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Sept. 16, 2022 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:09:24
Situation Update, Sep 16, 2022 - The economic ANNIHILATION of Europe - Gonzalo Lira and Mike Adams
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All right, welcome to the Situation Update for Friday, September 16th, 2022.
Mike Adams here.
Thank you for joining me.
And we have to put a kind of an asterisk next to today's podcast because we're breaking the format.
Very, very unusual.
Let me explain what happened.
I recorded about 45 minutes or so of news and analysis and then...
It was time for me to do the interview with Gonzalo Lira.
And he was right on time and we started talking and I was asking him if he could do maybe 30 to 45 minutes.
And as often happens when speaking with really intriguing, high IQ people, we went on, we talked two hours and 20 minutes.
And it's all recorded.
You're going to get a chance to hear it all.
Not all today.
I've decided to split that in half.
We'll give you roughly about half of the interview today in the podcast, and then the other half roughly tomorrow.
Now, in that two hours plus, we talked about a whirlwind of, I think, fascinating subjects.
We started out with Ukraine and Russia, some...
Military coverage of what's going on on the ground with the war and so on.
But then we got into Western Europe, economics, energy, scarcity.
And then we got into the nature of the leadership class in these Western societies and why they are so incompetent and why they seem to be on such a suicide mission.
Gonzalo was able to talk about some of his theories about...
Believing that the world is run mostly by incompetent, disconnected leaders rather than some grand globalist plan that is being meticulously followed for a controlled demolition of the world's economies.
Gonzalo explains, you'll hear this, that he believes what we're experiencing in Western civilization is more the result of just Arrogance and stupidity, incompetence, or maybe not raw stupidity, but certainly incompetence and a disconnected philosophical or, how to say this, elitist culture under which the rest of us are suffering quite dearly.
So we talked about that and much more.
I mean, all kinds of things.
So it was a rather fascinating conversation.
Now, in wrapping up that conversation...
Which has put me, by the way, at this moment, quite early in the morning.
Because I'm in Texas, he's in Ukraine, and it was his morning, it was my late night.
And that's when I realized that the first 40 minutes that I had already recorded for this podcast wasn't very useful compared to the conversation that I had with Gonzalo.
It was kind of entertaining, a little bit funny.
I was making fun of the Queen of England.
Well, not exactly.
I was making fun of her royal guard who passed out and face-planted at her funeral, which, let's face it, if anything is deserving of mockery.
It's the royal guard who is unable to stand.
I thought it was a great metaphor for the fall of the British Empire, actually.
See, because the only thing that the royal guards have to do is just stand.
That's the one skill you must have as a royal guard.
And, well, you have to wear the big black fuzzy funny hat thing.
Which, to me, looks like a tool that you would use to clean the cobwebs off the ceiling or something.
But they have to wear that and they have to stand there.
And then this one royal guard apparently lost consciousness and face-planted right in the middle of the queen's funeral.
I thought that was a great metaphor for what's happening to Western Europe, by the way.
But the rest of what I recorded...
You know, it didn't matter that much.
So here's what I've done.
I've just skipped all that.
I'm not even using that, what I recorded earlier.
And instead, we're going to jump into roughly about an hour of an interview with Gonzalo Lira.
And that's going to be today's podcast.
And then tomorrow we'll feature the other hour.
Well, wait a minute.
Wait, today's Friday.
Oh, yeah, so it's going to be a weekend edition that features the other half.
That's what's going on.
I've lost track of time for some reason, or at least the calendar.
But nevertheless, you'll get the other half tomorrow.
This is the hard part about interviewing people from all over the world, especially sometimes crossing the international dateline and so on.
But you're going to hear both hours of the interview, and we're going to jump into the first hour right here, right now.
So, well, just one final comment before we jump into that.
The reason I enjoy speaking with Gonzalo Lira is Let's face it, he's a controversial person in the sense that he refuses to censor himself and to conform to the warped ideologies of a twisted culture.
He is his own thinker.
And anybody in society who is his or her own thinker and who expresses their own thoughts is going to be not just controversial, but demonized more often than not.
And I don't reach out to Gonzalo and invite him to this interview because he and I absolutely agree on every single thing because we don't.
There are differences in our views and our life experiences and so on, which is completely normal.
I enjoy talking with Gonzalo and sharing that with you because he is insightful, he is thoughtful, he is courageous in what he says.
He, again, does not self-censor, he does not conform.
He is a rare kind of person in a world where obedience is demanded constantly of everyone.
And Gonzalo Lira refuses to obey false authority for the sake of merely being obedient.
And that's a remarkable property, and frankly, I think we need more people like that in our world.
I don't even mind whether or not, if those theoretical people were to emerge and become more numerous on our planet, it wouldn't even matter if they agreed with me or not.
I don't even care about that.
I just want people to be thoughtful about their positions.
Just...
You know, arrive at a conclusion through a process of reason and logic and data and so on instead of just, oh, it's the popular thing, I'm going to do that!
And then there's this next thing, and then there's this new thing, and, you know, I have to change my avatar on Facebook and go along with the next new thing.
That's stupidity.
That's insanity.
There's way too much of that in our world.
So it's a real treat to speak to people who are the antithesis of that.
And that's Gonzalo Lira.
So enjoy the interview.
We'll post more tomorrow.
Here we go.
All right.
Welcome, folks, to this much-anticipated interview.
I'm thrilled to have Gonzalo Lira joining us today.
He joins us from Ukraine.
Actually, it's late night in the USA, early morning his time in the Ukraine, to talk about psychological warfare versus kinetic actual 3D warfare, and to get his analysis of what he thinks is going on right now with Ukraine and Russia, the counteroffensive that...
Ukraine pushed into Izum, and then Russia's likely response.
We'll talk about Western Europe and what's coming, the Gazprom Christmas gift and all that stuff.
Mr.
Lyra, thank you so much.
It's an honor to have you on.
Oh, thank you very much for having me on.
It's always a pleasure.
So, yeah.
And thanks.
So, about the situation here?
Oh, yeah.
But first, I'm sorry, let me mention your YouTube channel is GonzaloLira2.
Yeah.
Two I's, I guess.
Yeah, two I's, exactly.
Right.
GonzaloLira2.
So, folks, if you want to follow him there, check out that channel.
Yeah, thank you very much.
No, the situation with this counteroffensive, there's a complete disconnect between the reality on the ground and what is being sold to the Western public insofar as what happened with this offensive.
There were actually a series of offensives.
There were, the way you count it, you can call it either two or three.
And it looks like there's going to be another offensive in the not-too-distant future.
But, see, these offensives...
We're catastrophic for the Zelensky regime and for the Ukraine side.
They lost over 12,000 men.
I mean, 12,000 men killed in action in these three offensives.
And the Russians...
Go ahead.
I hadn't heard the numbers that high yet.
I definitely heard thousands.
But are you saying not just wounded, but killed 12,000?
Yes, killed 12,000.
Wow.
Wounded in action is likely double that number.
The wounded to killed in action is usually between 2 and 3 to 1.
The numbers that are coming out Are catastrophic in so far as this.
Because you see, like in the Kharkov offensive, what was the issue?
I live in Kharkov City.
I'm in the center of the city.
Last Friday when the Russians had this missile strike, I was there!
I was here!
I saw it!
And the lights went out and the whole shebang.
So anyway, the point is that...
When the Ukrainians carried out this offensive, they carried it out against a part of the region of Kharkov.
It's like New York City and New York State, the city of Kharkov and the region of Kharkov.
The sector of the region that the Russians had captured early on was to the north and to the east of the city.
What happened was that the The Zelensky regime forces mounted a heavy offensive.
Now, what happens in a military offensive is that you have to get out of your defenses and move forward.
And so you expose your troops.
And so since the Russians have an advantage in artillery fire, and they have an advantage in aircraft and air defense systems, see, the Ukraine forces were completely exposed.
And so in that offense, go ahead.
Well, I just want to, for our audience, I want to underscore the artillery advantage by the Russians, I think, is generally cited as 10 to 1.
At least.
And then secondly, as you said, it seems like what Ukraine did was they traded men for territory.
So the cost of gaining that ground was dire in terms of lost soldiers that cannot be simply replaced.
Yes, exactly.
And to add insult to injury, it is emerging that the Russians for the past several weeks, they knew that this offensive was coming, and they had been pulling out their people for weeks, plural.
And so the actual force defending this territory numbered, and this sounds outrageous, but it seems to be true.
It seems that they had only between 1,000 and 2,000 troops there against an attacking force of something like 30,000.
And that 30,000 group went into essentially surrendered territory.
And the Ukraine forces went in there, and of course, they were exposed.
And since they have no air cover, since they have no air defense systems, because the Russians have destroyed them all, and they certainly don't have the artillery, they were completely exposed, and they suffered losses of 4,000 men killed.
And likely twice that number severely wounded.
And so out of a force of about 30,000 men, they lost at least 10,000 for nothing, for cow country.
Because I've been there.
It's cow country.
There's nothing.
It's just empty fields.
So this is...
If you have more offensives like this, you're going to lose the war really, really quick.
And in the West, they have this weird notion that the Ukrainians captured all this territory.
This is such a wonderful thing.
But you see, the Russians, they don't care about territory.
Their objective is to destroy the Kiev regime armed forces.
That's their goal.
That's their stated goal.
They've said so repeatedly.
So for them, this was like Christmas morning, because they got to destroy a whole bunch of soldiers who will not be fighting them in the future.
And they had to give up, you know, yeah, it's like 2,000 square kilometers, but you have to keep in mind, this country is enormous.
This country, Ukraine, is the size of Texas.
When you actually look at the map and you look at the captured territory, it's minuscule.
Russia has captured at this time over 150,000 square kilometers.
So 2,000 square kilometers is about 1% of the territory.
So it means nothing.
Is it your conclusion then that Russia deliberately weakened their lines almost to invite this to come in or that they simply took advantage of Well, All those soldiers, at least I read, were armed with NATO gear and some NATO training and even NATO contractor personnel as well.
At least that's what I heard.
But do you think this was all deliberate?
There are multiple possibilities and multiple schools have thought on these issues.
Some people say that it was Russian incompetence and that they shouldn't have let that flank get so weakened.
They should have shorted up.
Others say, oh no, this was a trap, you know, from the get-go.
There's all kinds of opinions about it.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.
It could have been a complete Russian mistake that they flipped around on the Ukrainians and got in a very powerful lick against them.
It could be that.
Or it could be that this was all pre-planned and it was all part of a plan and they knew exactly what they were doing.
But the result is all that matters.
It doesn't matter the intent.
The result is between the Kursan offensives, which are in the south of the country, And Kherson offenses were a catastrophe, because there, they went up against top-tier Russian soldiers.
You see, in the Kharkov region, they were going up against not top-tier Russian soldiers, or even the allied militias of the DPR and LPR. They were going up against, essentially, Russian territorial defense forces.
Okay?
I mean...
You know, not combat soldiers.
Right.
Just there to kind of occupy for the moment.
Yeah, just to keep an eye on things.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, you know, where the Ukraine forces have gone up against, you know, top tier Russian soldiers, they don't make a dent.
Okay.
And what happened recently, that they did make a salient that is an incursion.
They kind of like broke through and entered a salient in the south and around the Kyrgyzstan region.
But the Russians went ahead and blew up this dam.
And the dam...
Flooded this river and the river cut off these soldiers.
That's why they blew up the dam.
They didn't blow up the dam just to harm civilians because actually they don't harm civilians.
The Russians are not interested in destroying civilian infrastructure except insofar as it's being used by the enemy.
And so what they did was they blew up that dam.
It flooded this river.
And now there are several thousand Ukraine soldiers who have been cut off because they crossed that river with pontoon bridges.
That river was to their rear.
And so now that river is flooded, and they're cut off from supplies, from reinforcements, and from retreat.
So they're going to be annihilated.
And that's going to be another, you know, four to 7,000 men.
It's not clear how many are in that saline at this time.
But, you know, the Russians...
Look, I've said this many times.
The Italians are good at food.
The French are good at fashion.
And the Russians, well, they're good at war.
They know what they're doing.
OK, and when the hysteria started of these of the Kharkov offensive and the Kursan offensive and all the rest of it, and everybody said that, oh, the Russians are losing.
I was like, these guys don't make a mistake insofar as war is concerned.
You can argue with that and say a lot of things about the Russians, but they're not stupid and they don't make mistakes when it comes to war, or at least not big ones.
And so you have to wait and see.
And they're winning.
Go ahead.
Yeah, let me jump in with a couple of questions.
One is about the town of Izum, which I believe that is currently under the control of Ukrainian forces.
Is that your understanding as well?
Yes, it is.
In fact, Zelensky gave a little, you know, a flash visit there and took a picture of himself there.
Yeah, yeah.
But isn't that city of some significant logistical importance in terms of access to roads?
It was.
The Russians spent a lot of effort capturing Izym because they expected Izym to be the jumping-off point to be able to attack to the south, what the Russians called Sherwood Forest.
That was a big forest with a lot of Ukrainian soldiers defending it.
And they thought that this would be the perfect village and springboard.
And it was indeed a crossroads of the railroad system.
And they thought that this would be the perfect place to do resupplying and also as a jumping off point for offenses.
But they captured Isium, look, I can't recall if it was April or May, but it was a couple of months ago at least.
And so what happened was that they made the effort to go south from Izium, but it didn't work.
The defenses were too hardened and would cost too many lives and too many Russian troops.
And their resupply routes, they were able to reroute them in other directions and make their logistics more efficient.
So in the end, they didn't need ISIUM. That's the point.
You see, sometimes in the military, I've never been in the army myself or in the military, but, you know, you pick up a lot as you're forming a war this closely.
Yeah, it's living that in your case.
Yeah, exactly.
And so sometimes, you know, some random hill is essential today, but next week, it means nothing.
So Isium was essential two months ago, but today, it means nothing.
And so, you know, the fact that they lost it doesn't mean anything.
Because ultimately, see, you always have to remember what their goal is.
And their goal is to destroy Ukraine forces.
Their goal is not to capture territory, just to capture territory, just for the sake of it.
Right, right.
It doesn't matter where they are.
It doesn't matter where they operate geographically.
Their goal is to diminish the ability of the Ukrainian forces to wage future action, essentially.
Exactly.
That's exactly it.
And so they don't care if they lose Izium.
You could say that it's a very cold-blooded or very cynical calculation to abandon the city, that a lot of the native population, the local population, help you out.
Perhaps.
But, you know, in a war, you have to make cold-hearted decisions that are sometimes very ugly, but very necessary.
You have to sacrifice these people over here to save these people over there.
You see what I mean?
Well, speaking of those decisions, I'd like to ask your interpretation of the Russian missile strikes that took place.
You talked about it earlier.
They struck, I believe, electrical infrastructure in certain cities.
You spent a day without electricity in many other areas.
Yes, yes.
Right.
But two questions on that.
Number one, what do you suppose was the point of that?
And secondly, why wasn't it followed up with an effort to permanently disable those electrical infrastructure if, in fact, Russia wanted to take that down on a long-term basis?
I mean, how does it serve Russia to just have the lights off for a little bit, but then it recovers?
What do you think is the point of that?
That's a really good question.
I don't know.
They must have a very good reason, though.
I mean, because they don't...
There's a saying that the Russians don't go to the bathroom without a plan.
And that's accurate.
They really are.
They have always a very good reason to do something.
And so the fact that they knocked out the lights...
When was it?
On Friday, was it?
And then on...
The days have bled into each other.
Tuesday, I think.
I'm on the 12th story of my building.
I had to go up and down.
It was not fun.
No elevator, not fun at all.
And I'm a smoker, so that was just not fun.
Anyway, the point...
I don't know.
I can't give you an answer.
There has been some intelligent speculation.
A guy called Dima at a YouTube channel called Military Summary, which is very good.
Yes, I've seen that.
Yeah, he gives daily briefings of the situation on the front.
His YouTube channel is called Military Summary Channel, and it's fantastic.
He speculated that the Russians wanted to slow down The Ukraine train system.
Because the train system in Ukraine, 90% of it is electric.
And the Russians, in one go, in just one go, in a two-hour strike, they took out the entire electrical grid of the whole country.
Now, the Ukrainians, they took it out at 8 p.m., I remember, and the Ukraine technicians restored it at, like, around 2 a.m.
I can tell because the next morning I saw my microwave, you know, the clock on my microwave.
You know, when the power goes out, it starts at 12 noon and starts running again, right?
And so that's how I figured out that it was restored at 2 a.m.
Anyway...
So for those six hours, the lights were out.
If the Russians had wanted that to continue throughout the rest of the morning, they could have done that.
I suspect that they did it because they wanted to stop the trains, because the Ukrainian armed forces are moving troops and equipment around via trains.
Because, of course, you can't have tanks running down a highway.
It just chews up the concrete.
And more importantly, it spends all your gas.
You don't want to be spending gasoline moving troops around.
So you move them by train.
And the same with the troops.
And so Dima at the military summit was, I thought, a very shrewd observation.
He thought that it was the Russians wanting to stop movement of troops, probably to have an intelligence re-evaluation to see where the battlefield was on all fronts.
And that's an intelligent, very shrewd guess.
I don't know.
Nobody knows what the Russian general staff is thinking.
But they did it again on...
I keep forgetting.
Monday or Tuesday.
Tuesday.
Oh, yeah.
Because they were supposed to repair my hot water heater here.
And it was on Tuesday, on Tuesday morning, that they knocked out the lights in the whole city from, I think it was like around 8 a.m.
until...
I think around 4, perhaps, or no, around like 2.30, something like that.
And so why they did that on those two separate occasions, I'm not clear.
Nobody is.
Well, I have so many questions about this, and let me throw a couple your way.
So one question is, domestically, if Russia were to continue to strike electrical infrastructure targets in Ukraine, surely at some point very soon, the supply of spare components is gone, right?
Especially with manufacturing now shut down, not only in Western Europe, but somewhat in China as well.
Where do you keep getting these components to repair the blown-up Buildings or portions of buildings that cause the lights to go out, right?
So that's one question.
I've got another, but do you want to respond to that one?
I have no idea.
I mean, simple as that.
I have no idea how they are repairing this stuff.
But they are, obviously, because we're talking on the internet and the lights are on here in the city, at least.
So I cannot answer that question.
I don't even know where to start.
Well, the second question, though, is a bigger theater of war question, given that I believe various officials in Russia have been warning in the last couple of days that NATO should stop funneling weapons through Ukraine and training Ukrainian soldiers and essentially running much of the Ukraine war,
and essentially implying that if NATO forces don't do that, that they may face some larger And my question to you is, isn't it technically possible for Russia to use, for example, the hypersonic missiles to hit electrical infrastructure in Germany or other nations?
They don't have to limit themselves to Ukraine, and it doesn't have to be nuclear.
It could be non-nuclear striking other countries to slow down the same kind of weapons coming in.
What do you think about that?
Well, about the weapons coming in, this is my guess, okay, what I'm about to say.
So, you know, take it that I am not a military man, but this is what I understand, is that a lot of these weapon systems, like Leopard tanks from Germany, the famous HIMAR systems that arrived here, the M777 howitzers and all the rest, It takes several months to train.
Months, plural.
So my guess is that what's going on is that these weapons are filtering in.
And it's not the weapons that bother the Russians.
It's the NATO troops that are manning those weapons.
Because the Zelensky regime does not have the time to train its soldiers to operate that weaponry.
So my guess, and this is a guess...
What is really upsetting the Russians is the fact that NATO troops or NATO-adjacent troops, i.e.
private contractors, who technically aren't under the orders of NATO, but in actuality they are, Are the ones operating these weapons systems.
And it's known that there are a large number of foreign fighters here, professional fighters, not the volunteers that came in initially, who ran in horror after they got one dose of Russian artillery, because those guys went away.
And they came in thinking, oh, we're going to kill some Ruskies.
And the Russians had another thing coming.
And, you know, okay, so no, we weapons.
It is my guess, and I think it's a reasonable influence, that if it takes you two months at least to learn how to operate leopard tanks, because you've never had any experience with a leopard tank, then to operate in a combat-effective way.
It's not just driving a tank.
That's right.
People think that you hop in a tank and you just drive around and start blowing stuff up.
I like a video game.
Yeah, exactly.
They think it's like that, you know?
No, as I've explained, people have asked me the same question.
And I said, well, there's a difference between getting a driver's permit to drive a car versus being a professional race car driver who can win races.
That takes years and exceptional skill.
Exactly.
That's an outstanding analogy.
You hit it right on the money.
And I'm going to steal that from you.
Okay, please do.
Because you're right.
You're absolutely right.
It's exactly that.
Between getting a learner's permit and being in the Daytona 500.
Exactly.
You and I both drive.
I'm assuming you drive.
I drive quite a bit.
And I wouldn't get behind the wheel of a Daytona 500 car.
No way.
No, we'd be blown away by the professional drivers.
I mean, we'd be left in the dust.
We'd crash.
Yeah.
We'd crash.
Quite frankly, and probably in the first go-around.
You need to know what you're doing.
These weapons.
So that's why I believe that what is upsetting the Russians is the passive-aggressive, surreptitious infiltration of NATO troops into this conflict.
That's what's probably bothering them.
That's why they told the Germans that it's a red line if they start shipping tanks, because they know who's going to be manning those tanks.
It's going to be either German soldiers or German soldiers who have resigned five minutes ago and have been hired on by some private contracting firm.
But it's basically the German state that is financing this operation.
And so I think that's what's going on.
And make no mistake, see, the M777 Howitzer's Heimar system, these are sophisticated, complex systems.
They are not, I have to insist, well, you already made the point with your brilliant analogy.
And so the point is, I think that that's what's pissing them off.
Now, will the Russians attack in EU territory outside of the theory of operations?
No, I don't think so.
Because that would, to them, would be an enormous escalation.
And what the Russians' priority is to not escalate, to keep this at a steady grind.
Because this steady grind is working for them.
Indeed.
I want to turn a little bit to the reaction in the West.
I've heard a lot of people, I've heard this man, Peter Zayan, Z-E-I-H-A-N, who's like a geopolitical pundit.
And he is just ecstatic and saying, oh, the Russians are losing, they're going to get kicked out of the country, you know, the Zelensky regime is going to march on Moscow or something like that.
It's absurd.
It's crazy.
It's totally delusional.
And like I said before, it doesn't matter if the Russians were caught with their pants down in the Kharkov region, or if this was all pre-planned and they knew exactly what they were doing.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is the net result.
The Russians gave up this territory that was of no military use to them.
They reforged on the west, on the east side of some river that separates Kharkov region from Lugansk.
I forget the name of the river, it doesn't really matter.
And they're in a much better position to defend there.
They gave up all this territory.
They didn't use that many troops.
I mean, if they lost troops, it would be in the hundreds and the very low hundreds.
And they inflicted 4,000 dead and perhaps twice that number of incapacitated on the Zelensky regime forces.
So from their point of view, this was a win.
If the rest of the world wants to think that the Russians lost, it doesn't matter because at the end of the day, you don't win the war on Twitter.
You win the war on the ground by defeating the enemy army.
That's the whole point.
Let me augment that, if you don't mind.
It could matter to the extent that if the PSYOPs of the West are able to, let's say, substantially alter Russia's own domestic population's perceptions, if that were very effective, and you know the PSYOPs are very, very strong, well-funded, very aggressive, and so on, couldn't that alter the dynamics of the domestic pressure against Putin and, in essence, force him into more rapid escalation?
That's a good point.
But there are two things that go against that.
Number one, the West has basically cut off internet to Russia.
So Western information is not getting to Russia.
Google left.
They've all left.
They've all cut off all contact because of the sanctions.
So not that much information from the West is filtering to Russia, number one.
And number two, in Russia, initially, everybody was furious at the Russian army.
But as the days have passed, and they're actually looking at the results, because the results are all that matter, they're realizing, oh, this wasn't a loss.
This was a win, a very clever win.
Again, irrespective of whether the Russians neglected that front and, you know, took their eye off the ball and they were caught by surprise, which is, it's not the case, by the way, because the Russians from Izium were removing people, including civilians, for at least two weeks before the start of this offensive in Kharkov.
So they knew it was coming.
The Russians, again, for all the faults that they may have or you may accuse them of, bad intelligence is not one of them.
They know exactly what's going on in all of Ukraine.
Indeed.
That they removed troops, removed civilian personnel for at least two weeks indicates that they knew that this was coming.
They planned accordingly.
Because also you could say that, oh, they started removing troops because they knew that they couldn't reinforce that area.
Fine.
But they fell back to a more defensible position.
The Zanthi regime forces were utterly exposed and utterly annihilated by artillery and air power.
And so in the end, again, I have to insist, the results are all that matter.
You have to keep in mind, like I said, the Crisson offensive that happened in late August, that started in late August, and the Zaporozhia offensive, and the The Kharkov offensive.
Each of those lost approximately 4,000 troops in each of these three theaters.
That's the estimate.
Even if you go more conservative and say it was not 12,000, say it was just 8,000.
With the same number, with double that number of incapacitated wounded, right?
So you're still talking 24,000 men that were taken off the battlefield.
So somewhere between 24,000 and 36,000 Zelensky regime forces were basically taken out.
And this is catastrophic.
No army can sustain such losses.
And the worst part is that in the West, they're believing their own PR. They're believing their own nonsense.
I don't know if I can use four-letter words in this conversation.
I won't, but they're believing their own nonsense.
nonsense, their own PR, their own propaganda.
And so they are, rather than doing the smart thing, which would have been to negotiate an end to hostilities now, because at least they have the perception that they're winging, and so they could go to the negotiation table.
No, we're going to have more offensives.
And notice, in Zaporozhye and in Kherson, there has been absolutely zero advance.
You know, pockets here and there, and except for that one salient around Kherson, which has, like I said, it's estimated between 3,000 and 7,000 troops.
It's not really clear how many, but it doesn't really matter.
They all got cut off.
They're all going to be, you know, either annihilated or taken prisoner of war.
And so, if you have these wins, you're going to lose a war.
See?
And they're going to do another one now.
Well, there are a couple of factors here that I want to bring in, too.
And one is, I want to ask you about the axis of time.
And I think you pointed out something very observant when you said that Russia doesn't want an escalation of this.
And when you consider the progression of time...
moving in its orbital path around the sun with its axial tilt.
The days will become colder and colder and colder for Northern Europe.
And winter becomes almost a weapon, just cold weather.
And it seems like, well, I guess my question is, do you think that Putin, knowing now that the, the what I'm calling the suicide sanctions that were initiated by the West have backfired so catastrophically to the point where Western industry leaders are now warning about, quote, permanent deindustrialization of the continent.
That Putin, all he has to do is kind of wait for winter to kick in?
And that's...
It's cheaper than artillery, too.
Yeah, exactly right.
See, look, the people of Western Europe are going to go cold, dark, and hungry this winter.
And see, this cannot be changed anymore.
It's like when you watch that video of a car crash...
And it's in slow motion, in super slow motion, right?
The car crash already happened, even as the first fender starts to bend against the concrete that it's striking, okay?
It already happened.
You're just watching the effects, the inevitable effects that cannot be changed.
Even if Europe somehow had completely different political leadership, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that there's some sort of weird spot election and all the people who are pro-sanctions and anti-Russian and all the rest of it, they were kicked out of office and replaced by pro-Russian politicians.
The Russians, the Kremlin, does not trust them.
So they'll never agree to any kind of negotiation.
Never.
Okay?
Any kind of negotiation is going to take months, if not years.
And so this winter, the next four or five months, are going to be catastrophic for Europe.
And this is a reality that cannot be changed.
Okay?
There will never flow gas from Russia to Europe.
Period.
We'll go cold, dark, and hungry, like I said.
And you've got to keep in mind something else that people don't seem to understand.
When they say that there isn't going to be gas, because you have to keep in mind There is no way, there's no place that can provide the energy resources that Europe needs for this winter.
There is no place except Russia.
And the Europeans did it to themselves because they were anti-nuclear.
Because nuclear power would have solved their problems.
But they were so anti-nuclear because of the Green Parties and climate change and all this nonsense.
And by the way, I've never quite understood why Nuclear power, which is the cleanest energy around, is part of the green agenda.
Yeah, there's no carbon emissions from nuclear power.
Exactly.
You know, because when you see those smokestacks of nuclear reactors, that smoke is water vapor.
It's water vapor, yeah.
Yeah, it does nothing to the environment, okay?
And it's clean, pure water vapor, because what it is is, of course, the steam that comes off the water that's cooling the turbines that drives the generators, right?
And so it's the cleanest energy, but the green parties with their green agenda are anti-nuclear.
And so...
The Europeans cannot get the natural gas that they need from any source, not the United States, nowhere.
It's just not possible.
You're right.
The energy price is so high because of the sanctions.
That it's still going to break their economies because it's going to make them uncompetitive.
And so what's happening, and people don't understand this, is that, see, the natural gas, it's not for electricity for people's homes, okay?
It's for industry, okay?
Because you see, industry is what eats up that electricity, that electrical power.
And so if your factories cannot afford electricity, or there isn't electricity, they shut down.
And when they shut down, people go unemployed.
And those unemployed people, they go to their German welfare state, their French welfare state, and demand payments every month that the government does not have.
And so all of a sudden, and of course, you lose the tax revenue from these industries.
And so that's what's going on.
When those factories go bankrupt, they don't just get mothballed.
They sell off their assets.
They default on leases.
They lose the human knowledge base that used to run the factories goes somewhere else.
And once you distribute all those resources to the winds of the far west and east or wherever, you can't start that factory again.
It is permanent deindustrialization.
And let me bring in one other element here that I think you'll find fascinating.
Yesterday, in this same time slot, I interviewed Finnish economist Tomas Malinin, and he said that the exposure to the European banking system For the defaults of industry, that that exposure is absolutely catastrophic.
And of course, it will have a domino effect to American banks and other Western banks that have cross-invested in debt instruments and so on.
So, you know, think about the chain reaction.
Gazprom...
No gas, no industry, defaults, bank failures, bank failures spread, and Putin is sitting back and toasting his feet in front of the fire and sipping on wine, like, wow, winter is pretty awesome.
Yeah, yeah.
And also, there's something else, too, that's pretty funny.
The Russians are selling less gas and less oil, but they're making more money because of higher prices.
And they've got plenty of customers in India and in China.
Now, of course, the Iranians, the Iranian Ayatollah and And Putin had a very pleasant meeting.
I mean, you could see by the body language that they were just happy as clans to be chatting it up.
And at the end of their meeting, they were talking about all kinds of industrial agreements and business and all the rest of it, you know.
It's going Russia's way.
Anybody in the mainstream media who tells you that this is the death blow of Russia and Russia is going to collapse tomorrow, you just have to go on YouTube and you can see all kinds of videos of English-speaking Russians who show you dating life in Russia.
Yeah, sure.
McDonald's went away, but the McDonald's franchise was bought up by some local, and they're selling Big Macs.
They don't have Apple computers, but they have Lenovo computers and all kinds of other computers, and they're perfectly fine.
You know, it's not affecting them.
And people say, oh, the chips, these special chips that, you know, they're not going to get from the West.
No, they'll just get them from China.
And on top of that, it's an exaggeration that these microchips are that crucial to the economy that if you don't get them, the entire economy will collapse.
It's copium.
It's copium.
I don't know if you've ever heard of this drug.
It's this drug that you don't inject into your vein like heroin.
No.
You stick it into your eyes via your screen when you read all this nonsense.
Because it's nonsense.
And it's just all copium.
Because, see, they have to justify to themselves this catastrophic mistake that they make.
Because sanctions historically have never worked.
And by the way, sanctions are a truly cruel weapon because the only people who are injured are the common people of the country that's targeted with sanctions.
We saw this in Cuba.
Cuba has been sanctioned under sanctions since, what, 1960 or whatever?
And, well, has the island sunk?
No.
Has the leadership been changed?
No.
Same with Iran.
The sanctions don't hurt the leadership of a country.
On the contrary, the people are smart enough to realize that this is an attack on them.
And so, rather than be angry with their leadership, they realize, hey, the West hates us and wants to destroy us.
They want to destroy my babushka.
They want to destroy the future of my kids.
I'm not going to be protesting against my leadership because the leadership was doing what I think was perfectly sensible.
I'm going to hate the West.
I'm not going to overthrow my leadership.
And it's in Western Europe and the United States where you're going to see more and more repressive measures.
You're already seeing it.
The corporate media is not reporting on these massive protests that are going on in Germany, in the Netherlands, in France, in Spain.
All of these protests, Czech Republic too, all of these protests are basically saying, stop with the sanctions, make nice with Russia.
We don't we see what's coming and we don't want any part of it.
And the leadership of Western Europe is using its its manipulation of the mainstream media to silence these voices.
I mean, you don't hear any reporting whatsoever on what's going on.
No, and those protests are only going to increase dramatically in the months ahead as people are freezing and starving.
But about the sanctions themselves, I think it's also these sanctions are forcing Russia and giving it a financial motivation to expand its own domestic supply chain and domestic production.
I mean, Russia manufactures microchips to some extent, and they can certainly manufacture a lot more.
There's no lack of engineering intelligence in the Russian people where they can't make microchips.
Of course they can.
There's some of the just highest raw IQ people on the planet.
But then in the United States, the Pentagon just announced recently that they've halted all shipments of F-35s because there are components they found that use rare earth metals from China.
So where Russia is sourcing domestically and actually building a domestic resiliency in its supply chain, the United States is depleting itself of its munitions by shipping them off to Ukraine while shutting down the actual delivery of its most modern fighter jet because the United States is depleting itself of its munitions by shipping them off to And there's no solution to that.
I mean, contrast those two positions.
Yeah, well, look, Russia is the only country, as I see it, that is truly self-sufficient.
If they shut off all their borders around the world, they'd be fine, because they have the key resources.
They have energy, they have food, and they have raw materials for industry.
So they can shut themselves off from the rest of the world and become a hermit country, and they will be fine.
That is the calculation that the West did not make.
They kept thinking that sanctions are the way to go.
And you have to keep in mind, too, they've invested so many psychological chips that at this point, Borrell, the foreign minister for the EU, is basically saying that...
It's a war between the West and Russia.
They've invested so much that they can't pull back.
They won't pull back.
They'll just keep on doubling down.
Any kind of domestic resistance in the West will be crushed.
The Germans have announced that on the 1st of October, they are going to deploy It's not a democracy anymore.
You have this professional leadership class that is completely incompetent, that has made catastrophic decisions, that is directly affecting the people of Europe and the United States.
And, you know, Europe is going to be economically annihilated.
And here's something else, too, that people aren't giving much consideration to at this time, but I think is going to be a big issue.
Europe has an enormous migrant population from Africa and from the Middle East, right?
They threw open their borders and, you know, we can do it, you know, is Angela Merkel's famous phrase.
And they brought in all of these migrants.
And these people are not used to the cold.
They're not used to the dark.
They thought that they'd go to Europe and it would be the land of milk and honey where all the sidewalks are made from gold.
And what are they going to be?
They're going to be cold and they're going to be hungry.
They're not going to be happy.
Those people potentially can be a powder keg of just all kinds of misery.
And I pointed that out on my Twitter account and my Twitter account got banned because of that.
Of course.
Yeah, because of course, because you have to repress the news that you don't want to hear.
And so Europe is lost, and there's no coming back.
And Europe will be deindustrialized.
People will go hungry.
And of course, the fabulous welfare state that they have depends on industry paying taxes, a lot of taxes, and individuals paying a lot of taxes.
But when you have all those people who used to pay taxes are now unemployed, where are you going to get the money?
And so what they're going to wind up doing is they're going to have to print money eventually.
And you've got to keep in mind, no matter how much money you print, see, if the good or service is not available in terms of energy, it doesn't matter how much money you have.
You can have a million dollars, but if you're stuck in the Sahara Desert with no water, the million dollars, you can set it on fire.
It's not going to help you, you see?
And that's the problem of Europe.
They're going to print euros as they are doing and give them to all the people.
And the people are going to take those euros and go to the supermarket and say, hey, where's the food?
And they're going to go to the gas station and say, hey, where's the gasoline for my car?
Where's the electricity for the heating in my home?
There's them there!
You've really hit upon the key disconnect.
I'm so glad you brought up this point where so much of Western civilization today is operating in the realm of financialization or virtualization of assets where they think, oh, we can trade commodities on paper and that the paper is the commodity, but it isn't.
Yeah.
Or that we can print money, and then that's how we can help people afford electricity.
But the electricity isn't there.
The kilowatt hours don't exist because the gas doesn't exist.
And so you could have...
The Swifts, who are threatened with three years of prison if they heat their homes above 19 degrees Celsius, you could make them all billionaires with cash or whatever currency, but they're still freezing, right?
Exactly.
And by the way, to the Swiss bros who might be listening, see, if I were you, I'd go to prison.
I would put up my knee and call.
Yeah, because in prison you'll be fed and you'll be warm.
Right, right.
That's the first question.
But, you know, you also realize that the Swiss government is going to have to deploy temperature police.
To run around the cities with little thermal sensors and zapping your window to see how much heat is leaking.
And this is a whole new level of a police state that even the Nazis hadn't come up with that.
It's incredible.
And also, there's going to be a bigger push for digital currencies and the Internet of Things so that you can be controlled.
I mean, I personally, when I was living, until recently, I was living in the Netherlands.
Okay.
And I personally was totally against any kind of Internet of Things or Siri or whatever, you know, AI was in my home.
You know, because, you know, it'll be easy to monitor people.
And this is going to be Panopticon.
I don't know if you've ever heard of the Panopticon prison.
It's a prison.
It was a thought experiment where basically the warden or the guards would be at the center of a circular prison.
And all the prison cells are on the outside facing into the center.
And from the center, everybody can be monitored.
This is a panopticon state that we're going to be arriving at, whereby the central authority is monitoring every single person.
And everybody is a prisoner.
The fact that they are trying to cut off people from moving to the east, moving to Russia, It's turning into a prison continent.
Europe is.
It's going against every Western value.
Every Christian value and the inheritors of the Christian values of the Enlightenment, they're going against all of them.
The dignity of the individual, free speech, freedom of movement, all of that is going out the window because of the catastrophic mistakes that they made.
And it's too late.
It can't be taken back.
I mean, if you wanted to, you know, as a thought experiment, you could have said that maybe in May, you know, or maybe June, they could have rolled this back, but now it's too late.
And like I said, see, the psychology of these leaders, they cannot admit a mistake.
They cannot.
They cannot say, I done goofed.
And they have to continue with these policies that, when you take the big macro step back and you look at the expanse of history, you have to remember that Europe and the United States were always political backwaters.
And people don't remember this or understand this in a historical context.
But you have to understand that the center of the world has always been Asia, China, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, all those countries in Asia.
And Russia has been sort of like peripheral to Asia.
Western Europe was a backwater.
People don't seem to understand this, but between the end of the Roman Empire and approximately 1600, Europe was a wasteland.
Nobody wanted to go there, okay?
And it was only through a series of historical accidents and the emergence of industrialization in Europe, which started in Europe, especially Great Britain and the Netherlands.
That's when you had these great colonial powers going around and establishing empires.
And from 1600 until now, that's why Europe and the United States, especially after, you know, Really, starting with 1918, they became the dominant players.
But this is a historical fluke.
The resources and the people are in Asia and Russia.
And Europe is forcibly de-industrializing itself through incompetence.
And they're going to go back to being a backwater.
Poor...
Without food, without any natural resources, because Europe doesn't have any natural resources to speak of.
It has coal at best, and that's it.
And so you won't be allowed to burn it, though, to heat your home.
That would be illegal.
No, because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would throw a hissy fit.
She'd start crying at some.
You know, fenced somewhere, you know?
I mean, come on.
Yes.
Now, Gonzalo, I want to be mindful of your time.
Are you okay to spend a couple more minutes?
Sure.
Yeah, you can go as long as you like.
I mean, I'm just hanging out, having coffee, smoking a cigarette, and watching a very quiet car car this morning.
So, yeah.
Okay, great.
Well, and folks, if you're enjoying this interview, be sure to check out Gonzalo's channel.
He is still somehow on YouTube, GonzaloLira2, or the second, I suppose.
I mean, it means his second channel, I believe.
Yes, it is.
I couldn't come up with a better name, so yeah.
But he has these very interesting roundtables with some very intelligent people joining to talk about things.
And, you know, what I find fascinating about the roundtables that you do is whether or not someone agrees or disagrees with the guests that you have on, at least in every single case, they are a thoughtful, intelligent, reasoned person or their argument is reasoned.
Whereas when you turn on Western media, it's just script reading dumb as dirt propaganda.
Like these people are morons.
Right. - You said it.
I didn't.
I'm too polite for that.
No, that was me being polite.
Are you kidding?
I held back the profanity.
I didn't want to say, you know, like, Buck Fiden or something like that.
But your guests are intelligent whether or not you agree with them, you know?
Yeah, that's the point.
The point of the show is to bring together people who, if they disagree or not, that's perfectly fine.
Oops.
Hello.
You still hear me?
Yeah, I still hear you.
I lost my little ear pod.
Yeah, the point of the show is to have intelligent people who disagree, perhaps, but it's always simple and it's always based on fact.
It's not just, oh, because it's like that and I think so.
No, that doesn't fly in my shows.
And so I never have guests who are propagandists.
I have guests who have thoughtful positions.
Whether I agree with them or not is irrelevant.
What's interesting to me is to have smart conversations.
Look, I always think of it like a really good dinner party where you have random guests.
Yes.
Talking about different things.
And yeah, that's the approach I take.
That kind of civil discussion between intelligent people, I think, is sorely lacking, unfortunately.
But it's the level of the discourse that we have today, where people think that they have to shout and have the dumbest ideas possible to make themselves noticed, which is a pity.
But that's the way things are today.
And also, of course, the mainstream media The corporate media, the controlled media, doesn't want people to understand what's going on.
That's why I want to come back to the issue of these offensives, that in the West, I've noticed that they are hysterical.
They think that this is like, you know, hallelujah, you know, they're going to win and they took back all this territory and Any day now, they're going to take back Crimea, and then after that, they're going to take Moscow.
What are you talking about?
You have to keep in mind something else, too.
A lot of times, people see some video of, say, some Russian soldiers being captured or some Russian tank being blown up.
It doesn't mean anything.
Because you have tens of thousands of soldiers on either side of the front.
Altogether, just a casual guesstimate, I'd say that at any given time on the contact line, on the war front between Russia and Ukraine, there must be a good 100,000 that are facing each other and shooting each other.
You know, 100,000.
That's bigger than any stadium, okay?
Yes, yes.
And you have to keep in mind, too, that the front, you look on a map, and it's no big deal, but you actually start to measure the distances.
It's 1,200 kilometers.
That's roughly 800 miles, okay?
And so it's enormous.
And so any particular video that you look at, you have to kind of like, oh, that's interesting, but kind of ignore it.
Well, people have to come...
Go ahead.
I'm sorry, but people are so very much fixated on the geography and the map, and I'd like to share kind of an internal thought that I've had on this, is in the game of chess.
So everybody knows how chess starts out, one player on one side, one player on the other.
But especially later in the game, it doesn't matter which squares you control.
What matters is eliminating the enemy's Knights and bishops and queens in this case that can exert power.
If you eliminate their pieces, it doesn't matter where you are on the board.
Yeah, you're going to win.
Exactly.
And that is demilitarization, is eliminating the opponent's pieces.
Even if you have to maneuver around, you have to give, you have to take, you have to retreat from time to time, you have to faint, whatever the case may be.
I mean, that's, you know, speaking of Russia, that's chess also.
Yeah, and look, there are From the very beginning of this conflict, there was no way for the Zelensky regime to win.
It was simply not possible, okay?
And they should have negotiated some sort of ceasefire, some sort of settlement months ago.
It's too late now because the Russians, they just don't believe the West or NATO. They just don't believe them.
And so you cannot make a contract, an agreement with someone, if you don't believe in them.
If you don't believe that they will hold up their end of the bargain.
Yes.
See?
I mean, every business deal that you have, there is an element of trust.
And, you know, and it goes both ways.
And it has to be there.
But if it's gone, as it is now, it's gone forever.
It's never coming back.
Because there was the Minsk agreement, the Minsk 2 agreements that were signed in 2015.
And for almost seven years, the West, Germany and France and the United States made no effort whatsoever to implement these agreements.
That's right.
And so if for seven years you have a peace agreement that would have brought long-lasting peace to the region and stability and all the rest of it, and, you know, you don't agree to it, Then how is anybody going to believe you when you come later and say, no, no, no, no, now I really, now I'm really going to sit down and nobody's going to believe you.
Okay?
And so it's as simple as that.
And so the Russians are going to keep on going in the slow grind.
A lot of people are saying, oh, maybe they're going to up the remit of the special military operation and call it an anti-terrorist operation.
Because after all, the Zelensky regime has assassinated people in Russia.
They did.
Darya Dugina back a month ago.
And I know people who knew her personally.
And they were like, you know, she's just some, you know, PhD student and commentator and very charismatic and very liked by a lot of people.
But she was a nobody politically.
And they assassinated her knowingly.
You know, you have this, you know, persecution of Russian speakers.
You have...
Well, you know, all kinds of nastiness going on in the Zelensky regime.
They're really just a nasty bunch.
But the point here is, the serious point is, the Russians, I don't think that they're going to up the ante insofar as calling this an anti-terrorist operation.
They're going to keep on grinding because it's working for them.
It's working.
And here's a key issue.
From the very beginning of this conflict, The Western military analysts were saying, why aren't the Russians using their best gear?
Because, for instance, in their air defense systems, they're using what's known as the S-300 system.
Oh, yeah, those are much older systems, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, they have the S-400 and the S-500, which are way more sophisticated.
I mean, these are always quantum leaps up, okay?
The S-500, it's credibly believed that it could intercept any first strike, any nuclear first strike, and intercept all of the weapons in one go.
And that's how sophisticated this stuff is.
And here's another thing, that in the United States, because of arrogance that's been fed by Hollywood and distorted history, they believe that American military is the best in the world.
That's not true.
The American military does not have an air defense system that comes close to the S-300, let alone the S-400 and the S-500.
Yes, that's a fact.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And a lot of people are wondering, you know, why isn't there like a no-fly zone?
Why doesn't NATO impose no-fly zone?
You know what you're talking about?
about that?
And everybody was saying, if NATO were to do a no-fly zone in Ukraine, every single NATO plane, without exception, would be blown out of the sky by the S-400, which is a step up that the Russians have not deployed.
Because the Russians are holding back their best gear because they still think, you know, maybe NATO is going to get involved, boots on the ground and the whole thing.
And when that happens, that's war.
And that's where we take the gloves off.
Because as I said from the very beginning of this conflict here, the Russians have been tiptoeing through Ukraine.
They don't want to break it.
They don't want to destroy it.
They don't want to do like what the United States did in Iraq or Syria.
They want to do as little damage as possible to the civilian infrastructure, as little damage as possible to the country as a whole.
They want to demilitarize and denosify, certainly, but they don't want to break the whole thing.
That's why they haven't declared full war, and that's why I think that they're still at this SMO stage, Special Military Operation, and they're not going to up it.
Because there would be escalation.
And they don't want to escalate because they don't want to give NATO the excuse.
Because they understand the United States and the Europeans much better than they understand themselves.
Because the Western leadership class, if Russia were to up the ante, even if it goes from an SMO, a special military operation, to an anti-terrorist operation, there is significant factions in the West that would demand and get a NATO escalation Okay, this is Mike Adams interrupting our conversation here.
What you just heard is about the first hour of the interview with Gonzalo Lira that actually lasted two hours and 20 minutes, and the remainder of this interview will be posted tomorrow on my channel.
This weekend, let's say, perhaps tomorrow or the next day, on my channel on brighteon.com and other platforms as well.
My channel is HR Report.
So we have a lot more to talk about.
You know, Gonzalo's a fascinating individual, and we get more into philosophy, world leaders, and theories of...
The demise of Western culture and all kinds of fascinating issues.
So don't miss that upcoming interview, roughly the second half of our conversation.
You'll find it soon on brighteon.com.
And thank you for tuning in today.
It's super, super late for me, so I'm going to say goodnight.
But I hope you enjoy this and feel free to repost it on other platforms.
You have our permission.
God bless you.
Take care.
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