RIP Instagram Yeltsin
Kieselguhr
joined 4 years ago
Munich Security Conference were already reeling
Do you know if UKR+USA blowing up Nord Stream was on the agenda of this important German security conference? What did they say about that? Will they bring them to justice?
It's amazing how obvious it is that Zelensky is just a regional manager propped up by the Corporate HQ in Washington.
White Terror actually murdered more civilians, but for some reason some historians don't count the antisemitic mass murders committed by the Whites.
That's true, but just calling it a different perspective makes it look more benign and naive than it actually is. They also purposefully lie and suppress factual narratives in the mainstream media, and they never use their own standards on their own power elite: Bush, Blair and the others never had their trial, even though they should be considered war criminals from even the liberal perspective.
Powell lied at the UN to start a war that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Even if I view the facts as a philosophical liberal who reads and loves Popper, Rawls et al. it's still an enormous crime that went uninvestigated and unpunished. Or the way they talk or don't talk about Nord Stream, Israel etc.
So yeah, some of them truly believe the West has the moral superiority, but it's the largest case of cognitive dissonance in history fuelled by deliberate propaganda. What's interesting is that some liberals truly grapple with this dissonance, while others just cynically incorporate a kind of racism of the Western Supremacy. The West is good therefore whatever the West does is good (That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal... etc.)
I haven't read the book in question, but it seems like to problem with it is a typical liberal illness - it doesn't have the toolset of critical historical materialism. It sounds like Reid took the diaries, letters, journals and memoirs of British soldiers and politicians of the time and compiled them into a narrative, and yes, it could be the case the "aims of the war are ill-defined" when we read the letters of so-and-so, but the Empire is a Behemoth that doesn't need to be fully understood by its agents. It very well could be that General X thinks they are spreading democracy, but that doesn't matter in the end. Imperialism has its own logic.
With that said there are cunning amoral pragmatic bastards as well, like Churchill, who fully understood that this was about Imperial interest not about Ideas. Or maybe even he himself has believed his speeches about 'democracy'.
Liberal historians are being weird again.
They correctly see certain facts (about the British intervention in the Russian Civil War):
There was plenty of reason to see the intervention as nasty – for starters, lack of clear war aims, atrocities on which the Allies turned a blind eye, half-hearted support of reactionaries followed by ignominious betrayal – but the real reason it was judged so harshly was that it failed. Nothing substantive was achieved, while, as the British commander of Allied forces in the north, Edmund Ironside, noted at the time of the British withdrawal from North Russia in the autumn of 1919, the cost was to incur ‘the everlasting enmity of both sides – the Whites for deserting them, and the Reds for opposing them’.
Exactly - it was hopeless and unnecessary.
Apart from getting rid of the Bolsheviks, the aims of the Western intervention were remarkably ill-defined. Sometimes it was to protect British interests and keep the Germans, Turks, Poles, or Japanese imperial or territorial ambitions in check; sometimes to support ‘democratic forces’ in Russia, notably the transient Czechs; and sometimes just to back up the (anti-democratic) Whites.
So the support of "democratic forces" was just posturing, in other words.
A national claim the Allies did not support, however, was the Ukrainian one, or rather, any of the various Ukrainian claims that were on offer.
the Allies essentially accepted the Poles’ argument that Ukrainian nationalism was German-inspired and incoherent, with little popular support. In Reid’s summation, although Ukrainians today ‘view the Allies’ failure to support them as a tragic missed opportunity’, ‘in truth the scoffers were probably right. Split, by the end of 1919, between two paper governments, one allied with the Poles against the Russians and the other the reverse, they did not have the leadership or unity to win power, even with outside military aid.’
Sounds about right
Reid’s encounter with widespread and virulent antisemitism – both as practised on the ground in Ukraine by Whites, Poles and Ukrainian nationalists, and as tacitly condoned by the Allies – was ‘one of the most jolting aspects of researching this book’. The first major pogroms of the Civil War were conducted in December 1918 by the Polish army after capturing Lviv from Ukrainian forces. The local British representative, setting a pattern that was often to be followed in subsequent months, ‘dismissed pogrom “rumours” as “grossly exaggerated”’. Antisemitism was a core component of White propaganda [..] Altogether, the pogroms of 1919 in Ukraine were on a scale ‘not seen since the Cossack rebellions of the 17th century’, but the Whites weren’t the only ones to blame: Symon Petilura’s and Nykyfor Hryhoriv’s Ukrainian forces, as well as Nestor Makhno’s anarchist ‘Greens’, were also heavily involved.
and so on and so on. But then.
Reid’s problem is that, recognising a degree of similarity in the two episodes of foreign involvement in war on Ukrainian territory, she holds diametrically opposed value judgments of them: the early 20th-century intervention on behalf of the Whites was pointless, but current Western support of Ukraine in a war started by the Russians is morally imperative and, in global political terms, necessary. Present-day Ukraine is a democratic or democratically aspiring country that ‘for all its faults ... really does deserve the world’s help’, she writes in the recent second edition of Borderland. ‘Betraying the country would be moral and strategic failure on a par with the crushed Hungarian Rising or Prague Spring – and with much less excuse.’
It is so weird that liberals have this fundamental premise that Western powers have both the moral superiority and the means to sort out conflicts in far away lands. How is this different from the early XXth century British conception of a benign civilizing Empire? What kind of mental gymnastics they need to perform so that their heads don't split from the cognitive dissonance? How come they don't see the similarities that the Western powers are willing to support any kind of reactionary force so long as it is in their geopolitical interest? That they didn't give a shit about pogroms, because the main concern was to own the ‘the blood-stained, Jew-led Bolsheviks’? That they are supporting Azov just to hinder Putler?
Perhaps the real takeaway from Reid’s history isn’t so much a lesson as a premonition: that not too far down the track, we could be witnessing a shamefaced withdrawal of Western support that leaves the Ukrainians – like the Russian Whites a century earlier – to sort out the mess with Moscow on their own.
It's always an "I told you so", but they just don't care.
Anyone who said a year ago that sending billions of dollars worth of weapons to one of the most corrupt countries on Earth is not the brightest idea*, was branded to be a Putlerist shill
Hell, even linking this article would make you seem like a Russian bot
*except of course if you own shares in the MIC
They claim in that thread that RU is losing 1k people on the front daily. I think they've learned statistics from the VoC foundation.
reddit is full of 
and shitlibs and chuds, of course, but I swear since even western MSM started to talk about Ukraine like it's a lost cause, the posts about "evil ruZZians" resurged with a fresh momentum.
users on r/europe have the gall to say Gaza is off-topic since it's not in Europe, even though EU countries send weapons to Israel - so it would definitely be more relevant to the presumably Western redditors handwringing about Putler. But I guess they don't want to 
out politicians aiding Israel's genocide. EU and European redditors are the worst kind of shitlibs.
Poe's law at work: some of them seem to think that rural chinese restuarants are involved in espionage
Just a couple of sidenotes
RU attacking Germany is as unlikely as RU shelling London, NY, or Tokyo
I think the news was that someone shelled Zaporizhzhia "Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for shelling the Russian-controlled plant." Now, I'm not Hercule Poirot, but if RU controlled the plant at the time, wouldn't that make UKR the most likely culprit?
Surely Russia turning a tap is less pertinent than USA literally bombing the pipeline?
So where are you buying from the rest of your resources? Surely nuclear is more feasible than coal from a purely geopolitical/economic point of view? I guess good luck with the solar panels.
You seem to be a bit confused about the situation.