One American's Death in Kharkov

This weekend brought the news that Gonzalo Lira, a dual American and Chilean citizen who had been a prominent critic of the US/NATO backed Zelensky regime in Kyiv, has died after months of poor health accelerated by maltreatment in a Kharkov jail. Kharkov or Kharkiv in the Ukrainian language sits barely 20 miles from the Russian border. Many of Gonzalo's YouTube viewers and supporters were left scratching their heads as to why he never fled to safety in that nearby direction. Instead in his final attempt at fleeing prosecution or persecution for his dissident YouTube videos, Gonzalo chose to cross almost the entire Ukraine to reach and seek political asylum in Hungary. A European Union member country that the European Parliament is sanctioning for not supporting the Zelensky regime 100% and for closing its borders to illegal mass migration.

As we know, Gonzalo wouldn't make it--he was picked up by the same Ukrainian border guards who routinely intercept their hapless countrymen desperately fleeing the near-death sentence of being dragooned into the Russian artillery-blasted trenches of the Donbass. The 55-year-old Gonzalo was returned to Kharkov to supposedly await trial--in practice to be kept in dank and unhealthy conditions until he predictably died, with many a NAFO troll on Twitter/X either celebrating or excusing his death, oblivious to the 'bad optics' for 'the normies' outside their social media bubble. Most normal Americans who've heard this sad news are asking themselves how is it possible that a regime so utterly dependent on U.S. aid as Zelensky's couldn't simply have shown clemency and deported a critically ill American citizen to Poland or Hungary. Why did the Zelensky regime insist on making an example of Gonzalo and killing him instead?

Perhaps the Zelensky regime did so in direct defiance of Elon Musk, the supposed richest man in the world whose Starlink systems had proven so critical to Ukraine's war effort, after some prompting from ex-Fox News Channel commentator Tucker Carlson interviewing Gonzalo's father on X? Or was Gonzalo tortured in jail and eventually maltreated to death because, as his father contended, he had also been outspoken in his criticism of the Biden Administration?

Some people in the alt-media who accused Gonzalo of being some sort of CIA agent or informant for the Zelensky regime goons of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) now look quite foolish. They concocted such theories to explain how Gonzalo got arrested by the SBU, then temporarily released and continued making Youtube videos for several months critical of the wartime Kyiv regime and the Biden Administration's support for the war waged by the Zelensky regime. But the explanation for Lira's refusal to flee to safety just twenty miles away happens to be quite mundane: he was going through a divorce from his Ukrainian wife, but still wanted to stay close to his Ukrainian citizen children. So regardless of whether you personally regard Gonzalo Lira as having been heroic or foolhardy, he died for what he believed in--staying near his kids and speaking out online. Gonzalo's death is a quiet rebuke to many naysayers in this age of cowardice and stolen vicarious valor, far from the frontline hellscape of Soviet rust belt towns reduced to rubble and Terminator HKs-evoking exploding FPV drones hunting men on both sides of the trenches down like animals.

Take it from Kharkov AND Belgorod Residents, Breaking Up a Superpower Union is Hard to Do

Besides the irony that salvation for Gonzalo from his tormentors was just twenty miles or a full day of being smuggled out of Kharkov in a car trunk away, there is an even greater tragedy. And that is of Russian-speaking Ukrainian men raised in Kharkov being drafted to fight and kill Russian men from the border city of Belgorod just 60 miles away. With ordinance flying in both directions, with Russian missiles destroying Soviet-era Kharkov factories converted to armored vehicle repair shops and Ukrainian retaliation often involving wasting millions of dollars in NATO-supplied missiles (or successful Russian air defense intercepts) on destroying cars in Belgorod parking lots. All because of a historic, Absurdistan accident whereby Soviet leaders drew the borders between the Ukrainian SSR and the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), confident that such administrative boundaries like the one across the Perekop Isthmus separating Crimea from the Ukraine wouldn't matter in the Unbreakable Union of Fraternal States. The once-mighty Soviet Empire, which at its postwar 1950s peak stretched from the Iron Curtain along the Elbe River in a divided postwar Germany to the Bering Strait--with nearly one third of the Earth's landmass and over a billion people including then Soviet-aligned Maoist China under the Red Banner. No one should be nostalgic for that dead and buried Empire. Even if the Russian Army returns to the outskirts of Kyiv again--the Soviet Union is not coming back. But it's fair to repeat the quote attributed to Russia's President Vladimir Putin that whoever doesn't recognize the real human tragedies and wars sparked by the collapse of the USSR has no heart, but whoever wants to resurrect the Soviet Union has no brain.

For the pro-Ukrainian reader who happens upon this article, the burgeoning graveyards full of Kharkiv native patriots of Ukraine now lying under tombstones and fluttering blue-gold flags in the winter steppe winds disproves the Russian propaganda contention that Ukrainian identity was simply something the western Ukrainians with their cult of the UPA or Kyiv State Department funded NGOs shoved down the throats of the southeastern Ukrainians--both before and since the 2014 'Revolution of Dignity'. That said, the 'vatnik' enemies of a united Ukraine in its pre-2014 borders didn't all come from thousands of miles away in Siberia. In a fact that is still painful for many Ukrainian warriors let alone their often NPC (I support the current thing) supporters abroad to acknowledge, tens of thousands of pro-Russian volunteers were and still are native to the rich black earth Soviet rust belt coal country of eastern Ukraine's Donbass. These were men who had been raised in Soviet Ukraine or an independent Ukraine, and who held Ukrainian passports until the fateful 'Russian Spring' of 2014. With the options to flee to either government-controlled Ukrainian territory or the Russian Federation, these men instead chose of their own free will to take up arms against what they regarded as an illegitimate coup-installed post-Maidan Kyiv regime that had been puppeteered by the United States government and its NATO allies into inveterate hostility toward them and their pro-Russian neighbors in Donetsk and Lugansk.

When Ukraine Goes Full Paraguayan in the War of the Triple Alliance and a Second Ruina Ukrainia

After watching Calvin Froedge of shipping securities tracker platform Marhelm post names-blurred screenshots on X of subscribers canceling over his discussion of the hot button topic of U.S.-Israel relations, we must insert here a brief disclaimer. Lest any subscriber angrily label this Patreon post an exercise in 'both sides-ism between the aggressor nation and the victim nation', I am not drawing any moral equivalences between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Words like moral equivalency, much like the word "deserves" in the most notorious scene in Clint Eastwood's Western film Unforgiven "has got nothing to do with it!". What it has everything to do with is whether future pro-Ukrainian historians will look back on the years of 2014-2034 as a second Ruin of Ukraine, far worse (due to a mass emigration of Ukrainians from their devastated homeland) as a percentage of the inhabitants than the depopulation that occurred from the 1930s Holomodor through the Nazi occupation of World War II or during the 17th century wars fought between Poland, Sweden and the Russian Empire.

Future New Poland/Lithuania Commonwealth-absorbed western Ukrainians may sincerely ask themselves how it was possible that a nation in the early 21st century with Internet access allowed its national pride and sense of superiority over its much larger and more powerful neighbor to be manipulated by outsiders into a foolhardy war of mass democide. Not unlike the brave and keen to uphold national honor to the point of national suicide Paraguayans in the late 19th century war of the Triple Alliance, that historians estimate wiped out up to 70% of the Paraguayan male population. But at least the poor Paraguayans didn't have Internet back then to sort out war propaganda from reality--or TikTok to make drafting their young birthing age women and sending them to the frontlines seem fun and sexy.

"Tell Me How This Ends..."

(An aside here, to both sincere Ukrainians and Boomer-con warriors from the last Cold War: Respectfully, for anyone who still believes that Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russia's and Ukraine can win a 21st century artillery and drone war of attrition with a nation that outnumbers it in manpower at least 4 and possibly 5 to 1, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Sincerely, do you friends of Ukraine understand that Washington and London are ready to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, but that NATO will not dare overtly risk a single pilot or special forces advisor alongside your brave soldiers? That the Americans and Britons who have died alongside your troops will forever be disavowed as volunteers and never get acknowledged as active duty servicemen even decades from now?

(As then Secretary of State Colin Powell asked in the run up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, tell me how this ends. Because that is a question for not only Vladimir Putin and the Russians, but also for the Ukrainian people to answer. How many more hundreds of thousands will have to die to restore Ukraine's 1991 to 2014 borders? And is that even possible without direct NATO intervention that risks blowing up the Northern Hemisphere? Was it ever possible by conventional military means as opposed to waiting in vain over the coming decades for the breakup of the Russian Federation? If former Zelensky advisor/spin doctor Alexey Arestovych asks these hard questions of your countrymen, will you shoot the messenger? End aside).

My point is that there are lessons from the breakup of the USSR for Americans, and the most important and obvious being: breaking up a superpower union is hard to do. The second most important lesson is be careful what you wish for, when you speak about a national divorce or secession--one day you just might get it. What started as little more than Ukrainian oligarch funded LARPing by students on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti in the winter of 2013-14 in Kyiv, or in summer 2020 with BLM and antifas rioting winked and nodded at by the powers that be--could eventually end up in people who used to consider each other fellow citizens killing each other. If only for the basic reason that it's always dangerous for one side to presume it has the right as 'patriots' or 'anti-fascists' to claim a monopoly on extra legal force, to take up arms as the western Ukrainians did in February 2014 against the corrupt President Yanukovych, but anyone who mirror images their actions is a traitor who deserves a traitor's death (the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist ‘Azov’ and other hastily formed in spring 2014 units‘ response to the 'Russian Spring' when pro-Russians in the Donbass began to march with Russian flags, seize local police station and Soviet-legacy armories, and arm themselves).

Texas Openly Defies the Imperial Capital on llegal Immigration--

A Stage the Soviet Republics Didn't Dare Reach Until Very Close to the End of the USSR

Which brings us to this past week, when the State of Texas under orders from Republican Governor Greg Abbott, finally took action in direct defiance of a Biden Administration that has cynically and deliberately opened the floodgates to millions of border crossers. Gov. Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to secure a field in Shelby Park, located in the Texas-Mexico border city of Eagle Pass. This park has been a camping ground for thousands of illegal migrants, a large percentage of them OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) from Chavista regime-impoverished Venezuela and even Africans who flew thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean to Mexico because they heard the border was wide open.

Yes this first baby step is mostly a matter of optics: the Texas National Guard isn't actually hindering the illegal crossings all that much, except with some mostly symbolic barbed wire fences. But what matters is, for the first time, the DC deep state regime is experiencing open defiance from a powerful state government. Perhaps the most powerful and energy-rich state in the Union in the great state of Texas. The precedent has been set: If the federal government can simply make up novel legal theories to prosecute the chief political opponent of the regime in Donald Trump, then ambitious governors like Abbott or more likely his successor can read into the 10th Amendment to the Constitution and their own broad emergency powers the liberty to take action against a federal government engaged in wholesale human trafficking for purposes of achieving sudden demographic change and permanent alteration of the electorate. To turn the Democratic Party of the United States into a Partido Revolucionario Institucional like the old PRI that ruled and impoverished Mexico with their corruption for over 70 years.

As we started this essay pondering the post-Soviet Ukrainian city of Kharkov or Kharkiv, we'll conclude by noting this: it took the mighty Soviet Union all the way until the late 1980s to reach the point where any Soviet republic's leader directly defied orders from Moscow. And Joe Biden resembles less the young and energetic but incompetent Mikhail Gorbachev so much as he does the ailing geriatric late Soviet placeholder Konstantin Chernenko, whose death in office prompted then President Ronald Reagan (no spring chicken himself in the early 1980s) to quip, "They keep dying on me".

Sure you can argue that Alabama Governor George Wallace defied the order to send federal troops to enforce desegregation until he backed down in the 1960s, but the U.S. dollar is a far more fragile as the world reserve currency today than it was during the LBJ and Nixon years of America waging war in Vietnam. And rather than the Vietcong or the Pashtun Afghans who drove out the Soviet Army, with Pashtun sons and grandsons later defying the NATO occupation of Afghanistan one or two generations later, the US(S)A's reckoning with nemesis abroad could come in the guise of Syrians, Iraqis and Yemeni Houthi warriors from the Iranian-armed and Russian encouraged 'Axis of Resistance'.

The Soviets could leave Afghanistan and avoid collapse of their client regime for another few years, the U.S. could abandon its doomed war in Vietnam and bounce back to 'win' the last Cold War. But Washington and London's enemies have finally found, in the Bab al Mandeb (the Gate of Tears in Arabic), a fight America and Great Britain can't simply declare victory and walk away from—not without intolerable economic losses to global trade and their own fading reputation for ruling the waves. A true zugzwang or damned if you do--wage a years-long and futile counterinsurgency against an Iranian-armed enemy that has already fought and defeated the Saudis in their futile counterinsurgent war. Or damned if you don't--cede a strategic waterway through which 15% of ocean going commerce travels to enemy proxies) situation for the Globalist American Empire (GAE).

Blow the Dust Off the Clock--Your Watches Are Behind the Times

As the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) likes to say, quoting the late American monk Fr. Seraphim Rose (who also forecast with uncanny accuracy that UFOs would be used to usher in a New World Order religion), "It is later than you think. Hasten therefore, to do the work of God".

Isn't it time to set in motion your exit strategy, and figure out if there's another place besides the USA where you and your family can do God's work?