KulakRevolt
Writes at https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/
Writes weird Twitter Threads @FromKulak
Rides motorcycles... poorly.
.
Winner of Motte Post of the Year 2019
User ID: 905
Every war in history has ended in a negotiated settlement in which the winner keeps the territory and prizes they took. The exceptions are things like Troy, Carthage, and Berlin... and the Ukrainians aren't making it to Moscow.
The most likely scenario if Ukraine doesn't negotiate is this continues until America stops funding them, and Europes economic aid stops working... at which point they collapse, Russsia takes vastly more, and they become a warlord run failed state for the next several decades.
Wars are either won in the maneuver or the economics and logistics... the maneuvering has stopped and Ukraine's economic position is only going to get worse. America isn't going to give them another hundred billion dollars, perhaps even a majority of that disappeared into bribes, and what's left of their economy is going to collapse in the next 6 months.
Russia taking its land corridor and the republics, and crimmea now, and then Ukraine getting a few years to actually have an economy, rearm, and ideally set u psome trade ties so they aren't on constant edge with russia is a massively better idea than them fighting til they collapse on some lie Europe told them about an EU membership they were never going to give a country with nothing to offer and a GDP below 5k per capita (ask the Turks about that one)
If i were to describe the Ukraine war I describe it like the Iran-Iraq War... Two awful regimes you'd never want to live in grinding conscripts and people with no better prospects against each other. And also maybe Iran was a better place to live than Iraq during the time... low bar. (or maybe Iran just happens to be the only middle-eastern country with a movie industry so it seems better)
Ultimately I'd like them both to lose, and the cynical western backers drawing out the war to lose even harder....
Picture the map of the region rendered in stained glass... and then picture all the lines if you hit that stained glass repeatedly with a hammer... Those are what the borders should be. I wouldn't trust any of these people to govern a man 10 miles away let alone 400, and even then I'd want that local subject to be heavily armed.
Putin is awful... don't get me wrong. But Ukraine is literally executing civilians for continuing to live in occupied areas, has shelled civillians since 2014, has banned every rival political party, banned a free press, banned its population from leaving... Ukraine is basically North Korea at this point... and this is what our leaders hold up as their ideal and model of democracy for the rest of us.
Fuck that.
To quote Marylin Manson: "I wasn't born with enough middle fingers, I don't need to choose a side."
KulakRevolt
1mo ago
Men were executed based on the official version. There was a trial, and none have walked it back and Jurisprudence has not denounced it.
Human Soap and Executions of 20k jews at a time by NUCLEAR WARHEAD were Proven at Nuremberg with US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson acting as prosecutor.
To deny these things proven in open court by an alliance of the best jurists of the US, Brittain, and USSR would be to deny the very legitimacy of any findings of the the Nuremburg court or any judicial system touched by them. It'd be akin to saying that the Allies US, UK, and USSR were an alliance WITH the most brutal totalitarian and deceitful regime in world history, not an Alliance to defeat that regime.
No matter how much Russia underperforms, screws up, or fails against seeming ridiculously favorable odds...
-
They can mass mobilize a million+men any time it gets heated, while Ukraine is already maxed out (in terms of new troops per week)
-
they have the old soviet stockpiles that means even as the average equipment regresses decades, they can feed the war machine, whereas the European and even American stockpiles are getting hazardously low.
-
The Russian economy is actively profiting from the war and global increased scarcity, whereas the Germans are preparing warming centers because they won't be able to keep the lights or heat on.
-
The collapse of international supply chains if this continues are going to start Arab spring style regime change and civil war throughout the world, which draws the American empire away from Europe and towards Middle eastern deployments, whereas Russia has already secured Assad and its few major allies.
-
Ukraine's GDP was 3k per capita before the war, Russia's was 10k. As the Eurozone economy collapses and shortages hit the world, the Average Ukrainian's standard of living is going to collapse even if their government has properly managed their food stores so they won't starve (which who knows?)
-
Russia has already conquered all the territories it geostrategically needed. It has Donetsk and Luhansk, it has Crimea, it has its land border, it controls Kherson and the mouth of the Dnipro river... Those are its victory territories. Those are its bare minimum victory territories... but that's it. If the borders never move Russia has secured everything it strategically needed from this war.
.
Winter is not going to favour the Ukrainians... Russia is already in place and has its supply lines. Russia does not have to pull off big maneuvers to win. And the economies Russia is intimately tied to aren't going to collapse and fall to riot and rebellion this winter.
Ukraine just made a big deal of taking 1000 square kms... Russia has taken hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, and the lines have barely moved in 5 months. Unless the Russians mutiny and break, which is very very unlikely...the lines are likely to stay there til next spring at the earliest... all drawing out the war is doing is killing 10s of thousands of Ukrainians a month, and ensuring that the inevitable global humanitarian crisis is all the worse.
there should have been a negotiated end to this war months ago, and the European countries should be pushing Ukraine to cede and accept their loss... not egg them so their constituents can freeze (probably to death in the case of the elderly), global famines can wrack the world, and more Ukrainians can die under Russian artillery... and all to prop up America's hegemony, not even their own empires.
KulakRevolt
7mo ago
You have to feel for him, ever so slightly, in that he was elected on a peace platform of negotiating with Russia and the breakaway republics... and then was forced into the war by the Ukrainian ultranationalist in the Ukrainian perma-government who would have 100% assassinated him if he'd actually negotiated agreeable terms or peace.
KulakRevolt
1mo ago
This is Holocaust Denial.
It is clearly established that everything was 100% planned from the outset, the Wansee Conference executive summary was 100% written in code and everyone in the german government knew it, and they 100% planned a total extermination of the Jews from the beginning, and there are millions of unmarked graves that can't be found because they were perfectly cremated with the fuel the Germans didn't have to run their tanks.
KulakRevolt
11mo ago
Hitler has to be despised... for the very reasons you cite.
In any other era he'd be considered a great hero of his nation.
The Greeks, Romans, Mongols, hell the Indians, Arabs, Thais, and Ukrainians today all see him as a great hero of history. You can buy management books in many third world countries that proport to teach "Hitler's secrets of management".
There is very VERY little Hitler did that was not what great tribal leaders did for 99% of human history, only scaled up and industrialized... His worst crimes are 1 to 1 what Caesar did to the Celts, Alexander to Thebes, Agamemnon to Troy, Lincoln to the Natives... Indeed Hitler often compared himself to the great American presidents and his plans for the east to America's settlement of the west.
He was a great chieftain proposing to save his tribe by forcing out and crushing their rivalled neighboring tribes... he is analogous to Saladin, Jean D'arc, Geronimo, Scipio Africanus, Hannibal, Napoleon...
He is exactly what western civilization has always defined and expected a great hero of history to be.
Thus everyone who defines themselves by their "anti-fascism" inevitably winds up denouncing western civilization itself... which really can be expanded to just human civilization back to the earliest tribal level (since again there isn't anything uniquely western or even modern in what Hitler did)
Hell look at Fiction... Aragorn in Lord of the Rings basically did what Hitler... United the various factions of middle-earth through a combination of alliance building, inspiration, and threats in the case of the Dunharrow... Defeated the foreign force that was encroaching on the lands of his people... and he went to the black gates and (with the help of hobbit intervention (maybe analogous to eastern European axis factions?)) wiped out the Mordorian civilization and the orcish race to the last.
By contrast the great communist leaders were plagues upon their own nations. Mao sacrificed tens of millions more Chinese people for the sake of his own twist vision than he ever sacrificed foreigners for the sake of the Chinese. Likewise Lenin and Stalin were nightmares for Russia and the slavic peoples.
There a book "They Thought They Were Free" about Germans living under the Nazis and how many people were happy to buy into it, and you had to actually look to notice the disturbing aspects of what Germany was becoming... (For example for most of the 30s the concentration camps held fewer people per capita than American mass incarceration)... no one is ever going to write a "They Thought They Were Free" about the early Soviet Union, hell you can read accounts by figures like Solzhenitsyn and they are deeply pained by just how hard it is to convey that NOTHING was comparable to a free society.
Ayn Rand gave a speech to congress about the Soviets in the 50s and a congressman thought she was being ridiculous "Do families not gather for holiday dinners in the Soviet Union?" and Rand struggled to express how even that was a paranoid affair that merely mentioning politics or a disagreement at dinner could result in an uncle or niece, or even grandparent informing and destroying you and a good chunk of your family.
And Rand and Solzhenitsyn were RUSSIANS! They were the people at the heart of Soviet empire, they weren't some despised conquered peripheral people the state wanted gone... you have to look at Ukraine and Holomodor to see how they treated them... there is no Nazi Equivalent to Holomodor. No people they slayed by the millions in the midst of a decade plus of peace... Horrific as the Holocaust was... 95% of it happened during a world war a time when even America and Britain had concentration camps and killed civilians by the hundreds of thousands, Holomodor, the Great Leap Forward these were done as matters of policy without external pressure or even the fig leaf that these would be just part of the millions already being killed by the realities of scarcity and human conflict.
But our elite justify their multi-ethnic empires and right to plunder the democratic majorities they're supposed to be beholden to... with the same moral language as the Soviets... Its very convenient when you rule "For the betterment of mankind" or for "the worst off" because you can always justify taking from someone who has something, either their property or their liberty, in the name the worst off... Does it ever get around to benefiting the poor or the destitute or the unwashed masses of the working class? Well that's the convenient part, they're poor and disempowered, therefore they aren't really positioned to do an accounting of what's taken from the productive segments of humanity in their name, and notice somehow 50 or even 90% of it is lost in transit. Their loyalty can be bought for peanuts, not even their loyalty, the loyalty of the thugs amongst them, and then any tall plant can be harvested in their name... such that all power concentrates in the hands of the, self appointed, "defenders of the poor". And then when this ruling elite wants to sacrifice the poor... well they can always withhold in the name of some more deserving, more desitute, more moral, impoverished group somewhere...
It is a system for not for benefiting the marginalized at the expense of the established, but to crush all rivalled established social power so that everyone will be marginalized and unable to resist the state.
There is a very good reason in the Western Democratic nations where society and the majority are supposed to control and make the government subserviently to them, the governing class really wants you to admire unelected dictators who crushed social institutions and impoverished the majority of their nation even when they killed hundreds of millions in peacetime, and really REALLY wants you to hate an elected leader who rallied social institutions and the majority to benefit themselves at the expense of the minority, who only killed tens of millions in wartime.
Just wanted to comment I'm really keen for responses to this one.
Seeing made up atrocities arise as a way to score points in the propaganda war and then get debunked in realtime, as well as reading "Iron Curtain Over America" by Beatty really shook my belief in any of the stories of German atrocities. It seemed obvious to me that without the internet "40 beheaded babies" would have just become sacrosanct and in a few decades denial of it would have been criminalized in the west.
Once you see the exact same institutions that ran public opinion in the 40s doing it, it becomes very hard to imagine they weren't doing the exact same thing in the 40s when the brazenness of the propaganda was infamous and is even parodied by everyone down to children's movies today.
KulakRevolt
11mo ago
DID YOU READ!?
A province's government changed, the second largest politcal party switched from vehemently pro to anti-lockdown with the Pro-lockdown losing their jobs, Trudeau's government is basically crippled all of his policies since have failed as seen with his gun ban falling through...
And the emergencies act failed to be extended, the relevant powers were lost when its 7 (not 9) limit expired without the power to extend it.
The fetishism of defeat. The desire to be powerless in the case of clear and undeniable victory is disgusting.
Your enemies can be absolutely as irredeemable, corrupt, and tyrannical as their worst critics imagine, AND STILL BE WEAK.
The hell do you want? Do you want the CBC to pat you on the back and say "No its OK. You won"
Grow up. Politics is war by other means, casualties on your own side are acceptable in the pursuit of victory.
And the truckers won a complete victory. Every freedom I had lost from 2019 to 2022, everything I expected to never get back and to suffer across decades of insurgency trying to claw back... Was restored, mostly within a month, and the rest in half a year.
THAT IS TOTAL VICTORY.
I will not let blackpilled moldbuggians tarnish it with their own impotence.
FLYOVER country won whilst all the theory-cells and blackpilled cosmopolitan right wing wing intellectual wrung their hands... Becuase the flyover rubes are better than you. More fit to rule. More fit for combat. More able to organize. And now it is the job of the right wing intellectuals to catch up with the 40 year old small businessmen and conpsiracy theorists who've shown themselves more capable that the entire right wing political class
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
I don't listen to RWA. I just pay attention to the relevant ratios, who's consistently shown to be full of it, and what get leaked or admitted.
none of even the serious pro-Ukraine people expect them to win the fight. Peter Zeihan is a full on neo-con and he keeps talking about pushing Kherson and cutting off the water and Electricity supply to Crimea, that that'd be a bargaining chip, or taking out the bridge at the Kerch strait and cutting off rail supply... but neither of those seem to be materializing, and it seems more likely Russia would just retaliate against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. And aside from that, he's just "Ya Ukraine is outperforming... really showing bravery, too bad the default is they'll probably lose"
And every neo-con or belicose commentator is like this once you ignore the high energy announcements and get into their analysis and predictions its "Ya no its exciting they could pull off this crazy dramatic campaign we've never seen signs of them doing and it would change everything ever... but odds are they won't and they'll get ground down and lose everything slowly and painfully... but hey we still bleed Russia and stop the Germans from pivoting to them, so a US geostrategic victory"
Every time, as soon as you dig into one of these more serious commentators that stake their influence on major us intellectuals taking them seriously, they'll spend ten minutes hedging, praising the UKrainians bravery, lay out some absurd tele-lazer snipe Zelensky could do if he levels up his mech to 5 stars... and then they say "But they need something like that, because as is they're going be ground down militarily and economically until they collapse"
Zelensky admitted 200-500 deaths a day, that's probably 1000-1500 total casualties once you include wounded. That's not sustainable. Their squads that go around black bagging people for the front are going to become predictable and conscripts will dry up. Especially in a corrupt country where gdp is 3k per person, everything runs on bribery, and perhaps even a majority of America's 100 billion went to just paying people off.
We should not expect the Ukrainian commanders to be much different than the Afghan allies the US was funding and training for 20 years... Right now they're getting those black bagged conscripts to the front, because the money hasn't dried up yet... after a winter of economic decline and the US has gotten distracted by an election cycle, another current thing, and congress and the senate are gridlocked across multiple parties, and no one can pass a Ukraine funding bill without someone attaching funding for abortion for illegal immigrant's ar-15s...
US clients have never not been like this. Vietnam collapsed the second US funding and backing started to wane, ditto Iraq, ditto Afghanistan... Hell the US almost lost Berlin to the soviets.
.
US backed regional wars are a very specific genre just like slasher movies or romantic comedies There is a formula, a very simple formula.
The enemy is always on the run... except none of the "Dangerous" regions ever seem to become safe regions, and there are a shocking number of offensives that get uncomfortable. The allies are always great brave men fighting for their homeland and the best anywhere in the world... but their budgets are never trackable and they seem to be oddly overlapped with organized crime... hey is that oppium? Hey are those neo-nazi tattoos? America's allies are always winning and training and get really professional and buttoned up...yet they never seem to stop being dependent on attached mercenaries and special force... and seem to always have bad luck maintaining any initiative,
and finally The enemy is always laughably incompetent, loses every battle, and can't do even basic stuff the US expects of its worse units...and yet somehow they win the war.
.
.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results... well the US kinda learned... they aren't sending their own conscripts to this Vietnam... just blowing incredible amounts propping up an ARVN force they know isn't sustainable... so instead of years and administrations before the whole thing fails, Ukraine has months and a midterm.
.
America wins every invasion, and cia coup... for the same reason it loses every complex local enabled patronage war... the US in constitutionally incapable of addapting its meta tactics. Its winning formula are winning and they work, and they don't get changed... and the second a US invasion gets repelled it might literally be the end of the world, but until the end of the world every US invasion will be a cakewalk. And likewise every US backed local military force, militia and insurgency they arm and train are going to be primarily interested in scamming the American tax payer, because hell that's what the American contractors are there to do and the US isn't going to adapt tactics even if you're caught scamming them.
That people can still fall for this Afghan National Army bull... I swear some of the articles about female fighters were just search and replace and they forgot to take out the sentence about face coverings.
Its a formula. Its a very simple formula.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Not letting your citizens leave the country is a very VERY unique horror with very few precedents. And one I am very fucking sensitive to having just lived through the Canadian lockdowns.
KulakRevolt
11mo ago
Bullshit a province's government fell, an major party did a complete 180 on its position, litterally every policy demand was changed within a year or less...
Compare that to anything that was expected in December January 2021-2022 and its a total victory.
Do you care about actually winning the policy victories you want and actually getting people what they want, or do you care about getting gibs for your activist class whilst nothing gets better?
KulakRevolt
1mo ago
He was a US Intelligence Officer of the Rank of Lieutenant-Colonel during WW2, wrote the reports on Decrypted Germans Cyphers, briefed Generals...
And he wrote a book about Jewish involvement in Communism and their ties to the Soviet union... Full Putin-esque deep dive on the Germans back to the Tuetonic Knight and the Jews back the Khazaria 800bc- 1952... And he mentioned the holocaust once as an off-handed "And there are still some people who still believe this ridiculous wartime propaganda by jewish lobbyists"
And a half Dozen US Generals wrote glowing reviews saying it was the most important book of the 1950s and exactly captures the truth of the Second world war.
Likewise Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle make no mention of the holocaust or final solution in their thousands of pages of works on ww2.
You'd think if out of 80 million dead in ww2, 6 million were jews, you'd get like 5-8% of time dedicated to it... just proportionately?
Nope. Nothing. In the 1950s they didn't act as if the camps were opened and the revelation of the greatest crime in history had just been revealed. The Holocaust only entered public consciousness in 1967 after the 6 day when the US pivoted to Israel.
KulakRevolt
11mo ago
This was NOT a given. And the Trucker protest and sister protests in other nation were a MASSIVE cause of restrictions ending.
All the talk in Dec Jan 2021-2022 was of making lockdowns semi-permanent and ramping up the vaccine passport system ever further to crush dissent.
KulakRevolt
11mo ago
How was Saladin, a Kurd from Northern Iraq, defending his own nation when he launched a war against a Kingdom that had existed in various states of peace and war for 100 years.
By that Standard Abu Bakar Al Baghdadi of ISIS was merely resisting the crusader infidel when he promised to drive the Israelis into the sea and Unite the arab world under his Caliphate... after all the state of Israel is now younger than the Kingdom of Jerusalem was when Saladin reconquered it.
This is the problem with trying to base your morality around "attacker vs defender" EVERYONE HAS DIFFERENT CLAIMS. Hell when Hitler invaded Poland to recapture Danzig and the Prussian homeland it had only been separated from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles for 21 years!
in the conflciting claims of European nationalities and nations you are never going to carve out some clear distinction as to who's claims are legitimate and who's aren't... because they're imaginary ethical Ideas... Why are Saladin's claims 100 years after a kingdom has formed more legitimate than the crusaders claims 100 years earlier 300 years after Islam conquered the holy lands from the Christian/Jewish Kingdoms that reigned there before hand?
Why is Abu Bakar Al Baghdadi's claims to reclaim the holy land 70 years after the formation of Israel then completely out of the question? Why is it Russia fighting a war to try and recapture Poland in 1918-1921 the very years Poland declares independence considered worng, but complex enough that Brittian and France don't declare war or intervene on behalf of the Poles... but 18 years later Germany, actually setting out to recapture German speaking lands that had always been under German or Prussian rule, somehow demands a WORLD WAR to stop?
STOP PRETENDING YOU HAVE PRINCIPLES. You have rationalizations. You're just like every other person in human history.
You don't have compressive fully complete theory of just war that somehow magically supports all the wars on the side you like and denounces all the wars on the side you don't, You have ingroups and outgroups.
you think its good Saladin Reconquered the kingdom of Juerusalem 100 years later, because you don't like the Crusader Kingdom. You think its bad Al Baghdadi declared he wanted to do the same thing with Israel merely 70 years after because you support Isreal.
In ww2 the US and Brittain invaded or annexed dozens of countries that were otherwise neutral, and had done nothing aggressive, because they held some strategic value, nothing more.
Iceland was invaded by Britain, Ireland was nearly invaded Britain. Should the Icelandic people have fought to the knife, landed in Scotland, firebombed London, and set about a decade of De-Churchill-fication?
Every war. Every fucking one... Is WW1. Its all stronger powers positioning whilst weaker powers get fucked, or through extraordinary obstinance and violence, manage to carve out some nationalist vision for themselves.
Some are vastly more brutal, some more temperate... but to pretend there's some magical principle that entitles America to decide the fate of Poland, or some Kurd from northern Iraq Jerusalem in the 12th century, but not a Sunni from southern Iraq the fate of Jerusalem the in the 21st... its laughable.
You claim to be such a Hobbesian, actually read him! Read his theory of international relations and justice between kingdoms and nations.
Hobbes holds no such justice can exist, because nations, knigdoms, and princes are inherently in the state nature against one another... there is not Just or unjust aggression or defense... For no one is ever going to agree with eachother who's claims are legitimate and what counts as aggression, and what's more no lawful sovereign exists between separate nations kingdoms, and princes... or they would not be separate nations kingdoms, and princes... There is only noble or Ignoble conduct within the contest, and observations of what regulating rituals nations come observe between each other in inherently unstable equilibria.
Leaders, if they are to be judged, are to be judged by body-count and violence committed vs. avoided. Not some Laughable Idea that we can somehow disentagle why Hitler invading Poland was unjustified and demanded a World War... but Stalin invading Poland 2 weeks later did not, or that somehow Germany is not entitled to militarily intervene on its ancestral homeland right on its border 100kms from berlin... but DC is entitled to Invade Iraq 10'000 kms away.
By that standard New York or Boston would have been legitimate targets if the Nazis or Japanese had gotten the bomb first. Also "purely civilian cities" was a reference to the firebombings of Europe... in which yes many targets were almost wholly indefensible from any military perspective.
"hero of western civilization" if you're going to use quotation marks actually fucking quote me. I did not say Hitler was a hero of western civilization, I said he was a figure that for most of western history would be considered a "Hero of his nation" I even gave helpful examples of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Ceasar, Hannibal, and Lincoln. All war criminals responcible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions, who never the less are venerated by their nationalities, and loathed by anyone who takes a second to remember the genocides they committed (ask a Native American about Lincoln)
One could add the reverence modern Romanians have for Vlad Tepest or Mongolians for Genghis Khan.
The fact that you have juvenile Ahistorical definition of "Hero" does not change the fact the term used correctly absolutely would be applied to Hitler by anyone prior to 1914. and the vast majority of people on planet earth (south asians, Middle easterners, Latin Americans, Chinese) AFTER even 1945.
There are billions of people around the world right now dreaming some Hitlerian figure will rise and lead their glorious historied but somehow wronged... faith, ethnicity, tribe, nationality etc. to some final victory over their hated rival tribe... Indians and Pakistanis dream of this, Arabs and Palestinians dream of this... hell Peruvians and Chileans dream of this.
Hell the Chinese and Russians actually still STILL have personality cults and reverence for Mao and Stalin! As great national leaders who fought for Chinese or Russian nationality against the hated foreigner, and they both killed vastly more than Hitler, and their victims were disproportionately their own people.
Hilter is not some exception. He's the rule.
As far as national heroes go he's worse than Wellington, Lincoln, or Hannibal, but still better than Stalin, Mao or Genghis Khan... and per capita probably comparable to Caesar, or Alexander (who genocided the celts, and a whole list of cities respectively)
KulakRevolt
11mo ago
Britain invented the concentration camp during the Boer war and killed 10s of thousands during it via starvation, Canada and US used concentration camps for forced labour during ww1 and ww2, and the allies firebombed purely civilian cities killing hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands more during the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasagi, often explicitly "To break the will" of the civilians being bombed.
it takes really special pleading to argue the Nazis were uniquely evil and not simply on the spectrum somewhere between the warcrimes and mass murders of the west and the peacetime genocides of the communists.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
This logic is never applied to any other circumstance.
If someone is attempting to murder a regular child the regular american celebrates the person who violently stops them. If a mass shooter strikes the ordinary non-governmental person who runs in to shoot them is celebrated as a hero. We have an entire culture based around celebrating the idea of resistors to nazi occupation, or the british, and who actively imagines violence against a hypothetical tyrannical government ALL THE TIME.
And yet the question of guerilla violence against abortion doctors "Child murders" in this logic... is not only not done, it is not even discussed as a question except by pro-lifers saying "Look obviously you don't believe this... you aren't even willing to discuss violence"
I can even count the number of nations that have been bombed in my lifetime, and certainly can't count the number where bombings have been openly discussed by the common laymen... the number of people who have suggest the death penalty for drug dealers, or going and vigilante turning back illegal immigrants, or punching facist, or standing up to communists...or defending the enviroment... or defending your property from enviromentalists.
Talk of escalating to lethal violence is the NORM of political discussion. People regularly praise fathers who kill pedos, or mothers who go vigilante on killers of family members... or hell women who cut the dicks off of boring dates they often never even subsequently accuse of sexual assault (people will praise just literal crazy people for maiming others)
hell VIOLENCE is the logical end of all politics... that what we're discussing when we discuss politics, who we'll organize to employ violence against... do you think taxes are backed up with only letters?
.
And yet the only issue where there is no talk that violence could be justified, where there is zero tough talk of escalating to lethal solutions... just so happens to be the one where its claimed millions of children are being murdered.
I've literally heard more earnest talk in my life of escalating to violence over drag queen story hour, or Milo giving a speech on campus, than I've ever heard over abortion.
Do you not find that weird!?
And then you get even to the legal state backed solutions... and there are no teeth. No one proposes charging women who get abortions with homicide (meanwhile you hear howls for blood when it comes to mother of born children who kill their kids), there's very little discussion of even charging abortion doctors... You'd think talks of the death penalty for abortion doctors would be really common given they're supposedly SERIAL MURDERERS OF CHILDREN.
.
Somehow this one issue, the holocaust of millions of children, is the one issue in politics people just seem to never get overly worked up about. contrast how much violence there was over a few hundred police shootings a year... or a single "'stolen election'"... or merely being forced to use a coivd passport, and be restricted from engaging in civic life.
Did any anti-lockdown pro-lifers look at lockdowns and the the covid authoritarianism... and when a comrade compared it to Nazi Germany say to them:
"What the hell are you talking about? Medical passports? Restricted economic activity? Maybe making Quarantine camps? That's low level 1930s stuff! Regime "Doctors" murdered almost one million CHILDREN last year alone. And they did the same the year before that. AND THE YEAR BEFORE THAT! We've been at 1945 sheer moral horror EVERY YEAR OF OUR FUCKING LIVES. And you're talking about them starting to maybe make camps!? We've been living in one of the top 5 worst regimes in human history, at a perpetual midnight of horror, for 50 years!"
.
No pro-lifer thinks like that. None sit around cursing the day Washington was born, that had any moment in US history changed, maybe if the British or French had held control, none of this would have happened. None sit around wondering maybe if the south, or the Kaiser, or Hitler, or Caececescu had won... maybe 1 million children wouldn't be murdered every year...almost none sit around praying for biblical judgement to destroy DC like Gomorrah or Jericho. But its exactly what their own axioms would suggest.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Production is irrelevant when the time to produce the stocks is measured in years, and the rate of consumption is measured in months.
The US cannot keep the supply of Javelins or any other matteriel flowing to Ukraine at anywhere near the rate this war is consuming them. Russia's crappy soviet stockpiles are decades behind the times and half have been plundered... but 50ish% of them are there.
To take just Javellins, the US had given 1/3rd of its total stock of Javelins to Ukraine by April and most of that's been consumed or been sold off to the highest bidder by now.
The US has almost certainly crossed the 50% mark by this point.... that's it. The supply is not going to reach that peak again during this war and the US is almost certainly hoarding most of the remain stock for themselves given they just witnessed how fast that supply is consumed in any real conflict.
KulakRevolt
1mo ago
Why? Did you painstakingly go through the works of Churchill, Eisenhower, and De Gaulle, find that every instance of mass death during the Second World War which you agree happened is mentioned in direct proportion to its share of the total 80 million dead, and note a glaring exception in the case of the Jews?
You do realize it's actually fairly trivial to find the digital version Ctrl-F for every reference of "Jew" "final solution" "holocaust", Etc.
And I did. I checked Unz work.
Eisenhower does actually mention a holocaust in crusade in europe. Specifically a "Bomber's Holocaust", carried out by the allies against the germans. But nothing about a mass extermination of jews, only that when released from the work camps they and all the other prisoners were starving from lack of food, largely because German logistics had collapsed.
KulakRevolt
6mo ago
And what would have happened if the US and USSR had not pushed a ceasefire?
How many wars end in 6 days!?
If not for the international alliance system, Israel would win and win and win... for the first few months. Then their forces would reach the limits of what they can hold... and then the reality of being 10 million amidst 500 million Muslims would set in and they'd be ground away to nothing by the reality of attritional artillery warfare and urban insurgency... and they'd be fucked.
Israel has never fought a war like the Iran-Iraq war, or the Russo-Ukraine War, or the World Wars, or even the Chinese or US civil wars, or even Vietnam, Iraq, or the Soviet-Afghanistan. Or even the Rhodesian Bush war, where they have to face an armed organized enemy continuously attacking their military and probably civilians for a decade+.
They've always been able to depend on the international order forcing a ceasefire and locking in their victories... and securing hard blockades on their Palestinian enemies, enforce even by their regional rivals in exchange for US Aid.
Rhodesia certainly didn't have the US bribing Mozambique and Zambia to the tunes of billions of dollars a year to enforce secure borders and block smuggling, the way way Israel does with the US bribing Egypt and Jordan.
That is very unusual. Especially in the 20th century. And it is NOT stable.
The fact that they then decided to Sex Traffick the children of the power they desperately need to backstop 100% of their regional security concerns is the cherry on top.
KulakRevolt
1yr ago
Did you even read the axios piece? https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/ukraine-1000-casualties-day-donbas-arakhamia
200-500 dead per day and 1000 tatal casualties per day in the donbass alone. Per the ukrainian negotiator working directly for Zelensky.
Sorry I don't know the Ukrainian term for their whitehouse so used Zelensky to stand in for the Office and Senior leadership. A normal linguistic convention for world leaders if you ever attributed anything to Biden or trump that came from Jen Psaki or Sean Spicer.
Sorry i was trying to let you save face by giving you multiple sources the most face saving of which dips down in the direction of your estimate... but lets be real Ukrainain officials have been lying about every operational detail then openly admitting they were lying at every point in this war... so I'm going to take the higher number that even they admitted.
If I may ask... Why do you have so much hatred for the Russian state... A kleptocratic petro-state... but not Saudi Arabia, a vastly worse kleptocratic petro-state without even the pretenses of democracy, that has been commiting Genocide against the people of Yemen for the past 8 years? And which America and the west could bring down in a second by sanctioning?
I really don't get how you can say the current Russian regime is somehow worse than the USSR when the USSr didn't even have the pretense of elections, or any of the basic economic freedoms, that even compromised, the modern Russians takes for granted.
These are really obvious questions.
Russia's a shitty country...but its like 110th out of 200 in the world today in terms of quality... might even crest the top 100.... And the offense that that 110th country might attack the 120th country, when the 120th has been shelling civilians for 8 years and waging war against independent regions...
It is just because Ukraine made fawning noises about the EU and Yemen didn't/wasn't white enough?
Your need to make things personal is noted.
For reference, I tried to track down the english translation of Pinochet's memoirs...
Not a single public library or university sytem within 1000miles of me has them... Lots of memoirs by communists about "Living under Pinochete" or "memoirs of a Bicyclist who disapeared in Pinochet's Chile" But somehow not the Memoirs of the Dictator they wring their hands about.
You rage that I'm right about major works by world leaders having been disappeared is revealing. The fact you're offended by me pointing it out and desperately need to grasp that these aren't "real banned books" when you have no problem with the barnes and noble displays of "the handmaid's tale" and "to kill a mockingbird" is doubly revealing.
You're not upset that I haven't personally tracked these down and put them on libgen, you're upset that I've surfaced them to 10s of thousands of people, and now someone with access to UTexas or UPenn library system (the only two places I could find copies) will.
Rage Fueled rant: What is with the intellectual bankruptcy on Ukraine?
I'm not talking about fog of war stuff, or always erroring towards one side... even the most stern eyed realist struggles with emotions infecting analysis...
I'm talking about respected, degree holding, prominent figures... who have built careers around the dispassion of their analysis, engaging openly in the worst, laziest, most childish, intellectual abuses when it comes to Ukraine.
I was listening to a commentator, i had followed for quite some time, and thought of as quite dispassionate (won't link him... he's dead to me) who just opened a video declaring that "The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"
.
set aside everything else... set aside your faction in the culture war, set aside what you think of the war...
Can you think of another war where this language would be tolerated from an allegedly dispassionate subject matter expert?
"The Second Libyan civil war (2014-2020) was the clearest example of good vs. evil in the 21st century", "The 2014 Gaza War was a matter of Good vs. Evil", "Gulf War 1 was really about Good vs. Evil", "the Falklands was a clear example of Good vs. Evil", "The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was entirely a matter of good vs. evil (though there you could make the case... they were fighting the Khmer Rouge)", "The US invasion of Grenada... really just a matter of good vs. evil", "The Sino-Indian war was really a matter of good vs. evil", "The bay of pigs invasion, when you get down to it, was about good vs. evil", "The French War in Algeria was a clear matter of Good vs. Evil", "The Spanish civil war was a true contest of good vs. evil", "The Irish war of Independence was really a conflict of Good vs. Evil"... WW1? Good vs. Evil. The Russo-Japanese war? Absolutely good vs. evil, had to stop the yellow menace. The Boer war? Entirely good vs. evil (though again there you could make the case... the British, Canadian, and Australian contingent invented the concentration camp in that war to deal with the Rebellious ethnic Dutch colonist...The Boer, the scum race of the Transvaal)
.
If you heard any figures saying these were matters of "Good vs. Evil" you'd immediately discount them and probably think them some anti-intellectual freak. In my first year history course I received a D on an essay for an anachronistic, sides taking, argument 1/1000th as egregious. (I argued the attitude expressed by a Ming dynasty diplomat describing India could be interpreted as "Westward Orientalism")
This figure would be embarrassed describing any other war in such terms... hell I'd never even heard him use such language discussing the second world war...
And yet the 2022 Russo-Ukraine war... that's the war so egregious he'll throw intellectual impartiality to the wind in the name of sheer denunciation.
.
It's not even the most egregious war currently being fought within 1000km of the Black sea. That infamy belongs either to the reignited Nagorno-Karabakh war where Azerbaijan and Turkey are trying to squelch the young democracy in Armenia, or the ongoing conflict in Syria where turkey is likewise trying to Squelch the increasingly autonomous Kurdistan and its various democratic movements ... We don't hear about these conflicts though, because Turkey is a NATO member and a keystone of Europe's treaties to keep migrants out.
.
I could grasp this, though not respect it, if this figure was somehow tied up in the US establishment and had career opportunities riding on it... but he's well independent of that. Just likes the coolaid.
.
This trend i also egregious if you consider the rhetoric around the Ukraine war... That its fought for democracy, that Putin is an Autocrat... that this is a war for freedom....
Such as the freedom to criticize your government? Do you? Nope, just criticizing the people the government and media tells me to criticize.
The applause signs around words apparently being more important than any meaning the words themselves might have.
.
Was this what it was like in 2002-2003 when Afghanistan and Iraq were starting? Did every remotely public intellectual drop their standards this quickly? I remember the Anti-war movement being more prominent at the time... Was that only after the fact?
Or is the Anti-war movement silent because this is Putin and he's now coded pro-trump and Anti-gay... (yet somehow everyone else in central Eurasia isn't)
.
.
Sorry if this is ranting... I actually respected this commentator and this combined with other things was just a remarkable intellectual slide... I feel dirty... like the time engaging with him left me dumber somehow, and now I have to go back through ideas I first heard from him and check for the rot.
More options
Context Copy link