In Ukraine, Putin’s army is shelling Kharkov and Kiev. Ukrainian civilians are dying beneath the rubble of their homes as I write. There is reportedly a hit list of pro-democracy Ukrainians.
In the US, QAnon fanatics heckled the President during the State of the Union this evening, as he spoke about his son’s death. Trump and Tucker Carlson defend Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The January 6 Commission continues to interview witnesses and review evidence.
Canada is recovering from a trucker protest funded by American Trump supporters. It is unusual for protestors in democracies to demand the resignation of the head of state, or to harass and attack citizens near the site of the protest. And I cannot recall protesters attempting to cause a recession in their own country, as the Canadian truckers did by blocking the border crossings between Ontario and the Upper Midwest, hurting manufacturing on both sides of the border.
Their organization was remarkable. QAnon, white supremacists and anti-vaxxers were blended together and funded by rich Trump supporters in the US. The Canadian government seemed frozen in place, stunned perhaps at the opposition to reasonable public health measures, and at the sheer un-Canadian tone of the truckers.
It did not resemble a normal protest so much as an FSB Staff College exercise. Even if the protest wasn’t planned in Moscow, the apparent intent was to de-stabilize the Canadian state.
The conduct of the truckers in Ottawa left a mark:
It may seem as though everything is going wrong at once; the world is suddenly chaotic.
I submit that the chaos is more apparent than real. All these events are tightly linked and flow from the same cause: Billionaire Capitalism, which is entering a much more violent phase.
Putin invaded Ukraine intending to de-stabilize and intimidate Europe, humiliate the Biden administration in the run-up to the mid-term elections, give Trump ammunition against Biden, and perhaps get a nationalistic bump from the Russian public. He may have assumed that four years of Trump had weakened NATO.
But the Ukrainians reacted as Republican moderates and Joe Manchin should have reacted long ago. The Ukrainians are fighting like men and women who know precisely what they value, and precisely what they reject. When I was young, people used to say, “fight like a cornered raccoon,” to describe someone fighting with strength beyond strength. But these raccoons also believe in something. They call it “Europe,” by which they mean democracy, education, a free press and human dignity. Also a class structure without kleptocrats, and a head of state who doesn’t poison people.
They don’t want Putin’s Billionaire State, nor Trump’s either.
The Ukrainian government opened up its armories to the citizens. On TV, I saw a statistician with an AK-47 on the streets of Kiev. Instead of going to work, he went to the armory that morning, picked up his weapon, and found a group of partisans to join. Such a man should be uniquely qualified to calculate the odds against him and his country, but he wasn’t in a calculating frame of mind.
Jung said that “God” is the highest value the psyche can encompass, and are there higher values than human life, human dignity, and the path of the spirit? Are we witnessing a theophany in Ukraine?
Is the Ukrainian resistance a turning point? It certainly is in terms of the world’s understanding of the threat Putin (and Billionaire Capitalism) pose. Russia is not just a semi-normal country with a mediocre human rights record. It is instead a threat to us all.
The Socialist Investor 
Well done! I like it
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