Insane in the Ukraine, Insane in Ukraine

I've transferred this blog to Substack , partly because it looks nicer and has various bells and whistles, but mostly because I'm a bit disturbed by the response I got from the Blogger 'team' (or algorithm) to my post "Nazis in Ukraine? That's ridiculous, they have a Jewish president!" . I published the post on Feb 4, and on Feb 8 I received a (presumably automated) email from 'The Blogger Team' informing me that the post had been unpublished because "Your content has violated our Malware and Viruses policy. Please visit our Community Guidelines page linked in this email to learn more." No further explanation was given, but I was invited to submit it for review once I had fixed the problem. Needless to say, the post doesn't contain any malware or viruses, or link to any pages that might qualify as such. I didn't change any of the post, apart from adding the note to the Blogger.com content moderation team that is still there, and

Since the beginning of Russia's Special Military Operation in Ukraine, the conflict has been universally characterised in the western media and by western politicians as a battle between democracy and autocracy/dictatorship, with Ukraine firmly on the side of democracy. If such an insulting oversimplification were to be taken seriously (and not everyone does), what exactly are the criteria by which Ukraine could be judged to be a democracy and Russia an autocracy? Freedom of the press Since 2019, laws have been introduced in Ukraine that curtail press freedom in the name of ' fighting disinformation ' or 'stopping the spread of fake news'. In practice this means that the Ukrainian National Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting are able to block websites and TV and radio stations, if they don't approve of what they're saying. In February 2021 , they used these powers to shut down three TV stations. In January 2023 , the draft bill introduced in 2

**Note to the blogger.com content moderation bots/humans: This post was flagged as violating Community Guidelines, specifically because "Your content has violated our Malware and Viruses policy". I have no idea how this post could contain malware or viruses, and none of the links are harmful, so I don't know how I can make it acceptable. Maybe the real reason has nothing to do with malware or viruses? ** Someone - a Jewish person as it happens - said that to me, pretty much verbatim. And it's true, it is ridiculous! Unfortunately, that doesn't make it untrue. Volodomyr Zelensky has stated that his great-grandparents were killed when German troops burned their village during WW2, that all of their male children joined the Red Army, and that of those children, only his grandfather survived the war. He is not only Jewish, his first language is Russian. Either of these things could make him expendable for diehard Ukrainian nationalists - in fact, expendable may be

Armed conflict is an ugly thing, and it's not uncommon for a lot of civilians to get killed. Leaders of belligerent parties generally at least pay lip service to the idea that this is an unfortunate consequence of fighting the armed forces of their opponent. Not so Petro Poroshenko in 2014, at the beginning of Ukraine's war on the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, when he declared that  "Their children will hole up in the basements - this is how we win the war!" 'We will win the war by targeting civilians, especially children' - and this has been going on since 2014. This is the side that our entire media is telling us is the bulwark of freedom, democracy and human rights, the poor underdog whom big bad Russia have invaded in a completely unprovoked act of aggression, boo hoo, #StandWithUkraine. If this doesn't make you really, really angry, I don't know what to tell you. Poroshenko wasn't bluffing about targeting kids. This vi

If you are interested in seeing the sources that I'm quoting for yourself, here are some of the best. A lot comes through Telegram, a messaging app (it is necessary to create an account to use it) through which you can subscribe to people's feeds and which isn't censored - beware, you may see things you'd rather not, although all of the following are responsible about what they post. Patrick Lancaster American Navy veteran who has been reporting from Donbass and other warzones for the last 8 years. Has a page on Myrotvorets . https://www.youtube.com/c/PatrickLancasterNewsToday/ https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Eva Karene Bartlett Canadian journalist who has been reporting on Syria and Ukraine for many years. Has a page on Myrotvorets . https://www.youtube.com/@EvaKBartlett https://twitter.com/EvaKBartlett https://t.me/Reality_Theories UKR Leaks Telegram channel of Ukrainian ex-SBU agent Vasily Prozorov, who saw with his own eyes some of what Ukraine was doing in D

On the morning of Friday 29th April 2022, Russia announced as part of their daily briefing on their Telegram channel that "High-precision, long-range air-based weapons of the Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed the production buildings of the Artyom missile and space enterprise in Kiev". It was implicit that this had occured in the preceding 24 hours. This strike coincided with the visit of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to Kiev , a day after his visit to Moscow. Also on 29th April, Radio Svoboda - the Ukrainian arm of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty - announced that the Russian strike had claimed the life of RFE/RL journalist Vera Hyrych (also spelt Vira Gyrych/Ghyrych, from Ukrainian Віра Гирич) who was killed in her apartment building. Віра Гирич Hers was reportedly the only death; there were also some reported injuries. Kiev mayor Vitaly Klitschko posted a video on Telegram on the morning of 29th April from in front of her apartment building, a gaping hole c

You'll have to excuse me if I seem to be harping on the BBC in a number of my posts, but this is the news that I grew up trusting, and which many people I care about still trust. The BBC calls itself a news organisation, which implies a degree of impartiality. Obviously the easiest way for a media outlet to maintain a pretence of impartiality while being very partial to one side, is simply not to report on things that reflect badly on their side. Their trusting audience will assume that the outlet is reporting honestly on what is going on, and thus that these allegations don't exist, or are not credible. If a whole slew of other media outlets do the same, the impression given is that they have all come to the same conclusion, impartially. So what can a media outlet do when stories gain enough traction independent of the mainstream, that people might hear about them from friends, colleagues or family members? The BBC's approach, it seems to me, is to grudgingly report on