Ukraine: Carpenter

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/nato-expansion-war-russia-ukraine

The Clinton administration proposed inviting Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to become members, and the US Senate approved adding those countries to the North Atlantic Treaty in 1998. It would be the first of several waves of membership expansion.

Even that first stage provoked Russian opposition and anger. In her memoir, Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, concedes that “[Russian president Boris] Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.”

Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, similarly described the Russian attitude. “Many Russians see Nato as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country. They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the west should not do the same.” It was an excellent question, and neither the Clinton administration nor its successors provided even a remotely convincing answer.

George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the cold war, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of Nato’s first round of expansion would set in motion. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”

He was right, but US and Nato leaders proceeded with new rounds of expansion, including the provocative step of adding the three Baltic republics. Those countries not only had been part of the Soviet Union, but they had also been part of Russia’s empire during the Czarist era. That wave of expansion now had Nato perched on the border of the Russian Federation.

Moscow’s patience with Nato’s ever more intrusive behavior was wearing thin. The last reasonably friendly warning from Russia that the alliance needed to back off came in March 2007, when Putin addressed the annual Munich security conference. “Nato has put its frontline forces on our borders,” Putin complained. Nato expansion “represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”

activist-teachers

 https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/how-activist-teachers-recruit-kids?s=r

Last month, the California Teachers Association (CTA) held a conference advising teachers on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. 

Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.

what makes for a successful LGBTQ middle school club? What to do about meddlesome parents who don’t want their middle schoolers participating in such a club? What if parents ask a club leader—point blank—if their child is a member?

The advice to those who run middle school LGBTQ clubs is: keep no records, so you can plead ignorance of the membership with the members’ parents. In fact, middle school teacher Kelly Baraki can be heard in the same session describing having named her club “the Equity Club,” and then, “You be You,” rather than the more ubiquitous “GSA.”  

Middle school kids, apparently, did not have endless interest in sitting around with their teachers during lunch discussing their sexual orientations and gender identities. “So we started to brainstorm at the end of the 2020 school year, what are we going to do? We got to see some kids in-person at the end of last year, not many but a few. So we started to try and identify kids. When we were doing our virtual learning – we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing school work. One of them was googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ 

And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus. Whenever they follow the Google Doodle links or whatever, right, we make note of those kids and the things that they bring up with each other in chats or email or whatever,” Baraki can be heard to say. Beyond electronic surveillance of kids’ internet use, “we use our observations of kids in the classroom—conversations that we hear—to personally invite students. Because that’s really the way we kinda get the bodies in the door. Right? They need sort of a little bit of an invitation,” Baraki says in the clip.

Bernie Sanders on Ukraine

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/08/we-must-do-everything-possible-avoid-enormously-destructive-war-ukraine

Tabletmag on Ukraine and buffer states

 https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraines-deadly-gamble

By tying itself to an American administration that had shown itself to be reckless and dangerous, the Ukrainians made a geopolitical blunder that statesmen will study for years to come: A buffer state had staked its future on a distant power that had simply seen it as an instrument to annoy its powerful neighbor with no attachment to any larger strategic concept that it was willing to support. 

Russia then lopped off half of the Donbas region on its border and subjected Ukraine to a grinding, eight-year-long war, intended in large part to underline Russian capacity and Ukrainian and American impotence.

Also:

https://popularresistance.org/ukraine-intensifies-shelling-of-donbass-as-western-media-are-silent/

How to make an entire army attack you.

 https://twitter.com/SpencerGuard/status/1497583307504046087

Russia-Ukraine Crisis article by John J. Mearsheimer

telegraph version

https://telegra.ph/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is-the-Wests-Fault-02-28

pdf version with roundtable afterwards

https://www.natur.cuni.cz/geografie/socialni-geografie-a-regionalni-rozvoj/studium/doktorske-studium/kolokvium/kolokvium-2013-2014-materialy/ukrajina-a-rusko-mearsheimer-souleimanov.pdf

MEARSHEIMER: Well, the key point here is to remember that it's really what the Russians think. It's not so much what we did or what we think. I mean, again, to go back to Mike McFaul, Mike McFaul's point is that the Russians should have understood that NATO expansion was not directed at them. And my response to that is that what Mike McFaul thinks is largely irrelevant. It's what the Russians think.

The Russians thought that NATO expansion into Ukraine and into Georgia was going to happen, maybe not right away, but over the long term, and they were deeply concerned about that.

Now, there's no question that in 2008, at April 2008, as I said, the Germans and the French were a brake on NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit. That's clearly the case. But the Americans were pushing very hard, and that's why, in the final communique from the Bucharest conference, it was said that NATO and -- that Georgia and Ukraine will eventually become part of NATO. That's what the final declaration said.

And the Russians reacted immediately to that. That declaration was never taken off the table. Nobody ever said that NATO expansion was not going to happen. So the Russians had good reason to believe that it would eventually happen. And, by the way, Ukraine has just said -- this happened on August 29th -- that it was going to move to change its non-aligned status and request membership in NATO. And then the NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said that if Ukraine did that and it met the requirements for NATO admission, then Ukraine could become part of NATO. This was just last month.

This is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. So the idea that NATO -- that Ukraine and Georgia becoming part of NATO is not a serious issue is not the way the Russians see it. And if I were a Russian, I would see it the same way. The mere fact that the United States of America remains committed to NATO expansion would scare me greatly.

Eric Coomer, Dominion officer

Eric Coomer, director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems, 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/magazine/eric-coomer-dominion-election.html

Oltmann said that in his research he found that Coomer had written “vile” anti-Trump Facebook posts. Oltmann proceeded to read from one of those posts, from July 2016, which characterized Donald Trump as “autocratic,” “narcissistic” and a “fascist,” among other, more vulgar insults. “I don’t give a damn if you’re friend, family or random acquaintance,” Oltmann read. Anyone who decided to “pull the lever, mark an oval, touch the screen for that carnival barker ... UNFRIEND ME NOW.” Oltmann displayed a screenshot of the post, which said that the author’s opinions “are not necessarily the thoughts of my employer, though if not, I should probably find another job. Who wants to work for complete morons?”

As Coomer watched the video, though, he felt a second strong emotion: a powerful sense of regret — because the Facebook posts were, in fact, authentic. Why, he thought, hadn’t he just deleted them? Coomer could imagine how his words would sound to just about any Republican, let alone someone already hearing on Fox News that Dominion was switching votes for Biden. He told me that he believed every word of what he said on Facebook, but when colleagues later asked him what he was thinking, he was frank: He had screwed up. At a time when well-​funded efforts to sow mistrust in the election were already underway, Coomer had given conspiracy theorists a valuable resource, a grain of sand they could transform into something that had the feel — the false promise — of proof.

On Friday, Nov. 13, the right-wing news outlet the Gateway Pundit, picking up on Oltmann’s podcast, ran a story that mentioned Coomer by name in the headline, included links to videos in which Coomer was talking about election security, and ran a full reprint of the open letter about antifa that he had reposted on Facebook. 

While most of that letter was uncontroversial — “Antifa supports and defends the right of all people to live free from oppressive abuse of power” — one line concluded that while nonviolent protest was preferable, “we cannot and will not take responsibility for telling people how they are allowed to be righteously outraged.”