By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal…. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real”

Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra”

Hit the fucking deck! Putin has been on the brink of invading Ukraine for 8 years now and the shit could hit the fan at any second. Everyone from the granola brained yuppies at MSNBC to the fist pumping cop worshippers at Fox News are slamming the fucking panic button and they’re slamming it with their own heavily Botoxed faces while screaming, “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” Those pervert Russians have been coming for about twenty goddamn years now, since right around the time the Kremlin swapped out the Fourth Estate’s vodka swilling teddy bear, Boris Yeltsin, for a decidedly less compliant plutocrat named Vladimir Putin, but this time they really are coming. We totally mean it, you guys. Stinky pinky swear.

A force of somewhere between 100,000 and 100 billion goosestepping Ivan soldiers are menacingly occupying pre-existing bases within their own borders. The State Department has ordered their diplomats to pack their bags and released an urgent travel advisory telling every Yankee coed to reconsider taking that trip to sunny Chernobyl for spring break. 3,000 American troops are being shifted from one end of Europe to the other while thousands more have been put on high alert for a potential deployment to NATO’s Eastern Flank.

The western media is teeming with tales of secret Kremlin coups and elaborate false flag attacks, all furnished to them by those trusty anonymous sources in the so-called intelligence community. Some people say the invasion is coming next week, some people say next year, but you better bet your bottom ruble that it’s coming and anyone who tells you otherwise is a dangerous peddler of Russian misinformation who should be forcibly gagged with their own mouse and permanently purged from the ranks of every social media platform known to mankind, from Twitter to JDate. So, for the love of White Jesus, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and all that our indispensable nation holds dear, stay glued to your TV sets!

Now this is how an empire throws a war in the breathless era of the 24/7 news circus. You don’t need guns, you don’t need bombs, hell, you don’t even need a willing adversary, all you really need is lights, cameras, action! Repeat. Get enough yacking heads to repeat the same damn lie over and over and over again, and even seemingly intelligent people start to buy the bullshit by the truckload. Putin is not going to invade Ukraine. Anyone who takes the time to turn off the TV and look at the facts rationally can tell you that. There is quite simply nothing to gain that would be worth the fall out. Ukraine is a rusted out economic basket case and Russia, a nation the size of a small planet with an economy the size of Italy’s, isn’t doing much better.

If Russia was going to march on Kiev, they would have done it back in 2014 when a US backed coup overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and replaced him with a gaggle of neoliberal gangsters and crypto-fascist babushka bashers. Instead, Putin just calmly excepted the already constitutionally autonomous region of Crimea’s popular decision to return back to Mother Russia, thus securing Moscow’s single warm water naval base in Sevastopol and left it to the hyperventilating jackals in the western press to make up the rest. Putin hasn’t even lifted a finger to recognize the sovereignty of his supposed comrades in the Donbass, not because he’s some kind of fucking pacifist but because he’s some kind of fucking capitalist and there are just simply no rubles to be made there in post-Soviet rustbelt country.

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