Now that we are starting to get some clarity on how the military situation in Ukraine is going to play out this year, it is a good time to contextualize the war, which means understanding the politics of it. The only way to understand this war is to understand the people responsible for it and the people responsible for this war and the many other wars since 1990 are the neoconservatives.
It is a bit ironic that this bizarre cult may meet its end in the place where their ancestors got their start. Most of the neocons from the middle of the last century were from parents who emigrated from places like Galicia, which is currently part of Ukraine, but was part of the Russian empire a century ago. That part of the world has produced far more than its share of troublemakers.
Stefan Bandera was from Galicia. He is the inspirational leader of current Ukrainian nationalists, like the Azov battalion, which have been fighting Russian militias in the Donbas since the coup in 2014. Interestingly, many prominent Bolsheviks were from this part of the world as well. Of course, many of the most important neocons came from that part of the world as well.
It would be nice if 2023 brought some attention to this bizarre cult of fanatics responsible for this Ukraine disaster, but these people are better at avoiding sunlight than they are at starting monstrous wars. People like Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland should be brought center stage and explained to the public. They are responsible for death and carnage that would make a certain Austrian blush.
The show this week is a primer on these people and their machinations over the last thirty years with regards to Russia. It looks like this long bloody history will come to a head this year, which means the official narrative will collapse. It also means the nationalist narratives will fall apart as well. The Ukraine war is about imperialism, but not the sort of imperialism they imagine.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Neoconservatives
- Kaganites – Post-Cold War Neocons
- Russophobia
- Ukraine War
- It Is Complicated
Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed
Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On Odysee
Zman, a blogger and podcaster, gives a good rundown on the history of the (((neocons))) who are behind the Ukraine-Russia war and how their ethnic hatred of Russia goes way back.
— KATANA
Transcript here: katana17 (dot) com
Pingback: The Z Blog – A Ukraine Primer – Jan 13, 2023 – Transcript | katana17
Seeing our guys’ reaction to the invasion has been disappointing because I followed the regional events from before 2014. It was a failed Gell-Mann test. Many names I gave the benefit of the doubt to or respected revealed themselves as ready consumers of the sloppiest Russian propaganda, while others proved unaware of historical context or simply unwilling to do due diligence.
Dissidents have a duty to better the regime’s position. Instead many delivered worse and revealed themselves as merely contrarian.
Pingback: Russophobia And Them – Dissident Thoughts
There’s a hell of a lot of deporting that’ll need doing – of course, that will just be the lucky ones…
It’s saddening to take a trip on Twitter.
You see how full it is of feces in barely human shape who, while on no-one’s payroll, function as automata: in the specific, as pro-Globohomo bots.
They are like loudspeaker: the Masters of the Discourse, by means of their totally owned celebrity/media/”politicians” systems, input in them what it serves their interests best to have spread, and they spread it.
The fact that this “people” use slurs, violent images and rhetoric, and hate speech all the time suggests that they are mentally ill wrecks. This doesn’t prevent the amount of co-ordinated noise they output from being useful to the Masters, still.
Most people are fairly heavily invested in an image of themselves as “the good guys” or at least on the same side as those fabled good guys. Explaining that the world is driven by the actions of psychopathic apes just sounds like the Charlie Brown teacher trombone to them.
Mount Ararat is located in Turkey, not Azerbaijan.
Good piece, nits to pick, The Warsaw Pact (1955) was a reaction to NATO (1949) not the reason for it.
Saddam Hussein’s Scuds being a threat to Israel was a big noise generator, if not justifier, for the attck on Iraq.
NATO was a reaction to Bolshevism. How many times did Russia invade their neighbors between 1917 and 1941, again? Like the Chinese, the Russians have no legitimate grievances. None. Illegal Russian colonists in places like Ukraine and the Baltic States have had thirty-two years to take the hint and go back where they came from. Like the Israelis, they are squatting on stolen land to which they have no legitimate right and complaining about their neighbors’ lack of enthusiasm for their presence. I have neither sympathy nor pity for them.
I am continuously unable to grasp why people in the West who claim to be on the Right can fail to admire Ukraine’s heroic White warriors. When stunted little brown half-Mongol invaders came, they raised the Black Sun banner to fight for blood and soil. The Ukies are far less cucked than we are. The Russians invaded them with the stated intent of enslaving them, replacing them, exterminating them, and stealing their land. They picked up rifles and put boot to ass. What would happen if you went to Texas and tried that? The Border Patrol would turn away from waving the invaders through at the border and handing out their welfare checks and voter registration forms a million at a time long enough to shoot you, that’s what. From here it looks like the Ukrainian government is doing what its people actually want and fighting back instead of putting up banners that say “love is love” and “refugees welcome” in Russian while arresting their own people for complaining too loudly when the Russians rape their pets and farm animals and steal their household appliances. On that basis alone, their government is vastly less corrupt than our own, and far more legitimate.
Every year that passes further confirms that a certain Central European politician of the last century, a fellow with a Charlie Chaplin mustache, was right about women, right about homosexuals, right about the Jews, right about Russia, and right about Western “conservatives.”
Why we are doomed reason number 682:
Seen on the rear window of a pick up truck in Western NC, pasted prominently under a “Viet Nam Veteran” sticker: a large, blue and yellow Ukrainian flag.
The Human Race never fails to disappoint.
boomers gotta boom.
The spotlight will never be turned on the people who cause all of these wars to expose their lies and hypocrisy because that would be anti Semetic
Gonna have to stop blaming Jews for everything some time.
I’m with you that this frequent, lazy moaning is annoying. I sympathize with people like Z Man, Jared, and Derb who are repelled by it. But there is undeniably some truth underlying it. Hard needle to thread.
The best introduction to this unwelcome knowledge is:
1. Observe the power of the hegemonic media to strongly shape the issues that people, even smart people, believe to be moral and significant or don’t notice at all.
2. Research who owns and directs the media. Observe what they say to each other about you and your ancestors when they think that you aren’t listening. The behavior of the media is exactly what you would expect from these people.
At this point, many people observe, correctly, that there are lots of white liberals involved as well. My short answer is, “We have more than one problem.”
One can argue that the problem is just “Cultural Marxism” and any further subdividing of the particpants into subgroups is unnecessary. This is like talking about WW2 and saying that there is nothing to be gained by subdividing the axis powers and studying them separately.
Forever Templar: “Gonna have to stop blaming Jews for everything some time.”
In case you didn’t glance at any headlines on Saturday [while observing the Sabbath?], the j00z have gone full nukular on Tater Joe.
All the j00ish media outlets are dumping psychological sewer on the poor guy, and it’s abundantly clear that the j00z want Tater Joe vanquished so that Kamalatoe & and her J00ISH HUSBAND, Doug Emhoff, will be free to incinerate Russia.
I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life.
Apparently the Council of the Sanhedrin came to a decision, and the decision was that not enough progress was being made in destroying Russia, so Barnea made a few phone calls, and, overnight, in the blink of an eye, the entire power structure of the j00ish media pivoted in unison to destroy Tater Joe.
Never. Seen. Anything. Like. This.
The overnight explosion of outrage at the “mishandling” of the classified documents makes the 1990s coverage of that filthy fat stinking j00ess, Monica Lewinsky, look like a cheap street-walking slut by comparison.
All the A-Listers in the j00ish dugout & bullpen were called up to dump on Tater Joe.
You want a first-rate conspiracy theory?
How about the j00, Merrick “Garland” Garfinkel, raiding Mar-a-Lago not to destroy the pesky goy, Cheeto Man Bad, but rather as a misdirectional feint designed to lay the groundwork for subsequently destroying that other pesky goy, Tater Joe [who was supposed to have died by now]?
Tater Joe doesn’t know what day of the week it is, and he wouldn’t be able to distinguish the difference between a classified document and an old issue of Playboy Magazine lying in his Corvette’s garage.
I tried to warn everyone that the purpose of the 2020 election steal was to get Doug Emhoff into the Oval Office, but Normies gonna norm.
The Tribe swings for the Left Field fence, and they like to hit homers.
Plus they own all the umpires who make the calls on the balls & strikes.
Turns out Heartiste and others came to precisely the same conclusion as did I:
https://gab.com/kingofallnads/posts/109689791219932213
The Council of the Sanhederin wants Douglas Emhoff in the Oval Office, playing the duel roles of Edith Wilson and Henry Morgenthau Jr, in order to enact a “Morgenthau Plan” on Russia [i.e. tying up all the loose ends of Larry Summers’s only partially successful Rape of Russia].
===============
PS: I just checked wiki, and President Woodrow Wilson married Edith Wilson in 1915 when she was already FORTY THREE YEARS OLD.
Epic Beta Fail.
Yikes!!!
By their Betatude shall ye know them.
It’s out there that DOJ knew about the docs before the midterms. It’s a ham-fisted disaster if anybody wants to hammer Garland on it.
They do own the spotlight after all.
Gentlemen, it’s not the Jewish ethnicity, it’s not Judaism. Heritage Americans have no problem with any of that. The problem is the Marxism and the history of the diaspora in Russia and eastern Europe. It’s unfortunate that many Jews hold communism as their religion, but they are a minority of the Jewish people and they have had very few children.
One or two generations from now Jewish Americans will have almost completely blended biologically with Heritage Americans and left communism behind, and all of this will be history.
I know this to be true because my wife is Jewish, my children are technically Jewish and for them all this has no relevance in their lives.
” It’s unfortunate that many Jews hold communism as their religion, but they are a minority of the Jewish people and they have had very few children.”
C’mon man… that line is 100 years old now….
That may be true of worldwide Jewry. Unfortunately we in the US have been stuck with the Eastern European crazies. Imagine if the most rabid, anti-British Americans of Irish descent controlled US foreign policy. That’s what we’re dealing with.
The talmudic tradition is pure hatred of the goyim. Communism merely appeals to their preexisting disposition. (((They))) do not follow the torah, as many fools say. Read some of the rabbinical texts, then tell me that it is simply communism.
And if we just vote harder, for a little longer, we can turn things around in the next election.
Like most white men, it is natural for you to divide the people in the world up by values and beliefs. No one else in the world does that. Good luck.
So when the cannibals beheaded the Rockefeller kid, that was not based on his being an “other”? So when the “natives” slaughtered all the arabs in Zanzibar, that was a result of what, exactly? Hatred of the boers being slaughtered africa not based on categories? Japanese raping Nanking (you may not realize there is a difference between the two groups)? Hutus and Tutsis? African and native american tribes slaughtering and enslaving eachother based on tribal allegiance? Sorry, my priviledge must be blinding me.
When discussing Galicia, it’s worth considering that Galicians not only formed up Waffen SS divisions in WW2, they also were part of the the Austria-Hungarian army at war with Russia in WW1, and helped man Schwarzenberg’s Austrian divisions marching in with Napoleon’s invasion in 1812.
Seems find and natural that Galicians would hate Russians and want to be part of the EU. What’s f-ed up and evil is the (((C.I.GAE.))) helping the Galicians impose that ideology on the central 70% of the nation that has mostly been part of Russia for centuries.
Besides Azov and Right Sector, some other similar battalions are Aidar, Kraken, and Tornado.
Question
Is American Kulak Fraternity a honey trap?
Asking for a friend.
I was with a member for about a year and attended an event. They are good guys and it was authentic when I was involved. Difficulties in my life forced me to focus on narrower concerns.
Thank you.
🤠👍
The Neoconservative name came from leftist Michael Harrington in 1973:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/who-named-the-neocons
Who did the closing song? She sounds like aural velvet, and that’s encoding compression piped through a tin can. Come on, Z, show notes!
I found an interview of my great grandfather online talking about his immigration to the U.S. What an amazing find. He passed away at age 98 days before I was born. I never expected to hear his voice.
He said he was from Russia, in a city on the Dnieper near Kiev. I found it interesting he mentioned Russia hundreds of times but never made any references to Ukraine. He was a member of the Russian army. Anyway he would not appreciate my politics I’m sure.
If it’s not gonna get you doxxxed, care to share a link? No reason other than I suck up whatever chance to listen to old timers from times long lost. Or don’t – given the climate any reticence is understandable.
I am honored that you are interested. He was my maternal great grandfather with a different last name so I’m not so worried about being doxxed. Besides I’m pretty mild mannered on these alt-right sites and don’t really say anything that would upset anyone (other than being on them in the first place).
There is a transcript but I recommend listening to the tape. You get a better feel for him and his experiences. He was in his 90s when this was recorded. I find him to be a humble, likeable man.
The one thing I take away from this is how random, almost accidental his journey to the U.S was. Yet if he never migrated here I never would have existed.
https://ohms.wisconsinhistory.org/oral-history/render.php?cachefile=WSA0129.xml
Very interesting, thank you.
If I’m not mistaken, Castreau’s right-hand Gorgon has close ties to that part of the world. There’s definitely something in the water.
The Gorgon’s father was high up in Bandera’s thugs, really high. He made it to Canada somehow probably with CIA help and his daughter made wormed her way higher and higher into Canuckistan government.
These people cannot learn, can’t forgive and can’t forget. That’s why I’ve said we need to be done with them all.
More like something in the lox and bagels.
It can be frustrating to see how easily the public’s opinion and perspective on geopolitical affairs can be shaped by friendly regime media. Not only with regards to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, but American foreign policy in general. Too many accept the caricatured portrayal of one side being an absolute hero while the other is the evil villain. It was surprising to run across this article from the Los Angeles Times.
Published in 2016 the author of the piece lays out a balanced description of the situation in the region at that time with relevance to how we ended up at the present.
Op-Ed: “Russia’s got a point: The U.S. broke a NATO promise.”
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shifrinson-russia-us-nato-deal–20160530-snap-story.html
Folks are steeped in the Hollywood fantasy view of the world where there is a “good” guy and a “bad” guy, and the “good” one “wins” in the “end.” It colors their view of everything.
This agitprop has been so effective for so long that even people who hate Hollywood and see it for the depraved propaganda mill that it is still think this way. Even dissidents.
There might be remnants of such good guy vs bad guy trope, but it’s hardly the norm anymore. Good guy wins, bad guy loses was mandated by movie censorship in the 30’s through 1968. Called the “Hay’s Code”. That was tossed.
What we saw in its place was the rise of the “anti-hero”. In short, a mixing of good guy and bad guy characteristics such that the rules of engagement were no longer clear and therefore the characters were muddled. A full court press for “end justifies means” depiction of good vs evil. This we are told is the more nuanced view of the world. The “Batman” movie series is a good example of this progression.
Also, if you are going to argue in favor of the regime/NATO/Ukraine side, then you take the position that the people in the Donbas have no right to self defense.
With regard to coups and revolutions you must also take the position that no one had a right to object to the coup.
Back during the Russian Collusion Hoax, a couple of political researchers (can’t think of the names) backtracked it beyond the people we know about, and landed on … Ukrainian mobsters, er, I mean oligarchs who wished to return to their business model of raping Russia’s economy, which Putin had brought to an abrupt halt. Originally that old Soviet blackmail boilerplate was their effort to paint Putin as Trump’s lapdog, so Putin would lose the upcoming election and these Ukrainian mobsters could resume the lifestyle to which they were accustomed.
This of course failed, but originally, Trump was just collateral damage, not the real target. At least until they discovered Trump’s refusal to drink from their particular font of corruption.
Western billionaires are just billionaires. Russian and Ukrainian billionaires get to be oligarchs. If I were a western billionaire I would feel cheated.
LOL, yes… tho technically an “oligarch” is one who has a hand on the reins of power. Not all of our billionaires qualify, but in a country as corrupt as Ukraine, there’s probably no other way to achieve such wealth.
Trump has always drunk from the river of corruption.
Anyone raised in NYC knows how the game is played. Trump is no different than any other successful businessman in this environment.
Compsci,
Just a warning. Corvinus has been a notorious leftist troll/thread disruptor over at Unz Review for some little time. It knows how to do that, hijacking threads over there, spamming up the place with gay abandon. Sailer’s half-baked civnattery made that blog a prime hunting ground; not having to be revulsed by the Crow’s intrusive, sententious posturing is one of the benefits of no longer frequenting that blog.
So feed that troll at our joint peril, as I fear that this will be taken as an invitation to latch on and do likewise here.
Your warning well taken. However, trolling on Unz for this guy is unknown to me as I don’t read Unz as I do Z-man. I have a tendency to accept folk at face value until they demonstrate differently. So I guess I’m saying, his one posting did not clue me into your understanding of his nature in commentary
Thanks for the heads up, but I can’t promise I won’t respond if he seems sincere. I will however examine whether there is any point in responding to future posts from this person and of course take heed not to get caught up in back and forth repartee with a troll.
Through all my teachers, I am made wiser.
I just read on a site called War News 24/7 an article about the capture of Soledar. According to the story, the Russian airborne force was ferried by helicopter to a defensible spot behind the line and proceeded to block and disrupt from there. Great news and may they roll up the entire line.
It looks like Soledar is, in fact, under Russian control now.
WN24/7 however is known to spread objectively false information regarding this war, and they seem to be a part of Russian propaganda machine. In this case, article might be a part of some sort of popularity contest between Wagner Group and Russian Army, or to be more specific, between Putin’s wing and Yevgeny Prigozhin. There was a little bit of drama when Prighozin claimed that his WG took Soledar under control, pretty much on their own, and response from Putin/Army Command was that Russian Army’s airborne operation that article mentions was a key element and major contribution to this victory…
Apart from all that, how’s that a
“Great news and may they roll up the entire line.”
Little that I know about your thought process, it looks like there is a growing belief in dissidents, that the only way GAE may be dismantled is after its policies suffer some humiliating defeat, thus undermining the entire system.
What do you think is gonna happen after that? WEF crowd will stop WEFing? Your schools will get better? Your politicians will get less corrupt? Women will stop whoring, men will grow balls? Your minorities will embrace Old American way of life and
everything’s gonna be great again?
I think that America’s good run after WWII deeply skewed people’s perception by putting external factors, usually foreign disasters, at the beginning of causality chain of American success…
OT: Blackrock reporting layoffs and massive losses. About 1/6 of the money they had under management is gone too (i.e. withdrawn). so TPTB don’t have it all their way…
I imagine we will hear “too big to fail” repeated again in the immediate future (it may be true in this case, which is a good argument against companies this size). Fink has been squealing like a pig about the end of free money, and if you look at last year’s Blackrock results the reason is obvious. Vanguard dropped ESG a few months ago. Blackrock either will or will continue to slide into the abyss.
Pray for the physical health and safety of Jerome Powell.
Jerome Powell needs a food taster and a 24×7 squad of ex-USMC ex-Seals ex-Green-Berets surrounding him.
And I am not in any way being facetious here.
The Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen fake money spigot has been turned off, and the happy grinning hand-rubbing shape-shifting merchants are now in the process of transmogrifying into angry frowning teeth-grinding fist-clenching monsters.
Assassination [or “Focused Foiling” as it is known in the trade] is their preferred method of changing the odds in their favor.
Heritage America needs Jerome Powell to hold the line even more than we need Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas [in reserve].
Jerome Powell is the only man on Planet Earth who is fighting for us.
===============
Insert vidya of Morpheus saying, “He fights for us”.
I recommend reading Tom Luongo at “gold,goats, and guns”. He’s been calling this since the beginning of last year and and is seemingly being proven correct as time marches on.
a demonic entity like blackrock is most dangerous when it’s cover has been blown or when it suffers a setback. I’m worried more about what there next scheme is.
Remember all that real estate Blackrock was buying?
It appears they bought near the top of the largest bubble of all time.
You just love to see it.
I wonder if Larry still wants to come down here and try to force my behavior?
rent prices are also collapsing :). they’ll have no choice but to sell at a loss, given current mortgage rates. bet a buck Fink isn’t still ceo in a year.
The biggest story this year won’t be the Ukraine going tits up, if that happens. It will be Blackrock becoming the Shrinking Man and dragging down Clown World’s economy with it. The next Blackrock shareholder meeting will be lit AF, as will be the next phone calls Fink takes from Soros and the DNC.
What, Larry won’t be leading the Blackrock Cavalry’s charge to rebuild Ukraine after the Russians are ignominiously ejected? Say it isn’t so…
They indeed did buy at the top of the biggest bubble in history, from November 2021-June 2022. The handwriting had been on the wall for months if not years. All I can guess is they thought Powell would stop hiking around early fall last year and Blackrock would swoosh in and buy all the rental property in the country at slightly lower prices and it would be game, set, match. Whoops. Powell is probably near his maximum because of the debt disaster and the cost to service it, but there will still be some more hikes despite all the happy talk in the largely useless financial media.
27 million Russians died in ww2. Horrible but not 80 to 100 million
And the Iraq war was about Israel Not Russia
Google says of Russia “The last reliable population figure was that of the census of January 17, 1939, which showed a population of 170,500,000.” So no, 80 to 100 million did not die. But I am intrigued by Zman’s iconoclastic take on Iraq. Yes it was Israel, but his Russia angle is provocative.
I misspoke on the death toll of the Russians during the war. I actually woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it, but there was no way to fix it, so I went back to sleep.
The West has worked hard to minimize the death toll the Russians suffered, but a good number is 20 million.
Still it is a horror. When reading about just who and how it is hard to contemplate. For example, the cohort of males born in 1920 simply vanished by 1945. Indeed, I’ve seen Russian newspaper editorials exhorting surviving males after the war to in essence take second wives in order to reproduce to population such were the demographics of that time.
Iran was an ally of Russia and the US wanted to put a wedge between Iraq and Iran, two Shia Muslim countries, which may have formed an alliance in another timeline. Israelis don’t like the thought of Muslim alliances. The Iran-Iraq War wasn’t enough to satisfy the usual suspects, so Kuwait was enlisted. The Gulf War wasn’t enough, so 9/11 gave them a new excuse. The Second Iraq War wasn’t enough, so the usual suspects by 2022 just said, “F*ck it, we’re not pussyfooting around anymore, we’re just gonna regime-change Russia and nevermind Iran, Syria, and Lebanon.”
Iraq was another chess-piece in the great game between J*ws and Russians. So yes, the Iraq War(s) were ultimately about Russia.
Ba’athism is “Arab Socialism”, brought by Nasser’s attempt to expand an Arab League under Soviet tutelage.
Nasser was a Soviet client.
Arafat was KGB trained.
Even Nehru’s India was aligned with the USSR, as was much of the Global South. African Independence was about breaking away from Western Europe to form Lumumba School soviets, that is, socialist republics.
“Communism”, in the 70s, had planted its flag over half to three-quarters of the planet’s surface. Remember South America’s banana republics? They were broken in the Contra wars. Contra went on to become Cartel.
The Schism between Western European juden and Eastern European juden is looming large in this picture.
I think the Zman is onto something big here; this would rewrite our understanding of the Cold War.
Wait, didn’t Truman recognize Israel to keep Stalin from being first?
Or, was it that Stalin threw in with Egyptian Nasser’s Arab League to counter that, and to counter the influence of the Anglo-Arabian and Anglo-Persian oil companies (Herzl’s friend, Saudi King Fasil, and the Reza Shah who replaced Mossadegh)?
Turkey was another Ottoman piece on that gameboard; the Great Game over oil may have been as much about whether Rothschild-Warburg controlled the oil, versus Chabad Lubbavitch, who happens to be Putin’s mentor.
(White nationalism is a literal crime in today’s Russia, despite our hopes.)
The more I think about the Cold War 70’s, the more it looks like a struggle for dominance between Rothschild and Chabad; two horses pulling one wagon, the United Nations of Earth.
East-West is becoming Industrial North versus Brown Plantation South, another eerie echo of the shipper juden versus the plantation juden (who both eyed the new money of the western mining juden with suspicion.)
George W. and many of his top lieutenants repeatedly said that their foreign policy was guided by Ukranian-Israeli politician Natan Sharansky’s book “The Case for Democracy. The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror”.
MinTruth’s Wikipedia says,
“The Case for Democracy is a foreign policy manifesto written by one-time Soviet political prisoner and former Israeli Member of the Knesset, Natan Sharansky. Sharansky’s friend Ron Dermer is the book’s co-author. The book achieved the bestsellers lists of the New York Times, Washington Post and Foreign Affairs.
In the book, Sharansky and Dermer argue that the primary goal of American foreign policy, as well as that of the free world, should be the expansion of democracy. The book advocates a moral foreign policy based on belief in the universality of freedom and human rights. Sharansky and Dermer argue that nations that respect their citizens will also respect their neighbors. The authors express passionate and controversial arguments against any compromise on the road to freedom.
It has been read and famously endorsed by former United States president George W. Bush.[1] Other members of his administration, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have also read the book. ”
Reading Sharanky’s bio, he clearly obsessively hated Russia, but my understanding is that the main thrust of the book is that the US’s foreign policy should be built around getting rid of Arab/Muslim dictators so as to turn their nations’ peoples into NPR-in-Arabic-listening pot-smoking sushi-eating Colbert-watching feminists who will love Israel. Bush and his people repeatedly said that was their take away from the book, and that they invaded because they wanted to set up a liberal democracy in Iraq that would serve as a model for the transformation of other Muslim nations, the end reult of which would be making Israel safe.
Saddam was as anti-Israel as they came. Also from Wikipedia, relevant:
Operation Opera (Hebrew: מבצע אופרה) was a surprise airstrike conducted by the Israeli Air Force on 7 June 1981, which destroyed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor … While Iraq and France maintained that the reactor, named Osirak by the French, was intended for peaceful scientific research, the Israelis viewed the reactor with suspicion, believing it was designed to make nuclear weapons that could escalate the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict … Israel called the operation an act of self-defense.”
I think oil did play a pretty decent role in the Iraq war. George W was very worried about “peak oil.” America was down to like 3.x million barrels a day from a peak in 1970 of about 10mbd. Saudi Arabia had been playing accounting games for decades and appeared to be peaking. Mexico was past their peak. Venezuela was past their peak. It looked the Russians were peaking out at the time. Iran had past peak. Also, conventional natural gas peaked in the US during the W presidency. Bush even commissioned a study to show how long it would take to overturn the US passenger vehicle fleet presumably to EVs. By the end of the Bush presidency, oil was 150 Dollars a barrel. From what I can tell, he was already concerned about “Peak Oil” when he went to Washington in 2001. Presumably he believed we could procure oil from Iraq to make up for the shortfall.
Oil was probably not the only reason. Surely Israel played a role. Grift was playing a role too. Lots of reasons. But I think oil was probably close to the top of that list. I certainly don’t think its a bad idea. I’m OK with bombing countries for their oil, especially if we have good reason to think we are near global peak oil.
Downvoted. Expending money, lives, and resources to steal money and resources is not a recipe for expanding the energy supply or national prosperity. It certainly enriches well connected pirates in the MIC though. Personally I want those people dead (in Minecraft of course). The only way out of “Peak Oil” is massive investment in nuclear fission in the near term and fusion in the longer term. Now I never expected Bush to pursue that policy and the even dimmer bulbs surrounding Brandon are even less likely to.
“Dimmer bulbs”?
Pretty sure our rulers banned the incandescent lightbulb around that time.
And now they are working on banning CFL technology—they very technology they mandated to replace the incandescent bulb, despite the knowledge that LED technology was only few years out! This seeming contradiction will be shoved down the “memory hole” too.
The negatives of peak oil are so great and widespread that it is well worth the price of bombing a country into submission. Good fusion won’t help. There is almost no chance of fusion working well for the foreseeable future.
Oil has its oily fingerprints on every single aspect of our lives. It’s not just cars and not even just transportation more generally. Much of our clothing is even made from oil. Steel is made with oil. Most mining is powered by oil. Almost everything is transported via oil.
Peak oil will be a long period of having ever less oil at ever higher prices.
Those things are true but irrelevant. If you have sufficient quantities of energy you actually don’t “need” anything else beyond rocks and dirt. EVERYTHING can be synthesized or produced from plant or animal feed stocks. If there’s actually a particular chain of hydrocarbons for which there is no known synthesis and that can only be found in fossil fuels, genetically engineered enzymes can be produced to make it.
The latter is *highly* unlikely though. Fossil fuels were not magical gifts of the gods. They are nothing more than plant and animal matter subjected to heat and pressure over time. If nothing else, we can replicate and accelerate THAT process and make our own fossil fuel.
This doesn’t mean there won’t be scarcity for a time while we shift to synthetics. Taking on superpowers like Russia over the remaining oil though, is certain to result in massive scarcity if only because you can’t heat your house when it’s been blown up in a resource war. These kinds of calculations make sense for well connected and wealthy sociopaths of course but unless that’s your job description you should rethink this.
I wasn’t talking about countries capable of fighting back. I meant places like Iraq.
What makes you think we can create our own fossil fuel? Fossil fuels took a lot more energy to make than we get from them. Since we’re not the ones who initially put in all the energy, it’s all gain to us. But to replicate that process would be an energy losing proposition.
We lose energy all the time. We lose enormous amounts of energy making electricity. But this is to serve a purpose of getting energy in a form useful to us, like electricity.
Even genetically altered algae based bio-oil consumes enormous energy and costs. The end product costs over 300 Dollars a barrel to produce. That number is not fixed. It will go up with the price of fossil fuels.
The deepest oil has been found something like three miles down, well below the oldest fossils, and while tectonic plates move, they don’t entirely flip over. And we know where coal came from, because coal is pretty much solid fossils, and coal beds are also for the most part quite shallow (hence strip mines). But oil? I think rather more likely the result of carbon compounds in the mantle being subjected to heat from below and pressure from above. Which also explains why “dry” wells have refilled over the years, and why oil has been found below pretty much any thin flat part of the crust (Ie. having not been upthrust by collisions).
@Reziac I don’t buy that. We know other places in the universe where it literally rains natural gas. But there is really no evidence at all for abiotic origins of oil and a ton of evidence that it’s from biological material laid down millions of years ago.
There is ONE oil well (that I have heard of) that gained oil after being produced. But it is known where the oil came from and it was also biological in nature.
But even if it were true that all or some of the oil is abiotic in nature, it doesn’t mean it is being produced by nature at a rate that can keep up with what we are producing.
Pozymandias: “Fossil fuels were not magical gifts of the gods. They are nothing more than plant and animal matter subjected to heat and pressure over time.”
Ackshually, an whole helluva lot engineers, with lifetimes of experience in very deep well-drilling [many miles down into the crust], are convinced that there is something to the idea of “Abiotic” petroleum.
We know next to nothing about the inner workings of Mother Earth.
In medical terms, we likely aren’t even as relatively knowledgeable about the topic as were, say, the physicians who bled to death George Washington in 1799; their medical knowledge at that time would dwarf our current knowledge of what transpires beneath the crust.
On the other hand, this emerging theory of plate techtonics and continental subduction [completely submerging whatever had once been on the surface of the continent] implies that if Life on Earth can get itself jumpstarted within, say, a mere billion years, then we might be on our fourth iteration of Life [with three other interations having been subducted back into the mantle].
I agree with Tars to an extent. Access to energy is in our national interest. National security, if you will. At least it was, until the Gaia Worshippers took control of great swaths of Western political parties.
There’s a lot of nonsense on this thread. I’m replying to your post though because there’s no reply button for Tars’.
“Losing” energy. No, making an amount of synthetic gasoline with, say 1MJ of energy content using 100MJ of fission energy doesn’t mean you’ve lost anything. If you need the gas to run a car you accept the energy cost. If we actually had abundant fission energy to do this regularly that would not be a problem.
The scientific advances we will make and are making in fusion power are permanent as well (unless we let the neocon madmen send us all back to the stone age of course). Energy sources can even be found in space such as space based solar power and He3. Combined with raw materials from the asteroid belt these could be turned into energy sources that can be shipped back to Earth.
None of this exists yet of course and would require vision, genius, and an ambitious plan to develop it. So no, our leadership won’t be doing it. That doesn’t mean other nations won’t and both China and Russia have advanced capabilities in space.
@Pozymandias We don’t have any of these technologies and won’t be likely to have them any time soon. Yeah, fusion would be great if we had it, which we don’t.
We’ve had fission a long time and still no nuclear plenty.
Your whole mining asteroids solution is even more optimistic than your nuclear plenty.
Your argument basically comes down to “Tar’s arguments make no sense because all of the very real problems he mentions will be solved in the future by technology we do not yet have”
With near unlimited nearly free energy, yes, most of our problems with energy would/could be solved. We could even use the excess energy to get rid of all the waste heat from 1000 to 1 energy losses making oil. If a frog had wings he would fly.
I’m not saying this cannot happen. I am saying it has not happened and if it does, is an indeterminable period in the future. There is absolutely no guarantee that a machine to create all this energy will ever be invented. Oil, gas and coal is what we have NOW. It’s what 10s of trillions of Dollars in equipment is designed to run on. Nuclear fission is here, but expensive and not especially plentiful. With I think one exception, there has not been a new fission power plant built in the US in 40 years.
Maybe you could put yourself in suspended animation with instructions to wake you up when the glorious future arrives.
In a society of intelligent people I would agree with pursuing nuclear fission, but even the Japanese were too dumb to set up a system with sufficient redundancies to prevent a meltdown. Plus all the psychopaths in Ukraine don’t seem to have any compunctions against bombing nuclear plants even if it does end up poisoning everyone.
The Japanese plant that melted down was old technology. The are newer plant designs that won’t melt down, thus preventing such radiation release. However, all such production of any new design fission reactors has effectively been banned.
The Japanese were dumb enough to buy a system from General Electric.
They won’t be making that mistake again.
That’s why Americans don’t muster patriotic fervor against China; the Chinese haven’t overtly invaded anybody for a long while, instead they conduct covert economic war.
I had to downvote too, just taking someone’s oil is an expensive proposition if you count blood and treasure. I’d prefer we leave the rest of the world alone. Plus, I kind of wonder if the old abiotic oil theory might not be true. We sure seem to come up with new supplies as needed.
A big nope. Oil was a fallacious excuse. Mainly propagated by the left. Go do some research. Hint – it was to do with money. First you have to discover what REAL money is.
Conventional oil production removes about 5-10% of the total organic trapped within the oil bearing strata (Earth pressure driven extraction). Secondary and tertiary recovery methods get at about another 5% (water flood & CO2 pressurization) under good conditions but slow. Fracking is still in its learning curve phase, but another 5-10% seems reasonable under current economics. Other methods of enhanced recovery are in the research & development phase, but too soon to know if this will be practical anytime soon. Also, still lots of untapped resource on the continental shelf regions all over the planet and this includes North Slope opportunities. Peak oil is pure bullshit that is being used to politically restrict development and supply so as to keep prices up. Boom & bust has always been both the history and bane of oil & gas production business economics.
I knew there would be someone saying peak oil is BS. We have observed the same pattern over and over and over. All peak oil is, is peak oil per field writ large at the nation level and at the world level.
Oil produced off the continental shelves is not equal to oil produced in less remote land areas. It just takes a whole lot more money and a whole lot more energy to produce that oil. The same is true with the right side of the production curve and the left side. The left side comes out under natural pressure and the right side is pumped out. This is a loss in EROI.
We are removing literally thousands of years of plankton every single year from the ground. Yes, it’s true oil came from plants, but there is simply not enough biomass on the planet even if all of it could be converted to the chemicals we need cheaply.
I’ve been hearing about cheap plentiful fusion energy since I was a kid. Supposedly some lab just turned positive, but suspiciously, no EROI was provided. Getting a 0.2% gain is useless. Might not even be positive after all energy consumption by the plant is taken into consideration (lights, computers, air conditioning and heating etc) . We need 30 40 50 to 1 EROI. Maybe this will happen eventually, but it seems very unlikely to me to be happening any time soon.
Frankly it seems very egalitarian to me that people are so offended at the idea of installing a US puppet for our own benefit. If it’s a choice between me and my family being energy poor (AKA poor) and the Iraqis being poor, I’m gonna chose take the oil every single time.
The Tubman regime has been masterful since WWII in getting ordinary Americans to identify with it. This isn’t surprising since the existence of cheap oil allowed the regime to insure that ordinary and even sub-ordinary Americans’ fortunes rose with those of the regime.
Even today, there’s a wide circle of elite wannabes and just people who still think that they will get a slice of whatever pie the Tubman Beltway People (TBP) are carving up at the moment.
One’s ability to partake of these pies is contingent on two factors. First, the Tubbies need to have a workable plan to actually acquire said pie, and then they need to be willing to share it with you. They don’t and they won’t. The plan is for you and your family to be energy poor and every other kind of poor. That’s unless you know people or are people that usually don’t post on this blog. I suspect not. The Tubbies are keeping the whole pie for themselves this time. You don’t need “egalitarianism” to see that.
I don’t mind the idea of colonizing the Middle East and all of Africa for resources if that’s what you’re implying. It was the British who struck oil in the Middle East I believe and the apes had no clue what Gas or even metal was before Europeans arrived. I would just quit crying about peak oil and make the argument about power and cheaper gas. We’ve got centuries of oil in shale for now, but we made the Arabs rich thanks to environmentalists in the US bitching about peak oil. Then they went and funded terrorism with that money and fly white women out to Dubai to bang their cousins and camels. Like my boomer dad always said “let’s nuke the whole Middle East and put up hotels and oil rigs” or something like that, just don’t use our troops. That’d be a great use for migrants or minorities Actually.
You’re the reason America needs to be destroyed.
I agree with abiotic, hydrocarbons produced in the deep core, contaminated with organic traces as it bubbles up through the fossil layer.
But, Peak Oil means Cheap Oil; it isn’t about running out; it is about how slowly natural basins refill.
TomA is also right, though, there are oceans of oil under us we aren’t allowed to get to. The US Geologic Survey simply stopped measuring, rather than admit the Western US floats on a sea of oil. Most of that land is “owned” by Bureau of Land Management.
Like oil itself, the access rights have their own value, worth fighting wars over.
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for spelling out the realpolitik of peak oil. Agree with you completely.
Don’t forget that Saddam was going to sell oil in Euros along with dollars. Didn’t make him very popular.
Gaddafi had the same idea and got the same treatment.
Wasn’t he pushing a gold standard for all of Africa? I want to say it was called the African Dinar or something? You know that was never going to fly.
Moreover, he was threatening that French colonial currency arrangement they have, which is why it was a French led operation from the start, in which GAE was more or less along for the ride.
Yup, French President (((Sarkozy))) led that raid.
They stole his gold, his weapons, and his oil. A week after his fall, a country without a government had an oil bank up and running.
Operation Iraqi Liberation all over again,
O.I.L. ll
I figured it was a war not for oil per se, but for the petrodollar. Can’t risk any middle east producer of note getting uppity and deciding to sell his black gold for some funny looking currency not sporting a dead US president.
“I figured it was a war not for oil per se, but for the petrodollar.”
Amounts to the same thing — as long as the US can get real oil for fiat dollars, everything is hunky-dory as far as the GAE is concerned.
That’s the SBD, isn’t it? A currency based on a basket of commodities- crude oil, kerosene, diesel, gasoline, and natural gas.
I remember in the 90s, when the GAE had a secretary of state from eastern Europe who did her part to get it involved in an eastern European war, I was thinking that the constitutional prohibition on non native born citizens being president should have been extended, probably at least to all cabinet level posts and congress, the senate, and the supreme court too. But you can file that away under ideas to save a republic that is already dead.
“The neocons just hate Russia” sort of strikes me as the flipside of alleging that one day, for no reason at all, Putin decided to invade Ukraine. Although it’s certainly true that GAE foreign policy of the last several decades has largely revolved around isolating and weakening Russia. After all, that’s what multiple generations of GAE foreign policy personnel were trained and educated to do. It’s hard to just turn that off merely because a wall came down.
As for the neocons, and those over whom they hold sway, they must truly believe that they can succeed. That they really can be the ones to subjugate and carve up The Bear. Since there’s no other obvious GAE interest in Ukraine.
Seems like I can recall another empire or two which believed the same thing.
I don’t think there’s ever one reason for a war in modern times. What typically happens is that different factions of the elite in nation A decide, perhaps for totally independent and even contradictory reasons, to attack nation B.
I the case of Russia, yes, there’s a neocon faction of fanatical Jews who hate and fear ANY White people who seem to have a sense of national or racial pride. They’ve managed to crush almost all traces of that (at least officially) in Western Europe and at least the coastal parts of AINO. They will never truly rest of course until the last European man is a woman and vice versa.
Then there’s the faction of what I called MIC pirates in my post above. They know AINO needs oil and they actually just see a gigantic version of Iraq but with colder weather when they look at Russia.
Are both factions dumber than hammers? You bet your daddy’s Shell stock they are! To avoid just being dismissive I’ll take a detailed Minecrafty look at both factions:
The obvious end game for depopulated and deracinated Europe is Muslim and African Europe. Those people make Nazis look like pikers. So these wealthy and supposedly educated Jews are replacing people who kinda sorta didn’t like or trust them with people who will go full Rwanda on their asses as soon as they have enough members in parliament and their own ethnics in the Polizei to do the wet work. Of course, at the level of your typical hyper-wealthy Beltway neocon, there’s undoubtedly some convoluted Straussian reasoning for why filling Germany with Ayatollahjugend is “good for the Jews”. Hint: it isn’t, and while these people are a lethal threat to everyone’s freedom, sanity, wallet, and life, they are probably most dangerous to their own people. Sentence: hauling ice blocks across Baikal only to have them all deleted by the Great Programmer when they get to the other shore.
As for Russia as Really Big Iraq Oil Puddle: Yes, Russia is just like Iraq. T34 tanks and Mig15s. It’ll be a cakewalk, blah, blah. What’s that bright flare in the sky coming toward us? I heard something about how they had hypersonic missi… Yes, there are people this dumb. Most of them aren’t Jews but grillers who, in many cases, actually don’t realize the Russians aren’t Communists anymore while “we” are turning into them. Their motives are as simple as their minds. They just need to grill and well, you need oil for that Comrade Brandon! Sentence: I don’t know but it probably involves a grill.
There’s a reason I put a G in Civnat G. Normiecon. Anybody who starts to ask what it stands for instantly realizes.
I saw a theory that the Kagan/Nuland hatred for Russia derives from being descendants of Jews who were expelled by Russia over a hundred years ago, and they still bear a familial grudge.
Americans don’t realize that in Europe, a grudge that is only a hundred years old is still fresh and bloody.
Side thought: there’s a YT channel “Voices of the Past” that reads old diaries. One was a Russian diary dated 1917-1921, who wrote that Lenin (with about 40 more of his ilk) was trained, funded, and sent by Germany to Russia, specifically to foment revolution. Hmmm…
I’ve heard it called Cold War muscle memory.
What else are they going to do, learn to code?
Good post by the Z-man! There was also a 17 minute Youtube video that Larry Johnson did explaining the background of the conflict to some church group that is worth watching but I’ve lost the link.
If the U.S. survives for another decade I predict that the Indian imports will influence U.S. foreign policy in a similar manner as have these mostly Jewish imports from eastern Europe. Look for the U.S. to become increasingly hostile to China and Pakistan as Indians become more and more influential in Washington.
Ugh. That’s the ugly reality of a multipolar world, isn’t it. We’re getting dragged into everybody else’s feuds, as if our own azzholes aren’t enough.
Very possible, but the thing is, Indians don’t pass for white people. it would be a very hard to to sell to normal Americans that a war with Pakistan is in their interests
It worked against Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt…
They will have to use the light skinned pretty ones as fronts.
Auron MacIntyre, who is actually pretty decent on a lot of subjects we care about uploaded a video on neoconservatives yesterday completely redefining neoconservatives to not include our special friends at all. It is absolutely laughable to talk about neocons without talking about our small hatted friends from the Middle East.
What he describes is a very real problem for the mainstream conservative movement, but has absolutely nothing to do with neoconservatives. Roughly, he defines “neoconservatives” as disgruntled leftists who lose their home in the left and drift over to the GOP bringing their leftists ideas with them.
This MacIntyre character is picking up a lot of steam and is corralling conservatives into yet another cul-de-sac.
The video is called “The Neocon Cycle” if anyone is interested.
Auron is great for primers on things like Oswald Spengler and Italian elite theory (Carl Schmitt, Mosca, Praeto, even James Burnham).
But he’s also a working man; took at job at the Blaze so now he has editors to answer to. It’ll color his writing going forward, because generating clicks will be his fundamental mission.
There seems to be a very very strong correlation between taking a salary to be a right wing figure and suddenly not being able to see the dreidel.
On the issue of whether neoconservatism is driven by anti-Russia or pro-Israel, I am of the camp that sees it as both.
Does anybody know what the song/artist is at the 57:30 mark? My “shazam” app has gotten it wrong twice, so I’m hoping someone on this thread knows. Maybe Z man?!
I fell asleep, and it woke me up.
I was dreaming that I heard the Elves in Rivendale singing.
I do like that, would love to know what it is.
Very nice music. I would love to know also.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=45KGFgO4174&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE
A good read on the ugly history of Eastern Europe is Bloodlands by Timothy Snider
I remember looking at that book in a bookstore and feeling that I should hold it by the corner because it seemed to be dripping blood! I’m depressed enough at the present and I think I’ll avoid reading it until my mood improves.
Good show! I believe the Ukraine area was once called Red Ruthenia. Towards the end of WW1, the German Army which occupied the area helped promote Ukrainian independence. It may have had a short independence following WW1.
Z-man’s theory about the origins of the Iraq invasion may be true, but I think it was too close to home for neocons. Remember the SCUD missiles during the 1991 Gulf War! Iraq was working on a nuclear power plant in the early 80’s that got bombed by Israelis. The Iranians tried bombing it previously and probably gave the Israelis intelligence on it.
The Russians ran the Iraq military, so it was reported at length, the night the war began. (John Batchelor, WABC New York)
Saddam’s top brass were escorted to Syria in a long convoy of Russian limousines, so it might be a two-fer.
The factional dislike between German and Pale juden holds a seed of optimism; it might explain why the Diaspora are happy to throw the Israelis over.
The neocons appear to be Maccabbees, zealots intent on punishing their own for impurity, as ever the Tribes have done between each other.
Like the Bloods and Crips.
Could the rift be exploited into a full-on fight between elites?
I’ve settled on petrodollar politics as the primary driver of the 2003 invasion. But there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen.
You could be right about this. There were probably many things driving the invasion. Lots of cooks in the kitchen, and some of the utensils may have been kosher.
https://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/10/30/iraq.un.euro.reut/
Petrodollar was the only concern. Look at how we’re treating the europeans now with regards to the Ukraine.
Galicia was part of Austria-Hungary, along with Zakarpattia, both of which are now part of Ukraine. Both areas had a large Jewish population, which was slowly emigrating to the West, including interesting individuals like Robert Maxwell.
To the east of these areas was Bessarabia, which was also full of troublemakers. Now it’s partly in Ukraine, but mostly in Moldova.
Btw, did you know that Moldovans like to pickle water melons? Weird people.
“Moldovans like to pickle water melons”
Let’s try ’em with vodka!
I’ll take pickled watermelons over twerking and pronoun games.
https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/bacon-wrapped-watermelon-rind-pickles
yummy party food.
There’s an enlightening piece by Susan Watkins, written about three months ago, at New Left Review. One doesn’t have to agree with all of it but she does do a fine job of providing context.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii137/articles/susan-watkins-five-wars-in-one
I opened it and will read later but from skimming it, it’s useful.
Good podcast, I plan to pass this one around.
I agree, as primers go, this is one of the best.
Darryl Cooper’s primer of background history, posted ten months ago, is also worth a listen:
https://martyrmade.com/thoughts-on-ukraine/
Nothing to add; good primer Zman, love the Ukraine war talks.
Except this: What one country can do, another can do. Surely China would prefer to see a collapsed and destitute West, particularly the US?
I’m sure they’re taking notes. TikTock, mass technology theft, bribe and blackmail operations against government officials; Xi only knows what else.
I’m sure from a pragmatic point of view, assuming the Chinese rulers are being pragmatic, the “net good” of the US is a pretty simple calculation. Adding to the good is the huge US consumer market while subtracting from that is – basically everything else about the US. In Chinese Paradise Universe, the rest of the world is rich enough to offer a market for Chinese goods while the US is a vast stone age wasteland ruled by twerking Amazons and Wakandans.
One of the great tragedies of the hyper-moralization of politics is you need to dig into several layers of detail to get any idea of the actual reasons for state actors acting the way they do. It used to be they would at least talk about the interests of the people they rule, but the case in Ukraine is entirely based off the idea of being the good guys enforcing peace around the world.
It goes along with the statement that these people don’t see the need for nations anymore, but a moral hegemony every people must adhere to. Problem is, even most religions understood, even if the general moral principles are the same, that different cultures had different virtues and vices, and their society had to be organized with that in mind. The modern neocons are far more totalitarian, controlling both the overriding morality and structure of a society.
Cherchez le juif.
Yeah, Chet nails it here.
Over drinks, ask your Griller friends to explain our vital national interest in Ukraine. I do. The dialogue goes like this: ” blah blah Putin…..blah Poland…..um, aggression…….uh NATO….blah democracy…um, pass me another beer, what are the Minsk Accords?…..really 6000 nuclear warheads pointed at us? …..so where is Donetsk?
The Congress-critters aren’t much better.
“blah blah Churchill …. blah blah Munich … blah blah Holocaust”
If I had unlimited power to enact US law, I would make it illegal to publicly interpret modern nation and international politics through the prism of Nazis and/or Holocaust. If either have any explicative power for understanding the modern world, it has been overmined a thousand times over by now.
Related: Many people in modern America who have seen too many EVIL NAZEES movies and shows don’t seem to understand that if one’s only goal is to stop a ship from capsizing to the right, if that is the only danger that one sees to ship, you are guaranteed to do things that will make the ship capsize to the left.
Don’t normally comment before listening but wanted to say that I’m in the camp of wanting Z to devote some of his writing/podcasts to Ukraine. I’m also in the camp of enjoying podcasts that focus on a certain topic, particularly a historic (Rome, Greece) or ideology topic.
These probably take more time, but they are very useful because I can send them to family or friends. These topics tend to be good gateways to our thinking as they’re more neutral emotionally. Current events seem to get up people’s guard. Historic topics are about another people or another time, so normies can listen with some indifference and thus we can plant some seeds.
Yes! I remember hating communists back in the 70s and 80s. The walls came down and we liked Poles, Czechs, and Russians again. Except our foreign policy makers didn’t stop hating Russians. It was weird until all the dots got connected.
Yeah, I was in college for the Solidarity stuff in Poland…..I met some Polish and Hungarian refugees…..I immediately recognized that these people would be a huge pain in the ass if we ever tried to make peace with the Russkies. The Refusenik Jewish dissidents actually took a mellower line, because they wanted the Eastern Bloc to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel, so they were more focused on that issue than the denouement of the Cold War.
The aggressive, Jewish Neocon party line was not prominent on campus in those days at all. If anything, because of Pope John Paul II, the Catholics were more strident in those days than the Jews.
The eternal Catholic.
“They are responsible for death and carnage that would make a certain Austrian blush.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger? 🤔
No, Sigmund Freud
It’s funny you should mention Freud. Supposedly when Freud was sailing into the New York harbor, visiting the USA for the first time, he said, “They don’t realize that we’re bringing them the plague.”
Quotes like these seem too good to be true, so I treat it is apocryphal. My best effort, less than 5 minutes of searching this morning, to find the source of this quote is a 1996 book by Bruce Fink.
Plausible. Fink’s a believer, and Freud was funny, more insightful than he’s now given credit for, and prone to that kind of Nietzschean self-irony. I’ve never bumped into that quote because nothing’s worse than a book *about* Freud, but it’s a characteristic remark. And it’s true.
The Viennese upper-class/intellectual/Jewish milieu he’d stewed in was uniquely insane, blighted by “social contagions” (suicide especially) and shared delusions, etc. It was a soap opera of neurosis with the contrast jacked all the way up. So he saw people’s failings very clearly—though heavily “artifacted.”
The harbor was full of literal ships of fools.
Hemid,
I own a very interesting book, published in 1979, entitled A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889, by a historian named Frederic Morton. He was of Jevvish ancestry, his grandfather having moved to Vienna from, interestingly enough, Galicia, at the same time of this book’s coverage, in order to escape that woebegone, backwater province and to make something for himself and his descendants.
I started it when I was gifted it some time back, but serious illness, and the associated recuperation made me put it down. Your comment made me think of it again, and I took it down from the bookshelf.
Morton picked a particularly ominous time for the Ancien Regime of Hapsburg Austria, and Vienna in particular, filled as it was with all sorts of creative, but also wildly neurotic people. He wanted to really delve into the details and backstories of the people and the events of the day rather than to compose a sweeping study that would relegate these to mere, fleshless mentions.
It looked fascinating before I was constrained to put it aside, and a cursory look now has persuaded me to pick it up again.
Perhaps you, or other nlog readers might wish to investigate this richly derailed, and very well written volume.
I was enjoying today’s instalment and you had to ruin it by mentioning Jonah goul-berg 😉
A bunch of half-breed troublemakers from the destruction of Mesopatamia cut their chops in the Bronze Age Collapse, and then went on causing enough troubles they eventually got kicked out Egypt, then later the Roman Empire. (With many stops along the way since Labanayama the Canaanite let them in.)
From there, they ran north; in what is now the Ukraine they met another band of troublemakers who had gotten kicked out somewhere else. This, we can tell, was the start of a beautiful friendship.
Not going to change a leopard’s spots.
Or, a scorpion’s nature.
I might be wrong, but I think Eastern Galicia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, after which time it passed briefly into Polish hands from 1920 until September 1939. It was the apparent crackdown by the Poles in those 20 years against Ukraine that generated the genocidal hostility the Ukrainians showed in 1942-3 to the Poles in Galicia and Volhynia.
Yes, Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv was its metropolitan center. Long a part of the former Polish state it came to the Habsburgs in the late 18th century. Sometimes referred to as Ruthenes these Ukrainians were favored by Vienna as a balance to the ethnic Polish elite. The region is also the cradle of Uniate Eastern Slavic Catholicism.
Remember how before 9/11 we realized we knew almost nothing about the Arab Islamic world, and then an avalanche of history poured out?
This is going to be good stuff right here. I don’t think anyone else has done a study of the relevant history. I can hardly wait to see what you worthies will bring us today!
Don’t know but maybe the crackdown was caused by the Ukies behaving so badly that they earned what they got.
My family is originally from Galicia on my mother’s side, but I’ve known very little about it until the past few years. In my family historical memory is dead, unfortunately. I’ve had to learn all of this on my own. It’s quite sad, actually — all of my older relatives who knew this have long passed on, and in my age group (which isn’t young anymore), no one cares, to say nothing of the next generation.
I tried to get a few of them to watch “Wolyna” with me over the Thanksgiving holiday, with no luck. It’s a pretty brutal film.
Tangential to that, Martyr Made has a remarkable 2.5 hour podcast called “The Anti-Humans,” about that era in Eastern Europe. Not for weak stomachs. https:// martyrmade.com/19-the-anti-humans/
Norman Podhoretz presents:
A John Podhoretz joint –
“My Cossack Problem- And Ours.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x9nqMl5pJSQ