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Javier E

Opinion | Russia's War in Ukraine: This Is How World War III Begins - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sia-ukraine-world-war-iii.html

russia war ukraine response invasion

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • World War II didn’t so much begin as it gathered, like water rising until it breaches a dam. We, too, have been living through years of rising waters, though it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for much of the world to notice.
  • did Putin have any reason to think, before Feb. 24, that he wouldn’t be able to get away with his invasion?
  • He didn’t. Contrary to the claim that Putin’s behavior is a result of Western provocation — like refusing to absolutely rule out eventual NATO membership for Ukraine — the West has mainly spent 22 years placating Putin through a long cycle of resets and wrist slaps.
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  • The Biden administration now faces the question of whether it wants to bring this cycle to an end.
  • the administration continues to operate under a series of potentially catastrophic illusions.
  • Refusing to impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine may be justified because it exceeds the risks NATO countries are prepared to tolerate. But the idea that doing so could start World War III ignores history and telegraphs weakness
  • Americans squared off with Soviet pilots operating under Chinese or North Korean cover in the Korean War without blowing up the world. And our vocal aversion to confrontation is an invitation, not a deterrent, to Russian escalation.
  • Bottom line: Expect him to double down. If he uses chemical weapons, as Bashar al-Assad did, or deploys a battlefield nuclear weapon, in keeping with longstanding Russian military doctrine, does he lose more than he gains? The question answers itself.
  • He wins swiftly. He terrifies the West. He consolidates power. He suffers consequences only marginally graver than the ones already inflicted. And his fellow travelers in Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang take note.
  • How does the next world war begin? The same way the last one did.
criscimagnael

Xi and Putin's 'No Limits' Bond Leaves China Few Options on Ukraine - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...putin-ukraine-china-xi.html

shared by criscimagnael on 07 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • They had just finalized a statement declaring their vision of a new international order with Moscow and Beijing at its core, untethered from American power.
  • Over dinner, according to China’s official readout, they discussed “major hot-spot issues of mutual concern.”
  • Publicly, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin had vowed that their countries’ friendship had “no limits.” The Chinese leader also declared that there would be “no wavering” in their partnership, and he added his weight to Mr. Putin’s accusations of Western betrayal in Europe.
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  • The implications for China extend beyond Ukraine, and even Europe.
  • “He’s damned if he did know, and damned if he didn’t,” Paul Haenle, a former director for China on the National Security Council, said of whether Mr. Xi had been aware of Russia’s plans to invade. “If he did know and he didn’t tell people, he’s complicit; if he wasn’t told by Putin, it’s an affront.”
  • In any case, the invasion evidently surprised many in Beijing’s establishment
  • Mr. Xi’s statement with Mr. Putin on Feb. 4 endorsed a Russian security proposal that would exclude Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
  • Even so, as Mr. Putin became determined to reverse Ukraine’s turn to Western security protections, Chinese officials began to echo Russian arguments. Beijing also saw a growing threat from American-led military blocs.
  • “Putin may have done this anyway, but also it was unquestionably an enabling backdrop that was provided by the joint statement, the visit and Xi’s association with all of these things,”
  • “He owns that relationship with Putin,” Mr. Haenle said. “If you’re suggesting in the Chinese system right now that it was not smart to get that close to Russia, you’re in effect criticizing the leader.”
  • For decades it sought to build ties with Russia while also keeping Ukraine close.
  • Over the past years, as growing numbers of Ukrainians supported joining NATO, Chinese diplomats did not raise objections with Kyiv, said Sergiy Gerasymchuk, an analyst with Ukrainian Prism, a foreign policy research organization in Kyiv.
  • For both leaders, their partnership was an answer to Mr. Biden’s effort to forge an “alliance of democracies.”
  • Before and shortly after the invasion, Beijing sounded sympathetic to Moscow’s security demands, mocking Western warnings of war and accusing the United States of goading Russia. Over the past two weeks, though, China has sought to edge slightly away from Russia. It has softened its tone, expressing grief over civilian casualties. It has cast itself as an impartial party, calling for peace talks and for the war to stop as soon as possible.
  • Beijing had its own complaints with NATO, rooted in the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, during NATO’s war in 1999 to protect a breakaway region, Kosovo. Those suspicions deepened when NATO in 2021 began to describe China as an emerging challenge to the alliance.
  • n Feb. 23, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, accused Washington of “manufacturing panic.”
  • Chinese officials tweaked their calls to heed Russia’s security, stressing that “any country’s legitimate security concerns should be respected.” They still did not use the word “invasion,” but have acknowledged a “conflict between Ukraine and Russia.”
  • “Many decision makers in China began to perceive relations in black and white: either you are a Chinese ally or an American one,”
  • “They still want to remain sort of neutral, but they bitterly failed.”
lilyrashkind

Why YouTube Has Survived Russia's Social Media Crackdown | Time - 0 views

time.com/...-russia-ukraine-disinformation

social russia politics

shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • In a style part investigative journalism, part polemic, the video’s hosts report that one of President Vladimir Putin’s allies, Russian senator Valentina Matviyenko, owns a multimillion-dollar villa on the Italian seafront. The video contrasts the luxurious lifestyle of Matviyenko and her family with footage of dead Russian soldiers, and with images of Russian artillery hitting civilian apartment buildings in Ukraine. A voiceover calls the war “senseless” and “unimaginable.” A slide at the end urges Russians to head to squares in their cities to protest at specific dates and times. In less than a week, the video racked up more than 4 million views.
  • TV news is dominated by the misleading narrative that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is actually a peace-keeping exercise. Despite this, YouTube has largely been spared from the Kremlin’s crackdown on American social media platforms since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly a month ago.
  • The app had been a particular venue for activism: Many Russian celebrities spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine in their Instagram stories, and Navalny’s Instagram page posted a statement criticizing the war, and calling on Russians to come out in protest.
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  • On March 11, YouTube’s parent company Google announced that it would block Russian state-backed media globally, including within Russia. The policy was an expansion of an earlier announcement that these channels would be blocked within the European Union. “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events, and we remove content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy,” Google said in a statement. “In line with that, effective immediately, we are also blocking YouTube channels associated with Russian state-funded media, globally.”
  • That could leave many millions of Russians cut off from independent news and content shared by opposition activists like Navalny’s team. (It would also effectively delete 75 million YouTube users, or some 4% of the platform’s global total—representing a small but still-significant portion of Google’s overall profits.)
  • Today, YouTube remains the most significant way for tens of millions of ordinary Russians to receive largely uncensored information from the outside world.
  • Part of the reason for YouTube’s survival amid the crackdown is its popularity, experts say. “YouTube is by far and away the most popular social media platform in Russia,” says Justin Sherman, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s cyber statecraft initiative. The platform is even more popular than VK, the Russian-owned answer to Facebook.
  • Still, Sherman says the situation is volatile, with Russia now more likely than ever before to ban YouTube. For an authoritarian government like Russia’s, “part of the decision to allow a foreign platform in your country is that you get to use it to spread propaganda and disinformation, even if people use it to spread truth and organize against you,” he says. “If you start losing the ability to spread misinformation and propaganda, but people can still use it to spread truth and organize, then all of a sudden, you start wondering why you’re allowing that platform in your country in the first place.” YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.
  • On the same day as Navalny’s channel posted the video about Matviyenko, elsewhere on YouTube a very different spectacle was playing out. In a video posted to the channel of the Kremlin-funded media outlet RT, (formerly known as Russia Today,) a commentator dismissed evidence of Russian bombings of Ukrainian cities. She blamed “special forces of NATO countries” for allegedly faking images of bombed-out Ukrainian schools, kindergartens and other buildings.
  • “YouTube has, over the years, been a really important place for spreading Russian propaganda,” Donovan said in an interview with TIME days before YouTube banned Russian state-backed media.
  • In July 2021, the Russian government passed a law that would require foreign tech companies with more than 500,000 users to open a local office within Russia. (A similar law passed previously in India had been used by the government there to pressure tech companies to take down opposition accounts and posts critical of the government, by threatening employees with arrest.)
  • The heightened risk to free expression in Russia Experts say that Russia’s ongoing crackdown on social media platforms heralds a significant shift in the shape of the Russian internet—and a potential end to the era where the Kremlin tolerated largely free expression on YouTube in return for access to a tool that allowed it to spread disinformation far and wide.
marvelgr

Opinion | We're in a Fossil Fuel War. Biden Should Say So. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ossil-fuel-climate-change.html

shared by marvelgr on 24 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a war enabled and exacerbated by the world’s insatiable appetite for fossil fuels.
  • Russia is a petrostate — its economy and global influence are heavily reliant on its vast reserves of oil and natural gas — and Vladimir Putin its petromonarch, another in a line of unsavory characters whom liberal democracies keep doing business with because they’ve got something we can’t live without.
  • The way out of this bind would also appear obvious and urgent. By accelerating our transition to cheap and abundant renewable fuels, we can address two grave threats to the planet at once: the climate-warming, air-polluting menace of hydrocarbons and the dictators who rule their supply.
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  • yet American politicians on the left sure seem incapable of drawing out this connection
  • In his State of the Union address shortly after Russia’s invasion, President Biden whiffed on a major opportunity to revive his stalled climate change agenda by underlining the geopolitical dangers of fossil fuels. His references to climate change — what he has previously called an “existential threat” to the planet — were buried under, rather than connected to, his comments about the war.
  • pundits on the right have had a field day with the notion that Russia’s invasion somehow points up the folly of focusing on climate change. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board blamed “the Biden Administration’s obsession with climate” for making “the U.S. and Europe vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s energy blackmail” and wrote that “the climate lobby has made Mr. Putin more powerful.”
  • This could have been a moment for moral clarity on the dangers of fossil fuels — but so far, Democrats have fumbled that message.
  • “This narrative has not been out there — that this war is why we need to get off of fossil fuels,”
  • “More groups need to be connecting the dots, making the case that true energy independence is about running on sunshine, because sunshine is free and abundant and cannot be controlled by dictators.
  • such a message is likely to resonate with people. A study she and a co-author published online in 2017 examined the political factors that led to clean energy policies. “What we found was, overwhelmingly, these policies were passed during energy crises,”
  • the Democrats have yet to aggressively make the case for their proposals in the new context of war — to point out that climate policy is not unrelated to foreign policy, and that freeing ourselves from other people’s fuels is the best long-term solution to skyrocketing energy prices.
  • the ways in which fossil fuels make energy prices far more volatile and put us at the behest of powers and leaders that can act in ways that are dangerous and unjust” has rarely been more obvious.
  • “I started to think about the parallels between climate change and this war and it’s clear that the roots of both these threats to humanity are found in fossil fuels,” Krakovska said in the interview. “Burning oil, gas and coal is causing warming and impacts we need to adapt to
  • And Russia sells these resources and uses the money to buy weapons. Other countries are dependent upon these fossil fuels; they don’t make themselves free of them. This is a fossil fuel war. It’s clear we cannot continue to live this way; it will destroy our civilization.”
Javier E

At the China-Russia Border, the Xi-Putin Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-russia-china-ukraine-5c588831

china russia relationship partnership tension

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • The meeting in Moscow this week between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to showcase what they have declared a partnership with “no limits” between their countries. Beneath the surface are economic, political, cultural and historical divisions that undercut the relationship.
  • Russia seeks to disrupt the international order, including through military action. The International Criminal Court last week issued an arrest warrant against Mr. Putin for war crimes. China, which reached its economic stature through the status quo, seeks changes that further its interests, complicating the binational collaboration,
  • In many ways, the Chinese and Russian economies are highly complementary. Russia exports natural resources China needs to power its industrial economy. China sells goods that Russian consumers want. On the energy front in particular, Chinese purchases of oil and gas since the invasion of Ukraine have helped Russia weather Western sanctions.
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  • China-Russia relations are far from a “monolithic bloc,” Zhao Long, a scholar at China’s Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, wrote in a recent paper. “In Beijing’s vision, it never should become one.”
  • One exhibit depicts the killing of thousands of Chinese in the region by Russians in 1900. Over a loudspeaker, a narrator concludes that Russia-China relations were today peaceful, but that China must remain vigilant. “We can never forget this history,” the narrator said. “If you lag behind, you will get beaten.”  
  • A long and sometimes violent history between Russia and China has left a legacy of distrust. A museum in Heihe is dedicated to what it depicts as centuries of aggressions by Russian soldiers against the Chinese
  • Mr. Xi’s language during his Moscow visit will be closely parsed by Western officials and security analysts seeking to understand China’s intentions for Russia. The frayed ends of China-Russia economic ties are, by contrast, out in the open.
  • Another newly opened bridge, in Heihe, had been highly touted in Chinese state media. It didn’t appear last week to be an economic boon. On the China side of the bridge, two Russian truck drivers, hauling what appeared to be metal shelving, idled near a customs checkpoint. Trucks traveling from China to Russia crossed the bridge at a rate of roughly one every five minutes and even less frequently in the other direction.
  • Before the invasion of Ukraine, most China-Russia trade was settled in U.S. dollars or Euros, an arrangement upended by Western sanctions. Chinese companies now struggle to get paid. One survey by local central-bank officials of Chinese companies that trade with Russia found that after the invasion of Ukraine, 60% of them had suspended operations or were barely scraping by because of logistical and financial hurdles from the sanctions.
  • Russia’s growing dependency on the yuan makes Russia more vulnerable to Chinese actions should relations between the two countries falter
  • “Russian leaders like to emphasize the unprecedented strategic cooperation between the two countries,” Ms. Prokopenko wrote in February for the website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Yet in reality, this cooperation makes Moscow increasingly dependent on Beijing.” 
Javier E

FC90: Hapsburg Austria Resurgent (c.1650-1700) - The Flow of History - 0 views

www.flowofhistory.com/...FC90

austria hapsburg history

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • When the Thirty Years War and Peace of Westphalia stifled Austrian ambitions in Germany, the Hapsburgs expanded eastward against the Ottoman Empire.  Ever since the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1565, the Ottoman Empire had been in serious decline, with a corrupt government, rebellious army, obsolete military technology, and decaying economy. Such a faltering empire was a tempting target for its neighbors.  However, the Hapsburgs were never able to concentrate solely on the Turks.  This was because France under Louis XIV posed a constant threat of invasion to the various German states, which forced the Hapsburgs to divide their attention between east and west.
  • This triggered the Turks' last major invasion of Europe, climaxing at the siege of Vienna in 1683.  A huge Turkish army of possibly 150,000 men, but with no large siege artillery, was faced by only the stout walls of Vienna and a garrison of ll,000 men.  The siege lasted two months as the Turks gradually used the old medieval technique of undermining the walls.  Just as the hour of their victory approached, a relief army from various European states arrived and crushed the Turkish army.  From 1683 to 1700, Hapsburg forces and their allies advanced steadily against the Turks, only being interrupted by having to meet French aggression in the West.  In 1697, the allied forces demolished another Turkish army at Zenta and watched as the once proud Janissaries murdered their own officers in the rout.  The resulting treaty of Karlowitz (1699) gave Austria all of Hungary, Transylvania, and Slavonia.  Karlowitz re-established Austria, now also known as Austria-Hungary, as a major European power.  From 1700 until the end of World War I in 19l8, the Hapsburg Empire would dominate southeastern Europe, while the Ottoman Empire staggered on as the "Sick Man of Europe."
  • Although the Hapsburg Empire had regained its status as a military and diplomatic power, it still had serious internal problems, namely a powerful nobility ruling over enserfed peasants, a hodge-podge of peoples with nothing in common except that they all called Leopold their emperor, and a variety of states that each had their own rights, privileges and governmental institutions
ethanmoser

Allies Set Sights on Raqqa in Battle Against Islamic State - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ainst-islamic-state-1477399477

battle us terrorism isis stronghold Raqqa Mosul

shared by ethanmoser on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Allies Set Sights on Raqqa in Battle Against Islamic State
  • The U.S. and its allies are preparing to launch the invasion of Islamic State’s Raqqa stronghold before the recapture of Mosul in Iraq is complete
  • U.S. officials hope to start the invasion of Raqqa as soon as the coming weeks, provided the Mosul campaign proceeds as planned, though the push for the militant group’s de facto capital in Syria remains complicated by regional political sensitivities that haven’t appeared in the fight for Mosul.
Javier E

The Internal Invasion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-internal-invasion.html

trump chaos competence crisis government

shared by Javier E on 21 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • This is a remarkable day in the history of our country. We have never over our centuries inaugurated a man like Donald Trump as president of the United States.
  • We’ve never had a major national leader as professionally unprepared, intellectually ill informed, morally compromised and temperamentally unfit as the man taking the oath on Friday.
  • Many Americans think their families and their neighborhoods are being denuded by the impersonal forces of globalization, finance and technology. All the Republican establishment could offer was abstract paeans to the free market. All the Democrats could offer was Hillary Clinton, the ultimate cautious, remote, calculating, gesellschaft thinker.
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  • It was the right moment for Trump, the ultimate gemeinschaft man. He is all gut instinct, all blood and soil, all about loyalty over detached reason.
  • Some on the left worry that we are seeing the rise of fascism, a new authoritarian age. That gets things exactly backward. The real fear in the Trump era should be that everything will become disorganized, chaotic, degenerate, clownish and incompetent.
  • The real fear should be that Trump is Captain Chaos, the ignorant dauphin of disorder. All the standard practices, norms, ways of speaking and interacting will be degraded and shredded. The political system and the economy will grind to a battered crawl.
  • For America to thrive, people across government will have to cooperate and build arrangements to quarantine and work around the president.
  • Already you see the political system uniting to contain Trump. In negotiations on the Hill, administration officials feel free to ignore his verbiage on health care and other issues. Members of his team are already good at pretending that Trump doesn’t mean what he clearly does mean, on matters of NATO and much else.
Javier E

Obama Assures Americans This Will Not Be Another 1456 Ottoman Siege Of Belgrade | The O... - 0 views

www.theonion.com/...is-will-not-be-another-1,33719

obama ottoman balkan history historical analogy fun

shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • “I of course realize that many people around the country are concerned that an intervention in Syria would devolve into another Siege of Belgrade, but I can assure you that this operation will be swift, decisive, and will in no way resemble the Ottoman Empire’s ill-advised invasion of Nándorfehérvár,” Obama told the assembled White House Press Corps.
  • “When I heard we were getting involved in Syria, right away I thought, ‘Well, here we go, it’s 1456 Belgrade all over again,’” said Seattle resident Matt Haggerty, 42, who, like millions of Americans, says he “in no way supports the idea” of getting entangled in any military campaign even remotely similar to the Ottoman invasion of the Catholic Balkans.
Javier E

Rumsfeld's War and Its Consequences Now by Mark Danner | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...s-war-and-its-consequences-now

Rumsfeld Iraq al qaeda invasion history defense

shared by Javier E on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • if the attacks on New York and Washington had been bold and shocking and outlandish, the goals behind them had been the classic objects of insurgents for millennia: to encourage recruits to join the insurgent cause, to show the vulnerability of the ruling power, and to provoke that power to overreact—to respond to insurgent attacks in such a way that would reveal to the world the regime’s cruelty and repressiveness and so bring the quiescent population (in this case, all Muslims) increasingly over to the insurgents’ side
  • the Americans offered a gift undreamt of in al-Qaeda’s philosophy: they invaded and occupied Iraq, a much more important country. The result was catastrophe, not only for Iraq but for the Bush administration’s worldwide “war on terror,” for the invasion seemed to brand Bush’s war, in image after bloody humiliating image of “Americans killing Muslims,” as a new Western crusade against the Islamic world, confirming in every newscast the guiding idea of al-Qaeda’s politics and propaganda.
  • Henry Kissinger, Rumsfeld’s old antagonist from the Ford administration, when asked why he supported the Iraq war, had reportedly replied, “because Afghanistan wasn’t enough.” The radical Islamists had wanted to humiliate us, he went on, “and we need to humiliate them.”3 This was about restoring national credibility, about rebuilding the national power—consisting in no small part of the image of power—that had been severely diminished by those world-altering real-time pictures of the collapsing towers
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  • Proud realists, neither man put much stock in the “democratic tsunami” that, in the fantasy of neoconservative true believers like Wolfowitz, the Iraq war would send sweeping out of Baghdad to engulf the Middle East. Instead they put their faith in “American leadership” and the restoration of American power through a decisive demonstration of American strength.
  • Rumsfeld is first and foremost a patriotic midwesterner, a politician who nourishes in his soul a primordial and undying belief in the manifest need for, and rightness of, American power. To him this truth is self-evident, imbibed at an Illinois breakfast table. Who do we want to lead in the world? Somebody else? The idea is plainly inconceivable.
  • As for the occupation—well, if democracy were to come to Iraq it would be the Iraqis themselves who must build it. There would be no occupation, and thus no planning for it. Rumsfeld’s troops would be in and out in four months. As he told a then adoring press corps, “I don’t do quagmires.”
  • He was smart, brash, ambitious, experienced, skeptical of received wisdom, jealous of civilian control, self-searching, analytical, domineering, and he aimed at nothing less than to transform the American military. The parallels with McNamara are stunning.
  • month after month in his arrogance and tenacity he would deny an insurgency had taken root. Month after month, as the shortcomings of the army he had sent into Iraq—too small, too conventional, not configured or equipped or trained to fight an insurgency and thus fated in its impotent bludgeoning to make it ever worse—became impossible to deny, he would go on denying them, digging in his heels and resisting the change he had to know was necessary.
Javier E

How Jeb Bush Triggered an Iraq War Watershed - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...riggered-an-iraq-war-watershed

iraq war origins partisan consensus politics history mideast

shared by Javier E on 15 May 15 - No Cached
  • It was one thing when John Kasich and Chris Christie said they would not have invaded Iraq - guys who would run as relative moderates and either aren't running or don't realize they're not running for president. (Rand Paul said the same but that's no surprise.) But now we have Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz saying they would not have either. Rubio is the big tell here since he among all the 2016 contenders is angling for the support of the neoconservative foreign policy intelligentsia. If he can say categorically that it was a mistake, the debate is probably really finally over.
  • With everything that has happened over the last dozen years, including events of just the last year, it's very hard to say that the invasion was a good idea. But people say lots of things that are either hard or downright ridiculous to say. Indeed, we should note that as recently as two months ago, Rubio was saying just the opposite, that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.
  • In the years just after the war, support for the war was an article of faith for most Republicans. That fixed much of the public debate in place. Many elected Democrats, meanwhile, were trapped by their own votes in favor of Bush's authorization to use force.
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  • In the 2008 presidential race, the Iraq 'debate' was largely fought over who was right about the surge.
  • We all sort of know that the ground has shifted on this issue. We can see it clearly in public opinion polls. But it is as though it's been years since we actually had a show of hands - especially among national Republicans. Good idea? Bad idea? As I was writing this, Jeb Bush himself has now come forward and, on the fourth try, said the Iraq War was a mistake. What I've called that showing of hands seems to show virtually no one of any consequence standing up for the decision to invade. Maybe we all kind of knew that that was where people had gotten to. But seeing people say it is a transformative event.
  • the ground has shifted not just on the facts of the issue, but on what is in many ways a more consequential front: Time has passed and Republicans simply don't feel the same sort of partisan responsibility for the conflict. It's drifting back into history. The sense of ideological and partisan commitment has just loosened - the intuitive reflex that says our guy did it so it must be right and I need to defend it
  • Cruz and Rubio especially are fighting for base Republicans. If they were still committed to the wisdom of the Iraq War, they wouldn't be saying this. And yet they are. That is a major watershed in the country's reckoning with the war. If Republicans running as hawks say it was a mistake, then the debate is really over.
  • with a consensus in place that the Iraq War was a bad idea, the whys and hows of just how we made this decision are up for discussion in a very new way.
Javier E

History News Network | World War II: From the Chinese Perspective - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...160447

WWII china history

shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931. A wider invasion began in 1937, and by the time Japan surrendered in 1945, between 13 and 20 million Chinese people died. Refugees trying to flee the fighting numbered 100 million.
  • Was it not the Kuomintang, the nationalists, who largely engaged the Japanese? The Communists, who defeated the Kuomintang in 1949, were in disarray in 1937. Didn't Mao Zedong tell Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in Beijing in 1972, when diplomatic relations were restored between China and Japan, that if it wasn’t for the Japanese the Communists would never have taken power as the invasion gave them time to regroup under an umbrella of resistance to Japan.
  • China accuses the West of generally ignoring its role in the war. In this they are right; the Chinese theatre is only now beginning to be appreciated as a factor in tying down Japanese troops. But also the Communists were none too keen on discussing the war in case it gave credence to the Kuomintang. That has changed. A more assertive Beijing feels it can bolster its reputation by establishing direct lines between resistance to Japan, its legitimacy and its stance against Japan in maritime disputes.
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  • In defeating the Nazis, it is said that the US gave materiel, Britain gave time but the Soviet Union gave blood and more. Four out of every five Nazi soldiers were killed on the eastern front.
  • A new grand alliance? No, at least not yet. China is more outward looking, it wants to engage, on its terms sure, with the West but it still wants to engage more. It is seeking to open up the  "Stans" and central Asia economically and build an efficient, speedy and safe land trade route to Europe. It is also undergoing an economic transformation with less reliance on low-end manufacturing. Russia, hit by sanctions over its actions in Ukraine, views the West with greater suspicion. Beijing and Moscow have formed a partnership of convenience, based, in part, on ignoring inconvenient truths.
Emilio Ergueta

Russian TV doc on 1968 invasion angers Czechs and Slovaks - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-32959054

russian bbc slovakia coldwar history

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 01 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The Czech and Slovak governments have accused Russia of rewriting history after Russian state TV broadcast a documentary about the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia.
  • Warsaw Pact - Pages Declassified, broadcast on state-run Rossiya 1 TV, argued that the Soviet-led military alliance was a purely defensive organisation in the face of an "aggressive" Nato alliance.
  • The programme claimed a Nato-backed "armed coup" was being planned under the cover of the "legend of peaceful civilian uprising with the romantic name of the Prague Spring".
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  • Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek summoned Russia's Prague ambassador Sergei Kiselyev to complain about the broadcast as well the inclusion of several Czechs on a list of 89 EU politicians and diplomats banned from entering Russia
  • The government in Bratislava said the decision to broadcast the documentary damaged traditionally good relations between Slovakia and Russia. It also pointed out that the Slovak government had vigorously refused what it said were attempts to revise the history of World War Two in a way that cast doubt on the role of the Red Army.
qkirkpatrick

Ukraine's Poroshenko warns of 'full-scale' Russia invasion - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-33003237

ukraine russia history politics

shared by qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Russia has denied that its military is involved in Ukraine, but Mr Poroshenko said 9,000 of its troops were deployed.
  • The outbreak of violence, in the government-held towns of Maryinka and Krasnohorivka, was among the worst in eastern Ukraine since a ceasefire was signed in Minsk in February.
  • If there is a spike in fighting, like the battle in the town of Maryinka on Wednesday, then both sides know they cannot be seen as the aggressor, because they lose credibility and damage the negotiating position of their allies in either Moscow, or in European capitals.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Neither side wants to be seen as responsible for breaking the highly publicised, but so far unsuccessful, Minsk peace agreement.
  • "Ukraine's military should be ready for a new offensive by the enemy, as well as a full-scale invasion along the entire border with the Russian Federation," he said. "We must be really prepared for this."
  • More than 6,400 people have been killed in eastern Ukraine since the conflict began in April 2014 when rebels seized large parts of the two eastern regions, following Russia's annexation of the Crimea peninsula.
  • Mr Poroshenko said Ukraine had 50,000 troops in the east who were able to defend the country.
  • qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15
     
    Tensions rise in Ukraine and Russia
qkirkpatrick

Poll: US did more than UK and USSR to defeat Nazi Germany - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...SR-to-defeat-Nazi-Germany.html

poll germany ussr history politics

shared by qkirkpatrick on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The United States receives the most credit for defeating Adolf Hitler's Germany during World War Two, according to a YouGov poll
  • While the USSR trailed significantly in many of the countries sampled, the Soviets suffered the greatest losses of any of the Allies.
  • According to a new poll, however, most other countries look to the United States as the country that did the most to vanquish Adolf Hitler
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • A YouGov survey asked respondents from the US, Britain, and several European countries who they thought was most essential to defeating Germany in the Second World War and the US was the top choice in all but the UK and Norway.
  • An estimated 24 million Soviet combatants and civilians died in the war, compared to 450,000 Brits and 420,000 Americans. Both Britain and the USSR fought longer than the US, which did not declare war on Germany until December, 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
  • Britain and France declared war on Germany in September of 1939, following the invasion of Poland, while the USSR began four years of fierce combat with the Nazis following Hitler's invasion of the country in June, 1941.
  • While there were no Russians sampled by YouGov, a 2009 study found that nearly two-thirds of Russians said that the Soviet Union could have defeated Nazi Germany on its own, and nine-in-ten believed the USSR played the decisive role in the war. More Russians polled said that Britain's role in the war was "insignificant", as opposed to "very large".
  • qkirkpatrick on 07 Mar 16
     
    Perspective on who defeated Germany in WWII
johnsonma23

Tony Blair says he's sorry for Iraq War 'mistakes' - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics iraq war policy

shared by johnsonma23 on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he's sorry for "mistakes" made in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, but he doesn't regret bringing down dictator Saddam Hussein.
  • "I can say that I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong
  • Blair acknowledged to Zakaria that there are "elements of truth" in the view that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the principle cause of the rise of ISIS.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The consequences of Bush's decision to to take America into Iraq has repeatedly reared its head this year among candidates vying for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
  • "I find it hard to apologize for removing Saddam. I think, even from today in 2015, it is better that he's not there than that he is there
  • Saddam was notorious for his ruthless oppression of Iraqi citizens during more than three decades of dictatorship.
  • We have tried intervention and putting down troops in Iraq; we've tried intervention without putting in troops in Libya; and we've tried no intervention at all but demanding regime change in Syria,"
Javier E

Opinion | Conservatism's Monstrous Endgame - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-apparatchiks-deep-state.html

gop conservatism corruption democracy

shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • while we may congratulate ourselves on the strength of our political institutions, in the end institutions consist of people and fulfill their roles only as long as the people in them respect their intended purpose. Rule of law depends not just on what is written down, but also on the behavior of those who interpret and enforce that rule.
  • If these people don’t regard themselves as servants of the law first, partisans second, if they won’t subordinate their political goals to their duty to preserve the system, laws become meaningless and only power matters.
  • And what we’re seeing in America — what we’ve actually been seeing for years, although much of the news media and political establishment has refused to acknowledge it — is an invasion of our institutions by right-wing partisans whose loyalty is to party, not principle. This invasion is corroding the Republic, and the corrosion is already very far advanced.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • There are bad people in both parties, as there are in all walks of life. But the parties are structurally different
  • The Democratic Party is a loose coalition of interest groups, but the modern Republican Party is dominated by “movement conservatism,” a monolithic structure held together by big money — often deployed stealthily — and the closed intellectual ecosystem of Fox News and other partisan media. And the people who rise within this movement are, to a far greater degree than those on the other side, apparatchiks, political loyalists who can be counted on not to stray from the party line.
  • it’s not just the courts. Even as Trump and his allies spin fantasies about sabotage by the “deep state,” the reality is that a growing number of positions in government agencies are being occupied by right-wing partisans who care nothing, or actively oppose, their agencies’ missions. The Environmental Protection Agency is now run by people who don’t want to protect the environment, Health and Human Services by people who want to deny Americans health care.
  • ow do people who think and behave this way respond when the public rejects their agenda? They attempt to use their power to overrule the democratic process. When Democrats threaten to win elections, they rig the voting process, as they did in Georgia. When Democrats win despite election rigging, they strip the offices Democrats win of power, as they did in Wisconsin. When Democratic policies prevail despite all of that, they use apparatchik-stuffed courts to strike down legislation on the flimsiest of grounds.
  • As David Frum, the author of “Trumpocracy,” warned a year ago: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” That’s happening as we speak.
Javier E

Witnessing the Rise of Fascism in Italy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-origo-chill-in-the-air.html

fascism italy history war WWII

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Shortly after their marriage in 1924 (when Iris was 22), the Origos bought a large, rundown estate of some 7,000 acres in the Val d’Orcia; it included numerous old ruined buildings and some 57 farms. As the fighting approached their area, the plucky Marchesa Origo took in war orphans, hid fleeing Italian partisans and Allied paratroopers, and negotiated with the German military units that patrolled the area.
  • One of the great values of this brief but highly readable earlier diary is that it was written when the direction of history — whether there would be a war and how it would turn out — was far less clear. As a result, it more accurately represents the moral and political complexity of Italian life under Fascism. The people Origo encounters represent a much broader range of views: from convinced anti-Fascists to unquestioning Fascists who repeat phrases like “A good Italian’s duty now is to have no opinions.” Most occupy a swampy middle ground: They are uneasy about the slide into war but accept the regime’s argument that Italy has little choice but to fight.
  • A journal kept in the middle of tumultuous events makes us realize how wrong most people, including many intelligent and well-informed people, can be about the import of events that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seems obvious. “It is curious — the unanimity with which everyone here refuses to believe in the possibility of war,” Origo writes in mid-July 1939, six weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Observing the strange calm of the Italian public amid the growing international tension, a young Italian officer tells Origo: “‘Look what Fascism has done for our people! … Compare their calm with the feverish tension in France and England!’ But it isn’t exactly calm. It is a mixture of passive fatalism, and of a genuine faith in their leader: the fruits of 15 years of being taught not to think. It is certainly not a readiness for war, but merely a blind belief that, ‘somehow,’ it won’t happen.”
  • A few days later, Origo describes the scene at a dinner in Rome as the wealthy, well-connected guests await the arrival of Mussolini’s son-in-law, Italy’s foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, while Mussolini is trying to broker a peace plan. “When at last he arrived,” Origo writes, “he was beaming. ‘You can set your minds at rest,’ he said. ‘France and England have accepted the Duce’s proposals. … So go to bed tonight with your minds at rest!’ The guests followed his advice, and woke the next morning to the news of the invasion of Poland! Neither the Duce nor his son-in-law were told of it until two hours before the event.”
  • The radio, which the Fascist regime used with great skill, plays a large role in Origo’s account, and it is hard not to see some parallels with our current situation, with its constant claims of “fake news.” “The ultimate result of unceasing propaganda has now been to cancel out the effect of all news alike,” Origo writes. “One man said to me, ‘The radio has made fools of us all.’”
  • the day before Mussolini’s official declaration of war, Origo poses a question that seems deeply important in this time of resurgent nationalism: “Is it possible to move a country to war, against its historical traditions, against the natural instincts and character of the majority of its inhabitants, and very possibly against its own interests? Apparently it is possible.”
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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g-dragon

The Collapse of Gupta India - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/mpire-in-india-collapse-195477

Gupta Empire india collapse

shared by g-dragon on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • The Gupta Empire may have lasted only about 230 years, but it was characterized by a sophisticated culture with innovative advances in literature, arts, and sciences.
  • Called India's Golden Age by most scholars, the Gupta Empire was likely founded by a member of a lower Hindu caste called Sri Gupta.
  • During this Golden Age, India was part of an international trade network which also included other great classical empires of the day, the Han Dynasty in China to the east and the Roman Empire to the west.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The famed Chinese pilgrim to India Fa Hsien (Faxien), noted that Gupta law was exceptionally generous; crimes were punished only with fines.
  • The surviving architecture includes palaces and purpose-built temples for both Hindu and Buddhist religions, such as the Parvati Temple at Nachna Kuthara and the Dashavatara temple at Deogarh in Madhya Pradesh.
  • The emperors also founded free hospitals for their citizens, as well as monasteries and universities.
  • Aryabhata's incredibly accurate calculation of pi as 3.1416, and his equally amazing calculation that the solar year is 365.358 days long.
  • In part, this was due to the common people's dislike of the meddlesome and unwieldy bureaucracy.
  • As with the collapses of other classical political systems, the Gupta Empire crumbled under both internal and external pressures.
  • Internally, the Gupta Dynasty grew weak from a number of succession disputes. As the emperors lost power, regional lords gained increasing autonomy. In a sprawling empire with weak leadership, it was easy for rebellions in Gujarat or Bengal to break out, and difficult for the Gupta emperors to put such uprisings down.
  • By 500, many regional princes were declaring their independence and refusing to pay taxes to the central Gupta state. These included the Maukhari Dynasty, who ruled over Uttar Pradesh and Magadha.
  • By the later Gupta era, the government was having trouble collecting enough taxes to fund both its hugely complex bureaucracy, and constant wars against foreign invaders like the Pushyamitras and the Huns.
  • Chandragupta's son, Samudragupta (ruled 335–380 CE), was a brilliant warrior and statesman, sometimes called the "Napoleon of India."
  • Even those who felt a personal loyalty to the Gupta Emperor generally disliked his government and were happy to avoid paying for it if they could.
  • In addition to internal disputes, the Gupta Empire faced constant threats of invasion from the north. The cost of fighting off these invasions drained the Gupta treasury, and the government had difficulty refilling the coffers. Among the most troublesome of the invaders were the White Huns (or Hunas), who had conquered much of the northwestern section of Gupta territory by 500 CE.
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