This article was originally published in Danish on January 30, 2023.
By Povl H. Riis-Knudsen
It’s been a long time since I’ve looked into Russia’s conflict with the United States. Not much has changed, of course, but perhaps it’s still worth revisiting the issue. As I see it right now, the world is hurtling full speed toward a nuclear war. The West has simply fallen in love with its own destruction.
It views the world as a video game and doesn’t seem to have grasped that this is serious. Once the nuclear bombs start falling, it will be too late.
When, in the context of some financial planning, I expressed this somewhat pessimistic view to the expert I’ve hired to help me with it, he replied: “I take a more optimistic view of that. It seems the Russians are waking up, so they’ll probably handle it themselves.” He had clearly been watching TV. Here, a big deal has been made of the fact that, naturally, there are also groups in Russia who are dissatisfied with this, that, and the other thing—in this case, with the operation in Ukraine. Russia is, after all, a democracy. In this context, people completely overlook the fact that we’re talking about marginal groups—groups without any popular support and without any power base. It would be akin to seeing Generation Identitaire in Denmark as the harbinger of an imminent overthrow of the system. That is not done—GI is silenced, just as attempts were made to silence Men in Black, even though that was a larger group. None of them are the harbingers of a revolution. Yet Russian groups, which are relatively much smaller, are highlighted as signs of a rebellion against Vladimir Putin. They are not; they are insignificant ripples on the surface, benefiting from the West’s attention—and financial support. What we are seeing is the West’s wishful thinking, an expression of the Western press’s abysmal ignorance, self-importance, and inherited hatred of Russia.
They genuinely believe that our warped ideas must be what all people strive for, and that other ways of thinking are merely expressions of tyranny and oppression—something forced upon people. That is not how it is.
For example, they mention a group of mothers of fallen soldiers who are demanding an end to the war. Whether this group exists, I naturally do not know, but it is certainly conceivable. We were told that Putin met with a hand-picked group that—of course—supported the war—or pretended to support the war. Sources for this theory were, of course, not provided. But there is actually another group of mothers of fallen soldiers: They are demanding an intensification of the war effort and total mobilization (approx. 25 million men) so that the killings can come to an end. The same sentiments are heard from strongly conservative circles and advocates of Russian ideology. The more pressure is put on the Russians, the more resistance they offer. When Biden says that we are already in World War III, and Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s unqualified, ignorant, and irresponsible foreign minister, declares that Germany is at war with Russia—well, that awakens Russian national sentiment, and it is no coincidence that Channel One here today has aired a lengthy historical review of all the West’s attempts to subjugate Russia, or that Baerbock’s declaration of war is practically on a loop on Russian television channels. The fact that Germany is acting as the leader of the pack significantly aids this national awakening. Every family has lost loved ones as a result of Germany’s latest attempt to colonize Russia, resulting in a total of 30 million deaths. To once again witness German tanks attacking Russia will further mobilize the Russian will to resist. Make no mistake: The Russian bear can be provoked for a long time, but once it attacks, it is not to be trifled with. This is an old lesson, but people today believe that world history began with their birth and that this is history’s most pivotal event. There is a far greater chance that the peoples of the West will rise up against their governments to stop the war. These groups are far larger than any Russian dissident groups, but their massive demonstrations against the war receive no further attention from the media, which is completely uniform and state-controlled, as it survives on state subsidies and VAT exemptions.
Unless even more Germans wake up soon, however, their cities will once again be reduced to smoldering ruins.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll gladly repeat it: There is only one force that could potentially topple the Russian president, and that is the military, where there are also elements that want to ramp things up. The military, however, is an organization built on discipline (a word modern people don’t know), so that won’t happen unless something truly extraordinary occurs. The West can count itself lucky that it is Putin who is at the helm. Less level-headed people would have attacked NATO long ago, as it is, after all, the de facto belligerent against Russia. Any thoughts of defeating Russia can be safely forgotten—at best, one can only provoke a nuclear war. The more weapons sent to Ukraine, the more Ukrainians (and Russians) will die, and it won’t be long before the Russians have had enough. When Bild proclaims that tanks save lives, it is downright perverse. The German tanks now being delivered to Ukraine will cost tens of thousands of lives—to no one’s benefit. What has become of the peace movements and the entire ideology of peace? Or is that, in reality, what it’s all about: killing as many white people as possible so there’s room for Africa’s population surplus. Jews like Zelensky, Blinken, Soros, Michel, etc., also strike me, in other contexts, as a historically familiar constellation dedicated to combating the survival of the white man.
Western propaganda is not merely deceitful. It is dangerous because it misleads the West’s ignorant and mentally deficient politicians into believing that “winning” this war will be an easy matter. It will not be. It will transform Europe and the U.S. into a smoking, radioactive wasteland for the next several hundred years. We can probably do without the U.S., but it would be a shame for European culture—and that, of course, includes Russia as well.
One should be able to expect a critical stance from the press, and that much-vaunted democracy should, after all, ensure a diverse press. We hear that democracy cannot exist without it. However, we do not have such a press—but then again, we do not have any democracy either. As a step toward tyranny and dictatorship, people have been barred from viewing and reading Russian media. They have been shut down in the West. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Even at the height of the Cold War, one could freely buy Russian newspapers everywhere in the West. However, they have gone even further. They are blocking any discussion on this topic, and people who express views in support of Russia lose their jobs and are barred from speaking out. That is how far “democratic freedom of speech and information” has come. Not surprisingly, the German dictatorship is leading the way. I am not saying that the Russian press always reports the gospel truth, but neither does the Ukrainian press. It is normal in a war to treat the truth more loosely than in everyday life. Now I regularly read Russian news coverage—and, incidentally, you can do so in a wide range of languages other than Russian. The German edition of RT is formidably good, as it also covers Germany, and I must simply say that the analyses and perspectives presented in, for example, Russia Today, are far more in-depth than anything we’re presented with in the Danish press, and the international experts who speak there have far greater knowledge and insight than the ignorant idiots the Danish Broadcasting Corporation presents as experts from the Defense Academy or elsewhere in the state system—or from the British intelligence service.
People in government positions are appointed for political reasons—quite simply. It is not their knowledge and expertise that matter, but their party affiliation. There’s a lot of cleaning up to do there!
The examples are many, but let’s take the most recent one. A Russian missile strikes a residential building in Dnipropetrovsk. The entire press and all politicians are screaming about war crimes and inhumanity, etc. And of course, the actor Zelenskyy is rolling out in full, shrill force. Nowhere in the Western press is it revealed that Zelensky’s own office has admitted that it was the Ukrainian air defense that shot down the missile in question as it flew over the city. When it unfortunately struck the apartment building, it exploded. That is, of course, another story, but still the intellectual pretenders at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation are spouting theories that the Russians are running out of modern missiles, so they are now using old and inaccurate weapons. Pure fantasy with no basis in reality and nothing else. These so-called “experts” simply have no idea what they are talking about.
The poor man who revealed this was forced to resign—not because he had said anything wrong, but because the truth didn’t fit the narrative of the liar Zelensky. He responded by saying that it is conceivable that Ukraine will lose the war—despite all the West’s weapons. Oh well.
It is, of course, amusing that the outrage comes from the nations that, during World War II, deliberately bombed civilian targets and reduced entire cities to ashes, resulting in the loss of around one million lives in Germany alone (Churchill called it “moral bombing,” foreshadowing Orwellian Newspeak!).
We don’t even mention the bombing of Tokyo or the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in this context. But that’s not all: Over the past 8 years, Ukraine has murdered 14,000 civilians in the Donbas through bombings aimed exclusively at targets such as schools, kindergartens, hospitals, theaters—and homes. This is never mentioned in the Western press. And here we are even talking about Ukrainian citizens being murdered by their own government because they are Russian and want the right to be Russian. And Zelenskyy is still doing this. Every day, civilians are often killed in Donetsk—this is never mentioned in the Western propaganda media. When something like this happens in Burma, there is no end to the outcry.
When the Russians redeploy their troops to spare soldiers who can be used more effectively and with fewer casualties elsewhere, as happened, for example, in Krasnyi Liman, it is a sign that Russia has run out of steam and that Ukraine is winning. Experts should know better.
When Hitler lost a million men at Stalingrad and thereby lost the war, it was precisely because he refused to withdraw those troops in time. It was a tactical blunder of the highest order, a sort of repetition of the folly of World War I, which Hitler was otherwise very conscious of avoiding. A modern war requires shifting fronts. The Ukrainians haven’t grasped that either. They are now being surrounded in Artemovsk. They have dug themselves into massive fortifications. When they fall, they’ll be out in the open, if anyone survives.
When Putin shuffles around command posts in the military, it’s because he’s “under pressure.” It could also be because he is smart and puts the people in who are best suited to the given situation. And so on. All the while, an attempt to convince the home front that Russia is about to surrender, so they just need to send even more weapons. It is a very dangerous tactic!
When the Russians evacuate people from Kherson because fighting is expected there, they are “deporting” or “forcibly relocating” them, and when, for the same reason, they secure works of art and the like by moving them out of the combat zone, they are “plundering Ukraine of its cultural treasures.” This borders on the ridiculous. According to various conventions, belligerent parties are obligated to safeguard cultural assets. Russia can only do this by moving them to Russia. But what cultural assets does Ukraine have there? One could be cynical and ask what cultural assets Ukraine actually possesses that are not also Russian cultural assets. They share a history spanning over 1,000 years. Surely not Potemkin’s sarcophagus? At the same time, Ukraine is in the midst of destroying its own culture and history by purging everything Russian, including the statue of Potemkin’s mistress, Catherine the Great, who founded Odessa. Perhaps the city should be demolished as well? Or the statues of notable poets. After all, Ukrainian cultural life took place in Russian for centuries. This is somewhat akin to us having to remove Holberg—not just his statue, but also his works—because Holberg was, strictly speaking, Norwegian, or to Norway having to remove H.C. Andersen’s works because Andersen was Danish, and the Danes were, as is well known from the Norwegian perspective, responsible for centuries of darkness in Norway. Banning the reading of Russian works is not merely ridiculous. It is downright criminal. For example, the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy belong to all of humanity, and they have been read in schools by all Ukrainians. I refer to my book “My Russian Life,”1 which deals precisely with this. If Ukraine is to remove everything Russian, it will also become, culturally speaking, a very, very impoverished country with no historical roots to speak of.
It is also amusing that Western politicians want to set up a tribunal to try Russian leaders for “war crimes.” I fully support a tribunal to investigate what actually happened and why. That would be useful. But the tribunal they’re raving about is, of course, a tribunal whose outcome is predetermined, and it presupposes an unconditional surrender on the Russian side. In other words, a situation like after World War II, where the victors could unilaterally judge the vanquished, who could do nothing to oppose it. As mentioned, such a situation will under no circumstances arise in this war, which Biden—perhaps as a result of his advanced dementia—has already dubbed WWIII.
The list is very long, because the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s “journalists” in particular have a very hard time navigating the geography. They have thus accused the Russians of bombing Donetsk—which is Russian. The Russians have neither bombed Donetsk, blown up Nord Stream or the Crimean Bridge, nor shelled the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, which is under Russian control. No.
Russia is not running out of ammunition. Every month, they produce far more than the Ukrainians are firing—and the Ukrainians are firing a great deal. The Ukrainians will not run out of weapons as long as other countries can still supply them. But that, too, will eventually come to an end. The Ukrainians, however, will soon run out of soldiers. The latest estimates of casualties are 150,000 Ukrainians and between 15,000 and 25,000 Russians. That is why they are sending more and more foreign troops to the country under the guise that they are “volunteers.” There is probably a limit to how long the Russians will put up with this. And we must not forget that Russia possesses the most modern nuclear weapons and, not least, the most advanced delivery systems for nuclear weapons available. Therefore—and due to Russia’s size—experts estimate that in a nuclear war, Russia would lose “only” 10–20% of its population, while the West would lose around 80%. Now, everyone should consider whether Ukraine is worth it? The moral crusaders of the dismal sort will claim that it is the morally right thing to do. The many hundreds of millions killed will not agree with them! Ukraine will, furthermore, be the first country to be totally wiped out.
Ukraine could have been living in peace today if the “rule-based” approach the Americans applied to Serbia regarding Kosovo’s secession had been used. Over 150,000 young men, who are dead today, would have survived. The rules for Russia are apparently different from the rules for the U.S.
The result may very well be that Ukraine disappears from the map. In any case, it is very difficult for me to see any other outcome to the conflict—regardless of whether it ends in a nuclear war or not.
It is dangerous to pursue “values-based” politics. Foreign policy, in particular, must necessarily be interest-based and grounded in reality. What interest do we have in Ukraine? None whatsoever. Russia is not about to attack Denmark—or Germany, for that matter. Russia has no interests here.
In Russia, they watch with barely concealed wonder—and today perhaps with a certain degree of amusement—as we proceed to destroy ourselves through immigration, climate hysteria, military buildup, and so on. The West poses no threat to Russia—but is a laughingstock. Russia therefore has no interest in attacking the West. In the Baltic states, the situation is different because they have a very large Russian population. Here, Russia has interests because Russia represents all Russians, no matter where they live—just as Denmark represents all Danes regardless of residence. When, especially in Estonia and Latvia, people do everything they can to make life difficult for local Russians, they are asking for annihilation. These states can only survive if they go along with the Russians. These are the realities. Politics is also a matter of power dynamics, and one must accept that. Independent states cannot act as they please—just as neighbors cannot act as they please. Since there are no universal values, values are not suitable as a basis for world politics. Value-based foreign policy is, plain and simple, an expression of imperialism. We, on the other hand, have a very strong interest in maintaining good relations with Russia. There are crucial economic benefits for us in doing so—and the fact that Denmark is currently facing major economic problems, which are hitting the population with full force, is due entirely to our misguided foreign policy and the politicians’ belligerence and sheer stupidity.
Ukraine is portrayed as a model democratic state based on “European values.” Let’s take a moment to reiterate some facts:
- Ukraine is de facto a dictatorship with only one permitted party. All genuine opposition parties are banned.
- Ukraine has a 100% state-controlled press.
Opposition media are banned.
- Ukraine has never before been an independent state.
- Ukraine has no natural or historical borders.
- Ukraine was merely an administrative unit within the Soviet Union that did not take national affiliations into account.
- Ukraine seceded from the Soviet Union/Russia to form its own nation-state. Why do the populations of Crimea, the Donbas, and all of Southern Russia not have the same right to secede from Ukraine in the same way that Kosovo seceded from Serbia?
- Ukraine has declared its intention to carry out an ethnic cleansing of the Russian population (35%).
- Ukraine also oppresses other national minorities, primarily the Hungarians and Ruthenians.
- Ukraine violates religious freedom and bans the Russian Orthodox Church, imprisons its priests, and seizes the church’s property. This amounts to a full-scale assault on Christianity.
- Ukraine is Europe’s most corrupt country. Weapons from the West are openly sold on the black market to terrorists around the world, and the abundant funds Ukraine receives from Denmark and others disappear without a trace, as there are no financial accounts for them. Following the latest scandals, Zelenskyy promises “to do something about it.” However, he himself has yet to account for his quite substantial personal fortune, which cannot possibly come from his work as an actor. See “The Panama Papers.” All of his ministers appear to have personally enriched themselves through the war. Why not send the whole lot to the front, for that matter? They are all of military age, after all. Instead, younger men are abducted from the streets—especially if they belong to minorities such as Russians or Hungarians. They are sent directly to the front to certain death. This is called ethnic cleansing.
- Ukraine does not respect private property rights.
- Ukraine prohibits national minorities from using their own native languages.
- Ukraine bans Russian literature.
- The minimum wage in Ukraine is 1.75 euros.
- Ukraine has lost 50% of its population since 1991.
- Ukraine has allowed the Americans to experiment with chemical warfare agents and other prohibited weapons.
- Since 2014, Ukraine has killed 14,000 of its own civilians in Donbas.
If this is an expression of “European values,” then these must have undergone significant changes recently. The question is whether this state is truly worth defending at the expense of our own economy, our own welfare, and our own existence. But the central question is: how much are you willing to sacrifice for Ukraine? Are you willing to be incinerated in a nuclear war for Ukraine’s sake? That is the question you must answer before expressing your infallible opinions on this conflict. A writer on Facebook expressed the view that it couldn’t be “right” to simply “tyrannize” one’s neighbors “just” because you have nuclear weapons. I must take this as an indication that the person in question would gladly be vaporized in the first attack—along with their children and grandchildren. For this is not a theoretical question. It is a very concrete question. If you’re on the S-train and a man suddenly pulls out a sword and starts hacking everyone down, you’d naturally go over and try to disarm him with your bare hands, wouldn’t you? The reality is that Danes just look the other way when women are raped and children beaten down right next to them. That is the harsh reality, and the Danes want nothing to do with it. Ukraine is something else for the Danes—it’s purely theoretical, because it’s, after all, “the others” who are dying. But that won’t be the case anymore the day the war really breaks out. Then it’s you and your children who will die! Once nuclear war rages, there’s no going back to Danish coziness. And I deliberately say “when” and not “if.” This is the West’s war against Russia, but quite apart from the facts of the matter, one must take a realistic view of the consequences of Western intervention. If Russia is backed into a corner, Russia has no choice. It will be forced to launch a nuclear attack, and as mentioned, Russian nuclear weapons are far superior to those of the West. Regardless of right or wrong, this will lay the entire civilized world in ruins and render our part of the globe virtually uninhabitable for the next several hundred years.
We’re not talking here about small bombs like the ones the Americans dropped on Japan in 1945. Ukraine’s independence will be a purely academic question. The country will no longer exist. Is it really worth it??
It’s as if our politicians have lost all sense of reality. In my youth, people were afraid of a nuclear war. Everyone agreed that such a war must not take place. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, both the Soviet Union and the United States worked tirelessly to find a way out of the crisis so that nuclear war could be avoided without either side losing face. Today’s politicians calculate with nuclear war without a shred of shame. It will come as a shock to them when they discover the reality of war—yes, even the realities of a conventional war. In West Berlin, there is an old bunker from the Cold War era. It has been opened as a sort of museum. The purpose of this and other bunkers was to keep a few thousand people alive until the worst of the radiation had subsided. A rather naive notion. All Western politicians should be forcibly confined to test this bunker during a simulated attack! It has little in common with Regan West and other bunkers for “the important people.”
It is a bunker for the rest of us.
The politicians’ and others’ foolish and, frankly, criminal behavior in this matter is naturally linked to the pampering the younger generation has been subjected to—combined with the catastrophic decline in educational standards that has occurred over the past 50 years.
Young people can see no connections, for they are completely ignorant of the historical conditions that underpin their own existence. And above all, they do not believe that anything truly bad can happen to them. After all, in their own imagination, they are the center of the world. No matter what happens, they will become much wiser.
Dear fellow Danish citizens. Your politicians are playing with your lives. Unless you rise up strongly against them now, you are the generation that will be allowed to experience Armageddon—though probably without the resurrection and the afterlife on the green meadow. When politicians say that Russia “must not” win this war, it is above all because they know they will be held accountable by their populations.
The streets will run red with their blood the day people realize how this war is connected to it all. Unless, of course, nuclear war comes first. Then we will all turn to dust…
Note
- The book has only been published in a Danish-language version. ↩︎
Danmarks Frihedsraad 