THE COUNTER-OFFENSIVE AND THE COSTS OF WAR
The whole world is waiting around for the Ukrainian ‘counter-offensive,’ which may or may not be underway. Der Spiegel, in a long article on the state of the war, summarizes my position — which is that the ‘counter-offensive’ is mostly a political instrument, designed, essentially, to remind the Western world that their cause matters. “The Ukrainians, though, aren’t just taking on the Russian army, they are also fighting to shore up public opinion in the West,” write Oliver Imhof and Alexander Sarovic in Der Spiegel. “If the counteroffensive doesn’t deliver results, support in Ukraine’s partner countries could begin to erode.” The Ukrainians quoted in the piece are pretty disparaging about the whole idea. “I’m not even using the word counteroffensive,” says Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s Security Council — adding that the only goal is complete liberation however long that takes.
So what that means is a half-hearted offensive that will create a lot of death and devastation and which the Ukrainians themselves fear that they are backing into. Implicit in the quotes of Ukrainian officials is the idea that the war sooner or later must reach a negotiated settlement. Unfortunately, as a Wall Street Journal piece on a possible settlement demonstrates, the grounds for a settlement are really no closer now than they were at the war’s start. The ten-point peace plan laid out by Zelensky includes restoring the pre-2014 borders and prosecutions for war crimes. Talks to be held at a summit of global leaders in July would attempt, as The Wall Street Journal puts it, “to place Ukraine and its allies at the center of international diplomacy….and to ensure that future talks take Kyiv’s plan as the diplomatic reference point.”
That sounds like a worthwhile exercise for diplomats to engage in but also underscores the futility of the process. There really is nothing for Russia anywhere in that plan: even if Ukraine was to back away from the prosecution of war crimes, the idea that Russia would pull out on the war having gained no territory whatsoever would seem to be a non-starter — just as a ceasefire along existing lines would be unthinkable for the Ukrainians. As the Wall Street Journal demurely reports, “U.S. officials have said recently that they believe the likelihood for meaningful diplomacy before the end of the year is low.”
So back to the grinding war and to both sides attempting to outlast each other. As a grim analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows, wars that do not end in the first year last a decade on average. At some point the current battle lines simply get ossified — but if Ukraine might be willing one day to accept the loss of all of its territory over the past year, it certainly is not ready to do so at the moment.
What the Ukrainians can hope for, however, is the loss of the will to fight by Russian soldiers on the ground. The dispute between Wagner and the Russian military’s high command really does continue to get more complicated and more fractious. This week, Wagner captured and extracted the video ‘confession’ of a Russian lieutenant colonel who, in a state of intoxication, had opened fire on a Wagner vehicle. As Anton Gerashchenko of the Ukrainian ministry of internal affairs gloatingly put it, ““It seems that the feud between PMC Wagner and Russian regular army got on the next level.”
The sense is that Putin’s oddly diffuse command structure may be catching up to him — that it really doesn’t work to have a regular army and a body of convict mercenaries fighting in parallel. It still may be wishful thinking that Russia’s war effort falls apart over a schism like this, but, so far, it’s been difficult to underestimate the Russian military. And it’s not impossible to believe this is how the war one day ends. Prigozhin has already threatened to walk off from the conflict. The regular Russian army has been less-than-enthusiastic about fighting. If the fallout of a split like this is damaging enough, Putin may start to consider that the war — or at least the offensive side of the war — isn’t worth it to him.
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Meanwhile, Der Spiegel has another, terrific piece speaking with the families of Wagner fighters who have been trying to get word about what happened to their sons. The piece focuses on the family of Andrei Kargin in the Volgograd region. Kargin had an awful childhood — his father was uninvolved, his mother died from alcoholism. He grew up in an orphanage and then with a foster mother he eventually became estranged from. "Orphanage, foster family, prison, war and death — what a fate for a child,” says his aunt Larissa.
Kargin received a five-year sentence for the theft of a car and, while in prison, was recruited by Prigozhin and Wagner. For Der Spiegel, Larissa plays an audio recording that Kargin sent to her. “Hi, I’m doing well, but I’m going to war,” he says casually. “For a private army. I’m going to fight for six months and then I’ll come home.”
Seven weeks after her final message from her nephew, Larissa received a call from a military commander telling her that Kargin had been killed in action — and saying that, for any subsequent information, she would have to visit the local military office. But the local military office told her, not so surprisingly, that they had no information: “We have nothing to do with Wagner.”
Months of inquiries yielded nothing, until Larissa received a message from a woman she did not know with a photo of Kargin’s grave in Bakinskaya. That turned out to be at one of seven known Wagner cemeteries — with Der Spiegel counting 600 graves there, a twelve-fold increase since reporters’ last visit three months earlier.
For Larissa and for Kargin’s foster mother Lydia, there was nothing else — no death certificate, no recognition, no compensation. A Wagnerite Larissa got on the phone said to her “What do you want? You’re not getting any money” before hanging up. Larissa and Lydia have been too terrified of Wagner to ask for anything else.
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In an interview in Meduza — one of Russia’s last remaining liberal publications — the sociologist Dina Khapaeva claims that the way to understand what has happened in Russia is the emergence of ‘a death cult.’ In a meeting with soldiers’ mothers in November, Putin had claimed that it really was better for the soldiers to have died “accomplishing their mission” rather than to have “died from vodka or something.” For Khapaeva, that’s pretty much the underlying, nihilistic attitude of the officials running the war. “Instead of a meaningless, hopeless, impoverished life, Russians are being offered a chance to die ‘for the Motherland,’” she says.
It’s an old idea. Napoleon, viewing the thousands of corpses and maimed solders after one of his bloodier battles, is supposed to have remarked, “Bah, one night in Paris will replace all of these men.” And that seems to be the mindset that sends Andrei Kargin off to war and, as soon as he has been killed in action, treats him as utterly disposable.
AN OPEN MIND FOR ALIENS
Today is fringe day for me. I want to talk about aliens and I want to talk about Bobby Kennedy and, in so doing, to voice a few opinions that I’m normally shy about sharing.
There’s a real bombshell report in The Debrief (and picked up as widely as The Guardian and New York Magazine). David Grusch, a decorated combat officer and liaison to the DoD’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force comes out as a whistleblower claiming that the UAPTF’s investigations had been railroaded by “elements of the intelligence community” attempting to hide the government’s crash-retrieval program.
Grusch’s statements really are the highest level of corroboration so far for what the UFO community has been claiming going back to the ‘40s. That’s the basic narrative about Roswell and the government taking downed extraterrestrial craft into its possession. It’s also what Bob Lazar claimed to have been a part of in the 1980s — the reverse engineering program, with downed craft from around the world brought to sites like Area 51 and with physicists like Lazar attempting to figure out how they worked.
But Lazar was such an outlier, and the story had enough holes in it, that it seemed like it just had to be set to one side. “It’s a weird one,” Joe Rogan said after he interviewed Lazar in 2019. What Grusch is claiming is that it’s not just that Navy and Air Force pilots have been seeing inexplicable aerial phenomena and the United States government is, in good faith, investigating it through the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and its successors (that was the round of revelations centering on the New York Times’ 2017 ‘On The Trail of a Secret Pentagon U.F.O. Program’ piece), it’s that people within the Task Force are coming across compelling evidence of the very old and very well-established “crash retrieval” and “reverse engineering” programs.
It’s all wild stuff. There are limits to what Grusch knows. He says he hasn’t seen the craft or photos of the craft himself, and corroborative documents that he provided as part of his whistleblower complaint remain classified. But what doesn’t work is to go after Grush’s credibility or to claim that UFOs were a trick of the mind and crash-retrieval a hallucination of the lunatic fringe — which was the standard line, for decades, on this whole phenomenon. Enough senior, credible government officials have come forward to talk about UFOs/UAPs that we do have to shift our framing, that we sort of have to sift through the available evidence and come up with reasonable conclusions about what’s going on. Stanford immunologist Garry Nolan, who, separately from Grusch, claims to have his own second-hand knowledge of the reverse-engineering program, says that taking the possibility of aliens seriously requires little more than “looking at what your government is doing right now” — with a dozen senators signing off on the UAP task forces and with “dozens of individuals coming forward and talking to [Congress] in classified settings.”
Personally, I think I buy it. There are enough data points there — between the testimony of Roswell witnesses; Philip Corso’s book on his work with alien technology in the 1950s; Bob Lazar’s account of the reverse-engineering program; the Navy pilots who saw and had sensor recordings of anomalous craft in the 2000s; and the testimony of people like Grusch, Nolan, Lue Elizondo, and Christopher Mellon who have been privy to various of the government’s UAP programs. But that is not to say that I couldn’t be convinced otherwise. I think it’s possible to call bullshit on Corso and Lazar — to dig into their stories and question their motivations. Now, though, the data points are really starting to accumulate — and what’s emerging, if Grusch, Nolan, et al, are to be believed, is that the government’s involvement with alien technology isn’t just the measly $22 million socked away in the UAP program, as reported by the New York Times. It’s extensive and multi-faceted. What has been most convincing to Grusch, Nolan, and to an Air Force officer The Debrief is calling Jonathan Grey is simply the volume of briefings, the number of people they know and trust who claim to have been involved in crash-retrieval or reverse-engineering. In an interview on NewsNation, Grusch said:
I thought it was totally nuts and at first I was being deceived, that it was a ruse, but then plenty of current and former intelligence officers came to me, many of which I knew my whole career, that confided in me they were part of a program that there was in fact a program that the UAP Task Force was not read into.
Nolan said that what most compelled him was “his personal experiences with people who, frankly, I know have worked, or are working on, the reverse engineering programs.”
What happens now is congressional briefings, disputes within governmental agencies, and, as Nolan puts its, “the professionalization of this” — he’s interested in trying to make use of materials that the government has recovered from downed craft.
In terms of public discourse, much of the burden remains with the government and what it is willing to share. But the terms of the discussion have shifted. It no longer avails — if it ever really did — to treat the UFOs and the rumors of the downed craft simply as “fringe” or “conspiracy.” As Nolan puts it, “The onus is no longer on me to come up with an answer, it’s also on you, because we’re having a discussion about it.” There’s a lot of evidence for thinking that this is really happening — and it’s worth approaching with an open mind.
LET RFK SPEAK!
I had an interesting experience last year while I was doing a lot of travel around the U.S. Depending on where you were, the stands in airport bookstores looked completely different. And, on a layover in Dallas, I came across a copy of Robert Kennedy’s bestselling The Real Anthony Fauci — a surprise to me because, as far as I knew, Kennedy had been bounced from the public sphere, kicked off Instagram, exiled from his own family, but here he was, in Dallas, with a major bestseller.
The experience of coming across that airport stand made a deep impression on me — really illustrated for me how stark the fissures were in American society. In the ‘liberal’ blue states where I lived, RFK’s points — the critique of the Covid vaccine and of vaccines in general, the challenge to ‘Big Pharma’ and the scientific ‘consensus’ — were so outrageous that he had been thoroughly canceled and disavowed, his family name notwithstanding. In the red states — and probably in the battleground states — there was no problem. His critique resonated with a lot of people there; his book was just understood to be interesting and provocative.
That split-screen effect is playing out again. RFK’s appearance in the presidential race was immediately dismissed, in liberal circles, as fringe. A Democratic fundraiser quoted in The Free Press compared him to Connor Roy. His positions were seen to be either laughable or dangerous. But the rest of the country is in a different reality. The 20% that RFK polled upon his entrance in the race may not hold for him but it is reflective of a real constituency — Democratic primary voters who are exactly the wing of the party that most needs to be nailed down in a general election and who are profoundly unhappy with the Democratic establishment.
Everybody who listens to RFK seems to have the same reaction — that, as media consultant David Kochel put it, about 90% of what he says is bold and interesting and 10% is sheer madness. Having listened to some of his conversation with Elon Musk, I don’t actually think he’s ready for prime time — don’t think his candidacy will get very far. He really is too much of an oddity. But his positions, I believe, are worth hearing. Covid overreach — the mask and vaccine mandates, the deference to pharmaceutical companies, the stifling of debate in the press and on social media — is a major unaddressed sin of the Democratic Party. And it is important to discuss the hold that Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Media have over liberal institutions — and the way that they stifle genuinely democratic discussion. “If you’re a media platform, you should be questioning the government,” Kennedy says in The Free Press profile. “What’s happening now is kind of the opposite. Instead of speaking truth to power, they’re broadcasting propaganda to the powerless.”
And, yes, that’s a good line and in an entry point into what his campaign is meant to be about. The underlying issue here seems to be that legacy institutions really do believe that they can control the narrative — say, by exiling aberrant voices from the public sphere — and miss the extent to which the polity (and swing voters in particular) are unpersuaded. As a former congressman quoted in The Free Press article says, “It’s almost like that which is not talked about. The people who are pros, they know there’s a reckoning coming.” Or, as Kennedy matter-of-factly says, “There are people who are angry and they deserve to be angry.” And the campaign that he has in mind represents the shape of what almost certainly will be the Democratic Party’s electoral future — connecting to the populist tendencies of swing voters, challenging the Washington status quo, taking a page from Trump’s playbook in terms of political rhetoric but with a broad tent appeal.
As Peter Savodnik writes in The Free Press piece, challenging the Connor Roy narrative:
The thing is, 20 percent in the polls isn’t quixotic. The confusion and sense of loss on the left — the people mystified by the mask mandates and the party’s coziness with big pharmaceutical and tech companies — that is real. It is percolating across the country. And just as it upended right-wing norms and expectations, it will upend the whole progressive project. It will redefine it.
I doubt that Kennedy himself will ultimately be the one to harness that. He’s just too much of an odd duck — and the Democratic electorate will see that if he’s allowed to campaign openly. But the Democratic establishment is so paranoid, so careful, that they’re trying assiduously to cut RFK and the “fringe” candidates from any public hearing. Most critically, the Democratic Party has indicated that it has “no plans” for primary debates.
That’s, actually, shocking to me. In a piece I wrote for Persuasion, I argued that the current M.O. of closing ranks behind Biden is bad strategy — it just means that Biden’s weaknesses as a candidate will be exposed when it matters most, in the general election. But it’s also unethical. Kennedy is polling at 20%; Marianne Williamson at around 10%. They both, in their very different ways, have interesting things to say that resonate with aspects of the Democratic constituency, as well as with independents. An open, fair-play-for-everybody primary could help to pull in independents and voters disaffected by the Democratic establishment; and is also, obviously, the right thing to do given Kennedy and Williamson’s concerted challenges.
But that’s not the direction the Dems are going in. The justifications for it get pretty shabby. On Substack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whose writing I generally like, applauds the cancelation of debates by saying, “Debates are worthless political theater. Full of sound and fury — signifying nothing.” Which is a ridiculously un-democratic proposition and, I’m sure, not something that he would write if, say, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren were in the race. Mostly, though, the Dems aren’t bothering to justify it at all. The New York Times, writing of Kennedy’s conversation with Elon Musk, describes him as “pushing right-wing ideas and misinformation.” Well, yes, there are some doozies in what he said — attributing the spike in mass shootings to anti-depressants is probably the most egregious — but the bulk of the critique isn’t actually right-wing at all. It’s pretty much the position of the ‘60s left — more Eugene McCarthy than Bobby Kennedy, actually. “It’s become a war party,” Kennedy said of the Dems. “It’s become the party of the neocons. It’s become the party of Wall Street and the party of censorship, which, I think, is, you know, antithetical to liberal values.”
I want to emphasize that I disagree with much of what Kennedy says. I’d be shocked if I end up voting for him, or for anybody other than Biden. But silencing him — which is what is happening — is not the way. As Michael Shellenberger puts it, “A dizzying political realignment has scrambled all of the traditional categories and left in its wake just two sides: not left and right, but insider and outsider.” The whole idea of the primary process is that it’s a chance to hear from the outsiders as well.
Interesting about books being noticeably easier to find in certain airports. A delightful topic. I still give Gatwick Airport props for selling a book as literary and dark as Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango. Too bad my experience is a bit too sporadic, it's a fascinating topic in and of itself. (Finding Nathalie Sarrautes Martereau at SFO was another high point) Was thinking of reading the Fauci book since I detest the guy, but investment in the fate of America dwindles by the year. What's the coolest book you've found in an airport?
RFK's appeal is interesting in that sense, and I can see how Dems who have woken up to the Woke insanity or intense Party corruption view him as a salvation. Although if a Party is as screwed up and power-lusting as the Democrats are now it seems like his position is as flawed as that of the Reform Communists in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s; what they wanted was just a "better" version of the same rot. (They were "lucky" enough to have a Soviet Invasion wake them up from their delusions) What you said about the Dems ignoring debates altogether may disturb you now. But back in 2020 the Party routinely avoided bringing Biden out in public: there was even a term on the Internet, "put the lid" on him, as if he was Oscar the Grouch. (or the Puppet Man in Jay Reatards song of the same name) It was shocking how little he appeared in public, and it was a surprise they even brought him out for the debates at all. It's no wonder people were appalled at the outcome: it wasn't just because of Trump, and Jan 6, and evil right-wingers, and yada yada. Biden's victory also represents the victory of a no-campaigning presidency, of which the American people gave their approval. (Ironically, while crying to the skies about democracy dying) And while it may feel like a great victory to Dems because they vanquished the evil orange man it was, in reality, a victory for unthinking, uncritical, unadulterated tribalism such as you mention with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
What's happening here with the eschewing of debates is only the next logical step - 2.0 if you will - from what was started in 2020. Imagine how it will look in 2028. I've been too broke in life to be a betting man: but if I was, I'd bet that they start calling out for the nomination phase itself to be thrown away: why waste time watching Dem nominees bicker and look bad in front of the "evil Republicans" when we can just choose "the best one" from the start and get it over with? Besides, competition is a form of Whiteness. (That now-famous Smithsonian pamphlet on Whiteness made that argument, so somewhere in the Dem psyche that belief is already accepted)