“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” prov 16
Russia’s victory over the Ukraine is a foregone conclusion. Unless the West goes nuclear, the victor in the Ukrainian war has been chosen. When the time is right, Russia will either storm across the Ukraine with it’s million-plus man army, or force the Ukraine to it’s knees at a negotiating table. This is reality. The harsh truth. It’s not something Western elitists want us to know or can face themselves, but is, nevertheless, true. Let me state this another way — there is no path to victory for the West, militarily or culturally. Russia has won.
Now, let me clarify. Most Americans know that this was never really a war between two countries, the Ukraine and Russia, but rather a proxy war between the West writ large and the RoW (the Rest of the World). Now that the government’s jackboot is off the neck of Twitter, to give one example, we’ve been able to see how ordinary Ukrainians were rehypothecated by American elitists and then ordered to die in faraway places like Bakhmut. Their brutal and unnecessary deaths, as well as the deaths of mercenaries, have rarely been mentioned in the Western prestige media. This has led more Americans to think of the media as the propagandistic arm of the government.
Clearly, Western elitists don’t want people to know about their failures and losses — and, clearly, the media is helping the government silence the truth. But no one can control information these days. It can be slowed, but not stopped. The Internet is abuzz in spite of censorship. Truth is getting out.
Few people take the news at face value anymore. Today, Americans interpret the news — they don’t turn to the news. Most ordinary Americans know that in the Ukraine real journalists are not covering a real war, but rather pretend journalists are parroting CIA-authored propaganda in a proxy war. Unfortunately for these journalists, propaganda isn’t as effective as it used to be. Americans have learned to interpret media “stories” and put what they hear into idiosyncratic mental file cabinets. The days of Dan Rather speaking ex-cathedra are over. A charismatic figure today can only reach a thin slice of Americans, not the whole pie. This is because there’s no pie. The common culture — the pie — to which a personage like Rather once spoke is gone. The deathly triad of 1) the cult of multiculturalism, 2) progressive authoritarianism and 3) unbridled immigration killed the common culture. So today, when the government desperately needs to propagandize, it can’t do it — Americans have permanently individuated as well as self-siloed into think-alike communities. They have no authorities. No believable public figures. Americans think for themselves because they learned to distrust.
A lag time exists between the introduction of a new event and the people’s understanding of that event. When journalists breathlessly hyped COVID and vaccines, most Americans were understandably worried … at first. They didn’t have a place in their mental file cabinets to put such information. They needed to create new mental folders. New files. But now that these files have been created, Americans are quite skeptical about, for example, the efficacy of vaccines. They’re questioning the motives of the actors in this drama. They’re talking among themselves to get “unvarnished” information. In short, the government discredited itself.
I was in Wallyworld several months ago — it’s one of my fav haunts to observe and talk to “real” Americans — in the television section. Let me back up a minute here. When I’m in the US, I try to shop at Walmart because it’s such a cultural shock to be there — I confess this. But it’s a good sort of shock because I get information about how Americans regard each other, their values and, of course, how they look at their government. In my opinion, the BEST PLACE to observe and interact with Walmart shoppers is the television section. Though most of the time the long bank of televisions are tuned to stupid Hollywoodish stuff, when the news is deemed important, employees of Walmart tune all of the televisions to a news channel so they can watch as they work. Shoppers, too, watch. I actually get in my car and drive to Walmart if I think there may be a crowd watching the news … this is great primary source material!
So, when COVID was in full swing, the televisions at Walmart were often tuned to the news. People stood in the aisles, watched and muttered. I remember, distinctly, the instantaneous and unforced reaction of Walmart shoppers when Dr. Fauci came onto the screen — they moaned, scoffed, and a few shook their fists at the screens. They had had enough of whatever the government and that man were saying.
Elitists in Washington, I’m certain, still think Americans believe in their hero, Dr. Fauci. They do not realize that trust in him — and them — evaporated. Reality set in. Few Wallyworld shoppers believe masks work. Few want to be inoculated with the “clot shot.” In the thin, tall silo of Washington, however, Fauci is thought to be a revered figure among ALL Americans. The chasm is HUGE and growing between the perceptions of ordinary people and those of elitists who try to control the information people receive as well as their thinking about that information. That chasm is getting wider. At this point, if the government tried to foist another COVID-like disease or vaccine on Americans, the people’s distrust-o’-meter would be flat to the right because Americans have already created a place in their minds to file information and dis/misinformation about pandemics. They know how to deal with it. Changing their mental file cabinets won’t be easy. It may be impossible.
A critical, disbelieving skepticism of elitists pre-exists all the news cycles the government wants to control. Increasingly, Americans are numb to the sort of fear elitists think will motivate them. It’s not just COVID, but the green agenda, trannies in public schools, and all sorts of down-enforced “goodthinking” that Washington wants people to parrot. This includes the war in Ukraine.
Speaking for myself, I have never seen such a ridiculous spectacle like the stompy-footed edicts coming out of Washington, Brussels and London. Like most Americans, when I see Biden’s or Ursala’s face I recoil in disgust. My reaction isn’t just intellectual, but visceral. I’m not alone. Western elitists have made ordinary people cringe so often, that they reflexively look away or inwardly groan. The RoW, however, which has not been as “cynicized” as Americans — yet — still spits with anger at the uninhibited hubris and blind incompetence tethered together in elitist public statements. Western elitists act as if they have both the political power and moral authority to tell the RoW what to do. Understandably, the RoW doesn’t like this. Or them.
I don’t know if elitists really believe what they’re saying. Perhaps they do. They may be so narrowly siloed with other leftwing Secularists that they’ve lost touch with the RoW. Like throned royalty fed half-truths and lies by sycophantic courtiers, Western elitists may be utterly blind to how the RoW (and increasingly their own citizens) think about them.
My hunch, though, that their emotional grip on the fantasy they’ve construed, is … tightening. Things could get worse before they end. Coming to terms with an alternate reality will provoke a huge and existential crisis in Brussels and Washington. The root problem is pride. Raw pride. This is a character problem, one that Christianity addresses but will never solve until the world ends; every generation and every individual faces anew his or her own delusionary tendencies. For some, it’s easier to lie to oneself than face someone else’s truth. Most of us, however, are forced to accept at least some external reality early in life. Failure does this. Suffering does it more quickly.
But there are people who have been sheltered from the harsher aspects of reality. For them, suffering, failure and a more accurate take on the world are seemingly impossible. The political Left embodies this sort of self delusion with their utopian fantasies; Ursala, at the EU, personifies it. These people have calculated, intuitively and internally, that the fear and cost of dealing with another reality is far greater than the cost of living in an construed fantasy. The problem with propaganda, as I wrote a couple days ago, is that it only works when the cost of believing is trivial. Additionally, propaganda sorta works, but only superficially, in repressive societies. If people are coerced to mouth “goodthinking” dogmas, they will. They’ll put on a show in front of the totalitarian elitists who repress them, but won’t really believe the propaganda.
Today, with so much information that can’t be stopped, it’s impossible to control American public opinion. Watching public opinion shift regarding the war in the Ukraine is quite fascinating. To me, it looks exactly like the trajectory of American’s trust-to-distrust over vaccinations and COVID — inevitably, belief is chastened and changed by increased information and, yes, reality.
The inflection point of trust in the government’s narrative about the war in the Ukraine will be reached when a sizeable chuck of the American public flips to an alternate reality. This will happen when the government’s propaganda with it’s surreal, fantastic, illusionary take on the war seems too dangerously ridiculous to put up with. In my opinion, this will happen soon. In weeks, not months.
I’m more concerned, however, about the siloed, prideful and at times dangerous elitist inability to adjust. Their way of thinking is far more set in concrete than that of ordinary people. Western elitists’ ability to adapt to a reality which includes Russia’s inevitable victory is not assured, particularly those in the EU who, buoyed by American money and military might, have been deluded into thinking the war can still be won. Coming to terms with losing, even incrementally, will be incredibly hard for haughty and proud European elitists.
I do have pity on them, but not much. Elitists brought this on themselves, after all. They caused, then outstretched, this war which actually started in 2014 not 2022. Ordinary people have been wisening up to what’s happening on the ground. As I just wrote, propaganda works only a short while; that time is almost up. There’s no way the CIA and Biden can censor what people inevitably see and feel: images of dead soldiers, so young and bloodied; thousands of graves adorned with Ukrainian flags; inflation in the supermarket and deteriorating home prices; bulging pockets of war profiteers including the Biden family who have become wealthier because of this war; smug faces of Brussels’ bureaucrats; endless lines of tanks and millions of conscripted Russian soldiers seemingly well-trained and equipped; and, hopefully not but probably soon, the bodies of their own sons, daughters and relatives returned in boxes — surely someone, somewhere among the 35,000 bureaucrats in Brussels, is able to face what ordinary people see clearly.
