Alternative news sources and Interesting articles to examine

[SOL]

I am going to start off with this article. It is a long read and the author provides what appears to be a balanced view on the topic

Striving to Make Sense of the Ukraine War 750

No matter how hard we try to be dispassionate and logical, our thinking is affected by our own experiences, by the background knowledge we have and by the assumptions they generate. In discussing Ukraine – which arouses understandably high passions – I want to explain to you some of the experiences which affect my own thinking.

I will start with childhood, when my world view was pretty firmly set. I spent much of my young life at my grandparents’ on my mother’s side, in Norfolk. In the spare room in which I would sleep, under the bed there were cardboard boxes full of periodicals that I, as an avid ten year old reader, devoured completely. They included large sets of The War Illustrated and The Boy’s Own Paper.



The War Illustrated was a weekly magazine produced in both the first and second world war, detailing the week’s key events with stories, photos and drawings. This was the second world war collection. It was sometimes remarkably stark – I still recall the report of the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and a companion ship by Japanese aircraft, of which the magazine somehow had aerial photos.

But in the early part of the war, known as the “phony war“, when not a great deal was happening to fill the magazine, it concentrated very heavily on the heroic Finnish resistance against Stalin’s Russia in the Winter War. There were, every week, photos of heroic Finns in white hooded winter gear, against a white snowy background, and stories of how they had skied up and down Soviet armoured convoys, destroying them, and were holding back a massively superior opponent amidst lakes and woods. After reading though many weeks of the periodicals, I felt intimately acquainted with the Mannerheim line and those big brave Finns, whose individual tales of great daring I lapped (no pun intended) up.

Incidentally, after writing that paragraph I read this article in the Guardian about Ukrainian quad bike patrols in the snows and the forests, knocking out Russian tanks with drones. It really is identical in content and purpose to the Finnish ski patrol stories, only updated for modern technology.

Then suddenly, from one issue to the next, the Finns were no longer heroes but were evil Nazis, and the Mannerheim Line was now definitely as German as it sounds. What is more, if marginally more gradually, the evil Communist tyrant Stalin, who had sent army after army unsuccessfully against the Finns and been executing his own commanders, was suddenly genial, wise Stalin. As a ten year old, I found the transition very hard to fathom, and being now romantically fully committed to the Finnish cause, I rather went off the magazines.

I tried to ask my grandfather to explain it to me, but whenever we mentioned “the war”, his eyes filled with silent tears. You see, those magazines had belonged to his only son, my mother’s only brother, who was to die aged 19 in a Mosquito bomber over Italy. That is why those magazines were still under his bed and had never been thrown away. Jack’s absence hung over my childhood, and I often felt myself a very inadequate substitute. Jack had been a very talented footballer, who had signed apprentice forms for Sheffield Wednesday, then perhaps the best team in the country. He had been a very talented musician, like my grandfather. Whereas I failed to excel at, well, anything.

I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I was fortunate to be loved unconditionally. But I grew up with a real sense of the terrible loss, the waste, the void of war, of young lives lost that can never be replaced. I grew up with a hatred of war and of militarism. And of distrust of the official narrative of who are the goodies and who the baddies in war, when that official narrative can turn on its head in a week, as the magazines did with the Finns.

Well, it is now over 50 years later, and those are still exactly my sentiments today. And that parable of the noble/evil Finns is still relevant today. Because much of what is happening in Ukraine still reflects the failure to resolve who was on which side during World War II, and some pretty unpleasant underlying narratives.

You can see the line of thinking by which nations which had been suppressed, or risked suppression, by the Soviet Union, or by Russia before it, might see an alliance with Nazi Germany as an opportunity. Remember that the second world war was taking place only 20 years after the dissolution of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern Empires. Even a nation like Poland had only enjoyed 20 years of freedom in the past 150, and that with some fairly dodgy governance.

That the Finns effectively allied with the Nazis has never been fully worked through in Finnish national dialogue, even in that most introspective of nations. Sweden hid from itself the extent of its elite collusion and fundamental integration into the Nazi military industrial complex for, well, forever. Probably no country advanced its comparative economic position more out of World War II than Sweden, that epicentre of smug, condescending European liberalism.

So in this mess you can see how a figure like Bandera, fighting for Ukraine’s freedom, can become a national hero to many of his countrymen for fighting the Soviets, despite fighting alongside the Nazis. The key questions in re-evaluation today, across those nationalities which fought the Soviets at the same time as the Nazis did, ought to be these – how much coordination with the Nazis was there, and to what extent did they participate in, or mirror, Nazi atrocities, doctrines of racial purity and genocide?

This is where Bandera and the Ukrainian freedom fighters must attract unreserved condemnation. They were heavily involved in genocidal attacks on Jews, on Poles in Ukraine and on other ethnic and religious minorities. Ukraine was by no means alone. Lithuania was very similar, and to only slightly lesser extent, so were Estonia and Latvia. In none of these countries has there been a systematic attempt to address the darknesses of the nationalist past. Ukraine and Lithuania are the worst for actual glorification of genocidal anti-semite and racist figures, but the problem is widespread in Eastern Europe.

Even Poland is not immune. Poles are proud of their history, and are very touchy at the fact that the millions of Poles who died in Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps are often overlooked in a narrative that focuses, in Polish nationalist eyes, too exclusively on the Jewish victims. But the Poles are themselves in denial about the very substantial local collaboration between Poles and Nazis specifically against Jews, often with an eye to obtaining their land in rural areas.

This is where the story gets still more difficult. The neo-Nazi nationalists of Ukraine are an extreme manifestation of a problem across the whole of Eastern Europe, where ancient atavistic social views have not been abolished. I say this as someone who loves Eastern Europe, and who has spoken both Polish and Russian fluently (or at least has managed to pass the Foreign Office exams designed to test whether I could). Viktor Orban in Hungary, the religious right government of Poland, and yes, the far right voting electorate of Austria, are all on the same continuum of dark belief as the Nazi worshipping nationalists in Ukraine and Lithuania.

Let me tell you another story from my past, from twenty five years ago. I was First Secretary in the British Embassy in Warsaw. A highly respected elderly Polish lady, from an old family in the city, was our most senior member of local staff. I had asked her to set up a lunch for me with an official from the Polish Foreign Ministry, to discuss eventual EU accession. I made a remark about the lunch being enjoyable as the lady was both very smart and very pretty. Drawing me aside, our most senior member of local staff gave me a warning: “You do realise she’s Jewish, don’t you?”.

You could have knocked me down with a feather. But in four years in Poland I was to become used to bumping into matter of fact anti-semitism, on a regular basis, from the most “respectable” people, and particularly from precisely the forces and institutions that now bolster the current Polish government; not least the Catholic church.

These are highly sensitive issues and I know from experience I will receive furious feedback from all kinds of nationalities. But what I state is my experience. I should add that from my experience of Russia, society there is at least as bad for racial prejudice, especially against Asians, for homophobia, and for neo-Nazi groups. It is a problem across Eastern Europe, which is insufficiently appreciated in Western Europe.

I know Russia too well to have a romanticised view of it. I have lived there, worked there and visited often. I have very frequently expressed my frustration that many of those in the West who understand the ruthless nature of Western leaders, lose their clear sight when looking at Russia and believe it is different in that regard. In fact, Russia is even less democratic, has an even less diverse media, even worse restrictions on free expression, and an even poorer working class. The percentage of Russian GDP lost in capital flight to the benefit of oligarchs and Western financial institutions is hideous.

To continue reading (probably at least 4-6 pages more click on the link
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives ... n-ukraine/

[SOL]

This dude has a pair of Super reinforced Titanium Cahoones. One thing novel about his approach is that for the most part he does not tell you what is going on or try to create a narrative, he talks to people, shows you images and lets you draw your conclusions.

The situation is simply heart wrenching


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLZ2ZzoD-W0&t=620s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRtLFT2sbBg

[Budge]

This dude has a pair of Super reinforced Titanium Cahoones. One thing novel about his approach is that for the most part he does not tell you what is going on or try to create a narrative, he talks to people, shows you images and lets you draw your conclusions.

The situation is simply heart wrenching


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLZ2ZzoD-W0&t=620s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRtLFT2sbBg

We are at yet another Malthusian/Darwinian Conjunction (MDC)

[Cinnamon]

https://youtu.be/KRz4gM3z49Y

[deepthinker]

Big Tech’s ‘Cancel Culture’ Love Affai

Pepe Escobar) This month, several of us – Scott Ritter, myself, ASB Military News, among others – were canceled from Twitter. The – unstated – reason: we were debunking the officially approved narrative of the Russia/NATO/Ukraine war.

As with all things Big Tech, that was predictable. I lasted only seven months on Twitter. And that was long enough. Contacts in California had told me I was on their radar because the account grew too fast, and had enormous reach, especially after the start of Operation Z.


I celebrated the cancelation by experiencing an aesthetic illumination in front of the Aegean Sea, at the home of Herodotus, the Father of History. Additionally, it was heart-warming to be recognized by the great George Galloway in his moving tribute to targets of the new McCarthyism.

In parallel, comic relief of the “Mars Attacks” variety was provided by expectations of free speech on Twitter being saved by the benign intervention of Elon Musk.

Techno-feudalism is one of the overarching themes of my latest book, Raging Twenties – published in early 2021 and reviewed here in a very thoughtful and meticulous manner.

Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. In my own case regarding Twitter and Facebook – two of the guardians of the internet, alongside Google — I knew a day of reckoning was inevitable, because like other countless users I had previously been dispatched to those notorious “jails”.

https://www.newsfromtheperimeter.com/ho ... ove-affair

Sol predicted this would happen but it just amazes how fast it is coming to pass, We are really living in a gestapo regime, in fact right now we are even worse than Russia and China. At least there you are told what you can't do. Here you are told you have freedom which is a lie for you if you step out of line they just cancel you

[SOL]

Harry I happened to see the post before you deleted it. You are trying too hard to be a polite dude. Just let it flow, let it out and make sure you post a bloody good skit to go with your sentiments hahaha

https://media.giphy.com/media/j6emqIvEV ... /giphy.gif

[LoriPrecisely]

John Mark Dougan, a US marine (ex?) living in Moscow, reporting in Ukraine.
https://rumble.com/user/BadVolf
He has videos interviewing Ukranian citizens saying the Ukranian military is taking their food and medicines, also videos of the Russians finding bombs planted by the Ukranian military near the electrical power facility.
I just listened to an interview of him on YT with Jason Goodman of Crowdsource the Truth 5--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-t2mDiIgc0
In this interview he says the Chechnya (a republic of Russia) military is fighting alongside the Russian military.
He mentions another Ukranian citizen journalist/dissident, Patrick Lancaster, doing some excellent reporting. https://www.youtube.com/c/PatrickLancasterNewsToday
This guy is on the frontlines. Very brave!

[SOL]

@lori

Patrick has some cahones. Here are two of his latest videos.

This one I posted in a different thread. I was just amazed at the resiliency of the kids
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnBlk8Z ... kLancaster


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUask2c ... kLancaster

[harryg]

Harry I happened to see the post before you deleted it. You are trying too hard to be a polite dude. Just let it flow, let it out and make sure you post a bloody good skit to go with your sentiments hahaha

Well spotted

I'm not against self-censorship.

[SOL]

Harry I happened to see the post before you deleted it. You are trying too hard to be a polite dude. Just let it flow, let it out and make sure you post a bloody good skit to go with your sentiments hahaha

Well spotted

I'm not against self-censorship.

Neither Am I, but sometimes I think you forget we are in the land of the free (albeit electronic land), but one is allowed to express the way they feel with a large degree of freedom because, well so far everyone on this board appears to be a critical thinker and close to 10K posts later, there has not been one overly aggressive event.

And what you posted on a scale of 1 to 10 for aggressiveness did not even make it to 3. So if anyone takes offence at that, they need to take a hard look in the mirror. I did not mean to call you out. I just wanted to know if you had made that statement about something I posted I would not even have blinked. My mental response would have been "it's Harry's right to have an opinion.

[bpcw]

Yeah harryg, I've had to take enough crap from ninja's on this forum, now make me a cup of tea:

https://youtu.be/Si60-uxolNE

[harryg]

Yeah harryg, I've had to take enough crap from ninja's on this forum, now make me a cup of tea:

Eh! Eh! Caalm down! Caalm down! You fightin'?

Good of you to keep posting the real Harry.

You need no help from me against the onslaught of ninjas.

Some of them probably look like this:

[SOL]

Yeah harryg, I've had to take enough crap from ninja's on this forum, now make me a cup of tea:

Eh! Eh! Caalm down! Caalm down! You fightin'?

Good of you to keep posting the real Harry.

You need no help from me against the onslaught of ninjas.

Some of them probably look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PNtvXT ... yNightLive

[SOL]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzeEq5M ... elioudakis

[bpcw]

Blast didn't know that picture of me was still around, very round actually, boom boom!

Good old two Ronnie's!