When the Struggle for Both Sides is Existential

The French sociologist Emanuel Todd suggests that for both sides in this proxy war between USA/ NATO and Russia this is an existential conflict.

The west has made it abundantly clear that it doesn’t like Russia. It didn’t like Russia as communist.It doesn’t like Russia as capitalist. It doesn’t like Putin, doesn’t like the Russian Federation, doesn’t like Russia’s political system. doesn’t like anything about Russia. The west, inheritor of the profits of slavery and colonialism, the wielder of hydrogen bombs, the scourge of the global indigenous, the world’s foremost manufacturers of lethal weapons and murderous gasses, ironically preens itself as morally, intellectually and in every way superior to Russia, even though victory in World War II was the result of enormous sacrifice of Russian blood, more than for all those of the western alliance, and even though the source of western elites’ dislikes and snooty disapprovals is the lust they nurture for Russian mineral wealth. They will countenance every dirty trick in the book to stage color revolutions and secessionist movements with little to no sound or legitimate pretext.

And what motivates this lust is the otherwise insupportable burden of western and especially US debt. The US system of dollarized hegemony requires that the manipulation of sanctions regimes, control over the value of the dollar itself, ability to impact through fiscal and market regulation the values of oil and gas, of global stocks and bonds, the printing of money (quantitative easing), substitution of fiat money for real wealth, the system of bribery and blackmail that is its methodology for staying ahead of judgment day on its multiple trillions of dollars of debt. Russia’s ability to withstand US sanctions, its superiority in nuclear and industrial weaponry, its readiness to face down the US and US poodles in the battlefields, its alliances and popularity in the global south - even before we begin to talk of China, the BRI, SCO etc. - all sound the death knell for 500 years of the west’s pompous self-adulation and imperial grift.

For Russia this is existential because if it stops now it risks its own annihilation as a civilization. Zelenskiy is either extraordinarily sociopathic to have handed over, without necessity, without pressure, and for little meaningful reward, his own country and its people as the organic battlefield proxy on which is being fought this titanic struggle that will determine the shape of the next world order…or he is a western agent, a roboticized Manchurian candidate of some description.

Is there an escape route in existential conflict short of mutual annihilation? That is the question. The most important ingredients for the answer are knowledge, intelligence, morality, humility, courage, strength, patience, and independence.