Ron Bulman Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 1 hour ago, W. Niederhut said: John, You wrote: "That’s what I mean by projection. Kotkin’s thesis is essentially the Manichean “evil Russia vs good USA” one that I mentioned previously. It’s a thoroughly perverse perspective because, if anything, the preponderance of morality lies not with the aggressor, the USA, but with the victim of the aggression, Russia." I emphatically disagree. I'm the furthest thing from an apologist for CIA and U.S. military atrocities in the post-WWII era, but let's not forget about the dark side of Russian history since 1917, including Putin's current atrocities in Ukraine. Stalin was one of the most evil, immoral men in the annals of world history. Jared Diamond and other historians consider the Stalinist/Soviet genocide to be the single worst genocide in human history-- resulting in an estimated 20 million Russian deaths caused by the Soviet government, including the Ukrainian Holodomor. Have you read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago? The Mitrokhin archival material published at Cambridge University as The Sword and the Shield is another important reference about Soviet KGB history. (A less well known eye opener is Professor I.M. Andreeyev's history of Russia's Catacomb Saints, documenting the horrific, largely secretive persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church by the Soviet government after 1917.) As for Putin, his grandfather Spiridon Putin was Stalin's chef, and his father Vladimir worked in Stalin's notorious NKVD Destruction Brigades in WWII. Putin was a KGB agent stationed in Dresden during the collapse of the Soviet Union, before later re-surfacing as an "ex-KGB" apparatchik in the Yeltsin government. After coming to power in the 1990s, Putin gradually transformed Russia's nascent democracy into a totalitarian police state, run by Putin's FSB-aligned oligarchs.. British author, Catherine Belton, has written cogently about this subject in Putin's People. Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West: Belton, Catherine: 9780374238711: Amazon.com: Books Compare the legacy of the U.S. Marshall Plan in Western Europe to the fate of the totalitarian police states of the Soviet Eastern bloc. Is it any wonder that the people of Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland and the former Warsaw Pact nations want to belong to NATO? What does Putin's oligarchic/police state offer them? So, Kotkin is correct, like most Princetonians. Bump. As things on here disappear quickly. A very informative, objective synopsis for me at least. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Allison Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 The reason no one takes the Putin apologists seriously is because as I pointed out, the U.S. and NATO are not land-grabbing aggressors. Putin is. And no amount of gaslighting or projection can ever change that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kirk Gallaway Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 John, It sounds like your views are very hierarchic. Which is not to judge it, as maybe it's practical. But contrary to Putin's claims. Is Ukraine a sovereign nation with a right to determine it's own destiny? i say that because after you get out of the general indifference to Nato in Western Europe prior to this invasion, I found on a recent trip just 3 months ago that a general theme among people in Eastern Europe, Croatia Bosnia Herzgovina , and Montenegro is that the every person did not like Putin, was cheering for Ukraine and was just thankful Putin hadn't invaded them. So the aspirations of these countries to be closer to the West are dismissed because we want Putin to be happy and not invade? So they are just to be considered pawns in a greater geopolitical game, because that's the way it's always been? I'll agree with Ben that no one was planning to invade Russia. In fact the great migration of old Easter Bloc countries to Nato (10 countries) happened by 2004! Since then only 3 countries have joined Nato in the last 18 years! Putin never even made a public acknowledgment that anything was wrong until 2007. So this trumped up Russian Nationalism is just a last ditch effort, (assuming that Nato was weak) for Putin to salvage his name in Russian history. I'm disappointed that when Ben badgered you , you would feed Ben's conspiracies that in our all knowing American Exceptionalism Intelligence, we set up a trap for Putin to invade Ukraine. It's more of the same abnegating of Putin free will that we see from the followers of Trump. They never had a chance before the American "Deep state!! Right? Biden was true to his NATO agreements, and by law, he reaffirmed that Russia was in no direct threat of military intervention from the U.S. or Nato. I will remind people that even after a Russian troop buildup there were few political pundits, or influential people, like Oliver Stone who thought Putin would invade, as well as a few Putin apologists here on the forum, who said there was absolutely no way Putin was going to invade Ukraine! To assume the U.S. and Nato would take such such foolhardy gambles(while offering Zelensky a ride no less ?) that there wouldn't be great world economic fallout and displacement, which there's been! and they would never be caught and Ukraine would eventually win out, is a new realm of crazy but in fairness I have heard other foolhardy "low hanging fruit " on the JFKA side as well, so I guess it comes with the territory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Koch Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 (edited) 11 hours ago, Matt Allison said: The reason no one takes the Putin apologists seriously is because as I pointed out, the U.S. and NATO are not land-grabbing aggressors. Putin is. And no amount of gaslighting or projection can ever change that. uhhhh, how long ago did Iraq war happen? The United States Occupied Iraq for twenty years, basically undercuts your statement, kinda like not knowing the United States Annexed Hawaii. Donald Trump Jr's Tweet perfectly illustrates the Antifa minds of people like you.. Matt Edited October 10, 2022 by Matthew Koch Deleted the word "Matt" for over redundancy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Koch Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 8 hours ago, Kirk Gallaway said: I'll agree with Ben that no one was planning to invade Russia. No one said they were invading, they implied they would take 'First Strike' nuclear missiles that would be too close to intercept, and continue to kill ethnic Russians on the border.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Douglas Caddy Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 North Korea's Crypto Hackers Are Paving the Road to Nuclear Armageddon - CNET Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Douglas Caddy Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
W. Niederhut Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 Putin bombs Shevchenko Park in Kyiv Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Allison Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 Yep, the Putin apologists think bombing innocent children is good. Really says everything about what kind of people they are, right there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Cotter Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 (edited) 15 hours ago, W. Niederhut said: John, You wrote: "That’s what I mean by projection. Kotkin’s thesis is essentially the Manichean “evil Russia vs good USA” one that I mentioned previously. It’s a thoroughly perverse perspective because, if anything, the preponderance of morality lies not with the aggressor, the USA, but with the victim of the aggression, Russia." I emphatically disagree. I'm the furthest thing from an apologist for CIA and U.S. military atrocities in the post-WWII era, but let's not forget about the dark side of Russian history since 1917, including Putin's current atrocities in Ukraine. Stalin was one of the most evil, immoral men in the annals of world history. Jared Diamond and other historians consider the Stalinist/Soviet genocide to be the single worst genocide in human history-- resulting in an estimated 20 million Russian deaths caused by the Soviet government, including the Ukrainian Holodomor. Have you read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago? The Mitrokhin archival material published at Cambridge University as The Sword and the Shield is another important reference about Soviet KGB history. (A less well known eye opener is Professor I.M. Andreeyev's history of Russia's Catacomb Saints, documenting the horrific, largely secretive persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church by the Soviet government after 1917.) As for Putin, his grandfather Spiridon Putin was Stalin's chef, and his father Vladimir worked in Stalin's notorious NKVD Destruction Brigades in WWII. Putin was a KGB agent stationed in Dresden during the collapse of the Soviet Union, before later re-surfacing as an "ex-KGB" apparatchik in the Yeltsin government. After coming to power in the 1990s, Putin gradually transformed Russia's nascent democracy into a totalitarian police state, run by Putin's FSB-aligned oligarchs.. British author, Catherine Belton, has written cogently about this subject in Putin's People. Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West: Belton, Catherine: 9780374238711: Amazon.com: Books Compare the legacy of the U.S. Marshall Plan in Western Europe to the fate of the totalitarian police states of the Soviet Eastern bloc. Is it any wonder that the people of Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland and the former Warsaw Pact nations want to belong to NATO? What does Putin's oligarchic/police state offer them? So, Kotkin is correct, like most Princetonians. Yes William, I’ve read a lot of Solzhenitsyn and I’ve read a lot about Stalin’s murderous excesses. However, in that sentence by me that you quoted I was referring to the current Ukraine crisis and the post-Soviet context in which it has arisen, as discussed by Mearsheimer and other “Realists”. I don’t see how going back before that can throw much light on the current situation. One could, for example, cite many passages from The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznik if one wanted to weigh the many past sins of the USA against those of Russia. One could invoke Guido Preparata’s book The Incubation of Hitler (see link below) in which he describes how Anglo-American elites helped to finance the Bolsheviks and the Hitlerites in order to prevent a German-Russian alliance that would overturn the Anglo-American global hegemony. One could advert to the 1960s assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK. In the first of these cases the US Government’s own investigative body, the HSCA, concluded in 1979 that there was probably a conspiracy involved in the JFKA. Yet no US government since then has followed up on that conclusion to investigate who the conspirators were. Therefore, every US government since 1979 has been an accessory to the assassination. A similar logic applies to the MLK assassination in relation to a court finding in 1999 that state agents were involved in that assassination. The RFK assassination obviously involved a conspiracy, and it’s also obvious that state agents were involved in covering it up. Hence, the US government is a murderous regime in respect of its own past political leaders. MLK said that the USA was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. Since then, US President Jimmy Carter has said: "Since we normalized relations with China in 1979, the US has been in constant war. China has not been in combat with anyone." "[The US] is the most warlike country on earth." Hence, claiming that either Russia or the USA has a moral monopoly in this situation is problematic to say the least. “Realists” such as John Mearsheimer offer a more balanced, objective view which facilitates dialogue and mutual understanding rather than vilification and warmongering. Please excuse me if I don’t get around to replying to all the posts addressed to me. Sublunary exigencies, not to mention Brandolini’s law, preclude me from giving them all the time required to deal with them. https://wikispooks.com/w/images/7/7e/IncubationOfNaziism.pdf Edited October 10, 2022 by John Cotter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Allison Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 Whataboutism, America-hating and projection all in one post. Quite a trifecta. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
W. Niederhut Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 John Cotter has a reasonable point about the international crimes of the U.S. in recent years-- especially in regard to PNAC and our post-9/11 Neocon "War on Terror." As for Putin, I have been somewhat obsessed with understanding the man since 2007, after he and his FSB assets seized our Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) in the U.S., Western Europe, and Australia. IMO, Putin is, definitely, a product of the Yuri Andropov Institute -- a latter day Stalinist sans Bolshevik economics. His murder of journalists, war crimes in Ukraine, and exfiltration of Ukrainian civilians to Russian prison camps, is the ultimate proof of his vileness. And, although he lights occasional ceremonial candles, the man is no Orthodox Christian. His Moscow Patriarchate has been a tool of the NKVD/KGB since the murder of Patriarch Tikhon in 1921. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Thomas Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 Experts paint grim portrait of a second Trump presidency: 'Authoritarian autocrat on steroids' By Travis Gettys October 10, 2022 https://www.rawstory.com/second-trump-presidency/ “ “You’d be looking at states — Democratic states — which would be taking over Republican arguments about states’ rights and applying them in a different way to try to limit the reach of the federal government,” said Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University. “And then you’d also be seeing something which I think has already started to happen as a result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade: You’re going to see people moving. It might be a peaceful process at first. But I think you’re going to see populations sorting themselves out according to where people feel safe and at home, which will mean red states becoming more red and blue states becoming more blue. And that makes some kind of secession or breakup scenario in the medium term more likely.” “ I said a while back that what the Supreme Court did with abortion rights is going to drive this country into a civil war. Steve Thomas Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Koch Posted October 10, 2022 Share Posted October 10, 2022 5 hours ago, Matt Allison said: Yep, the Putin apologists think bombing innocent children is good. Really says everything about what kind of people they are, right there. Matt, Crimea River.. You're the type to cry out, as you strike someone. You were literally celebrating blowing up the bridge on Putin's birthday! Now you're crying about Dog Shelters being targeted by Putin.. "Yesterday was Vlad's 70th birthday, and Ukraine helped him celebrate by blowing up the illegal bridge he built after his 2014 illegal invasion of Crimea. How about that, eh? Maybe at least his birthday cake was tasty." -Matt Allison Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted October 11, 2022 Share Posted October 11, 2022 1 hour ago, Matthew Koch said: Matt, Crimea River.. You're the type to cry out, as you strike someone. You were literally celebrating blowing up the bridge on Putin's birthday! Now you're crying about Dog Shelters being targeted by Putin.. "Yesterday was Vlad's 70th birthday, and Ukraine helped him celebrate by blowing up the illegal bridge he built after his 2014 illegal invasion of Crimea. How about that, eh? Maybe at least his birthday cake was tasty." -Matt Allison What is amazing is people claiming to be against war and violence, yet they are cheerleading things that keep the conflict and suffering going. Its totally moronic and shows them to be something other than they claim to be. I saw a meme this morning pointing out that the same people wanting to save every life during C19 are now beyIng for blood and nuclear conflict. Its amazing how radicalised these sheep are from news headlines. The mind is so vulnerable to groupthink and tribal behaviour. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” Ghandi If JFK were here he’d be seeking a deescalation, detente and rapprochement. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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