Now

Like a Church

The opening.



The strange titles prelude, driven by Kenyon Hopkins's cool.



And the quiet. . .



Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961) became mythic upon arrival. The movie was top box office for '61 and '62, was nominated for nine Oscars (winning for Eugene Shuftan's beautiful and mysterious photography; and for Gene Callahan's sets, although the main poolroom was a real one three-floors above Times Square). The character of "Fast Eddie" Felson (played by Paul Newman) became an instant pop culture icon. Yet the movie -- similar to Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1959) with which it shares much -- is at war with itself; unlike Minnelli, a fracturing director Robert Rossen fails to heal, leaving us with a flawed masterpiece -- two worlds fluttering wildly into incoherence: the energy, purity, and life of the game; and the oppressive grim distractions of what is supposed to be Eddie's salvation from the game: life with Piper Laurie.

The beautiful Carol Rossen was the director's daughter, and that special (and forgotten) actress has said many times that for her father The Hustler was a very personal work. It shows. Everything in the film flows from a lone sacral respect, a single outrage and tenderness. (For good and bad.) Yet Robert Rossen is problematic from any "auteurist" point-of-view. He was producer, writer, and director from the late-30s to the middle-60s. The Hustler apart, his lasting output is thin. He wrote The Roaring Twenties (1939) for Walsh, The Sea Wolf (1941) and A Walk in the Sun (1945) during the war, a couple of second-rate post-war noirs The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and Johnny O'Clock (1947) -- his first direction. His second was Body and Soul (1947). Among the late-40s/early-50s boxing movie explosion, it may be the most humanly interesting and philosophically inert. Garfield is great, yet to compare it to Force of Evil (1948) is to expose its meaninglessness. (Abraham Polonsky -- Body and Soul's screenwriter and the maker of Force of Evil -- would eventually be helped along toward professional extinction by Robert Rossen's HUAC testimony.) In 1949, Rossen directed, wrote and produced that year's Oscar champ: All the King's Men, a demagogic view of a supposed demogogue. Rossen's fictionalized Huey Long is not a passionate populist leader breaking heads in pursuit of genuine 1930s socialism, but the frightening embodiment of a government activist conman. (Thomas Dewey must have cheered.) The Hollywood Blacklist nightmare had begun.

Rossen's 50s output is chum. Released the same year as Boetticher's Bullfighter and the Lady, Rossen's The Brave Bulls (1951) is safe. At the end of the decade there is They Came to Cordura (1959) -- a strange and unpleasant western-trying-hard-not-to-be-a-western that has its fans. What's most interesting about Cordura is the tortured (and already dying) Gary Cooper. But in '53 Robert Rossen would leave his mark on the decade by testifying before HUAC, naming 57 colleagues as suspected "communists." So let us call The Hustler a miracle. . .

And the first match between Fast Eddie and Minnesota Fats is indeed that, as perfect a 20 minutes as has ever been filmed.



The respect and care and intimacy shown toward all things. The room's boodle-boy, maids, the owner/manager. Each man's gestures and body movement (the only glimpses of anything female here are what we see of the room's black maids). The time of day. Thirst, hunger, and exhaustion. The attention paid toward the respectful spectators. And what faces they have! Greedy, direct, too impatient for hypocrisy. In love with honest sport. Rossen and DP Eugene Shuftan's wide-screen spacing is at times as radical as that season's Last Year at Marienbad or L'Avventura, without a hint of abstraction. Fast Eddie's world becomes born to us by this scene; and by the opening in the ramsackle bar, where Eddie and Charlie happily take the rubes while winding up back in their beat-up junker: gasoline and bus stations, cheap motels, drive-ins, mechanic shops, diners, factories, steel mills.

Gleason steals the match, and the scene.

FELSON

That old fat man. . .

Look at the way he moves,

like a dancer. And them fingers,

them chubby fingers. And that

stroke. It's like he's playing

a violin or something.

Gleason's Minnesota Fats was an invention of novelist Walter Tevis and the movie. (Some pool player took the name after The Hustler became a hit, doing very well for himself.) We believe Fats can do anything. And the movie's belief in him is both honest and childlike. He is devoid of personality beyond the heroic, as our first sports heroes were. As Fast Eddie's object of glory, what Rossen gives us of Fats is enough. But why stop there? Gleason demands much more. Where is the conversation (over JTS Brown) between Fats and Eddie? Or seeing what arrangements have been made between Fats and manager Bert Gordon (George C. Scott), for Fats seems scared of him. Here the movie genuflects before a world functioning on the relaxation of men taking, or not, another step up at just the right moment. Inside the tension, the scene swims through some warm mood deeper than air, and there's an intimation of treachery one can recover only in a dream, as if alone in a room, windows shut, and a paper has blown from the table.

Eddie loses and leaves his partner behind. He meets a girl in a bus station, begins an affair with her. At her place, he flops.

And begins to hustle on the side.



Charlie finds him: the great Myron McCormick. Like Cooper in Cordura, dying of cancer.



Eddie finds Bert Gordon.



What exactly are we supposed to loathe and fear about Bert Gordon? Funny, brilliant, super-straight and tough -- he would be a great manager (until you crossed him or began to lose your stuff) and he wants to take Fast Eddie (and himself) to the top. What's wrong with this or the way Gordon plans to do it? Is it the 75 (to him)/25 cut he demands? What is Eddie supposed to do in its place? Manage himself, having gotten rid of Charlie? Scuffle around in back alleys -- maybe open up "a little pool room with six tables and a handbook on the side"? Paul Newman was 36 when he made The Hustler, but Felson in the movie seems barely out of his 20s. Again: what is Rossen and co-screenwriter Sydney Carroll leaning on Felson (and us) to understand? Settle down with his very disturbed girlfriend, have some babies, maybe become an early-60s Tin Man? Which parts of Bert Gordon's advice should we shun? Which judgments on Eddie's character and game? What piece of Gordon's plan to put Eddie's talents to good use seems wrong? It feels as if we're to turn away in horror from Gordon's ideas of what it means to be "a loser."

Why?



Isn't Gordon saying that "a loser" is someone who doesn't have the strength and purity of heart to live his life from the core of his talent? To never let up. To always let the talent dominate the room, rather than the other way around. And that only people with special talent are worth bothering with. The purity and exclusivity of it is cruel and illiberal. And this was 1961. What if a society devolved into where the only "talents" honored were those of aggression and domination? What if one's talents flowed from a sense of honor instead? Gordon accuses Eddie of intentionally losing by needless drinking and exhaustion, of not knowing when to declare victory. Yet doesn't the game go on and on because of Felson's respect for the Fat Man?

Refusing the 75/25 split, Eddie quits Bert Gordon. But not before being warned about taking his game into the wrong places. Advice he ignores.



Broken, he returns to Sarah, who dutifully heals him. And for a brief time, The Hustler blossoms with that second knowledge which is part of one's childhood, and which so rarely returns for men and women. During their picnic together, Rossen makes us feel as if they had known each other perfectly as children, and now as man and woman meet in full, further sympathy. Perhaps only after suffering and defeat can the naked intuition again break free between a man and a woman.



Broken, Fast Eddie also returns to Bert Gordon.



It is with the person of Sarah Packard where the cracks in Robert Rossen's artistic character are revealed. She is a holdover from the 40s and 50s where Hollywood male directors took the suffocations of the nuclear family and defined them not by corporate/Cold War culture (Ray's Bigger Than Life [1956] and Sirk's Imitation of Life [1959] are exceptions) -- but by a spider woman. Often limited by definition to glamorous, sexual ladies such as Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Ava Gardner in The Killers, Jean Simmons in Angel Face and Gaby Rodgers in Kiss Me Deadly, these women are just as often regular girlfriends or wives portrayed as parasites. Or saviors. (One of the many great things about Out of the Past is how the small-town blonde is seen as a weakening, not as a savior.) Rarely do we see boyfriends or husbands this way, Hitchcock's The Wrong Man an exclusive.

Sarah Packard is lonely, rather plain, and lame -- and seems to feel about Fast Eddie the way she accuses Bert Gordon of feeling about him: hating all that could cause her to lose him, to keep him in the clutch of her hand. She doesn't want him to feel too alive, to win too much, to drink and eat too well. Of the hangers-on, she is one of the hardest to root for. Does Rossen know this?

Preminger's great Man with the Golden Arm (1955) has ex-junkie and would-be drummer Frankie Machine (Sinatra) torn between the sexual ardency of a young Kim Novak and the insane guilt caused by Zosch (Eleanor Parker), a "cripple." Parker is lovely and moving throughout, but the movie plays it small at the end.



As with so many things, Vincente Minnelli in Some Came Running (1959) takes the hanger-on cliche and makes it beautiful. Sinatra (originally cast to play Eddie Felson) is caught. He longs for a bright frigid blonde college teacher, who wants nothing sexually to do with him (and who is sort of a well-born version of Sarah), while he is being longed for by a dumb working-class pushover, in Dean Martin's words -- "a pig."

Yet no one has ever felt that way about him before. Maybe he can help her.



Who can Sarah help?



Is Rossen testing the depths of our compassion by making her so pathetic and unappealing?

The movie and Rossen seem to be caught between two storms. His embrace of Sarah is meaningful and sincere, yet rather than test our compassion toward her, he is not up to it: failure and weakness and fear are perhaps things he hasn't known. He is also not up to what was happening: that the country's heart was opening, "losers" would be as interesting as winners, the gentle and lost would be recognized, aggression and domination less so. The change would be smothered in its crib, leading to our current jungle. As Eddie says, if a guy knows -- if he knows what he's doing and why and can make it come off. With the crippled and weak, not here for Rossen. But Rossen in the vanishing world of rooted men and rooted success is as great as his main character.

Oooops

Tulsi vs. Bitch Doll

Can You Forgive Her?

She is madly in love with him, like a schoolgirl, making things perfect for him in his absence ~ her place, his dinner, herself. He is, Devlin (Cary Grant), an American intelligence agent in the days before there was CIA. And he is her recruiter, down in Rio, against a postwar Nazi bund looking to acquire atomic secrets.

He is her torturer, now arriving with their first assignment.



Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is the beautiful daughter of a convicted Nazi traitor, a recent suicide cheating his life sentence. When we see her Miami life, she's surrounded by -- beyond the feral reporters and cops -- dumpy sexless middle-aged drunks and poop-a-doops. Enter Devlin. (We never learn his first name.) When we first see him, it's the back of his head we see. And we stay inside that head throughout. For Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) is in the grip of Mr. Devlin's torturous, raging, ice-cold hatred (born of fear) of Alicia Huberman's sex. (A hate matched astonishingly by Ted Tetzlaff's sinister, silver-plate photography.) The most engaged great actor we have ever had is estranged here from all things, except his own burning. Grant's face does not light up once in the 102 minutes. His loathing of her has little to do with Alicia's father's past and all to do with the past of her scent, her body, skin and taste. His lust for her is overwhelming and petrifying. He has recordings of her and her father, recordings he uses to prove her "patriotism" and love for America. Actually, daggers to the heart, for she is already his; and Devlin has other recordings of her as well, of a different sort. Recordings of her bedroom, sofa and terrace, her bathroom. No wonder his look at her is hard from the start, before they have even met. All he thinks, he already knows. . . and when he reveals the recordings, he is delighted. And when he tells her of her father's death, it's as if he's asking her to pass the salt. . .

Devlin is being driven mad by his need to have it all, especially her past. Hitchcock makes it clear that he has had it from the beginning, much as Scottie has all of Madeleine / Judy a dozen years later in Vertigo (1958). And, like Scottie, he's blind to it, so at each opportunity he does what he can to break her "tramp's heart." Yet the only other decent-looking man we see is Devlin's boss Paul Prescott (Louis Calhern) -- clearly no rival, even if others regularly remark on his good looks. Devlin sends Alicia on her way toward the physical embrace, and marriage, with the short, fey, unattractive Claude Rains as Alexander Sebastian. What if Sebastian had been a stud, a true threat to Devlin's game? A different picture all together. Perhaps a greater one.

At the center is the crucified. Alicia's ripped apart by the sexual possessiveness and torment of three people -- Devlin, her dream man; Sebastian, her husband; and a figure straight out of Carl Dreyer's Day of Wrath, Sebastian's mother (Leopoldine Konstantin).

When the turn of the screw comes, it is in the forms of a key, party champagne running low, and a wine bottle filled with uranium ore. Alicia is "saved" at the end -- but from what and especially toward what? In the midst of postwar triumphalism, Hitchcock presents us with a dead world, an ice-cold Cold War world where the weak and confused and relaxed are destroyed. At the end, the "fat-headed guy, full of pain" does rescue her ~ temporarily overcoming his torture and sending his rival to sure death without a moment's look-back. Alicia Huberman's unavailability and physical possession by Sebastian distracts his torment. Yet the entire time Devlin is with her he treats her with contempt. Are we to believe the sadistic control he has over her will not continue into and through a marriage? It is there before, all the way -- before she gives herself to another man as Devlin stands by, before she marries the man. Will it not be there going forward? As Alicia lived a childhood dominated and destroyed by an evil father, she will now perhaps live a marriage dominated and destroyed by a sinister husband. Even if he is Cary Grant. . .

Hot Take

The wonderful Clare Daly.

 

Smelling a Rat

George Galloway.

 

Tucker

Yes, that's where we are ~ Tucker!

Self Destruction

Michael Hudson.

Empires often follow the course of a Greek tragedy, bringing about precisely the fate that they sought to avoid. That certainly is the case with the American Empire as it dismantles itself in not-so-slow motion.

The basic assumption of economic and diplomatic forecasting is that every country will act in its own self-interest. Such reasoning is of no help in today’s world. Observers across the political spectrum are using phrases like “shooting themselves in their own foot” to describe U.S. diplomatic confrontation with Russia and allies alike. But nobody thought that The American Empire would self-destruct this fast.

For more than a generation the most prominent U.S. diplomats have warned about what they thought would represent the ultimate external threat: an alliance of Russia and China dominating Eurasia. America’s economic sanctions and military confrontation have driven these two countries together, and are driving other countries into their emerging Eurasian orbit.

American economic and financial power was expected to avert this fate. During the half-century since the United States went off gold in 1971, the world’s central banks have operated on the Dollar Standard, holding their international monetary reserves in the form of U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank deposits and U.S. stocks and bonds. The resulting Treasury-bill Standard has enabled America to finance its foreign military spending and investment takeover of other countries simply by creating dollar IOUs. U.S. balance-of-payments deficits end up in the central banks of payments-surplus countries as their reserves, while Global South debtors need dollars to pay their bondholders and conduct their foreign trade.

This monetary privilege – dollar seignorage – has enabled U.S. diplomacy to impose neoliberal policies on the rest of the world, without having to use much military force of its own except to grab Near Eastern oil.

The recent escalation of U.S. sanctions blocking Europe, Asia and other countries from trade and investment with Russia, Iran and China has imposed enormous opportunity costs – the cost of lost opportunities – on U.S. allies. And the recent confiscation of the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, Afghanistan and now Russia,[1] along with the targeted grabbing of bank accounts of wealthy foreigners (hoping to win their hearts and minds, enticed by the hope for the return of their sequestered accounts), has ended the idea that dollar holdings – or now also assets in sterling and euro NATO satellites of the dollar – are a safe investment haven when world economic conditions become shaky.

So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two. The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving Dollar Diplomacy a free ride. I thought that de-dollarization would be led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on the United States.[2] But U.S. officials are forcing Russia, China and other nations not locked into the U.S. orbit to see the writing on the wall and overcome whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.

I had expected that the end of the dollarized imperial economy would come about by other countries breaking away. But that is not what has happened. U.S. diplomats themselves have chosen to end international dollarization, while helping Russia build up its own means of self-reliant agricultural and industrial production. This global fracture process actually has been going on for some years, starting with the sanctions blocking America’s NATO allies and other economic satellites from trading with Russia. For Russia, these sanctions had the same effect that protective tariffs would have had.

Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market neoliberal ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture and industry. The United States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic self-reliance on Russia. When the Baltic states obeyed American sanctions and lost the Russian market for their cheese and other farm products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.

Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations of its dollar and euro reserves may finally lead Russia to end its adherence to neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating, in favor of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

The same dynamic of undercutting ostensible U.S aims has occurred with U.S. sanctions against the leading Russian billionaires. The neoliberal shock therapy and privatizations of the 1990s left Russian kleptocrats with only one way to cash out on the assets they had grabbed from the public domain. That was to incorporate their takings and sell their shares in London and New York. Domestic savings had been wiped out, and U.S. advisors persuaded Russia’s central bank not to create its own ruble money.

The result was that Russia’s national oil, gas and mineral patrimony was not used to finance a rationalization of Russian industry and housing. Instead of the revenue from privatization being invested to create new Russian means of protection, it was burned up on nouveau-riche acquisitions of luxury British real estate, yachts and other global flight-capital assets. But the effect of sanctions making the dollar, sterling and euro holdings of Russian billionaires hostage has been to make the City of London too risky a venue in which to hold their assets – and for the wealthy of any other nation potentially subject to U.S. sanctions. By imposing sanctions on the richest Russians closest to Putin, U.S. officials hoped to induce them to oppose his breakaway from the West, and thus to serve effectively as NATO agents-of-influence. But for Russian billionaires, their own country is starting to look safest.

For many decades now, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury have fought against gold recovering its role in international reserves. But how will India and Saudi Arabia view their dollar holdings as Biden and Blinken try to strong-arm them into following the U.S. “rules-based order” instead of their own national self-interest? The recent U.S. dictates have left little alternative but to start protecting their own political autonomy by converting dollar and euro holdings into gold as an asset free from political liability of being held hostage to the increasingly costly and disruptive U.S. demands.

U.S. diplomacy has rubbed Europe’s nose in its abject subservience by telling its governments to have their companies dump their Russian assets for pennies on the dollar after Russia’s foreign reserves were blocked and the ruble’s exchange rate plunged. Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investors moved quickly to buy up what Shell Oil and other foreign companies were unloading.

Nobody thought that the postwar 1945-2020 world order would give way this fast. A truly new international economic order is emerging, although it is not yet clear just what form it will take. But the confrontations resulting from “prodding the Bear” with the U.S./NATO aggression against Russia has passed critical-mass level. It no longer is just about Ukraine. That is merely the trigger, a catalyst for driving much of the world away from the US/NATO orbit.

The next showdown may come within Europe itself as nationalist politicians seek to lead a break-away from the over-reaching U.S. power-grab over its European and other allies to keep them dependent on U.S.-based trade and investment. The price of their continuing obedience is to impose cost-inflation on their industry while subordinating their democratic electoral politics to America’s NATO proconsuls.

These consequences cannot really be deemed “unintended.” Too many observers have pointed out exactly what would happen – headed by President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov explaining just what their response would be if NATO insisted on backing them into a corner while attacking Eastern Ukrainian Russian-speakers and moving heavy weaponry to Russia’s Western border. The consequences were anticipated. The neocons in control of U.S. foreign policy simply didn’t care. Recognizing Russian concerns was deemed to make one a Putinversteher.

European officials did not feel uncomfortable in telling the world about their worries that Donald Trump was crazy and upsetting the apple cart of international diplomacy. But they seem to have been blindsided by the Biden Administration’s resurgence of visceral Russia-hatred via Secretary of State Blinken and Victoria Nuland-Kagan. Trump’s mode of expression and mannerisms may have been uncouth, but America’s neocon gang have much more globally threatening confrontation obsessions. For them, it was a question of whose reality would emerge victorious: the “reality” that they believed they could make, or economic reality outside of U.S. control.

What foreign countries have not done for themselves to replace the IMF, World Bank and other strongarms of U.S. diplomacy, American politicians are forcing them to do. Instead of European, Near Eastern and Global South countries breaking away as they calculate their own long-term economic interests, America is driving them away, as it has done with Russia and China. More politicians are seeking voter support by asking whether their countries would be better served by new monetary arrangements to replace dollarized trade, investment and even foreign debt service.

The energy and food price squeeze is hitting Global South countries especially hard, coinciding with their own Covid-19 problems and the looming dollarized debt service coming due. Something must give. How long will these countries impose austerity to pay foreign bondholders?

How will the U.S. and European economies cope in the face of their sanctions against imports of Russian gas and oil, cobalt, aluminum, palladium and other basic materials. American diplomats have made a list of raw materials that their economy desperately needs and which therefore are exempt from the trade sanctions being imposed. This provides Mr. Putin a handy list of U.S. pressure points to use in reshaping world diplomacy and helping European and other countries break away from the Iron Curtain that America has imposed to lock its satellites into dependence on high-priced U.S. supplies?

But the final breakaway from NATO’s adventurism must come from within the United States itself. As this year’s midterm elections approach, politicians will find a fertile ground in showing U.S. voters that the price inflation led by gasoline and energy is a policy byproduct of the Biden Administration’s blocking of Russian oil and gas exports. (Bad news for owners of big SUV gas guzzlers!) Gas is needed not only for heating and energy production, but to make fertilizer, of which there already is a world shortage. This situation is exacerbated by blocking Russian and Ukrainian grain exports to the United States and Europe, causing food prices already to soar.

There already is a striking disconnect between the financial sector’s view of reality and that promoted in the mainstream NATO media. Europe’s stock markets plunged at their opening on Monday, March 7, while Brent oil soared to $130 a barrel. The BBC’s morning “Today” news broadcast featured Conservative MT Alan Duncan, an oil trader, warning that the near doubling of prices in natural gas futures threatened to bankrupt companies committed to supplying gas to Europe at the old rates. But returning to the military ‘Two Minutes of Hate” news, the reports kept applauding the brave Ukrainian fighters and NATO politicians urging more military support. In New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 239 points, and gold soared to over $2,000 an ounce – reflecting the financial sector’s view of how the U.S. game is likely to play out.

Trying to force Russia to respond militarily and thereby look bad to the rest of the world is turning out to be a stunt aimed simply at ensuring Europe contribute more to NATO, buy more U.S. military hardware and lock itself deeper into trade and monetary dependence on the United States. The instability that this has caused is turning out to have the effect of making the United States look as threatening as Russia is claimed to be by the NATO West.

But the final breakaway from NATO’s adventurism must come from within the United States itself. As this year’s midterm elections approach, politicians will find a fertile ground in showing U.S. voters that the price inflation led by gasoline and energy is a policy byproduct of the Biden Administration’s blocking of Russian oil and gas exports. (Bad news for owners of big SUV gas guzzlers!) Gas is needed not only for heating and energy production, but to make fertilizer, of which there already is a world shortage. This situation is exacerbated by blocking Russian and Ukrainian grain exports to the United States and Europe, causing food prices already to soar.

There already is a striking disconnect between the financial sector’s view of reality and that promoted in the mainstream NATO media. Europe’s stock markets plunged at their opening on Monday, March 7, while Brent oil soared to $130 a barrel. The BBC’s morning “Today” news broadcast featured Conservative MP Alan Duncan, an oil trader, warning that the near doubling of prices in natural gas futures threatened to bankrupt companies committed to supplying gas to Europe at the old rates. But returning to the military “Two Minutes of Hate” news, the BBC kept applauding the brave Ukrainian fighters and NATO politicians urging more military support. In New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 650 points, and gold soared to over $2,000 an ounce – reflecting the financial sector’s view of how the U.S. game is likely to play out. Nickel prices rose by even more – 40 percent.

Trying to force Russia to respond militarily and thereby look bad to the rest of the world is turning out to be a stunt aimed simply at ensuring Europe contribute more to NATO, buy more U.S. military hardware and lock itself deeper into trade and monetary dependence on the United States. The instability that this has caused is turning out to have the effect of making the United States look as threatening as Russia is claimed to be by the NATO West.

Listen!

Stop drooling over the beautiful Russian stewardesses and listen to the man!

 

Sanction This

Russian Model Kristina Shcherbinina.

 

From Russia with Love

All things Russian have been demonized and degraded: athletes, vodka, Tolstoy, movies, Stravinsky, college students, Fantasia, cats. And this coming from the dumbest, most violent, most corrupt and insipid culture in the history of man.

The Bolshoi Ballet, Balanchine's Jewels.

Russians with Attitude

The famous TIME cover about the US/NATO destruction of Serbia, being projected onto the front of the US embassy in Moscow. What's good for the Goose is good for the Gander. (And it's also good for the 2,000 new genders discovered for the first time in human history by the Woke Wad!)

The West is Dead VI

Pepe Escobar and Richard Medved.

Crazy Like a Fox

 Scott Ritter:

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine goes on, the world wonders what the reason was behind such a precipitous act. The pro-Ukraine crowd has put forth a narrative constructed around the self-supporting themes of irrationality on the part of a Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his post-Cold War fantasies of resurrecting the former Soviet Union.

This narrative ignores that, far from acting on a whim, the Russian president is working from a playbook that he initiated as far back as 2007, when he addressed the Munich Security Conference and warned the assembled leadership of Europe of the need for a new security framework to replace existing unitary system currently in place, built as it was around a trans-Atlantic alliance (NATO) led by the United States.

Moreover, far from seeking the reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, Putin is simply pursuing a post-Cold War system which protects the interests and security of the Russian people, including those who, through no fault of their own, found themselves residing outside the borders of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In this age of politicized narrative shaping, which conforms to the demands of domestic political imperatives as opposed to geopolitical reality, fact-based logic is not in vogue. For decades now, the Russian leadership has been confronting a difficult phenomenon where Western democracies, struggling to deal with serious fractures derived from their own internal weakness, produce political leadership lacking in continuity of focus and purpose in foreign and national security relations.

Whereas Russia has had the luxury of having consistent leadership for the past two decades, and can look to another decade or more of the same, Western leadership is transient in nature. One need only reflect on the fact that Putin has, in his time in office, dealt with five U.S. presidents who, because of the alternating nature of the political parties occupying the White House, have produced policies of an inconsistent and contradictory nature.

The White House is held hostage to the political constraints imposed by the reality of domestic partisan politics. “It’s the economy, stupid” resonates far more than any fact-based discussion about the relevance of post-Cold War NATO. What passes for a national discussion on the important issues of foreign and national security are, more often than not, reduced to pithy phrases. The complexities of a balanced dialogue are replaced by a good-versus-evil simplicity more readily digested by an electorate where potholes and tax rates matter more than geopolitics.

West Germany joined NATO in 1955, which led to the formation of the rival Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. (Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Rather than try to explain to the American people the historical roots of Putin’s concerns with an expanding NATO membership, or the impracticalities associated with any theoretical reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, the U.S. political elite instead define Putin as an autocratic dictator (he is not) possessing grandiose dreams of a Russian-led global empire (no such dreams exist).

It is impossible to reason with a political counterpart whose policy formulations need to conform with ignorance-based narratives. Russia, confronted with the reality that neither the U.S. nor NATO were willing to engage in a responsible discussion about the need for a European security framework which transcended the inherent instability of an expansive NATO seeking to encroach directly on Russia’s borders, took measures to change the framework in which such discussions would take place.

Russia had been seeking to create a neutral buffer between it and NATO through agreements which would preclude NATO membership for Ukraine and distance NATO combat power from its borders by insisting the alliance’s military-technical capabilities be withdrawn behind NATO’s boundaries as they existed in 1997. The U.S. and NATO rejected the very premise of such a dialogue.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine must be evaluated within this context. By invading Ukraine, Russia is creating a new geopolitical reality which revolves around the creation of a buffer of allied Slavic states (Belarus and Ukraine) that abuts NATO in a manner like the Cold War-era frontier represented by the border separating East and West Germany.

Russia has, by redeploying the 1st Guards Tank Army onto the territory of Belarus, militarized this buffer, creating the conditions for the kind of standoff that existed during the Cold War. The U.S. and NATO will have to adjust to this new reality, spending billions to resurrect a military capability that has atrophied since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Here’s the punchline — the likelihood that Europe balks at a resumption of the Cold War is high. And when it does, Russia will be able to exchange the withdrawal of its forces from Belarus and Ukraine in return for its demands regarding NATO’s return to the 1997 boundaries.

Vladimir Putin may, in fact, be crazy — crazy like a fox.

The West is Dead V

 Professor John Mearshimer.

 

On Fire

In 2016, Oliver Stone produced Ukraine On Fire -- a documentary exposing the so-called Orange and Euromaiden "revolutions" for what they were: U.S. intelligence ops aimed at taking over not only Ukraine but a more important piece of geo-strategic real estate -- Crimea. Unsurprisingly, Stone could not get the film theatrically distributed in the U.S. or in any western country. A Russian-dubbed version was available immediately and aired on Russian television, but the people of the "free world" were left without access.

No longer.

Ukraine Revealed

Three years later, Stone gave us the appropriate follow-up: Revealing Ukraine (2019). (Again suppressed across the board by the Vampire US media.)