It's my weekly day off, so 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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.
https://t.me/asbmil ~ ASB Military News, banned from Twitter.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster - crowd-funded U.S journalist, mostly pro-Russian, works on the ground near warzones to report news and talk to locals.
https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.
https://t.me/rybar ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
With the entire western media sphere being overwhelming pro-Ukraine already, you shouldn't really need more, but:
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Yesterday's discussion post.
Banned from worldnews sub because I called out the Yemeni genocide and called Americans 'crackers'
Yeah you can’t use cracker, gusano or any other fun insult there
Whenever somebody awful dies I like to just comment "RIP Bozo" and it always gets a ton of furious replies. I remember like the last time I did it was the Prince Phillip and those two words got people to launch into long winded rants defending the legacy of colonialism and assuring me he was absolutely not a Bozo and how horrible and disrespectful my comment was
The way Libs don't hate their enemies is so weird to me. I'll say something really straightforward like "I hate my enemies and it would be a good thing if they died" and libs will go on whole tirades about how wanting a mass murderer to die so they stop doing mass murders is morally equivalent to doing mass murders. Bizarre people.
Libs hate their enemies as much as everyone else. They're just not being upfront about who their enemies are.
liberals, conservatives, fascists, social democrats, they all fight for the same thing: The entrenchment of capitalism. liberals might disagree with those other guys about strategy or compete with them about who gets to be on top of the grift but at the end of the day they're colleagues, not enemies. Their enemies are communists and they are treated accordingly. No lib ever concern trolls when people smear the memories of Castro, Stalin or Mao.
Venezuela and Iran sign 20-year cooperation plan, Maduro pledges joint ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ Multipolarista
Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro took a historic trip to Iran and announced a 20-year cooperation agreement, pledging to more closely integrate the countries’ economies and work together in a joint “anti-imperialist struggle for a better world, of international respect and peace, without hegemonies.”
Maduro signed the pact with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Tehran on June 11. It was described by the Venezuelan and Iranian governments as a “partnership agreement” and “cooperation agreement.”
The deal involves collaboration in science, technology, agriculture, oil and gas, petrochemicals, tourism, and culture, according to Tehran’s Press TV.
Iranian President Raisi said the document establishes formal “cooperation in the fields of energy, thermal power plants, repair and overhaul of refineries, exportation of technical and engineering services, economic, defense and military relations in the current government are indicative of the existence of many potentials and capacities in the two countries.”
Oh, okay, Venezuela wants to sign an anti-imperialist agreement with Iran - but does it not realize that Iran does things abroad, thus making it imperialist? Checkmate, west-hating tankies.
Ah but doesn’t Maduro realize that Iran is an evil rightwing theocracy?!?!?!?!? What is he some kind of nazbol?
Tbh İran is a imperialist actor. I heard from hakim that almost half of iraq parliement is usa puppet and other almost half is İran puppet. Can not blame maduro tho
Imperialism is when you challenge the influence of a hostile genocidal empire in your immediate geographical area.
Having politicians in a neighboring country in your pocket so that they prevent a staging ground for your invasion is imperialism?
Hakim has Breadtube Brain™ so I would not honestly take anything he says seriously.
They might have a non-American perspective, but they certainly don't have a non-Western one. Same with Luna Oi honestly.
I kind of laugh when Luna Oi said that vietnam before adopting Chinese imperial system was an “anarcho-syndicalist” system
Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, which lead to a devastating war that lasted almost 8 years. On top of invading Iran, Iraq also resorted to violating the Geneva Convention by using chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers. How much of real and alleged Iranian influence on Iraqi domestic politics is actually for the sake of an Iranian imperialism and how much of it is just so Iran doesn't get invaded again?
This. It's hard to call Iran's efforts to get influence in Iraq imperialism, given how hard the US tried to turn Iraq in to a US puppet, and how much regional instability and conflict came out of destabilized Iraq. Like maybe it's technically Imperialism, but having ISIS running around unopposed in your back yard while Western backed Al-Qaeda fighters try to further destabilize the region and US and Israeli spec-ops run around stirring up shit isn't something you can ignore.
Yeah there are 2 kinds of people who are “into” war. There are geopolitical and history war nerds, like Matt Christman or the War Nerd or WW2 dads. They usually want to understand a war better out of curiosity or to better understand a bigger picture
Then there are tacticool psychos who legitimately like war itself, they are the ones watching tons of gore and combat footage and doing montages.
I’m not talking only about liveleak hoodfuckery enjoyers.
I’m talking about people obsessed with gears and weaponry. Wow nice looking guns bro, if only you can rambo the rest of the war
Tacticool as i cower in my bunker/trench as thousands of artillery munitions explode around me
At least whoever finds your corpse will get a sick pair of oakleys.
There’s a large overlap. The online outspoken Ukrainefans in my opinion are largely either bluecheck neolibs, or insane fascist spec-ops guys who spam gore everywhere
Definitely one of the funnier mini-sagas of this war is the people from the West who went to Ukraine and were like "yeah I have no combat experience, never fired a gun at another person before, not sure how to drive a support vehicle, but I do have over 1000 hours in Arma and 1500 in Call of Duty so I think I know what I'm doing" and got fucking annihilated.
There's no reason to give a shit about the people who are just chuddy and wear camouflage while driving an SUV with a Blue Lives Matter and also a Don't Step On Me flag on their cars, but you can just throw "Sir, did you serve in Ukraine to save those brave people from Russian aggression?" at the more serious tacticool or militaryspeak people and either it's gonna be "Yeah, but I shat myself as soon as I saw I couldn't just order a drone strike because I saw some brown children in a village drinking from a well" or "No, but it's because I have, uh, bone spurs"
The annihilation of the Reddit brigade is probably one of the funniest things to ever happen in human history tbh
Calling it now, they'll make an overwrought 'Secret Soldiers of Benghazi' style film about them in a few years where they make them out to be brave martyrs.
I’m still laughing at one of the confirmed mercs who fled the warzone’s Reddit comment:
a medic died a day after he got to the front, another guy tried shooting an AK at an APC and was killed immediately.
Yeah, that's mindblowing. Like, even in videogames that probably wouldn't work lmao.
Remember that guy lmao.
Also hid using red Cross vests to escape Ukraine. Isn't that some sort of war crime, combatants pretending to be medical professionals in order to flee a warzone?
I remember some news broadcast from some major western news outlet. An ambulance arrived in the background and about 5 dudes carrying weapons got out and started having a cigarette.
It was clearly being used for transport. I guess it’s plausible they were aiding a wounded comrade but none of them looked stressed, they looked exactly as though “ah, finally back for some grub.”
My 1000 hours in ARMA have taught me that "get fucking annihilated" is pretty much all light infantry do in modern warfare.
The bone spurs discourse was one of th most annoying parts of the Trump admin. Oh wow he didn't wanna fight in Vietnam, haha wow what a shitty guy haha. Much more respectable if he napalmed villages in Cambodia right?
John "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" McCain, darling of the media.
Oh yeah, dodging the draft was the only kinda good thing that Trump did (he didn't really oppose the war any other way though so it was still fairly selfish, if smart). I just use it to make fun of people who support wars and think that they're fundamentally good and opportunities for valour and all that liberal and chud shit, but don't actually want to go fight in them.
1500 hours of cod and arma
My brother in christ you are in escape from tarkov and the enemy is playing red alert 2
This war has brought out a large contingent of people, who when you mention the war, display an extraordinary level of knowledge about howitzer systems and intelligence twitter accounts and will talk endlessly about the minutiae of a random engagement in Banderaversk.
No actual discussion or understanding of any of the wider strategic implications or trends beyond the mainstream narrative, just endless guff about how cool this piece of artillery is clogging the discussion with asinine nonsense.
You attempt to challenge any of this and they condescend that because you don't know that the NATO Chode weapons system actually outranges the Russian equivalent by 0.15cm you have no idea what you're talking about.
also that "outranges russian artillery" stuff is complete horseshit, only if they're using the real expensive rocket assisted guided rounds are they longer ranged and not a single picture of the howitzers the US gave them has the guidance computer. there's some image of artillery ranges that's going around that appears to be entirely made up
Guns point forward, mortars point up, howitzer's are half way between the two
Today’s German Economic Elites Have Strong Links to the Nazis Jacobin
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Over the past couple of decades, a malignant form of historical revisionism has emerged on the American right. Led by conservative political commentator and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza, the Right has peddled a convenient fiction: that the Nazis, because their full name was “National Socialist,” belonged to the Left, and that Adolf Hitler was a product of “statism” gone awry.
Nothing could be further from the truth, as investigative journalist David de Jong demonstrates in his new book, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties. According to De Jong’s thorough reporting, German capitalists supported the Nazis at every turn — and their legacy continues to this day, with the country’s economic elite still closely intertwined with Nazi war profiteers.
Many German billionaires, De Jong shows, are intertwined with the Third Reich, which extensively mobilized Germany’s industrial base and enslaved and murdered millions of Jews, Roma, and Slavs to deliver on the never-ending orders from the Reich’s military-industrial complex.
And to this day, Germany’s capitalist elite maintains close ties to Nazism. For example, the modern-day neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party, cofounded by a former Goldman Sachs economist, received major campaign contributions from August von Finck Jr, a financier whose father had founded financial services giant Allianz and a major private bank, Merck Finck, and profited handsomely from the Third Reich.
This is far from the only example. Joseph Goebbels’s stepson and onetime protege, Harald Quandt, grew to become one of the leading industrialists of postwar Germany. The Porsche sports car company — the first producer of the Volkswagen — was founded in 1930 by Ferdinand Porsche, an Adolf Hitler confidante and war profiteer, in conjunction with Anton Piëch, who was Porsche’s son-in-law.
The Porsche/Piëch family’s full acquisition of Porsche and Volkswagen in 1935 was only possible through an Aryanization process that left Volkswagen’s Jewish cofounder, racecar driver and investor Alfred Rosenberger, with peanuts. De Jong reports that Porsche had 20,000 slaves provided to him by Hitler.
Such details aren’t simply ancient history. Until 2015, the supervisory board for Volkswagen and Porsche included Ferdinand Piëch, the grandson and son of the Nazi war profiteers who had founded and then Aryanized the company.
The family ties aren’t secret — many Nazi heirs, in fact, are quite brazen about their histories. One descendent, cookie heiress Verena Bahlsen, conceded in 2014 that her family had seven hundred enslaved Polish and Ukrainian captives working in their factories in World War II. But according to De Jong, Bahlsen wasn’t contrite about it, since she said her family had treated these slave laborers fairly.
“I own a quarter of Bahlsen, and I am happy about it, too,” said Bahlsen. “It should continue to belong to me. I want to make money and buy sailing yachts from my dividends and stuff.”
Adolf Hitler was a product of “statism” gone awry.
Libertarian socialism is as historically literate as Dinesh D'Souza lol, the Hannah Arendt quote retweeting ultraleftists delude themselves into thinking they aren't neoliberals, despite sharing the exact same critique of Stalinist authoritarianism as every reactionary in the last 100 years.
It feels weird to think about how brazen it is but then I realize how bad we are in thr us and it is no different
I've read a couple of articles on how many major businesses, banks, and institutions owe their existence to Slavery. I recall that a couple of Ivy League universities owe much of their endowment to slavery money.
Learning about the Red Army Faction and how there terrorism was mostly about assassinating prominent Nazi business and government figures was very interesting.
spoiler
Knowing that made watching Butcher go to work on him more satisfying
Soooo many western journalists embedded themselves with FSA in Syria and quickly found out they were just Al Qaeda in a trenchcoat
Russian telegram reports that civilians are leaving the Azot plant as Russia advances in the Severodonetsk industrial zone, but there are still "several hundred" civilians there.
Given how quickly the residential areas of Severodonetsk were taken once the proper offensive on the city began versus the industrial zone which is essentially a human shield situation, I guess it shows how slowly Russia is forced to go to avoid further civilian casualties. Meanwhile, the US bombs weddings with tens or hundreds of people to kill maybe a single jihadist.
Further west, Germany has blocked the shipment of the Leopard tanks from Spain, as there appears to be a general agreement to not send tanks to Ukraine (as well as planes, I suppose). I'm not sure exactly why - maybe they don't want the technology captured by Russia?
honestly thinking accurate artillery is why its going so slow. just send some drones out and zero in the shots
seems like artillery got even more important than before with the advent of personal drones
Yeah, it replaced dudes crawling through fields at incredibly slow speeds for 15 hours straight, with a strong chance of being caught or being bitten by a snake or something, to find enemy positions for your artillery to hit. There's been a ton of interesting and major changes to war over the last century but I think one of the really huge ones over the last decade or so has been having total vision of where your enemies are at all times, via satellites or planes or drones or whatever. Like, how does it change war if you can't hide your movements and soldiers anymore?
When it's just poor farmers in an insurgency then it doesn't really matter as much as you can just carpetbomb or dronebomb them to oblivion and they don't have any anti-air to deal with it, but in a near-peer, extremely modern war like this? Very interesting. Very much a rubber-hits-the-road moment of testing what shit actually works and what doesn't. I think only Taiwan + US against China would be more near-peer than this, but then it's more of a naval or amphibious situation, so it would have some different lessons.
"I think only Taiwan + US against China would be more near-peer than this" - that seems so at a glance, but US is - for decades already - building it's military around fighting insurgencies/guerilla & making money (and they indeed are extremely eficient at moneymaking = selling overpriced junk) so I'm pretty sure they wouldn't do as expected vs China.
I'd say that on Ukraine battlefield we are - while still not being able to fully understand what is happening due to no historical distance and all kinds of prejudice about USA military might - looking at the (by now already remains of...) NATO on steroids (see below) both in quality and number of troops: That is to say if you compare US soldier to Ukie one, I'd say US guy has higher BMI (typical American stuff), much lower morale (fighting in the foreign land and not for his home), much less (=zero) real combat experience and so on, all that while - very generously - assuming that US would be able to somehow, magically, project hundreds of thousands of troops to the Ukie battlefield ignoring all technical/logistical/political...problems and loses on the way.
Oh yea and another "detail" I forgot, in USA vs Russia there would likely be no SS officers behind your back to put a bullet through your head if you dare thinking about retreat. More comes to mind but nobody reads textwalls, so lets stop here.
PS edited for grammar.
compare US soldier to Ukie one
A US Infantryman has like 18 months of training compared to whatever ramshackle bootcamp Ukraine is putting conscripts through. That would change if losses got bad enough, but the simple amount of training a US soldier has going in to their first engagement is huge compared to what Ukrainian conscripts have. I do agree on morale - Convincing Gen Z kids to go die on the beaches of Taiwan for semiconductors and freedom seems like a hard sell.
it would have some different lessons.
I'm sure everyone is excited to learn just how lethal mass deployment of modern anti-shipping missiles really is.
They know that Ukraine will not win in the long run anyways so they send them obsolete or simple equipment to score PR points while they also debt trap the country.
Everyone realizes Ukraine lost. Why send more equipment to be destroyed and captured fruitlessly?
Hilarious to see the Reddit cope now that news outlets are starting to admit Ukraine is losing, saw a post about Ukraine running out of ammo and half the replies are "Yeah... W-Well the Russians are running out of ammo MORE! :le-pol-face: "
Best cope I saw was someone saying the Russian army was equipment rich but manpower poor.
As opposed to the Ukrainians ...
lmao Redditors love making shit up when they start losing arguments
Arestovich, one of Zelensky's main advisors and mouthpieces:
"Let's say if Putin wins. And another 500 thousand Ukrainian army will join the 1.5 million Russian army. Everyone has seen how we can fight. And all this will then go to Europe. And then where will the funny European troops be able to stop the union of Ukraine and Russia, if that happens, plus Belarus?"
I uhh. This is a threat? He is directly threatening them. It's not even very veiled.
"If you allow Russia to win this war by not doing what we want now then we will turn our power on you."
That's up to the reformed government of Ukraine in conjuction with Belarus and Russia - not Zelensky.
I don't think he's saying this while imagining a reformed government. He's still imagining himself and his friends leading it. For that to be the case what he is really picturing is a situation where Russia takes donbas and "wins" through that, war stops there. Then what remains of Ukraine in their hands turns on Europe.
Ukraine attacking NATO out of revenge for not being sent tanks and planes and not being let into the EU or NATO and then every single journalist and person being incredibly confused at who to support is the secret ending to this conflict and definitely the funniest
Volunteer twitter lib brigades, future historians will refer to this timeperiod as "The most civil wars"
It would be such a plot twist for NATO to activate a defensive world war against just some rando country
And another 500 thousand Ukrainian army will join the 1.5 million Russian army. Everyone has seen how we can fight.
Russia wins and then immediately collapses.
The Capitalist Union states war against the US is 'unfair' after the US refuses to supply the CU with the latest generation of arms
What, he's just flat out saying that if a pro-Russian guy comes to power all the heroic freedom fighter guys will go "aw shucks, we gotta follow orders after all, got damn" and go invade Europe?
It's now my personal headcanon that like 99% of the people who visit that site are either us or just regular people like us, but Netanyahu and, idk, Bari Weiss also visit it.
I'm 90% sure at least one John Oliver writer is a regular here
A few too many of the jokes line up with pbscure topics we were talking about just weeks before
John Oliver writer if you're reading this make John Oliver do a BlackMoldFutures rant
NATO Secretary General: peace in Ukraine is possible, but the question is what territories she herself is ready to give up for this. Therefore, the Alliance helps Kyiv so that it "pays the lowest price":
“Peace in Ukraine is possible. The question is what will be its price. How much territory, freedom and democracy we are willing to pay for this world. NATO intends to help Ukraine to give it the strongest position at the negotiating table with Russia, which should end the hostilities.
Stoltenberg added that the NATO military does not participate in hostilities, and the Alliance itself opposes the spread of the conflict outside the country.
How much territory, freedom and democracy we are willing to pay for this world.
What’s the conversion rate between freedom (tm) or democracy (tm) points and the war scoreboard?
One day someone in the MSM is going to accidentally compare the outcome of this war to what was on the table for Minsk II and then that reporter will quietly lose their job.
That's a different tune than the one we're used to hear. Are the imperialists beginning to realise they've been beat?
Wikipedia claims that "ukrop" is simply an ethnic slur directed at Ukrainians by Russians holy shit.
What is it? I've heard it a few times but I don't know what it means.
It is derogatory and used towards Ukrainians but specifically the fascist kind. It's a dismissive term for dipshits yelling, "slava ukraina" and wearing far right insignias and so on.
Imagine if the Wikipedia entry for "Nazi" was just, "ethnic slur used against Germans by Soviets".
There’s actually a Ukrainian Maidan political party called UKROP, it’s a nationalist party
Watched one of the recent Patrick Lancaster videos where he interviews one of the new Kherson government officials. A few sentences were based but mostly his (Kherson official's) head is entirely full of Russian :brainworms:
spoiler
Especially repeating tropes about LGBT being "bourgeois decadence" and how this is a sign people have forgotten what life is really about. :cringe:
Why the fuck does everyone have brainworms about gay people? Cocaine and caviar are bougie decadence ffs.
It's an old 1920s Soviet piece of cringe (only rich gay people were visibly out, therefore being gay was a decadent rich affectation.) Once the LGBT friendly Proletkult was sidelined cadres took "Listening to the people" to mean "embrace any prejudice we think is hard to suppress".
Not a great moment, but not measurably worse than western positions of the time.
Additionally, since all the rich people gay societies of the time had cringy Ancient Greek names like "The Sacred Band" or "The Daughters of Sappho and Bacchus" and were sometimes (but far from always) open to nonces, being LGBT was often tainted by association.
It looks like it's stuck around despite the SU walking back on that line in the last 2 decades of it's existence. But it's not like the West doesn't still have the same brainworms, just less deeply.
The interview wasn't really worth watching guy said a whole lot of nothing. PL just kinda sat there and let the dude rant and then tried to steer the discussion to more practical materialist analysis of the current situation instead of the cringe meta rants.
Yeah he had some really shitty takes. Lots of racist subtext too.
