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.
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.
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.
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
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.