Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Yesterday’s discussion post.
Cope and Dipshittery
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Vienna Must End Its Long Waltz with Putin. You absolutely do not gotta hand it to Orban, but this is a very idealist article compared to the material reality that if Austria and Hungary banned Russian gas and oil, their economies would collapse. Maybe with the benefit of hindsight they would have done something differently - though Orban maybe not, it’s hard to know exactly how much of his sorta pro-Putin behaviour is to avoid his country being fucked over once the conflict ends - but reality is what reality is. src
Critics from Ukraine to NATO have of late been chastising Germany for reacting too slowly and timidly against Russian aggression. Fair enough. Germany, as the largest economy in the European Union, bears disproportionate responsibility in helping to coordinate the Western response against the Kremlin’s atrocities and lies. But the attention given to Berlin obscures the not-so-helpful role played by several smaller European countries.
Most reprehensible among those is, of course, Hungary. Its prime minister, Viktor Orban, is an authoritarian right-wing populist who’s long been buddies with Russian President Vladimir Putin. While Orban has gone along with the EU sanctions passed so far, he’s blocked arms deliveries to Ukraine via Hungary and threatened to veto any European embargo of Russian oil and gas. Orban’s Hungary is the West’s weakest link.
For the title of second-weakest, there’s competition, but a strong contender is Austria. It shares not only a language, culture and history with its larger northern neighbor, Germany, but also a legacy of pro-Russian sentiment and cozy relations with Moscow. If Washington, Brussels and Berlin want to keep the West united against Putin, they’d do well to start by leaning on Vienna to choose a side and make it known.
Austria was part of the Third Reich that brought so much suffering and death to Europe, including Russia and Ukraine. Nonetheless, Austrian politics were not primarily shaped by post-war atonement as Germany’s were. Germans joke that their southern neighbors’ greatest achievement has been to convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler German. Toward Moscow, in particular, Austrians always had fewer complexes.
Nonetheless, Austria and Germany after World War II were initially in similar situations. Both were occupied by the four Allied victors. But whereas the Iron Curtain ran through Germany, it always ran around Austria, because the Soviets didn’t impose socialism in their zone. The country became sovereign again in 1955 on the condition — imposed by Moscow — that it remain neutral in perpetuity. To this day, Austria is not a member of NATO, a status it shares with only five other EU members.
Just after independence, Vienna took over Austria’s energy infrastructure from the Russians. The Soviet Mineral Oil Administration became what is today OMV AG, the country’s oil and gas behemoth. In 1968, Austria became the first country in front of the Iron Curtain to sign a contract to get natural gas from the Soviet Union. It became the hub for Russian hydrocarbons flowing to western Europe.
At the same time, Vienna attracted probably the world’s greatest concentration of spies, and Soviet ones in particular. After the Cold War, it remained just as popular with Russian snoops. It’s still a preferred venue for spy exchanges.
Russian oligarchs also took to Austria — its companies, picturesque mountains and accommodating bureaucracy. As of 2020, Russian investment in the country was second only to German money. Ski resorts such as Lech became Russian haunts.
Retired Austrian politicians went on to soaring careers in Russian companies. Germany’s ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder deservedly hogs notoriety for his board memberships in Russian energy giants. But former Austrian chancellors such as Wolfgang Schuessel and Christian Kern have held similar positions — though unlike Schroeder, they’ve handed in their resignations since Feb. 24.
In brazenness, the closest analog to Schroeder in Austrian politics is Karin Kneissl. While she was foreign minister, in 2018, she invited Putin to her wedding. He showed up with a Cossack choir in tow, gave a pitch-perfect toast in German, and danced with the bride. Kneissl then curtsied before him all the way to the floor. The visuals said it all. To this day, she blogs for Russia Today, an arm of Putin’s propaganda machine, and sits on the board (chaired by Schroeder) of Rosneft, Russia’s oil leviathan.
There had been another excruciating moment, even by Austrian standards, in 2014, just a few months after Putin’s annexation of Crimea. While the rest of Europe was struggling to coordinate sanctions, Putin dropped by in Austria for another visit.
In his welcome address, the then-president of Austria’s main business lobby joked about how many times he’d already greeted the Russian president over the years, because both had been in office so long. “Dictatorship,” quipped Putin, bringing the house down, before adding: “But good dictatorship.” The hilarity grew from there. The speaker also reminded Putin that, a century earlier, part of Ukraine had been Austrian. “What are you offering?,” Putin deadpanned to the howls of Austrian industrialists.
All the while, Austria was making itself utterly dependent on Putin’s energy. Wherever a Siberian hydrocarbon molecule embarked on a trip to Europe, Austrian money, lobbying and cheering weren’t far. For example, Nord Stream 2, a geopolitically disastrous Russian pipeline under the Baltic, has been blamed mostly on German governments, but OMV was also a big investor (though it is writing down its Russian assets). Even today, about 80% of Austria’s gas comes from Russia.
That said, the brutality of Putin’s current war has shaken even Austria out of its long Russophile romance. In that sense, at least, it differs from Hungary. Last month, Chancellor Karl Nehammer became the first Western leader since Feb. 24 to meet Putin in Moscow. His access to the hermit despot was a legacy of their countries’ special relationship. But Nehammer made clear that “this is not a friendly visit.”
And yet, the rest of the West will be forgiven for wondering how much it can rely on Austria as the conflict drags on or escalates. Will Vienna support a boycott of Russian oil and gas? Will it bid adieu to its neutrality — as Sweden and Finland are about to do — to side with the West? Orban may be too far gone for Western appeals to reason. But in Vienna, there’s still a chance.
This is a very long dipshittery and cope section, also climate and stuff
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As Putin Gets Desperate, U.S. Should Remember Pearl Harbor src
The Western powers are tightening the screws on Russian President Vladimir Putin: The next move appears to be a phased-in European ban on purchases of Russian oil.
It’s the right policy, given that oil money is financing Putin’s war in Ukraine and keeping the Russian economy alive. But the risks may be substantial: Revisionist powers have sometimes become most violent when campaigns of economic strangulation against them are about to succeed.
The classic example is Japan before World War II. For a decade, Tokyo had been seeking a vast empire in Asia. It had embarked on a military rampage, seizing Manchuria, invading China and expanding into Southeast Asia.
The U.S. was initially slow to respond. But eventually, Japan’s bid for regional dominance, the brutality of its tactics in China — bombing of cities to incite terror, systematic killing of civilians, the use of biological weapons — made an enemy of Washington.
N-not that we would want anything like that to happen in China today, of course. Also, uh, you dropped nukes on Japan. And firebombs. And like, Agent Orange in Vietnam later.
By 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration was supporting the Chinese government financially. The next spring, American warplanes and volunteer pilots began arriving in China.
Most important, Washington took the fight to Japan economically. Roosevelt first constricted the export of aviation materials, high-octane gas, scrap metal and other goods to Tokyo. After Japanese forces moved into southern Indochina in mid-1941, FDR delivered the hammer blow: A full oil embargo.
Japan was vulnerable to economic coercion. Before World War II, writes historian Waldo Heinrichs, Japan “imported 80 percent of its oil products, 90 percent of its gasoline, 74 percent of its scrap iron and 60 percent of its machine tools” from the U.S.
The oil cutoff was particularly devastating. It threatened to leave Japan’s ships and planes running on fumes and bring the war in China to a humiliating end. Japanese military officials, having promised glorious conquests, now feared that the country was facing strategic ruin at America’s hands. Japan was “like a fish in a pond from which the water was gradually being drained away,” as one War Ministry official later put it.
Rather than concede, Japan’s leaders risked everything, by seizing oil-rich colonies in Southeast Asia, attacking U.S. and Western possessions across much of the Asia-Pacific, and trying to wipe out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
At the time, few Japanese leaders believed that they could defeat America in a long war. Yet sometimes, said military strongman Hideki Tojo, “One must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes, and jump.”
As with any historical analogy, it’s important not to overdraw the contemporary parallels. The oil embargo and other sanctions imposed on Japan were more crippling than the punishments inflicted on Putin today. And one crucial reason Japan opted for war in 1941 was that it had a tempting window of military opportunity because the U.S. had been so slow to rearm after its post-World War I military drawdown.
As Japan’s rapid gains in the months after Pearl Harbor showed, Tokyo possessed — if only fleetingly — a degree of military superiority over Washington that Putin does not enjoy today.
But the Russian leader does have options for making things worse. He could, as Central Intelligence Agency Director Bill Burns warned, use tactical nuclear weapons inside Ukraine. Or he could launch cyberattacks, physical sabotage campaigns, or even conventional military strikes against the countries that are supplying Ukraine with weapons and choking Russia with sanctions.
The rhetoric out of Russia has certainly become more ominous as awareness of the country’s terrible predicament sets in. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the contest in Ukraine as a proxy war in which the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are trying to destroy Russia. The Russian Orthodox church has deemed the conflict a holy war.
The Russian government is increasingly invoking the memory of World War II, a zero-sum contest for national survival. Taking their cues from Putin, who has regularly hinted at the prospect of nuclear escalation, Russian propagandists are talking in apocalyptic tones.
Putin himself does not seem suicidal. But if he worries that he might not survive, politically or physically, a military defeat in Ukraine or the slow death of the Russian economy, his incentive to close his eyes and jump could be strong indeed.
As the war drags on, the U.S. and its friends will ratchet up the coercion of Russia, to increase the price Putin pays and gradually deprive him of the wherewithal to keep fighting. Yet the closer they get to succeeding, the more they will sharpen the choice Putin faces between accepting a humiliating defeat and intensifying his aggression in hopes of salvaging a victory.
Climate
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Renewable electricity powered California just shy of 100% for the first time in history src
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Climate change means 1 in 25 homes in Australia could become uninsurable by 2030, report warns src
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Horn of Africa ravaged by worst drought in four decades src
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Extreme Heat devastates Male Honeybees and threatens Fertilization of Crops src
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Tunisian scientists alert on the degradation of Posidonia, the lungs of the Mediterranean Sea src
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Natural Resources Must Be ‘Part of the Solution’ in Fight Against Deforestation src
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New Forms of Urban Planning Are Emerging in Africa src
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Zanzibar Embarks On Climate Change Mitigation src
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DR Congo approves auction of oil blocks in one of the world’s largest carbon sinks src
Nine of the blocks are located in a region of the Congo Basin known as the Cuvette Centrale, an area about a third of the size of California which is home to the world’s largest tropical peatland complex. At least three of the blocks up for auction directly overlap with the peatlands, according to the Rainforest Foundation UK.
Scientists estimate the peatlands store the equivalent of three years of global CO2 emissions.
Left undisturbed, this tropical peat swamp forest is likely to remain a carbon sink and counteract some global heating. But if the peat is drained or the land converted to other use, it could become a significant source of emissions.
- Forest trees also take up nanoplastics src
We get closer to The Lorax every day!
