Ukraine war – Page 2 – The Burning Platform

To figure out what’s really happening in Ukraine (and not just there), DON’T watch TV, or read the New York Times, or any other Western media outlet (whether corporate OR “alternative”)

For those who may not be inclined to trust “our free press” vis-a-vis the conflict in Ukraine (or any other subject), here are five takes on what’s happened lately over there, from the “Redacted” team, Scott Ritter, The World and We, Russian military journalist Alexander Kots, and Edward Slavsquat. Although they variously differ with each other, altogether they comprise a valuable corrective to the propaganda thundering from “our free press,” whose “coverage” of the conflict has relied on not a single correspondent on the scene, but (it would seem) entirely on the “journalists” in Langley.

This is not a denial of the propaganda coming out of Russia, or from commentators partial to the Russian government. There certainly is propaganda coming out from both sides, in this war as in every other going back (at least) to World War I; so we would all do well to heed George Orwell’s admonition (based on his own experience doing wartime propaganda for the BBC—a stint that fed his deft portrayal of the Ministry of Truth): “All propaganda is a lie, even when it is telling the truth.” Even when its “facts” are accurate, war propaganda, necessarily, is over-simple and one-sided; so we should not mistake it for the truth—i.e., the whole truth, and nothing but—just because we want it to be true.

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Niall Ferguson: Seven Worst-Case Scenarios From The War In Ukraine

Authored by Niall Ferguson, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,

Most conflicts end quickly, but this one looks increasingly like it won’t. The repercussions could range from global stagflation to World War III…

Consider the worst-case scenario.

I have argued here before that the global situation today more closely resembles the 1970s than any other recent period. We are in something like a new cold war. We already had an inflation problem. The war in Ukraine is like the Arab states’ attack on Israel in 1973 or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The economic impact of the war on energy and food prices is creating a risk of stagflation.

But suppose it’s not 1979 but 1939, as the historian Sean McMeekin has argued? Of course, Ukraine’s position is much better than Poland’s in 1939. Western weapons are reaching Ukraine; they did not get to Poland after Nazi Germany’s invasion. Ukraine faces only a threat from Russia; Poland was partitioned between Hitler and Stalin.

On the other hand, if one thinks of World War II as an agglomeration of multiple wars, the parallel starts to look more plausible. The U.S. and its allies must contemplate not one but three geopolitical crises, which could all happen in swift succession, just as the war in Eastern Europe was preceded by Japan’s war against China, and was followed by Hitler’s war on Western Europe in 1940, and Japan’s war on the U.S. and the European empires in Asia in 1941. If China were to launch an invasion of Taiwan next year, and war were to break out between Iran and its increasingly aligned regional foes — the Arab states and Israel — then we might well have to start talking about World War III, rather than just Cold War II.

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