I know you don’t care about what Vlad has to say for himself. In the main, neither do I. But …
I’m laying this down anyway, because of one arguably non-political or trans-political thing that struck me.
Alex Christoforu is droning on about the High Oligarch’s speech and what got said–at about 1:50, I startled, when he says:
“I would say that Putin’s speech was a declaration, to the world and to the old world order, the Western world order, that Russia is now Out Of The System. They are free. They’ve done it. They’ve managed to break out of the Western architecture, and they are charting an independent and sovereign course”.
There’s more and go listen if you want, but the basics are all right there in a few words.
This is what my own heart craves. Making that same declaration. Of Independence. And from exactly the same people.
Even more importantly, having that declaration be demonstrably factual and true–a new truth–perhaps even Self-Evident.
Eventually … it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the economic bonds which have shackled them to some Other, and to assume the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature entitle them. Even if they were born, and still are, wage slaves.
Whenever any form of government, such as the merger of the state with the corporations, becomes destructive of life, liberty and the pursuit of meaning, it is the right of people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new kinds of governance, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to insure their safety and their happiness.
When a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
Over and over, we have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, but they have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity of our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
Like all such declarations, this one will most definitely not come freely or easily, and may even cost in blood of some kind. But still it was worth it then, and it is worth it just the same today.
The ungodly piles of money we sent and continue to send to the military-industrial complex through the poor dumb puppet state are an immorality worthy of King George.
The boomeranging sanctions were ugly and wrong by any measure, hurtful to those least able to bear them at home and abroad.
But perhaps history will see them as a fateful and necessary spark, of revolution at long long last.