This is a headline on RT:
Here’s another:
Unlike the RT news channel, which is very good, I’ve often questioned the RT website’s effectiveness at promoting Russian interests. I think at some point I’ve even suggested that it could be being sabotaged by bad actors on the editorial staff.
However, seeing multiple stories effectively bragging about countries avoiding sanctions got me thinking about something I was already thinking about: could Russia be pushing the West into sanctioning them further?
I’m not an economist, but based on what I know of the situation, this is what I would do: I would spend 8 years preparing for maximum sanctions, then I would push for maximum sanctions. I don’t really think I’m smarter than Putin, and I think this strategy is effectively obvious in hindsight.
Russia had to have some understanding of the implications of all of this kook global warming stuff the West is doing, which really does a lot to make everything much worse for the West regarding these sanctions.
It would also explain why Russia made no attempt to censor the internet, and went along with the coronavirus thing. They didn’t want to give the game away. They were purposefully looking weak.
In terms of total economic damage, the sanctions will do more to hurt Russia. But that isn’t really the measure you would look at. The measure you would look at is total impact on society, and the sanctions are going to have a much more serious impact on Western society than they will on Russian society.
Russians are much tougher, they’re much more used to being poor, taking the train, just grimacing a bit and having a drink at a local pub or a bowl of soup in their meager flat. Americans want to drive around in massive trucks and live decadently – they want to be fat slobs and have everything convenient all the time.
The decadent Westernized class in Russia is still relatively small and they’re all going to have to either accept the situation like normal Russians, or get beaten with bats and thrown in gulags in the near term.
Russia isn’t going to starve and they’re not going to run out of energy. I don’t think the West understands Russia at all, and is, like a woman, incapable of viewing things from an alternate perspective, to imagine that they would handle specific consequences differently.
A good example of this confusion is that the West views it as a gotcha to ban Russians from watching Disney movies and using Netflix. It’s like soymen banning lumberjacks from Starbucks.
$9 a gallon gasoline will hurt America worse than breadlines will hurt Russia. In fact, as long as Putin is capable of managing the faith and resolve of the people (I could publish a white paper on how to do that), breadlines and general poverty would almost certainly strengthen the resolve of the Russians.
There is also the fact that Russia is under a clear existential threat – Putin can make a clear argument that the West is attempting to conquer Russia by threatening it with missiles in the Ukraine. Meanwhile, Americans are being told that they should feel really sad because buildings in a country they can’t find on a map are getting blown up. They’re being told they should ride a bicycle through the snow to work in order to protect democracy in a country on the other side of the globe they know nothing about. Meanwhile, the media admits, while instructing Americans that they will have to make these sacrifices, that making the sacrifices actually makes it more likely that they will be nuked.
It seems to me that Russia has thought all of this through a whole lot more than the West, and it seems that Putin has had a team of very intelligent people running game theory on all of this since the Maidan revolution, and he has wheels spinning within spinning wheels.
But what do I know?
I’m the guy who still holds faith that Vladimir Putin is a Christian King sent by God to free Christendom from the clutches of the Jewish homo agenda.