1/17/23: BLOOD PAWNS W/ JAMES PONDER

The United States and several other countries are realizing the war in Ukraine is not at all successful in weakening Russia, but it is debilitating other countries and moving them into scarcity. And leave it to the Zelensky contingency in coming to Davos and beg for more weapons of war. Using Ukraine as a bloody pawn by the globalists is seriously flawed. Moreover, it is difficult to determine how much Western political leaders and their media mouthpieces actually believe in their own moralistic propaganda. This is not just a Ukraine crisis or what some now call a “Polycrisis” — it is a humanitarian crisis. Tonight on Ground Zero, Clyde Lewis talks with military analyst, James Ponder about BLOOD PAWNS.

SHOW SAMPLE: 

SHOW PODCAST:

1/17/23: BLOOD PAWNS W/ JAMES PONDER

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

To start the show, I want to try and have us all think about what the world was like 30 years ago.  Now picture in your mind a time traveler who reveals himself and holds a press conference. Not very many people attend, but the Time traveler says that in 20 ore 30 years form NATO countries would be invading and bombing military bases inside Russia through Ukraine with hundreds of thousands killed.

I am sure many people would say that this sounds a lot like World War III.

The time traveler again would say that this war would cause the American monetary and financial controls of the world to  collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to fund their huge trade deficit for nothing. This war would become existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go. This is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other.

This would be an unbelievable account of the future and people would have a hard time believing that we would make these kinds of mistakes because we would still be in the mindset that America is too big to fall– but in scenario like World war Three there would be no winners.

Then after all of our resources are exhausted – someone would push the button and the nuclear bombs would fly — it would be unclear what the target was.

Such a fiery event would also be practically feasible: with the exception of New York, most US elite live in highly gentrified neighborhoods with wooden/flammable mansions amid vast expanses unimpeded by concrete and metal around a handful of cities. That’s a perfect use for a multi-hundred kiloton air burst that ignites as well blast these elite residences away en masse.

When The time traveler is asked who fired first — his reply would be “Who cares.”

It is a fallacy to believe that the globalists are going to make everything nice and homogenized. Especially when the world is in such a mess right now. So the chilling solution for them is to basically remove those who wish to fight them.  But not everyone is on board with the culling –and many people are waking up to the fact that there is another open ended war happening in Europe.

The United States and several other countries are beginning to wise up to the idea that the War in Ukraine is not being at all successful in weakening Russia, but it is weakening other countries and moving them into scarcity.

This has been the mission of the globalists — and leave it to Ukraine to come to Davos to beg for more weapons of war.

A large Ukrainian delegation of ministers and mayors, headed by Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska, began a major effort Monday at the World Economic Forum in Davos to lobby for greater Western aid and weapons deliveries.

Zelenska is set to speak on Tuesday in one of the opening sessions in person, while her husband is scheduled to speak via video link at events on the sidelines of the forum on Wednesday and Thursday.

The mayors of several other cities including Mykolaiv and Lviv are scheduled to attend, as well as the economy, culture and digital affairs ministers among others, making the Ukrainian team one of the biggest national delegations at the event.

Russian officials and business leaders have not been invited to Davos, with many of them under travel bans and EU sanctions in any case.

When world leaders are gathering together to plot the demise of one country — they expect the citizens of their various countries to be on board for dizzying inflation and destroyed economies.

Most people would see this as a strange prelude to World War III. Using Ukraine as a bloody pawn in their plans is seriously flawed.  Eventually, countries who wish to thwart Russia will have to suit up and go to war directly or Ukraine will be erased from the map.

The Propaganda will tell you that Ukraine is supposedly on the frontlines of a global struggle between democracy and freedom on one side and brutal authoritarianism on the other. That justification lacks credibility for two reasons. First, Ukraine itself is a corrupt, repressive autocracy, not a freedom-loving democracy, even if one uses the most flexible, expansive definition of “democracy.” Second, the Russia-Ukraine war is a nasty turf fight over mundane stakes, not part of an existential global confrontation between good and evil.

It is hard to determine how much Western political leaders and their media mouthpieces actually believe their own moralistic propaganda. Some likely have drunk the Kool Aid, but others clearly have more practical (and less savory) reasons for wanting Washington to wage a proxy war against Russia. First and foremost, the financial benefits to the military-industrial complex are enormous.

The United States has already provided more than $100 billion in aid to Kyiv, and a major portion of those funds are going to pay for Ukraine’s purchases (now or in the near future) of weapons systems from Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, or other manufacturers. Those firms also will benefit from the destruction of weapons already provided to Kyiv, since US stockpiles supposedly must be replenished. The usual collection of hawks already are sounding alarms that the arsenals of the United States and its NATO allies have become significantly depleted.

Shortly after the US announced it will send a Patriot air defense system and more weapons to Ukraine, a Pentagon spokesperson has now announced a group of Ukrainian soldiers will come to the United States to train on a Patriot system so they’ll be ready when their own system arrives.

Pentagon Press Secretary Gen. Pat Ryder in a press conference on Tuesday stated “Training for Ukrainian forces on the Patriot air defense system will begin as soon as next week at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.”

The training will reportedly take several months.

Many Americans are concerned about the Pentagon’s new move and believe it is a National Security concern.

Does this move by the pentagon make the US an even bigger target for possible Nuclear attack?  It could.  But will it be something else entirely?

Republican State Senator Nathan Dahm recently filed a SCR2 in an attempt to stop any foreign troops from training on Oklahoma soil.

Some say that those who will train them are traitors because they are contributing to the turmoil in the United States and making us a target for an all-out assault by Russia.

Russia has to act on this decision, if they don’t then the rest of the world (the war hawk first world that is) has just taken this move as a green light to absolutely flood  Ukraine with all of their modern weaponry, as it’s now the testing ground it seems for the effectiveness of the hardware in the real world. Russia, absolutely, will respond to this massive provocation, and I don’t think we’re going to like the response.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin may have inadvertently disclosed a broader, ignoble motive for the proxy war. An April 2022 statement that he issued in Poland at the end of his stealth visit to Kyiv emphasized that Washington’s goal was not merely to help Ukraine repel Russia’s invasion, but to “weaken Russia” to the point that it could no longer pose a threat to any other country. Achieving such an objective would indisputably require a prolonged war in Ukraine – regardless of the consequences to the Ukrainian people.

That cynical strategy replicates the one the United States used in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 to aid Mujahidin fighters to resist the Soviet army of occupation. Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later disclosed that the Carter administration had started the flow of weapons even before Moscow launched its direct military intervention in December 1979 to prop up Afghanistan’s faltering, pro-communist government. The amount and potency of weapons given to the mujahidin accelerated greatly under President Ronald Reagan.

The goal in Afghanistan then, as it is in Ukraine now, was simply to harass and bleed Washington’s adversary. Then, as now, there was little concern about the impact on the beleaguered inhabitants in the country serving as an arena for a proxy war – and surprisingly little concern about the wider geo-political ramifications.

If the world leader in the west are all contributing to the war effort without breaking a sweat and allowing Ukraine to do all of the work — wouldn’t this be seen as a hired-hand situation where Ukraine is doing the dirty work for the world.  It’s obvious that the conflict, which started as a limited territorial war and is escalating to a global economic confrontation  between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war.”

It has not been officially declared that is what historians do but Ukraine has now petitioned world leaders at Davos to give more weapons and money for the war.  If these leaders are funding the war — wouldn’t Russia see this as a world effort at weakening them?

How many more bloody pawns can Ukraine sacrifice and how is it that these financers believe that they are not bloodying their hands in this matter.

Western media are again out of touch, they keep saying, ‘Russia is isolated, Russia is isolated’. But when we look at the votes at the UN, we see that 75% of the world does not follow the West, which then seems very small.

We are literally seeing a division of the planet where Russia may call in a few favors themselves.  They would gladly call in for the help of their middle eastern allies to get into our country through open borders and engage in terrorist attacks.

We all know that there was an attempt to smuggle weapons-grade radioactive materials into the U.K. –and it appears that security concerns have already plagued our airlines. We are literally baiting inside chaos–with well-planned bombings and shooting on US soil. If this continues then perhaps the United States would stop hiding behind the Ukrainians and put boots on the ground.

President Biden has said in no uncertain terms that this wouldn’t happen — but at the same time, everything seems to be on the table.

The question now is will humanity survive the current conflict, militarily centered in Ukraine? The use of nuclear weapons is highly probable, in which case humankind may disappear. The planet will, however, survive and new life will emerge. Since humankind is so brainless to have come to this point in its short existence, self-destruction by its own invention allegedly created for safety and security despite elementary logic may be the inevitable outcome.

If humankind survives this conflict, it is rational to expect a high probability that the Russia-China partnership will dominate other countries and stymie the development of a genuinely free world simply because great power inherently tends to dominate.

Washington’s seemingly open-ended commitment to aid Kyiv creates an even greater danger the more it continues.

In September 2022 and again in November 2022, Secretary Austin pledged that US military support for Ukraine would continue “for as long as it takes” to prevail against Russia’s aggression. For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s New Year’s address seemed designed to prepare the Russian people for a long war. The conditions are in place for a lengthy war of attrition that will leave Ukraine totally in ruins. In early November 2022, Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that Russia and Ukraine had each suffered more than 100,000 dead and wounded already. The prospect of how many casualties will occur if the war goes on should be horrifying to any decent person.

The question arises whether the Biden administration is cynical enough to continue waging its proxy war to the last Ukrainian. Unfortunately, given Washington’s conduct in Afghanistan during the 1980s, that scenario appears to be all too plausible. Instead, the administration should push for negotiations to end the bloodbath in Ukraine as soon as possible. That policy change means rescinding the blank check of military support that Washington has given to Kyiv. The current policy is both reckless and cruel.

A Pentagon-commissioned Rand Corporation study published in December, titled Responding to a Russian Attack on NATO During the Ukraine War, provides clues as to what may be in the cards for 2023

The study examines U.S. options for responding to four scenarios in which Russia attacks a range of NATO targets, from a U.S. intelligence satellite or a NATO arms depot in Poland to larger-scale missile attacks on NATO air bases and ports, including Ramstein U.S. Air Base and the port of Rotterdam.

These four scenarios are all hypothetical and premised on a Russian escalation beyond the borders of Ukraine. But the authors’ analysis reveals just how fine and precarious the line is between limited and proportionate military responses to Russian escalation and a spiral of escalation that can spin out of control and lead to nuclear war.

The final sentence of the study’s conclusion reads: “The potential for nuclear use adds weight to the U.S. goal of avoiding further escalation, a goal which might seem increasingly critical in the aftermath of a limited Russian conventional attack.” Yet other parts of the study argue against de-escalation or less-than-proportionate responses to Russian escalations, based on the same concerns with U.S. “credibility” that drove devastating but ultimately futile rounds of escalation in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other lost wars.

U.S. political leaders are always afraid that if they do not respond forcefully enough to enemy actions, their enemies (now including China) will conclude that their military moves can decisively impact U.S. policy and force the United States and its allies to retreat. But escalations driven by such fears have consistently led only to even more decisive and humiliating U.S. defeats.

In Ukraine, U.S. concerns about “credibility” are compounded by the need to demonstrate to its allies that NATO’s Article 5—which says that an attack on one NATO member will be considered an attack on all—is a truly watertight commitment to defend them.

So U.S. policy in Ukraine is caught between the reputational need to intimidate its enemies and support its allies on the one hand, and the unthinkable real-world dangers of escalation on the other. If U.S. leaders continue to act as they have in the past, favoring escalation over the loss of “credibility,” they will be flirting with nuclear war, and the danger will only increase with each twist of the escalatory spiral.

Russia will create new commands near Europe as it expands its military to 1.5 million people — there are no signs of de-escalation.

New structures in the regions around Moscow, St. Petersburg and Karelia on the border with Finland will be created under the program, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told commanders Tuesday, saying the major changes will start this year and continue through 2026. In addition, he said, “self-sufficient” units will be set up on the Ukrainian territories that Russia has illegally annexed.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the military expansion came in response to the “proxy war” he claimed the US and its allies are waging against Russia in Ukraine, Interfax reported. Kyiv and its allies are fighting to fend off Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last month approved Shoigu’s plan to boost the size of his military from the current target level of 1.15 million but the Kremlin hasn’t said how fast that will take place.

Shoigu said the expansion will be spread across all branches of Russia’s military and will be coordinated with the delivery of new weapons to equip them.

Russia has repeatedly said it plans to boost deployments in the northwest in response to a pending expansion of NATO, where Finland and Sweden are in the process of joining, with their applications ratified by 28 of 30 alliance members.

I appears that while we hear of possible Russian expansion into Europe — it is NATO that is doing the expanding.

This could open up a new theater in the war– as the Kremlin may feel that it is being surrounded.

The U.S. stance in this war is that the fighting stops and peace talks begin only when Kyiv says the fighting stops and the negotiations begin.

But Americans, whose support for Ukraine has been indispensable in this war, also need to have a voice in when the war ends.

But will anyone speak up? Are we all in denial of the end-game outcome that threatens our lives?

For us, the greatest stake in this Russia-Ukraine war is not who ends up in control of Luhansk, Donetsk or Kherson, but that we not be drawn into a military conflict that would put us on the fas escalator to Nuclear Armageddon.

Nothing in Eastern or Central Europe is worth a major U.S. war with Russia that could go nuclear and cost millions of American lives.

This is not just a Ukraine crisis or what the globalist now call a Polycrisis — it is a humanity crisis.

It certainly is close in magnitude to the near-certainty of species extinction within the next few years.

Russia resents the West’s violation of its unmistakable and supremely important pledge to President Gorbachev in 1990 that the power of NATO would not move one further inch eastward.

The United States has deployed its weapons far closer to Russia than Russia has deployed weapons close to the U.S.– the question is –should this alarm anyone?

I seriously think it should — when even a sneeze in the wrong direction could ignite a nuclear conflict with Russia.

The United States has positioned nuclear defense/offense capabilities close to Russian borders in countries such as Poland and Romania. There are between 160 and 240 U.S. atomic bombs in NATO countries, of which 50 to 90 are stored in Turkey, a NATO member. Britain (225) and France (300) have their own sizeable nuclear arsenals.

Although it is commonly presumed that a nuclear exchange would quickly move from incremental (if there is any moderation at all) to massive, assessments as to how a nuclear war would actually pan out are extremely complicated for both technological and geopolitical reasons. It is not beyond comprehension that a conflict might be confined to so-called low-yield nuclear bombs or mini-nukes. Nor is it at all certain that nuclear weapons will all work as they are supposed to (in fact, it is reasonable to presume they will not). Many uncertainties attend the newest generation of hypersonic missiles. And the functionality of so-called missile defense systems is perhaps most of all in question.

In addition, there is the issue of the weaponization of nuclear reactors, which is to say their conversion into weapons by missile or another form of strike, whether intentional or otherwise. There are 15 reactors in Ukraine and another 123 in Europe. The U.S. has 93, and Russia 38. Not least is the danger of nuclear accident, which almost certainly increases in the context of accelerating tensions between countries at least one of which possesses nuclear weapons or countries that can strike the nuclear facilities or reactors of other countries. There have been at least a dozen or so near misses since the U.S. dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Although their deliberate use by the United States that year is the only time that nuclear weapons have actually been fired in conflict, there have been many instances in which the use of nuclear weapons has been seriously considered.

There was Winston Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable, formulated within weeks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It contemplated a nuclear strike against Soviet Russia.

The Pentagon developed at least nine such first-strike nuclear war plans before the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. The 1949 Dropshot plan envisaged 300 nuclear bombs and 20,000 tons of conventional bombs on 200 targets in 100 urban areas, including Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Fortunately, the U.S. did not have sufficient weaponry for the purpose at that time.

In the United States and its allies, Russia confronts an adversary which is the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons on another, although this made little concrete difference to the outcome of the Second World War.

This is also an adversary which has many times since considered using nuclear weapons again, which tolerates the acquisition of nuclear weapons by its closest allies like Britain, France, and Israel and bitterly opposes even the faintest possibility of their acquisition by its opponents North Korea and Iran.

Who would have thought that a choice for President Biden was a choice for an open-ended war that could escalate into a nuclear conflict?

This conveniently has become a non-issue and the media is compliant — are we waiting for the media to tell us when to start over protests and actions against another criminal President, who in his 80s wants to take his followers to their graves like a mad cult leader that demands you drink the Kool-Aid?

It is a tragic point in our history, where we have become passive and have allowed such criminality to continue. One only hopes that the whole matrix of war they have constructed caves in on itself — and we hope that someone or some group rises up while others stay still and do nothing to change the paradigm.

 

 

SHOW GUEST: JAMES PONDER

James Ponder was in the Army from 1975-1987 as a Missile and Testing officer and Chief Data Officer. He was privy to Soviet tactics and strategies, Russian and Warsaw Pact equipment, specialized in their nuclear and space systems as well as their deployment of forces.  In 2011, he was taught that the Iranian government based cyber attackers were branching into all fields of attacks on Western sites (esp. US, UK and Israel), including logic bombs, DDoS attacks, hidden malware and ransomware.  James is co-founder of EMP survival systems.

Written by Ron Patton