wv wrote:

zn wrote:

Zooey wrote:

The fear expansion of Euro-American hegemony, though. .

Which is only the case because they want their own expanded hegemony. ..

=== I could not disagree more. I see NATO as a terrorist organization seeking hegemony, in service of a capitalist system that has condemned all life on Earth to doom. 🙂 w v

I agree with you about capitalism’s effects, and want it all gone — via non-violent, democratic change. No remnants. Replaced by an updated, future-proofed version out of Kropotkin and Morris, with a bit of James C. Scott thrown in for good measure. But I think your comment points to my earlier questions.

Your condemnation of NATO is absolute and immediate, without any attempt to try to figure out its possible rationales, or any sequence of cause and effect through the decades. It just flat out condemns NATO.

When it comes to Russia, however, or some other entity seen as in opposition to the West, ginormous energy is expended by some to “explain” their actions, present rationales, or even dismiss the idea that they’ve done what has been claimed.

Again, I would understand this a lot more if the people and entities involved really were “oppositional” to capitalism and its effects. If they were champions of the planet and its people across the globe. But that’s not Russia, and that’s not Trump, obviously. If anything, they’re even more intensely on Team Exploitation/Waste/Pollution, and they share that white supremacy/anti-LGBTQ “base.”

My edit to the above didn’t make it into the post:

I see the large red letters and am absolutely behind “condemn war everywhere!” But, it’s typically not done every time a new flashpoint tragedy hits the globe. If it were done, that would weaken the effect of reportage on each individual flashpoint/horror/atrocity. Humans have only so much empathy/compassion to give at any one moment in time. Spread it out, everywhere, all at once, and it’s going to be drastically watered down.

Give all of those individual shocks their due, in context, in depth. It generally doesn’t work to merge them all together as one, every time the hammer comes down on humanity and the planet, etc.

Tilting at windmills: Clicking on the author’s link to Zooey’s revamped article, I bumped into a mention of Jimmy Dore. Couldn’t help thinking then about all the efforts by Dore, Greenwald, Mate, and a few others to explain, dismiss, justify, and in effect support Russian aggression against other nations, going back to its election interference at least. All too often, they use the same language as Trump and the GOP to do it. This, at least indirectly, aids and abets the far-right Trump, the far-right Putin, and their supporters.

Listening to music as I walked yesterday, politics kept intruding. Probably because it was a curated station with lots of antiwar music from the 1960s and 70s. So Zazen died and I zoomed out and thought: These same folks never apply any of that energy to explaining, justifying, or dismissing actions taken by America or NATO, especially if it involves those evil “corporate Dems.” Not that they should. But they don’t.

Just an assumed, unquestioned condemnation of the US, with a particular focus on the Dems and the (GOP’s invented) “deep state.” Zero effort is made to figure out why they act as they do. No endless explanations of “Well, X did this to Y 20 years ago, and Z is seen as a threat here, cuz A, B, and C.” It’s just instant judgment, instant blanket condemnation, and zero fucks given. Russia? “We’re going to dig and dig until we find something to justify their violent aggression!”

This has always puzzled me to no end. Not because of the critique of US policy. I get that and share most of it with them. US/corporate policy pisses me off to no end and drives me up the wall. And I’ve worked hard to study it, and studying that makes me angrier and angrier. I’m puzzled because the critique is so selectively applied, and all too often in the service of far-right individuals and entities. I’m puzzled because the same drive to explain is never there for the US and the West in general, especially if it involves “corporate Dems.”

As already mentioned, I favor the “a pox on all their houses” approach, but if there is going to be a concerted effort to find all the cause and effect routes through history, it’s disingenuous to limit those efforts to just Russia — and by extension, Trump. And since the people in question are supposedly “leftists,” one would think they would have chosen fellow leftists to champion, not far-right sociopaths. One would think they’d focus their time and energy supporting the powerless, the oppressed, the truly needy — per leftist tradition — not Russian oligarchs and American billionaires.

I think we leftists need to at least question their assumptions, their intentions, motives, and analyses — if for no other reason than the obvious lopsidedness of their critique.

Zooey,

Thanks for taking the time and trouble to clean up that article. Will dig in after I get back from a walk.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NFJ6YCEX24I6ZGMHTXHO4YVD6Y.jpg&w=916

zn wrote:

I suggested you clean it up first by posting it in a place that strips the code first.

In case anyone missed it, this is a good software program for doing the above, and it’s free:

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Zooey wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

I’m just not buying the legitimacy of their feeling threatened enough to start a war.

I don’t, either. It seems far more likely to me that Russia is worried about Ukraine emerging as a competitor in the European natural gas market. Ukraine’s emergence as a significant supplier of natural gas would come at Russia’s expense. That, to me, makes the most sense of anything I’ve seen.

Makes sense to me, too.

Of course, if we invested a ton in Solar, Wind, etc. etc. . . . we could make all of it irrelevant. And if we don’t, we Sapiens won’t survive much into the 22nd century.

Thanks, Zooey. Maps help. Though I think the angle of that one distorts the situation a bit. It makes the surrounding countries look bigger than they really are, relative to Russia. It’s actually, as you know, massive. No nation comes close to it in size.

I’m just not buying the legitimacy of their feeling threatened enough to start a war. It’s sheer paranoia, IMO, though it at least has the benefit of actual geographical proximity. US invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. . . . can’t claim even that much.

(Listening to Country Joe McDonald, among other 1960/70s classics, as I write this . . .)

Again, my hobby horse: We can’t let “we do it too” stop us from condemning the indefensible.

I haven’t seen the “Putin is a lunatic” narrative until recently. If anything, the usual Western story was to paint him as a master chess player, a kind of brilliant Bond villain of sorts. Fear him because he’s diabolically clever, etc. Yes, I know that’s overgeneralizing, but, I’m trying to save some space here.

I think the beginnings of the “lunatic” arc are coming (mostly) from long-time state department folks who have known Putin for two decades. They’re saying they see a different person now, and they found his recent speech ominous, with its mendacious accusations that the Jewish Zelensky is a Nazi, etc. Putin also threatened nuclear war. Nuclear war. If that doesn’t get the “lunatic” rating, I’m not sure what should.

I’m also not sympathetic to the various calls to rationalize Putin’s actions based on encroachment on Russia’s borders. It exists on land conquered over centuries of empire-building — as is the case with the US too, of course (but in a more compressed manner). Russia went from centuries of a Czarist empire where it violently gobbled up its neighbors, to an all too brief flash of leftist democracy, with great hopes of breaking up that empire, to an absolute betrayal of that left-populist revolution and a new consolidation. Then, with the end of the USSR, it still retained most of the original Romanov lands, shedding relatively little, which Putin has tried to gobble up again, here and there. He’s ruled as an uber-capitalist kleptocrat, and far-right ideologue, and funds far-right movements all across the globe. He’s the darling of the far-right in America now, especially its growing Trumpist wing. We’re living in the Twilight Zone.

For me, this is an easy call. We’re all Ukrainians now.

Another one worth reading from Jacobin. Just saw it. Strong historical perspective, context, etc.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/02/putin-anti-bolshevik-tsarist-mythic-history-ukraine

An excerpt:

Putin’s Anti-Bolshevik Fantasies Could Be His Downfall

By
Mario Kessler

. . . .

De-communization

“Do you want de-communization?” asked Putin, citing the demolition of Lenin monuments in Ukraine. “Well, we are very happy with it. But we must not, as they say, stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real de-communization means for Ukraine.” Lenin’s internationalism and Putin’s Great Russian chauvinism are, indeed, incompatible.

All this should show socialists in particular that the man ruling the Kremlin is their bitter enemy. This is true regardless of all the cardinal errors of the West. The Putin government bears full responsibility for the current war, taking up the imperial desires of tsarist Russia, which Joseph Stalin resumed after the break with the Bolshevik internationalism of 1917.

Putin presents himself as the patron saint of all Russian minorities who he alleges are threatened by “genocide.” This historical lie may have further consequences, for Russian minorities also live in the Baltic States. Will their NATO membership deter Russia from invading — even in the case that a (reelected) Donald Trump sends signals that give Putin a free hand? As improbable as this sounds, what is currently unfolding sounded just as unlikely only weeks ago.

All the more important is a broad international peace movement to hobble Russia’s current war and oppose future military buildup. Anyone in Russia who dares to protest against the war deserves the greatest possible support — however small the possibilities may be at present.

To state the obvious: there are a lot of competing versions of events in Ukraine right now, and even more when it comes to its past. It appears there’s a lot of divergence even within Ukraine — east to west, especially. And since Russia has the most time zones of any nation-state on the globe . . . it’s a given that opinions differ dramatically there.

For this leftist, it’s not an easy task to sort through it all, find trustworthy sources, etc. etc.

Thanks, youze guys, for posting articles from diverse sites like Jacobin, etc. My own preference, however, is to find out what you think about these things. In your own words, etc.

In the midst of a Camus kick, rereading some of his works and books about him. The world really is absurd, but his voice, his courage, the tremendous obstacles he overcame . . . it all somehow gives me hope. Wish he were alive today, along with Orwell, Gandhi, Einstein, Day, MLK, etc. Jim Morrison would help too.

Notepad++ is a free alternative to Notepad and Word, and helps make it more secure to cut and paste. It strips away html tags, which can hide stuff if you cut and paste directly from site to site. You can see what’s on the page before you paste it elsewhere. I’ve been using it for years. Helps a lot with formatting poetry, for instance.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Billy_T.

Zooey,

You did the legwork, and it couldn’t have been easy. But it’s too much for me to sift through, and the formatting here isn’t cooperating with your efforts. It’s not really readable for me. Could you distill it down to an essence or two? Your own take from those articles?

Also, to each their own, but I personally don’t see Russian State TV (rt.com) as worth a damn in this situation. The same would go for any “official” media for the US, Ukraine, or any other nation in the midst of war. It’s just not going to be credible.

The world has gone mad. Just read about bomb threats and a campaign of harassment at a hospital in NH, cuz the hospital wouldn’t treat a patient with ivermectin. And now Ukraine.

I get the feeling Sapiens want to join the Sixth Extinction.

Agreed, Nittany.

An old house like that would be great. Though I’d prefer a castle. Wish I had the money to buy one, or build one. Thick stone walls, hardwood floors, and ceilings built to last a thousand and one years. A massive kitchen, with an old-school “hearth” I could use for cooking. Huge cauldron there, over a big old fire. Enough surface area to cook for an army, if necessary.

But I’d wire it for the 22nd century, somehow. Fiber to the prim. Gigabit-plus ethernet throughout the house. Easy to reach patch panels for everything.

And greenhouses near the house, so I’d always have fresh veggies and herbs, exotic plants and trees, etc.

Large wood-shop, metal-shop, my own small dairy. Several ponds stocked with fish, ducks, pheasants under glass. I mean, water.

And a small troop of beautiful Amazons to hunt for me, with bows and arrows. Fresh food, never store-bought.

Aaah, that’s the life!

Also,

I’ve been on the receiving end of “blame America first!” accusations a thousand times, and they always piss me off. But I think some of my fellow leftists do have a habit of doing just that, forgetting, ultimately, in cases like this, especially, it really doesn’t matter if the US failed to negotiate in good faith with Putin. He still never needed to start a war with Ukraine. Even if we did all of those terrible things Hedges mentioned, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would still be wrong, totally unnecessary, and unprovoked.

Ukraine was and is no threat to Russia. And just as America has a history of wildly exaggerating the Russian threat, Russia has a history of wildly exaggerating threats from beyond its borders.

We had no right to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, etc. Russia had no right to invade Ukraine, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Crimea, etc.

A pox on all their houses. War is wrong.