That tweet refers to this op-ed piece - Niall Ferguson: Putin and Biden Misunderstand History in Ukraine War - Bloomberg Ferguson is pro-war. He argues sanction is not going to work and that the US should enter the war. Russia is weak now, it's an easy win kind of thinking. He was also pro-Iraq war but later distance himself from it, saying that the Bush admin did a bad job at it. Not sure why he thinks the US is going to do a 'good job' this time. As for GG, I find him to be one of those "tweet" flash readers and responding without realizing what he's doing. GG is full of strawmans and likes to repeat anything that is anti-US-gov or anti-Press without any critical thinking - the last one I remember is him quickly jumping on board the BioLab conspiracy theory started by QAnon and pushed by China and Russia.
No you and the people who you are quoting are very confused (or misleading intentionally). I posted this a while back before the invasion. Turning Ukraine into a combat zone was never the objective of the US. The objective of the US was to stop Russia from invading. It was Putin who wanted to turn Ukraine into a failed state so that he could easily control it and prevent it from every organizing a gov't or a military capable of defending itself. He wan't make sure its cities were turned to dust. We know this because this is his MO from his prior invasions. The US isn't trying to stalemate Russia, it's trying to get Russia to leave the Ukraine and help Ukraine defend itself against an aggressor. That is why we are supplying defensive military weapons and probably just as importantly, critical intelligence and know how which is often decisive in a conflict. To date, the US has been revealing all of Russia's plans with excellent accuracy to the world. That shows how much we know about their communications and movements, and their planning. I can't imagine that conservatives will be very happy if Ukraine pushes Russia out. Because it will mean that the US foreign policy was spot on and Russia was held in check without sacrificing a single American soldier and certainly without risking a nuclear war.
This is another example of what I’m talking about. Okay so what policy do you support then Glenn Greenwald? The other day you were all worked up because you thought the media was trying to escalate the Biden admin (which he has a point) by asking what is he going to do as a next step vs what is he doing to de-escalate. Now today he’s complaining that the US isn’t doing enough and letting Ukraine take the fall so the US doesn’t have to do anything. What is it? What’s the actual policy you think they should be doing? Also the US military people and all the experts thought the Russians would roll the Ukrainians in days. That sure doesn’t seem like a bleed out strategy to me. What does he think the US is going to do once Putin has bled out his military?? Invade Russia? What a stupid point by another attention w**** with an axe to grind.
Yeaaaaahhhh.... I'm just gonna go ahead and not take any advice from that guy... Which I guess was his point, right?
So you think conservatives want Russia to dominate? Or, do you think the GOP wanted to see American soldiers die just so they could blame it on Biden?
I think the GOP tastemakers want to see Biden fail so they can win - they don't care about much else than winning. I think the average Joe conservative won't give Biden credit no matter what happens and find a way to attack him. I think some conservatives are pro-Russia, and some are pro-Ukraine.
The objective wasn't but that isn't a failure on their part - there was no one who could have stopped, including Trump.
The Biden admin hasn't made it clear what their objectives and goals are other than a strong united NATO and supporting Ukraine. Biden admin objective of a strong united NATO has so far been very successful. Most peace-loving people that don't value war crimes and straight out disregard for the killing of civilian do hope to see Putin fails and Russia's aggression die out - and yes, I think NATO and the WEST are now involved in a long game with Russia until Russia fall back to non-aggression. There is really no need to state that outright - it's pretty much given due to Putin's aggression causing the start of a new 'cold war' with European countries now beefing up their defense spending and positioning themselves to not be dependent on Russia's energy long term (1 year from now).
For those who like a bit of nuance. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...-holding-back-here-s-why/ar-AAVnuAJ?ocid=EMMX We have had dozens of stories about how the Russians are deliberately trying to kill as many children and women as possible in hospitals and orphanages etc.
The Russians are going to demand that "hostile states" pay for Russian oil and gas using Russian rubles. Of course the Europeans are dependent on both. So this is the Russians dictating terms to the "hostile states," and effectively also to the North Atlantic globalist elites. They are probably not going to take this well. Russia To Demand "Hostile States" Pay In Rubles For Gas
I was reading about Putin's religiousness last week and it's not clear if he's just using it as a tool or is he really thinking he's doing the 'work of god' with talks about higher moral standing. You hope he's just using it as a tool. Opinion: A month into war, Putin’s mind-set is complex — and dangerous By David Ignatius 3/22/22 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/22/putin-religious-russia-history-ukraine/?tid=ss_tw As the Ukraine war nears a month of brutal fighting, Vladimir Putin is obsessed with Ukraine, angry at his generals, paranoid about enemies at home and abroad, and wrapping his bloody deeds in spiritual language almost mystical in its vision of Russia’s past and future. Putin’s mind-set was on display at a stadium concert last week, as he invoked a Russian Orthodox warrior-saint who spoke of his own battles as “thunderstorms” that would “glorify Russia.” “This is how it was in his time; this is how it is today and will always be,” Putin said of Fedor Ushakov, an 18th-century admiral reputed never to have lost a battle and canonized as a saint in 2001, shortly after Putin became president. Putin’s short remarks offered a reminder that his personality is more complex — and perhaps more dangerous — than the usual stereotype of him as an ex-KGB officer who wants to revive the Soviet Union. Putin is something different — a Russian Orthodox Christian believer rather than an atheist, with an ideology closer to Benito Mussolini’s fascism than Vladimir Lenin’s communism. Penetrating the riddle of Putin’s psyche is a life-or-death matter these days, as the Ukraine war grinds on and the world worries about the danger that Putin will escalate with chemical or even nuclear weapons. Experts say Putin isn’t irrational in the usual clinical sense. But he has entered a realm where his decisions are driven by a grandiose sense of his place in Russian history. In his own mind, his mission is transcendent. The concert speech is a good place to start decoding Putin’s outlook. It was billed as an anniversary celebration of the March 2014 referendum in Crimea that endorsed its links with Russia after Russian forces seized the territory from Ukraine. Putin used the gathering as a flag-waving pep rally for the brutal invasion of Ukraine he launched on Feb. 24. Putin described the bloody assault as salvation for Ukraine — and spoke of a religious duty “to relieve these people of suffering.” Astonishingly, he quoted the Bible to justify his blitzkrieg: “I recall the words from the Holy Scripture: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Putin’s words sound perverse, even blasphemous, to us in the West. Putin’s army has bombed maternity hospitals, shopping malls and opera houses in Ukraine. But this twisted version is evidently what Putin believes. Putin’s religiosity is a little noted but powerful part of his personality. Putin’s mother, Maria, was a “deeply religious” woman, according to biographer Steven Lee Myers, who survived the siege of Leningrad in World War II after moaning for help amid a pile of corpses. When her son Vladimir was born in 1952, she "secretly baptized the boy,” Myers writes. Putin is said to wear a small aluminum cross that was given to him by his mother, according to a 2012 biography by Chris Hutchins and Alexander Korobko. He didn’t display it while serving in the KGB, but when he went to Israel in 1993, according to their account, Putin claimed he “put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since.” Putin’s passion for the Russian Orthodox church underlies the sense of “oneness” between Russia and Ukraine that he expressed in a rambling essay he wrote in July 2021, which was a precursor of the violent assault to come. Putin noted that the roots of his faith were in Kyiv, where St. Vladimir in 988 converted from paganism to Orthodoxy. The Orthodox faithful were often repressed over subsequent centuries but they persisted in Russia and Ukraine, Putin wrote. “We are one people,” he proclaimed. Though Putin often seems nostalgic for the Soviet Union, his July essay blasted the Soviets for creating what he claimed was a false sense of a separate Ukrainian identity, enshrined in a separate republic carved out of Mother Russia. “The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments,” Putin wrote. “One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed.” In place of communism, Putin proposed what Yale professor Timothy Snyder has described as “Russian fascism.” Its ideological guru was the philosopher Ivan Ilyan, who fled Russia in 1922, after the Bolshevik Revolution, and visited Italy before settling in Germany. Ilyan admired the Italian dictator Mussolini, and praised the Fascists for capturing the popular “Spirit,” or Dukh. Ilyan saw Russia as a perpetual victim of the West that needed a “manly” leader who would become “the living organ of Russia,” according to Snyder. Putin embraced this mystical Russian ideal. “Beginning in 2005, Putin began to rehabilitate Ilyan as a Kremlin court philosopher,” Snyder writes. He brought Ilyan’s remains back to Russia, placed flowers at his grave and cited him in articles, such as a 2012 essay that explained Ilyan’s vision that “Russia as a spiritual organism served not only all of the Orthodox nations … but all the nations of the world.” At the heart of Putin’s worldview is a sense that Russia has been humiliated by a Western conspiracy. In Putin’s view, the “Euro-Atlantic countries” have lost their spiritual anchor, according to biographer Myers. “They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual” and are on “a direct path to degradation and primitivism,” Putin said in a 2013 speech quoted by Myers. Putin’s rage at Western elites and their Russian friends was on vivid display last week, in a March 16 video speech. He ranted at “scum and traitors” who supported “the so-called collective West” rather than Russia. He scorned those who “cannot make do without foie gras, oysters or gender freedom, as they call it.” Russia’s enemies are immoral, Putin argued. “They believe that everything is for sale and everything can be bought, and therefore they think we will break down and back off. But they do not know our history and our people well enough.” Take a good look at the face of the West’s adversary in Ukraine. Putin does not appear to be simply a bully or an opportunist, who can be swayed by economic pressure or vanquished by arms. He believes deeply in the evil that he is doing. He sees the destruction of an independent Ukraine almost as a religious duty. Two obvious warnings emerge from this narrative: Handle the volatile mix that is Putin with care, lest it explode in a far wider war. And do not let him succeed.
Is Putin a ‘Real’ Christian? To Understand This Conflict We Need to Ask Different Questions | Religion Dispatches BY SARAH RICCARDI-SWARTZ AND ROBERT SALER MARCH 15, 2022 Vladimir Putin’s campaign of violence in Ukraine has brought to the fore questions about his longstanding religious connections, prompting scholars and journalists to challenge his well-marketed piety and seemingly deep devotion to Russian Orthodox spirituality—the latter of which is often expressed in its deep ties to the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate. In the study of religion, it’s long been common to question whether the categories of sincere or authentic religious belief are adequate for analyzing the complex motivations and actions of adherents or believers. When practitioners are public figures with global geopolitical aims, the classification of true religious subjectivity is often suspended in favor of assuming a kind of charlatanism, or spiritually spurious intentions built to curry favor with faith communities. Our goal here isn’t to argue about Putin’s personal faith; rather, we want to reflect on how academic assumptions about individual religious practices and beliefs are often analyzed through categories that typically begin and end with western conceptions of what counts as correct or wholehearted spirituality. In other words, we want to question the questioning of Putin’s faith. Whether it’s religious leaders in the US calling elected officials to account for assumed incongruities between their professed religious convictions and their legislative priorities (e.g. “if Donald Trump is Christian, how can he favor locking children in cages?”), or disagreements as to whether Christian nationalist rhetoric is “really about” gender or sexuality or race, the notion that a given political actor’s religious sincerity is both discernible and relevant is hard to shake. Presumably this is tied in with confidence that authentic or pure faith can somehow serve as a check upon nakedly political ambitions, even as scholars also caution us that treating a given religion as a sui generis phenomenon uncontaminated by political conditions is also often a form of mystification rather than clarification. Religious expression, in other words, is deeply contingent on political, cultural and material—i.e. ‘worldly’—conditions. In the case of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, some writers have suggested that Putin’s latest attempt to ravage Ukraine is a holy war, and that the Russian president understands his imperialist role in global politics as almost divinely inspired or mandated. Somewhat paradoxically, however, when Putin’s individual beliefs are positioned in this public framing, he’s often pegged as religiously motivated but not a true believer; he’s seen as evil or a fraud. These incongruities harken back to how Donald Trump was assessed by scholars and the media over the last decade, and typically those writing about both politicians have not fully interrogated the psycho-social dimensions of their religiosity. We have, it seems, become used to believing that those most adamant about the holiness of nationalist causes are, cynically, the least purely religious themselves. Perhaps this is the case with Trump, but if we opt for the bad faith actor frame immediately, as many do with Putin, we lose sight of potential contributing factors that personal faith makes to his political actions. If we don’t take seriously how religion personally relates to or contours Putin’s worldbuilding agenda, then we miss out on the historical and theological backing he uses to bolster his claims of political authority. The case of Vladimir Putin’s relationship to post-Soviet Russian Orthodoxy illustrates both the temptation to gauge his religious actions in these terms of sincerity and authenticity—“is Putin really a believer or is he just using religious rhetoric to shore up the Church’s support of his ambitions?”—and the limits of doing so. Needless to say, no one has access to another’s inner life, and in the case of Putin he’s famously opaque as to his real driving motivations and beliefs. Yet Putin’s supporters suggest that his public actions of piety—including shirtless dives into the blessed frigid waters during Theophany, his pilgrimages to sites such as Mt. Athos, and his purported regular confessions to a spiritual father—are indicative of a personal piety that makes him a proper political and spiritual heir to many of the Russian tsars. Through these acts of performative piety, Putin links himself theologically and politically with the power of Russian Orthodox history and its unique relationship to state, often monarchic, authority. Within sectors of the Russian church and its Western admirers, monarchs are often regarded as saints and as cosmic protectors of Christendom and its proper relationship to political authority. Certainly, Putin’s war in Ukraine, with its indiscriminate bombing of civilian homes, hospitals, and places of worship, leads western media to speculate about how someone who actively markets himself as a Christian could approve such a catastrophic campaign. Apart from the problematic assumption that if one is authentically religious they must be good, we in turn might ask what Putin’s long history of supporting anti-human rights policies in Russia means in terms of sincere religiosity. After all, we tend to acknowledge the deep religious beliefs of American public figures, like former Vice President Mike Pence, who often support many of the same anti-human rights ideas as Putin. ...
conti. Given the clash between Putin’s performative piety and prejudicial policies, it’s natural for those troubled by his actions (including the invasion of Ukraine) to contest narratives of his personal holiness in favor of a more skeptical narrative that renders his religiosity as simply a cynical ploy to dupe a longsuffering church that underwent genuine trauma under Soviet repression. Yet to do so is essentialist. It makes assumptions about personal religiosity that are unknowable, sometimes even to the believer themselves. Furthermore, using a western (passively Protestant) conceptual framework for understanding Orthodox religiosity reenergizes longstanding orientalist assumptions about the political sophistication of Christianity outside of the West. The Western imagination is shaped by suspicion of Elmer Gantry-like appeals to religious sentiment for political gain. This, of course, takes place against the further backdrop of a largely Protestant tendency, however secularized, to measure the intensity or truthfulness of religiosity according to the sincerity of the believer. This skepticism joins a long tradition of political critique regarding religious belief and practice. This line of critique is called into question, however, when we consider that, in the last several decades, and especially since perestroika, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has crafted a particularly enmeshed mix of politics, religion, imperial nostalgia, and lethal military force under the auspices of a revival of “Holy Rus,” and more disturbingly a multinational “Russian World.” The Russian Orthodox Church, in many of its expressions, has been an active participant in Putin’s vision of global domination. Patriarch Kirill isn’t just a willing participant in the transnational expansion of Russian power, culture, and Christianity—he’s a co-conspirator in this worldbuilding project of faith and politics. But the matter goes beyond the hierarchy proper. From priests actively blessing and supporting the development of a nuclear arsenal; to the invocation of the beloved St. Seraphim of Sarov in favor of a military deterrent “shield” around Russia’s territorial interests; to the more recent willingness on the part of the Moscow Patriarchate to cast the invasion of Ukraine in terms of a holy war against the corrupting powers of Godless Western secularism; the Russian Church has been an active participant in the construction of an apocalyptic mythos. Within this project of weaponized faith, the lines between the “religious” and the “political” are nearly impossible to discern, because in fact the categories themselves are so intertwined as to be inseparable. The co-mingling of faith and politics, for better or worse, is part of the history of Orthodox Christianity. Byzantine Symphonia. Nationalism. Monarchy. In some respects, it’s a marriage of incongruences that has been lived out in unions of political conveniences, religious freedom, social oppression, and spiritual marginalization. We can’t understand Putin’s contemporary preoccupation with power without understanding how Russian Orthodoxy and political authority have historically developed in tension with each other—during the pre-revolutionary period, against the backdrop of the Soviet Union, and in the post-Soviet moment. We also can’t understand this current crisis without understanding how Putin’s nationalist worldview has been shaped by Orthodoxy, a faith that has wrestled with nationalism for centuries. Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church are entangled in a theopolitical relationship of reliance and reconfiguration. To assume that either is insincere in their religious goals is to misunderstand the imperial worldbuilding project of Russian Orthodoxy more generally. While Western commentators on the ROC should resist the temptation to exoticize it by overstating the distinctions between it and more familiar modes of Christian nationalism in the United States and Europe, the truth is that any sharp distinctions between authentic or pure faith on the one hand and cynical political manipulation on the other (or, as a corollary, between sincere religious conviction as opposed to pragmatic appropriation for political ends) betray a kind of characteristically Western Protestant prioritization of belief over action, of conviction over ritual, of pure Church over political entanglement. In the case of Russia and its ecclesial/political hierarchies, those dichotomies obscure more than they illuminate. What’s interesting about the Russian Church and its active complicity with Putin’s agenda in Ukraine is that, in a manner perhaps akin to emerging and strengthening forms of white Christian nationalism in the United States and Europe, in order to understand what’s happening we need to get past any implied purity of religious expression, or the categories we use to describe it, in order to understand just how deeply entangled religious belief, politics, and empire are in global geopolitics. We cannot know, finally, whether Putin is a real or sincere Christian believer, partly because categories for analyzing belief founder in the face of the complex post-Soviet Russian Orthodox experience. And while we may not be used to questions of what it means to “believe” ceasing to be academic and becoming matters of life and death, those days may be upon us.
