Ukraine, Russia etc.

[Mr. Tea]

To a Blur soundtrack.

Song Tu-22

 

[Mr. Tea]

Mearsheimer has been sounding the this was almost inevitable since the orange coup/revolution. He writes for Foriegn Affairs and except for zionists both Christian & Jewish, has an unimpeachable record.

From 2015:

See, even just the title of this video illustrates pretty well the general idea I'm talking about, which is that Russia is at a huge advantage over the West in one respect, because there are tons of pro-Russian Westerners, but AFAICT no pro-Western Russians. Westerners in their liberal democracies tend to be very smug about things like freedom of speech, but they don't always recognise that this can constitute a massive weakness compared to authoritarian/totalitarian states where the government strictly controls the flow of information into and around the country and violently punishes dissent.

So I think very few people in Russia think the opposite of what's being presented here - that their country started a nakedly imperialist war of conquest against a country that poses no threat to them at all - and if any of them do think that, they're not saying it publicly, because they'd find themselves in prison, receiving the Navalny treatment. (Perhaps I'm being too hard on ordinary Russians here - I know there were anti-war protests a few years ago - but even there, I got the impression that these were more about the unfairness of conscription than about the inherent unjustness of the war itself. And there was certainly widespread support for the war, at least initially.)

Whereas in Western countries, your Finkelsteins and Mearsheimers are free to publicly lick the Russian boot, and far from risking imprisonment, torture and death, they're making good careers out of it.

 

[GhostofKinski]

See, even just the title of this video illustrates pretty well the general idea I'm talking about, which is that Russia is at a huge advantage over the West in one respect, because there are tons of pro-Russian Westerners, but AFAICT no pro-Western Russians. Westerners in their liberal democracies tend to be very smug about things like freedom of speech, but they don't always recognise that this can constitute a massive weakness compared to authoritarian/totalitarian states where the government strictly controls the flow of information into and around the country and violently punishes dissent.

So I think very few people in Russia think the opposite of what's being presented here - that their country started a nakedly imperialist war of conquest against a country that poses no threat to them at all - and if any of them do think that, they're not saying it publicly, because they'd find themselves in prison, receiving the Navalny treatment. (Perhaps I'm being too hard on ordinary Russians here - I know there were anti-war protests a few years ago - but even there, I got the impression that these were more about the unfairness of conscription than about the inherent unjustness of the war itself. And there was certainly widespread support for the war, at least initially.)

Whereas in Western countries, your Finkelsteins and Mearsheimers are free to publicly lick the Russian boot, and far from risking imprisoned, torture and death, they're making good careers out of it.

The talk was from 2015 idk if it had that title back then as it was 5+ years before the invasion by Russia. I thought Meirsheimer made perfect sense and his analysis was not only accurate, but damn near clairvoyant.
The U.S. would never let China/Russis push up on our borders in Canada & Mexico. We were moments away from the world ending during the Cuban missile conflict.
I don’t want to speculate about how the average Russian feels because there are a lot of Russians. In general I find them to be obnoxious know-it-alls on virtually every subject. But, I went back to school well into adulthood. Just a Jr. college (CUNY) and I was stricken by how many professors from the Maths/Scienes to English Litetature were all educated in the former Soviet Union.
The Sciences didn’t raise any eyebrows for me but Literature (in English) I was ashamed of myself and my fellow students.
Idk why you would call JM, & especially Finkelstein Russian boot lickers. If you, like JM are a West Point grad during the Cold War and go on to specialize in regional/ world power, I think it would not be possible to not know an awful lot about Russia.
The Finkelstein observation is from out of space imo. I’ve read most of his work and corresponded with him for a spell. The only time I’ve ever heard him talk about Russia was in the context of his mother (not sure about his father, can’t remember which camp he was liberated out of) had undying loyalty for the rest of her life to the USSR for saving her life and doing more to destroy the Nazi war machine than all the other allies combined.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The talk was from 2015 idk if it had that title back then as it was 5+ years before the invasion by Russia. I thought Meirsheimer made perfect sense and his analysis was not only accurate, but damn near clairvoyant.

Russia began invading Ukraine in 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation

The U.S. would never let China/Russis push up on our borders in Canada & Mexico. We were moments away from the world ending during the Cuban missile conflict.

Well yes, obviously, but the USSR put nuclear missiles in Cuba and pointed them at the US. There are no American nukes in Ukraine pointed at Russia, are there? So it's an irrelevant comparison.

Idk why you would call JM, & especially Finkelstein Russian boot lickers.

 

[Mr. Tea]

All these people are just Lord Haw-Haw wearing a Palestine flag pin badge.

 

[GhostofKinski]

Russia began invading Ukraine in 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation



Well yes, obviously, but the USSR put nuclear missiles in Cuba and pointed them at the US. There are no American nukes in Ukraine pointed at Russia, are there? So it's an irrelevant comparison.



View attachment 22990

The Crimea “invasion” is a misnomer.
Yes, Crimea was part of Ukrainian territory. But, without splitting hairs it is to me like saying Puerto Rico is a non state part of the United States. At least half of the population spoke & identified as Russian. The Ukraine was in turmoil due in no small part to U.S./western interference and was as corrupt as a European territory can be.

At the time of the Cuban Missile crisis the U.S. had nuclear tipped Jupiter missiles in Turkey pointed right at Moscow.

You’re pretty dismissive about highly sophisticated weapons systems being moved into Ukraine by the west, than they did before Russia, finally, after making it clear on numerous occasions that NATO’s expansion (see Estonia & Latvia) to Russias border would not go without serious consequences.
Ignored by NATO/the west.

I couldn’t load, watch the NF comment about Russia being right but I will YT it and get back after I get my kid to school.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Why do you the Baltic states might have chosen to join NATO? Or Sweden and Finland more recently?

 

[Mr. Tea]

And I can't help but chuckle at "invasion is a misnomer." If tanks rolling across the border from one country into another doesn't constitute an invasion then the word has no meaning.

The "Ukraine is/was corrupt (so Russia is right to invade it)" line is funny, too. Do we therefore conclude that Russia, of all countries, is corruption-free? It could also make a pretty good justification for the US invasion of Iraq, no?

You'll also have to provide some details of these "sophisticated weapons systems being moved into Ukraine" (and why this greenlights Russian bombardment of civilians and civilian infrastructure).

I mean, I recognise that neither of us is going to change the other's mind, here. I'm just interested in your thought processes that led to these conclusions.

 

[GhostofKinski]

And I can't help but chuckle at "invasion is a misnomer." If tanks rolling across the border from one country into another doesn't constitute an invasion then the word has no meaning.

The "Ukraine is/was corrupt (so Russia is right to invade it)" line is funny, too. Do we therefore conclude that Russia, of all countries, is corruption-free? It could also make a pretty good justification for the US invasion of Iraq, no?

You'll also have to provide some details of these "sophisticated weapons systems being moved into Ukraine" (and why this greenlights Russian bombardment of civilians and civilian infrastructure).

I mean, I recognise that neither of us is going to change the other's mind, here. I'm just interested in your thought processes that led to these conclusions.

The only thought process I’m working from is Americans (me) having the balls to call out countries that behave in the exact same way as we do, all over the world.

 

[GhostofKinski]

Without looking it up yet I do now recall Finkelstein saying something about Germany supplying Tanks to Ukraine and saying that within living memory of a dwindling but still good amount of people, Germany is responsible for invading/killing 20 million Russians during WWII and saying he hoped those tanks should get burned to a crisp.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The only thought process I’m working from is Americans (me) having the balls to call out countries that behave in the exact same way as we do, all over the world.

But you seem to be strenuously avoiding doing that in the case of Russia, specifically.

 

[thirdform]

Crimean Tatar language is mutually intelligible with Turkish. Has very little to do with Russian or Ukrainian.

Don't care for the tet-a-tet between you two but just felt it necessary to state that.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Without looking it up yet I do now recall Finkelstein saying something about Germany supplying Tanks to Ukraine and saying that within living memory of a dwindling but still good amount of people, Germany is responsible for invading/killing 20 million Russians during WWII and saying he hoped those tanks should get burned to a crisp.

Well he's openly cheering on this century's fascist invader, then, isn't he? German military equipment is being used to defend Ukraine from Russia's invasion. Russian military equipment is being used to terrorise a civilian population. If any country at present is fitting the bill as the 21st century analogue of Nazi Germany, it's not Germany but Russia, right down to the antisemitic propaganda:



That's why I'm comparing Finkelstein to Lord Haw-Haw.

 

[thirdform]

Well he's openly cheering on this century's fascist invader, then, isn't he? German military equipment is being used to defend Ukraine from Russia's invasion. Russian military equipment is being used to terrorise a civilian population. If any country at present is fitting the bill as the 21st century analogue of Nazi Germany, it's not Germany but Russia, right down to the antisemitic propaganda:

View attachment 22993

That's why I'm comparing Finkelstein to Lord Haw-Haw.

Germany also massively funding Israel's genocide.

bourgeois campist politics are so stupid. Finkelstein is a campist, you are a campist (even if unconsciously).

 

[GhostofKinski]

But you seem to be strenuously avoiding doing that in the case of Russia, specifically.

Idk. I don’t get the sensation of strenuously defending Russia. I have zero love for Putin & besides one day visiting the Hermitage, no fascination with Russia. I do know that we (the U.S.) would have used lethal force if a nuclear armed foreign power (Russia or China) made some sort of exclusivity agreement with Mexico or Canada.
Especially knowing our stances, whether it be aiding and abetting a genocidein Gaza, to Iraq, Libya.and generally sticking our nose in other countries business on every continent.
If it comes off as being a Putin apologist, you can believe it or not that’s your opinion.
But I don’t feel that way.
I do feel like anyone that does try to put the Rus/Uke war in context by comparing it to our own behavior seems to get called a Putin toasdie at best and a dupe/russian spy at worst. All of which I’ve read on here from various posters.

 

[thirdform]

that's the thing, being a nationalist for anyone (even if under the benign rubric of anti-oppression) always means nationalism at the expense of someone else.

 

[thirdform]

16. Without demanding royalties for just the one line, we can complete the chapter which was interrupted by the death of Karl Marx (which he would have considered an arbitrary individual incident, and who was accustomed to quote Epicurus on such occasions; a philosopher to whom the young post-graduate had dedicated his thesis). As related by Engels: “Every event which derives from necessity carries in itself its own consolation”. It is pointless to have regrets.
It isn’t identifying sources of revenue, as it appears “at first glance”, which defines class.
With one blow, syndicalism, workerism, labourism, corporatism, Mazzinism and Christian socialism are knocked off their pedestals once and for all; including all past versions and those yet to come.
But our conquest went well beyond getting the ideologues of the spirit and of the individual, of the liberal society and of the constitutional State, to recognise, in a half-hearted way, that different professions and trades have collective interests which cannot be ignored. More than anything our initial victory lay in establishing that, with regard to the “social question”, even in such a reduced form, it was useless to stick ones nose in the air and close ones eyes to it. It would penetrate the modern world. But spreading through it in a capillary fashion is one thing; it is quite another to smash it to smithereens.
It is worthless, statistically, to define classes in a “qualitative” way according to monetary source of income. It is even stupider to select them in a quantitative way according to the “pyramid of earnings”. For centuries this has been raised: and in fact the State census in Rome is all about income scales. For centuries simple arithmetic operations have shown to the philosophers of poverty that reducing the pyramid to a more level prism, but on the same foundations, will just create a society of paupers.
Is there, qualitatively and quantitatively, a way out from these myriad difficulties? A senior civil servant is paid a salary, and therefore according to time, just like a wage earning labourer who works, let’s say, in a State saltworks; however the former’s income is higher than many merchants and industrial capitalists who live off profit; the labourer’s salary is higher not only than many small peasants’ income, but also more than that of many minor landlords living off rent...
A class isn’t defined by income statements, but by historical position within the gigantic struggle by which a new general form of production overtakes, overthrows and then replaces the old one.
It is stupid to consider society as simply made up of the sum of its individuals understood in an abstract sense, but it is no less stupid to see class as simply made up of individuals understood as economic units. ’Individual’, ’class’ and ’society’ are not pure, idealist categories. Since they are constantly altering within time and space, they are the products of a general process, whose sovereign laws have been worked out by applying the powerful methods of the Marxist approach.
The concrete social mechanism propels and moulds individuals, classes and societies without “consulting them” on any level.
A class is defined by its historic task and the road it takes, and our class, via an arduous dialectical point of arrival to be reached only after immense effort, is defined by the revendication that the class itself should actually cease to exist in a statistical quantitative and qualitative sense; a demand made particularly with regard to itself (since it has little or no interest in advocating the disappearance of its enemy classes, a process well underway already).
Today the class as a whole appears before us in a state of constant flux: as nowadays it is for Stalin, for a capitalist State such as Russia, for a gang of MPs and would-be MPs who are much more anti-Marxist than Turati, Bissolati, Longuet and Millerand ever were.
17. Therefore all that remains is the party as the existing organ which defines the class, struggles for the class, and when the time comes governs for the class and prepares for a time when there will be no governments, and no classes. On condition, that is, that the party doesn’t belong to particular men, doesn’t succumb to the cult of the leader; that it goes back to defending, with blind faith if necessary, its invariable theory and rigid organisation; and the method which doesn’t set out from sectarian preconceptions, but knows that in a society which has developed into its typical form (like Israel at year zero, and Europe at year 1900) one has to strictly apply the battle-cry: those who aren’t with us are against us.

The Historical Invariance of Marxism - 1952

 

[GhostofKinski]

If any country at present is fitting the bill as the 21st century analogue of Nazi Germany, it's not Germany but Russia, right down to the antisemitic propaganda

Speaking of the Bizarre: didn’t the German Government just arrest a Jewish person protesting the Israeli regimes genocide for,…wait for it,…Antisemitism?

 

[GhostofKinski]

It’s a bit long but he does criticize Germany, the U.S.. Israel (natch)
I think it’s worth the listen.

 

[Mr. Tea]

What's doubly funny about his ludicrous equation of the countries helping Ukraine defend itself from genocidal fascism with Nazi Germany is that the Nazis weren't even the only state to commit genocide in Ukraine in the last century, because millions of them were deliberately starved to death by Stalin. But I'll happily bet my house that Finkers either thinks the Holodomor was "greatly exaggerated by Western historians", or some other snivelling bullshit about how its victims deserved it for being bourgeois kulaks or whatever.

These guys present themselves as being the diametric opposites of the Zionists who maintain Israel's "right to defend itself" by bombing whole families, but they're just another flavour of the same product.