Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged world war i

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
8More

Zelenskiy open to China's peace plan but rejects compromise with 'sick' Putin | Ukraine... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...cts-compromise-with-sick-putin china ukraine peace plan compromise
shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • , Zelenskiy indicated he was willing to consider aspects of the Chinese proposal. He said he planned to meet president Xi Jinping and said it would be “useful” to both countries and global security. “As far as I know, China respects historical integrity,” he stressed, adding: “Let’s work China on this point. Why not?”
  • Zelenskiy – who was dressed in a black fleece, khaki trousers and desert boots – said compromise with a “sick” and “bloody” Russian leadership was currently impossible.
  • He recalled how Ukrainians “didn’t run to Russian troops with flowers” when they came across the border a year ago and instead greeted them with weapons. Russia had turned from a “neighbour and friend” into a prodigious murderer that “killed and tortured people”, and abducted children, he said.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “Do you think we can sit and negotiate with them after this?” he asked. “They need to stop shelling us, destroying infrastructure, launching airstrikes, killing animals and burning forests.”
  • Asked about the worst moment of the past year, he cited Bucha – the garden town just outside Kyiv where Russian soldiers last spring executed at least 700 civilians, dumping bodies in the streets in a grisly display. “It was horrible,” he said. “We have seen that the devil is not somewhere underground but among us.”
  • So far the US president’s administration has refused to provide long-range ATACMS artillery to the Ukrainians, apparently on the grounds that it could be used to hit targets inside Russia. Zelenskiy said it was needed to protect civilians from Russian predation, adding Ukraine would employ these systems solely to target enemy logistics centres in occupied areas.
  • The conversation was reminiscent of what happened with tanks, he said. European countries and the Biden administration initially ruled out sending them, only to later change their minds. They would similarly agree to supply F16 fighter jets, he predicted. Delay was terrible since it means “we lose more people”, he said.
  • Zelenskiy repeatedly emphasised the war was not a local dispute between unhappy neighbours. He said Ukrainians were fighting and dying for civilised European values and for freedom. Asked if Moscow would invade another state, if it won in Ukraine, he said: “Unfortunately, yes. Putin has failed on the battlefield. He needs to demonstrate success.”
8More

A Dissenting View of US Policy toward Russia | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...iew-of-us-policy-toward-russia policy russia ukraine crisis culture politics
shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Since the Cold War’s end, American foreign policy has been conducted by responding to today’s news. To the extent the United States has had a long-term perspective, it is the hazy dream, first articulated in Christian millennial terms by the Puritans, of an American-led global transformation.
  • (I wrote about this in a 1992 book, Grand Illusion, and political scientist John Mearsheimer recently described this outlook in The Great Delusion.)
  • The question to ask about this process is this: how did we get to the point where we were unable to respond constructively to Russian fears of a new encirclement from NATO? As my former colleague Robert Wright put it, how could American and Western European leaders say, on the one hand, that they did not contemplate Ukraine becoming a member of NATO and say, on the other hand, that they would not accede in any way to Putin’s demand — at the center of his December communication with Biden — that NATO commit itself to barring Ukraine’s membership?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Now with Putin’s recognition of the separatist regimes, he has, perhaps, set the stage for a wider conflict; and the United States and its allies in NATO would have no choice but to respond with sanctions. But sanctions, such as those imposed after Russia seized Crimea, are unlikely to deter Putin. And really draconian sanctions, such as those used against Iran, could plunge Europe and the U.S. into a recession.
  • On the basis of this entirely unrealistic view of the world, the U.S. has stumbled into crises that it didn’t know it was creating.
  • The conflict with Russia over Ukraine would seem to have called for what Richard Nixon called “playing the long ball.” Nixon had played the long ball — defied prevailing opinion — by going to China
  • The United States might have stepped back from the years of provocations and resets to propose a “grand bargain” with Russia that would resolve or at least ease the conflict — one based, perhaps, on a neutral Ukraine or on the enforcement of the Minsk II agreement.
  • it seems to me that without such a bargain, we could be headed for another foreign policy disaster — one that will have repercussions in the United States and Western Europe as well as in Russia and Ukraine. Think war, skyrocketing energy prices, recession, refugees and a Russian-Chinese alliance against the United States and its allies.
10More

As U.S. sends Ukraine military aid, a lobbying coalition is forged - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...aine-lobbying-military-aid-war lobbying ukraine mobilisation mass campaign crisis politics
shared by Javier E on 29 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Ukrainian civil society, she said, has “this approach, which is called ‘we are a drop in the ocean,’ which means that we all, all the efforts, are modest because we are not gods, we are human beings,” Matviichuk said. “But together … we can change the reality for better.”
  • As part of a nationwide campaign, they also aired television and radio spots and bought billboard ads highlighting that Russian forces have destroyed hundreds of churches and tortured and killed Christian pastors.
  • One such billboard popped up across the street from the church Johnson attends in his district. “We pushed on every lever,” said Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy at Razom
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “We did things like bring over shrapnel from Ukraine, from cruise missiles that exploded in civilian areas, and put it on their desk and say, look, this is what we’re up against,” Murskyj said. “You know, this landed in somebody’s house, and now it’s in your office.”
  • “The intensity was high; there was energy in the air. And we realized that we needed to do everything that we possibly could to make this happen.” Murskyj said, adding that there were “dozens of organizations, and hundreds if not thousands of individuals, who worked hard” to get the legislation passed.
  • “I think the most effective thing [the Zelensky administration] did was, they listened, and then they gave the speaker space to work the issue,” said a person familiar with Johnson’s position, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the issue. “They took him at his word after that meeting with Zelensky in December.”
  • Johnson indicated early on that he would support the legislation if his main questions were addressed, those involved in the talks said. Over time, he became an ally.
  • “Up until that point, it had really been an aggressive pressure campaign,” the person said. “And really, from my view, it was having the opposite effect because it was just making the people who were ‘never Ukraine-ers’ say, ‘They’re just eviscerating you; they’re not interested in giving you space or what’s in America’s interests.’”
  • For Johnson, a Southern Baptist, arguments from fellow members of the evangelical community were particularly important, those involved in the process said. The speaker met numerous groups of religious leaders from the United States and Ukraine who pushed him to pass the aid bill.
  • American evangelicals helped dispel a narrative circulating in the conservative media that Ukraine was persecuting Christian communities, pointing out that it was in fact Russia that was restricting religious freedom.
5More

Killing of Hamas Leader Fuels More Tension Between Biden and Netanyahu - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...srael-hamas-assassination.html netanyahu biden
shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • Mr. Biden contended that the assassination of Mr. Haniyeh was poorly timed, coming right at what the Americans hoped would be the endgame of the process, according to the U.S. official, who likewise did not want to be identified describing private talks. Moreover, Mr. Biden expressed concern that carrying out the operation in Tehran could trigger the wider regional war that he has been trying to avert.
  • According to both governments, the Israelis did not inform the Americans of the plan to kill Haniyeh even though Mr. Biden had hosted Mr. Netanyahu at the White House just days before. Mr. Netanyahu did not want to compromise the Americans by giving them a heads-up, the Israeli official said
  • “I’m very concerned about it,” the president said. “I had a very direct meeting with the prime minister today — very direct. We have the basis for a cease-fire. He should move on it and they should move on it now.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The president’s frustration over the fitful cease-fire talks came as Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Friday that Mr. Netanyahu had clashed with his own security chiefs, who accused him of changing the terms of the proposal to make it harder to reach a deal.
  • The subsequent phone conversation between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday was a tough one. The president was extremely direct and forthright, according to the U.S. official, telling the prime minister that it was time to get the deal over the finish line.
31More

Opinion | How We've Lost Our Moorings as a Society - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-civility-society.html guardrails society evolution context culture crisis trump politics
shared by Javier E on 30 May 24 - No Cached
  • To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today — but not just in nature.
  • Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves as well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.
  • You see, shame used to be a mangrove
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • That shame mangrove has been completely uprooted by Trump.
  • The reason people felt ashamed is that they felt fidelity to certain norms — so their cheeks would turn red when they knew they had fallen short
  • in the kind of normless world we have entered where societal, institutional and leadership norms are being eroded,” Seidman said to me, “no one has to feel shame anymore because no norm has been violated.”
  • People in high places doing shameful things is hardly new in American politics and business. What is new, Seidman argued, “is so many people doing it so conspicuously and with such impunity: ‘My words were perfect,’ ‘I’d do it again.’ That is what erodes norms — that and making everyone else feel like suckers for following them.”
  • Nothing is more corrosive to a vibrant democracy and healthy communities, added Seidman, than “when leaders with formal authority behave without moral authority.
  • Without leaders who, through their example and decisions, safeguard our norms and celebrate them and affirm them and reinforce them, the words on paper — the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — will never unite us.”
  • . Trump wants to destroy our social and legal mangroves and leave us in a broken ethical ecosystem, because he and people like him best thrive in a broken system.
  • He keeps pushing our system to its breaking point, flooding the zone with lies so that the people trust only him and the truth is only what he says it is. In nature, as in society, when you lose your mangroves, you get flooding with lots of mud.
  • Responsibility, especially among those who have taken oaths of office — another vital mangrove — has also experienced serious destruction.
  • It used to be that if you had the incredible privilege of serving as U.S. Supreme Court justice, in your wildest dreams you would never have an American flag hanging upside down
  • Your sense of responsibility to appear above partisan politics to uphold the integrity of the court’s rulings would not allow it.
  • Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be a mangrove.
  • when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage — and immediate demands for firings — “it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of forging real understanding.”
  • In November 2022, the Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit advocacy group, surveyed 1,564 full-time college students ages 18 to 24. The group found that nearly three in five students (59 percent) hesitate to speak about controversial topics like religion, politics, race, sexual orientation and gender for fear of negative backlashes by classmates.
  • Locally owned small-town newspapers used to be a mangrove buffering the worst of our national politics. A healthy local newspaper is less likely to go too far to one extreme or another, because its owners and editors live in the community and they know that for their local ecosystem to thrive, they need to preserve and nurture healthy interdependencies
  • in 2023, the loss of local newspapers accelerated to an average of 2.5 per week, “leaving more than 200 counties as ‘news deserts’ and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information.”
  • As in nature, it leaves the local ecosystem with fewer healthy interdependencies, making it more vulnerable to invasive species and disease — or, in society, diseased ideas.
  • It’s not that the people in these communities have changed. It’s that if that’s what you are being fed, day in and day out, then you’re going to come to every conversation with a certain set of predispositions that are really hard to break through.”
  • we have gone from you’re not supposed to say “hell” on the radio to a nation that is now being permanently exposed to for-profit systems of political and psychological manipulation (and throw in Russia and China stoking the fires today as well), so people are not just divided, but being divided. Yes, keeping Americans morally outraged is big business at home now and war by other means by our geopolitical rivals.
  • More than ever, we are living in the “never-ending storm” that Seidman described to me back in 2016, in which moral distinctions, context and perspective — all the things that enable people and politicians to make good judgments — get blown away.
  • Blown away — that is exactly what happens to the plants, animals and people in an ecosystem that loses its mangroves.
  • a trend ailing America today: how much we’ve lost our moorings as a society.
  • Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be mangroves.
  • civility itself also used to be a mangrove.
  • “Why the hell not?” Drummond asks.“You’re not supposed to say ‘hell,’ either,” the announcer says.You are not supposed to say “hell,” either. What a quaint thought. That is a polite exclamation point in today’s social media.
  • Another vital mangrove is religious observance. It has been declining for decades:
  • So now the most partisan national voices on Fox News, or MSNBC — or any number of polarizing influencers like Tucker Carlson — go straight from their national studios direct to small-town America, unbuffered by a local paper’s or radio station’s impulse to maintain a community where people feel some degree of connection and mutual respect
  • In a 2021 interview with my colleague Ezra Klein, Barack Obama observed that when he started running for the presidency in 2007, “it was still possible for me to go into a small town, in a disproportionately white conservative town in rural America, and get a fair hearing because people just hadn’t heard of me. … They didn’t have any preconceptions about what I believed. They could just take me at face value.”
« First ‹ Previous 881 - 885 of 885
Showing 20▼ items per page