Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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To what extent are Russians correct in calling modern liberal America and Europe "genocidal Nazis preparing to launch Nuclear Barbarossa"? © Adûnâi (2026-07-08)
As you may know, since 2014 Russia and the West have ever increasingly been on a collision course to war. The modern cultural perception of the West in Russia is colored by a number of things - including old Bolshevik third-worldist propaganda about "evil White colonisers", coupled with ancient Stalinist conflation of the Anglo-French with the German Hitlerians (Molotov-Ribbentrop apologia to prevent an Anglo-German alliance to kill all Slavs), and now with the Ukrainian ethnic cleansing (Balkan style petty ethnic nationalism against Russians in the Ukraine).
Now, what are the actual arguments, pro and con?
Pro 1 - German tanks are literally invading Russia. Anglo-French missiles are raining on Russian cities. There's effectively been a state of war between Russia and the West for years at this point, Russia is simply too degenerate to respond. This is a huge point, culturally speaking - Germany was never forced to apologise for genociding 30 million Russians and Poles, only the 6 million Jews, Roma, homosexualists and disabled persons. So the German vehicles invading Russia are equivalent to Germany reconstituting the Auschwitz death camp and burning Jews alive in the ovens once more - with the civilised Western world turning a blind eye to it.
Pro 2 - the West is supporting the Ukrainian state which is notoriously brutal, committing many war crimes, supporting terrorism around the world (Moscow, Monaco, Mali), abducting and torturing its own citizens in broad daylight in the streets of Kiev, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkhov, even Lemberg - this ought to revivify the old imagery of Nazis deporting Jews to death camps, yet the Western media are totally silent on this. (Ukrainians also famously throw Hitler salutes, although not sure why as they are ruled by a Jewish president.)
Pro 3 - the West has gone on a massive rearmament campaign for its whole European part, German industry, Polish armed forces, German forces in Lithuania, nuclear sharing with Finland; the conventional supremacy of Europe over Russia alone is many times over, thus clearly noting the West's readiness to turn this war nuclear since day 1.
Now, these are all quite obvoius and steel-manned arguments for the Russian side. Yet numerous objections exist, too. Let's have a look.
Con 1 - Nazi Germany was an explicitly pro-White ethnostate with materialistic goals in acquiring Russian land and genociding its inhabitants; the West is the opposite - anti-White, anti-materialistic, it has no interest in settling virgin soil with sturdy peasants, it never talks about the good of its ethnic comrades, or living space, or blood and soil, absolutely nothing.
Con 2 - the West remains fanatical in its "White man's burden" raison d'être to increasing the quality of life, bringing peace and prosperity to the whole non-Western world, unlike Hitler's Germany which was focused on its own well-being at terrible cost to its neighbours.
Con 3 - Hitler's Germany was a European project that explicitly banned "entartete Kunst" such as jazz music, it was anti-feminist in removing women from the places of learning, and it was pagan in valuing beautiful animals above ugly humans; the modern West is exactly the opposite - the Ukrainians uglify their own folk songs with metal rock covers, they kill their men but women walk around like queens, and animal welfare is completely outside the political/religious sphere.
Granted, Russians overall call everyone "Nazi" who's genocidal - especially those who want to genocide Russia. So they don't care if they are being slaughtered by LGBT rights or by Nordic supremacists, as the Russians turn into corpses all the same. But the crux of the matter is that the Westerners themselves in this cyberspace barely conceive of their empire as such - as capable of burning alive tens of millions of Russians this decade in an invasion surpassing the mythical Operation Barbarossa when Adolf Hitler launched his continental War of Extermination (Vernichtungskrieg) in 1941 CE. Just how come such a massive Baurdillard-esque parallel reality is possible? Is it because the brain-washing power of Western propaganda is so total, and the death of the anti-war pacifist movement so complete? Or are the Westerners truly "Nazi" under their veneer of civilisation, and they secretly yearn for it?
The visions of Nuclear Barbarossa fascinate my mind, with hundreds of nukes launched from the submarines onto the Russian silos and storage facilities, and thousands of Polish tanks blitzing through Belarus, precipitating Moscow's fall... And yet nobody else in the world is gripped by it? Maybe not Nazi per se, but still the largest genocide since Tojo.
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Some headlines I'm looking at, haven't posted these in a while. Also happy to discuss items from here. Something that's been on my mind is that narratives on Iran oil prices are kinda removed from the best indicator, which is number of ships passing through Hormuz.
Geopolitics
US strikes Iran in response to drone strike on commercial ship
US and Iran enter technical talks to secure peace deal, shipping restart
Sudan says China has waived $50m loan
The Balochistan Liberation Army is a global terrorist threat, says Pakistan.
UN must blacklist global terror threat BLA, says Pak
Lithuania moves to lift nuclear weapons ban, following Finland's lead
Ukraine war briefing: More than 2 million military casualties caused by Russia's invasion, study finds
Russia putting weapons on civilian ship in order to avoid it getting impounded by NATO
German Prosecutors Charge Suspect In Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage
United States
U.S. Rushes Elite Rescuers, Starlink Terminals, and Warships Into Venezuela's Disaster Zone
OpenAI reportedly discusses giving US government a 5% stake
Rest of the Americas
670,500 Haitians expelled from the Dominican Republic in 20 months
Middle East
Bahrain Targeted, Ship Struck as Iran War Ceasefire Tested
Israel defense minister says troops to stay ‘indefinitely’ in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza | Arab News
Israeli attacks have killed over 4,247 people in Lebanon since 2 March
What is the framework agreement signed by Israel and Lebanon? Israel attacks Lebanon News Al Jazeera
######## Iran
Iran nuclear and military damage revealed in restricted satellite images
Trump administration silent on Iranian school strike four months later | AP News
Iran opens Khamenei funeral ceremonies in Tehran
Asia
Bangladesh healthcare under strain as dengue cases hike amid measles burden
More than 100,000 killed in Myanmar since 2021 coup, monitor says
Pakistan airstrikes in Afghanistan
Africa
Terrorism: 79,323 killed, 34,773 abducted in 6 years, averaging seven attacks per day and roughly 36 victims daily, in Nigeria.
Africa CDC confirms Marburg case in Uganda as Ebola outbreak rages
Ebola Outbreak Could Cost Africa $3.6 Billion, UN Warns
Africa: WHO Adds First Diagnostic Test for Ebola Bundibugyo Virus to Its Emergency Use Listing
Burkina Faso’s military government severed diplomatic ties with France effective immediately, accusing Paris of “blatant neo-colonial ambitions” and of actively supporting subversive networks and terrorists.
Tanzania bans political rallies ahead of planned anti-government protests
Biorisks
Senate Armed Services Committee Flags mRNA Cuts, Biodefense Gaps in FY2027 Defense Bill
The Senate Armed Services Committee's FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act reflects concerns about U.S. biological preparedness and defense capabilities in light of federal public health funding cuts. Key provisions address military implications of mRNA vaccine funding deficits, vulnerability of anthrax countermeasures, and the security of pharmaceutical supply chains, driving the need for briefings from the Department of Defense to evaluate and mitigate these risks significantly affecting military readiness and servicemember health.
The report emphasizes several critical areas, including the prioritization of biological threat intelligence, the necessity of rapid detection capabilities for chemical and biological agents, and the integration of AI tools in medical countermeasure development. Additionally, accountability mechanisms are put in place due to concerns arising from the proposed reductions in funding for civilian health initiatives by the White House, highlighting the dual dependency of defense and public health systems.
Second batch of China medical expert teams to head to DRC for Ebola outbreak assistance: NHC
African Swine Fever Tightens Its Grip Across Asia-Pacific as Outbreaks Persist Into 2026
Patient tested for suspected Ebola virus at Glasgow hospital
Ebola outbreak spreads to 4th province in DR Congo
Scientists have built a cell from the ground up
Ebola in DR Congo: Mass gatherings banned in Kinshasa to contain spread
Ebola outbreak in Congo leads to banned public gatherings in four provinces
U.S. Measles Cases in 2026 Nearly Match Full-Year 2025 Toll With Six Months Still Remaining
Artificial Intelligence
Automated cyberattacks.
Claude Fable 5 available globally
Claude Science
OpenAI offers feds a stake, Anthropic gets out of AI model jail and Meta wants to be a neocloud
Google caps Meta's Gemini use as AI demand strains capacity
Huawei OpenPangu 2 Flash, 512K ctx 92A6B: Weights, inference code, training ops
Meta's brain-scanning system reads sentences non-invasively, code open source. Brain2Qwerty v2, the highest-performing end-to-end pipeline capable of real-time sentence decoding from non-invasive brain recordings, approaching levels of accuracy previously exclusive to techniques that require brain surgery.
GPT-5.6 Preview System Card
Claude Sonnet 5
GPT 5.6 Sol cheated during METR evaluations
Ukraine doing more AI integration. Drones already directed by AI in final seconds.
Austria urges Europe to host Anthropic following US curbs on AI access
Alibaba reportedly bans Anthropic’s Claude Code internally over ‘backdoor’ risk concerns. heh.
Why Washington’s AI Export Control Couldn’t Hold
Claude Desktop red team
Review of AI regulations in the US
Meta launches Pocket, an AI mini-game generator app
Goldman Sachs: AN AI JOB APOCALYPSE?
More tech
We built the fastest API for GLM-5.2 (280 TPS)
Leanstral 1.5 (Lean 4 formal verification MoE)
Climate and Nature
Spain heat wave kills over 1,000 in second-hottest June ever. But these are mostly old & sick people dying a bit earlier.
For non-paywalled information, see also the UN Secretary-General's most recent report, which quotes numbers from the International Organization on Migration.
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