Ukraine.

Exactly. One of the reasons why the imperialist propaganda machine is able decades later to spin up these narratives, like “Holodomor” or X million deaths in the Soviet Gulags or the Great Leap Forward, is because there was very little contemporary documentation in English or other Western languages at the time.

And of course if a source is in Russian or Chinese it is much more obscure, or easily ignored, or discarded as “regime propaganda” unless coming from defectors with an axe to grind against the socialist government. At the time those socialist governments had more important things to worry about than their perception in Western countries.

It is immensely helpful to have third party sources (meaning not on the payroll of Western governments) that do the work of compiling the primary sources and history in such a way that it can be digested by Western audiences, if only to show that there were people actively debunking this stuff as it was being fabricated.

It really shows the absurdity of this whole narrative when you even just begin to compare it with what other countries’ response to terrorism has been. And that’s before beginning to investigate who is actually behind the spread of these extremist ideologies, as well as their funding and arming…

I think this article could make for a very good reference source in the future. It summarizes everything very well, and not just how the narrative was created but also the background behind the Chinese policy decisions that were taken out of context and misrepresented in the West.

Fair. But you have to realize that from an outside perspective all of north-eastern USA is practically “on the Canadian border”.

They already have. They also provided surveillance, targeting and intelligence to help the Zionists more effectively murder doctors, first responders and journalists.

“may have used”

So basically they have no idea and are just speculating. How is this news?

I just stumbled onto this video today about egalitarianism in pre-historic hunter-gatherer societies and the development of patriarchy that might interest you since it is related to the topic you were asking about:

https://youtu.be/FHUBXfJ71pw

🎯

Pure projection. That is the US’s MO. Russia supports the socialist and progressive Cuban government against US backed far right gusanos trying to overthrow it. They support the Venezuelan government against a violent US backed far right. They support the socialist governments of China and Vietnam. They support the anti-colonial governments of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

Europe is doing the exact same. There is no “civilized world” to be found anywhere in the collective West.

Yeah. I guess the only point here that we disagree on is the possibility of a nuclear weapon use. Maybe i’m the one being naively hopeful here, but i would like to think that isn’t a real possibility. The consequences of that would be i think too detrimental for Russia. It would be very bad international PR even with their allies, and it would open the door for the US to also start using them in their own conflicts elsewhere once the taboo against their use has been broken, even if only to show that they too can do it. For those reasons and because i think that the Russian leadership, no matter how much they may despise the current European elites, are still worried about the humanitarian impact on civilian populations, i don’t see them going there unless someone else strikes Russia first.

Good analysis, though i will be pedantic and point out that this part is not exactly true:

It drops all the pep-talk narratives and sets forth the material facts of ammunition consumption, casualties, and broken supply chains with clinical detachment.

There are still some misconceptions there about Russia and the broader conflict that are rooted in western narratives.

For instance, you hint at how questionable the narrative about Ukraine’s claimed interception rates is:

Russia launched 19,044 such sorties in just one quarter. And even if the claimed 88% interception rate is taken at face value, that still leaves over 2,000 munitions getting through.

I don’t know if that is supposed to be drones or missiles or both, but either way it’s very dubious.

Compare it with the interception rates in the war against Iran, where Iran launched smaller waves than Russia does regularly and with less advanced missiles, and there the US air defenses were fresh and not depleted like Ukraine’s.

Another part that i would not take for granted is this:

Ukraine did manage to regain 400 square kilometers around Dnepropetrovsk, its biggest gain since late 2022, but there’s a catch. The operation was made possible by the Americans shutting down thousands of Starlink terminals that Russian forces had been using to communicate.

I’m not sure that we have seen evidence to support either of those two claims. A lot of commentators and mappers are becoming incredibly skeptical of both.

The notion that the Russian command would allow the use of Starlink for official communications, let alone make its front line reliant on it seems hard to believe.

And anyway there is a big problem with mapping gray zones so pseudo-advances can be mapped simply by walking a few soldiers into the largely empty gray zone and taking some photos.

And this passage actually sounds like the authors of the analysis are projecting:

A bolder speculative outcome would be Russia deliberately avoiding a total victory, keeping the war as a frozen conflict but allowing it to burst out now and then.

I don’t think Russia wants to keep this going indefinitely, i don’t think that’s politically tenable, and in fact the indications i’m seeing point to increasing impatience among both the Russian public and parts of the elites to get it over with, even if that requires escalation.

I can see how the West might dream of doing that to permanently keep Russia embroiled in conflict at what they perceive to be “low cost” to themselves. That operates on the flawed assumption that Russia will allow NATO to indefinitely wage war on them by proxy without Russia hitting at the real source of the war.

Then there’s the old canard about possible Russian nuclear use in response to perceived failure on the battlefield, which has been a talking point from the beginning:

If these tactics led to some major Ukrainian success, Russia could take action by conducting a demonstration nuclear strike, which would reset the entire calculus.

But the reality is that Russia has many other non-nuclear escalatory measures, and a non-first-strike doctrine for nuclear use.

Why go nuclear when you have conventional intermediate range ballistics that can wipe out NATO bases and destroy NATO decision making centers?

You also have the contrast being made between the non-committal and disunited NATO and Russia which is 100% committed:

Russia puts all its effort into the struggle without internal political conflict, while the West debates interminably over each measure of economic aid.

This is a bit of an allusion to the trope that the “democratic West” needs to take into account public opinion and “dictatorial Russia” does not, but all indications are it’s the opposite.

European populations generally have no appetite for a war with Russia yet the leaders are moving in that direction anyway, while Russia is only able to remain as stable as it is because most of the population at the very least understands that they need to see this through, even if they are unhappy with the situation.

Also, it does not look to me like Russia “puts all its effort into the struggle”. If they were the war would look very different. A lot of Russia’s force has been kept in reserve throughout this conflict, and in fact that reserve has been expanding, in case of a larger conflict with NATO.

The economy is also not at all on a war footing. The percentage of the Russian GDP being used for the military is not reflective of a society in all out-war, in fact it’s only slightly higher than NATO’s 5% target.

The economy has not been mobilized for war, the investment into the war has been kept to the minimum necessary to keep advancing, and the primary concern of the Russian state has clearly been to maintain economic stability rather than quickly win the war.

Finally, i also find it interesting how it’s always “Russian miscalculation” that is supposed to trigger an expansion of the conflict:

A Russian miscalculation, such as a stray missile landing on NATO territory, could lead to direct conflict.

But what about NATO miscalculation? The assumption here is that only NATO has red lines, and that there is no possibility of NATO miscalculation – such as getting too directly involved in facilitating attacks on Russia – that would be the cause of the expansion of the conflict.

I would question even the premise that Russian strikes on NATO territory would immediately draw in all of NATO. I think this is also a flawed assumption that overestimates the readiness of NATO governments to open themselves up for direct attacks on their own territory just to defend other NATO members.

If Russia were to decide to strike Ukraine-supporting NATO logistics in Poland tomorrow, do we seriously believe that Germany, France or Britain, would directly attack Russia, thus guaranteeing that their own territory will be struck?

Currently they support involvement in the Ukraine conflict precisely because they don’t believe that their own homes and offices will ever be hit as a result. When that changes, will they still be as bold?

Great documentary. Highly recommend watching.

Not a Trot but i was an anarcho-communist for about a week in high school, when a socdem friend of mine got into an argument with a communist friend, and i took the “middle ground”/“enlightened centrist” option of “let’s stop arguing about what kind of state and just not have a state at all”. I quickly realized that was stupid and started a years-long transition from something like a “euro-socialist” to Marxism-Leninism, by slowly learning history and bit by bit unlearning the propaganda i’d been fed all my life about communism. It’s a gradual process without any big “awakening” moment.

Though i guess if there was a “red thread” that guided me throughout the whole process it would be a commitment to anti-fascism. If you are actually seriously anti-fascist and serious about investigating and understanding history, i think you cannot help but arrive sooner or later at the conclusion that Marxism-Leninism is by far the most successful weapon against fascism.

But i understand where the impulse to go Trotskyist comes from. You see that communism is the right way to go but you’ve been told too often that Stalin was evil and that the “Stalinist” socialist system of the eastern bloc was evil, and it’s too difficult to question that consensus and expose yourself to accusations of supporting “authoritarian dictatorships” so you fall back on the old “if only the good communist had taken power instead of the bad one, everything would have been perfect”.

It’s a mix of purity fetishism, being attracted to the failed communists because they never held power so never had to make compromises, and being psychologically unable to let go of and deconstruct anti-communist propaganda because the peer pressure is too great so you find a way to “side-step” it instead, a way to square the circle: “yes those communists were bad, but not us”.

Good points. To be fair though, there is a lot of that sort of exaggerated reputation with Azov as well. They have a lot of fancy expensive gear and their commanders get treated as celebrities around the world but they generally stay away from actual fighting and prefer acting as barrier troops for the conscripts.

In the battle of Avdeyevka they ran away without orders when the Russians were closing in too fast and left the conscripts to slow the Russians down. In Mariupol they spent weeks holed up under ground in the industrial zone crying and begging to everyone around the world to tell the Russians to let them go. The Kiev regime always prioritizes them for prisoner exchanges. They seem most comfortable when they get to do war crimes, torturing and killing unarmed people, most of the time fellow Ukrainians.

EU leaders are deeply delusional and live in an ideological echo-chamber where they just talk to each other all day, but they also have no political way out. Like an addicted gambler their only option is to keep doubling down until they go completely broke. They will keep escalating and crossing all red lines until Russia has no other choice but to hit back.

It seems they believe that the best way out of the political crisis they have created for themselves, where they ruined their own economies on the promise of defeating and plundering Russia, is to provoke a large European war against Russia that will drag in the US to bail them out (kind of like what Israel always does).

Because if they were to admit to their own populations that all the sacrifices they forced Europeans to make and all the freedoms they curtailed on the pretext of the Russian threat were for nothing, they would be thrown out of power, at a minimum.

And many of them have deeply tied personal financial interests in the continuing of the war and in European rearmament. Others have generational grievances against Russia going back to WWII or before, and others are just true believers in Western supremacy/liberal hegemonism, being products of the US NGO-academic Atlanticist pipeline.

So they are growing more desperate the more they see the US pulling out of Europe and leaving them holding the Ukraine bag and facing a now very pissed off and empowered Russia.

In Russia it is already clear that Ukraine is only a matter of time. The debate there now is how to respond to the increasingly aggressive Europeans who are already complicit in launching direct attacks on Russia.

Putin is one of the last liberal/moderate holdouts but more and more in the Russian public and the Russian elite are now looking at how Iran has struck back proportionately against all sources of aggression against themselves, regardless how “uninvolved” they pretended to be, and are asking why Russia is not doing the same to restore deterrence.

I think, unless Europe comes to its senses and pulls back, that hardline faction will eventually win the debate in Russia.

A fun statistic for anyone interested:

Azov has now expanded to the point that it makes up about the same proportion of the Ukrainian military as the SS did in the Nazi Wehrmacht.

Like the SS they are the best equipped, best paid, get the best trained recruits, and have the most political influence of any part of the Ukrainian military.

China is still whole. USSR is not. Yugoslavia is not. Ergo they must have done something right in how they structured their state that the other two did wrong. A state must be able to survive without disintegrating at the first economic or social crisis. Because no system will be perfect, no economy will grow forever, no state will avoid crises forever. It just has to be robust enough to stay together even when crises hit.

There is also a lot to learn from Chinese history about what causes dissolution of states, as China has broken up many times before, and it was almost always due to regional elites becoming too independently powerful vs a weakened central government. It always got particularly unstable when hereditary regional ruling elites began to form and develop their own networks of patronage and parallel loyalty.

It was always much more stable when the central government controlled the appointment of bureaucrats.

Of course i’m talking about diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural states. It is much easier if you are just an ethnostate, as most European states ended up settling on that model to guarantee stability (it’s why France for example heavily and forcibly uniformized its language and culture). But that is not something that we as socialists should aspire to or look to as the only possible model of state-building.

(Sadly some self-proclaimed socialists seem to think that any state that is not an ethno-state is imperialist and should be broken up but i vehemently disagree.)

Iran is another example of a stable multi-ethnic state by the way. The Russian Federation so far also seems stable. India, for all its many issues, is another that managed to remain intact. So we should be asking what do all these states have in common and what can we learn from them?

Unitary state with autonomous regions but not regional parties. The formation of regional ruling cliques must be prevented to avoid a disintegration scenario like Yugoslavia or USSR where separatism can be stoked by compromised regional elites, because if that happens then imperialists will take advantage of it and create puppet regimes and devastating fratricidal conflicts like we have seen in Yugoslavia and between former Soviet republics.