UK Sanctions like pinning a target to your own arse
Published: 4 April 2022 ~ Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
Congratulations Viktor Orban on your landslide victory in the Hungarian election: Viktor Orban celebrates victory over “Brussels bureaucrats and the Soros empire”1
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“The Western economic blockade and sanctions of an unprecedented scale are clearly having an effect. The question will ultimately be whether Russians are willing to accept their new status as global pariahs and give up the Western comforts some had grown used to.” ~ CNN article, 14 March 2022, “Here’s how we know sanctions are hurting Russia”
My wife’s response on social media: “Russians are willing to accept giving up ‘Western comforts’, which mainly means the loss of McDonald’s, Zara and IKEA. We have plenty of home-grown products💖. As for ‘global pariahs’, we are OK with this definition too. After all, Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky are in our company. 🤣”‘
So there you have it: ‘western comforts’ belong to the corporate-led, consumer lifestyles of material western cultures, which, presumably, cannot survive without them, and the perception of ‘global pariah’ really depends on (a) a limited definition of what constitutes the world, ie the world is the western collective, and (b) whether exclusion from the neoliberal globalist club is something to lament or something to rejoice about.
Quote: “The Western economic blockade and sanctions of an unprecedented scale are clearly having an effect.” Question: On who? and Who says so? Ahh, western media!
“First off, let’s shift this into a UK context, because as we know Britland is the crust on Uncle Sam’s American Pie and everything the yanks say the Brits go along with. So, Brits take note: Brit mentality is not Russian mentality. The entire British hierarchy from the elitist neoliberal classes to the lush-living liberal lefties to the sheep-bleating and avatar-changing minions live in a world that is totally disconnected from Russian thought and feeling. This is one reason, the main reason, why it is so easy for the UK to miscomprehend Russians on the grand and amusing scale that it incessantly does.
But the disconnect between Russian and UK mentality is not the only void; there is another, equally unbeknown to the UK masses, between the style, approach and coverage of Russian media and that of its UK counterpart.
Objective comparison of Russian and UK media coverage of Ukraine immediately reveals that when it comes to news that is straightforward, easy to assess and assimilate, Russian media wins hands down. The UK establishment is frightened of this, which is why at the first sign of trouble in Ukraine they moved to ban Russian media, but not before they had disguised their motive by slapping it with a propaganda notice.
In the UK, views and narratives that do not conform to the official neoliberal one are routinely shouted down. Brexit, the plandemic and now Ukraine, it’s the same old story. It has to be, if not the UK government cries ‘propaganda’, UK media cries ‘propaganda’ and, you’ve guessed it, the UK public cry ‘propaganda’. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? So, they don’t.
Where UK media excels is in the spheres of overt-sensationalism and melodrama. This is not to congratulate but to recognise how it works. People of independent thought, what few there are left in the UK, can see through the deception and the disingenuous character of UK media with the minimum of effort, but cloned and colonised minds cannot and sadly for various reasons the great proportion of Brits fall into this latter category.
Take, for example, the recent media handling and presentation of the situation in Ukraine. Huge, concerted effort was disproportionately assigned by UK media to heartstring-pulling tales about the humanitarian tragedy and the subsequent plight of hapless refugees. I am not knocking the reality of the collateral damage of military conflict but the way in which that reality is deliberately and cynically manipulated.
The UK government and its corporate media are maestros when it comes to playing the emotive fiddle. They can tap into the mythicised tolerance of the legacy Briton mindset without breaking sweat. It is not the first time, for example, that Brits have been asked to feel good about themselves by opening their hearts and borders to ‘asylum seekers’, economic migrants and even genuine refugees.
Think back to the troubles that the US-UK alliance exacerbated in Syria. Remember the cruel images of refugee children, some dead some rescued, on the beaches of Europe when their migrant rafts capsized, images later claimed by some commentators to have been stage-managed but cried down frenetically as ‘fake news’ by liberal fact checkers?
No sooner had these images been published than up went the banshee cry for accepting more refugees and adopting refugee children. Do you remember this? Do you also remember changing your avatar, and whilst you were doing this forgetting to remember the role that the US-UK played in creating the Syrian tragedy? Propaganda they cry! But then they always do.
It is different in Russia. Contrary to UK popular belief, popular because when Brits have no answers they simply shout ‘propaganda’ in the same way that they shout ‘racist’, Russians, unlike Brits, do not believe everything they see and read in the media. Schooled in the hard knocks in life, not the university of ‘I’ve got rights’, am molly-coddled and cosseted, Russian minds have fortunately escaped the deleterious process of homogenisation that has soldered UK minds into one inflexible lump.
The parrot-and-sheep UK hybrid simply does not apply in Russia. Changing avatars as a substitute for intelligence and for touchy-feely membership to the mutual appreciation society is not a natural part of the Russian psyche. A comparatively turbulent history has taught Russians how to endure and overcome and, as a consequence, has enabled them to develop a reservoir of personal and collective fortitude on which they can draw for survival whenever the need arises.
Equipped thus, the ‘pariah’ does not feel like a pariah, if anything it feels exclusive. Hence, the ‘pariah of the global world’ (which actually means the globalised world) sees that world from which it has been excluded, to which it is told it does not belong, as the pariah it can do without. Now, isn’t that ironic?
if you learn but one word in Russian, let that word be Pofick!
To help with your understanding of this, if you learn but one word in Russian, let that word be pofick! In English, pofick equates to ‘And what?’ or ‘So what!’; in French c’est la vie; or universally to a simple shrug of the shoulders. ‘Pariah!’ Pofick!; ‘Sanctions!’ Pofick!; US-UK sissy fit! Pofick!
Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
Gone are the days when all Russians clamoured and craved to run to Europe. Some of the country’s arty-farts and techies have left Russian as a virtue-signalling gesture about Ukraine, but let’s face it they couldn’t just up and go unless they had money and property salted, tucked away and waiting for them in Europe, so the general feeling here is that those who have gone were gone already.
The majority of Russians, thanks to the internet, no longer harbour any illusions as to what it is like to live in the West. Once, like many others, they were keen to experience French culture or German culture or British culture but globalism, with the assistance of George Soros’ third-world taxi service, has reduced such norms to nuances. Now very little culture is left in these countries, and what has managed to survive is suffocating beneath legions of creepers and poison ivy.
So, the odds on Russian society being upended by self-reflection as a pariah state to the West are not ones on which you should stake your existence. Sanctions, attempts to cancel culture and general Russophobia are impotent leverage mechanisms for exchanging tradition and love of historic homeland for deviancy and woke.
Another UK government-media myth, borrowed from the US of A, is that sanctions are ‘crippling’ and ‘strangling’ Russia. They are certainly not designed to make life easier but, to quote my Indian friend, who considers himself a great philosopher: “Every problem has a solution”. And this is what we are seeing.
About sanctions, you could say, and many political pundits, economists and political analysts around the world are saying, that the US and its minions have shot themselves in the collective foot, but I prefer my own analogy, which is that the US and its western collective are using their arse for target practice.
The situation into which they have backed themselves reminds me to a lesser extent of one that occurred in a publishing house in which I was employed. Against the advice of his peers and underlings, one of the directors went ahead and implemented a controversial project which, as anticipated, completely backfired. In short it was a financial disaster. A friend and colleague of mine created a little ditty to commemorate this folly, which every time the misguided director appeared my friend would unkindly sing. It went something like this: “We all tried to tell him it just wouldn’t do. It went off half-cock, it hadn’t been thought through”.
Thus, when the UK’s Liz Truss, Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs of the United Kingdom (Trus her to talk b!**&!*s!) gives it the big one about the impermanence of UK sanctions and proffers the carrot and stick of removing sanctions if Russia will behave itself ~ stop behaving like a naughty boy ~ we between-the-lines readers see a very definite case of ‘Oh dear, we got it all wrong; we didn’t think those sanctions through’. The U-turn is plainly visible; it’s the next bend in the road ahead. But saving face is less easy to see. Quick, shout Propaganda!
For the moment, for the Liz Truss moment, saving face means talking out of your arse. The arse-about-face of it is for Brits that they are to continue fuelling their ego at the expense of rising fuel costs, which are fuelling the cost of living crisis, in the lamentable belief that somehow their little over-populated, socially fragmented and culturally impoverished island holds, by some quaint and curious stretch of imperialistic imagination, the whip hand over Russia, the largest country on planet Earth and also a sovereign superpower.
The attempt to ruin Russia on the part of America and Europe is like two gays trying to conceive a child. The more they try, the more their arses hurt.
A RECENTLY DISCOVERED RUSSIAN ANECDOTE HASH-TAGGED ON SOCIAL MEDIA
I’m sorry fellow Brits, but like everything else with this Ukraine conflict your government is selling you sanctions porkies. But please don’t take my word for it. In spite of liberal revisionism, Google has yet to expunge the date when the British Empire waned.
Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
It couldn’t be more obvious than Britain is overcrowded that refusing Russian gas and oil and limiting and/or excluding other essential commodities is akin to wearing a Covid mask in order to spite your face (or is that to spite your intelligence?) or playing darts with your trousers in order to spite your arse. It’s like me saying, instead of buying a packet of crisps from Mr & Mrs Patel’s British corner shop, I’ll buy it from outer Mongolia and ship it in by taxi. Yup, it’s economic madness. It won’t affect the elites, of course, but it will and is already driving down the living standards of your over indebted average Brit. Woops, there goes the heating bills, like a nuclear missile straight through the roof! We’d buy some more insulation, but we haven’t the money to do it with!
Meanwhile, Russia, which has got loads and loads of energy resources, and other resources, is picking up the phone and saying, “Hello India, hello China, we’ve got some oil and gas to flog, are you up for it, mate?”
A similar thing is happening at economic warfare’s sharp and masochistic end, viz with banking and credit card sanctions. “Hello, Russia here. We are in the process of ditching the dollar, how are you fixed for replacing it with the Yuan?”
There are many other import/export sectors where sanctions just aren’t working and where by imposing them the West is on a hiding to nothing, as if using its arse for target practice is not painful enough and only self-flagellation will do.
The level of discomfort that “the Western economic blockade and sanctions” is inflicting on ordinary Russians is, according to CNN, “clearly having an effect”, but it is patently not clear what exactly that effect is because CNN is unable, or unwilling, to tell us, at least with any conviction. I can tell you, as I live in Russia, that the more bellicose and sanction obsessed the West becomes, the more galvanised and resilient is the Russian response. It tracks back to my comment at the opening of this post, the difference in Russian and Brit mentality.
I am sure there are numpty head equivalents here to numpty head UKers, who would rather pay £100 for a T-shirt with a silly brand name on it than a better quality T-shirt with no brand name that retails at a tenth of the price, but that particular extortion has not yet taken hold or replicated itself half as successfully in Russia as it has in the West. If such was the case would the greedy companies selling such tat have put virtue signalling above profit and left Russia so quickly with their tails between their legs? No T-shirt no cry ~ Pofick!
Mick Hart to the rescue! Forever the entrepreneur, to compensate for the loss of brand-name apparel, I am busy working on a new line of clothing for fashion-conscious Russians. These items of haute couture, unisex but not for ‘its and others’ as they are not intended for export, will be designed, manufactured and marketed under the ‘Babushka Brand’ name and will cater for all garment and occasion ranges from woolly socks to evening wear. The prototype is already in the pipeline (which is more than can be said for Russian gas to Europe). The wife is busy knitting me my first cravat in wool.
On the credit card front, true Visa and Mastercard have gone, but they continue to function internally until 2028, or so we have been told, and the Chinese card system, UnionPay, is due to replace the western versions. Incidentally, UnionPay provides access to making payments in over 180 countries. I thought I’d mention that just to remind you that the ‘international community’ to whom Liz Trust-her-not and her dodgy colleagues refer is in fact confined to Usual Suspects Inc ~ the US and its acolytes.
The reality is that in spite of Liz All-Trussed-Up-Like-A-Turkey’s offer to Russia that one day it could be ‘business as usual’, now not only do Russia’s political and business classes know where they stand with the West, but so does the rest of the world. If they had any doubts before Ukraine about the loaded mechanisms inherent in globalism by which suppression and subjugation can be brought to bear on sovereign nation states for the benefits of others and primarily for US advantage, even albeit raggedly and short of consummation, now their application and the risks involved could not be more apparent.
Moreover, there is more than an outside chance that having been ostracised once too often, Russia may never want to return to the West’s unchummy playground no matter how many Western sweeties it is paedo-politically offered. Indeed, leading economists and political analysts the world over anticipate that whatever the outcome of Ukraine, but conspicuously because of it, the era of US and western dominance is rattling to an end.
Symbolic of this move in the right direction is the exodus from Russia of such odious companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken and British American Tobacco, and not-before-time banned Facebook and its incestuous sister Instagram, all of which means for Russians that they will be physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and ultimately morally healthier.
And so, we say to these companies, and others of their ilk regarding sanctions and disappearing tricks: “We all tried to tell them it just wouldn’t do. It went off half-cock, it hadn’t been thought through”.
Thus, although in the short-term difficulties are to be overcome, in the long-term for Russia and the multipolar new world order into which we are emerging, it is difficult to imagine a more win-win situation.
Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
A long time ago, when I was labouring under the delusion that the US and UK double act was, like the words from that well-known hymn (well known if you’ve managed to save something from your culture and past), “All things bright and beautiful”, my friend, a retired scientist, corrected me. Said he, with some impatience: “You don’t understand, Mick, Russia has all those resources and all we’ve got [in the UK] is too many people”
His exact words were, “Too many bloody stupid people!” But I’ll leave you to be the judge of that.
DISCLAIMER: I may have mentioned ‘arse’ once, but I think I got away with it …
And whilst we are on the subject …
Cancel Culture Quickly, the West is on its way out!
Why does the West want to Cancel Russian Culture?
Sanctions Backfire as Brits do Bollocks on Social Media!!
Sanctioned by Facebook Fickle Friends is a good thing!
Copyright © 2018-2022 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.
Reference
1. Results of Hungarian election announced — RT World News
Image attributions
Brickies bum: https://www.clipartmax.com/middle/m2i8i8A0A0Z5K9K9_bottom-mein-po-builders-bum-clipart/
Target with bullet holes: https://www.freeimg.net/photo/101364/tiro-target-butt-shot
Union Jack: Author: Karen Arnold / publicdomainpictures.net; https://www.freeimg.net/photo/1361181/union-jack-flag-union-jack-flag-colors
Stars & Stripes: Author: Webflippy / pixabay.com; https://www.freeimg.net/photo/834709/usa-usaflag-unitedstates-unitedstatesflag
Mobile phone: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-graphics-of-mobile-phone-with-big-screen/10449.html
City Warp: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/skyscrapers-city-warp-architecture-6004214/
Evil face: https://www.freeimg.net/photo/1167019/art-background-bad-costume
Missile: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Rocket-at-take–off-vector-clip-art/20032.html
Man on phone: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-clip-art-of-man-talking-on-old-style-telephone/27569.html
Boomerang: https://freesvg.org/vector-drawing-of-boomerang
Granny knitting (B&W): http://clipart-library.com/clipart/8cxrGb4Mi.htm