Introducing A New Writer To The Truth Barrier

Who Was Zelensky? "He never Really Had An Appetite For War."

I’m introducing a new writer, who wishes to go by the name Manorborn—also crossing into new territory, (old territory returned to) wearing the hat of Editor.

I am “publisher” of this online periodical “The Truth Barrier” and when I publish another writer, I wish to stress that I am allowing another writer... to write. Not be an exact replica of what I think. Naturally, I resonate with Manorborn’s “views,” but I am publishing him as a writer. He has free reign. Publishers ought not keep writers too close to their own views. That said, I find nothing to object to “politically” or whatever the word may be, in Manorborn’s writing, so yes, I “agree with him.”

But the objective is to let writers write. A writer brings a world alive on the page: “Look at this, consider this, watch this, feel this.”

Manorborn sent me this many weeks ago—as an email.

According to my email history, he sent it to me on October 19, 2023. That puzzles me, as I believed I read it first from Granada, not from New York. Time is very strange to me, lately.

In any case, this is geo-political writing that does not depend upon “freshness” factors of time. The piece stands the test of time.

This is also our first step onto the new terrain of The Truth Barrier turning into a real (if small) periodical, with more voices than just yours truly. I miss being an editor. I was “Features Editor” at SPIN, toward the end of my tenure there, some time in the 1990s. I loved working with writers. An “editor” is somebody who gets excited and inspired by other people’s writing, that’s all, and commits to serving and nourishing it.

—Celia Farber

Volodymyr's Last Option: Exile in Exurbia

By Manorborn

Real war is death by a thousand cuts. And that’s what we’re seeing now as Ukraine bleeds out. None of the fatuous politicos inside the Beltway who planned this atrocity will ever know the horror of it. Neither will the shills in MSM or the featherweight political theorists like Heather Cox Richardson or the editors of magazines like The Atlantic and New Yorker. For them, war as a thing is not real but an abstraction that’s clearly beyond their empathic zone.

Zelensky, the comedian, is perplexed by war as evidenced by his admission today that Israel has a right to defend itself from terrorist attacks – inadvertently ratifying Putin’s argument for coming to the rescue of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who’ve been terrorized for eight years by Kiev regimes. Even his wife’s only interest in war is in its economic consequences laid out in articles she scans in The Financial Times jetting to Paris on $1M jewelry spending sprees (she had a salesgirl fired on her last jaunt whom she believed was being “obstreperous.”)

Meanwhile, there are reportedly less than 14M people under retirement age left in Ukraine and a large portion of them are poverty level children and amputees or others unfit for work or combat. Running out of options now that his calls for deporting Ukrainian draft dodgers in Europe have failed and the average age of a Ukie grunt is over FORTY with diminished physical skills, Zelensky has expanded conscription to include high schoolers and women... mostly poor and desperate.

Predictably, draft eligible men in the Ukrainian diaspora have zero interest in returning to fight... even the loudmouth chickenhawks among them who’re beating the war drums. To compensate, Zelensky has transferred much of the prison population into trenches on the front lines. Most of them are now dead and their ubiquitous gravesites are pissing off BlackRock for cluttering up the wheat fields it just bought.

So, with no real resistance, Putin will gradually work toward entirely sealing off the Black Sea and then mercifully reclaim the iconic Russian city of Odessa leaving behind a rump state riddled with Nazi politicians and an unskilled workforce who speak only Ukrainian.

“Gradually” is the operating word. Putin’s been graced with the proverbial slow hand... he has no need to play the bully game of Shock and Awe. War as melodrama does not interest him, even though absent Paths of Glory and The North Star, the greatest films of the war film genre like The Cranes are

Flying and Ballad of a Soldier were undisputedly Russian.

And now that the majority of skilled Ukrainians and those who had voted for President Yevtushenko in 2014 – also a majority – are gone for good, Nazis and their sympathizers will go from being the 5% or so minority they were in 2014 across the whole of Ukraine, to a near majority per capita when the debacle is over and only a depopulated western Ukraine remains.

I raised the possibility at the beginning of the war that perhaps a corollary US/NATO plan was to create a hybrid Nazi state that could relentlessly harass Russia the way certain Islamist organizations covertly funded by the West relentlessly harass Israel, Ethiopia and Syria. It wouldn’t provide Ukraine NATO membership, but in a way would be just as effective. Then those yellow and blue lapel pins and lawn flags will become demonstrative evidence of participation in a war crime. Ditch them while you can.

All this has Zelensky panicked. He never really had an appetite for war. As
Alex Mercouris pointed out on The Duran, Zelensky neither understands nor is interested in war per se. He thinks like an actor and is fascinated only by the theatrical nature of war... just like the educated nerds running the Endless War machinery on C Street or like the ridiculously goofy Jens Stoltenberg and Ursula van der Leyen – the reincarnation of sadist Herte Botha – in Brussels.

But the stakes are much higher for Zelensky who’s in a no-win situation: if Nazi- led Ukraine is victorious despite the million to one odds, he’ll be expendable; if defeated, which is an absolute certainty, he’ll be terminated or exiled. Probably terminated. Either way, he’ll be deemed persona non grata by the West or more humiliatingly, simply ignored. The uber snobs of Europe’s ruling class will revert to regarding him as a useless midget from a country that has served as their doormat for centuries.

So Zelensky’s best bet is to take his Oscar and shack up in the tony enclave Ross CA with his mancrush, Sean Penn, while he still has the chance. I almost feel sorry for him.

Almost.

– Manorborn