Scott Ritter on Tank Realities

Ritter provides detailed information on the reality of tank warfare in Ukraine, as well as the maintenance nightmare as described by American veterans.

He also gives a history of the Banderite fascist Nazi armed groups supported by the U.S., starting with the CIA after WWII.

The most memorable part of this vital piece by Ritter is a quotation of remarks by Petr Bystron in the German Parliament.

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/24/scott-ritter-the-nightmare-of-nato...

SCOTT RITTER: The Nightmare of NATO Equipment Being Sent to Ukraine

January 24, 2023

... German History & Optics

The Ramstein meeting was hampered by concern within the German Parliament over the optics associated with Germany providing tanks which would be used to fight Russians in Ukraine.

This angst was perhaps best captured by Petr Bystron of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party. “German tanks [fighting] against Russia in Ukraine,” Bystron challenged his colleagues, “remember, your grandfathers tried to do the same trick, together with [Ukrainian nationalists] Melnik, Bandera and their supporters.

“The result was immense suffering, millions of casualties on both sides and, eventually, Russian tanks came here, to Berlin. Two of those tanks remain on permanent display nearby, and you must keep this in mind when you pass them by every morning,” Bystron said, referring to the two Soviet T-34 tanks at the Tiergarten memorial to fallen Soviet soldiers...

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@theLemniscat

A reminder

How long did the following countries last before they surrendered to Nazi Germany in WW2?

Netherlands: 5 days
France: 6 weeks
Belgium: 18 days
Denmark: 6 hours

The USSR fought the Nazis for 1418 days and were victorious

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@humphrey

Looks like Poland will do OK though.
Insensible. There is little forethought here.
This may actually be the deal breaker.
EU in shatters. No more NATO. And still
the US can't win. Heh

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Cassiodorus's picture

@QMS -- the US is not trying to win. Rather, this is another for-profit war. One wonders when the nice politicians will become fed up with the idea that they have to buy tanks rather than just agreeing to some sort of preliminary peace and taking a good look at the benefits and drawbacks of more war. Gee, wouldn't that be reasonable?

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"I'm starting to believe that they want Donald Trump to get elected." -- Compton Jay

@humphrey Denmark contributed about 5,500 soldiers who fought in the Soviet Union. Russia remembering WWII and the March of the Immortals have been mocked by the West.

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something else. Not quite sure of its significance.

@MrWebster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in_the_early_2...

Finland
In Finland, the hakaristi (swastika) was used as the official national marking of the Finnish Defence Forces between 1918 and 1945 and also of the Finnish Air Force, anti-aircraft troops as a part of the air force and tank troops at that time. The swastika was also used by the Lotta Svärd organisation, a Finnish paramilitary organisation for women, which was dissolved in 1944 according to the terms of the Moscow Armistice.

The Finnish Airforce units still wear a swastika on their colours.[12][13] In addition, the shoulder insignia of the Airforce Headquarters bears a swastika design.[14] In 1945, the Air Force changed its national emblem to a roundel, but the use of swastika in some other insignia was continued. In 1958, the President of Finland Urho Kekkonen inaugurated the colours of the Air Force units which feature a swastika design. The latest colour of this pattern was inaugurated by president Tarja Halonen 25 October 2005 for the newly formed Air Force Academy

Present-day brigade mark of the Finnish Air Force Academy

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janis b's picture

@humphrey

haven't woken up yet in Finland.

Allegiances can be a strange and powerful thing, even if not necessarily of mutual benefit.

I was quite surprised by Germany's decision to send tanks to Ukraine. I wish Germany had honoured the Mana it achieved for trying to right wrongs. I hope it hasn't all gone down the drain.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

@MrWebster

....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.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

@Pluto's Republic Some people said we are in Cold War 2.0. Given the countries the Soviet Union defeated, it almost seems like the NATO coalition and we are now in 1945 world war 2.0.

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@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.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

@QMS

...is a continuation of the Crusades. It's a religious obsession on the part of the Western Christofacists. According to Dmitry Orlov:

The Southern Crusades are far better known in the West, while the Northern Crusades, launched in 1147, are far less widely known. But they were kept going the longest — until February 22, 2022 — because, unlike China, India and just about every other non-Western country, Russia has never surrendered to anyone.

The gauntlet was thrown down in 1252. Rather than ask for a blessing from the Pope in Rome, as was required of all Western kings — Alexander Nevsky accepted an official document, called yarlyk, from Khan Batyj of the Golden Horde (part of the Mongolian Empire), allowing him to reign as the Grand Prince of Kiev (and thus the ruler of all of Russia).

For the Western potentates, their claim to be ordained by God was based on approval by His head office at the Vatican. To the Russians, the Pope was just some heretic usurper. The religious distinction played itself out over time, but the notion that there is an exclusive club of Western nations who deserve to wield authority over the rest of the world has remained to this day.

There followed a series of onslaughts on Russia spanning many centuries, all stemming from the same simple principle: that which the West cannot control must be destroyed.

.
This war started over a thousand years ago. This is actually true. Ukraine is merely a battlefield of irrelevant bystanders. Nobody wants Ukraine. The IMF and Russia begged each other for years to take Ukraine. They both begged the EU to adopt the basket case. But Ukraine is a moral and economic black hole that cannot be reformed. Meanwhile, Americans have little to no history to guide them. What's there is largely a propaganda narrative. The current geopolitical reality goes right over their heads. As citizens, they have no agency and they are economically insecure. The US is essentially a large concrete industrial park surrounded by a plantation, held together by a mid-century modern infrastructure. The US is the incarceration capital of the World, because incarceration is the only solution for a failed state and untethered society. The official language of the US is DoubleSpeak.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

@Pluto's Republic

the conquistadors have been in the business of pillaging for eons
in the name of god or democracy, conquest is the purpose of these
greedy sponges. It is apparent present day countries and societies
no longer adhere to such past norms.

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@Pluto's Republic
.

The last line of The Great Gatsby reads:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Unable to let go of a glorious self-image based in the past, we wind up face down in our opulent estate's swimming pool.

I don't quite buy it as an explanation of our suicidal crusade against Putin, but it is a compelling idea as a contributing element.

I still believe that this bizarre adventure is part of a bigger globalization project that requires the end of the Anglo-American Era of world history. There might not be any meaningful distinction between the two conceptions.

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I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

Creosote.'s picture

@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.

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@humphrey Russian military + civilian deaths

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NYCVG

He goes over two articles written by US military officers over the problems that have to be overcome by the Ukrainians.

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janis b's picture

and for the commentary it evoked.

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@janis b Janis.

I am so shaken by a video I saw today, from a link at MofA, of Ukrainian forces dragging a young man from his home as his little boy tried to save him and Ukrainian forces knocked the little boy down, I am despondent and screaming to myself, how are we going to stop this? What are we going to do to stop this? I wish we could have a forum here just dedicated to that question.

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janis b's picture

@Linda Wood

I think if there's a solution to be found suggestions from those here would be sound ones. Often though the way seems insurmountable, leading one to a feeling of despondency and lament.

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@Linda Wood channel and if there is a way to bring video here from Telegram, I have not figured it out yet.

Horrifying and heartbreaking as the young boy tried to peel the soldiers off his Dad.

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3 users have voted.

NYCVG

Alexander Mercouris has it right.

100 tanks to Ukraine will not change a thing.

Russia has 12,000 tanks on hand and is building 1,000 new up-to-the minute tanks per year.

Spitting in the wind, all the brouhaha about tanks that will be wiped out by Russian fire as soon as they get to Ukraine. Just as the 3,000? previous tanks have been taken out of service.

The endless celebrating about tanks is the Current Distraction from reality.

Which may be what we have all talked about---Ukraine is Losing.

Or it may be something else entirely, as The Duran guys speculated yesterday. The tanks are to build up Poland's front line for the day when Ukraine is Partitioned and the USA's 20,000 troops stationed in Poland join the Polish military to secure what they used to call Galicia.

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5 users have voted.

NYCVG

snoopydawg's picture

@NYCVG

destroyed close to 4,000 tanks and lots more of the other equipment that has been sent over there. One thing to keep in mind is that NATO countries have disarmed themselves and now have fewer ways to protect themselves. From what is the question. Plus there’s all the money our defense companies are going to make because they will replace the equipment that Russia has destroyed. It’s why not too many congress members complained about that $80 billion of equipment we left in Afghanistan. Might be why we bugged out so quickly. I’m impatiently waiting for the day Americans stand up to congress for spending hundreds of billions on weapons of death and destruction instead of spending it on making our lives better.

As a kid I thought that the world of the Jetsons could be possible, but last week I saw how billions of dollars were spent on the next phase of deadly automated weapons that will bring their makers tons of money. Just think what could have been if we hadn’t been so propagandized.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg in despair.

Nothing matters except the drive for profit.

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NYCVG