Mark Felton Productions
Published 4 Dec 2018The history of Checkpoint Charlie, the most famous of Berlin’s East-West crossing points and the focus of a serious standoff between the US and Soviet Union in 1961 that could have led to World War III.
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Larry Correia in his monthly round-up post:
C. Okay, the big one. WW3. Last time I did an update post about this I said I’m not an expert on global geopolitics, and unlike most of the internet I’m not going to pretend to be one. And the only thing I know about military issues is how the contracts work and how to fix the DOD’s terrible spreadsheets. So, just personal opinion, while recognizing my strategic limitations so all the self anointed Von Clauswitzes don’t come yell at me AGAIN, real brief version … fuck Vladmir Putin. I’m rooting for the little guy and I hope the clock is ticking towards when some oligarchs get pissed off enough Putin “commits suicide” by thirty rounds of 5.45 to the back or drinks a polonium milkshake.
C2. By root for, I mean I think we should have a 4 for $10 Javelin missile blow out sale. We’ve got ATGMS! We’ve got Stingers! We’ve got bombs and more bombs! You’ve got Russians? NOT ANYMORE! Because at Crazy Lockeheeds, everything must go!
C3. By root for, what I don’t mean is that I’m going to be a hypocritical scumbag like Stephen King, and expect my countrymen to kill and die so I can proclaim my virtue because I Care So Hard. If you feel that strongly there’s a Ukranian Foreign Legion and they’re taking volunteers … Oh wait … No. He didn’t mean like that. He meant your sons need to “take those punches” (i.e. get shot or burned to death). Not him.
[…]
E. On propaganda and the fog of war. Duh. Of course it exists. Its always existed. Every side does it. The internet just makes it faster.
However all those “legends” the deboonkers are so smugly debunking … You kind of miss the point. That emotional manipulation exists for a reason, and it’s important. You just need to try and recognized when it is aimed at swaying YOU, rather than to motivate the people doing the fighting.
[…]
O. Justin Trudeau is really super lucky WW3 rolled around to push his stupid doughy face out of the news cycle. Justin Trudeau makes Mitt Romney look like a vertebrate. What a scummy little wannabe tyrant.
P. But for Americans, the real lesson there is the tactics that dirt bag used against the people who stood up to him. In the old days they’d just kill you to shut you up. Now they freeze your bank accounts and make it so you can’t work or feed your family, until you comply. They take away your voice and your legal ability to push back, taking options off the table until only the worst apocalyptical options are left … and if you use those, then they’ve got an excuse to kill you.
P1. All of these effeminate little sneering leftists are one bad day away from being Pol Pot. All of them. Never forget that. Once they reveal who they are they need to be driven from office and never let anywhere near any sort of authority ever again. They will happily destroy you and everyone you love.
I’ve gotten a bit tired of reminding people on social media that almost everything we think we know about the fighting in Ukraine is — to a greater or lesser extent — propaganda by one side or the other. That said, Ukraine’s propaganda efforts have been far more effective than the Russian equivalents. In The Line, Jen Gerson rounds up some of the best-known stories that have flashed across Twitter and other social media platforms since the combat began:
Perhaps it’s simply the inevitable consequence of protracted news overload, but the war in Ukraine feels surreal. Pulling up the news, following Twitter, none of it feels like reality, but rather like we’re all collectively remembering an event that was always destined to happen. Perhaps I’m the only one suffering from this dissociative state? Or perhaps not; is anyone else feeling as if our daily life has taken on this faded quality of a simulacrum?
Maybe this is the inevitable sensation of watching a war play out on Twitter and TikTok. It has a participatory quality that offers the sensation of being a part of the conflict without the dose of necessary, reality-evoking risk.
Did you see the viral video of the Ukrainian babushka demanding the Russian soldier keep sunflower seeds in his pocket so that he leaves behind flowers when he dies? Or the one of the soldiers on Snake Island telling the Russian warship to “go fuck yourself” when asked to surrender? Reportedly, 13 died after that ship blew the station apart — though it appears that this was false and they in fact were taken alive.
Did you watch the Twitter video of Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky filming himself on the streets of Kyiv to thwart rumours that he had fled? Or the guy who moved an anti-tank mine from the road with a cigarette drooping out of his mouth?
Did you hear about the Ghost of Kyiv, a mysterious fighter pilot who has allegedly scored more kills than any other in recent memory?
Or the TikTok video of the young woman teaching her contemporaries how to operate an abandoned Russian tank; the stranded artillery towed by Ukrainian farmers; the men stuffing polystyrene into Molotov cocktails to make peasants’ napalm?
Oh, and in case you missed it: an official music video lionizing the Ukrainian drone, Bayraktar.
I can’t assess the reality of any of this — and I presume some or all of it is staged. That’s what propaganda is, after all. All I can do is examine the transparent unreality of it all, to take note of the ephemeral, the narrative. And from here, the Ukrainians are absolutely crushing the propaganda war.
On Monday, David Patrikarakos also came to the same conclusion in UnHerd after viewing the online echoes of the war:
The internet is a chaotic place, but it is nonetheless ruled by a series of iron laws, especially when it comes to what we put on it. Perhaps the most important one is that whatever you post, try to make it visual. Once that’s established it’s about what sort of image will best hoover up those likes and shares and retweets. Well, that’s down to where you are and who your audience is. But as a rule of thumb there are two things that generally never fail: blondes and guns.
Over the past few days, the very brave and very blonde Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik has been tweeting various pictures of herself posing with an AK47. She began last Friday:
What is striking about the photos is not that Rudik posted them: she is a people’s representative in a time of war — it’s exactly the sort of thing she should be posting. What’s so interesting, and smart, is how she did it. Rudik does not pose in a uniform, or even in camouflage fatigues. She does not salute or lift the AK triumphantly; in fact, the way she holds it makes it clear that she’s not used to holding a weapon of any sort. The photo is taken not in a base or even in an office, but clearly in the living room of her home, just by a window that looks out onto a small patio.
The final touch though — and it’s a genius one — is that she doesn’t have shoes on; instead she stands barefoot, her toes painted a delicate pink.
In one sense, this all seems irretrievably amateurish — but that’s the point. Of the many things the internet craves, authenticity is sacrosanct. And this is a model of the genre. The tweet is designed to do two things: first, to show that Ukrainians will stand and fight for their homeland; and second, to humanise those whom we are told will be doing the fighting. And it does this by showing them to be the most ordinary of people; people standing in their bare feet, vulnerable and ordinary — just like civilians across the world. As such, they stand in total contrast to the stormtroopers invading their lands. It’s pink toenails versus mud-encrusted jackboots; smiling mothers versus bearded Chechens — all shorthand for the battle playing out between Ukraine and Russia.
As Kurt Schlichter said, “The first report is always wrong and nobody knows nothing”:
The battle in Ukraine seems to be one of the most covered and worst covered events in history. You cannot spend more than two minutes on social media without crossing paths with a snippet of shaky cell phone footage of a Russian tank burning or some heroic story of sturdy Ukrainian resistance. You have experts on TV trying to tell you what’s happening but no one is actually giving you any real information. Maybe you think the Ukrainians are winning, that their counterattacks are driving out the Russian invaders. There are plenty of sources saying 2800 or 5300 or some other oddly large and specific number of Russian soldiers are dead. All hail the coming victory!
Well, we’ll see.
Don’t believe a damn thing you see or hear right now. I’d like to. I want the Ukrainians to win. But I understand that I, like you, am a target of information operations by Ukrainians, Russians, and even Americans. Get woke to it.
All that exciting footage? What do you know about where it was shot, or when? Nada. Zip. Zero. We’ve seen people trying to pass off simulator footage as real battle footage. We’ve seen explosions and fires without context. What caused them? Who knows when all you have is the label on the video? All those Russian tanks on fire? Well, guess what kind of equipment the Ukrainians use.
I don’t know if the Ukrainians are winning or losing, but I know that a lot of people in the media want them to win. So do I, but simply because I would prefer they send the Russkies packing does not mean that I am blind to what is an obvious and effective propaganda campaign designed to keep the West in Ukraine’s corner. And it has worked, with a few sketchy, wacky exceptions. I am impressed by the information operation designed to get resonant stories out there, like the defiant guardians of Snake Island, the “Ghost of Kyiv”, or that Ukrainian marine who was forced to blow himself up to take out the bridge. It’s like they were designed to appeal to us.
In short, we don’t know what’s happening — for excellent military reasons on both sides — and much of what we’re being told is almost certainly pure fiction. Keep your bullshit filters up and re-calibrate ’em if and when you get genuine information, but good luck on finding any of that in the immediate future.
In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith on the plight of Ukraine under Russian attack and the rather surprising success they have been having on western social media and in legacy media coverage:
Soon after the Russians invaded Ukraine, President Zelensky released a video to the world. Filmed on his mobile phone, it looked as if he could have been anyone else in the 21st century. He was tired and sad, and the skin was red around his eyes. Whatever a strong leader looks like, President Zelensky looked like the opposite.
That feels like a long time ago now. Somehow, the Ukrainians proceeded to launch the greatest PR operation of our times. How many people had heard of Zelensky, a veteran comic actor whose most significant action on the world stage since his electoral triumph in 2019 had been listening to Donald Trump’s ramblings, until a few days ago? How many people even knew there had been fighting in Donbass?
You have to wonder if the Russians, having seen the capitulation of the Afghan government, thought a Western ally would hightail it at the first opportunity. Zelensky, on the other hand, announced that he was staying in Kiev. His speech, addressed to the Russian people, was measured, dignified and eloquent. His little updates from the Kiev streets were mischievous and bold.
A weak country invaded by a powerful aggressor is naturally sympathetic. But the Ukrainian cause projected a uniquely irresistible combination of victimhood and strength. Theirs is not a tale of mere persecution but of underdog resolve.
What happened on Snake Island, for example, remains mysterious. The Ukrainians reported that their soldiers were killed after delivering a “go fuck yourself” to a Russian warship. The Russians claim they are alive. Still, the emerging image of unbreakable defiance, spreading across the vortex of social media, has won hearts and minds across the world.
What has been crucial is that people are not just pitying. They are inspired. We have heard relatively few tales of atrocities, because the Russians were attempting to minimise casualties, but also because the Ukrainians have attempted to maximise their triumphs. Did the “Ghost of Kiev” exist? Almost certainly not. But when such urban legends were combined with undeniably tough Ukrainian resistance in cities like Kharkiv, foreign sympathisers were encouraged to think that the Ukrainians, while embattled, had a fighting chance. This has been translated into sanctions on Russia and massive donations of arms and equipment.
David Warren reports that the Chinese government has accused the Ukrainians of trouble-making in Hong Kong:
This did not happen yesterday, I should explain, but some months ago. How did those clever Ukrainians do this, my reader may ask, naïvely. They did it by secular inspiration, when they uttered the phrase, “Slava Ukraini!” — which they had been doing in their own nationalist cause since the nineteenth century — and more aggressively since they fought for independence from the Leninist regime of the Soviet Union, during 1917–21.
Since 2014, the phrase has been in the air again, just as truck horns are in the air here in the Canadas. The Hong Kongois, who tend to be well-informed to a fault, picked up on it in 2019. They began to declare, “Glory to Hong Kong!” in multiple languages, from Cantonese to English; or rather, to sing it, for this phrase and its variants are often set to music, in both countries. (The Canadian trucker’s “Honk Honk” makes its own music.)
Wi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and little Justin Trudeau, all get quite offended by the use of such phrases; and all have gone to the trouble of manufacturing bare-faced lies to resist the respective sovereignty movements. Readers will gather that I am unsympathetic with any of these dictators, or Mr Would-Be.
Because I (or more exactly, my father) was also unfavourably inclined to the dictatorship of Mr Adolf Hitler, it may be incumbent upon me to specify of what my disapproval consists. For granted, Hitler was a nationalist of a sort. I have long been an enemy of nationalism, when it is rudely proclaimed, though with mysterious moments of enthusiasm for nationalisms of other sorts.
TimeGhost History
Published 28 Feb 2022What do you get when you combine vigorous grain-tax policies, bad harvests with Stalin’s fear and animosity for the rural population of Ukraine? A man-created murder famine, designed to kill millions of Ukrainian men, women and children.
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Glenn Greenwald on the war propaganda being pushed by both sides in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and how after two full years of “war on Wuhan Coronavirus propaganda”, we’re seeing a smooth transition to more traditional war propaganda from our governments and media:
In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.
Less than a week into this war, that can no longer be said. One of the media’s most beloved members of Congress, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), on Friday explicitly and emphatically urged that the U.S. military be deployed to Ukraine to establish a “no-fly zone” — i.e., American soldiers would order Russia not to enter Ukrainian airspace and would directly attack any Russian jets or other military units which disobeyed. That would, by definition and design, immediately ensure that the two countries with by far the planet’s largest nuclear stockpiles would be fighting one another, all over Ukraine.
Kinzinger’s fantasy that Russia would instantly obey U.S. orders due to rational calculations is directly at odds with all the prevailing narratives about Putin having now become an irrational madman who has taken leave of his senses — not just metaphorically but medically — and is prepared to risk everything for conquest and legacy. This was not the first time such a deranged proposal has been raised; days before Kinzinger unveiled his plan, a reporter asked Pentagon spokesman John Kirby why Biden has thus far refused this confrontational posture. The Brookings Institution’s Ben Wittes on Sunday demanded: “Regime change: Russia”. The President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, celebrated that “now the conversation has shifted to include the possibility of desired regime change in Russia.”
Having the U.S. risk global nuclear annihilation over Ukraine is an indescribably insane view, as one realizes upon a few seconds of sober reflection. We had a reminder of that Sunday morning when “Putin ordered his nuclear forces on high alert, reminding the world he has the power to use weapons of mass destruction, after complaining about the West’s response to his invasion of Ukraine” — but it is completely unsurprising that it is already being suggested.
In the reporting and opining on the conflict in Ukraine, Mark Steyn says the frequent rhetorical invocation of Neville Chamberlain in 1938 are unfair:
Which brings us to this last day of February 2022. Which is beginning to feel like late February 2020, don’t you think? That is, in the stampede to impose the suffocating blanket of “the narrative” to the exclusion of all else. There is certainly a real country called Ukraine, where real people are being killed by real missiles hitting their apartment houses. Just as there was a real virus called Covid-19, which emerged from a real lab in a real city in China and began killing real people all over the world. Yet “the narrative”, then as now, seems designed to obscure any serious consideration of the underlying causes.
Nevertheless, certain things should be capable of being grasped even by viewers of CNN and readers of The New York Times. Just as Covid revealed that China is now the planet’s dominant economic power, so Ukraine confirms that America’s post-Cold War unipolar moment is dead: over the weekend, the talk shifted (again very Corona-like) from fifteen days to flatten the Tsar to an acceptance that this is a long-term thing — that, for a while at least, “a gas station masquerading as a country” (in John McCain’s characteristically stupid sneer) has succeeded in rolling back the great European liberations of three decades ago.
These days Neville Chamberlain is too invoked and the comparison is unfair. In 1938, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, the Prime Minister went on the radio and described it as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”. For America, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the precise opposite: a quarrel in a far-away country of which their leaders know everything. Because they’ve been up to their neck in it for years.
Ukraine is a beautiful place, its people are intelligent and agreeable, and its women are stunners. But it is a very poor country and, notwithstanding its many fine qualities, the most corrupt nation in Europe, and, per Ernst & Young, the ninth most corrupt in the world. As I pointed out regularly three years ago on Tucker and Rush, at a time when Hunter Biden was getting fifty grand a month plus seven-figure bonuses from Burisma, the average wage in Ukraine was $200 a month: The Biden family’s heist was “not a victimless crime”.
A far-away country of which we know nothing? Has there been any Washington scandal that has not involved Ukraine in recent years?
The Trump impeachments? Ooh, he telephoned … Ukraine!The “Russia investigation”? Putin wanted Trump to win why exactly? Oh, no problem: because he’ll roll back sanctions imposed for Moscow’s actions against … Ukraine!
Do we have any witnesses to any of this? Yeah, sure, the really good guy’s some Colonel Vindman. He’s an immigrant from … Ukraine!
On the other hand, Obama made Biden his point-man in … Ukraine!
Biden told the Ukrainians they had to clean up all the corruption. They took the hint and put Hunter on the board, and Joe, Jim and the rest of the mob family suddenly acquired extensive “business interests” in Ukraine.
Oh, and the biggest source of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation is … Ukraine.
Andrew Sullivan on what Winston Churchill referred to as “the historic life-interests of Russia”, the inability (and unwillingness) of the western nations to do more than send hopes and prayers to Ukraine, and the parallels between the Russia-Ukraine situation and the China-Taiwan potential conflict:
Taiwan relief map.
Library of Congress Geography & Map Division via Wikimedia Commons.
… in one crucial sense, Putin has already won a victory. A nuclear-armed great power has invaded and occupied a neighboring country in Europe, and there is nothing anyone else has been able to do to stop it. Many in the West assumed Putin wouldn’t go that far — surmising that international law, universal condemnation, economic sanctions, and the lack of any serious threat from Ukraine to Russia would restrain him. But he has called our bluff. He has even hinted at Russia’s nuclear capacity to intimidate other states from intervening. And so we have a precedent. Ukraine is a Russian possession. A fact on the ground. All we have been able to do is watch.
All of which brings us to what seems to me to be the larger dimension of this clash: how it will resonate in Beijing and Taiwan. With apologies to Mitt Romney, China is easily the greater geostrategic challenge. And the parallels with Russia are as striking as they are unnerving. China sees Taiwan as part of its national identity in a similar way to how Russia sees Ukraine as part of its. And we are committed to the defense of Taiwan the way we have committed to the defense of Ukraine: kinda, but not really. In the face of this underlying Western ambiguity, the fall of Kiev is news that Xi will be watching closely.
The parallels are not exact, but nonetheless striking. Taiwan is next door to and deeply entangled with China in its history and culture, just as Ukraine is uniquely entangled with Russia. Seeing Taiwan and China (like Ukraine and Russia) as simply random sovereign states with a right to self-determination under international law is correct, so far as it goes. It’s also moral — as majorities of both Ukrainians and especially Taiwanese want independence and have constructed nascent democracies in the wake of autocracy.
But the nationalist passion Russia feels about Ukraine and China feels about Taiwan is real, visceral, and hard for outsiders to understand intuitively. The sense of a rogue region that somehow got away from the homeland is vivid among Russian and Chinese nationalists. This kind of understanding — claiming a “sphere of influence” — is now deemed reactionary by the West’s foreign policy elites, as, perhaps, it should be. But that doesn’t mean that everyone, especially China and Russia, have actually moved past it. Even Americans have very different emotional responses to perceived threats in our own hemisphere compared with the rest of the world. So this is also a culture clash of sorts — globalism and the nation state vs nationalism and spheres of influence.
I’m not saying that this belief in a sphere of influence is a universal view in Russia or China — or that it is justifiable. I’m just saying it is real. And I’m not excusing Putin or Xi from taking a particularly zealous view of this irredentist nationalism, which they both do, for their own personal and political advantage. I’m just noting how national pride deeply informs them, that resentment of the West consumes them, that a sense of historical grievance spurs them on — and that they are not outliers among their compatriots. It is crazy to underestimate the power of this kind of revanchist nationalism — among rulers and ruled. And I fear we underestimated it in the case of Putin.
This means, as Barack Obama once insisted, that Russia will always care much more about Ukraine than we do; and China will always care much more about Taiwan than we do. In those cases, the last thing we should do is promise support that we do not seriously — truly seriously — intend to provide. The vague pledge by the Western powers not to rule out future NATO membership for Ukraine was the worst of all worlds: poking the bear, with no serious intention of fighting it.
The fall of Afghanistan was a margin call … and Ukraine is the point where airy western “guarantees” will have to be backed up with actual force. But western leaders have grown very comfortable in a world where gestures were taken seriously and few if any such gestures actually had to be followed-through with meaningful action. And now, the geopolitical pantomime is over and we’re back in a world where gestures are seen as signs of weakness and do nothing to deter adventurism.
World War Two
Published 26 Feb 2022Erich von Manstein’s Axis counterattack on the Eastern Front begins this week and right away smashes through the Red Army lines, threatening all the recent Soviet gains. The Allies — the Americans — also suffer a big defeat in Tunisia at the Kasserine Pass, though in the Pacific it is the Americans who occupy the Russell Islands.
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Niall Ferguson from The Spectator:
“War:, in Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s most famous dictum, “is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” A generation of Democrats — the American variety, but also European Christian and Social Democrats — have sought to ignore that truth. Appalled by the violence of war, they have vainly searched for alternatives to waging it. When Vladimir Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Barack Obama responded with economic sanctions. When Putin intervened in the Syrian civil war, they tried indignant speeches.
When it became clear that Putin intended a further and larger military incursion into Ukraine, Joe Biden and his national security team opted for sanctions once again. If Putin invaded Ukraine, they said, Russia would face “crippling” or “devastating” economic and financial penalties. When these threats did not deter Putin, they tried a new tactic, publishing intelligence on the likely timing and nature of the Russian assault. Cheerleaders for the administration thought this brilliant and original. It was, in reality, a species of magical thinking, as if stating publicly when Putin was going to invade would make him less likely to do so.
Those who dread war approach diplomacy the wrong way, as if it is an alternative to war. This gives rise to the delusion that, so long as talks are continuing, war is being averted. But unless you are prepared ultimately to resort to force yourself, negotiations are merely a postponement of the other side’s aggression. They will avert war only if you concede peacefully what the aggressor is prepared to take by force.
Putin decided on war against Ukraine some time ago, probably in July when he published a lengthy essay, “On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians”, in which he argued tendentiously that Ukrainian independence was an unsustainable historical anomaly. This made it perfectly clear that he was contemplating a takeover of the country. Even before Putin’s essay appeared, Russia had deployed around 100,000 troops close to Ukraine’s northern, eastern and southern borders. The response of the United States and the European Union was to make clear that Ukraine was a very long way indeed from either Nato or EU membership, confirming to Putin that no one would fight on Ukraine’s side if he went ahead with his planned war of subjugation.
Over the past few months, Putin has used diplomacy in the classical fashion, seeking to gain his objectives at the lowest possible cost while at the same time carefully preparing for an invasion. Western leaders have achieved nothing more than to remain united in saying they will impose sanctions if he invades. But a Russian invasion of Ukraine beyond the Donbas will create an entirely new situation. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic may express a common outrage, but it will not take long for their unity to be eroded by the altered reality and their fundamentally divergent interests. The US does not need Russia’s natural gas. At least in the short run, Europe does.
Arthur Chrenkoff offers what he calls “disjointed thoughts at a tragic time”:
Putin is invading Ukraine – not just sending “peacekeepers” into the breakaway pro-Russia regions in the east of the country – in order to “denazify” and “demilitarise” the country. The former is an outrageous slur in a long communist tradition from Stalin to today’s Western left of smearing anyone they don’t like and agree with as a Nazi. Ukraine is as Nazi as Australia or Greece, or Russia for that matter. “Demilitarisation” is the more pertinent excuse. What Putin wants is a cordon sanitaire separating Russia from the West (which now includes Poland and the Baltic states). His vision for Ukraine is a pro-Russia puppet state or at least a neutral and impotent non-entity. According to Putin, Russia’s got a legitimate security interest in not being bordered by hostile (read pro-Western) states. Why this should trump Ukraine’s (or any other country’s) legitimate security interest in its own security, territorial sovereignty and the choice of international friends is unknown, except that might makes right and Russia fancies itself as a special case on the basis of its past great power status.
No country has an obligation to send it troops to fight a conventional war with Russia in Ukraine. But countries have moral obligation to offer any and all assistance to the people of Ukraine, including military equipment, as they defend themselves against unprovoked aggression. Countries also have moral obligation to punish Putin and Russia with utmost severity, including – if only they had the guts – complete economic and trade sanctions. Not a drop of Russian oil or a cubic foot of its gas. Let Putin swim in his unsold carbohydrates. Sadly that won’t happen because the Western European governments have, despite numerous warnings, made themselves energy dependent on imports from Russia. Shutting down coal, closing nuclear power plants and praying to the sun and the wind are now coming home to roost.
At First Things before the invasion began, George Weigel explained what was being obscured by Russian propaganda and western media complaisance:
For months now, the world press has described Russian troop deployments along Ukraine’s borders as spearheads of a possible invasion. The truth, however, is that Russia invaded Ukraine seven years ago, when it annexed Crimea and Russian “little green men” ignited a war in eastern Ukraine that has taken over 14,000 lives and displaced over a million people. Whatever the current military developments, a Russian invasion of Ukraine has not been “imminent”; the invasion is ongoing.
That fact has been obscured by a massive Russian propaganda and disinformation campaign. So some truth-telling is imperative.
The first fact: This is a Russian crisis, not a “Ukraine crisis”. What is typically called the “Ukraine crisis” is entirely of Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s making. Ukraine did not create this crisis. The United States did not create it, and neither did NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is, was, and always will be a defensive alliance, is no more a threat to Russian national security than NATO is to Botswana’s national security. The claim that NATO threatens Russia is a Big Lie that obfuscates the security realities in central and eastern Europe: Former Soviet satellites (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) and the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) joined NATO because they fear Russia, not because they intend to invade Russia. The same rationale explains Ukraine’s NATO application.
The second fact: This artificially created crisis, aimed at Ukraine’s destabilization and subjugation, is one expression of Putin’s determination to reverse history’s verdict in the Cold War. Putin has been quite clear about this for twenty years, and only fools or those peering through the ideologically befogged lenses of the new “national conservatism” fail to grasp what is afoot here. Putin, the old KGB apparatchik, is bent on overturning the victory of imperfect democracies over pluperfect tyrannies in the Revolution of 1989 and the Soviet crack-up of 1991. That grand strategic goal is at the cold heart of the recently announced alliance of purpose between Putin’s kleptocratic regime in Russia and Xi Jinping’s genocidal regime in China — an announcement these two wicked men made just before the Winter Olympics. Putin and Xi want nothing less than a fundamental re-ordering of world affairs in which their oppressive regimes call the tune. In the tyrants’ bid for global hegemony, Ukraine and Taiwan are in the role played by Austria and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s: If they fall to the tyrant-regimes, others will follow.
At Samizdata, Perry de Havilland notes that not every single thing that happens in the wider world is linked to or directed by American action:
Yes, the United States is the richest and most powerful nation on earth and it has been since World War II. And yes, it has interfered under presidents of all stripes for good or ill in a great many places, in pursuit of its perceived geopolitical interests, sometimes benignly, other times with a breathtaking lack of judgement.
But just as the leaders of that great nation have often overestimated the USA’s ability to impose its will in far away lands, many people in many places similarly overestimate America’s involvement everywhere. They largely deny that local people have agency, oblivious to the fact people everywhere are capable of organising politically in ways not directed and driven from an agency in Langley, Virginia. As a friend of mine who was deeply involved in the 2014 Maidan revolt in Kyiv said to me once:
“Woah! I’ve just heard we’re all CIA puppets on Washington’s payroll. There must have been an oversight as me and my friends never got a penny. You know people in America, so can you get me an address to apply for that lovely CIA money I’m apparently due?”
He was of course joking, but Maidan was a golden example of how something overwhelmingly driven and executed by Ukrainians, in Ukraine, in response to Ukrainian political and social pressures becoming intolerable, was nevertheless written off as CIA mischief-making.And whilst that was pushed hard by Russia when their pet oligarch was deposed, its entirely possible Putin himself believes it too. It is actually more supportive of his worldview than the notion it really happened because millions of Ukrainians loathed Putin, his Ukrainian’s puppet in Kyiv, and the malign influence of Russia generally.
But so many people seek a simpler world, a bipolar one in which everything is down to the Big Actors (with America still the biggest at the moment). Understanding that and feeding into it grants profound insight into Russian (and to some extent Chinese) propaganda. Add to that the rightly shattered confidence in Western institutions the last two years has wrought, and it is not surprising otherwise discerning folk fall for it.
And with bombs dropping and people being killed in Ukraine, John Kerry keeps his laser focus on the important issue — climate change:
World War Two
Published 19 Feb 2022The Red Army liberates both Rostov and Kharkov this week, but their advancing spearheads are close to an even bigger prize, Adolf Hitler himself. It is the Axis, however, who are both advancing and consolidating in Tunisia, and gearing up for new offensive actions next week.
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World War Two
Published 17 Feb 2022Outnumbered, outgunned, and outproduced by the Allies, the noose seems to be tightening slowly but surely around the Third Reich. For Joseph Goebbels, salvation lies in a radical transformation of the economy and society – Total War. But first, he must sell it to the German people.
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Forgotten Weapons
Published 31 Aug 2017The PPS-43, designed by Alexei Sudayev based on a previous submachine gun design by I.K. Bezruchko-Vysotsky, was the Soviet replacement for the PPSh-41. The Shpagin submachine gun was a very effective combat weapon, but was time-consuming to produce and required specialized manufacturing tools. The Soviet military wanted a weapon that was cheaper and faster to make, and which could be produced at small shops not experienced in firearms production. The Sudayev design fit these criteria extremely well, being made almost entirely of simple bent metal components.
Production of the first prototype Sudayev submachine guns begin in 1942 in the besieged city of Leningrad, where guns were quite literally taken from the factory door to the front lines and put into service. A few minor flaws were discovered and corrected, and by the time the siege was broken the gun was suitable for mass production. It was designated the PPS-43, and while it was theoretically a replacement for the PPSh-41, it never did actually replace the former weapon. It was decided to continue PPSh-41 production in the factories already tooled up for it, while making use of the PPS-43’s simplicity to put it into production as a range of new factories that did not have the technical capacity to make more complex weapons.
Mechanically, the PPS-43 was a simple blowback gun, using basically the same conceptual operating system as the PPSH-41. However, Sudayev resolved the most significant practical problem with the PPSH-41 by abandoning its unreliable drums and developing his own new double-stack, double-feed 35-round box magazine. The PPS-43 magazine is simpler to load, more reliable in use, and much smoother to insert and remove from the weapon than PPSh magazines. The improvement was substantial enough to justify the use of different and incompatible magazines in the two guns. In conjunction with the discarding of the drum magazine, Sudayev also designed his gun to have a lower rate of fire than the PPSh, to better manage ammunition supply. However, the roughly 600 rpm rate of the PPS-43 is actually relatively difficult to control in that light weapon, where the PPSh-41 was substantially smoother shooting despite (or perhaps because of) firing faster.
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At Founding Questions, Severian looks at the way the Nazi economy was actually two entities — the “wartime” economy and the effectively separate SS economy under the control of Heinrich Himmler:
Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, 1938.
German Federa Archive via Wikimedia Commons.
Here’s where the Nazis really blew it. “Nazism” should really be called “Hitlerism”, as it was a true cult of personality; there was no ideology without the specific individual man. That’s the tension at the heart of any collectivist ideology — somebody’s got to be The Boss, however temporarily — but Nazi Germany suffered it worse than most. Had the Nazis won the war, the bloodbath at the top would’ve been as spectacular per capita as the war itself. As thoroughgoing Social Darwinists, they only had one possible principle of succession …
Let’s provisionally call that the first consequence of an ideology in power: The personal is the political and vice versa. That seems trite, I realize, but I’m putting it here to emphasize its literalness – in an ideological state, building your own “affinity”, Bastard Feudalism-style, just IS politics. There’s no other possible political activity. And as much as the Nazis seemed to have screwed it up by going all in on the Fuhrerprinzip at the very top, their out-and-proud Organizational Darwinism (for lack of a better term) made them super-efficient at the lower levels.
Let’s bring Khrushchev back in. In many ways, he’s the Soviet Himmler. He was one of Stalin’s right hand men throughout the war, but somehow didn’t get tagged as a major player in the succession crisis until it was too late for all the other contenders for the purple to take effective countermeasures. In the same way, Hitler did announce a successor, sort of. In fact he did it twice: Before the war, it was Rudolf Hess; during the war, Hermann Goering. Neither of those guys had anything approaching the power Himmler had, but like Khrushchev, his personality was such that the other bigshots couldn’t help overlooking him. Just as the rest of the Politburo couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of this uncouth quasi-Ukrainian peasant being a major threat, so the rest of the Nazi leaders couldn’t help seeing Himmler as this fussy little file clerk.
It’s a hell of a trick, and I’ll admit, I’m buffaloed. Even if Himmler (Khrushchev) was one hell of an actor, and the egos on the other top Nazis (Soviets) were gravity-defying, they still should’ve been able to see that this fussy little file clerk had some seriously hard boys working for him. Reinhard Heydrich was as ruthless a fuck as was ever born, and Himmler kept him in check. Ditto barbarians like Odilo Globocnik and Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski — they don’t come any nastier than those two, yet Himmler managed them easily. What other conclusion can you possibly draw about Himmler, other than that he was nastier than all of them put together? And yet, apparently, nobody did …
The only explanation for this that I can think of is the Nazis’ ideologization of governmental structures. As opposed to the Soviet experience, where the Party and the Bureaucracy were supposed to be, and often actually were, distinct. After some disastrous experiments with demoting technical experts to field hands, and vice versa, the Russian Communists learned that ideological correctness and “soviet power” does not, in fact, obviate the need for stuff like math. (See also: Mao’s backyard blast furnaces). So the Soviets made sure to separate what they called the “technical intelligentsia” from the Party. The head honcho at Gosplan, Gossnab, etc. would be a Party hack from way back, of course, but the actual brainworkers wouldn’t be. I don’t know just how many of them had Party membership cards, or if any of them did, but nobody I know of rose through the Party’s ranks via Gosplan.
Once a Gosplanner, always a Gosplanner. The technical intelligentsia got all kinds of perks in the Soviet system, but one thing they did not do was get perks inside the Party. You can be a technical expert, or you can be an up-and-coming Party man, but you can’t be both.
The Nazis did the exact opposite of that. The way the Third Reich actually functioned is still opaque in a lot of ways (especially to non-specialists), and of course the pressures of wartime forced a lot of ad hoc measures, but it seems like the SS was supposed to be a sort of All-Purpose Expert Corps. Not only did they have their own army and intelligence service, but they had their own economy — the brief history of the Third Reich makes a lot more sense when you realize that half or more of the official Reich economy was hamstrung by the informal but very real SS economy, operating largely (but far from exclusively) through the labor camps.
Indeed, the SS had their own administration. As incredible as it seems, the Nazis had no grand plan for what to do once they’d conquered Europe. Himmler did, at least as far as the East was concerned, and he tried his damnedest to put it into action in Poland (which is why the General Government was so legendarily brutal). Hitler apparently thought in terms of Germany’s lost late 19th century colonies, when he bothered to think about it at all … which wasn’t often. In his typical Fuhrer-riffic style, he just ignored the problem, trusting to Organizational Darwinism to sort it out …
… which is where the All-Purpose Experts of the SS stepped in. The General Government, for instance, was headed by a civilian lawyer, Hans Frank, but the day to day governance largely fell to the SS, because that’s who stepped up. Poland was an occupied zone, with vital war industries, but it was far behind the front for most of the war; the army couldn’t waste vital manpower garrisoning it. Thus the SSPF (the SS and Police Leader) stepped in, drawing manpower as needed from a wide variety of sources — the camp guards, the Wehrmacht (when garrison troops were available, and when they could wrangle them from the various army commanders), the civilian police, the “General SS”, and so on.
The details aren’t nearly as important as the big picture, which is: Unlike the technical intelligentsia in the Soviet Union, members of the SS could climb to the highest ranks of the Party. Indeed they were expected to: the SS was rapidly becoming a Party-within-the-Party at the outbreak of the war, not least because Himmler awarded a “ceremonial” SS rank to anyone who mattered politically in the various departments. The savvier guys refused the “honor,” of course, because they didn’t want to be subordinate to Himmler, even ceremonially, but many didn’t. Which meant that had the Nazis won the war, not only would Himmler have been the next Fuhrer, but the SS would’ve closed ranks, essentially taking over The Party — they’d be the Inner Party, as opposed to the “mere Nazis” of the Outer Party.
World War Two
Published 12 Feb 2022Operation KE, the Japanese evacuation of Guadalcanal, concludes this week and the campaign has been a big loss for the Japanese. The Axis forces are also withdrawing — and the Red Army advancing — in the Donbas and the Caucasus, closing in on both Kharkov and Rostov. And a front that’s been quiet for a while, the Burma front, begins heating up again with an Allied advance out of India.
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Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Oct 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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The modularity and clever design of the Stemple Takedown Gun is perhaps best illustrated by the STG-M1A and STG-1928 (these are the same gun with either a horizontal or vertical front grip). In the early 2000s a bunch of Thompson parts kits came into the US, WW2 vintage lend-lease guns sent to Russia. They were M1 and M1A1 models, and had intact barrels but torch-cut receivers. BRP, who makes the Stemple, realized that the sear-to-magwell dimensions on the Thompson were almost identical to the Suomi and Stemple — and that he could make a version of the STG that was a nearly perfect clone of the M1 Thompson.
The registered Stemple receiver slides into a square Thompson lookalike housing, and original Thompson grips, stocks, and hand guards are used. It is chambered for .45ACP, using original Thompson stick magazines (naturally). The result is a submachine gun that almost perfectly duplicates the handling of a true Thompson, without the historical value that makes the Thompson so expensive and keeps many owners from wanting to actually take their Thompsons out to the range.
Note that the gun in this video is an early example, and models made today are able to take both stick and drum magazines. Also, due to the design of the disconnector in the original Thompson FCG, the semiauto setting is not functional in the Stemple version — it’s only full automatic.
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