American G.I. Lt. Dick Winters hurled himself into world history in 1944 on D-Day, taking the war to Hitler on Hitler’s home turf. But while Winters was away killing America’s enemies, , Winters was betrayed at home. There were forces at work killing American manhood. By the time Winters returned home, America was a different place. It was less civil. It was less mature because American males were surrendering maturity and responsibility. Grown American businessmen were like children compared to those mature boys who fought with Winters to save civilization. The materialistic fellows on Main Street were sinking into a spineless self-centeredness as though someone was whispering to them that they were completely excused from manly responsibility.
Less than a decade after Winters trained his men to fight Nazis, Major Winters was ordered by the US Army to train other young American officers to fight Communists in Korea. He tried. Then, in frustration, he resigned from the military because the young officer candidates would not be men. They were frivolous and undisciplined. They were not serious about the meaning of conflict or manhood. They were not willing to think like men. And they were not willing to grow up.
“Every few hundred years,” wrote Winters contemporary Peter Drucker, “in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself -- it's worldview; its basic values: its social and political structures; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived.... We are currently living through just such a transformation.”
Winters saw this transformation first-hand. It was more than a shift in fads or cultural preferences. The post-WWII transformation destroyed American manhood in the same way Winters destroyed Nazi gun emplacements. This happened because parents ceased to raise boys into the maturity of real life, and the maturity necessary for manhood. America without manhood can no longer be America. It can only exist as a new-world playground for spoiled, infantile males -- and for the social planners who function as their babysitters.
-- Geoffrey Botkin
Winters was portrayed by Damien Lewis in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers
Putin has been consistent from the before the Military Operation that he simply wants to be left alone by NATO, the EU and the US. His terms for peace have been reasonable and have not changed.
Alastair Crooke:
"There are reports that Macron and Starmer agreed in a conversation that Zelensky must conduct some provocative operation [this week]
"--a false flag operation or a provocative attack into Russia, into the depth of Russia or something else--sufficient to create an absolute pressure on Putin to respond, and thus to destroy the meeting altogether, to stop the meeting taking place.
"The Europeans are terrified of the [Alaska] meeting taking place [on Friday] and they want to stop it. I believe the Russians have probably picked up on it, suggesting that there is going to be an attempt to create some incident, some security catastrophe, that creates the impossibility of following up on this meeting. And the Euros are trying to insert Zelensky into Alaska, whether invited or ...
"For four hundred years, Americans lived in a world wherein your brother, your neighbor, your town and region were your responsibility. And where you yourself, could do anything under the commodious carapace of the King of Kings.
"More than anything, the CIA wanted Christianity destroyed; it bred self-determination and strength. Under MKUltra, and mostly at Stanford’s Research Center, using the flower children and rock scene of L.A. and San Francisco, they figured out how to ruin human potential.
"In fact, they called it the human potential movement, in a typical inversion of reality. What it did was celebrate and encourage your worst impulses, praise your degradation, tell you that weakness is your strength, supplant your heritage with the heritage of foreign faiths and experimental practices."
Elizabeth Nickson
"Donald Trump doesn’t understand what (Russian Defense Official) Medvedev tweeted. Medvedev was telling Trump to knock it off with the dangerous threats, saying that if you do this, America can end up looking like the walking dead because of the Dead Hand.
"The Dead Hand is a reference to the perimeter system, which is a defensive system put in place by the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. So that if they are ever struck preemptively by the United States—a first strike, by the way, the tactic to be used in a first strike is to bring the Ohio-class submarines close to Russia’s shores, fire off their Trident missiles on a flattened trajectory to avoid detection so you can strike the targets quicker, which is what Trump just actually appeared to order the U.S. Navy to do. So, the Dead Hand now becomes a factor, because if Trump is dumb enough to launch an attack against Russia, the Dead Hand (the defensive perimeter system) will ensure that all of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces ...