Certainly makes me feel less sympathetic for the ‘poor conscripts’ sent to the front-lines.
Russian rhetoric calling the Ukrainians nazis and stating that Ukraine is to be de-nazified indicated that one goal of the invasion would likely be to kill civilians and erase their homes and history.
And it also promoted and made easier the kind of behavior that we are seeing. In the exact same way that the Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda made it easier for German soldiers to become willing executioners of Hitler’s extermination plan. When you vilify and dehumanize your victims, you make it easier for your forces to put aside their scruples and behave like this.
You have a talent for understatement.
Yup.
some with hands tied behind their backs, their bodies scattered in the streets of the city
Some of them mined or booby-trapped according to some reports.
The British vehicles are attractively priced, roughly half the cost of their equivalent makes on mainland Europe,
And yet the price of second-hand cars has ballooned here recently. The pandemic chip shortage meant not enough new cars available and so many paid over the odds for ‘nearly new’ vehicles and it cascaded all the way down the market. So I’m slightly surprised they are still much cheaper than in mainland Europe.
And later in the article is perhaps a partial explanation (my bold):
the British cars are bought from both second-hand dealerships and individuals in the UK who will offer them for a cut price, sometimes accepting cryptocurrency as payment,
That right there is a sci-fi movie script
Obviously, Nazis will resist; and those resisting are Nazis.
Yep. Pretty much the reasoning many if not all wars.
One might remember the line in Full Metal Jacket, “If they run, they are VC. If they don’t run they are well trained VC.”
We need to get in our time machines and go back and protest harder
Well, the Milo Minderbinders of the world always find a way…
A poem by Timothy Snyder about Ukraine after Bucha
The lying and the truth
The lying
that there is no Ukraine
that there is no nation
that there is no state
The war to make the lies true
The lying about the war
The shelling of Kyiv
The shelling of Kharkiv
The shelling of Chernihiv
The old beautiful cities
The shelling everywhere
The bombing everywhere
The ghastly siege of Mariupol
The attacks on refugees from Mariupol
The bombing of children in Mariupol
The lying about Mariupol
The attacks on refugees from everywhere
The reporters
The truth of seeing
The abducted
The deported
The millions in flight
The schools Those bombed schools
The hospitals Those bombed hospitals
The archives burned
The lying about the schools and the hospitals
The lying on Russian television
The lying at Russian funerals
The lying about death that enables
The killing for a lie
The future lying enabled by the burning of records about the past
The truth under everything
The rubble, the bodies
The volunteers
The truth of solidarity
The mass murder at Irpin, the bodies under tanks
The mass murder at Bucha, the hands behind backs
The mass murder at Trostyanets, the desecration of corpses
The cities, the towns, the villages, the countryside
The murders everywhere
The truth
Only among the 18-24 age group is “alarm, fear, terror” narrowly more common than “pride in Russia” (37% vs 31%), and basically nobody is ashamed.
At the start of the war I assumed that Russian propaganda had not done enough to prepare the population for it, and I hoped that Russians would be outraged if only they had true information about what was going on. But now even Russian media is showing pictures of the destruction - framed and spun with lying intent, obviously, but the scale of the war is out in the open, and there should be enough details to piece together some impression of the truth. It turns out this is not enough to turn public opinion - there was enough propaganda after all, and this is not just Putin’s war, but all of Russia’s. It does not bode well.
I listened to some military commentary two weeks ago. The gist: Ukraine could not have kept its nuclear arsenal even if it would have wanted to when the CSSR disassembled. To expensive to maintain, outdated, in some parts so much that it was more of a threat than an aggressive defense. Also, remember that Ukraine had a massive nuclear crisis already.
Hell, apparently they weren’t even in the position to adequately guard the nuclear arsenal.
Going by her past experiences, i’m surprised that she didn’t suggest nail pulling
