But are Europeans here "the lapdogs" of the Empire? Some enthusiastically promote this view even in this thread, but it hasn't gone so easily with the US and it's allies. France is a good example of this. It has joined several of the wars that the US has fought, but not all. In not going along with the invasion of Iraq — ssu

It's an old French dream -- to which I subscribe -- to build an autonomous Europe, including in terms of foreign policy and military. The idea is called "l'Europe [comme] puissance" (Europe as a power), as opposed to what we have now which is basically a common market with bells and whistles. But other EU members have always preferred NATO as the best security framework for Europe.

Yes. Charitably speaking, people are also tired of a unipolar world, something I can understand, and it's a new thing, not a feature in the 30's. It's not healthy that the US army be as large as what? the next 5 to 10 national armies put together? They are just too dominant. And hypocritical to high degree. That much I can concede.

So when a guy challenges that dominance, even an evidently evil guy, a mass murderer, some simple minds see that as a plus.

Like thinking it's either full out war or Russian despotism. What kind of an idiot would be so simple as to think those were the only two options? — Isaac

A person being bombed by Russian despotism could view things this way, I guess.

In the 1930's the division was more between moderates being for democracy and radicals being for totalitarianism, be it right-wing or left-wing. — ssu

This dichotomy is still with us. After two generations tried to remember the horrors of Nazism, now people are eager to forget and to come back to simple solutions. So you see folks here conceding that Putin might be a bit authoritarian, yes?, like Hitler was deemed "a bit intolerant" back in the 30's. But in the grand scheme of things, they wet their panties for the big guy who sticks it to the Jews err West.

The more the Russians murder innocent bystanders, children, grandmothers and the likes, the more hospitals, maternities and supermarket they bomb , the harder it will be to make any lasting peace.
— Olivier5

Someone who hates and despises isn't an "innocent bystander". — baker

How do you know that the children crushed by bombs in Mariupol or elsewhere 'hate and despise' the bombers?

Hating your own murderer justifies the murder now?

Aren't you full of hatred yourself, to the brim?

Money is not a problem. There's vast amount of it everywhere. Europe is rich. Now that the Brits are gone, the EU has a better chance of making progress. We were slowed down by these free wheelers.

You can notice it some rhetoric from the 1930's. That mr Hitler has done wonders with fighting unemployment. That there was this feeling of a new Germany. So some people were "understanding" Hitler, not totally adhering to the ideology. Surely leaders are reasonable when it comes to realpolitik, surely? — ssu

"Surely, and Mr Hitler is fighting communism. That must count for something."

Often they would have the good sense to qualify their support: "I find him a bit intolerant, though."

Can stories defeat Putin?
Op-ed by Jo Nesbø, Le Monde, April 7, 2022

Vladimir Putin’s narrative that Russia invaded Ukraine to save a repressed people from 'a gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis' has gone down well, in Russia. Is this the real battlefield, the narrative? And what role can fiction play when the truth has fallen?

[...] in an era in which the truth has been devalued by fake news and propaganda, where powerful leaders are elected on a wave of emotion rather than their merits or political viewpoints, facts no longer carry the same weight they once did.

Facts have had to give way to stories that appeal to our emotions, stories about us and what defines us as a group, a nation, a culture, a religion. Perhaps it wasn’t a lack of weapons or military power that lost the wars of occupation in Vietnam and Afghanistan, perhaps it was a lack of stories that could “win people’s hearts and minds”. Or, more accurately: perhaps it was because the opposition had better stories.

"The first casualty of war is truth," said California Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917 - and it's one of the most often mentioned quotes about the current war in Ukraine. A quote used, among other things, to remind journalists how vulnerable fact-based truth is when two sides are fighting to impose their own version of events. But it also reminds us how naive it is to believe that a journalist - no matter how honest and independent - can separate his work from his own culture, nationality and inherited worldview, especially in times of war. [...]

In 1937, when the fascist general Franco bombed Guernica, massacring the civilian population, the whole city stood witness to what had happened. As soon as images of the destruction and the victims began to circulate, Franco and his generals, understanding the stir this would cause in Spain and abroad, insisted that the Republican population of Guernica had destroyed their city themselves.

For a long time, this version of events was believed -- at least by those who wanted to believe it. But the Republicans had a better storyteller on their side: Pablo Picasso countered with one of his most famous paintings, Guernica, which depicts hell falling on the small Basque town. Painted in Paris in 1937, this work is a non-objective representation of events, the product of an artist's imagination and experience, but it helped open the eyes of Europe. It was exhibited in Paris the same year, and then all over the continent, inspiring volunteers to go and fight alongside the Spanish Republicans.

If Guernica is both a work of propaganda and a masterpiece, so is Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin [1925], commissioned by the Soviet authorities to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution. While both works speak of real events, they also take great artistic liberties - the famous scene of the massacre on the monumental staircase in Odessa, for example, never actually took place.

But a fiction writer need not worry about such details. His goal is to tell something true, but not necessarily something factually true. To touch hearts and minds - not to report the number of deaths, who did what to whom, when and where. This freedom is what gives fiction its power, especially when we, the audience, are not aware that we are dealing with propaganda.

Tanner Mirrlees, a professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, is the author of Hearts and Mines: The U.S. Empire's Culture Industry [2016]. In it, he explains how the U.S. Office of War Information created a division during World War II devoted exclusively to Hollywood, the Motion Picture Service. Between 1942 and 1945, the department reviewed 1,652 manuscripts, rewriting or deleting anything that portrayed the United States in an unfavorable light, including anything showing Americans as "indifferent or opposed to the war." [...]

Today, the whole world is sitting in the same theater watching the events unfolding in Ukraine. But what we are seeing are dubbed versions in each of our languages, which means that we are not all hearing the same story. There is a battle going on between the different versions of the story; the best one will triumph. Or, as the Norwegian film critic Mode Steinkjer writes in the daily Dagsavisen, "In war, the aim is not only to destroy this or that civilian or military target; it is just as much to win the hearts and minds of those parts of the world's population that are not directly involved in the conflict."

So the question is, what steps are we willing to take to win those hearts and minds, especially in a situation where a dictator like Vladimir Putin is playing by his own rules, deploying a kind of censorship and propaganda that we thought had been banned.

Is it desirable - or even proper - to play by Mr. Putin's rules? Isn't it contradictory for a democratic country to give up principles like freedom of speech and transparency, even if its goal is to temporarily protect these freedoms? Winston Churchill once said, "In time of war, truth is so precious that it must always be protected by a bulwark of lies." A pessimistic mind might add that in wartime lies are so precious that they must be protected by new lies, but the problem is that there will always be a new war or conflict somewhere to provide an excuse for new lies.

Optimists, including myself, can hope that the truth -- the imperfect, subjective truth of a journalist, artist, or any other story writer trying to express something true -- will win. We can hope that Abraham Lincoln was right when he said that "you can't fool all of the people all of the time" - in any case, the implosion of the Soviet Union or the ousting of Donald Trump from the White House point in that direction. Faced with the thousand and one versions of reality that we are served, we are not forced to give in and accept the idea that all versions are equally true. Some are truer than others.

We follow the day-to-day developments in military events, sanctions and diplomacy. But the war of stories is a long war. It is a war that Vladimir Putin will eventually lose, no matter how many bulwarks he surrounds his lies with. The only question is when.

Franco ruled Spain for almost forty years [from 1936 to 1975], with censorship among his main weapons of defense. But in the end, he was defeated in the history books; the Spanish people demolished his legacy and his ideas. Guernica was first exhibited in Spain in 1981, six years after Franco's death. In the space of just twelve months, the painting was seen by more than one million people, and today it remains one of the greatest attractions of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. Because the truest stories - if not always the most factual - are the best.

You should write for Disney.

You have a vivid imagination, I grant you that.

If anyone can find a similar statement from His Holiness the Pope on the other parts of the world where the same rivers are flowing, please post it here. — FreeEmotion

It's part of his job description. He does so all the time.

It's like this stuff follows a script. — StreetlightX

Of course it does. It's the same old cold war script: invade country, bomb children, rape women and shoot prisoners, then deny deny deny, while the other side tries to make political hay of it.

:kiss:

we were talking pre-invasion. Very naughty of you — StreetlightX

Don't be so judgmental. You asked:

where is the fabled 'agency' of the Ukrainians now? — StreetlightX

Possibly an April Fools joke? — FreeEmotion

It's a satirical piece.

where is the fabled 'agency' of the Ukrainians now? — StreetlightX

At the end of a gun. The war has changed everything.

Thanks, nice.

The conclusion of the article:

Yet Mr. Zelensky’s behavior, odd to the point of erratic, obscures a truth: He has no good options. On the one hand, any concession to Russia, particularly over the conflict in eastern Ukraine, would likely bring hundreds of thousands of people to the streets — threatening him with the fate of Viktor Yanukovych, the president overthrown by a revolution in 2014. Any decisive move against Russia, on the other hand, risks giving the Kremlin a pretext for a deadly invasion.

The show must go on, of course. The crisis continues. But the president’s performance — strained, awkward, often inappropriate — is hardly helping.

Thanks, interesting. Not a major plunge in popularity from what I can tell, but I don't have a NYT subscription.

Poll Shows Zelensky Leading 2024 U.S. Presidential Race
Andy Borowitz, March 17, 2022

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a development that could upend American politics, Volodymyr Zelensky has emerged as the front-runner in the 2024 U.S. Presidential contest.

A new poll conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute shows the Ukrainian President leading both Republicans and Democrats in the race for the White House.

According to the poll, Zelensky is the first choice of fifty-one per cent of Americans, followed by President Biden at twenty-three per cent, Donald J. Trump at seventeen per cent, and Senator Josh Hawley at half of one per cent.

Davis Logsdon, who supervised the survey, said that Zelensky’s showing in a U.S. Presidential poll was the strongest ever for a Ukrainian politician.

“The fact that Zelensky was not born in the U.S. was not seen as an obstacle to his becoming the nation’s President,” Logsdon said. “And, though he does not speak fluent English, that has not historically been an obstacle either.”

How's that going, exactly? — StreetlightX

It's two to tango.

Wiki would no doubt forget that Zelensky's popularity was in the dumps before the war, — StreetlightX

You have data on that?

Always nice to be reminded about being infinitely critical of state power, unlike Western liberals who, having learnt the name 'Zelensky' in the last two months having never heard the name before in their lives, have turned him into a new Bono to fangirl over. — StreetlightX

Zelensky is the modern anarchist champion. Power to the people!


From wiki, emphasis mine:

Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine. Prior to his acting career, he obtained a degree in law from the Kyiv National Economic University. He then pursued comedy and created the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and TV shows including the TV series Servant of the People, in which Zelenskyy played the role of the Ukrainian president. The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party bearing the same name as the television show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.

Zelenskyy announced his candidacy in the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election on the evening of 31 December 2018, alongside the New Year's Eve address of then-president Petro Poroshenko on the TV channel 1+1. A political outsider, he had already become one of the frontrunners in opinion polls for the election. He won the election with 73.23 per cent of the vote in the second round, defeating Poroshenko. He has positioned himself as an anti-establishment and anti-corruption figure.

As president, Zelenskyy has been a proponent of e-government and unity between the Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking parts of the country's population.[6]: 11–13  His communication style heavily uses social media, particularly Instagram.[6]: 7–10  His party won a landslide victory in a snap legislative election held shortly after his inauguration as president. During his administration, Zelenskyy oversaw the lifting of legal immunity for members of the Verkhovna Rada,[7] the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic recession, and some progress in tackling corruption in Ukraine.[8][9]

Zelenskyy promised to end Ukraine's protracted conflict with Russia as part of his presidential campaign, and has attempted to engage in dialogue with Russian president Vladimir Putin.[10] Zelenskyy's administration faced an escalation of tensions with Russia in 2021, culminating in the launch of an ongoing full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Zelenskyy's strategy during the Russian military buildup was to calm the Ukrainian populace and assure the international community that Ukraine was not seeking to retaliate.[11] He initially distanced himself from warnings of an imminent war, while also calling for security guarantees and military support from NATO to "withstand" the threat.[12] After the start of the invasion, Zelenskyy declared martial law across Ukraine and a general mobilisation of the armed forces. His leadership during the crisis has won him widespread international admiration, and he has been described as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.

is he a gambling person, after all? — FreeEmotion

Is he?

Isn't Zelensky the reason this is still going on?

If he would have left the country, Ukraine would be part of Russia now, right? — frank

Good point. That's probably true, and would explain the relentless character assassination attempts by the representative of the Federation of Russia on TPF. They also tried to kill him for real, twice.

That's the whole idea of self-determination: none of my business to figure out anything. I have no "right" about it. — boethius

Self-determination means nothing to you then? You have no criteria for it, no way to ascertain it?

Mr Zelenskyy might be a clown but he is a good one. Servant of the People is really funny. THAT -- and not CNN as suggested by @boethius, the mage who came from the cold -- is what Mr Putin should watch if he wants to understand better the mindset of his opponent. And I doubt he is a crook yet. Not as much as the other guy.

Why can't Crimea decide how it will vote and "self determine" what a vote? If you say it's not valid due to Russian influence, why can't Crimea decide to be influenced by Russia? — boethius

How would you figure out what they want without asking them?

If you have a right to self determination, don't you have a right to carry out votes as you please? — boethius

In theory, that's precisely what it implies and requires: a vote. How do you know what people self-determine without a referendum?

The EU is a project. It's not finished yet.

Okay so you don't exactly know when he was told but it was after or soon before the start of the war.

So my case is strengthened: it was not a priority for him to change the constitution before the war. He had no good reason to do so.

But your personal bias against the democratically elected leader of a nation invaded by a criminal and militaristic autocracy is sadly noted.

He literally said this on live television in a CNN interview ....
— boethius

"I requested them personally to say directly that we are going to accept you into NATO in a year or two or five, just say it directly and clearly, or just say no," Zelensky said. "And the response was very clear, you're not going to be a NATO member, but publicly, the doors will remain open," he said. — CNN

But that quote is dated a week after the start of the war. Before the war, he was never told that.

I said he continued the war that Ukraine started by refusing to accept Crimea and Dombas right to self determination. — boethius

Okay so you lied implying that Zelenskyy had started an atrocious war and threatened the world with nuclear Armageddon. Just like Putin did.

And Zelenskyy is the one asking for a transparent popular vote in Crimea and Dombas (?). Don't assume all the people in these places want to live in a mini-putinistan. Maybe they prefer to live in a democracy, who knows?

Zelenskyy pretending to not have been told NATO would never let Ukraine in, but advocating to join NATO and making social media stunts for the purposes of joining NATO etc. is one of those "the big lie" as a rational to fight the Russians. — boethius

What evidence is there that Zelenskyy was told about that before the war? At what occasion did NATO tell him?

You may have a short memory, but "Ukraine has a right to join NATO" was not only a reason to fight, but also a reason to refuse Russia's peace terms
— boethius

Refresh my memory and present evidence of that, oh noble liar for the Great Bare-chested One.

they can get the Ukrainian perspective anytime of the day or night by turning on CNN. — boethius

CNN is just hogwash and clickbait, most of times. At best they are facile. You can do better than that in understanding the Ukrainian perspective.

So did Zelenskyy. — boethius

That's a lie again. Mr Zelenskyy started no war.

Maybe it's perfectly clear — boethius

To you, certainly it is. But not to me.

Lying about the reasons to fight and die are not "doing the best you can". — boethius

What lie are you talking about, oh confused one?

Had Zelenskyy simply not mentioned joining NATO as a reason to fight, — boethius

That's a lie. Ukraine is fighting to defend herself, not for the right to enter NATO.

Why the "aggressive" attitude towards Putin? — boethius

Mr Putin decided to start a pretty atrocious war and threatened the world with nuclear Armageddon, if you remember.

However, if a peace deal is the only resolution of the war available to Ukrainians, then understanding the opposing perspectives is required to find a peaceful resolution. — boethius

Likewise, if a peace deal is the only resolution of the war available to Russians, then understanding the Ukrainian perspective is required to find a peaceful resolution. Tell that to your masters.

It's obviously relevant that one of the main reasons for fighting and not making peace with Russia, and one major galvanization of Ukrainian and Western public opinion behind Ukraine was the "right to join NATO" which Zelenskyy was already told by NATO would never happen. — boethius

Your post is very unclear. Try and write less but clearer.

Are you now talking of the present situation, or of the pre-war situation? Pre-war, Zelenskyy might legitimely have had other priorities than changing the constitution. Post-war (or during the war) the situation is very different. Now Zelenskyy has been told that NATO membership is not an option, and is under pressure from the Russians to drop the idea altogether. And he is ready to do so so what's your beef?

More generally, why the agressive stance towards Zelenskyy? He's doing well, the best he can. If one has to be a political realist and accept Putin as a player, as you have argued, what's the point of bitching endlessly about the other guy, Zelenskyy? Are you paid for badmouthing him, or what?

What I would be interested in is if anyone could tell me what they think is going to happen next because I consider my theory of a straightforward solution pretty much defunct now. — Baden

I agree that a peace deal appears almost impossible now, in part because of the war crimes committed by the Russian army which the Ukrainians will find very hard to forgive, but also because the Russians will want a revenge from their recent defeat around Kiev. This war is not ending soon.

That's good news for Democrats. — frank

Let's hope so.

All I am saying is that you guys seem to be parroting the US extreme right. That's objective and verifiable, it's not an opinion.

I simply don't think Benkei should be a mod. — Christoffer

Seconded, he has proved himself unworthy of it. @Baden was more civil but equally biased IMO. He is only looking for 'fallacies' on one side of the debate. There ought to be a fancy name for that fallacy...

I said what I had to say. You may ignore it now.

Some of the missing context is indeed that I am tired of making careful arguments only to be ignored or insulted in return, including by petulant mods. There's something rotten in TPF.