Dakota Beacon

A strange incident at Kennedy International Airport earlier this week, a seemingly minor event, should serve to open our eyes to the significant threat the Biden administration and a long line of its predecessors, from George W. Bush on, pose to the future existence of America.  Rather than retell the story here myself, I will link Judge Napolitano’s interview with Scott Ritter here.  I strongly encourage you to watch it.

Almost since its post-WWII reorganization, going from presumably an intelligence-gathering agency to its current iteration, the CIA has focused its entire being on war with Russia.  It was Patton’s opinion that Eisenhower should have given the go-ahead to take all of Berlin and Germany at the end of WWII’s European conflict.  He might well have been right there.  The decades that followed, with the Soviet Union as our erstwhile ally against Hitler, became known as the Cold War era.  If you were a kid when I was, you will remember the horrible, traumatic nuclear attack drills in school, where we were told that those who survived would go out into a poisoned, radioactive, deadly environment and everyone else out there would be dead.  To be one of these lucky survivors we were to sit in the hall in the school basement with our hands locked over the backs of our necks and wait for the blast.  Happily, the era passed without having to experience the nightmare described to us.  

There was a moment in 1962, when then President Kennedy called out the Soviets for placing strategic weapons - nuclear missiles - at our back door in Cuba.  It became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Kennedy brokered some kind of resolution with then Premier Kruschev and the latter removed these missiles.  The world breathed a sigh of relief.  They shouldn’t have, apparently, because those who would perpetuate the climate of terror and continue the Cold War were not just some Soviet aggressors bent on whipping the West (Kruschev infamously said, “We will bury you”).  There were plenty of conspirators in Washington who partnered with others who profited from it.  

Not only was the financial motive there, but also an insidious power motive.  In some entities we had both.  The entire VietNam war was American foreign policy in shambles.  We had nothing to gain there, nothing to defend there.  It was entirely unrealistic in its stated purpose - to “contain” the Soviet Union and somehow preserve for the Vietnamese freedoms they had never enjoyed in the first place.  Upon the disgraceful and shocking - and dramatic - loss of that war, did we see a re-evaluation of this kind of foreign policy?  This belligerent kind of policy?  No.  We did not.  Since the last of our embassy personnel were lifted from a rooftop by a helicopter, signifying our abject failure in that venture, we have never been at peace.  It’s just that all of our wars have been undeclared ones.  Sort of illegitimate ones, to be sure.  The Senate has never voted to declare another war since FDR’s call for it in 1941.  They simply vote to appropriate our tax dollars to support it without a declaration.  It’s not legal, of course.

Bush decided to take us into a war in Iraq.  The result was of no benefit to either Americans, who paid for it in money and lives, nor for the Iraqi people, nor for “world peace”.  Quite the contrary.  The Iraqis were better off with Saddam Hussein running the show there because for the most part he was not enforcing the Sharia.  We were also better off because he was not perpetrating wars and terrorism here.   As repulsive as he might have been, he was not a particular threat to the world.  The war in Afghanistan was a huge mistake for America.  No one should go to war there.  And the ending was as ignominious as was our humiliating defeat in VietNam.  Then Obama and his henchwoman Hillary Clinton took it upon themselves to set up a sort of international Murder Incorporated and use it to knock off Muamar Ghadaffi.  Makes as much sense as a screen door on a submarine.  Now we have engaged in yet another fiasco - Ukraine.  And the same nefarious agency has been behind it all.

Whereas we were only deeply chagrined in the case of Viet Nam - a 20-year war which killed nearly 60,000 Americans and who knows how many others - and humiliated again in Afghanistan, and gained absolutely nothing but more lives lost in Iraq, while further destabilizing the Middle East, we absolutely destroyed Europe with our assassination of Ghaddafi.  Whereas he had been more or less an ally of the West and strongly leaning to becoming more so, the vacuum left when he was murdered opened the floodgates to unprecedented invasion of Europe by aliens from Africa and the MIddle East who have never been inclined to assimilate.  We now have in full view the death of Europe and European culture.  

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.  Seventy years of the communist experiment destroyed the nation of Russia from within.  No shots were fired.  It just caved in like wet cardboard.  Without doubt America’s strong defense was a factor.  “Peace through strength” was the motto.  (Note that the first word was the implied outcome - “peace”.)   But no longer need we fear the saber-rattling or fist-shaking or shoe-pounding of the Soviets.  They were under house arrest, basically, in their own dachas.  Instead there was a brand new Russian Revolution, one in which perhaps the flame of freedom might be kindled, and a new era of peace could be commenced.  

But no.  And why not?  Because the United States had developed a taste for a climate of war.  Even if a hot war had not broken out between the “superpowers” of the USSR and the USA, the threat of it fueled defense spending at an astonishing level.  Now these dreams of firing off the ICBMs were being extinguished.  And the powers that be weren’t having it.  

Where a sane and intelligent person might have seen an opportunity here to develop trade with perhaps the nation with the greatest natural resources and human resources and cultural resources on earth, to develop partnerships and constructive kinds of enterprises to benefit all mankind, instead we saw nothing but bullying by the West - primarily the United States.  We have heard this insane speech from the likes of Lindsay Graham, to whom anything is virtuous if it kills Russians - the more the better.  Or his colleague, Mitch McConnell.  Or his colleague, Kevin Cramer.  

Why have these people been bent on punishing the people of Russia?  First they were the victims of the Soviet machine (and of the lies it told them about the people of America) and then they became the victims of American politicians and regimes.  If we weren’t yet ready to call them “friend” or “ally” there was no reason not to call them “trading partner” or even fellow humans.  What an opportunity squandered.  Again, the US was proven a false friend.  Just as with so many other of America’s ruses, the promise of a better future in freedom was just a convenient lie. 

There is a special mindset in the CIA.  At the uppermost levels, they seem to be detached from reality altogether.  They are living in the 1950s, when the USSR and the USA were in a race to space, to put a man on the moon, to gain control of this or that little backwater in Southeast Asia or in Africa, to put it in the USSR or USA column.  Back when the US actually enjoyed military superiority.  It is so senseless.  We could perhaps understand it back in the 50s, when Kruschev was going to bury us, in keeping with the promise of the Bolsheviks of 1917.  But it makes no sense at all since 1991, when the Soviet Union came to an end.  

Yet here we have NATO, instead of simply maintaining its strength as of 1991, when its entire founding purpose ended, or better yet, voting to dissolve itself and save the world a ton of money and grief and save millions of lives, forging ahead, growing, gobbling up members like Pac Man, all for absolutely no reason.  Russia was expressing every wish to find peace and prosperity.  Nothing kills prosperity like war does.  It is natural and sane to wish to have prosperity instead of war.  It should take a madman like Hitler to bring nations to war.  Everything else should be negotiated peacefully between countries.  

The war in Ukraine is an example of the dangerous nature of our CIA and certain of our politicians.  (Nearly all of our politicians are dangerous, but most of them are so in the capacity of willing followers of bad leaders.)  Someone in the State Department decided that it would be good to invite Ukraine into the bloated NATO community.  We had promised Russia that we would not do this.  Instead of keeping that promise, we went ahead and recruited members until Russia was surrounded by hostile NATO nations on its borders.  Ukraine was to have been a buffer. 

Instead, the US, led by Victoria Nuland, an inveterate neocon and State Department head, meddled in the Ukrainian elections, or rather overturned them.  Why not?  Why not treat Ukraine, with its extensive border on European Russia, like a vassal banana republic?  Why bother with honoring promises made?  Who cares?  If even the Republican President of the United States can refer to our Constitution as an old, yellowed scrap of paper, why should we honor promises to other countries?  And so we fielded a cross-dressing comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who someone saw playing a president on TV, and installed him.  For the record, he DID make a campaign promise to pursue peace with Russia.  

It was always a given that inviting Ukraine to enter NATO would be considered a provocation.  So be it.  We provoked.  And provoked.  We have bioweapons labs within a few miles of the Russian border, where scientists are researching viruses and other kinds of bio weapons specifically to threaten Russia and the Russian people.  We have missiles and other military bases there within striking distance of Russia.  We use Ukraine as a money-laundering exchange.  Ukraine is also a center for human trafficking.  We not only tolerate but encourage and participate in all of this.  Our current president’s family has deeply participated in this meddling and corruption in Ukraine by their own admission.

We used to say “let sleeping dogs lie” - don’t rouse them.  We might also say, “don’t poke the bear”.  Equally sound.  Well, we poked and poked.  We slapped it across its snout.  We stepped on its paw with golf cleats.  We did everything we could until we finally crossed the line with the impending NATO membership, the one thing we knew Russia could not tolerate on its border.  After all, we couldn’t tolerate a few missiles on an island off our coast.  It was understandable.  And Russia has posed no threat to Europe which could justify expanding NATO at all, say nothing of as far as Russia’s own doorstep.  

And so, using Ukraine as a bait dog, America has fueled this war.  When, in April of 2022, the principal parties agreed to peace terms - generous ones, at that - what did we do?  In a panic, we sent one of our other puppet’s prime minister - England’s Boris Johnson - to tear up that agreement and not merely promise to support Zelenskyy’s war, but to DEMAND that he continue with it or ELSE.  And so the war went into high gear.  Months later America blew up two Russian gas pipelines which supplied Germany and thence the rest of Europe with affordable gas.  This was an act of war.  Avoidable had we let peace be forged and kept out of it and stopped meddling.  Of course that was only one loss (and it harmed our allies far more than Russia, crippling Germany’s industry and trade).  Tragically, since that peace was aborted - by the US - some 600,000 Ukrainians have died.  Mostly younger men.  Ukraine will never succeed as a nation now - once the breadbasket of Europe, its agriculture and industry have been destroyed, its people now condemned to poverty forever, the economy decimated, the people and the culture destroyed, families left without support and the nation without a realistic possibility of regenerating its population.   It is a heart rending disaster.  And we, America, are the author.  

All through this the crooks and benighted members of our US Senate - including many who identify as “conservatives” have stood by cheering it on.  Funding it with our tax dollars.  What did we buy with this?  

1. Thinking we could dictate to the world, we decided to impose economic sanctions, weaponizing the US dollar.  It’s not working out well.  We have ruined our own currency, as by using the US dollar to control nations, we have driven many nations away from it.  Now we have a number of very populous and productive nations, such as India and others, as well as emerging nations turning away from the dollar and toward the Russian alternative - BRICS.  (Who said “sanctions work”?)

2. We have shown ourselves to be a false friend - those in Ukraine who are suffering from this war are only harmed by our continuing to fund it and keep the fire blazing.  We have created a hell on earth for Ukrainians.

3. Ukraine will lose its population, its cultural integrity, its nationhood - all for nothing.  NATO membership offered no benefit whatsoever for Ukraine and served only to bring the force of Russia against them.  

4. We have wasted our money at a time when our own economy is suffering, and added to our incredible national debt.  We can never get control of our debt.

5. We might have had a profitable trade partnership with Russia - they have a large population and are basically a wealthy nation.  A great marketplace.  We can’t hope for that now.

6. We have driven Russia to partner with any nation which hates America - China and Iran first come to mind.  And now Russia is openly turning to the same kind of proxy warfare that we and NATO have been prosecuting against them.  

7. We are risking a very serious direct conflict with Russia for no good reason, a conflict which could result in nuclear holocaust.  At best we have returned, all on our own initiative, to the ugliness of the Cold War.  

8. We have lost our moral bearings.  At what possible time could we ever have thought the US would commit acts of terror?  What else can you call blowing up a pipeline belonging to a nation we are not at war with, unprovoked?  How is it different from blowing up the Lusitania?  Or the famous Maine (which some now believe was not blown up by Spain at all).  These are the kinds of things that bring nations to war!  We have become a reckless, dangerous, immoral actor on the world stage.  All for nothing.  

We have been paying a fortune for our own nation’s destruction as a world power.  Following is a list of benefits for America and the west from our antagonistic stance with reference to Russia:

1. . . . Well, can YOU think of one?

We could go on and on.  There are endless reasons why our conduct with respect to Ukraine and Russia is unacceptable for a civilized nation.  We are acting like any other usurper or aggressor in this.  And our representatives in Washington, men like Kevin Cramer and John Hoeven are voting for it.  We need to rein them in.  We need to call them on this.  Even otherwise sane people like Ted Cruz are on board for most, if not all, of this.  We should not tolerate this.  If we care about our children or grandchildren, if we care about our founding fathers and their dream of a great nation acting in good faith, we cannot tolerate it.  War means inevitable loss of our freedom.   No less a man than James Madison observed that “no nation, including the United States, can preserve its freedom in the midst of continuous wars”.  He was quite right.  Every time we have a war we lose freedom - much of it  forever.  This might be the idea in the first place.  Those who would deprive us of freedom, who would control us like animals or robots, would see the benefit in a perpetual state of war.  And that is what we have had up to the present.  We might be in the final phase of that “perpetual state” now.  We might be on the brink of unbridled, total and all-consuming hellfire of war now, and it will have been achieved with the help of evil or insane operatives in the guts of our CIA and our Washington establishment and the collaboration of our elected representatives and with a background of indifference of the American people to all of this.  One would think Americans would have better minds and hearts than to want to use the carnage of Ukraine simply to provoke a war with Russia.  

Russia and Putin look like the reasonable people here.  Why do we let this be the case?  We don’t we demand that our leaders be the adults in the room instead of the vandals and delinquents?  To this point Russia has exercised great restraint.  It has been met with nothing but more aggression from the United States and its puppets in Europe.  By now Russia will have determined that this is not helping them.  And why not?  When we scuttle peace offers made in good faith, when we violate our own agreements with regard to NATO expansion, when our puppet states in Europe candidly admit that the Minsk Accords we nothing but a sham to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military to use against Russia, what intelligent leader would continue this restraint?  They have not even retaliated (yet) for OUR blowing up THEIR pipelines - a blatant act of terrorism.  This won’t last.

In the past (since even before the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine) and again more recently,  I have argued for dissolving NATO.  NATO has evolved from its stated purpose as a deterrent to Soviet aggression into a criminal organization which provokes war where there is - and need be - none.  Again - Ukraine would have had no benefit of its own in NATO membership.  Since 1991 no nation has.  Unless you look at the dubious “benefit” of signing up on the US side.  It obligates such foolish nations to act as America’s cats’ paws in these pointless, single minded aggressions against Russia.  

Which nation has been constantly embroiled in war since VJ Day?  True, Eisenhower’s bad decision to stand back and let Stalin’s Soviet Union share in carving up Berlin set the stage for Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe but by the time the Soviet empire closed up shop and went out of business we have since had nearly 33 years in which to show that we could be a good ally and neighbor and turn to the good works of peace and prosperity and away from death and destruction of war.  OUR choice was death and destruction.  It wasn’t theirs.  

Now, I hope that North Dakota’s senators Cramer and Hoeven are paying close attention.  No doubt they felt important as North Dakota acquired two important military bases in the early cold war era.   It has made Grand Forks a target of retaliation since 1957.  Since then, numerous base closings have threatened to end this, but every time greedy, pathetic  local citizens rallied to keep it in operation (for all the wrong reasons).  Today this makes this city (and Minot as well) a prime target.  And Russians have been taking notes.  THEY don’t even have to fire the kill shot.  They can have North Korea do it, just as we have used the hapless nation of Ukraine to act as our proxy against peaceful Russia.  Or maybe they can use one of our Caribbean or South American neighbors to do the job in another location.  They hate us and would surely be willing.   Who knows?  This is the trap we made ourselves and then walked into.  

There are two reasons why we are at war with Russia:  special interests’ financial greed to exploit a defeated Russia’s resources (in their dreams) and a power grab here at home.  In a state of war our freedom at home will be destroyed. 

Cramer, Hoeven and every other idiotic robotic, ill-motivated member of our Senate and Congress should be cashiered now.  They should be sent home and replaced immediately - asked to resign.  This foreign policy may already have killed the west.  A lot of well-meaning conservatives shunned candidate Ron Paul back in 2012 because he wasn’t belligerent enough on foreign wars.  He was right in that too.  

It is one thing to be prepared and ready to defend our country - that is sensible and patriotic.  It is another to forge alliances with the express purpose of trying to threaten other legitimate nations such as Russia.  One speculation is that the greed of no-holds-barred for-profit entities such as Blackrock seeks to turn Russia itself into one of America’s puppets so as to rob their vast resources, natural and human.  This would always have been mindless.  Russia is a formidable nation with some things going for it - especially in the post-Soviet era.  It has a common Christian religion, it has a truly great culture - literary as well as musical and art - and it would never have worked.  Throughout history, Russia has had a strong distrust of the West.  Churchill described Russia as a “riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma”.  Now perhaps we have served to vindicate this suspicion.  It is easy now for their leader - their very popular leader, by the way - Putin, to point to our behavior and say, “See?  We have been right all along.”  

It is not legitimate for Congress to appropriate tax dollars to fund any wars anywhere absent an open declaration of war.  James Madison explained the reasoning for this very succinctly, along with the stipulation that the cost of any war must be borne by the generation which prosecuted it:  “[T]hat war should not only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits: but that each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expence of other generations.”  This would preclude the kind of senseless exercise we have seen over the past two years in Ukraine.  And in so doing, would have saved the nation of Ukraine and allowed its people to prosper in peace, while allowing the nations of Europe to at least maintain their economies.

Meanwhile we can probably resume the pointless, ineffective nuclear attack drills in North Dakota.  Congratulations, Senators Cramer and Hoeven, good for you, Congressman Armstrong.  Thanks a lot, civic leaders.  Let’s hope it’s not goodbye.

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