Another excellent chat by Perun for folk interested in this kind of thing.
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“All manpower, no metal” – Ukrainian mobilisation, equipment shortages, and trainingAugust 14th, 2022 |
 2 comments to “All manpower, no metal” – Ukrainian mobilisation, equipment shortages, and training |
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The Ukrainians have done very well.
Mr Putin has proved himself a useless military commander, but Russia should have won anyway, in spite of his utter incompetence – it is the fighting spirit of ordinary Ukrainian fighting men that has, so far, prevented that.
On training and tactics – the Ukrainians have taken these things very seriously (and have received a lot of British weapons and training – over quite some years now). The Russian Army essentially remains essentially hostile to giving individual soldiers proper training and allowing them to use their own intelligence and judgement.
A real Russian patriot would be horrified by this – as an effective military depends on effective individuals, and there are many real threats to Russia.
Mr Putin must go – but so must this entire system.
There must be a repudiation of the past – not “the Soviet Union had its good side” that one still gets in Russian school and university books. And things need to be built up from below – not imposed from above.
And yes this does mean a rejection of the old myth that a Big Boss would have saved the Rus from the centuries of Hell under the Mongols and Tartars – the Mongols were the greatest mixed (heavy as well as light) cavalry army the world has ever seen, a “Big Boss” leading all the Rus would have made NO DIFFERENCE.
Indeed it was not till the time of the Cossacks (Russian as well as the Ukrainian) with their lack of a “Big Boss” (the very word “Cossack” comes from a Turkish word meaning “free booter” or “masterless fighting man”), and their firearms, that the Steppe gradually belonged to the Indo Europeans again – all the way to the Pacific (as it had in ancient times).
The Emperor or Empress would then be informed that such-and-such a place was now returned to the Rus.
This is written up in the history books as the Emperor or Empress taking such and such a place – even though they often had nothing much to do with it.
By the way – Cossacks had to row as much as they rode, rivers often being a vital form of transport. But then the Rus are the “rowers”.
Such men paid no taxes (some of them were still not paying taxes as late as the First World War) – military service was enough. And they often decided exactly what form that military service was to take – where was to be retaken from the Baltic to the Pacific (and beyond – almost to where San Francisco now is), from the Artic Ocean to the Black Sea and the Caspian.
Such independent spirit, such self reliance, has to be relearned.
The bureaucracy in Moscow or Saint Petersburg was never any good – it always did more harm than good.
The main idea of the rulers of Moscow was to impose SERFDOM (although it was never universal – partly because people could vanish into the endless lands) – a copy of Western fashions , just as later rulers in Moscow imposed another Western fad – Marxism.
The absurd Tower Blocks of the Marxists remain – disfiguring the outskirts of Russian and Ukrainian cities (and absurd in areas with so much LAND).
Just as the top-down control of the military remains – with everything being under the control of some “Big Boss” in the Kremlin – whose main experience of enemies is not warriors on the battlefield, but prisoners in the torture cells of the Organs of state security.