Kieselguhr [none/use name]

I am actively exercising self-discipline not engaging with certain western shitlibs gloating about the terror attack in Moscow.

Putin is Schrödinger’s dictator isn’t he? When something bad happens to ordinary Russians, it’s backlash for supporting Putin. But when they talk about elections/democracy etc. then Putin is a dictator who cannot be removed except with force. Which is it western liberals?

some say they recruited convicts from death row to hack the United States

Civilian casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian war

Casualties as in killed by the war? Because the numbers I’ve seen are ~10 thousand, which is comparable to the first month of the war in Iraq

Biden would never do something as authoritarian as repairing a bridge.

Listen, kiddo, I get it. I don’t like the two-fascist-party system. I think our country is corrupt and fascist and, quite frankly, I don’t wanna vote for Biden; it feels like voting for a fascist, but I’m gonna do it. You wanna know why? Because the alternative is a fucking christo-fascist. A christo-fascist. It’s a christo-fascist. Maybe we can have the conversation about dismantling the two-fascist-party system when a christo-fascist isn’t running. Maybe we can do that later, kiddo. Champ. Chief. Maybe we can talk about it later.

Netanyahu wants Trump to be elected,

Putin wants Biden to be elected, so checkmate! No need to , the two cancel each other out.

carbon emissions put lives of billions at risk

The cartoon is not really about building twice as many new nuclear power plants, but using and maintaining and upgrading the ones we already have.

Just a couple of sidenotes

At the start of the Ukraine war, it was unclear whether Russia might also launch attacks on us, including our nuclear reactors.

RU attacking Germany is as unlikely as RU shelling London, NY, or Tokyo

Russia also attacked nuclear reactors in the Ukraine, which certainly reminded people of Chernobyl.

I think the news was that someone shelled Zaporizhzhia “Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for shelling the Russian-controlled plant.” Now, I’m not Hercule Poirot, but if RU controlled the plant at the time, wouldn’t that make UKR the most likely culprit?

Russia also cut off our natural gas supply.

Surely Russia turning a tap is less pertinent than USA literally bombing the pipeline?

We have practically no own Uranium deposits either,

So where are you buying from the rest of your resources? Surely nuclear is more feasible than coal from a purely geopolitical/economic point of view? I guess good luck with the solar panels.

You seem to be a bit confused about the situation.

RIP Instagram Yeltsin

Munich Security Conference were already reeling

Do you know if UKR+USA blowing up Nord Stream was on the agenda of this important German security conference? What did they say about that? Will they bring them to justice?

It’s amazing how obvious it is that Zelensky is just a regional manager propped up by the Corporate HQ in Washington.

White Terror actually murdered more civilians, but for some reason some historians don’t count the antisemitic mass murders committed by the Whites.

That’s true, but just calling it a different perspective makes it look more benign and naive than it actually is. They also purposefully lie and suppress factual narratives in the mainstream media, and they never use their own standards on their own power elite: Bush, Blair and the others never had their trial, even though they should be considered war criminals from even the liberal perspective.

Powell lied at the UN to start a war that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Even if I view the facts as a philosophical liberal who reads and loves Popper, Rawls et al. it’s still an enormous crime that went uninvestigated and unpunished. Or the way they talk or don’t talk about Nord Stream, Israel etc.

So yeah, some of them truly believe the West has the moral superiority, but it’s the largest case of cognitive dissonance in history fuelled by deliberate propaganda. What’s interesting is that some liberals truly grapple with this dissonance, while others just cynically incorporate a kind of racism of the Western Supremacy. The West is good therefore whatever the West does is good (That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, that’s not a big deal… etc.)

I haven’t read the book in question, but it seems like to problem with it is a typical liberal illness - it doesn’t have the toolset of critical historical materialism. It sounds like Reid took the diaries, letters, journals and memoirs of British soldiers and politicians of the time and compiled them into a narrative, and yes, it could be the case the “aims of the war are ill-defined” when we read the letters of so-and-so, but the Empire is a Behemoth that doesn’t need to be fully understood by its agents. It very well could be that General X thinks they are spreading democracy, but that doesn’t matter in the end. Imperialism has its own logic.

With that said there are cunning amoral pragmatic bastards as well, like Churchill, who fully understood that this was about Imperial interest not about Ideas. Or maybe even he himself has believed his speeches about ‘democracy’.

Liberal historians are being weird again.

They correctly see certain facts (about the British intervention in the Russian Civil War):

There was plenty of reason to see the intervention as nasty – for starters, lack of clear war aims, atrocities on which the Allies turned a blind eye, half-hearted support of reactionaries followed by ignominious betrayal – but the real reason it was judged so harshly was that it failed. Nothing substantive was achieved, while, as the British commander of Allied forces in the north, Edmund Ironside, noted at the time of the British withdrawal from North Russia in the autumn of 1919, the cost was to incur ‘the everlasting enmity of both sides – the Whites for deserting them, and the Reds for opposing them’.

Exactly - it was hopeless and unnecessary.

Apart from getting rid of the Bolsheviks, the aims of the Western intervention were remarkably ill-defined. Sometimes it was to protect British interests and keep the Germans, Turks, Poles, or Japanese imperial or territorial ambitions in check; sometimes to support ‘democratic forces’ in Russia, notably the transient Czechs; and sometimes just to back up the (anti-democratic) Whites.

So the support of “democratic forces” was just posturing, in other words.

A national claim the Allies did not support, however, was the Ukrainian one, or rather, any of the various Ukrainian claims that were on offer.

the Allies essentially accepted the Poles’ argument that Ukrainian nationalism was German-inspired and incoherent, with little popular support. In Reid’s summation, although Ukrainians today ‘view the Allies’ failure to support them as a tragic missed opportunity’, ‘in truth the scoffers were probably right. Split, by the end of 1919, between two paper governments, one allied with the Poles against the Russians and the other the reverse, they did not have the leadership or unity to win power, even with outside military aid.’

Sounds about right

Reid’s encounter with widespread and virulent antisemitism – both as practised on the ground in Ukraine by Whites, Poles and Ukrainian nationalists, and as tacitly condoned by the Allies – was ‘one of the most jolting aspects of researching this book’. The first major pogroms of the Civil War were conducted in December 1918 by the Polish army after capturing Lviv from Ukrainian forces. The local British representative, setting a pattern that was often to be followed in subsequent months, ‘dismissed pogrom “rumours” as “grossly exaggerated”’. Antisemitism was a core component of White propaganda […] Altogether, the pogroms of 1919 in Ukraine were on a scale ‘not seen since the Cossack rebellions of the 17th century’, but the Whites weren’t the only ones to blame: Symon Petilura’s and Nykyfor Hryhoriv’s Ukrainian forces, as well as Nestor Makhno’s anarchist ‘Greens’, were also heavily involved.

and so on and so on. But then.

Reid’s problem is that, recognising a degree of similarity in the two episodes of foreign involvement in war on Ukrainian territory, she holds diametrically opposed value judgments of them: the early 20th-century intervention on behalf of the Whites was pointless, but current Western support of Ukraine in a war started by the Russians is morally imperative and, in global political terms, necessary. Present-day Ukraine is a democratic or democratically aspiring country that ‘for all its faults … really does deserve the world’s help’, she writes in the recent second edition of Borderland. ‘Betraying the country would be moral and strategic failure on a par with the crushed Hungarian Rising or Prague Spring – and with much less excuse.’

It is so weird that liberals have this fundamental premise that Western powers have both the moral superiority and the means to sort out conflicts in far away lands. How is this different from the early XXth century British conception of a benign civilizing Empire? What kind of mental gymnastics they need to perform so that their heads don’t split from the cognitive dissonance? How come they don’t see the similarities that the Western powers are willing to support any kind of reactionary force so long as it is in their geopolitical interest? That they didn’t give a shit about pogroms, because the main concern was to own the ‘the blood-stained, Jew-led Bolsheviks’? That they are supporting Azov just to hinder Putler?

Perhaps the real takeaway from Reid’s history isn’t so much a lesson as a premonition: that not too far down the track, we could be witnessing a shamefaced withdrawal of Western support that leaves the Ukrainians – like the Russian Whites a century earlier – to sort out the mess with Moscow on their own.

It’s always an “I told you so”, but they just don’t care.

Anyone who said a year ago that sending billions of dollars worth of weapons to one of the most corrupt countries on Earth is not the brightest idea*, was branded to be a Putlerist shill

Hell, even linking this article would make you seem like a Russian bot

*except of course if you own shares in the MIC

even liberal and conservative historians agree that the damn commies were actual communists: behind closed doors they didn’t talk about machiavellian power grabs - they used the same historical materialist framework they would use in public. (for example Kotkin is adamant about this in his Stalin bio. Communists believed in communism. Shocker.)

Reminds me of a debate I had.

Poster said “Marxists lack nuance”.

I asked which one of these works lacked nuance in his opinion: The German Ideology? The Grundrisse? Anti-Dühring? Or maybe slightly more recent stuff like Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks?

The reply: “Marxists don’t understand human nature: it’s about the stronger monkey having things.”

The irony didn’t even hit him. He was dead seriously try to sell me this “human natooor is strong dogs fuck” as a social theory.

somebody actually did splice together the video when the Chinese tank goes around the guy, and the footage on the other side is from the BLM protests when a cop car just drives into the crowd

Even Stephen Kotkin (the lib), who is a highly esteemed academic historian (professor at Princeton), said what happened in Ukraine in the 30s wasn’t genocide in his Stalin biography. The only revisionism that’s happening here is libs pretending that there is a consensus about calling it a genocide among academic historians.

All of these actions were woefully insufficient for avoiding the mass starvation in the countryside caused by his policies, in the face of challenging natural conditions. Still, these actions do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians.

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 by Stephen Kotkin published in October 2017 by Penguin Random House

Here’s Mark Tauger’s takedown of Applebaum’s Holodomor book:

Some might ask whether Applebaum’s writing is more accessible to “non-specialist” readers. There are many excellent writers among Slavic specialists, and a more accurate account could easily have been presented in clear and simple language. Applebaum’s writing does not “simplify” the truth, it obscures it, as discussed in this review. Red Famine thus does not fit well in the existing scholarly literature, even as “popular history.” Its interpretation resembles that of Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, and it does use recent published sources that provide vivid descriptions of many people’s experiences in the famine. But it leaves out too much important information, has false claims on key points, and draws unjustified conclusions on important issues based on incomplete use of sources, making it not even close to the level of genuine scholarship, like Davies and Wheatcroft’s Years of Hunger. Red Famine is better characterized by a passage from Peter Kenez’s book on The Birth of the Propaganda State: “propaganda often means telling less than the truth, misleading people … manipulating and distorting information, lying” and addresses “audiences in simple language…”