The proxy war between NATO and Russia has been dragging on for almost a year and a half. The odds are that Ukraine cannot win: even if you believe in what the mainstream media tell you that Kiev’s armies will soon re-conquer Crimea and then storm the turrets and towers of the Kremlin, a look at the map, a cursory scan of the statistical data comparing the economies of the two belligerents and their human resources ought to make everyone sober up. You may feel strongly about Ukraine and still see reality; twenty or so years ago there were people – though it is difficult to imagine – who felt strongly about Serbia when this small country was being bombed into stone age by the Americans and still reasonably they could not cherish any hope that tiny Serbia would be capable of defying and successfully opposing the gargantuan, trigger-happy aggressor.

If reality is what it is, if facts are what they are (and as we know that facts obstinately refuse to conform to our wishes), why then prolong the hostilities? It is highly unlikely that NATO will let itself be drawn into the conflict as that would mean World War Three and MAD i.e. mutually assured destruction. Why then feed Ukraine with a scanty number of tanks or armoured vehicles or – as is being planned – aircraft? Why funnelling money into the Kiev regime to the detriment of the many needs that Western countries have? Why all this madness, all this insanity, all this war-mongering?

I can very well understand why Western politicians have an insatiable thirst for blood:

First: They revel in playing the big game around the globe, creating and destroying nations, flying from place to place and having talks while participating in palatable, luscious and delectable dinners and defecating comfortably in luxurious hotel bathrooms.

Second: They are beside themselves with raging fury because President Putin reversed the course pursued by President Yeltsin: President Putin effectively put a stop to the plunder of Russian resources and finances. They are shaking with raging fury because they have “invested” so much in Ukraine and expected huge returns, and all of a sudden someone threw a monkey wrench into their plans of subjugating and exploiting Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

Third: They are raving mad because all those sanctions – wave after wave after another wave – have not only had no effect but seem to have strengthened Russia economically, socially and politically (the imminent expansion of BRICS, Sino-Russian bond, high popularity ratings for President Putin). Worse, the sanctions became a backlash for the European economy.

Fourth: They are livid with anger because they have severed all diplomatic channels and now do not know how to come to a settlement – or better out: how to backpedal – without losing face. To do so, they would have to sit down at the negotiation table with the “killer, murderer, despot, tyrant” and all the other names that they have applied in reference to Putin, being so self-assured that they could use them with impunity because they were oh so certain that this killer, murderer, despot and tyrant would not survive politically once they had launched their sanctions and would be toppled down either by a popular uprising or the Russian elites.

To sum up: I can perfectly understand why the Western politicians are reluctant to even consider a peaceful settlement. After all, they are safe, well-fed, travelling the world over and enjoying life to the fullest. They do not have their sons in the trenches, either, and no missiles or blackouts or power cuts disturb the peace of their daily routine. Also, their voters are not thrown into the meat grinder that the Ukrainian conscripts are, which means they do not fear a backlash from their own people.

But what about all those activists that usually shoot their mouths off about human rights, peace, ecology/climate change, and animal rights?

Hey, I’m calling on you, champions of human rights: tens of thousands of Ukrainians are dying senselessly and have been dying senselessly for several months now; millions of Ukrainians are suffering from fear, shortages in supplies, and have been suffering for several months in the war that cannot be won by Ukraine. Millions have left the country and continue to do so. Why are you, champions of human rights, not protesting? Why aren’t you taking to the streets? Why aren’t you screaming at the top of your lungs that the war must be stopped?

Hey, I’m calling on you, peace movement activists! Why are you silent? Follow in the footsteps of your predecessors who so eagerly protested the war in Vietnam! Where are you? War is being waged next door to you and you are afraid of making yourselves heard? You are afraid of making yourselves visible? Why? People are dying on a daily basis and you do not care?

Hey, I’m calling on you, activists of the green movement, climate change activists, environmentalists! Tens of thousands of exploding shells and missiles release tens of thousands of tons of chemicals that pollute the air and the ground and contaminate the water. Where are you, uh? You are otherwise so sensitive about the carbon print of a single man or woman or child being left with a single breath, and now, in the face of such a colossal, catastrophic, gigantic contamination of the environment you remain silent? No Fridays for future this time? Why, for heaven’s sake?

Hey, you activists of all and very stripe, hey you, allegedly so independent of the managers of the world, of the wicked capitalists and evil politicians, can it be true that someone has told you, Don’t you dare! and you tucked your tail between your legs?

Look, you are allowed to cut school on Fridays because the carbon print threatens to do away with all life on the planet earth but you cannot stage a weekend protest over the tens of thousands of tons of chemical compounds and shells mangling and mauling and lacerating the Mother Earth? Shame on you! 

If you think that self-hating whites who are on a crusade to combat white supremacy are a new occurrence, then you do not know history well enough. A self-hating white despising white civilization is a psychological phenomenon, a psychological disturbance, a psychological ailment or even disease. As such, it must have existed and indeed has existed since the dawn of humanity in various latitudes and periods. Just as we know of no nation or corner of the earth without slavery, neither do we know of a time or region without self-haters.

19th century Poland was a nation divided by three neighboring countries, three European superpowers of that time: one part of Poland was incorporated into Prussia, one part was incorporated into Austria and yet another – into Russia. The easternmost parts of the former Polish state – those annexed by Russia – had a particular social structure: the gentry were of Polish nationality and professed Catholic Christianity, while the peasantry were – to use today’s language – Ukrainian and professed Orthodox Christianity. Since these territories were under Russian rule, the Russian authorities began to work on the minds of the Polish youth, on the minds of the prospective Polish landowners. In schools, in universities, in historical publications the Polish gentry was depicted as cruel exploiters of the poor and noble common Ukrainian people. The exploitation was not limited to economy: the Polish gentry was also accused of suppressing Ukrainian culture (cultural colonization). Young, impressionable sons of the Polish nobility that studied at the Russian universities in Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow or Saint Petersburg would imbibe these ideas and would be slowly converted to the Russian or Ukrainian point of view, with the effect that they assumed a hostile approach to their own fathers and their own interests. To them, to those young people who romanticized and rhapsodized everything Ukrainian, who lionized the cossacks, who were enamoured of the Orthodox Christian tradition, Ukrainians became brothers while their own compatriots began to be perceived as villains.

Their world view was a simple black-and-white picture: on the one hand Polish exploiters and oppressors, on the other – noble and virtuous Ukrainians. These young Polish students would always find fault with their fathers and condemn them. This eventually led some of those students to national and religious apostasy: they would claim to be Ukrainian and consequently would convert to Orthodox Christianity. The seeds of self-hatred would come to fruition.

What did those young Polish sons of the Polish gentry demand?

One. The Polish gentry must resign from their privilege of… being Polish and Catholic. Does that not make one think of today’s white privilege?

Two. The Polish gentry must stop Polonizing Ukrainians through village schools and churches. Does that not make one think of today’s cultural colonialism that whites supposedly pursue in their dealings with the people of color?

Three. The Polish gentry had best leave the Ukrainian territories and move to central Poland or… the Polish gentry had better stop being Polish. Does that not make one think of today’s demands that whites ought to pack up and leave or subject themselves to the demands of the people of colour?

Those young students – as students everywhere – would form clubs and these very often united and consolidated students of one ethnicity. It turned out that in Kiev’s university some Polish students formed a Ukrainian Club whose members were made up of… Poles alone. Why?

Because Ukrainian students and the Ukrainian intellectuals or Ukrainian upper classes preferred to speak Russian and regarded themselves as Russians. They looked down upon the Ukrainian people. Notice that today, too, black upper classes do not mingle with black lower classes but rather tend to associate themselves with whites; notice also that today all those anti-racist white activists make up a mutual admiration society where you will have a hard time trying to find a person of colour.

What forms the minds of self-hating whites or self-hating Poles or self-hating anybody?

First, persistent propaganda. When the mass media, the entertainment and the education are bent on impressing certain messages on people’s minds – systemic racism, climate change, planned parenthood, gender reassignment and, and, and, – then with time they necessarily notch up a success.

Second, the one-sidedness of views, opinions or information that is fed to the recipients. This is by far the gravest intellectual sin of them all. People exposed to one type of information, one world view, one set of facts, develop a distorted perception of reality. Today just as yesterday this triad of the media, entertainment and education shoot their mouths off about white privilege, white supremacy, systemic racism, and the whole string of such notions while other argumentation is either suppressed or ridiculed. Consequently, one-sided views are formed and those views become firmly set.

Third, apotheosis of one race, ethnicity or social class that is performed against the background of the vilification of the other race, ethnicity or social class. Thus, for example, peoples who were at first perceived as culturally backward and hence were called savages, receive the adjective noble and become noble savages (Rousseau); cultures that were patently and demonstrably lower than that of the Europeans become viewed as simply different. Young activists romanticize and rhapsodize about the other race, ethnicity or social class drawing their knowledge from novels, movies and selected pseudo-scientific books in which reality is skewed and re-interpreted (Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxist economics, etc). The result? Self-hating Poles, self-hating whites, self-hating capitalists, and self-hating men (men who fell into the trap of feminist fairy tales of male exploitation and male privilege).

All those activists mull over the many ideas of a better (raceless, classless, sexless) world without giving as much as a passing thought about who and why feeds them these ideas. Those activists are like children watching a play: their attention is easily controlled by the spotlight. They see what they are supposed to see and never wonder what is in the shadows, and never question why the spotlight calls their attention here rather than there; it never occurs to them that there is someone in charge of this spotlight who has full mastery over their eyesight and through it over their minds.

In the case of 19th century Poland it was the Russian authorities that controlled the spotlight and thus the minds of the sons of the Polish gentry. The Russian authorities were the enemy of the Polish nation. Though they were known as such, still they were successful in duping some of the young Poles. Who controls the spotlight in the West? Certainly not Russians, but certainly an enemy of the Western world who is all the more efficient and successful in his doings because he remains in the dark.

19th century self-hating Pole, born as Włodzimierz Antonowicz, died as Володимир Антонович. Early in his adult life he renounced his “Polish and aristocratic privilege” and Catholicism, became a Ukrainian and Orthodox Christian, and married two Ukrainian women so as to raise Ukrainian offspring (expiatory ethnic miscegenation). Ukrainian though he desperately wanted to be, he spoke and wrote either in Polish or Russian; somehow, he could not master the language of those he gave the knee to.

People spend the night in front of ATMs with the hope that money will be brought there and they will finally be able to withdraw it after standing in line for many hours. Sometimes the fights break out, even among those waiting in front of the banks. Tensions reach their peak. Branches are set on fire and people all over the country take to the streets….

Scenes from Cyprus 2013? No. Nigeria, Laos, April this year. Old banknotes were invalidated in February and since then no new ones have been printed, only the old ones collected from the market by the central bank and destroyed. At the same time, they introduced central bank digital currency (CBDC), which was not accepted by the people at all. Over 200 million people were deprived of their money overnight. Almost no one wanted to pay or transact with the new e-currency (called eNaira). Thousands of businesses went bankrupt in a short period of time. A paradoxical situation arose in which gasoline could no longer be bought at gas stations in the country, which is one of the largest oil producers in the world.

Nigeria, with its 22o million people, has long since overtaken South Africa and is the largest economy on the Dark Continent. It is a country with huge raw material resources and a development potential that African mentality and corruption, which is present everywhere, wreck. It can be said that it is a rich country of poor people because almost all the capital is in the hands of politicians. One of them, the head of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefile, said in Davos that his country would soon be cashless and – lo and behold – that might end with blood in the streets. It is hard to believe that in a country where 32% of the people are illiterate, where most people do not have access to electricity, the idea of digital currency comes from below; that the shamans had whispered it in the ears of ordinary people. No, it comes from above and from outside. Third World countries have always been a training ground for Western elites, the grassroots movement of the new authoritarian world without cash. This time they are testing how far and how fast they are able to implement their ideas.

Finally, it should be remembered that the complete transition to cash, would make citizens transparent. Central banks could regulate digital money, depending on how they would like a citizen. It could also be that the validity of the money would be limited in time and could only be spent for certain purposes. Electronically, that’s easy to organize. How embarrassing that would be for the Germans, 58% of whom pay in cash! Nigeria has also been called the “cash king” in Africa.

The virtual world threatens the physical world. More on this in Gefira 73.

The names may be different, but the phenomena remain the same. The Western world, which is so free, especially in terms of freedom of expression, has long since abolished censorship, hasn’t it? No, there is no censorship, God forbid. There are community rules that preclude the expression of this or that opinion, or laws against hate speech that silence someone, but certainly no ban on free speech.

It is much the same with wars. Have you noticed that the good old days when country A officially declared war on country B before bombing it are long gone? But then why should we declare war? We don’t fight wars anymore, we conduct military operations to prevent a demographic or human catastrophe in a particular region. Or we fight terrorism, so sometimes we declare war, but not against a country or a nation, but against terrorism, against evil people or evil ideologies.

Different designations can make us think differently about phenomena that are very similar, not to say identical. Gephira 74 compares the events and characteristics of two instances of such hostilities, separated by almost two hundred years: two wars fought between the West and Russia for world domination, or at least for domination in one region, two wars both connected in one way or another with the Crimean Peninsula. One of these wars took place between 1853 and 1856, the other began in 2022.

We are also examining the American and German economy. Unseen policymakers like Powell and Scholz are attempting to appear optimistic, but the reality is that there are many indications that the decline will persist. Immigration is ongoing and is doing nothing to improve the labor market, the reason that was supposed to legitimize these absurd social policies. Companies and big banks are going into bankruptcy, education standards are dropping, while TV presenters only talk about new challenges, rather than an impending collapse.