@Pluto's Republic

to such an insane degree? Is this Penis Putin envy or what?
Why fight what you can't control? Look at the real enemy here, Nazi Neo-
cons are a much better target if you gotta fight.

#1.2

....March of the Immortals by Dmitry Orlov, a Russian American writer who is staying in Russia to witness this conflict first hand. Orlov had also visited Russia many times during the Russian collapse in the 1990's, and has written several books that projected that the US will be entering the same collapse right about now. But with far fewer resources and security.

Yesterday, May 9, 2022, I participated in a million-person march down Nevsky Avenue in St. Petersburg: the annual march of the Immortal Regiment.

A million people (probably quite a bit more) marched under portraits of their relatives who fought in the Great Patriotic War (a.k.a. World War II). We marched under a portrait of my wife’s grandparents, who served together in the signal corps and got along so well that my mother-in-law was born a couple of months before the fall of Berlin. They lived long and happy lives; but many other participants marched under portraits of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents whose lives were cut short. Some died in battle; many others died of mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis. It was a tragedy of immense proportions and hardly any family in Leningrad/St. Petersburg remained untouched by it, but the immensity of the tragedy is matched by the immensity of the victory, and the raw power of a “Hurrah!” sweeping across several kilometers of the six-lane Nevsky Avenue, packed wall-to-wall, was tremendous.

In that war, Russia vanquished Nazi Germany and (as is often overlooked) also Rumania, Finland, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia and Austria, which sent their troops into Russian territory, as well as numerous mercenaries and volunteers from the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France and Spain, and, of course, Britain and the US which bankrolled the German Nazis and provided them with key technologies and fuel. Thus, the Russian victory was not even specifically against Germany but against the combined West. The cost in human life was absolutely staggering—a human tragedy beyond comprehension—but most Russians will tell you that it was entirely worth it. Furthermore, many Russians will say that they will repeat the lesson if necessary.

Luckily, as often happens in history, the tragedy is being repeated as a farce. In place of Hitler we have German Bundeskanzler Liverwurst who made a name for himself in Russia: he thought out loud that calling tens of thousands of civilian casualties accumulated during eight years of Ukrainian shelling in Donetsk and Lugansk as “something like genocide… is really ridiculous.” The ridiculousness doesn’t stop there: there is the aptly named lady-gynecologist Ursula von der Lyin’ in charge of lyin’ for the entire European Union and the various foreign and defense ministresses who like to go on joyrides atop NATO tanks (a ritualistic humiliation for any politician, but these ones are too stupid to realize that).

And then there is the rest of NATO, which looks impressive only on paper and keeps sending all sorts of useless or obsolete military junk to the Ukraine, where it gets either stolen on the way. or remotely blown up by the Russians. The little bit that does reach the front ends up lying abandoned in heaps by the retreating Ukrainians who are, at this point, mostly raw recruits who hate their commanders with a passion and are often quite eager to surrender — because, you see, Nazi Ukraine is running out of Nazis! The Nazis are part of a neopagan death cult; they are high on special battlefield drugs that the Americans have been providing them, and so tend to fight to the death, but their numbers are being quite successfully whittled down by Russian artillery. The Russians are treating the entire “Special Mission Of Demilitarization and Denazification of Ukraine” (SMODDU) as a live fire training exercise and are generally busy rotating their forces.

@Pluto's Republic
as it describes his experience of the last oligarchic days of the Soviet republic. Now I see many similarities I hadn't personally felt before.
Example: He mentions some older women who owned similar sets of dishes and in order to speak freely would describe what was happening to these as a way of translating to each other current real-life or financial events otherwise dangerous to mention. And his description of the comtempt oligarchs had for people who did any work at all work rings true now as well.

#1.2

....March of the Immortals by Dmitry Orlov, a Russian American writer who is staying in Russia to witness this conflict first hand. Orlov had also visited Russia many times during the Russian collapse in the 1990's, and has written several books that projected that the US will be entering the same collapse right about now. But with far fewer resources and security.

Yesterday, May 9, 2022, I participated in a million-person march down Nevsky Avenue in St. Petersburg: the annual march of the Immortal Regiment.

A million people (probably quite a bit more) marched under portraits of their relatives who fought in the Great Patriotic War (a.k.a. World War II). We marched under a portrait of my wife’s grandparents, who served together in the signal corps and got along so well that my mother-in-law was born a couple of months before the fall of Berlin. They lived long and happy lives; but many other participants marched under portraits of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents whose lives were cut short. Some died in battle; many others died of mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis. It was a tragedy of immense proportions and hardly any family in Leningrad/St. Petersburg remained untouched by it, but the immensity of the tragedy is matched by the immensity of the victory, and the raw power of a “Hurrah!” sweeping across several kilometers of the six-lane Nevsky Avenue, packed wall-to-wall, was tremendous.

In that war, Russia vanquished Nazi Germany and (as is often overlooked) also Rumania, Finland, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia and Austria, which sent their troops into Russian territory, as well as numerous mercenaries and volunteers from the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France and Spain, and, of course, Britain and the US which bankrolled the German Nazis and provided them with key technologies and fuel. Thus, the Russian victory was not even specifically against Germany but against the combined West. The cost in human life was absolutely staggering—a human tragedy beyond comprehension—but most Russians will tell you that it was entirely worth it. Furthermore, many Russians will say that they will repeat the lesson if necessary.

Luckily, as often happens in history, the tragedy is being repeated as a farce. In place of Hitler we have German Bundeskanzler Liverwurst who made a name for himself in Russia: he thought out loud that calling tens of thousands of civilian casualties accumulated during eight years of Ukrainian shelling in Donetsk and Lugansk as “something like genocide… is really ridiculous.” The ridiculousness doesn’t stop there: there is the aptly named lady-gynecologist Ursula von der Lyin’ in charge of lyin’ for the entire European Union and the various foreign and defense ministresses who like to go on joyrides atop NATO tanks (a ritualistic humiliation for any politician, but these ones are too stupid to realize that).

And then there is the rest of NATO, which looks impressive only on paper and keeps sending all sorts of useless or obsolete military junk to the Ukraine, where it gets either stolen on the way. or remotely blown up by the Russians. The little bit that does reach the front ends up lying abandoned in heaps by the retreating Ukrainians who are, at this point, mostly raw recruits who hate their commanders with a passion and are often quite eager to surrender — because, you see, Nazi Ukraine is running out of Nazis! The Nazis are part of a neopagan death cult; they are high on special battlefield drugs that the Americans have been providing them, and so tend to fight to the death, but their numbers are being quite successfully whittled down by Russian artillery. The Russians are treating the entire “Special Mission Of Demilitarization and Denazification of Ukraine” (SMODDU) as a live fire training exercise and are generally busy rotating their forces.