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This is 100x worse than ATACMS. This shit is a scourge on humanity. The fact that the US is not a signatory of the Ottowa Treaty is tantamount to a warcrime in and of itself. Ukraine itself i a signatory to the Ottowa Treaty and it should be illegal for it to receive shipment.
So there’s not a lot of “popular history” of this kind of stuff in the West.
I’ve gotten a lot of this knowledge mostly by studying history and reading the works of Marx/Lenin/Trotsky/Mao. You can get a lot of really good basic info if you study the Sino-Soviet Split (The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World)
For specific recommendations that are accessible:
Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party - Good primer about global communist development
The New Class by Milovan Djilas - this is the OG book of “I’ve been trying to build this shit and I’m mad at what we’ve built” Conversations with Stalin by Milovan Dijas is also a good read because it really explains the reality of the consequences of USSR foreign policy in places where it needed to succeed the most in real communism building ways and not in “fight America” ways.
Also if you read The New Class absolutely must read The New Industrial State and the Affluent Society by Gailbraith because the entirety of the structure of Djilas and Gailbraith lines up, you start to see the patterns that are literally about industrial production as a social process in and of itself has hard problems that were solved in almost the exact same ways on both sides of the Iron Curtain, leading to similar outcomes of social stratification, one capitalist and one communist.
Other than that back copies of Comparative Communist Studies and Communist and Post Communist Studies from JSTOR or however you can get academic publications have been really interesting to me.
In terms of a distinct meaning, ethnic cleansing is a descriptor of generally dispossessing a people, where genocide is a descriptor of destroying a people. You can ethnically cleanse people without destroying them.
Genocide itself used in the IR sense is a legal charge according to the genocide convention. Not all ethnic cleansing counts as genocide in the genocide convention.
You know, you raised something in my mind; The Germans committed the Herero genocide in, what, 1898? Okay, 1904 to 1908. The idea that the Germans needed to look outside for inspiration is preposterous on it’s face, they’d already committed genocide in their own colonies.
The one reason they’d need outside inspiration is that doing a genocide in a colony is a bit different than bringing the empire home. The colonial apparatus is already primed to do violence against the colonized population. The reason they needed inspiration is because a double sized colonization where you colonize the periphery (Westward expansion) and you recolonize the imperial core (Trail of Tears, slavery, population transfers, Jim Crow) at the same time was really an American invention.
The conflict between agriculturalists and pastoralists/nomads is such an incredibly deep conflict in human history. Any suggested reading for how Khazaks experienced the USSR?
Good overview for the Sovietization of Central Asia is
Inside Central Asia by Dilip Hiro
Nomads and Soviet Rule by Alun Thomas is on my reading list but I haven’t gotten to it. So I cannot vouch for its quality.
There’s not a lot of “friendliness” in portions of this history so you’re not gonna get a lot of good feelings but I’ve heard good things about:
- The Hungry Steppe – 1930 famine, it’s an anti-Stalin polemic so you have to critically read where Cameron is pushing something that she can’t actually back up
- Atomic Steppe – How the bomb was developed in Kazakhstan
- Steppe Dreams – Post-Soviet studies
In practice a lot of this is really the history of colonial conquest…
Japan’s Siberian intervention, 1918-1922. tells the story of Japans attempt at the same region during the same time.
I mean dance class is going to still teach you the basics of fighting, the mechanics of throwing a punch, the mechanics of kicking and using your body effectively. Cardio. Discipline.
This will effectively teach you to fight in most “normal guy in a bar scenarios”.
MMA will teach you a more realistic but still gamified form of fighting tactics.
However MMA can also teach you overconfidence. Most dance class will teach you to asses risks in fighting better than MMA will.
IRL the risk assessment and cardio is actually much more important than the fighting skill part, because you’re not realistically taking people 3 on 1 unless you’re yoked, train every day, etc. You’re also not going to realistically take on someone significantly bigger than you, because that’s not something you actually train for in MMA.
Also you really wanna choose your MMA gyms carefully, like you said this attracts too many chuds and many gyms especially if they’re run by them, do not take safety seriously enough because chuds excuse and permit chud behavior from other chuds.
Most martial arts is not fighting, it’s dance class.
This is one of the best takedowns of On Tyranny which is in reality one of those “should have been a blog post” drivel books that I’ve read:
Yeah fun fact that I just wanted to look it up. Naimark has basically gone on an Israeli podcast and has toed the academic line, about how you can’t just destroy Palestinians because you want to. He didn’t call it a genocide, he explicitly denied it was a genocide but said it was ethnic cleansing. And he also used the term “the so-called Nakba”.
The host by the end of it looks so sad because he really thought he was gonna get this Jewish Genocide Studies scholar to definitively say, YOU CAN TREAT THE PALESTINIANS LIKE DOGS.