Accepting how the world works is not the same as saying it’s moral.
If someone threatens to shoot you, you saying it’s immoral is not a practical defense, unless there is some kind of higher power like a justice system with a police to enforce it. But the entire point of international politics is that such a force does not exist, just countries with interests.
The Freikorps consisted mostly of veterans of the Prussian army, and the specific division that executed Luxemburg and Liebknecht was led by Waldemar Pabst a high ranking official in the Prussian army.
What I am “implying” is that there was good reason why in the interwar period being anti fascist and anti SPD was not an uncommon opinion.
Calling it a democratic government is quite a short cut. They were in the middle of a revolution, in the process of deciding what the future of Germany would look like, no elections had taken place. In the population there was huge support for dismantling the Prussian military institutions, but the SPD decided to not only keep the military as is but also to use it against their political opposition. I’m not saying the Spartakusbund were the good guys, I’m saying that the excessive violence of the SPD was foreboding of what was to come.
The line “first they came for the communists” from Martin Niemöller’s famous poem, goes back longer than just the Nazis.
After the fall of the Kaiser the SPD started working together with ultra rightwing shock troops (Freikorps) to subdue communists, the broader left and the labor movement. Gustav Noske (SDP) literally called himself the bloodhound (bluthond).
Lookup the death of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht for more fun facts about the SDP in that era.
I only read the article before, but Christ that video is shocking. He just intensionally twists the question three times, and then accuses the journalist of not doing his job for only citing two sources (the fucking Israeli government and the UN). Plus the moderator constantly interrupting the journalists while the government is just obviously lying. Staatsräson in action.
They should have asked Annalena Baerbock she has seen the videos.
Out of curiosity, if this is ever legally recognized as a genocide, is there anything human-rights law or international law says about people knowingly spreading lies in support of it?
Edit: And will she be just as vigilant about Israel systematically raping prisoners as a form of torture (something for which there actually exists multiple sources).
If Russia succeeds in occupying Ukraine completely it will take an immense amount of resources to subdue the population, I don’t see why this will be any different than Iraq. Given the current resistance it might even be impossible for Russia to simply occupy Ukraine and extract its resources, this is also probably the reason why they have tried to sue for peace multiple times.
Putin is a moderate in Russian politics, and it is relevant because it means there are ways to negotiate with him.
How does this argument work, the military spending of the Nazis was insane in the build up to the war, up to 40% in 1939, no such numbers in Russia. Even now it’s just estimated at 10% and they clearly need all of it just to fight the war in Ukraine. How are they ever gonna steamroll Nato with those numbers, there is no tangible proof that they are planning for this.
The Putin is Hitler mantra also doesn’t make any sense, he has been a moderate (all be it an authoritarian) politician for decades, and now he suddenly is the rebirth of Hitler. Just looking at his politics he’s clearly not a fascist.
We’ve been sold that Ukraine can win this war militarily, and the collective west can cripple the Russian economy with sanctions alone. Now that this turns out to be complete BS, they (a subset of western politicians) are looking for a way out, and clearly their preferred way is further escalations. So now they are selling us even more BS to justify this.
A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed an interview that gave a similar account. It cited a 41-year-old detainee whe said that interrogators "made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire," and also said that another detainee "died after they put the electric stick up" his anus.
So they are raping people to death…
I was more stating what I think will happen rather than wat we should be doing.
In terms of pure physics it is ofc easier to turn off the metaphorical tap, but in terms of power and politics we seem unable to transition to renewables. And I’m afraid once we switch on the geo-engineering button we still won’t transition. Only once oil is priced out of the market completely, be it fusion or abundant solar and wind (with energy storage), will we make the transition. But again I might be too pessimistic.
Fusion would solve a lot, but even if we invent room-temperature superconductors today, it would still take so much time to roll fusion out on a big scale and replace oil infrastructure with electric infrastructure.
I tend to be very pessimistic about climate change, but I hope I’m wrong.
NATO is still a collection of nation states with interests, being powerful does not mean you can be trusted. (As the US has shown multiple times)
The people actually fighting this war, don’t want to, they need to be forcibly conscripted by the Ukrainian government, I have met multiple people that can no longer renew their pasport because the Ukrainian government (and western governments by extension) want them to die at the front.
And finally Ukraine is losing, and probably always was, the economic and manpower difference is just too big. There was a point in the summer of 2022 where Ukraine had a position to get a deal on relatively good terms, and there actually was a peace process going on. But somehow this broke down, I’ve heard rumors that it was the UK or the US that convinced/coerced Zelensky to walk away. I really hope that isn’t true because that would mean they have a lot of blood on their hands, and mostly Ukrainian.