"The Good Demagogue"
by Addison Wiggin
“War is the health of the state.”
– Randolph Bourne
“I was in the Soviet Union in the 90s,” Rickards tells me in his interview this week. “Three big black SUVs pulled up in front of my hotel in Moscow and the first car and the second car had all four doors open. All these thugs and dark suits with machine guns under their coats created a security perimeter,” he enthralls. “They opened the SUV door and two little 10-year-old girls in party dresses got out. They were going to a birthday party, but they were the daughters of an oligarch.”
That’s the absurdity of it all. Young kids are made to live under the gun. Maybe the names and the deeds have changed. But the narrative has not. Who actually wants to fight a war? Who wants to send their sons and daughters into danger? Do the theories of the West coveting Russian land… or Ukrainian wheat… or shipping lanes into Sevastopol warrant death?
The unfortunate lesson of history is that war is the natural outcome of a failure of politicians to guard the people from fighting words and things they don’t understand or care about. “China and the US have locked themselves into a new cycle of recriminations,” Bloomberg Surveillance writes, “provoking fresh worries that the world’s two biggest economies are heading down a path that could one day lead to the once unthinkable: the possibility of open conflict.”
A palpable and mounting distrust for “the other side” recalls images of a Red Scare or McCarthyism. Paranoia from within. “Even worse, the escalating rhetoric is entrenching divisions that could make it harder for both sides to find a way to co-exist peacefully over the long term,” Bloomberg concludes. Why don’t we listen to these words?
Our viewers on Youtube had trouble swallowing some of the things Jim had to say about the War in Ukraine. “I follow Jim for his financial advice,” commented the oddly named Zummbot, “but I must say I was taken aback by his terrible and ill-informed take on Ukraine.” He (it?) continues in dismay:
"It’s ironic these two talk of propaganda (of which there is undoubtedly plenty on both sides) when just repeating verbatim the Russian propaganda line. In truth, the Ukraine war is the deal of the century for the US. We get to exhaust the military capacity of one of our chief rivals on the world stage for a relative pittance and do none of the dying. The Chinese-Russian partnership is born of weakness, not strength."
“If only it were that simple,” Bill Bonner might chuckle in response. That is the problem with this kind of “Bad Guy Theory”; it is dangerous nonsense that only appeals to simpletons. People are neither always good, nor always bad… but always subject to influence.
No doubt, the imagery from Ukraine has been manipulated from the onset. “Remember during the early days of the war,” Rickards says. “There'd be a Ukrainian patriot in battle fatigues with an M4 rifle, and there were just these absolutely gorgeous women defending the Ukraine. And you look at them and say, ‘Wow, she could be a model.’ Turns out they were models. They were actually Vogue models posing as soldiers.”
“They're really good at PR and propaganda,” Rickards explains with fervor. “They're being killed by the hundreds of thousands. The country's being destroyed.”
This, we believe, is the truth of it. Whatever propaganda channel is reaching our eyeballs is inevitably tinged with the tentacles of political assumption; under all of it, under all the rubble and rabble, a country and a people decimated by powers greater than they. A proving ground for the symptoms of an emotional polity, easy to manipulate, easy for “thesis-creep” (Ken Griffin of Citadel talks about this too, with regard to financial politics at home) an easy climate of rage to be capitalized upon by a good deceitful demagogue.
So it goes,"
"The Fed Will Overshoot & Kill the Economy"
"In today’s episode, I have with me back on the show Jim Rickards. Jim is an American lawyer, economist, and investment banker. He's the best-selling author of a number of books on currencies, gold, the global economy, and most recently sold out an analysis of supply side inflation and why the Fed is powerless to do anything about it."
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