NORA HOPPE—The arts – in their truest and noblest forms – have always posed a serious threat to despotic powers because they represent a freedom of spirit and independence of thought. During the Third Reich, the Nazis engaged in “Cancel Culture” by censoring various forms of music, literature, films, theatre plays that were considered an “insult to German feeling” and which they condemned as “Entartete Kunst” [degenerate art]. Instead, they promoted works that exalted the “blood and soil” values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience.
UKRAINE
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Democratic House Member from New York Ritchie Torres was recently confronted during a town hall by constituents demanding an investigation into whether, as investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently revealed, the United States was responsible for the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Torres deflected and distracted from the question, bizarrely suggesting that the U.S. could not conduct an investigation of a European pipeline and then calling his questioners “Putin puppets.” Guest host Aaron Maté breaks down the unbelievable cowardice on display in the non-response to the Hersh story exhibited by elected officials and the media.
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ALEKS—Russia, and back then the Soviet Union, was preparing for decades for a war with the West. Therefore, it built up strategic arsenals and depots to sustain months of fighting with the whole of NATO, without [having to] produce a single further piece. For example, you can take into account one of these arsenals, which is guarded by Russian troops in Transnistria. But there are numerous [like it], across Russia.
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Tactics without Strategy is the Noise Before Defeat
19 minutes readANDREI RAEVSKY—The title of this article is a quote by the famous Chinese general, strategist, philosopher, and writer Sun Tzu who lived 2500 years ago. And while it is true that warfare has dramatically changed over the past millennia (for example, operational art was added as an intermediate level between tactics and strategy), the fundamental logic of Sun Tzu still applies. To grossly oversimplify this issue, you could say that tactics are the means toward an end that has to be defined and the definition of that end goal is strategy. Again, this is ridiculously oversimplified, but for our purposes that is good enough.
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LARRY JOHNSON—Ignore the fact the Russia has stepped up its missile strikes on key infrastructure during the past two months. If Ukraine’s tanks are moving and the Russians are losing, according to Lipson, then why does Ukraine desperately need hundreds of tanks from the West? If Ukraine is winning and Russia is being defeated on the battlefield, why is the West not preparing its victory party? Cobbling together a failed NATO summit in Ramstein this past week is not a sign that the West is confident of Ukraine’s military prospects.