October 17th's update is here! TLDR? Here's the summary!
October 18th's update is here! TLDR? Here's the summary!
Next update will be next Friday, but I'll be poking around the thread during that time. Next thread will go up on Monday like usual.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists, for the “buh Zeleski is a jew?!?!” people.
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.
Last week's discussion post.
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Liberals trying not to see the world in the great man theory Challenge (impossible)
Mostly projection, Great man Theory is how liberals view the world, this is why they believe that a certain president can change the destiny of a country instead of understand that a president is the manifest form of a state apparatus
First of all, imagine thinking a nation of 1.4 BILLION people could be administered by the whims of a single individual. :blob-no-thoughts:
As for why, I think this sort of propaganda is simply necessary to sidestep any discussion about democracy in China. Xi must be an autocrat, because if he were simply a public official bound by the tides of political economy and public sentiment, that would require an honest analysis of the political institutions and social relations in China. We would have to grant the Chinese public agency, which they're not supposed to have in a dictatorship, and we would have to grapple with the fact that many of them are happy with the way their country is being administered. Ultimately, we'd have to admit that the Chinese are not helpless victims in need of a white savior.
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My thinking is that it's a mixture of a) referring to a country as being personified as a single person, usually their current leader, is a shorthand that is useful when trying to contextualize big geopolitical concepts into simpler ones in your brain; b) it's a consequence of having a very individualistic, liberal worldview that you view things in this way - not that thinking like this necessarily makes you a liberal, just that neoliberal ideology surrounds us and so you will naturally think or talk this like this if you grew up in those conditions unless you actively make an effort to stop doing so and, c) what the others in this thread have said; additionally, portraying your strong enemies as alone and therefore weak is a classic fascist lens. The whole point is that the enemy must be so strong that you will inevitably and heroically die in battle against them, but so weak because [your guys] are the superior ubermensch and [their guys] are the inferior untermensch, and also that if you simply kicked in the door, the whole rotten structure would come crashing down.
I predict that we'll only see these Nazi viewpoints become more and more prevalent as the West's neoliberalism decays into fascism under the weight of a changing world order that greatly shifts flows of supplies and energy, as well as alliances
Yep, it's not even just an anti-communist thing. Americans think Hitler ran Nazi Germany himself and cannot comprehend there was a state and party apparatus that he worked with as well as how he was ultimately answerable to German capital.
100%, I don't diss anybody who treats, say, Biden as the personification of current-day America and brushes aside the other people in his admin doing bad things, not because they think that, say, Blinken is an okay person, but because it gets awfully cumbersome to refer to "the Biden administration, as well as all the non-elected people in the American government who would be there regardless of the current president" instead of just "Biden".
But Great Man Theory is an oversimplification of history to the point of propaganda, and we need to be on guard against it, because it affects how we think about strategies in the current day. If Bezos or Zuckerberg or Gates died of heart attacks tomorrow, it wouldn't do anything to reduce our suffering under capitalism. Hell, if every current billionaire died tomorrow and there was no left-wing movement to capitalize (ha!) off that, then things would be basically the same. It's a system, not a group of people (up to a certain point).
I'm reminded of analysis I heard about the French Revolution, where the reason why the revolutionaries kept cutting off people's heads was more about them being unable to really create a fairer system like socialism due to the lack of technological advancement at that point and so they tried to quell the anger of the sans-culottes by essentially offering them blood instead. Of course, now we can create a reasonably prosperous and fair society under socialist principles, but it's possible that a similar situation may again arise - a group, unable to truly conceptualize and believe in an alternative to the current system, simply starts removing the Bad People and pretending that makes up for it.
You could just say "the deep state" but then people look at you weird.
The one conspiracy theory I find most plausible is the one that the deep state actively encourages and promotes insane cranks like the Q people so that any talk about the government doing shady stuff, even if it is well-researched and documented, immediately gets labelled as crazy by normies.
Great man Theory also has the advantage of when you apply sanction on the country, it is a easier pill for your populace to swallow to see it as a way to attack the Great man instead of the sanction's repercussion on the population of the country
Western media is made by liberals and the liberal mindset needs individuals to make personally responsible for bad things. They can't conceptualise bad things of there's not some person to blame.
Western journalists and western media consumers are lazy. Understanding the various factions, persons and interests involved in formulating the policies of a nation takes a lot of effort. Pinning everything on a single individual gives a much simpler explanation and spares you from having to learn boring stuff.
Explaining policies as things created through progresses involving many groups also makes it very hard to deny that they are acting rationality whereas ascribing every political decision to a single individual makes it possible to explain away the underlying rationales of enemy states as the irrational, delusional or even crazy antics of said individual. "Putin is a madman!" is a much more digestible explanation to westoid audiences than an explanation of the opposing security interests of Russia and US/NATO and the history of western imperialism in the post-soviet space.
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The audience doesn't even consider it to be a military occupation of south korea. The audience sees it as the same as US bases anywhere else in the world, completely normalised as the world police.
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For sure, it insinuates that military action against that country would just be a police action, where as soon as The Evil Man gets blown up, all the regular people will cheer and kiss the troops and the entire country will peacefully transition into a Western Democracy.
Like the stories about Putin being mislead into believing that Ukraine would welcome him with open arms when he merc'ed Zelensky. It's always projection.
I think that story is just a retreading of an old clasisc, since the whole "we will be greeted as liberators" played out in the American press with Iraq, and before that the Cubans during the Bay of Pigs. I'm sure there are multiple other instances of this type of rethoric being used, but I don't live in the US, so I don't know for sure, since this type of reporting doens't typically make it across the atlantic.
:saddam-hussein:
Great man theory
I think it's because it makes them seem like authoritarian dictators that rule for life or through a dynasty. I mean, come on, what's next? Are they going to have a king and queen we're all supposed to care about?
it signals a lack of democracy - whether substantiated or not.
To get support for regime change.
Because getting to write out “Xi’s unprecedented third term” implies that there is no democracy involved, when in reality people like Nancy Pelosi have been re-elected to the same position for almost half a century
:wojak-nooo: The CCP is undemocratic for electing Xi three times!
:so-true: OMG the recently deceased lady who ruled the UK for 800 years with no other legitimacy than birth was such an amazing inspirational figure!
The judges ruling this nation by fiat weren’t elected by anyone
Also true