READY FOR A NUCLEAR WORLD WAR III?

If not, listen up...

Tucker Carlson recently spent more than an hour interviewing Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov. I watched the entire interview and felt it important enough to forward to the participants of another online forum I belong to. One participant in that forum, rather than spend the time to watch it himself, asked me to supply a summary. Here is my response:

I'm happy to offer my personal impressions but need also to observe there is no free lunch here, ladies and gentlemen. If yvou want a decent understanding of Russia's mentality and perspective on what is happening in Ukraine, you couldn't do better than to sit down for an hour with that nation's foreign minister as Tucker Carlson did with Mr. Lavrov - and as you can do by taking the time to watch this interview. You can get your information on this critical subject filtered through the grossly biased minds of the pro-war propagandists of the West, or you can get it straight from the horse's mouth and judge for yourself.

Consider, in today's world, pervasively polluted with pro-war bias and one-sided propaganda from the West, how rare such an interview is, what an opportunity and service Tucker has provided us. Indeed, can anyone on this list remember an occasion - apart from Carlson's interview with Putin - when the Russians have been given the opportunity to explain themselves directly to the people of the West?

I invested the time to watch the whole interview and found the time very well spent. Given what is at stake - the very real possibility of World War III - Putin has repeatedly warned the West that nuclear weapons are on the table if Russia is attacked - every serious-minded person with a stake in this issue - who among us in the West does not have such a stake? - ought to be willing to do the same.

I believe that most people in the West are utterly, pathetically ignorant of Russia, its history and its national interests and are thus pawns in the hands of anti-Russian propagandists. I am quickly reminded here of Thomas Jefferson's observation: "Those who image a people can be ignorant and free - in a state of civilization - imagine what never was and never will be." I would update and paraphrase Jefferson thusly: "Those who imagine a people can be ignorant and stay alive and safe in today's dangerous world imagine what never was and never will be." This calls to mind the utter devastation the ignorance and gullibility of the German people brought down on their heads consequent to their buying hook, line and sinker into the great lies of Nazism:

Here are a few of my takeaways from the Lavrov interview:

• Lavrov is a reliable source of information. Never evasive in this interview, he exudes a straight-forward credibility and does not exhibit any degree of deceitful shiftiness or sliminess.

• He makes clear that the Russian people have a strong and deeply rooted ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic identity. This should not come as a surprise to any but those entirely ignorant of Russian history.

• Based on the aforesaid national identity, Lavrov makes clear Russia's feeling - clearly supported by Russia's diplomatic interface with the West in recent years - that the Western powers, while aggressively pursuing their own interests in the region, including by means of the Ukraine war, have never been prepared to acknowledge Russia's legitimate national and strategic interests in that part of the world - notwithstanding the glaring fact that the West's aggressive NATO posture there proposes to abut right up against Russia's borders. Monroe Doctrine indeed.

• Russia's interests in their original incursion into eastern Ukraine and in the ongoing conflict center on the ethnically, culturally, religiously, and linguistically Russian minority that, prior to the incursion, were being brutalized by the anti-Russian Ukrainian government. The Ukrainian government had passed laws against the use of Russian language, forbade teaching in Russian, burned Russian books, shut down the Russian Orthodox Church and in other ways, including violence, were militating against their Russian ethnic minority living on the western border of the great nation of Russia. These are established matters of fact, not empty allegations.

• Lavrov asserted that, rather than starting a war, Russia's incursion into eastern Ukraine was intended to bring to a halt the violence and injustices being done to the ethnically Russian population there.

• The ethnically Russian populations of eastern Ukraine - in the Crimea and the Dombas - wish to be part of Russia. The population of Crimea, via a referendum, voted to join Russia. Lavrov says the West, while advocating for the principle of self-determination for all peoples out of one side of their mouths, ignore this principle when it comes to the abused ethnically Russian people of eastern Ukraine.

• From the very beginning - and to this very moment - the Russians have declared their willingness and interest to enter to negotiations to bring the conflict in Ukraine to a close. All of their initiatives in this regard have been either ignored or rebuffed by the West.

• The Russian conditions for an end to the conflict include a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO, and that the Russian population of eastern Ukraine be free to join Russia as they have chosen to do. In return, Russia will join the Western powers in guaranteeing the territorial integrity of non-Russian Ukraine.

• Finally - and critically - Lavrov cited a comment from a Biden government spokesman to the effect that the war in Ukraine should not be expanded to include the use of nuclear weapons because "our allies in Western Europe would pay too high a price." Lavrov said this statement - which implicitly assumed that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would never be expanded directly to impact the United States - expressed an extremely dangerous naivety. In other words, if nuclear weapons are used at all, all bets concerning the limits and scope of such use - including the bet that America would never be hit - would be off.

We live in a complex world where the truth of things - the rights and wrongs, the good and evil - is often painted in shades of grey rather than simplistically in stark blacks and whites, as they rightly were in the days of World War II - "The Good War".

In my view, to depict Russia in the Ukraine conflict as another Nazi Germany bent on world conquest is ridiculous and displays the gross ignorance - or the propagandistic deceit - of those who hold to and promote such views. Anyone remotely informed about the history of Ukraine, especially the areas of eastern Ukraine populated by ethnic Russians, knows that the Russian state has bona fide historic, ethnic and cultural, interests there - interests that were actively being militated against by the Ukraine government prior to the invasion. While one can debate the wisdom and appropriateness of Russia's approach to pursuing its legitimate national interests in eastern Ukraine, to deny those interests exist and to expect Russia not to defend them is foolhardy.

The following map tells the ethnic tale of eastern Ukraine:

Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost in the war in Ukraine - perhaps as many as a million human lives lost in total - men, women, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, children. The illegitimate, egregiously stupid Biden regime has fueled this hellish war furnace, fed this human slaughterhouse, with hundreds of billions of our dollars, destroying myriad Russian lives and, in the process, aided and abetted in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives.

As the dark humor has it, "America will resolutely continue the Ukraine war until the last Ukrainian is dead." And should that day come, when the last Ukrainian is dead, there will still be hundreds of millions of Russians left alive. That is the basic reality of this conflict. Short of WWIII that risks burning down the whole earth, this is a war Ukraine cannot win.

Who then are the good guys here and who are the bad guys? Again, not a simple question answerable in blacks and whites. Still, it seems to me there is a fundamental reality in what has happened in this conflict heretofore that goes a long way to helping us pin the right tail on the right donkey. Talking is always better than killing - unless you are a monster. When you have one party to a conflict declaring from the onset its willingness to talk and negotiate, and the other party rebuffing all such initiatives, utterly refusing to talk, who are, at least in some basic sense, the good guys and who are the bad buys?

Which party bears the greater responsibility for the ongoing bloodshed?

You tell me.

Torquemada