Tuesday, March 1, 2022

ARMCHAIR SPECULATION

The first state-sponsored invasion that engaged me politically was the abortive attempt by the United States to overthrow the Fidel Castro government in Cuba. That was 62 years ago and things have not gotten much better since. The most terrifying international event that I have lived through was the Cuban missile crisis, a year later. I sat that one out in Chicago with my VW stocked with dried food and a Geiger counter and reservations for my wife and myself on planes heading north to Canada and south to Mexico, depending on which way the wind was blowing. I am, I suppose you might say, an equal opportunity scaredy-cat.

 

What terrifies me most in the present situation is the possibility that Vladimir Putin, pushed to the wall, will launch tactical nuclear weapons, although I have no idea where he would find an appropriate target for one. That would make him only the second national ruler after Harry Truman to use nuclear weapons in a war.

 

There is no point in my trying to make predictions at this point. All I can do is sit here in the relative safety of North Carolina and watch what happens. But I would like to try my hand at speculating what the long-term consequences will be of this Ukrainian invasion, assuming we get through it without a nuclear war.

 

It seems to me quite likely that this will more or less permanently change Russia’s geopolitical position in the world. Russia’s economy will in the medium-term be devastated, and since it depends so thoroughly on oil and natural gas exports, its long-term prospects are dim as well. It strikes me that it would be extremely imprudent in the current situation for China to forge closer ties with Russia, which suggests that the relationship between China and the United States will change. Since China in the course of the remainder of this century is on track to lose half of its population, it may find its ambitious “One Road, One Belt” project more difficult to pursue than it may have imagined.

 

The big winner from this event almost certainly will be the United States, which has been handed by Vladimir Putin a golden opportunity to strengthen and expand the European alliance that it leads.

 

Is this a good thing? Lord, I do not know. It must really bug Putin that America got away with launching a completely unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Iraq, almost halfway around the world, and he cannot even get away with invading what I am sure he views as part of his own territory.

 

What can we say about Pres. Zelensky?  That he was the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian version of that tale. That he got his political start by playing the president of Ukraine in a television show. Even as I write this I have the feeling I am making it up.

 

There is an old stock market scam that works like this. The scam artist targets a thousand or so marks and sends half of them predictions that a stock will go up and the other half predictions that the stock will go down. Whichever prediction turns out correct, the scammer then divides the 500 who got the correct prediction into two groups and sends half of them a second prediction that a different stock will go up and the other half a prediction that the stock will go down. After several more iterations, he has identified a small group of potential investors who have received an unbroken series of correct predictions from him. Having thus established himself as a canny and highly knowledgeable insider, he proceeds to rip them off.

 

I am tempted to try a version of this scam on my blog readers. I could make a series of quite specific predictions – for example that the 40 mile long column of tanks and supply vehicles making its way toward Kyiv will be pretty much destroyed by Ukrainian partisans using shoulder held rocket launchers. If I turn out to be right, I look like a genius. If I turn out to be wrong, nobody will remember.  But I shall abstain from these games and just continue watching the television.

182 comments:

  1. Achim Kriechel (A.K.)March 1, 2022 at 9:23 AM

    Dear Professor,

    The problem of nuklarwaffen, who dares to assess Putin for sure. Many pictures, especially these government meetings in which he sits at a ridiculously long table (I know this only from comics), indicate that he unfortunately lives in his own world. This makes things extremely dangerous. I was sure that Trump would have been prevented from making any real nonsense at any time. In Putin's environment, at least today, I see no heroes.

    One of the potential targets in the cold war scenario, especially during the installation of Pershing II missiles by the USA here in Germany against the SS20 of the USSR, one thing was clear, here where I live would have been ground zero for the first strike with strategic nuclear weapons. The reason is simple, 5 minutes flight from here the American warheads are stored, even now.

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  2. We need to be in communication with Putin's direct reports to give them a gentle push toward assassination or some kind of neutralization.
    My judgment is that he is functionally insane, perhaps temporarily.
    He is like a Thorndike's cat madly reaching for a lever to get him out of his box, and one of those levers is a nuclear button.
    There is little we can do about it- I am glad Biden is in charge, someone who is sane and maybe wise

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  3. Biden: Let me have men about me that are fat;
    Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’nights:
    Yond Putin has a lean and hungry look;
    He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

    Trump: Who wrote that stupid garbage?

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  4. People in the know who I know increasingly confirm Putin is a little fucked up as is this situation.
    They used words like 'emotional' and 'bonkers'
    General MCCaffery on MSNBC- 'off the rails'
    Just people I know like colleagues at work and friends: ditto.
    Pierre Janet famously said that theories are fine but that doesn't stop the facts from existing

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  5. Even a tyrant needs accomplices- that is my great hope

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  6. Achim Kriechel: "One of the potential targets in the cold war scenario, especially during the installation of Pershing II missiles by the USA here in Germany against the SS20 of the USSR, one thing was clear, here where I live would have been ground zero for the first strike with strategic nuclear weapons. The reason is simple, 5 minutes flight from here the American warheads are stored, even now."

    And that is why it should be easy to see why a Russian might disagree with your previous statement, quoted below. It's not necessary for the adversary's military assets to be located in a place that is directly adjacent to your border when we are talking about delivery systems that can travel at thousands of kilometers per hour.



    Achim Kriechel: "The so called Nato East expansion and the alleged 'encirclement' of Russia is a fairy tale after all. The only direct border between NATO countries and Russia is with Norway, Estonia and Latvia. Only if you add the enclave around Kaliningrad, Poland and Lithuania are added. Sweden is neutral, as is Finland. Between Russia and Turkey lie Azerbaijan and Georgia. Apart from the very understandable membership of the Baltic states in NATO, this is all that leads to the alleged 'encirclement' of Russia according to Putin's narrative. There was defacto no military threat potential in these countries....
    Realism means recognizing that there is no military threat to Russia."

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  7. There is certainly a need for correct and timely information today in such a military conflict. Some investigative journalists are trying to use their network (bellingcat) to keep ahead of the bad propaganda and support the good propaganda, if they can. Here is a link to their monitoring map which could help you better than main stream media news such as Al Jazeera or DW News which repeat their video clips too much for me:

    https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/27/follow-the-russia-ukraine-monitor-map/

    There are many video clips and other evidence on Twitter sources such as The Intel Crab or KLW World News (Lee Wheelbarger) that suggest the Russians are getting very desperate and demoralized by Ukrainian resistance, but they are escalating their efforts rather than giving up and going home. It looks as if either Russian insiders will kill Putin themselves to stop the war; or Putin will continue to get more and more desperate using cruise missiles and his army will cause ecological or nuclear disasters by undiscriminating fire (war crimes), causing the world to rush in to save us from fallout, then Putin will take the final nuclear step to avoid defeat. Lee Wheelbarger (American inventor and military contractor, from Raleigh area, according to his podcast on YouTube) has firmly predicted that the Russians will not attack NATO or use their nuclear weapons because they know that their enemies can destroy them first (he is supremely confident in this NATO technology advantage = if rational, the Russians will not attack NATO given their likely losing any war). I cannot tell if he is right, but he is certainly an important military insider with the right expertise to know this issue. He is however making propaganda for the Ukrainians at the same time as he proclaims providing "real news in real time" with his web cams in Ukraine and network of associates on the front lines that he formerly trained personally.

    The Russians have over 500 nuclear missiles in their submarine fleet and on Russian national TV last night, Dmitry Kiselyov (Russian journalist and news executive, also known as Putin's mouthpiece) explained that the submarines had orders to hide, and if Russia was destroyed, then a world without Russia was not worth saving and they were ordered to end it all for everyone. You can find a video clip of Kiselyov on the Daily Mail web site but reading tabloids might be bad for everyone's stress levels right now.

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  8. Sitting down in the matching armchair ...

    The picture of that long column of Russian tanks and such reminds me strikingly of the picture from the '91 Iraq war of the destroyed column of Iraqi equipment. I thought at the time that if that had happened in biblical times we would have had an account of it in the bible. Either it's a trap or the Russians must be very sure that Ukraine has no ground-attack aircraft.

    The problem with being utterly terrified of nuclear war is that it leads to the slogan we surely remember from that time, "Better Red than Dead." I have to wonder whether certain parts of the anti-nuclear movement would have been so ready to surrender if it had been Fascists threatening Armageddon rather than Communists. And sure enough, now that Russia is Fascist, it's the far right that advocates appeasement. The paradox is that of course global thermonuclear war is indeed utterly terrifying. But as any hostage negotiator must know, if you value hostages infinitely, taking hostages would always work.

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  9. So Barney are you tinkering with a custom made game theory. The people in Putin's court might be uncomfortable enough not to go down the nuclear ship with him.
    It's tough to get a reading and there is no Politburo- but even tyrants need their enablers

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  10. In the New Left Review blog the economist Wolfgang Streeck argues that NATO creeping east was real and long a cause of concern for Russia. He further suggests/predicts that the likely mid-range effect of the invasion is intensified U.S. control over the E. U./NATO and closer alignment of Russia and China: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/fog-of-war?fbclid=IwAR2sIc8qZt3AF3qOwQX_sX88aRP5TUGemGlAV2hYnTBjZB-YTdo9b3mW4Ag

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  11. Tony Couture,

    Didn't you say the other day that Lee Wheelbarger claimed the conflict would be over in 72 hours? He obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.

    As for Bellingcat and propaganda:
    https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/

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  12. Eric, Lee Wheelbarger has been disabled by 2 strokes and has a 30 year career as military contractor and inventor, and most definitely knows what he is talking about, but he is also making propaganda for Ukraine side. Listen to his live podcast KLW World News which he does on YouTube nightly, and performs some public service education which trying to get listeners to subscribe to his private news network.

    Bellingcat is one example of a counter-propaganda network, struggling to separate fact from fiction, and if you have better eyes and ears than the rest of us, please give us better sources to watch. They are networking with other journalists and sharing information instead of nitpicking. Maybe Sean Penn's documentary for VICE news which he should be able to complete now that he has hiked his way out of Ukraine and to Poland border to save himself will be interesting.

    Do you have anything interesting to add or are you falling into counter-counter-propaganda posturing?

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  13. Barney Wolff has it as “Better Red than Dead,” but as I recall the slogan was the to me quite incomprehensible “Better Dead than Red.” I think this raises questions concerning his claims in his second paragraph concerning who would have surrendered to whom.

    Anyway, I was happy to see John Rapko referencing Wolfgang Streeck’s analysis at Sidecar, which as J.R. says, argues that one outcome, a consequence of American geopolitical calculation, would seem to be greater American control over EU/NATO, which must now be seen as joined at the hip—so much for a more independent Europe.

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  14. RPW: "What terrifies me most in the present situation is the possibility that Vladimir Putin, pushed to the wall, will launch tactical nuclear weapons, although I have no idea where he would find an appropriate target for one."

    He doesn't even have to go that far. He can just shut off the pipelines.


    Doesn't anyone think it is curious that CNN et al are still being allowed to broadcast around-the-clock live from Moscow?

    If Putin is really the modern incarnation of Hitler, intent on conquering all of Europe, as some seem to believe, why hasn't he arrested or expelled all the foreign journalists to keep them from reporting anything unfavorable to him? Why hasn't he at least confiscated their equipment, blocked their broadcast signals? As often noted, he is a former KGB officer. Do we really think he is so clueless that he has not considered this?

    By contrast, Ukraine's President Zelensky completely shut down pro-Russia opposition newsmedia producers last year. And Google/Youtube & Facebook have now blocked RT across Europe. (RT, formerly known as Russia Today, is the Russian state-affiliated media platform that broadcasts outside Russia. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was mercilessly attacked by McCarthyite Democrats for having attended a conference in Moscow that RT held in celebration of its 10th anniversary. Stein says she went to argue for a "peace offensive" rather than further war in the Middle East.)


    (Meanwhile, we have some Democrats in Congress calling for all Russian students to be expelled from the US. We have a former Japanese prime minister, Abe, saying that Japan should be discussing having US nuclear weapons hosted in Japan.)

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  15. Eric--The Gray Zone basic profile = from Wikipedia

    "The Grayzone is a left-wing[2] to far-left[9] news website and blog[13] founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal.[10] The website, initially founded as The Grayzone Project,[14] was affiliated with AlterNet before becoming independent in early 2018.[3] The website's news content is generally considered to be fringe[3][15][16][17] and it is known for its sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes[3][11][18] and its denial of the Uyghur genocide.[22]

    The Grayzone's news content is generally considered to be fringe,[3][15][16][17] with its content ideologically centered around the website's desire for a multipolar world.[3] Along this vein, the website has supported the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria,[24] publishing content denying that the Syrian Government used chemical weapons against civilians during the Syrian Civil War,[3][25] and maintains a pro-Kremlin editorial line.[24][2] The website has also denied the scope of the Xinjiang internment camps and the Uyghur genocide, downplaying widely reported abuses by the Chinese government against Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.[3][11][10][15] "

    All I can find online right now is pro-Ukraine propaganda or pro-Russia propaganda and I would like to find some news source that is more objectively oriented and neutral, or with some modest, reasonable degree of moral objectivity to improve the reporting of events. Jason Stanley argues that there is no such thing as neutrality in our current media and I hope that he is wrong.

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  16. Tony Couture,

    I was an active editor at Wikipedia for several years. A lot of politics go into the production of articles on politically-charged topics, like the article you quote. Without me getting into a rant on that here, let me just say that, for multiple reasons, the Establishment's narrative almost always wins out, so anything you read there on a political or controversial topic needs to be viewed with a great deal of skepticism.

    Jason Stanley is right.
    As I.F. Stone said, all governments lie. If we start from that point of view and keep asking cui bono, we might stand a chance at getting some semblance of the truth every now and again.

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  17. Putin was allowed to fashion a system with no checks. Now that the boy ain't quite right, obeying orders or drawing straws is all that's left. BTW, is there a Russian dub of "Old Yeller"?

    This may be of interest:

    http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Fallout_Map_3-23-1963-Saturday-Evening-Post.jpg

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  18. AA, call and raise:

    Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
    Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
    Appliquons la grève aux armées
    Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
    S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
    À faire de nous des héros
    Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
    Sont pour nos propres généraux.

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  19. aaall,

    Not really a raise - none of us simple folk can understand what you wrote.

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  20. aaall,

    According to that map, we should all move to Oregon.

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  21. "Kings intoxicated us with smoke,
    Peace among us, war on tyrants!
    Let’s apply the strike to armies,
    Rifle butts raised on high and breaking ranks.
    And if they insist, those cannibals,
    On making heroes of us,
    They’ll soon learn that our bullets
    Are for our own generals."

    There are many advantages to West Coast fly-over country.

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  22. Aha! The Internationale!

    I had never seen it in French, although its author, Eugene Pottier was French.

    We will all sing it, when we see Putin hanging from a scaffold.

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  23. This version of The Internationale, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, was banned in the U.S.


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OPvWFDzDlA

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  24. Professor Wolff's stock market scam is basically the game that Macroeconomists have played since the 1930's.

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  25. This is one of my favorite versions:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H15UiQXejO0

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  26. Love it!

    Are there any reports of Americans, Canadians or others following in the footsteps of Hemingway and Dos Passos traveling to Ukraine to fight by their side?

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  27. Regarding the relative merits of Red & Dead,
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_red_than_dead

    On the whole, while those who preferred Red certainly had many IQ points over the Dead Heads, I spit on both their houses.

    I'm not smart enough to invent my own game theory, but even a novice can understand that assigning a value of minus infinity to an outcome requires either assigning exactly zero to its probability or immediate surrender. So far, Biden is taking reasonable care not to back the Russian military into a corner, but does not seem to be paralyzed by fear of global nuclear war.

    I don't know whether Putzik is crazy or just pretending to be, and I don't much care. I think the real question is whether the people who enable him, the people who carry out his orders, are crazy. On the basis of no information, I expect not.

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  28. Putzik! A good Yiddish epithet.

    May he lose all of his teeth but one, for pain.

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  29. I hope you don't mind, Barney, that I introduce a philosopher into this mini-debate:

    https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003082415-2/better-dead-red-anthony-kenny

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  30. I should have added, where there's life there's hope.

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  31. Thank you Barney.
    It sounds like you are a little impatient but have reasonable expectations.
    You know what should or could happen but like all of us not what will happen

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  32. And Barney if Teddy by Salinger ever comes to Broadway you should play the leading role

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  33. Recall the definition of insanity:

    https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F477ef72c-0f7f-499e-a271-e0913f600c53_896x1154.png

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  34. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  35. Eric writes: “If Putin is really the modern incarnation of Hitler, intent on conquering all of Europe, as some seem to believe, why hasn't he arrested or expelled all the foreign journalists to keep them from reporting anything unfavorable to him?”

    This seems rather strawmanish. I haven’t heard anyone — certainly no one here — make the claim that Putin is intent on conquering all of Europe. The fact that he launched an unprovoked war on a sovereign nation is enough to earn him condemnation. He needn’t be as ruthless as Hitler or any other pre-Geneva-convention tyrant. His willingness to let foreign correspondents broadcast from Moscow does indeed show a respect for modern norms. As does the evident fact that, in the war’s first few days, the Russian army seemed to limit its strikes to military targets. Of course, now that the war hasn’t gone Russia’s way it seems their tactics are about to get more ruthless and indiscriminate — which I would think shows that Putin’s putative respect for norms has its limits.

    “By contrast, Ukraine's President Zelensky completely shut down pro-Russia opposition newsmedia producers last year.”

    You are citing Putin’s willingness to let CNN et al broadcast from Moscow as evidence of Russia’s press freedoms, which are meant to compare favorably to Ukraine’s. But this just isn’t the case. Russia remains a terrible country for press freedom. And let’s keep in mind, again, that the reason Russia is getting beat up in almost every quarter is that they are waging a war of aggression.

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  36. Howie,

    I had to dig out my copy of Salinger’s Nine Stories in order to refresh my memory of what Teddy is about. I am not sure I understand your associating the story with Barney Wolff. Are you referring to Teddy’s preoccupation with Zen Buddhism? As you know, the ending of the short story is extremely enigmatic – did Teddy’s sister push him into the pool, killing him? Or did Teddy push her into the pool, killing her? Why you think Barney should portray Teddy in a stage production eludes me

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  37. Achim Kriechel (A.K.)March 2, 2022 at 5:22 AM

    Erich said:
    "And therefore, it should be easy to see why a Russian might disagree with your previous statement quoted below. There is no need for the adversary's military assets to be in a place that is directly adjacent to your border when we are talking about delivery systems that can travel thousands of kilometers per hour."

    That's exactly how I saw it at the time, and I took to the streets with hundreds of thousands. I'll spare the whole historical psychology of the Cold War and so-called "nuclear deterrence" here, I think many remember that. Also that at that time the Pershing II were an answer to the previously installed SS20. But in any case a crazy theater.

    But now, for more than a decade, the Russian government has been constructing a threat scenario on its western border that is not one. There are states there that have everything else in mind but threatening Russia. Germany, today, has an army that would not be able to defend its own territory. Russia was and is not threatened militarily by the West. That is my "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" Just as there were no "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, there is no military threat to Russia from Europe. The only threat to Putin is the prospect of Ukraine becoming a constitutional state in the future and the people who live in it being more economically successful than the Russians under his regime.

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  38. Achim Kriechel (A.K.)March 2, 2022 at 10:11 AM

    normally I do not like to post links
    but this one, in my eyes, shows at the grassroots level which characters are on their way to enter parliaments to dissolve them from inside.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SunGGUktKok

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  39. Reading the Latin sentence included in Achim’s comment, I assumed it was a reference to Cato’s assertion with which he repeatedly ended his speeches, “Carthage must be destroyed.” So, I checked on Wikipedia just to be sure, and the translation they provided was: "By the way, I think that Carthage is to be eliminated." As translated, it reads like just an afterthought - by the way, we are going to destroy the central city of Carthaginian culture, burn it to the ground, and expel everyone in it. This does sound like something Putin would say – we are going to bomb and destroy Kyev, and kill everyone in it. Just thought I’d tell you.

    Watching the heart-wrenching images of Ukranians, women and children, desperately seeking to escape from Kyev and other Ukrainian cities, I thought that this is what it must have been like for centuries, when aggressors set siege on a major city – Alesia, besieged and circumvallated by Caesar’s forces; Jerusalem, besieged several times through history, by Roman forces and King Richard’s Crusaders; Orleans, surrounded by the English; Constantinople, by the Ottomans; Stalingrad, by the Nazis. The list goes on and on. For the first time in history, we can see first-hand the desperation and bravery of the besieged, as they face the trauma imposed on them by a foreign power.

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  40. Achim Kriechel (A.K.)March 2, 2022 at 11:04 AM

    the story goes, after all, that Cato uttered this sentence at the end of every session of the Roman Senate, no matter what the subject was. So my ceterum censeo would be; "there is no military threat to Russia." I feel that, oddly enough, you have to keep emphasizing that. There is no such threat beyond the degree to which people on the border with Russia feel threatened by Russia on their part. Defacto, unfortunately, their fear was justified.

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  41. Another anonymous

    It was Teddy's tone that was evoked to me.
    I'll think of a proper way to explain

    Teddy is about a very precocious kid on a cruise ship with his family.
    The story ends when Teddy is interviewed by a reporter and Teddy talks with him with gentle condescension and studied impatience
    That was the tone I picked up on from Barney.
    Maybe it's just me

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  42. Eric, I am not impressed with your arguments against Wikipedia or support for Max Blumenthal, or personal anecdotes about the unreliability of wiki-methods.

    Here is what Cass Sunstein writes about Wikipedia: It is successful because "large numbers of knowledgeable people are willing to participate in creating Wikipedia, and whatever errors they make usually receive rapid correction, simply because so many minds are involved" (Infotopia, p 151). "Wikipedia is in part a deliberative forum, with reason-giving by those who disagree and with deliberative 'places' to accompany disagreement" (p 152). "On Wikipedia, no person considers himself 'the' author of an entry. With wikis in general, the concept of authorship is discouraged, and, in a way, senseless; it is disconnected from the very notion of a wiki" (p 153). "Wikipedia works because those who know the truth, or something close to it, are usually more numerous and more committed than those who believe in a falsehood" (p 154). While only an administrator can permanently delete pages, anyone else can make temporary changes or deletions which will then be reviewed. Other readers can report vandalism or revert pages to their previous form after sabotage is noticed. "Wikipedia works because the vandals are hopelessly outnumbered by those who want to make the project work" (p 156). Sunstein has updated his research on social media in #Republic and argues against philosophical snobbery of any kind towards Wikipedia. Eric, save your rants for when you are walking in the forest, and when nobody can hear your nonsense. Ukraine is burning while the propaganda wars rage, and reason is eclipsed by the temporary fog of war.

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  43. The tone was charming precocity a certain knowingness

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  44. Howard,

    Teddy is one of the most enigmatic and puzzling of Salinger’s short stories. Actually, it does not end with Teddy’s conversation with Bob Nicolson, who is an academic. After Teddy’s conversation with Nicolson is concluded, Teddy, who has been searching for his sister, leaves to go to the pool on the luxury vessel. The story ends as follows:

    “He [Nicolson] was little more than halfway down the staircase when he heard an all-piercing, sustained scream – clearly coming from a small, female child. It was highly acoustical, as though it were reverberating with four tiled walls.”

    The child who is screaming is assumed to be Teddy’s sister. Many commentators have speculated about what occurred to cause her to scream. Salinger never explained it.

    Most of the stories in Nine Stories deal with people who are suffering from depression, some of whom are contemplating suicide. In the first story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, the father who is depicted as a wonderful parent does commit suicide, [SPOILER] by shooting himself in the head with a revolver. The ending is so shocking that I was taken aback when I first read it.

    Salinger did himself suffer from depression, which is depicted in my favorite story in the collection, For Esme’- with Love and Squalor, about a military officer going through post traumatic stress disorder during WWII. Salinger, who participated in the landing at Normandy and visited a concentration camp near Dachau, had to be hospitalized for depression after that visit. He reportedly told his daughter years later, "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live."

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  45. My goodness! I outgrew precocity quite a long time ago. I'd be tempted to cast Peter Sellers as Teddy, but there's a little problem.

    The Red vs Dead dispute runs into the fallacy of composition. As an individual I can decide to sacrifice my life to avoid coming under Communist rule, or decide that it's better to go along and look for a way to escape. Rather obviously, the stakes are higher at the level of species extinction. But the problem with Better Red is the implicit assumption that it would avoid extinction. Recalling disputes between China and the USSR, that should not be assumed. Surely history teaches that schisms are inevitable. In the tiny village near my summer house there are two churches right next to each other, Baptist and Methodist. I would have to look it up to understand the doctrinal dispute.

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  46. He reportedly told his daughter years later, "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live."

    Damn.

    My aunt said something to me recently about the effects of WW2 on my grandparents (and on their parenting styles, which in turn impacted her and my mother, which in turn impacted my siblings and me...). She said something about what it was like to have a dad haunted by the memory (about which he'd kept mostly silent) of that one time as a teenager when he found himself and his comrades wading knee-deep in human blood.

    I've had an "easy" life, on paper, despite some mental health and disability issues, but when I think of some of the darker experiences that I as well as my aunt and her siblings (including my mom) have had, I figure that my grandparents' WW2 experiences make for a few missing pieces of the psychological puzzle.

    It all reminds me of a term I heard my therapist use, "intergenerational trauma." (Actually used while wondering aloud about the ramifications of Trump's immigration policies - young children forcibly separated from their parents, etc.)

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  47. Yes AA.
    Language does more for me than plot. I sometimes get so enraptured by language I forget where I am
    Barney, perhaps what I took as precocity is really just wisdom, which is in short supply

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  48. Interesting article:

    https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine

    JM seems headed into crankdom if he isn't there already.

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  49. All go to the same place. All come from dust, and to dust all return.

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  50. I said I was done commenting on this, but I wanted to make a remark on the subject of threat, mentioned again by A.K. above.

    Let's assume, as A.K. and others have said, that NATO expansion posed no objective military threat to Russia. NATO is primarily a defensive alliance, Latvia was not going to invade Russia, etc.

    Russia could still have been concerned about NATO expansion. Why? Because the U.S. and Russia have seen each other in recent years as geopolitical rivals (a word that is fuzzier than the word "enemies," but nonetheless means something, even if it is hard to pin down).

    Geopolitical rivals may be and often are concerned about the extent of each other's influence (another somewhat fuzzy word), even if there is no military threat involved.

    Because the U.S. plays a leading role in NATO, its expansion could have concerned (and did concern) Russia even in the absence of a military threat that had any chance of translating into offensive military action. Of course, this in no way justifies the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    If Mexico were to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or, more pointedly, lease a military base to China, this would concern the U.S. even though it poses no military threat because neither Mexico nor China is going to invade the U.S. And of course the U.S. would not be justified in invading Mexico for these reasons.

    My point is that repeating the mantra "NATO posed no threat to Russia" does not, as a descriptive matter, answer or solve everything, because Russia, as a geopolitical rival of the U.S. (and as a country whose political system is of a very different type than that of the U.S.), could have been, and was, uncomfortable about NATO expansion even though it posed nothing that, judged at least from the outside, amounted to a military threat. Again, this does not justify in any way the Russian invasion of Ukraine. All I'm trying to get at is that intl politics sometimes tangles up issues of geopolitical rivalry and prestige in situations where neither side is threatening the other militarily, at least not in any way that would appear to an outside observer to be threatening. Couple this with a leader presiding over a stagnant, rather kleptocratic system, and to whom prestige and appearances seem to matter, and the situation can become dangerous.

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  51. I would think that with the defeat in Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union that serious folks in Russia would have owned up to there no longer being any geopolitical rivalry and besides that, developing viable internal economic and political structures had to be prioritized. Instead their first president was a drunk who allowed a few oligarchs to begin the looting that his chosen successor allowed to continue (make a former KGB officer your successor - what could go wrong?). Consider how things might have turned out if instead of Washington we made a combination of Aaron Burr and Franklin Pearce our first president or Hoover won a second term.

    If China joins some economic arrangement with Mexico - mazel tov. A military base? To what end? Mexico wants nukes targeting them? I believe the last time a permanent foreign presence in Mexico was attempted, the Mexicans stood him up against a wall and shot him. The US incursion after Villa shot up a border town was sort of a fiasco.

    What we have here is merely the downside of a personalist autocracy. Russia made some bad decisions in the 1990s, the Soviet Union made some bad decisions in the 1970s.

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  52. Eric,

    There is an analogous maxim in chess - after the game is over, the King, Queen, rooks, knights, bishops, and pawns are all returned together to the same receptacle.

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  53. LFC,

    https://youtu.be/-Y8ny69uU3g

    At 19:50 in the above link, Timothy Snyder gives some useful (albeit brief) context to the NATO-Russia issue, pointing out that in the 90s a hostile relationship between the two was not assumed. In fact, there was cooperation, and Putin himself acknowledged NATO as a defensive alliance. In addition, the former head of NATO (1999-2003) has stated that Putin asked him directly when Russia would be allowed to join the alliance, though he bristled at the idea that it wouldn’t be able to leapfrog over countries “that don’t matter.” Of course, nothing Putin says can be taken at face value, and the fact that Russian forces were committing atrocities in Chechnya concurrent with this certainly complicates the matter.

    The position I’ve come to settle on is that a focus on NATO is somewhat of a red herring. Not only does Putin not fear NATO militarily, but after the veto from France and Germany on extending membership to Ukraine in 2008, after the war in Georgia that same year, after the conquest of Crimea on 2014, Putin knew well that the prospect of Ukraine joining the alliance had been effectively neutered. Nobody — not even the United States — was going to poke that bear. Of course, he also knew that the US and other Western powers would never openly admit this, which he has used to his advantage in cobbling together a rationale for war.

    What Putin objects to, simply, is the prospect of Ukraine joining the West — which may, somewhere far down the road, lead to NATO membership, though I am assuming that this doesn’t necessarily bear on his calculations. I do believe that Putin simply does not want a thriving liberal democracy in Ukraine by which Russia will look bad in contrast. Indeed, Putin now openly proclaims that he considers the two countries to be one and the same. Why shouldn’t be believe him?

    Realists like Mearsheimer are correct that this is ‘sphere of influence’ thinking and the US has behaved the same in the past with regard to its neighbors. However, I do think that Mearsheimer’s position (shared with people like Chomsky) amounts to appeasement, though they are reluctant at to use that word. Appeasement as policy has a bad rap (and we all know why) but the rationale this school of thought offers — namely that appeasing Putin by sacrificing the autonomy of Ukraine, a country with no geostrategic interest to the US, is better than nuclear war — seems rather irrefutable.

    Anyway my sincere hope is that all parties (including China?) can come to som face-saving compromise, and that the people of Ukraine end up safe and secure. I fear that the current trajectory (or what *appears* to be the current trajectory) of waiting for Russia to buckle under the weight of a long insurgency and massive sanctions is a dangerous path. The bear may feel himself poked.

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  54. I feel I should clarify my above post by saying that I do not endorse wholesale appeasement. Ukraine’s autonomy must be respected and Putin should certainly suffer consequences for this horrific war. I just think that, given the stakes, any deal that is reasonably favorable to both sides ought to be taken.

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  55. Ed Barreras

    Thanks for the link.

    I just listened to Snyder on NATO, his answer toward the end. His point that the process was driven by the E. Europeans and that they were the ones who pushed to join I'm sure is correct. Ditto on the change in Putin's thinking. (As to what the U.S. and the (then) Soviets said to each other when, and whether after the dissolution of the USSR those representations were felt to be still operative, that's probably a tangled mess and I'd have to read various things that I haven't.)

    I hope Snyder is right on the possibility of some compromise, though I don't see a lot of grounds for optimism right now. But things could change, I suppose.

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  56. Regardless whether Putin has, or does not have, a legitimate gripe regarding the expansion of NATO, it appears now to be irrelevant. The bottom line of this discussion appears to be that because Russia has nuclear weapons, Putin can blackmail the rest of the world to accept Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The best the U.S. and its allies can do is to impose economic sanctions and ostracize Russia from cultural and athletic events. This is probably not going to be enough to force Putin to reverse course in Ukraine, and by next month it is likely he will have installed a puppet government in Kyev.

    My question is, where will this stop? Suppose Putin decides he wants to annex the Baltic states next, and threatens nuclear war if he is opposed? Can the U.S. and Europe afford to call his bluff? If, as Ed Berreras states, avoidance of a nuclear conflict is the irrefutable conclusion, what possible deterrence can prevent Putin from invading the Baltic states, if, his appetite having been whetted by his success in Ukraine, he threatens nuclear war if opposed?

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  57. Another Anonymous,

    Obviously there must be limits. An invasion of France or Germany would certainly be considered intolerable. As for the Baltic states, ever since they joined NATO people have wondered whether the West would really come to the defense of Estonia, for example, when the cost is potential nuclear war. This has always floated as a sort of a hypothetical, though now it has veered frighteningly closer to being a reality. I tremble to think what would happen if we ever reached that impasse. Still, I think the prospect remains highly unlikely. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that Putin is *that* unhinged, and anyway one hopes that an attempted war with NATO would be enough to precipitate a palace coup. The current thinking is that Moldova may be next, which the West will not defend with boots on the ground. Other than that, I really don’t know what to say except that this moment is very frightening, and not something I would’ve thought I’d ever live through.

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  58. In the unlikely (I hope) event that Putin decided to invade any country that is a NATO member, I think NATO wd meet its Art 5 commitment and come to its defense. Biden has said repeatedly that "every inch" of NATO territory will be defended. He can't go back on that and hope to maintain any credibility.

    My guess wd be that if Putin threatened in advance to use nuclear weapons, either openly or implicitly, it would not make any difference. NATO really has no choice but to defend every NATO member.

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  59. aaall @2:52 pm, thanks for the link to the New Yorker article. It was interesting.

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  60. I'd take Biden at his word on this. Defaulting on Article Five would be the end of NATO which would give Putin his multi-polar world so if any NATO nation is attacked we find out how survivable the resulting war will be.

    On another happy note, I've seen reports that part of the nuclear alert Putin effected has ICBM launchers scattering around Siberian forests and subs maneuvering. Since China is south of Siberia, I imagine Putin will be getting a phone call soon, if not already.

    There's a breakaway part of Moldova so I'd expect a move to annex a path from the Black sea. I've seen accounts of Russian movements towards Odessa by sea. Hopefully the Ukrainian forces have plans and plenty of these:

    https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39865/marines-test-javelin-missile-teams-in-rubber-rafts-like-somali-pirates-but-better-armed
    .



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  61. Why does the Free World continue buying gas and petroleum from Russia?

    If the Free World wants to hurt the Russian economy, the quickest way would seem to be to stop buying Russian gas and petroleum. That well might send Russia into an economic crisis which would lead to the fall of Putin, not necessarily to be replaced by a functioning social democracy, but probably by someone less bloodthirsty.

    That measure would of course cause a rise in the prices of fossil fuels and a recession. The Free World might have to ration gas and petroleum, and fossil fuel producers such as the United States might have to "share" what they produce with countries like Germany, but that all seems like a small price to pay to stop Russian aggression, if the Free World is really so concerned about that.

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  62. s.w. There's an interesting discussion of economic warfare by David Edgerton in today's Guardian.

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  63. Another AnonymoussMarch 3, 2022 at 10:58 AM

    s. wallerstein,

    I just saw a report on CBS News which addressed the question you have raised.

    They offered two main reasons why your proposal has been rejected:

    1. The three main exporters of oil are Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Russia. The amount of oil which Russia exports is so huge that even if S.A. and U.A.E. increased the oil exports to their maximum, it would not compensate for the loss of Russian exports, and the loss would spiral the world into a serious recession.

    2. There is serious concern that if Russia’s oil exports were entirely cut off, Putin would be so desperate that he would launch a nuclear war. The commentator reminded us that it was an embargo against oil exports to Japan that persuaded Japan to launch its attack on Pearl Harbor.

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  64. In an unfortunate twist of history, while it has been confirmed that Ethel Rosenberg was innocent with respect to Julius’s providing American nuclear secrets to the Russian government, Julius engaged in the espionage out of concern that the United States should not have a monopoly on nuclear weapons, which would give it an unfair advantage in dictating foreign policy. Now it is Russia which is using its nuclear arsenal to blackmail the world. Although in all likelihood Russia eventually would have developed the nuclear technology without the nuclear secrets which Julius provided, his concerns about the consequences of the U.S. being the sole nuclear power, given current events, were misguided.

    I expect to get pushback on this latter claim, along the lines that had the Soviet Union not been provided the nuclear secrets, the U.S. would have used its nuclear arsenal to dominate the world. Given what did happen, we will never know. But we do know that it is now Russia which is using its nuclear arsenal to do what Julius Rosenberg believed the U.S. would do. Moreover, the U.S. did not use its nuclear weapons in the Korean War, before either the Soviet Union or China had developed nuclear weapons.

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  65. There is a key question to which I have never seen a clear answer maybe because no one knows: how much power does Putin have?

    There are dictators and dictators. Hitler led Germany to absolute disaster in spite of the advice of his generals: he had absolute power.

    On the other hand, Pinochet was no democrat, but in Octuber 1988, having been convinced by his yes-men that he was very popular, held a plebiscite and as the results came in showing that he was defeated, began to doctor the results in his favor and massed Army troops for another coup. However, at the last moment, the Air Force refused to go along and Pinochet lost the plebiscite. That is, Pinochet controlled the Army but did not control the Air Force, which until the 1988 plebiscite had always backed him.

    Is Putin' power more like that of Hitler or that of Pinochet? If he plans nuclear war to destroy the world in an apocaliptic suicide, would his generals go along? One can imagine many Russian generals, who would have no ethical qualms about invading Ukraine, but might not want to destroy humanity.

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  66. While written in 2019, and possibly no longer accurate, here is an opinion piece from the NYT on the question. It offers hope that s. wallerstein is correct, that Putin is not as powerful as he appears to be in the media.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/how-powerful-is-vladimir-putin-really.html

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  67. If my recollection of the dates is correct, the USSR got the atomic bomb in 1949, so it already had a nuclear weapon by the time of the Korean War.

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  68. Another,

    Thanks for the link, but unfortunately, the NYT informs me that I have already reached my limit of free articles and suggests that I subscribe, which I am not going to do.

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  69. Anonymous,

    Thanks. I read the David Edgerton article. Worth reading.

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  70. s. wallerstein: "Why does the Free World [lol] continue buying gas and petroleum from Russia?"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7SnaMphvug&t=15s

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  71. LFC,

    True, but that was “only” a nuclear test. The Soviet Union did not have an effective delivery system while the Korean War was waging. In 1946, the U.S. had already fitted super bombers, larger than the Enola Gay, with nuclear weapons. If the U.S. wanted to assert the kind of world domination that Julius Rosenberg feared, it would have used nuclear weapons in the Korean War against the Chinese, who had no nuclear weapons. The U.S. refrained from doing so, which, I believer, proved Julius Rosenberg wrong.

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  72. Oops.

    While the Korean War raging.

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  73. Brian Becker provides an expansive overview of the Ukraine crisis in this discussion with Abby Martin, recorded around 26 Feb:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6HQeunm2f4

    (Becker is a longtime anti-war activist and a foreign-policy expert. He founded the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which is a communist political party, in 2004.)

    (nb you can speed up any Youtube video's playback speed by changing the settings)

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  74. Scott Ritter was a UN weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s and is a retired US marine major. He became very critical of US Middle East policy and became a target of the Bush administration when he opposed the proposed invasion of Iraq and said that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any remaining weapons of mass destruction.

    There are plenty of reasons Ritter might be critical of US government policy (he was/is also married to a Russian). Having said that, I recommend you hear his comments on the Ukraine crisis from an interview that was recorded I believe the 2nd day of Putin's military operation.
    Completely unlike anything you will see on CNN or Rachel Maddow.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IexFtDCJNsM

    (If I get time later, I may be able to post some snippets from the interview here.)

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  75. Eric,

    Thanks once again. I've listened to the first half of the Scott Ritter interview and it's a perspective that everyone in the Free World should consider before they rush to conclusions
    about what's going on the Ukraine. I'll finish listening later when I have more time.

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  76. s.w. I've found that clearing one's browsing history often allows one to read things after one has supposedly gone beyond the limit.

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  77. Anonymous,

    Thanks, but it didn't work.

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  78. s.w. you might try selectively deleting cookies.

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  79. aaall,

    thanks, but if one third of what Scott Ritter says in the video Eric links to above is true, just one third, the mainstream media like the NYT are distorting the facts and lying even more than I had imagined.

    I know Glenn Greenwald is not especially popular in this forum, but I believe that he is right that in a situation like the invasion of Ukraine, perfectly sane emotional responses such as empathy and righteous indignation leave us prey to being manipulated by the media and that it is wise to wait a few weeks before reaching definitive conclusions about what is going on.

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  80. s. wallerstein,

    In a few weeks, several thousand Ukrainians will be dead, tens of thousands more wounded, and Kyev, Kharkiv, Odessa, Lviv, and Marapol will all be rubble and under the control of Putin and his ruthless centurions. What excuses will you make for Putin then, and what spin will you invoke in order to continue to condemn the Western media as mere anti-Russian propagandists?

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  81. Another,

    Don't they teach reading in law school?

    I said above that I would try to wait a few weeks before condemning Western media or those who disagree with it.

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  82. s. wllaerstein,

    No, they do not teach reading in law school, because I know of no law school which admits students who do not already know how to read – including students who are blind, but can read Braille.

    You want to wait a few weeks before you condemn Putin and his ruthless centurions, as they ravage Ukraine by bombing civilian centers killing civilians indiscriminately, the reports of which you attribute to anti-Russian propaganda by Western media. But you do not have to wait several weeks. The writing is already on the wall – but you refuse to read it, preferring instead to condemn Western media as nothing more than propaganda.

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  83. s. wallaerstein,

    Post-script:

    And please don’t try to rationalize what you have written, asserting that we should wait a few weeks before reaching a conclusive decision about the validity of claims made by the Western media. You did not wait a few weeks to reach your own definitive conclusion that, “the mainstream media like the NYT are distorting the facts and lying even more than I had imagined.”

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  84. s. wellerstien,

    Bypass Paywalls Clean

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  85. Another,

    You have a pleasant habit of distorting whatever others say so than others are forced to clarify many times what they say.

    I never said that Western media is only propaganda.

    Of course the Western media distort the facts and lies, all media does.

    My comment above is open, I'm wondering how much Scott Ritter is telling the truth. As I said above, if one third of what he says is true, then the Western media distort the facts and lies even more I had previously imagined. As I said, all media distort the facts and lies: that is journalism 101, there are no "objective" media.

    You seem to sacralize the mainstream Western media as if they really narrative "all the news that's fit to print" and as if anyone who doubts that is a heretic or a Kremlin apologist.

    You love to put people in a situation where they have to justify and apologize for themselves. That's the prosecuting attorney in you. It's not a likeable human trait because it presupposes a certain suppposed moral superiority on your part and a certain probably unconsious sadism hidden behind a cloak of righteousness. I'm bowing out of this conversation. Thank you once again Eric.

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  86. s. wallerstein,

    I will leave it for others to disentangle the cognitive dissonance between these two statements:

    “I never said that Western media is only propaganda.

    “Of course the Western media distort the facts and lies, all media does.”

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  87. I checked out snippets and caught Ritter's take on Afghanistan. It's beyond stupid and the other ones didn't impress me so (and as with Greenwald) opportunity cost wins. The NYT is too infuriating too often so I subscribe to the WP.

    All that is besides the point in the instant case.. With Mearsheimer, Greenwald, and Ritter on Ukraine it's clowns to the right, jokers to the left.

    This one isn't close. Putin is a corrupt revanchist who decided to start a war based on attitude, delusions and lies. Prior to 2014 he had stooges in Belarus and Ukraine. In 2014 he lost his Ukrainian stooge and invaded part of Ukraine as pay back. In 2017 he got an American stooge (recall that the 2016 Republican Platform eliminated its pro-Ukrainian plank). In 2021 he lost his American stooge. Time is probably running out for him so here we are.



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  88. Another,

    I'm going to assume that I was not sufficiently explicit and clear in what I said above.

    Yes, I never said that Western media is only propaganda. The statement that "Western media lies and distorts the facts" does not imply that Western media never states the truth or is ONLY propaganda.

    At times the mainstream media lies, at times they tell the truth. You have to read defensively just as you have to drive and walk defensively on busy streets, looking out
    for distortions, but that does not mean that everything that Western media says is a distortion of the truth.

    By the way, you will note that above I stated that the Western media are distorting the facts even more than I imagined IF a third of what Scott Ritter claims is true. I did not make any affirmations about the truth of what Scott Ritter says, only that it is a perspective that is worth considering.



    Given the above, I try to check what I see or read in mainstream media in other alternative sources of information. It is extremely difficult to determine who is lying and who is not and for that reason, I referred to Glenn Greenwald's suggestion that given our genuine emotional responses of empathy and righteous indignation in the face of an attack of aggression (such as that of Putin), it is wise to wait a while before forming a definitive opinion.

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  89. Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.

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  90. @S. Wallerstein,

    Here we are one week into the war. If one is a functioning adult, and one doesn’t know enough by now to realize that that Ritter diatribe is little more than a rank apologia for a criminal war of aggression, then I’m afraid there’s little anyone can say to help you. It seems you want to adopt this “cooler heads” rhetoric to position yourself as some paragon of wisdom and restraint, but really you just look obtuse (at best). A morally sane person does not need to take a few months to realize the fundamental criminality of what Putin has done, nor to recognize an apologist for fascism when he sees one staring him in the face. Right, so Putin “hates” the brutality he’s being forced to inflict on his “brother Slavs;” he has no choice; it’s their fault — the language of the abuser. (And by the way, that interview was from the day after the start of the war — now that Russia has begun to inflict large-scale civilian casualties, how’s that drivel looking?)

    Someone above mentioned opportunity cost; and indeed I don’t consider it worth my time to say much more. I’ll just end this by asking you to consider what the implications of Ritter’s rhetoric are for people in the Baltic states, which are, after all, unlike Russia, functioning democracies that have very good records on human right — in addition to a history of being brutalized by their neighbor Russia. Or perhaps democracy and human rights are things you can only bother yourself to care about when it is the Unites States threatening them.

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  91. "Ladran, Sancho, señal que cabalgamos".

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  92. So nothing of substance. Just a bon mot indicating your eagerness to further ensconce yourself in you prejudice. Well, you certainly are a quixotic figure, Wallerstein, I’ll give you that much.

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  93. In support of s.w. (though for obvious reasons I do wish he'd put "free world" in scare quotes) and the truth as against the pro-war propagandists, some remarks of David Harvey

    https://mronline.org/2022/03/04/remarks-on-recent-events-in-the-ukraine-an-interim-statement/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=remarks-on-recent-events-in-the-ukraine-an-interim-statement

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  94. For all that I would disagree with in that David Harvey piece, he at least acknowledges that Putin’s actions are “unjustifiable” and “needless.” Compare that to the Ritter interview posted by Eric — a fawning love letter to Putin (delivered by a complete dumbass) that prompted Wallerstein to say “Gee, I’ll need a few months to think about it.”

    Also, it’s surreal and somewhat comical that my position is being labeled “pro-war propaganda” when the war being waged is Putin’s doing. For those who have a hard time grasping what is clear and obvious: I am *against* the pro-war propagandists.

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  95. there’s the truth that russia launched a brutal attack on Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are suffering the awful miseries of war

    but that truth is embedded in a larger truth, that there is a context to russia’s actions that we ought to acknowledge—and it’s a context so few in the western media are acknowledging, which is why it’s appropriate to term so much of that stuff propaganda in the derogatory sense of the term.

    this is not to exculpate russia (though that is the myopic view of those who want to imagine the world is simple and that their simplistic view of the world is the only correct one), it is to try to encourage a bit of soul searching about moral culpability, it is to urge that at least a moment be spent contemplating the hubristic post Cold War US dominated global order

    why should we acknowledge that there is a context to russia’s actions? because it gets at the truth as to why countries go to war. and it gets at the truth as to why this war at this particular time. and if we’re not interested in understanding that then we’re simply fundamentally pro-war despite all protestations to the contrary.

    finally, I anticipate that the largest fallout from this war will be that the US dominated global apparatus will be enormously strengthened and more hubristic than ever (something of a replay of the years following the collapse of the USSR but worse), and that’s something that should make all those concerned for world peace more frightened than ever.

    s.w., eric, and I, and others, are not alone:

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/04/an-antiwar-primer/

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  96. Should we look for context? Absolutely — though, of course, how context is illuminated will always be a matter of dispute. What I can’t abide is people who are so eager for a context in which blame falls squarely in the lap of the United States that they resort to excuse-making and fawning over Putin. That Ritter thing is an almost parodic example. And earlier, Eric tried to insinuate that Russia is better than Ukraine on press freedom —which, as someone pointed out to him, is utterly ridiculous. (Russia just shut down all opposition media, btw.) Which should cause us to wonder not only why someone would formulate such a falsehood, but why they would consider that falsehood relevant in *this* context. Russia is waging a brutal war against Ukraine. What would be the point of going tit-for-tat on issues of censorship, except if one was eager to find something, anything, to make Putin’s regime look good? One sees this kind of thing over and over.

    It’s been dismaying to see the cognitive dissonance among my fellow leftists. So many of them were certain that Russia would not launch a full-scale invasion — thinking reports to the contrary were just CIA propaganda — that when it really happened the took it like a two-by-four to the face. Now they’re reeling from the upsetting of their happy assumptions. And unfortunately one way they’ve been coping is with soothing, binary thinking wherein US=bad and Putin=good — and that Ritter thing feeds into this mindset like junk food.

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  97. I have nothing to add to He Man's accurate critique, other than to endorse it. Well done.

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  98. " usual suspect said...there’s the truth that russia launched a brutal attack on Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are suffering the awful miseries of war but that truth is embedded in a larger truth, that there is a context to russia’s actions that we ought to acknowledge—and it’s a context so few in the western media are acknowledging, which is why it’s appropriate to term so much of that stuff propaganda in the derogatory sense of the term."

    Or as WFB wrote in 1963:

    "Surely one thing is clear enough at this point in American history, namely, that the Negro problem cannot be solved by even the most artful piece of legislation. This kind of “progress” projected under the proposed civil rights laws is the kind of progress which is based on the assumption that people can be brought under coercive pressure to do things they are disinclined to do."

    "There are those who sincerely believe progress is not fashioned out of that kind of clay. There actually are true and wise friends of the Negro race who believe that a federal law, artificially deduced from the Commerce Clause of the Constitution or from the 14th Amendment, whose marginal effect will be to instruct small merchants in the Deep South on how they may conduct their business, is no way at all of promoting the kind of understanding which is the basis of progressive and charitable relationships between the races."

    Context can be used to rationalize as well as explain.

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  99. For me this is a question of mental health.

    The world is going to continue exactly as it whether or not I energetically condemn Russian aggression or not.

    When I find myself driven to buy something online (which is much easier than taking the trouble to walk downtown to shop), I wait a day or two.

    I even try to wait a bit before answering those who contest my affirmations online although that it is even harder, especially in the middle of the night. We're two hours ahead of New York here. Still, I'll keep trying. The secret is not to subscribe to follow-up email comments, I guess.

    When I find myself crying (which does occur) when I listen to Zelensky (the hero du jour), I wonder a bit. As Yuval Harari says, they know us better than we know ourselves: he's talking about how we are manipulated by algorhythm to buy, to get indignant and to cry.

    I'm not saying that I shouldn't see Zelensky as a the hero du jour, but for out of respect for whatever sanity I have left in this insane world, I try to cultivate a certain critical distance.

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  100. WFB? It took me a while – William F. Buckley

    s. wallersteint:

    “The Hottest Places in Hell Are Reserved for Those Who in a Period of Moral Crisis Maintain Their Neutrality.” Dante

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  101. Just to be clear, so far as I'm concerned, putin = bad, us = bad too, x = bad, y = bad, . . .

    i, for one, have never fawned over putin or russia before or after 1989; i've never fawned over the us or "the west," or "the free world" either. come to that, i can't remember ever fawning over any country or any politician anywhere at any time. i can remember becoming angry with my own country from when i was about 13, and have never looked back.

    i hope that helps, y'aaall. otherwise, your refernce to WFB etc. goes way over my non-american head

    and on the "fellow leftists" matter, since when were leftists all bonded in fellowship? never, i'd wager. there must be some way to denominate the sort of argument that's being waged when "my fellow [anything]" is a precursor to 'so many of us have sadly lost their way.'

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  102. Another,

    You need to brush up on your Dante.

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  103. s. wallerstein,

    Well, wherever in hell Dante placed the neutrals, it was not pleasant. One translation has him placing them in the vestibule of hell, where “they swirl increasingly in clouds of red sand, their faces bitten by wasps and hornets.”

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  104. U.S. my point is that appeals to "context" as with 'culture" and "place" are too often a refuge for scoundrels. William F. Buckley was rationalizing white folks terrorizing Black folks which, along with the many other things he advocated, makes him a scoundrel. Wherever you reside, I'm sure you have examples.

    Simply declaring "bad" all around is a cop out. "Fawning" ignores the reality that over the next few years every leader in a NATO nation will have to stand in a free election (OK, Hungary is a wobbler). Putin has been in power for over twenty years with no clear exit ramp. You don't see a difference?

    AA, I believe it was traitors, which comforts me when I think of Trump,et al.

    ReplyDelete
  105. Oh, and really cold, not hot.

    ReplyDelete
  106. well it's all very well to assert that appeals to context are too often a refuge for scoundrels, so i hope you don't mind this scoundrel observing that those who ignore context are too often idiots

    it's very depressing to have to try to defend oneself against the kind of moral mccarthyism which insists that everyone climb aboard the cause of the day and voice exactly the same kinds of thoughts about it. no matter the cause, since when did it become unforgiveable, treasonous even, as aa is suggesting, to claim that thinking about it is so wicked?

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  107. Seen on the web ...


    PBS Newshour profiles a Ukrainian mayor as a hero fighting Russian invaders.
    The Newshour correspondent fails to mention or ask him about the portrait of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera that is hanging on his office wall.



    Sam Sokol, The Jerusalem Post, 22 Dec 2015:
    "Two months after local elections were held across Ukraine, residents of the small northern city of Konotop are expressing shock and dismay over the behavior of newly chosen Mayor Artem Semenikhin of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party.
    According to reports, Semenikhin drives around in a car bearing the number 14/88, a numerological reference to the phrases 'we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children' and 'Heil Hitler'; replaced the picture of President Petro Poroshenko in his office with a portrait of Ukrainian national leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera; and refused to fly the city’s official flag at the opening meeting of the city council because he objected to the star of David emblazoned on it. The flag also features a Muslim crescent and a cross."
    https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/ukrainian-jews-shocked-after-city-elects-neo-nazi-mayor-437975


    Norman JW Goda, History News Network (HNN):
    "As an uncompromising leader of the militant, terrorist branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Bandera became a Nazi collaborator who lived with his deputies under German protection after World War II began....

    Historian Karel Berkhoff, among others, has shown that Bandera, his deputies, and the Nazis shared a key obsession, namely the notion that the Jews in Ukraine were behind Communism and Stalinist imperialism and must be destroyed.... When the Germans invaded the USSR in June 1941 and captured the East Galician capital of Lvov, Bandera’s lieutenants issued a declaration of independence in his name. They further promised to work closely with Hitler, then helped to launch a pogrom that killed four thousand Lvov Jews in a few days, using weapons ranging from guns to metal poles. 'We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,' a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews....

    It is a sad comment on Ukrainian memory that the man declared a Hero of Ukraine in January headed a movement that was deeply involved in the Holocaust."
    https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122778


    The PBS Newshour story is here:
    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russian-forces-bombard-targets-across-ukraine-as-official-warns-worst-is-yet-to-come

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  108. Eric,

    No one who is knowledgeable would deny that there were Nazi collaborators among the Ukrainian people and that they engaged in pogroms and atrocities against Ukrainian Jews. The massacre at Babi Yar no doubt was accomplished with the help of Ukrainian citizens. And many of them probably survived he war and held positions of authority. This was probably true of several countries after the war, including Germany. But this does not confirm Putin’s allegations that neo-Nazi Ukrainians were recently engaging in genocide against Russian speaking Ukrainians. And the fact that Ukrainians elected a Jewish comedian, the grandson of Holocaust victims, demonstrates that Ukraine has made progress vis a’ vis its relationship with its Jewish citizens.

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  109. Wow. So we’ve reached the stage where the “denazification” angle is being defended. I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. This one’s easy, fortunately. As AA points out, the notion that Ukraine is run by Nazis is rather belied by the fact that Zelensky is Jewish. And the truth is that far-right parties in Ukraine do very poorly in elections there, performing much worse than their counterparts in, say, France. What’s next? Are we going hear that Putin was telling the truth about genocide? As for Bandera’s legacy, I find it about as distressing as the fact that (per the BBC) Stalin has enjoyed a surge in popularity in Putin’s Russia, with fully 70 percent of people saying he played a positive role in Russia’s history, and 51 percent affirming that they “like” the dictator (https://youtu.be/B7rjaDBAe0w). The unfortunate truth is that all nations have a tendency to white wash the legacy of the figures they would hold hope as heroes, valorizing what is positive while forgetting what is negative. The Russians do it with Stalin, and there is much argument in the West about the extent to which it’s done with, for example, Thomas Jefferson or Churchill. And needless to say, none of this at all justifies what is currently being done to the people of Ukraine, even though that is the sordid implication of bringing it up.

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  110. Hummm, seems a cease fire in some areas has just been announced. Anyway, I seem to recall some Nazi fan boys in Orlando chanting Putin, Putin, ... last Saturday so glass houses. Given the fascist/revanchist revival in Europe and North America, it would be surprising of there weren't at least a few Nazis most everywhere. How about Stalin's latest Russian poll numbers?

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  111. Whether or not Putin respects the cease fire seems to be good test case for the hypothesis, at times seen in this forum, that Putin is completely deranged and/or the new Hitler.

    If he does respect it, it seems like solid evidence in favor of the hypothesis that Putin is a rational actor and can, in some cirumstances, be negotiated with.

    ReplyDelete
  112. Another Anonymous,

    The isssue is not whether Putin's claim about de-Nazification should be taken at face value. A lot of the discussion here these past few days has been about the reliability of the reporting from major US media sources. Is the reporting fair and reasonably objective, or is it propaganda? Can the average person who has no specialized knowledge about the context of the events occurring in the Ukraine conflict understand the situation if they are getting all their information from sources like NBC/MSNBC, CNN, and, in this particular case, PBS?


    (It is a truly astonishing thing to watch people twisting themselves into pretzels to overlook the fact that neo-Nazis are being portrayed as heroes.

    But maybe I am not being fair. The fact that Zelensky was elected president must mean that antisemitism is no longer a problem in Ukraine, just as the fact that Obama was elected president means that racism is no longer a problem in the US.)

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  113. "To anyone who read [the New York Times] between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken....
    The Times's flawed journalism continued in the weeks after the war began, when writers might have broken free from the cloaked government sources who had insinuated themselves and their agendas into the prewar coverage...."
    https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/weekinreview/the-public-editor-weapons-of-mass-destruction-or-mass-distraction.html


    "We look back now at a largely forgotten aspect of [George H.W. Bush's 1991 invasion of Iraq]: the vast domestic propaganda campaign that occurred in the United States before the invasion began. The story centers on a young Kuwaiti woman named Nayirah. On October 10th, 1990, the 15-year-old girl gave riveting testimony before Congress about the horrors inside Kuwait after Iraq invaded....
    Nayirah’s testimony was rebroadcast across the country and marked a turning point in public opinion on going to war. President George H.W. Bush repeatedly cited her claims....

    But it turned out Nayirah’s claims weren’t true.... It also turned out Nayirah was not just any Kuwaiti teenager. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasser al-Sabah. She had been coached by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, which was working for the Kuwaiti government."
    https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/5/how_false_testimony_and_a_massive

    Have we learned nothing?

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  114. Neo-nazis in the Ukraine (from The Nation).

    https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/neo-nazis-far-right-ukraine/

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  115. Eric,

    Yes, I and other commenters on this blog have learned to take verbal statements about the cause and nature of a conflict with a grain of salt. But that does not mean that the grain of salt cannot be dissolved when the initial verbal statements are confirmed by additional evidence. What evidence have you seen to confirm Putin’s claim that neo-Nazi Ukrainians are killing Russian speaking Ukrainians, let alone committing genocide against them? It is you who are violating your own precept about reading allegations with a critical eye.

    Moreover, the claims by Western media that Putin is waging a scorched earth campaign against the Ukrainian people is not just supported by verbal statements by reporters, but by video footage of bombed out apartment buildings, a bombed nuclear power plant, and thousands of Ukrainians fleeing their country. Do you claim that all of this footage has been doctored?

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  116. Can somebody please tell me what the sudden obsession with neo-Nazis in Ukraine has to do with the current war of aggression? What is the connection? If your point is that neo-Nazis are currently committing genocide against Russians in Ukraine — as Putin claims in justifying the invasion — then why don’t you just say so? (Because in that case we’ll know to shun you for being utterly delusional.)

    I mean, yes, it’s an interesting topic in and of itself. But the mere fact that far-right groups exist in Ukraine — just as they do everywhere (don’t make me pull up links on how Putin is not only a sponsor of far-right movements abroad, but is practically worshipped as a hero by, for example, white supremacists American nationalists) — has nothing to do with the war, because it can’t possibly serve as a justification for it.

    I know many of you suffer under the illusion that the mainstream American media ignores this aspect of Ukrainian society. Yet not being ones for irony, you don’t seem to realize that the very articles you link to reference plenty of coverage of this topic in mainstream media (the New York Times, etc.)

    We know that the leadership of Hamas and the PLO have made plenty of nasty anti-Semitic statemetns over the years — even offering praise for Hitler. Yet the same putative leftists who would bristle at idea that anti-semitism among Palestinian justifies the Israeli occupation, are the very ones who are now link-bombing this thread with articles about Ukraine’s far-right movements for the purpose of — what? — rationalizing Putin’s war crime? Again, I’m genuinely perplexed.

    Also, keep this in mind: every time war breaks out between Israel and Palestine, the defenders of Israel love nothing more than to pull up endless anti-Semitic quotes from Palestinian leadership. Obviously this makes for good propaganda. Yet the New York Times, by contrast, does NOT tend to run articles focusing on this unsavory aspect of Palestianin culture during times of crisis. Ponder that for a moment.

    Furthermore, the standard answer leftists give when confronted with rampant anti-semitism among groups like Hamas — as well as their violent and nationalist tendencies generally — is that the Israelis themselves, with their violence and oppression, bear responsibility for fomenting these ultra-nationalists movements. Simply put, when a group of people are violently attacked, it is all too predictable that they will turn to any entity that has the potential to offer protection, no matter how violent or ideologically odious that entity may be. Survival, and defeating the enemy, will always be the number one priority. One hears Chomsky make this point constantly, for example... Now apply that same reasoning to the case of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine since 2014.

    But I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that the Ukrainians are especially anti-Semitic of sympathetic to far-right groups. Clearly they are not. This is from the wiki “Far-right politics in Ukraine”:

    “In the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election, all major Ukrainian right-wing parties formed a nationwide united party list with the political parties Svoboda, National Corps, the Governmental Initiative of Yarosh, and the Right Sector.[4] However, the resulting coalition only managed to win 2.15 per cent of the popular vote, and since the coalition failed to pass the 5 per cent threshold, no parliamentary seats were gained.[5] All parties ultimately received no representation in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's parliament), as they all failed to win any single-mandate constituency seat.[5]”

    Sadly, thanks solely to Russia’s actions, far-right nationalists groups may yet increase their support among the Ukrainian people if there happens to be another election — though that seems unlikely at this point.

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  117. He Man,

    A point of clarification. Ukraine has never sent terrorists into Russia to kill Russian civilians. Nor has it launched rockets into Russia aimed at Russian cities. The Palestinians, by contrast, have done both of these things vis a’ vis Israel. Moreover, Russia claims it opposes Ukraine admission into NATO because it needs a buffer against a possible invasion by NATO and the U.S. Israel has no buffer between it and the Arab nations which have threatened its right to exist in the past.

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  118. @AA

    You raise good points. The situations are not apples to apples, of course. But certainly this obsession among the pro-Putin left with Nazis in Ukraine — when compared with how they generally approach anti-semitism and pro-Hitler sentiments among Palestinians — is a case study in hypocrisy.

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  119. I am the above “anonymous” btw.

    ReplyDelete
  120. Since there will surely be a spasmodic response on the part of some to the following , I'm putting up the author information first:

    Michael Brenner is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins. He was the Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner is the author of numerous books, and over 80 articles and published papers. His most recent works are: Democracy Promotion and Islam; Fear and Dread In The Middle East; Toward A More Independent Europe ; Narcissistic Public Personalities & Our Times. His writings include books with Cambridge University Press (Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation), the Center For International Affairs at Harvard University (The Politics of International Monetary Reform), and the Brookings Institution (Reconcilable Differences, US-French Relations In The New Era).

    No doubt that will not prevent his views being dismissed as those of a "usual suspect." But the more fair minded readers will thoughtfully read what he has to say.

    https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/05/another-casualty-of-the-ukraine-conflict-the-truth/

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  121. Of course the Israelis are illegally occupying Palestinian territory in violation of several UN resolutions.

    I imagine that if Russian successfully conquers Ukraine, as will probably occur and the Ukrainain resistence begins to fire rockets into Russia, many people here will applaud them as "freedom fighters".

    As has been said before, one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist.

    I'm not endorsing Putin, Hamas or Joe Biden by the way, just watching the wheels go round, as the song says and trying to stay sane.

    Orwell has a great essay, Inside the Whale, where on his way to fight in Spain he stops in Paris and talks to Henry Miller. Miller tells Orwell that he is crazy to go risk his life for a Great Cause and suggests that he stay in Paris and enjoy the wine, women and song. To his credit as a great writer, Orwell portrays Miller's viewpoint as clearly as he does his own. As I watch the wheel go round in Ukraine and in the media on both sides, I tend to agree with Miller, also a great writer.

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  122. usual suspect,

    Thanks. I needed that.
    "Presumably, he wants Netrebko to arm herself with Madame Butterfly’s knife, clamber over the Kremlin walls and eviscerate Putin in his pajamas." lol

    "So it goes." (Slaughterhouse-Five)

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  123. @usual suspect

    I just thoughtfully read what Brenner has to say, and I think it is dismaying that you would fall for such rank and transparent pro-war propaganda.

    There are a few ways we could approach this (how convenient, for example, that Brenner leaves unmentioned the Russian army’s well-documented record of brutality in, e.g., Chechnya in his little historical overview), but I think we could focus in on this:

    “Civilian casualties in Ukraine are relatively few. Despite the strenuous efforts to find [them], actual numbers appear to be in the order of 300-400. [...] In comparison, the Ukrainian army has been shelling the city centers of Lugansk and Donetsk, producing casualties estimated by a UN agency at more than 1,300 (3 or 4 times what objective observers estimate on the Ukrainian government’s side of the battle lines).”

    First off, this is from a Reuters report today: “At least 351 civilians are confirmed to have been killed in Ukraine since Russian troops invaded on Feb. 24, and another 707 wounded, although the true numbers are probably "considerably higher", a U.N. monitoring mission said on Saturday.”

    So no, the number of deaths don’t “appear” to be 300-400; they are likely “considerably higher” per sources Brenner trusts.

    But that isn’t the worst of it. Brenner cites the 300-400 figure in comparison with 1,300 supposedly killed by Ukrainian forces in Lugansk and Donetsk. And this is supposed to indicate the disproportionate brutality of Ukraine compared to Russia — something the Evil MSM is all to eager to sweep under the rug.

    However, note what is stated in the actual UN report, dated August, 5, 2014, from whence Brenner derives the 1,300 figure:

    “[Ging] stressed the importance of protecting civilians, pointing to 1,367 deaths and 4,087 injuries to civilians and combatants recorded by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for human Rights (OHCHR) Human Rights Monitoring Mission since mid-April.

    Look at how dishonest Brenner is being. He gives the impression that he is comparing civilian deaths in Ukraine to civilian deaths in Lugansk and Donetsk, yet the 1,300 deaths pertaining to the latter include both civilians and combatants (and this may include some Ukrainian combatants in addition to Russian ones), whereas the 300-400 includes only civilians. Furthermore, those 1,300 deaths in question took place from mid-April to about the beginning of August 2014 — more than three whole months — whereas the civilian deaths in Ukraine have taken place in just about the span of a week. And once again, those deaths are likely a significant undercount and are certain to rise exponentially. (And why is Brenner giving the impression of comparing concurrent civilian deaths, when the 1,300 figure is from way back in 2014?)

    This is rank dishonesty, and it can only be deliberate.

    Last and certainly not least, all the deaths that have taken place in Lugansk and Donetsk are, in any case, the responsibility of Putin, since when you invade a sovereign territory you own the entirety of the aftermath.

    I hope that this convinces you to come to your senses and check the work of charlatans and propagandists. Somehow I doubt it will. But at least don’t post that kind of drivel here in the future.


    Here is the Reuters report: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-03-05/more-than-350-civilians-confirmed-killed-in-ukraine-so-far-u-n-says

    Here is the UN report: https://www.un.org/press/en/2014/sc11508.doc.htm-0

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  124. your response does not in the least surprise me, "He Man." (hey, how's that for a pen name??) neither does it surprise me that you are now trying to censor what people post here.

    to make it very clear, i'm not interested in debating this with you. i just hope there are others out there willing to consider what is going on in a less rigid, self-righteous way than you are.

    that said, i'm done here

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  125. usual,

    He man is not the owner of this space and is not authorized by Professor Wolff to decide what is "drivel" or not.

    He (I assume that it is a he) seems to have a certain sense of his own authority (I lack that) and tries to impose it on others.

    Don't let him impose the rules. Please keep commenting.

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  126. I expected such a response. Of course, you can’t be interested in debating this because what’s there to debate? Your boy Brenner was caught blatantly cooking numbers to slander the Ukrainians. Rather than contrition or introspection, we get a hissy fit from you. Typical.

    And I’m not “trying to censor” posts — obviously I don’t have that power. But is it too much to ask that people not post demonstrably dishonest propaganda?

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  127. Wallerstein,

    How was anything I wrote vis-a-vis the Brenner piece an attempt by me to “impose” anything. Read it again. The man straight up lied. And yes, I am indignant about it — but if you want to interpret that as haughtiness, that’s on you.

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  128. He Man,

    You told Usual "not to post this kind of drivel here in the future". That seems like an expression of authority which you do not possess.

    I don't see that as "haughtiness" by the way.

    I can't think of the right word to describe it.

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  129. It is the universal authority anyone possesses to request that people not disseminate blatant, demonstrably false propaganda, especially when this is far from a trivial matter.

    I did not tell usual suspect to stop commenting altogether, nor, obviously, would I claim to have any actual power over the content of this blog. Usual suspect was just embarrassed, so left in a huff.

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  130. I see this as a space where different perspectives on what is occurring in Ukraine can be expressed and I find that to be valuable.

    I don't have the time to check out all the figures and statistics so I'll not argue about that. I'm going to assume that on that level you do your homework, but when you come on so strong, people get scared off. We're all sensitive. And someone who at one moment may
    link to false statistics may have something worth reading to say the next day and thus, should be encouraged to continue to speak their mind.

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  131. There are no statistics to go over. Brenner’s reasoning was along the lines of: *(i) Covid killed 1 million Americans from 2020-2022, (ii) the flu killed 3 MILLION Americans from 1980-1990, (iii) Ergo, the flu is 3 TIMES more deadly than Covid.* Yes, it’s that bad — and Brenner’s purpose was to claim that the Ukrainians have been more indiscriminate in their killing than the Russians. And no, I won’t not call that kind of thing out, very strenuously, whenever it crops up on my radar. Again, these are grave matters, and I can’t do much about them but I can do this.

    I doubt usual suspect left because I was “coming on strong” since her or she didn’t seem all that timid up to this point. Simply, no one likes having egg on their face, and that’s what happened.

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  132. He Man,

    You're a college professor?

    ReplyDelete
  133. I am not. Did something I say imply I was??

    ReplyDelete
  134. What you say above seemed professorial. Bad guess on my part.

    ReplyDelete
  135. Ah, well, I’ll take it as a compliment even if it’s just an observation.

    ReplyDelete
  136. s.w.

    I like you even though we've never met.

    I have to make a couple of observations though (well, I don't *have* to but I'm going to). First, He Man did not tell usual suspect to stop posting; rather he asked u.s. to stop posting "drivel." There's a difference. Strong language, but as AA said to me on another occasion, if you can't stand the heat get out of the (virtual) kitchen.

    Second, I'm not familiar with Brenner's work, his credentials seem to be impressive, but this sort of thing, based on what He Man has said, is simply inexcusable. People are suffering, cities are in the process of being leveled, lives are being completely upended, and the least a professional academic like Brenner can be expected to do is not completely distort the facts. Where they're unclear, acknowledge that, but don't misrepresent in this way. There is no excuse for it.

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  137. Yes, for sure.

    I've been an academic myself and I'm currently a semi-retired translator and I only work with academics, all of them scientists or research doctors, because they have higher standards of intellectual honesty than, say, the business community or those involved in government service.

    ReplyDelete
  138. LFC,

    Thank you for the compliment. You yourself are also quite likeable.

    ReplyDelete
  139. No egg, no anything really. Just tired and frustrated by a conversation that goes nowhere amidst a flurry of supposed motives and innuendo.

    Anyway, I suggest to Brenner's critic that he goes directly to the source where I got it and let him put those criticisms directly to Brenner at the site I referenced, who would be the one best able to respond to them. Doesn't that sound reasonable? And fair?

    Meantime, I'll await the report on what happens

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  140. /The Brenner article is dated 03/05/2022. He writes this:

    "Russian forces are calculatingly avoiding attacks on urban centers; after all, 40% of the population is Russian and concentrated in the regions where the fighting is taking place. Moreover, Moscow has no interest in subjugating the country to its rule."

    Most of the article is about bad things the US has done recently. Fair enough, I guess, but anyone who could write the above two sentences for publication on 03/05 clearly shouldn't be taken seriously. He goes in the Greenwald file.

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  141. Unless I missed something, Brenner did not cite the specifics of the sources for the figures, and did not state to which period the casualties figure for Lugansk and Donetsk applies. Without that information, it doesn't seem fair to claim Brenner is being dishonest.

    Why would someone writing in 2022 cite a 2014 report to substantiate a claim being made with the present perfect continuous tense ("has been shelling")?

    https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1496308793810034688

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  142. > Why would someone writing in 2022 cite a 2014 report to substantiate a claim being made with the present perfect continuous tense ("has been shelling")?

    Because propagandists don’t care about being honest. This is from the latest UN civilian casualty report, covering 24 February 2022 to 4 March 2022:

    > 471 casualties (86 killed and 385 injured) were recorded in Donetsk and Luhansk regions: 355 (63 killed and 292 injured) in Government-controlled territory, and 116 (23 killed and 93 injured) in territory controlled by the self-proclaimed ‘republics’.

    So no, the 1,300 figure can not have been from the start of the war. Clearly it is from the 2014 report I cited. Brenner is using the ambiguity of the continuous tense because he needs to be slippery (and he doesn’t cite his sources — how convenient). Note, too, that since the start of the war casualties in government-controlled areas far outstrip ones in the occupied territories.

    There are other examples of blatant dishonesty in Brenner’s piece, but I’ll stop. (And usual suspect: no, I will not be soliciting Brenner’s defense of himself; I’ve seen enough.)

    Also, consider that Brenner regards 300-400 civilian deaths over the course of 9 days as “relatively few” — yet the report cited in the Aaron Mate tweet shows that there have only been 136 civilian deaths in the conflict over the course of the three years he mentions. If 300-400 in 9 days is relatively few, are we to regard the latter as “relatively minuscule”? And anyway, as I mentioned, it was Russia who invaded sovereign territory so ultimately responsibility lies for the deaths lies with them.

    This is madness. Please stop.


    Here is the latest UN report: https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/files/2022-03/Ukraine%20-%20civilian%20casualties%20as%20of%2024.00%204%20March%202022%20ENG.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  143. Relevant? Interesting?

    https://www.palestinechronicle.com/navigating-our-humanity-ilan-pappe-on-the-four-lessons-from-ukraine/

    ReplyDelete
  144. NO and no.

    "Lesson One: White Refugees are Welcome; Others Less So."

    Duh!

    "Lesson Two: You Can Invade Iraq but not the Ukraine"

    Or you can invade the latter and not the former, or both or neither.

    "Lesson Three: Sometimes Neo-Nazism Can Be Tolerated"

    Like in Skokie?

    "Lesson Four: Hitting High-rises is only a War Crime in Europe"

    No.

    There have been lots of "what about X" articles as there always are when something of note happens. They aren't interesting because repetitive and aren't interesting because everyone already knows the items by heart. "Again" will never be "never" if what-about is the best we can do.

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  145. Another,

    You're challenging me to debate. It seems like we're back in junior high school and you're challenging me to fight if I'm "man enough".

    Maybe to a chess game in your case or to some other competitive sport.

    I don't play any board games nor have I participated in (or watched as a spectator) any sports since the last time I had obligatory physical education classes in college almost 55 years ago.

    We're previously discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I know your point of view and you know mine. I see no reason besides a rather adolescent macho competitivity (which I no doubt still have traces of in my psyche) to debate the issue again. I sincerely hope that you can find another kid to arm wrestle with you.

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  146. Since I received some harsh criticism—some of it deserved because I too quickly overlooked the casual deployment of questionable data on deaths in my eagerness to broadcast Brenner’s more general argument regarding the great interpretive and political divide that has opened up here and elsewhere respecting how to understand the origins and the possible consequences of the war on Ukraine—I thought I’d tempt fate again by giving another reference:

    https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2022/03/the-anti-war-left-should-not-be-cowed

    PS. By the way, isn't the piece that has just aroused AA's and aaall's ire authored by an Israeli historian? Just asking

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  147. s. wallerstein,

    It was you who gratuitously introduced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the discussion regarding Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, stating, “Of course the Israelis are illegally occupying Palestinian territory in violation of several UN resolutions.”

    It was you who threw down the gauntlet, which, according to your own purported standards, was an act of “adolescent macho competitiveness.” I decided not to allow your gratuitous remark to go unrebutted, and picked up the gauntlet.

    And usual suspect, yes, Ilan Pappe’ is an Israeli now living in France. Does that automatically mean that everything he states about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is valid? Do you believe that everything Justice Thomas writes about affirmative action must be valid simply because he is African-American?

    ReplyDelete
  148. Another,

    As usual, you distort.

    I didn't bring up the subject of Israel. He-man did at 11:32 AM yesterday and then you seconded his point at 12:42 PM.

    I appeared at 1:21 PM to differ with both of you.

    ReplyDelete
  149. s. wallerstein,

    I stand corrected and clarify. It was you who introduced the issue of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as a purportedly apt comparison to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is not. And the fact that you could even compare the two is evidence of your inveterate distortion of history and current events.

    ReplyDelete
  150. u.s.

    "PS. By the way, isn't the piece that has just aroused AA's and aaall's ire authored by an Israeli historian? Just asking."

    Don't know, don't care, makes no difference.

    The New Statesman article is yet another what-aboutist thumb sucker.

    BTW, it's really annoying to continually see the references to Western Neo-liberal economists screwing up Russia. Conservatisn, Neo-liberalism, and Neo-conservatism screwed up most of the world between the 1970s and the present, not just Russia.

    Also, I see that TFG (who has a non-trivial chance of winning in 2024) has advocated painting F-22s with red stars and bombing Russia so as to start a war between China and Russia.

    ReplyDelete
  151. AA, somewhat orthogonal (maybe) but my understanding is that the influx of Russian Jews after the Yom Kipper War and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union shifted Israeli politics to the right and created pressure for the Settlements. Perhaps the role of Soviet/Russian antisemitism should be noted.

    ReplyDelete
  152. aalll,

    That is correct. Russian Jews and Sephardic Jews (who emigrated to Israel from the Arab countries) tend to be more nationalistic and right-wing when compared to the European Ashkenazi Jews who were the first to settle in, and fight for the independence of, the nascent State of Israel. They were responsible for electing Sharon and Netanyahu as prime ministers, and are not as supportive of a two-state solution as were members of the Labor Party.

    ReplyDelete
  153. He Man: "yet the report cited in the Aaron Mate tweet shows that there have only been 136 civilian deaths in the conflict over the course of the three years he mentions."

    Who is the "he" to whom you refer (Maté or Brennen)?
    Where, specifically, did you find the 136 civilian deaths figure (out of curiosity, as I have tried to find it but have come up short)?
    Which 3 years do you mean, specifically?

    I am not asking in bad faith; I honestly am confused.

    ReplyDelete
  154. What does this symbol mean, in the present context?

    https://twitter.com/RateMySalad/status/1500598065434181638

    ReplyDelete
  155. I gather that by now everyone here, or most anyway, have seen the reports of Ukrainian and other government officials discriminating against black and brown people trying to flee from the warzones.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/open-door-die-africans-report-racism-hostility-trying-flee-ukraine-rcna17953

    https://abcnews.go.com/International/extremists-harass-minority-refugees-arriving-poland-ukraine-witnesses/story?id=83203897

    ReplyDelete
  156. Informative discussion of the Ukraine situation by Mark Sleboda, a US-born, Moscow-based analyst, with Anya Parampil.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9RSsvTR06k


    I'll save those of you who want to find reasons to ignore anything he says the trouble:
    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/may/08/russia-analyst-interviewed-by-abc-a-blatantly-pro-kremlin-apologist

    ReplyDelete
  157. Eric, I saw a Black man being interviewed on the TV. He related that an official tried to take him a bus. An Ukrainian woman grabbed him an said this is my husband so he stayed on and made it to Poland. White people be white peopling everywhere there are white people. On the other hand, not every white person is named Ken or Karen.

    ReplyDelete
  158. Dear aaall, I’m afraid I find your “don’t know, don’t care, makes no difference” response and your “yet another what-aboutist thumb sucker” responses sadly symptomatic of the moment we live in. I think we’re all by now so prone to falling into rages when we encounter points of view so antithetical to our own ever hardening stances that we again and again fail to have genuine discussions because we are less and less capable of responding to each other with any generosity and with any aspiration to arrive at any better understanding of the situations which deeply trouble all of us. You are evidently incapable and/or unwilling to see the world as some others of us see it. And doubtless you view others of us as incapable of seeing the world as you see it.

    There is, by the way, yet another point of view. I find, to my surprise, that I’m responding quite positively to the following

    https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-ukraine-western-left-doesnt-understand-putin-or-the-world-outside-the-us/

    and

    https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/an-african-view-of-whats-happening-in-europe/?source=in-article-related-story

    the first by a Russian, the second by a Ugandan. I take them both, but especially the first, to be arguing that the debate going on in “the west” is very “westcentric,” if I may coin the word. The Russian author’s complaint is, I think, that western leftists are too locked into their traditional critique, if you will, of a global system that is now on the way out. I think, however, his point could be generalised. For it seems to me, other, non-leftist, western critics of what’s going on in Ukraine are also locked into their own perhaps increasingly out-dated tradition. Maybe we are all engaged in a kind of intellectual imperialism here? Maybe we all of us have to try to think about the emerging new world in ways that don’t begin from the assumption that we are at the centre of it all?

    But I'm not sure I'll get there.

    ReplyDelete
  159. usual suspect,

    I read the piece by the Russian that you linked. The closest he comes to criticizing or denouncing Russia's invasion is saying that it mimics U.S. imperialism. The claim is somewhat dubious or so it could be argued, but putting that aside, it's not clear what his analysis of the situation is. He writes "Do not let half-baked political positions substitute [for] an analysis of the situation," but then says he can't offer one himself because of "the fog of war."

    Statements of the obvious ("Russia [i.e., Putin and the elites around him] is an autonomous agent") are also not a substitute for analysis.

    He writes:
    "This is not to accuse the Western Left of ethnocentrism, but to point to its limited perspective. Overwhelmed with the fog of war and psychological stress, I cannot offer a better perspective. I would only call for help in grasping the situation in theoretical terms while incorporating insights from our corner of the world. ‘US-plaining’ is not helpful to us to the extent that you think it is."

    The assumption here seems to be that there is a Leftist perspective on the situation, a distinctive way "to grasp the situation in theoretical terms," but no one can figure out what it is while events and "the fog of war" are ongoing. But when it is figured out, it will incorporate "insights from our corner of the world." Such as what? There may well be some, but he doesn't say what they are.

    A thought: maybe self-identified leftists, both in the West and elsewhere (including in Russia), should agree that if you want some kind of genuinely democratic socialist change, you shouldn't dance around the fact that there is no justification for the Russian invasion. Russia/Putin has grievances and interests, but no construal of them can justify what the article itself calls the use of "brute force" in this situation. Brute force is not a "progressive" instrument in most cases and esp. not when used offensively to extinguish the right of a political community to try to chart its own domestic course. He calls for canceling Ukraine's debt to the IMF, which under the circumstances strikes me as a complete non-sequitur: the country's infrastructure is being destroyed by the invasion, a humanitarian crisis is occurring, it's not at all clear that Ukraine will even survive as an independent entity, and he's concerned about its foreign debt? This tack is so non-responsive to the current situation that under other circumstances it might be funny rather than strange. (In fairness, he does say something about refugees and humanitarian assistance.)

    Maybe this person is being careful because the Russian authorities are monitoring what he's writing, I don't know. But it seems to me that any analysis should begin with some clear affirmations to the effect that the invasion is unjustifiable and a "new world" in which this kind of behavior gets normalized or rationalized will not be an improvement but a step backward.

    When the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq occurred in 2003, there were demonstrations against it across the world. Now there are demonstrations against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instead of expressing solidarity with them, this author delivers a vague admonition about the need to move beyond "US-splaining" and the "colonisation [sic]" of Eastern leftists by "Western Marxism."

    Marx himself, as you doubtless know very well, wrote trenchant analyses (which doesn't mean they were flawless of course) of some of the wars etc. and other int'l events of his day. It's interesting to wonder what he would have written about the current situation. I doubt it would be anything like this piece.

    ReplyDelete
  160. P.s. to be clear, I'm in favor of questioning one's assumptions and being open to varying points of view. That's one reason I read the piece. I just found it disappointing. The piece doesn't use the phrase "multipolar world" (maybe he considers it too west-centric a phrase) but seems to be hinting that Russia will become a more powerful "actor" in the future. That may or may not be the case, though under Putin's leadership if it does become more powerful that will not be a welcome development.

    The world is already multipolar. The U.S.'s "unipolar moment" was over a long time ago. The question is what kind of multipolarity will it be. Will it be a multipolar world in which bigger countries invade smaller ones in blatant violation of intl law (Iraq 2003, Ukraine 2022), and where minority rights are brutally repressed (e.g., Uighurs), or one in which competition betw. different systems and ideologies is carried on without resort to brute force as an instrument of policy? The whole planet faces existential issues too obvious to need mentioning, and brute-force revanchism a la Putin in that light is what appears as truly outdated.

    ReplyDelete
  161. I don’t think you’re right, LFC, when you say that the closest he comes to criticizing or denouncing Russia’s invasion is saying that it mimics U.S. imperialism, though I do think he’s right to invoke the parallel with many US actions that we’ve witnessed in our lifetime. He does, after all, refer to a reality emerging around Russia, “a reality of destruction and harsh repression, a reality where nuclear conflict is not unthinkable anymore.” Further, I think his explicit reference to “Russia’s shelling of Kharkiv” indicates that the motive for him writing this piece is his dismay at what’s happening to Ukraine. He certainly does not, to my eyes, offer any justification for any of that.

    I would, in other words, reject the suggestion that his invocation of the US parallels is the “whataboutism” that some like to refer to: He is not suggesting that Russia’s actions be evaluated in light of American actions. Neither, as I read him, is he countenancing any notion that Russia could legitimate its actions by claiming to be acting as the US has acted. Rather, I think he is suggesting that whatever it is that has set limits on the ways countries behave in the world has changed to a degree sufficient for Russia now to behave with the same lack of control as the United States has been able to do for so long. It is simply going to behave with the same disregard for civilians, with the same indiscriminate destruction, imposing regime change where and as it can, for that’s the global system we now inhabit.

    But more than dismay, horror even, his words are surely also an expression of confusion. A kind of confusion which many of us feel because the ways we thought would provide us at least a modicum of understanding about our world that would guide us as we tried to make it a better place no longer seem adequate. He’s hoping against hope but with very little expectation that something like new thinking will be created that will somehow allow us to pursue that broad goal, but like most of us he has no idea how to help bring that about. He's trying to call attention to a huge problem, a problem he doesn't know how to begin to go about solving. We live in a time where left movements everywhere have been reduced to a few embattled holdouts or else have taken bizarre forms, where in Europe, for example, social democracy has become, if anything at all, a mere term lacking content. These sorts of ideas, which for so long contributed in major ways to the domestic and international consciences and so helped constrain actions no longer have much currency. And the Russian invasion of Ukraine is simply, if you like, a clear, horrifying signal that the post-War world is dying, perhaps already dead.

    In short, I don’t think you’re finding in his words the anguish that I find in them, that I find in myself. And that is why I--I can't speak for others--have been urging that mere condemnation of Russia, some of it seemingly unprincipled and motivated by god knows what, is not enough. We desperately need so much more.

    best wishes

    ReplyDelete
  162. u.s., The first part of my reply was because who wrote the article is irrelevant; the article speaks for itself. The second was because I have to deal with a property closing but it is apt.

    LFC is on point.

    Also:

    Khatondi Soita Wepukhulu writes: "No African country was ever colonized by members of the former USSR" in the sam paragraph in which he references the "Berlin Conference of 1884–85." Maybe in that time period Russian was dealing, like China, was dealing with a land empire.

    After the consolidation of the 1917 revolution and ensuing civil war it was the mid-1920s and Africa was sliced up and the USSR had no means anyway. Imperial Russia got into North America and as far as Hawaii but hadn't the ability to make it stick.

    A longer way of saying the article isn't serious.

    I still believe Putin is boxed in and running out of time. He decided to turn Russia into an autocracy a long time ago as well as recreate whatever he imagines Russia should be. Two things happened:

    1. Trump lost - another four years and the US and NATO would have been toast.

    2. The dictator of Belarus Lukashenko had a color moment in 2020 which unfortunately didn't succeed but had to shake up an isolated Putin.

    He can't lose Belarus and didn't (can't?) wait 6 - 8 years (possibly believed his own and our clueless blob's propaganda on Afghanistan) so that may be motivating this.

    You mentioned the sad state of social democracy. We are hopefully digging our way out of the disastrous shift to the Right that began in the 1960s and took off in the mid - 1970s. There are Neo-nazis in Ukraine because there far right/revanchist movements in the US, Canada, Europe, etc.


    ReplyDelete
  163. u.s. Re: my last point the article by one of our firth columnists may be of interest: Lots of backtracking currently going on.

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/putin-our-tsar-protector/

    ReplyDelete
  164. usual suspect,

    Thanks for the reply. Perhaps you're right that I didn't sufficiently catch the piece's tone (i.e., anguish). Will think about it.

    ReplyDelete
  165. LFC and aaall,

    It has become apparent that you are wasting your time and efforts on usual suspect and Eric. Nothing you will say or write will convince them. They, and the writers and articles which they cite, are irreversibly committed to the propaganda that the past purported imperialist actions of the United States and its Western allies discredit their motives vis a’ vis Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine. They are uncomfortable seeing Russia’s actions for what they are – the illegitimate use of aggression to bend a sovereign nation to its will, justified by alleged comparable foreign policy transgressions by the U.S. They are diehard Russian apologist, period, who are incapable of nuanced historical analysis.

    ReplyDelete
  166. @Eric

    The “he” is Aaron Mate, who mentions the years 2018-2021. And the data is from the very report he links to. Civilian deaths in the conflict from those years number 58, 27, 26, and 25, respectively.

    Once again, it is useless to bring up the neo-Nazi element in some small portion of the Ukraine armed forces, since this has been well reported on in MSM sources, and I have asked you to already whether you think this justifies the full-scale invasion fo Ukraine, and whether you agree with Putin’s contention that the war is meant to denatzify the government and stop a genocide. You didn’t answer, of course. You just keep link-bombing on this issue without comment. And again, the relevant data points are that, in the 2019 election, a Jew won some 70 percent of the vote while the far-right party — representing the 5 major far-right factions in Ukraine — recieved only 2.15 percent of the vote, not enough to win any seats in parliament. That rather belies the idea that Ukrainian society at large is overrun with Nazis, just as the documented existence of white supremacist elements in the U.S. army is not a reflection of the U.S. as a whole. (One feels diminished for even having to engage these arguments.)

    ReplyDelete
  167. @S. Wallerstein

    You did not “differ” with me re Israel-Palestine. I never claimed that Israel wasn’t illegally occupying Palestinian territory and that is irrelevant.

    My point was to expose the hypocrisy of this hyper-focus on neo-Nazis in Ukraine. You link-bombed an article from The Nation on neo-Nazism in the Ukrainian armed forces. I’m asking you honestly: What would be your reaction if, during the last Israel-Palestine war, someone linked an article (without comment) recapitulating all the rotten, anti-Semitic, and genocidal things that have been uttered by Hamas over the years? I think you are intelligent enough to know what the purpose of that would be.

    Similarly, you are intelligent enough — or should be — to realize that this neo-Nazi thing is a huge red herring that serves no purpose but to feed into the Russian propaganda narrative. And I should add that there is considerably more justification for taking the Palestinians to task over anti-semitism than the Ukrainians (see my comment to Eric above).

    ReplyDelete
  168. He-man,

    I don't know if I'm intelligent enough.

    However, I don't believe that Putin invaded Ukraine out of a concern for neo-Nazism. In fact, Putin finances the European ultra-ring, Le Pen in France, Vox in Spain, Salvini in Italy, etc.

    Finally, if I have subscribe to a posture, Mearsheimer is the most convincing. Putin
    attacks Ukraine because he wants to stop NATO expansion much as JFK threatened nuclear war because of Soviet military presence in Cuba.

    I was listening to a program in CNN-Chile last night. Juan Gabriel Valdes, ex-Chilean foreign minister, ex-representative of Chile in the UN and ex-Chilean embassador to the U.S., completely mainstream and by the way, a Princeton graduate, interviewed by Raul Sohr, CNN-Chile's foreign affairs guru and by other journalists. Both Valdes and Sohr
    agree with Mearsheimer, without mentioning his name.

    Neither Valdes nor Sohr believe that Putin is deranged or the new Hitler or about to set out on conquering the rest of Europe.

    ReplyDelete
  169. my error.

    I meant to write "the European ultra right" and wrote "the European ultra ring".

    ReplyDelete
  170. u.s. it helps to understand the nuts and bolts. Left-wing journals usually don't and right-wing journals almost never get there.

    Things like this:

    https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b150npp3q49x7w/how-harvard-lost-russia

    are interesting and often helpful. Screwing up at an inflection point is like jumping off a ten story building and changing your mind as you pass the sixth floor. And once again too many folks who just want to watch the world burn are in a position to strike a match and move on. Oh, and keep the matches away from Larry.

    ReplyDelete
  171. @Wallerstein

    Fair enough, though I would remind you that Mearsheimer’s neorealist position essentially justifies the U.S.’s actions in the Cold War. It boils down to “international politics is an anarchic space, and great powers gonna do what great powers gonna do.” One might say that Mearsheimer believes it’s a *good* thing that the US threw its weight around during the Cold War, with the caveat that “good” is probably an inapt terms since realists, in the tradition going back to Machiavelli, tend not to countenance moral judgments. It is descriptive and not normative.

    ReplyDelete
  172. He Man,

    Yes, I understand Mearsheimer's position.

    I don't claim to have a fully coherent position myself. However, while I try to understand international relations in descriptive terms and not to over-moralize them,
    I treat the U.S. differently than I do, say, China.

    First, there's a "not in my name" thing. That is, I'm a U.S. citizen and I'm sick and tired of being treated by others as an imperialist. I'd like to come from a "clean" country, if only for selfish reasons, how others treat me. I've thought about renouncing my U.S. citizenship, but it's a long, tedious and fairly expensive process and I detest bureaucracy.

    Second, what I call the "mental health" issue. I was brought up with the myth of American exceptionalism, that George Washington never told a lie, that honest Abe walked 20 mile through the snow because he had overcharged someone 10 cents to give the other guy back the money, with the cold war anti-communism where the commies were seen as "masters of deceit" and where "we" had God on our side. It's been 60 years of psychological struggle to undo this brainwashing (it goes deep) and I've wasted so much mental energy struggling with it that the efforts to paint, say, the situation in Ukraine in moralistic terms, in terms of American exceptionalism, that "we" are good and the dictator du jour; Putin, is evil irritates me immensely.

    Just yesterday I tuned into another blog and it was Orwell's Two Minute Hate directed against Putin, evil incarnate. I didn't bother to comment but it all takes me back to the claustrophobic atmosphere of Camelot, of the hideous cold war anti-communism which all of us of my generation in the U.S. grew up with.

    ReplyDelete
  173. Descriptive and normative elements often get tangled up, unacknowledged, in discussions of these matters, which might lead the proverbial person in the street to get puzzled or annoyed by them (even w.o reference to what some might see as a too "west-centric" angle (as e.g. usu suspect, above, does)).

    For ex. I just read a short piece in WaPo dated March 3 by Daniel Drezner in which he criticizes certain aspects of Mearsheimer's views.

    Drezner quotes a passage in the New Yorker interview where M. says the U.S. shd be focused on China and shd have enlisted Russia as part of its "balancing coalition" against China. Drezner replies that Europe and the U.S.'s Pacific Rim allies are more important parts of any balancing coalition against China than Russia would be.

    It's not clear what is meant here by "more important," but part of this difference may stem from different estimates of "strength" and different views of the world. In strictly military terms, it may be that Russia would be a more important counterweight to China than Europe (though the Russian military's methods, involving the apparently routine commission of war crimes, as displayed earlier in certain other contexts and now in Ukraine, may cast some doubt on that assumption).

    The difference is perhaps partly explained by how one sees the world. More specifically, if you think it's better to be allied with other democracies, you'll think the existing U.S. alliances are "more important". If you're thinking in strictly geopolitical terms, with countries as chess pieces moving on a board, and you don't much care about the democracy vs. autocracy "frame" or whether regimes are blatantly corrupt, kleptocratic, oppressive etc., then you'll end up in a diff. place. Maybe sometimes the geopolitical approach is helpful or necessary, other times not.

    But if these differences don't get surfaced and debated, one is just left with dueling assertions.

    Both Drezner and Mearsheimer apparently take for granted that "balancing" of some sort is inevitable in an "anarchic" system. That assumption is deeply embedded in a lot of IR thinking, but it also can be questioned. See e.g. A. Wendt's publications from the late '80s and '90s.

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  174. LFC,

    I'm not in any sense as knowledgeable in international relations theory as you are. I simply listened to a few talks by Mearsheimer in Youtube after following the long discussion in Leiter's blog about the Ukraine crisis where Leiter defended, as far as I can see, Mearsheimer's perceptions about what is occurring in Ukraine.

    However, since He man and others have pressured me to "take a stand" one way or another in this situation, that of Mearsheimer and of Leiter seems more convincing to me than others I've seen, but undoubtedly you've seen more different postures on this issue than I have.

    ReplyDelete
  175. " In strictly military terms, it may be that Russia would be a more important counterweight to China than Europe..."

    I don't see how that could be conventionally. War crimes aside, if the Ukrainian military can bog them down in Europe, what would happen in an encounter with the PLA way east of the Urals? Anyway, in a decade or so global warming will shaking up Asia big time.

    I don't get the Putin thing. He's an authoritarian kleptocrat who fancies himself a Peter or an Ivan. Like Trump, and after 20+ years of running Russia, there should be no problem summing it up as "the boy ain't right." Make a grifter president or a former KGB officer prime minister, what could go wrong?

    s.w. I count myself lucky that I was never all that idealistic. I got into politics while still in high school so I saw how the sausage was made well before Vietnam. That and a friends step-father was connected to organized crime so that helped reality check wise.

    Oh, and Washington, Lincoln, and FDR were actually pretty great, and then our luck ran out.

    ReplyDelete


  176. The poignant face of war.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5akPdpcpns

    ReplyDelete
  177. Good, short (15 minutes) discussion of the Ukraine situation with Tariq Ali.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAJ0VZDZoow

    ReplyDelete
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