#russian barbarism

[alcestas-sloboda]

[milenaolesinska]

These photos are shocking. For a whole generation of young people in Ukraine, this fucking Putin is destroying the future

[herukapadmajungiansworld]

My beloved city, we will definitely endure💙💛The last few days have been the toughest nights of the entire war. The aggressors have attacked us with missiles and Shaheed. I feel such a mixture of pain and pride for our people.

Last night,

my niece stayed over,

and when the explosions began,

I hesitated to wake the child.

I sat on the floor next to her bed, prepared to shield her with my body if needed.

The attacks intensified, and eventually,

I had to wake her up.

My dog ❤️ lay at our feet,

we all sat on the floor together,

hoping for God's protection 🙏 and relying on our Ukrainian Air Defense💙💛.

You know, after such nights, my questions are not directed at God, nor at ordinary people, or even the aggressors.

My one question is for the world leaders: why do you say that we cannot use Western weapons to attack russians territory ?

⭐Do you consider the lives of our people less valuable?

⭐ Have you ever shielded your children with your own body?

⭐Why has everyone forgotten about Kherson, Bucha, Mariupol?

⭐Why isn't the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant equally terrifying?

After such sleepless nights for our children, 💥we have every right to wipe the kremlin off the face of the earth. 💥

I feel the pain for our people, but we are not broken 💪 .

We continue to move forward.

There's still champagne in the fridge that I will open on Victory Day.

I love you, my city❤️you are our fortress, you give us strength🫶

#Odesa

#GloryToGod

#GlorytoAFU

[irhabiya]

i honest to God think yemenis have every right to gut any saudi, emirati or usamerican if they so please

[corallapis]

@redundare another bit about the master on trial you might enjoy, from the brig's memoir in "the doctor: his life and times"

[soon-palestine]

Hostages tortured to death. Parents executed in front of their children. Doctors beaten. Babies murdered. Sexual assault weaponised. No, not Hamas crimes. This is part of an ever-growing list of documented atrocities committed by Israel in the five months since 7 October – quite separate from the carpet bombing of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and a famine induced by Israel’s obstruction of aid. And yet while the western establishment media has been chock full of the most lurid allegations of savagery directed against Hamas, sometimes with little or no supporting evidence, Israeli atrocities are excused or quickly forgotten. Accusations against Hamas are endlessly reheated to paint a picture of a supremely dangerous and bestial militant group, in turn rationalising the slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s population to “eradicate” it as a terrorist organisation. But equally barbarous atrocities committed by Israel – not in the heat of battle, but in cold blood – are treated as unfortunate, isolated incidents that cannot be connected, that paint no picture, that reveal nothing of import about the military that carried them out. If Hamas’ crimes were so savage and sadistic they still need to be reported months after they took place, why does the establishment media never feel the need to express equal horror and indignation at equivalent or worse acts of cruelty and sadism being inflicted by Israel on Gaza – not five months ago, but right now? Israel's torture of doctors, its sexual assaults of Palestinian women, it's leaving premature babies to die after its forces stormed a hospital. Where is the outrage? This is part of a pattern of behaviour by the western media that leads to only one possible deduction: Israel’s five-month-long attack on Gaza is not being reported. Rather, it is being selectively narrated – and for the most obscene of purposes. Through consistent and glaring failures in their coverage, establishment media – including supposedly liberal outlets, from the BBC and CNN to the Guardian and New York Times – have smoothed the way for Israel to carry out mass slaughter in Gaza, what the World Court has assessed as plausibly a genocide. The role of the media has not been to keep us, their audiences, informed about one of the greatest crimes in living memory. It has been to buy time for US President Joe Biden to keep arming his most useful of client states in the oil-rich Middle East, and to do so without damaging his prospects for re-election in November’s US presidential vote. If Russian President Vladimir Putin was a madman and a barbarous war criminal for invading Ukraine, as every western media outlet agrees, what does that make Israeli officials, when every one of them supports far worse atrocities in Gaza, directed overwhelmingly at civilians? And more to the point, what does that make Biden and the US political class for materially backing Israel to the hilt: sending bombs, vetoing demands for a ceasefire at the United Nations, and freezing desperately needed aid? Worrying about the optics, the president expresses his discomfort, but he carries on helping Israel regardless. While western politicians and commentators worry about some imaginary existential threat those brief events of five months ago pose to the nuclear-armed state of Israel, Israel is quite literally wiping Gaza off the map day by day, quite undisturbed.

[der-blauweisse]

Political and social double standards - racism in the USA, Israel and (Nazi) Germany. A historical comparison.

USA-Germany-Israel: the Mental Bermuda Triangle Three states play a special role in the imperial charade of the “West of values”: the USA, Germany and Israel. For the fiction of a West supposedly based on human rights, democracy and freedom, the triangle of these states creates special narratives of this fiction and at the same time represents the “Bermuda Triangle” in which historical truth…

[milenaolesinska]

🇷🇺 Russian mercenary Igor Mangushev proudly showed the skull of a killed 🇺🇦Ukrainian soldier.He explained the real goal of the Kremlin in this war: the complete destruction of #Ukraine, not tales about denazification and demilitarization.

NEXTA Twitter

[herukapadmajungiansworld]

[dostoyevsky-official]

there is nothing essential about russian culture that puts the country on a warpath against its neighbors; there is nothing inherently cruel, violent, or sadistic to be found in it. there is likewise nothing about azerbaijanis or turks that makes them predisposed to barbarity against armenians, kurds, greeks. we are going to see all this happen again and again and again if we buy into this superficial, reactionary argument

[don-lichterman]

Biden slams Russian 'barbarism' after missiles shatter Kyiv's quiet - World News

Biden slams Russian ‘barbarism’ after missiles shatter Kyiv’s quiet – World News

News Life and Culture Columnists and Opinion Haaretz Hebrew and TheMarker Partnerships Haaretz.com, the online English edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, gives you breaking news, analyses and opinions about Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.© Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights…

[mariacallous]

The great fault of the global left is not that it supports Hamas. For how could Western left-wing movements or left-inclining charities or academic bodies truly support Hamas if they were serious about their politics?

No one outside the most reactionary quarters of Islam shares Hamas’s aim of forcing the peoples of the world to accept “the sovereignty of Islam” or face “carnage, displacement and terror” if they refuse.  You cannot be a progressive and campaign for a state that executes gay men. An American left, which includes in its ranks the Queers for Palestine campaign group, cannot seriously endorse lethal homophobia in its own country.  They will turn a blind eye in Palestine, as we shall see, but not in New York or Chicago.

Finally, no left organisation proudly honours the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the fascist tradition that Hamas embraces with such sinister gusto, although in a sign of a decay that has been building on the left for more than a generation, many will promulgate left-wing conspiracy theories which are as insane as their fascist counterparts.

No, the problem with the global left is that it is not serious about politics. It “fellow travels” with radical Islam rather than supports it. The concept of “fellow travelling,” with its suggestions of tourism, dilettantism, and privilege, is well worth reviving. The phrase comes from the Bolsheviks. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 they looked with appreciation on Westerners who supported them without ever endorsing communism. Artists, writers, and academics who were disgusted with the West, often for good reason, I should add, were quite happy to justify Soviet communism and cover up its crimes without ever becoming communists themselves.

Leon Trotsky put it best when he said of fellow travellers that the question was always “how far would they go”? As long as they did not have live under the control of communists in the 1920s or the control of Islamists in the 2020s, the answer appears to be: a very long way indeed

W.H. Auden said, as he looked back with some contempt on his fellow travelling past, if Britain or the United States or any country he and his friends knew were taken over by a “successful communist revolution with the same phenomena of terror, purges, censorship etc., we would have screamed our heads off”. But as communism happened in backward Russia “a semi-barbarous country which had experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment”, they could ignore its crimes in the interests of seeing the capitalist enemy defeated.

You see the same pattern of lies and indulgence in the case of Hamas. Journalists  have produced a multitude of examples of fellow travelling since 7 October but let one meeting of the Oakland City Council in the Bay area of San Francisco speak for them all.

A council member wanted the council to pass a motion that condemned the killings and hostage-taking by Hamas, who, in case we forget, prompted the war that has devastated Gaza, by massacring Israeli civilians. The motion got nowhere

According to one speaker Hamas did not massacre anyone, a modern variant of Holocaust denial that is becoming endemic. “There have not been beheadings of babies and rapings,” a woman said at the meeting. “Israel murdered their own people on October 7.”  Another woman said that calling Hamas a terrorist organization is “ridiculous, racist and plays into the genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media.” Hamas was the “armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance” , said a third who clearly had no knowledge of the civil war between Hamas and Fatah.

“To condemn Hamas was very anti-Arab racist” cried a fourth. The meeting returned to modern Holocaust denial as a new speaker said the Israeli Defence Forces had murdered their own people and it was “bald propaganda” to suggest otherwise. A man intervened to shout that “to hear them complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wifebeater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back”.  

Anyone who contradicted him was a “white supremacist.”

Of course they were.

Now if theocrats were to establish an Islamist tyranny in the Bay area, I am sure every single speaker would scream their heads off, as Auden predicted. They can turn into fellow travellers as there is no more of a prospect of theocracy threatening them than there was of communism threatening readers of the left-wing press in the UK and US in the 1930s.

A serious left would have plenty to complain about. Consider the Israeli position after the breakdown of the ceasefire. The Israeli state is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a catastrophe of a prime minister, who left his people exposed to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. His war aims are contradictory: you cannot both wipe out Hamas and free the hostages.

Worst of all, the Israeli defence forces are to move to the southern Gaza strip where two million Palestinians are crammed. Just war doctrine holds that a military action must have a reasonable chance of success if the suffering is to be permitted. How, reasonably, can the Israeli army expect to find guerilla fighters hiding in a terrified population?  According to leaks in the Israeli media, Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of state, was warning the Israeli government that, “You can’t operate in southern Gaza in the way you did in the north. There are two million Palestinians there.” But he was ignored.  A radical movement worth having would surely be putting pressure on the Biden administration to force Israel to listen to its concerns.

The radical movement we have will not engage in practical politics because compromise is anathema to it. Any honest account of the war would have to admit that Israel has the right to defend itself against attack. It is just that the military position it finds itself in now may well make its war aims impossible and therefore immoral.

You can see why practical politics has no appeal. Where is the violent satisfaction in sober analysis,  the drama in compromise? Where is the Manichean distinction between the absolute good of the Palestinians and the pure evil of Israel?  

Meanwhile, ever since the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967, you have been able to say that Jewish settler sites on the West Bank were placed there deliberately to make a peace settlement impossible, and ensure that Israel controlled all the territory from “the river to the sea” forever.

A serious left might try to revive a two-state solution by building an international consensus that the settlements must go. Once again, however, that is too tame an aim. For the fellow traveller watching Palestine from a safe distance, satisfaction comes only by embracing Hamas’s call for the destruction of Israel. Some progressives try to dress up the urge to destroy by pretending that Jews and Palestinians will go on to live together in some happy-clappy, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state. But most must know they are advocating a war to the death. What makes their position so disreputable is that, if they thought about it calmly, they would know it would be a war that only Israel could win. It is the Israelis who have the nuclear weapons, after all.

The worst of the global left is dilettantish. It advocates a maximalist position which has a minimal chance of success - just for the thrill of it. David Caute, a historian of fellow travelling with Stalin and communism said that the endorsement of communism by fellow travelling intellectuals in the West “deepened the despair” of Soviet intellectuals. “In their darkest hours they heard themselves condemned by their own kind”.

The 2020s are not the 1930s. I am sure that, if I were a Palestinian in Gaza, my sole concern would be the removal of Israeli forces that threatened me and my family. I would either not care about demonstrations in the West or I would receive some comfort from the knowledge that people all over the world were protesting on my behalf.

Nevertheless, a kind of betrayal is still at work. By inflaming and amplifying the worst elements in Palestine the global left is giving comfort to the worst elements in Israel, which are equally determined to make a compromise impossible.

The New Statesman made that point well when it ran a piece by Celeste Marcus.   She came from the Zionist far right, and was taught doctrines that dehumanised Palestinians. She grew up and grew away from the prejudices of her childhood and became a liberal. But after she moved into her new world, she “recognised immediately that progressive leftists feel about Israelis the way radical Zionists feel about Palestinians: these are not real people.”

The result is that for all its power on the streets and in academia the global left is almost an irrelevance.

“To influence Israel,” she writes, “one must be willing to recognise it. Since leftist leaders cannot bother to do this, they cannot be of real use to Palestinians. This is a betrayal of their own cause.”

The dilettantism of fellow travelling always ends in betrayal and denial for the reason Auden gave: terror is always more tolerable when it happens far, far away.

[anastasiareyreed]

absolutely horrible profiting from death and war.

russian realtors walk around Mariupol (the Ukrainian city destroyed by the russians) showing "affordable" apartments to clients from russia.

update: video added

just think about it. russians invaded the territory of Ukraine. with tanks, heavy artillery, rockets and infantry. invaded the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

completely destroyed it and killed the inhabitants, whose bodies still lie buried under the windows of their houses and in the middle of the streets. some days during periods of heavy russian shelling, up to 150 people a day were buried in mass graves.

the russians killed whole families and then brought other russians to their homes for settlement. in apartments where the devastation caused by the russians and the personal things of the murdered Ukrainians are still visible.

they came to foreign territory, killed the local people and settled in their houses. these are non-humans. terrorists. occupiers.

how can the civilized modern world watch this barbarism and continue to cooperate with russians, listen to russian music, watch russian films, enjoy russian art and tolerate russians in everyday life? russians are a bloodthirsty nation. half of them come and kill, and the other half profit from it, come after and steal the belongings of the killed, steal their homes, their future, their lives.

I don't have enough words. only anger, only pain for my country and my people. please don't stop supporting Ukraine.

[juana-the-iguana]

TW: Rape, murder, child abuse

(aka things posted on Hamas' Telegram and Twitter)

Hamas isn't posting photos of maps. Hamas isn't showing Palestinians intervening and trying to stop women from being raped.

They're not talking about how, in the hypothetical scenario where they allowed Palestinians to evacuate buildings they know will be bombed, there are not spaces for them to go.

They're not talking about why the people in Al Aqsa who were beaten after lighting fireworks inside the mosque and aiming them at praying Jews had the right to be there, or all the ways that Jews standing in the Al Aqsa complex last week are offensive.

They're not talking about why it's okay for them to work with Iran and use Russian weapons that are undoubtedly being tested there so they can be used in Ukraine.

They're not arguing that what they're doing actually isn't antisemitic, it's just decolonizing. They're not talking about why we should tolerate fundamentalist Islam and how it's only temporary.

Hamas is flooding twitter and telegram with videos of rape, kidnapping, torture, murder, dead bodies being paraded, hostages being dragged through the streets, fathers being made to watch their kids get executed and kids being made to watch their fathers get beheaded. They are showing videos of Palestinian kids beating a kidnapped Israeli boy and calling him a "dirty Jew" while he calls for his mother. They want us to see Palestinians gleefully eating sweets, lighting fireworks, spitting on bodies and cheering this overall barbarity. They are telling us that they want to kill all Jews. They are telling us this is about a global jihad, not a Palestinian state.

You, anti-Zionist tumblr poster, are doing more work to justify their actions than they are.