By Tom Luongo - March 29, 2024

Have you ever tried to break out of the orbit of a narcissist? It’s damn difficult. Their pattern of emotional abuse is designed to make you feel like the abuser, demoralizing you, sapping you of your vitality and agency.

They weaponize your humanity and feed off your guilt. When you finally summon the courage to divorce yourself from them that’s when the fangs really come out. That’s when their true face is revealed. And it’s nothing but scorn, derision and unfettered hatred.

Narcissists don’t love you. They love themselves.

I’m opening this article with that quick reminder of human psychology to set the stage for this week’s discussion of all things geopolitical. There ain’t no art in this piece folks, I’m too damn exhausted to craft the language.

Why am I exhausted? Running behind narcissists as they perp walk us towards World War III saps the energy of even the most resilient personality. The truly malignant narcissists that think they operate the levers of power over the world have realized that we are walking away from them.

And they are fucking angry. The feeling is very, very mutual.

Since the firing of VicToria “Cookies” Nuland from the State Department on March 5th (and make zero mistake she was fired) events surrounding Russia are accelerating. Last weekend’s attack on the Crocus Concert Hall in Moscow was supposed to originally happen on March 9th, apparently. It was to be timed with Joah BIi-Den’s! State of the Union address and meant as a severe warning to Russians to ‘make the right decision’ and vote against Vladimir Putin a week later.

That day the State Department issued a warning to all Americans to stay away from meetings, concert halls, etc. I think this was us finally acting like a grown up, because it begs a major question that doesn’t comport with unlimited US aggression towards Russia.

Why would we issue this warning knowing full well the Russians would respond to it and stop the attack?

It literally makes no sense. When Nuland is fired from the State Department, our first reaction was to see it as a shift in US foreign policy away from Russia and towards China. Toria lost a power play. See you at the auto show.

That sounds neat and compact… but is it the whole story?

Because then the attack actually happens two weeks later. A bunch of Tajiks go in, like the professional soldiers they are, shoot the place up and make their escape. Acting not at all in character for the ISIS head-choppers who were immediately blamed for this.

Pepe Escobar’s recent article on this is excellent and is worth the read. He goes through the timelines and traces a lot of important connections. But, as I was reading it I noticed that he ‘buried the lede,’ as i saw it.

"Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).

The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.

But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.

The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks."

Because the GGnG community sniffed out this angle almost immediately, linking in Khairullin’s post for us to ruminate on. This isn’t meant as a slight to Escobar. He was working a lot of angles in this story, parsing through everything to lead to a conclusion. That takes time and I’m glad he took it.

But for me, the MI6 angle is the first one to be considered in this attack, not the last one.

And the keys lie in that very timeline. Because, as opposed to assuming that the US is the catalytic agent for events here — easy to think because Nuland is involved — reframing this as a distinctly British operation (with help from rogue elements in the State Dept. and CIA, of course) yields a far more coherent narrative.

Remember, we’re dealing ultimately with narcissists here. Then let’s remember cui bono.

Because without assessing who benefits from this attack, we aren’t doing the analysis right. Moreover, I’m not trying to blame shift here away from the US. We are definitely a player here. But it’s defining who ‘we’ in the US is where the nuance lies.

What if Nuland was fired because knowledge of this attack finally reached the right people at State and the DoD? And they realized, rightly so, that an attack like this would make it nearly impossible for Putin to ignore and force his hand politically to escalate the war in Ukraine to a level that would justify to the people of the West that it was finally time for us to get involved over there.

You can hear the growing chat of “Putin must go” emanating from the think tanks on K Street and the halls of GCHQ.

Who wants that outcome? Who has been begging for that outcome for over two years? Who has staged provocation (Kerch, Nordstream, Bucha, hitting Russian ships in the Black Sea, ZNPP, etc.) after provocation to get Putin “on tilt?” Outside of Victoria Nuland’s office and Lindsay Graham, no one in the US has been fully committed to this the entire time.

Nikki Haley was finally forced out of the presidential race.

If anything, the longer this war goes on the less support Ukraine has gotten from the US, even from Bii-Den!. The shift in the US attitude towards Ukraine has been happening for over a year.

No, the people who have made the most noise are the gods-damned British, who Nuland certainly works hand-in-glove with. The French and German Greens have been just as full-throated, so continental Europe isn’t being spared here either.

So, now here’s what I think the real story is surrounding Crocus. Nuland, MI6, and likely the Turks put this thing together using ISIS-K Tajik mercenaries to kill a bunch of Russians. The operational goal was to keep the US from turning its back on the malignant narcissistic colonialist assholes in Europe who need this war but cannot fight it. That’s the Yanks’ job.

US leadership, already deep in plans to extricate themselves from Europe and pivot to China, warn the Russians on March 7th which scrubs the March 9th operation after sending the major signal that things in Ukraine will calm down by firing Nuland on March 5th.

This is what real statecraft looks like.

After that, the operation is still going forward but under someone else’s guidance (or just on auto-pilot). Nuland’s fingerprints are all over it. The US looks guilty as hell. What does evil do? It doesn’t sleep, it waits. And then we get the actual attack last weekend, after Putin wins a massive re-election. It still serves it’s primary purpose, force Putin’s hand.

Now, the kicker. Who issues notes of condolences to Russia for the attack? Shockingly, the US and NATO. In the past three years there hasn’t been one conciliatory utterance from Sec. of State Antony Blinken’s pie hole when it comes to Russia. He’s been the epitome of the anti-diplomat.

And yet, here he is issuing condolences to Russia. Then the US abstains from the UNSC council vote against Israel, another British project going completely haywire.

None of this tracks with the US and Russia are implacable enemies narrative folks. Not. One. Single. Bit. Of. It.

Now, guess who refused to even acknowledge the Russian loss of life? Yup … the UK.

Here’s Jeremy Hunt:

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt has told Sky News that Britain has “very little confidence in anything the Russian government says.”

“We know that they are creating a smokescreen of propaganda to defend an utterly evil invasion of Ukraine. But, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a tragedy when innocent people lose their lives, when you have horrible bombings,” Hunt said. Hunt further emphasized that London takes “what the Russian government says with an enormous pinch of salt… after what we have seen from them over the last few years.”

Can you not feel how dirty Hunt felt having to even half-heartedly lament dead Russians? It’s beyond pathetic and inhuman, but then again, he’s a member of the British Political Elite… what else can you expect from these bloodless ghouls?

David Cameron has done nothing but lambaste the US for not ponying up more money for Ukraine. In effect blaming us for Ukraine’s losses. This is classic narcissistic bullying of the victim here.

But, the real revelation came from . . .

[SNIP]