“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – George Orwell
For those of you in tune, it must seem obvious that the liberal world order now has the power to change the number of hours in a day. Those of us who have sought to moderate the worldview of Russia, of Vladimir Putin even, are now only muffled annoyances for the “normal people” who get their brain set from CNN, BBC, ABC, or from their brainwashed friends on Facebook. Not only has Russian state television been silenced around the world, but societal institutions of every kind have also been brought to bear on the Russians. Huge technology companies, corporations, financial institutions, media companies, NGOs, and even sports organizations have collaborated at the behest of western billionaires to crush the Russians if they can.
It’s unprecedented in my lifetime, in the lifetimes of my father and my grandfather, and in the volumes of history I’ve read since childhood. I’m confident, there’s never been a force, visible or invisible, wielded like this in the history of the world. And no one, almost no one is even bothering to ask the only pertinent question, “Why?” For at least 15 years, every think tank, newspaper, magazine, or geopolitical genius in the western hemisphere has been telling us what Vladimir Putin wants. I don’t need to remind anyone. It’s as if the American-led order not only wished for this moment to arrive, but the elites also who run our world conjured it like some Satanic priests summoning hell. Here we are, they finally pushed Russia into the corner, jabbed the sticks into the bear, and now they gleefully chant and point, jumping up and down, “See, see, see, we told you so!”
I only wish I had something to add, something that most of you reading this need in order to decipher the berserk situation we find ourselves in. You are informed about the kleptocrats ousted from Russia by Putin. You already know the reasons for NATO’s existence. Big energy’s role is well documented. America’s exceptionalism has been discussed, time and time again. Britain, the Queen Mother, the CIA, NSA, GCHQ, and all the acronyms are already discussed. Even the people trapped inside the propaganda dome in my country understand how all the shadowy players operate. We grew up knowing.
From the standpoint of somebody who’s studied Putin and the Russians from a friendlier point of view, this whole situation is right out of the novel The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger. There’s a moment in the book where the narrator, Holden Caulfield walks into a dormitory room in the Edmont Hotel and observes a man putting on silk stockings, high heels, a bra, a corset, and an evening gown. He also sees a man and a woman in another room taking turns spitting mouthfuls of their drinks into each other’s faces, as they laugh hysterically. And like many of you reading this, I sometimes wonder if it is not me who sees things with lopsided intellect? Are we observing the nuthouse, the lunatics in the grass from the Pink Floyd song? Or, are we patients in the whacko farm? I wonder if it’s possible that Russia securing its closest border through military action, is really a lesser evil than America invading countries ten thousand miles away? Could we be wrong? Is Vladimir Putin that Moriarty who never, ever, ever gets caught? Certainly not! Jeffrey Epstein was caught, our presidents and British princes did take a wild ride on the “Lolita Express,” the people who run the shit show do rape young girls and joke about it. The NSA does spy on us all. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are helping Big Brother destroy Putin or anybody in the way of “progress.” You know I am not dreaming. I think, instead, that like all of the rest of you I’m falling. We are all trapped in a surreal theater where, as Salinger wrote:
“This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”
A Cretan man I know, the guy who delivers coffee from a local shop, stood for fifteen minutes he didn’t have to listen to my answer to his question yesterday. “What do you think of the Russia-Ukraine thing?” Every two minutes I took a pause and realized how intelligent and how worried the man was, to stand flat footed and listen like that. I told him about what I know of Vladimir Putin. He understood when I said I’d studied the man as much as anyone the past 10 years. When I was done he seemed satisfied, sure that all any of us can do is pray now. I can share with you the point at which I witnessed the poor man’s surrender to reality.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.