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31 minutes ago, Simon Tan said:

West is not fascist, just human. Greedy and kinda incompetent.

I am not sure than a Fascist West would be worse than what is expecting us in the path we are traveling now.

Mussolini was not a model statesman, but Klaus Schwab wants to reduce global human population dramatically. Then there is the Great Reset.

Edited by sunday
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1 hour ago, Perun said:

It is not diferent at all. It is the same thing. No one answered me logicaly what is diference between Soviet troops in Cuba and NATO troops only ~100 km from Petrograd. If Russia has nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad (I didnt see any proof of that) it is still Russian soil while US nuclear arsenal is not on US soil anywhere in europe.

I just did, and no disrespect to yourself, you arent listening.

 

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1 hour ago, Simon Tan said:

Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen suggest otherwise. 

Yes OK. But the development gap is what feels like centuries. And the religion is Islamic. There is almost never anything going on.

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57 minutes ago, sunday said:

I am not sure than a Fascist West would be worse than what is expecting us in the path we are traveling now.

Mussolini was not a model statesman, but Klaus Schwab wants to reduce global human population dramatically. Then there is the Great Reset.

Yeah, and the fifth columnists and useful idiots of the Cold War "knew" that their countries were ruled by the Military-Industrial Complex, greedy capitalists and old Nazis who were eroding their freedoms, destroying the environment, planning for war and generally leading the world to doom, too. I refer to my post about West German protest movements a couple pages back:

Quote

Peace movement: Started in West Germany over the question of rearmament after WW II. There was broad public opposition from leftists, the churches, unions, intellectuals and veterans against the establishment of the Bundeswehr, and particularly its possible equipment with nuclear weapons. By early 1958, protests reached 1.5 million. From 1960 there were annual Easter marches for peace and disarmament, with a total of 300,000 participants in 1968. The NATO Double-Track Decision lead to a significant uptick; half a million congregated in Bonn during Ronald Reagan's visit in 1982.

1983 saw a total of 1.3 million on one day, with a continuous human chain formed from Stuttgart to Ulm. There were peaceful blockades of nuclear weapon sites, including by a group of 20 serving judges. A "Generals for Peace" group of retired NATO generals formed, which was later found to be under direct Stasi influence, a case where the traditional charge of conservatives that the peace movement was a communist front was actually true. Another critical group was the "Darmstadt Signal" formed by active Bundeswehr officers in 1983, which still exists. The republic survived.

Anti-imperialism: Emerged from the student movement of the 60s demanding more political and societal liberties, and criticizing a lack of addressing the Nazi past, the continuation of Third Reich officials in influential positions, relationships with authoritarian states, the Vietnam war, etc. Students waved Mao's red book and chanted "Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh". A protest against the Shah of Persia to West Berlin on 2 June 1967 radicalized the movement after Shah supporters and police attacked the crowd and a student was shot dead by an officer (who later turned out to have been a Stasi informer, though it was never shown to be a deliberate provocative act). A right-winger also shot and severely wounded student leader Rudi Dutschke in 1968.

This inspired various terrorist groups like the "Movement 2 June" and Red Army Faction, the latter committing its last attack in 1993. There was a sharp divide in society between some who demanded a reintroduction of capital punishment for terrorists, and sympathizers in arts and academia. There was the introduction of new police powers and legal measures which stirred fear of a police state among leftists. There was an attempt to ban suspected sympathizers from public service, which was eventually mostly countermanded by courts. The head of the Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations himself noted that the state couldn't just rely on repression, but would have to address the grievances of the younger generation. The republic survived.

Environmentalism: Particularly directed against nuclear energy in the 70s. There were regular six-digit protests at nuclear sites which sometimes turned violent. Some warned of the coming authoritarian "atomic state". "Mostly peaceful" protests against nuclear waste transports to the Gorleben storage site, accompanied by huge police deployments, continued until a decade ago. Among the other issues which gained similar national attention was the construction of a new runway at Frankfurt Airport in the 80s.

There were mass protests against the required cutting of trees which were latched onto by radical left-wingers; there was destruction of electric lines and a bomb attack on the house of the airport CEO. In 1987, two police officers were killed and nine others wounded when shot at with a pistol which had been taken from another officer at an anti-nuclear protest in Hanau the previous year. [...] The republic survived.

[...]

Various recent grievances: Protests against the reconstruction of Stuttgart Central Station in 2010 were a harbinger of a new development. Not necessarily the young and left-leaning, but middle-aged of various if any particular polical background, frequently latched onto by the far right, though other things are the same - discontent with political representation and societal development, warnings of an emerging dictatorship, etc. This includes the weekly PEGIDA marches in 2014/15 which topped out at 35,000 in Dresden alone; and the ongoing anti-COVID protests. Established politics and media lament violence against police, ideological involvement from authoritarian regimes and that supporters shouldn't be in public service, while others warn that not everyone who attends over worries where the nation is headed is a political extremist. It's all very familiar from the 70s. So far, the republic survives.

[...]

 

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2 hours ago, sunday said:

Thirty, twenty, even ten years ago there could have been no doubt.

I am not too sure about now - Global Warmism, mandatory LGBTetc., CRT, wokeism, satanism, experimental vaccines...

Would not an invasion by Putin's Russia mean death to all those movements? Those people should be the first to man the barricades, in order to protect their "way of life".

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2 minutes ago, wendist said:

Would not an invasion by Putin's Russia mean death to all those movements? Those people should be the first to man the barricades, in order to protect their "way of life".

Not really. Armed services rank and file, especially those on the front lines, tend to be just the opposite.

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6 minutes ago, sunday said:

Not really. Armed services rank and file, especially those on the front lines, tend to be just the opposite.

Maybe I misunderstood your first post. That the armed forces of an independent country would fight an invader goes without saying, that's why they signed on in the first place. But the irony here is that those peace loving, anti-militarist civilians that I thought you referred to would have some very good reasons to join their armed countrymen in the fight against an invasion from Putin's Russia. They stand to loose a lot in a Putin world.

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17 minutes ago, wendist said:

Maybe I misunderstood your first post. That the armed forces of an independent country would fight an invader goes without saying, that's why they signed on in the first place. But the irony here is that those peace loving, anti-militarist civilians that I thought you referred to would have some very good reasons to join their armed countrymen in the fight against an invasion from Putin's Russia. They stand to loose a lot in a Putin world.

They, or more precisely their leadership, would be happy sending their fellow, but wrongthinking, countrymen to serve as cannon fodder. 

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17 hours ago, Perun said:

What would UK or France do if for example Belgia join CSTO and invate Russian nuclear forces on its soil. 

It is same like in Cuban misille crissis, for "west" it was ok to stationed nuclear weapons in europe but it was problem when Soviets did the same in Cuba.

For that what-if to stand, some prerequisites need to be set up first because Belgium has good relations with the surrounding countries and those surrounding countries have good relations with each other. It's something that they achieved that shoukd not be taken for granted given the kind of history western Europe has had for centuries. It's part of the heart of the EU. So in order for the what-if to stand, poor relations between Belgium and the surrounding countries woukd need to be setup and the reason why such relations went bad because the reason for it will be a factor in assessing motives/competence/desires in Belgium and the surrounding countries. Since they all have good relations, it adds credibility to the sensibility by Belgium and all surrounding countries. Saying that does have a tangent towards the matter about EU beaurocracy and regulations but leaving that aside. 

So then that leads to the question about how we got here with Ukraine to begin with. Ukraine is deeply divided but still just one country so what one side wants will rub the other side badly. 

The literal changing of international borders by force can lead to a whole can of worms in the future. Once done once, its not hard to imagine people to start thinking of trying it again. 

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11 minutes ago, futon said:

The literal changing of international borders by force can lead to a whole can of worms in the future. Once done once, its not hard to imagine people to start thinking of trying it again. 

Ding Ding Ding.  Hold the presses we have a winner!

Next step, identifying who started this trend in the last generation.

Either all International borders can not be changed or all can be changed. And not the entity doing the change can not decide if its right or wrong.

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25 minutes ago, Perun said:

Maybe you answered but I didnt get answer. Not from you specificaly but from no one

Ok, address the question, what drove both deployments, that is NATO in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet deployment in Cuba?

The Soviets didnt deploy to Cuba for the reasons you think. Yes, they were there partly to make sure America didnt invade. But a deployment of a couple of Divisions would have done that fine. No, the reason why they deployed the missiles was to ensure they didnt lose another Socialist state, in a period shortly after the Sino Soviet split. In short, Khrushchev overreacted. There was also the other not inconsiderable matter of achieving nuclear parity with the US much quicker than expected. Something that would have been easy to achieve if the Soviet Premier wasnt being deceptive.

Why is NATO in Eastern Europe? Its because the Eastern Europeans were occupied by the Soviets for 40 years, they treated them abysmally, and they didnt want to be in the thrall of Russia again. NATO didnt push to Eastern Europe, it was pulled by a lot of people scared by Russia in the 1990's.

Secondly, that movement was undertaken with the permission of Russia, specifically Vladimir Putin. So Putin's claims that NATO are 'encroaching' on Russia are kinda like claiming you have been robbed, after your gave the burgular your keys and told him to help himself.

One deployment was not for the interests of the people concerned. The other was. And considering there are 30 Nations that agree NATO acted responsibly, and only one that does not, for me Im still coming down on the NATO side.

In short, people keep using the Cuban analogy, the problem is they clearly are listening to Putin's perspective, whom clearly has read totally fuck all about it. Pretty much like his history of the Ukraine, based on impressions but completely without any historical evidence whatsoever. But then its written for people not into such things. Who needs evidence anyway?

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Just now, Mistral said:

Ding Ding Ding.  Hold the presses we have a winner!

Next step, identifying who started this trend in the last generation.

Either all International borders can not be changed or all can be changed. And not the entity doing the change can not decide if its right or wrong.

Soviets decided to change their own borders themselves, not including quite a few Russians actually. We are all in the thrall of the choices they themselves made, and nobody put a gun to their head and made them do it.Basically, if they wanted to hold onto the USSR, maybe they should have shot a few more civilians when it would have made a difference.

I wonder what the international response would have been if Britain had said it wanted its Empire back in 1975, and started lining its tanks up on the Irish border for starters. Im sure everyone would similarly have pointed to US aggression in Vietnam as a justification, because 'reasons'.

 

 

 

 

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Just now, Stuart Galbraith said:

Soviets decided to change their own borders themselves, not including quite a few Russians actually. We are all in the thrall of the choices they themselves made, and nobody put a gun to their head and made them do it.Basically, if they wanted to hold onto the USSR, maybe they should have shot a few more civilians when it would have made a difference.

I wonder what the international response would have been if Britain had said it wanted its Empire back in 1975, and started lining its tanks up on the Irish border for starters. Im sure everyone would similarly have pointed to US aggression in Vietnam as a justification, because 'reasons'.

 

 

 

 

So, are all international borders inviolable or not?

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59 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Ok, address the question, what drove both deployments, that is NATO in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet deployment in Cuba?

The Soviets didnt deploy to Cuba for the reasons you think. Yes, they were there partly to make sure America didnt invade. But a deployment of a couple of Divisions would have done that fine. No, the reason why they deployed the missiles was to ensure they didnt lose another Socialist state, in a period shortly after the Sino Soviet split. In short, Khrushchev overreacted. There was also the other not inconsiderable matter of achieving nuclear parity with the US much quicker than expected. Something that would have been easy to achieve if the Soviet Premier wasnt being deceptive.

Why is NATO in Eastern Europe? Its because the Eastern Europeans were occupied by the Soviets for 40 years, they treated them abysmally, and they didnt want to be in the thrall of Russia again. NATO didnt push to Eastern Europe, it was pulled by a lot of people scared by Russia in the 1990's.

Secondly, that movement was undertaken with the permission of Russia, specifically Vladimir Putin. So Putin's claims that NATO are 'encroaching' on Russia are kinda like claiming you have been robbed, after your gave the burgular your keys and told him to help himself.

One deployment was not for the interests of the people concerned. The other was. And considering there are 30 Nations that agree NATO acted responsibly, and only one that does not, for me Im still coming down on the NATO side.

In short, people keep using the Cuban analogy, the problem is they clearly are listening to Putin's perspective, whom clearly has read totally fuck all about it. Pretty much like his history of the Ukraine, based on impressions but completely without any historical evidence whatsoever. But then its written for people not into such things. Who needs evidence anyway?

Thank you for answer but I disagree. There is no diference between Soviet forces on Cuba and NATO 100 km from Petrograd

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1 hour ago, Perun said:

Thank you for answer but I disagree. There is no diference between Soviet forces on Cuba and NATO 100 km from Petrograd

The US would have tolerated Soviet troops in Cuba, and either you know that and you're a troll, or you are not very well informed about a well-documented part of recent world history. The 1961 events are known as the Cuban Missile Crisis and not as the Soviet Troops-in-Cuba Crisis. It was about a nuclear missile threat to Washington with a warning time of under 10 minutes which made surprise attacks to decapitate the US government possible.

Nothing of what's happening in Europe today is comparable in threat level to Moscow to that. Where the general threat level from intermediary range missiles has escalated in the last ten years, it's been flagrant Russian violations of treaties; maybe they were provoked by stationing a small number of anti-ballistic missiles - and like Stuart back in the day I didn't think it was a particularly good idea because of the destabilizing effect - but at the same time the Russian counter-move wasn't proportional, and given the number of installed systems and the high level of transparency that NATO offered about the whole thing, it was also irrational as it has, at the end of the day, made Russia's security situation worse rather than improved it. Like pretty much every other move that they made over the past fifteen years.

Putin may be a great tactician, but he has little strategic foresight. So, here we are.

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The Russian Army Doesn’t Have Enough Trucks To Defeat Ukraine Fast




The Kremlin has used trains—hundreds of them with many thousands of cars, in total—to stage along the Russia-Ukraine border weapons, vehicles and supplies for an army of around 100,000 troops.

If Russian President Vladimir Putin pulls the proverbial trigger and orders that army to roll west into Ukraine’s restive Donbas region, those same trains will haul supplies to forward depots and haul away from the war zone any damaged vehicles in need of deep repair.

That dependency comes with risk that, more than any tank-on-tank or artillery-on-artillery match-up, could define a wider war in eastern Ukraine. Trains can’t roll all the way to the front line. For that, Russia needs trucks. But it’s woefully short.

Russia is vast and its roads are poor compared to roads in Western countries. That helps to explain why the country, and its army, leans so heavily on rail for logistics. State-owned Russian Railways owns 20,000 of the country’s 21,000 locomotives. Private firms own most of the roughly 1.2 million freight cars, including 66,000 flat cars for hauling vehicles.

Those 66,000 cars, handled by unique army railway troop brigades, are “more than enough to transport the equipment of the entire Russian ground force units,” according to Konrad Muzyka, an analyst for Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

But railheads aren’t always close to the front line. To reach battalions rolling west toward Kiev, supplies must travel scores or hundreds of miles by road.

That’s where the Russian army’s logistics are weakest. “The Russian army does not have enough trucks to meet its logistic requirement more than 90 miles beyond supply dumps,” U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vershinin wrote at War on the Rocks.

The Russian army has 10 “material-technical support” brigades. Each operates around 400 trucks. Even if every support brigade mobilized and all of their vehicles remained operational throughout a campaign, the available trucks wouldn’t stretch very far, Vershinin explained.

“Although each army is different, there are usually 56 to 90 multiple launch rocket system launchers in an army,” he noted. “Replenishing each launcher takes up the entire bed of [a] truck. If the combined arms army fired a single volley, it would require 56 to 90 trucks just to replenish rocket ammunition.”

“That is about a half of a dry cargo truck force in the material-technical support brigade just to replace one volley of rockets. There is also between six to nine tube artillery battalions, nine air-defense artillery battalions, 12 mechanized and recon battalions, three to five tank battalions, mortars, anti-tank missiles and small-arms ammunition—not to mention, food, engineering, medical supplies and so on.”

The Kremlin can supplement the army’s trucks with helicopters and civilian vehicles. But that’s just tinkering around the margins of an enormous logistical problem. All that is to say, trucks—more than tanks or artillery—could dictate the pace and extent of a deeper Russian invasion of Ukraine.

That truism should also inform the Ukrainian army’s own thinking. As Ukrainian gunners select targets for their tube artillery and rockets, they should always prioritize the seemingly most boring targets. The trucks the Russians can’t fight without.

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/01/13/the-russian-army-doesnt-have-enough-trucks-to-defeat-ukraine-fast/

Edited by Perun
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2 hours ago, Mistral said:

So, are all international borders inviolable or not?

Clearly not since Western Nations, Russia, China have all disrespected them when it suits. China is currently building villages in disputed territory with india. I doubt very much they are using Kosovo and Iraq as justification.

 

You really think he wouldn't be doing this if there was no Iraq? I do. He is the street thug. People like that dont look for reasons, they look for what they can get away with.

 

 

 

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40 minutes ago, Perun said:

The Russian Army Doesn’t Have Enough Trucks To Defeat Ukraine Fast




The Kremlin has used trains—hundreds of them with many thousands of cars, in total—to stage along the Russia-Ukraine border weapons, vehicles and supplies for an army of around 100,000 troops.

If Russian President Vladimir Putin pulls the proverbial trigger and orders that army to roll west into Ukraine’s restive Donbas region, those same trains will haul supplies to forward depots and haul away from the war zone any damaged vehicles in need of deep repair.

That dependency comes with risk that, more than any tank-on-tank or artillery-on-artillery match-up, could define a wider war in eastern Ukraine. Trains can’t roll all the way to the front line. For that, Russia needs trucks. But it’s woefully short.

Russia is vast and its roads are poor compared to roads in Western countries. That helps to explain why the country, and its army, leans so heavily on rail for logistics. State-owned Russian Railways owns 20,000 of the country’s 21,000 locomotives. Private firms own most of the roughly 1.2 million freight cars, including 66,000 flat cars for hauling vehicles.

Those 66,000 cars, handled by unique army railway troop brigades, are “more than enough to transport the equipment of the entire Russian ground force units,” according to Konrad Muzyka, an analyst for Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

But railheads aren’t always close to the front line. To reach battalions rolling west toward Kiev, supplies must travel scores or hundreds of miles by road.

That’s where the Russian army’s logistics are weakest. “The Russian army does not have enough trucks to meet its logistic requirement more than 90 miles beyond supply dumps,” U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vershinin wrote at War on the Rocks.

The Russian army has 10 “material-technical support” brigades. Each operates around 400 trucks. Even if every support brigade mobilized and all of their vehicles remained operational throughout a campaign, the available trucks wouldn’t stretch very far, Vershinin explained.

“Although each army is different, there are usually 56 to 90 multiple launch rocket system launchers in an army,” he noted. “Replenishing each launcher takes up the entire bed of [a] truck. If the combined arms army fired a single volley, it would require 56 to 90 trucks just to replenish rocket ammunition.”

“That is about a half of a dry cargo truck force in the material-technical support brigade just to replace one volley of rockets. There is also between six to nine tube artillery battalions, nine air-defense artillery battalions, 12 mechanized and recon battalions, three to five tank battalions, mortars, anti-tank missiles and small-arms ammunition—not to mention, food, engineering, medical supplies and so on.”

The Kremlin can supplement the army’s trucks with helicopters and civilian vehicles. But that’s just tinkering around the margins of an enormous logistical problem. All that is to say, trucks—more than tanks or artillery—could dictate the pace and extent of a deeper Russian invasion of Ukraine.

That truism should also inform the Ukrainian army’s own thinking. As Ukrainian gunners select targets for their tube artillery and rockets, they should always prioritize the seemingly most boring targets. The trucks the Russians can’t fight without.

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/01/13/the-russian-army-doesnt-have-enough-trucks-to-defeat-ukraine-fast/

90 miles beyond their supply dumps and they are in Kyiv.

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