History may not repeat itself but it most certainly rhymes. Get out your Twilight Zone nuclear war episodes, all the more stark and compelling because of their black and white simplicity, because if you listen to Russian media, it’s time to ramp up the paranoia machine all over again.
Russia is reacting to having a real president back in the White House, as opposed to a clown that they groomed and pandered to incessantly, although the while laughing at him as well. Ukraine is still a mess, and it was a mess for the entire four years that Donald Trump was in office. Now, the tide has turned, and Russia is worried about the possibility of the U.S. establishing a military presence in Ukraine. That is upsetting a lot of people. Daily Beast:
… “They want to destroy us,” hyperventilated Dmitry Kulikov, appearing on The Evening with Vladimir Soloviev. “It’s in their nature,” agreed Soloviev, adding: “You can’t turn a wolf into a vegetarian.” The host further claimed that Russia “will be destroyed very quickly” if it “loses Donbas”—a Ukrainian territory that is not Russia’s to lose or to keep—because “Putin’s electorate won’t stand for it.”
Rather than to risk Putin’s eternal presidency, Soloviev suggested that the fight over Ukraine’s Donbas will end in a “nuclear conflict” between Russia and NATO. Senior military analyst Mikhail Khodaryonok, a former colonel from the Soviet air defense force, opined: “I think that any conflict could be stopped by the threat of at least a tactical nuclear strike from our side. The main question is how convincing our message will be.”
So it’s the 50’s and 60’s and we’re back to the game of nuclear chicken — which is one hell of a game. The stakes are nothing short of entire annihilation of the human species — and animal species, and plants, and algae and…….
We don’t know if the games are going to begin, but they’re being contemplated and that is sobering in itself.
Khodaryonok then proposed launching a limited nuclear strike in neutral ocean waters as a warning shot to the West. “Perhaps we should start by doing that right now,” Soloviev suggested. “It’s not only probable, but very likely indeed,” Khodaryonok confirmed. The potentially devastating consequences of such a reckless approach didn’t seem to bother the professional performers of Putin’s propaganda machine.
Ukraine has been a real world battleground for some time now, although all foreign policy went on hiatus when Trump was in office. As much as things went to hell domestically in the Trump era, foreign diplomacy was either at a stand still or became the punchline of a bad joke. Never forget, Trump’s only interest in Ukraine was to see if he could have Rudy Giuliani dig up some dirt on Joe Biden. That is the fullest extent of what that moron could comprehend about world politics and America’s place in the world. And nobody knows this better than the Russians. They loved Trump, not only for his entertainment value, but because while the other countries were still moving pieces in the world chess game, America had fallen clean off the board.
America’s response to Russian aggression had been uneven under former U.S. President Donald J. Trump, with his administration sending weapons to Ukraine while Trump tried to make that aid contingent on political help against Joe Biden, his political opponent. State media experts acknowledged that things would have been quite different if Hillary Clinton won the electoral college—and not just the popular vote—in 2016.
“The same state of war that we have right now would have started within the first 6 months of the Clinton presidency,” asserted Dmitry Kulikov—member of the Zinoviev Club, instituted by the Kremlin-controlled media giant Russia Today—said on Soloviev’s show. He added: “America was much stronger then.” The host, Vladimir Soloviev, pointed out: “And Russia wouldn’t have had four years.” Kulikov emphatically agreed: “That’s why they [Americans] are furious with Trump. He stole those four years from them and gave them to Russia and China.”
Under Biden, such games appear to be over. Instead of laughing about Trump’s embarrassing subservience to Putin, experts and pundits on state TV are grim-faced as they anticipate harsh measures against the Kremlin by the Biden administration. Even Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-funded RT and Sputnik, whose bombastic anti-American rhetoric fills the air on multiple state media programs, admitted that Russia is not immune against U.S. sanctions. Appearing on the talk show Our Truth that aired on television channel NTV, controlled by state-owned Gazprom Media, Simonyan conceded: “There could be sanctions that would cause us to end up living like we’re in Iran… We have vulnerabilities, as you know.”
Fears of additional sanctions are holding Moscow back from overt aggression, but the inflammatory anti-American rhetoric is being ratcheted up across all of the Kremlin-controlled state media. Duplicitous claims that Russia wants peace with America and loves its people are now being replaced with raw admissions of hostility and ill will. The host of Russia’s 60 Minutes, Evgeny Popov, claimed that the Russians can’t stand U.S. politicians, but love ordinary American people. He was cut off by his wife and co-host, Olga Skabeeva, who proclaimed with brutal honesty: “Let’s be real, we don’t love the American people either.”
The adults are back in power, but things moved on without America being represented, unless you want to call the likes of Giuliani and his henchman like Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman “representation” on the world stage. We’ll have to pick up the ball where it was dropped. We have no choice. In the meantime, I guess you can fix a cocktail and screen Dr. Strangelove.
A little something to dial back the hyperventilation: Russians lie. A lot. Especially government bureaucrats. If they didn’t, five or six countries would already own their home turf by now.
Can’t wait for the giant scorpion mutants to take over Las Vegas.
Oh noes! They’ll eat Murfster and I! And then what will you do for entertainment? Besides, if all the bombs they were blowing up in the desert in the fifties and sixties didn’t create giant scorpions, I think we can breathe easy.