By John Helmer
@bears_with
There is a risky way of being an American against the wars that President Donald Trump is aiming to fight, especially the one Trump claims not to be fighting against Russia on the Ukraine battlefield. The risk is that you may have to use words like imperialism, oligarchy, false consciousness, revolution.
Trump is right about one thing – Americans don’t have to go to Harvard on state grants and minority quotas to learn about words like those.
One of the first great Americans to run that word risk, miss Harvard, and do more than sympathize with the Russian revolutionists of the late 19th and early 20th century was Clarence Darrow. He is also one of the first and still the most eloquent of examples of being an American against American wars which is almost unremembered today. “If this war be called patriotism,” Darrow said in 1898 about the US war to take the Philippines from Spain, “then blessed be treason”.
Few enough words to make the tweet limit, but not rightfor endorsement in Truth Social. Too “WARPED RADICAL LEFT”.
Darrow (1857 -19384) was the greatest courtroom lawyer in American history, practising across the country in the defence of the oligarch-owned railroads and also union workers; big city mayors; blacks framed for the murder of whites; women who killed violent husbands; Jewish thrill-homicidalists; and the McNamara brothers who on October 1, 1910, dynamited the Los Angeles Times, killing 21 and injuring more than 100. After that trial Darrow was prosecuted himself for bribing the jurors; in his two-day address to the jury he had them in tears; they acquitted him on the defence of moral necessity.
“The great question between capital and labour,” Darrow said in 1912, “cannot be solved by marching”. Nowadays that last word would be replaced by tweeting.
“Clarence Darrow is the greatest power for evil in the United States today!” declared the California state prosecutor in Trump style – it was March 1913 and Darrow was on trial on a second bribery charge. The jury deadlocked – eight for conviction, four for acquittal – and the judge declared a mistrial.
In today’s podcast with Nima Alkhorshid and Ray McGovern, we discuss the Russian assessment of Trump’s tweets and the future sequencing of wars which Russians understand that Trump and his State Department and Pentagon are attempting – just as the Russians are sequencing their own war in the Ukraine and the future war against the Euro-Nazis led by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
In the short run, a Moscow source in a position to know says: “both sides — three, if you include China — know all the sequencing moves. Russians are better at sequencing [than the Americans]. So far in surrenders and strategic withdrawals from Syria, on Gaza, on Iran too, it’s all for a purpose. US sequencing is nothing new and not surprising. You can be sure that the Russians have plotted where and what they will give up, and what posture they will take to fight when they must.”
Commenting on the Russian memorandum or term sheet to be tabled at the next round of negotiations with the Ukrainians, the source adds, “the Russians will agree to a ceasefire where they are. The peace terms will include all four [Novoriossiya] regions. Added to that, demilitarization across the Dnieper River [eight regions] and change of regime [in Kiev and Lvov] will give the result that’s wanted; at a minimum the four regions will be fully folded into Russia. The ceasefire won’t be negotiable beyond three months or six months, when an election must take place [replacing Vladimir Zelensky].”
The Russian assessment of Trump is that he is preparing to make money, not war. “When [President Putin] says he trusts Trump, he means that it’s expected Trump would hold to his side of an agreement – if it’s reached – to stop supplying arms and intelligence, either directly or indirectly, to the Ukraine and that would be the essence of a peace treaty.” This pact will also include Trump’s agreement to halt enforcement of economic sanctions against Russia, reopen airspace, and resume international banking and the Euroclear and Swift transfer systems.
The sequencing priority on the Russian side right now, according to the source, is for time to rebuild the military forces, starting with acknowledgement of mistakes — battlefield failures, command-control failures, commander-in-chief misjudgements – and what must be done next, and for the future. The mistakes conceded have been made strategically since 2014, operationally in February 2022, and tactically since then.
To follow up the mentions in the podcast, here are the references:
Source: https://x.com/MedvedevRussiaE/
Source: https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/2019597/
“Genuine Nazism is rearing up its ugly head. Examples abound, including speeches by new Chancellor Friedrich Merz in which he claims that time has come for Germany to lead Europe again. One would have to be cynical to the bone to utter such words. The militarisation of Europe is proclaimed as a main objective for the second half of the decade. This is a dangerous dynamic.
It is they who plead for a respite – solely to rearm. They have stated as much publicly. My former colleague, now President of Finland, Alexander Stubb, declares that Vladimir Putin is obliged to agree to an immediate ceasefire – yet insists such a ceasefire must impose no restrictions on the West’s dealings with the Ukrainian regime.
What does this signify? That they intend to continue militarising this state.
Present here are members of our delegation who recently attended the first round of talks in Istanbul. The Ukrainians sat with them, conversed, and discussed agreements that began to take shape – concerning POW exchanges and a memorandum outlining key issues for a settlement to be drafted by both parties, to which priority attention must be given. An understanding was reached. Yet nothing substantive followed. They agreed because they presumed Western support, including from the United States, would be eternal – that they would forever be permitted every indulgence.
However, US President Donald Trump has demonstrated a different interpretation of the situation. He has repeatedly underscored that this is not his war but Joe Biden’s. Precisely so. His stance – that the US acts in its national interest – extends to the Ukrainian context. What national interest does the USA have in Ukraine, beyond the objective pursued by Democratic administrations: to “contain,” “encircle,” and “keep Russia in perpetual tension?” None. Economic interests, by all means – no one forbids that.
Another revealing statement by Friedrich Merz emerged when he sought to justify his militarisation agenda – the creation of Europe’s strongest army. He asserted that Russia would not stop in Ukraine and would proceed to seize Europe. In Freudian terms, he projected his own inclinations: rather than protecting his compatriots, he envisions conquest and exploitation. These Nazi instincts have proven remarkably persistent.”
On the contrary, the anti-Russian, no-concessions line represented for Trump by General Keith Kellogg and agreed with France, UK, Germany, Ukraine and Poland (FUGUP) preserves majority public support in Europe overall and in the UK.
Source: https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/
Measured country by country, there are big differences in public opinion between Denmark, Belgium, and The Netherlands, which are the most anti-Russian states, and Romania and Italy where pro-war sentiment is least popular.
Source: https://geopolitique.eu/
British public opinion is solidly in favour of backing the Ukraine to oppose territorial concessions in the negotiations with Russia; of putting British troops on the ground as peacekeepers; and of paying more from the national budget to reach Trump’s target for NATO defence spending.
Polling dated mid-February 2025. Source: https://yougov.co.uk/
NOTE: The lead image is an adaptation of an 1899 cartoon by Victor Gillam, published in Judge, a weekly magazine of political satire based in New York from 1881 to 1947, and oriented towards the Republican Party.The title of the cartoon was "A Lesson for Anti-Expansionists", showing the growth of Uncle Sam over the stages of his life; the lesson was that the US “has been an expansionist first, last, and all the time.”
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