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Now Biden wants a New Tax on Undeclared Gains. Well here's an idea, make all taxations equal for all wage earners high, low, medium, wavy does not matter we all pay the same tax not refunds, no payments, no IRS, no paperwork, only comes straight from you paychecks to the US Treasury every pay period and monthly from business's and from monthly brokers accounts on gains each month same exact percentage, easy peezy no more crazy ideas to get more money from some of us, rather all of us give the exact same percentage every period during the year. No more April 15th, no more loopholes, no more rich folks getting away with zero taxes paid in. Goes away. We all pay exactly the same value each and every day for common household items and groceries and gas and everything in the free market so why do we make our tax system unfair for all. Does not make sense. The money collected would be more than enough to pay our bills and maintain a budget and pay down the debt. But the catch is no one in power wants this change because they gain by the unfair favoritism in the market today where they win and you lose. I say lets change it all now easy as pie. Unfair now all fair after.
You folks are going to get this fool elected again. So funny. RFK the only way here. Two old and older men getting it on in the next election is not very appealing to most Americans. RFK's wino family has abandoned him, thank God, I am sure the feeling is mutual and tells me all I need to know about him. Gives me a newfound respect for this person. That is where my vote will go here in 2024.
As did Kamala Harris during the Summer of Love. Bailed out criminals who actually attacked the local authorities. But our memories are short it’s called the McDonalds complex.
Food for thought.
https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/the-strategy-of-the-mind-maoism-and-culture-war-in-the-west/
Culture War in the West
David Martin Jones, M.L.R. Smith
Photo 32858264 / Mao © Imran Ahmed | Dreamstime.com
To cite this article: Martin Jones, David, and Smith, M.L.R., “The Strategy of the Mind: Maoism and Culture War in the West,” Military Strategy Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 1, summer 2022, pages 4-10.
David Martin Jones is Visiting Professor at the University of Buckingham, UK. M.L.R. Smith is Professor of Strategic Theory at King’s College, London, UK. They are authors of The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and Radical Left (Cheltenham, UK/Northampton, USA: Edward Elgar, 2002).
The political condition within Western societies has, in recent years, increasingly been cast in terms of a ‘culture war’ between radically opposed value systems: between those that want to preserve a pluralistic society where the right to freedom of expression is upheld against those who believe that society should be protected from offensive behaviors and ‘hate-speech’, which are embedded within systems of structural discrimination and oppression.
What has this condition got to do with the ghost of the Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung? More than one might think. The legacy of Mao’s struggle for power in China, and his strategic formulations for winning power, casts a long – and little understood – shadow over contemporary political conduct in the nations that constitute the liberal-democratic West. Of all the strands of modern political theorizing that may be said to influence current Western political conduct, it was Mao, above all, who articulated and put into practice ideas of so-called cultural warfare. Key to the idea of culture war is the understanding that the space to be conquered to gain and retain power is not necessarily the physical battlefield but the intangible sphere of the mind. The Maoist conception of the strategic utility of the mind, and its capacity to be molded towards the waging of cultural warfare, presents some interesting challenges to traditional Western notions of strategic formulation, as this essay will endeavor to show.
Discerning the Strategic Dynamics
Although the notion of culture war is not new, its salience has heightened since 2016, and turned into actual violence in the United States and the UK in May/June 2020. The death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the US city of Minneapolis was the immediate cause of the violence. Arguably, however, it was the long-term consequence and logical escalation of forces that had been brewing in US and UK polities for the better part of six decades.
The manifestation of the culture war took the form of riots and civil disturbances across US cities, as well assaults upon public statues, heritage sites and icons. In non-violent form culture war continues in the felt need to ‘decolonize’ the alleged structures of oppression, from the secondary and tertiary curriculums of schools and universities to libraries, health services, the police, the armed forces, and to just about everything.
The motive towards cultural iconoclasm and the impetus to destroy an inconvenient past is something that should concern strategic theorists. After all, the role of strategic theory is to render explicit what is implicit in our social surroundings by identifying the purpose and the means that impel political actors towards actions that seek to fulfil ideological goals. Yet few analysts, have sought to uncover the strategic dynamics at work in the culture war currently convulsing Anglophone institutions.
Looking at the philosophical creed that seeks confrontation with the Anglo-American liberal democratic project, we see the work of the radical Left, a broad movement dedicated to advancing notions of social egalitarianism that ultimately has no interest in the preservation of the existing structures of society. Unlike the constitutional or social democrat Left, the radical Left does not accept the legitimacy of the current capitalist democratic order. It is prepared to engage with the structures of that order to exploit its fault lines and expose its weaknesses with a view to overthrowing it.
How to advance towards the new social order has seen radical Left theorists develop a profound interest in matters of strategy, often attending carefully to the methods necessary to bring about the conditions for revolution. The strategy of cultural warfare on the part of the contemporary radical Left comprises an amalgam of many different strains of thought, from Vladimir Lenin to Antonio Gramsci, to Herbert Marcuse. However, this essay focuses on the underappreciated influence of Mao Tse-tung’s thinking on the strategy of cultural warfare in the West.
Maoist ideas of revolutionary war have filtered into Western political discourse ever since the late 1930s when Chinese communist forces, holed up in the caves of Yenan in the remote Shensi province after the Long March, attracted the attention of sympathetic American journalists, like Edgar Snow and Anne Louise Strong, eager to broadcast Mao’s struggles to the wider world. During this period Mao and his acolytes scrutinized the failures of former Communist strategy, extending back to the 1920s, which had initially sought to stimulate revolution through urban uprisings, before being forced out of its Kiangsi Soviet and onto the Long March in 1934/35. It was in Yenan that Mao and his comrades cultivated their vision of the revolutionary persona necessary to withstand the rigors of long-term political struggle.
The victory of the communists in 1949, but especially the impact of the Cultural Revolution after 1966, drew further Western adherents, who were attracted to Maoist ideas of revolutionary purification. Mao’s thinking had a particular impact upon a generation of French intellectuals that, in part, constitute what is often termed the New Left – Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, among others. The New Left looked to sources of inspiration like Mao to reinvigorate communist thinking from its moribund condition following the revelations of Stalinist excesses in the Soviet Union. Largely via their reflections, Maoist ideas of cultural struggle arrived upon the shores of American campuses in the late 1960s. And never left.
Dissecting the direct and indirect intellectual influences of Maoist thought on Western radicalism reveals, as this essay discloses, a very different construction of the strategic realm than that which has traditionally constituted the basis of Western political conduct.
Maoist Thought Confronts Western Strategic Formulation
The principal difference in strategic approach resides in the Maoist conception of the self and its manipulation as a latent source of power. As Philip Short wrote: ‘Stalin cared about what his subjects did (or might do); Hitler, about who they were; Mao cared about what they thought’.[ii] How the mind could be molded towards revolutionary ends was to become highly influential upon the theorists of the New Left.
In contrast to liberal-democratic notions of the individual self and its autonomy, Maoist thought devotes considerable attention to addressing how to break down the barriers between the interior and external worlds in a manner that undermines established Western understandings of politics to a degree often overlooked in appreciations of strategic formulation. In that regard, Maoist ideas open up possibilities little understood either among scholars of strategy or mainstream political practitioners.
Strategy can be understood as the endeavor to relate means to ends: the use of available resources to gain defined objectives,[iii] encompassing the attempt to maximize interests with available resources.[iv] Actions are thus consciously intended to have utility. They are intended to achieve goals and therefore are constructed with a purpose. Strategy is, then, an inherently practical subject, concerned with translating aspirations into realizable objectives. Strategy, as Colin Gray explained, functions as the ‘bridge’ between tactics, that is, actions on the ground, and the broader political effects that they are intended to produce.[v] From this perspective, we can analyze the challenges and possibilities that Maoism poses for strategic conduct in a Western liberal democratic setting.
Strategy as objectively observable
The conception of strategy as a goal-orientated enterprise thus delineates a pragmatic concern with realizing tangible objectives with available means. In its intellectual and operational manifestations, therefore, strategy concentrates on practices as physically observable phenomenon. Strategy is revealed and evaluated in relation to material facts, acts and outcomes: political mobilization, armed clashes, organized violence, plans, battles, campaigns, victories and defeats. Simply put, a successful strategy can usually be gauged by real world effects that are clear and demonstrable: objectives achieved, battles won, victories secured.
Strategy as a method of completion
Focusing on achieving empirically observable outcomes, strategy, as traditionally conceived, has little to say about the mind: the sphere of the self of private thoughts, reflections and beliefs. Strategy, conventionally understood, is about transforming an idea – a desire to achieve an objective – into reality. Strategy, in this sense, is a movement from inception to completion. The desire for completion, winning in war or attaining any other goal, reflects the wish to make something final, that is, to reach a definitive end that will be hard to question or undo. Moreover, a physically observable aftermath demonstrating the achievement of aims validates that final completion. Where the aim might arise in the individual or collective consciousness is something in which the study of strategy has evinced little interest.
The political distinction between war and peace
This conception of strategy as something that is focused on achieving tangible outcomes also reflects the clear distinction often drawn in Western political thought between the state of war and peace. Although, of course, professional thinkers on strategy, military planners and policy makers, do not see strategy as simply a wartime activity, the point is that the liberal conception of war is regarded as a largely negative consequence of the public breakdown of civil or inter-state relations, requiring a decision to be reached through force of arms.[vi] By contrast, ‘peace’ is war’s antithesis – the absence of fighting – and an altogether more preferable state of affairs.
Indifference to the private sphere
Yet where ‘fighting thoughts’ come from in the first place is rarely, if ever, examined in Western strategic discourse. This dichotomy itself reflects understandings in Western philosophy concerning the self. Modern philosophy begins with René Descartes’ mind-body dualism and the method of doubt. [vii] Seventeenth century liberal thought gradually came to treat the mind as an internal sphere free from the legal and confessional controls imposed on external behavior (the Catholic Church was very happy to examine men’s souls as was the Puritan version of election). This was for seventeenth century materialists a function of the body, whether it was the arm that threw the stone or the mouth that uttered an insult.
This mind-body dualism in Western thought over time came to delineate, at least in England, the separation of the private from the public realm, which in turn established the grounds of social contract theory and the ‘cultural inheritance’ of Western liberalism. Through a series of unintended consequences, it enabled a more liberal and rationally enlightened polity to develop. In essence, so long as subjects acknowledged their temporal allegiance to the constitutional monarch or the republic, the state would not seek to look into men’s souls.
Over time, the quid pro quo of outward conformity in return for the state’s indifference to the private beliefs of its subjects enabled a political language and practice of individualism. Inexorably, the idea of the liberal democratic state as a container of individual legal rights, including the right to free speech and dissent became normalized.
Although the concept of the private self was to be challenged by the growth of the administrative state and totalitarian ideologies during the twentieth century, the notion of the self-regarding autonomous individual – endowed with the vote and a right to political participation – remained the foundational condition of the Western liberal polity.
The Concept of Universal Struggle
In contrast, Mao sought control of the mind collectively and individually for the purposes of creating revolution. His strategic novelty in this respect resides in the challenge posed to notions of finality and completion in Western strategic discourse. For Mao, there was no endpoint, no single decisive victory, only endless struggle; a condition embodied in the phrase often ascribed to Mao (and Leon Trotsky) of ‘permanent revolution’.
Mao elaborated his thinking about the ceaseless nature of struggle in On Contradiction (1937). He asserted that the ‘interdependence of the contradictory aspects present in all things and the struggle between these aspects determine the life of all things and push their development forward’. For Mao, ‘contradiction exists universally and in all processes, whether in the simple or in the complex forms of motion, whether in objective phenomena or ideological phenomena’.[viii]
The implication of Mao’s ideas were that the interior realm of thought and belief was a site of contestation, and constituted the key to revolutionary progress because ‘Contradiction is universal and absolute, it is present in the process of development of all things, and permeates every process from beginning to end’. ‘The old unity with its constituent opposites’, Mao continued, ‘yields to a new unity with its constituent opposites, whereupon a new process emerges to replace the old. The old process ends and the new one begins. The new process contains new contradictions and begins its own history of the development of contradictions’.[ix]
Mao’s thinking about the universal struggle of contradictions confronts Western strategic understandings about the separation of the physically observable from the intangible. Mao was not, however, the first to make the connection between the material and the intangible elements of strategy.
Did Clausewitz Get There First?
Carl von Clausewitz is perhaps the one figure in the Western strategic tradition to challenge the notion of strategic completion. Clausewitz’s notion of the trinitarian theory is often associated far more with the ‘passions’ than the mind.[x] However, there are intimations, albeit somewhat inchoate, that he intuitively grasped the inherent power of the interior realm. In a short and under-analyzed passage in On War, he observed: ‘The result in war is never final’. He continued: ‘even the outcome of a war is not always to be regarded as final. The defeated state often considers the outcome merely a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found in political conditions at some later date’.[xi]
What Clausewitz may or may not have meant by this passage is rendered opaque by the lack of much in the way of further elucidation. Consequently, we are, like quite a lot of Clausewitz’s incomplete thoughts, left to infer what he might have been hinting at or ‘read in’ what we – that is, Clausewitz’s modern interpreters – wish to see. Clearly, he was writing about his own experiences in the Napoleonic wars where the defeat of his beloved Prussia in 1806, did not turn out to be final. Likewise, the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 following the Battle of Paris did not turn out to be conclusive but arguably was in 1815 after the Battle of Waterloo. Nevertheless, Clausewitz’s theoretical point is that the seeds of resistance are always present that might one day disturb or overturn the status quo. This holds true even in instances where no further attempt is made to violently contest the political conclusion in war. For example, the defeat and dismemberment of Germany after 1945 may have been categorical, but it did not stop Germany from re-uniting in 1990. In politics, all is change: and the political conditions wrought even by resounding victories or defeats are always, and can only be, provisional.
Thus, although Clausewitz did not enlarge upon his observation, it intimated that he, like Mao, considered that the conduct of war was not reducible to physical phenomena, but entailed an interior dimension that is obscured by the strategic focus upon the construction of visible means to reach a terminating point where fighting stopped, and peace began. Clausewitz’s other famous aphorism, that ‘war is a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means’,[xii] also implied that war is simply the overt expression of different interests generated by the internal clash of popular passions. Politics, in this rendition, is the sublimation of a continuous struggle made manifest.
In stating that the result in war is never final, Clausewitz contests conventional expectations that war and strategy is only about clinical endings and beginnings. War begins in the mind and does not necessarily cease with declarations of victory or defeat. Clausewitz infers that decisive outcomes in war are, in fact, inherently uncertain, unstable, and indeed may contain unresolved contradictions that could see war recur as a consequence of continued mindful resistance to the status quo. Internal resistance may at some point break out into open physical violence once more. For that reason, the results in war remain impermanent because they create, to paraphrase Mao, new conditions and therefore new contradictions in which conflict can arise.
Political Power Grows Out of the Mind, Not the Gun
Clausewitz’s reflections on the philosophical origins and purposes of war present intriguing parallels with Mao’s writings on the unity of opposites and the perpetual struggle between contradictions. It may be of some interest that there remains a continuing historical debate as to whether Mao might have read and been influenced by Clausewitz.[xiii] Pondering Clausewitz’s potential influence on Mao it is possible to contradict his oft-cited maxim that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’.[xiv]
Mao undoubtedly approved of revolutionary violence ‘whereby one class overthrows another’.[xv] ‘Only with guns can the world be transformed’, he wrote.[xvi] His injunction about power growing out of the barrel of a gun was, though, issued principally in order to reiterate the necessity of retaining political control over the means of violence as the following sentence reminded his audience at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Communist Party’s Sixth Central Committee in November 1938: ‘Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party’.[xvii]
In fact, if we accept that there is an overlap between Clausewitz’s thinking about the result in war never being final and war as a continuation of politics with Mao’s contentions regarding the continuous struggle between contradictions, then it suggests, logically, that political power does not only grow out of the barrel of a gun, as a Mao’s phrase might suggest, but rather that it grows out of the passions, fears, and moral beliefs held within the minds of individuals. This reading, moreover, would seem to fit more accurately with Mao’s understanding of the cognitive sources of revolutionary struggle, as stated in his 1937 tract, On Practice, where he maintained: ‘Cognition starts with practice and through practice it reaches the theoretical plane, and then it has to go back to practice’.[xviii]
Mind Control
Given Mao’s interest in unlocking the revolutionary potential of collective action, it followed that controlling the mind was the key to unleashing the power of mass resistance. Maoist ideas opened the strategic possibility of exerting control over the private sphere as a tool of struggle and revolt. Mao’s ruminations on how the interior world could be instrumentalized towards revolutionary emancipation offer a systematic philosophy of the human mind as both perfectible and perfectly malleable. The Maoist conception proceeds methodically from the assumption that under capitalism and imperialism the mind is polluted by cultural accretions requiring permanent rectification and purification if the collective will of the masses is to be made strategically useful.
Maoism seeks purification for a purpose, to make control of the interior realm strategically instrumental. Mao emphasized that the final stage of cognition was ‘the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary practice’. Having ‘grasped the laws of the world’, Mao stated, ‘we must redirect this knowledge to the practice of revolutionary class struggle and national struggle’.[xix] The imperative for revolutionaries in this respect was, first and foremost, not to wage violent struggle, but to ‘reconstruct their own subjective world, that is, to remold their faculty of knowing; and to change the relations between the subjective and external worlds’. Finally, he added: ‘When the whole of mankind of its own accord remolds itself and changes the world, that will be the age of world communism’.[xx]
What Mao Should Be Remembered For
When analysts consider Mao’s contribution to strategic thought they tend to focus on his three-stage theory of people’s war to win power. Arguably, though, his most original and influential contribution lies in his understanding of the latent power that can be instrumentalized through mind control. As Apter and Saich state, Mao’s goal ‘was nothing less than the generating of new modes of power: the power of discourse’.[xxi]
Tracing the evolution of Maoism in the West, it is possible to perceive how 1960s radicals began to redirect their thinking towards Mao’s ideas on cognition and the generation of ‘alternative’ modes of power. As disillusion with the armed struggle set in during the early 1970s, radicals moved to embrace other methods. As Collier and Horowitz noted of the Maoist inspired Black Panthers: ‘The Party no longer seemed to believe now that power grew out of the barrel of a gun but from community organizing’.[xxii] By adopting such means, the Panthers were not abandoning Mao’s tenets but rather moving towards his position on cognition as a means to elevate the revolutionary spirit by reshaping the external environment.
As the era of violent ‘direct action’ subsided in the course of the 1980s, Maoist ideas of social control and thought reform gained currency in activist circles. Bill Tupman, a Marxist scholar explained in 1991: ‘The young revolutionary has only the one place to run to. Maoism gives people something to do: Trotskyism was about waiting around and selling newspapers. I see it coming back in a big way’.[xxiii] Channeling the Maoist appeal to ‘do’, finds its expression across the modern campus Left with academics asserting that universities should act ‘as missionaries, teaching new ideas’ that ‘enable active citizenship and even inspire some to take up activist roles’.[xxiv]
The instrumentalization of the socially re-constructed mind toward activist roles, and committed towards waging cultural warfare, is pure Maoism in action. In its applied ‘critical theory’ guise, it focuses on ‘controlling discourses, especially by problematizing language and imagery it deems theoretically harmful’, in a manner that leads to the scrutiny, rectification and policing of thought.[xxv] This social activist mindset percolates from the universities to the wider professional and business world beyond. From schools to media services, to multinational corporations, ‘Organizations and activist groups of all kinds announce that they are inclusive, but only of people who agree with them’.[xxvi] In his 1937 tract, ‘On the correct handling of contradictions’, Mao explained how to address incorrect, ‘non-Marxist’, ideas. ‘As far as unmistakable counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs of the socialist cause are concerned, the matter is easy, we simply deprive them of their freedom of speech’.[xxvii]
Conclusion: Harnessing the Power of the Private Sphere
Obviously, the notion of culture wars and the impact of Mao’s thinking on contemporary political practices in the West is a vast subject, and at best one can only draw attention to its general contours in a brief essay such as this. This short article has therefore sought to illustrate how the all-pervasive thought and language policing within public and private institutions in evidence across the Anglosphere attests to the little understood influence of Maoist strategic ideas. His proto-constructivist writings on how perceptions of the exterior world can be re-ordered by changing one’s subjective cognition may be found in any number of contemporary social science texts in Western academic literature, and which in many other respects provides the fuel for culture war. Whether or not one regards these developments as a progressive good, the ideas regarding the harnessing of the power of the internal sphere as a latent realm of power represents Mao’s most innovative contribution to strategic thought, more so than his writings on guerrilla warfare. Certainly, it represents his most enduring influence on the post-modern West.
Whatever else Maoism may be in a Western setting, it repudiates the liberal understanding of politics, which draws a separation between the personal and the political. Maoist understandings of the private sphere reject this view and hold that the un-curated mind is a barrier to social transformation and needs to be sanitized of all impurities. Politicizing the private realm is precisely what Maoist strategic conduct aspires to. Mao made no secret of his aversion to liberalism. He despised its civility, its willingness to hear ‘incorrect views without rebutting them’, and its latitude for permitting ‘irresponsible criticism in private’.[xxviii] Whatever one’s viewpoint on contemporary political and cultural developments, there should be few illusions, Western Maoism seeks to eliminate the liberal-democratic conception of the West.
References
See Matthew Clapperton, David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, ‘Iconoclasm and Strategic Thought: Islamic State and Cultural Heritage in Iraq and Syria’, International Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 5 (2017), pp. 1205-1231.
[ii] Quoted in Timothy S. Chung, ‘In search of Mao Zedong – two views of history’. Taipei Times, 25 May 2000, http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2000/05/25/0000037415, (accessed 29 April 2021).
[iii] Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars (London: Counterpoint, 1983), p. 36.
[iv] F. Lopez-Alves, ‘Political crises, strategic choices, and terrorism: the rise and fall of the Uruguayan Tuparmaros’, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1989), p. 204.
[v] Colin Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 15-53.
[vi] See Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (London: Hurst, 2008), pp. 5-22.
[vii] Renati Des-Cartes [René Descartes], Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur (Paris: 1641).
[viii] “Mao Tse-tung, On Contradiction,” (August 1937), pp. 2-3, Maoist Documentation Project, available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm (accessed 3 May 2021).
[ix] Mao Tse-tung, On Contradiction (August 1937), pp. 2-3, Maoist Documentation Project, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm (accessed 3 May 2021).
[x] M.L.R. Smith, ‘Politics and Passion: The Neglected Mainspring of War’, Infinity Journal, Vo1. 4, No. 2 (2014), pp. 32-36.
[xi] Carl von Clausewitz, On War (trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 80.
[xii] Ibid., p. 87.
[xiii] See for example, Edward Katzenbach and Gene Hanrahan, ‘The revolutionary strategy of Mao Tse-tung’, Political Science Quarterly, 70/3 (1955), pp. 321-340; Francis Miyata and John Nicholsen, ‘Clausewitzian principles of Maoist insurgency’, Small Wars Journal, 24 October 2020, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/clausewitzian-principles-maoist-insurgency (accessed 3 May 2021).
[xiv] Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. II, pp. 224-225, Maoist Documentation Project (2004),
[xv] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/ (accessed 3 May 2021).
[xvi] Mao Tse-tung, ‘Report on the peasant movement in Hunan’, February 1927, Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-1949, Vol. 2 (New York: Armonk, 1992), p. 434.
[xvii] Mao Tse-tung, ‘Problems of war and strategy’, in Mao’s Road to Power, p. 553.
[xviii] Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, pp. 224-225.
[xix] Mao Tse-tung, On Practice (New York: International Publishers, 1937), p. 11.
[xx] Ibid., p. 11.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 15.
[xxii] David Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, p. 35.
[xxiii] Quoted in Peter Collier and David Horrowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (New York: Encounter, 1989), p. 166.
[xxiv] Quoted in Simon Strong, Shining Path: The World’s Deadliest Revolutionary Force (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 253.
[xxv] Sandra J. Grey, ‘Activist academics: What future?’ Policy Futures in Education, 11/6 (2013), p. 708.
[xxvi] Helen Pluckrose and James Lyndsay, Cynical Theories (London: Swift, 2020), pp. 61-62.
[xxvii] Ibid., p. 65.
[xxviii] Mao Tse-tung, ‘On the correct handling of contradictions among the people’, People’s Daily, 19 June 1957.
[xxix] Mao Tse-tung, Combat Liberalism, 7 September 1937, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm (accessed 12 May 2021).
https://rumble.com/v4ioguf-the-rise-of-woke-marxist-islamism-and-gaza-floyd-w-james-lindsay-winston-ma.html
https://www.winstonmarshall.co.uk/p/james-lindsay-the-rise-of-woke-islamism
I hear it’s being replaced by “Tranny CSI” so you can keep watching.
Another opinion Ukraine War. War is not a good thing in the end whatever the end brings. What does winning look like, billions and politicians just like in America take all the money and the rest of the population is fighting the war for them to become richer and greedier with our tax dollars. That is what winning looks like in Ukraine. Not the people but for the rich wealthy people getting enriched further with our money. Nice hey, you're tax dollars at hard work for others. Thanks for giving.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/frontline-ukrainians-fear-new-aid-from-us-will-be-a-disaster
Frontline Ukrainians Fear New Aid From U.S. Will Be a Disaster
MAKE IT STOP
Much of the world is celebrating fresh U.S. aid, but some of the people in the areas where it matters most think the war will be prolonged and the wrong people will benefit.
Anna Conkling
Published Apr. 25, 2024 4:38AM EDT
Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images
KHARKIV, Ukraine—After months of infighting on Capitol Hill, President Joe Biden has finally been able to sign off on a huge new $61 billion military aid bill for Ukraine. Delays to the bill, which got bogged down in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, were widely blamed for impacting Kyiv’s ability to defend itself from Russian advances.
After its passage last week, some members of the House waved Ukrainian flags while others cheered in celebration that Ukraine will soon receive new weapons ahead of Russia’s expected counteroffensive. Signing it into law at a White House ceremony on Wednesday, Biden promised the arms shipments would begin immediately and hailed what he called “a good day for world peace.”
The reaction here, near the front lines of the war, felt very different.
Oleg sighed when The Daily Beast told him about the events 5,000 miles away in Washington, D.C. “Are you serious?” he said. “Now this war will just continue.”
Oleg is from Saltivka, a part of Kharkiv city that has repeatedly been attacked by Russian missiles. A large majority of residential buildings, businesses, and critically needed infrastructure have been damaged. Oleg said that he is not pro-Russian, and does not want to live under occupation. He has seen some of the worst effects of the war. He has countless friends fighting on the front lines, some of whom have been severely injured or killed, and he’s had to move out of his home. For the most part, Oleg said he just wants the war to be over, but he knows that if Russians soldiers occupy Kharkiv, and discover the large number of friends he has who are fighting for Ukraine, he could be killed. Still, he does not think that the $61 billion in aid will help Ukraine win the war.
“In my mind, and all of my friends, this money doesn’t help Ukraine,” he said. “Our country has too much corruption.”
A military expert surveys a bomb crater at the site of a Russian aerial bombing of the city's Saltivskyi district.
Ivan Samoilov/Gwara Media/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
“The new money will just prolong the war, and civilians and the military are tired. People want peace and negotiations. Not the continuation of the conflict,” he added.
Kharkiv has gotten increasingly dangerous over the last few months, with air raid sirens ringing consistently and new attacks most days. On Monday, Russia partially destroyed Kharkiv’s TV tower, causing interruptions in broadcasting signals, and later that day, the city was attacked again. The Kyiv Independent recently reported that Russia’s new counteroffensive could aim for Kharkiv, and The Guardian predicted that the city could become the next Aleppo, drawing reference to the Syrian city that was destroyed by the Syrian and Russian government a decade ago.
The new aid, which will include cash as well as direct military contributions, will undoubtedly help fend off Russian advances in the country, as the Kremlin’s troops focus their attention on Chasiv Yar. Soldiers told The Daily Beast Russia hopes to take control of the city in the Donbas region by May 9, the World War II Remembrance Day for Russia and other post-Soviet countries.
Throughout much of Ukraine, a collective sigh of relief has been felt, and many far away from the fighting feel that finally, they are receiving the aid they so desperately have needed. But in Kharkiv, 19 miles away from the Russian border, some residents are angry that the U.S. is resuming its aid.
Olena, a local cafe restaurant worker in Kharkiv told The Daily Beast that she is considering leaving her home city and meeting her son in Germany if fighting returns in the expected next Russian offensive. She said that she loves Ukraine, and hopes that they will win the war, but believes Russia may soon have control over the entire country. “Will we win the war if we’re given these weapons?” she scoffed. “I doubt it, very much.”
She is resigned to the scale of the battle Ukraine now faces despite the new injection of support.
“It would be a disaster without weapons,” she said. “But mostly, it's a drop in the bucket.”
One man The Daily Beast spoke to, Vladimir 45, a construction worker in Kharkiv, said that the $61 billion will end up benefiting the wrong people. “Only for politicians, their pockets. They buy houses, apartments, and we have friends who are at war,” he said.
Vladimir and his wife, Julia, 39, live with their two children in a small suburban village on the outskirts of Kharkiv. The family hear explosions nearly every day, and their 12-year-old son is constantly scared of the war, and often has panic attacks when Russian rockets zoom past his home. Last week, shrapnel from a shot-down missile pierced Vladimir’s metal fence, and there are crater-sized holes in his backyard from where a rocket landed two years ago. Vladimir and his family have seen some of the worst aspects of the war in Kharkiv, and he said that they are tired of constantly living under the stress of never knowing if they will survive or not.
At the beginning of the war, Vladimir said that he was hired to help in the reconstruction of a large boiler plant in Kharkiv that had been bombed by Russian attacks. He claimed that the workers had received money from Germany to help cover the costs of the repairs, but that a large majority of that money “got lost on the way from Kyiv to Kharkiv. They [Kharkiv] didn’t pay the crane operators, some part of it was underpaid,” to staff, while other expenses were written off as costing larger than they did to repair. He added that he was not paid for the work.
Vladimir believes that money was used by Ukraine’s government to buy luxurious items, and not given to the people who need it, like soldiers with missing limbs, elderly people, or those who have lost everything. Right now, Vladimir said, he does not think that Ukraine will win the war.
“We might have won this war if we hadn’t stolen money, but since we don’t have money, of course we’re losing,” said Vladirmir. In regards to the new aid to Ukraine, he said “It doesn’t mean that Ukraine will win the war, it will go to the government. There will be more destruction, more people will die. We have to sit down and negotiate before the whole infrastructure [of Ukraine] is smashed.”
Another Kharkiv woman named Anya said that she supports Russia and believes that it can take all of Ukraine in the next six months, adding that she will stay at her home regardless of who is in control of it.
Anya said that Ukraine's government has been “A bunch of fools. They've been stealing, and they're gonna keep stealing” from the aid given by other countries. She added that soldiers no longer want to fight, and everyone is tired.
Anya's son was a Ukrainian soldier who died in combat last December near Bakhmut. Before his passing, Anya often bought him supplies he needed, like clothes, ammunition, and even a rifle, because he did not get enough support from the government.
Ukrainian President Voldoymyr Zelensky recently signed a bill the army draft from age 27 to 25 in the hopes of gathering new recruits as the number of voluntary enlistments diminishes. Many of Ukraine’s soldiers fighting on the frontlines end up dead or wounded, and if the latter, they might have to spend weeks to months in hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and psychiatric wards to recover from their injuries. Once healed, they are often sent back to the frontlines without much of a break or time to be healed.
A soldier named Artem who The Daily Beast spoke with said that he believes he has had up to 30 concussions since the war began, and is only just now on a 21 day treatment at a psychiatric ward in Kharkiv. Artem said that for months his injuries were treated on the frontlines by military medics, who told him to keep fighting. Recently while on the frontlines in the Donetsk region, he said had a psychotic break and was brought to the psychiatric ward in Kharkiv.
“I’ve had post traumatic stress disorder for a long time now. I’m used to it,” Artem said, adding that right now his brigade does not have enough weapons to ward off Russian advances. He said that he hopes that the U.S. aid will help Ukraine, and give soldiers like him and his brigade enough weapons to win the war, but that he does not think it will amount to much. Artem has to go back to the frontlines soon, and said that he is trying to find some way to not go, he does not believe he can mentally handle the fighting any longer. He just wants the war to be over.
As he spoke, he began to cry, and said that the only thing keeping him motivated on the frontlines is his fellow soldiers. When asked how he feels about having to return to combat, Artem said “Look in my eyes,” as they filled with tears, adding that the new U.S. aid “won’t help.”
“I think Russia can win the war. I don’t want to go back,” he added.
And that gets narrower when the outcome seems to many to be a forgone conclusion. I hope that is not true but I had heard before Vance’s speech that Ukraine would run out of soldiers in the long term. Which is not great news. And no I am not in favor of protecting others borders first before our own. Snd if the European Countries have reduced militaries due to us saying don’t worry we have your backs that needs to change as we cannot support the globe and protect everyone. Some news when war occurs is not usually good news. Throwing money at it and then washing our hands staring at least we did something here is not the answer. The only answer while they wait for arms is full on diplomacy with strong minded folks from the European Union and us at the table with all participants and hammer it out. The way it used to be done but prior intense pounding from our military occurred before the enemy would sit at a table with us and others. Today not sure that could happen. Time will tell.
I am sure none of those companies you have listed use any foreign required materials. Those who vote in favor do not want to be the bad folks in DC in not attempting to help, no one likes to hear the bad news that it is a no win situation. Reality is hard, something no one likes to live with in today's over sensitive world.
Be that as it may we all of course have our own opinions on these things. Mr. Vance served in Iraq as a U.S. Marine now in Washington trying to continue that service to America.
Found this article from last November. Also during his speech there is one specific armament that Ukraine needs I believe it was short range missiles which will not be available until the end of 2025 for them. Consequently what do the fighters in the field do until that time. Seems like a bad situation is about to get worse. But hey what do I know everyone has their own opinion and then there is reality again.
This was from last November 2023
US is running low on some weapons and ammunition to transfer to Ukraine | CNN Politics
US is running low on some weapons and ammunition to transfer to Ukraine
By Jim Sciutto, Jeremy Herb, Katie Bo Lillis and Oren Liebermann, CNN
7 minute read
Published 9:03 AM EST, Thu November 17, 2022
CNN —
As the first full winter of Russia’s war with Ukraine sets in, the US is running low on some high-end weapons systems and ammunition available to transfer to Kyiv, three US officials with direct knowledge tell CNN.
The strain on weapons stockpiles – and the ability of the US industrial base to keep up with demand – is one of the key challenges facing the Biden administration as the US continues to send billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine to support its fight against Russia. One of the officials said the stockpiles of certain systems are “dwindling” after nearly nine months of sending supplies to Kyiv during the high-intensity war, as there’s “finite amount” of excess stocks which the US has available to send.
Among the weapons systems where there’s particular concern about US stockpiles meeting Ukrainian demands are 155mm artillery ammunition and Stinger anti-aircraft shoulder-fired missiles, the sources said.
Some sources also raised concerns about US production of additional weapons systems, including HARMs anti-radiation missiles, GMLRS surface-to-surface missiles and the portable Javelin anti-tank missiles – although the US has moved to ramp up production for those and other systems.
For the first time in two decades, the US is not directly involved in a conflict after withdrawing from Afghanistan and transitioning to an advisory role in Iraq.
Without the need to produce weapons and ammunition for a war, the US has not manufactured the quantities of materiel needed to sustain an enduring, high-intensity conflict.
Defense officials say the crunch is not affecting US readiness, as the weapons sent to Ukraine don’t come out of what the US keeps for its own contingencies.
But the seriousness of the problem is a source of debate within the Defense Department, officials say. While the US will not be able to provide high-end munitions to Ukraine indefinitely, assessing whether the US is “running low” on stockpiles is subjective, one senior defense official said, as it depends on how much risk the Pentagon is willing to take on.
Multiple officials underscored that the US would never put at risk its own readiness, and every shipment is measured against its impact on US strategic reserves and war plans. Both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley monitor levels of US stockpiles closely, officials said.
A major manufacturing challenge
One reason for the concern about low stockpiles is that the US industrial base is having difficulty keeping up with demand quickly enough, the sources said. In addition, European allies cannot sufficiently backfill Ukrainian military requests due to their need to maintain to their own forces’ supplies.
“It’s getting harder and harder,” Rep. Mike Quigley, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN. “This is a war we thought would be over in days but now could be years. At a time when global supply chains are melting down, the West is going to have a very difficult time to meet demands at this very high level.”
Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told CNN that the US will continue to support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” while adding that no weapons transfers to Ukraine have diminished US military readiness.
close dialog
“DoD takes into consideration the impacts on our own readiness when drawing down equipment from US stocks” Ryder said. “We have been able to transfer equipment from US stocks without degrading our own military readiness and continue to work with industry to replenish US inventories and backfill depleted stocks of allies and partners.”
At a press conference Wednesday following a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, Austin touted the commitments of a half-dozen countries providing additional weapons to Ukraine, including Greece pledging more 155mm ammunition.
“All Ukraine is asking for is the means to fight, and we are determined to provide that means. Ukrainians will do this on their timeline, and until then, we will continue to support all the way for as long as it takes,” Milley said at the press conference. “It is evident to me and the contact group today that that is not only a US position, but it is a position of all the nations that were there today. We will be there for as long as it takes to keep Ukraine free.”
The degree to which weapons stockpiles are running low varies system by system, as the US defense industrial base is better equipped to ramp up production of some weapons, while others are more difficult – or the production line has been shut down altogether and can’t be easily resumed.
“In most instances, the amounts given to Ukraine are relatively small compared to US inventories and production capabilities. However, some US inventories are reaching the minimum levels needed for war plans and training,” Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a September article. “The key judgment for both munitions and weapons is how much risk the United States is willing to accept.”
The Pentagon said in a September fact sheet it had committed more than 806,000 155mm artillery rounds to Ukraine, for instance. Cancian wrote that ammunition for the 155mm howitzers was “probably close to the limit that the United States is willing to give without risk to its own warfighting capabilities.” At the same time, he wrote that a dozen other countries could supply the same ammunition, and Ukraine was unlikely to be constrained in what it needed thanks to the global market.
“Someone saying uncomfortably low - that’s a judgment,” Doug Bush, Assistant Army Secretary for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, told reporters. “You know, that’s a judgment about risk between sending munitions to an ally to use them in combat versus a hypothetical other contingency that we need to stockpile for. You know, that’s a judgment call.”
‘No question’ there is pressure on stockpiles
Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, told reporters in a recent roundtable, “there’s no question” the weapons pipeline to Ukraine has put pressure on the stockpiles and industrial base of the US as well as its allies.
“Look, we’re seeing the first example in many decades of a real high intensity conventional conflict and the strain that that produces on not just the countries involved but the defense industrial bases of those supporting, in this case supporting Ukraine,” Kahl said. “I will say Secretary (Lloyd) Austin has been laser-focused since the beginning in making sure that we were not taking undue risk. That is that we weren’t drawing down our stockpiles so much that it would undermine our readiness and our ability to respond to another major contingency elsewhere in the world.”
Kahl added that the support the US has provided to Ukraine has not put the US military “in a dangerous position as it relates to another major contingency somewhere in the world,” but he said it has revealed there’s more work to do to make sure the US defense industrial base is more nimble and responsive.
The questions about weapons stockpiles comes as Congress is finalizing the Pentagon budget for the current fiscal year through the annual National Defense Authorization Act as well as the government spending package Congress is expected to try to pass before government funding expires on December 16.
The US military often turns to Congress for a funding boost – lawmakers have routinely added billions to the Pentagon’s budget requests in annual spending bills.
The Biden administration on Tuesday sent a letter to Congress seeking an additional $37.7 billion in funding for Ukraine. The funding includes $21.7 for the Pentagon to be spent in part to address weapons shortages, according to a White House fact sheet that says the money the Defense Department spending is for “equipment for Ukraine, replenishment of Department of Defense stocks, and for continued military, intelligence and other defense support.”
The $37.7 billion request comes as Republicans are projected to reclaim the House majority in the next Congress, which could make it more difficult for the Biden administration to authorize funding to Ukraine next year. House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy has said Republicans won’t give Ukraine “a blank check” – though he also clarified to his conference’s foreign policy hawks that he supports continuing to fund Ukraine’s war – and there are numerous Republicans pushing for a significant curtailing of US aid to Ukraine.
This was from last November 2023
US is running low on some weapons and ammunition to transfer to Ukraine | CNN Politics
US is running low on some weapons and ammunition to transfer to Ukraine
By Jim Sciutto, Jeremy Herb, Katie Bo Lillis and Oren Liebermann, CNN
7 minute read
Published 9:03 AM EST, Thu November 17, 2022
CNN —
As the first full winter of Russia’s war with Ukraine sets in, the US is running low on some high-end weapons systems and ammunition available to transfer to Kyiv, three US officials with direct knowledge tell CNN.
The strain on weapons stockpiles – and the ability of the US industrial base to keep up with demand – is one of the key challenges facing the Biden administration as the US continues to send billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine to support its fight against Russia. One of the officials said the stockpiles of certain systems are “dwindling” after nearly nine months of sending supplies to Kyiv during the high-intensity war, as there’s “finite amount” of excess stocks which the US has available to send.
Among the weapons systems where there’s particular concern about US stockpiles meeting Ukrainian demands are 155mm artillery ammunition and Stinger anti-aircraft shoulder-fired missiles, the sources said.
Some sources also raised concerns about US production of additional weapons systems, including HARMs anti-radiation missiles, GMLRS surface-to-surface missiles and the portable Javelin anti-tank missiles – although the US has moved to ramp up production for those and other systems.
For the first time in two decades, the US is not directly involved in a conflict after withdrawing from Afghanistan and transitioning to an advisory role in Iraq.
Without the need to produce weapons and ammunition for a war, the US has not manufactured the quantities of materiel needed to sustain an enduring, high-intensity conflict.
Defense officials say the crunch is not affecting US readiness, as the weapons sent to Ukraine don’t come out of what the US keeps for its own contingencies.
But the seriousness of the problem is a source of debate within the Defense Department, officials say. While the US will not be able to provide high-end munitions to Ukraine indefinitely, assessing whether the US is “running low” on stockpiles is subjective, one senior defense official said, as it depends on how much risk the Pentagon is willing to take on.
Multiple officials underscored that the US would never put at risk its own readiness, and every shipment is measured against its impact on US strategic reserves and war plans. Both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley monitor levels of US stockpiles closely, officials said A major manufacturing challenge
One reason for the concern about low stockpiles is that the US industrial base is having difficulty keeping up with demand quickly enough, the sources said. In addition, European allies cannot sufficiently backfill Ukrainian military requests due to their need to maintain to their own forces’ supplies.
“It’s getting harder and harder,” Rep. Mike Quigley, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN. “This is a war we thought would be over in days but now could be years. At a time when global supply chains are melting down, the West is going to have a very difficult time to meet demands at this very high level.”
Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told CNN that the US will continue to support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” while adding that no weapons transfers to Ukraine have diminished US military readiness.
“DoD takes into consideration the impacts on our own readiness when drawing down equipment from US stocks” Ryder said. “We have been able to transfer equipment from US stocks without degrading our own military readiness and continue to work with industry to replenish US inventories and backfill depleted stocks of allies and partners.”
At a press conference Wednesday following a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, Austin touted the commitments of a half-dozen countries providing additional weapons to Ukraine, including Greece pledging more 155mm ammunition.
“All Ukraine is asking for is the means to fight, and we are determined to provide that means. Ukrainians will do this on their timeline, and until then, we will continue to support all the way for as long as it takes,” Milley said at the press conference. “It is evident to me and the contact group today that that is not only a US position, but it is a position of all the nations that were there today. We will be there for as long as it takes to keep Ukraine free.”
The degree to which weapons stockpiles are running low varies system by system, as the US defense industrial base is better equipped to ramp up production of some weapons, while others are more difficult – or the production line has been shut down altogether and can’t be easily resumed.
“In most instances, the amounts given to Ukraine are relatively small compared to US inventories and production capabilities. However, some US inventories are reaching the minimum levels needed for war plans and training,” Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a September article. “The key judgment for both munitions and weapons is how much risk the United States is willing to accept.”
The Pentagon said in a September fact sheet it had committed more than 806,000 155mm artillery rounds to Ukraine, for instance. Cancian wrote that ammunition for the 155mm howitzers was “probably close to the limit that the United States is willing to give without risk to its own warfighting capabilities.” At the same time, he wrote that a dozen other countries could supply the same ammunition, and Ukraine was unlikely to be constrained in what it needed thanks to the global market.
“Someone saying uncomfortably low - that’s a judgment,” Doug Bush, Assistant Army Secretary for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, told reporters. “You know, that’s a judgment about risk between sending munitions to an ally to use them in combat versus a hypothetical other contingency that we need to stockpile for. You know, that’s a judgment call.”
‘No question’ there is pressure on stockpiles
Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, told reporters in a recent roundtable, “there’s no question” the weapons pipeline to Ukraine has put pressure on the stockpiles and industrial base of the US as well as its allies.
“Look, we’re seeing the first example in many decades of a real high intensity conventional conflict and the strain that that produces on not just the countries involved but the defense industrial bases of those supporting, in this case supporting Ukraine,” Kahl said. “I will say Secretary (Lloyd) Austin has been laser-focused since the beginning in making sure that we were not taking undue risk. That is that we weren’t drawing down our stockpiles so much that it would undermine our readiness and our ability to respond to another major contingency elsewhere in the world.”
Kahl added that the support the US has provided to Ukraine has not put the US military “in a dangerous position as it relates to another major contingency somewhere in the world,” but he said it has revealed there’s more work to do to make sure the US defense industrial base is more nimble and responsive.
The questions about weapons stockpiles comes as Congress is finalizing the Pentagon budget for the current fiscal year through the annual National Defense Authorization Act as well as the government spending package Congress is expected to try to pass before government funding expires on December 16.
The US military often turns to Congress for a funding boost – lawmakers have routinely added billions to the Pentagon’s budget requests in annual spending bills.
The Biden administration on Tuesday sent a letter to Congress seeking an additional $37.7 billion in funding for Ukraine. The funding includes $21.7 for the Pentagon to be spent in part to address weapons shortages, according to a White House fact sheet that says the money the Defense Department spending is for “equipment for Ukraine, replenishment of Department of Defense stocks, and for continued military, intelligence and other defense support.”
The $37.7 billion request comes as Republicans are projected to reclaim the House majority in the next Congress, which could make it more difficult for the Biden administration to authorize funding to Ukraine next year. House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy has said Republicans won’t give Ukraine “a blank check” – though he also clarified to his conference’s foreign policy hawks that he supports continuing to fund Ukraine’s war – and there are numerous Republicans pushing for a significant curtailing of US aid to Ukraine.
Now here is a person who wants the people of America to understand the facts related to the aid going to Ukraine and the military industrial complex. It is not enough to pass money for this cause there are a lot of other related elements which common sense tells us from history will not work here. Not enough of the type of weaponry they need until the end of 2025 and not enough humans to fight up against the Russian invaders. Mr. Vance does not understand why the representatives in Congress and the Senate who have good intentions here do not realize that in the end it will be diplomacy and negotiations that this war will end, not by arms and money being thrown at it. Mr. Vance is basically telling us this now wondering why over all these years we have not learned one thing about war in other countries and how there are consequences beyond the battles in the aftermath of all of them. I agree with his position here based on the facts as he presented them yesterday before the Senate. Most folks do not listen some do and let it go like hey we are giving them money now we can slap ourselves on the backs and go have a drink and celebrate what we have done. All the while knowing deep down what they have done is prolong what will end up happening. The old days of Mr. Henry Kissinger and many other great diplomatic minds an agreement of the minds would be had but today no one wishes to give the President of Ukraine bad news here. They have fought bravely against this invasion but without other troops coming into their Country they will run out of personnel to fight against their invaders. Remember we do not make most of our own weapons any longer and we outsource them to other Countries. But we have told the European Countries we can defend you if you get into trouble, we cannot that is a lie. Germany about the 4th of 5th largest industrial nation has but one full battalion of an army to ward off an invasion from Russia because they were told by the U.S. do not worry we have your backs. This is why Europeans enjoy great health care is because they do not have to support any great military efforts. We own what we have sown here in Europe and the rest of the world for that matter.
Ukraine God Bless You, but you will not defeat this enemy and the enemy is twofold here and someone with some guts needs to tell you these things in person and then negotiate the best deal you can to end this tragedy. You should view Mr. Vance’s speech folks seriously even knowing you do not like to hear facts.
https://www.vance.senate.gov/press-releases/senator-vance-the-math-on-ukraine-doesnt-add-up/
“This is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.”
An Op-Ed Published In The New York Times
By Senator JD Vance | April 12, 2024
President Biden wants the world to believe that the biggest obstacle facing Ukraine is Republicans and our lack of commitment to the global community. This is wrong.
Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiersthan it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.
The Biden administration has applied increasing pressure on Republicans to pass a supplemental aid package of more than $60 billion to Ukraine. I voted against this package in the Senate and remain opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war. Mr. Biden has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground.
The most fundamental question: How much does Ukraine need and how much can we actually provide? Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine. That is also wrong. $60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.
Consider our ability to produce 155-millimeter artillery shells. Last year, Ukraine’s then defense minister assessed that their base line requirement for these shells is over four million per year, but said they could fire up to seven million if that many were available. Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year — less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million — 30 percent of what’s needed — by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad.
Just this week, the top American military commander in Europe argued that absent further security assistance, Russia could soon have a 10-to-1 artillery advantage over Ukraine. What didn’t gather as many headlines is that Russia’s current advantage is at least 5 to 1, even after all the money we have poured into the conflict. Neither of these ratios plausibly lead to Ukrainian victory.
Proponents of American aid to Ukraine have argued that our approach has been a boon to our own economy, creating jobs here in the factories that manufacture weapons. But our national security interests can be — and often are — separate from our economic interests. The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque. We can and should rebuild our industrial base without shipping its products to a foreign conflict.
The story is the same when we look at other munitions. Take the Patriot missile system — our premier air defense weapon. It’s of such importance in this war that Ukraine’s foreign minister has specifically demanded them. That’s because in March alone, Russia reportedly launched over 3,000 guided aerial bombs, 600 drones and 400 missiles at Ukraine. To fend off these attacks, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and others have indicated they need thousands of Patriot interceptors per year. The problem is this: The United States only manufactures 550 every year. If we pass the supplemental aid package currently being considered in Congress, we could potentially increase annual production to 650, but that’s still less than a third of what Ukraine requires.
These weapons are not only needed by Ukraine. If China were to set its sights on Taiwan, the Patriot missile system would be critical to its defense. In fact, the United States has promised to send Taiwan nearly $900 million worth of Patriot missiles, but delivery of those weapons and other essential resources has been severely delayed, partly because of shortages caused by the war.
If that sounds bad, Ukraine’s manpower situation is even worse. Here are the basics: Russia has nearly four times the population of Ukraine. Ukraine needs upward of half a million new recruits, but hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men have already fled the country. The average Ukrainian soldier is roughly 43 years old, and many soldiers have already served two years at the front with few, if any, opportunities to stop fighting. After two years of conflict, there are some villages with almost no men left. The Ukrainian military has resorted to coercing men into service, and women have staged protests to demand the return of their husbands and fathers after long years of service at the front. This newspaper reported one instance in which the Ukrainian military attempted to conscript a man with diagnosed mental disability.
Many in Washington seem to think that hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have gone to war with a song in their heart and are happy to label any thought to the contrary Russian propaganda. But major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic are reporting that the situation on the ground in Ukraine is grim.
These basic mathematical realities were true, but contestable, at the outset of the war. They were obvious and incontestable a year ago, when American leadership worked closely with Mr. Zelensky to undertake a disastrous counteroffensive. The bad news is that accepting brute reality would have been most useful last spring, before the Ukrainians launched that extremely costly and unsuccessful military campaign. The good news is that even now, a defensive strategy can work. Digging in with old-fashioned ditches, cement and land mines are what enabled Russia to weather Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive. Our allies in Europe could better support such a strategy, as well. While some European countries have provided considerable resources, the burden of military support has thus far fallen heaviest on the United States.
By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence. But this would require both American and Ukrainian leadership to accept that Mr. Zelensky’s stated goals for the war — a return to 1991 boundaries — are fantastical.
The White House has said time and again that they can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.
Yes been working since age sixteen. Did not have the time on my hands to become one of these zombies attending so-called colleges without higher learning other than hatred for others. Privileged is what I call them. By the way I made no such threat here. You interpret incorrectly but that is the norm here.
Real broad brush here you know!!!
Ah liberal colleges showing their true colors of hatred towards another race of people and more. Walking blindfolded to the reality pushing out what they all have been spoon fed by their media. Worse than anything Jan.6th was and Oct. 7th was. They claim to be Hamas. Do they even know what they are saying here. Sick is what this is. This is a powder keg folks. America your Liberal students teaching you what has been sown. Good luck to all here.
Thank God for that, because if the status quo is considered normal then I am definitely the opposite of that wayward thinking for sure. Thanks for the compliment appreciate it. You're normal is $35 trillion in debt. My normal attempts to eliminate this debt by cutting spending. Be that as it may thanks again.
Plenty of blame to go around with multiple Presidency holders in this Country. need to pass a balanced budget Amendment and any foreign funding passed that a new law be enacted that double those amounts be provided for our own Country's borders going forward. Maybe they will think twice about how much of our money they give away to others.
Go out and hold a parade celebrating $35 Trillion in debt, if true. Have a party for ruining our Country. Good until it’s over right, Luce for today screw the children. You all want them aborted anyway. Have your parade and be happy for today at least and I will wish only good honest future for America and Americans. Thanks.
And I make zero apologies here or anywhere for looking and standing up for America first in everything. Unlike our so called elected leaders in D.C. doing their work not the People’s work. That has to change.
Although true on the Libertarian front as a realist I understand the way this Government has evolved into the huge monster it has become and taxes bring a big part of it. Yes if I had my way we would all be paid in gold and silver only. And taxes would only be levied on the money you make with the wages you earn for working for a company or yourself. In the current tax system and it’s being totally unfair to lower wage earners who cannot take advantage of all the loopholes provided to others to avoid paying their fair share of taxes like these others have to. My system would eliminate the IRS altogether and we all no matter your status in wages or earnings would all pay the exact same percentage of your earnings as all of us would.
We all pay the exact same for groceries, gas, new cars etc. etc. no matter your wage earnings in life. So why is it unfair that we all pay different taxes to our Government? Not fair the way it is it favors different wage classes of people.
To me keeping it simple where everyone understands that the hit to our earnings wallets would all be the same percentage as everyone pays. And easy money goes straight to the Treasury every two weeks no IRS forms, no loopholes, no deductions, no refunds or more payments to send in, simple.
The current Government system we live with wants to keep it complicated for a reason. I do care where with our current crooked tax system even more so than most that sending money to assisted foreign nations before helping my own Country should be unconstitutional. Otherwise I never want to hear we have some huge National Debt to deal with. It’s a figment of our Governments wild imagination to keep the citizens at bay to pay their taxes on time. It’s a ploy, does not exist because if in reality if it did exist there would be no excess spending being done snd a balance budget Amendment would be in place. It is not due to this ruse being played out to make us feel good about paying our taxes now.
.Libertarian yes but I live in a Country who has different leanings and lives to waste our money on BS to make themselves feel better, not the folks they are hired and there to support.
How does it feel to always be on the wrong side when it comes to supporting America? But other Countries you have no issue!!! But you claim to be for this great Country but you favor everything that destroys it and makes it weaker? Hey you have to live with those issues, I do not.
The Uni-Party in D.C. the spending capital of the world just spent more money to protect other Countries borders instead of our own. More children died in Gaza last night. More money going for more bombs and bullets to kill people. Republicans with no backbones just joined the spending other peoples money friendly Party to pay for these weapons to kill other humans. Not a good judge of character here. In D.C. there are ALWAYS ulterior motives. Uni-party rules!!!! Real Republicans snd Conservatives who are for the United States of America held firm for the USA. Others catered to their donors with other peoples money as per usual. Hey how’s our own border security looking? Oops there is none.
C’mon now which one of you haters lit themselves up today at the trial?? Got to be one of you folks. Last time I saw that was when I live overseas. They do this versus being humiliated in public and lose face. But here it’s a new one for sure. Smoking kills!!!
Because it’s common knowledge and been in the media a bunch of times of late among articles online everywhere. Unless I am in fact speaking to ostriches again here????
Let all the border security folks go home their job is done. No more gates or walls or stops anywhere. It is now fully legal to come here and take all of American benefits away from those who earned it. Let everyone come here no matter who you are or what you are bringing with you. The Democrats have spoken no more borders or security required. God Bless our Democrats. Good job it is now fully legal to come here o documents required. Come one come all to former America.
Good so you agree with me that Samsung does not need any of our tax dollars here, thanks for verifying my point about using our tax dollars when it is not needed by a big corporation. Take care.
Biden gives $45 million to San Diego area for illegal immigrants, what from his personal bank account? Who voted for this to be done? How legal can this be? Biden gives $6.4 Billion to Samsung a company that makes computer chips for operations in Texas. Does Samsung have a money problem? Does Samsung have a bankruptcy issue or are poor? Why give big business free money here Joey? So do all the computers sold in America free then if using their computer chips in them because we already paid for them with our tax money or was it Joe's piggy bank again? Did anyone vote on this money going to Samsung? Are they poor? Don't they get the local tax breaks to move into Texas that should be enough no? This stuff is places where Government should let business do business they are not in the position of playing favorites in the business world, leave it alone Joe. WTF our money to a big corporation and you wonder why they all take advantage of us all because they know we are all short minded and stupid that this is OUR TAX MONEY going to a business. We are not supposed to be doing such things with our Government and our money. Sick is what I call this and out of control. These things used to occur naturally, you offer to the computer chip companies a lowest bidder scenario to come to Texas to build such a facility because it needs to be done not because you give them $6.4 Billion to do it. Our Government is out of control. Tells me there is no such thing as a National Debt because if there was no spending would be going on only cutting spending would be going on here. So to me there is no such thing as a National Debt. So wipe it out today with some crazy legislation move which will do so easy peasey get er done folks.
NPR suspends writer on staff for 25 years for telling the truth. Liberals hate truth.
You are correct here Biden stands with Israel, yes on HIS terms not Israel's. Sorry that soundbite does not make it so mouthing the words is all that is there. They should be full on with Allies against terrorist, if you not with us you are against us remember that? Guess not. Soros understand how to shut down the cops in blue with his payments to those who shut down highways. But hey lets all find some more sand to stick your heads in.
Directions:step 1. place head deep in the sand, Step2. Repeat.
Well you Democrats have a funny way of losing every Jewish vote in this Country by supporting these death to America idiots snd other violent voices here in our own Country legally or not. You all just lost the entire Jewish voting public here. No other Party for them to run to as no one considers third parties in this crooked process. So Republicans who will represent them and defend their Country from terrorist attacks and on college campuses against elitist attacks who defend our enemies have won the day here. Good luck with those apples you have chosen wrong again. Foolishness. Biden needs to say to our Allies we will stand with Israel fully if they determine to retaliate against their aggressors no matter where they come from. Biden needs to get Qatar on the blower and tell them to move that money for Iran back into a U.S. bank control today, not tomorrow but NOW!!!! This must occur or this President may have lost more than their stupid election here. Grow a pair!!!
Trump on all the dumb newscasts all over the place. One cannot buy that kind of promotion time. Once again Libersls getting the person they supposedly hate re-elected again. Cannot grow more dumb brain cells here now you’ve wasted all your good ones talking about orange man. But again none of you get it.
I have a friend who knows teo brothers in Michigan during the last 3020 election that they received 25 ballots each sent to their house. My buddy is a conservative, the brothers are Democrats. They used every one of them to vote in 2020. So now what say you Zab? Nothing I assume. I told my friend he should have turned them in but legality is it’s all hearsay.
So much for Fauci playing God, and the Deep State you all think does not exist in our Government. Oh well I hate being right all the time. The NPR story says it all and proves the Deep State facts alone.
https://www.theartistree.fm/journal/341184/dr-peter-daszak-involved-in-covid-19-origins-and-lab-leak-denials-to-speak-to-congress-on-may-1/
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/great-covid-cover-up-shocking-truth-about-wuhan-15-federal-agencies
Insider Exposes NPR's One-Sided, Leftist Slant in Programming (dailysignal.com)
Below proves and resolves the Deep State concerns for all in the words of this author he does not use this term but it proves what a lot of American’s except this Board already knew and know.
National Public Radio is the left-wing propaganda factory you always thought it was.
That reality was exposed in an enlightening piece published by The Free Press on Tuesday. It was written by Uri Berliner, who has worked for NPR for 25 years.
What he described is a publicly funded news network that went from having a liberal bias to one that would make Pravda seem like it was evenhanded. NPR now plays the same tired notes again and again for an extremely narrow audience with little inclination to inject even a drop of ideological balance.
National Public Radio is not national, nor does it serve the public. It’s a pipe organ of left-wing views soaking up federal money serving the interests of one political party—Democrats, of course.
Berliner—who wrote that he’s the “stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite”—laid out what it’s now like on the inside at NPR.
He explained how the network eagerly peddled stories dear to Democratic Party leaders, like the Russia collusion hoax about former President Donald Trump that simply disappeared from its coverage when the story collapsed.
Berliner highlighted how the network is obsessed with identity issues, often to the exclusion of anything else.
“Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace,” Berliner wrote. “Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system.”
Berliner wrote that employees were given “unconscious-bias training sessions” and that a growing DEI staff hectors other employees to “start talking about race.” He noted that NPR now has a “burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.”
Berliner listed some of these affinity groups and programs, including the “MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program),” the “Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media,” and many others, in some cases equally absurdly niche identity groups.
These identity blocs, Berliner explained, are a priority for NPR’s union, which ensures that “advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.”
The result is a constant stream of predictably ludicrous and virtually identical programming.
“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” Berliner wrote. “It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”
Berliner said he did a little digging into the party affiliation of the people who run NPR and found that the outlet had “87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.”
When Berliner brought this information to an all-staff meeting, he wasn’t met with hostility, but “indifference,” he wrote. Nobody seemed to find this fact unusual or a problem.
Since 2011, NPR’s mostly left-leaning audience—which then still included a fair number of conservatives and moderates—is now almost entirely left-wing. He said that the network’s programming has veered further and further left, alienating nearly all but the most ideologically committed.
“That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience,” Berliner wrote. “But for NPR, which purports to ‘consider all things,’ it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.”
I agree with Berliner that there was a time when NPR at least tried to be more balanced and had programming that wasn’t either Democratic Party talking points or laughable race and gender nonsense. But shows like “Car Talk” are a thing of the past.
NPR these days, as Berliner outlined, peddles little more than regime propaganda mixed with an overwhelming cocktail of narcissistic LGBTQ propaganda and racial identitarianism. The programming is now entirely coded for a small subset of upper-middle-class left-wingers who almost certainly (and disproportionally) have those “In this house, we believe …” lawn signs in their yard.
It’s a parody, inside and out.
Of course, NPR’s direction was entirely predictable given the trends of recent years.
It’s gone down the same path as the vast majority of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. Any institution connected to America’s informally established secular church of higher education—especially when it gets government money—becomes almost entirely woke-ified.
What the Left stands for these days is cultural revolution, shaming America for its racial sins, liberating bathrooms from the gender binary, and obsessing over every new and novel marginalized group on the ever-expanding web of intersectionality. So that’s exactly the nonstop drumbeat listeners get from NPR.
For a network called “National Public Radio,” NPR certainly doesn’t seem to be serving the nation or providing a general service to the public. If it were an entirely private network like the equally left-wing MSNBC, that wouldn’t be a problem. The issue is that federal dollars continue to flow to NPR despite it being completely one-sided.
And that’s where I disagree with Berliner. He wrote that “defunding isn’t the answer,” and suggested that “there’s still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith.”
Waiting for institutions like NPR to reform themselves from within is a fool’s errand. Unless they have direct and continuous financial and political pressure, they will keep on doing what they’ve been programmed to do; namely, promote and further their ideological agenda.
The moment to defund NPR is past due.
Conix, finally some real truth from a known source human here. Thank you for shedding some hard truths here for folks to swallow hard on.
Mexico's part time President part time leader of Mexican Cartels announces peace and love not violence. What a great humanitarian example of trash he is. We have families America has drug addicts. Where is Biden on this idiots comments standing up for our Country? Joe you sleeping this guy just openly slammed our Country and no comment? Where are your BALLS Joe gone to pasture? Hanging down to your knees? You should be telling this guy no more money for you and no soup either, we are shutting this border totally down no one comes in here anymore and when the time comes that you wish to talk about life and your cartels give me a call and see if I am available for you to waste my time with you. You stepped in the wrong pile of shiate here pal. Joe wake up this guy is smacking you dead in your face and you have zero comments about it. You my as well go back to China where you belong.
This guy stated in Mexico "show me a politician that is poor" "and I will say they are a poor politician" This is how they operate, you should know this already Joe, you have been on the take for over 40 years now, many folks own you maybe even the Cartels too, that is why no comment on the Mexican drug lords comment right Joey no guts no balls.
So its not all bad news for Biden's cronies, they are making big money from American Rescue Plan, ah America were illegals come to collect their checks and unions rape our Country dry of remaining monies left over what the illegals did not grab. Nice America enjoy you're day.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/house-committee-subpoenas-agency-head-amid-probe-of-127m-paid-to-teamsters-pension-fund-with-dead-participants/ar-BB1kAz5Q?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=HCTS&cvid=19173b8c13cb4e3aa1c69a2ebc74aeb4&ei=80
How's that ruling going in NYC against Orange Man? How you doing Leticia James? How about that so-called Judge Engeron how you doing pal? It is about time the adults took over this case, thank God adults are now in charge instead of these children.
So will this be per person per family $1,440 each so family of four gets $5,760 per month here??? How does this program work exactly. Oh well we are giving them box lunches now that costs money, so will that now end? No comment here. WTF folks. Sick is as sick does. Brainless wonders all of them.
Again, foolishness and stupidity all of it.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-nyc-migrants-credit-debit-cards-prepaid-240335300869
Free Money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The world is coming to the U.S. for a better life and free money and goods, take away services from real citizens of NYC and local area. WOW. This is Communism at its best at work. You know when you cannot find out who the "mark is" well folks "WE" are the "mark" here. We the taxpayers. Mexico President says he will not stem the flow until we send him more money, again "WE" are the "mark" here, in other words the fools of the world live here in the USA now.
Does anyone here know about this new spending extravaganza waste of taxpayer monies once again by those in charge of our purses here if any cuts were made to make up for parts of this new boondoggle? Aid to Ukraine Chuck Schumer wishes to die on that hill but is opposed to dying on the hill on the Southern Border where his citizens actually live. Fools all of them. Fund the Border crisis now folks it is a total wreck of a disaster. Folks storming National Guard troops today in El Paso, TX. Yeah let's all concern ourselves with Ukraine's border, that is the smart move right folks. Ooops those on this board agree with Schumer, sorry forgot where i was for a second.
Spending cuts anyone? Cannot cut items from the budget because we have none in place. But programs that no longer work but still being funded should be gone. American's are following the lead of our Government with their credit card debt now over $1.7 trillion dollars, hey they are just like teat Daddy in D.C. is.f Spend without any money in your account and let the debts pile up. But hey we helped XXX number of Countries with fake money/borrowed money. What a joke our Government has become.
Three simple questions FBI/DOJ can you answer enough time has now passed to allow you to grow a narrative for these three things.
1. Who planted the bombs on Jan.6th?
2. Who released the Dobbs Memo at the Supreme Court?
3. Who placed the cocaine in the White House?
All solvable and more than likely known but they do not want you or me to know the answers.
Otherwise they are useless entities.