Germany’s dark star of unpopularity was, of course, talking about the results of the regional elections in the Land of Saxony-Anhalt. They have produced a landslide victory for the new-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, under its shooting star Ulrich “Uli” Siegmund and a colossal, devastating fiasco for the CDU and, of course, Merz personally: The AfD has scored 43.8 percent of the vote, the CDU 17.2 percent. Compared with the last Land election, the AfD gained 23 percent, while the CDU lost 19.9 percent.

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The German public has been subject to what looks like a systematic campaign of escalating innuendo for almost a month. The story emerging from this barrage of unfounded claims and speculation masquerading as self-evident certainty has been changing: the role of an airport bus driver has remained unclear and contradictory: Did he merely discover the drone sitting quietly on the tarmac next to an extra-large Ukrainian transport plane or did he kick it to the ground with a Bruce-Lee-type flying kick, as initially claimed? Early reports of another drone colliding with a plane in flight had to be retracted when traces of birds became too obvious.

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In terms of religion, Iran is shaped by pious Shia Islam; Canada displays the flaccid mix of an emasculated Christmas-and-jingle-bells-only Christianity and aggressive anything-goes consumerist secularism typical of the contemporary West.

Geopolitically, Iran is a proud and victorious opponent of the US and Israel; Canada is a fairly ordinary vassal in the American empire.

Accordingly, Canada is deeply and proudly involved in the West’s proxy war against Russia by way of using up Ukraine. Indeed, the Canadian contribution is particularly ironic because it also serves a frenetic and powerful nationalist Ukrainian lobby, rooted in deliberately privileged fascist World War Two runaways and Cold War conspirators. Iran, on the other side, has long helped Russia and, for its efforts, been directly attacked by Kiev’s Zelensky regime. In return, Western sources claim, Moscow has been helping Tehran with its ongoing defense against the US and Israel.

Most importantly, Iran is a country on the side of elementary decency, fundamental human ethics, and international law and therefore against the genocide committed by Israel, the US, UK, Germany, and various other Western accomplices against the Palestinian nation. Canada – Israeli murders of Canadian citizens and some cheap and, in effect, empty gestures from Ottawa notwithstanding – has been, at the very best, yet another camp follower of the Western genocide coalition.

And yet, strange as it may be, recent events have produced something that Iran and Canada have in common. Or to be precise, it’s Washington’s bizarre policies that have created this odd overlap: both Canada the long-standing vassal and Iran the steadfast antagonist are currently at the receiving end of both fresh attempts at coercion by economic warfare and escalating rhetoric from Washington.

Of course, there are orders-of-magnitude differences between the Trump administration’s “Operation Economic Outcast” against Tehran and the latest round of tariff-and-trash-talk launched against Canada.

The “Operation” targeting Iran, according to its mastermind and cheerleader Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, aims to combine a naval blockade, intelligence gathering, “mapp[ing] every node, every facilitator and every network that Iran” is using to trade abroad, and wide-ranging secondary sanctions to, in Bessent words, “asphyxiat[e]” Tehran. The declared end goal is to “collapse” Iran by inflicting an “Economic D-Day,” as President Donald Trump has put it.

There’s no such intention to wage total economic war in the case of Canada. Regarding Ottawa, Washington has merely initiated a pressure campaign within its empire. Its goal is not absolute destruction but the punishment and coercion of a wayward vassal.

In essence, the Canadian government under Prime Minister Mark Carney has rejected Washington’s offer of a crudely disadvantageous and interfering trade deal, featuring, according to the Financial Times, “ludicrous” American demands.

Faced with “clodhopping bullying” so extreme no leader could have submitted – except maybe, say, the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen or Germany’s Friedrich Merz – Carney had an excellent opportunity to make a stand. He declared that Canada is under US attack and, in effect, at war – all restricted to the economy, of course – and that his government will retaliate tit-for-tat, dollar-for-dollar.

Washington is striking at Ottawa with 50-percent tariffs on Canadian goods worth 20 billion dollars, and, in return, Ottawa will give as good as it gets. That’s the plan at least. But while the Wall Street Journal reports that both sides are getting ready for a long fight, there also is still some time for last-minute off-ramps.

Things need to be kept in proportion: the new US tariffs would affect about 5 percent of Canadian exports to the overbearing southern neighbor. The Canadian retaliation would target about 6 percent of what the US sends north. Meanwhile, US rhetoric is surging. Trump has renamed Lake Ontario into Lake America and posted an extraordinarily odd AI-generated video about it, featuring (Canadian?) wild geese marching in lockstep under US flags and firing assault rifles. In Canada, for now at least, Carney’s hardline response is popular.

In short, what is really happening between Ottawa and Washington may well seem like a farce if compared to the state of things between Washington and Tehran. Unsurprisingly, the Iranian leadership has declared that it won’t budge. And why should it? It has already won two rounds of war against Washington. While its economy is certainly suffering, the American-Israeli aggression has, in effect, fully immunized Iranian society against any regime-change schemes.

Finally, Washington will not succeed in making key players submit to its secondary-sanctions blackmail. China, now the world’s great oil power, as The Economist concedes, and a crucial partner for Iran not merely in economic terms, has already made that much clear. Russia is very unlikely to be impressed either.

But take a step back and look at the picture as a whole. Here we are: the US is waging economic war – of different intensity – against both opponents and so-called allies. More importantly, it is meeting resistance in both cases. And most importantly, in both cases, there is no reason to assume that Washington will win. All of that is happening against a background of the US escalating its use of brute force: There is the fresh “deal” – really, steal – to siphon off 65 billion barrels of crude from the de facto US protectorate of post-Maduro Venezuela. Regarding the much-disturbed bond markets, meanwhile, Trump has openly threatened to use the US military to shape them to Washington’s advantage.

The idea is about as smart as trying to fix a microchip with a sledgehammer. But, with the US, that doesn’t mean it won’t be tried. For the red thread running through all of the above is a combination of slipping real power, escalating aggressiveness, and rising resistance from others. What makes this so dangerous is that Washington seems to have entirely lost the ability to realistically adjust its aims and demands to its declining capabilities. Think of it as a bully past his prime who is not only very violent but also not smart enough to see when being more flexible would be in his own best interest.

That is what I, some other foreigners, and quite a few Ukrainians, too, were thinking and even saying then. The country was politically and even culturally polarized, extremely corrupt, and a sham “democracy” even more fake than most of the rest.

It was dominated and bled dry by a greedy, hypocritical, and – despite all the cheap talk, the pious singing-of-anthems-hand-on-heart, and the cheesy peasant braids and stitched shirts – deeply unpatriotic establishment of typically post-Soviet turncoats, thieves, liars, and sell-outs. There was no rule of law, the courts were a bad joke, and the police was a racket.

And yet, while the usual business-crime complex took its toll and there was the occasional state murder of a journalist, there was no large-scale violence. There was bitter grumbling galore, including about Crimea, all the time. But there was no civil war – as the almighty US intelligence services had infamously as good as predicted in the even darker 1990s – and no one was reaching for a gun either to leave an unbearable country or keep others in it by force.

While the Americans were busy thinking about the possibility – and perhaps opportunities – of Ukrainians killing each other in large numbers, their UK cousins were considering another kind of doom: For them, more than three decades ago, the most interesting question was whether Ukraine and Russia would go to war, specifically over Crimea. There, British spooks back then warned with unusual honesty, “most of the population is Russian,” and things might become less than cordial if Kiev didn’t watch its steps.

And here we are now: On the 35^th official anniversary of its existence outside the former Soviet Union, Ukraine has become the sum of all fears, much worse than even its pervasively corrupt, brutally unfair, and de facto lawless pre-2014 version. It is now ruled by its worst, most corrupt, and most authoritarian and bloody regime ever – hands down – under Vladimir Zelensky and his cronies. They steal, embezzle, and launder piles of dirty money as if there’s no tomorrow, which, to be fair, there really probably isn’t for them, at least not in Ukraine.

They literally hunt and, in effect, sell their subjects as cannon fodder, so that they can profit and the West can have its slaughterhouse war against Russia, in an insane, evil, and futile attempt to eliminate Moscow as a power to be reckoned with. This is the reality of “busification,” and nothing remotely like it happened before Zelensky and his accomplices took over. Those who do not readily submit to being treated as combat cattle regularly die mysteriously (not really) from “falls” or maybe just blowing their nose.

The Ukrainian mass media have never been remotely clean, objective, or reliable. But then where are they? But the zombified and self-zombifying propaganda machine created under Zelensky is unprecedentedly awful. Those who openly resist the national brainwashing are incarcerated by kangaroo courts, tortured, and killed.

Or consider basic demography: Ukraine’s real population has almost halved since the end of the Soviet Union, and the future looks even worse. And while part of this catastrophe is due to the current war, much of it has been produced by the ceaseless class–war-from-above of injustice, exploitation, and hopelessness that Ukraine’s anti-elites have waged on their own subjects for a third of a century while blabbing sanctimoniously about nation this and nation that.

And the results of all these horrors? They are abysmal even on their own perverse terms. Just look at the map: Crimea is gone and so are substantial portions of Ukraine’s post-Soviet east due to a combination of regional rebellion, Kiev’s cack-handed, violent attempts to stomp it out, and a war with Russia. All of this could have been avoided.

Yet it was not. Indeed, Ukraine’s short post-Soviet history is, among other sad things, a record of at least sleepwalking toward and, more frequently, pro-actively provoking this twin catastrophe. But Ukrainians – or rather their rotten establishment – did have plenty of help in getting it so wrong. Take, for instance, the mean-spirited and asinine obsession with suppressing the Russian language to eradicate Ukraine’s windfall advantages as a mostly bilingual country of Russian and Ukrainian speakers.

That perverse and self-harming pursuit – recalling Freud’s hunch about nationalism as neurosis – was obstinately cultivated by both a narrow-minded but hyperactive and arrogant minority of ukrainier-than-though nationalists at home and descendants of run-away World War II nationalists, mass murderers of Poles, and Nazi collaborators from the West who were eager to infest post-Soviet Ukraine with their hoary bigotry.

Personally, I remember being naïve enough back then in the 2000s to ask Lviv acquaintances why Ukraine couldn’t just codify its own variant of Russian (comparable to the way American English is different from British English) and also promote Ukrainian (I know both languages, as it happens), and then focus on actually important matters. Blank stares were the answer, at best.

Ironically, well into the current war, there was a short news blip about someone in Ukraine having discovered the same obvious idea. How catastrophe can concentrate the mind and how sad that even now, after an estimated 1.5 million battle field casualties, such pragmatic thinking is still a minority taste: Kiev’s policy is only doubling down on a daft campaign to win the lexicon while losing the war.

Entitled, patronizing exile nationalists projecting their selfish tunnel-vision fantasies on and throwing their Western hard currency at desperate people freshly shell-shocked by ultra-predatory “transition” capitalism were one noxious outside influence vitiating Ukraine’s post-Soviet trajectory. But it was far from the only one. Indeed, as time went on, the West as a whole – its politicians, intellectuals, and mainstream media – became ever more interested in and vastly detrimental to Ukraine.

To be fair, the first yet already extremely harmful steps the West took to, ultimately, ruin Ukraine had very little to do with it: When Washington decided – not once but repeatedly – to cheat and humiliate Russia and break clear promises not to expand NATO eastward, it was first Germany, then multiple east European countries that were at the center of attention, but not Ukraine. Yet, ironically, even while neglecting it, the West’s reckless expansion already set the stage for phase two of putting Ukraine in the crosshairs.

That was reached in 2008, when, at an infamous summit in Bucharest, the high and mighty of the West, led by the indispensably destructive US, artfully maneuvered Ukraine into the very worst position imaginable: by making a promise of NATO membership for Ukraine sometime in the future, they inevitably poked Russia in the eye once too often. By keeping the reckless promise vague, they left Ukraine completely exposed, as if baiting Moscow to intervene. The whole mad scheme took willfully ignoring the clear warnings issued by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Munich one year before and multiple equally explicit warnings produced by not Russians but widely acknowledged Westerners such as George Kennan and, back then, even William “Bill” Burns.

Georgia shared this fate – lethal promises, no back-up – with Ukraine. And yet even after a short war there quickly demonstrated that this time Russia would stand its ground and defend its basic national security interests, the West stayed its course in Ukraine.

Indeed, it doubled down on it. If only the West had dropped Ukraine the way it dropped Georgia in 2008. Many Ukrainians would still be alive and the country would have lost none or far less territory. Instead, in the Ukrainian case, the West got involved ever more deeply, offering a poisonous EU association agreement and the shaping a regime change coup in 2014. After that, it bound the country so closely into official and black-ops NATO structures that formal membership looked increasingly irrelevant, while helping Kiev sabotage the last realistic chance to return to peace and avoid large-scale war, the Minsk II agreement of 2015. Meanwhile, demagogic public intellectuals, such as Tim Snyder and Anne Applebaum did their worst to pour oil into the fire by a mix of silly nationalism-by-proxy and nasty Russophobia.

Finally, the West almost non-chalantly refused to seriously consider Moscow’s, as it turned out, last pre-February-2022 offer to return to substantial diplomacy and compromise. Once the war had greatly escalated, the West sent Britain’s most evil clown to kill an excellent opportunity to make peace quickly produced by the Istanbul talks of spring 2022.

Since then, since locking Ukraine into a devastating, perfectly unnecessary, and futile yet deliberately provoked war to weaken Russia, things have only gotten worse and worse, and there seems no end in sight. Indeed, as a remarkably sane former German general has just explained, Kiev is still eager to drag all of Europe (at least) into an open shooting war with Russia. In Europe, many establishment figures seem to be all too willing to go along. Ukraine has become the outstanding example of how the West risked and then destroyed the opportunities of the post-Cold War period. Ukraine could have been a prosperous country profiting from its links to both west and east. Instead it’s a ruin.

Next up: Doing the same to all of Europe?

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A cynical explanation for why so many minors are dying in Israeli strikes on Gaza has been offered by a respected Western outlet: The Economist has published a piece pretending to answer why Israel is killing so many Palestinian children, or, as the British journal puts it, why “children are a very high proportion of the victims of war in Gaza.” The authors note that “in Ukraine, a conflict between two much bigger powers, children account for fewer than 550 of roughly 9,800 civilian fatalities over a much longer period.” Hence, they venture, “Gaza’s enormous child death toll reflects, among other things, its especially youthful demography.”

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Brazenly, the article removes the actual killers from the picture (the children fall victim to “the war,” not to the Israelis), gives just enough room to US President Joe Biden’s mendacious doubting of Palestinian victim figures (in reality certain to be under-counts) to make the reader wonder, and never mentions the true answer: so many children are getting killed because Israel commits one war crime after another against civilians, in pursuit of a strategy of collective punishment that amounts to genocide and ethnic cleansing (though these definitions, as is often the case with Israel’s actions, are being debated at various official levels). And also, because it can, due to the West’s complicity. In sum, an ordinary example of much Western mainstream coverage.

Yet there is more to this spin presented as cool, English-style level-headed analysis, complete with statistics and a chart. Inadvertently, the article opens a wide window on something ugly but important: The point where narratives about who has how many babies, or demography, meet the dehumanization that facilitates atrocities against fellow human beings.

As Khaled Elgindy, the director of the Middle East Institute's Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs, has explained in Newsweek, dehumanizing rhetoric conveys the idea that “the lives, suffering and humanity of Palestinians are less worthy than the lives, suffering and humanity of Israelis.” And as the genocide and Holocaust expert Raz Segal has found, the Israeli assault is a “textbook case” by the criteria of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, while making others appear less than human is a typical element of genocide.

This devastating weapon of mass misrepresentation makes perpetrators, such as many Israelis now, feel willing to kill and righteous about the result. It also motivates and protects accomplices, many of them in the West’s political, media, and intellectual elites. For bystanders, those merely silent and passive in the face of the Palestinians’ desperate need for protection, dehumanizing language, which caricatures Palestinians as “animals” and “savages” and any calls for resistance as support for “terrorism” without nuance, at least suppresses empathy, numbs whatever is left of a conscience, and rationalizes flagrant moral failure.

The Economist is, of course, careful to (barely) maintain appearances by wrapping its nasty points in plenty of Sociologese about average income, fertility rates, and secondary education. But its message still comes through loud and clear: Gaza’s children are dying in droves not because Israelis are murdering them, but because there are so many of them. Dehumanization step one: Stop thinking of children as children, with names and faces; instead think of them as numbers. And on top of that, excessive numbers.

Step two of dehumanization: The fact that there are so many young Palestinians, in turn, is, we learn from The Economist, not a normal outcome of human life. By comparing Palestinians with even poorer populations in the world, the authors conclude that their high birthrates are an anomaly to be explained, they argue, by militant politics, namely the pro-natalism of Palestinian leaders, from the PLO’s late Yasser Arafat to Hamas. In short, Palestinians are depicted as people who weaponize, as we now say, their own reproduction and, thus, children.

The implication is clear if vicious. Recall that in the eyes of the US, Israel’s main Western ally, the attack on Gaza, including the starving and killing of civilians, is Israel exercising its right to self-defense. (Let’s leave aside that, under international law, Israel is a military occupying power and thus “self-defense” is not an applicable justification for use of force against the occupied territories.) Combine that with what The Economist says about Palestinian children being part of a strategy of long-term demographic warfare “by the cradle.” From here, you only have two dots to connect to arrive at the conclusion that if children are a “weapon,” it’s acceptable to exercise “self-defense” against them. Even if no one at the magazine, from authors to editors, managed to think through to the moral abyss their own argument opens up, that failure alone would be shamefully revealing.

In reality, Palestinians have had to learn to understand their children as their future with an urgency that people not historically subject to systematic ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide may not know. To then, in effect, blame the massacre of these Palestinian children by Israeli perpetrators on the Palestinian victims because they dared have so many in the face of relentless oppression, is abjectly cynical.

Jews, of course, also know this kind of urgency, above all due to Germany’s historically recent attempt to exterminate them. But the genocide of their own people has not translated into empathy from modern-day Zionist leaders. For them, the slogan “never again” means “never again to us.”

Palestinian leaders, moreover, are not the only ones with thoughts about demography. Indeed, demographic policies have been at the core of the Zionist project from the get-go in the late nineteenth century, in two shapes: as a constant pro-active concern with increasing the number of Jewish settlers and then Jewish Israeli citizens; and as an equally persistent fear of growth of the Palestinian population. Since the first ethnic cleansing of the vast majority of Palestinians (at least 700,000), begun before and continued through the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, reducing their number and keeping it low has been one of the principal reasons why Israel has always denied the Palestinian right of return, affirmed in the UN General Assembly resolution 194.

That, in turn, has been a prime factor that has made a lasting peace settlement impossible. In other words, Israel regards Palestinians and their children as a fundamental threat to national security, and that is one of the worst obstacles in the way of a settlement that would bring justice to the Palestinians and free the world from a never-ending, extremely dangerous crisis that should long have been put to rest.

How can it happen that a prestigious, opinion-shaping publication like The Economist gets away with such an article – and not just at any time, but during an ongoing assault on Gaza in which over 10,000 people have been killed, almost half of them children? The answer is that the systematic dehumanization of the Palestinians, their rhetorical reduction to “bare biological life that can be extinguished without any moral doubt” – as explained by American journalist and author Ali Abunimah – has a long history.

Acute observers are pointing out that the West’s support of Israel’s actions is costing it whatever prestige it still has in the rest – that is, most – of the world. That is true and richly deserved. For what is even worse than the language of dehumanization is that it is not at all a fringe phenomenon: in the West, one can take part in this genocide-promoting practice and find resonance and recognition, rather than opprobrium and censure, as long as the victims are Palestinians. The West, while hallucinating itself as a “garden” of “values” has a long record of staggering violence combined with stunning hypocrisy. But at this moment in this ongoing history, the horrific abuse of the Palestinians – in word and deed – is its single most egregious depravity. And humanity won’t forget or forgive.

Launching their surprise attack with millions of troops and the explicit intention to wage a “war of extermination,” those Germans of yore, sought to build a “lebensraum” empire from hell, based on multiple deliberate genocides (including one of Soviet POWs), warfare with all legal or moral restraints systematically removed, and a supremacist ideology that would have designated anyone surviving among the conquered as a slave of inferior, if any, humanity.

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Recently, its fairly new commander-in-chief of has given a very combative as well as intriguingly ill-considered, even jejune interview. Speaking to Britain’s Telegraph, General Holger Neumann released several inflammatory statements. The one that has found most attention was his proud claim that his pilots stand ready not merely to fight Russia at a moment’s notice, but to strike with immediate, large-scale, and – he assumes with that special German military optimism some call fatal arrogance – devastating operations.

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In the Far East, Taiwan is currently ruled by a government so hell-bent on antagonizing the fellow Chinese on the mainland that Taipei’s political reflexes seem almost as perverse as those of Berlin: There you have the German elite which can’t find enough billions to fork over to Ukraine when Kiev and friends blow up Germany’s vital pipelines and lethally cripple its already ailing economy. And here is Taipei, getting really, really angry when the Philippines and Japan start negotiating away Taiwan’s maritime Exclusive Economic Zone. Angry, that is, at – Beijing.

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But the saying is much older. It is rooted in Martin Luther’s punchy translation of the Old Testament (in the English King James Bible, the relevant passage reads “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”). Clearly, the admonition not to preen and strut lest you stumble and fall flat on your silly, overbearing face is addressed to all of us, including, for instance, Americans or Israelis.

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The agreement we are talking about is, of course, the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), according to the International Atomic Energy Agency “the centerpiece” – no less – of much that is good, beautiful, and eminently reasonable. Namely “global efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and to further the goal of nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament.” Germany, for instance, is a long-standing signatory.

And yet, Germany and five other NPT signatories who belong to America’s NATO client system have nuclear gravity bombs on their (formally, at least) sovereign territory, and their air forces stand ready to carry them to targets which would be – surprise, surprise – in Russia. The little piece of shyster-level legal sophistry used to cover for this obvious breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is called – wait for it – “Nuclear Sharing.” Sweet, isn’t it? The world – or, perhaps, just Europe – may end in a man-made big bang of fire and fallout, but, as they say in kindergarten “sharing is caring.”

By the way, it is obvious – and would have been to men such as Clausewitz, York (both with some serious delay, admittedly), or Bismarck – that, for instance, German officers worth their salt would have to prepare secret emergency plans for rapidly seizing those nuclear weapons on German territory from our American overlord “allies.” Without bloodshed, if possible; or with, if necessary.

One very bad day, that may well be the only way to save Germany from getting its very own “end of history” by being burned to irradiated cinders in a “limited” nuclear war waged on behalf of one or another set of madmen – or women or whatever non-binary option then in power, of course – in Washington. A quietly kept drawer with such last-resort plans in one paper copy only would be the bare minimum genuine German national interest requires. If that’s too bold for you as a German soldier, maybe don’t join the military – or just be honest, change your citizenship, and sign up with the US already.

But back to the specific arrangements adding up to this great sharing in anticipated self-apocalypsing: They are quite complicated; this is modern life, after all: if we go, we go with a bang and a lot of bureaucracy. But their essence is simple: You, sort-of-sovereign country X (say, Germany), station US nukes on your territory, which inevitably makes you a target for retaliation in (nuclear) kind. But while you are making yourself a target, those nukes remain under the full control of Washington (so much for that sovereignty).

Guarded by American troops – whose real mission is, of course, to keep the compliant clients from laying their grubby hands on them – these nukes sit ready for American orders to be used. Yes, formally, there’s some mumbo-jumbo about a “dual key,” but everyone not badly dropped on their head when in their nappies knows that’s BS. As a French officer has just confirmed to Le Figaro, France’s conservative paper of record, in reality, “there’s only one key” and – as in every decent organized-crime outfit – only one man will decide: the US president (whether currently crazy or senile or both).

Then, in case the American capo di tutti capi gives his end-of-days order, you, country X, will have the privilege to take these American nukes to Russia. Once your – not US – planes drop American nukes on Russian troop concentrations and bases or, say, Kaliningrad or St. Petersburg, just sit tight and wait for the response. It would come, even if it were the last thing they ever did. Because that’s the way the world works. Also, they have told us so.

There are variations to the “nuclear sharing” shtick: Greece for instance, has a nifty little under-the-radar (that is, the Greek public’s, not Moscow’s, rest assured) deal which means it doesn’t host US nuclear bombs but maintains a unit for helping deliver such bombs to Russia. Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, “and two unknown countries” (not to Russia, you bet) are riding nuclear shotgun, as it were, by participating in the SNOWCAT (Support of Nuclear Operations With Conventional Air Tactics) program. So sneaky!

With things set up so neatly to cheat the NPT, you would think that everybody is hunky-dory, as that old mafiosi Tony Soprano would have said. Yet far from it. In reality, the US is loudly considering expanding the “nuclear sharing” scheme, and several European states – including some for whom mere SNOWCAT-ing clearly is just not good enough – seem eager to get their own local pile of US nukes beyond their control but inviting retaliation.

At the same time, as everyone acknowledges frankly, these fresh nukes for Europe are supposed to make up for Washington withdrawing its conventional forces from the old continent. What a message: “Dear Euro vassals, we won’t stay around to fight and die with you, but we are happy to make more of you bases and delivery boys for our nukes. Hope you feel safer now. (Oh, and also, we’d love to sell you more of our overpriced F-35 (US kill switches included) that you’ll need for your bombing runs against Russia when we whistle. Deal?)

In a normal world – or to be precise, a normal Europe – the answer to such American generosity would have to be a resounding “fuck off” (in plain American English). But Europe’s elites are not sane – or really, let’s be honest, Europe’s – and so Europe is very far from normal. There seems to be a real eagerness to do, this time as well, what America wants, European interests be damned.

That’s why the so-called “NATO 3.0” project associated in particular with “brain-of-the-Pentagon” Elbridge Colby is likely to proceed just fine. Its essence is simple: Fewer US troops, key capacities, and conventional arms for Europe, so that Washington can shift its weight against China. Apart from the grandly strategic, there’s the personal: The fact that Colby’s father, while working for the CIA, helped lose the Vietnam War may play a role in shaping his son’s priorities.

Russia, if things ever went that far, is extremely unlikely to play along with this NATO 3.0 strategy, obviously. On the contrary, once US nukes land on its troops, bases, and cities, whether launched from and through European vassals or the American mainland, Moscow is likely to hit back at both.

Yet the real mystery here is not how Washington has arrived at adopting such a transparently fragile strategy. Looked at from the big, group-think blob on the Potomac, it may appear worth a try. What is truly baffling is why anyone in Europe would agree. The catastrophic disadvantages are just too obvious: Painting more targets on Europe’s back, distributing nuclear weapons further east when NATO’s eastward expansion is precisely what caused the Ukraine War, sending yet another antagonizing signal to China that Europe is straining to do what it can just to help the US pressure Beijing, and, last but not least, setting Europe up for a large-scale re-run of what the West has just done to Ukraine: devastating proxy war.

Europe does not need even more “nuclear sharing” with the unreliable, irrational, and aggressive US. It needs decoupling from its abusive and exploitative masters in Washington. If its leaders wish to share, how about doing some hard thinking about the economic and security interests their countries clearly share with both Russia and China? But then, Europe’s leaders don’t think. And when they do, then not on behalf of their own peoples. What a shared misery.

The UPA was, in effect, the military arm of the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN had two political wings that mattered, one under Andriy Melnyk, the other under Stepan Bandera. They were rivals, but both were fascists.

During the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both OUN wings tried to collaborate with the Nazis. The Nazis, in their arrogance, did not always let them, but the whole OUN was very eager to please. The OUN and the UPA also participated in murderous German violence against Jews, serving as pro-active mass murder auxiliaries. In addition, they conducted a genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign of their own against Poles.

Predictably, the in-your-face obscenity of Kiev’s latest fascism worship moves has provoked Israel as well as Poland. Polish president Nawrocki would like to deprive Zelensky of the high state honors that Warsaw has foolishly bestowed on him and has threatened to curtail Poland’s support for Kiev’s EU ambitions. In Israel, both its official Holocaust remembrance and exploitation agency Yad Vashem and the foreign ministry have taken exception. That is, of course, ironic, since Israel itself engages obsessively in genocide and ethnic cleansing as well as in, literally, every war crime there is. Maybe, in this case, it takes a genocidal fascist to know one.

Official Kiev is in the middle of devastating corruption scandals – but to be fair, when is it not? – and shaken by mortifying revelations about Zelensky personally (surprise, surprise: a raging narcissist on coke and not a democrat but a kleptocrat) from a well-informed insider speaking to one of America’s most influential media outlets. Yet its ruling clique finds time to really rub it in, again, just how much it cannot stop hugging Nazis, dead and alive. Costs in foreign-policy terms? Apparently, no big deal: When the Nazi-loving urge itches really bad, to hell with caution and – very unusually for Kiev – even dissembling.

Some observers speculate that the fascism fetish is being escalated in public again because of the scandals and always plunging popularity of the regime: Zelensky and the rest of his merry gang of war profiteers and proxy war meatgrinder jockeys, such commentators believe, are merely using the Nazi play “out of a position of weakness,” to distract from the extraordinarily, unprecedently fetid swamp into which they have turned Ukraine’s always sleazy politics.

This is a mistake. It is time that even the slowest in the West accept a simple truth about Zelensky, one he is not even hiding (like so many others): He genuinely likes fascists. And, with his extremely cynical manipulation techniques, his vicious persecution of political opposition and any dissent, his abuse of the mass media for propaganda, and his deep contempt for democracy, he has much heartfelt affinity with them, to say the least.

Silly – and, actually, racist – pseudo-arguments, advanced by Western proxy war boosters that Zelensky can’t possibly ally with a violent far right because he is Jewish deserve no serious answer. The current Israeli regime and its policies of war, genocide, supremacy, and ethnic cleansing are fascist. Case closed.

In fact, the Zelensky regime has a longstanding, consistent habit of pandering to, working with, employing at high levels and on a large scale, and honoring the very far right. Some may love to quibble – bored-academic-style – about pedantically precise terms for fine distinctions in one big pile of rottenness. But, in reality, those labeled Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, fascists, ultra-nationalists and so on form a large whole having much more in common than not.

Re-labelling has also served to spread big fat lies: Indeed, in the case of Ukraine there is a long, foul tradition, reaching back far into the frozen depths of the first Cold War, of mendaciously re-packaging Ukrainian World War Two fascists with their own bloody flavor of terror, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. But re-labelling these Ukrainian fascists “integral nationalists” makes about as much sense as calling Idi Amin Dada – once ultraviolent dictator of Uganda and rumored to have sampled a few of his victims – an “integral vegan.”

And so it is in the present, too: Play with words as much as you like, a fact remains a fact: Zelensky’s Ukraine is state with a big fascism problem. In time, its roots reach back to the period between World Wars One and Two, with a massive escalation during the latter. Regionally, it used to be concentrated in western Ukraine and, after the Soviet victory over fascism in 1945, among fugitives in the US, Cananda, and Europe. There, with their brand of ready-to-kill fascist anti-Communism, they served the West in the first Cold War and systematically subverted Ukrainian communities and any institution they could buy their way into, such as Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this self-declared Ukrainian “diaspora” – ironically, a term popularized out of the same Israel-envy that produced an unseemly urge to politically claim a Holocaust of one’s own in the shape of the “Holodomor” (preferably with even bigger victim counts) – re-entered independent Ukraine and “repatriated” its ideology, vitiating Ukraine’s culture and politics with, unfortunately, great success.

In that, long-term sense, Zelensky and his regime’s sympathy for the fascist devil is part of a longer story. Yet Zelensky’s personal contribution is not merely substantial but crucial. First because he has simply gone much farther than any post-independent leader of Ukraine in making fascism part of a deeply sick new normality. And second, because in our world of often imbecilic identity politics, he has, in effect, exploited his Jewishness to promote his normalization of fascism. It is hard to imagine a greater intellectual and moral perversion. But then, this is Zelensky.

Genuine, decent conservatives tend to have much to say – about, for instance, such vital things as religion, culture, and the family – that is well worth listening to, whether you agree or not. And unlike dour, doctrinaire, and frequently neurotic Centrists, genuine conservatives often have the calm self-confidence that comes from being authentic, and thus they can afford tolerance and a sense of humor, even humility.

Alas, it seems that, in the West, such decent conservatives are if not on the verge of extinction, then at least seriously endangered. And, ironically, their worst enemies are not my sort of people, the often all-too-toothless Left.

What decent conservatives have to fear the most are their own fellow conservatives, but of the indecent kind. In the US – and not only – that indecency takes a specific form, namely spineless, profoundly unpatriotic submission to the interests of a foreign, and, as it happens, genocidal (and then some), state and its powerful lobby, Israel.

Case in point: Thomas Massie, a prominent and influential US Congressman from Kentucky. Massie has just been defeated by, in essence, his own political tribe: After serving seven consecutive terms in Congress for the Republican Party since 2012 and usually “cruis[ing] to victory” in primaries – that is, pre-elections deciding who will run for a party – he has now lost his latest primary and thus, in effect, his seat in Congress.

Primaries are frequent, but this one has attracted much special interest. And rightly so: It clearly was of great national significance, as US President Donald Trump himself went out of his way to launch and support the challenge to Massie, turning the humble local vote in a fairly remote district in a usually not-so-prominent state (strictly speaking, Kentucky is a “Commonwealth”) into a personal loyalty test: All who are with me – Trump in effect said – kiss my ring, and do not dare vote for Massie the rebel!

In that sense, Massie’s defeat by the largely unknown and politically inchoate newcomer Ed Gallrein is a victory for Trump. Once again, the man who made and betrayed MAGA has proven that he can stop – or at least, disrupt – the political careers of Republicans who oppose him. After a long, acrimonious relationship, Trump has won the divorce: Even during his first term he had called for, in effect, purging Massie from the Republican party. By the time of his second term, Trump publicly called him a “LOSER” and a “BUM” (yes, all in capitals, Trump-in-rage-style) to be ousted from office.

But the struggle between a narcissistic president habitually driven foaming-at-the-mouth furious by anything but full, unconditional submission and an independent-minded Congressman, who opposed that president on multiple key issues – for instance, Trump’s Covid policy, the “Big and Beautiful” Bill, and the Iran War – is only part of this story. And not the most important one.

What has really cost Massie his seat is, in one word, Israel. Or to be more precise, Massie’s open defiance of the Israel lobby in the US and the perverse relationship between the latter and most of America’s political elite. This is the US, after all, whose president openly boasts of his approval ratings not at home – where, admittedly, he has nothing to boast about – but in Israel, where Trump jokes, he could run for prime minister once he is done with the US.

According to Tucker Carlson, himself a highly influential conservative rebel against Trump as well as the Israel lobby, Massie is the only Republican in Congress – out of currently 217 – who has never taken money from the lobby. According to Massie, not for want of offers: the lobby, he reports, has attempted to buy him for years. Consistently saying no has made him a target for removal instead. For now, unfortunately, with success.

And the Israel lobby really made it rain this time. Megyn Kelly, like Massie and Trump an American conservative (by now) in opposition to Trump, has also dedicated a long segment of her very popular show to Massie’s defeat. With its total cost of over 32 million dollars, this was the most expensive congressional primary in US history. According to Kelly, of that obscene total – a new local record in America’s long tradition of the worst-democracy-money-can-buy – 9 million came from AIPAC, that is, the institutional core of the Israel lobby (at least in public) and another 7 million from an especially established Super PAC – in essence, an election-buying-and-manipulation machine – that channeled the brazen intervention of billionaires, such as Myriam Adelson and Paul Singer, who are also Israel lobby mainstays.

What has Massie done to deserve such hostile largesse? Massie is, of course, not an “antisemite,” although that smear has predictably been used against him. He is not even consistently against the genocidal apartheid state of Israel (as is, full disclosure, the author of these lines).

Massie’s real sins are breathtakingly simple: Massie has fought, with some if limited success, for transparency in the case of the convicted sex criminal, massively Israel-connected agent of influence, and certainly not suicide victim, Jeffrey Epstein. And he has argued that America is in such horrendous debt that it should stop supporting other countries, including the single greatest and strategically counter-productive drain on its resources, Israel.

That is enough in today’s America: to insist that Americans have a right to know about a hyper-connected criminal who was busy buying and blackmailing US elites and that Americans have no obligation to sacrifice their taxes to Israel. To insist, in other words, on American national interest.

That Massie then consistently also opposed Trump’s insane policy to waste US lives, wealth, and international standing (a very depleted resource anyhow) by obeying Israel’s order to attack Iran only strengthened his enemies’ resolve to destroy him at least politically.

This need not be the end of the story. Massie, for one, has already promised that he will use his remaining time in Congress to expose more individuals who were involved with Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes. He has also not ruled out a run for president in 2028. Neither does Tucker Carlson, as it happens.

For now, Trump, and through him the Israel lobby, are maintaining their devastating grip on US politics. Before it finally loosens, Americans lack not only genuine democracy but even elementary sovereignty. The key question facing their nation is simple: Will the shameless manipulation of their politics by the lobby of a foreign country continue to escalate or will it, at long last, provoke a backlash that, as a minimum, would restore US independence? And perhaps the possibility to survive as a decent conservative in American mainstream politics.

None of the above is news. Keen observers have long understood that things get shaky when a majority loses their belief in – or at least passive acceptance of – the prevalent ideology (in the original meaning of the term, namely as the elite’s imaginative story about reality, keeping the non-elites compliant).

In such a situation, things will change, but it is hard to predict how exactly. An acute ideology-reality mismatch can lead to rebellion and, if the latter succeeds, revolution. Yet it can also make the elites ramp up the indoctrination or become more punitive, adding more direct compulsion, to keep those below in line. There also always is the option of going to war with enemies abroad – real or, much more likely, invented – to distract from the disunity at home. Finally, all of the above can happen in messy sequence or even at the same time.

Despite differences and tensions, the West does constitute some form of political and social order. In its elites’ ideology, as spread by their compliant mainstream media, it is a fairy-light realm of political and economic freedom, combining representative democracy with free markets, the rule of law, individualism, and superior “values” to make the best of all possible worlds. In reality, obviously, it’s a darkening zone of capitalist oligarchy with increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Not the Hobbits’ cozy shire; rather Sauron’s domain under construction.

Markets, for one thing, are not “free,” but routinely and crassly gamed by insiders. Currently for instance, both the beginning of the criminal Israeli-US war against Iran and deliberately timed, repeated rumors about peace have facilitated manipulative trades over billions of dollars.

Likewise with the attacks of eleventh September 2001, that evil Big Bang of our current iteration of mass manipulation, authoritarian power grabs by “emergency” response, permanent warfare, and lying so intense it sometimes is hard to remember there is a truth, as the rebellious US ex-MAGA conservative Tucker Carlson has just reminded us: 9-11 as well was accompanied – and preceded – by trading for which the description “highly suspicious” is an understatement.

Democratic political representation and freedom of thought and speech are, at best, if not outright deceptions, then myths. That is, a messy hodgepodge of scraps of reality and large doses of invention. And those scraps of reality are diminishing ever further.

Concerning freedom, Britain under the widely hated Starmer regime, for instance, is a Zionist police state that smears as “antisemitism” and suppress not only any action on behalf of the victims of Israel’s crimes, including genocide, but also statements of public solidarity with them. There is no rule of law worthy of the name: perfectly legitimate speech is prohibited as “terrorist,” the police serve to harass political dissidents and the courts and their procedures – never much to rely on (ask Julian Assange) - are brazenly bent out of shape to produce unfair trials and punitive sentences.

Regarding representation, take Germany, for instance: It now has a breathtakingly, historically unpopular government that is only even in place because the last election saw widespread and statistically bizarre miscounts which accumulated – very un-randomly – to conveniently eliminate a whole new-left party (the BSW), and thus its voters, from parliament.

The German new right (AfD) and its voters, meanwhile, are openly threatened with unconstitutional punishments if they dare succeed too much: Vote too much AfD and your kid’s high school diploma will be treated like dirt. Yes, that crude; that really is the current level of shamelessness among Germany’s self-radicalizing Centrists.

Even the most conformist inhabitants of the West, moreover, cannot close their eyes anymore to the empirical fact that conspiracies are all too real and exert great, heinous influence by vicious means: You cannot have both your masses soundly believing in the myth of fair popular representation and an Epstein scandal, that is proof of the massive over-representation of very particular and even foreign-state interests through networks of subversion and blackmail. The system may survive at first, but its base will be undermined by mass frustration and cynicism.

Today’s real-existing West, in short, has much in common, and most of it is terrible. That is why we are observing one big trend across it now: In the words the Wall Street Journal – not usually known for subversive dissidence – “Europeans are fed up and taking it out on their leaders.” Polls show massive discontent across NATO-EU Europe. And not only polls but real elections, too: Britain’s Starmer regime has just received a horrific drubbing in local elections that may well mark the impending end of the UK’s dysfunctional and unfair two-party system.

In a study rating the popularity of 24 leaders, the three lowest rungs are taken by those of France, Germany, and Britain: The top-tier of the NATO-EU Europe complex is identical with the dregs of popularity. But that doesn’t mean others are doing much better. Italy’s, the Netherland’s, and Spain’s leaders all have disapproval ratings between 55 and 57 percent.

But what would the West be without its “indispensable” leader? Peruse the Financial Times, another mainstream media outlet above any suspicion of rebelliousness, and you’ll find that there is unhappy harmony across the Atlantic: In the US, more than half of all voters disapprove of President Trump’s policies, too.

Almost 60 percent are unhappy with Trump’s handling of inflation. Just like his awful predecessor, the senescent Gaza Genocide accomplice Joe Biden, Trump is now haunted by a cost-of-living crisis. Like Biden, Trump has only himself to blame: the two key factors driving up consumer prices are his crude tariffs and his predictable fiasco in Iran. Fifty-five percent of voters believe that Trump has hurt the economy; only a fourth think he has helped it.

It is always tempting to focus on each case of malaise individually: here the German mess with its peculiar East-West tension and its comically self-pitying leader Friedrich Merz, for instance; there the French decrepitude with its constitutional design flaws and the raging narcissist Emmanuel Macron at the center; and there again, the British establishment’s traditional vassalage to the US combined with its perverse relationship to Zionism and genocidal Israel. In the case of the America, it is, of course, the upcoming midterm elections that attract most attention.

But what if we adopt a longer view? Where is all of this misery going? Again, more than one outcome is possible. Full disclosure: I find things desperate enough not to mind rebellion and revolution. But it would be foolish not to consider other scenarios, namely those that Western elites would prefer: Increasing repression is an obvious fact already. Distraction by war abroad as well: those labeling the Israeli-American assault on Iran Operation Epstein (instead of “Epic”) Fury have nailed it. Berlin, being Berlin, naturally is gearing up for fighting Russia directly (as opposed to “only” indirectly as it is now), and so is, alas, much of the NATO-EU complex. The future is unpredictable. Except for one thing: Change is inevitable. Don’t bank on it being for the better.