There's this mindset in the West of the Rules-based order that everybody must adhere to if they want to be objectively good. Otherwise, they are objectively bad.
There is a perception that the EU is some inherently angelic mass of paperwork, the source of all things good, anti-corrupt, and regulatory.
But their ideology stinks, just like every other ideology. And between all the lines of dialogue that they 'stand with Ukraine' and all those other pretty, empty words, there lies the true message:
Keep killing innocent Ukrainian and Russian people
All these bureaucrats, and all their supporting populace, those who wave around protest signs to free palestine, to free Luigi, to honour George floyd, none of them have been exposed to what they are preaching against. They just reap the rewards.
None of them have stared down the barrel of a loaded gun. None of them have seen their friends limbs ripped apart and vaporized by a drone attack. None of them have woken up to banging on their doors at home, to see troops charge in and drag their husband or young adult son away. And, days later, get a message confirming they had been killed in Action.
And that's a good thing, generally. Who would want that? It's a wonderful time to be in a peacetime nation, safe from all the dangerous outside realities.
But these morons don't even spend time in their day thinking about it, conceptualising what it means to keep Ukraine in action. They don't imagine the physical and emotional trauma that can be thrown upon them, against their will. At most they think about clinical anxiety because going into public spaces make them uncomfortable, or phone calls makes them nervous, or people calling them discriminatory names online makes them 'fear' for their safety. Urgh.
5 minutes on the battlefield will have them begging any or all of the possible Gods to take them back to that world, the world where they can afford to make themselves peacefully miserable again.
It's not like I'm any different for the most part. Sometimes I stand up and my back clicks and my life flashes before my eyes as I envision a future in a wheelchair. I'm pretty pathetic.
The difference is that I actually spend time closing my eyes and at least attempting to feel what those fighting in Ukraine are feeling. Mostly because I have more free time than the average person.
Trump & Vance vs Zelensky
Yeah, those two did kind of act like asshole bullies, that has to be criticized fair and square but that's already heavily debated everywhere else. But at the same time, that doesn't make them Russian allies. This is such a tired narrative, long debunked. He says repeatedly that he isn't aligned with either, but he obviously can't call out Putin as evil and then open up negotiations expecting something to come of it. This point is strategically obvious.
The Rules-based order of the West
What these guys can't seem to understand is that Trump, like Putin, work in an old-world style of honouring hand shakes, verbal agreements, respect for each other and dignity. The 'West' see this as 'Fascism' because, apparently, they also forgot the definition of fascism.
But one can just as easily assign their political approach to markedly anti-fascist Winston Churchill and perhaps any other famous political figure who did not just become a bureaucrat with a nuclear button.
Trump is, like it or not, one of the few leaders of the world who understands this Putin-esque approach while also not actually being a dictator. He understands that Putin respects strength. Strength of character, strength of will, strength of military.
They are of the same ilk, but they are born of two separate paradigms. Putin knows that, for example, a Red Line that Obama draws which must never be crossed, can be crossed. He knows that somebody like Obama, a lawyer, will just slap a few sanctions on him and pretend it never happened. In this scenario, an agreement on paper is worth about as much as the paper.
But with Trump, Putin sees somebody who will respond in the same way he himself would respond, and that is a much larger threat. He and Trump would both take it very personally, and a much, much more threatening response would be on the table.
This is what Zelensky doesn't understand. He has spent way too much time hanging out with those who would roll out a red carpet for him, and literally call him the reincarnation of Churchill, a hero's hero.
They support him to keep chugging the country along in a stalemate for years and years until there's nobody left, because they don't understand the horror of mass slaughter. They just say it's bad in the same way a bureaucrat furrows his brow when somebody did not cross their T's in a contract.
If you never have. Listen to some war poetry from such legends as Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est:
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
In some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs...
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glorie
The old lie:
Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori
(Translation: It is sweet and right to die for one's country)
War in a nutshell.
So, Zelensky has been softened by these impotent pencil pushing virtue signalers in the EU, these soy-drinking, cocaine snorting liars who, after spending their lives failing upwards, are invariably working day and night to destroy their own countries from within.
Zelensky is not looking at his enemy, Putin, in the eye. He's not understanding him. Trump is the window to that understanding and what he says is true: Ukraine can't win, and Zelensky has to accept that in one way or another.
Sure, if for some reason the EU decided to go all in, they could probably 'defeat' Putin. But there's no 'winning' for Ukraine either way. The men have already been slaughtered. The buildings have already been annihilated.
What happens if Russia technically loses? Putin will sign a contract with the bureaucrats, take a photo and skulk back to his original borders? Civil war? Cold war? Total collapse and countless millions of Russians flood the rest of Europe to escape famine? Nothing good, either way, for anybody.
Where's the win?
What if Russia technically wins?
Well, they keep their land grab, and Ukraine because a smaller Ukraine with a lot of problems. Most the destroyed infrastructure is now Russia's problem. Ukraine is more closely allied with the rest of Europe and can probably start rebuilding with more support. They don't join NATO, and Russia goes away for a while so everybody on all sides has time to beef up their military might for some future problematic date.
Russia in the meantime gets poorer and increasingly unstable as sanctions continue and their population crisis is exacerbated due to all those deaths.
Again, no winners.
Again, Trump is right. The priority is to stop DEATH. Who gives an honest shit about borders and 'the right side of history' when all those people who actually care about it are 6 feet underground?
Trump and Putin are men of Thymos. (spirited debate, honour)
The EU leaders are people of Logos. (logic, legal frameworks)
It's time the Logos understood the Thymos and stop being so damn ideological, patting each other on the back for every virtue they signal. Yes, Trump and Vance took a very distasteful approach to that meeting a few days ago, and yes they are brutish and say a bunch of misleading or straight up wrong information.
But that thymotic sentiment?
Stop the War Now
Such fascists, lol.
I am not so sure about spirited debate, but I agree trump wants honour and respect. The apology that came from Zelensky reminds me of a prostitute paid to say that it is the biggest dick she has seen.
I don't think this is what they are trying to do though. They absolutely care about borders, regardless if people are six feet under. What if the end to the war and the stop of death was a deal where Russia got the mining rights? Would that be approved by the US?
Well yeah in Trump's case, fair point lol
Tbh, it's more likely than previous presidents. Trump has a track history of A) Being strongly anti-war, B) Letting the world know exactly his thoughts and intentions - which we saw live in front of the world with that oval office fight.
Now when it comes to the US government overall, that's an entirely different story and I'm not sure just how much one influences, or works around, the other. The USA has a long (perhaps entire) history of putting itself first:
First World War - American mostly sat around selling weapons to both sides, creating one of the most massive transfers of wealth ever known.
Second World War - Ready to extract even more wealth in the form of massive loans and and the sale of British companies for a dime a dozen. By the end the empire was eviscerated, cut to the bone, almost every penny sent into the wallets of the USA.
So yes, even when it came to the direct allies of the US, they were thinking about their wallets and resources above all else. Why would it be any different now?
So I do believe Trump is genuine, He more likely takes personal pride in being the anti-war guy, rather than empathetic reasons. But for the rest of the 'deep state' as they call it... who knows.
thank you for writing this post! It's so obvious really, but only when one has "common sense". People have lost basic logic reasoning by being blinded by their ideology. Stop this war and madness! Worse still, it could have been stopped 3 years ago...
I'm forming a basis of my views explicitly around the idea of 'anti-ideology' which, in a way, is ideological itself lol. But I do think these people are trapped in a rigid set of ideas, like a religion, unable to conceptualise that there might be another way. Frustrating to watch.
There is no place for the Bandera nazi regime in the modern world. Russia must change the regime in Ukraine to a more democratic one and allow the US to extract minerals to pay off Ukraine's debt.
I'm pretty skeptical about the whole Nazi thing. There's definitely Nazis in Ukraine, they've been quite open about it. But how deep it runs? I don't think that much.
Even if it was totally Nazi at this point, Putin isn't the saviour lol. Putin's motivations were clear with his monstrous essay and obsession with ancient Russian history. His second motivation is, of course, strategic and self-interested again: Oil, direct access to the sea, and a buffer zone around Crimea.
I doubt he gives a flying fish about Nazis in Ukraine, tbh
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That is the most fascinating thing about him, I suppose!