Ukraine

Where Do I Stand?

We see it all over the internet, on people’s profiles and posts: “I stand with Israel!” “I stand with Ukraine!” Pick your champion; someone’s standing with them. Safely outside the line of fire, mind you, but still.

Don’t mistake me: It takes courage to make a moral stand, even online. You lose friends, families get torn apart. People like me, who use their internet accounts to promote their writing/art/business, get blocked and lose customers. As a result, it’s usually also a stupid thing to do, especially since your brave stand with Ukraine doesn’t kill a single Russian soldier.

The difference between courage and stupidity is often so fine a line as to be nonexistent.

And yet…

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Why Are You…?

People keep asking me (online, for the most part) why I’m on this side or that. I tell them I’m not, and do my best to explain, and they remain confused. It goes like this:

“Why are you defending Israel? They’re committing genocide!”
“I’m not talking about genocide. I’m talking about [insert abstract topic].”
“That doesn’t matter! Israel is evil!”

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War Crimes and Cluster Bombs

War crimes? All war is a crime.

The concept of “war crimes” was an effort to pretend that war isn’t intrinsically a crime, and thus make it palatable for civilians and politicians. There are no just wars; there are no proper wars; there are no good wars. War is evil. That it is sometimes a necessary evil doesn’t make it any less evil. In 1944, we needed to invade Europe in order to defeat Nazi Germany; this means we had to do a bad thing to stop a worse thing.

Let’s all take that as read, shall we? While I can imagine objections to it, I can’t imagine any logical or well-reasoned ones. (If you disagree, that’s why we have a Comments section. Take your time and get it right, because if you don’t I’m going to mercilessly rip you apart. -Editor)

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War As A Spectator Sport

“Look at a map! Russia definitely invaded!”
“But Ukraine has Nazis!”
– from a Twitter conversation

The first lesson a sane human might draw from witnessing the above exchange might be: Don’t go on Twitter. That’s a perfectly reasonable solution, and further observation will confirm that, yes, Twitter is full of terrible people taking out their bad days on one another. So far so good.

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Russian Mobilization: What The Analysts Are Missing

“Vladimir Putin can call up all the troops he wants, but Russia has no way of getting those new troops the training and weapons they need to fight in Ukraine any time soon.”

So says Brad Lendon, CNN’s chief military affairs analyst. He’s not alone in his opinion. Other well-known commentators and military logistics experts have said much the same, pointing to the massive equipment losses suffered by Russian forces and chronic shortages of ammunition and supplies.

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Food Crisis: It’s Not About Ukraine

Northern Africa is heading into a season of shortage, one that may lead to widespread starvation. There is no famine; climate change is not responsible. Instead, we’re told it’s due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent shortages.

But it turns out, that’s not entirely true. It’s partly true, but this is not -just- about Ukraine. Read for a bit; we’ll see why that matters.

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The War Is Over. We Lost.

“You might as well appeal against a thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war. War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
― William Tecumseh Sherman

EDITORIAL

Doing this is hard sometimes.

When I started The Not Fake News, I set some ground rules. One of them is to always tell the truth as I see it, however painful that might be and without regard to the number of readers it will cost us. From time to time, that truth is harder to write about than not. This is one of those times.

Because the truth is that Russia, under Vladimir Putin, has won his war. And we lost.

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Fake News, Pearl-Clutching, and Ukraine

Some of the most inane fake news I’ve ever seen has been coming from pro-Russian media.

Bear in mind, both sides of the war are quite capable of propagandizing; in fact, Zelensky’s shown himself to have a natural talent. The more official Russian outlets have, by all reports, been quite competent at keeping their own nation focused on Putin’s talking points, and the formal separation of East from West information feeds, be they television or internet, have made this much easier. If it’s moderately difficult for citizens of the western world to get the official Russian party line, it’s harder by far for most Russians to access, for example, CNN.

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Nazis In Ukraine? Rodnovery And The Truth

The Nazis of the Second World War are reviled, and rightly, for their crimes; the Holocaust comes to mind. One might sympathize with an underdog country, afflicted with crippling poverty, seeking to recover their lost national pride — but never a government philosophy that burns books, stifles thought and expression, and slaughters their own citizens wholesale. Italian fascist militarism was barbaric; German Naziism was inhuman.

If there are Nazis in Ukraine, it’s worth our time to examine and our attention if it’s true.

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Mariupol Theater: An Unpleasant Truth

EDITORIAL

Of the hundreds of women and children that had taken shelter in Mariupol’s 150-year-old theater, we’re told now that many survived. The shelter in the basement withstood the bombing, and rescue workers are presently engaged in getting people out.

This is the good news.

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