Quotulatiousness

March 1, 2022

Words of the day — “tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism”

Filed under: Europe, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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.

February 27, 2022

“Putin finally called our bluff. The question to me is when and if Xi will decide to do the same”

Filed under: China, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

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.

February 25, 2022

Tsar Vlad begins the next stage in rebuilding the Russian empire

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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:

February 4, 2022

Canada’s delusionary approach to the question of providing military support to Ukraine

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, “Tommy Conway” explains why it makes no sense to take Canadian government and military leaders’ talking points on the situation in Ukraine seriously:

Canada has not done these things. We say we’re not sending weapons because “diplomacy is the solution”, but the reality is we can’t send anything meaningful. Any small arms we send would likely be on a NATO standard, and thus not very useful for Ukrainian forces who use Soviet calibers. As for the stuff the Kyiv really needs — the anti-tank and anti-air systems that the Americans, British, and Balts are sending — we are not sending them because we barely have any. Our anti-tank capability is mostly theoretical. Because we have not replaced older, worn-out systems, we have less anti-tank capability now than we did during the “decade of darkness” in the 1990s. We’ve known for decades that we need to equip the infantry with highly-portable, effective guided missiles like the U.S. Javelin, but we haven’t bothered, save for a few Spike missile systems for our special forces. Maybe our regular ground forces will get something similar by 2033. We have literally no air defence capability besides shooting machine guns in the air and hoping for the best, so we have no air defence missiles to send. Besides the fact that we can’t support Ukraine with weapons, we can’t really support NATO allies with reinforcements either because our units, on a modern battlefield, would lack the ability to defend themselves. We might be welcome as a political gesture, but we might also just be in the way.

Our deficiencies go deeper than weapons. CAF is well below strength. But instead of doubling down on core capabilities, CAF leadership insists on putting more people and resources into newer, faddish capabilities like cyber and information warfare, when we already have an entire government agency that does cyber. Our brigades — the core of the Canadian Army’s fighting power, are under-strength, and the army’s recent “Force 2025” concept concedes that the army should hope to field small, combat team elements as the core of any near-future operational deployment. To put this in perspective, a combat team makes up part of a battlegroup, which makes up part of a brigade. The Russians have 50 battlegroup equivalents on the Ukrainian border, and roughly 16 in the Kaliningrad exclave bordering Poland and Lithuania.

A Canadian deployment of a few combat teams would be too small a force even to help manage a large number of refugees in an active combat zone. We might be able to scrape together a battlegroup, but it would be vulnerable to air and tanks — in other words, not very useful. Once it was destroyed, that would probably be the majority of the Canadian Army’s combat power gone, with no hope of reconstituting it.

It would be one thing if the army sold this reorganization as a necessary evil in lean times, but this sort of hollowing-out is instead presented as allowing the army to “remain[…] ready to operate not only in the land domain, but pan-domain in a joint environment beyond simply reinforcing its existing capabilities.” Strip away the jargon, and it should be obvious that this phrasing is the victim of too much powerpoint and too little thinking. Junior NCOs and junior officers alike are instructed to build a “priority of work” into their plans for even small, simple operations. Given that we don’t have realistic “current capabilities”, reinforcing our shell of an army should obviously be on the top of the list before we commit resources to new things. At the very least we should be open and honest about what we can and can’t do.

If you ask most talking heads in the Canadian “defence space”, battlegroups that can’t battle aren’t a big deal. The idea that modern war will be won on social media or through “integration” and digital technologies, thus making the old ground-pounders outdated, is a common staple among civilian defence academics. It’s also present in the government’s defence policy, which goes on at length about space and cyberwar and climate change and “ungoverned spaces”, but little about building a realistic fighting force. This hopeful language about an army that can operate in a chaotic world without much messy stuff like hurting people or breaking things is obviously nonsense, but novelty and wishful thinking are pretty standard fare for academics and politicians. It’s much more concerning to see supposedly practical military people hold reality in such low regard.

The officer class’ shoddy thinking comes from decades of misguided pseudo-intellectual development. After the Somalia Affair in the 1990s, the CAF turned to liberal arts education as a way to buy credibility. There was nothing wrong with the idea of intellectual broadening in theory — the officer corps obviously needed reform. But the reforms were rushed and packaged, so they replaced one set of intellectual deficiencies with another.

November 17, 2021

Environmental pessimism despite the facts

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Alexander Hammond refutes one of the many, many articles preaching global environmental doom and disaster:

Last week, The Scotsman published an article by the journalist Anastasiia Zagoruichyk. In the piece, Zagoruichyk claims that thanks to climate change, fires, and deforestation in her native Ukraine, her children won’t get to experience childhood joys like “walking in the autumn forest, picking mushrooms and breathing fresh air.”

Forest coverage in Ukraine is, admittedly, a niche topic, but alarmism about the future of our forests and our children is unfortunately widespread. Indeed, it was not long ago that Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam confidently declared that due to deforestation and other environmental damage, “our children are going to die in the next 10-20 years.” Thankfully for humanity, these far-fetched claims are not based in reality.

Contrary to what Zagoruichyk would have you believe, forest coverage in Ukraine has increased drastically in recent years. Between 1992 (the oldest data available) and 2020, the share of land in Ukraine covered by forest increased from 16.1 percent to 16.7 percent. While a 0.6 percentage point increase might seem like a small amount, this equates to an additional 3,622 square kilometers of forest – a land area roughly 1.5 times larger than the country of Georgia.

Globally, the world does continue to lose forest area. However, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the rate of deforestation between 2010-2020 was 40 percent lower than in 1990-2000. At this rate, even without additional promises from world leaders at COP, the global deforestation rate will likely hit zero. Indeed, over the last 30 years, net afforestation has occurred in Europe (including Russia), North America, Oceania, and Asia.

The world’s two poorest regions, South America and Africa, are also the only ones that continue to experience net deforestation. This is no coincidence; many environmental scientists and commentators suggest that economic and ecological well-being are intimately related. According to one hypothesis, called the Environmental Kuznets Curve, a region’s environment worsens in tandem with economic growth but only until a certain income per capita is reached. At that point, people can afford to protect the environment, and ecosystems flourish. This environmental recovery has occurred across Europe and North America and is currently happening in China, Russia, India, and Vietnam.

Therefore, as South America and Africa continue to become richer, we can expect their rate of forest loss to slow and eventually reverse. Given this good news, why is there so much pessimism about the future of our forests? Zagoruichyk’s article offers some answers.

Earlier this month, Michael Shellenberger also had good-but-ignored environmental news to report in UnHerd:

No global problem has ever been more exaggerated than climate change. As it has gone from being an obscure scientific question to a theme in popular culture, we’ve lost all sense of perspective.

Here are the facts: in Europe, emissions in 2020 were 26% below 1990 levels. In the United States, emissions in 2020 were 22% below 2005 levels. Emissions are likely to start declining, too, in developing nations, including China and India, within the next decade. Most nations’ emissions will be bigger this year than last, due to post-Covid economic growth. But global emissions are still likely to peak within the next decade.

And the result will be a much smaller increase in global average temperatures than almost anyone predicted just five years ago. The best science now predicts that temperatures are likely to rise just 2.5-3°C above pre-industrial levels. It’s not ideal, but it’s a far cry from the hysterical and apocalyptic predictions of 6°C, made just a decade ago. A 3°C increase is hardly an existential threat to humanity.

Not that you’d know it, if you had half an eye on the headlines this summer. The floods, fires and heatwaves that plagued the world were, for many observers, proof that the impacts of climate change have already become catastrophic. In Europe, more than 150 people died in flooding. In the United States, wildfire season started earlier and lasted longer, razing hundreds of thousands of acres. Around the world, hundreds died from heatwaves.

But again, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the facts: there has been a 92% decline in the per decade death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did. Globally, the five-year period ending in 2020 had the fewest natural disaster deaths of any five-year period since 1900. And this decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled — and temperatures rose more than 1°C degree centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

July 27, 2021

QotD: Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Walter Duranty was possibly the worst foreign correspondent in the history of the Western press. Reporting on Russia for the New York Times during the 1920s and 30s, he not only lied through his teeth about the death of millions during the Ukrainian famine, but conspired, with some success, to prevent anyone else from telling the truth about it.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for his reporting, but ever since 1990, when a biography of him was published that emphasized the extent of his mendacity, there have been efforts to have the prize symbolically rescinded (Duranty died in 1957).

A man may be honestly mistaken, but Duranty had knowingly and persistently lied about matters of world importance. At the very least he deserved the sack rather than a prestigious award, but was never called to account during his lifetime; and the Pulitzer committee has twice decided that the award should not be withdrawn.

I can see the argument for rescinding the prize because Duranty’s conduct was truly despicable, and the prize had been for what, morally, was a great crime.

But there is also an argument for not rescinding it, for the posthumous withdrawal of an award can look like an attempt to rewrite the history of the awarding authority by an act of auto-absolution. An admission that the Pulitzer committee had made a terrible error of judgment might have been sufficient.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Richard Dawkins Punished for Inviting Us to Think”, The Iconoclast, 2021-04-24.

May 16, 2021

Joseph Stalin Jumps the Gun – 142 – May 16, 1942

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, India, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 15 May 2021

The Soviets pre-empt a German offensive with one of their own in the south of the Eastern Front, but that’s not the only fighting. The skies over Malta and the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence are full of action. Meanwhile, two races against time — and the Japanese — come to an end in India.
(more…)

November 11, 2020

How To Kill 15,000 People in One Day – War Against Humanity 022 – November 1941, Pt. 1

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 10 Nov 2020

As German troops pull into eastern Ukraine, locals fight back in any way they can. Some of them have been the target of Soviet brutalisation for decades. For many who are deemed ‘enemy of the Third Reich’, the first two weeks of November 1941 are their last, as the ‘Holocaust of Bullets’ continues.

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Jon Bjork – “Icicles”

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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
1 hour ago
You might have noticed how more and more of our War Against Humanity episodes are restricted by YouTube. For some, it might take up to three separate “warning” windows to see the video. Many don’t get the episodes in their subscription boxes or don’t receive notifications despite their settings having notifications turned on. The video might not be sharable on social media, or some might not be able to watch them at all because they don’t have an account, are deemed too young by YouTube or are in the wrong geographic location.

And that doesn’t even include the huge restrictions YouTube puts on the organic reach of these videos. If it weren’t for out loyal community and other social media channels, these War Against Humanity episodes would go virtually under the radar. Even though our episodes could be a remedy to the problems that YouTube and many societies are dealing with. Misinformation, ignorance, and the obliviousness to the horrors of our past are dangerous and the restriction of our educational, factual and academic coverage of these horrors adds insult to injury.

“The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences,” one of the warning says. And mind you that it’s not the facts that people find offensive. They’re facts. They are neutral. It is that we are showing them to the world that people find offensive.

We won’t change our content or our tone. To make sure to see our content no matter what, you can follow our other Social Media accounts and/or join the TimeGhost Army on https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory or https://timeghost.tv to ensure we stay financially independent.

Cheers,
Joram

October 2, 2020

The Rape of Humanity at Babi Yar – War Against Humanity 019

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 1 Oct 2020

Killing Jews by the thousands becomes the main way of eradicating the Jews in Eastern Europe in August and September 1941. The Mass Murder at Babi Yar in Kiev is yet another escalation in that process.

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Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
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Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
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Edited by: Miki Cackowski
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Colorizations by:
Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Tzo15 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Mikolaj Uchman
Spartacus Olsson

Image Sources:
Bundesarchiv
Yad Vashem 3725/4, 7717/273, 5705/29, 5705/43, 3150/37, 5705/48, 5705/53, 5705/54, 5705/21, 2725/7, 5705/12, 5705/20, 5705/22, 4788/72, 5705/26, 5705/40, 4613/1055, 3521/134, 3521/133
USHMM
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
from the Noun Project: Skull by Muhamad Ulum, soldier by Simon Child

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Cobby Costa – “Flight Path”
Andreas Jamsheree – “Guilty Shadows 4”
Jon Bjork – “For the Many”
Farell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Fabien Tell – “Never Forget”
Gunnar Johnsen – “Not Safe Yet”

Sources:
Berkhoff, Karel (ed.), Basic Historical Narrative of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (2018).
Desbois, Patrick, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (2008).
Fox, Holquist and Martin, The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses (2014).
Kay, Alex and David Stahel, Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (2018).
Longerich, Peter, The Unwritten Order: Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution (2001)
Longerich, Peter, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (2010).
Klee, dressen and Reiss, The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders (1991).
Müller, “The Brutalisation of Warfare, Nazi Crimes and the Wehrmacht”, In: Erickson & Dilks, Barbarossa: The Axis and the Allies.
Pieper, Henning, Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union (2015).
Rutherford, Jeff, Combat And Genocide on the Eastern Front: The German Infantry’s War, 1941-1944 (2014).
Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010).
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Encyclopaedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, volume II, Part A (2012).
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Encyclopaedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, volume II, Part B (2012).

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
3 hours ago
No one should have to go through what the subjects of todays episode went through. Every one of the 33,000 victims of the mass-murder at Babi Yar has their own personal story. They were humans, just like you and me, with memories, interests, hobbies, fears, hopes and loved ones. This is why we tried to make this episode as personal as we could – So that we don’t forget that we’re talking about real people here.

September 27, 2020

Free from the Nazi Occupation – but for how long can it last? WW2 – 109 – September 26, 1941

Filed under: China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 26 Sep 2020

In former Yugoslavia, the Republic of Uzice breaks free from the German occupation, even as the Germans are mopping up the masses of shattered Soviet Armies after last week’s capture of Kiev. In the north, it really looks as if Leningrad will hold out for the time being, and German troops from both north and south converge on the center for the coming drive on Moscow.

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Olga Shirnina, a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
– Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
– Mikołaj Uchman
– Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…

Sources:
– Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0: Bild_146-2005-0176, Bild_183-J21813,
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

September 20, 2020

Another week, another half million for the Germans – WW2 – 108 – September 19, 1941

Filed under: China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 Sep 2020

Kiev falls to the Germans, yielding hundreds of thousands of prisoners as whole armies are surrounded, but behind the lines all over German-occupied territories, partisan movements are gaining steam. Meanwhile, in China, Japan launches another campaign against Changsha.

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Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
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Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Monika Worona
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
– Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
– Olga Shirnina, a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
– Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…
– Daniel Weiss

Sources:
– Ra Boe / Wikipedia / Lizenz: Creative Commons CC-by-sa-3.0 de
– Mil. ru
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
– Estonica

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

July 25, 2020

Walter Duranty, Stalin’s tame “journalist”

Filed under: History, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Francis X. Maier makes the case that the Holodomor — the Soviet Union’s deliberate starvation of millions of its own people in Ukraine and surrounding regions — killed even more than the better-known Nazi Holocaust, then identifies one of the key apologists who lied serially and deliberately to hide the genocide:

A page from the Chicago Herald and Examiner from 3 March, 1935.
Wikimedia Commons.

[S.J.] Taylor’s 1990 article was timed to the release of Stalin’s Apologist, her withering biography of journalist Walter Duranty. A Pulitzer Prize winner, celebrated political analyst, and Moscow correspondent for the New York Times during the 1930s, Duranty interviewed Stalin twice. He also played a significant role in securing American diplomatic recognition for the Soviet regime. Less publicly, he was a prodigious womanizer, longtime opium buddy of Satanist Aleister Crowley, compulsive exploiter of friends, a spendthrift, occasional drunk, and an inventive, always-reliable flack for the Soviet regime.

One of Duranty’s lifelong memories involved his religious grandmother who, after catching the adolescent Duranty in a lie, had warned him that “liars go to hell.” He never forgot or forgave the correction. As an adult, he simply erased all family ties and falsely claimed in his autobiography that he’d been orphaned at age ten. Massaging the truth became one of his core skills. Brilliant, engaging, and widely respected at the time, he was, in the words of Malcolm Muggeridge, who also reported from Moscow and saw Duranty in action, “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.”

Committed to protecting his own influence and to a future “greater good” promised by the Soviet regime, Duranty at first dismissed rumors of the Ukrainian Famine. Then he downplayed them. Then he claimed that Ukraine’s “food shortages” were the result of local mismanagement and the work of “wreckers” and “spoilers” intent on undermining Soviet progress. He repeatedly denied the mass starvation in his reporting. But he did suggest that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” … especially when the omelet is the task of modernization, and the cooks are tough-minded Bolsheviks intent on a better tomorrow.

As Taylor notes in her book, Western powers struggling with the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler in Germany had little interest in rumors from Ukraine that might antagonize Stalin as a potential ally. Muggeridge had arrived in Russia in 1932 to string for the Manchester Guardian. A convinced socialist at the time, he intended to stay in Russia and renounce his British passport for Soviet citizenship. Reality interfered. By March 1933, he was reporting on Ukraine’s famine as “one of the most monstrous crimes in history,” and his disillusionment with the Soviet paradise was complete. But back in England, thanks in part to Duranty’s counter-reporting and Soviet propaganda, Muggeridge’s work was dismissed as “a hysterical tirade.” Muggeridge himself was slandered, vilified, and unable to find employment. And that might have buried the Holodomor story successfully, except for one man.

Welshman Gareth Jones was a young Russian Studies graduate of Cambridge and a former secretary to British Prime Minister Lloyd George. Stringing for the same Manchester Guardian as Muggeridge, he eluded Soviet press controls and spent three weeks on his own, walking through the hellish conditions of a starvation-ravaged Ukraine. Then he wrote about it in the spring of 1933, confirming and compounding the impact of Muggeridge’s recent work. Walter Duranty led the ferocious, Soviet-prodded attack on Jones’s credibility. He also bullied most other Moscow-based Western journalists — to their enduring disgrace — into doing the same, lest they lose their visas. Jones, however, had a spine. He did not back off. He continued writing and speaking about the famine in Ukraine with lasting effect, until his death under suspicious circumstances two years later.

July 20, 2020

A lost nation that lasted for 300 years in (relative) peace and prosperity

Filed under: Asia, Economics, Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’d heard of the Khazar Khaganate occasionally, but didn’t know much about it until I read a useful summary by Lawrence W. Reed:

Borders of the Khazar Khaganate between 650 and 850 A.D.
Wikimedia Commons.

The list of extinct countries includes the better known ones like the USSR (aptly dubbed “the Evil Empire” by Ronald Reagan) and Yugoslavia, as well as hundreds of largely forgotten others like Majapahit, Assyria, Babylonia, Burgundy, and the Ottoman Empire. Far more countries are long gone, in fact, than the 195 on the map today. As a history lover, I’ve never yet discovered a country whose inhabitants’ experience was devoid of interesting facts and lessons.

Take Khazaria, for example. It lasted over 300 years (650 to 965 AD) and covered more territory than the combined Scandinavian nations of our time. It spanned the eastern half of modern-day Ukraine, the steppes of the Volga-Don region of present Russia, the entire Crimean Peninsula, and the northern Caucasus. Its southern portion took in most of the shorelines of three seas: the Black, the Caspian and the Aral.

It’s my thesis that for a country to be “successful” for a considerable period — success being defined loosely here as economically prosperous, politically stable, and militarily defensible — it must possess substantial TTD. That’s not a pronounceable acronym, unfortunately, but it stands for trade, tolerance and decentralization.

Each of these three criteria for success is worth volumes of discussion but here’s the nub of it: When economic freedom and private property exist, trade flourishes. And trade is what peaceful humans do to satisfy wants and improve material well-being. Choke it off and living standards plummet. Tolerance is a sign that people appreciate the benefits derived from diversity in personal choices. An intolerant people deprive themselves of what others can offer and waste time and resources fighting instead of collaborating. Decentralization preserves the rich identities of local communities and stymies the concentration of authority with its inevitable corruption. Power dispersed is power tamed.

So a successful country is one that can boast a lot of TTD. It encourages exchange, celebrates diversity and avoids top-down, political command-and-control. Almost every “failed state” in history did just the opposite by stifling commerce; stoking racial, ethnic or nationalistic hatred; and/or installing a dictatorship.

Khazaria, to its great credit, practiced remarkable measures of trade and tolerance and enough decentralization to prevent its government from sabotaging either one. In the end, it met its demise not from internal decay but from foreign assault.

May 16, 2020

Polish-Soviet War – First Phase 1919 – May 1920 I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 15 May 2020

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The Polish-Soviet War was one of the biggest conflicts after the armistice of 1918 and the culmination point of the many sub-conflicts that made up the Western Front of the Russian Civil War. The question about the Polish-Russian border was decided with armored trains, cavalry charges and also on the negotiating table.

» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
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» SOURCES
Centek, Jarosław: “Polish-Soviet War 1920-1921”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08

Leonhard, Jörn. Der überforderte Frieden. Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (CH Beck, 2018).

Borzecki, Jerzy. The Polish-Soviet Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008)

Engelstein, Laura. Russia in Flames (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Smele, Jonathan. The “Russian” Civil Wars 1916-1926 (London: Hurst, 2015).

Davies, Norman. White Eagle Red Star (Random House, 2003 (1972))

Böhler, Jochen. Civil War in Central Europe, 1918-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Timothy Snyder. The Reconstruction of Nations. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)

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March 6, 2020

“Poltava” – The Great Northern War – Sabaton History 057 [Official]

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 5 Mar 2020

Bullets break the silent air, a wasted battleplan! It was a long and harsh march through the lands in the east, where the Swedish army of Charles XII sought to bring the Russian Empire to its knees. The Swedish king had the vision of a great victory, in which he captured Moscow and destroyed Tsar Peter I’s ambitions once and for all. However, as in late June 1709, the exhausted and hungry Swedish troops finally met the Tsar in open battle near the fortress of Poltava, it all seemed impossible. A relentless and fateful battle would commence. A battle after which only one empire would continue to rise while the other would fall.

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Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
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An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

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From the comments:

Sabaton History
2 hours ago
Just a quick correction: St. Petersburg was not named after Peter I himself, but after his patron saint St. Peter. Although the Russian Tsar made sure that he himself would be immortalized by founding St. Petersburg, Russia’s window to Europe.

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