By Caitlin JOHNSTONE
Pouring more weapons into Ukraine is not how you save lives; you save lives by negotiating a ceasefire. Pouring more weapons into Ukraine is how you create a long and expensive military quagmire for Russia at the cost of many thousands of lives to advance US strategic interests. While making a vast fortune for the arms industry.
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Issuing a guarantee that you would never add a nation to NATO who you don't plan on adding anyway is a no-brainer when the alternative is mass military butchery.
I mean, unless your goal was to provoke mass military butchery.
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If the Kremlin wanted to kill large numbers of people it should have done so with starvation sanctions and proxy militias like a civilized government.
Fashion has moved on since the early 2000s, you savages.
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You're not allowed to talk about the known US/NATO/Ukraine actions which experts have been warning for many years would lead us to where we're at. You're only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked, in a vacuum, solely because he is evil and hates freedom.
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Only talking about the guilt of the invader and not the things that were done to provoke that invasion is exactly what I'd want people to be doing if I'd just provoked an invasion.
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Believe it or not it's actually always completely legitimate to criticize the actions of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, especially when those actions clearly paved the way to a war.
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The fact that western media cover Ukraine in a wildly different way from US-led wars is actually immensely important and points to a problem that urgently need attention. Anyone who takes issue with that should shut the fuck up and stop interrupting adult conversations.
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Literally every single time I say NATO powers paved the way to the Ukraine invasion I get some liberal claiming that's like asking what a rape victim was wearing. No, actually, victim blaming a rape survivor is not at all like criticizing the most powerful and deadly power structure in the world.
Liberals have been bleating this line ad nauseum for days, and it's about the most obnoxious and most shitlib thing you could possibly come up with.
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Empire apologists always try to distort power dynamics to make it seem like they're the brave up-punchers sticking up for the little guy. It's tiny Ukraine against big bad Russia, not Russia against a globe-dominating empire of which Ukraine is just one member state. It's the brave freedom fighters of Syria versus Assad, not Assad against a planetary unipolar hegemon using proxy forces to effect regime change. It's Israel against the big strong Muslim nations which surround it, not an entire empire of which Israel is just one member state picking on far weaker powers. Etc.
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For years anti-imperialists have been calling for detente and warning that all this cold war brinkmanship with Russia could lead to hot war. Now hot war is here as a direct result of refusing to pursue detente and they're trying to act like we're the assholes.
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Gonna be real fun when the consensus that it's fine for government-tied Silicon Valley corporations to censor online speech in the fight against "misinformation" moves from targeting Covid skeptics to targeting people who disagree with mainstream cold war narratives about Russia.
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The solution to a crisis that was created by brinkmanship is not more brinkmanship. The solution to a crisis that was created by brinkmanship is detente.
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Saying the US government is still a far worse offender in the mass military slaughter department than Russia will be met with hysterical shrieking and the rending of garments now, but it's still indisputably true and if you disagree with it it's because you're propagandized.
That the US is the most murderous government in today's world is just an easily quantifiable fact. Putin will have to work very, very hard to catch up to those numbers. This is important to note not because of some genocidal dick measuring contest, but because it points to what a healthy attitude toward US military butchery would look like through eyes untinted by propaganda manipulation.
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Theoretically the actual US/NATO military decision makers know imposing a no fly zone over Kyiv would be insane, since it's a one-way ticket to another world war; probably a very fast and radioactive one. But the fact that so much of the official US political/media class has been calling for one discredits it forever.
They sincerely don't seem to understand what it is that would be stopping the Russian planes from flying under such a scenario. They think it's like a rule you make and then the Russians go "Aww shucks I wanted to fly there but it's against the rules now."
This is the only appropriate level of response to this madness:
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Obviously anyone who had anything whatsoever to do with supporting the Iraq invasion should shut the whole entire fuck up about Ukraine for all eternity.
Don't let people act like Iraq is some distant memory. It happened 19 years ago. The Simpsons stopped making good episodes longer ago than that. It just happened, the consequences are still unfolding, the occupation is still ongoing, and they're still using the same old tricks.
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Hollywood teaches us that heroism looks like an individual stopping a bank robbery or leaving a criminal tied up outside the police station so we don't realize that real heroism looks like a collective rising up against our plutocratic rulers and creating a healthy world.