Honesty? Realism? A sense of the bigger picture? I'm still looking for the exact term. (This is a reaction to the vast display of "support Ukraine" flag-waving you can see on social media at this moment.)

To focus the mind, let's look at this Bernie Sanders tweet again:

Please. No more speeches in the Senate about “freedom” until one Republican has the guts to stand up to Trump’s lies about Ukraine & Putin. Ukraine did not start this horrific war. Russia did. Zelensky isn't a dictator. Putin is. The US must not enter into an alliance with Putin.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) February 24, 2025

I thought there was some semblance of a point to being a Democrat before 1992. Sure, they're totally sold out, I told myself. But they're not warmongers like Reagan or the senior Bush, and they're not as stupid as Ross Perot. So I voted Democrat. Then the Green Party formed what was basically a club in my area in 1992. I may have occasionally popped in twice to vote for Bernie Sanders, but otherwise I was no longer a Democrat.

My guess at this point is that Democrats, those who still remain with the Party, pop out of the womb knowing their mission, more or less in the automatic, instinctual way in which calves know their first task in life is to stand up when they pop out of their cow mamas. And the Democrats' mission, in this vein, is to hand America over to the Republicans. Or maybe it's this link from the last decade I ought to post here. That's who they are; that's why they do it. I think that's the best explanation -- it's hardwired. They are all careerists, of the sort I saw in utero in high school in the late Seventies; empowering Republicans is their primary career objective in this era. Pretending to be the opposition to the CPAC crowd while selling out said opposition is their primary MO.

Anyone can tell what's going on; there are plenty of resources. Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone, The Duran, anyone who's been a guest on Napolitano's show, Sabby Sabs or Revolutionary Blackout, Danny Haiphong, Brian Berletic, Due Dissidence, Status Coup, Jamarl Thomas, Jimmy Dore or pretty much anyone else not connected to the Deep State. Look 'em up on YouTube. I'm amazed they're still allowed to participate in the Internet. But what you also see now on the Internet, this tsunami of activity, is this great howling that Donald Trump is a Putin puppet and "I support Ukraine" and all of the other Project Ukraine talking points. I'm amazed at its volume.

It should be clear at this point that if there had been any substance to the notion of "supporting Ukraine," at least, I don't know, six months ago you would have seen this dramatic effort among Ukraine's supporters to shore up Ukraine's deficiencies in the war-fighting effort. A lobby would have emerged: America needs to be retooled, it would have argued. We need to produce 155mm artillery shells to match Russia and to establish air supremacy over the boundaries of Ukraine, they would have said. Above all, they would have promoted a military draft; maybe said draft would have started with America's now-enormous unhoused populations. The advocates of this movement would have argued for a new Marshall Plan to shore up the economies of Europe after the massive hit they took when the Nord Stream pipeline went down.

But nothing like this occurred, and the moment for such a movement has passed if it ever had one. I am suggesting this alternate history as a speculative possibility simply because I wish to illustrate what "support Ukraine" would have looked like if it had been backed by a shred or two of political realism or honesty. (The flag-waving you see now is way dishonest.) Instead, the political realist par excellence, John Mearsheimer, who believes that the drive to war began around 2004 under Bush Junior when the realists lost their ability to advise the US government, sums up the realist position on Ukraine below.

The rest of the history is laid out in Jeffrey Sachs' video here.

Now, granted, amidst outraged depictions throughout social media of Putin puppets and of the sweet, kindly Zelensky being so rudely insulted in the White House by Trump and Vance, there are a few outside voices saying "don't you want peace in Ukraine?" Oooh, peace! Peace! Who could be opposed to peace? This speculation is also completely lacking in honesty, realism, or a sense of the bigger picture. The peace faction in the think tanks and shadow governments in the US is mainly interested in peace so that the movement I suggested above could be made a reality. We have peace, Ukraine rebuilds, and war begins again, they imagine. So who is to establish peace in Ukraine? Count me with the skeptics, with Mark Sleboda and others: Trump might walk away from Ukraine, but I don't think Donald "Chaos Bomb" Trump will give Ukraine peace. (In an attempt to promote honesty, here, I will confess my inactivism. I do not think there is any way I can affect this situation.) Trump's re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Russia, the silver lining to all this, will indeed prove useful in averting nuclear war, but that's about it. The initial problem was that Russia did not trust the West, and for good reason; why should Russia set a peace treaty with the US when it is winning the war and when Trump will remain in office for at most four years, after which the chaos might increase further.

Instead what we will eventually have in Ukraine is a coup d'etat and a capitulation. Europe will abolish what is left of its democracy as it has done in Romania. Simplicius, from a week ago:

I have stated multiple times myself that it’s more likely that Ukraine will ultimately lose via internal revolution leading to some kind of capitulation, rather than military defeat. The cutting off of US aid has far greater dimensions than just military: it will result in a lot of internal political and moral turmoil, which will greatly exacerbate the potentialities for a regime collapse.

The rest of the world will carry on with business as usual because, you see, the rest of the world outside of the trilateral nations may be itself lacking in the realism, honesty, and bigger picture departments, but not so thoroughly as what you see in the trilateral nations.

I'm awaiting the reaction to this diary. "Oooh, Cassiodorus, you're so depressing!" To which I respond: go ahead, then, and do something, and not "something" like a social media blitz where you post a bunch of Ukrainian flags on Facebook.