According to the astonishingly brainwashed liberal blogs I look at, "We" or "The West" or "NATO and its proxy/ally the Ukraine" or, really, "The USA military-industrial-complex oligarchy" is "winning" in the battle with Russia.
It might be true for all that I know. The corporate media's coverage has been abysmal. One-sided, hypocritical, sanctimonious. But they talk about Ukrainian victories, low Russian morale, Russian incompetence and losses of territory and equipment. And, most of all, Russian atrocities. (So I hear from snippets on nearby television news channels, radio five-minute news reports, and what I force myself to read from the liberal blogs.)
To get a different viewpoint I find myself reading websites I'd never bothered with before. Some of them are bizarre communities of mostly male, pro-Russian weirdos who espouse some Dostoyevskian notion of the superior culture of Holy Mother Russia against the decadent West. They speak of Putin's limited strategic goals, his restraint against unleashing a US-style "Shock & Awe" campagin devastating the Ukraine's cities, poor Ukrainian morale (middle-aged Ukranian "national guard" -type forces being pushed to the front to be obliterated by Russian artillery), and Russian destruction of roads and bridges in eastern Ukraine to slow the delivery of obsolete NATO weaponry that is itself destroyed long before it gets to the untrained hands at the front.
I don't find either side entirely credible. Of course, the delusion of the pro-NATO narrative liberals is so fucking obvious that it weakens their position. To say this military operation was "unprovoked" is just so blindingly stupid. To do all this shrieking about human rights violations when so many of these bloggers are US-Americans whose governments have done at least the same thing, but these bloggers don't seem too upset that they have war criminals in their own country wandering around free. These idiots and assholes sagely pondering whether NUCLEAR WAR (and, therefore the death of most of humanity and civilization) might be necessary to ensure the Ukraine's abstract right to join NATO are contemptible. Their denial of the undeniable FACT that genuine, bona-fide NAZIs dominate the Ukraine's government also undermines their credibility.
But yesterday I was watching the TV news at work and the coverage of the fighting reminded me about how the media in the 1960's talked constantly about "the progress" in Vietnam when the US leadership knew all along things were different. As revealed in the leaked "Pentagon Papers." And then, in my lifetime, we were told about the constant progress in Iraq was always just around the next Friedman unit. And how Afghanistan, ... well, we were always "winning" in Afghanistan. And when Trump got the US out of Afghanistan, well, Biden babbled about how powerful the Afghan military was and how it was going to hold the line and then it evaporated in a manner of weeks. (The Washington Post detailed the constant lying ... which was all printed in order to embarrass Trump ... in a series they called "The Afghanistan Papers.")
Who wants to bet there won't be anything later revealed in something that could be titled "The Ukrainian Papers"?
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