The Sultan And The Grandmaster: Nagorno Karabakh, Armenia, and Azerbaijan

There is a war going on between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

 

No there isn't. There is no war going on between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

 

The territory that is being fought over is territory that is recognised by literally everyone (including Armenia) as Azerbaijani territory. This includes two parts:

 

1. The enclave of Нагорный Карабах (usually written in English as Nagorno Karabakh, roughly meaning "Hilly Black Garden") which is mountainous and heavily settled by ethnic Armenians since ancient times, and until 1993 by many thousands of Azeris. This is surrounded entirely by Azeri territory, and was a part of Azerbaijan as it existed in the USSR.

 

2. Said surrounding Azeri territory occupied by Armenia, which is also recognised by everyone as Azerbaijani territory.

 

(a) These two territories are both completely occupied by Armenia since a 1988-93 war and comprise a quarter of Azerbaijan.

 

(b) The occupation of these territories was accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of over a million people, most of whom were Azeris, so that both parts of the occupied territory are now entirely Azeri-free.

 

(c) The two territories jointly declared themselves "independent" as a so-called Republic of Artsakh, which is not recognised by anyone, including Armenia. This Artsakh, by the way, is only one of several unrecognised republics that rose from the murder of the USSR; the others are Transnistria (from Moldavia), Abkhazia and South Ossetia (from Georgia) and, latest and far from least, the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics (from post Maidan Ukranazistan).

 

(d) UN resolutions have demanded the settlement of the dispute by negotiations. However, Armenia, until fairly recently far more militarily powerful than Azerbaijan, saw no need to negotiate on facts it had created on the ground by military force. Also Armenia is a CSTO treaty ally of Russia, which has a small military presence in the country.

 

(e) However, in the past few years, these things happened:

 

(i) In 2018 a colour revolution brought yet another "pro-western" regime - under prime minister Nikol Pashinyan - into power in Armenia. The Pashinyan regime has been spending the last two years slowly and systematically distancing itself from Russia, which, let me repeat, is still its CSTO ally and – with its military base in the country – its protector.

 

(ii) Azeri oil revenues boomed and it massively increased expenditure in defence, buying weapons from everyone from Russia to America to a certain settler ethnostate on the eastern Mediterranean coast that treats the native population abominably. I don’t need to remind you what this so called country is called.

 

(iii) Sultan Erdogan of the neo Ottoman Empire needed money for his Ottomanisation project, as well as an empire to rule.

 

(iv) The defeat of the jihadi headchopper invasion of Syria left a lot of armed jihadis trapped in Idlib and desperate to find a way to make a living.

 

(v) Erdogan suddenly discovered, or more correctly found it suddenly convenient to remember, that the Azeris, though Shia, were fellow Turkic speakers, and, therefore, people it was his “duty” to “protect”.

 

As a result of all this, Erdogan made an alliance with the (corrupt and easily purchased) Azeri president, the dynast Ilham Aliyev. The Ottomans would supply the means (air cover, weapons, and jihadi headchoppers to use as shock troops) to reclaim the Azerbaijani territory occupied by Armenia. Aliyev, as the Liberator of Azeri Land, could immediately scotch all opposition to his rule. In return, Erdogan would get a share of the oil revenues and the right to station Ottoman forces in the reconquered land.

 

Simple, right? In fact it played out in full public view, with Ottoman forces conducting “exercises” with Azeri troops in (Azeri controlled) Azerbaijan, after which less than all returned to their own country. Aliyev, too, sharply increased his anti-Armenian rhetoric, clearly signalling that the matter was now to be settled by military force. So obvious was it that even I, with no resources available to me but the news, immediately stated as soon as I heard of the fighting that it was the Ottomans who were behind it. But, as we shall see, someone who could have stopped this war before it started, didn’t.

 

Meanwhile, Pashinyan of Armenia was facing his own challenges. Armenia has hardly any natural resources. Its best farmland isn't even Armenian, it lies in the occupied zone around Nagorno Karabakh. And like a good little colour revolutionary he needed to obey the orders of those who put him into power. As such, he couldn't even ask Russia for help (this would anger his owners in Washington), or recognise Artsakh, or annex it, even though he "threatened" to when the fighting began.

 

It is, in fact, possible that Pashinyan has deliberately chosen to sacrifice the territory in order to get rid of a dispute that would normally stop Armenian accession to NATO. We will return to this point later.

 

Now let’s go over this again:

 

1.The so-called Republic of Artsakh is Azeri Nagorno Karabakh, historically settled by Armenians, surrounded by Azeri territory occupied by Armenia from which the Azeri population was ethnically cleansed thirty years ago.

 

2.Azerbaijan is in all but name an Ottoman proxy, which happens to have a sudden glut of oil money and is part of the neo Ottomanisation project of Sultan Erdogan Pasha.

 

3.Pashinyan is a colour revolution tool owned by Washington as much as Aliyev is the wholly owned property of Erdogan Pasha.

 

4.Normally, Armenia would have been able to smack down any Azerbaijan attack, but these are not normal times, because Azerbaijan is reinforced by Ottoman command and control, air support, and cannibal headchopper jihadi imports from Syria.

 

In fact, the Ottoman-Azerbaijan-Headchopper Alliance (hereafter referred to as OAHA for convenience) plan of action is as simple as it is predictable by anyone looking at a map. 

OAHA’s basic operational plan depends on two things:

 

First, the fact that Armenian manpower is seriously restricted by two factors:

 

(i)It has a much smaller population than Azerbaijan and therefore a much smaller recruitment base.

 

(ii)It has an Azeri enclave (Nakhichevan) and the Ottoman Empire on its western borders as well as, you know, Azerbaijan on its eastern borders, the part where it does not occupy Azeri territory.

 

As such, Armenia can’t, no matter how much it tries, mobilise as many troops as Azerbaijan. And of those troops it does mobilise, it can’t, no matter how much it tries, put all or even most into defending Nagorno Karabakh. It has to hold back many or most of them to defend Armenia itself from any possible attack from the Ottomans and/or the Azeris. It’s the classic dilemma of a two front war.

 

On the other hand, OAHA has no such constraints. It knows perfectly well that, unless suicidal, Armenia can’t and won’t attack them. They can perfectly well concentrate almost all their forces around Nagorno Karabakh.

 

Secondly, once said forces are concentrated around Nagorno Karabakh, what happens? Aliyev may be a corrupt sell-out, but he’s no idiot. Casualties in large numbers won’t be popular at home, no matter how popular the conquest might be. To this end, a blitzkrieg offensive into the waiting guns of fortified Armenian defensive positions on the Nagorno Karabakh hills is not exactly the best solution. So what is?

 

The really brutal, really simple plans are usually also the most successful. And a look at the map shows the extremely predictable strategy OAHA is following:

 

1.Impose unacceptable levels of attrition on the limited forces that Armenia can commit. At a certain point, the attrition will cause the Armenian lines to collapse. That point, in fact, has been reached north and south of Nagorno Karabakh itself in the plains.

 

2.Use jihadi headchopper imports from Idlib as shock troops, taking the casualties while the Ottomans achieve air supremacy and the Azeris hold back their own troops for the final push. This is the same way the Ottomans used jihadi headchoppers as shock troops against the Kurds in Syria and against Haftar in Libya, about which I’ll talk in a moment.

 

3.Attack Nagorno Karabakh cities (just like Stepanakert is being bombed and shelled) to trigger a refugee exodus into Armenia. This has already happened to a large extent with some half of the Nagorno Karabakh population already having been “displaced”, meaning, they’re fleeing.

 

4.Bypass the mountainous fortified area to cut off Nagorno Karabakh from Armenia in a pincer movement from north and south. As the territory becomes increasingly encircled, the remaining civilian population and at least a substantial part if not all of the surviving defenders will flee. Which sane Armenian, after all, will ever trust himself to the tender mercies of the Ottomans and their anti-Christian jihadi cohorts, not to mention Azeris filled with vengeance for their own ethnic cleansing thirty years ago?

 

5.Manufacture “Armenian attacks” on Azeri cities as propaganda. It is shoddy propaganda, like the Narendrabhai Damodardasbhai Modi regime’s anti-China propaganda (or like the EU “Novichok” propaganda), but like them, it’s meant as a justification, not to be believed.

 

And then what happens afterwards? If Erdogan’s actions in Syria, where he settled Uighur jihadi imports in a mini caliphate in Jisr al Shughour are any guide, the headchoppers from Idlib will be put into “liberated” Nagorno Karabakh and protected there by Ottoman forces. Just like the headchoppers in Idlib, come to think of it.

 

The Ottoman Question:

 

By this point the reader will have been aware that the driving force behind the entire war is the Ottoman Empire. This same Ottoman Empire is a member of NATO, allegedly not one in good standing, but still a member of NATO. I say “allegedly” because despite all the rhetoric against the Ottomans from the likes of the gerontophiliac Macronist regime in France, the Ottomans are

 

1.Still the second largest military in NATO, and by far the best – indeed the only competent – military in NATO.

 

2.The single most strategically located country in NATO, sitting as it does across the chokepoint of the Black Sea and overlooking all of West Asia.

 

Because of these factors, even if there was any option to expel a member from NATO (there isn’t) the Amerikastani Empire would never do such a thing. And that in turn means that

 

1.An Ottomanised Azerbaijan is a NATO Azerbaijan in all but name.

 

2.The endless appeasement of Erdogan by Russia, which I will refer to in the next section, will get nothing for Russia.All it is doing is emboldening Erdogan.

 

Among Erdogan-watchers there is a remarkable tendency to imagine that the Sultan is flailing around starting wars at random, as though he’s just another tinpot megalomaniac like Muhammad bin Salman al Bonesawi of Saudi Barbaria. This is absolutely not true. Erdogan, whatever else he might be, is a remarkably shrewd political operator. His wars are always extremely carefully chosen. Look at these:

 

1.From 2011, he assiduously supported headchoppers against Syria, laying out the red carpet for international jihadis, so that the airline from Istanbul to Gaziantep became known as the “jihad express”. In return he got the proceeds of the factories and warehouses the headchoppers systematically looted and shipped off to Ottoman businessmen, and, later, bought oil from ISIS; the Amerikastani Empire left the convoys of oil tankers from occupied Syrian oilfields to Turkey alone until the Russians began bombing them. Erdogan’s son is known to have personally benefited from these transactions.

 

2.In Libya, Erdogan intervened to save the so-called ‘government’ (the GNA, an outfit of slave-trading, human trafficking gangsters) when it was on the ropes against the forces of the LNA (led by “Field Marshal” Khalifa Haftar, a known CIA asset whose only saving grace is that he’s a secularist). In return he got the “rights” to oil exploration in the Mediterranean and a share of Libyan oil exports. He’d have got away with it, too, but for the fact that Haftar managed to hang on to the city of Sirte, the hometown of the martyr Brother Muammar Gaddafi. Libya’s oil reserves are pretty much all to the east of Sirte, in Haftar territory. In Libya, too, Erdogan used large numbers of jihadi headchoppers imported from Syria. Some of those headchoppers – the very same ones – have been sent on to Azerbaijan.

 

3.In Iraq, Erdogan’s repeated invasions are mostly a security measure meant to keep the Kurds down. It’s far from a war of choice; the Ottomans actually have, by their standards, a legitimate reason to not empower the Kurds. At the same time it’s not stopped Erdogan from buying oil from other Kurds in Iraq, at prices well below what he would have to pay the legitimate Iraqi government, well, as legitimate as any Iraqi government after the invasion of 2003 can be.

 

4.In Azerbaijan, as stated, Erdogan’s calculations are simple; victory for Aliyev in return for oil revenue.

 

In fact, Erdogan, who closely styles himself on the 16^th Century ninth Ottoman Sultan, Selim the Grim, like the Ottomans, wages war as a way of securing income. Then it was the loot of conquered cities, and the taxing of vassal states – the Ottomans didn’t really care what their vassals did as long as they paid their taxes – and now it’s the loot of natural resources and protection money from the looters. This is why the crash of the lira is a temporary blip; the Ottoman plan of war will succeed as long as nobody stops them.

 

And who will stop them? Well, then, let’s talk about...

 

Russia and the worship of the Greatest Grandmaster Genius The Galaxy Has Ever Known:

 

A few years ago I wrote an article in which I had compared Putin’s “restraint” against Amerikastani provocations not just failures in and of themselves, but direct encouragement to more provocations. Back in 2014, I had said, Putin was so single issue focussed on the Sochi Olympics that what even the Amerikastani imperialists STRATFOR called the “most blatant coup in history” played out in full public view in Kiev, without Russia lifting a finger. I had written that Putin could have sent in two battalions of Spetsnaz, overthrown Obama’s Ukranazi coup regime, reinstated Viktor Yanukovych, and withdrawn, with the clear statement that if there were any more coups Russia would return and this time to stay. I remember that when the militias of the Donbass were desperately raiding museums to secure WWII weapons to take on Ukranazi armoured columns, when Russian military blogs were demanding “Putin, dai prikaz!” (Putin, give the order!), Putin kept silent. When the defenders of Donbass had to withdraw from Slovyansk and were nearly cut into two, when the Ukranazis were at Donetsk airport, when defeat was only a matter of hours, it was then that Putin allegedly did something. What that something was I’m not clear about. It was certainly not the dispatch of Russian forces, or else Russian tanks would have been rolling down the Kiev streets in two days. It may have been finally sending weapons, allowing volunteers to go to the front to fight (including more than a few brave and laudable Americans; not all of them are brain-dead imperialists), and possibly limited artillery support. At any rate, when the defenders of the republics crushed the Ukranazis at Debaltsevo and were well on the way to liberating Mariupol on the Black Sea, Putin again withdrew support to them, leaving them without a port and stuck in a frozen war interrupted by sniping and shelling.

 

And what was the excuse presented by Putin’s worshippers online, a species I have recently dubbed “Putinoids”? It’s been changing over the years. At first it was that the Ukranazis would “inevitably” collapse. Well, it’s going on for seven years now, and, absolutely predictably, the Ukranazis are far too convenient a tool to the Amerikastani Empire to be permitted to collapse. Then the excuse shifted to the notion that if Putin had intervened, Russia couldn’t have got back Crimea. Apparently it passeth the limited understanding of these people that had Putin intervened, with a friendly government in Kiev, Russia would not have had to annex Crimea. Then it was something about Yanukovych not having had the courage to fight, so why should Russia fight for him. It seems that we are still in the 17^th century, when kings could conduct foreign policies according to their personal likes and dislikes, whims and fancies. It’s not, by the way, surprising that a lot of these Putinoids are people who hanker back to a Tsarist mythical golden age. Arch Putinoid the Saker (Andrei Raevski) is the most infamous, but the internet is full of them.

 

But let’s ignore the people of the two Donbass republics for the moment and look at the result of this “restraint”. Today, Amerikastani B52 bombers and RC135 reconnaissance planes fly freely through Ukranazi airspace right up to the Russian border, compelling Russian air defence systems to turn on their electronic defences, exposing their signatures for analysis and jamming by said Amerikastanis. Ukranazistan, not being a NATO member officially, is even more valuable to Amerikastan than it would have been as a NATO member, since it can be used for staging actions that could not involve NATO without risk of a world war. How’s that for “restraint”, Putinoids?

 

In fact, with the one shining exception of the war against Georgia in defence of South Ossetia in 2008, when Medvedev – not Putin – was president, Russian foreign policy has always been criminally defensive and reactive, never proactive. In 2011 Russia permitted Libya to be destroyed, turning an ally into a jihadi hellhole where a slave trading human trafficking regime and a CIA asset fight for control. In 2015 Syria was on the verge of collapse when Putin belatedly and reluctantly sent just enough planes and troops to save Damascus and help the legitimate government of Dr Assad liberate Aleppo, but failed to do a thing to stop the north and east turn into, respectively, an Ottoman colony and a Kurd Quisling puppet state under Amerikastani protection. In 2020 in Belarus it was only the personal courage and genuine popularity of President Aleksandr Lukashenko that prevented a colour revolution that would have turned the country into another NATO stooge. The same 2020 saw the Putin regime allow the racist right wing “liberal” Alexei Navalny to be sent to Germany, and predictably a fake “Novichok poisoning” was immediately manufactured to wreck EU-Russian relations, which were just about beginning to mend, beyond repair.

 

In none of these cases – none! – did what the Putinoids celebrate as the Greatest Grandmaster and Geopolitical Genius in the Galaxy do a thing to prevent it happening, even when everyone could see it coming. For instance, the moment I heard that the Azerbaijan regime had attacked Nagorno Karabakh, even I, with no information but what I could read in the news, instantly said the Ottomans were responsible. I refuse to believe that Putin, with the Russian intelligence services at his disposal, did not know any of these things were coming. But he never did anything proactive, and when he did react, it was just enough to impose a shaky and unstable status quo. Not a status quo ante, just a status quo.

 

This same instinct, apparently, is in effect where Putin’s relations with the zionist entity and the Ottomans are concerned. Under the Putinist “help” to Syria, the zionazi pseudostate bombs the country at liberty, and Putin, despite having S 400 air defence systems in place, does nothing. And after the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, when Russia, for some inexplicable reason, saved Erdogan’s bacon, it’s bending over backwards to appease him. It sold him S400s, offered the latest SU57 fighters, endorsed the Turkstream pipeline, and when Syria attempted to reclaim the Idlib jihadistate earlier this year, it withheld air cover, allowing the Ottoman drones to wreck the Syrian army spearheads. After which it signed yet another agreement that it knew perfectly well the Ottomans had no intention of honouring, as they have not.

 

Much is made by Putinoids of Russia calling the Amerikastani Empire “not agreement capable”. If it isn’t, and it is not, the Ottomans are a thousand times more “not agreement capable”. Anyone trusting Sultan Erdogan about anything needs a brain transplant. And yet the Putin regime keeps making agreements with them!

 

When I asked online how Russia has benefited from appeasing Sultan Erdogan, I was responded to by a counter-question. Did I think, a Putinoid asked, that a “western poppet” in Turkey would be better for Russia? I replied back by asking the Putinoid to inform me which conceivable Ottoman regime would be worse than one that occupies North Syria, routinely attacks Iraq, conducts a proxy war with jihadi headchoppers in Libya, and now helps Azerbaijan create a headchopper ministate in Russia’s underbelly. I would, I said, enjoy watching him make the attempt.

 

Not astonishingly, he never replied to me.

 

The “arguments” of the Putinoids, assuming one can dignify them with such a term, fall into these basic categories:

 

1.Putin is such a genius that he is beyond our comprehension; his slightest act (or, much more frequently, total inaction) is loaded with more symbolism and hidden plans than we mere mortals can ever fathom. I do not see this as a particularly persuasive contention.

 

2.Putin does not need to do anything because of the famous new Russian hypersonic missiles, which make it impossible for the Amerikastanis to attack Russia directly. The so-called analyst Andrei Martyanov, who among other things can’t stop boasting that he’s written three whole books, is a particularly loud exponent of this thesis. It again seems to have escaped the attention of these people that

 

(a)Said hypersonic missiles will only be of the slightest use in case of an all out war, which is now absolutely the least likely kind of war. Wars these days are first and foremost economic and fought by economic strangulation.

 

(b)Said economic strangulation is preceded by political strangulation, that is, stripping way friends and allies by jihadi invasions and bought and paid for colour revolutions. That’s what these colour revolutions and NATOisations, even of specks like Montenegro, are about.

 

(c)Is Putin going to go to war if Amerikastani colour revolutions and NATOisations end up blockading Russia on all or most of its borders? Really?

 

3.If I don’t like Putin, who do I want to lead Russia in place of him? (Followed by an abusive rant when I name anyone.) Well, I’m not Russian so it’s not my business who leads, but

 

(a)Is Putin immortal? Is he beyond cognitive degeneration that comes with age? If the answer to either of these is no, why has Putin not only not appointed any successor, but systematically loaded his government with personality-less bureaucrats who can never succeed him? What happens when Putin dies or becomes incapacitated? Apres moi l’deluge?

 

(b)Literally anyone who’s not of the Russian liberal Quisling set from Moscow, such as Navalny, would be a better replacement than Putin, in my opinion. From the far left or the nationalist right, anybody.

 

4.Why do I want Russians to die in Armenia?

 

(a)Let’s remember the Nazi coup in Ukraine. At that time Putin could have overthrown the Nazis at next to no cost in blood or treasure. But Putin was too obsessed with the Sochi Olympics, towards which his attention had been diverted by a few “Putler” memes and some canards about homosexual oppression in Russia. What happened in the end? Far more ethnic Russians (and Russian volunteers) dying than would have happened if Putin had acted in 2014.

 

(b)The exact same thing happened in Syria when Putin waited till the government was on the ropes before finally, belatedly, and minimally acting. To this day Russian servicemen are dying in Syria because of Putin’s “agreements” with Sultan Erdogan. Inaction costs lives.

 

(c)Absolutely no Russians needed to die in Armenia, or more precisely in Nagorno Karabakh, if Putin had stopped the war from happening.

 

Which brings up a couple of questions.

 

Let us assume (it’s an easy assumption to make, and a safe one) that the Russian intelligence agencies had intimated Putin in advance that the Ottomans were planning an attack in conjunction with the Azerbaijanis and jihadi headchoppers on Nagorno Karabakh. Then we must ask:

 

First, could Putin have stopped the war from happening at all?

 

The answer to this is, yes, yes, he could have. All it would have had needed was two phone calls and one public statement.

 

(i) A phone call to Erdogan saying that Putin knew what he was up to and that it would have dire economic consequences for Russian-Turkish relations, such as another ban on tourism. (The last time that happened, in 2015, it brought Erdogan to his knees within weeks, so important is Russian tourism to the Ottoman economy, so this is no idle threat.)

 

(ii) A phone call to Pashinyan saying that Russia isn't overwhelmed with joy at his actions since 2018 and that if this continues Russia will stand aside and let any future OAHA offensive overrun not just Artsakh but Armenia itself.

 

(iii) A public statement that Russia will not tolerate the changing of the facts on the ground by military action - by anybody.

 

I do not see that the Ottomans would dare to begin their aggression under those conditions. And under the current conditions I do not see them ending their aggression short of the fall of Artsakh entirely or most substantially. Erdogan has too much prestige invested, not to speak of money, to have it any other way.

 

Secondly, should Putin have stopped the war from happening at all?

 

To this question the Putinoids have a standard, scripted response. The Greatest Geopolitical Grandmaster Genius The Galaxy Has Ever Seen was teaching Nikol Pashinyan a lesson for sneaking around canoodling with NATO; a defeat in Nagorno Karabakh, apparently, would bring Armenia crawling back to heel.

 

It seems to have escaped the notice of these sublime geniuses that

 

(a)It might only play into Pashinyan's hands, assuming the idea (increasingly being voiced on multiple fora) that he wants to lose the war in order to sacrifice Artsakh and - free of the territorial dispute that might block the accession - join NATO is true. Russia would be faced with a NATO Armenia and a NATOised Azerbaijan together. A good idea? I think not.

 

(b) Officially, Artsakh isn't part of Armenia. Therefore it is not responsible for the crimes of the Pashinyan regime. Therefore allowing it to be overrun is ipso facto an imbecilic response to teach Pashinyan a lesson.

 

(c) If Artsakh is overrun, what happens to the other republics that seceded from post Soviet states? What about Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria? What about the two Donbass republics, which let me remind you, Russia doesn't recognise either? Does anyone really think the Ukranazis won't take the hint that Russia won't intervene unless they attack Russia itself?

 

(d) If part or all of Nagorno Karabakh is captured by OAHA, what exactly is stopping Sultan Erdogan from repopulating the place with jihadi headchoppers just as he did in Jisr al Shughour with his Uighur imports? A jihadi headchopper ministate in Russia's underbelly isn't exactly a great idea.

 

Or maybe I’m wrong, the Putinoids are right, and Putin is playing some kind of incredibly complex chess game in which he can see hundreds of years into the future, and Russia will save the world yet. We’ll only have to wait 10135 years to find out!

 

The religion factor:

 

There’s a school of thought that Russia should intervene, but only because Armenians are fellow Christians. This is rubbish.

 

Once again: it's entirely an ethnic/economic/political clash. Religion has absolutely nothing to do with it. (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood Sultan Erdogan is supporting Shia Azerbaijan with, among other things, (Sunni) Wahhabi jihadi headchoppers. Shia Iran is supposedly neutral but is being accused by Azerbaijan of sending weapons to Christian Armenia, with whom it has an open border, and has shot down Azeri drones. So-called Christian Russia – most Russians are atheists or agnostics – has stayed out of the fight completely. And (Sunni) Wahhabi Saudi Barbaria has opened another propaganda offensive in the meantime...against the Ottoman Empire.

There is nothing religious about it.

The Ceasefire:

At the time of this writing, I read that under Russian auspices a temporary ceasefire between the two sides to exchange prisoners and bury corpses has been signed. This is being presented by Putinoids as a “triumph for Russian diplomacy”. Apparently said Putinoids can’t read, because the “ceasefire” is specifically referred to as “temporary”. Both Sultan Erdogan and his ventriloquist’s dummy Ilham Aliyev have far too much invested to back down now.

 

And finally...what do I believe?

 

 

By now it should be obvious that I am not particularly enamoured of Putinoids or, for that matter, Putin. My position is that Russia, in fact, has a duty to the world; it is the only military bulwark (China being the economic entity on that scale) against the Amerikastani Empire. It is what stops the Amerikastani Empire from enslaving us all. When Russia stands up it stands up for all of us. When Putin betrays Russian interests he betrays us all.

Also, Russia is hardly secure. It’s beset on almost all its borders with Amerikastani aggression, colour revolutions, and subversion. It cannot afford “restraint” and complacency. A bit of proactive and aggressive action would only help it, especially if it nipped Amerikastani plans in the bud.

Therefore the Putinoid position that Russia only needs to “look after itself” is asinine, as imbecilic as the idea that Armenia will come crawling back if only Putin allows Nagorno Karabakh to be overrun. In fact, all it will do is convince everybody – including China – that there is no more unreliable ally and protector than Vladimir Putin. Is this what the Putinoids want? Really?

So here is today’s cartoon.

I’m also adding a version without dialogue, in case anyone wants to add their own.

 

 

Skies of Stone

 I died; and having died, my eyes and ears and skin all stopped. And I felt myself falling through my body, through the floor, through the earth and rock, and it was dark and I could feel nothing at all;

And then there was a grey light around me, and I found myself floating above a grey shore by a sea; and the waters of the sea were black, and things moved on them, things that had sails but were not boats.

And there were others around me, floating over the grey sand, and the winds that blew touched us, and sometimes blew one or the other over the dark water.

And the things with sails came to those blown people, and took them up, and swam out into the black sea, until they disappeared into the distance; and the rest of us were afraid, for we had no knowledge of where they went, and no way that we could resist the wind.

And I blew hither and thither, over the grey sand, and watched the wisp-souls that were all left of those who were once alive be blown out to the things with sails, out on the sea.

And the time passed, and the more I drifted, the more I was afraid, for the moment would surely come when I, too, was blown out on to that sea.

And the time passed, and the dead came by the thousands, and they went to the sea, and still I lingered, for I found a rock on the beach, and hid behind it, where the wind might not, for a while, find me.

And the time passed, and perhaps suns burnt out and galaxies turned and merged; and yet I still hid behind that rock. And the winds blew and hissed and roared, but they did not touch me.

But one day the wind wore away the rock. And it split and broke away, and in a trice the wind, that had waited so long, plucked me up in its claws and flung me over the ocean; and a thing with a sail rose up and caught me. And it swam away over the black sea.

And I looked back, and the grey land was a thin line behind me, nothing more. And I looked where the thing with the sail was taking me.

Far away, across the black water, was a land of brown and green. And stars shone in a jewelled sky above that approaching shore.

All Pentagon On The Hollywood Front

Or, Why Hollywood isn't remaking "All Quiet On The Western Front".

One of the most persistent criticisms of Hollywood these days - as well as one of the most accurate - is that it seems to have run completely out of ideas. It only makes movies that are remakes, or superzero franchises, or both. Of course, there's more to it than that; Hollywood only makes things that are guaranteed to make a profit by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Since the lowest common denominator is also essentially mindless, functionally illiterate, and barely able to summon the intellectual ability to look at a movie poster, cinema pandering to their tastes has to be as vacuous as possible. Superzero titles fit the requirements perfectly.
    Superzero cinema also has excellent things going for it otherwise. Look at the typical superzero. He or she is almost guaranteed to be white, Amerikastani, and always, invariably, a supporter of the authority in power and the status quo. Even the illegal immigrant Clark Kent, alias Superman, chose to grace the Imperialist States of Amerikastan with his presence and fought for Truth, Justice and the American Way. Many of them are also filthy rich; Batman or Ironman might, you know, have given some of their money to improve the conditions of the poor rather than acting as vigilantes above the law that's for the hoi polloi.
    Always, what do these superzeroes, even those not white or Amerikastani, do? They fight for capitalist Amerikastani interests. Suppose there's a hidden African country with an advanced civilisation,while the nations around them are exploited by Amerikastan, ruled over by Amerikastani-allied dictators, with high levels of poverty and illiteracy, malnourishment and civil war? Suppose in this hypothetical country someone rises up to demand that the super advanced civilisation do something to unite and liberate the exploited people of the rest of the continent? You'd think he was the obvious hero, right?
    Wrong. As per Hollywood, he is the villain. The hero would be the one who's going to stop him from doing any such thing.
    Then there is the little fact that all Hollywood movies these days that use any kind of weaponry need to get clearance from the Pentagon to make sure that Amerikastan's military is adequately propagandised. In return the filmmakers get access to anything they want, from combat ships to aeroplanes to rocket launchers, not to speak of war criminals ("soldiers" and "marines") to train the actors or even act as extras themselves. Hollywood is basically an Amerikastani Empire military propaganda vehicle.
    This is why I've said many times that the greatest Hollywood film ever, "Dr Strangelove", would never have been made today. Even then it was investigated for "espionage" because the B52 cockpit interior design it used was allegedly very close to the real thing. Of course, the real problem of the film was its anti militarist message, which wasn't Stanley Kubrick's first either. He'd already trod that track before with "Paths Of Glory", but that film was about French criminality in WWI, and therefore Amerikastan had no problem with it. The French regime did, banning the movie, but not the Amerikastanis.
    Today, of course, Kubrick would never have been permitted to make "Dr Strangelove". The producers wouldn't have financed it. The studios would have closed their doors. Kubrick would have been denounced as a "Russian agent", as would most of the actors, especially Peter Sellers, who was British to boot. But I'm almost sure that Kubrick couldn't have made "Paths Of Glory" either.
   Why? Because "Paths Of Glory" is as savagely anti militarism as "Dr Strangelove" is, only it doesn't attempt to be funny. It's based on a real life incident during WWI when a French unit, ordered by incompetent generals to assault an impregnable German position, was beaten back and troops refused to continue a senseless and suicidal attack. Three soldiers were taken at random from the units, given a kangaroo court trial with a foregone conclusion, and shot by firing squad to "encourage" the others to keep fighting. Kubrick's protagonist, the unit commander who acts as the soldiers' defender at the trial, is actually thought of as stupid by his superiors because he doesn't use this opportunity to push for promotion. A doomed mission, incompetent generals interested only in promotion, exhausted and demoralised troops who no longer want to fight....have we seen this recently? Somewhere in a possibly fictional country called "Iraq" and somewhere in another possibly fictional country called "Afghanistan"?
    And that is the reason why, though Hollywood is perfectly willing to scrape the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the barrel when it comes to ideas for rebooted superzero franchises, it won't make another "Paths Of Glory". It won't make another "The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming", the wonderful mid-60s comedy about a Soviet submarine that runs aground off an Amerikastani island, where the Soviet sub crew turns out not to be Evil Communist Ogres or Red Defectors Desperate For Capitalist Freedom, but emphatically People Like Anybody Else.
    A system that exists on Perpetual War against human beings on the other side of the planet cannot afford to have potential recruits see those human beings as People Like Anybody Else.
    And this is why Hollywood seems to have no interest in remaking one of its own greatest all time films, "All Quiet On The Western Front." The original novel by Erich Maria Remarque, which is surprisingly slim when you first see it, came out in January 1929. Within weeks it had become an international superhit, translated into English and French, and Hollywood had bought the movie rights and begun filming. German ex soldiers, who had settled in some numbers in Amerikastan after WWI, acted as consultants and extras. While by today's standards the movie would be rather overacted (the main cast were all silent movie veterans who were used to the exaggerated gestures and acting necessary to that medium), it was also an immediate hit on release. In Germany, too, it was a great hit, or would have been, but for the Nazis.
    The Nazis, then an up and coming fascist military worshipping party, called the film an insult to the German military. They attacked movie theatres, beat viewers, and soon pressured the German censor board into banning the film. In Poland, ironically, the film was banned as "pro-German". The right wing American Legion, comprised of Amerikastani former war criminals ("veterans"), also condemned the film. They were united in opposition because of the simple fact that the movie was not just anti war, but that it showed the soldiers, even enemy soldiers, as being not at all different from you and me.
   In one of the film's, and the book's, most famous moments, the protagonist (he's no hero, thank you very much) Paul Bäumer, is trapped in a shell hole on no man's land. A French soldier jumps into the same shell hole for shelter, and in a panicky frenzy Bäumer stabs him, wounding him mortally. The Frenchman takes hours to die, with the horrified Bäumer trying to comfort him and dress his wound. After his death, Bäumer is still trapped with his corpse in the shell hole for the next day and night, and he searches the body, finding letters and photographs. The Frenchman isn't a nameless enemy any longer. He's Gérard Duval, a printer in peacetime. Bäumer thinks confusedly that he should become a printer after the war in expiation of what he thinks of as his crime; he makes whispered promises to Duval's body that he will take care of the Frenchman's family after the war, only to realise that as the killer of their husband and father he can't expect anything but hatred from them.

"The Death Of Gérard Duval". Acrylic on paper.

    It is an immensely important scene, one of the high points of the book and the movie; the other is when Bäumer goes home on leave and finds that the civilians at home not only understand nothing of the war but are still pressuring their children to join up and go to the front.
   These are not themes that will be popular with the Pentagon today.
    Even the description of combat in the book is brutal. The original 1930 film (and a not too bad 1979 made for television remake) both totally sanitise the violence, but the book doesn't. During an attack, Bäumer trips over "an open belly, on which a fresh new officer's cap was lying". His friend uses a sharpened spade to cleave a giant French soldier down to the shoulder. Bäumer's friend Haie Westhus has his back blown open so his lungs can be seen as he breathes; he's still not only alive but conscious, biting his hands in agony. So it goes.
   If Hollywood were even remotely true to  its alleged liberal reputation, which of course it is not, it would have remade All Quiet for the 21st century, maybe in 3D. Rats, mud, corpses, the doubtful affections of French prostitutes, roasting stolen duck in a former kennel, crouching in a dugout under a barrage while new recruits go insane from fear, all of it.
    Not one bit of it would have brainwashed one single person to get into uniform, so of course it will not happen.
    The original German title of "All Quiet On The Western Front" is "Im Westen Nichts Neues", which is much better translated as "Nothing New In The West."
    Im Hollywood Nichts Neues either.