Kieselguhr [none/use name]

@JoeBiden After Vietnam, we learned how the harmful effects of exposure to Agent Orange took years to manifest in veterans, leaving too many unable to access care when they needed and deserved it.

The PACT Act means today’s veterans and their families won’t suffer those painful denials.

After the Holocaust, we learned how the harmful effects of exposure to Zyklon B took years to manifest in concentration camp guards, leaving too many unable to access care when they needed and deserved it.

good article!

What is important for us to understand, however, is that the strategic asymmetry goes beyond physical capacities like population base, industrial plant, and missile technology, and extends into the realm of strategic objectives and timelines.

Russia’s war has been deliberately framed in a fairly open-ended way, with goals largely tied to the idea of “demilitarizing” Ukraine. In fact, Russia’s territorial objectives remain rather nebulous beyond the 4 annexed oblasts (though it is safe to say that Moscow would like to acquire far more than just these). All that to say, Putin’s government has deliberately framed the war as a military-technical enterprise focused on destroying the Ukrainian armed forces, and has shown itself to be perfectly free to give up territory in the name of operational prudentia.

In contrast, Ukraine has maximalist goals that are explicitly territorial in nature. The Zelensky government has been open about the fact that it aims - however fanciful this may be - to restore the entirety of its 1991 territories, including not just the four mainland oblasts but also Crimea.

In particular, however, Ukraine cannot win a positional-attritional war because of its own maximalist definition of “winning.” Since Kiev has insisted that it will not give up until it returns its 1991 borders, an inability to dislodge Russian forces poses a particularly nasty problem - Kiev will either need to admit defeat and acknowledge Russian control over the annexed areas, or it will continue to fight obstinately until it is a failed state with nothing left in the tank.

Even Stephen Kotkin (the lib), who is a highly esteemed academic historian (professor at Princeton), said what happened in Ukraine in the 30s wasn’t genocide in his Stalin biography. The only revisionism that’s happening here is libs pretending that there is a consensus about calling it a genocide among academic historians.

All of these actions were woefully insufficient for avoiding the mass starvation in the countryside caused by his policies, in the face of challenging natural conditions. Still, these actions do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians.

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 by Stephen Kotkin published in October 2017 by Penguin Random House

Here’s Mark Tauger’s takedown of Applebaum’s Holodomor book:

Some might ask whether Applebaum’s writing is more accessible to “non-specialist” readers. There are many excellent writers among Slavic specialists, and a more accurate account could easily have been presented in clear and simple language. Applebaum’s writing does not “simplify” the truth, it obscures it, as discussed in this review. Red Famine thus does not fit well in the existing scholarly literature, even as “popular history.” Its interpretation resembles that of Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, and it does use recent published sources that provide vivid descriptions of many people’s experiences in the famine. But it leaves out too much important information, has false claims on key points, and draws unjustified conclusions on important issues based on incomplete use of sources, making it not even close to the level of genuine scholarship, like Davies and Wheatcroft’s Years of Hunger. Red Famine is better characterized by a passage from Peter Kenez’s book on The Birth of the Propaganda State: “propaganda often means telling less than the truth, misleading people … manipulating and distorting information, lying” and addresses “audiences in simple language…”

somebody actually did splice together the video when the Chinese tank goes around the guy, and the footage on the other side is from the BLM protests when a cop car just drives into the crowd

Sanna Marin announces plan to resign as MP and join Tony Blair institute

wow epic antiwar girlboss

Mind you the closest thing to a hard evidence is the leaked Nuland-Pyatt call where they talk about successors to the president.

The overall sequence of events closely resembles documented color revolution coups carried out by the USA, where the CIA supports ordinary protestors aligned with US interests and relies on corrupt politicians and fascists to do the shady shit.

So the TLDR

• We know Nuland was fucking around in Ukraine
• The US had both business and geopolitical interests at stake in Ukraine
• We know what US coups look like from history (e.g. Mossadegh, Jacobo Árbenz)… and they never stopped! We have absolutely no reason to believe the CIA stopped doing regime change shit. They even gloat about it on tv. They not gonna admit the Ukraine coup in the next 20 years though, obviously.
• The current Ukrainian regime kowtows to the US, they don’t appear independent at all
• if it was random chance, then the US power elite was incredibly lucky that it went the exact way they wanted it to go. It’s much more likely it wasn’t just random, and the US was involved.

It’s unlikely that a document saying “Let’s coup Ukraine” signed by Obama is going to get leaked in the next decade, so don’t hold your breath.

The idea that Ukrainian forces, lacking any air cover, would storm through Russian lines was always going to be more of a Hollywood plotline than reality.

I don’t even have a reaction to shit other than oh no everything the Russians said is true about NATO decadence/incompetence, confirmed on MSM media but libs are still “Russian propaganda?”

I am soo tempted to resurrect the thread from a couple of weeks ago about Prigozhin’s death where hexbear users debated federated radlib(?) users about the war, and the libs repeatedly claimed that:

• UKR army is doing well, they are on the road to victory, certainly

• The neonazi influence is completely marginal

We gave them many sources, and told them that even MSM media is disagreeing with the liberal fantasyland if you actually know how to read. The last couple of days we had this article and Poroshenko with a nazi badge… I honestly don’t know what is there to debate. They just refuse to see the truth.

Comrades of the newsmega often post interesting articles about the war, this one was worth a read:

https://bigserge.substack.com/p/escaping-attrition-ukraine-rolls

It’s pretty bizarre how big an a emphasis The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact gets among EU neocons on and twitter. They treat it like it’s some kind of scientific truth of the horseshit theory. I don’t remember people being this obsessed about it pre-2022. (And they clearly don’t read much history.)