Re: Ukraine
Posted: Tue May 13, 2014 11:27 pm
Thought it was a statement of political apathy and narcissism.
say it again nowrockonin wrote:I tried to play the mistake off quickly, with catchy war related lyrics.
In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia
Washington's role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime's neo-sizan, has huge implications for the rest of the world
US Meal Ready to Eat pack in Ukraine
A pro-Russian activist with a shell casing and a US-made meal pack that fell from a Ukrainian army APC in an attack on a roadblock on 3 May in Andreevka, Ukraine. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty
Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis", as if the truth "never happened even while it was happening".
Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy" which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.
In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – "our" terrorism – are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato's campaign in 2011, "Libya has become a terrorist safe haven".
The name of "our" enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an alternative to US domination. The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.
Washington's role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last "buffer state" bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-sizan in a country where Ukrainian sizan backed Hitler.
Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure of Russia's historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.
But Nato's military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.
Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend's provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine's population – have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are neither "separatists" nor "rebels", as the western media calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.
Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of "special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.
A doctor described trying to rescue people, "but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian izan radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday didn't even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent."
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta's defence secretary, Andriy Parubiy – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that attacks on "insurgents" would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow "trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation", according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama's grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its "remarkable restraint" after the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is "duly elected". As Henry Kissinger once said: "It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true."
In the US media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as "murky" and a "tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-sizan) attacked "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the victims – "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russia's "undeclared war". For the Germans, it is a poignant irony that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.
A popular truism is that "the world changed" following 9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs "special operations" – secret wars – in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and a loss of liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question is: why do we tolerate this?
Experimental tubes filled with fuel and explosives tend to do that from time to time.nowaysj wrote:I don't know what is the story, why'd that rocket blow?
i dont think we're the only intelligent life in the universe either, but i do have my doubts that we'll ever make contact with any other beings (aside from perhaps receiving/transmitting radio with decades if not centuries/millennia of delay). the universe is just way too huge (even the next nearest galaxy is 2.5 million light years away so if there's nothing else in the milky way, chances are nil imo) and superluminal travel is (unfortunately) impossiblenowaysj wrote:Or maybe there really are outside forces involved? I absolutely disbelieve that we are the only life in the universe, or the galaxy, or our little local star neighborhood. Prior civilizations could have become space faring millions, if not billions of years ago, don't think it is a stretch to assume they'd have superluminal travel and an interest in other life.
You really do disappoint phigure. Every scientific/engineering advancement we've made has been previously stated as theoretically impossible by fine learned scholars. That track record alone should be enough to convince you that we'll be zipping from star to star in no time. Let alone that we in one hundred years went from first flight to the moon. Give us a billion years and I'm sure we'll have it sorted (if we haven't already). And this is with the caveat that our superluminal travel may not be in the form of accelerating a massful object in this space beyond the speed of light. But then again, maybe it will.Phigure wrote:superluminal travel is (unfortunately) impossible
Perhaps, but on the scale of billions, hundreds of billions or thousands of billions, or even billions of billions, I think you have to play the odds, which in this case suggests we're on an average planet, orbiting an average star in an average galaxy in an average cluster....Phigure wrote:sometimes ive also wondered if the reason we haven't established contact with anything else is that maybe we're the first or one of the first intelligent life forms (of many to come)? someone's gotta be first right?...
by the same logic you could argue against any law of physics. those previous scientific/engineering advancements weren't prohibited by one of the most fundamental principles of... the entire universe. some things just aren't possible, like perpetual motion machines or faster than light travel. the only way you could do FTL travel is with hypothesized "alcubierre drives"... the problem is that they require particles with negative mass (which don't exist)nowaysj wrote:You really do disappoint phigure. Every scientific/engineering advancement we've made has been previously stated as theoretically impossible by fine learned scholars.
fair point, but if you're referring to wormholes, everything we know about them, even if we were able to form and link them, precludes being able to actually travel through them and make it out intact (tidal effects alone would shred anything passing through let alone possible firewalls).And this is with the caveat that our superluminal travel may not be in the form of accelerating a massful object in this space beyond the speed of light.
hey i'm not at all saying something like that isn't possible (or even traveling at fractions of / close to the speed of light, which is pretty damn good). i'm hugely optimistic about the kinds of crazy shit that we're going to be doing (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out in the next hundred/thousand/million years), stuff so wildly futuristic we can't even imagine it right now. but laws of physics are laws of physics (and the universal speed limit is just that, a limit), and the fermi paradox (the fact that statistically, there should be other life out there, but somehow, we havent met it yet) is definitely something to think aboutnowaysj wrote:At the very least, disbelieve half of everything you are learning, and have a little imagination. Have read of plans to shoot self assembling nano materials at significant speeds to nearby stars. We can send, molecule by molecule, self assembling exploration platforms to our nearby neighbors, self assembling landers, incubators. Given our current apelike understanding of the universe this is a reasonable method of humans reaching nearby stars and planets with foreseeable technology. It is just a start dude, but I can't just stand to see your light turned off by E=MC^2. That shit is a minor annoyance at best.