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Why Fox News doesn’t want to air the truth about Jan. 6

 
 
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 03:35 am
Quote:
Today, the Washington Commanders defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio complained to reporters that there have been “two standards” in the way we have seen the vandalism at some of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection. “We have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down, and we’re going to make that a major deal.”

This is a common charge on the right, but it is a myth. An AP study showed that more than 120 defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial for rioting, arson, and conspiracy for the 2020 protests, and that they are from all over the political spectrum, with many of them far-right extremists who traveled across state lines to the protests. And the January 6 attack was hardly victimless: 5 people died at the Capitol riot or just after it, more than 100 law enforcement officers were injured, and the rioters did more than $1.5 million in damage to the Capitol.

What happened on January 6th was not a “dust-up.” It was an attempt to overturn our democracy and install as president someone who had lost the popular vote and the Electoral College, upending the Constitution that is the law of our land.

As a report from the Brookings Institution put it: “President Joe Biden legitimately won a fair and secure 2020 presidential election—and Donald Trump lost. This historical fact has been uncontroverted by any evidence since at least November 7, 2020, when major news outlets projected Biden’s victory. But Trump never conceded. Instead, both before and after Election Day, he tried to delegitimize the election results by disseminating a series of far-fetched and evidence-free claims of fraud. Meanwhile, with a ring of close confidants, Trump conceived and implemented unprecedented schemes to—in his own words—“overturn” the election outcome. Among the results of this “Big Lie” campaign were the terrible events of January 6, 2021—an inflection point in what we now understand was nothing less than an attempted coup.”

Part of the crisis in which we find ourselves today is that many people don’t understand what is at stake in the hearings, in part because commentators have turned the attempt of Trump and his supporters to overturn our democracy into a mud-wrestling fight between Democrats and Republicans rather than showing it as an existential fight for rule of law. Today in his Presswatchers publication, Dan Froomkin explored how U.S. news organizations have failed to communicate to readers that we are on a knife edge between democracy and authoritarianism.

Froomkin notes that journalists have framed the January 6 hearings as a test for the Democrats or as a waste of time because they will not change anyone’s mind or perhaps because no one cares. He begged journalists not to downplay the hearings and present them as a horse race, but to frame the events of January 6 in the larger context of Republican attempts to overturn our democracy.

Tomorrow night, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold its first hearing to explain to the American people what happened at the end of the Trump administration. The hearings will be broadcast on C-SPAN, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, PBS, and the Fox Business Channel and streamed on the YouTube channel of the House Select Committee on June 9, 13, 15, 16, 21, and 23.

We have some idea of what the hearings will entail.

According to committee member Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the hearings will establish that the attack was the result of “concerted planning and premeditated activity.” The hearings will show who was behind the January 6th attack on the Capitol, ultimately connecting the attack to Trump and his closest aides. Raskin told the Washington Post that “we are going to tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.”

As the Brookings report put it: “Trump attempted to retain power by any means necessary.” He prepared to argue that the election was stolen long before it took place on November 3, 2020. Trump’s stories about voter fraud shifted and were inconsistent, and he “was repeatedly told by trusted advisors, experts, and courts that there was no fraud.”

Committee members have said there will be new evidence produced at the hearings, and new information has been dropping all week.

We learned that Trump expressed great interest in the Insurrection Act, which enables the president to call out the military to put down an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Court filings say that members of the Oath Keepers expected Trump to invoke the act to enable them to fight against those counting the electoral votes for Joe Biden.

We also learned that Trump badgered his Secret Service detail to permit him to walk with his supporters to the Capitol building after his speech at the Ellipse on January 6.

We have learned that Republican officials in at least 11 places in Michigan breached local election systems to try to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, and that the citizen initiative petition to limit voting rights in order to combat “fraud” had about 20,000 fraudulent signatures on it. In addition, there were allegations that petition circulators had lied to voters to get them to sign the petition, a practice that is legal in Michigan despite the attempts of Democratic lawmakers to prohibit it.

And, crucially, we learned that the Trump campaign told the fake electors in Georgia to operate in “complete secrecy.” The apparent plan of the Trump plotters was to get fake electors to present an uncertified slate of electoral votes that gave their state to Trump, rather than to Biden as voters had chosen. But, as a Trump official wrote in an email: "I must ask for your complete discretion in this process. Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result—a win in Georgia for President Trump—but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion." The official asked the electors to avoid the media and to lie to security guards about why they were at the statehouse. This email suggests the plotters knew they were acting illegally.

But perhaps the biggest sign that the hearings will turn heads is how hard Trump Republicans are trying to distance themselves from it, or to create a distraction.

Significantly, a piece in the New York Times by Peter Baker, published today, distanced Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump from the debacle of the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 election. “No matter how vociferously Mr. Trump claimed otherwise, neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen…. While the president spent the hours and days after the polls closed complaining about imagined fraud in battleground states and plotting a strategy to hold on to power, his daughter and son-in-law were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency,” the story reads.

If the former president’s daughter and son-in-law, both key White House advisors, are now trying to distance themselves from the events of January 6, perhaps the panic in the party more generally was best demonstrated today when the Republican National Committee responded to news of a man looking to harm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It sent out an email with the subject heading: “The Democrat SCOTUS Assassin.”

In his comment today about January 6, for which he later apologized, Del Rio claimed he just wanted to “apply the same standard,” and “to be reasonable with each other” and to “have a discussion.” The open-mindedness he calls for is a perfect approach to this month’s hearings.

hcr
Frank Apisa
 
  1  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 03:50 am
@hightor,
hightor wrote:


Quote:
Today, the Washington Commanders defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio complained to reporters that there have been “two standards” in the way we have seen the vandalism at some of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection. “We have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down, and we’re going to make that a major deal.”

This is a common charge on the right, but it is a myth. An AP study showed that more than 120 defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial for rioting, arson, and conspiracy for the 2020 protests, and that they are from all over the political spectrum, with many of them far-right extremists who traveled across state lines to the protests. And the January 6 attack was hardly victimless: 5 people died at the Capitol riot or just after it, more than 100 law enforcement officers were injured, and the rioters did more than $1.5 million in damage to the Capitol.

What happened on January 6th was not a “dust-up.” It was an attempt to overturn our democracy and install as president someone who had lost the popular vote and the Electoral College, upending the Constitution that is the law of our land.

As a report from the Brookings Institution put it: “President Joe Biden legitimately won a fair and secure 2020 presidential election—and Donald Trump lost. This historical fact has been uncontroverted by any evidence since at least November 7, 2020, when major news outlets projected Biden’s victory. But Trump never conceded. Instead, both before and after Election Day, he tried to delegitimize the election results by disseminating a series of far-fetched and evidence-free claims of fraud. Meanwhile, with a ring of close confidants, Trump conceived and implemented unprecedented schemes to—in his own words—“overturn” the election outcome. Among the results of this “Big Lie” campaign were the terrible events of January 6, 2021—an inflection point in what we now understand was nothing less than an attempted coup.”

Part of the crisis in which we find ourselves today is that many people don’t understand what is at stake in the hearings, in part because commentators have turned the attempt of Trump and his supporters to overturn our democracy into a mud-wrestling fight between Democrats and Republicans rather than showing it as an existential fight for rule of law. Today in his Presswatchers publication, Dan Froomkin explored how U.S. news organizations have failed to communicate to readers that we are on a knife edge between democracy and authoritarianism.

Froomkin notes that journalists have framed the January 6 hearings as a test for the Democrats or as a waste of time because they will not change anyone’s mind or perhaps because no one cares. He begged journalists not to downplay the hearings and present them as a horse race, but to frame the events of January 6 in the larger context of Republican attempts to overturn our democracy.

Tomorrow night, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold its first hearing to explain to the American people what happened at the end of the Trump administration. The hearings will be broadcast on C-SPAN, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, PBS, and the Fox Business Channel and streamed on the YouTube channel of the House Select Committee on June 9, 13, 15, 16, 21, and 23.

We have some idea of what the hearings will entail.

According to committee member Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the hearings will establish that the attack was the result of “concerted planning and premeditated activity.” The hearings will show who was behind the January 6th attack on the Capitol, ultimately connecting the attack to Trump and his closest aides. Raskin told the Washington Post that “we are going to tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.”

As the Brookings report put it: “Trump attempted to retain power by any means necessary.” He prepared to argue that the election was stolen long before it took place on November 3, 2020. Trump’s stories about voter fraud shifted and were inconsistent, and he “was repeatedly told by trusted advisors, experts, and courts that there was no fraud.”

Committee members have said there will be new evidence produced at the hearings, and new information has been dropping all week.

We learned that Trump expressed great interest in the Insurrection Act, which enables the president to call out the military to put down an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Court filings say that members of the Oath Keepers expected Trump to invoke the act to enable them to fight against those counting the electoral votes for Joe Biden.

We also learned that Trump badgered his Secret Service detail to permit him to walk with his supporters to the Capitol building after his speech at the Ellipse on January 6.

We have learned that Republican officials in at least 11 places in Michigan breached local election systems to try to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, and that the citizen initiative petition to limit voting rights in order to combat “fraud” had about 20,000 fraudulent signatures on it. In addition, there were allegations that petition circulators had lied to voters to get them to sign the petition, a practice that is legal in Michigan despite the attempts of Democratic lawmakers to prohibit it.

And, crucially, we learned that the Trump campaign told the fake electors in Georgia to operate in “complete secrecy.” The apparent plan of the Trump plotters was to get fake electors to present an uncertified slate of electoral votes that gave their state to Trump, rather than to Biden as voters had chosen. But, as a Trump official wrote in an email: "I must ask for your complete discretion in this process. Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result—a win in Georgia for President Trump—but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion." The official asked the electors to avoid the media and to lie to security guards about why they were at the statehouse. This email suggests the plotters knew they were acting illegally.

But perhaps the biggest sign that the hearings will turn heads is how hard Trump Republicans are trying to distance themselves from it, or to create a distraction.

Significantly, a piece in the New York Times by Peter Baker, published today, distanced Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump from the debacle of the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 election. “No matter how vociferously Mr. Trump claimed otherwise, neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen…. While the president spent the hours and days after the polls closed complaining about imagined fraud in battleground states and plotting a strategy to hold on to power, his daughter and son-in-law were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency,” the story reads.

If the former president’s daughter and son-in-law, both key White House advisors, are now trying to distance themselves from the events of January 6, perhaps the panic in the party more generally was best demonstrated today when the Republican National Committee responded to news of a man looking to harm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It sent out an email with the subject heading: “The Democrat SCOTUS Assassin.”

In his comment today about January 6, for which he later apologized, Del Rio claimed he just wanted to “apply the same standard,” and “to be reasonable with each other” and to “have a discussion.” The open-mindedness he calls for is a perfect approach to this month’s hearings.

hcr


Obviously Del Rio is intent on showing his physical dexterity. He apparently can put his foot completely into his mouth while standing.

Gotta give him credit where due.
0 Replies
 
Ragman
 
  2  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 05:02 am
Jack Del Rio is (or was) a football player, right? Looking for intelligent insight about such social or political matters is a fool’s mission. Consider the source.
Frank Apisa
 
  2  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 05:35 am
@Ragman,
Ragman wrote:

Jack Del Rio is (or was) a football player, right? Looking for intelligent insight about such social or political matters is a fool’s mission. Consider the source.


He is a coach now...of the Washington COMMANDERS. He is also a blow-hard.
Ragman
 
  3  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 06:39 am
@Frank Apisa,
Yes, I know. I believe at one point he was a player (linebacker). As in, he’s been hit in the head a few too many times.
0 Replies
 
bulmabriefs144
 
  -4  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 07:45 am
@Mame,
Yes, there is a legitimate border war with Ukraine.

Which we have have provoked in order to distract from Biden's own unpopular and financially ruinous electric car initiative, wherein he is forcing gas prices up. He admits to this, btw.
https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2022/05/biden-praises-gas-prices-were-going-through-a-transition-away-from-fossil-fuels/

Albania, Ukraine, same difference. Provoke a real war (unlike the movie, there is a grain of truth here), create some sob story images to get ppl to back Ukraine (who is no moee innocent than Russia or the US). Distract from the hate the public currently has for you by making them focus on whether they are bombed or not.

Quote:
Like putting Kirsten Dunst in a war-torn town, running across a bridge that doesn't exist, where a bag of Tostitos she's holding is turned into a calico cat (then a white cat).


Russia will not attack us directly because we are their equals and because they know the American people (including my own father) are easily swayed by false images. Putin is not a saint, but knows the US far better than they know Russia. But they will fight to reclaim their buffer states.
Ragman
 
  5  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 07:50 am
@bulmabriefs144,
What does this have to do with the topic the OP posted?
engineer
 
  2  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 08:05 am
@bulmabriefs144,
So it makes sense to you that the Sun is on the horizon, not dim and fading away, but bright and half above the horizon, half below (like in the picture you posted), yet somewhere else on Earth, it is directly overhead? How does that work? That video does not cover that at all.
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 08:12 am
@bulmabriefs144,
Quote:
Yes, there is a legitimate border war with Ukraine.

You mean it's okay for any country to just invade a neighboring country because it wants the land for itself? So it would be legitimate for Mexico to invade the USA and carve out a chunk to protect Mexican-Americans from racism and gun violence?
bulmabriefs144
 
  -3  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 11:00 am
@hightor,
I think if you did a DNA test of "Ukrainians", you would find them racially similar to Russians. They aren't just neighbors, they are a different country only as a legal fiction. They are a (formerly allied) border state that has been induced to become an ally of the West.

As for Mexican-Americans, they are immigrants into this country. That logic isn't the same at all. Also, some Mexican-Americans are active members of drug cartels, so yeah no.

This is more like us taking making Oaxaca a separate zone part of NATO, and Mexico being like "Uhhhh, hold up, this isn't your territory?" Oaxaca is then armed as an enemy state of Mexico, as NATO also claims all states from Oaxaca to Panama (in an effort to control the Panama Canal). Mexico justifiably tries to take back whatever of that area was its original territory, and probably tries to reassert national borders for the other areas. The US is like "Those poor Oaxacans look at the violence the Mexicans are doing against them!" They then use violence to assert borders that aren't theirs. While distracting from issues with their president (mustn't forget this part).

The **** you say. Oaxaca is part of Mexico.
Just as Ukraine is part of Russia's border cushion against immigrants (they apparently aren't good wall builders).
hightor
 
  4  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 11:39 am
@bulmabriefs144,
So you don't believe that people who share a similar genetic ancestry but are culturally different have the right to consider themselves a different nationality? That's racism. Ukrainians are dying to preserve their independence and you trot out this racist Mother Russia crap. People should be allowed self-determination and once they achieve nationhood it's barbaric to insist they return to the old empire because someone mistakenly believes they belong to the same "race".

.................................................................................................................................

Fact-checking Putin’s claims that Ukraine and Russia are ‘one people’

Rochester historian explains how Ukraine history is intertwined with Russia’s—but also with that of many other nations, empires, ethnicities, and religions.

Quote:
“It’s a complicated history. But I want to be clear that what’s going on in Ukraine now is a brutal act of aggression with absolutely no justification,” says Matthew Lenoe, an associate professor of history at the University of Rochester, who is an expert on Russian and Soviet history, Stalinist culture and politics, the history of mass media, and Soviet soldiers in World War II.

While the history of the Ukrainian state probably cannot be traced back any earlier than 1918, Lenoe says “to be clear—today Ukraine is a nation state” where polling in elections indicates that the “vast majority of Ukrainians” want to preserve their independence.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made several dubious historical arguments, most notably in his 5,000-word essay “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” published on the Kremlin’s website in July 2021. In it, he elaborates on his assertion that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” as a precursor to and defense of Ukraine’s invasion.

For instance, Putin claims that Ukraine didn’t exist as a separate state and had never been a nation. Instead, he argues, Ukrainian nationality was always an integral part of a triune nationality: Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian. Putin also writes that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians share a common heritage—the heritage of a realm known as Kievan Rus (862–1242), which was a loose medieval political federation located in modern-day Belarus, Ukraine, and part of Russia.

“When Putin says this is the heritage of these three Slavic peoples—in one sense, he’s not wrong. But there’s no continuous line to be traced from this loose river confederation to the Russian state. And there’s also no continuous line to be traced from this loose confederation to the Ukrainian state,” says Lenoe, who is the author of Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Harvard University Press, 2004) and The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (Yale University Press, 2010). He is currently finishing his third book, tentatively titled Emotions, Experience, and Apocalypse in the Red Army, 1941–1942.

Ukraine, for its part, also points in its declaration of independence to a continuously existing state from 1000 CE. Says Lenoe, “Today, both Russians and Ukrainians are making claims about their direct descent from Kievan Rus that are simply mythical and wrong.”

Over the course of centuries, the area that is today Ukraine has been alternatingly swallowed up, controlled, or taken over by the Mongol Empire, later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Empire, while Crimea was at one point a client state of the Ottoman Empire. Between the World Wars, portions of western Ukraine were ruled by Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.
map showing the first Ukrainian states after World War I

https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ukraine-history-world-war-I-map.jpg

In short, Ukraine’s territorial and ethnic history is “complicated and complex,” Lenoe says. Of course, its history is closely intertwined with Russian history, he adds. But it’s also intertwined with Polish history, with the history of the Greek Orthodox Church, even Romanian history, and the history of the Turkic peoples on the Eurasian Steppe.

Q&A with Matthew Lenoe

What do historians mean by “nation” or “nationhood”?

Contrary to popular belief, a nation is not something that has existed for centuries or millennia, with its origins in the distant past.

Lenoe: Historians don’t think of nations as existing from time immemorial. Instead, nations emerge from a process that is sometimes very deliberate. Often the birth of a nation goes hand-in-hand with people’s increased literacy, the instituting of universal schooling; a state has defined boundaries, a central bureaucracy that is professionalized, and it is not the retinue of a noble. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is the idea that every nation deserves a state.

When did Russia and Ukraine first emerge as states?

The Russian state emerged around the 1450s. Ukraine as a state didn’t exist until the early 20th century.

Lenoe: The history of the Russian state, as opposed to the nation, can be traced back to roughly the 1450s in a principality called Muscovy. Meanwhile, the history of the Ukrainian state probably cannot be traced back any earlier than 1918. So, to say that there was a Ukrainian nation in 1000 CE is an anachronism. There was no Ukrainian nation, just as there was no Russian nation in 1000 CE.
“Putin claims that there’s not a Ukrainian history separate from Russian. But that’s not true.”

Mass Ukrainian nationalism emerged out of the traumas of the 20th century. Like Ukraine, there are plenty of states in Europe now that don’t have a long tradition of statehood. Putin claims that there’s not a Ukrainian history separate from Russian. But that’s not true. Among the speakers of Ukrainian and in the lands now comprising Ukraine, there were many different experiences. They belonged at times to different states and realms. But there was interaction between Ukrainian speakers throughout much of this history, and they developed a common identity, especially after the mid-19th century.

What made Ukraine historically a place of “borders and mixing”?

Ukraine is an area of various ethnicities, including nomads, absent of clear religious or physical boundaries.

Lenoe: The word “Ukraine” derives from a Slavic root, which can mean “frontier,” “edge,” “border,” or “outlands.” It has always been a place of borders and mixing, although the country itself didn’t exist yet, including the border between the steppe and the forest zone, which is extremely important in terms of the sorts of people who lived here. You have the mixing of many ethnicities: different Slavic ethnicities, Turkic peoples. Eventually, you get Jews, Germans, people who come to be called Poles, Greeks, people who spoke Iranian languages, and so on. Religious boundaries were equally fuzzy between the Orthodox Christian Church and the Catholic Christian Church, with Islam thrown in.

What role do the Cossacks play in Ukrainian history and statehood?

Through rebellion, they established a Ukrainian Cossack state, the Cossack Hetmanate, that existed from 1648 to 1764.

Lenoe: The Cossacks were folks who lived in the steppe and started probably as multiethnic warrior bands; they pretty quickly became Orthodox and largely Slavs. They were fishermen or agriculturalists; they often lived on protected fortresses and rivers, and a lot of their living was made by raiding the Crimean Tartars and Ottomans.

The whole area of the steppe was known as the wild fields and was a kind of free zone. The Cossacks thought of themselves as free men. That’s very important. They practiced early on a form of warrior democracy. Controlling the steppe was something both Moscow and Poland wanted to do. And they both tried to use the Cossacks: Moscow hired them as mercenaries and supplied them with weapons, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would do the same.

Important to note is Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a Cossack who lead a rebellion against the Polish Commonwealth in 1648 and 1649 that resulted in the creation of a Ukrainian Cossack realm, known as the Hetmanate. You can’t quite trace the modern Ukrainian state to this, but Ukrainians remember it as an important part of their heritage. Khmelnytsky had to maneuver between Russia, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire to maintain independence. In the end, the Hetmanate threw in its lot with the Russians, under heavy pressure. Putin claims that the Russians “liberated” the Cossacks, but it was really a forced “choice.”

Putin claims that a separate Ukrainian identity is an artificial invention. Is he right?

Putin is about a quarter right—in part because he is aware of modern scholarship on Ukrainian identity.

Lenoe: Putin is referring to a myth that a separate Ukrainian identity was created in the mid-1800s by Poles and a few “misguided” Ukrainian intellectuals.

Now, as with a lot of what Putin or somebody in his entourage says, he’s aware of certain kinds of modern scholarship. There’s a quarter truth here. In the mid-19th century, when intellectuals start debating identity and assemble a Ukrainian grammar, the peasants couldn’t have cared less: they were almost entirely illiterate, they would not have thought of themselves as Ukrainian, they would have thought of themselves as Orthodox people, identified by their village, maybe identified with their position in life—as a peasant or townsperson. And the same thing held for Russia, perhaps with the difference that after the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, nobles were starting to think of themselves strongly as Russian.

By 1816, you’ll find the beginnings of a written Ukrainian language, coupled with an increasing romantic interest in the Cossacks as noble pirates, adventurers, and fighters for freedom. And while the Cossacks are a memory that both Russians and Ukrainians share, they become central to Ukrainian identity. By the mid-19th century, you have intellectuals and writers, such as Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) and Mykola Kostomarov (1817–1885), drawing on what they see as a Ukrainian legacy that goes back to the Cossack Hetmanate and, indeed, they’re saying back to Kievan Rus. Contra Putin, these folks are not Poles, but Ukrainians living within the Russian Empire.

Kostomarov really is one of the founders of Ukrainian nationalism. His vision is interesting, because he was also what we might call a “liberal.” He said that the Ukrainian people are naturally free people, that they will win their freedom from the Russian Empire, and that they will lead the world’s peoples to freedom.

Putin claims that the German Empire and Austrian-Hungarian Empire essentially created a modern Ukraine. Is that true?

The Central Powers were the World War I coalition that consisted primarily of the German Empire and Austria-Hungary. Putin’s claim that this coalition sponsored an independent Ukraine is wrong.

Lenoe: That’s basically a bunch of nonsense. Putin is basing that on the fact that Ukrainian leaders, at a particular moment, sought the support of the Central Powers to save their independence movement from the Bolsheviks. But at that point, there had been already a three-generation-long movement for Ukrainian autonomy or independence. So, this claim is nonsense.

Is modern Ukraine the product of the Bolshevik era, as Putin claims?

Putin takes to an extreme the nuanced scholarship about the Soviets’ sponsoring different nationalities, including Ukraine, which later split from the Soviet Union.

Lenoe: Early Bolshevik nationalities policy actually sought to build different nations culturally, because they wanted to head off the threat of nationalism to Communist power. They wanted to make sure they didn’t incur nationalist rebellions. Rather than relying on brute force, the idea was to have different republics that would be politically controlled by Moscow but would have cultural autonomy. In a sense, you can talk about a continuous Ukrainian state from 1918 onward, because nominally Ukraine was a kind of sovereign state within the Soviet Federation.

Now, as we know, in a lot of ways that idea of autonomy was false, but it’s still worth noting. Initially, the Bolsheviks actually promoted Ukrainian language and culture by creating a network of Ukrainian, rather than Russian, language schools. By the 1930s, of course, policies toward nationalities and minorities became very repressive under Stalin. However, in many ways policies promoting non-Russian national identities remained in place throughout Soviet history. So, Putin makes a claim here that the Bolsheviks with their nationalities policy actually created new nations.

Putin is using a much more nuanced scholarship in a brute force way. Recent scholars have argued that the Soviets created to some extent their own nationalities problem by sponsoring these different nationalities, which later split from the Soviet Union. And Putin is taking that point—he or somebody in his circle is aware of the scholarship—to an extreme, saying there was no Ukraine until the Bolsheviks created it by sponsoring Ukrainian culture. As we’ve seen, that’s a false claim.

Did Ukrainians welcome Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1941?

In the far western parts of Ukraine—yes, but only at first. It quickly became clear that the Nazis were even worse than the Stalinists.

Lenoe: One of the stories you’ll hear is that when the German troops came, Ukrainian peasants were waving swastika flags, giving them bread and flowers. The Ukrainian peasants hated Soviet collectivization, so in the far west, Germans were probably welcomed. Although it’s not clear what happened in the rest of Ukraine, it quickly became clear that the Nazis were even worse than the Stalinists.

Ukrainians as a whole hated the Axis occupation. There was, however, a fairly widespread collaboration among Ukrainians in the Holocaust, based on long standing anti-Semitism. No question, there were police units that Ukrainians volunteered for which were involved in the mass murder of Jews. This is troubling now because both Poland and Ukraine, where there was extensive Nazi collaboration, have passed memory laws that aim to ban discussion of that collaboration—and Ukrainian nationalists really don’t want to talk about it.

Of course, it’s also true that there are about 2,500 Ukrainians who have been identified by Yad Vashem [the World Holocaust Remembrance Center] as belonging to “the righteous among the nations”—an honorary designation for non-Jews who aided Jews during the Holocaust.
What about Putin’s claim that Ukraine needs to be denazified today? Does Ukraine have a neo-Nazi problem?

Putin’s claim of fighting for denazification in Ukraine distorts history. It’s another pretext to justify his invasion.

Lenoe: It’s a very complicated situation. The memory of the Holocaust and the far-right OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists that was founded in 1928, is part of why Putin claims there are fascist or neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine. Indeed, it’s troublingly that in 2012 Stepan Bandera [an antisemitic Ukrainian ultranationalist leader involved in terrorist activities and a known Nazi collaborator] was officially named “Hero of Ukraine” by the government. Yet I should also note that there was a lot of liberal opposition to this in Ukraine. And yes, it’s true that there was and is a kind of a Ukrainian national/neo-Nazi movement that looks back, for example, to the SS in World War II as a positive memory. The election support for those people peaked in 2012 at about 10 percent; since then it’s dropped to below 5 percent.

In Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine now has a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust. So, yes, there is anti-Semitism in Ukraine, but it’s not overwhelming. And Putin’s claim that the Jewish Zelensky is a kind of neo-Nazi—well, we’re getting into some really preposterous territory here.

Do you think Putin believes his own statements on Ukraine’s history?

Yes, says Lenoe.

Lenoe: I think that Putin believes what he has said. He was educated in this view of Ukraine when he grew up in the Soviet Union, and he puts this together with his understanding of the continued existence of NATO after the Soviet collapse, and US hegemony, and combines that with this idea that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia. And, he says, if Europeans are going to expand into Ukraine—whether as EU members or NATO—that’s basically NATO’s invading Russia.

He’s a desperate man: Russia’s international position before this invasion was weak, and now it’s far more so. Putin has created his own worst nightmare. If there was weak Ukrainian nationalism before, it will never be weak again. Ukraine will become like Poland, which you can take over, but never hold. He has inadvertently unified the West, along with countries like Japan and Korea, in an extraordinary bloc against Russia. Just to give you an example of how extraordinary this: the Germans have decided to increase their defense spending substantially. This was unthinkable before Ukraine’s invasion, partly because of Germany’s heritage of World War II.

How would you describe Putin’s decision to invade?

It’s an irrational move driven by Putin’s perception of a threat to Russia.

Lenoe: This is the act of a desperate man who actually thinks there is an existential threat to Russia because of a possible NATO expansion. And it’s his hubris. It’s a sign that people aren’t necessarily rational, and that simple-minded versions of rational choice theory don’t work. This is a move that’s irrational on every level, that might even lead to Putin’s being overthrown by, for example, a military coup. In a sense, it’s his emotional attachment to these kinds of historical claims and also a sense that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a humiliation that must be avenged.

rochester.edu
Walter Hinteler
 
  2  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 12:20 pm
@hightor,
Putin today equated himself with Peter the Great, a bill is being debated in the Duma to declare Latvia's independence invalid ...


If one follows this "logic" (which is also bulmabriefs') then the USA would soon have a few states less.
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  3  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 12:35 pm
@hightor,
Kind of an aside:

Olga of Kiev, regent of Kievan Rus from 945 to c. 960, asked the German king Otto I in 959 to appoint a bishop and help with the Christianisation of Kievan Rus. (She was, in fact, trying to establish strong links with the Western Empire).
Saint Adalbert of Magdeburg (known as the Apostle of the Slavs) became the first (missionary) bishop of Kiev before returning as archbishop to Magdeburg.
(A new Christianisation then took place in 987-988, but then under the Byzantine-Orthodox regime.)
0 Replies
 
vikorr
 
  4  
Reply Thu 9 Jun, 2022 04:22 pm
@bulmabriefs144,
Quote:
I think if you did a DNA test of "Ukrainians", you would find them racially similar to Russians. They aren't just neighbors, they are a different country only as a legal fiction. They are a (formerly allied) border state that has been induced to become an ally of the West.
It's easy to throw nonsense around - watch, I'll do it by replacing the country names in your nonsense above.

I think if you did a DNA test of most Americans, they are racially similar to the British. They aren't just neighbour across the ditch - they are a country only as a legal fitction.

What made the US become a separate country when they declared independence from the British, also made Ukraine a separate country.
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  4  
Reply Fri 10 Jun, 2022 01:15 am
As America watched Capitol attack testimony, Fox News gave an alternate reality
Quote:
[...]
The deadly riot was, according to the channel’s primetime host Tucker Carlson, “an outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards, that took place more than a year and a half ago”.

This was the alternate reality that Carlson, Fox News’ most-watched host, presented as he opened his hour-long show. He followed it up with a boast: the rightwing network would not be covering one of the most consequential political hearings in recent American history.

“The whole thing is insulting,” Carlson said of the primetime House subcommittee hearing on the insurrection, which revealed devastating new details on how Donald Trump appeared to support the assassination of his vice-president and how Trump’s supporters created a “war zone” outside the Capitol.

“In fact, it’s deranged. And we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live.

“They are lying and we are not going to help them do it.”

What followed instead was an hour of obfuscation, misdirection and what-about-ism, as Carlson, aided by a selection of guests that included one man who was fired from the Trump administration after he spoke at a conference attended by white nationalists.

Carlson’s first guest was Jason Whitlock, host of Fearless. Whitlock immediately parroted what was to become the line of the night.

“There was no insurrection,” Whitlock said. “There was a riot, a small one, that got a little bit out of hand.”

The scenes broadcast on other TV channels made this claim laughable. Non-Fox News viewers were watching previously unseen footage which showed police officers being kicked and beaten, and people carrying Trump 2020 flags breaking into the Capitol building.

Fox News viewers weren’t seeing those.

“If something noteworthy happens we will bring it to you immediately,” Carlson had said during his opening monologue.

It turned out that Carlson has an unusual definition of noteworthy, given that as the committee was detailing how Trump, on hearing that his supporters were chanting that Mike Pence should be hung, said: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it,” Carlson was merrily chatting with Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative who was railing against Congress passing a $40bn aid bill for Ukraine.

Gabbard – who has kept a relatively low profile since she gave a spirited defense of Vladimir Putin days before the Russian leader ordered the invasion of Ukraine – seemed happy to join Carlson in downplaying what was taking place, insisting that Congress should be focussing on other matters.

Carlson happily took up that theme. Several times he opined on why Congress was holding this two-hour hearing when gas prices have gone up, there are drug deaths, and, most memorably: “this country has never in its history been closer to a nuclear war”.

Through the first half of Carlson’s show, two tactics emerged: downplay the insurrection, and complain that the House wanted to investigate it. As he entered the home stretch, Carlson came up with a new, conspiracy-minded, trope.

“The point is not to get to the truth,” he said of the hearing. “It’s to hide the truth.”

According to the Fox News host, the purpose of the commission is to provide a pretext “for the Democratic party to declare war against millions of American citizens who oppose their agenda”.

To support his point, such as it was, Carlson – finally – showed some of the hearing.

“Liz Cheney is helping them,” he said. “Here she is just moments ago screeching about disinformation.”

Fox News cut to a clip of Cheney speaking in an extremely measured tone about how Trump attempted to overturn the result of the 2020 election through a misinformation campaign – a campaign that Cheney said “provoked the violence on January 6”.

“She is off on another planet,” Carlson said. “Why is Liz Cheney abetting the destruction of America’s civil liberties, and our sacred norms?”

Fox News typically has more than 3m viewers in the 8pm hour, but announced earlier this week that it would not air the hearing, instead relegating coverage to the Fox Business channel, which averages fewer than 100,000 viewers.

The channel stuck true to its boycott promise. Occasionally while Carlson talked a video stream of the committee would appear in a little soundless box, floating off to the right of the host’s head, but that was largely it.

While the hearing rolled on, Carlson rattled through his guests. A man running as a Republican for Congress said people at the Capitol had legitimate grievances over election fraud, before conceding that things became “a little bit dicey”. Another guest made vague claims about the entire insurrection being cooked up by the FBI.

Carlson’s final interviewee was Darren Beattie, a rightwing activist who was fired as a Trump speechwriter after it emerged he had attended a conference in 2016 alongside a prominent white nationalist.

Beattie’s take – nodded along to by Carlson – was that “the feds” were responsible for the riot on January 6.

“It’s a clear hoax, we know it happened.”

Carlson might well have nodded. Last year he hosted a documentary, Patriot Purge, about the January 6 attack which floated the conspiracy theory that violence that day was instigated by leftwing activists. Carlson has also suggested FBI operatives organized the attack on the Capitol.

As Carlson praised Beattie’s reporting, courage and general standing as a person, it brought to mind something Carlson had said earlier, after he had spent several minutes criticizing the hearing with Charlie Hurt, a writer for the right-wing Washington Times newspaper.

“You and I entered journalism about the same time, about 30 years ago,” Carlson told Hurt.

“It seemed honorable then. It seems really shameful now.”
Walter Hinteler
 
  4  
Reply Fri 10 Jun, 2022 05:58 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Fox News didn’t just ignore the Jan. 6 hearing. It did something worse.
Quote:
Fox News didn’t need to announce that it wasn’t going to cover Thursday night’s prime-time hearing from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The network has been all-but-completely ignoring the subject for 17 months; skipping this hearing was a continuation of a pattern, not a break from one. But it nonetheless announced that coverage would be shunted to Fox Business and the network’s streaming platform, and it shrugged at the various scoldings that followed.

When 8 p.m. Eastern rolled around, though, it became clear that the network wasn’t simply going to not cover the hearing. Instead, it began more than two hours of commercial-free rebuttal. It didn’t simply cover other things, it focused almost entirely on the hearing as though it was former president Donald Trump’s defense team — without, of course, showing its audience the prosecution’s case.

Part of that was probably timing. The hearing began just as Tucker Carlson’s show kicked off, and few people in America have been more energetically engaged than Carlson in casting the Jan. 6 riot as not worthy of discussion. Or as largely innocuous, save for some vandalism. Or maybe it’s a government false flag aimed at casting Republicans as racists or something. Rhetorical consistency is not Carlson’s strength, but that is happily for him not a limitation for his job.

So Carlson began by crowing about Fox’s decision to stand apart from its competitors.

“The whole thing is insulting. In fact, it’s deranged,” Carlson said. “And we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we’re not going to help them do it.”

Yes, God forbid that Fox News should air an hour of propaganda or dishonesty. Carlson didn’t articulate the purported lies, which he couldn’t have, because the hearing hadn’t actually begun by that point. But it didn’t matter, because his audience wasn’t hearing the evidence from the hearing anyway. Was it a lie when the hearing showed William P. Barr, Trump’s ever-loyal attorney general, describing Trump’s voter-fraud claims as nonsense? Doesn’t matter, just wave it all away as untrustworthy without actually explaining what was said and why it couldn’t be trusted.

How did Carlson’s show go? He transitioned quickly into his frustration that the committee wasn’t addressing the real questions, in his estimation.

“What did happen, exactly, on Jan. 6? What’s the truth of that day?” Carlson said. “Well, that’s still unknown. From the extensive video we have of Jan. 6, it’s clear that some in the crowd, more than a few, were encouraging protesters to breach the Capitol. To commit felonies.”

And here we go. You may recall that Carlson spent numerous episodes last year claiming that the riot was a function of FBI instigators, people easily identified as such thanks to their appearing as unindicted co-conspirators in federal charging documents. But that was nonsense: Both because FBI embeds wouldn’t be identified in that way and because some of those co-conspirators were easily identifiable. One was obviously the wife of a man charged for his role in the riot; when Carlson later hosted the couple so that they could complain about their persecution, no one mentioned that Carlson had previously called the woman a secret federal agent. Carlson, of course, never corrected his falsehood.

If you’re wondering whether Carlson would have the temerity to reintroduce his most infamous allegation about the insurrection, he did.

“In the case of a man called Ray Epps, we know his name, but they’ve never been charged,” Carlson said of the people in the crowd allegedly instigating violence. Epps didn’t actually do that; he was on video the night before saying that people should go into the Capitol the following day — but he didn’t urge the Capitol breach on Jan. 6 itself. Thanks to an article from a right-wing website run by a former Trump administration official who left his position after being linked to white nationalists, Epps became a target of rabid attacks from Carlson and others that alleged he was a federal agent. He wasn’t. But, months after that became clear, here’s Carlson trying to imply that Epps was some nefarious figure, even comparing Epps — who isn’t known to have broken any laws — with the Michigan gubernatorial candidate arrested this week for his alleged role in the Capitol riot.

Over the course of the hour, there were no commercials, nor were there commercials in Sean Hannity’s hour that began at 9 p.m. No reason was given for this, although Carlson did mention that unusual pattern toward the end of his show. Why not air commercials? Well, one reason would be to keep people glued to Fox News — and therefore not changing the channel to a network that was showing the hearing.

For much of the show, the hearing was shown on-screen as Carlson and his guests spoke over it. Often, the view was not of the committee members, witnesses or the video display at the front of the hearing room. Instead it was often a shot of the audience. One NBC News producer went back after the fact and synced Carlson’s show with what was being shown in the hearing room. During footage showing rioters breaking into the Capitol, Fox switched to the camera showing the audience. When the hearing showed information that didn’t need sound, Fox more than once cut away from it.

Not having commercials meant having more guests. And what a lineup! A who’s who of the Carlsonverse. The Federalist’s Sean Davis. Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Fox News’s favorite Democrat. Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Coalition, recently back from Hungary. Michael Tracey. And, at the end of the hour, Darren Beattie — the guy booted from the Trump administration who wrote that first Ray Epps story.

Beattie encouraged viewers to have their friends go to his website and read his allegations about a federal false-flag operation.

“Tell them to look you in the eye and say that the feds weren’t involved in this,” Beattie said. “It’s a clear hoax. We know what’s happened, but there’s unfinished business and we need to expose the feds for what they’ve done.”

He and Carlson agreed that there were questions that weren’t being asked. But, Carlson assured his viewers at another point, everyone knew why the riot occurred: because people had simple questions about the election! Like that Joe Biden got 10 million more votes than Barack Obama??? How could that happen??? (Population growth and anger at Trump, but you probably knew that.)

But this is what Fox News spent the hour doing. In a break from simply not informing its audience about the riot and the effort by Trump to block Biden’s election, the network decided instead to actively promote an obviously wrong alternate assessment of what happened at the Capitol that day. It hyped doubt about the election results, promoted debunked conspiracy theories and ironically cast the committee’s work as lies and propaganda.

Fox News didn’t ignore the hearing, as expected. Its audience would have been better served if it had.
0 Replies
 
bulmabriefs144
 
  -4  
Reply Fri 10 Jun, 2022 07:58 am
@Ragman,
If you are unable to understand the chain of reasoning of posts, you should reread them.

I have explained first that OP does not understand the truth of Fox News, and second that there is no truth here. Fox News is controlled opposition, like all news it is false. I then proceeded to show how easy it was to make a woman riding a dinosaur (I had previously explained my reluctance to believe in dinosaurs and UFOs) through old Tokyo with a UFO whizzing overhead by working with layered images.

Someone asked me "So you don't believe the war with Ukraine is real". I admitted the war itself is real, Russians, Americans, and Ukrainians are actually dying for it, but it's a controlled event to distract us from the indiscretions of Biden. And probably Putin. And probably the third guy. They're fighting a war, because wars have always kept people from admitting they hate the leader.

Jan 6 was a valid complaint against the president. It was not a violent insurrection. Let's be clear. The actual person who died (the others died or strokes, drug overdose, and heart attack) died of gun violence from an illegitimate state. The rest were arrested in a kangaroo trial, held indefinitely, and a cheater was allowed to take office and run thongs the way the NWO wants. Ukraine is a distracting war, straight out of the playbook of Wag the Dog. Only here, real lives get put on the line to maintain the charade.

Quote:
Why Fox News doesn’t want to air the truth about Jan. 6


Yeah, none of you know anything about the truth. You are fed lies from age (newborn). And like blind molerats, you never question anything.

0 Replies
 
bulmabriefs144
 
  -4  
Reply Fri 10 Jun, 2022 08:14 am
@engineer,
What do you mean half below?

The sun is above the horizon. At all times. It vanishes towards the horizon because of our perspective. Not because that's what actually happens. Grab a friend, and tell him to run as far as he can away from you. Watch the vanishing of him, then run towards him. Tell him to explain what he saw.

We never see the sensation of a huge sun curving around us, as would happen in the orbit described. Instead, we see a sun passing out of sight. The video describes the perspective which was more geometry than I learned. But this is consistent with what we see. We do not look at water hills or bended horizons. We look at an artificial grade toward the horizon both from above and below. Similar to those lines he drew.

One day, I saw the sun set twice. We were driving in a car towards a destination on a winding road, and there were differences in elevation, and we were heading toward and against the sunset. I knew then that the model of the Earth is flawed, and it is simply a matter of perspective that we can see these things as such.

If the Earth was quickly rotating, I would be unable to do this, short of going some great speed. But it was a windy road, and we made a full arc, allowing the sun to briefly rise again. Perspective. Not rotation. Oh yeah, and at one point, the sun went straight up. I knew then that the Earth is flat and nonrotating. And I knew that a double sunset is one of the most beautiful things you can ever see.
Walter Hinteler
 
  5  
Reply Fri 10 Jun, 2022 08:30 am
@bulmabriefs144,
bulmabriefs144 wrote:
I knew then that the Earth is flat.
Amazingly, it is known for over 2000 years that the Earth is round.
Eratosthenes was amazingly close with his calculation (39500 km, done by camel ride around 240 BC) of the circumference of Earth.
Perhaps you should try that, too.
0 Replies
 
Mame
 
  2  
Reply Fri 10 Jun, 2022 10:49 am
@bulmabriefs144,
How do you explain the satellite pictures of a round earth?
 

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