Today Moscow repeats its crime by invading Ukraine, by denying the existence of a Ukrainian nation. Think also of Russia’s accomplices in the West — those monstrous liars and accessories after the fact, who say that Ukraine and NATO are responsible for the war in Ukraine, or say that we must (for our own sake) allow the Ukrainian people to be butchered and oppressed again. It was shameful enough that the world stood by and believed the lies and tolerated Stalin’s genocide against Ukraine. But now, today, it unfolds again! And the dictator in Moscow finds no shortage of apologists and helpers in the West. They misrepresent those, like myself, who think Ukraine should be assisted, by calling us warmongers — as if we are advocating war with Russia. But there is no such advocacy. Ukrainians are already fighting because they have been invaded. It is their war, not ours. But we do have a moral obligation to help them. Furthermore, the evil they are fighting also wants to destroy us.
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Samizdata quote of the day – a question of evilJuly 13th, 2023 |
 32 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – a question of evil |
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I support a fully independent Ukraine. Not governed by Moscow, Brussels or Washington – or anywhere else outside Ukraine.
And, given the attack my Mr Putin’s forces, the military aid that the United Kingdom gave in 2022 to prevent the fall of Kiev was morally justified.
As for who will formally win the war – I do not know. But given the casualties – both Ukraine and Russia have already really lost.
It should also be pointed that some of the self proclaimed super patriots who oppose the military aid given to Ukraine, also oppose the British war effort of 1939 and 1914 – and, yes, I am thinking of Mr Peter Hitchens.
The British action in opposing German aggression in 1939 and 1914 was both morally justified and, basically unavoidable – for example even the German Ambassador in 1914 accepted that Berlin had given the British government no other choice but war – as the Imperial German government was invading various countries, including the lands opposite the coast of this island, and had refused any international peace conference or independent talks.
For self proclaimed super patriots to always support the foes of their country in time of conflict is rather odd.
“But Mr Putin has not actually killed anyone inside the United Kingdom” – actually he has had people killed here, several times. But the self proclaimed super patriots tend to ignore that as well.
Much as the Rothbardians (and others) ignore the campaign of bombings and shootings inside the United States by the Imperial German government before (yes before) the American Declaration of War in 1917.
One still still sees claims that “the so called Zimmerman telegram was forged by the British” – even though the German official Mr Zimmerman freely admitted that it was not forged. That he had indeed been stirring up Mexican groups to attack the United States. Just as the Imperial German government sent in “Lenin” to undermine Russia – yes the Imperial German Government did that, not “the Rothschilds”.
But one will never convince those people who think that Mr Putin has not had people inside the United Kingdom murdered, and who also deny that he was going for Kiev in 2022.
“Border dispute” this conflict is not. If it was a border dispute there would not have been the thrust to try and take Kiev at the very start of the war.
I’ve had several Ukrainians tell me this war is the true rebirth of Ukraine, transforming it in ways that would’ve never otherwise been possible.
American commentators with whose politics I usually agree often cite true bad things done by the Ukrainian government e.g. instances of corruption and authoritarian moves against the Russian orthodox church in Ukraine. It is right that these abuses should be pointed out. But for me, the accompanying hints that these things justify withholding support from the Ukraine when Russia is outright trying to conquer it and extinguish it as a nation are like people who think that when someone is murderously attacked in the street the police and bystanders ought not to intervene because the person being attacked has not always been a good citizen.
Take the anti-Ukrainian commentators here in the US with a grain of salt. The root of their issues with the country stem precisely from the way the Democrat/Republican oligarchy was using the country to profit from. Burisma? All the rest? Basically what drives their ambivalence and doubt.
The neat little ju-jitsu move that the people like the Clintons and Bidens pulled with ascribing Russian support to their opponents is typical of how these assholes operate. Who was it, again, who made the entire Uranium One thing happen, wherein the US sold off a huge chunk of uranium operations to the Russians? Who benefited from all the money flowing in from Russian oligarchs? Who would have likely lined up along with those already-documented Russian oligarchs to rape Ukraine post-conquest…? Why, yes… Not the Republicans. Mostly.
Thing I wonder is what the hell Zelensky has over the Biden Krime Krewe, because I’m pretty damn sure that they ain’t helping Ukraine out of the kindness of their hearts; Burisma was a Russian front from the beginning. The Clinton and Biden operation was working hand-in-glove to work towards raping Ukraine, and you can see that in the outlines we have revealed publicly so far. My suspicion is that Zelensky has something really, really good on the Bidens and their surrounding coterie of assclowns, which is why they’re so compliant with demands for military aid while simultaneously not shipping over the things like ATACMS and F-16s that would end the whole thing quickly…
Most Americans support Ukraine, or would support it if they knew the real facts of the matter. What’s produced the ambivalence is the very real corruption that the Democrats got themselves involved in, and the doubts produced from that. They know someone’s lying their asses off to them, but they don’t know who.
Me? I’d really like to know what Zelensky knows, because it’s gotta be pretty damn big. Because, if it wasn’t, Putin would even now be dividing up the spoils from his conquest of Ukraine…
Kirk – yes, that is why I did not mention American aid to the Ukraine, which is tainted by the history of the corrupt Biden family. Although even here it is not really Ukraine that was the big thing for the Biden family – it was the People’s Republic of China, which is on Mr Putin’s side in this conflict.
Powtiatowski – that remains to be seen.
During the war the stunts, the Eurovision song contest entry, the praise for Mr Trudeau of Canada (a vile person), the claim that Ukraine wants to join the European Union, are all justifiable – “say anything to keep the arms and ammunition coming”.
But if the E.U. flags (and all the rest of the “international community” stuff) are still in Kiev AFTER the war – that will be a different matter.
Let us hope that Ukraine wins the war and becomes a free and independent (independent) nation, fostering its own culture, rejecting BOTH the tyranny of Mr Putin and the sickness of Frankfurt School “Critical Theory” Marxism that is destroying the West.
If your arms supplier, the United States, is ruled by corrupt and evil people, which sadly it is, one has to be polite about them – till the moment the war is won, and not one second longer.
@Natalie Solent (Essex)
instances of corruption and authoritarian moves against the Russian orthodox church in Ukraine.
I understand that my opinion on this is very unpopular here, but I’ll stick my oar in again, and go off and lick my wounds after you all give me a kicking… but, Natalie, to say that is an massive understatement is in itself an massive understatement. It isn’t “some instances of corruption”, it is among the most tyrannical situation in European history. Arresting opposition politicians; banning opposition political parties; total government take over of TV and radio channels; not “moves against” the church, but banning it and arresting priests; arresting young men fleeing the fighting and forcing them to take up arms under their tyranny of the army and on an on.
when someone is murderously attacked in the street the police and bystanders ought not to intervene because the person being attacked has not always been a good citizen.
It isn’t that at all. It is like two criminal gangs in a shoot out, with innocent bystanders getting caught in the middle, and thinking that giving bigger guns to one of the gangs that you slightly prefer will make it all better.
I don’t know the answer, but we should at least be clear eyed about the situation. Putin is a monster, but Zelenskyy is a monster too. When is the cure worse than the disease?
Let the brave Ukrainians fight for their freedom. But let’s not pretend that “Zelenskyy” and “freedom” should ever be in the same sentence.
Major elements of the Russian orthodox church in Ukraine were effectively adjuncts of the Russian state, so shutting them down & giving their assets to Ukrainian Orthodox institutions independent of the Patriarchate of Moscow is hardly ‘authoritarian’.
Please explain what makes Zelenskyy a monster. Shutting down the Patriarchate of Moscow in Ukraine sure as hell doesn’t qualify 😀
Sure, I also have a problem with conscription but again, by that metric all WW2 era leaders from every combatant nation were monsters.
It’s all too conflicted. The rapacious Biden clan (and others) took so much dirty money out of Ukraine that it is an automatic hot button country for Republicans.
The Russian Orthodox Church is a Russian state agency, and has been for centuries. Putin directs it completely, and is prepared to use it for his direct political and military benefit. Allowing it would he the same as refusing to arrest spies. Note, he hasn’t made any attacks on Orthodox religion, just the church itself.
Corruption, shmoruption. Which country doesn’t have corruption? The issue is that Ukraine was making moves to fight it, at least on political levels, and Putin wasn’t having that. He wants it to be corrupt. So if you are opposed to corruption, then you should be pro-Ukraine. Bulgaria is thoroughly corrupt, too, but it seems to be getting better because people see a way out — through being part of western Europe, rather than being endlessly stuck in Soviet style institutions. If we deny Ukraine a way out, then we are condemning them to the corruption not just existing, but remaining.
Zelenskyy cancelling elections is the only really authoritarian thing that concerns me. It depends how long he does it for.
I read a book on the Vietnam War a while back and one line stuck with me from it: we didn’t fight because [Vietnam] was important; it was important because we fought. That’s how I feel about Ukraine. Standing up to Russian expansion is important.
That said, we have no idea where the money and weapons we’re been sending to Ukraine hand over fist are going. Just like Korea and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Haiti and the Dominican Republic and all those Banana Republics we’re propping up a horribly corrupt regime put in place by a Western-backed coup. And then there are questions about how the Biden clan fits into this.
My biggest problem with this war and our backing of them is driving us deeper in debt, not helping inflation in the least since the printing presses just keep running to pay for this, and we’re burning through our ammunition stores quicker than they can be replenished and we’ll be in a shooting war with China before too long.
@Chester Draws,
As I understand it, the Ukrainian constitution forbids elections during wartime. So, saying that Zelensky has “cancelled elections” is a bit disingenuous.
@Steven R,
Vietnam has to be looked at as a huge ‘effing mistake from one angle, a lost opportunity from another, and a massive PR blunder.
Regardless of what motivated Kennedy and his fellow Democrats to involve us there, the “accidental strategy” of fighting the Soviet block in Vietnam did far more economic damage to the Soviet Union than anyone ever really recognized. It’s possible that their collapse in the late 1980s was partially caused by the fallout from all the opportunity costs they incurred arming and supporting North Vietnam, and to what end? They got nothing out of it, really.
Had we continued support of South Vietnam, rather than betrayed their trust in us as an ally in 1975, it’s entirely possible that the Soviets would have been bankrupted even quicker if they’d rearmed North Vietnam for another attempt. Or, they’d have had to give it up as a bad job, and let South Vietnam continue to exist, which would have been interesting considering the effect that conquest of South Vietnam has had on the hard-liners.
The whole Vietnam debacle was very much an “own-goal” Democratic Party defeat. They got us involved there, then somehow transmogrified the war into a “Republican idea…”, and sold it all as being their fault. Then, when Nixon got us out, and promised continued military aid if the North invaded again, they betrayed those treaty commitments.
It ain’t lost on many of us here in the US that the identical playbook was utilized by the Biden Krime Krewe to stab the Afghan government in the back. The parallels are uncanny; it’s almost as if someone was reading the same after-action report and duplicating it, from cutting off funding to cutting aviation support after building an army dependent on it…
Sure we do.
By 11 November 2022, the Institute for the Study of War calculated that Ukrainian forces had liberated an area of 74,443 km2 (28,743 sq mi) from Russian occupation, leaving Russia with control of about 18% of Ukraine’s territory. The Ukrainian military didn’t achieve this by politely asking Russia to give it back.
As of March 2023…
Making all that happen is where the money is going.
Of all the bogus arguments against supporting Ukraine, the argument that Putin and Zelenskyy are more or less the same is the most bogus.
I think we can reasonably assume the weapons are being used as hoped.
I’m not saying Putin and Zelenskyy are cut from the same cloth or that the vast majority of the money and weapons being sent to Ukraine aren’t being used for their intended purpose, but Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, the US has a long history of not keeping track of where money or equipment or arms ends up on the best of days (the DoD just found over six billion dollars in funds meant for Ukraine the same way I might find a twenty in my pants pocket on laundry day and God only knows how much is unaccounted for from Iraq and Afghanistan), and the Bidens are involved and have been for years. It’s a situation made for misplacing cash and arms.
Problem is, that’s pretty much the US experience in all wars and conflicts. When you move lots of money around, the spillage gets big. Never waste a conflict, and all that.
Sure, I also have a problem with conscription but again, by that metric all WW2 era leaders from every combatant nation were monsters.
Britain attempted to fight the First World War without conscription. It didn’t go well. The volunteers were amongst the best men Britain had and – fighting at a time when Britain lacked the means or knowledge to attack successfully – died in huge numbers. Eventually, Britain found it simply could not fill the ranks with volunteers alone and introduced conscription. As it happened, the conscripts did very well.
I think a lot of the objection to signing up in the middle of the war was that it wasn’t seen as “fair”. “Why should I risk my life when this so-and-so won’t?” When it became apparent that everyone would have to play their part there most seemed happy enough with the arrangement.
I don’t think you can fight a war of national survival without it. This falls into the category of things I believe to be true as opposed to things I want to be true.
Yesterday, Biden signed an exec order sending American soldiers to NATO.
– – – – –
We already have about 100,000 people in Europe. The import of this Order really isn’t the extra 3000 (for now) people it sends, but the new status it confers on the Ukraine fight.
I guarantee that the anti-Ukraine-involvement push here in the US is about to get much louder and more forceful.
Looks like the latter are blaming the victim here.
As I have already said – the Biden family, led by Joseph “Joe the Big Guy” Biden, also took money from the People’s Republic of China, which is on the side of Mr Putin.
The Bidens are criminals, yes they have a ideological world view – they sincerely believe that a bigger and more interventionist government helps the people – that is how Joseph Biden has always justified his crimes (like Mayor Curley and so many others) “I may take some of the cream – but the milk goes to the poor”, but the Bidens are criminals – it does not matter to them who they take bribe money from.
It is a common libertarian trope that government is “organised crime” – that is misleading (it oversimplifies things) – but in the case of Mr Biden it is correct, he is a criminal. As is the rest of the Administration – they are all criminals.
“How can the Ukrainians justify allying with the criminal Biden regime?” in the same way that the alliance with the Mafia during World War II was justified.
It is militarily necessary.
I see no mention here of the schism between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
This could be a historical re-alignment: both Samuel Huntington and, before him, Carroll Quigley distinguished between Western and Orthodox civilizations. With most traditionally-Orthodox countries aligning themselves with the West, the future divide could be between Western and Russian civilizations.
The trigger for the schism, in case you have not heard, was Russian dissatisfaction with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church becoming independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, with the support of Constantinople.
The article in the Fount of All Knowledge.
Apparently, this is the 3rd schism between Moscow and Constantinople. The others were short-lived, as this could also turn out to be.
Major elements of every significant institution of Ukraine contain people who are at least Russia-aligned, if they don’t identify as straight up Russian entirely. Being aligned with Russia was the majority opinion and parties with this viewpoint won elections from the time the Soviet Union dissolved until the Maidan coup in 2014, when they suddenly became enemies of the state. That’s why the country has been in a civil war for nine years now.
When Ukrainians flee the war about a third of them seek refuge in Russia, rather than any western country. When Ukrainian military and foreign mercenaries gather in places like Kramatorsk or other Donbas cities local civilians often post their locations to Russian telegram channels to direct missile and artillery strikes. Ukraine’s real problem is they’ve gone to war against roughly a third of their own population.
When ethnic hostilities like this broke out in the former Yugoslavia the solution was peace conferences, peacekeeping missions and ultimately secession where reconciliation was considered impossible.
Always hard to separate the lowly serfs – the real victims – from the people who govern their nation. We routinely – historically – drop bombs on the serfs for the sins of their leaders.
Just to be clear: I meant victims of Biden, not of Putin.
The “suddenly” is disingenuous.
Ukraine bumbled along after the break-up of the USSR largely using Soviet institutions, so therefore Russia-aligned. It had no formed political parties, so politics was very personal, and messy.
As time went on, there was a split between those that liked the pro-Russia, keep-things-as-they-are fraction of the population, and those that wanted to move to more Western methods and alignment. Politics became organised, with party lines taking over, solidifying the split. The Maidan revolution (not coup, no military) was when the breaking point was reached, but it had been building up for a very long time.
It has been too in Belarus, but Lukashenko just managed to survive his equivalent of Maidan. When he goes, it will explode, is my prediction. Similar struggles have been fought in some of the ‘stans too, albeit between Russia-aligned and Islamic-aligned. This is not a situation peculiar to Ukraine.
For those that want a truly independent Ukraine, not being bullied by Russia, the most extreme pro-Russia are traitors. They would happily sell independent Ukraine down the river, to become what Belarus is. Indeed many did actually betray their country at the time of the invasion (partly because they never really thought of it as “their” country).
But none of this was either sudden, or surprising.
When a country has a massive split like that on core fundamental issues, civil wars are common. Spain, the US, etc.
Ludicrous. The reason Donbas went the way it did was the presence of Russia troops & heavy equipment as without that, the insurrection would have fizzled out long ago due to a mixture of indifference & outright hostility to the thugs backed by Moscow.
Clearly not true. The idea a third of Ukraine’s population think of themselves as Russian is falsified by the 1991 referendum.
People visiting this site are apt to be contrarians. Sometimes the mainstream view is correct. I find it disconcerting, too.
Most contrarians are conformists who lap it up from a contrarian echo chamber.
The total denial of the source of Ukraine’s civil war is certainly amazing. For the record, this is where Ukrainian refugees choose to go:
Russia 2,852,395
Poland 1,593,860
Germany 1,061,623
Czechia 516,100
United Kingdom 203,700
Spain 175,962
Italy 175,107
France 118,994
Slovakia 114,628
Moldova 107,645
Romania 97,085
Source : https://www.statista.com/statistics/1312584/ukrainian-refugees-by-country/
It’s interesting that an attempted takeover of a foreign country by stealth is now characterized as “Civil War”. There was zero real conflict between parties in the Ukraine until “little green men” showed up and started the “insurrection”, which was sponsored and supported by Moscow once it became apparent that their preferred corrupt oligarch wasn’t going to maintain power.
It’s unfortunate for some of our informants, but those are the facts. I got to watch a Russian-speaking Ukrainian refugee from the Donbas absolutely shut down a Putinist apologist with evidence and personal experience back around 2015. He had the receipts, right down to the Moscow-connected assholes who confiscated his up-to-then successful business, and then looted it. They called him a “Ukrainian”, and his entire family spoke Russian, going back generations.
If you term what is going on in Ukraine a “civil war”, you’re mouthing the words of the Russian expansionist looters and thieves. Ukraine was not “oppressing” the “Russian minority”, or “suppressing the Russian language”. At least, not so any actual Russian-speaking Ukrainians could tell… What was going on was about on the same level as Wales is encouraging the speaking of Welsh, as well as its study in school–After centuries of suppression by the Crown. So, if you’re gonna say what the Ukrainians were doing was wrong, what’re your brilliant takes on what Wales is doing? Or, Ireland?
Face the facts: Russia was and is a colonialist power. What was happening in Ukraine was the natural outgrowth of that colonialist power departing, and the natives attempting to revive their own culture, nothing more, nothing less. I’ve had many people give me first-hand reports (and, there are a bunch of Ukrainian expats around, one married to one of my brother’s best friends…) that the only “oppression” happening in the eastern bits of Ukraine came from the Russians, once they came in. The majority of the Russians that came in after the 2014 mess came as carpetbagging thieves that took over from the actual residents of those regions and then who were, in turn, repressed. Anyone who’d been there and had money or businesses that could be taken over? Suddenly, they’re “Ukrainian separatists…” who could have their property confiscated and turned over to the Putinist creeps put in charge.
The “narrative” ain’t what they say it is, that’s for damn sure.