Bringing Out the Dead
When societies lie about death, the deception leads to the collapse of the very cause they purport to support.
Accounting for the dead is one of society’s most important functions—it brings closure to the cycle of life, creating a sense of purpose and belonging essential to the normal functioning of families and communities. The dead were people with names and histories which those close to them would mourn and remember. But when the death toll becomes unmanageable, the names and histories of the departed are forgotten as the normal rituals associated with human death are brushed aside in favor of the exigencies of mass burials. During the Black Plague in the 14th century, body collectors removed the dead to prevent the spread of disease and, oftentimes, because the families no longer existed to manage the issue of burial. Civilized society hung on the edge of survival as entire institutions were depopulated. Today in Ukraine, the dead are either buried in cemeteries whose capacities are overflowing, or simply abandoned on the battlefield, forgotten. Ukrainian society hangs on the edge of survival. The difference between the Black Plague and the situation in Ukraine today is that the Black Plague was an act of God, the spread of a pestilence which societies at that time were not equipped to handle. The conflict in Ukraine, however, is one hundred percent man-made, an avoidable disaster perpetuated by those for whom death became an accountant’s game, ignoring the basic human need for end-of-life closure. The dead of Ukraine have become simple cyphers to be manipulated by political forces who care nothing for the population from which the horrible cost of war has been extracted. Moreover, by allowing the numbers associated with the dead of Ukraine to be manipulated for political purpose, these accountants of death have deceived themselves, creating a situation where the cause they purport to support collapses around them from the weight of their own deception.
Back in November 1967, during the height of the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland informed a gathering at the National Press Club that the war would be wrapped up in two year’s time. According to Westmoreland, who viewed the conflict in Vietnam as a war of attrition, the US had taken the number of soldiers available to the enemy (the National Liberation Front, NLF or Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese Army, or NVA) down from 300,000 in 1966 to around 200,000 in 1967. The numbers game had reached the all-important “crossover point” - estimated to be at 200,000 - below which the enemy could not recover. Westmoreland predicted that 1968 would be a year of “mopping up,” with the enemy defeated by 1969.
Instead, 1968 saw the enemy launch the Tet Offensive, with the combined NLF/NVA strength estimated to be at around 600,000—twice the estimated number of troops the US assessed in 1966, and three times the order of battle assessed for 1967.
Sam Adams, a CIA intelligence analyst assigned to the Southeast Asia Branch of the Directorate of Intelligence, started questioning the assumptions being made by Westmoreland and the US military and political command about the enemy order of battle. What he found was that the US leadership was deliberately under-reporting enemy strength, and over-reporting enemy losses, in order to create the conditions on paper that assuaged the dictate from the White House to bring the Vietnam War to an end. Westmoreland himself had been briefed on the true state of affairs in May of 1967, but purposefully continued the deception, setting the US up for embarrassment and defeat. Thousands of American lives were lost as a result.
A day after being sworn in as the 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump addressed the press about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. “We have numbers that almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed,” Trump declared. “About 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed. Russia’s bigger, they have more soldiers to lose but that’s no way to run a country.”
The next day, Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, stated that “I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT'S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don't make a ‘deal’, and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”
Dmitri Peskov, the spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin, was dismissive of Trump’s bluster. “He likes these methods,” Peskov said of Trump, adding “at least he liked them during his first presidency.” Rejecting Trump’s rants as irrelevant to the larger issue of a peace negotiation, Peskov declared that “We’re waiting for signals that are yet to arrive.”
If anything, Trump’s indifference to accuracy and truth when it comes to the comments he makes about the number of dead that have been produced on either side of the conflict can do little to engender confidence on the part of the Russians that the policy formulations being prepared by Trump are remotely close to being derived from the kind of present reality that the Russians insist serve as the foundation of any possible negotiation.
Back in May 2023, during a CNN Town Hall meeting, then-candidate Trump, when speaking about the Russian-Ukraine conflict, said “I want everybody to stop dying. They’re dying. Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. I don’t think in terms of winning and losing,” Trump went on to say. “I think in terms of getting it settled so we can stop killing all those people.”
In a paper published in April 2024, America First, Russia & Ukraine, retired US Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, who has emerged as Trump’s go-to man for policy analysis on the Ukraine conflict, quoted Ukrainian intelligence when assessing that Russia had lost some 200,000 dead and another 240,000 wounded in the Ukraine conflict. Kellogg also noted that Ukraine had lost around 100,000 dead and up to 120,000 wounded in the fighting. These figures inform Trump’s thinking regarding the state of the war in Ukraine.
However, just as General McNamara had relied upon falsified numbers in calculating a timeline for conflict termination in Vietnam, the numbers Trump relies upon are also deliberately cooked to create a perception of Russian weakness and frailty that is exploitable through a show of American strength and resolve.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Kellogg’s paper is an exercise in uninformed, politically-driven nonsensical propaganda. None of his underlying “facts” about Russia are accurate, and all of his foundational “facts” regarding Ukraine are constructed from misinformation produced by Ukrainian propaganda and given voice by a compliant mainstream media and an intellectually corrupted American intelligence community (a glaring example of this is Kellogg’s use of the oft-quoted phrase attributed to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky from February 2022: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” The CIA has acknowledged that Zelensky never said this; the quote was manufactured by an intelligence officer stationed at the US Embassy in Kiev.)
And yet Trump is relying on this information to shape his perceptions and impact his judgment when it comes to formulating policy for achieving conflict termination in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has indicated that he is ready and willing to engage in negotiations regarding bringing the conflict in Ukraine to an end. However, he has stipulated that any such negotiations must be premised on the present reality on the ground in Ukraine and, by extension, inside Russia.
As things stand, Russia is decisively winning the war of attrition that has defined the Russia-Ukraine conflict. While Russian casualties are severe, they do not come close to matching the numbers being fed to Trump by Keith Kellog (a more realistic assessment holds the number of Russian dead at around 95,000). The Ukrainians, on the other hand, are being eviscerated, with between 700,000 and 1.1 million of its soldiers having been killed. Hundreds of thousands more have deserted the Army, and even forced conscription can’t generate the numbers necessary to replace battlefield losses.
If Trump moves forward with negotiations premised on such fantasy-based drivel, he is setting himself up for failure. And while failure in this sense won’t necessarily translate into thousands of American dead, as was the case with McNamara, it would result in tens of thousands or more Ukrainians and Russians dead—but especially Ukrainian—putting the lie to Trump’s oft-declared sentiment of giving a damn about human life and wanting to stop the killing.
Trump, like all our figurehead Presidents, musters people around him who tell him what they think he wants to hear. He is a wily, not intelligent man; an arrogant, not judicious man; a pampered bully, not a temperate thinker. He imagines he can treat Putin and Russia as he does Colombia and Panama. He is going to find out that he can't.
While every person jumps up and down.....the fact is the World is in chaos which to me is good.
The world cannot keep going in it's present state.......many of us will die BUT hopefully there will, at the end, be a re-awakening.
The West is ENTIRELY responsible.