Every conflict produces its own set of acronyms; usually regarding weapons systems developed by the military. For instance, the US produced Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), provided to the Ukrainian government, were used in strikes on Russian targets.

The THAAD system – Terminal High Area Altitude Defence – is a type of missile defence system provided to South Korea by the US. There have been important and sustained protests by Koreans against the deployment of THAAD.

South Korean politicians and protesters are demonstrating their fundamental commitment to anti-imperialism, knowing full well that the stationing of THAAD on their territory is not a defensive posture, as Washington would have us believe, but an aggressive act in a widening imperialist adventure.

Each deployment of NATO weapons, American or otherwise, is accompanied by a fanfare of simplistic rationales about tipping the war. The sending of HIMARS – High Mobility Artillery Rocket System – was supposed to have turned the tide, enabling the Ukrainians to drive Russian forces out of eastern Ukraine.

The exact opposite has happened, with Russia constructing a steel wall in Ukrainian territory. Indeed, Ukrainian forces have been retreating, even though they possess the latest and greatest NATO weaponry.

Currently, the much hyped capabilities of ATACMS are in the news, in the latest cycle of ‘they are going to turn the tide’ shenanigans.

Such language is eerily reminiscent of the media releases and carefully orchestrated political stunts of the former US client state of South Vietnam. Headquartered in Saigon, the major corporate media parroted the lines – tipping the balance, turning the corner, on the edge of victory – but all these phrases turned out to be deceptive illusions. The parallels between Kyiv and Saigon are deepening with every passing day.

In fact, the battlefields in Ukraine have become the graveyard of US and NATO weapons systems about which American and European politicians have bragged. That is the assessment of a North Korean government official, and Pyongyang has been keeping a close eye on the purported effectiveness of American weaponry in Ukraine – know thine enemy.

Hubris is a condition characterised by excessive pride, an arrogant belief in one’s own invincibility or invulnerability. The Roman Empire suffered this kind of malaise; and now the collective imperialist West is exhibiting this mass delusion. What am I referring to?

Sending much vaunted NATO weapons to Kyiv, plus slapping the Russian economy with sanctions, was supposed to have brought about the rapid economic, political and military collapse of the Russian state. Numerous and repetitively boring headlines, screaming about the impending defeat of Russia and its economic implosion, dominated the corporate media’s coverage of the Russia-Ukraine conflict since 2022.

That kind of systematic gloating has evaporated as the reality of Kyiv’s failures, and Moscow’s resilience, sets in. Not only did Moscow learn from and adapt it military tactics since its defeats in the initial aftermath of the Ukraine invasion, but has reorganised its military Keynesian economy to produce weapons at a faster rate, and technologically more advanced, than anything Kyiv and its NATO backers could offer.

Kyiv’s much heralded counteroffensive spluttered and stalled in the first months of 2024. The NATO sponsors of the Kyiv regime have failed to maintain an adequate pipeline of armaments because of their own industrial manufacturing deficiencies. The Russian economy, saddled with the burden of increased military spending, grew by only 1.7 percent. Meagre growth to be sure; but the EU economies, unencumbered by sanctions, grew by barely 0.3 of a percent.

European Commission president and expert PR practitioner Ursula von der Leyen is now demanding state subsidies for armaments production. Fair enough, but that violates a central precept of neoliberal capitalism, that private companies are routinely more efficient that state industries.

The partisans of free market capitalism are stating the quiet part out loud; giving money and weapons to Ukraine is a cheaper way to weaken Russia as a competitor, while the human toll is borne by Ukrainians, not westerners.

The collective hubris of the imperialist west today is in many respects a repeat performance of the hubris which characterised the ruling circles in 1930s Berlin in the lead up to the 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR. Let’s examine the words of Seymour Hersh, veteran journalist and commentator, on the conduct of Washington in our times:

There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.

What the American government is telling its people, about imminent victory, and the reality on the battlefield, demonstrates the rank hypocrisy of those in power. This dissimulation is highly reminiscent, as Conor Gallagher writes, of the disconnect between the Nazi party’s expectations of a quick victory over the USSR in 1941, and the stubborn resilience of the latter’s population.

Expecting the military campaign and occupation of the Soviet Union to be a cakewalk, Hitler, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and the Nazi party hierarchy were stunned by the fierce resistance of the Soviet people.

Not only did they fight back, but these subhuman Asiatic hordes, (as Nazi ideology portrayed them), these people enslaved by Jewish-Slavic Bolshevism, organised their economy effectively, producing weapons of high quality in a short space of time, and inflicted serious defeats upon the mighty Nazi war machine.

The hubris of the West today mirrors that of the German government in the 1930s. Am I suggesting that Russian DNA is superior to that of other ethnicities? No, I am not. Am I suggesting that we all genuflect in front of a gigantic portrait of Vladimir Putin? No, I am not. If we want to understand Putin’s way of thinking, we can start by analysing one of his favourite philosophers, Ivan Ilyin (1883 – 1954). A Russian nationalist, anticommunist and conservative monarchist, Ilyin was expelled from Russia by the Bolshevik authorities in 1922.

It is very sad to see thousands of Ukrainians suffering trauma because of this war. At least 20 000 Ukrainians are amputees, a figure comparable to rates of injury during the intractable trench warfare of WW1. It is perverse of the Anglophone-EU axis to claim respect for Ukrainian lives, only to provide money and weapons for a NATO proxy war guaranteed to increase Ukrainian casualties.