Dakota Beacon

So this week we have seen another chapter written in America’s stupidity with regard to the Ukraine.  I am using the definite article again because it is only a matter of time until everyone will be using it again with respect to the Ukraine, once merely a Russian province, destined to be one again soon.

What I refer to here is the idiotic raid on Russia’s military airfields compounded by the terrorist attack (and it is nothing else) on a civilian railway, killing innocent civilians including children.  And this on the eve, literally, of “peace talks”.

First, the drone attack on the military aircraft.  This scheme was concocted, according to Zelenskyy’s “government”, over a year ago, and has been in the works all this time.  It also involved American intelligence and surveillance, which would have been at least arranged for, if not delivered, under that military genius, Joe Biden.  Why it went forward under the watch of Donald Trump is anyone’s guess.  

Looking at this from some of its several angles, we can say firstly, that as a military action it was a nothingburger.  Of course, according to that paragon of honesty and objectivity, Zelenskyy, his brilliant move took out 40 airplanes.  In reality, fewer than 10 planes were affected, and only 4 or so were destroyed.  More importantly, why was Russia so foolish and careless as to leave these nuclear-capable airplanes exposed for all the world to find and attack?  This is a great question and one to whose answer we should all take very, very, VERY seriously.  Was this sheer incompetence on the part of the Russians?  

To answer this question, we need to go back to 2010 and 2011, during the Obama era, when the United States and the Russian Federation signed and implemented the new START treaty.  This called for reductions in nuclear warheads plus the visibility of Russian and American bombers.  So the Russians suffered these losses (wth an assist from the United States) because they observed and abided by the terms of the treaty they signed.  In other words, their signature on the treaty was made in good faith (sort of like their trust in the Minsk treaties) while the United States did not operate in good faith under the terms of the START treaty.  So now we know.  

All along, it would appear that it has been the violation of agreements and treaties by the West, including the United States, while Russia has exercised restraint and lived by these treaties, that has brought about this extended and catastrophic war in the Ukraine.  We and the other NATO member nations agreed not to extend NATO any further west into former Warsaw Pact nations.  It could well be argued that instead of expanding, NATO should have been dismantled back in 1992, when it was clear that the Soviet Union was no longer a threat to other nations.  In fact, Russia’s satellite nations (Warsaw Pact countries) all became independent and elected their own governments.  Russia has expressed no intention of re-taking any of them.  Like the people of those emancipated nations, the Russian people have expressed hopes of normalizing relations and becoming successful trading partners and assuming friendly relations with the West.  

Instead of embracing this change in the political climate and encouraging this positive change in view on the part of the world’s largest nation and a nuclear super power, America, like the European nations, rebuffed Russia. Whereas nations like Poland or Romania were celebrated in their independence, Russia was treated like some waif in a Bronte novel, consigned to the cellar to live with the spiders and rats.  It seems so destructive. America and its leaders have thrown away the possibility of a century or more of peaceful and cooperative relations with the “other” super power.  

The answer to the question this begs is the all-powerful, now global, military-industrial complex.  Yes, the same one Eisenhower warned us about back in the 1950s.  And it is also part of the answer to why America keeps spending way beyond its means even as we watch bankruptcy gaining on us.  We keep spending on non-productive enterprises like military build-up and foreign wars rather than securing our own borders and diverting our energies and financial resources to productive outcomes like industry, agriculture, trade and freedom.  Indeed, James Madison was outspoken in his belief that war had the potential to undermine our liberties at home.  He was right.  And there will always be those in government who are eager to take advantage of war to do just that in order to increase their own influence and power.  

We see this at work undisguised, in the example of the war in the Ukraine.  We have allowed our CIA (which seems to be running our country now) in establishing illegal and immoral bioweapons labs right by the Russian border in the Ukraine.  We see it in our flagrant violations of promises and treaties with the Russians.  We see it in the wink our government gives to the notorious human trafficking facilitated in the Ukraine, in our choosing and propping up one of the most obnoxious, incompetent and morally defunct leaders to oversee the destruction this is causing.  The U.S. was responsible for overthrowing a duly elected president and replacing him with this piece of trash - Zelenskyy - and giving him his orders ever since.  Periodically he is sent by the CIA to come over and try to bully our elected legislators to pony up more money and war materiel for his use while he continues to needle the Russians.  And he is openly running his government as a dictatorship, even to the point of canceling elections.  What kind of “freedom” are we propping up there?  We don’t have to like Putin, but at least he doesn’t cancel his elections.  And at least he seems to be defending Russia, which is his job.  We might wish we could say the same for our own leaders.  And he seems to be able to control his impulses and play the adult in the room.  He seems to be able to sort out the relevant from the irrelevant, unlike Trump.  

Our government promoted NATO membership for the Ukraine, despite our promises and our agreements not to.  Russia, alarmed at a growing military presence of a western coalition of forces massing on its own border, warned against this.  Their warnings went unheeded and dismissed as of no consequence, as the bio weapon development and military armament proceeded.  Russia had little choice but to act in its own defense.    This is how Russia saw it.  And if we use our imaginations just a little, we can understand it.  If China, Korea, Iran and various other aggressive adversaries did the same on the Mexican or Canadian borders we would feel a need to take action as well - or we should feel that need.  Our government is so accustomed to betraying us that it might not care.

Rather than being a deterrent to Russian aggression as it was conceived to do, NATO has become the instigator of war, unnecessary war, war to no purpose, with Russia.  NATO needs to go.

We provoked this war - our CIA and certain profit-motivated elements in our government wanted this war to begin and to continue.  Some, like the repulsive Lindsay Graham, figured this was a great way to take down Russia (to what end it is difficult to imagine, a destabilized  nuclear super power being a rather alarming prospect) and reasoned that we could do this by expending the lives of the men, women and children of the Ukraine, rather than our own army.  As if Americans would tolerate sending our soldiers to Russia.  

There is a reason we have been at war without interruption since 1950.  None of these wars had anything at all to do with our national defense.  They were and are all meddlesome interference on one pretext or another, but none in defense of the United States.  In our own defense, we have been woefully lax while we have been butting into other nations’ business.  We have permitted unvetted migrants from all over the world, mostly military-age men and those trafficking children, to swarm over our border and into our own country - a literal invasion of unassimilable masses.  They have wrought destruction here at home, through social costs, crime, expanded welfare costs, contributing to the ruin of our great cities, even while we have been spending billions on foreign wars - our own combat and the propping up of others, as in the Ukraine.  We are impoverishing American taxpayers in order to fill the pockets of this military-industrial monster while it kills innocent Ukrainians.  

If I were a mother in the Ukraine, my dearest wish would be that America would take its money and its war machine and go home.  Every dollar we have spent there, depriving our own people, has wrought destruction on the people of the Ukraine.  We have turned that region, once the breadbasket of eastern Europe, into a wasteland and killed or injured (per May 2025 - US Defence Intelligence Agency) some 700,000.  And that’s military losses.  Obviously, civilians have died and been injured as well as lost their property and livelihoods.  Farms, homes and whole cities have been destroyed, transportation and infrastructure has been disrupted and destroyed.  This is the price people like Lindsay Graham have been willing to pay for their questionable objective of destroying or destabilizing Russia.  And what is the result?  A stronger than ever relationship between Russia and any other nations it can persuade to join it against us now and in the future.  A new currency - BRICS - to threaten the U.S. dollar, a climate of fear and distrust that can flame at any misunderstanding or offense on either side. 

 I hope Graham is finding ways to spend all of his ill-gotten gain out of this because there must be some.  The whole array of western leaders seems to be like mad dogs without reason when it comes to Russia.  It is unreal.

If the military action were not enough, this last week we have been at least somewhat complicit in the bombing attack on a civilian railroad, killing and injuring men, women and children.  This was NOT a military target, and Russia, unlike some nations, does not use its citizens as human shields to disguise and protect military resources.  These were simply civilian passengers on a train.  This fits some people’s definition of  terrorism.  We call out Iran as an exporter of terror.  We went to war in Iraq because someone imploded the Trade Towers with people in them.  What was this?  And it’s not the first incident - we also blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, another civilian non-military target, in September of 2022.  That was a crime on so many levels. For one thing, it also exploded the argument that we need fear carbon dioxide.  You could say that was the only positive aspect of that attack.

In the course of processing this war, the Russians have killed and injured civilians. They have acted on their promise to confront any effort to arm the Ukraine against them on their border or admit Ukrainian NATO membership and of course, it is inevitable that civilians get killed and injured.  That’s part of war, and why we should not desire it.

So now, besides the physical destruction of cities and countryside, of the economy, of life and limb, and the mental anguish that goes with war, now we have added the burden of our own  immoral behavior and terrorism to the list.  

So far, it seems that Putin is head and shoulders above the dogs’ breakfast that comprises the leadership of the west, at least in terms of forbearance and reserve.  He has been reluctant to expand the war beyond the Ukraine; he has not taken action against Zelenskyy’s manipulators or suppliers or underwriters.  Way back in 2022, in April, long before the blowing up of the pipeline, and when there were likely fewer than a thousand casualties, Putin and Zelenskyy sat down at the negotiating table and agreed to peace terms.  At that time the Ukraine was more or less intact, the cities still stood, shining in the sunlight, the crops were being planted.  All Putin asked was an end to persecution of Russian-speakers in the Donbass region, an end to the talk of NATO membership.  That, and he would go back to Russia.  In fact, he began at once to withdraw his troops as a good-will gesture.  Then in swooped Boris Johnson, perhaps with dreams of a revival of the British Empire and all its glory, at the behest of Joe Biden, intent on securing his own illicit profits from Ukrainian sources through his cocaine-addled son, and the hopes for peace and productivity and partnership were dashed.  And since then people have died in the hundreds of thousands.  If this is not immoral, it is difficult to believe that anything is or could be.  

Trump struck a chord with the American people when he said he would end this war on “Day One”  - namely January 20 (or perhaps 21), 2025.  With a phone call.  He loves his beautiful, perfect phone calls.  This one would bring peace and prosperity.  The American people made it clear that we are done with these pointless, costly foreign wars.  Except his phone calls don’t seem to work anymore.  At least not with Putin.  Or Zelenskyy.  True, he did invite Zelenskyy over to the White House to tee him up for a friendly kick in the pants out the door earlier this year, but Zelenskyy’s  bruised behind hasn’t seemed to have affected his brazen demands or modified his growling, insufferable behavior.  Trump is undermined consistently by his buddy Lindsay Graham and by his own government through the CIA.  We are still waiting for that magical phone call that will end this.  To some of us it seems that the phone call was never even necessary, just put a complete halt to any American dollars being thrown into this war or into Zelenskyy’s government, or, for that matter, anywhere near the Ukraine.  Simple.  Just say no to it.  If Zelenskyy were left to rely on Germany, Britain or France for his war welfare this would end quickly.  And at this point there is really no hope of reconstituting anything like the Ukraine that existed peacefully before the NATO overtures.  Ukraine will not survive as a nation now.  It can’t.  And the sad thing is, the promoters of this war policy - Graham, Blumenthal, Victoria Nuland, Mike Pompeo, the EU thugs and the rest, really don’t care.  It never mattered to them.  And as for those who champion the Ukraine as a nation, I, for one, would be adamantly opposed to any Marshall Plan to rebuild it.   Why would we?  We can’t pay our own bills anymore.  We’re borrowing from China.

It seems that the Emperor has no clothes, or at least no resolve, and this will go on for another year or so.  Trump doesn’t care what the people who elected him want.  He is more interested in the donor class, the globalists or whoever is playing the juiceman for the military-industrial potentates.  He, too, like Zelenskyy, seems to be someone else’s puppet.  

Trump told Putin that he had no idea about the drone strike deep into Russian territory, nor about the railway strike.  This only makes him look weak or a liar.  If he did not know, if U.S. intelligence was employed without his knowledge and these attacks then carried out without his knowledge or permission, then he merely looks weak and irrelevant.  Either that or he is lying, in which case the American government and Trump himself are implicated in making war by stealth (for which we severely punished Japan back in WWII) without so much as announcing it.  At this point, Trump looks like a complete loser.  It was the last thing he needed as he went out to sell his “big, beautiful bill”, throwing our country even deeper into debt.  A loser on all fronts.

Is it even possible to elect an honest person?  It begins to appear, no.  America seems to be well past its prime.  We seem, as a nation, to be in a rocking chair in a locked room of the old-folks' home for countries that are merely waiting to die, our money spent and gone into the ether of foreign wars and war machinery, our liberties dimmed and our future in serious doubt.  

Is Trump playing 4D chess again?  If so, he needs to put away the board.  No one else is even interested in playing with him.  It won’t be much longer before world leaders quit taking his calls at all.  And the price of his foolishness and inability to act decisively could be a nuclear conflict.  I hope those who were willing to check their better judgment and ride or die with this guy back in 2024 - when we still had a choice - have their bomb shelters well stocked.  

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