We’re publishing a guest post by blogger “Eugyppius”, where he reviews Michael Senger’s Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World, which spies the schemes of the Chinese Premier and his party behind all the lockdown madness of the past two years. This post was originally published on Eugyppius’s Substack account, which you can subscribe to here.
I will never tire of typing that the whole question, of how lockdowns became the default response to Corona, is very hard. Some points are nevertheless clear. There was, without a doubt and in the earliest stages, a kind of lockdown cabal, a small group of people in different countries who worked to bring some simulacrum of the Hubei response first to Italy and then to most of the globe. An insidious, coordinated information campaign accompanied their efforts, and this should warn us against easy assumptions that they had good intentions.
On social media, a swarm of manipulative pro-lockdown accounts promoted containment and attacked any prominent politician who tried to steer a moderate course. Michael Senger was among the first to point out that this campaign was operated, in part, out of China. His crucial September 2020 article on the Chinese promotion of lockdowns on social media for Tablet Magazine won him wide renown. He had over 100,000 followers on Twitter before the platform banned him; he now writes the New Normal on Substack, and you should all subscribe to him.
In his Tablet article, throughout his time on Twitter, and in his new blogging incarnation, Senger has developed a lean, straightforward thesis that aims to cut the Gordian knot of what has befallen us. He lays responsibility for lockdowns at the feet of the Chinese Communist Party, and in particular Xi Jinping. In the strictest sense, he is surely right here: None of our countries would have locked down, if China hadn’t done so first and convinced the World Health Organisation that mass containment was effective.
Senger’s thesis, however, is more precise than that. He sees lockdowns as a manifestation of fang kong, Mandarin for “prevent” or “control” – a broader, ideologically loaded concept that extends to things like the isolation or internment of political dissidents and mass surveillance. He writes (p. 44):
Xi’s lockdown of Wuhan had been inspired by the CCP’s pet hybrid of public health and security policy: Fangkong, the same policy that inspired the reeducation and ‘quarantine’ of over one million Uyghur Muslims and other minorities ‘infected with extremism’ throughout Xinjiang and Tibet.
Xi Jinping, in Senger’s telling, then leveraged extensive Chinese relationships with political, media and academic actors throughout the West, to establish lockdowns as a “global policy” in “one of the most audacious psychological operations in all of recorded history” (p. 42).
Senger sets the virus itself to one side; it is for him a minor matter, compared to the great edifice of the lockdown information war. He proposes, along with some other dissident theorists, that SARS-2 might have been circulating as early as 2018, in which case Wuhan is unlikely to the be city of origin: “[T]he CCP could have picked literally any city to shut down for purposes of its lockdown fraud. Xi Jinping [chose] Wuhan because there was a lab there” (p. 99). The lab leak thus becomes, in the Sengerian thesis, above all a propaganda distraction:
The Wuhan lab had indeed played a key role in lockdowns. But not necessarily as a source of the coronavirus, which proved to be fairly ordinary. Rather, the CCP had used the Wuhan lab as a decoy to misdirect their opposition. … The Wuhan lab had been engaged in ‘gain of function’ research on coronaviruses in bats … Worse yet, the Wuhan lab had lax security for one engaged in this kind of research. During gain-of-function research, so the story went, one of these coronaviruses had leaked out, causing mass death in Wuhan about which brave whistleblowers like Li Wenliang had to warn the world. But the CCP had covered it up, allowing the supervirus to spread. World leaders had to implement lockdowns and other cutting-edge measures on the advice of their best scientists and health officials. This was the narrative that preoccupied the intelligence community throughout 2020 and 2021. They knew about the virus’s unique furin cleavage site. All they had to do was prove SARS-CoV-2 came from that lab, and China could be held responsible. … It was, indeed, the perfect setup. Exactly as Xi Jinping intended.
Li Wenliang, the ophthalmologist admonished in early January for spreading rumours on WeChat of a novel SARS-related outbreak in Wuhan, is also in Senger’s view an invention of the lockdown propagandists. Intriguingly, he notes that “the first time the world ever heard the name ‘Li Wenliang’ was on January 27th 2020” (p. 40), when the Hubei lockdown was just four days old and the internet was brimming with mysterious, since-debunked videos of sudden virus death in Wuhan.
Senger also sees early PCR test development as essentially fraudulent (pp. 67–72), and the collapse in Wuhan infections after February 2020 in Hubei as a lie. “China had simply forged its data and quietly adopted a herd immunity strategy” (p. 77).
As they did so, Xi fed the world bogus medical advice calibrated to increase SARS-2 mortality (p. 105):
The CCP’s initial ‘medical guidance’ from Wuhan was designed to inflict death in three ways: 1. Excessive use of mechanical ventilators, killing patients outright; 2. Moving still-sick patients to nursing homes, ostensibly to clear up hospital space; and 3. The deprivation of lockdowns themselves, increasing deaths from other causes. That initial spike in deaths from China’s ‘medical guidance’ would be used as proof of COVID-19’s danger, sowing the fear that would justify further lockdowns.
The result was that a lot of Western media personalities and politicians began insisting on the necessity of lockdowns to eradicate SARS-2 and praising the Chinese response. Many of these characters had either Chinese ties, a history of strange public Sinophilia, or at the very least highly curious timing in their advocacy and public statements. When they finally got their lockdowns, these failed to work, which was unsurprising given the “evidently fraudulent scientific origins” of such interventions (p. 86).
Senger concludes (p. 140) that:
Lockdown was never about a virus. It was about sending a message: That stripped of all disguise, the illusion of virtue, competence, and commitment to human rights among the Western political class was nothing but conformity with easily-subvertible norms and institutions passed down by prior generations. Since the original egalitarian propaganda of communism no longer fooled most people, the system had to be rebooted with a new lie that would justify the indefinite suspension of the rule of law. Xi had found it in the form of a ‘virus’.
Ordinarily, in reviews, one tries to give an idea of the contents without giving the whole argument away, but I feel comfortable making an exception in this case, because Senger has outlined all of these ideas himself on Twitter, and because even a close summary is no substitute for this book. You really should read Snake Oil for yourself: It’s a lean, enjoyable and highly stimulating monograph, and its 590 end-notes (accounting for over 25% of whole book) are full of valuable references – many of them to long-forgotten articles from the earliest days of the pandemic.
Senger’s radical scepticism has tactical utility. It presses the Chinese origins of mass containment to the most extreme conclusion possible, leaving lockdown advocates in an embarrassing position, with their awkward histories of publicly extolling Chinese success against the virus. It also has the virtue of insisting that SARS-2 is just not that special. As I have argued many times, this is an important truth, and the only thing that has a hope of disarming the lockdowners and the vaccinators in the longer term.
Some will nevertheless hesitate to accept the entirety of Senger’s view that “Everything is Fake” (the title of his sixth chapter), and here I want to explore what a slightly less absolutist version of his thesis might look like.
I’ll start by ceding a little ground to SARS-2: It is not a magical virus, and it is not worth the expenses we have incurred in our war upon it, but we can solve a few problems if we posit that its genetic similarity to SARS-1 was a big reason for early hysteria, and that indeed it is deadly for some people. Once we have gone that far, Chinese motivation becomes easier to account for. Some would say that the Chinese, at the start, were responding to what they feared was another SARS-level outbreak, perhaps one that really had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology sometime in mid-2019. (I don’t think SARS-2 is likely to be much older than that; nobody can find earlier evidence.)
For a long time, I tried not to talk about the lab leak hypothesis, because I thought it fuelled pro-lockdown rhetoric, and this is surely one of the reasons Senger tries to sideline it here. I would nevertheless suggest that it’s a key piece of the puzzle, especially when it comes to explaining elite overreaction to Corona both within China and beyond. Nor is it an accident that the establishment press first entertained the thesis as the vaccination campaign kicked off and the vaccinators were struggling to submerge everyone in fresh terror of Corona. I don’t think that means SARS-2 is a bioweapon or that its genome carries very much evidence of ‘engineering’. It’s just a SARS-related bat coronavirus that has been optimised to infect humans.
We might also make some concessions to Chinese bureaucratic corruption and scientific incompetence, both widely attested. Cast in this light, the whole matter of Li Wenliang’s censure and his brief media cameo at the end of January 2020 begins to look like a Chinese repudiation of a prior policy to cover up the Wuhan infections. We don’t have to banish the doctor from existence, necessarily, although his death is highly suspicious.
As for skulduggery surrounding Christian Drosten and his early role in developing a SARS-2 PCR test development: The tests do detect the presence of the virus, after all, so perhaps it is not precise enough to dismiss this work as fraudulent. Instead, what we seem to be seeing here is an effort to throw together a means of diagnosing SARS-2 infection that would have credibility in the West and with the World Health Organisation. This was perhaps done, by laundering prior Chinese research through Drosten, a Western virologist known for his role in developing PCR tests for SARS-1 .
Many theses of Chinese motivations in promoting lockdowns to the West are possible. We may have to admit that we don’t know, and that our ignorance has two facets: 1) We don’t know what the Chinese were trying to do, and 2) we don’t always know what the small lockdown-happy cabal of western scientists and bureaucrats who imposed their policies upon us were trying to do.
In the absence of hard evidence, incompetence and a desire to save face might be the simplest path. By late February, after Western media outlets had spent weeks chiding China for their harsh authoritarian measures, Chinese officials had figured out that SARS-2 wasn’t that bad. The risk at that point was that no other countries would do very much about SARS-2, and they’d be none the worse for it. So, to save face, China needed the WHO to endorse their lockdown at the very least; ideally, some Western nations would even imitate their approach. The Chinese pulled what strings they had, even providing secret advice to Western public health officials and social media cover for their politicians.
Senger is surely right about the extensive influence China wields across Western political, media and academic institutions – much of it hidden or unexplored. For many key lockdowners, though, precise China ties remain obscure, and I think we will have to consider that at least some of them had other motivations. In some cases, as with Tomas Pueyo, we seem to be looking at incidental figures whose feverish internet theorising was promoted by rigged social media algorithms at the right moment. Epidemiologists and modellers like Neil Ferguson, on the other hand, have personal and professional motivations. Virus panic is how scientists like them get funding and become important. Of course, Senger would counter that China knew this and exploited these professional concerns, and he’d be right.
It’s a testament to Senger’s thoroughness, that he finds space (pp. 54-56) for the early history of lockdowns in Germany, and the suspicious roles played by Otto Kölbl and Maximilian Mayer in helping to draft a pseudoscientific ‘strategy paper’ full of fake modelling projections, designed to convince members of parliament and the press that lockdowns were the only way.
I’ll retell that story here, because it helps me think about lockdowns and the limits of our knowledge:
Directly after Neil Ferguson released his insane models predicting massive SARS-2 mortality in England, on March 16th, Christian Drosten and Lothar Wieler met with then-interior minister Horst Seehofer, and urged him to find a way to extend the German closures. Seehofer then convened a team of alleged experts to model the trajectory of the pandemic in Germany and the likely effects of necessary countermeasures. The team included Kölbl, a Germanist; and Mayer, a junior professor of international relations. Both were China admirers with no qualifications in virology or epidemiology, and they proceeded to inform the team from a position of authority, at a key moment even providing secret, ready-translated material straight from China. They were plainly cut-outs for hidden and anonymous Chinese advisers.
But here are the important things we don’t and may not ever know:
• The proximate cause of this little fraudulent strategy session was Ferguson’s model, and the proximate cause of Ferguson’s model was the Italian lockdown announced on March 8th-10th. The proximate cause of that lockdown, in turn, was regional containment and mass testing in northern Italy, organised by Walter Ricciardi from February 24th – exactly the day that the WHO held a press conference endorsing the Chinese lockdown in Hubei. Did Ricciardi stumble into lockdowns by accident, after mass testing uncovered community spread? Or was the intent to lock down already on February 24th, and the purpose of testing only to find cases to justify such an extreme measure? If so, why? [Editor’s note: the leap in Italy’s reported daily death toll on March 8th to 133 from 36 the day before, and then to 168 on March 10th, with many ICUs filling to capacity, is likely to have played a large role in the Italian panic in those days.]
• Christian Drosten was only in a position to lean on Seehofer because of the prominence his state media Corona podcast had won him. He started in that role at the end of February. Who put him there, was it related to his PCR test work from January, and which parties was he representing when he pushed for longer lockdowns on March 16th?
• How did German bureaucrats establish contact with Mayer and Kölbl? Whose idea was this bizarre strategy of laundering Chinese advice through transparent low-level academics? Was similar advice provided via the same process to other countries, and if so, who mediated those relationships?
The Chinese snake-oil peddlers are an important, early thread in this tapestry. Even if they are not the whole cloth, they are damning enough. Western epidemiologists and public health bureaucrats ditched their own longstanding mitigationist plans in favour of a mass containment fantasy that they copied wholesale from China. They then sold these unsupported improvisational measures to Westerners with Chinese help, via a deceptive and malicious propaganda campaign. This is a central aspect of the Corona pandemic, and Senger has done more than perhaps any other person to bring it to the notice of the world.
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So far mostly Ukraine interrupting supplies. If only the Germans had another pipeline to increase the capacity via a secure route, such as, say, under the Baltic…..
Germany is on an implosive self-destruct path – self loathing for being German appears to have finally driven them over the edge.
Their best option would be to hand the country over as an un-named ‘territory’ to be exploited by the CIA and the Pentagon as they see fit and just leave it at that.
“Finis Germania’ ,as a German Philosopher, Rolf Peter Sieferle reluctantly concluded just a couple of years ago. is the result of enduring guilt and self-loathing of te very idea of German nation following the Holocaust The composition of the current wokist, feminist, greenist Leftist “Government” “would have been a bad political joke just 20 years ago! How ironic that they are backing Ukraine Azov militia, who wave Nazi flags, wear their emblems and advocate and practice “ethnic cleansing” of Russian speakers !
It looks like they have been ‘elected’ to wrap everything up, sell off the stock and close the shop to both ‘save the planet’ and help Ukraine destroy Russia for the CIA..
Can’t understand what the FDP is doing mixing with such bizarre company- anything for a sniff of power I suppose.
Th AFD is the only party at all interested in retaining and saving “Germany” but of course they are branded ‘Extreme Right’ by the Globalists ( in fact more mainstream old CDU before Merkel) ‘cancelled’ abused, assaulted and ignored by the “virtuous” Leftist Wokist, Globalists -like Merkel – and their ‘on message’ media who run the ‘country’ whatever it says on the ‘party’ ticket .
No way is a dangerous US proxy war with Russia designed to destroy the country , backing a Ukraine victory and stirring up the Poles to occupy Lvov, sending old tanks in to provoke the Russians and cutting the Nordstream pipeline nose to spite the country’s energy needs face just to please the EU, Nato and the Pentagon in Germany’s interests.
You’re making a silly mistake in assuming that the German government is running the show in Germany.
As usual the industry bosses and billionaires are. That also explains all the paradoxical behaviors of political parties acting directly against their own voters’ expectations. And while the average German is stupid, cowardly, brainwashed, envious and quite eager to be whipped on command because of all this, the people at the top (and again, I don’t mean the puppet politicians) are in fact quite clever. This is why Germany is the richest country in Europe – a smart shadow elite with a mass of dumb, obedient worker ants.
It’s arguable whether the elites are protecting “German” interests as such, but they are certainly protecting their own interests and not believing any of the lies that they pump out on a daily basis through media. Just like the US they understand that Germany needs to export their problems to even stupider and more US-subservient countries (e.g. Poland), which will in fact be arranged one way or another to keep the harm away from Germany.
Don’t really know why you have attracted so many down votes. Germany is a mercantile society/economy. Its not at all ‘social democratic’ that people label it. Its elite are in charge and follow their own path. However they are making quite a ‘horlicks’ of their energy policy.
i am not ‘making a silly mistake’ – it is blatantly obvious that the German Government is running nothing in Germany – that in fact was the point I was making, which sadly you seem to have missed
Someone repeating CDU slogans from the 1990, eg Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland! (Germany is not a country people are supposed to immigrate to!) or Asylproblem lösen! (Solve the asylum-seeker problem!) in the Germany of today would certainly called a right-wing extremist bordering a domestic terrorist. But the AfD is no better. These are the people who keep harping on about how small, void of resources and insignificant Germany is and how necessary it would be to remain on a close, friendly footing with our BIG and IMPRESSIVE neighbours, ie, Russia. I don’t care for being sold to Putin instead of having been sold Biden.
Putin doesn’t want you.
A pretty stupid remark in the given context, as I was writing about political groups in Germany seeking a closer collaboration with Russia aka pro-active self-subjugation to Russian interests. These exist in the AfD and also, in the former GDR state party (most recent name Die Linke [The Left] — ironically, link and linken are a German adjective and verb describing the activities of con men ).
The prospect of German- Russian co-operation or worse an “entente” has terrified the Pentagon since the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939.
That was an agreement among equals who both wanted to get rid of Poland. That’s not what the current crop of German russophiles envision. They’re more thinking of a GDR-style situation, Germany becoming a Russian satellite state instead of an American one, or at least one that’s no longer allied to USA but still permantently blocked from having a foreign policy of its own, like Austria.
For a practical example of that, the Germany government has somewhat recently announced that they would put more resoures/ money into the military in future instead of being committed to remain below the NATO-agreed level of defence spending. Since then Sahra Wagenknecht (from Die Linke) has been trying to convince German people that this shouldn’t be done and that (ideally) the German state shouldn’t have any armed forces because We obviously cannot fight a war against nuclear armed Russia!
IMO, that’s clear case of With friends like that, we really don’t need enemies.
Ahhh good old solidarity
Sounds like the centrally planned, technocratic world of the Great Reset.
They’ll be drooling in Davos.
In fact Sunday week… Virefirer…is the next Davostokracy bean fest event – starts 22-26 May. Where our global overlord elite get to mingle and they’ll be in self-congratulatory pat themselves all on the back mode for having done so well with their Build Back Better agenda since 2020. /sarc
Bill of course will be there bragging about the looming next pandemic…
But yes, as we all know us 99% plebs are far too carbon based fossil fuel greedy….so they and GloboCap are openly trying to destroy the petroleum market for their own purposes and agenda.
They will too all fly in to Switzerland on PJs while bleating to us…on and on about man-made climate change – that perennial stick to beat us with – plus the deadly threats of biowarfare and terrorism as their justifications for a massive expansion of the digital matrix surveillance state and their social control over all things, but especially money as we shift to CBDCs.
Meanwhile they are actively working to make oil and gas prices so volatile as to the point of destroying investment in the industry. With Russia’s massive natural resource asset piles and Emperor Puta’s sovereigntist-minded stance tis why he has to go, and yes they’ll throw bi$$ions at it to make it so. This isn’t a war with a diplomatic solution.
Once a WEF approved Puta replacement is installed working together, restoring trust, the usual suspect G7 aligned global collective O&G corps will move in to savour the spoils.
No mater how many of us, ukes and/or ruskies die in the process, when come the 2022 winter many will simply freeze and starve. Its the new normal folks.
https://tomluongo.me/2022/05/12/real-reason-behind-eu-embargo-russia-oil/
Thank you for that link.
What is clear to any serious observer of EU politics is that they are not interested in what their people have to say or want.
Luongo nails it here. How many governments of any description are interested in anything “their people have to say or want”. Their interest in polls is only that of helping them decide what stories to tell them.
Even the pretence of democratic government is disappearing. I liked to remind people that politicians are our paid employees, and they should behave accordingly – not like our lords and masters. I no longer bother. It would make me sound far too old-fashioned.
Theirs is an agenda which will brook no opposition, even if it means destroying its own economy to bring a rival to its knees. (Luongo)
This certainly appears to be true of the US and the EU. Others, more cravenly, are principally concerned with displaying their servility to their masters (like the US and the EU).
The sin of the Russians (it’s not only Putin we’re talking about here) is that they will not allow their country to be laid waste again.
It was devastated in the Second World War, with a loss of life that was far worse than decimation; and devastated in the 1990s, as it was made a stomping ground to be plundered. That last devastation also cost millions of lives.
The Russians know what an existential crisis is. They will not be brought to their knees again.
Looking at the age of those in charge, more like dribbling!
Funny you should say that:
“These people are destroying Germany….Demilitarisation is what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Denazification is what Russia is doing in Ukraine. What Ursula von der Leyen, the EU and the United States is doing to Germany is deindustrialisation.”
.…..
“The Germany we will see coming out of this will be a completely different country. It will be a country which, to be straightforward about it, will fulfill the WEF’s dreams.”
https://youtu.be/__nkvIluFMM
A harsh lesson in the consequences of letting fanatics get into power in your country, whether they are green nutters, socialist nutters or woke globalist Russia-haters (but I repeat myself).
And Putin is a socialist
Nah. Don’t be silly.
Everything Von der Leyen touches turns to dust – look at the Bundeswehr!
In some circles it’s believed putting and end to the technocratic world of the great reset is just one of Putin’s objectives when intervening in Ukraine.
‘sounds like the centrally planned,technocratic world of Great Britain’
Does that work for you Stewart?
What’s the old saying?
“Play stupid games…’
They will be introducing a 10 year plan for tractor production next.
Some very strange comments here
‘A harsh lesson in the consequences of letting fanatics get into power in your country…’
Indeed:
‘Three Russian prisoners of war accused of targeting or murdering civilians, and a soldier who allegedly killed a man before raping his wife, are set to be in the dock in the first war crimes trials of the Ukraine conflict, the Ukrainian prosecutor general has revealed.
More than 10,700 crimes have been registered since the war began by the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general.’
The Guardian 11 May 22
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger
Pilgerism:
Conducting journalism in a manner supposedly characteristic of John Pilger, or, more specifically, as presenting information in a sensationalist manner to support a foregone conclusion; using emotive language to make a false political point; treating a subject emotionally with generous disregard for inconvenient detail; or making a pompous judgement on wrong premises.
Why did the Guardian publish his article? Emotive language or not, he is spot on.
You can’t have it both ways – referencing a G article to support your one-eyed and simplistic interpretation, but deriding other (older) articles that clearly describe the reality!
Checkmate.
More like 1. f3
Oh yes I can.
Condemning an entire newspaper would be just plain silly.
Quoting the Oxford English Dictionary circa 1990 is simply informative, allowing the readers here to make up their own minds.
Well done!
Give yourself a big pat on the back. Oh! You already have.
Grauniad…..
Ahaahaaahaaaa….
My point, exactly.
Bless!
Irony is lost on you poor souls. They don’t dish out critical comprehension skills in the Brigade do they.
And “bless”, almost as pathetic as “sweetie”
There was nothing in the statement Grauniad…..Ahaahaaahaaaa…. to indicate irony, so the fault of the author rather than readers if that was the intended meaning.
It seems likely that Monro suspected an ironic intent but decided to take it at face value anyway. That’s always the peril of using ironic or sarcastic tools without making it obvious.
Oh and somnol sticks it’s head out after coming on shift.
We’re just waiting for tripleduped to make up the platoon.
Ouch!
Thanks.
Sweetie would have been so much better.
Maybe think about changing your picture to Scooby Doo?
In other news: Ukrainians have such an acute sense of humour their Comedian leader is a billionaire.
Scotland leads the way in comedian leaders, but clearly not in commentary.
You might want to consider and investigate whether war crimes have been committed by the Ukrainians, particularly the Azov Brigade. The three soldiers in question may well be guilty, but it does not mean that the Russian Army as a whole is guilty. Also registering a crime does not mean it actually happened.
What about this:
Bloomberg: EU develops plan to buy gas from Russia without violating sanctions
The European Union intends to offer gas importers a solution that, on the one hand, allows them to avoid violating sanctions when buying fuel in Russia, and, on the other hand, to satisfy the requirements of the Russian Federation to pay in rubles.
The executive body of the EU at a closed meeting allowed the governments of European countries to open ruble accounts in Gazprombank and buy Russian gas. However, companies must make a clear statement that they consider their obligations fulfilled when they pay in euros or dollars in accordance with existing contracts. After that, European buyers should not require any action from Russia regarding payment.
The EU’s executive body has told governments that the guidance will allow them to buy gas without violating anti-Russian sanctions.
According to Putin’s decree, companies must open two accounts with Gazprombank – one in euros and one in rubles. At the same time, payments for gas are not credited until the conversion of euros into rubles.
Earlier it was reported that 20 European companies have already opened ruble accounts with Gazprombank, 14 have requested documents for opening an account, and 4 have already made a payment in rubles.
The plot thickens……
Finland is in payment arrears, according to Russia. No idea if that’s true.
Ukraine shut off the European gas, not bcc Russia. That’s Ukraine weaponising Russian gas and holding European citizens hostage.of course, this is done at the behest of the the US, UK and EU for specific purposes and agendas.
The wonderful and magical world of central planning …
Am I the only one wondering why, if the business of surviving without Russian gas is such a herculean task, why no one from the EU or anywhere else for that matter, is attempting to get the two sides to a table to talk about a cease-fire and some solution around territory. Turkey perhaps, or the French..?
Good gracious, this sort of practical, logical, down to Earth, common sense, realistic thinking just will not do in the new speak, new think, modern world! Can you imagine if people had thought like this we would not have had lock-downs, face-masks or universal vaccines, people would not be wringing their hands in despair over a climate change that nobody can actually find. I fear you are going to have to mend your ways, re-programme your thinking and get back on message before it is too late.
Perhaps the point is the clearance of people and buildings from the country, so we can step in and steal natural resources under the guise of ‘rebuilding’…
Rumours abound just now that senior NATO officers and staff have surrendered @ Azovstal
https://mobile.twitter.com/GonzaloLira1968/status/1525865485149011969?s=20https://twitter.com/GonzaloLira1968/status/1525865485149011969?s=20
Somebody has been protected at Azovstal. The efforts to prevent surrender to the Russians (from both within Azovstal and outside it) have been extraordinary.
Which is why Sec. Austin was soooo interested in speaking to Sec. Shoigun recently.
Worried about a US 4 star General and a UK Lt Col. appearing on Russian TV……
Oh what a treat that would be! Would be censored in Johnsonland of course!
Well, well …what goes around comes around. Is that what has taken the Russians so long?
They wanted whoever was there alive; and they insisted that they surrender to them – not to the UN or Red Cross (fine for the civilians).
Lovely jubbly
.
Far by less people would have died if the west just let Ukraine fall then did the sanctions they are currently doing.
the invasion by Russia is not right but not is prolonging the invasion and creating a proxy war.
Surely, the West doesn’t really care how many people die?
The terms almost agreed upon in Istanbul are revealing.
The Ukrainians knew by the end of the first week that they were in terrible trouble; but Zelensky was given firm instructions, and the possibilities of a swift end with relatively few casualties were gone.
The west doesn’t care how many non western people die, is likely more accurate.
It seems that putting one of your boots on the necks of European people’s, and with the other, trampling on all ideas of liberty and personal autonomy is easy stuff, and can be achieved in the blinking of an eye.
Strategic planning, true political savvy, forward thinking and vision, plus realpolitik in a world not full of eco greens and wokery are well beyond the abilities of this ersatz crew of hucksters and crooked operators.
I’m sure the windmills will provide …….
Oh.
Rumours abound now that everyone in the West is starving:
‘British pensioners eat toothpaste for dinner…’
RIA Novosti 16 April 22