. Under the joint-stock company system, the search for profits became the sole guiding principle for life. The small artisan class slowly disappeared and the factory worker, who took his place, had scarcely any chance establish an independent existence of his own, but soon sank to the proletariat level. His present and future passed into the sole power of the man of figures who, calling himself his employer or master, acknowledged no responsibility for his moral or physical wellbeing. The hungry sheep looked up and were not fed.
The member of the new social class so created were “disinherited “in a treble sense. They were deprived of their independence. They were herded together in vast factory towns under conditions of living and employment that not only ruined their health, but robbed them of all faith in their country and its system of justice. And they were made to feel that the manual labour by which they lived was degrading and inferior to other forms of work. The ancient Order of the Peasantry, as Disraeli had once called it, had been transformed into a herd of helot without privilege or status.
But the process of social leveling was not yet complete. The poor were enslaved, but the higher and middle orders-the last repositories of culture and national social tradition of the past- still remained independent. Their independence was the final barrier that stood between the architects of constructive chaos and their goal. To destroy it no effort could be too great, And here the archenemy of the nation and society, the eternal and denationalized Jew, whom Hitler in his strange obsession saw in all places working to destroy the living state, seized his opportunity. By a masterpiece of ingenuity -“one of the most infamous deceits ever practiced”- the Jew turned the bitterness of the poor, whom his own usurious and irresponsible capitalism had dispossessed, against those who had till now escaped enslavement. “At first he had used the bourgeois class as a battering-ram against the feudal order; now he used the worker against the strongholds of the bourgeois. Just as he had succeeded in obtaining civil rights by intrigue carried on under the protection of the middle class, so now he hoped that joining in the struggle which the workers were waging for their existence he would be able to gain absolute power over them….He kowtowed to the worker, hypocritically pretended to feel pity for him and his lot and even to be indignant at the misery and poverty he had to endure….He showed himself eager to study his hardships, real or imaginary. He strove to waken a longing in the masses to change the conditions under which they lived. Artfully the Jew enkindled that innate yearning for social justice which is a typical Aryan characteristic. Once that desire became conscious it was transformed into hatred against those in more fortunate circumstances of life. The next stage was to give a precise philosophical explanation of this struggle for the elimination of social wrongs. And thus the Marxist doctine was invented.
Yet, the ultimate objective of that sinister Movement was not, it appeared, the triumph of the proletariat, but the domination of those who by exploitation had created the Proletariat – the Jews.”Without knowing it the worker is placing himself at the service of the very power against which he believes he is fighting. In appearance he is made fight against capital, while all the while he is furthering capitalistic interests.” The ultimate aims of Marxism and international Capitalism were in Hitler’s eyes the same: the concentration of all power in the hands of a few, and the elimination of every independent agency that could resist the process. “
Arthur Bryant Unfinished Victory 1940
https://www.unz.com/book/arthur_bryant__unfinished-victory/
Under the freedom of trade the whole severity of the laws of political economy will be applied to the working classes. Is that to say that we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon a greater extent of territory, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions into a single group, where they stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletarians.
Engels, To Free Trade Congress at Brussels (1847)
“ World War II ended the “depression.” The same Bankers who in the early 30’s had no loans for peacetime houses,food and clothing, suddenly had unlimited billions to lend for Army barracks, K-rations and uniforms! A nation that in 1934 couldn’t produce food for sale, suddenly could produce bombs to send free to Germany and Japan!… Germany issued debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 and on, accounting for its startling rise from the depression to a world power in 5 years. Germany financed its entire government and war operation from 1935 to 1945 without gold and without debt, and it took the whole Capitalist and Communist world to destroy the
German power over Europe and bring Europe back under the heel of the Bankers. Such history of money does not even appear in the textbooks of public (government) schools today. ”
Sheldon Emry
Billions For Bankers, Debts for the People
https://archive.org/details/Billions20for20the20bankers
“I do not believe that this primal difference between gentile and Jew is reconcilable. There will be irritation between us as long as we are in intimate contact. For nature and constitution and vision divide us from all of you forever . . . I have no doubt that when Germany and England and America will long have lost their present identity or name or purpose, we shall still be strong in ours . . . We have joined your capitalistic world in deliberate emulation and rivalry: yet Jewish socialism and Jewish socialists are the banner bearers of the world’s “armies of liberation.” . . . But you feel our disruptive difference most keenly, most resentfully, in our deliberate efforts to change your social system. Seen in the dazzling lights of your desires and needs our ideal is repellently morose . . . Because your chief institution is the social structure itself, it is in this that we are most manifestly destroyers. We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers for ever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands.”
You Gentiles
By Samuel, Maurice, 1895-1972
https://archive.org/details/YouGentiles
“The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control. … Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.”
~ Larry P. McDonald
U.S. Congressman, 1976, killed in the Korean Airlines 747 that was shot down by the Soviets
in “Introduction” to The Rockefeller File, by Gary Allen (1975)
https://archive.org/details/TheRockefellerFile
“It is more certain, however, that the facile assumption that no
Jews lived in England from the end of the thirteenth to the
seventeenth century needs to be revised, in the light of researches
by such able Jewish investigators as Sidney Lee and Lucien Wolf.
Jews were very numerous and influential in the early Middle Ages.
They married Christians, and there were always enough of them to
constitute the core of an anti-Christian sentiment. William of
Normandy borrowed the money to conquer England from the Jews
of Rouen, and took many of them with him to serve as tax-gatherers.
William Rufus farmed out vacant bishoprics to Jews, evidently as a
joke on the Church, which he hated. Henry II also was a friend to
Jews. Cardinal Langton, who liberated England with the Magna
Charta, restricted their activities. Edward I, one of the greatest
English Kings, devoted to the Church and to his people, expelled
them.
In the twelfth century the chief complaint was their exploiting of
the people with usury. Bishops and monks were frequently in their
debt. Nine Cistercian monasteries and the Abbey of Saint Albans, for
example, were built on moneys borrowed at high interest from Aaron
of Lincoln. When the interest-rate was fixed by law, it was rarely
below forty-three and one-third per cent in England, as in
Germany.
17 In King John’s time most of the nobles had mortgaged
their estates to Jews. The Chronicle of Jocelin (1176) tells of a debt
of the monastery of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds to Jurnet the
Jew for sixty pounds, which the monks had great difficulty in paying.
When Richard de Anesty appealed a suit to the Pope, he borrowed
money for his litigation (1159-1163 A.D.) from Jews, who charged
him 3 pence to 4 pence in the pound per week—a rate of 85 per cent
per annum.
When all Jews were ordered to leave England in 1290, 16,000
left. As is usual in such tragedies, large numbers probably remained
as pretending Catholics. In London alone, for example, there had
been 2,000 Jewish families a short time before, and there was
probably more assimilation than has been supposed. During the
following centuries, Jews returned secretly to England as Spanish,
Portuguese, or Italian merchants. There were undoubtedly many
Jews among the so-called Lombards who collected the Peter’s
pence all over Europe, and did business of all sorts (including usury)
in Lombard Street, London. When the Jews were expelled from
Spain in 1492, large numbers went secretly to England; so
Ferdinand and Isabel complained to Henry VII.18 Under Henry VIII,
England was so crowded with foreign artificers that Parliament
passed a law complaining of them, and asserting that they were
“practising deceits and falsehoods in their handicrafts, to the loss
and damage of natives”; that they outwitted officials who tried to
enforce laws against them, by warning one another, and that after
making money dishonestly they took it out of the country to invest
abroad.19
Is it unlikely that some of these “foreigners” were Jews? The
inter-mixture was incalculable, but it was there. The Cromwell family
had Jewish characteristics and connections. Oliver Cromwell’s
grandmother was a daughter of Horatio Pallavicino, one of the Italian
money-lenders and advisers of Elizabeth and a close friend of
Benedict Spinola, another Italian known to have been a Jew. Both
these “Italians” became conspicuous for their violent Church of
England views at a time when such views were profitable.
All in all, there is probably some truth in the claim of Joseph haCohen ha-Sefardi that enough Jews remained in England after the
expulsion to prepare the way for the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth
century.
20 But even if all that has been conjectured of the
background were true, Cecil and his fellow-conspirators could
probably never have succeeded without the co-operation of the most
prominent Catholic layman of the time, Philip II of Spain.
Philip II: (1527-1598)
William Thomas Walsh
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=1889B28539B7506D637C3D5605BFD2A0
Goodness Flash, write an article.
No mere articles… These books connect the centuries long history of the sodomization of all Christendom by the power of money, which is the root of all evil.
“…the Satan strong eat the de-Christianized weak.”
This is what I’m afraid of. “Turn the other cheek”, “God will save us”. Etc etc
Robert E. Lee lost.
Sherman was the better general.
Sure Flash, if you agree with total war concept i.e. steal anything not tied down, burn EVERYTHING to the ground and kill all indigenous (men, women and children). Sherman was the first general controlled by the elite to use the “Total War” model.
I would argue that the two best generals of that war were N. B. Forrest and Thomas Jackson. Also, the fellow who developed and successfully demonstrated modern hit-and-run guerrilla warfare, Mosby, was studied at West Point for decades and still may be studied today. Mosby would intercept railroad trains and wagon trains, burn the supplies intended for northern armies, and then disappear. He was also famous for ambushing columns of mounted northern troops.
Engaging in fixed position battles on your own territory is poor policy when fighting an enemy who has access to far more war material and far more manpower. As an example, every country in Europe emptied all their prisons and sent their scum to northern ports, where they were promptly dragooned into the northern army.
Robert Lee was no doubt a splendid example of a human being, but he and most of the other generals on both sides learned conventional tactics and strategy at Hudson Military Institute and stayed true to what they were taught. When your opponent has far greater manpower and war material than you, using unconventional tactics and strategy is essential to success.
I have long believed that Stonewall Jackson was assassinated by agents of the northern state alliance because they recognized that he was the most successful of the South’s West Point generals. Had I been there, I would have been using that same tactic against the Northern Alliance.
I suspect that Forrest was too wily to make himself a target of snipers and assassins. The inept military stratagists of the South didnt make proper use of Forrest’s abilities. He “didn’t git no respect” because he was not a West Point general like the rest.
Sooner or later, the Russians will come to their senses and realize that having PCR as their ruler and decision maker is their avenue to success in the world. They will send a chartered Aeroflot airliner to carry PCR to Moskva, and two battalions of Spetnaz to escort him in style from his house in Virginia to the airport.
With PCR ensconed in the Moskva Kremlin, the Russian Federation will finally get the proper directions on conducting wars, international diplomacy, and internal affairs, down to such details as to how many squares of toilet paper to use when one of the Rus wipes his ass after dropping a big deuce.
I originally started to read PCR because I thought he was intelligent, knowledgeable, and had insights into the inner workings of Washington. After I realized that he was just another crazy old man given to foaming at the mouth, I still read his rants, because I thought he was entertaining-you know, like counting the number of times he says insouciant.
Now, I just skip reading most of PCR’s rants after the reading the title and first paragraph. PCR clearly does not have access to all the information which is the basis of the decisions of President Putin and the rest of the Russian ruling class. You remember President Putin, the guy who was actually elected, not appointed?
Ohmigod, can you ever stop being an idiot? You think Putin gives a shit what the West thinks about how he is leading his country? No! So, why should you, you putz.
You know who does give a shit about “Putin’s forbearance”? All the countries that border Russia, the largest landmass (country) on earth. At least half of Ukraine … and the other half, the Russiaphobes, will eventually come around when the Nazi brainwashing wears off. All the countries that Russia does business with, and there are quite a few in the Global South and Asia.
Bottom line? Russia is building a Fortress of Political Capital =====> countries know they can trust Russia to do what it says it will do, and Russia won’t bomb the fuck out of them if they go their own way! America? Not so much.
THAT’S what matters. Not your psychobabble irrelevant bullshit about what “the West thinks”.
.
.
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Oh. Not “could”, or “possibly”, or “maybe”, or “in my opinion”. Nosiree!!! You, you egotistical know-it-all bullshit artist, you and you alone can see the future and declare that the current conflict “WILL end in nuclear war”.
You probably have a good sized following. People will read it, many will believe it, they will send it to their friends, some of who will believe it, and so on …. even though you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground and all you accomplish is causing people unnecessary fear, angst, consternation, and other maladies of the mind.
Hope you die soon you evil bastard.
Well now. A lot has changed in the two years I’ve been commenting on this website. When I got here, if I so much as sneezed in PCR’s direction, a blizzard of downvotes clogged up the whole page!!!
PCR has a comically-inflated ego, to go along with his savior complex. And his irritation grows each day his phone fails to ring with a job offer from Moscow for a high level strategic advisory position.
Americans are impatient and distractable. It’s good and it’s bad. It’s probably why we’ve invented a lot of stuff and done a lot of things, but we can be like the hare in the Tortoise and the Hare. So we’ll see what happens. Russia’s refusal to wage war like Americans (massive, indiscriminate, immoral bombing followed by victorious photo ops followed by eventual evacuation, leaving the place a worse hellhole than before) will serve the Russians best in the long run. The areas of Ukraine that are added to Russia can’t become alienated from Russia by the way they were conquered. Leaving a landlocked rump Ukraine in the west may provide America an area from which to conduct its perfidy, but that could be staged from Poland, too. The Ukraine situation is an American war on Russia, bu it’s also an American war on the the economies of Europe. If the Europeans ever pull their head out of their ass long enough to realize that America is not their friend, relative peace could be possible.
Since when was Putin tolerant?
I find it deeply concerning that Paul Craig Roberts is so selective in his historical analysis of aerial bombing of civillian populations. The Germans started the tactic before the British or the Americans. Guernica in the civil war in Spain. Rotterdam and Coventry are other instances. the destruction of Nanking in 1937 by the Japanese is another example. Like Roberts I admire Putins forbearance. I suggest Roberts, when he looks at history, also takes Putins example of his disgust for the Axis powers. In his emotional reaction to current events Paul Craig Roberts is starting to develop a few too many blemishes for those of us who look for the cause of justice, rather than revenge on our adversaries.
Guernica was a town of 7000 people with troops in it, near the front.
PCR is a shill for Putin, but his statements about who focused on bombing civilians in WWII is correct. The British were fairly open about this, America tended to maintain the fiction that carpet-bombing a city was about some railyard or other.
If you don’t think it was policy, notice what types of bombers were designed before the war, and what uses they were for.
You write like a bot…
To seriously talk about “too many blemishes” of PCR, but at the same time hand-wave away Allied carpet-bombing of large civilian cities to be fully justified -even the scale- because Ze Germans did it first?
That stinks to high heaven.