Comrades: For the last week, I have been forwarding the war maps from RIAFA (with some commentary / summary of the days news as presented by ASBMil and Intel Slava, accounting for bias) to my company’s internal Whatsapp channel. I’m not doing it out of any effort for conversion, just to balance the info they might be getting a little bit. Today it finally drummed up a little bit of interest due to the Ukrainian Rada tweet comparing Kharkiv with Hamburg. After explaining how stupidly mask off that tweet was, I jokingly proposed to have a session to explain the origins of the war and why it wasn’t as black and white as it would seem if you only consume MSM. To my surprise, a few co workers jumped enthusiastically at the idea. I set a quorum of at least 10 people and warned them that this was going to go at least 1 hour of hard history, but I have gathered 8 people interested in less than 2 hours. I fear that I’m going to actually have to do this, or at least present them with a document outlining the mechanisms of NATO expansion, the geopolitical reasons of the Russian invasion, and all the nitty gritty that is conveniently left out of the Western coverage (I live in Latin America). To this effect, I would need some cooperation in selecting which topics do you think must not be left out (I’m considering the period from 1991 to the present, to start with NATO expansion up until the war in the Donbas and the current situation); what sources can I provide that could be amenable to libs or left-of-center apolitical people (but hard communist sources are welcomed too!); debunked hoaxes of Ukranian propaganda, as well as hard confirmation of neo NAzi organizations other than Azov, etc. In short, anything that can help me substantiate this presentation. Can you help me, comrades?
I think it’s important to dispel the notion that NATO was ever a “defensive alliance” so you should definitely mention that many of its founding members were literal Nazi war criminals like Adolf Heusinger. The way NATO bombed Yugoslavia and invaded Libya are particularly egregious and well documented examples of why they’re so dangerous too.
I think it’s important to dispel the notion that NATO was ever a “defensive alliance”
this is very important, I commented recently on reddit something about it:
"USSR wanted to join NATO in 1954, was refused and that lead to the Warsaw Pact
the refusal speaks volumes of what NATO is really about, how does a “defensive” military organisation refuse the world’s biggest army into its ranks? surely that would improve their defensive qualities, no?
apparently Putin also wanted to join back when he was first ‘elected’"
OP, you can read more here and here, I hope it can be helpful and, although the addressed nation there is mainly Russia, the same stream of thought can be applied to the Soviet Union, and in that case, instead of a hypothetical unified UE, I believe the consequence would clearly be the exporting of communism across Western Europe, a big no no for the US (there’s even more you can search and read about how isolating the communist part of Europe was very much a plan of the big capital once WW2 ended, iirc the term “Iron Curtain” was coined by Churchill, they sold the idea that the communist block was the one trying to shut itself in, when in fact that effort came from the outside)
other than the facts, of course the rest is conjecture but I didn’t came up with it myself, I just don’t remember where I read/watched a similar analysis, but again it seems like that would be the natural run of things
also fun fact: after the portuguese carnation revolution the usa parked a Saratoga in the Tagus River in front of the official residence of the President (Belém Palace) when there were talks of Portugal leaving NATO, here’s a pic
I think it’s very important to cover the “nationhood” of Ukraine.
This issue gets almost no coverage anywhere, but if you look into history you realize that Ukraine is not a “nation” in a way that, say, France or Italy or Spain or even Germany are.
Ukraine is a frankenstein of territories, assembled into single entity as part of USSR under Ukrainian SSR for administrative management. The very fact that this hodge-podge “state” exists is because of a stroke of Yeltsin’s pen. It’s borders are not drawn with blood, sweat and tears the same way as other EU countries is.
In a sense, Ukraine is closer to modern day Iraq or Nigeria or any of the other poor african “countries” whose borders were drawn with a fucking ruler with no regard to actual people living on the ground.
The infamous Dulles in his report on USSR called Ukraine “as inseparable part of the country as a Great Lakes region is to USA”.
As a Donbass native, I can speak for overwhelming majority of people there — this is not an invasion for us. It’s a homecoming long overdue.
I would also advise a bit of emotional note at some point. Something from western sources like Laura Bonnele’s movie “Donbass”, Graham Philips’ channel (he does war reports from DNR side), or even the fresh Maryana Naumova’s response to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
