KulakRevolt
Writes at https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/
Writes weird Twitter Threads @FromKulak
Rides motorcycles... poorly.
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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)
No matter how much Russia underperforms, screws up, or fails against seeming ridiculously favorable odds...
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?)
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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.
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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
3yr ago
Uh... your second sentence contradicts your first.
Teens carry knives in Canada. its normal at a highschool party "Hey anyone got a knife" and whole host of pocket knives come out.
The idea that you think there are categories of people you can deny an invention that's two million years old... even if they're with their friends and out of doors... that's incomprehensible to North Americans.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Britain Knives thread
Who was it that first forged the deadly blade? of rugged steel his savage soul was made.
— Tibullus (c. 55 BC – 19 BC)
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Below /u/incognitomaorach has a great thread about violence that eruptted in the UK between Muslim and Hindu cricket fans, ut in the middle he mentioned this:
Videos of some of the men having knives (all too common in the UK now) also circulated.
In North America there's a mocking parody of the UK that live in jokes and memes, that after banning guns they started banning knives leading to lots of joking "OI you got a loisence for dat ther potata peeler" or picking up a stone for skipping only for the bobbies to materialize and taze you because the angle of the stone was too sharp.
But every so often you see clips from UK media or here a story or see an interview of a worried middle aged woman, and start to wonder if it is a joke...
I'm a Canadian firearms enthusiast and something of an outdoorsman, and I'm tickled and a little horrified at the idea that a knife, a basic tool with archeological evidence dating back literally millions of years to pre-hominid times (Who first forged the deadly blade? They called him Oook), could be "all too common"
the knife is next to opposable thumbs in the things that make one human... i'm genuinely curious about this attitude... did he mean "men who'd openly draw blades are all too common now", to be fair such men have quite a storied history in the UK: they were called gentry. Or did he actually mean the physical knives themselves are too common?
In Canada folding knives, including the scary looking scythe style fighting knives, are sold at convenience stores and all kinds of mall ninja weapons (real sharpened steel) are for sale at most toy and game stores.... often in goofy coloured finishes so that tweens and early teens can blow their allowances on them and feel cool for a few minutes. Parents give kids knives for Christmas. I remember summer camp we were all just given folding knives (cheap ones we were expected to keep) because it was a camping camp and we were expected to make shelter and survive in the woods. Its normal in most small towns and even most cities for guys who are blue collar ect. to wear big knives visibly on their belts, and maybe 20-40% of men and women have a pocket knife or something comparable on them at basically all times.
In Britain is there a real serious attitude that people should just not have knives...or could be denied them? Like not memes, and shitposts, but for real?
British Mottizens is this a real attitude?
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Not sure how inflammatory it is compared to just describing reality... Australia had quarantine camps and Canada as well had guarded mandatory "hotels"... wasn't even for confirmed cases, you could test negative but if you met requirements (daring to leave the country while unvaxxed, filling out a form wrong) you actually were physically detained without trial.
Contracts were awarded to build vastly more expansive versions of these COVID prisons, the conspiracists weren't making up the contracts and the preparations... they were just always pork contracts for the politically connected or the governments were forced to back off by the political push-back.
Its incredibly difficult to state just how much true totalitarianism was implemented in the name of COVID restrictions and how many people were demanding that they be expanded to truly horrific extents.
Canada mandated a phone app to leave and reenter the country and for a while pursued regulatory reprisals against those who deleted the app. People were calling for the fines and prison terms to be applied to everyone who tried to reenter the country without downloading the app.
I'm an Anarcho-capitalist.
I only want no government.
Private property, class, want, hunger, struggle, danger, dying young.. that's all fine with me as long as in the interim I'm free. Live free or Die.
But being ruled by another, especially these totalizing dystopian regimes of mediocrity and lies, is completely unacceptable, and any chaos would be tolerable to them.
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The idea these gloriffied pozi schemes with armies and propaganda departments get to kidnap young men in the prime of their lives and kill them em mass so they can keep the retirement accounts of old school marms going another year... that's an unacceptable horror.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
No for most of human history there was no effective means to enforce border controls and people could just leave if they wanted, except for totalitarian states for which literally any violence is justified to end their existence. It remains a horror to the average American that any soviet countries could have existed without the populace flaying the flesh from their tyrants in the night.
that a "democracy" equipped with the technology and surveillance tech to actually prevent its citizens from leaving, has chosen to restrict mass cross-sections of the country from exercising basic freedom of travel, and has done so that they might be imprisoned and fed into the war machine is a very unique fucking horror and one no westerner has EVER tolerated in a democracy.
At the height of the Vietnam War the US did not control americans leaving. That's how draft dodgers got to Canada, they just fucking drove. If the US had set up checkpoints on the other side of the road and started interrogating anyone trying to leave the country, there would have been armed insurrection and those guards would have been firebombed in their homes with their children inside.
The fact you treat a totalitarian country like Soviet Poland as an at all acceptable comparison as if its very existence wasn't an insult to the human race, says a whole lot about those willing to support the Zelensky regime.
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Live free or die. Any regime that gets remotely close to these restrictions demands endless armed insurrection until the populace is free of it or until no one is left alive within it.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Cultural genocide is defined as the purposeful elimination of a culture with a group of people especially including attempts to break linguistic continuity.
I'm a Canadian who has to hear about how residential schools were "genocide" against the native population multiple times a week at land acknowledgements before events, in PSAs put out endlessly on radio, TV, and youtube ads and you better damn well believe I'm going to hold the woke's puppet regime to the exact same standards of what constitutes genocide that they want to hold white Canadians to... Especially when murder of civilians, often over stuff as simple as social media posts, are rampant in Ukraine.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Political freedom is not a function of the state but the individuals ability to commit violence against the state. Knights were free and serfs were slaves not because of some deriliction or philosopgical disposition of the king, but because the knights could rebel and offer violence to the king but the serfs could not even offer violence to the knights.
Likewise the North American colonists were able to gain so much more freedom than their European counterparts because they were armed and could murder government officials... Even Canada has had more rebellions in the past 200 years than Brittain.
Making oneself subservient, even in an armed role, to the state does nothing to gain one liberty Ask all those russian concripts who died with no political freedom under communism.
One does not gain freedom by fighting the state's enemies. One gains freedom by making the state your enemy
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
I have seen no evidence Russia wasn't largely supported by the populations of Crimea and the Donbass indeed both regions have recruited large forces in the past 8 years to resist Ukrainian agression against the independent republics, and Ukraine's ethnic and linguistic war against its russian speeaking minority certainly hasn't had made me sympathetic to them.
Ukraine is a corrrupt authoritarian country that has been commiting cultural if not actual genocide against its russian minority since 2014... This isn't Hitler invading Poland
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Of those three Finland is the only one I'd possibly consider free or non-horrifying... and I suspect that's probably just my ignorance and it actually is horrifying in some way I haven't yet heard of, given it feels entitled to enslave its male population... and largely not even give them a vote on the matter since conscription begins at 18 and voting only occurs 1/4 years.
Most conscripts who've die in wars of "Democracy" die for a country they were never eligible to vote in.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
No putin larpers wouldn't win. The enemies of the regime would win.
You're acting as if a socialist would want the Tzarist forces to lose the Russo-Japanese war because they want Shintoism to take over russia... No they want the Tsarist regime humiliated so the revolution of 1905 could happen (though they wouldn't like that that revolution failed).
Likewise Putinism to the extent its an ideology is already prettymuch failed and dying... I want the Liberal Globalist order to lose to that failing and dying ideology not to prop up putinism but to humiliate and ruin the Liberal international order so that the homegrown ideologies already taking off in the west can have their revolutions as detached from putinism as Liberal Constitutionalism and Socialist revolutionaries were from Shinto-Imperialism.
distant enemies of my enemy can be quite useful.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
I don't care if the hands are tied. I want free people to exist not states.
I'd rather A country be reduced to Afghanistan and lose a chunk of its territory and free people exist somewhere in the uncontrolled territory than no free people exist anywhere because the state propped up its own existence by enslaving them.
Yes this goes for WW2. Yes this goes for the civil war. I have not seen a single faction in a single war in any moment of human history where i thought their propping up their war efforts by resorting to litteral slavery was at all an improvement.
the 20 million who died fighting for the soviet union might have lived had they murdered their commissars and officers instead of being fed into the Soviet Unions horrific efforts at self preservation.
The worst enemy you have no matter what is the man who has you at gunpoint and is issuing orders... he is always the first person you need to kill. And if a nation and a people... even call themselves your people are standing behind him demanding your death, then they are your enemies too.
There is no one more sympathetic in WW2 than the soviet citizens who volunteered for the Nazis, or the German citizens who volunteered for the soviets or allies... They accurately assessed who their greater enemy was: Their own governments.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
The Palestinians have one government that controls them... Israel yet they are denied citizenship, a vote, and are forced into ghettos where the "pallestinian leadership" which Israel can and does murder at any moment, predates upon them.
Israel is one state, it has been for decades now since Israel has defeated all Palestinian resistance... yet Israel maintains the fiction that there is or ever can be two states because then it doesn't have to grant the pallestinians, who have been born and lived entirely under israelli control, a vote of their own.
There should be a one state solution. One person. one vote. Full Stop.
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As is its as if America denied the native American's any rights as citizens, claiming the reservations were seperate countries, but "invaded" them near weekly to enforce its authority.
Its textbook apartheid. Denying full citizenship to those born within a country on the basis of their heritage.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Its a big deal if Ukraine wins its shores up the "Liberal international order" another 30 years, and then we live to see the slow role of totalitarianism every western country is headed towards come to fruition. You can see it in Ukraine: Our elites wish they ban opposition parties, opposition press, and then round up their ethnic and political enemies to use as canon fooder just like Zelensky is doing...
If Russia had won quickly and decisively it would have probably broken the western elite, and forced Germany and Co. to pivot towards Russia to secure their energy and econonmic interests... And then the possibility of the global total state would have been impossible.
As it is, if Ukraine wins this war or Russia collapses I shudder at what globohomo might become...
I'm not outraged at Ukraine or the middle-east because of any especial emotional attachment to the people there... I'm outraged because of what it lets us know about what the western and more specifically north American elite will do to us here.
Same way they've been trying to deploy all the tools of the war on terror against dissidents at home, you can bet they'll use all the Zelensky techniques and cite "what those brave Ukrainians did" as a precedent when they wage war on their own population.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
I'd be more sympathetic to the "Liberal democratic order" if it wasn't directly funding and propping up genocide and apartheid in Yemen and Palestine.
Or if the US and UK had vastly more egregiously invaded a country 8000km away who had offered no aggression to them over lies not 20 years ago, causing close to a million deaths and geostrategic instability that probably killed a million more... And then done it all again in Libya in 2012.
I've been keeping score. The modern Russian state is vastly less threatening to the human race in terms of body count than this "Liberal international order"... Which is neither liberal, nor providing order to anyone outside a very select club.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Yes but why should Americans care?
Were trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives wasted over that continent not enough?
And why does proximity affect the ethics of it. America arms and funds dozens of crappy countries doing vastly worse. I haven't read of Russians doing anything to Ukrainian civilians under its territorial control comparable to what Israel does to Palestinians...
And as for unmotivated wars of aggression... Russia had a vastly better case for invading Ukraine, right next door/already waging war agianst ethnic russians, than the US ever had for invading Iraq
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Universal mobilization means you are now an element of the war machine, and leaving is desertion. It has happened everywhere at different times for different reasons, and exists as an option for all developed nations in the world as we speak.
A principled stand for freedom here is worthwhile, but probably only if your particular set of borders has a bunch of nukes/is part of a nuclear alliance.
I have written about concription several times on the motte... In every instance I've argued it demanded lethal violence against thos administering it. Up to ands including killing the volunteer members of the draft boards
Not really... Russia was positioned to become a US ally as late as 2008-2012, partner in the global war on terror stuff... another nuclear armed, economically dependent, ethically suspect appendage of American empire like Israel or Pakistan... Not really democratic, but good at keeping the locals in line...
Then the woke stuff hit, Putin was a white man who was anti-gay and the democrats went from mocking republicans for treating them as a geopolitical rival ("The 1980s called they want their foreign policy back" said Obama to Romney) to hating any republicans agreed with the take Obama had in 2012...
Its all Trump and Gay Marriage.
That's why Ukraine was treated as a major geopolitical happening in 2014 when Russia-Georgia was completely ignored, or how we're going defcon 1 with sanctions now... but didn't when Putin was propping up Assad in Syria back in 2015.
There can't be a white country that isn't woke. and Russia's the only Asia regional power Americans consider white... So when Turkey wages war on the Democratic and freedom loving Kurds, who have been America's allies for 30 years... no one gives a shit. But when Russia wages war against an ultranationalist not really democratic country that's been commiting warcrimes for 8 years... defcon 1.
Trump, Gay Marriage, white skin. Those are the driving forces of US foreign policy on this. Those are the only things that separate Russia from Turkey or Pakistan or Egypt... or any other Faux democratic, kinda belligerent regional power with dozens of different border disputes.
Yep. The western elite has seen Ukraine bar the leaving of the country, ban critical newspapers, murder dissidents, ban opposition parties, imprison opposition leaders... and they have called it the height of democracy and encouraged us to be more like them.
There is no doubt in my mind the American, Canadian, and European elite would gladdly do the exact same things, selectively conscript their ethnic rivals and send them to the suicide units the second they got an excuse.
This is why I'd prefer Putin win... it might result in regime change in the west. I understand you feel the exact same, if not worse, hatred for Putin than I do for my government...
But Putin doesn't want my family dead, and the western elite does... Toronto Star (state funded newspaper) litterally ran front page stories about how th Unvaxxed should be denied medical treatment, and senior regime figures encouraged doctors and nurses to covertly not treat the unvaxxed... this while I was split open and going through multiple surgeries.
Russia is a very long ways away, and I knew people disfigured and unbanked here.
KulakRevolt
3yr 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.
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?
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Well that's terrifying if that's the trendline and the anti-war movement was that strong recently... certainly ups the odds of a world war if that's the case.
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."
So a negotiated settlement or a defacto settlement which saves face by not signing a paper. the point remains: there is no way you magically get lost territory back by wishing, and unless you keep escalating til you lose everything you have to accept your enemy controls what they control.
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