Developed rich Westernized countries wallow in internal strife and petty squabbles while lawless warlords and gangsters dominate the global scene.
Too many of our politicians behave like clowns and jesters, nurturing and entertaining their fan bases with stunts and hot rhetoric, but never apparently willing to acknowledge how the warlords’ activities beyond our borders are setting a global stage increasingly hostile to us and to our interests.
To name the most obvious example, Russia’s enemies abroad are being targeted for retribution with increasing vigor. The most recent high-profile murder was of a Russian military helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine in 2023 to reap the prize money. He was living under cover in Spain, as reports have it, and was assassinated the other day in a parking garage near his beach resort home: shot six times and run over with a car. Russia had marked him for murder as a traitor. The assailants are as yet unknown.
Sources in Spanish intelligence services told Spanish outlet El País that it will be hard to directly link the murder to one of Russia’s agencies, but they believe Moscow hired hitmen from outside Spain to carry out the assassination.
Russian billionaire dissident Bill Browder believes that Putin has lost any restraint, especially since the murder of Alexei Navalny. Browder predicts an assassination spree, especially against Kremlin targets living in or traveling through the UK.
“The killing of Alexei Navalny has shown Putin has lost all restraint and that he will embark on a major international killing spree which will include against all his enemies in the UK. […] I believe there are at least a dozen people here at risk and they will focuson on high-profile ones. Politiicans are at risk. I’ve been fighting Putin since the murder of my lawyer Sergei magnitsky in 2009. […] And ever since they’ve been coming after me with death threats, kidnapping threats, interpol interventions, arrest warrants and extradition requests.
“Putin is a murderous gangster and he kills people who stand in the way of whatever his objectives are. Unless we wake up, we’re going to find ourselves in World War Three.
“I am not exaggerating, these guys who run the country are murderers, thieves, torturers who only care about money and power.”
It’s not very hard to see how this works. Dictators on the world stage behave like bullies on the school playground. They will take control if they aren’t challenged, if there is insufficient will to stop them.
The industrialized Western countries are incapable of showing any seriousness when it comes to dealing with the gangster governments. Western political leaders at times even look either bought off or cowed—at least sufficiently quiescent with the gangsters. And the gangsters act without any compunction, not concerned in the least with any significant repercussions—even when they flagrantly break the laws to commit murders in free and open societies.
As this blog points out, aggressive and criminal foreign powers are imposing their murderous regimes outside their own domestic boundaries—not just on unstable developing countries, but also in supposedly free nations. And the free nations are failing to do much of anything about it.
Cynthia and Optimum: Well done! Thank you.
I finished my second zoom meeting of the morning, have another one in 10 minutes. I walked 75 minutes in between. I jotted down notes on some research ideas while walking. The regulars know I do that, and are used to it. Newbies get nervous at this old guy talking to himself (I was wearing my audio eyeglasses, and dictating).
We have a woman at the Y who is both wonderful and murder for dieting. She is widowed, and bored. So she brings in a container of sweets every morning that she made. Today were homemade blueberry muffins. Mostly cookies, but yesterday were chocolate dipped pretzel rods. She places the sweets on a container in the lobby, and the elderly gather there and eat them, while chatting. Someone else brews coffee. We gave her an award in January for her contributions in making our Y a nicer place.