RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18324/putin-one-man-war

It is hard to know what went on in Putin’s mind. But the past two weeks have shown that he has planned his war according to KGB rules rather than classical military strategy. He has relied on massive and indiscriminate use of force, and where Gerasimov and the professional military are concerned about losses among their men, he has been focused on wreaking as much havoc as he can.

His model is Ivan the Awe-Inspiring (Grozny). He wants to terrorize people into abject submission, as his forces did in parts of Syria where he and his allies hang on to an illusion of power.

In a classical war, the immediate aim is formulated with three words: conquer, cleanse, control. Putin’s idiosyncratic style of war, however, measures success by the size of debris created and the piles of civilian dead left behind.

Even the aero-naval bases that Putin has secured on the Syrian coast of the Mediterranean remain vulnerable.

No war is won by one side unless the opposite side admits defeat, at least as the best of all bad options. This is, perhaps, why since 1945, no one has really won a war on a once-and-for-all basis.

But what Putin cannot do is to rebuild Ukraine as he pleases. Over 2,000 years ago, historian Tacitus quoted the Celtic resistance leader fighting Roman invaders as saying: They make a desert and call it peace!

When he launched his invasion of Ukraine over two weeks ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared like a man who knew what he was doing. In his televised session with the High Council of National Security, he gave the impression that he had a precise war plan with clear objectives.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/03/how-to-launch-a-revolution-and-lose-it-too/

“The ledger of ruinous edicts enshrined as public policy made no distinction between dying ‘with’ or dying ‘of’ COVID. Next came the suppression of medical information at variance with orthodoxy, censoring dissenting scientists and constant, taxpayer-funded ad campaigns ‘nudging’ the populace to accept lockdowns, curfews, closed borders and social exclusion as rational, essential and never, ever to be questioned.”

The last time I checked, there had been recent mass protests against governments and their anti-Covid regulations in cities in France, Germany, Austria, New Zealand, Italy, Australia, the United States and most influentially in Canada where a “Freedom Convoy” of Canadian and US truckers had snarled up the parliamentary district of its capital city, Ottawa, by parking in force and hooting their horns.

I had previously thought that the height of Covid policy silliness had been reached in Melbourne when a policeman entered a friend’s garden where he was digging responsibly alone and threatened him with a fine unless he put on a mask. But no. The flame that torched the truckers’ protest in Canada was the mandate from the Canadian government that truckers must be vaccinated before driving their long and lonely way along the vast interstates of North America. 

Why was the mandate both an overreach and a serious political error?

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/03/dividing-the-kingdom-britains-game-of-

“There is disunion and distraction in Downing Street as the Prime Minister struggles to explain his cavalier attitude to lock-down rules. Meanwhile, amid growing divisions at home and absent efforts to broaden and deepen ties beyond Britain’s shores, the Commonwealth faces the prospect of dissolution. The unavoidable surmise is that policy-makers and bureaucrats are either asleep at the wheel or actively hostile.”

After Brexit, government policy-making was supposed to focus on securing the national interest. Those who supported leaving the European Union assumed the United Kingdom would resume control of its territorial borders, reassert parliamentary sovereignty and return to its historic role as an independent sovereign state with a commitment to a rule-governed international trading order.

Indeed, the Johnson government embarked upon a desultory effort to re-establish the UK’s economic and political links with the world beyond Western Europe. It forged “bespoke” free-trade agreements with Australia, New Zealand and Japan and has applied for membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/03/11/canadas-real-prime-minister-n1565874

Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland furnishes an interesting case study in an apparently contradictory dynamic of incompetence and competence. As a high-ranking minister, she is clearly incompetent, having, for example, nearly deep-sixed our NAFTA treaty talks with Donald Trump. Her insistence on the inclusion of “progressive” policies, such as gender equality, labor union safeguards, a chapter dedicated to indigenous peoples, and favored environmental standards only ensured that Canada got the short end of the renewed accord. Her attempt to enact Liberal policy was politically inept.

She also exhibits a sentimental tendency to tear up at critical moments. She is famous for walking out of the EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada, fighting back tears—though as former NDP Premier Bob Rae tweeted in Freeland’s patronizing defense, “Crying is not a sign of weakness, it is a natural emotional response to a lot of different situations.” Her valediction to her conference confrères was risible beyond belief. “Canada is disappointed, I am personally very disappointed, I have worked very, very hard. We have decided to go back home. I am very, very sad, really. Tomorrow morning, I will be at home with my three children.” So there!

Being on the verge of tears for not getting her way with a team of alpha males is not how the representative of a G7 nation in the midst of a tough bargaining session is expected to behave. Rather, we are witnessing the hoary cliché of the spoiled little girl whose wishes Daddy has denied, but who will eventually pout her way through any setback. This is Canada’s finance minister.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/03/eric-zemmour-the-insiders-outsider/

“The last thing you would expect a French Jew to do is declare Dreyfus guilty and Pétain a saviour. Very well, and thanks for the candour. We now know how far the maverick presidential candidate is prepared to go to establish in voters’ minds his nationalist credentials and his distance from any other identity. If identity politics is the sleep of reason, it certainly brings forth monsters.”

Every politician must, I suppose, have a view of history. The radical tends to see the past as a tale of woe in which improvement, if it has occurred at all, is thanks to such as he, while the conservative tends to see it as a tale of triumph spoiled only by the like of his current opponents. As in one of those drawings beloved of perceptual psychologists, which the viewer can see either as a vase or two candlesticks but not as both, so it is with politicians’ version of history: glory or damnation, but not both.

One of the prominent (and most controversial) candidates in the forthcoming French presidential election, Éric Zemmour (above), is definitely a history-as-triumph man. In part, this might be explained by his background. The son of Jewish Berber immigrants to France not long before Algerian independence, he has gratefully seized the opportunities offered him by the country of his parents’ adoption. He has by application, high intelligence and talent carved out a brilliant career for himself as a patriotic polemicist and broadcaster whose books now sell by the hundreds of thousands. (It may be, of course, that the causative relationship went, and goes, partially in the opposite direction: because he believed in the French Republican model of meritocracy, he was enabled or encouraged to seize whatever opportunities were going.)