Ukraine is the only state, other than Israel, where both the President and the Prime Minister are recognized as Jewish- at least in the eyes of the Israeli Chief Rabbis.
Peter Beinart who feels obliged to write nonsense because he is Jewish but not too keen on Israel, ignores the elephant in the room so as to write in the Guardian
n 1943, the Hungarian-born journalist Arthur Koestler wrote: “In this war we are fighting against a total lie in the name of a half-truth.” That’s a good motto for American progressives to adopt in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Koestler was working for the British Ministry of Information- perhaps his befriending, in Malaga, of Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell who had been head of British military propaganda towards the end of the First War helped him get this job- but was not naturalized till 1948. Thus, he wasn't writing for himself or presenting the official British view. Rather this was 'targeted propaganda', written to order, aimed at American 'pessimists'- apparently Koestler's bosses thought America was well provided with such people- and so writing this dreck constituted Koestler's contribution to 'fighting'. Evelyn Waugh has satirized the manner in which if one worthless shithead wrote an article appealing to 'pessimists' then some other Department would get a different worthless shithead to write an article appealing to 'optimists'.
Why is Beinart quoting this shit? Is it because Koestler- who wasn't fighting at all- was Jewish and knew that this was a case of Jews surviving either by running away or getting to Israel and defending the Jews there and also enlisting in British or any other anti-German forces so as to kill the Jew-killers and thus save themselves from extinction?
The true significance of Putin's invasion is obvious. Whatever happens, Ukraine is going to turn into Syria- i.e. the oligarchs will either morph into localized Mafia Dons or yield to ragtag militias which will turn into extortion and trafficking rings. Who will be blamed for this shit-show which will gradually infect Romania and perhaps parts of Poland? Jews. That is why the Ukrainian Rabbis aren't pleased that two Jews are presiding over a populist, chauvinistic, linguistic sub-nationalism even stupider than that of Saakashvili's Georgia. On the other hand, Orban is dreaming of getting territory from Romania after it succumbs to the Ukrainian infection.
Saying the US stands with Ukraine because America is committed to democracy and the “rules-based international order” is at best a half-truth.
The US does not stand with Ukraine. That is why it has not gone to war. The UK did stand with Poland in 1939. It went to war. It could not stand with Czechoslovakia in 1938 because even Poland wanted a piece of that hodge-podge nation. Nobody can stand with a country stupid enough to try to impose the majority language on one third of the population who have never used it in their own region.
Saying the US will ramp up sanctions on Putin because of Ukraine is true enough. It is also quite true that America always mentions democracy and other such stuff on such occassions.
The US helps dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates commit war crimes in Yemen,
in return for help in committing war crimes. So what?
employs economic sanctions that deny people from Iran to Venezuela to Syria life-saving medicines,
How? Such medicines are easy enough to get much more cheaply than from America. Indeed, lots of Americans travel across their border to get life-saving medicines at an affordable price.
rips up international agreements like the Iran nuclear deal
It was a multi-lateral, not an international, agreement. Why pretend that P5+1 is 'international'? The fact that a Permanent Member can withdraw from it, even if certification occurs, means it is neither international nor an agreement. It was merely a coordinated plan of action. Thus it was not regulated by the law of treaties and thus was wholly unjusticiable.
and Paris climate accords, and threatens the international criminal court if it investigates the US or Israel.
So these aren't 'international agreements' at all- just stuff Beinart thinks ought to be subject to the law of treaties.
But this hypocrisy wouldn’t have fazed Koestler, because it’s nothing new.
Koestler wasn't a lawyer. But he wasn't stupid. There was no hypocrisy in the U.N declaration because the US had an explicitly racialist legal code which drew a wide distinction between 'Caucasians' and others when it came to civil and political rights.
In 1943, the alliance that fought Hitler
who recruited non Caucasians- including Indians- into the Waffen SS and who supported Netaji Bose against Churchill
was led by a British prime minister who championed imperialism,
not against White Dominions which were fully autonomous and permitted to treat their darkies in a manner they pleased- even if those darkies were the majority
an American president who presided over racial apartheid,
Had Churchill been killed by Hitler's agents, the plan was for Jan Smuts to take over as the head of the Imperial forces. Apartheid is a South African word.
and Joseph Stalin.
whose credo opposed any type or racial or religious or linguistic chauvinism. Fuck is wrong with Beinart? Does he really not know that lots of Jews, like Koestler himself, aligned with Stalin purely because of his ideology?
Koestler’s point wasn’t that the US or Britain, let alone the USSR, were virtuous in general.
Has Beinart never read Koestler? Is he utterly illiterate? Or is he simply lying? The facts are plain enough. Koestler, like Orwell- another Ministry of Information employee- was an ex-Communist disgusted by Stalin's perfidy. He was useful to the Brits for the same reason Orwell was useful. He was telling the ex-Communists in the States ('pessimists') not to cling to isolationism or to say 'a plague on both your houses', but instead to back the War and buy war bonds or whatever. Meanwhile, that same Ministry of Information was employing all sorts of nutters- Pan Islamists, Vegans, Occultists, spoiled Catholics, pedophiles, witch-doctors, you fucking name it- to write various types of shite which were then 'placed' with appropriate journals here and there. This did not represent any type of 'fighting', but it beat getting shot at on the battlefield. To his credit, Evelyn Waugh preferred the latter course.
It was that they were virtuous relative to Nazi Germany in the specific circumstances of the second world war, and that these sinful governments were the only ones with the geopolitical heft to stop a totalitarian takeover of Europe.
Fuck off! Pearl Harbor had already happened. Hitler had declared war on the US. It was obvious that winning the war meant that you could be as pessimistic as shit about all sorts of ideological bollocks, but the fact remained that the scarce resources of the world would be at the command of the victors. They would dine well because they had ended up with both the butter and the guns. The losers would starve.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is neither as powerful nor as genocidal as Hitler’s Germany.
It is infinitely more powerful. It can blow up America and England and anybody else who tries to invade it. Does Beinart really not know this? How fucking ignorant is he? The guy is a Professor of Journalism. Every line he writes is obviously, mischievously, false. Is that what he teaches his students?
But Putin’s claim that historical and cultural affinity gives Russia the right to bludgeon Ukraine into submission is a total lie.
A right exists if a remedy exists. That remedy may be self-provided- e.g. the right to self-defense which is effective if you can kill anyone who tries to kill you. We don't know whether Russia can bludgeon Ukraine into submission. The balance of probabilities is- sure. It can do so in the medium term. It is a 'total lie' that there is no 'historical and cultural affinity' between Russia and the Ukraine. It is also a total lie that the West will risk getting nuked to stand by the regime of Jewish comedian- if not a clown.
It is no less of a lie because the US – by pushing Nato ever-further eastward after 1989 – exploited Russian weakness and compounded Russian humiliation.
This is silly. If the Ukrainians had done sensible things they would be perfectly safe. Indeed, Companies headquartered in Kiev would be building factories in the poorer parts of Russia to take advantage of lower wages. The richest Russian oligarchs would site their most ostentatious palaces in a Crimea which remained wholly Ukrainian and thus safer for them. Indeed, a Ukrainian accent would be as fashionable among Moscow's elite as it had been in the time of Kruschev and Brezhnev.
The Treaty of Versailles was also a victor’s peace.
It was a piece of shit. Everybody was terrified by the Bolshevik revolution. The Allies failed to topple it and so the German General Staff did a deal with the Reds who had previously also helped Kemal Attaturk.
Keynes, fuckwit that he was, published a book after the War explaining that America would turn into a net food importer (he claimed it already was!) and thus the Germans would starve unless they conquered Ukraine. That's why, once the 'extend and pretend' financing of the Weimar Republic collapsed (because of the Wall St. crash) Germans had no alternative but to vote for the Army's maximal program. The only surprise was that it was a Catholic Corporal not a Junker General who presided over that shambles.
It also strengthened toxic political forces in the defeated nation forced to accept its terms.
Fuck off! Germany lost much more territory after the Second war. No 'toxic political forces' rose as a result. The Germans realized that General Staffs are as stupid as shit. They are happy in their so called army drills with broom stick handles painted black.
Hitler’s murderous revanchism, like Putin’s today, was still a crime.
Sheer fantasy! The French may have had 'murderous revanchism' but they didn't have an offensive doctrine and didn't try starting any trouble coz they knew they'd be fucking stomped.
Putin is exchanging access to Western markets- which does most Russians little good- with tangible real estate. Basically, if sanctions say you can't get a Lexus, then you double down on grabbing olive trees. However, if Ukraine's economy had grown on the basis of a vibrant manufacturing sector, the Rooskies would be cool with its rise. After all, it would be able to pay for more and more for gas and other raw materials while providing a safe place to build your palaces and stash your loot. Moscow's elites during the Soviet era were perfectly happy to see Finland thrive economically. It was a great place to shop with your hard currency allowance.
Koestler’s adage is subject to abuse.
It was stupid shit. Fight only if it profitable to do- i.e. you have a good chance of winning and that outcome is much better than the alternative. Also, definitely fight if you will cut your own throat tomorrow because of your remorse for not fighting.
This holds even if it is a complete lie to say that the rapist who is trying to grab your kid intends to eat him. It is a half truth to say that he is going to fuck your kid in the ass because actually the rapist suffers from premature ejaculation. But this is not the reason you should punch and kick that pedo scumbag till the police arrive. The reward will be obvious to you when you find nobody will let you pay for your drinks at the pub tonight.
Hawks might interpret it as suggesting that because the US is a democracy and Russia is a dictatorship, America has the moral high ground in every clash between the two.
Fuck the moral high ground. Are guys who occupy it actually buying you drinks after you kicked the shit out of a pedo? No. They are tut tutting about your vigilantism and the fact that you might have voted for Brexit or Trump or Netanyahu or Narendra Modi or whatever.
That’s not true. Democracies can commit aggression and tyrannies can oppose it.
Democracies- like Hitler's Germany- can do genocide. Tyrannies, like Stalin's Russia, might oppose it.
When Putin opposed the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, Russia was defending a half-truth against America’s total lie.
No. It was defending a former client. But that defense was half-hearted because Saddam was as crazy as a bed bug. Dr. Assad wasn't. That's why he is still around. Ukraine may become like Syria but I bet it won't have the same Jewish President or Prime Minister ten years down the line.
When his government backed UN resolutions condemning Israeli settlements that the US vetoed, Russia supported human rights and international law while the US defied them.
Perhaps Beinart thinks the Ayatollahs and Al Qaeda nutjobs are equally praiseworthy supporters of human rights and international law when they decided it was safer to kill non-Israeli Westerners because Mossad be gangsta.
When Joe Biden declares, as he did last Thursday in his remarks on Ukraine, that “America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom. This is who we are,” progressives should hold their applause.
They do hold their applause because they are holding their dicks or, if they don't have dicks, are fisting themselves vigorously.
Claiming the US possesses an inherent inclination to support liberty implies that the United States can be trusted to act outside of the bounds of international law – a logic that leads to the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.
If so claiming human beings possess an inherent inclination to support democracy under the rule of law involves subscribing to a logic which entails the conclusion that Peter Beinart is torturing his own mother in Abu Ghraib by inserting dead cats into her rectum. This is completely unacceptable behavior.
But Koestler’s point was that progressives can puncture America’s pretensions to universal virtue while still recognizing that it is sometimes one of the few instruments available to combat evil.
Very true. If you constantly tell people that they are truck-stop whores sucking off dudes for a dollar at a time then you can still recognize that these truck-stop whores are sometimes one of the few instruments available to prove the Reimann Hypothesis. On the other hand, people may beat you if you incessantly berate them for their supposed occupation. Still, the best sort of 'progressive' is the one which has just had its head kicked in by a hen-party of lasses from Hendon with burgeoning careers in Cost and Management Accountancy or Digital Advertising. This didn't happen to me. It was somebody else. I can't tell you his name coz we were in the SAS together.
As important as it is to recognize that the US is capable of wars like Vietnam and Iraq, it’s equally important to recognize that not everything the US does is Vietnam or Iraq.
It is not important at all to recognize stupid shit. Just don't do it.
In Ukraine, it was Putin, not Biden, who lied about weapons deployments.
This is foolish. Heads of State are not deemed to lie on such subjects. Why? Of their nature, such matters are subject to strategic ambiguity. A President may 'mis-speak' about them but there is an immediate official correction even if what was said was obviously true. In other words, there are protocol bound matters where truth is undefined by convention or because this is the 'canonical' solution to a coordination game.
Beinart has done nothing but lie during the course of this article. Though a Professor of Journalism, he has shown a reckless disregard for the truth.
It was Putin, not Biden, who defied the UN and international law.
We may have different views about what the law will decide but, till a Court has spoken, the matter is moot. We don't know whether International law really has been defied until a sentence has been passed. As for the UN, Permanent Members have a veto. There is no question of defiance.
It is Putin, not Biden, who is bombing another nation and creating vast numbers of refugees.
And it is Biden, not Putin, who is refusing to permit the influx of vast numbers of refugees into his country. So what? Either America will stop being a global military power or it will sooner or later start bombing another nation. Indeed, Biden has ordered air-strikes just like Putin.
In Ukraine, the US is sending weapons not to a prop up a dictator but to defend a free nation against one.
Will javelin missiles win the war? No. But they could turn the thing into a Syria like quagmire. Maybe just handing out machine guns and teaching everybody to make Molotov cocktails wasn't a smart thing to do. When neighborhoods have to defend their water and bread and pool of conscripts from each other, this will become clear.
In a rare and admirable act of self-reflection, the left-leaning journalist Matt Taibbi last week noted that he had underestimated the chances that Putin would launch a full-scale invasion because of “reverse chauvinism”.
American journalists are utterly shit. Why not find a proper 'structural causal model' for Putin's actions? Why just write any shite that comes into your head?
He was “so fixated on western misbehavior” that he discounted the possibility of Putin’s.
This is stupid shit. Putin waited to hear back from China etc. Then Imran Khan came to see him. That set the optics right. Putin is fucking over the Christian West. Islam is cool with that. The UAE abstained. The Eurasian block will grow and grow. Magnitsky will push more and more 'non-aligned' countries- Bangladesh, Myanmar etc- into the China bloc. Then the Chinese, who always recognized Hamas, will show Israel that the path to peace is through Beijing not Camp David. Suddenly Beinart will have nothing to virtue signal about. Sad.
It’s not surprising that American progressives, having lived through the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, would grow skeptical when Washington’s military and foreign policy establishments gear up for conflict with a foreign adversary.
There is gearing up here whatsoever. Obama said 'American foreign policy is doing stupid shit'. The Biden doctrine is 'shit yourself while running away'. The bonus is if Biden manages to destroy 'exorbitant privilege' by making the dollar too politically perilous to act as a reserve currency. China and Russian and the BRICs do have some sort of sub-par settlement system. But if Russia is cut off from SWIFT, smart crypto types will cobble together something no country owns but which all can use. The good news is that everybody could then disintermediate the regulated sector which is getting stupider and more bureaucratic and maybe even a little bit 'woke'.
But that skepticism must extend to America’s adversaries as well. As one socialist put it last week on Twitter, “believing America has a monopoly on being evil is just another kind of American exceptionalism”.
as is having any such belief. The truth is most Americans don't give a shit about virtue signaling bollocks and moral high grounds and such.
And in the current conflict over Ukraine – where the US is a flawed but essential element in the fight against Vladimir Putin’s murderous lies – it’s a form of American exceptionalism progressives must avoid.
Where are these 'progressives'? Do they have any power? Are we talking about AOC? Does Beinart think she is asking Biden to send troops to Ukraine- rather than get Congressional approval first? Is that what Beinart himself wants? Does he not get that every fucking jihadi will turn up to kill those troops? American air power will be ineffective. So there will be no saving Private Ryan. Except, there won't be many privates with names like Ryan. Rodriguez maybe. Oh. I see. That's the whole point right? Save White Christendom by sending in Latinos. Works for me. What this Continent needs is better Mexican food. And tequila. Lots and lots of tequila.
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