Quotulatiousness

August 30, 2024

Experts are concerned that criticism of experts will weaken their role in our political system

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the National Post, Geoff Russ dares to imply that the experts are not the divinely inspired superior beings with unfailing wisdom about any and all issues:

So-called “experts” have weakened Canada’s political discourse far more than Pierre Poilievre ever has. Journalist and author Stephen Maher recently penned a column in the Globe & Mail titled, “By slamming experts, Pierre Poilievre and his staff are degrading political debate”.

Maher is an even-handed journalist, and his column should not be written off as the scribblings of a Liberal partisan. What his column misses is how the term “expert” has been abused, and the degree to which “experts” have thoroughly discredited themselves in recent years.

Poilievre’s criticisms of the “experts” would not resonate if they lived up to the title bestowed upon them.

For example, the Doug Ford government’s decision to close 10 safe injection sites after implementing a ban on such facilities located near schools and child-care centres. The closures were lamented by “experts” trotted out by the CBC as putting peoples’ lives at risk.

The safe injection sites slated to be shut down are near schools and daycares, and there is demonstrable proof that crime rises near these sites wherever they are located.

Derek Finkle recently wrote that the critiques of the closures levelled by selected “experts” failed to note how community members had been threatened with rape, arson, and murder since the injection site in his Toronto neighbourhood had been opened.

These are reasonable grounds for a government to reconsider whether they should allow drug-use, supervised or not, to proliferate in neighbourhoods where families reside.

For all their alleged expertise, many “experts” seem unwilling to actually investigate what is happening on the ground, and often give plainly bad advice altogether, and this goes back decades.

The “experts” failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis, they said the risk to Canadians from the coronavirus was low in early 2020, and they failed to prevent runaway inflation after the worst of it had subsided.

Was it not the “experts” who asserted that arming and funding of Ukraine prior to Vladimir Putin’s invasion in 2022 was a bad idea? After the invasion began, was it not the “experts” who confidently predicted Putin’s army would conquer the whole of Ukraine in a matter of days, and not be bogged down in a years-long conflict that would reshape global trade?

The truth is that we live in a worse-off world because of the advice and predictions of “experts”.

June 25, 2024

“Nigel Farage’s sin […] was to tell the truth which our rulers and their bought, sycophantic media are desperate to hide from us”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As the British general election rumbles into its final days, most media outlets reacted very strongly to Nigel Farage’s willingness to break with the narrative over the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war:

Nigel Farage has really got the elites and their prostitute mainstream media panicking, this time by being the only politician who dares tell the truth about the origins of the Russia-Ukraine war.

First let me stress that I am not condoning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But Putin has made it very clear for at least the last 15 years that he saw Ukraine and Georgia, which both have long borders with Russia, joining Nato as an existential threat to his country and warned “not an inch eastwards”.

The West arrogantly ignored Putin’s warnings. That was dumb.

At a conference in April 2008, where Putin was invited to address Nato leaders, he warned that inviting Ukraine and Georgia to join Nato, and thus parking Nato troops and missiles directly on Russia’s borders, would be seen as an existential threat to Russia’s security. This was even reported in the BBC’s in-house rag, the Guardian, on April 4 2008: “The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, today repeated his warning that Moscow would view any attempt to expand Nato to its borders as a ‘direct threat'”.

In December 2021, Putin yet again warned the West that allowing Ukraine and Georgia to join Nato would be unacceptable, in the first minute of this three-minute video. In this video Putin (sensibly in my opinion) asks whether the US would allow Russian troops and missiles to be positioned along its borders with Canada or Mexico and reiterates his “not an inch eastwards” threat.

Yet in January 2022, the US presented its written response to Russian demands on Ukraine not joining Nato and on Nato troops being withdrawn from Romania and Bulgaria, but made clear that it did not change Washington’s support for Ukraine’s right to pursue Nato membership, the most contentious issue in relations with Moscow.

The reply, which was delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry by the US ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan, repeated the US offer to negotiate with Russia over some aspects of European security, but the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said the issue of eventual Ukrainian membership of the alliance was one of principle.

Blinken was speaking hours after his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, threatened “retaliatory measures” if the US response did not satisfy the Kremlin.

“Without going to the specifics of the document, I can tell you that it reiterates what we said publicly for many weeks, and in a sense for many, many years. That we will uphold the principle of Nato’s open door”, Blinken said, adding: “There is no change. There will be no change.”

June 4, 2024

Assassination-to-order, or war by other means

Filed under: Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I was not well-informed about the goings-on within Vladimir Putin’s Russia even before the Russo-Ukrainian war went into high gear and disrupted all information from that part of the world and I hear much but trust nothing I’ve been hearing since then. kulak, on the other hand, seems to have paid much closer attention to Russian internal affairs, including one particular political assassination:

On August 20, 2022, 29 year old Daria Dugina was killed in a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow. The bomb, it was widely agreed, had been intended for her father the famed/infamous Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin (whose works are now shockingly hard to get in English and appears on my “Real Banned Books List“), and while there were lots of deflections and denials, it was fairly widely agreed the plot had been carried out with US and UK backing by Ukrainian-aligned insurgents and agents within Russia.

Indeed many US aligned “Journalists”, “Open Source Intelligence” types, Bellingcat-associated influencers, and other CIA-aligned carve outs openly CELEBRATED the death of Daria, since she had been involved in Putin-aligned political youth organizing.

Of course, the fact political volunteers and door knockers have NEVER been considered legitimate military targets, nor the fact the real target was a PHILOSOPHER and everything he had ever done would have been perfectly legal to do even within the United States under the auspices of the first amendment … that somehow never occurred to these commentators. Nor the wider US intellectual class, and somehow neither did the natural logical conclusion.

Russia is by and large NOT run by its political organizers and academics. You could probably kill 1000 Russian university professors and it wouldn’t unbalance the Russian state too extraordinarily. Russia is run by a combination of old Soviet secret policemen, gangsters, and crooked/”reformed” oligarchs all attempting to reorganize themselves into a somewhat respectable upper-class, with a blend of impressive and farcical results.

Before he was killed in an internal power struggle the former head of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin embodied this, turning from a St. Petersburg gangster, to a prisoner, to a (definitely money laundering) caterer for the presidential palace, to the head of a PMC mercenary company. Every prominent person in Russia has a career like this Right down to Putin going from a KGB officer, to a gangster/political fixer, to president … Every elite member of Russian society is basically leading a life ripped right from Grand Theft Auto IV, complete with the eternal struggles of trying to “go legit” and formalize everything as a normal upper-class elite, to being dragged back into gangsterism or even Soviet power struggles by their complex past.

Put simply the actual Russian Elite are not people very intimidated by assassination. They’ve all known people to be killed in power struggles, espionage, and criminal altercations, and are used to the anxiety that death might wait for them around the corner. And the US and Ukraine lashing out at academics who might be intimidated doesn’t really affect them.

However, if the Russian state did the logical tit-for-tat escalation and responded in kind … that would shake America to its knees. America actually IS run by its academics, political organizers, and bureaucrats. And almost none of the people with power have a gangster or KGB agent’s stoic familiarity with death and danger.

Killing a Russian Academics daughter did very little to the Russian state… It’d be a very different story for Russia’s armed agents to do the same in America and kill Chelsea Clinton, daughter of current Columbia professor Hillary Clinton.

It’s be a very different story if Russia assassinated Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan, husband of former under-secretary of state Victoria Nuland. Or any number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton political philosophers or International Relations commentators, or members of their family.

One can imagine the headlines if John Hopkins and RAND fellow Francis Fukuyama was so killed:

“It is the end of Fukuyama”
– History

And again remember, though the various income streams of the US elite may resemble embezzlement, protection rackets, and money laundering … these aren’t gangsters. These are complacent, highly agreeable, shockingly unoriginal and cowardly … academics and bureaucrats.

Indeed one can imagine Putin weighing the risk of such a reprisal and then deciding against it, not out of ethical concerns, but because the American ruling class is too unpredictable and prone to womanly hysterias.

Indeed amongst the few senior American and Ukrainian officials who knew of the attack beforehand you can imagine them salivating that Putin might respond in kind and the subsequent freakout might commit the US to joining the war (one of the few scenarios where Ukraine could possible survive against their overwhelming odds).

May 10, 2024

A different take on the Russo-Ukrainian War

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

Kulak suggests that far from being a model for future wars, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine may not prefigure anything at all about future wars:

Few weeks go by where I don’t read a piece on how Ukraine is the Future of warfare and armies and thinkers need to adjust to the reality that the warfare of the future will involve massive unaccountable amounts of artillery, trenches, conscription and grinding warfare.

While sometimes they point to relevant lessons: Yes the inability of the US to quickly reindustrialize and produce artillery shells at a rate comparable to Russia does speak to a profound rot in American governance, the military industrial complex, and American business regulation more generally,

Often times the conclusions drawn are dangerously delusional: A draft would be more likely to break the American nation than save it. As indeed conscription has resulted in Ukraine’s population collapsing with somewhere between 6 and 10 million Ukrainians (out of a pre-war 36 million) having fled the country, not to escape the mostly static war, but to escape the Totalitarian conditions the Zelensky regime has imposed in response to the war. (1.1 million of whom escaped INTO Russia, for any who deny this [is] largely an ethnic conflict between Western and Russian Ukrainians, as it has been since 2014).

And the thing is all of these discussions rest on a assumption that seems ludicrous the second you stop and think about it: Ukraine is not the future of Warfare, these conditions will be almost impossible to ever create again.

Ukraine had a pre-war Nominal GDP of 199 billion USD. Officially this only declined to 160 billion in 2022 as a result of the war, but there’s good reason to think its actual internal private sector economy collapsed far further [given] it had collapsed from 177 billion in 2013 to 90 billion in 2015 as a result of the US backed Coup/Revolution.

Indeed given the population flight, conscription, and impositions on the populace, it is very likely a SUPER-MAJORITY of that 160 billion GDP in 2022, was actually the result of US and NATO pouring hundreds of billions into the country. Where it was either used or siphoned off as corruption.

Simply put Ukraine has received military, financial and other aid most like in excess of what its entire internal economy produced in the same period, and as of writing it’s still losing territory.

When commentators say this is a war between NATO and Russia they are almost entirely correct. If you combine all the economies that are funding, arming, or fighting on one side or the other of this war you get a majority of the entire global economy.

And they have used all that money to pay off the Ukrainian regime to refuse any peace agreement, even ones their own negotiators had agreed to, and that were clearly in the best interest of the country … you know if you value hundreds of thousands of young men and not having your population collapse more than narrow stretches of land being bought up by Blackrock.

April 20, 2024

Russian and French Nazis Defend the Reich – ϟϟ Foreign Fighters Part 3

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

World War Two
Published 19 Apr 2024

As the war turns ever more against Germany, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler keeps loosening the racial standards of his Waffen SS. More and more non-Germans fill the ranks of his forces. Some of these non-German fighters will be among the last defenders of the Third Reich.

Click here for parts one and two:

• ϟϟ Foreign Fighters
(more…)

March 3, 2024

The five “generations” of warfare

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter outlines the definitions for the way wars have been waged from pre-history down to today:

Warfare is fundamentally about breaking the enemy’s will to fight. This can be done with violence, or without it – before the fight even starts, through raw intimidation. Working from this understanding, military theorists have divided the history of warfare into five generations.

First Generation Warfare, abbreviated 1GW, was war as it was waged from the dawn of civilization up through roughly the Civil War. This style of conflict involved massed line infantry, equipped with spears, pikes, swords, or line-of-sight ranged weapons such as longbows, crossbows, or muskets. The basic tactic was to draw up two large groups of armed men, bring them into close contact, and have them hack at one another until one side grew demoralized by the slaughter, at which point their line would break and the real slaughter could begin.

These defined “generations” of war apply only to states, as Bret Devereaux described warfare before states (and between early states and non-state groups) this way:

The oldest way of war was what Native North Americans called – evocatively – the “cutting off” way of war (a phrase I am borrowing from W. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America” in Empires and Indigines, ed. W. Lee (2011)), but which was common among non-state peoples everywhere in the world for the vast stretch of human history (and one may easily argue much of modern insurgency and terrorism is merely this same toolkit, updated with modern weapons). The goal of such warfare was not to subjugate a population but to drive them off, forcing them to vacate resource-rich land which could then be exploited by your group. To do this, you wanted to inflict maximum damage (casualties inflicted, animals rustled, goods stolen, people captured) at minimum risk, until the lopsided balance of pain you inflicted forced the enemy to simply move away from you to get out of your operational range.

[…]

We may call this the first system of war. It is the oldest, but as noted above, never entirely goes away. We tend to call this style “asymmetric” or “unconventional” war, but it is the most conventional war – it was the first convention, after all. It is also sometimes denigrated as primitive, but should not be judged so quickly – first system armies have managed to frustrate far stronger opponents when terrain and politics were favorable.

That (important, IMO) digression aside, back to John Carter’s definitions:

Industrial or Second Generation Warfare (2GW) brought rifled firearms, machine-guns, and indirect artillery. Men could now be killed at a great distance, without ever seeing the enemy. Camouflage, concealment, and cover became the keys to victory. Its heyday was roughly from the Civil War to the Great War.

Mechanized warfare or 3GW arrived with the internal combustion engine and powered flight. Tactics now depended on speed and manoeuvrability. It dawned with the Second World War and reached its apogee with the invasion of Iraq.

Mechanized warfare created an overwhelming advantage for large industrial states. Small states and non-state actors responded with 4GW, which can be thought of as televisual warfare – combat via propaganda. This is war as fought with cameras and media distribution networks. It is guerrilla warfare via weaponized morality: using the enemy’s own military actions against it by showing the consequences of war for one’s civilian population to the enemy civilian population. Bait the enemy into killing babies, then ask them how many more babies they’re willing to murder. Think Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

The response to 4GW is 5GW – warfare by psyop, utilizing misinformation and sentiment engineering. Its characteristic weapons platform is the social network. Where 4GW seeks to use the enemy’s own morality against it, 5GW seeks to change that morality, to transform the enemy’s inner nature, getting the enemy to attack themselves for you, to surrender with open arms and smiles on their faces … ideally, without the enemy even realizing that they’re under attack.

An excellent introduction to the 5GW campaign that is being waged against us as we speak was provided by Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Benz. Robert W Malone MD, MS has provided it on his blog, complete with transcript: The End of Democracy: “What I’m Describing is Military Rule”. This is worth watching in full. It provides a cogent, lucid description of what’s been happening to our precious networks over the last decade.

Benz argues that until 2014, a free and open Internet was seen by the Western spook state as a powerful tool of foreign policy. Uncensorable many-to-many telecommunications networks could be leveraged to foment and guide colour revolutions against “authoritarian” regimes, meaning any country that was not yet fully on board with the rules-based international new world order of post-Cold War liberal democracy. Thus, in the early oughts we saw the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and the 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. The subsequent development of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in the mid-oughts, followed by their rapid, mass global adoption, set the stage for these tactics to be taken to the next level, with the Arab Spring spreading across the Middle East in the early 2010s, toppling governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and destabilizing Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Sudan, and especially Syria.

The zenith of this strategy as an offensive foreign policy implement came in 2014, when the Euro-Maidan protests unseated the elected government of Ukraine, prizing the post-Soviet rump state away from the political orbit of Mother Russia.

Russia responded to America’s 5GW triumph in Ukraine immediately, swooping in and annexing the Crimean peninsula. Russia’s geopolitical imperative was clear – no Crimea, no access to the Black Sea – as was its moral justification, the population of the Crimea being almost entirely ethnically Russian. There was also a democratic justification: the Crimean populace held a referendum, and chose overwhelmingly to rejoin their traditional homeland, rather than remain at the tender mercies of the dubious new regime in “Keev” and its Neo-Nazi battalions.

NATO didn’t buy the referendum results at all. Having spent the last two decades knocking over one country after another by destabilizing their governments with carefully orchestrated popular uprisings, their assumption was that the FSB had finally figured out how to play the game. That meant that an open Internet was now a strategic vulnerability: if Moscow could brainwash adjacent populations into rejecting the obvious superiority of the Hegemony at the End of History, maybe they could do the same to the West’s domestic populations1.

The next few years provided apparently abundant justification for the Regime’s paranoia: Brexit; Trump, Bolsonaro, and most recently Milei; populist opposition to the European migrant invasion; repeated failures to gather support for an invasion of Syria (while Russia was defending the Assad government); stubbornly persistent, widespread skepticism towards both the supposed scientific consensus regarding climate change, as well as the policies supposedly intended to prevent it; and most recently, the push-back against the pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions mandated in the name of mitigating SARS-CoV-2. In each case the mantra from the Regime has been the same: failures on the part of the consumer-residents of Western states to show appropriate enthusiasm for the Regime’s preferred policies and favoured political candidates could not possibly be organic, but could only be explained as results of misinformation seeded by Russian influence operations, Putler’s troll farms hacking Our Democracy with bot swarms.

The Regime responded with the Great Shuttening.

    1. Benz doesn’t mention it, but Occupy Wall Street was probably the establishment’s first “oh shit” moment regarding the politically disruptive potential of social media. It came out of nowhere, within no time at all it was everywhere, and it brought together a broad spectrum of malcontents across traditional ideological boundaries. Occupy is left-coded now, so people forget that in its gestational phase tankies and anarcho-syndicalists were marching alongside End-the-Fed Ron Paulists and techno-libertarians, all of them united against the extractive criminality of Wall Street and its cozy, too-big-to-fail relationship with FedGov. The Regime put the uprising down in short order, and then opportunistically hijacked the movement’s cultural momentum to inject Woke into the everyone’s veins. That said, it should not be ruled out that Occupy was not spontaneous: it’s possible that it was a 5GW op from the beginning, intended to harness popular outrage against the bailouts following the real estate implosions, and direct it towards popularization of the race communism that took over the West over the past decade.

February 29, 2024

Ukraine asks for mothballed Canadian missiles that should have been destroyed 20 years ago

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

In The Line, Alex McColl makes a case against granting a Ukrainian request for obsolete CRV7 70mm air-to-ground rockets:

An SUU-5003 bomblet dispenser with six CRV7 air-to-ground rockets (left) and six BDU-33 bombs (right).
Photo by Boevaya mashina via Wikimedia Commons.

Canadian parliamentary committees — and even the leader of the official opposition — are endorsing a request by the Ukrainian military to send that beleaguered country thousands of mothballed rockets that have not been adequately stored or maintained. The plan has received nothing but approval from Canadians; however, according to multiple sources I have interviewed, the rockets in question are probably useless. In a worst case scenario, a few could go off and hurt or kill the Ukrainians trying to jury rig them into a short-range rocket artillery weapon.

This is about Canada’s stockpile of expired CRV7 rocket motors, which were slated for environmentally responsible disposal twenty years ago. Despite this, these weapons are being requested by the Ukrainian military, which is desperate for any kind of munitions as the war with Russia drags on.

[…]

During the Cold War, the Canadian-made CRV7 was one of the best 70mm NATO rockets thanks to its powerful motor, high speed, and consistent accuracy. It was carried by NATO fighter jets and attack helicopters. In the early 1970s, it could outrange most Soviet short-range man-portable surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS), giving pilots an advantage in air-to-ground missions. Our pilots could shoot at the bad guys from far enough away that the bad guys couldn’t shoot back.

That was then. Today, surface-to-air weapons have advanced to the point where unguided rocket attacks are rarely worth the risk, which is why these rockets were retired 20 years ago.

One of the CAF officers I interviewed reached out again the next day to get in the final word. Here’s what I was told:

“In general, I’d say that the phase when donating from existing inventory was relevant ended in early 2023. Canada has donated many useful things, but focussed on what Canadian industry can provide, not what Ukraine desperately needs. Unarmed ACSVs and drone cameras are useful, but Ukraine needs predictable and reliable supplies of battle decisive munitions, most of all air defence missiles and artillery ammunition. The conversation Canada should be having isn’t about rotten surplus, but how we support new production of key ammunition, ideally at home but ultimately whoever we can fund to get it to Ukraine fastest.”

I couldn’t agree more.

February 10, 2024

“Ukraine is running out of soldiers to man the front”

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

In the second part of his review of the situation in the Russo-Ukrainian War, Niccolo Soldo discusses why the plight of Ukraine’s military is getting worse, not better:

Since the previous entry was published, several key developments continue to make the outlook for Ukraine even gloomier than it already was then. The Ukrainian-held city of Avdiivka is now falling to Russian forces. This city is right next to Donetsk, the largest city in the Donbass. It is from Avdiivka that the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) have been shelling that city for almost a decade now. It is considered by many to be the location with the strongest fortifications along the entire front line. Its capture by the Russians would be a significant victory, not just because of the size of the battle, but especially because it would spare the city of Donetsk from any future artillery barrages from the Ukrainian side.

Since the last entry, the ongoing fight between President Zelensky and his top general, Valeri Zaluzhny, has broken out into the open. Zelensky has indicated that he will be replacing Zaluzhny (and others) in order to “shake up” Ukraine’s war effort, a move that the general refuses to accept. The two Z’s do not see eye-to-eye, with observers informing us that Zaluzhny has called for the UAF to pull out of Avdiivka in order to buy time and not lose more men and arms in defending a city that they would lose in due time. [NR: Zelensky announced that Oleksandr Syrsky has replaced Zaluzhny on February 9th.]

Making matters even worse for the Ukrainians, the US Senate failed to agree to send more money to Kiev to help them in their fight against the Russians. Ukrainian officials told the Guardian that the failure in the US Senate “… will have real consequences in terms of lives on the battlefield and Kyiv’s ability to hold off Russian forces on the frontline”. US Aid For Ukraine President Yuriy Boyechko sounded an even gloomier note:

    Everyone was hoping that US won’t let us down, and now we find ourselves at a very difficult place. People are losing hope little by little. We don’t have time for this because we see what’s going on at the front. The more time we give for the Russians to build up their stockpiles, even if the aid is going to show up it might be too little too late.

Newly-elected Polish Premier Donald Tusk criticized Senate Republicans by invoking the memory of Ronald Reagan:

And not to be outdone, Politico is blaming who else but Donald Trump.

The EU did finally manage to convince Hungary to agree to a new 50 Billion EUR package for Ukraine, but European leaders all agree that it is “nowhere near enough”, and requires the USA to chip in just as much as a minimum to sustain the war effort. This package is to be spread out until 2027, but Ukraine faces a funding shortfall of 40 Billion USD this year alone! From the linked article:

    “Everyone realizes that €50 billion is not enough,” said Johan Van Overtveldt, a Belgian conservative who chairs the European Parliament’s Budget Committee. “Europe realizes that it needs to step up its efforts.” And by that, he means finding money from elsewhere.

    World Bank estimates put Ukraine’s long-term needs for reconstruction at $411 billion.

Money is one thing (and a very, very important thing at that), but all the money in the world doesn’t address the elephant in the room: Ukraine is running out of soldiers to man the front.

February 8, 2024

“Mwa-mwa-mwa”, they said

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray expands on the topic of yesterday’s post about the legacy media wanting you not to do your own research because it might lead to the “wrong” kind of answers:

I’m a hundred pages into a book I’ve been meaning to read for years, and I meant to spend last night reading it. But then I accidentally looked at social media.

For years, now, I’ve been watching as journalists and politicians connect a set of fact claims to a conclusion that has nothing to do with the evidence they’ve just given: This happened, and this happened, and this happened, and, trust us, all of that means this. It snaps your head back, because the statement about the meaning of the evidence is so ridiculous they can’t possibly have failed to notice. The news is frequently a series of bizarre interpretive non-sequiturs.

I wrote about a favorite example here, as an army of Barack Obama hagiographers described The Lightbringer’s glorious childhood in Indonesia. He went there with his mother and Indonesian stepfather in 1966, during a massive purge of communists by the army that included a great deal of mass killing, and Obama’s biographers describe the future American president being a young child in a place where rivers were choked with corpses and soldiers marched prisoners through the streets. Then, casually, they conclude that his time in Indonesia was idyllic and warm, and Jakarta was the place where this wonderfully decent future leader learned the gentle values of civic engagement and democratic pluralism.

See also this example, from back in the days when I didn’t have many subscribers, discussing an op-ed piece that described the Freedom Convoy as a movement of anti-government radicals who wanted to live in a society with no rules at all and marched on Ottawa behind the banner of authoritarianism to implement their fascist agenda.

Over and over again, reading the “news” that these people write, you catch yourself muttering but you JUST SAID …

Fact claims don’t add up, categories clash, paragraphs self-refute, sentences start out insistently claiming X and then wander into a firm insistence upon Not X before the period arrives at the end. The great complex of global news and politics has the internal consistency and logic of the day ward at a mental hospital.

Last night we seem to have suddenly turned the knob on that machine up to eleven, BECAUSE HITLER IS IN MOSCOW TO DO AN INTERVIEW. The people who are proud that we’re fighting authoritarianism by arresting the leading figure of the political opposition and throwing him off the ballot are also very angry that Tucker Carlson is interviewing an autocrat, and they hate autocracy, so Tucker Carlson must be arrested and bankrupted and barred from returning to the United States, to stand up to authoritarianism. I had a moment last night when I sincerely wondered about the wisdom of paying attention, because the experience of hearing from The Responsible People™ became painfully hallucinatory.

The officials at the EU get to decide who counts as a real journalist and who gets ruined, to protect democracy. Ukraine is the brave and incorruptible vanguard of ideal democracy, by the way, and so pure it floats, like an ad for soap. Nothing bad has ever happened there, you Nazi, but now Satan Putin’s vampire fangs drip with innocent blood, and there’s absolutely nothing else to say about it, send cash.

Watching people like Bill Kristol and David Frum comment on real-world events now is like watching a homeless drug addict having a psychotic break at a bus shelter. The connection between fact and interpretation has become painfully severed. A whole layer of allegedly high-status people have gone barking mad. We need to arrest everyone who disagrees with us about politics or else we’re going to lose our system of open society to authoritarianism, and you really ought to smoke some of whatever we have inside this glass pipe.

The lead-up to the Russo-Ukrainian War

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

At Founding Questions, “El Barbudo” has a guest-post on the situation in Ukraine, including a lot of background to the outbreak of full-scale combat with Russia’s “Special Military Operation” strike that was intended to decapitate the Ukrainian government and capture Kyiv in February, 2022:

Britain’s Ministry of Defence regularly posts these situation maps through their Twit-, er, I mean “X” account. This is the most recent one from 2024-02-02.

One framing point: the Russians are fighting a conventional, industrial war, for real-world (economic, territorial and national-security) objectives. The Ukrainians are fighting a proxy information war — large-scale armed propaganda, if you will — where the primary purpose of battlefield action is to feed political-warfare objectives, and thereby maintain western support. Seen from Kyiv, the centre of gravity (the thing from which Ukraine draws its strength and freedom of action) is western support — making narrative (as seen from the west) central, while the media is enlisted as a conduit for narrative warfare. Hence, through a western media lens, what you’re seeing is carefully curated to influence rather than inform. (Nothing new here — I defer to the historians, but I think Paul Fussell made this point about World War Two. Ask yourself when was the last time you saw a dead Ukrainian soldier, intact or otherwise.)

What that means is that battlefield defeats can be managed, as long as the narrative — the core of the war, as western sponsors see it and as the Ukrainians therefore are forced to see it — can be maintained. What’s causing the current crisis is not so much the death, destruction or loss of territory (though those are real). It’s that the mismatch between rhetoric and reality has finally reached the point that people are noticing.

[…]

Ukraine has been at war with Russia in some fashion since 2013, with violence first spiking into the open in February 2014. The Ukrainians call the 2014-2022 period the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) but it involved fairly heavy fighting — against Russian-backed separatist militias in the east, and internal to Ukraine among various factions including, yes, the Banderite nationalists (“neo-Nazis”) beloved of Russian media and Canadian parliamentarians alike, though they’re less prominent now (mainly because a lot of them are dead).

We should also note how this arose — first Russia and the U.S. forcing Ukraine to give up its nukes in 1994, then NATO expansion after Bosnia, and (publicly acknowledged) US interference in Russia’s 1996 election to ensure Boris Yeltsin got re-elected, creating a sense of threat in Moscow. Then Kosovo 1999, Bush and Putin’s failed attempt to make nice after 9/11, Estonia, Georgia, the Reset Button of 2009 and betrayal over Libya in 2011. (Hillary promised no ground troops or regime change, persuading then-president Dmitry Medvedev to abstain on the UN Security Council Resolution that authorised the intervention, only to renege on all counts then laugh on live TV when she found out Gaddafi had just been sodomised to death with a bayonet).

All of which infuriated the Kremlin, and confirmed the West was not “agreement-capable” (they have euphemisms in Moscow too) leading them to intervene in Syria to support the Assad regime. Then came the Ghouta gas attack of September 2013 — in which Obama failed to enforce his own Red Line, and John Kerry had to beg Sergey Lavrov (Russian foreign minister) to save us from the consequences of our own weakness … which convinced Russian leaders we were not only threatening and untrustworthy, but also weak. More great work there.

Russia’s seizure of Crimea followed, four months after the red-line debacle. It was clearly a result of Russian hatred and contempt. (Oderint dum metuant — the hatred was long-standing; what was new was the realisation, after Ghouta, that they had nothing to fear). Crimea was also a reaction to a US-backed revolution in Ukraine (Euromaidan), and the operation’s popularity should have made it clear that Ukraine is seen by Russians, of all political orientations, as integral to their identity, along with Belarus. No Russian politician could tolerate western advisers or weapons in Ukraine … which was the policy pursued after 2014. (There’s a chicken-and-egg security dilemma here. The west was reacting to perceived aggression from Russia, which was reacting to perceived western aggression. Both sides saw themselves as innocently defensive, and the other as aggressive.) [NR: Emphasis mine.]

Putin, by Russian standards, is a relative moderate on Ukraine — he frequently gets panned by war bloggers, retired generals and divers chickenhawks for being soft on the west, not prosecuting the war hard enough. If the neocons got their way and he was regime-changed, his replacement would likely be far worse for their interests — someone like, say, Nikolai Patrushev. Putin gets painted as Hitler in the media, but this is an artefact of the Alinskyite approach American political/media players take to any conflict: first freeze the target (no negotiation is possible) then personalise the enemy via an individual leader (Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Saddam, Gaddafi, Kim etc), then paint that leader as irrational and evil (without limits, restraints or goals except to be evil). From that point, it’s good versus evil, any means necessary, war as moral imperative. Putin is the latest foreigner to get this treatment, Trump the latest domestic equivalent. Trump’s greatest foreign policy crime, in fact, may have been his willingness to treat Putin, Kim, Xi, MBS etc. as rational actors worthy of respect (for Trump values of “respect”) rather than moral pariahs. This has hilarious consequences when people previously given the pariah treatment (Maduro, MBS, the Taliban) need to be rehabilitated via creative retconning so the narrative can keep rolling.

Anyway, from 2014 to 2022 the war was pretty static, with a few bigger battles (Debaltsevo the main one), artillery exchanges and trench warfare: a foreshadowing of how things are today, though without the massive tech acceleration we’ve seen since February 2022, and far fewer casualties.

Trump’s people have suggested Putin was frightened of him, which is why Russia didn’t invade during Trump’s term. There may be some truth to that (Trump after all reversed Obama’s prohibition on lethal aid) but it’s more likely the Russians just saw Trump as dangerously unpredictable, a decision-maker who never fully controlled his own government, especially on Ukraine (see Impeachment #1). The Russian way of war involves predicting an adversary’s reaction to provocation, then doing just enough, ambiguously enough, to achieve a fait accompli without triggering a response. This goes back to Trotsky and Tukhachevsky in the 1920s, but when your adversary is Trump, it becomes impossible to predict the trigger or the reaction if you piss him off. (Qasim Soleimani says hi). There was also one particular battle in Syria in February 2018 where US SOF killed some large number of Wagner guys by refusing to play their little games, and when the Russians complained Trump basically said it served them right.

Once Trump was gone — with Washington in disarray after January 6th — the Russians sensed an opportunity, and began building up around the Ukrainian border from April 2021. Then in August, when we covered ourselves in glory during the Great Kabul Pants-Shitting, the Russians probably thought they had the measure of Biden — who they knew of old — and decided we were so flaccid they’d get away with a lightning move against Kyiv, “Crimea 2014 on steroids”. (PS: when neocons start overtly asserting, in their in-house journal, that “the Afghan withdrawal did not trigger the Ukraine invasion” you know it’s true — even if the Russians hadn’t already said as much, in as many words.)

So, the Russians tried Crimea on Steroids in February 2022 — and their plan failed by breakfast on D Day, triggering the protracted war of attrition we have now. The reasons were partly bad luck for the leading Russian air-assault units attempting to seize the airfield at Hostomel outside Kyiv, partly good initiative by U.S. and U.K. trained Ukrainian SOF and territorial defence guys, partly over-compartmentalisation on the Russian side — key players were kept out of the loop for OPSEC reasons, and the invasion was mostly planned by political hacks with limited military understanding. (Why should we have the monopoly on that?) This video is a decent open-source account of that happened.

February 5, 2024

“Why can’t these Russians see how they’re being oppressed?”

Filed under: Food, Media, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As the war in Ukraine has gone on, western media seem to have completely lost track of what ordinary Russians think about their government, replacing reality with a westernized imaginarium of Russia somehow being little more than a mirror of western progressive opinion:

For the average western normie, Russians are suffering under a brutal and vicious dictatorship, and cannot wait for the day that Putin loses power and western liberal democracy becomes the law of the land.

None of you reading this are normies, and all of you know full well that the overwhelming majority of Russians are not buying what western media and think tanks are selling. They have a unique (and foreign) history and culture that has at times moved towards Europe, but they have always managed to stand apart. This informs how Russians view their country and how they deal with the rulers that rule over them.

Many had hoped that the War in Ukraine would finally see Russians rise up against their own government and remove it from power. Those hopes were always misplaced and naive. Western journalists have long been blinded by their own false assumptions regarding the “superiority of western liberal democracy” and Russian sentiment. “Why can’t these Russians see how they’re being oppressed?”, is the generalized refrain. Harper’s Magazine sent two journalists to explore Russia along the Volga River, and what they found was a culture far removed from the West, and very proud of its own. It’s a long piece, so here are some highlights:

    Piotrovsky, who is mild-mannered and cerebral, and who wore his jacket loosely over hunched shoulders, seemed to have become a warrior. “Russia is many people, but one nation,” he asserted. “Russia along the Volga was able to incorporate everyone. Islam is just as much a religion of Russian tradition and identity as is Christian Orthodoxy. In Europe, in America, you speak of nothing but multiculturalism, but your cities are bursting with hate. For us, it didn’t take much to include everyone, because we’re an imperial civilization.” Then he grew more animated. “Look at the Hermitage!” he said, opening his arms to the room around us, widening his eyes. “It’s the encyclopedia of world culture, but it’s written in Russian because it’s our interpretation of world history. It may be arrogant, but that’s what we are.”

On renewed trade with Asia:

    Sergeeva took me to see the Jewish, Armenian, and Iranian neighborhoods of Astrakhan. An exhibition of photographs highlighting the civilian volunteers supporting the military was being set up outside of a park. At sunset, the elegant riverfront was swarmed with families and groups of young people talking and laughing in hushed tones. Couples sat on railings eating watermelon while food stalls projected multicolored lights on the Volga. There was a fin de siècle quality to the atmosphere, curls of smoke emanating from shashlik grills, a warm breeze delivering the lament of a distant violin. No military uniforms in sight.

    The café façades and the wrought-iron balconies reminded me of New Orleans. Sergeeva pointed out the renovations along the canal that runs through the old town, indicating the nineteenth-century wooden villas that will soon become hotels and luxury homes. “They seemed destined to crumble,” she said. “But now that money is going around, Astrakhan is once again the gateway to European Russia, Central Asia, and India. This is how it is for now. Later, we’ll see.“

and

    In Astrakhan, it was rumored that the Iranians had invested billions in the development of the Caspian-Volga-Don corridor. There was talk of trafficking agricultural products and oil, but also turbines, spare mechanical parts, medicine, and nuclear components. I couldn’t verify this, but it was clear that Astrakhan is central to the anti-Western economic bloc’s efforts to turn east.

The general opinion in February of 2022 was that the Russians would easily seize much of Ukraine, but that they would pay a very large economic price, possibly the destruction of their entire economy. This was a safe bet, and it was totally wrong.

Import substitution:

    “The Russians are reacting to the sanctions in an extraordinary way, even with a weak ruble and the inevitable inflation. The prices of essential goods have held steady. And now we’re consuming better and healthier products than before the war, even exceptional cheeses.”

    I had never imagined that the rise of hyperlocal food would be one of the recurring themes of this trip. But it appears that the Western sanctions and war economy have intensified a traditional Russian gastronomy movement. Western products had piqued the palates of average urban Russians, and local producers were trying to fill their vacuum, proudly offering Russian-made Camembert and prosciutto, as if to provide some material evidence of Russkiy Mir, Putin’s ideology of Russian supremacy. As I dined along the Volga, menus often specified the farms from which ingredients had been sourced. Restaurants served svekolnik and okroshka, simple cold summer soups, exalting the quality of local radishes grown without Western fertilizers.

An ethnic Tatar foodstuffs producer from Kazan, Tatarstan on the sanctions regime leveled against Russia:

    Since then, the company’s net worth has become the stuff of legend. But Kazankov, too, is a great supporter of Western sanctions: “They’re an incredible developmental tool for Russia,” he told me. “The West should have imposed them back in the Nineties. We’d be the engine of the world by now. Too bad.” For him, the sanctions are pure adrenaline, and to prove it he added that his company has copied Italian, German, and Israeli “production means” to the letter: “We doubled processing in one year and we supply almost a thousand supermarkets in all of Russia.” Ivan believes that his “full-circle communist company” is the ideal model for “rebuilding a new Soviet Union with healthy local food from our lands.”

On the loss of vacationing in Europe:

    Was this fatalism? Indifference? Or arrogance, as Piotrovsky had implied back at the Hermitage? I struggled to find room in hotels or on ferries, all of which were overflowing with tourists forced to give up on the Mediterranean and make do with the Volga. Take Tatiana, the middle-aged manager of a supermarket chain. When I met her on a ferry in Yaroslavl, she wore a Panama hat, Gucci sunglasses, and capri sandals; she was heading downstream, to the same dacha where she had spent her summers as a girl. “I’ve had a boat docked in Mykonos for three years — who knows when I’ll see it again,” she told me. “I’m getting to know my river again. I’m running into friends I haven’t seen in thirty years. An interesting vacation.” I told her she looked a bit sad and resigned. “Russians have been sad and resigned for thousands of years,” she replied. “It’s how we stay resilient. I’m against this war, but I can’t do anything but wait, like everyone else. They manipulate us with artificial ideas. Garbage. But the West has been humiliating us for too long. Don’t we also have a right to be who we want to be without feeling like barbarians?“

January 29, 2024

Peter Hitchens isn’t onboard with the march to yet another war

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Writing in the Daily Mail, Peter Hitchens decries the apparent drift by western politicians into yet another war:

Are we the baddies? What if the Ukraine war is just as stupid and wrong as the Iraq war, but the state propaganda has been more successful and hardly anybody has realised … yet?

Many people to this day still think the damaging and morally dubious Western attacks on Serbia and Libya were justified. Many still think the gory attempt to destroy Syria was a good thing. It took ages for opinion to swing on the Vietnam war, back in the 1960s. And, as one who opposed the Iraq war, I remember only too well just how many (who now think they were against it all the time) were fooled into backing Sir Anthony Blair and George W. Bush.

The issue is more pressing as generals and admirals warn we must live in a militarised society and prepare for what they think is an inevitable war against Russia. They could get their way. If you go on backing this policy, you could be condemning yourself, your children or grandchildren to a world of war, privation and perhaps conscription into some sort of military service.

[…]

This is what I have never been able to work out. We have a Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, who has perfected the art of shouting loudly while carrying a very small stick – thunderous, belligerent declarations while our Armed Forces melt away thanks to neglect and badly targeted spending. Perhaps, if the long-feared Russian invasion of Western Europe takes place, we can fend it off by dispatching our troops on the pestilential e-scooters and e-bikes which are this former Transport Secretary’s major contribution to the nation.

Certainly these vehicles are terrifying to those not riding them. They have nearly killed me more than once. And, piled up in heaps, they make formidable obstacles, as the people of London are finding.

What Mr Shapps does not seem to grasp is that Britain became great by staying out of continental conflicts, and letting others do the fighting. Even in the battle against Bonaparte, we paid our European allies to do most of the hard work.

Our greatness ceased when bombastic moralising took over, in 1914. We flung ourselves, supposedly nobly, into a Russo-German war. Within two years we were bankrupt, and bereft of the flower of our young manhood.

People still refuse to believe me when I say accurately that Britain has not paid off its huge 1914-18 war debts (now worth about £40 billion) to the USA. But I promise you it is true.

Four years of terrible loss left the Russo-German problem unsolved and we had to do it all again in 1939. After that we were even more bankrupt, and in 1946 had to ration bread, like some desperate People’s Republic. But for many years afterwards we were largely governed by grown-ups who had fought in actual wars and been wounded, and had seen death very near them, or endured bombing and a war economy. And so we largely stayed out of major foreign trouble.

December 15, 2023

How far are we from a final communiqué from Kiev saying that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Ukraine’s advantage”?

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

Yeah, I stole the idea for the headline from Severian’s post from a few days ago. So sue me. But seriously, CDR Salamander considers what he calls the cold truth of the Russo-Ukrainian war:

Well, history didn’t fold out as the Russians wanted. There was no 3-day war. No 3-week war. No 3-month war either. Kiev remains in Ukrainian hands … but what about a 3-year war?

Despite all the pre-war metrics, the “expertise” of the Smartest People in the Room™, every wargame that would have been run at all our war colleges would have told us that there would not be a conventional war in Ukraine is finishing up its second and going in to its third year, but here we are.

They were all wrong.

A common problem, one that well pre-dates the invasion of Ukraine, is that we have shockingly well credentialed people of influence from both parties who have an inability to understand that Russians are not Westerners. They don’t think like Westerners, though they may look like them.

The Russians have a distinct culture, history, and view of themselves and their place in history. The underperforming political, military, and diplomatic elite in the West — with few exceptions outside the former Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO — expect Russians to react in the same way and to the same degree to the incentives and disincentives that move needles and preferences in DC and Brussels.

Time is always on the side of Russia, which is one of the reasons the slow rolling of weapons to Ukraine has been an exercise of malpractice of the highest degree. You are either in or out.

Two years on, “we” still are not sending a clear signal. It is amazing, really; in military might, GDP, demographics and a whole host of other reasons, Russia should not be as resilient as they are … which is why DC & Brussels are being played so hard. They still do not understand Russia.

Even after 1,000 years of experience, we have Western leaders who refuse to believe that the Russians are fundamentally different than the West is in the 21st Century. You can’t put the cultural ability to absorb damage and brutal patience you cannot see in some metric that can go on a PPT slide.

What the Russians lack in so many other places, they make up for here. As such, this critical part of understanding Russian motivation keeps being missed. Yes to their economy and apocalyptic demographics. Yes to all that.

For all the reasons Russia continues to fight, so too do their Ukrainian brothers – demonstrating greater resilience and endurance that Western expectations.

The time for leaving Ukraine to its fate is long past. Yes, the West has a short attention span and is suffering under the dead hand of entrenched leaders with a defeatist mindset – but none of this is written.

Ukraine can still win – or at least something that can be called a win. It would help if the Russians had some internal issues that required more attention that Ukraine, but even then – all is not worth shrugging over.

Yes, I’ve seen the math — the metrics — but war is informed by math, but not defined within it.

At a relatively modest cost in our treasure and almost none of our blood, we are wearing down Russia’s ability to project power for a generation, perhaps two. Perhaps many more generations should demographic instability mate with political instability. The Ukrainians – facing the same economic and demographic challenges as the Russians – are up for the fight. There is no reason for more comfortable nations who have supported them so far to go wobbly at half-time.

Of course, as noted yesterday, this ship may already have sailed thanks to Hamas.

December 14, 2023

The West – “Ukraine? Ukraine? Do we know a ‘Ukraine’?”

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

In The Line, Andrew Potter notes just how quickly cross-partisan support has eroded since the summer, and especially since the Hamas atrocities in Israel on October 7th:

Well, you can’t say Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t try. With a new U.S. aid package for his country frozen by a Republican filibuster, the president of Ukraine made a last-ditch visit to Washington to plea, as he has done so often, for help against the Russian invasion. But unlike previous visits, he was treated more as yesterday’s annoyance than a global statesman fighting for the cause of freedom.

The wheels came off the bus of Western support for Ukraine gradually, then suddenly. The slow distancing from Ukraine has been underway since last summer, but it was finally pushed off the cliff in the wake of the barbarism of Hamas on October 7. Since then, the world’s attention, effort, and in important cases, arms, have been focused on the Middle East. But also, the intensely polarizing character of the Israel-Hamas war has hardened political divisions in almost every country, in a way that has largely destroyed what had been, in many countries, a cross-partisan consensus on Ukraine.

But for all its slow-motion inevitability, it is still shocking to see just how quickly support for Ukraine evaporated, how hollow the promises have been revealed to have been, how ugly the finger pointing has got, and how unprepared NATO, the EU, and the West as a whole are for the danger that is staring them in the face.

Let’s start with a basic fact: the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which began in early summer with so much dramatic hope, has failed. The goal was to drive to the Black Sea, split the Russian forces in half, and begin the work of retaking the sovereign Ukrainian territory that had been seized by Russia since 2014.

It didn’t happen, and it didn’t even come close. Why that is the case has been, and will be, the subject of intense scrutiny and analysis, but what seems clear is that the Russians were given too much time to dig in and lay minefields tens of kilometres deep across the front lines. In the absence of sufficient airpower to achieve air superiority over the battlefield, the attacking Ukrainian forces became sitting ducks to Russian artillery, helicopters, and drones.

So the fight is at a stalemate. The commander of the Ukrainian army, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said as much in an article he wrote for The Economist at the beginning of November. President Zelenskyy has admitted it as well, as has the head of the Ukraine war cabinet.

This failure need not have been a disaster. Success in battle is never guaranteed, the enemy always gets a vote, and there is nothing stopping the Ukrainians from tending their wounds, burying their dead, and trying again.

Nothing, that is, except the fecklessness, the division, and the bad faith of Ukraine’s partners in the West. Instead of sitting down to figure out what went wrong, adjusting and increasing their aid accordingly, and recommitting to the fight, the whole so-called alliance has degenerated into infighting, blame shifting, and ass-covering. The Washington Post recently had a whole series devoted to giving anonymous American “senior officials” plenty of acreage to underbus the Ukrainians, who were, allegedly, too slow to start the counteroffensive, too cowardly when it finally began, too incompetent in their execution, and too stubborn to listen to the Americans advising them.

This all may be true. But something else is also true: The West, for all its promises to back Ukraine to the hilt, to stand by it through thick and thin, to do whatever it takes as long as it takes, has not done any of this. Support, in the form of arms deliveries, training, aid, ammunition, what have you, has been slow, grudging, performative, and inadequate to the task.

December 2, 2023

QotD: Western media and Putin’s war

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, Quotations, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Regarding [Vladimir Putin’s] Magical Mystery War, I’m going with the stoyak that the casualty counts peddled by the [western media] is part of a very very old playbook which various Western observers have peddled since 1905-that of Russian stupidity and indifference to casualties. Russia loses a war? They’re stupid gopniks who flung their soldiers into meat grinders until they rebelled (1905 or 1917). Russia wins a war? They’re stupid gopniks who flung their soldiers into meat grinders until they won (1945, 2023). Note that you can effortlessly pivot your propaganda when it becomes obvious in hindsight the outcome of the war. This becomes very important when [Putin] negotiates his 18th century kabiniettskreig ending to the war, since nobody in the West, especially AINO, understands how a cabinet war is fought, much less ends. They will claim that they foiled Putin’s plan for conquering all Ukraine (which he never has wanted) by killing hundreds of thousands of poor, oppressed, stupid, vodka-fueled gopniks used as cannon fodder who simply overwhelmed the valiant forces of good by sheer numbers. Not by superior strategy or tactics, or weapons, but the good ol’ Russian sledgehammer. Just like Hitler’s excuse in 1945, when Ivan was knock knock knockin’ on his bunker door. His generals who survived carried that piece of gospel West when the US Army started studying how to fight the Reds and asked the Germans how they did it. Their answer was happily embraced by the next generation of Very Clever Boys in the 1960s and carried forward to today’s Fistagon — Wunderwaffen.

Pickle Rick, commenting on “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-12-01.

Rick agreed to me posting this quote as long as I included this colourized photo of Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov (“because it’s gangsta as FUCK”)

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