No-one needs reminding of the dangers we now face…

‘World War Three’ seems to be on everyone’s lips. There’s a danger of self-fulfilling prophecy about this, with images of clever told-you-sos grinning after the event… albeit it, briefly.

How did we get here? I’d like to propose four new horsemen of the modern apocalypse: greed, fear, impotence and ego. There’s nothing new about any of them, but, together, they have (in my opinion) come to define an age that was supposed to offer creativity and freedom to a world of people made comfortable by progress.

My father is Ukrainian and my mother is Russian…

Each of us has an opinion, hopefully, though there are signs that having an opinion actually formed by our own thinking is a dying art…

We watch the deadly horror of the nightly news, seeing Ukrainian cities destroyed by the will of a man whose response to protest is greater and more extreme violence. His techniques of destruction were honed in Syria, while the world looked on and did little. He is a psychopath, one of many thrown up by extreme events throughout history; Alexander ‘the great’ spent most of his time pursuing the same path, but history is written by the ‘victors’. Hitler was defeated but only by a remarkable unity of ‘Western’ determination.

They were never enemies…

Such determination is expensive. Britain only recently finished paying off its war debt to the USA. What was left of the British Empire changed at that point, effectively ceasing to exist. Hitler may have been vanquished, (and we should remember this was greatly assisted by Russia) but the new order soon marked itself by virtue of Europe and America’s fear of Communism, and for good reason, though isolated countries produce extreme and often violent responses.

This is a deadly thing when the front line of the technology of war is the hydrogen bomb, several of which will effectively destroy a country.

Such cataclysms are the place where history is re-written, where it comes to an end for many and where the world ‘order’ changes. Occasionally, there are even greater changes. Astrologers tell us we are in one of those periods. There is not sufficient space here to go into details, but the planetary conjunctions of the past two years have been once in a lifetime events…and continue to be so.

Our brotherly nations will then still be able to make peace…

It can reasonably be said that all of this is an externalisation of human nature; that everything befalls country is an outward projection of its collective inner state, which, itself, is the sum of the individual inner states.

That would have been rejected as fanciful before the last century – the period in which man’s internal ‘processes of self’ were finally made visible. We can acccurately label President Putin as a psychopath because we watch him accelerate the destruction of Ukraine and know he feels nothing.

Actually, that’s untrue. The self-centred person feels a lot, and it’s all to do with the inflation of their inner importance, their ego. President Putin knows this is his last chance to restore the cold-war status of Russia and go down gloriously in its history. That this is already impossible, except by coercion on a massive scale, is of no concern to him.

I am ashamed I allowed lies to be told on Russian TV screens…

It’s likely that China does not want a world war, but it does want a new world order. It will become the markets denied by sanctions to Russia, but will set its own price. No-one else will bury from him. Russia will become a vassal state to its Eastern neighbour. Its economy is already tiny, in comparison to other large nations, and the success of Western economic sanctions, although painful to the rest of the world too, are already destroying the rest of Russia’s economic options.

Into the arms of China it will go, leaving the entire far-northern hemisphere dominated by a single super-power, with Europe, now damaged by Britain’s exit at the worst possible time, facing the economically-united northern neighbour. Sobering thoughts…

The Russian oligarchs are an example of extreme greed, but are not alone. London is the world capital of money-laundering. When I last looked, something like 90% of the world’s wealth was ‘owned’ by less than 5% of its people. No-one sane wants Communism, but that Democracy has led us here suggests that Democracy has long ceased being democratic. Its societal manipulation of voters’ minds – gleefully enriched by the ability to buy social media influence – is a war on the individual. We can exercise few choices that affect the super-rich, or the continued growth of their power, just as the citizens of Russia and other authoritarian regimes have no real say in the running of their countries .

We were silent in 2014 when it all started…

Positives… We should end this by examining what they could be. Renewable energy on a massive scale could be one example. Against the odds, and thanks to strategic investment by companies like Siemens, wind power has become efficient and economic. Vast wind farms now operate offshore, delivering an increasingly significant proportion of our energy.

On the negative side, a prolonged economic war with Russia will empower the calls for restored ‘dirty energy’ to be given special and ‘temporary status’. This will include fracking, currently suspended in the UK. The first round of this has been negative from a parliamentary ‘advice’ perspective, but watch this space for manipulation.

Right-wing MP’s have their fingers in many pies. A good deal of funding has come from Russia into their coffers. Serious journalistic investigations are ongoing into the influence of Russian money on the Brexit campaigns. Anything that breaks up Europe benefits President Putin; the rest is common-sense logic for a dictator prepared to poison the city of Salisbury to get to one oligarch.

It’s unlikely we will stop President Putin from destroying Ukraine, though the valour of the people of that brave country is remarkable, and the west has made united efforts to support the democratically elected leaders. ‘Crush and destroy’ will continue to be Putin’s approach; and we needn’t think that he will stop at the Ukrainian border, as his missile attack on the army base only 20 miles from Poland has just demonstrated. It is the action of a determined man, one who cares nothing for the world’s opinion, and has seen how effectively it worked in Syria.

Hitler followed a similar path. He was stopped only by force, far later in the day than it could have been. No-one wants to believe that really bad things are happening… things that change their world-order.

It can be argued that the West had a chance to prevent this. To do so it needed to acknowledge Russia’s right to be protected from having a NATO country on its immediate borders in the former Soviet Union territories. Putin asked NATO not to do this. The West could have invested in Ukraine, economically, without accepting its demands to be a NATO member, thereby creating a buffer zone between European and Russian interests. The economic structures to support this were already well established – just look at the oil pipeline through Germany. Ironically, at the time of checking this post, there are new, ongoing peace talks centred on this very option,

The Ukrainian people would originally have rejected it, since they viewed themselves as politically independent, but how much better might this have been than a destroyed country and a massacred population?

No-one believed Putin would do what he has done. Nor did he believe that the West would be so efficient in its opposition to his actions. So here we are, with Putin holding the balance of terror and the trigger to his nuclear weapons. A psychopath isn’t worried about consequences in the same way that a sane person is.

I always worry when I hear people voicing the opinion that ‘our best hope is that someone close assassinates him’. It’s a clear failure of everything else.

If we have a prayer, beyond the devastating suffering of the Ukrainian people, let us use it for Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One, Russia’s state media channel. On Tuesday evening, she rushed onto the early evening live news channel with an extraordinary protest against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

She has been released after nearly 24 hours of questioning. A fine has been levied for her production of a video accompanying her actions. Other state legal action against her is likely.

I don’t know anyone else that brave… but our collective history does. The quotes throughout this post are hers, taken from the pre-recorded video she left behind. We should be suspicious if she mysteriously falls ill…

Moments such as Marina Ovsyannikova’s TV protest are pivotal in the world’s inner history of humanity. They strike through the slow crawl of politics and bring us into contact with our Being. Perhaps at that level, equipped with the power of truth, and facing our fears, we can make a difference.

©Stephen Tanham 2022

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog