I’m glad someone’s finally addressing this because i’ve been noticing this trend in entertainment for years now and it’s been really pissing me off.

I wouldn’t bet on it. Westerners will understand nothing until they experience total societal collapse.

for as bad as we might say Blumenthal is, PSL isn’t really proving themselves any better than him

Another way of putting is is that neither is bad, they just aren’t perfect and do or say things that they should be criticized for. I don’t like this tendency that leftists have to immediately want to cut all ties to a person or organization as soon as they perceive a problem. We need to stop doing this moral puritanism thing when it comes to people who, at least in the struggles over the primary contradictions, are on our side. The Grayzone has issues but they are a valuable anti-imperialist outlet. PSL has issues but they are a valuable socialist organization trying to do good work inside the imperial core.

My coworkers are fighting to be able to wear hijabs

Which shows that this was never about freedom for women to dress however they want. I don’t know how it is in the US but all over Europe Muslim women have to constantly fight against societal and sometimes legal discrimination against wearing the hijab. Even when the state doesn’t get involved like it does in France, you still have to deal with other people around you looking at you with either fear or disgust and treating you differently because of how you choose to dress, not to mention the fact that sometimes there are outright physical attacks. Westerners don’t want women to dress the way women want, they want women to dress the way western men want them to.

Blumenthal’s anti-vax views are cringe, but i don’t see the problem with this tweet (assuming that it’s true, which feel free to correct me if it’s not) What is worse, having some idiot grifter at your anti-imperialist event, or marching alongside weapons manufacturers who are fueling imperialist wars and a genocide? I’m not saying PSL shouldn’t take part in a march for a good cause just because these evil organizations are trying to co-opt it, but it does seem hypocritical to attack others with guilt by association while doing worse yourself.

Communism is not necessarily totally incompatible with religion on a superficial level (though the different philosophical frameworks, materialism vs idealism, obviously will clash at some point), and in particular there are social elements in many religions, including in Christianity and Islam, that communists would approve of.

That being said the Catholic church is a deeply reactionary institution. They cooperated with the Nazis and were instrumental in destroying socialism in some eastern European countries, most notably Poland. The same goes for the Orthodox church to a lesser extent.

While personal religious beliefs can be progressive, institutionalized religion is almost always inherently reactionary. Exceptions such as liberation theology in Latin America exist but are rare (another positive example is the tradition of resistance struggle within Shia Islam).

Judging by those names i’d say Asia Times is more a brand of crackers than a news outlet.

Because these videos are directed to the audience of a channel with an already established following base

I think so too. I mean i do my best to actively follow the developments in Ukraine and even for me these sorts of channels are just too obsessive about every little minutiae of the battlefield. These videos really don’t have much mass appeal beyond a very specific audience that is hyper-focused on following the most up to date updates of every FPV drone strike and every single building and tree line taken. To me this frankly isn’t very interesting… i have a limited amount of free time and there are many other global events to keep up with, but i do think it’s important that there are people who document everything and keep track of the maps so that the big picture analysts have solid data to draw from. Anyway, all that is to say that his audience probably understood the joke.

They’re not pro-Russia, they’re just realistic.

This is definitely true. I mean they wouldn’t be making videos literally every day covering the most minute and for the most part not very relevant developments in obsessive detail if they didn’t think they could monetize this. But as far as this particular video title is concerned I think it was more of a joke as i explain in my other comment.

Okay so i have to clarify here, this is a joke title. As far as military summary channels go this one is not that bad, it has actually been fairly neutral (not that that’s necessarily a good thing, but they’re Singaporean so they have a complicated relationship to the anti-US camp) in covering the conflict, and some minor clickbait-y sensationalism aside they admit in most of what they post the obvious, which is that Russia is clearly winning and advancing, and that this is a trend that is going to continue.

The guy tweeted about exactly this video title telling the pro-Russia viewers to basically chill, this video just covers specifically the one day in a very long time when Russia didn’t make any advances (according to him) while Ukraine made some very minor regains (this is completely normal and it’s why i always tell people don’t obsess about the most minute day to day shifts of the front line); these are likely to be reversed in a few days anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of channels out there that unironically post videos with titles like this, and yes the pro-Ukraine social media crowd really does live in an alternate reality (with very few exceptions), but this channel isn’t one of those.

Ukraine isn’t a sovereign country.

Historically, has a military campaign that is almost exclusively bombing ever succeeded?

No. Wars cannot be and have never been won by air power alone. It is a fundamental basic military fact that air power by itself can’t take and hold ground, which is what is ultimately required to win a war. As we are also seeing in Ukraine today, all of the fancy tech that today’s militaries have is still secondary in importance to the basic infantryman who is the backbone of any war. Second is artillery by the way. Air power, missiles, drones, etc. are tertiary at best.

And if they really think that they will succeed with this approach where everyone else in history who has tried this failed (if sheer scale of bombing won wars then the US would have won Korea and Vietnam, but they lost the latter and fought to a stalemate in the former, and only because they actually deployed very large amount of ground forces for the Korean war) shows an utter illiteracy in military understanding. It shows that they have fully bought into their own bullshit, drank their own koolaid about American air supremacy having been what won the Iraq war rather than what it really was that did it which was massive amounts of CIA bribes.

If they want to win any kind of war they will have to deploy boots on the ground and we’ve seen very clearly not just over this past year but ever since a much weaker Hezbollah first kicked them out of Lebanon that nowadays the Zionist genocide forces are godawful when it comes to ground combat. Once upon a time in the 60s and 70s that may have been different as they still had a lot of Soviet WW2 veterans but all they’ve done for decades now is bully and murder an occupied population armed with sticks and stones and homemade weapons.

The Baltics don’t need food, they are so civilized and advanced they have learned to subsist solely off of NATO bases, pro-fascist historical revisionism, and hatred of Russia.

They didn’t need any referendum when they fast tracked Finland and Sweden into NATO and they won’t need them in this case either if they can manage to keep their puppets in power and their grip on the country’s institutions through their network of NGOs.

the US is no Porte and there’s no equivalent to Tzarist Russia or Austria now to use to our leverage

I wouldn’t even make that comparison. Romania was never integrated with the Ottoman empire anywhere near to the extent that it is today in the Western imperialist system. Now the political, media and educational institutions are all so thoroughly captured in a way that the Ottomans never in their wildest dreams could have imagined doing. The reason why even the very idea of such “leverage” is nonsense is because to the empire, to Washington and Brussels, the notion of neutrality is anathema. They cannot and will not abide it, they are the blob, they will either absorb or destroy you.

We saw what they did to Ukraine when Yanukovich tried to play both sides and remain in the middle. Even a country as powerful as Turkey can only occasionally manage to demonstrate some semblance of opportunistic autonomy and that’s only because they got lucky and even though they offered themselves up on a platter, the Europeans were still too racist to let them into the EU which would have meant complete subjugation.

God its depressing to think the fucking phanariots had more agency then our current ruling class does

Depressing but it is an important realization to come to. It is the starting point for a realistic understanding of the current situation that Romania finds itself in, and only once we understand how things are can we begin to formulate a plan to change them. When you understand what needs to be done is where the revolutionary optimism begins, so don’t lose hope!

In an ideal world we’d have something like the Union State

In a different world things might be different, yes. I understand your sentiments, i even partly share them to some extent, but we can’t just ignore the reality of present geopolitical conditions and act like this is something that would be happening in a vacuum. We can’t just say “if reality was not what it is, then this and that would be the ideal course of action” - that is idealism and it gets us nowhere - at least nowhere good.

I just wanted to hope that we didn’t sell our souls to Brussels for nothing

Unfortunately i think that we have done just that, and we have not yet seen the worst of the consequences of that disastrous deal with the devil, or if you’ll pardon me bringing out a proverb from my grandma: “nu se fură tămâie de la dracu”, you’re never going to come out on top selling your soul even if you think you’re being clever. This unification may very well happen and you may get your wish but i hope for both Moldova and Romania’s sake that it doesn’t, that the Moldovans will rise up to resist it, because otherwise it will only further entrench the power of Brussels and Washington over our two peoples while putting Romania on the front line of WWIII.

Let me just say first off that i agree with you about the microstates issue, and i do think that you are right about it being beneficial for countries to unite together to better resist imperialism and colonialism. That being said, the idea of present day Romania absorbing Moldova is deeply horrifying to me, it would be a catastrophe for the people of Moldova as they would immediately become NATO’s new front line in the war against Russia. So long as Romania is a loyal vassal of Brussels and Washington and so long as its ruling class is top to bottom Atlanticist, russophobic compradors who do nothing but worship American and German boots any sort of unification is unacceptable and should be prevented at all costs.

If any kind of reunification is to take place there it should be with Russia so that Moldova can join the Eurasian sphere which is where the future is and where the most economic development will be happening going forward. That way Russia can help them like they are helping the liberated Donbass now to start to recover from the economic devastation of the last 30+ years since the destruction of socialism. Because its only future with the “West” and “Europe” is as yet another neocolony to be exploited and drained of everything of value by the big western European powers while being turned into a militarized NATO outpost like so many other eastern European states that were absorbed into the neoliberal EU abomination.

Romania and Poland are well on their way to becoming second and third Ukraines after the West has used up all the Ukrainians, why on earth would any sane Moldovan want to enter into this suicide pact? I think the whole discussion about whether or not Romanians and Moldovans are “one people” is irrelevant. That may even be the case, i grew up hearing that my whole childhood so the thought is hard to shake, but i really have no interest in having a whole ethno-linguistic debate about national identity, because regardless it does NOT justify unification under a Western puppet state that is currently locked without any foreseeable hope of escape in the neoliberal, totalitarian prison of the EU and being increasingly occupied and militarized by NATO.

Why would you want to doom the poor Moldovans to that fate? At least now they still have a hope of kicking out their US installed comprador government, even if they’d need a little help from Russia to do it. If they are our brothers then let’s be happy for them that they have not yet been swallowed up by the Leviathan like we have.

P.S. I think the point where you are most wrong is the idea that Romania could just decide to turn away from the West once it has gotten what it wants from them. That’s not how neocolonialism and imperial vassalage works. Point me to one instance where that has worked, where a country could just freely decide to exit US vassalage after its entire institutions and elite were captured and remade in the West’s image. You think you’re being clever bending the knee to the empire because you can opportunistically benefit from it but in the end it is always the empire that wins and you lose, and once they have you they won’t ever willingly let go. For Romania to escape the EU and NATO at this point would take an all out war of decolonization.

Thank you so much for writing this. As a Romanian myself i was appalled to read that take by a fellow comrade here, but unfortunately not in the least surprised. The indoctrination in Romania into “Greater Romania” irredentism and nationalist mythology is incredibly pervasive and nearly impossible to escape. It’s the one thing that has a larger consensus in Romanian society than anti-Roma racism. It took me a long time to grow out of these myths that are drilled into us from the time we are young children, and i was only able to take a step back and look at the whole thing objectively because i haven’t lived there for what is by now a majority of my life. I can only imagine how hard it is not to fall in line with this thinking if you live there and are surrounded by a society which almost to the last person buys into this and where all sides of the media spectrum are constantly pushing the idea of (“re-”)unification regardless of the sentiments of the people in Moldova itself. So please don’t judge the OP of that comment too harshly, i have hope that they will take this as an opportunity to learn and reflect.

“And remember to be especially non-violent against the poor innocent machines making the genocide bombs and death planes. As tolerant leftists (not evil tankies) we have to respect the MIC’s private property, otherwise that would be bad optics.”