The insatiable quest for natural resources

Ever since the beginning of time, energy has been converting from one form to another, incessantly, all over universe. A very tiny fraction of this energy arrives at the Earth's surface from the Sun, outer space, and within the Earth. An even smaller amount of this energy (mostly in the form of sunlight) is captured and stored mostly by plants via photosynthesis. It is this tiny amount of energy that enables all life on our planet including humanity.

Of course, energy is not the only necessary ingredient for life. Water is the solvent of life and thus human civilizations grew from large freshwater sources (the Hudson river, the Great Lakes, Lake Ladoga, the Volga river, the Danube river, the Mississippi river, the Amazon river etc). Good soil is also important as a template to grow plants/crops which sustain us. Thus, for millennia humans sought and settled lands with the most abundant natural resources. [Moses wandered the desert in search of the promised land of "milk and honey” for 40 years.]

Where resources are abundant, human civilizations thrive. The problem is that over time, humans tend to wreck the lands on which they settle via pollution, overpopulation and overexploitation/depletion of available natural resources. Natural calamities (e.g. drought and volcanic activity) also occur. These events force mass migration, suffering and death. For example, the suffering caused by the Dust Bowl migration in the 1930's was memorialized in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

When populations are displaced, refugees seek to colonize new lands in search of more natural life-sustaining resources. If these "new” lands are already populated, a cultural and social clash ensues, caused by population pressures. For example, this was witnessed some years ago when Europe hosted Syrian refugees due in part to a massive drought in the Middle East. The associated chaos and pressures often provoke wars. Excuses can be easily invented to justify conquest. Adolf Hitler proclaimed the need for "lebensraum” for the German people as his justification to invade the Soviet Union. In comparison, Germany was a relatively small though highly industrialized nation with relatively little natural resources (especially petroleum).

The resulting attack of the Soviet Union was essentially a savage genocidal race war between Germanic and Slavic peoples causing the deaths of tens of millions of innocent civilians. In the aftermath of that war, Germany lost a significant amount of its "lebensraum” and this is still an issue with many German politicians to this very day guiding their formerly surreptitious but now wide open anti-Slavic and anti-Orthodox Christian foreign policy and hatred — particularly since the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990.

As in WWII, cultural differences (e.g. between European white settlers and Native American tribes) and presumed cultural "superiority” (e.g. the white man's burden) are routinely used as a pretext to ethnically cleanse and slaughter weaker/”inferior” ethnic groups and basically take their land and resources (and even occasionally enslave or force them into perpetual indentured servitude as in Ireland). Tragically, this is how modern America was founded as defeated Native Americans were relocated (e.g. the "Trail of Tears”) and forced to live in ethnic ghettos ("reservations”) with little natural resources. In Britain, the English largely took the best lands, subjugated and ethnically cleansed the native Celt, Pict, and other peoples so that these cleansed/displaced peoples now largely reside in the more rocky fringes of the Island where there are less natural resources but which were more defensible (e.g. Wales and Scotland).

Today, as a consequence of globalism, hyper-capitalism (profit at all cost), rampant pollution, overpopulation and climate change, our world is in deep crisis as natural resources dwindle and are being needlessly squandered. The primary reason for this is due to climate change but also due to restricted control (e.g. supply chain "issues”) of these natural resources by "elites” who think they have the right to play God and parcel "their” resources as they see fit (vis a vissanctions etc).

As the Earth warms, arable land will decrease and desertify which was already causing a food crisis well before the Ukraine/Russian conflict. Russia, as the world's largest nation by area, has the most natural resources, period. The West, which is facing a precipitous decline of its natural resources (e.g. water in the Southwest US), has sought for centuries to break Russia up into a number of weak, divided and economically-destitute smaller countries (via Soros-funded colored revolutions) so that it can cheaply exploit Russia's immense natural resources.

This divide and conquer scenario is just what happened to Yugoslavia in 1991 when Germany and the Vatican illegally recognized the "independence” of Croatia and Slovenia  which precipitated the breakup Yugoslavia into its constituent republics and then some as Kosovo was stolen from Serbia. I have written in the past that the West, using NATO, would do the same to Russia as it did to Yugoslavia. However, the West, as it has done so often in the past, misjudged Russia's resolve (and might) and this may lead to WWIII which no one will win and we will all lose.

It is also creating great suffering worldwide, particularly in Western Europe, which doesn't have the natural resources (including fossil fuels) that Russia has and is forced to pay stratospherically high prices to import resources from other faraway locations such as the US. The West is also bankrupting its future by just printing money out of nothing.

The problem is that Western "elites” just don't understand that this conflict, provoked by NATO with Victoria Nuland's support for the Maidan coup/putsch of 2014, is an existential one for Russia. For the "elites,” this is all about control of the world and cheap exploitation of Russia's natural resources (and other nation's) to continue their pyramid scheme of endless profit via theft.

They're not fighting for the Ukraine. They are paying/bribing people to fight to the last Ukrainian. And thus, it doesn't matter how many mercenaries, US dollars and euros, and "cool” high tech weapons are pumped into the Ukraine.

Russia must and will win this war in its backyard because the resolve to preserve one's existence is always greater than anything money and technology can do. This is also why Russia resoundingly defeated the Nazis and every other heretical power from the West over the more than one thousand years of her existence. [King George III learned the hard way that when empires need to pay for mercenaries such as the Hessians to fight the American colonists during the Revolutionary War, this is the beginning of the end as the motivation of for-profit mercenaries will never match that of those defending their homes.]

The sooner the West acknowledges its responsibility for this crisis and encourages the Ukrainians to seek peace with Russia, the better off we all will be. Russia's natural resources belong to the Russian people — not Western Oligarchs. Instead of squandering immense natural and human resources fighting Russia using a Ukrainian proxy sent on a fool's errand, we should be working with Russia as a beneficial partner to mitigate climate change before it's too late.