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The Modern Feudal State [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-23

By David Glenn Cox

An authoritarian government needs to make authoritarian moves, if just to prove their superior abilities over that lowly cumbersome democracy we’ve heard so much about. We can arrest all the criminals and make all the trains run on time too! We are always 100% dead certain we are right about everything we do. Therefore, we need no oversight. We’re streamlining government and passing the beating on to you! The big bad bully tactic always works well, until it doesn’t.

Good King Thump gives sick man Vladimir Putin 100 days to come to the negotiating table. Like telling a dying man to get up and fight or we’re coming in after you! The King has reversed himself about Ukraine, but the King never reverses himself. Reversing himself implies uncertainty and the King is always certain. The King was made aware of certain geopolitical realities and then the thought occurred. Just think of the spoils! Russia on her knees, think of the bargains! A semi-clever fellow could become rich beyond a King’s avarice.

Ukraine gets what it wants. NATO gets what it wants, and I get what I want! And when Russia fails, King Thump gets the credit. Then there will be a redistribution of the national assets. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss but with an American zip code. But forgotten in the dreams of riches and aggrandizement is a former KGB agent. An agent who knows well the price of failure in Russia. So put yourself in Vlad’s shoes. You aren’t walking home from here. Either you run and hide someplace warm and sunny, quietly waiting for death or you stick it out in the bunker until the end.

While the King’s remarks must hearten Ukraine, they must terrify the Russian leadership. The King was the hope they had all hung their hats on. Suddenly gone! It ups the domestic pressure to get rid of Vladimir. Maybe some general perhaps takes over. A general maybe in his seventies and in poor health with a caloric temper. A proud man trained in the lowest traditions of Soviet Military doctrine.

Going to conquer Mother Russia huh? I don’t think so, Capitalist swine! NYET!

Good King Thump is hoping for an easy victory to show us his, “Look Ma! No hands! “approach. All I have to do is shake my fist and growl. So, we will be less likely to question him later on down the road. When even darker spirits arrive, Auschwitz wasn’t built in a day you know. You don’t need to question the King ever! So, the King makes his other demonstrative moves and what are the Russians to think?

100 days, you’ve lost your ass and now we’re about to take your shit away from you. Coming to the negotiating table, hat in hand. Trouble? Could there be trouble? (An armistice for twenty years?) The Allies contemplated assassinating Der Fuehrer but thought better of it. The replacement could have been worse, so it’s best to stick with a known quantity. Better not to bring strangers to the table unfamiliar with the game with so much at stake.

Maybe on the 99th day the Russian’s decide we’ve lost the war and are about to be jailed, killed and disgraced. Let’s nuke Kiev just to teach the world a lesson about fucking around with Mother Russia. Otherwise, we have to face the Russian people with nothing to show for this war but death and misery.

All that my way or the highway stuff works real good on TV. They wouldn’t dare! Cornering your adversary and leaving them no escape is a recipe for a miscalculation. This is an unstable nuclear power you’re poking with a stick. What sort of controls do they have on their nuclear arsenal in say a collapsing broken government scenario where no one is actually in charge anymore? What’s the going black-market price on a good low mileage second hand nuclear weapon? That tough guy stuff only goes so far, and it has as many pitfalls as advantages.

The Russians won’t see the King as reasonable, but as unreasonable. Russia already knows the King is a scoundrel. They will see his intent as larcenous and corrupt. Not brokering an honest peace but a highwayman shouting, “Stand and deliver!” Maybe they let another nuclear power plant go boom in Ukraine and of course blame it on the Ukrainians.

The King demands the Afghans return the seven billion dollars in American lost military hardware. I’m sure that check is in the mail already. The King demands the return of the Sudetenland Canal. Are these rational demands? What would you think negotiating with people like this? Other than they are either crazy or you can’t believe a word they say or both.

The goal isn’t peace, it’s robbery. Ding, ding, ding! Oil in the ground? Smell familiar? Hmm? Sounds like you need a new government to me. A government that will sell us everything we want at everyday low, low Walmart prices. Nationalize that oil industry or sell me the railroads for a dollar. Blessed are the peacemakers turning your sword into their plowshare. A vassal Russian state working to enrich the billionaire class on the modern feudal planet Earth.

After Greenland, I have no further territorial ambitions.

First, they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me.

- Martin Niemollar

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