Did Tom Pauken start a fad here, going to the author of a piece as “authority,” and copying them here to possibly repeat what they said elswhere in black and white, as if we can’t read it ourself, and make our own independent “credibility judgment?" And now as the author is included on the email, we must raise our hands in abject surrender to such “overwhelming authority,” and give total deference to that argument? Rather than exercise our own minds and experiences, while drawing upon a multitiplicity of sources? I haven’t had time to fully address the “questions” posed by the last one of these “authorities,” the author of a biography of an extreme-right wing “political theorist,” but I will when I get to it because our right-wing ideologists (bi-partisan: my ideological analyses is not based on infantile “party politics”) are working at destroying this world, and before we destroy ourselves, we should at least try and understand the truth of what they’re doing to us. And that category includes, in my opinion, Timothy Snyder, and what seem to have been his “mentor,” Timothy Garton Ash, a Senior Fellow at one of the most extreme right-wing “think-tanks” in the United States, the Hoover Institution:https://www.hoover.org/profiles/timothy-garton-ash. While not conclusive, that’s a stong “clue,” though a “rebuttable presumption,” to the ideological position anyone connected to Hoover has, to include their collaborators. Is that some weird idea of Pierce? No, it’s an essential element of “Network Analysis,” per the Israelis and everything I was taught as essential to “PsyOps Intelligence,” by the US Army. Independent of the Army, I studied “Information Warfare” (PsyWar, PsyOps, Cognitive Warfare, with the latter the highest, most sophisticated level achieved so far in this field (as Willmoore Kendall was a “pioneer” in, on behalf of the Conservative Movement) and ever-present in our lives, as conducted by CIA/DOD/NATO, and think-tanks, formally in graduate school. And with the Army-Air Force Center for Low-Intensity Conflict and through independent research in academic publications, and its constituent part: propaganda. Including “propaganda by omission.” And having carefully studied Snyder’s and Ash’s work for almost a decade now, as with Anne Applebaum’s, it has been my opinion that their “work” relies heavily upon “omissions,” as far as what is presented as “history.” That’s merely my “opinion,” which the First Amendment guarantees my “right” to say, notwithstanding Conservative “legal theorists” asserting the First Amendment is not ‘legitimate” (you know who I mean). A long way of saying, I don’t defer to Snyder, or Garton Ash, whom Snyder seems to have some connection to. Nor Applebaum, who virtually came out and said in my presence at an event at CUNY, that we “maybe” we needed to adopt tactics of the Orwell had warned us about. (When I asked in a question how that differed from fascism,” I was “politely,” ignored, and video of that speech was never posted online, unlike most of her talks at CUNY. All in my opinion, of course.” But all three have had a constant theme since before the U.S. engineered coup in Ukraine as directed by Victoria Nuland of the war-fevered Kagan Klan, which was “Russia Evil/Ukraine Angelic. So let me register my refusal to defer to Snyder, or Garton Ash, Applebaum, or Edward Hughes. As a Cold War Hawk, and anti-Soviet “Conservative” (yeah, I knew all about the war-fevered Burnham, Goldwater, Buckley, and Kendall, from long ago, the 1980s, though a h/t to someone here who made me more aware of the latter), and History student at the University of Minnesota studying the USSR with Prof. Theo Stavrou, along with being a regular reader of Commentary magazine and its coverage of the Soviet Union, I was not naive about the USSR, nor have I ever been an apologist for them. What I didn’t realize at the time however was how genuinely comparable “elements” of our own government were to our WW II enemies, which became fully apparent after 1991, and more so post-9/11. It’s so easy, and comforting, for naive people, or bad-intentioned ones, to divide the world into Us vs. Them, and I never saw that so evident as today, even at the height of the Cold War. And all it took was to declare Trump in league with the Russians, and never, absolutely never, do a deeper analysis of “who” Trump was actually allied with, and “what” country actually put all their resources toward getting him elected. That is, as Haaretz, and every other newsource in Israel has reported, Israel. Specifically, their “Radical-Right (fascists), which is so intertwined with Trump and Desantis, and the Republican Party. Both “Right” and “Left” in U.S. politics are complicit in that, as the “Left” (with their own latter-day Goldwaterites in charge) saw electoral gain in those accusations, and FT the US, if that helped their party, to the detriment of the world. And the “Right,” with being so intertwined with Israeli Fascism, was happy to distract “Conservatives” from knowing that Trump and his “New Right” was even more intertwined with Israel than the so-called “Neocons” ever were. Of course, any counter-narrative to the “Official” bi-partisan CIA/DOD narrative is charged as “Russian Propaganda” (hold your tongues you right-wing, New Right fanatics for war on China, you “Thielists,” synonymous for “Fascist,” hold your propaganda as it was you that concealed so much of what Trump was doing in Ukraine and Easter Europe in preparation for war on Russia!). Notwithstanding this is intended as a panegyric to Snyder, it reveals a couple of importany points: BLUF: "Snyder had come to speak at an annual conference, Yalta European Strategy (YES), which was founded in 2004 to promote ties with Europe. Funded by a Ukrainian oligarch, the conference had become an occasional stopover for the gladhanding global elite. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Gordon Brown, Elton John and Richard Branson had all participated in previous years, and the roster for the 2022 meeting included the American national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. . . . "It was a sign of Snyder’s standing that the YES conference was only the second-highest-profile stop on his Kyiv itinerary. The main reason for his trip, Snyder told me, during one of three long conversations we had recently, was a private meeting with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.” Is Snyder running for VP of Ukraine? Or official appontment as Ambassador, instead of just ex officio? As Snyder admits: "Snyder dislikes the scholarly tendency to hide judgments under a cloak of pseudo-objectivity.” Clearly there’s “no objectivity” in his advocacy of Ukraine, “pseudo,” or not. In fact, he reminds me of those Americans who went to Ukraine, when it was part of the USSR in the 1930s, as “apologists” for the Ukrainian (Khruschev), and Georgian (Stalin) Soviet leaders, as well as other Soviet nationalities, to include Jewish, and Russian, who were confiscating Ukraine’s foodstuffs, directed by the Communist Party of the USSR, not by Russia. And writing panegyrics to them. That Khruschev later made “amends” by unilaterally transferring Russia’s traditional territory of Crimea, to his “Homeland,” Ukraine. Which the US was then eager to take advantage of by disarming, in acquiring, Sebastopol, Russia’s one Naval Base on the Black Sea, and its last remaining naval barrier to Western military domination. But from what I have seen of Snyder’s work, those facts seem to be omitted. So, according to the Guardian, “As Snyder’s public profile has risen, he has attracted an increasing number of critics.” Count me as one of them, and sorry Ed, I refuse to defer to him as there is nothing in his background or scholarship what would give me reason to, anymore than I defer to fans of the 1950s right-wing extremists, ot their present incarnation in the New Right and the National Conservatives. If others here wish to, just as others here wish to adopt Trump/DeSantis/Netanyahu fascism (I can’t identify Netanyahu as one and then not say the same of his co-ideologists, can I? Here’s another point of view of Ukraine’s fascist history, with that a “proud tradition” in Ukraine yet: BLUF: "So while Bandera and his men were responsible for killing Jews, their ideology wasn’t fundamentally anti-Semitic; rather, it was pro-Ukrainian, and anti- everyone who appeared to be in the way of that, which included the pro-Soviet Jews. “For the Nazis, anti-Semitism was an unconditional core belief, and Nazi anti-Semitism was an all-or-nothing proposition that was both immutable and immune to circumstances,” explained Alexander John Motyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers, in an email. “For the Ukrainian nationalists, their attitude toward Jews depended on political circumstances.” BLUF: "Before the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Bandera helped the Nazis set up two Ukrainian intelligence battalions within their army. He also organized units that accompanied German troops into the Ukraine to form the local government and police. Bandera and his people considered the Soviets and the Jews their main enemies." BLUF: "During World War II, the older Bandera had served as Providnyk — a title analogous to the German Fuehrer — of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, a brutally violent and authoritarian Ukrainian ultranationalist organization that had collaborated with the Nazis." . . . "By 1940, the organization split and the elder Bandera took over the larger faction, OUN-B, which subsequently adopted a 1941 manifesto calling on its members to “liquidate undesirable Poles, Muscovites, and Jews.” BLUF: "A long sordid history of antisemitism casts an understandable pall over Jewish attitudes toward Ukraine and Ukrainians. From the 17th century pogroms of Khmelnytsky rebellion to collaboration with Nazi genocide during the 20th, the annals of Ukraine are filled with unconscionable crimes that Jews have not forgotten.” . . . "The flashpoint for contemporary Ukrainian neo-fascism revolves around the figures of Stepan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk and the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Bandera led his faction from 1940 to his assassination in 1959. Melnyk led his faction from 1939 to 1964. Both collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. "The great Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as America’s UN ambassador and as a US senator, said, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” "And the indisputable facts are that Bandera was a mass murderer who was motivated by ethnic bigotry against Jews, Poles and anyone else who didn’t meet his arbitrary definition of who was a ‘genuine’ Ukrainian. "The 10th OUN commandment instructed its members to “expand the strength, fame, wealth and area of the Ukrainian state, even through the enslavement of foreigners”. "And Bandera in particular, would routinely cloak his murderous antisemitism under the facade of his struggle against Soviet communism."
BLUF: “Poland’s foreign ministry has intervened after Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany denied that Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera was responsible for the mass murder of ethnic Poles and Jews, and also sought to justify his collaboration with Nazi Germany.” . . . “Jung then quoted a propaganda leaflet signed by Bandera calling for Russians, Poles, Hungarian and Jews to be “wiped out”. Melnyk responded that he “will not distance myself from it. That’s my decision [even if] you may not understand it. Sorry Ed, count me out for the war you seem to love, with your own “omissions” of how the Ukrainian fascists launched attacks upon ethnic Russians as soon as Nuland/USG gave Ukraine over to them. Identical in ideology and tactics to the Proud Boys! And don’t any nitwits pop-up with “Nuland is a Democrat.” She and her Kagan Klan are fascists (in my opinion) and they’re bi-partisan (Trump just prefers Israeli fascists to those tainted by having served other administrations, or none of them until now have measured up to his preferred level of war fanaticism in the way he is most comfortable in, like he and DeSantis do with the Israeli fascists. On May 17, 2023, at 3:41 PM, Edward Hughes via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote: Professor Tim Snyder reports the horror Ukrainian civilians in Kyiv experienced as a result of the latest Russian missile attack. https://snyder.substack.com/p/missiles-over-kyiv?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=310897&post_id=122059407&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email |