Paul Craig Roberts Attacks Faker, Martyanov and Orlov, Fires the Opening Salvo of the 5D Dunce Civil War
A patient sours on the Group Therapists, lashes out
I can't say I read Paul Craig Roberts. The depth of his "knowledge" is sufficiently explained by the fact that as late as November 2021 he was still shilling Putin as a COVID rebel who had preserved voluntary vaccination in Russia — a truly preposterous and absurd notion, diametrically opposed to actual reality.
In other words, PCR is a clown who lives in an alternate reality and his output is trash. It's one thing to make a surface mistake here or there, another to not even bother looking into the basics of the basics of what you're going to sermonize on.
However, a day ago Slavland Chronicles, which I do keep an eye on, highlighted a PCR piece from October 7 in which he attacks The Faker, Martyanov and Orlov:
Andrei Martyanov, the Saker, and Dmitry Orlov have seriously misled their pro-Russian audience. Martyanov and Saker stressed the superiority of Russian firepower and tactical operations, which was correct, but they ignored the built-in strategic failure of the Russian “limited operation.” Moreover, the Russian tactical advantage was reduced when the limited forces Putin had been willing to commit became too thin to protect the boundaries of the conquest, and modern weapons from the West and targeting information substantially reduced Russian firepower advantage.
Putin, having foolishly let the war go on month after month, a war that he should have competed in one week, gave the US and UK time to train a larger Ukrainian army and equip it with modern weapons. It should have been obvious to the Kremlin from day one that this was in the cards. Any time a war is drawn out the advantage passes to the side that is not constrained by self-imposted constraints. It is impossible to imagine Napoleon or the Wehrmacht fighting in such a constrained way as Russia is required to fight in Ukraine. If Stalin had fought in the way Putin is today, there would be no Russia.
Ouch. Quite the passage. Gotta love that fratricidal 5D multipolarista slaughter. PCR might be pushing 80+ but he still knows how to swing that hatchet.
His diagnosis of what went wrong is pretty decent, and I love the bitterness. It very much feels like the disappointed PCR was part of this "pro-Russian audience" that he says was "misled" by the trio of faux Russians. (Faker never lived there, Orlov got out when he was 12, and Martyanov falls in the 0.001% of ex-Soviet naval officers who settled in the US.)
But why was PCR looking to these clowns to tell him about the war in the first place?
These are the dunces who didn't even know the war was going to happen. Here is Orlov on February 7:
As an imminent Russian invasion of the Ukraine continues to look less and less plausible in spite of American hysteria, I rest on my laurels as a geopolitical prognosticator and put on my linguist hat to make some more videos for Russian-speaking English aficionados. To be sure, I’ll get back to writing on geopolitics as soon as anything notable happens—more notable, that is, than hot air spewed by political talking heads or movements of minuscule quantities of troops and weapons.
In this episode, I explain how the English language became a creole of mangled French and Latin words in an Anglo-Saxon-Scandinavian-Norman sourdough mix with a continuously mutating disaster instead of a vowel system and an orthography that is seven centuries out-of-date and rotten to begin with. And yet this is the language of international discourse on planet Earth? Give me another globe! There seems to be something wrong with this one.
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Utterly fucking hilarious! Two weeks before the war this guy was "resting" on his "laurels as a geopolitical prognosticator" (what "laurels" LOL??), declaring the war had become even less likely, and gave his readers a lecture on th much more immediately relevant topic of...French words in the English language!
Hilarious!
Meanwhile some headlines on Anti-Empire on that same February 7:
3 out of 4 Russian Cruisers Are Now Either in the Med or the Black Sea
US Intel Echoes Anti-Empire’s Estimate From 2 Weeks Ago That Russians Are 70 Percent Ready
Utterly bizarre what parallel reality these people were living in. Orlov is going on about "movements of minuscule quantities of troops" a full week after the entire Far Eastern Military District had migrated to Belarus.
This is stuff that was shockingly beside the mark from before the war had even kicked off. So why was PCR drawn to it? Well, because he is a Kremlin-whitewashing 5D multipolarista clown himself. Turns out he is slightly more realistic than they, and ultimately under the weight of insane amounts of evidence, has lowered his kool-aid intake, but from where I'm standing he's cut from the same cloth.
And that is what makes this so delightful. I am all for a much-needed fratricidal slaughter between the 5D dunces. Preferably feed them some PCP and give them glass shards so they can really make a go at it.
Listened to Martyanov once or twice to quickly realize this guy was a shill. Perhaps a truly believing in the Russian military superiority shill, but nonetheless. Stopped reading Sacker back in 2014 when he became a big backer of Putin's Conniving Plan, known in Russian as Хитрый План Путина or ХПП, when 100s of pro-Kremlin propagandists started to push the narrative that Putin not taking advantage of the situation that emerged in early 2014, when a bigger half of Ukraine was for taking by simply not recognizing the coup, because of people's resistance to the nationalist Maidan in Kiev, was because he wanted "the whole Ukraine to be friends with Russia". How events developed from there on is well known - Russia and Ukraine are big friends now, yeah, right... Orlov I missed somehow. I guess from a get go he wasn't someone I could trust.
But PCR is a different matter. He always maintained balance and the needed distance in assessment of Russia. I agree with his view that you presented in current article about how running this war for months works against Russia and in favor of Ukraine/NATO, as well as his other piece where he blames Putin for a policy of constant give-ins, retreats and questionable deals that he conducted for twenty plus years starting with the sinking of submarine Kursk in 2000 when he didn't dare to recognize that american submarine was directly involved in this, either accident or the action of intent. Same story repeated under Putin with Russian military flagship of the Black Sea fleet cruiser Moskva in 2022. Russian generals preferred to say that ship was damaged because of the fire that started because of smoking in no-smoking area and then, to avoid further investigation into the incident, they decided to sink the ship on the way to Sebastopol. Meanwhile the truth appears to be that the largest Russian ship on the Black Sea was sunk due to joint attack by NATO and Ukrainian forces. Putin's policy of constant concessions in economy, geopolitics and in military was constantly wetting appetite of the aggressor and this has led us to the situation we see today in Ukraine with a great potential to bring us to a hot phase of WWIII and to the nuclear Armageddon.
I was not a fan of PCR initially but as events developed it turned out he was right almost all the way. Have you bothered to read what he was actually writing – its all there on his website, and I’ve just been reviewing what he was writing in March. Already then (and long before) he was consistently critical of Putin and the whole Russian leadership on both their conduct of the war and Russia’s economic response. Even then he was saying that Russia’s go slow approach and anxiety to negotiate would result in disaster and possibly an escalation to nuclear war. Long ago he was massively critical of Russia’s response in 1914 …… oh, what the hell, do I have to spell it all out for you? Go back and read what he actually was saying before you jump in and start hammering him on no basis whatsoever, other than your assumption that because he is now saying the right thing that he must therefore have been mistaken in the beginning. Let’s face it no one probably got everything absolutely right in every detail but he seems to be one of the very few that was getting the broad picture and he seems to have been doing it for a long time. And I’m speaking as someone who was skeptical of him – but can now see that overall in big picture terms he was more right than almost anyone else. Sure if one goes through his stuff with a fine tooth comb one might find some details that he was mistaken on but he has shown himself very ready to correct when he was wrong. Come on, you’re a good analyst, and he is too, we don’t need this kind of pettiness and attempted point scoring: It’s childish!