The valiant Defenders of Ukraine

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From information I have, both of those societies are leaning towards their own forms of democracy. One just needs to look beyond western MSM. People who actually live and work there have different story to tell.

As I said, democracy is always conditioned on someone’s slavery - while you might like your democratic options and prosperity, you will very gladly close your eyes to various juntas in Latin America, less than democratic governments in S-E Asia or even apartheid in South Africa. Not to mentioned Arab world or Iranian regime. Lot of those regimes replaced democratic governments who objected to Neo-colonialism through various regime changes.

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Living in a democracy is not always easy , in a democracy you have a lot of freedom.
With that freedom also comes responsibility and for some people that is too hard and they do not want to take responsibility
Also very important in a democracy is too always fight to reduce corruption as corruption is the path to the dark side.
Democracies are also run by people so they are not perfect and mistakes have been made and will continue to be made.
Also a big problem is that idiots also have the freedom to voice their opinion.
Living in a democracy has to be a choice or it will not work ,history has shown it can not be forced on people.
The Ukraine people want to try and live in a democracy and even without Putin that would have been hard for them but they were willing to put in the effort.
They have done the living under a murdering regime for the last century and it has cost them a lot so they now want to see if they could make it as a democracy
America almost lost their democracy in 2020 when Trump tried to take over after he lost the election.
Russia made some steps in the democracy direction but they failed hard

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What secret information do you possess that I don’t?

And as I said before, most great civilizations of history have done so too. Whether it’s called a peasant, a serf, a slave or a commoner, the wealth of the rich and powerful has always been built of the work of the poor. That is not inherent to democracy, it’s inherent to society. It’s not a great thing and I would very much like to see it changed, probably no different from you, but you fool yourself by just blaming democracy and idolizing some bullshit kleptocratic system that will only make it worse if anything.

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I wouldn’t consider a staunch ally of Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela to be “pure fashist[sic]”. Putin is far closer to Maduro and Diaz-Canel than he is to any religiously conservative dictator or wannabee dictator.

Fascism is far more than just lots of nationalism and religiously conservative social views. The closest thing to “Fascism” these days is probably Erdogan in Turkey. Viktor Orban in Hungary has a couple of Fascist leanings, particularly in how he rants against the Treaty of Trianon, but modern-day Hungary isn’t remotely close to a Fascist country. For starters, Hungary has perfectly legitimate elections.

Putin is a murderous dictator who wants to impose a tyrannical bureaucracy on Ukraine while murdering millions of innocent Ukrainians in the process. Perhaps such insipid bloodlust transcends ideology.

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The idea that Trump supported Russia while in office, or colluded with Russia during either of his campaigns, appears to be a completely unfounded myth. Russia, for various reasons, seems to have supported Trump in his 2016 election, but many media sources appear to have grossly exaggerated the extent of this material support, while also flat-out lying about the existence of any reciprocal nature of it. The biggest sources of this exaggeration are probably the Krassenstein twins, Christopher Steele, Louise Mensch, Brian Ross, and Seth Abramson.

When media personalities push false narratives, it leads to some like Marjorie Taylor Green becoming pro-Russia, which is a problem. They think that since so many media sources lied about Russia before that they must be wrong now, which is catastrophically wrong. Russia is slaughtering Ukrainian civilians and sending many to so-called “filtration camps”.

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Seems like humanity always fails to learn time and again about the very real consequences of false narratives, gaslighting and misleading, generally egregious lies from the media. In fact, I’m covering an especially heinous case of the latter here:

The Soviets before 1989: “This is a fake story because the Nazis said it and muh Nazi bad, don’t ya know?”

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Yes, fashism is more than simple nationalism but a vision of the own nation to be a cheated people who have to get back to their destiny. Mussolini (more futurismo than conservative) talking about recreating the ancient Roman Empire and Putin today recreating a Russia that has never existed. Cuba, North Korea Venezuela and who else disliking “the West” are yust usefull.

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It is very interresting to follow your day by day reports about Katyn.

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Putin has his own religios patriarch. The Russian church has been since tzarina ekatarina part of the russian empire ruling system.

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The Late-Roman/Byzantine system of Caesaropapism, which Russia adopted, puts any believing and communicant member of their church who is head of state at the head of their church. For practical purposes, Putin is the head of the Russian Church.

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So he is not so far from beeing a religios dictator? But, never mind, we may disagree about old news but we agree that Putin must be stopped.

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News from Ukraine:
The Kiev Independent:
“Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that two months ago no one expected the country’s Armed Forces to become proficient with NATO weapons and swiftly adopt alliance’s standards. “Initially, howitzers were brought to us, but this is just the beginning, we will get much more,” he said.”

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Not secret. You just have to be interested to learn.

You can also look at Abbey’s TikTok, she is very good.

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Interesting video you posted there. It poses some interesting ideas, but as I expect you are a critical thinker, you would not just accept it because someone said so. Luckily TedX helps us a bit with this and posted a critigue of this talk as well. I expect you read that piece as well right? If not, here it is: A critique of Eric X. Li’s “A tale of two political systems” | TED Blog

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I agree that from what I could quickly see she makes pretty decent content and has somewhat of a credible basis to back up her claims. I also don’t see her promoting the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a good thing as you have done here in this channel. Actually, she doesn’t really have much content on Russia-Ukraine at all after her last post on the matter on the 28th of February where she mentioned two different perspectives and then stated she will make more content on the matter in the future. This has not happened yet, so I am still curious as to how you can justify the invasion.

You can accuse me of cherry picking and sure I may be, but you haven’t provided very specific citations either, just broad links to outlets with content on diverse topics. You also (wrongly) assume I don’t watch and read leftist opinionators and only binge state TV. Whenever you did cite specific claims, they turned out to be twisted narratives or plain falsehoods, so now I challenge you to do more critical thinking.

If you want to be a socialist, that’s fine by me and I see compelling reasons to identify as such, but remain critical, especially on concentrations of power.

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Subject was different forms of democracy.

This was expressed by many non-westerners, leaders, political experts, statesmen, scientists, … and even some western ones - I already posted links for “False promise of liberal hegemony”.

Western blindness for diversity, unilateralism and desire for hegemony has created situation that we face, verge of WWIII.

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As critical thinker I don’t need others to think and critique for me. Li is just one of many telling the same story. You asked what secret I know - I showed you how easy it is to find those “secrets”.

Examples of how perceptions (fake news, manufacture of consent) are created in the west:

Harff: For 18 months, we have been working for the Republics of Croatia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina, as well as with the [anti-Serb] opposition in Kosovo…

Merlino: What achievement are you most proud of?

Harff: To have managed to put Jewish opinion on our side. This was a sensitive matter…
President Tudjman was very careless in his book, Wastelands of Historical Reality.
Reading his writings, one could accuse him of anti-Semitism. In Bosnia the situation was
no better. President IzetbegoviÉ strongly supported the creation of a fundamentalist
Islamic state in his book The Islamic Declaration. Besides, the Croatian and Bosnian past
was marked by a real and cruel anti-Semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in
Croatian camps. So there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to
be hostile toward the Croats and the Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this attitude.
And we have succeeded masterfully

At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the affair of
[Serb] concentration camps [probably a reference to Gutman’s reports]. We jumped at the
opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations – the B’nai B’rith
Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish
Congress. In August we suggested that they publish an advertisement in the New York
Times and organize demonstrations outside the United Nations.
That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on
the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in
the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia. The great
majority of Americans were probably asking themselves in which African country Bosnia
was situated. But in a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys
and bad guys, which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish
audience. Almost immediately, there was a clear change of language in the press, with the
use of words with high emotional content such as “ethnic cleansing,” “concentration
camps,” etc, which evoked images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
The emotional charge was so powerful nobody could go against it.

Merlino: But when you did all this, you had no proof that what you said was true. You
only had the article in Newsday!

Harff: Our work is not to verify information. We are not equipped for that. Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favorable to us, to aim at judiciously chosen
targets. We did not confirm the existence of death camps in Bosnia, we just made it
known that Newsday affirmed it.

Merlino: Are you aware that you took on a grave responsibility?

Harff: We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to be
moral.

That was an interview with Ruder-Finn professionals.

I wonder if any of such professionals are doing the same today, against Russia, China, Venezuela, etc. What do you think?

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Replace Western with Russian and the statement is even more correct.

I take issue with this false promise, probably as much as you do, but again, just because I don’t like some stuff my country or allies are doing I don’t go off and praise some bullshit kleptocratic dictatorship. My country let’s me point out the stuff that’s wrong with it and I’ll make use of it to do so.

I think there are misinformation campaigns going around in many places, not limited to western or eastern sources. I also think it is foolish to take one proven instance of misinformation and use it to immediately disregard everything that is critical of something you like.

You also conveniently assume Russia, China, Venezuela, etc. and other ‘alternative’ regimes are the only target of misinformation campaigns. You also completely skip over the glaring fact that all these countries have themselves at some point or another been involved in such campaigns.

Again, you can criticize western democracies and governments all you want, but it only sounds hypocritical if you’re not willing to critigue your own. As I stated before, “US bad” is somewhat of a fact, but not a substitution for a political philosophy.

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So 2 months in and sanctions don’t seem to be hurting the value of the Ruble much. Does anyone think the cutting off of gas supplies to certain countries changes anything? Just curious.

Personally, If I were a Polish patriot it might be a good time for an accident near Nordstream 1. Oops, now no one gets gas except through the overland pipelines.

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Patriotism is to harm your ally?