Chaos Theory ‘discovered’ the staggering idea that a flimsy cause may have dire and unforeseeable consequences. Its popular draw card seems to be the perverse link between a delicate creature and promiscuous carnage.
That is how reality can sometimes work. When a butterfly in the Amazon flaps its wings a tornado in Burundi may follow.
Terrible wars were precipitated by the flimsiest events. The ‘War to end all Wars” began with a humble sandwich. Plans by the Black Hand group to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand went awry when a grenade tossed at his motorcade hit the wrong car. On a visit to the injured, his driver took the wrong route and backed out just where the hired assassin happened to be buying a sandwich. WWI followed.
So how did we get to the Russian war on Ukraine – the biggest, most devastating and far-reaching conflict since WWII? Where and when did the butterfly flap its wings?
The flimsy detail is less important than the chaotic consequences which follow. Even when the detail is not flimsy at all, indeed is very substantial – like a rigged election for the White House – apocalyptic consequences can dwarf it.
Is Putin’s war of such a type? Unquestionably. Grounded on democracy as a threat and the West as an enemy, what Putin is up to is no ordinary crusade. The assault on Ukraine is an era-making and empire-building moment.
The Economist documents that a Russian cult of war has grown unobserved. Putin invaded, “in the name of Russkiy mir—the Russian world, a previously obscure historical term for a Slavic civilization based on shared ethnicity, religion and heritage. His regime has revived, promulgated and debased this idea into…a quasi-religious cult.” Reactionary, obscurantist and having a day in the sun The West could thus be confronting a holy war no less. Russia’s Orthodox Church paints the conflict in Ukraine as a holy war It cannot be incidental that Russia’s Putin and Iran’s caliphate fanatics are firm allies.
Post modern? Our contentious times have produced belly gods and warlords who are primitive enough to devour their own people, never mind the planet.
In a conflict of might against right, you don’t want a leader deficient in both. Biden, who unseated Trump more than he succeeded him, is that kind of leader. When a President calms the enemy down by saying that he will tolerate a mere incursion – as if knowing what makes a full invasion any different – he fails to convey the might which deters an aggressor. Nothing can be more dangerous than when an aggressive regime doubts American resolve. That can only mean chaos ahead.
And the moral right to confront the Putin regime which Leo Tolstoy believed gives a leader the moral resolve to triumph over evil: what does Biden score there? Having sneaked into the White House on the back of dirty tricks, Biden lacks the moral spine to go up against an evil dictator. The lesson is that a feeble minded rogue pitted against a steely zealot is on a hiding to nothing.
Political campaigns are never clean. Biden’s was conspiratorial. Democrats burgled him into the Oval Office. The infamous “laptop from hell” which they rubbished and censored, was the final conspiracy of a full suite.
The Hunter Biden story alone could have swung the vote against Biden. But other cards, one after the other, were played to steal the election, as George Parry put it, “by a process that had all the features of the colour revolutions our deep state has successfully fomented around the world.” https://spectator.org/joe-bidens-war/ And Parry enumerates the different joker cards the Democrats kept up their sleeve to cheat Trump out of office.
Biden’s caretakers may deny the evidence but not the verdict of simple logic, which they’d find insurmountable. There are only two alternatives: the elections were clean or they were stolen. Which has the greater probability?
So consider. Violating longstanding norms, Democrat leaders refused to accept Trump’s election in 2016 as legitimate. They took to calling themselves “the Resistance,” as if the Trump administration was akin to the pro-Hitler Vichy regime. Without stop Hillary Clinton, Jerrold Nadler, Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter called Trump an “illegitimate” president. For three years Democrats did almost nothing else than try to oust the ‘imposter’ with “Russian collusion”. They tasked a special undertaker, Robert Mueller, to hammer the nails into Trump’s casket lid. When he failed their rancour was that of a demonic kid.
So consider. If Trump was illegitimate and Democrats thought of themselves as a resistance movement fighting to overturn a 2016 rigged election, would they fight a clean one in 2020? They’d give Trump a fair go at winning a second term? The logic is beyond absurd.
Had voters got access to the facts about the son of Godfather Joe, and had the voting process not been manipulated and corrupted, Trump would be enjoying a second term and Putin, on past behaviour, would have kept his powder dry.
Instead the West got Biden for President. When a Commander in Chief appeases, the Russian bear roars. /news/323185 Not to mix metaphors, The Woke bible’s craven and petty obsessions are to Putin as blood in the water is to a rapacious shark.
War game models haven’t the capacity for anticipating the inflammable Putin. A war so fluid and messy could go any-which way. What Donald Rumsfeld called the “unknown unknowns” and Nicholas Taleb termed “black swans” can realign the environment anticlockwise.
The book, Radical Uncertainty: decision-making for an unknowable future, considered how business strategy could deal with chaos.
But no strategy – business, military or diplomatic – would ever envisage what the Democrats have done to the world two years after they stole an election.
Ukraine is laid waste. Ten million people are displaced and dispersed. Mass graves wait to be dug up, Eastern Europe is in turmoil. Nuclear war can’t be ruled out. There’s an all out economic war on Russia, a source of every basic commodity. America has been left reliant on Iran, a terminal enemy and Russian ally, to plug its energy deficit. A threat of hyper-inflation confronts the West.
Ah, Democrats will retort, you can’t blame it all on the election of Biden. Putin would have invaded irrespective of who was President. They’d be hard pressed to back such a wild supposition. And they’d have to dismiss the fact that Trump is the only President this century to not get America into a war. And that Trump left office with America dependent on no country for energy.
The question is, will the President who blundered out of Kabul, now blunder the West into World War III? We could be running out of time to wait for time to tell.
Steve Apfel is an authority on anti-Zionism and on Covid policy, the author of scores of essays, two books and some manuscripts. Before turning author full time he was a business economist, management accountant and expert on world class costing techniques. His blog Balaam’s curse is viewed in over 15 countries on five continents. He lives in South Africa.