No update today.
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.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
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.
Opinion poll runners can go fuck themselves, all they ever do is make up a license for the ruling class to do as it would have done anyways, they only matter when they match up with the plan, if they dont then they are not real or representative.
They mostly work on commission and guess who has money for those commissions.
I’m watching the Indy 500, and I can’t help but feel we’re about to see a bit of an uptick of Covid in the Midwest. 500k people sat closely together outside might not be as bad as I fear, but knowing how busy the bars and restaurants are in Indy that weekend…
:yikes-1::yikes-2::yikes-3:
Russian state propaganda:
France limits water usage RT
A severe drought has prompted 24 out 96 departments of France to impose limits on water usage, the country’s Ministry of Ecological Transition said on Saturday.
Global food crisis may spread from grain to sugar RT
Sugar prices are expected to soar due to the export restrictions imposed by a number of key producing nations seeking to tame rising domestic food prices.
US general insists he is ‘apolitical’ RT
Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley stressed the idea that the military must be apolitical during a speech at Princeton University and in a subsequent interview with Fox News on Friday, glossing over criticism that he has been anything but during his tenure in the cabinets of President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump. “You’re not taking an oath to a dictator or wannabe dictator, or tyrant… you’re taking an oath to the Constitution of the United States of America,” Milley said at Princeton University’s ROTC Class of 2022 ceremony.
Former Soviet state considers letting NATO blow up WWII memorial RT
The Riga authorities are weighing different – including the most extreme – options to demolish a World War II monument in the city, the Latvian capital’s vice mayor, Vilnis Kirsis, said on Friday. Asked by local media whether the city council was considering the idea of letting “NATO troops, our military” blow up the monument, Kirsis confirmed that the option was not off the table.
The memorial also became the centerpiece of a controversy around this year’s May 9 celebrations. The Latvian authorities declared the date – when Victory Day is celebrated in Russia and a number of other countries – a day of mourning for those killed or injured in Ukraine. The move prompted thousands of people to defy the ban on commemorating the Soviet victory and come to the monument to lay flowers, which were bulldozed away shortly thereafter. However, people returned to the site with even more flowers the next day.
Our empathy for human suffering is determined by to two factors: Who are suffering and who are responsible for the suffering.
Russians in Latvia are a dehumanised minority, associated with our official enemy and the nationalist Latvian state oppressing them is le epic underdog hero who stands up to ebil Russia. There is no chance in hell westoids are going to give a single fuck about what happens to them.
A third of the Latvian population are Russian-speakers. They have previously been denied basic rights like citizenship and if you are concerned about the fate of minorities you should be really worried about what will happen to them now that Russophobia has been mainstreamed in the west.
Get ready for Latvian de-nazification lol
Keep blowing up Soviet statues Latvia, I fucking dare you
Exactly how would the denazification of Latvia work? If Russia intervenes and stops the nazis, then we have a Russia-NATO war, a war with very high risk of ending organised human civilization.
It's bipartisan and therefore apolitical
:amerikkka-clap:
Russian telegram:
"Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that Zelensky was guilty of launching a special operation in Ukraine. According to the politician, if the Ukrainian leader had promised Russia not to join NATO, not to allow the alliance to deploy its troops at the Russian borders, today's events would not have happened. Abe also said that Zelensky could grant autonomy to the DPR and the LPR. But instead, he chose conflict."
This seems to be a rather exaggerated statement by telegram. The interview with Abe has him saying:
" I don’t think there are many options left in this situation. There are lots of ways to analyse Putin’s character, but I think he is someone who believes in power and is a realist at the same time. He is not the type of person who pursues ideals, or makes sacrifices for ideas.
Before the invasion, when they had surrounded Ukraine, it might have been possible [to avoid war]. If [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky could have been made to promise that his country will not join NATO, or made to grant a high degree of autonomy to the two enclaves in the east. I understand this would be hard to do—perhaps an American leader could have done it. But of course [Zelensky] would refuse.
However, now that we are here, I think the only way forward is to stand with Ukraine and thoroughly oppose Russia’s aggression. That is the way to protect the international order that we have created since the end of World War II."
besides https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md what are some other resources on regime change, invasion, etc to help pry libs away from nationalism
I remember this book from a long time ago, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. I never read it so this is just word of mouth.
Of course the MSM is going to claim everything is a conspiracy but I figure even if the details are a little bit embellished the overall picture should be accurate.
Testimony of US citizen Stephen James Humberd, who lived in the city at the time of Izyum's liberation. Confirms the facts of the shelling of Izyum by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in order to intimidate the civilian population. https://t.me/intelslava/30244
From the close circle of the Chairman of the Nikolaev Regional State Administration Kim, we learned that this morning the military of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which were located on the territory of the Okean shipbuilding plant in Nikolaev, were with heavy weapons (tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, MLRS) , as well as a warehouse of RAV and fuel and lubricants, and up to 40 nationalists were destroyed, more than 20 were injured. Special thanks for the information to one of Kim's advisers. Even Kim's close circle begins to understand the reality of what is happening. https://t.me/intelslava/30243
4th generation warfare includes killing your own people and blaming the enemy for it. I'm still waiting for horror stories to come out about the political reppression Kiev is doing to it's own citizens
So a crank coworker of mine is convinced that whatever Treaty that's in the works right now to be signed under the banner of the UN to give the WHO unilateral power to declare pandemics and shit is a deep state conspiracy under Obungler and his puppet O'Brandon to declare gun violence and white supremacy a pandemic and to "treat" them with the same government overreaching zeal we saw with the covid lock downs.
“treat” them with the same government overreaching zeal we saw with the covid lock downs.
oh so the government will ask them to stop and then transition into hiding the actual statistics to prevent the public from realizing it's a problem
Yes I had to grimace to conceal the shit-eating grin I had on my face.
Imagine if white supremacy over minorities was initially handled by ""government overreach"" once the problem had fully manifested itself and needed to be dealt with to ensure the survival of the country, but was not actually eradicated, and then over time, white superiority was slowly normalized and people became increasingly accustomed to it until it because an invisible miasma that many people don't even think really exists anymore and yet still threatens to pull the society into disorder? What a wacky reality that would be!
there's hundreds of clips like this on the war telegrams. i feel bad for the national forces because the vast majority of them dont want to be there and have very little to no training. they're lied to about EVERYTHING. They get sent to the front without any support.
Is the br00tal music part of the actual drone footage?
no idea, I know that Russians like to put music over the footage and time the bass drop or whatever to the strike hitting. not sure if Ukraine does it too.
The Russian mind is still partially stuck in the 2000s era of epic pwnage and MLG no scopes
so the Merc "Aiden Aslan" has started a youtube channel from Russian Imprisonment ..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgS37LCsPIE
Ayy yo, it's ya boi, the one and only, Uber1488 live from a Siberian prison camp, and today's challenge is going to be: how many rocks can I split open in one hour, that's right, ONE HOUR, with this pickaxe? Remember to like and subscribe for more, it really helps the channel grow!
Sometimes I wonder if would’ve had the courage to join the Lincoln Brigade and fight alongside Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and then I wonder if this is how all the foreign chuds feel about volunteering for Ukraine in this war
You would've had the Communist Party and the Communist internationale at your back in getting you trained, equipped, and moved over to spain to be organized into an international Brigade you could integrate into. A lot of the hogs just straight up gofundme'd themselves into the Ukraine war.
From what Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia the situation was kind of a cluster fuck ,with badly limited supplies and poor training. All his group had was good morale.
And at the time there were no spy satellites, no drones, no rocket boosted artillery, no cruise missiles, the tanks sucked, the trucks sucked, the only people who had aircraft in theater were, as I understand it, the Luftwaffe (and I may be wrong about that). It was a very different kind of war, where light infantry had at least some chance of making a difference.
that isnt to say that you will be well equiped, the civil war was fought in very precarious situations.
You were probably more better equipped than the war pigs mercs in ukraine right now, and fighting a less technologically advanced enemy too! (thats to say all the wicked and terrifying shit todays war is being fought with didn't exist in the '30s)
With 100 Million Refugees, the Migrant Crisis Has Barely Begun Bloomberg
For the first time ever, more than 100 million people worldwide have been “forcibly displaced,” in the jargon of the UNHCR, the refugee agency of the United Nations. Millions of Ukrainian women and children have fled from Russia’s war of aggression in just the past three months. Millions more — often less conspicuous in the Western media — have run from violence in places like Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Afghanistan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Both the numbers and the suffering are about to get worse. Also owing to the Russian attack on Ukraine — a “bread basket” that now can’t export its wheat and other staples — a global food crisis is imminent. Most people in Western countries will feel it as a painful rise in prices. But those who are already hungry — in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere — will face starvation.
Margaritis Schinas, the European Union’s commissioner in charge of migration, told Bloomberg that he’s expecting another refugee crisis. In this one, people will be coming in dinghies across the Mediterranean, rather than on trains through Ukraine and Poland. It’ll be “more messy,” Schinas reckons. As if all those other crises hadn’t been messy enough.
Part of human nature is to distinguish between in-groups and out-groups, and to show the ins more empathy than the outs. Even Benjamin Franklin, ordinarily an open-minded type, looked askance at German and other non-English immigrants, whom he considered “swarthy” and suspect.
That might explain the about-turn in Polish policies and attitudes between the 2015 crisis and this year’s. Back then, the refugees were dark-skinned Muslims, and Warsaw slammed its borders shut. Now they’re fellow Christians and Slavs, and Poland has warmly welcomed more than half of the 6.7 million Ukrainians who’ve fled abroad.
Poland is also getting tired of Ukrainian refugees at this point.
...
The biggest refugee crisis in history is still ahead of us. War, famine and plague will not only stay around, but spread and become worse, because of climate change. What will that do to our societies, and to us as individuals?
There are no easy answers. Speaking for most Germans in 2015, the country’s president at the time, Joachim Gauck, expressed the dilemma well: “We want to help. We are big-hearted. But our means are finite.” It’ll be important to keep both parts of that sentiment in mind — the magnanimity and the limits. But when in doubt, we should heed Leviticus, and keep our hearts big.
I'm not sure if you get to support your country and bloc committing a global campaign of genocide and terror and destabilizing regime change, and pumping pollution into the atmosphere until the asphalt on the equator starts melting, then daintily skip off and go "We need to maintain our compassion in the face of human crises. We were all refugees and immigrants once!" The West caused the crises we're seeing today.
I find it interesting how commonplace the term "Russia's war of aggression" has become. What other wars have been called "X's war of aggression in Y" rather than "the war in Y"?
The war of northern aggression :angrels: <-(trying to find a good Engels emoji to reference the confederate Engels meme)
This war has led to some really annoying linguistic virtue signalling on both sides. In westoid discourse the invasion is always "unprovoked" and "unjustified" and Crimea is always prefixed with "the illegally annexed peninsula". In Ukraine Russia is not just Russia but "Russia (aggressor country and terrorist)".
Meanwhile in Russian media Meta, the company behind Facebook, is always prefixed with "(banned in the Russian Federation for extremism)"
All of these performative attempts to constantly underline how evil your enemies are and how just your own cause is are excruciatingly tedious and annoying to read, like a written version of a popup ad.
Facebook should be banned for extremism, it promotes killing Russians and has enabled multiple genocides
I don't disagree. I just don't need to hear that it's banned in Russia every time it's mentioned.
Well one sides verbal tics correspond to reality (Facebook IS an extremist organization that promotes hate) whereas the other continue to lie off its ass and ignore context (this is not a Russian war of aggression, neither side has labeled it a war and the aggression was done by NATO in the 2014 coup and attacks on Donbas)
Every war is like this. To get people to kill each other for rich men's geopolitical games you have to dehumanize the enemy as absolutely as possible.
i believe in mexico the US-mexican war is called the war of northern aggression
Pretty much every war is called "X's war of aggression" by the side being aggressed upon
The North’s War of Aggression
They are repeating their Lost Cause confederate apologism in a new form
Hope the machine translation (from Russian -https://t.me/sashakots/33179) won't slaughter this, I'm too tired from job today (on damn Sunday!) to translate manually:
Representatives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are conducting secret negotiations with the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on the burial of their dead. And about surrender. The negotiations were successful. Group "O" says:
“I will not repeat that this has already become the norm for the Kyiv regime and they act on the principle: “no bodies to bury = no problem” (= no money for their families). I want to talk about something else here.
I tried to write this post for a long time, something kept stopping me. Probably did not want one of its participants to repeat the fate of Sergei Lapko (a company commander who received a term for showing the plight of the Armed Forces of Ukraine).
So, after the liberation of another settlement from the Nazis in the Donetsk region, we went to the enemy command (fortunately, intelligence works well and their call signs with the frequencies on which they work are well known to us) and offered them to pick up the bodies of their dead comrades, naturally with a complete cessation fire from our side and unhindered passage of the car to the designated place.
After some conversations, they received a categorical refusal and a request not to disturb them anymore on this topic (this is a polite way to put it, there was actually a long stream of obscene expressions). Toward evening they were all buried. (I don’t attach a photo, I’ll explain further).
In the middle of that night they come to me on the radio from the checkpoint and ask me to urgently arrive. Understanding nothing, I am confused, I leave for the post. On the spot, they tell me that a fighter came from the other side, calls your call sign, said he will only talk to you. I go into the room, a young guy is sitting, the uniform is dirty, shabby. Showed documents. And he began to say: “I am the commander of a platoon of those boys whose bodies you proposed to take today, I couldn’t get on the radio with you, they would immediately undertake steps. Bury my soldiers, please, and tell me where, I will pass on the location to their relatives. The command flatly refuses to inform the families about the dead and wounded, so as not to cause panic among the relatives. We are now being drafted only because otherwise we will go to jail, and we can’t even retreat - there are cadres or nationalists behind us, we would get a bullet in the back from them.”
He told how they were prepared in training before being sent to the front: "For two weeks we studied the charters, 30 bullets for training in shooting and on the road we go." All his words were confirmed by photographs. He says: "Fortunately, phones are not taken away, we record everything."
They talked for a long time, spoke about the mood in the units: "everything is sad, everyone is afraid, and those who are in front and those who are behind." But he came not only with this request. "My main task," he continued, "is to save the lives of my fighters. Tell me how we can surrender. We don't want to fight for the oligarchs who are sitting abroad and our corrupt government! Why is surrender possible for Azov, but not for us?"
After receiving all the instructions, he left, left with the hope that his remaining subordinates would remain alive. A day later, after the start of the assault on the next settlement, the platoon of this commander surrendered in full force, as he promised. Now their lives are not in danger.
Summing up, I want to ask only one question. When will the population of Ukraine realize that their president, a drug addict and that child-lover Arestovich, does not care about the lives of the citizens of his country!? They calmly surrendered the Azov in Mariupol, declaring that this was an evacuation, and they will continue to do so. Until the last Ukrainian... PS I wanted to be brief, but it didn’t quite work out.”
If this is at all extrapolatable to the wider Ukrainian forces - and who can truly say either way, though it makes sense to me that morale would be bad for Ukraine - it really adds a disturbing edge to the oft-repeated "strong resistance" of the Ukrainian troops. While the media lauds their bravery and toughness against the oncoming Russians, in reality, they have a gun jammed into the back of their heads at all times. They have no choice to be a "strong resistance" if they don't want to end up needlessly killed by neo-Nazi bullets.
Many wars are hostage situations for the working class who fight them for their bourgeoisie, but this one really takes that concept to a whole new level. At least if Russia was being particularly brutal with them or their POWs or the civilians of Ukraine then there might be a solid reason why the command thought they mustn't give an inch of ground, but they're being a lot more careful with them than most other armies, though of course not perfect.
It is a morbid, monstrous plan to slowly turn tens of thousands of young, innocent folks to corpses, buying more time as ordered from Washington. In front of our eyes, sometimes virtually recorded.
It's similar to pointless mass murder of Japanese soldiers [by their own government] in WW2 which was lost years before the first nuke dropped, and Hirohito & his men even waited till the second one; in case anyone wonders "when will it stop?".
Russian telegram:
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The EU has once again failed to reach a deal on the oil embargo. The unity of the European Union regarding sanctions against Russia is "beginning to crumble.", according to Germany's minister of the economy.
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The DPR is negotiating for recognition from several countries (I assume none of them are western)
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Ukrainian President visits front line in first official appearance outside Kyiv since Russia invaded
Alternate headline "Zelenskyy emerged from his bunker and saw his shadow pointing to 6 more weeks of war."
In response to @TechnologyMoth:
The interest in the war in the media is noticeably slowing down and has been for a while, definitely since Mariupol fully fell. Their daily update threads are still going, though. The google trends is pretty explanatory - though the tail of the curve seems to be holding out at a relatively stable if very slowly falling level, which implies that the remaining people interested are in it for the long haul (us, political redditors, twitter bluechecks, etc) and the average person has turned off, which matches my personal experiences.
