Whatever Happened to Gonzalo Lira?
Letter to Baron Bethell #21
Letters from Vienna #198
Letter to Baron Bethell #21
Whatever happened to Gonzalo Lira?
Dear James,
the next time you run into Rishi Sunak or Rashid Sanook as Joe Bidonopolis (aka the most corrupt politician on the planet) refers to him (if he happens to recognise him or remember who he is that is!), please tell him that you’ve had complaints about the cutting up of children for their organs, the torture and slaying of Russian POWs and the disappearance of Gonzalo Lira in the Ukraine. It just doesn’t look good, especially if it’s UK sponsored Uko-Nazis who are committing these appalling crimes against humanity.
If the Opposition raises these issues in the upcoming election it will be extremely difficult to deny British involvement (and the Americans won’t be too pleased if you blame them either!). After all: it’s the West which is financing Zelensky and determining everything on the ground (the Ukraine can’t even appoint its own judges!). It’s even the West which is running the disastrous “counter offensive” that is so eerily reminiscent of Kursk in 1943. Where exactly are either Zaluzhnyi or Budanov? It certainly doesn’t look good if the Russians got them. And it certainly doesn’t look good if it’s British or American generals who are bungling the business so badly. Why exactly were the Russians told (six months in advance) where exactly the Ukrainians would attack and why are Ukrainians being sent into mine-fields without demining equipment or even a shred of either air-cover or artillery support? Why, in short, are Ukrainians being massacred merely that the military industrial complex can increase its profits?
This war, as all wars invariably are, is a sick joke, and must be stopped as soon as humanly possible; the corruption stinks to high heaven!
In April Seymour Hersh reported: “The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia. It is unknown how much the Zelensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.”
“What also is unknown is that Zelensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.””
““Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions on it.””[1]
This reminds one of how the American sold oil to the Germans, built tanks and fighter planes for them while feeding them information about where their own merchant marine were to be found during the war! I sometimes think Catch-22 the best book of all time! It is so true.
Of course, many in the UK will take a perverse pleasure in the fact that Britain is once more “pulling the strings” (just as it did when it financed the Nazis and helped Hitler escape to Argentina) and is once more a “world power”. And they’ll also be pleased about being able to spend recklessly, bankrupt the country and run up vast debts! The money they’ll be able to “skim-off” will be enormous! Fortunes are being made right as we speak!
To be honest: only diabolical, bored and malignant civil servants could have come up with schemes on how to put Hitler into power and get away with the Holocaust without anyone suspecting British involvement or the whole Covid/jab/5G/chemtrail assault on humanity for that matter. Who knows that this has all been done with money from the drug’s trade? “Why, it’s genius” as Sir Humphrey would say, “You’ll get the Germans blaming “the Jews” and “the Jews” blaming the Germans and none will be the wiser!” And let’s be honest: without the Holocaust how could it have been possible to create a “Jewish Ulster” to protect the strategically vital Mosul-Haifa pipeline? It would have been quite impossible.
I’d recommend you read one article in particular so that you get a feel for what’s actually happening on the ground in the Ukraine:
“Syava’s battalion, which numbered about six hundred men, was posted on the edge of a village south of Bakhmut. The village was controlled by the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organization notorious for committing atrocities in Africa and the Middle East. For the war in Ukraine, Wagner recruited thousands of inmates from Russian prisons by offering them pardons in exchange for combat tours. The onslaught of expendable convicts proved too much for the Ukrainians, who were still reeling from Kherson and had not yet replenished their ranks and matériel. The commander of the battalion, a thirty-nine-year-old lieutenant colonel named Pavlo, said of the Wagner fighters, “They were like zombies. They used the prisoners like a wall of meat. It didn’t matter how many we killed—they kept coming.””
“Within weeks, the battalion faced annihilation: entire platoons had been wiped out in close-contact firefights, and some seventy men had been encircled and massacred. The dwindling survivors, one officer told me, “became useless because they were so tired.” In January, what was left of the battalion retreated from the village and established defensive positions in the tree lines and open farmland a mile to the west. “Wagner kicked our asses,” the officer said.”
“The Russian mercenaries subsequently left for Bakhmut, to shore up other forces there, and the conventional troops who replaced them were far less numerous and suicidal. By the time I joined the battalion, about two months had passed since it had lost the battle for the village, and during the interim neither side had attempted a major operation against the other. It was all the Ukrainians could do to maintain the stalemate. Pavlo estimated that, owing to the casualties his unit had sustained, eighty per cent of his men were new draftees. “They’re civilians with no experience,” he said. “If they give me ten, I’m lucky when three of them can fight.””
“Just two of the soldiers who were rebuilding the machine-gun nest had been with the battalion since Kherson. One of them, a twenty-nine-year-old construction worker called Bison—because he was built like one—had been hospitalized three times: after being shot in the shoulder, after being wounded by shrapnel in the ankle and knee, and after being wounded by shrapnel in the back and arm. The other veteran, code-named Odesa, had enlisted in the Army in 2015, after dropping out of college. Short and stocky, he had the same serene deportment as Bison. The uncanny extent to which both men had adapted to their lethal environment underscored the agitation of the recent arrivals, who flinched whenever something whistled overhead or crashed nearby.”
“I only trust Bison,” Odesa said. “If the new recruits run away, it will mean immediate death for us.” He’d lost nearly all his closest friends in Kherson. Taking out his phone, he swiped through a series of photographs: “Killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . wounded. . . . Now I have to get used to different people. It’s like starting over.”
“Because the high attrition rate had disproportionately affected the bravest and most aggressive soldiers—a phenomenon that one officer called “reverse natural selection”—seasoned infantrymen like Odesa and Bison were extremely valuable and extremely fatigued. After Kherson, Odesa had gone awol. “I was in a bad place psychologically,” he said. “I needed a break.” After two months of resting and recuperating at home, he came back. His return was prompted not by a fear of being punished—what were they going to do, put him in the trenches?—but by a sense of loyalty to his dead friends. “I felt guilty,” he said. “I realized that my place was here.”[2]
But the weather has turned warm and I wish to get out!
Best,
Michael
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/29/two-weeks-at-the-front-in-ukraine
I agree with you about Heller’s brilliant Catch22, which I read at age 16 to present to my high school history class (that is a clear indication of how stupid our teachers were). This whole dog & pony show makes me think of that war and your letters, of Major Major Major Major. A little recap for your friend Baron Bethell if he is reading your letters, which I hope he is. Wiki is good for some things, so I’ll quote:
“Relating Catch-22 characters to William J. Goode's sociological definition of ineptitude, Jerry M. Lewis and Stanford W. Gregory describe Major Major Major Major as the ‘clearest portrayal of an inept role’ in the novel. They give three reasons for this: Maj. Major ‘always followed the rules, yet no-one liked him or trusted him’; his swift promotion to the rank of Major where he then remains is "a clear foreshadowing of the Peter Principle"; and the anathema to Maj. Major of being identified with Fonda, a symbol of competence, causes Maj. Major to retreat from everyone around him, making efforts to hide and to become, in the novel's words, a recluse in "the midst of a few foreign acres teeming with more than two hundred people". Lewis and Gregory state that Catch-22 supports a thesis that goes beyond Goode's, namely that the inept can identify their own ineptitude, and become active participants in its own institutionalization; whereas Goode asserts that the inept only ever have a passive role and can do little but accept their lot in life.”