They're irrelevant because the Ghost of Kyiv is single handedly trashing Russia's air force. /s

I had several catalysts while earning my BA in History. It's a sick joke, and if you cry foul, they hold you in the same regard as Holocaust deniers or anti-vaxxers because you're "fringe".

They're half-aware of the double-standard, too. My professors talked a lot about the dubious nature of sources, and how much of modern historiography amounts to reinterpreting the available evidence to challenge narratives, and how much academia requires funding for research and catering to your sponsors.

My favorite professor told me you wouldn't find any "Stalin apologists" in academia today. He, and others, all astonished (and horrified) me once. We got to do this trip to Italy, and I mentioned an interest in seeing Roma culture. The prof leading the trip (an American, mind you) called them the g-word and said they're all thieves. When I brought it up to my other history professors, all Americans, they agreed.

The foundations are rotten. The body of "experts" is intentionally stacked to control the narrative. If you somehow get into a level of status and respect in the humanities, it will be through omission or deception. And if you ever speak against the narrative in regards to communism, you will be destroyed. Want to humanize Nazis or explain away responsibility for their actions? You're free to do that. Want to point out the inconsistency of anticommunist fables? You won't even be allowed to operate on the fringes. Even climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers will have more status than you.

I wish I had any helpful advice.

Don't forget the old chestnut about how nuking Japan saved more lives than it took, and we had to do it/didn't know better. I still remember that one. I think some teachers still teach that.

The wildest thing about libs is that they love the novel 1984, and love to project this idea onto the USSR, China, and North Korea. It's wild to me because of the emphasis on information control, censorship, propaganda, etc. that they love to go on about regarding AES countries, but then they do the same thing without a single iota of self-awareness.

When I was a kid, my peers had largely lost faith in our democratic system because it didn't seem like it mattered who we voted for: the conservative elements in society always triumphed, even when they lost. Obama winning didn't change shit, the Forever War continued. No local elections mattered because the state I live in is so thoroughly Republican, it was like pissing in the wind. Yet, we were always told to have faith and vote.

Fast forward to now, and the reason people are losing faith in our democracy is because they think foreigners are manipulating everything to make the other side win. I should have guessed some insane, xenophobic conspiracy theory was the only way for people to question our system.

In the US, there's a pretty sizable percentage who refuse to admit we lost Vietnam. I don't know any dumb enough to say we won it, but I feel the mentality is similar: "I didn't lose the fight; I just felt bored after getting my nose smashed in and losing most of my blood."

Got in an argument with an anarchist who was pro-Zapatista and called me a redfash tankie. I doubt this will sway him in the slightest.

If we're timestamping WWIII based on current events, where the US isn't even at war with rival superpowers but simply ravaging the world through proxy wars, attacks on smaller countries, and coups, then we might as well say WWIII started during the Cold War when the US began doing all this in the first place. It's really all just been one long war of the US trying to maintain the European hegemony it took over after the other "World Wars". Of course, the definition of World War has always been kinda odd, anyway, lol.

I'm under the suspicion it's not pointless, but an intentional effort to manufacture as high a death toll as possible. I don't think the fascists ever expected or planned for a Ukrainian victory, but rather to sacrifice as many as possible in order to justify a new era of russophobic fascism in Europe.

Something that's darkly amusing about that, living here, is that the election results are almost a 50/50 split every time on the national level, and sometimes even when one candidate has more than the other guy, the other guy wins anyway. So, even if everyone had faith in the system and that the numbers are accurate (which politicians do cheat, so they really aren't), that still means that: a) roughly half the country is going to be against the winner and support any effort to undermine them, and b) even getting a majority doesn't really mean much if the Electoral College can just support the other candidate.

But yeah, I just gotta keep voting Blue for that harm reduction they can't deliver on, while living in a state that's consistently 2/3 Republican in every election, and which passes laws that make it difficult to vote for anything else.

I'm not bitter in the slightest.

I've been under the impression Ukraine was an explicit trap for Russia, to draw them into a quagmire war they couldn't really avoid, and that the West intends to draw it out for as long as possible to tie up Russian resources and possibly even break them through attrition.

Ukraine's current regime has become aggressive towards its Western paymasters, hyped up on their own fascist rhetoric if their politicians are anything to go by, and they're losing bad, proving they're an unreliable and dangerous ally. However, I don't think they'll be thrown under the bus quite yet. I suspect, if NATO's puppet regime can't win, they'll just turn the region into a terrorist state. Whatever government Russia sets up there will need constant Russian military support, and this will be used as propaganda of how Russia "conquered" Ukraine. Fascist resistance, heavily armed, will be trained, supplied, and directed by NATO for years to come, shown as "freedom fighters", while every action Russia takes to keep its borders secure - or even to help Ukraine against fascist terrorism - will be skewed and displayed as tyranny.

In other words, the US will do what it does in every country it fails to install its puppets. At least, that's my prediction. But who can say?

I'm sure racism is a component, but to me it reads more like the arrogant self-righteousness the West engages in, mixed with falling for their own propaganda. Americans, at least, still think the stories from the beginning of the war of massive Russian losses and Ukrainian farmers taking out battalions of tanks are still true. When you try so hard to create this image of the invincible underdog, you shouldn't be surprised when your own side plans for that kind of impossible prowess. Everyone in the West was stirred up into a frenzy about the righteousness of the Ukrainian cause, the tenacity of the Ukrainian people, and the miraculous heroics they allegedly pulled off. I'm not surprised that, at some point, someone actually fell for their own lies. They're paying for it. Or rather, the Ukrainian people are paying for it, sadly.