Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Yesterday's discussion post.
Ugh it's always disheartening to see based people having bad takes.
An old Marxist teacher of mine said this the other day:
Did you just say it goes beyond Vietnam? You are literally one of the smartest most knowledgeable people I've ever met, but this is just nonsensical propaganda.
cf.:
"In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters."
"Over 7.5 million tons of bombs were dropped by the US and its allied nations during the Vietnam War."
War is fucking horrible, but how the hell can you say that 3 months of war in Ukraine goes beyond Vietnam?
:jokah:
That kind of perceptive disconnect with this war really makes me feel like I'm going insane sometimes. There is no relationship between the actual, measured level of death/destruction and people's perception of it. There is no level of hyperbole that is unacceptable. The fucking President called it a genocide and the worst in Europe since WW2 (everyone forgot :yugoslavia: ???) and no one batted an eye. I don't understand what liberals see when they see this war, when they speak about it it's like fan fiction, just a completely different reality from mine. They actually see a couple thousand deaths versus millions and say the former is worse, and manage to say it as if you were the crazy one. And you don't need to go back as far as Vietnam, the Afghanistan war literally ended last year and yet bringing it up is like ancient history somehow. I hate to use the term outside the abuse context, but it really feels like constant gaslighting. An uninterrupted stream of unreality from people in my own life right up through the highest levels of power, influence, and visibility. If I couldn't look at the numbers myself and confirm that I'm not nuts, I don't know how I'd feel.
The elephant in the room is Yemen, with approximately 400,000 deaths and counting, and no talk of sanctioning Saudi or the US.
The genocide in Yemen will be the model for neoliberal response to climate change going forward.
Far from sanctions, they're using this as the model
No talk of sanctioning the Saudi Arabia or the US is a generous assessment of the discourse. I don't think most people know that there is anything going on there, if they even know of the place at all; they sure as hell don't know we're currently helping invade, blockade, and starve a whole country.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen... there really are quite a lot of elephants.
They think white, "civilized" people shouldn't be fighting like this. Neoliberalism (they think) brings peace and stability to the world. White folks fighting challenges this notion that the white people who have accepted neoliberalism aren't actually better than anyone else.
Yes! This is exactly why I commented here. I am grateful for this place. Whenever I wander into liberal spaces I feel like they are from a parallel universe.
And yet... the factual truth is that 70000 civilians died in the Afghanistan War (at least) , and cca 3000 civilians died in Ukraine. Both figures are from mainstream sources, but suddenly you are a tankie if you'd tried to suggest that there were worse wars in the past 10 years. More than twenty times the civilian casualties. All for a war that haven't achieved any political objectives apart from making the Military-Industrial Complex richer.
It's their manufactured reality that would shatter if they were actually consistent in calling out war crimes.
How the fuck can you be a fucking Marxist and know about an analytical tool as powerful as historical materialism and then go "I dunno sometimes pure evil just happen for no reason I guess"?
Exactly what makes me so confused. He usually has much more nuanced takes. I had to read it twice, because this kind of shitlib take is completely out of character.
He teaches Althusser and Badiou btw
Tell him that then.
Nah. Week 2 of the war I decided not to engage in debates about the conflict, especially with people who see this as some kind of Good vs Evil war like we are living in Narnia. Maybe after the war some people will be more willing to take an historical perspective, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
I am just flabbergasted that even Marxist professors are prone to this.
Old age and propoganda get even the best of us. Especially if there is no material incentive not to believe it, and every material incentive to.
How disgusting and eurocentric. Racist old fuck deserves having his nose rubbed in a pile of agent-orange covered dogshit for such an opinion.
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Don't forget all that agent orange, which still causes birth defects today
Also don't forget all of the unexploded ordinance that litters the countries america bombed just for funsies, that still kills dozens of people every year to this day
In Laos alone the yearly average death toll is around 50 people, usually mostly children and farmers
50 people now. Total for Laos is 20k dead since the end of the war.
Plus many high-explosives and rocket propellents are toxic all by themselves, or decay in to toxic substances.
I’m always fascinated by the notion of “pure” evil. What does that “pure” mean? Like what is pure evil uncontaminated by, in contrast to regular evil?
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i literally cannot stop thinking about this. how can you put so little thought into a statement
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Lot's of people have dogshit takes and blind spots. Kill your heroes.
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No. This is not the whole paragraph. He is writing about Russian war crimes.
Made me think of this anecdote about Tony Blair and the Iraq war
https://youtu.be/25aYrfvOGUs?t=1055