Ukraine war mega thread

[bsnub]

Not so much a dead Russian soldier being returned to a grieving Mother/Wife ... it doesn't fit with the narrative, the Media propaganda.

No, and I have posted a vid here that validated that.

[bsnub]

I think this got lost in the spam that the Three Stooges push...



It really is an amazing vignette of a Russian soldier. Once again, you have to be sharp enough to click on the CC subtitles box in the bottom right of your YouTube.

[Buckaroo Banzai]

I think this got lost in the spam that the Three Stooges push...



It really is an amazing vignette of a Russian soldier. Once again, you have to be sharp enough to click on the CC subtitles box in the bottom right of your YouTube.

I don't know what this video proves or disproves.
idealistic youth send to do the dirty work of old men, and faced with the realities of war.
Is it any different for either side? has it ever been any different?

[Norton]

Is it any different for either side? has it ever been any different?

A double no from me.

[OhOh]

05-22-2022 - "WHAT'S UP WITH THE HOWITZERS?"

[Backspin]

[NamPikToot]

[Switch]

The much maligned and discredited Ritter issuing a self declared win?

Some pasty faced Judge?

Is that the best you can do?

They both look like they need physical and mental help to keep breathing for much longer …….

[harrybarracuda]

It's funny when the ones supporting the war criminals try and mock the other side.

They don't really understand how utterly fucking stupid they look.

[sabang]

The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d'état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.

There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

None of these opposition forces, which did not reverse the permanent war economy but curbed its excesses, now exist. The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry. Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts. NBC’s “Meet the Press” aired a segment May 13 where officials from Center for a New American Security (CNAS) simulated what a war with China over Taiwan might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle Flournoy, who appeared in the “Meet the Press” war games segment and was considered by Biden to run the Pentagon, wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”

The handful of anti-militarists and critics of empire from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, and the right, such as Ron Paul, have been declared persona non grata by a compliant media. The liberal class has retreated into boutique activism where issues of class, capitalism and militarism are jettisoned for “cancel culture,”

multiculturalism and identity politics. Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw them join significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler. There is little hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the disasters being orchestrated on a national and global level. The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists chant in unison for war. Biden has appointed these war mongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department.

Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. This military adventurism accelerates the decline, as the defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate. War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War, or the threat of war, will curb the growing economic and military clout of China.

These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality. No longer able to salvage their own society and economy, they seek to destroy those of their global competitors, especially Russia and China. Once the militarists cripple Russia, the plan goes, they will focus military aggression on the Indo-Pacific, dominating what Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, referring to the Pacific, called “the American Sea.”

You cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The U.S., whose growth rate has fallen to below 2 percent, while China’s growth rate is 8.1 percent, has turned to military aggression to bolster its sagging economy. If the U.S. can sever Russian gas supplies to Europe, it will force Europeans to buy from the United States. U.S. firms, at the same time, would be happy to replace the Chinese Communist Party, even if they must do it through the threat of war, to open unfettered access to Chinese markets. War, if it did break out with China, would devastate the Chinese, American, and global economies, destroying free trade between countries as in World War I. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Washington is desperately trying to build military and economic alliances to ward off a rising China, whose economy is expected by 2028 to overtake that of the United States, according to the UK’s Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The White House has said Biden’s current visit to Asia is about sending a “powerful message” to Beijing and others about what the world could look like if democracies “stand together to shape the rules of the road.” The Biden administration has invited South Korea and Japan to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.

But fewer and fewer nations, even among European allies, are willing to be dominated by the United States. Washington’s veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its economic decline, with China’s manufacturing 70 percent higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible. War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Thucydides noted in the History of the Peloponnesian War.

A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class, and military families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service. It protects the military from internal revolts, carried out by troops during the Vietnam War, which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed forces.

The All-Volunteer Force, by limiting the pool of available troops, also makes the global ambitions of the militarists impossible. Desperate to maintain or increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military instituted the stop-loss policy that arbitrarily extended active-duty contracts. Its slang term was the backdoor draft. The effort to bolster the number of troops by hiring private military contractors, as well, had a negligible effect. Increased troop levels would not have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the tiny percentage of those willing to serve in the military (only 7 percent of the U.S. population are veterans) is an unacknowledged Achilles heel for the militarists.

“As a consequence, the problem of too much war and too few soldiers eludes serious scrutiny,” writes historian and retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich in After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. “Expectations of technology bridging that gap provide an excuse to avoid asking the most fundamental questions: Does the United States possess the military wherewithal to oblige adversaries to endorse its claim of being history’s indispensable nation? And if the answer is no, as the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, wouldn’t it make sense for Washington to temper its ambitions accordingly?”

This question, as Bacevich points out, is “anathema.” The military strategists work from the supposition that the coming wars won’t look anything like past wars. They invest in imaginary theories of future wars that ignore the lessons of the past, ensuring more fiascos.


The political class is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses to accept the emergence of a multi-polar world and the palpable decline of American power. It speaks in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it has the right to impose its will as the leader of the “free world.” In his 1992 Defense Planning Guidance memorandum, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival superpower again arises. The U.S. should project its military strength to dominate a unipolar world in perpetuity. On February 19, 1998, on NBC’s “TodayShow”, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version of this doctrine of unipolarity. “If we have to use force it is because we are Americans; we are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”

This demented vision of unrivaled U.S. global supremacy, not to mention unrivaled goodness and virtue, blinds the establishment Republicans and Democrats. The military strikes they casually used to assert the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and prolonged warfare. None of them saw it coming until the hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center twin towers. That they cling to this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope over experience.

There is a deep loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy League architects of American imperialism. Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to project power abroad and produce rising living standards at home. It was tolerated when it restrained itself to covert interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam. The military defeats that followed accompanied a steady decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series of economic policies and trade deals, orchestrated by the same ruling class, which deindustrialized and impoverished the country.

The establishment oligarchs, now united in the Democratic Party, distrust Donald Trump. He commits the heresy of questioning the sanctity of the American empire. Trump derided the invasion of Iraq as a “big, fat mistake.” He promised “to keep us out of endless war.” Trump was repeatedly questioned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin was “a killer,” one interviewer told him. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump retorted. “You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump dared to speak a truth that was to be forever unspoken, the militarists had sold out the American people.

Noam Chomsky took some heat for , correctly, that Trumpis the “one statesman” who has laid out a “sensible” proposition to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution included “facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe…in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation.”

Trump is too unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the economic war against Venezuela and reinstituted crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which the Obama administration had ended. He increased the military budget. He apparently flirted with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” But he acknowledges a distaste for imperial mismanagement that resonates with the public, one that has every right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us into one war after another. Trump lies like he breathes. But so do they.

The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier$13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”

“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”

Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/l...Y8&s=r#details

[sabang]

US Senator Joe Manchin said at the World Economic Forum on Monday that he opposes any kind of peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia.

Manchin, who at the moment is one of the most powerful elected officials in Washington, added that only the complete forcible ejection of Russia from all of Ukraine is acceptable, that the war should ideally be used to remove Putin from power, and that he and the strategists he talks to see this war as an “opportunity”.

“I am totally committed, as one person, to seeing Ukraine to the end with a win, not basically with some kind of a treaty; I don’t think that is where we are and where we should be,” Manchin said.

“I mean basically moving Putin back to Russia and hopefully getting rid of Putin,” Manchin added when asked what he meant by a win for Ukraine.

Manchin clarified that he did not mean pushing Putin back to “pre-February”, ostensibly meaning with Russia still controlling the largely Moscow–loyal Crimea and supporting separatist territories in the Donbass, but with Kyiv fully reclaiming all parts of the nation.

“Oh no, I think Ukraine is determined to take their country back,” Manchin said when asked to clarify, further clarifying that he wants his call for regime change in Russia to be carried out by “the Russian people.”

“I believe strongly that I have never seen, and the people I talk strategically have never seen, an opportunity more than this, to do what needs to be done,” Manchin later added. “And Ukraine has the determination to do it. We should have the commitment to support it.”

Manchin’s comments fit in perfectly with what we know about the US-centralized empire’s real agendas in Ukraine.

Earlier this month Ukrainian media reported that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the nation’s president Volodymyr Zelensky on behalf of NATO powers that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”

Last month US Secretary of “Defense” Lloyd Austin acknowledged that the goal in this war is not peace in Ukraine or the mere military defeat of Russia but to actually weaken Russia as a nation, saying “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

Last week The New York Times reported that the Biden administration is developing plans to “further choke Russia’s oil revenues with the long-term goal of destroying the country’s central role in the global energy economy.”

Just the other day Ukraine’s military intelligence chief announced that the mission has already creeped forward from the goal of defeating the Russian invaders to reclaiming the Crimean territory which was annexed by the Russian Federation in 2014.

Two months ago Biden himself acknowledged what the real game is here with an open call for regime change, saying of Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

Statements from the Biden administration in fact indicate that they expect this war to drag on for a long time, making it abundantly clear that a swift end to minimize the death and destruction is not just uninteresting but undesirable for the US empire.

This is not a proxy war with peace as an option anywhere within sight. It’s not about saving Ukrainian lives. It’s not even about beating Russia in Ukraine. It’s about achieving regime change in Moscow, no matter how many lives need to be destroyed in the process.

Peace is not on the menu.

his war could easily have been prevented with a little diplomacy and reasonable compromise. As the University of Ottawa’s Ivan Katchanovski recently explained to The Maple, “an agreement in which Ukraine promised to remain a neutral country and the fulfilment of the Minsk accords could have stopped Putin’s invasion.”

We know now that the US intelligence cartel had good visibility into what the Kremlin had planned for Ukraine, so they would have known exactly what could have been done to prevent the invasion. They knowingly chose to do none of those things, because the goal was to provoke this war the entire time and then weaponize it against Moscow.

That’s why the Biden administration has been hindering diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to this war, why it has refused to provide Ukraine with any kind of diplomatic negotiating power regarding the possible rollback of sanctions and other US measures to help secure peace, and why Washington’s top diplomats have consistently been conspicuously absent from any kind of dialogue with their counterparts in Moscow.

Empire spinmeisters and their propagandized victims like to claim that Ukrainian forces are fighting for “peace” in Ukraine. The other day Kyiv Independent’s Illia Ponomarenko, who has called the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion his “brothers in arms,” tweeted this:

https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1527982921625346049?s=20&t=JV1dz45Yi0RWMVGKX6CrKg

But anyone who understands this war knows this is ridiculous. Peace is not the goal in Ukraine. Most of the Ukrainians doing the fighting surely believe they are fighting for peace in their homeland, and peace is surely their intention, but that’s not something the empire will allow if the empire gets any say in the matter.

Even if Ukraine does somehow avoid being used as cannon fodder to draw Moscow into a long and costly slog as US officials have admitted was done in both Afghanistan and in Syria, and even if they do somehow manage to deliver a crushing and conclusive defeat to Moscow in the near term (which is far less probable than the western media would have you believe), that wouldn’t be the end of the war. The war would just change shape as the empire and its proxies go on the offensive against Moscow.

This war does not end with Russia being driven from Ukraine, it ends with regime change and the balkanization of the Russian Federation. Really it doesn’t end until the rise of China has been stopped and US unipolar hegemony secured. Or when the empire collapses. Or when we all die in a nuclear holocaust.

All forward motion in this war has nothing but violence as far as the eye can see on its trajectory into the future. No matter how much wealth and war machinery you pour into this conflict, that trajectory of death and destruction will just keep stretching out to the horizon. As Chris Hedges recently explained, war is the only path the empire has left open to itself.

I’ve seen some cute kids in my time, but nobody’s as adorable as people who think the US pours weapons into foreign nations in order to achieve peace.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/05...not-an-option/

[harrybarracuda]

Nice to see a Republican not kissing Putin's arse.

[sabang]

OPINION

Republicans return to their roots as the antiwar party

Since the Vietnam era, Americans have come to expect antiwar rhetoric from liberal Democrats. Cancel that.

By Stephen Kinzer Contributor,Updated May 26, 2022





With Americans now engulfed in passion for Ukraine, it wasn’t surprising that President Biden proposed sending $33 billion worth of weaponry and other aid to Ukraine’s beleaguered military. Nor was it surprising that Congress raised the number to $40 billion, or that both the Senate and House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor. Hidden within that lopsided vote, though, was a shocker: Every single “no” vote — 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House — came from a Republican.

Since the Vietnam era, Americans have come to expect antiwar rhetoric from liberal Democrats. Cancel that. This month’s votes in Washington signal a dramatic role reversal. Suddenly it is conservative Republicans who oppose US involvement in foreign wars.

The most ringing antiwar speeches during this month’s debate came from far-right members of Congress. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida sounded like a latter-day George McGovern when he warned of “a dangerous bipartisan consensus that is walking us into war with Russia. . . . Just a year ago we lost a war against goat herders waving rifles. Now we’re rushing to fight a nation that possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads?”

On the Democratic side, by contrast, there was nothing but outrage, denunciation of Russia, and aggressive chest-beating. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described democratic socialist, voted for the $40 billion. So did Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and her ultra-progressive comrades in “the Squad.” Even Representative Barbara Lee, who in 2001 cast the only vote against launching what became the “global war on terror,” supported it. She said arming Ukraine is necessary because invading Russian troops are committing “crimes against humanity” and President Vladimir Putin is “trying to establish autocratic governments around the world.”

This table-turning makes ideological sense. Conservatives instinctively oppose social programs aimed at reshaping America. If they are consistent — as lamentably few are — they should also oppose projects aimed at reshaping other countries. It is liberal utopianism that tells Americans we can and should transform the world, react forcefully whenever crimes against humanity are committed, and fight to resist the emergence of autocratic governments anywhere.

Most intriguing about this political turnabout is that it does not represent a new departure for conservative Republicans, but rather a return to form. Over the past century and more, Republicans have repeatedly emerged as powerful voices opposing US intervention abroad. Today’s antiwar Republicans are calling the party back to its roots.

The most famous Republican in American history, Abraham Lincoln, outspokenly condemned the US seizure of Mexican territory while he was a congressman in the 1840s, before the party even existed. Half a century later, Republicans became principal leaders of the Anti-Imperialist League. One of them, Governor George Boutwell of Massachusetts, a cofounder of the GOP, denounced America’s “aggressive, unjustifiable, cruel war” in the Philippines, and said every country should be free to design its own government “without any inquiry by us as to its character.”

An idealistic Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, indulged the millenarian fantasy that the United States could secure “the final triumph of justice” by creating “a new international order under which reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail.” He ended up setting off nationalist rebellions in half a dozen countries and helping to lay the groundwork for Bolshevism and World War II.

All three presidents who succeeded Wilson were conservative Republicans who favored restrained foreign policy. Warren G. Harding said in his inaugural address that the United States “can be party to no permanent military alliance” and added: “We do not hate; we do not covet; we dream of no conquest, nor boast of armed prowess.”

Calvin Coolidge summoned world leaders to Geneva and proposed a global treaty to limit naval power, but was stymied by a coalition of shipbuilders, steel manufacturers, and arms makers. Herbert Hoover was the most anti-imperialist of all 20th-century presidents. He dared to tell Americans that many people abroad consider the United States “a new imperial power intent upon dominating the destinies and freedoms of other people,” and vowed never “to interfere by force to secure or maintain contracts between our citizens and foreign states.”

After World War II, Senator Robert Taft, known as “Mr. Republican,” led opposition to the proposed military alliance that became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “The building up of a great army surrounding Russia,” he warned, “violates the whole spirit of the United Nations charter.” He said the NATO alliance would set off “an inevitable arms race” because it “necessarily divides the world into two enemy camps.”

Since then, Republican presidents like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush have reveled in their ability to bomb other countries and overthrow their governments. Democrats often protested, urging more diplomacy and less rush to conflict. That period may have been an aberration. History, and this month’s votes in Congress, suggest that conservative Republicans make the best peaceniks.

https://archive.ph/YmP1t


Interesting little history lesson.

[harrybarracuda]

Interesting little history lesson.

If you know fuck all about history I would imagine it is.

[sabang]

Oh but of course Einstein, we don't all have your encyclopedic knowledge of American political history- y'know Senator Taft, Calvin Coolidge and so on, and their attitudes to foreign engagement and interventionism. This one was strictly for the rest of us Prof.

[sabang]

"I'm finding myself having less and less patience with people who think the US is an innocent little flower regarding the Ukraine war. It's like, come on. Grow the fuck up."


"The airhead mainstream narrative that Ukrainian forces have been destroying Russian troops and humiliating Putin in epic win after epic win has become unsustainable:"


https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/kayfabe-populism-notes-from-the-edge?s=w

[harrybarracuda]

Oh but of course Einstein, we don't all have your encyclopedic knowledge of American political history- y'know Senator Taft, Calvin Coolidge and so on, and their attitudes to foreign engagement and interventionism. This one was strictly for the rest of us Prof.

If you try and read some big words you'll find even more amazing things about Republicans.

You should try reading about the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

Then you won't come across as such a skidmark-style thicko who has to google everything.

[panama hat]

Then you won't come across as such a skidmark-style thicko who has to google everything.

Well, he still does but just not as much.

"I'm finding myself having less and less patience with people who think the US is an innocent little flower regarding the Ukraine war. It's like, come on. Grow the fuck up."

There's a moron quoting a moron . . . that'd be you, sabang, quoting her:

Caitlin Johnstone is a 100 percent crowdfunded rogue journalist, bogan socialist, anarcho-psychonaut, guerilla poet and utopia prepper living in Australia with her American husband and two kids. She writes about politics, economics, media, feminism and the nature of consciousness. She is the author of the illustrated poetry book "Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers."

Caitlin Johnstone | Scoop InfoPages

[sabang]

That's Catty! I find her polemics quite entertaining.

[OhOh]

29 May, 2022 20:50 HomeWorld News

Israel threatens rival over attacks through ‘proxies’

Iran’s era of “immunity” is over, Israeli PM says, vowing to go after the “head of the octopus” for instigating violence.

"Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has called out Iran for attacking his country through terrorist proxies, saying the Persian Gulf nation will no longer go unpunished for using third parties to strike its enemies.
“For decades, the Iranian regime has practiced terrorism against Israel and the region by means of proxies, emissaries, but the head of the octopus, Iran itself, has enjoyed immunity,” Bennett said on Sunday in a broadcast to his ministers. “As we have said before, the era of the Iranian regime’s immunity is over.”"

Israel threatens rival over attacks through ‘proxies’ — RT World News

Inferring via a mirror, a similarly held view as the 84% of the world's countries, regarding Israel, NaGastan ....

"For decades, the NaGatstan regime has practiced terrorism against (insert any sovereign country here) and the region by means of proxies, emissaries, but the head of the octopus, NaGastan itself, has enjoyed immunity,”

Bennett said on Sunday in a broadcast to his ministers.

“As we have said before, the era of the NaGastan regime’s immunity is over."

The cap fits perfectly, sir, wear it with pride.

29 May, 2022 17:19

HomeWorld News

Foreign fighters in Ukraine ‘underequipped and outgunned’ – Washington Post

Many fighters fresh from the battlefield recounted to the Washington Post “glaring disparities” between expectations and reality.

"Americans and other foreign fighters who had travelled to Ukraine in order to fight Russia, and have now returned home, have spoken of their disappointment to the Washington Post.The newspaper's reporting marks a small change in tone in US/UK mainstream coverage of the conflict. In the article, those interviewed lamented, among other things, a lack of equipment and weapons and poor lines of communication.

One of the fighters who agreed to speak to the paper, asked to be named only by his first name, Dakota, over concerns for his own safety and that of his family. A US Marine Corps veteran, he arrived in Ukraine just days after Russia launched its military operation, back in February.

He and several other foreign fighters were reportedly tasked with assisting and training Ukrainian troops in the use of US-made anti-tank Javelin missiles. In early March, the Ukrainian unit Dakota was attached to, he explained, was deployed to an unnamed town northwest of Kiev, where they came under heavy Russian fire. The Marine Corps veteran recalled that while his team had been issued Javelins and other anti-tank weapons, they had no batteries for the launch units, which effectively rendered the missiles unusable.

After two nights under heavy Russian artillery bombardment, eight out of twenty foreign fighters from Dakota’s unit abandoned their positions, he explained. He claimed that a fellow US Marine veteran had tried to break his machine gun with a rock, apparently hoping to pass it off as battle damage, while another one had feigned injury.

The US national eventually returned home after he was diagnosed with a brain injury, which as he said, was likely the result of him having been too close to shelling.
Another US army veteran, Dane Miller, who did not take part in the actual fighting in Ukraine but rather helped assess prospective foreign fighters’ military records in Poland, told the Post that some of the volunteers had overestimated their military experience. According to Miller, not all of the men wishing to fight for Ukraine had been in combat before, despite being military veterans, while others had only taken part in limited counter-insurgency operations.

As a result, he had to advise some of the aspiring fighters, who were apparently driven by “this idea of heroism,” against going to Ukraine"


Continues:

https://www.rt.com/news/556298-forei...isappointment/

[harrybarracuda]

Oh look, someone's posting Russian propaganda in a Ukraine war thread. Who could it be?

[Iceman123]

Sadly, Ukraine is now having its arse kicked.

Play with the propaganda anyway you want but the facts stand.

[harrybarracuda]

Sadly, Ukraine is now having its arse kicked.

Play with the propaganda anyway you want but the facts stand.

So in which areas is it having its "arse kicked"?

Since as far as I can tell it just got kicked out of Karkiv and is now going all out with the local pro-puffy militia it sponsors to try and take Donbas, which it has failed to do conquer for four years

So do share your information by all means.

[OhOh]

The term "UkraineStan",

"We'll turn Ukraine, into another Afghanistan",

has popped up, used by Col. Douglas Macgregor:

"Douglas Abbott Macgregor (born January 4, 1953) is a retired U.S. Army Colonel and government official, and an author, consultant, and television commentator."

Douglas Macgregor - Wikipedia

In a 20 minute video, "Ukraine Russia war UPDATE", produced by "Judge Napolitano".

"Andrew Peter Napolitano^[1] (born June 6, 1950) is an American syndicated columnist whose work appears in numerous publications, including The Washington Times and Reason.

He was an analyst for Fox News, commenting on legal news and trials. Napolitano served as a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995.

He was a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School. He has written nine books on legal and political subjects."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Napolitano

available here:

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Enjoy or dismiss.

"It's Up To You"

[Troy]

So do share your information by all means.

The Russians have all but secured the Luhansk region. It has been slow progress but they are steadily achieving their goal of securing the whole of the Donbas.

I don't know if the Ukraine army retreated from Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, but they needed to if they don't want to be surrounded.