It had me thinking about the young Americans who flew across the Atlantic to liberate Europe in world war 2. I Can only imagine what they were thinking as they were heading for the beaches in France.
The wreckage of the pro-Putin fake “left” on Twitter this morning is something to behold. They don’t know where they are.
Lashing out all around them. Paul Mason seems to be a particular target of their ire.
Being on the wrong side of history is not a pretty place to be.
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I’m forgetting what exactly? You brought up some nonsense a little a war plaque in reaction to me calling out the main opposition party here flip flopping on the topic at hand. Is this just your usual efforts at deflection or did that wall exercise you? I know there is large overlap between Éirígí types and Gemma supporters like yourself, so I fear the latter.
Maybe stay on topic for once.
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They were drinking like fish in Belarus.
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He is some twat
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Did you read about them being fed dogfood?
Its a bit worrying in some ways even more with Putin.
You don’t really want to corner a rat. Especially not one with a nuclear arsenal.
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Look over there. Look over there**
**You are right in many ways about memorials to Brit soldiers, but you know what art? Ireland’s capacity for individual kindness and forgiveness is just about the most special thing about it, and if this is just a reflection of that (and I believe it is in some significant way), so be it. Better than being a hateful nation like little ingerland.
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Mason? Why? His analysis of this conflict has been very good from the start. He called what Putin is a long time ago.
The people who are in disarray are the “stop the war” crowd, who chant “stop the war” as an empty slogan, and do everything they can to blame NATO for the war, not Putin.
“Stop the war” means nothing if you don’t understand who caused the war, who started the war, who wanted the war.
Empty appeals for “diplomacy” (now, at this stage, seriously?) are such a fundamental decision to misread the situation that you’d wonder if these fuckers have the intelligence to tie their own shoelaces.
Fact: there is a war.
Fact: Ukraine did not start it, NATO did not start it and neither Ukraine nor NATO nor anybody else in the world outside Russia and Belarus did anything to start it.
Fact: Ukraine are fighting on our behalf and we are leaving them on their own.
Fact: In a war of this nature, you wage it until you win. This is existential.
People who attribute blame for the war to the wrong people basically become active agents for Putin. I don’t know what it takes to get that through peoples thick skulls. “Stop the war” as used by these people has basically become the new anti-vaxxerism.
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Ah lovely
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The antisemitism animating Putin’s claim to ‘denazify’ Ukraine
The Russian leader’s pretext for invasion recasts Ukraine’s Jewish president as a Nazi and Russian Christians as true victims of the Holocaust
When Russian president Vladimir Putin announced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at dawn on Thursday, he justified the “special military operation” as having the goal to “denazify” Ukraine. The justification is not tenable, but it would be a mistake simply to dismiss it.
Vladimir Putin is himself a fascist autocrat, one who imprisons democratic opposition leaders and critics. He is the acknowledged leader of the global far right, which looks increasingly like a global fascist movement.
Ukraine does have a far-right movement, and its armed defenders include the Azov battalion, a far-right nationalist militia group. But no democratic country is free of far-right nationalist groups, including the United States. In the 2019 election, the Ukrainian far right was humiliated, receiving only 2% of the vote. This is far less support than far-right parties receive across western Europe, including inarguably democratic countries such as France and Germany.
Ukraine is a democratic country, whose popular president was elected, in a free and fair election, with over 70% of the vote. That president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is Jewish, and comes from a family partially wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust.
Putin’s claim that Russia is invading Ukraine to denazify it is therefore absurd on its face. But understanding why Putin justifies the invasion of democratic Ukraine in this way sheds important light on what is happening not only in eastern Europe, but worldwide.
Fascism is a cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by ethnic or religious minorities, liberals, feminists, immigrants, and homosexuals. The fascist leader claims the nation has been humiliated and its masculinity threatened by these forces. It must regain its former glory (and often its former territory) with violence. He offers himself as the only one who can restore it.
Central to European fascism is the idea that it is the Jews who are the agents of moral decay. According to European fascism, it is the Jews who bring a country under the domination of (Jewish) global elite, by using the tools of liberal democracy, secular humanism, feminism and gay rights, which are used to introduce decadence, weakness and impurity. Fascist antisemitism is racial rather than religious in origin, targeting Jews as a corrupt stateless race who seek global domination.
Fascism justifies its violence by offering to protect a supposedly pure religious and national identity from the forces of liberalism. In the west, fascism presents itself as the defender of European Christianity against these forces, as well as mass Muslim migration. Fascism in the west is thus increasingly hard to distinguish from Christian nationalism.
Putin, the leader of Russian Christian nationalism, has come to view himself as the global leader of Christian nationalism, and is increasingly regarded as such by Christian nationalists around the world, including in the United States. Putin has emerged as a leader of this movement in part because of the global reach of recent Russian fascist thinkers such as Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov who laid its groundwork.
It is easy to recognize, in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the roadmap laid out in recent years by Dugin and Prokhanov, major figures in Putin’s Russia. Both Dugin and Prokhanov viewed an independent Ukraine as an existential threat to their goal, which Timothy Snyder, in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom, describes as “a desire for the return of Soviet power in fascist form”.
The form of Russian fascism Dugin and Prokhanov defended is like the central versions of European fascism – explicitly antisemitic. As Snyder writes, “… if Prokhanov had a core belief, it was the endless struggle of the empty and abstract sea-people against the hearty and righteous land-people. Like Adolf Hitler, Prokhanov blamed world Jewry for inventing the ideas that enslaved his homeland. He also blamed them for the Holocaust.”
The dominant version of antisemitism alive in parts of eastern Europe today is that Jews employ the Holocaust to seize the victimhood narrative from the “real” victims of the Nazis, who are Russian Christians (or other non-Jewish eastern Europeans). Those who embrace Russian Christian nationalist ideology will be especially susceptible to this strain of antisemitism.
Prokhanov had a core belief, it was the endless struggle of the empty and abstract sea-people against the hearty and righteous land-people. Like Adolf Hitler, Prokhanov blamed world Jewry for inventing the ideas that enslaved his homeland. He also blamed them for the Holocaust
Timothy Snyder
With this background, we can understand why Putin chose the actions he did, as well as the words he used to justify them. Ukraine has always been the primary target of those who seek to restore “Soviet power in fascist form”. Echoing familiar fascist antisemitic tropes, in a 2021 article, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev denounced Zelenskiy as disgusting, corrupt and faithless. The free democratic election of a Jewish president confirms in the fascist mind that the fascist bogeyman of liberal democracy as a tool for global Jewish domination is real.
By claiming that the aim of the invasion is to “denazify” Ukraine, Putin appeals to the myths of contemporary eastern European antisemitism – that a global cabal of Jews were (and are) the real agents of violence against Russian Christians and the real victims of the Nazis were not the Jews, but rather this group. Russian Christians are targets of a conspiracy by a global elite, who, using the vocabulary of liberal democracy and human rights, attack the Christian faith and the Russian nation. Putin’s propaganda is not aimed at an obviously skeptical west, but rather appeals domestically to this strain of Christian nationalism.
There are broader morals here. The attack on liberal democracy in the west comes from a global fascist movement, whose center is Christian nationalism. It will be hard to disentangle this movement from antisemitism (albeit a version of antisemitism that allies with forces pushing for a Jewish nationalist state in Israel). Unsurprisingly, proponents of the view that a Christian nation needs protection and defense against liberalism, “globalism” and their supposed decadence, will be marshaled to their most violent actions when the faces of free, secular, tolerant liberal democracy prominently include Jewish ones.
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That is absolutely horrific. Those poor men.
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In the immortal words of John Rambo
Putin will have them incinerated further now, as he will with all dead Russian soldiers. There will be no Russian coffins coming home from Ukraine. No funerals. Just ash to fertilise the sunflowers.
Evaporators they call them
There’s no need to be putting up videos of carcasses of dead bodies.
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Every weapon the west can muster must flow into Ukraine. This is only the start. This is 1989. The despots must fall everywhere.
THREAD 1/7 Intel from a Ukrainian officer about a meeting in Putin’s lair in Urals. Oligarchs convened there so no one would flee. Putin is furious, he thought that the whole war would be easy and everything would be done in 1-4 days. @EPPGroup @general_ben @edwardlucas @politico
2/7 Russians didn’t have a tactical plan. The war costs about $20 bln/day. There are rockets for 3-4 days at most, they use them sparingly. They lack weapons, the Tula and 2 Rotenberg plants can’t physically fulfil the orders for weapons. Rifles and ammo are the most they can do.
3/7 The next Russian weapons can be produced in 3-4 months – if even that. They have no raw materials. What was previously supplied mainly from Slovenia, Finland and Germany is now cut off.
4/7 If Ukraine manages to hold the Russians off for 10 days, then the Russians will have to enter negotiations. Because they have no money, weapons, or resources. Nevertheless, they are indifferent about the sanctions.
5/7 Alpha Spec Ops have been near Kyiv since the 18th February. The goal was to take Kyiv and instal a puppet regime. They are preparing provocations against innocent civilians – women and children – to sow panic. This is their trump card.
6/7 Russia’s whole plan relies on panic – that the civilians and armed forces surrender and Zelensky flees. They expect Kharkiv to surrender first so the other cities would follow suit to avoid bloodshed. The Russians are in shock of the fierce resistance they have encountered.
7/7 The Ukrainians must avoid panic! The missile strikes are for intimidation, the Russians fire them at random to “accidentally” hit residential buildings to make the attack look larger than it really is. Ukraine must stay strong and we must provide assistance! #StandWithUkraine
8/7 Spread this information so the world would realise how important it is to assist Ukraine right now and without hesitation! It is difficult for Russia, but it is difficult for Ukraine as well if the West does not provide meaningul support! @EPPGroup @MFAestonia @MoD_Estonia
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This is war unfortunately.