Power, money and ideology. Power and money wins out over ideology (Leon Trotsky for example).
The welfare of the people...has always been the alibi of tyrants...giving the servants of tyranny a good conscious. Albert Camus (quoted by Peter Schweizer in "Red Handed."
I'm not even sure that tyrants care about whitewashing their conscience. It's just a sales pitch.
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin.
A bit of background:
The Ukrainian 36th Separate Naval Infantry Brigade was the main component defending at Shirokino on the northern coast of the Sea of Azov, starting from about March, 2015. In Rantburg's archives are several stories about this unit, ending with how they successfully forced the separatists out of Shirokino after many weeks of fighting.
Accompanying the 36th was the Azov Battalion, with its bases being Mariupol.
[ColonelCassad] The commander of the 36th separate marine brigade, Colonel Baranyuk, was not killed during an unsuccessful attempt to break through from the territory of the Ilyich plant.
In fact, Colonel Baranyuk was taken prisoner.
It is obvious that misinformation was launched about the death of Baranyuk while his interrogations were going on + perhaps Baranyuk himself was used to speed up the surrender of the remaining forces of the 36th brigade at the plant named after Ilyich.
One way or another, this is the first captured brigade commander since the beginning of the NWO.
Another video (https://t.me/boris_rozhin/47583?single) with the captured brigade commander of the 36th infantry regiment Baranyuk and his chief of staff lieutenant colonel Kormyakov, who was also captured during an unsuccessful attempt to break out from the territory of the Ilyich plant.
Valuable catch for military intelligence.
Here is a video of part of Col. Baranyuk's interrogation, in which he discusses the different command structures, his infantry brigade under the Ukrainian ministry of defense and navy, and the Azov Battalion under the Ukrainian interior ministry.
The translation itself is not very good, but the video is translatable.
Adds Russian Spring:
The brigade commander, Hero of Ukraine, Colonel Volodymyr Baranyuk and Chief of Staff Colonel Dmitry Kormyankov were captured after an attempt to leave the Azovmash plant and have already testified about the circumstances of their capture and their conduct of hostilities in Mariupol.
They say that the Marines and the command of the 36th Marine Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not hesitate to fight side by side with the Azov National Battalion, according to a video recording of the testimony of the brigade commander and the brigade chief of staff, made at one of the points on the territory of the DPR.
"I went to the headquarters of Azov. We saw the literature, the pictures that are there. And the flags that are Nazi, Germany. Were with them... I'm not interested in literature that talks about Nazism and fascist symbols. I’m not interested in this," says Chief of Staff Colonel Dmitry Kormyankov.
Of course, in captivity, he quickly turned into an anti-fascist who fought side by side with the neo-Nazis exclusively "as part of the order."
"To fight not shoulder to shoulder, but to fight within the framework of a combat order received from a senior commander. Within the boundaries that are determined for you by the senior commander," he answers the question of whether he is interested in fighting together with the Azov people.
The same story with the brigade commander Baranyuk: interesting things are revealed in captivity.
Once in captivity, he declared that he was "a categorical opponent of all sorts of Nazi moments like these."
"These were not my colleagues. So by the will of fate it turned out that they were my neighbors at that moment. During the defense of Mariupol. It could be like any other unit… At least I didn’t see people with UPA* books and, let’s say, with Nazi symbols," said Baranyuk.
During the defense, he claims to have received "a certain sector of defense." “Both to my right and to my left were units of the Azov battalion,” he added.
Azov brands Colonel Baranyuk as a coward:
"Azov" began to brand the commander of the marines of the 36th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Vladimir Baranyuk, who was taken prisoner.
A member of a neo-Nazi gang today, during a press conference broadcast from the Azovstal plant, said that Baranyuk "ran away like a coward, thinking only of himself, forgetting about his duty."
“He refused to obey the order (of the Nazis from Azov,” RV note) and tried to flee the city with a small group in armored vehicles, trying to break through, ”said a gang member.
Recall that video evidence appeared today that brigade commander Baranyuk and chief of staff of the 36th brigade Dmitry Kormyankov were captured, and not killed, as previously thought.
As Russkaya Vesna reported, Kormyankov sharply turned into an anti-fascist in captivity , saying that “all these neo-Nazi things” were never close to him personally. He spoke extremely negatively about "Azov" and "Azov", saying that the marines were subordinated to "Azov", whose commanders led the defense of the city. Thus, trying to remove at least part of the responsibility for war crimes.
[ZERO] The following is an abridged version of a talk delivered on Wednesday, April 20, 2022, during the question and answer portion of an OpenTheBooks.com virtual event. Videos, media, and other speeches are available at YouTube/OpenTheBooks.
Victor Davis Hanson, earned his B.A. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his Ph.D. in classics from Stanford University. He is the author of several books, including A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War and The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. Dr. Hanson is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of classics emeritus at California State University, Fresno.
QUESTON:
Dr. Hanson, You and I are both native Californians. So looking at California, do you think we've lost the state? Or do you have any strategy advice to reverse this current downward trend set up that we have, and bring some success to us? Just in the state of California.
ANSWER — VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
California is sort of like a prodigal son. We've all had members of our family that we love, and we grew up with and we thought they were stable, and then they take drugs or they get wayward, they get in trouble, but we don't disown them. Well, we don't move away from them. We try to work with them and hope they can find redemption.
I think that's what we're doing in California.
So, there isn’t one Republican statewide officeholder. Republicans only have 11 of 53 Congressional seats. The rest are Democrats. Both houses of the state legislature have super majorities (Democrats). The ninth federal appellate court is the most liberal in the nation. So, they got what they wanted; the left did.
#1
Well, we don't move away from them. We try to work with them and hope they can find redemption.
Well, there sure have been a heck of a lot of them moving to other states. We can only hope they moved because they were fed up with the status quo. Similar movements have occurred in other blue states as well leaving benind high taxes, over-regulaion and corruptocrats.
#2
They came with far fewer skills, and they came in mass over the last 30 years.
Let's see 2022 - 30 = 1992. Wasn't 1992 the year that Bill Clinton won the presidential election? Yeah, it was. He may have been a pervert but he sure knew how to turn California blue. Biden is doing the same thing now to the rest of the country.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
05/09/2022 11:58 Comments ||
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#3
So, upper middle class and working and middle class Hispanics (that are 40% of the CA population) are undergoing — I'm not even sure they're fully aware of it in the abstract — the most radical political shift in my lifetime.
The current chair of the California Republican Party is an Hispanic woman and one of the candidates for governor is Hispanic.
Some members of our Asian communities are shifting to the GOP as well, especially those who fled communism in places like China, Cambodia and Vietnam. They know what happens when communists take over and they get very emotional when they talk about it.
So I suppose there is hope. It's exactly the kind of shift that Democrats deserve. I just hope it's not too late.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
05/09/2022 12:17 Comments ||
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#4
There are currently NO GOP folks occupying any statewide office positions in CA. None. Dems have super majorities in both houses of the legislature. This is not going to change. I wish it were otherwise but no. I'm born, raised CA. I've seen all that has gone down. Short of getting nuked, nothing is gonna change in CA, the Dems - with the fealty of the CA GOP, have seen to this. At best, we can hope for a blip, but nothing more. CA is nothing more than the Dem's Potemkin Village. None of it is based in reality.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
05/09/2022 17:23 Comments ||
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[NYP] History shows us that forced ideological conformity never ends well for Jews, but liberal Jewish institutions keep wanting to give it another go.
In a Wall Street Journal piece, Elliott Abrams and Eric Cohen, respectively chairman and CEO of Tikvah and co-chairmen of the Jewish Leadership Conference, reveal that Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage canceled a planned JLC event because Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was an invited speaker.
Write Abrams and Cohen: "We were working closely with the museum on the details for the June 12 event — until, out of the blue, we were told by the museum staff that Mr. DeSantis didn’t ’align with the museum’s values and its message of inclusivity.’ Either we disinvite the governor, they said, or our event was unwelcome."
The museum gingerly pushed back. On its Twitter account it said this wasn’t a "free speech or censorship issue" but "simply a contractual and logistical decision," which doesn’t actually contradict what Abrams and Cohen are alleging.
Yes, the museum made the "contractual and logistical decision" to deny rental space to Tikvah, an organization that has hosted many events at the museum, because DeSantis was to be a speaker. It’s not a "free speech or censorship issue" since that implies government is stopping the speech, and that is clearly not happening here.
#1
It's not the government doing it, but (to give another example) the possibility of someone not automatically mandarin-class aligned buying Twitter and loosening the speech codes is a light-your-neon-hair-on-fire-and-scream panic event...
#2
This is vile. Messers Abrams and Cohen should reschedule their event elsewhere, taking out ads in the New York Times and elsewhere to explain that they are doing so because the Museum of Jewish Heritage ha chosen to politicize what had heretofore been an apolitical event.
[American Thinker] Dinesh D’Souza is an effective filmmaker and he didn’t disappoint with 2000 Mules, a riveting documentary examining the way leftist organizations used activists to stuff ballots in the 2020 election (and the 2020 Georgia run-off election that handed the Senate to the Democrats). However, after watching it, I felt there were some unanswered questions that also deserve scrutiny so I hope D’Souza follows up on these issues.
2000 Mules begins with the premise that Trump voters have found it impossible to believe that Trump lost the election. When they contrast his campaign appearances (60,000 screaming fans) with Biden’s campaign appearances (6 vaguely animated lumps sitting in little circles); the bellwether counties states showing Trump winning by a large margin; the significant gains Trump made with Hispanics and Blacks; the millions of votes Trump gained over the four years of his presidency; and the mysterious overnight counting shut-down in the states that ultimately gave Biden his "victory," they know that something is wrong.
The folks at True the Vote also suspected that something was wrong, very wrong. The founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, working with Gregg Philips and a team of computer analysts, came up with a very clever way to determine whether there was fraud. They suspected as much, thanks to the way in which Democrats in key states used COVID as an excuse to increase absentee voting. That included states which allowed only absentee voting with drop boxes across cities and towns, where there had been massive ballot harvesting. That is, people, both real and fake, didn’t fill out their own ballots. Instead, they were collected, completed, and put into drop boxes by partisan and paid activists.
To prove this theory, True the Vote obtained geo-tracking information for major urban areas in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, allowing them to follow cell phone signals. They marked all the drop boxes and all the facilities for left-wing non-profits. They then looked for cell phones that traveled between the non-profits and drop boxes at least ten times (to be sure to winnow out statistical noise). Through FOIA requests, they also obtained as many videos as they could showing people stuffing multiple ballots into the drop boxes, a completely illegal act.
Their data revealed 2,200 mules in just five cities, visiting between 20 and 45 drop boxes each, at which they dropped off an average of five ballots. When you do the math, the numbers are staggering:
[Dawn] THE danger is clear and present: militancy is on the upswing and matters could get worse before they get better.
As per statistics released by the Pakistain Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, April saw a 24pc increase in bully boy attacks as compared to the month before. There were 34 such attacks in April with a corpse count of 55. At least 25 people were maimed. In March, the attacks numbered 26, but the casualty figures were much higher — 77 dead and 288 injured — largely on account of the devastating suicide kaboom at a Shia mosque in Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistain's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire... on the fourth day of the month which was claimed by the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems.... group’s Khorasan chapter.
The frequency of attacks in March was twice that in February, indicating a rapidly worsening security scenario. Most of the violence took place in the tribal districts, parts of which have become hotbeds of militancy once again, followed by the rest of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and then Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... The second coming of the Afghan Taliban ...Arabic for students... last year has had a negative fallout on Pakistain’s security landscape. In fact, Lions of Islam of all stripe seem to have been emboldened by the success of the Death Eater force in driving out the world’s sole superpower.
There is an eerily symbiotic connection between the new regime’s takeover of Kabul and the rise in militancy in this country. The year 2021 saw the highest number of bully boy attacks in Pakistain after a consistent decline of six years — with the maximum occurring in August, the very month the Afghan Taliban seized power next door.
It soon became clear that, contrary to their pledges to the international community, Kabul’s new rulers were not going to take any action against the banned TTP, or any other violent mostly peaceful Death Eater outfit for that matter, that are taking refuge on their soil. This was partly because they feared that such action could drive some from its own ranks towards other bully boy groups. But the situation also presented the Afghan Taliban with the opportunity to repay the TTP for giving them safe harbour in erstwhile Fata when they were fleeing the US forces invading Afghanistan. At most, they were willing to facilitate talks between their ideological brothers-in-arms and the Pak state.
After the failure of the short-lived truce that came about as a result, the TTP has not looked back. Pakistain needs to neutralise the threats emerging on its western flank without delay.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistain's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire...
