Tag: The Cold War

Žižek on the War in Ukraine

Monday 27 June 2022

Žižek’s recent comments on Ukraine have quite understandably bewildered and divided socialists around the world. Ukraine, he says, ‘risked the impossible, defying pragmatic calculations, and the least we owe them is full support, and to do this, we need a stronger Nato.’ But wait! Supporting Ukraine is to support a Nazi-captured state, post-Maidan, and to seek a stronger NATO is to desire a reinforced US unipolarity and the furtherance of American liberal and capitalist hegemony. To the socialist (qua a leftist who reads) this is simply anathema. … More Žižek on the War in Ukraine

Parallel Realities on Russia

Friday 6 May 2022

The notion that Putin has designs on invading Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, or anywhere else in eastern Europe is unsupported by the facts. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has largely stayed within its own borders. There has been no realistic indication or intelligence that Russia has been planning an assault on Europe. It is plain to see that, like the war in Georgia in 2008, Russia has no plans on annexing Ukraine. … More Parallel Realities on Russia

Zelenskyy’s Dirty Propaganda War

Thursday 5 May 2022

This is the nature of the information war being fought by the Ukrainian government — the side that is the righteous victim, the side that does not need to tell lies, the side that has innocence on its side. Yet, the multiplication of the entities of these stories — their details — point to them being fictitious; they push the boundaries of believability. … More Zelenskyy’s Dirty Propaganda War

Chekhov’s Nuclear War

Wednesday 4 May 2022

NATO and the western media have made a great fuss about Russia’s revision of its nuclear strategy; suggesting that, by incorporating a particular nuclear option into its conventional military response, the Putin administration has adopted a fundamentally more aggressive and bullying strategy — and has leapt on this to accelerate the expansion of the anti-Russian nuclear alliance and the buildup of ‘defensive’ forces on the Russian border. Little if anything, however, has been said about why Russia made these revisions in the first place. … More Chekhov’s Nuclear War

The Problem with Russia

Tuesday 19 April 2022

Now that the war is happening, and now that we are at — as Noam Chomsky described it — ‘the most dangerous point in human history,’ the West finds itself unable to see Russia correctly. We are still looking at our projection of Russia — a false image of our fears rather than Russia as it really is. In effect, then, Washington and its NATO client states are boxing their own shadows while the real Russia acts in totally unexpected ways because we don’t expect a fiction to behave as anything other than a fiction. … More The Problem with Russia

Why Ukraine’s Nazis are Different

Tuesday 22 March 2022

Ukrainian Nazis, however, are fairly unique in the fact that they have both a historical link and a political line of succession to the Nazism of the Third Reich, to the Schutzstaffel (the SS), and to the Nazi extermination camps. The Nazism of the Svobado Party, the Azov battalion, and many of the other Nazi groupings in Ukraine is a fossilised and authentic Third Reich Nazism. … More Why Ukraine’s Nazis are Different

How the US Instigated War in Ukraine

Monday 21 March 2022

As the old democracies know, the people do not always vote as they should — and this is what happened in Ukraine. From 1996 the State Department had always taken an active role in helping Ukraine choose the political leadership Washington wanted, but when the people had other ideas in the 2010 presidential election the US began to rethink its approach. … More How the US Instigated War in Ukraine

Russia Hints at a Tactical Nuclear Escalation

Sunday 20 March 2022

Yet, the most powerful statement this strike makes is in the particular capabilities of the Kinzhal hypersonic missile (developed by Russian Federation and the PR China); the Kinzhal or ‘Dagger’ missile is designed to deliver a tactical nuclear warhead payload. More to the point, as a hypersonic weapon capable of velocities between Mach 5 and Mach 12, it is technologically beyond the interception capabilities of NATO’s defences. … More Russia Hints at a Tactical Nuclear Escalation