In November 1983, my late, dear friend Herbert E, Meyer, a brilliant Fortune magazine business writer whom Director of Central Intelligence William ("Bill") Casey improbably raised up to be vice chairman of President Ronald Reagan's National Intelligence Council, produced a memorandum arguing that official Soviet state economic statistics were so fictional that they bore no relationship to the true, far more dire living conditions of the peoples of the Soviet Union.
Consequently, Herb argued, the Soviet economy was already in a state of irreversible decay and collapse. The Moscow leadership therefore would react to the crisis by appointing a new reforming president and communist party leader. But all efforts at saving the dying system would prove futile and the entire Soviet Union would inevitably disintegrate within a decade.
All, of course, worked out exactly as Herb predicted and warned.
However, the entire US Deep State consensus was so outraged by this brash prediction that they tried to drive Herb out of government and Washington, DC entirely.
A still young and brash Herb, he was still only in his mid-30s, was summoned before the Director of Central Intelligence.
“I’ve got bad news for you Herb,” Casey said. “The entire US government thinks that you are a menace and mad. Only two people believe in you.”
Then Casey smiled.
“Fortunately, those two men are me and the President of the United States.
Years later, I asked Herb what led him to his crucial insight that the endless reams of officials, secret statistics that all Soviet hierarchies had loved to churn out since the days of Lenin and Stalin were meaningless bilge.
Herb reverted to his experience in his early career as a business writer interviewing the super-rich and successful and the blowhard fakes who talked a good business plan but bungled every one they came up with.
“When someone really is a billionaire, they live like it, Marty,” he explained. “Even if they are modest personally, they can afford and will command the best of everything. But if someone lives in an off-road hovel without running water or online electricity and claims to have conquered the problems of wireless transmitted energy, obviously you know you’re dealing with a delusional nut.”
“That was the case with the Soviet economy,” Herb said. “If they were doing as well as John Kenneth Galbraith and generations of CIS analysts claimed, why was everyone, including the so-called elite, still living in dingy squalor? It just didn’t add up.”
I was reminded of Herb’s devastatingly simple insight reading the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Gordon’s recent offhand remark in an article that US intelligence had assessed Russia had suffered 270,000 dead soldiers since the Ukraine war began.
And in August, the New York Times reported that Russia had suffered close to 300,000 casualties including 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injuries. Yet when we look at developments within Russia, we see none of the signs of such mass casualties being suffered at all.
There is certainly a war going on, scores of thousands of Russian troops have certainly died with many more injured, but the scale of casualties is clearly nowhere comparable to appalling losses inflicted on the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).
There are no reports of mass demonstrations against the war across the cities of Russia. There are no reports of despair or grief over hundreds of thousands of deaths from the war. The Russian armed forces and police are not raiding bars, restaurants or other public places across their vast country to try and scoop up tens of thousands more involuntary recruits to be forced to fight in the war, such has been happening across Ukraine.
Russian society is manifestly not collapsing as it did in 1916-17 or Austria-Hungary and then Germany did in the closing stages of that terrible, senseless conflict
Meanwhile, urged on by their US and NATO military “advisers” – in truth puppet-masters – the Armed Forces of Ukraine have doggedly pressed ahead with their ponderous, from the start bungled, obvious straightforward human wave offensives of ill-trained terrified, inexperienced young troops against lethal modern battlefield defensive lines prepared in depth.
Geoffrey Roberts, the eminent Emeritus Professor of History at University College, Cork, assesses the inevitable results. Applying Herb Meyer’s remorseless logic and common sense, he shows how it is Ukraine, not Russia that has bled to death in this terrible war.
Ukraine – last chance for a negotiated peace? – Pearls and Irritations (johnmenadue.com)
“(E)vidence from a multiplicity of sources point to a conservative estimate of 150,000-200,000 Ukrainian dead. Close observers of the war such as Scott Ritter and Colonel Douglas McGregor consider 400,000 a more realistic estimate,” Roberts writes.
“Ukraine’s cemeteries are over-flowing with war dead and the incoming body count has doubled since the counter-offensive began. ‘One in two people now know somebody who has died in the fighting,’ says Ukrainian MP, Dmytro Natalukha. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of friends I’ve lost,'”.
It is the same story as US General Andrew Jackson’s slaughter of Britain’s proud elite regular forces at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, Confederates mowing down waves of Army of the Potomac Union soldiers at Cold Harbor in Virginia in 1864, or the countless meaningless bloodbaths that stained Europe red through the mass insanity of World War I.
In fact, this obsession with throwing an entire generation of a nation’s precious youth into the killing fields of modern war never, ever went away.
Not a single one of the host of worthless, dignified pompous, empty ignoramuses who fill the think tanks and television studios of Washington as the rotting maggots they are, ever once referred to the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988.
But I was The Washington Times military analyst covering the last three years of that war and I saw what I had read about in the fading history books of my youth and never thought to see again in my own life time: The futility of Iran charging long, deep, well- prepared Iraqi defense lines head-on with hundreds of thousands of poor boys driven on by iron, unyielding, stupid, worthless merciless discipline to no other end than their own deaths.
(No one else in Washington paid any attention to the lessons of the unfolding Iran-Iraq War at all: As usual they were instead obsessed by what super-wonder diplomat Dennis Ross was NOT doing to bring eternal lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians: Still waiting on that one).
Now I – and the rest of the world – are seeing the same awful old story unwind again on the steppe-lands of Ukraine.
However, it’s all for a Good Cause: The “brilliant,” so-called “strategic” cause of bleeding Russia to death.
As our ruling elite, from National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, through the repeated confident comments of Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal and therefore “we” must keep arming Ukraine to the teeth because the Ukraine Army so heroically and brilliantly led by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is bleeding Russia to death.
By Now Jake Sullivan Expected Russia to be Destroyed – New Kontinent
And on what do they base that confident assessment? Why on the considered assessments of the mighty $100 billion-a-year-funded 17 agencies of the US intelligence community of course.
Well, to quote and paraphrase Charles Dickens – and Herbert Meyer – if the mighty $100 billion-a-year-funded 17 agencies of the US intelligence community believes that, then the mighty $100 billion-a-year-funded 17 agencies of the US intelligence community are an ass.
Exactly the same principle exists today looking at Russia, applying Herb Meyer’s simple, brilliant logic and passion for clear thinking and truth 40 years ago.
If Russia has suffered 270,000 dead and is bleeding to death, the awful consequences would be evident throughout its society, just as they were in the World War I nations in 1916-17 and in Ukraine today.
But we don’t see a collapsing society in Russia today, just as we DID see a collapsing economy in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. I know I saw it there myself.
But none of the policymaking or “thoughtful” pundit-“geniuses” of Washington even want to consider that. None of them will bother going to Russia and Ukraine to see the clear and evident realities for themselves. They haven’t got the guts to: And besides they don’t need to.
Their mighty dignified mountains of fantasy blot out any poor, contemptible, whimpering, messy inconvenient realities on the ground, The screams, whimpers and desperate prayers of the dying mean nothing to them.
And so it is written in the Book of the Damned.
