This Putin Parrot sees correlation between Russia's three century old Ukraine erasure project and domestic American political and economic power structures. Since genocidal Russification precedes western involvement by centuries this correlation is really a very simple number: zero.
Putin Parrots like Mr. Dunn merely recycle Russian talking points:
Russia the NATO victim and NATO expansion caused the war,
Russian speaker in the near abroad=Russian national,
Putin will nuke us if we support Ukraine,
the Maidan was a CIA coup and Ukraine banned the Russian language in the Donbas.
Supporting Ukrainian victory = blood lust for Russia
Withdrawing support for Ukraine will bring peace through surrender (a surrender which Mr. Dunn has advocated, though he won't tell his more recent readers this).
Here's a handy guide to refuting these Russian genocide apologists in one place:
In case you doubt that Russia's war is genocidal: just listen to what its leaders say: https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/
What you have to unsee to believe Russia's western useful idiots, just from one day's headlines in The Guardian:
"Russia-Ukraine war live: Moscow has removed 700,000 children from Ukraine, says Russian MP; person killed in drone attack"
"Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina dies after being wounded in Kramatorsk strike
Tributes paid to celebrated author who had been documenting Russian war crimes since the invasion"
"My friend was out for pizza when the missile hit. Putin’s targeting of civilians must be punished"
"The weapons used were Tochka-U missiles, banned by more than 100 nations, which are designed to cause severe injuries to humans, and would not have been chosen had the intention been to destroy weapons."
How to Guide to Russian Useful Idiot Disinformation Demolition
The Lefty Version of Contempt For Knowledge & History
https://news.yahoo.com/russia-removes-holodomor-memorial-mariupol-164700564.html Erasing history and genocidal denial: Russia removes Holodomor memorial in Mariupol. “Russian state news agency RIA Novosti published video footage of the monument’s removal, claiming it “was a symbol of political misinformation,” and saying the granite block will be “made into construction materials.”
Two sides of genocide apologist hit my evidence and history-based writing about the Russia-Ukraine war, but differently. These differences tell you how to design disinformation demolition of each. Disinformation demolition without disinformation diagnosis is ineffective.
The Ukrainians-are-Nazis Bucha/Irpin/Izyum were false flags Putinist right are as untethered to reality as the QAnon Jewish space laser Big Lie Trumpster right. The less overtly paranoid blame NATO left half of genocide apologists masks its contempt for evidence, history and scholarship with a facade of pursuit of peace through diplomacy bothsides-ism.
The first right wing half is more absurdly entertaining and less dangerous for the uninformed and unwary who, before the war, might not have found Ukraine on a map. The second lefty half is utterly unfunny in its earnest hypocrisy, and far more dangerous due to the hope of oxygen it gives to Russia’s dying incompetent military and imperial kleptocracy.
Jewish space laser MTG, Gaetz and “blank check” McCarthy may pose more budgetary danger to US support for Ukraine. But it’s the faux-peacenik left that infects the Democratic Party’s progressive caucus, Scholz’s SPD, the Corbynite wing of Britain’s Labour Party and the French Socialists (Segolene Royale, Jean-Luc Melenchon), laying political speed bumps in front of western coalition support for Ukraine.
As a Latvian resident Jewish historian who learned French in the south of France and lived in Italy for sixteen years, I’m used to having three targets on my back: LePen-iste and Mussolini fascist, anti-Israel leftist and theocratic Islamist. So having only two — from the anti-interventionist left and the openly pro-Putin right — is an unaccustomed luxury.
As a speaker of conversational Russian and Latvian who previously lived in early post-Franquista Barcelona for three years and learned fluent Catalan and Spanish, I’ve lived on both sides of the stateless-statist linguistic divide also found in Ukraine. Of course, none of this expertise and lived experience moves my Z-brandishing Rashist and Code Pinko critics. Utter imperviousness to evidence and expertise is part of the package.
But my purpose here is not to change their minds, but to show the modus operandi of the more insidious left wing of Russian useful idiocy. The lefty useful idiot genocide apologist will psychologize you instead of refuting evidence, ignoring the American Psychiatric Association’s ban on remote diagnosis. For example, I answered with hard quantitative data my critic’s question: So if we just give him (Ukrainian army chief Zaluzhny) all that, he could win the war, right? Answering yes with hard numbers showing South Korea alone can fill Zaluzhny’s wish list elicited this diversionary flee from evidence reply:
“You have a surprising amount of blood lust for Russia. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so consistently wishing for the demise, the destruction or just supreme misfortune for Russia as you do.”
This lefty psychobabble is part of the Russia as encircled victim blame NATO expansion for causing the war. Just address Russia’s “security concerns” and give Russia “security guarantees” to end the war. In this morally inverted world, it’s the mass bomber of Ukraine and producer of mass graves, flattened Ukrainian cities and deportations at scale that needs “security guarantees”.
Reply: The Baltic States were NATO candidates in 2002 and joined NATO in 2004, three years after Putin broached the idea of Russia joining NATO in 2001. Throw in the driving distance from the Finnish border to St. Petersburg: 172 km, less than from Manhattan to Montauk, as proof that NATO expansion is not the problem. The correlation between NATO expansion and Russia’s 2 1/2 century long Ukraine erasure conquest obsession since Catherine the Great is a very simple number: zero.
2. Russia is fighting for a fairer multi-polar world against a unipolar US superpower run by Wall Street and Big Oil. Ukraine and Zelensky are American pawns.
Reply: Read #5. When useful idiots try to have it both ways, the arguments cancel each other out. Example of have-it-both-ways-ism: the same writer who called the war a “manufactured distraction” and a Wall St conspiracy to get hold of Russia’s oil and gas reserves said: “The West cannot defeat Russia without incurring enormous costs that could destabilize the world’s economies.”
Well, which is it? Russia as innocent victim of ravenous western capitalists or Russia as imperial giant that can’t be defeated?
3. Ukraine can’t/doesn’t deserve to win/isn’t worth defending because it’s a weak, corrupt failed state, i.e. contingent, temporary, negotiable.
Reply: This is simplistic regurgitation of Russian neo-imperial prejudice about Ukrainians as nothing but “Little Russian” peasants with no national identity and language of their own.
4. Ukrainian victory dangerously risks Russia going nuclear, so don’t humiliate Russia.
Reply: Putin’s nuclear blackmail long predates the current war, beginning with the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia. Putin renewed the nuclear saber-rattling the day before he launched the invasion, warning that “countries that interfere with Russian actions will face “consequences you have never seen”.
$80 billion in western aid later and….no consequences.
5. The West doesn’t have the economic or military resources to support Ukraine until victory.
Western coalition GDP (NATO+EU+Japan+South Korea+Taiwan+the UK+Australia+New Zealand+nearly NATO Finland & Sweden): $70 trillion+
Russian GDP: $1.8 trillion pre-war and dropping to $1.5 trillion.
South Korea alone could fill General Zaluzhny’s weapons wish list.
6. Don’t support a Ukraine that’s infiltrated by Nazis (Azov Battalion).
Reply: Far right vote percentages: Ukraine: 2%, Italy: 25%, France’s LePen: 45%, Germany’s AfD: 13%, Orban’s Hungary: 2/3 super-majority, Spain’s Vox: 15% of upper house seats, 11% of lower house. A Russian popular culture swimming in neo-Nazism and WWII counter-factuals with the USSR and Hitler’s Germany on the same side against the West tells you where the real Nazis are: in the Wagner PMC named for Hitler’s favorite composer.
https://twitter.com/search?q=Sergej%20Sumlenny&src=typed_query&f=image
https://twitter.com/search?q=Sergej%20Sumlenny&src=typed_query&f=image
https://twitter.com/search?q=Sergej%20Sumlenny&src=typed_query&f=image
Tim Snyder is right to brand Putin’s Russia as the child of Nazi Germany’s build imperial Lebensraum project in Ukraine with Stalin’s genocidal Holodomor that Russified the Donbass, represented visually as:
7. Who’s right doesn’t matter since 44 million Ukrainians aren’t worth risking a nuclear exchange for.
This is where the appeasing useful idiots say the quiet throw Ukraine under the bus part out loud. It’s the appeasement version of the Trolley Problem, with Russia as the out of control trolley, Ukraine as the one guy on the track to divert the trolley onto, and the rest of the world as the four guys on the track the trolley will surely kill if not diverted to kill Ukraine. The difference: the certainty of the Trolley Problem’s premise vs the very low probability of Putin committing suicide by ordering a militarily useless tactical nuclear strike against dispersed Ukrainian troops and the certainty of a non-nuclear conventional response by NATO should Putin choose military suicide by breaking the nuclear taboo. It’s geopolitica GIGO — garbage in, garbage out.
8. The Maidan Revolution of Dignity was a CIA-sponsored US coup.
Reply: The omnipotent American Empire could move Maidan coup pawns on a geopolitical chess board at will, but the West can’t win. One viewing of Netflix’s Winter on Fire documentary of the genuinely bottom-up civil society revolution that the Maidan Revolution was exposes the Maidan coup thesis as a Big Lie like Trumpster election denialism. Then there’s the Yanukovich was democratically elected part, ignoring that Putin’s puppet’s pivot to a phantom Eurasian Union trampled on the Ukrainian Rada’s overwhelming vote (by 85%+) for the EU Association Agreement.
9. Crimea and the Donbass were “always” Russian.
Reply: Stalin’s genocidal Holodomor Russified the Donbass that was historically the territory of Tatars and unenserfed Cossacks. Stalin’s mass deportation of Crimean Tatars in March 1944 Russified Crimea.
10. The “realists’” Ukraine was always within Russia’s sphere of influence.
Reply: Just a variation on Putin’s “Ukraine isn’t a real country” and Ukrainians are just Little Russians speaking a peasant dialect….If this is true, Catalans are just dialect-speaking Spaniards, Kurds are just “mountain Turks” and Zhirinovsky is right that “the Baltics are just dacha countries” that will again be Russia’s. It’s Russkiy Mir supremacist history as destiny that ignores our world’s post-1918 age of empire demolition of proliferating sovereignties from 56 states in 1945 to over 200 now.
11. This war is a psycho-therapy problem whose solution is a de-escalation skill set that’s universally applicable. Solutions to geopolitical conflict supersede history, local knowledge, language and cultural fluency.
Reply: This is the anti-intellectual hubris and contempt for knowledge that brought us Michael Gove’s “people have had enough of experts” Brexit, flood the zone with shit Trump-Bannon, climate change denier and Amazon destroyer — and now congress vandalizer — Bolsonaro. It’s typical of those whose arguments have had all intellectual legs to stand on cut off by evidence. Its thesis is that we have to change our side’s behavior before asking Russia to renounce its historic imperial expansionism. It unquestioningly accepts Russian victimhood, seeing Russian imperial behavior that long predates western involvement as solely to blame on the West. In this inverted world the West is responsible for Russia’s centuries of grievance-driven narcissistic nationalism and marriage to empire.
The cure for blaming the war on the western or Ukrainian red herring of imaginary Russophobia? Read this BKean story about watching the iconic Soviet holiday classic film, The Irony of Fate, which I’ve seen many times. He watched it again, invited by two Ukrainian refugee women in Austria. In this story you can glimpse a future reconciliation scenario, IF a deimperialized Russian people admit the truth of what they’ve done, as the Germans did. From the story:
“There was no anger toward Russians despite having every reason in the world to hate Russia and Russians. These two women in their love for the traditions of the Soviet past, in their nostalgic need to watch the “Irony of Fate,” clearly and concisely demonstrate two things. The first is just how wrong Putin is in his assessment that Ukrainians hate Russians. I am sure he doesn’t believe that but he needed that lie for his narrative. The second thing is just how misdeveloped the Russian brain has become over the past 20 years. Ukrainians didn’t have even the faintest hint of dislike for Russians before February 23rd because Ukrainians for the past 20 years have, for the most part, been privy to an open, free and modern flow of information. They have not relied only on the lies of the Kremlin. Russians, however, have been not been privy to information or truth for the past 20 years and so that is why when Putin said, “They hate us,” the vast majority just accepted that lie without flinching. They accepted it as if it were just another part of being Russian — someone hates us because we are the greatest. As the women laughed and the three of us recalled the wonderful nostalgia of that film, my wife is younger and so feels it less, I raised a shot of vodka and we toasted to the strength of the Ukrainian people.
And then one of the women added to the toast, “Let’s not forget about the strength Russians will need to remember that we are their eternal friends.”
She left me speechless.
After this war that’s finally a war in Putin’s words, reconciliation will come when a deimperialized Russian state and people look in the mirror and see what’s really there and take responsibility for their war crimes. The Germans did starting in the late 1960s and 1970s. and the French and Germans reconciled.
The Japanese refused to look in the mirror, visited the Yasukuni shrine’s Class A war criminal graves instead, and never fully reconciled with their Korean, Chinese and Indonesian and Filipino neighbors. This difference is well-documented in Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan.
Now that the Germans are shipping Leopards and the Americans Bradleys and Patriots to Ukraine, the end of this war — and Russia’s reckoning — comes closer.
You should hope that a post-Putin decolonized Russia will have its own version of the rebellious children of Germany’s generation of 1968 who asked what did you do in the war daddy? Confronting the truth is essential for the reconciliation that benefits all sides, as it was between France and Germany, in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Pinochet Chile.
But the sine qua non of this process is Russia admitting the truth and accepting accountability proportionate to the scale of the crimes committed: war crimes trials, reparations for Ukraine’s reconstruction financed by Russian oil and gas revenues. For lessons how to overcome amnesia the Russians should ask the Germans, but not the Japanese and the war criminal-Waldheim and Haider-voting Austrians.
