alanjjohnstone
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An escalation?
Missile strikes to the west of the country, near to Polish border.
Just watched a George Galloway interview recorded before the invasion he was categorically assuring that there was not the remotest chance there would be an invasion…so we are in good company, IDrive.
As for the impending attack Kiev, has Zevenskyy seen what was done to Grozny? It was literally flattened by the Russian army. He has to hope it is only going to be a siege on the Ukrainian capital
You can kick the brains out of fascist racist scum, IDrive, but you can’t kick the socialist case into their brain.
And with reasoned rational argument, it is possible to persuade the most stubborn of people, after all, they usually became what they are because they were full of discontent and unrest at the way they perceived the present system allocates fairness and equity.
In my union days, I encountered those I called orange-reds, staunch union members who were bigoted, Unionist Rangers or Hearts supporters but who were always the first on the picket lines. They somehow even managed to differentiate the trade unionist James Connolly from the Irish nationalist James Connolly and would stood side-by-side with Celtic or Hibernian Republican sympathisers against the bosses. Class interests overcame their religious affiliations.
IDrive, The socialist position is not pacifism and individual members are not setting themselves up to be martyrs. We want to live for socialism.
In a hypothetical situation of a Ukrainian WSM member, I would guess it would be wise to stop voicing his or her politics knowing the threat to life and the priority would be to seek safety and sanctuary as a refugee. It seems most men are forbidden from fleeing but I’m sure it is still possible. If not, there are non-combatant roles one could perform.
I have faced or rather faced down aggressive drunks in pub arguments before. It is easy to simply change the subject and defuse the tension. I cannot recall any recourse to self-defence
I used to regularly watch Jimmy Dore but he quickly leapt onto the anti-mask mandate anti-vaxxer anti-Fauci bandwagon.
He has a feud with TYT about Russiagate, which he recognised as a totally made-up controversy to benefit the Democrats.
For the attention of our Magpie member ;-p
The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned of “alarming levels of inaction” from governments as he declared that the COVID-19 outbreak had become a pandemic. Two years on, with a number of highly effective vaccines, we have the tools needed to end this pandemic. But the complacency of some governments has only become worse.
We have heard the well-rehearsed line that “no one is safe until everyone is safe” from leaders in the global north. Yet, after two years, we have seen little evidence that they are serious. At regular intervals, wealthy governments push out press releases announcing donations of millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines. However, they fail to mention that dose donations are sporadic, sometimes close to expiry, and do not correspond to the needs of low and middle-income countries.
Another fail
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached a record high for the month of February, jumping by a 62% increase over last February’s level.
“This absurd increase shows the lack of policies to combat deforestation and environmental crimes in the Amazon, driven by the current administration,” said a Greenpeace campaigner. “The destruction just isn’t stopping.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/03/11/amazon-deforestation-hit-record-high-february-62-2021
Cracks appear in the Russian media, Robbo?
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-60685883
Criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has appeared on Russian TV, marking an unusual departure for the tightly controlled Russian media.“Evenings with Vladimir Soloviev,” a popular pro-Kremlin talk-show on the Russia-1 channel, strayed from Moscow’s official line. Semyon Bagdasarov, an academic appearing on the show, asked whether “we need to get into another Afghanistan, but even worse”
The comments are unusual as the programme’s host Soloviev has been a loyal ally of PutinMore likely the threat of invading is to engage Taiwan into accepting a Hong Kong deal, one country, two systems.
Taiwan industry has a large presence on the mainland – Foxconn who produce all the Apple products in China is Taiwanese
The situation in Odessa
“What I think of Russia has not changed today, I don’t see Russia as an aggressor. I believe that in a month, maybe a little more, the military actions will stop and more reasonable people will take the place of our current leaders,” said Alexander, a resident of the city. “For me it’s the defenders who are the danger, much more than the so-called aggressors.”
Perhaps it was to occupy only the Donbas region of Ukraine and unite it to the LPR and DPR, enlarging those to make it the friendly buffer state that Russia sought Ukraine to be, plus to make it more viable and Russia fell for its own propaganda that they expected it to be more sympathetic to Russian rule.
But first, before grabbing the Donbas, Russia had to achieve Ukraine’s surrender to permit the eventual re-drawing of the border in a peace settlement. Putin may indeed hold the belief that such a goal still remains possible.
It may explain Russia’s reticence to initially launch a full-scale shock and awe war and appear to try to limit their attack to military objectives such as airports but that has gone awry and now it is seen necessary to capture cities, maybe even only encircling them in sieges to pressure Zelenskyy into capitulation and ceding the eastern part of the country.
So in my scenario, while NATO expansion was a factor there was another way of fending it off.
But what do I know, I was only a postman and never studied military strategy at Sandhurst or West Point.
AS Israel welcomes Ukrainian jewish refugees, it excludes Palestinians once again
A new law passed Thursday that effectively bans the naturalization of Palestinian spouses of Israeli Jews.
The law discriminates against Israel’s 21% Arab minority – who are Palestinian by heritage and Israeli by citizenship – by barring them from extending citizenship and permanent residency rights to Palestinian spouses.
The Covid-19 pandemic may have claimed 18.2 million lives around the world, more than three times the official death toll, a new study suggests.
The higher figure is a better estimate of the true global casualty figure to the end of 2021, according to an analysis by a consortium of health researchers published in the Lancet.
As for the war widening, I don’t think we can discount the possibility. Let’s not forget that most here never thought a Russian invasion would actually happen and we were proved wrong. We thought the statesmen were going to act rationally. Russians weighing up the consequences of an attack and NATO understanding their concerns and reaching a compromise with some concessions. How wrong we were
Zelenskyy certainly seeks the active participation of NATO. He wants the war to spill-over. Something in their adulation of him that the media refuses to acknowledge.
He is justifying such intervention on humanitarian grounds, so each and every atrocity by the Russian against civilians is made headline news.
So far his requests have been sensibly denied.
But what if Russia is foolish enough to use chemical weapons as it has in Syria and it is verified?
There is also such a thing as mission creep, the unintended escalation of involvement from events. Again NATO has avoided such entanglements. But if military supplies continue to arrive overland, can there be the risk of a border skirmish?
Paddy is right. We should be cautious of being members of the Chairbourne Division and that also means not dismissing the threat of the war spreading as a remote one.
Accidents in war do happen. They cannot be prevented by the mere nature of war. They can lead to a change of policy. (USS Maine, Lusitania, even the War of Jenkins Ear)
And a European war does not necessarily mean a nuclear exchange. Gas warfare was never used in WW2 despite well-founded fears it could be and the ability to conduct such.
I can’t believe how people forget history.
“For our generation, it’s very alien to see this in Europe.”
The break up of Yugoslavia and the Balkan war is totally forgotten about, Europe engaged in ethnic cleansing and according to the international courts, genocide.
A lot of similarities between the two nations, relative recent creations from WW1, culturally diverse, differing languages, a history of fascism during WW2.
Over 100,000 dead, over two million refugees and over two million Internally displaced, Belgrade was bombed by NATO that also sent in an occupation army, Kosovo became a narco-state.
All vanished from a prince of the realms memory banks
And closer to his home was the civil war in Northern Ireland
And the Falklands War, despite its location a war between European peoples
Capitalism is thoroughly stained by bloody warfare.
And as for Russian atrocities, risings in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia crushed with tanks. Not to mention Chechen war and the Georgian war.
