[gha-peace] SOMETHINGw HAPPENED
- From: "ozemail.com.au" <mindquest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Leo Semashko <leo.semashko@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2022 10:13:52 +1100
Friends & Colleagues
When a prediction proves erroneous, a decent respect for your colleagues requires at least an explanation.
cheers
Michael Brennermbren@xxxxxxxx
Michael Brenner is A PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS. AMERICA’S RECENT FOREIGN POLICIES ARE MY PRIMARY PROFESSIONAL INTEREST. MY AVOCATION EXTENDS TO MATTERS OF SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, ECONOMIC DOGMAS, & THE INTELLECTUAL SPIRIT OF OUR TIMES. THE WRITINGS ON THIS SITE RANGE FROM STANDARD ACADEMIC PIECES TO POLICY ANALYSIS TO ADVOCACY. THEY ARE AS VARIABLE IN LENGTH AS IN SUBJECT MATTER. I HAVE ADDED REFERENCE TO THE WRITINGS OF OTHERS, INCLUDING NEWS STORIES THAT SEEM EXCEPTIONALLY ILLUMINATING IN TOPIC OR TREATMENT.
I INVITE COMMENTS. ALTHOUGH THIS IS NOT AN INTERACTIVE ‘BLOG,’ I INTEND TO POST ALL COMUNICATIONS UNDER CORRESPONDENCE.
SOMETHINGw HAPPENED
My mused knocked at dawn. Exhausted after catching the redeye from Moscow and then diverted over Finland. He insisted on a full breakfast before whispering in my ear. A week pulling up the grass roots from the permafrost in Gorky Park while subsisting on borscht and boiled cabbage had drained him.. Reanimated, the Truth began to flow – in short, staccato sentences with none of the usual refinements and subtle similes.
Context and background are everything in understanding the Russian attack. Look at the process of decision as dynamic over time rather than sharply focused in the immediate. Putin is not a dictator. He cannot simply choose a course of action and give commands a la Stalin. Never has been. He has great authority; yet, at the same time, he represents the underlying convictions, thoughts and interests of powerful people in and around the government. Most of them were seated in that semicircle at St. Catherine’s Hall for the televised meeting of the Russian Security Council. They, along with most all of Russia’s political cum economic class, have felt deeply humiliated by what they see as the shabby, patronizing treatment they have received from the West – led by a crass America – since 1991. The insults in word and action have hit them nonstop since 2014, reaching a crescendo from March 2021 onward. They have known full well that the aim is to denature Russia as a political
cum diplomatic power in Europe – and beyond. The West want it neutralized and marginalized so that the U.S. can remain master of Europe as it prepares for a titanic struggle with China for global supremacy. Unfettered access to Russia’s wealth of natural resources is a bonus,
Concrete security concern have sharpened progressively as Washington has broken a series of major arms control agreements, expanded NATO, connived to replace friendly governments with American proxies via the notorious “color revolutions,” sought to undercut energy ties with European states, and deployed advanced weapons systems (above all, the anti-missile systems in Poland and Roumania able to be converted into offensive missile launchers), and via its ‘rules-based international order’ sloganeering and democracy vs autocracy campaign make explicit its intention to do everything possible to rig the game of world politics in its favor. Ukraine, they believe, became the occasion (not the cause) to pin down a Russia whose growing strength discomforted and annoyed the Americans. It represented a conscious decision of the Biden administration under the sway of reborn Cold Warriors in State, the NSC, the CIA and the Pentagon. The triumph of their will in a government bereft of contrary voices and led by a weak, manipulable President was a sure thing. The Ukraine anti-Russia operation began in March with the Washington encouraged build-up of Ukrainian military forces along the Donbass Line, delivery of large quantities of arms including Javelin anti-armor weapons, renewed talk of heavy economic sanctions, and a chorus of shrill rhetoric from all quarters in Washington and Brussels. The American objective of putting Russia back in its subordinate place was taken as an obvious given by the Kremlin. Uncertainty existed on the question of what initiatives on the ground to expect: a major assault on the Donbass or provocative acts to force a Russian reaction that could be used as a pretext for imposing sanctions (above all, the cancelling of NORDSTROM II). It is likely that senior policymakers in Washington themselves had not made a definitive judgment on the issue. Divisions among individual players and a wavering President could very well left have important matters unresolved within a soft, cloudy consensus. There was visible evidence of this in the repeated juxtaposition, and alternation, of bellicose rhetoric and Biden’s mollifying words in public and the “let’s not go to war” telephone conversations he initiated to Putin and reaffirmed at their Geneva Summit. In Moscow, too, there likely were differences of opinion – or, more accurately, of emphasis. They surely led to some divergences over what actions Russia should take. It is essential to bear in mind that Putin himself seems to have been closer to the dovish end of the continuum among Security Council members on the overarching issue of how to deal with the U.S., with the West, and particularly Ukraine. One could imagine a gradual hardening of thinking among all individuals as tensions mounted and frustrations grew in the Kremlin. A Putin, who might have been trying to fashion an approach that reconciled his own wariness about military confrontation with genuine worry about the threats to Russian security presented by Washington’s hardline, might have found himself in a quandary. I suspect that American official have very little understanding of this reality or appreciate its implications.
That could explain the promulgation of that strange position paper/demarche wherein he laid out in detail a list of demands for a drastic revision of Europe’s security configuration punctuated by an emphasis on time urgency. That is to say, a Hail Mary to stay the hand of a growing consensus that the time had come for Russia to hit back at the West in the Ukraine. Two things perhaps tipped Putin’s thinking into accepting the necessity of doing what he did. One was the West’s unbending and unaccommodating response. The other, was the Ukrainians’ launching an unprecedented artillery and mortar barrage against the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Who forced that fateful step? Elements of the Ukraine Army and/or security services? The AZOV brigade and associated parties? Zelensky? With how much encouragement from the CIA and/or the White House?
Michael Brenner
mbren@xxxxxxxx
Sent from my iPhone
On 25 Feb 2022, at 2:46 am, Leo Semashko <leo.semashko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Happy birthday to Vladislav Krasnov
Happy birthday to Vladislav Krasnov
Dear Vladislav,
The GHA is happy to congratulate you on your birthday, wish you good health, creative success, harmony and strengthening of goodwill in the spiritual polyphony of the two peoples: Russia and the USA through your organization of the same name: https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=752.
Despite the reigning spirit of the official ugly Russophobia of the American establishment, which has lowered relations between the two countries to the threshold of a military confrontation in Ukraine and to the brink of a new world war, relations between ordinary people of the two countries remain honest, friendly and benevolent.
Together with your birthday, we are happy to congratulate you on the new talented book "A Saga of How Vladimir Osipov visited Monterey" (https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=1022). It deeply reveals the whole historical period of Russian dissidence since 1950, which made a decisive contribution to the exposure and defeat, as Solzhenitsyn accurately defined, of the “ugly Marxism-Leninism” that reigned in the USSR and destroyed the Russian Orthodox peacemaking culture.
You also deeply penetrated the new GGHA scientific ideas, revealing polyphony at the genetic level of the structural harmony of the Gandhian Spherons, ensuring global peace, to which you have another great book about the two "peace giants", about Mahatma Gandhi and Alexander Solzhenitsyn: https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=884
Unfortunately, your birthday coincided with the key action of the pacification of Ukraine and the military protection of the civilian Russian population of the LDNR from the 8-year-old genocide of Ukrainian neo-Nazis nurtured under the wing of the West and NATO, like Hitler's fascism. In this regard, I am glad to send you the “GGHA Statement” (https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=ru_c&key=947) on this event with FULL support for the two statements of the Russia President the launched military, peacemaking operation, designed to put out the fuse of the third world war in Ukraine. We look forward to your support for this statement. Thanks.
GGHA wishes you good health and long years of your great life!
With love,
Leo Semashko,
GGHA Founder (2005) and Honorary President,
www.peacefromharmony.org
24-02-22
Dr. Leo Semashko:
-State Councilor of St. Petersburg, Russia; RANH Professor;
-Philosopher, Sociologist, Cybernetician and Peacemaker from Harmony;
-Gandhian Global Harmony Association (GGHA) Founder (2005) and H/President (2016);
-Director, GHA Website "Peace from Spherons Harmony": www.peacefromharmony.org;
Editor, the GGHA 10 books for 16 years, including:
-Anti-Nuclear Manifesto, 2020: https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=908
-Gandhica, 2019: https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=848;
-Global Peace Science of the Spherons, (GPSS), 2016:
http://peacefromharmony.org/docs/global-peace-science-2016.pdf;
- I Know How To Build A Society Without War/Violence, 2020, Final interview:
https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=964;
-Personal pages: http://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=253
and: https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=1000 .
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