Background
I have been quite fascinated by Europe’s continental suicide in the face of the failure of Project Ukraine and the fracturing of the “transatlantic understanding”.
I think Europe still has time to choose strategic autonomy:
- Rapprochement with Russia to restore their energy competitiveness.
- Rapprochement with China to restore their global trade and industrial competitiveness.
- Seek out global markets to blunt the Trump tariffs.
- Pressure Ukraine to hasten their inevitable capitulation before they loose EVEN MORE LAND AND SOLDIERS.
Of course as we all know, the Western media has the complete opposite narrative, a jumble something like “Russia has lost 10 bajillion soldiers and they don’t actually have military equipment at all and also advancing on the battlefield counts as losing if it wasn’t as fast as we ourselves predicted it would be.”
Content for the tribunal:
Mod actions: removed comments, banned from community
Responsible mod: Unknown to me
Link to First Comment (now removed)
First comment with better formatting:
- This war started in 2008 at the Bucharest NATO summit, when the US announced its intention to expand NATO into Ukraine and Georgia. EVEN EUROPEAN LEADERS like Merkel and Sarkozy noted AT THE TIME that the Russians would view NATO expansion into these countries as tantamount to a declaration of war. Over the next 14 years the West did a “color revolution”, the Banderites did an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Donbass, and the West sabotaged and undermined THREE DIFFERENT PEACE AGREEMENTS before the Russians’ famous patience finally expired in 2022.
- Ukraine doesn’t need money to win the war, it needs TRAINED INFANTRY and to a lesser extent weapons. MOREOVER, anyone who thinks this money will last Ukraine even a whole year is delusional. The annual BASELINE burn rate of the Ukraine regime is 150B+ annually, and tax receipts are essentially nonexistent.
- They must be REALLY DESPERATE to risk the CREDIBILITY OF THE ENTIRE EUROPEAN FINANCIAL SYSTEM on this foolish gambit. They are breaking the very “Laws of Capital” that the West itself wrote. The Europeans seem determined to beat the Americans in a race to economic decline and collapse.
Tell me again about the “moral case” for stealing sovereign assets to prop up a stunningly corrupt regime in terminal collapse?
Looking forward to the tortured logic justifying my ban.
My Commentary
I know enough to know that they really don’t like contrary narratives about Russia/Ukraine in any of the Euro-comms so I wrote my comments very carefully.
Can you, the esteemed commenters of YPTB, spot the misinformation or rage bait? Perhaps I am just blind to it in my own content. If present, did I “ragebait first” or did the other commenter?
Reminder that “Russia says this, therefore it is misinformation” is not a cogent argument or evidence.
How do you suppose it was that I went from being a Liberal to an ML?
Propaganda
What media is NOT propaganda in your view?
What does that matter?
Well, in my experience many in the West believe it is essentially impossible for their native media to ever be propaganda, which blinds them to its deceptions.
If by contrast, you hold the view that ALL media slavishly serves SOME master we need not discuss it further.
Then it does not need to be discussed further.
So then I think we are agreeing that naturally there are at least two major disjoint information ecosystems (Western and Russian) surrounding this war.
The people who I have been most interested in for the past several months are those within the Western media ecosystem, but from the “realist” school of geopolitics.
All the realists in the West have a strong consensus about the decisive Russian victory that is building on the battlefield. I trust these realists so very much more than the corporate media because not only are their arguments much more sensible and better founded, but everyday they are risking severe consequences for speaking out against the “Good War”.
In fact, the EU has already started handing out extrajudicial sanctions against its own citizens for speaking out against the war. One sanctioned, you cannot fly, access your bank account, leave the country, work OR appeal your sanction in any way. Only the Realists are talking about this so I doubt anyone in the West who doesn’t listen to them has heard about it.
An interested party could watch this video of two European academic Realists (ostensibly both Liberals) discussing the sanctions and mourning the death of European democracy.
I am a realist, and russia can win if everyone gives up on Ukraine. Ukrainian sovereignty needs to be protected against russian expansionism. It’s not speaking out against the “good of war” its parroting moscow talking points
I don’t think the arguments you are making would be considered Realist, but I don’t really want to split hairs about that.
Putting aside for a second the high-minded talk of sovereignty and aggression, if you believed that there is literally NOTHING the Ukrainians could do to achieve their war aims at this point would you still advocate a continuation of the war?
Both the Ukrainians and the Russians have plainly said for some time that the manpower differential between the belligerents only grows everyday. There are literally no more weapons for the West to send, and the factories to build their replacements were mothballed two decades ago. It is also plain to see on any map of the war that the Russians have sidestepped, undermined and/or captured every major Ukrainian defensive line on the front, often in multiple places at once.
Do you think Ukraine’s sovereignty will be best defended by a catastrophic collapse of the state and military? That’s where this is headed