Death by International Republicanism
Ukraine, like South Vietnam, embraces revolutionary defeat.
“Every successful revolution against fascist forces in recent history succeeded because they didn’t listen to republicans who hate them and want them to get massacred” - @KenBlackstone23
For two years, Ukrainians and their PiS-Brexiteer think-tanker/rebranded German Covid lockdown personality allies spun a nightmare tale of Sleepy Joe Biden smothering Slava Ukrainians with a sinister sundowning embrace, muttering through his rictus “as long as it takes,” to the patter of Jake Sullivan scatting in legalese as the lights slowly fade.
Now, with ammunition running low and little hope of Congress sending more, Ukrainians finally have what they always wanted: Republican leadership to bury them.
It is a pattern we see across time: whenever a struggle against Reaction erupts, Democrats move to support it, however haltingly, while Republicans sabotage it, shifting all blame to Democrats. The survivors then become a reliable bloc of Republican voters, carrying with them the warped Republican alternate history of events they lived through, forever blaming spineless Demonrats for their defeat.
A single ethos guides all populations under Axis assault: “Republicans aren’t responsible for anything!” Republicans can always count on their aid for revolutionary defeats as they shift the frame of discussion from ongoing Republican sabotage to arbitrarily defined Democratic failures, robbing Democrats of a vast slate of victories and replacing them with talking points of how Democrats “have no strategy.”
This dynamic gives Republicans a strategic depth they lack on the continent sufficient to deliver them victory where they may have faced defeat. This was the case with Reagan’s 1980 victory against the heroic Jimmy Carter, who never stopped fighting Iran, or the 2014 midterms, which Republicans carried after keeping Assad in power the year before and giving ISIS room to thrive, or with their 2016 election of Donald Trump, which also resulted from the successful Republican defense of Assad.
Ukrainians sealed their fate with the 2022 midterms with the victory of their Real Reagan Republicans, who committed to cutting off Ukraine from all aid. Had Ukrainians spent the last two years objectively reporting on the state of and shortcomings in U.S. aid, Republicans never would have had room to maneuver against them. Instead, Ukrainians shifted from one Republican disinfo op to another (perhaps most notably the ATACMS grandstanding by High Assadists Jim Risch and Michael McCaul, who now spend their days yelling about Assad on X-Twitter).
The reason for this is simple. All Ukrainians are eager to topple Sleepy Joe Brandon, the sole reason for Ukraine’s continued existence, so they can fold back into the russian empire like always while saving face and for a lucky 10% to make it to Ukrainian Heaven as refugees and live out the rest of their lives as straight Republican voters in a red state, forever blaming Sleepy Joe Brandon for their defeat.
Ukrainians are always eager to name and shame Democrats and specific politicians, especially Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, and Antony Blinken, whenever possible. However, under no circumstances do Ukrainians name Republicans as the source of their ills. At most, they identify “MAGA Republicans” or usually just a single Republican. Whenever the discussion turns toward Republican malfeasance, Ukrainians shift their language to blaming “Congress,” “Americans,” or “the American people.”
When Sleepy Joe Biden announces an aid package, Ukrainians downplay it and say the package “isn’t enough,” “we need more,” “The White House doesn’t want Ukraine to win,” and “Jake Sullivan” is holding back the good stuff. They ignore the content and say, “It isn’t [insert wonder weapon]” or “Send [insert wonder weapon] now!”
However, when any other country besides the U.S. (or Germany) sends an aid package, no matter how small, Ukrainians deliriously celebrate how it will be useful and why Ukraine needs such “boring” equipment. Ukraine’s wunderwaffenfieber curiously subsides whenever Sleepy Joe and the Scholzing SPD aren’t in the picture.
Of course, as we predicted, the wonder weapons are never celebrated, only maligned even when delivered. Once Ukrainians received ATACMS, they shifted the discussion to how Stalemate Sullivan sent them too late, didn’t send them in sufficient numbers to make a difference, and how Ukraine actually needs Tomahawks, which Sleepy Joe and Stalemate Sullivan gleefully deprived heroic Slava Ukrainians.
Ukrainians never cycle through other potential explanations for the wunderwaffenverzögerung, such as the dangers of experienced HIMARS crews firing cracked ATACMS that blow up on the ground, the prospect of pro-russian Army planners or simple misers hoarding ATACMS, the need to use ATACMS against China and North Korea, or the simple lack of an ATACMS replacement until PrSM came online, which it did just before Biden sent first batch of ATACMS to Ukraine.
The likelihood that Biden expedited ATACMS delivery under these conditions never arises among propaganda by Ukrainian partisans. Instead, Ukrainians strain to reach for the most conspiratorial explanation for Team Biden’s actions, consistently and without fail, like every other population under Axis assault.
No Ukrainian partisan demands the wonder weapons in the spirit of actual escalation against russia. They merely invoke them to neg Sleepy Joe Brandon into an early retirement. They aren’t simply setting unrealistic expectations. Ukrainians arbitrarily elevate the wonder weapons as the sole measure of success, an impossible bar Sleepy Demented Joe can never clear by design, which flattens differences between him and the Real Reagan Republicans Ukrainians count on for salvation.
The only reason Republicans have been able to mount successful attacks on Ukraine aid they have long planned is because Ukrainians foster a climate that allows these conspiracies that undergird such attacks to run rampant. Sleepy Joe’s calculated stalemate, the unwinnable slugfest he stumbled into, are the twin incompatible conspiracies Ukrainians promote that underwrite efforts by Republicans and “independents” who want to abandon Ukraine “because the war can’t be won.”
All Ukrainians needed to do to deprive Republicans of this cover was to report what was needed accurately and the nature of U.S. aid. Instead, at every point where multiple possible reasons for actions by Team Biden are possible, such as logistics, bureaucratic wrangling, russia sympathizers within the U.S. government, or even the U.S.’s own laws, Ukrainians choose “Sleepy Joe is strangling us!”
This ploy becomes obvious when we see Ukrainians treat Republican hawkfacers as a ray of Azovstal light breaking through the clouds of Biden’s brain fog. Ukrainians sit around campfires, regaling themselves with tales of Lindsey Graham putting putin “on notice.” The fact that Graham is actively sabotaging Ukraine by demanding elections and the blackmail border deal is of no concern to them.
It is logical to conclude that these populations are quasi-Axis, psychologically torn between urges that draw them to and repel them from the Axis.
Globohomo, therefore, isn’t all that is under siege globally; the Democratic Party, too, faces only enemies outside the United States. Yet the core constituencies of the Democratic Party cannot abandon these international “allies,” as the Axis ultimately seeks their subjugation. Democrats then are caught in the terrible position of having to give full support to actors who work against them at every turn.
Democrats must push these unruly rivers up hills to keep themselves from drowning.
And when Republicans succeed in breaking this dam, they carve out a new history. It was Republicans trying to convince spineless Democrats to commit to victory fully - “If only they had the courage to win, not to play politics with national security!”
This swamp left over is the malaise required for conservatism. Republicans can conjure sprites on its waters that move at their will. This is how Republicans, after waging a Fabian campaign against toppling Assad, walked away with “Obama’s red line!” as their main line of attack against Democrats, which Ukrainians then eagerly took up as their own.
For Republicans, this is all they could have wished for and more. In the aftermath of the Second World War, in order to dispense with their reputation as the party of isolationists, Republicans needed to frame Democrats as such. By slowly sabotaging another war and pinning defeat on Democrats, they could create an atmosphere of paranoia and confusion conducive to their gaslighting.
Republicans tested this new strategy in the Korean War, but it was Vietnam where they achieved true success.
With the Vietnam War, Republicans successfully retconned Democrats as the party responsible for the fall of South Vietnam. Yet it was Eisenhower who declared no USian troops send troops to South Vietnam, setting the limits for future action. It was Republicans who restricted U.S. action beyond airstrikes to the borders of South Vietnam, dooming South Vietnam to defeat. It was Republicans under Nixon who brokered a secret deal with North Vietnam to ensure their victory, in the same way as Republicans did with the Taliban in Afghanistan under Trump. And it was Nixon who engineered Vietnamization, a blatantly doomed-to-fail non-strategy in place of a real one, created to provide an excuse for the withdrawal–something Ronald Reagan made a point of celebrating when he rang in the 1972 Republican National Convention.
And even with the “anti-war" movement,” which legacy media presented as a left-driven Democratic affair, it was upper-class white and rural Republican-stock Fortunate Sons tuning out and off from the war that formed its line forces.
The Republican strategy proved successful. Vietnamese as a bloc remained staunch Republican voters until 2020. The most iconic symbol of International Republicanism’s magic must be the South Vietnam flag flown on January 6, where Republican necromancers raised the flag of a sacrificed republic to bury their own.
As expected, Ukrainian-Americans, too, long Republicans, worked tirelessly to their own destruction, promoting Republicans even after they lent russia critical aid in its annexation of Crimea by delaying Congressional action for several weeks. This was time enough for putin to take much of the peninsula and establish a fait accompli on the world stage. Harry Reid may have died, but we remember this sequence of events that Republicans sought to erase from the historical record by pinning russia’s occupation on Obama’s “inaction” rather than their sabotage.
And, of course, the greatest irony of Ukrainian and Eastern European International Republicanism is that it is, as always, the result of gaslighting and historical revisionism. Pick any International Republican from these areas, and beyond Reagan Worship, they will cite Roosevelt as the reason for their Republicanism. They will say it was FDR who armed the Soviets in the Second World War, ultimately empowering the USSR to subjugate their own countries.
Yet it was under the Republican administration of Silent Cal that the Soviet Union became a power that could not be ignored. For Coolidge, the business of America was business, which also meant allowing the sale of as much advanced industrial machinery to the nascent Soviet Union as they desired. It was the actions of Republicans in the 1920s that made Roosevelt’s decisions in the 1940s inevitable.
Of course, this is no surprise to anyone who understands the true disposition of world revolutionary movements. Soviets saw liberal and social democratic movements as their true enemies and challengers to the leadership of the world revolution. Conservatives proved a natural ally to the Leninists and openly carried on their legacy against The Libs.
We are truly only scratching the surface of the phenomenon of International Republicanism. We can spend the rest of our lives outlining key incidents and the damage it has done and continue to do to the antifascist movement.
What is important to understand is our “allies” will ensure that whatever can go wrong in the fight against the Axis will. To cite Ukraine again, Ukrainian High Command, which is staffed almost entirely by DeSantis supporters, is so negatively polarized against Democrats that they threw the summer offensive. Rather than follow the Gay Democrat DoD’s advice to concentrate their forces on a single axis, they split them up onto multiple fronts, blowing their one shot to cripple russia.
And, of course, Ukrainians blame Sleepy Joe for not giving them the weapons to win.
But had they followed '“Democrat advice,” Republicans would not have been able to sabotage aid consequentially. Ukrainians, like all populations under Axis assault, have their priorities, which are diametrically opposed to those of Democrats.
We can imagine South Vietnamese military leadership engaging in the same dynamics, making decisions based on their negative polarization against Democrats, on the advice of Republicans, that hastened their own defeat and future as reliable Republican voters.
Republicans may enable a russian breakthrough in Ukraine by stalling aid or withholding it entirely. But by knowing the nature of International Republicanism, we can prevent a Ukrainian breakthrough against the antifascist movement and a victory for Trad World Order when they, and any other population facing an Axis assault, blame us for their defeat.
2-1-2024 Note: I have discovered the smoking gun. As predicted, Republicans provided bad advice to South Vietnam’s leadership, which they readily accepted and acted on as International Republicans, to their own destruction. Kissinger told South Vietnam’s President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu not to worry about the Soviet Union or China arming North Vietnam after a U.S. withdrawal. Thiệu seems to have believed these assurances and asserted South Vietnam did not need American help to continue to exist. Within two years, South Vietnam would fall to a North Vietnamese invasion, with the support of the Soviet Union and China, as was predictable to anyone unaffected by International Republicanism.
Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, Venezuela, Free Syria, and all countries under Axis assault are now following the same path.
2-4-2024 Note: And, of course, Mike Pompeo touches down in Kyiv to “reassure” (read: silence) the Desantisimps of Team Zelenskyy of “bipartisan support” for Ukraine as Tucker Carlson tours Moscow to interview Putin. And yes, this is the same Mike Pompeo who reportedly asked, “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?” The only rational explanation is Ukrainians are afraid of victory and want to lose to russia, but need to save face so they can reintegrate into russia’s empire like they always do, but on their own terms, the pride of the Cossacks fully intact.