When Leaders Trust Narratives More Than Reality

We are bombarded every day with terrible news: the Western dollar-based financial system is unraveling in a hyperinflationary collapse; the “likelihood” of war between nuclear powers is casually discussed in all the media; the pandemic continues to take lives, while new epidemics emerge; famine is killing thousands and threatening billions.

Leaders in the transatlantic world conveniently try and claim that all this can be blamed on Russian President Putin. Thirty years of neo-colonial regime change wars in Asia, Southwest Asia and Africa, we are expected to believe, had nothing to do with it. Nor did the printing of quadrillions of dollars to bail out the major banks, rather than putting them through bankruptcy reorganization. Nor did the “Green New Deal” with its slashing energy production and taking land out of food production. No, it’s all Russia Russia Russia.

That line has also been seized upon by the world’s billionaires and bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Klaus Schwab opened the week-long event on May 23 by introducing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the keynote speech. After a standing ovation, the latter basically demanded tens of billions of euros more for reconstruction, in addition to the billions already poured into weapons and other propaganda. (Note that just two days before, Ukraine’s chief negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak said his government was not negotiating to end the war and would not accept a ceasefire.) While Zelensky was elected in 2019 on the basis of his commitment to peace in the Donbass and with Russia, he has unfortunately become the hostage of the West’s notorious military-industrial complex, after receiving mafia-like threats from extremist Russophobes and neo-nazis in Ukraine itself.

To underscore how serious the situation is, London’s foremost strategic think tank, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), has actually proposed that Kiev could escalate the war up to the point that Russia feels it must threaten to make use of nuclear weapons to avoid losing Crimea, after which negotiations would force Moscow to capitulate (cf. below).

Meanwhile, President Biden is in Asia, foolishly attempting to isolate China in the region, under the banner of uniting “democracies against autocracies” (cf. below). Fortunately for all of us, the vast majority of the world’s peoples and countries are not drinking the kool-aid, being more oriented to reality than to narratives. The conferences organized by the Schiller Institute this week and on June 18-19 will present the alternative to this policy.