The gist of the interview is that Ukraine will lose unless it receives the level of support that the west is simply not capable of providing.
The gist of the interview is that Ukraine will lose unless it receives the level of support that the west is simply not capable of providing.
B-b-but I just read on Reddit that Putin is shriveling up into a corner and Russia is losing!
The collective meltdown that’s about to happen is going to be incredible to watch. I also suspect that that it’s going to radicalize a lot of people. Once the narrative collapses and people are forced to accept the fact that Russia won, they’re going to start asking how that could’ve possibly happened.
It’s going to be hard to reconcile that with the belief that Russia is in tatters and Ukraine is triumphant. And that’s going to make people feel stupid as they realize that they’ve been duped. People hate feeling stupid, and those who’ve been championing the narrative most publicly are the ones who will be the most upset.
For sure. I’ve been following this (as most tankies should be) since the beginning and it’s been absolutely wild seeing history happen in front of our eyes like this.
I said this at the end of February to my family and friends that the start of Russia’s operation represents the beginning of a new historical era, a clear sign that the west no longer controls the world. I also predicted that the clock has begun ticking on the reunification of Taiwan with China. I don’t know when it will happen but it has become an inevitability now that Russia has shown the “rules based international order” can be defied.
They mostly just looked at me funny. I got replies like “whatever, i don’t care about Taiwan but Ukraine is in our backyard, this kind of thing shouldn’t happen in Europe”. It will take a while to sink in with western liberals how monumental of a shift in the global balance of power has just taken place. They still think that if Russia can just be put in its place then things can go back to normal again and they can go back to brunch.
You may or may not be familiar with Michael Hudson and his theory of Superimperialism. It was so influential in the seventies when he first put it on paper that the US DoD and maybe State Department used his (Marxist!) economic theory to teach people how to do empire more effectively and even called in Hudson to teach them about it.
In February or March he wrote an essay about how this war symbolizes the end of Superimperialism and dollar hegemony.
Even for us MLs who think about and engage with this type of stuff regularly, I’m not sure we fully understand how different the world will look because of this development. It was inevitable at some point, but it’s crazy in many ways that the empire itself has in a way chosen to bring about its own end.
a few of my friends are still talking like this in our group chat. I had to silence the chat for a while because I got so tired of them being like “Putin is fucked,” “Russia’s military is so inept, look at this pic of one of their broken down tanks,” “check out this video of a drone dropping a grenade on a single Russian soldier, epic!”
Needless to say I’ve been looking forward to this war ending, mostly because I want an end to the bloodshed but a small part of me just wants to enjoy watching all the “slava ukraini!!!” people being forced to confront reality lol
What I find amazing is just how effective indoctrination is. A lot of the narrative has already been proven wrong, and yet they continue to buy into new claims completely uncritically. They’ve been promising that Russia was going to run out of ammunition any day now for literally 10 months now. Yet, nobody is asking why Russia is using as much ammunition as ever today.
NYT just reported that the serial numbers on missiles they find in Ukraine indicate they’ve been produced recently. Yet, people still think that Russia isn’t able to produce missiles without western chips.
Somehow nobody in the mainstream is wondering how is it that Russia is consistently able to repel Ukrainian attacks since their army is supposed to be collapsing and the west is feeding everything they’ve got into Ukraine.
Nobody seems to be bothered by the fact that Russian economy hasn’t collapsed, the inflation is lower than in the west, and that Russia is making more money off energy exports than ever. Apparently this is an indication that the sanctions are working perfectly.
All of the above information is openly reported in mainstream western media. Yet, people just read the narrative and ignore the facts being reported.
It’s truly amazing to watch.
This part in particular blows my mind. Read between the lines, and you can debunk most propaganda like Xinjiang and Russia/Ukraine using Western MSM alone (seems the one thing they brazenly lie about is the DPRK). Yet libs still live in an alternate reality.
It’s also mind blowing how liberals refuse to accept that propaganda exists in the west.
They won’t. Look at how yanks talk about Vietnam and Iraq even now.
Almost every day I get news updates on telegram from TASS (a Russian news agency) about Ukrainian attacks being repelled, heavy Ukrainian losses, hospitals filled with wounded soldiers. And Russia is still not going as hard as they could be even after they said they were taking the kid gloves off lol.
TASS is not really impartial tbf
Maybe not but there’s no reason for me to distrust them like Western news. It’s mainly for following events in Russia, most of my other sources come from Telesur, CGTN, Global Times, etc
TASS seems pretty objective so far from my experience, simply because it doesn’t really editorialize. Just straight up “this is what current reports are indicating” or “this is what X person is saying” type stuff. Telesur and Global Times are good too, and so is PressTV, though these are more your typical news media whereas TASS is basically an aggregator. On the other hand I’ve found that CGTN and even RT can be very liberal and western-leaning at times, even though they are obviously still pro-Chinese and pro-Russian respectively.