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You've been fed propaganda nonsense about Ukraine and the invented Russian menace. These are the lies you've been told

In my trade I have long grown used to the way governments lie and get others to lie for them.

It is what they do.

But I have seldom seen such a cloud of lies as we face now. Hardly anyone in this country knows the truth about Ukraine.

There has been nothing like it since we were all lied to about the Iraq invasion, with bilge about fictional ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. The liars were caught out.

And they learned from it. They learned to lie more skillfully.

Meanwhile, many of those in our society who knew how to challenge such lies died off or retired and were not replaced.

We have never had a debate about the Ukraine crisis which started from the beginning. Did anyone in power ever tell you truthfully how, when or why this war began? No. Did anyone in power explain why Britain, crime blighted, decrepit, rubbish-strewn, rat-infested, broke Britain, had to get involved in it? Never.

You have just been fed propaganda rubbish about ‘democracy’, freedom and an invented Russian menace. Here are some of the lies you have repeatedly been told.

The war, they say, was not provoked.

Seldom in history has a war been more provoked.

Russians, nice ones like the liberal, democratic politician Yegor Gaidar, and nasty ones like the bloody despot Vladimir Putin, begged the West to stop trundling its military alliance, Nato, eastwards towards Russia.

ALL Russians, including the great anti-Communist author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had been shocked and angered when Nato in 1999 abruptly gave up its defensive posture and launched attacks on Yugoslavia – which had not attacked a Nato member.

These protests reached their peak in February 2007, when Putin made a dramatic speech in Munich. He said Nato expansion was ‘a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. We have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?’

Look, if someone as gaunt as Putin spoke to you like that in a pub late in the evening, you’d take it as a warning that he was seriously riled. And unless you wanted a fight, you’d back off. But we didn’t back off.

In April 2008, Bush said that Ukraine should be placed on the path towards joining Nato. Even the Guardian, the Liberal Warmonger’s Gazette, conceded that this was ‘likely to infuriate the Kremlin’. And so it did. I suspect we were on the path to war from that moment.

I am always accused, when I say that, of making excuses for Putin. I am not.

I think he was stupid as well as wrong to be provoked. Wise men ignore provocations. But to claim he was not provoked is just to lie.

Another lie we are repeatedly told is that Russia attacked Georgia later in 2008. But anyone can find, on the web, a 2009 Reuters news agency story headlined ‘Georgia started war with Russia: EU-backed report’.

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Originally posted by THG:

Its obvious Putin's propaganda matches right up with signym. Listen comrade, it's not and never has been NATO encroaching on Russia. What it is and always has been, is countries breaking away from the Soviet Union, IE Russia, and seeking protection from the Russians with NATO. Big difference than NATO encroaching on Russia. Get your facts right stupid.

T

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Signym has obscenities marked on her forehead, but denies that the symbols are there:

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by THG:

Its obvious Putin's propaganda matches right up with signym. Listen comrade, it's not and never has been NATO encroaching on Russia. What it is and always has been, is countries breaking away from the Soviet Union, IE Russia, and seeking protection from the Russians with NATO. Big difference than NATO encroaching on Russia. Get your facts right stupid.

T

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Signym has obscenities marked on her forehead, but denies that the symbols are there:

https://imgur.com/gallery/no-i-don-t-have-on-forehead-you-must-be-lyin
g-Ts9HCTP

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by THG:

Its obvious Putin's propaganda matches right up with signym. Listen comrade, it's not and never has been NATO encroaching on Russia. What it is and always has been, is countries breaking away from the Soviet Union, IE Russia, and seeking protection from the Russians with NATO. Big difference than NATO encroaching on Russia. Get your facts right stupid.

T

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Signym has obscenities marked on her forehead, but denies that the symbols are there:

https://imgur.com/gallery/no-i-don-t-have-on-forehead-you-must-be-lyin
g-Ts9HCTP

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yup! And there have been no color revolutions and attempted color revolutions (Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus), no bombing (Yugoslavia), and no screwing around in eastern European elections (Serbia, Romania, Hungary) either!

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yup! And there have been no color revolutions and attempted color revolutions (Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus), no bombing (Yugoslavia), and no screwing around in eastern European elections (Serbia, Romania, Hungary) either!

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“No, I don’t have a dick on my forehead, you must be lying” - March 21 2022

https://imgur.com/gallery/no-i-don-t-have-on-forehead-you-must-be-lyin
g-Ts9HCTP

Translation of the Russian political satire:

Off camera woman: Hello, could you tell me your thoughts on the fact that all Russian citizens have had dicks drawn on their forehead? What do you think about this?

Woman with dick on forehead: Oh, well, I don't really know much about the topic. I'm not a urologist, I'm a regular person. I don't know what someone drew on someone else.

Off camera: You don't need to be a urologist to understand you have a dick on your forehead. Just look in the mirror.

Woman with dick on forehead: But it's illegal now to look in mirrors, and as for what people say...you know, people say one thing and the TV says another. Who knows what is true?

Off camera: Why not ask one of your relatives? I'm looking at you and I'm telling you you have a dick on your forehead. Why would I lie?

Woman with dick on her forehead: I don't know. These days, there are so many fakes, so much provocation. We can't know where the truth lies.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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50 Years On, Washington Has Learned Nothing From Defeat In Vietnam
Wednesday, Apr 30, 2025 - 12:25 PM

Authored by Ted Galen Carpenter via The Libertarian Institute,

Today, April 30, 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the final, definitive defeat of the U.S. military crusade in Vietnam. The images of U.S. helicopters desperately flying American diplomats and Washington’s high-level South Vietnamese collaborators from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon effectively captured not only the chaotic environment, but also the extent of Washington’s overall policy debacle. The outcome of the war was a humiliating defeat for the United States in every respect. Vietnam’s reunification under a communist government was now an indisputable reality. Indeed, the United States finally succumbed to the pressure to establish diplomatic relations with that government in 1995.

Washington’s failed effort over more than two decades to prevent that outcome was extremely expensive financially to the United States, with more than $141 billion expended. Measured in terms of 2025 dollars, that amount would be approximately $838 billion. Even worse was the terrible cost in blood. The war took the lives of more than 58,000 American soldiers and caused an estimated 3.8 million casualties, both civilian and military, in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.


Widespread disillusionment about Washington’s armed crusade in Southeast Asia was evident in the United States, and for a few years, the disastrous experience seemed to inoculate the American public against supporting any similar adventures. When Ronald Reagan’s administration flirted with providing military backing for corrupt client regimes in Central America, there was noticeable pushback, especially from Democrats in Congress. “No more Vietnams” became a popular mantra throughout the country.

However, a closer look at public attitudes, especially the views of political elites in both parties, would have suggested that the change in Washington’s overall foreign policy orientation was less substantial than it seemed at first glance. There was little resistance to pro-war adventurism elsewhere in the world, as long as U.S. military personnel were not directly at risk. For example, Washington’s policy of using Islamist rebels in Afghanistan to harass Soviet occupation forces received extensive bipartisan support.

Even direct U.S. military involvement received little push back, as long as an American victory was quick and decisive. That point was confirmed when U.S. forces invaded Grenada in 1983 and promptly ousted a pro-communist regime that had recently seized power. The Reagan administration’s meddling in Lebanon’s civil war, though, showed that there remained an extensive public and elite aversion to American casualties. The loss of 241 Marines in the bombing of the U.S. barracks outside Beirut immediately caused the administration to move the remaining troops to ships off shore, and that step was just a prelude to the departure of all U.S. forces from Lebanon.

Although the bruising experience in Vietnam had apparently induced a somewhat greater level of caution—at least temporarily—among Washington’s political and policy elites with respect to a few specific cases, it had not caused any reconsideration of the foundational assumptions of U.S. foreign policy. In particular, the “1930s model” still dominated elite perceptions about world affairs and America’s proper role in the international system: American opinion leaders were still obsessed with preventing the rise of “another Hitler.” Closely related assumptions were that “appeasement” never works, “aggression” had to be stopped in its tracks as soon as signs of it appeared, and that complex, murky geopolitical struggles could be portrayed as stark conflicts between good and evil. Despite the negative consequences of the Vietnam War, those attitudes remained intact.

The continuing ability of such propaganda to sway public opinion in favor of war became apparent during the Persian Gulf crisis in 1990-1991. The simplistic “good versus evil” narrative was especially tenacious. George H.W. Bush’s administration, with the active assistance of a hawkish news media, succeeded in convincing the American public that not only was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein a monstrously evil ruler, but also that he posed a threat to world order comparable to Hitler’s.

It was a preposterous notion for multiple reasons. First, Washington had viewed Saddam as a valuable client throughout Iraq’s multi-year war of aggression against Iran’s revolutionary government. The Iraqi leader got into trouble with Washington only when he failed to win the fight against Tehran and then had the temerity to seize Kuwait (a longstanding Iraqi territorial claim) without Washington’s permission. Bush administration officials and their media allies exaggerated Iraq’s military capabilities and invented inflammatory atrocity stories to justify a war against Iraq waged by a U.S.-dominated international coalition.

The surprisingly easy victory by coalition forces largely erased the lessons of caution remaining from the Vietnam experience. Administration officials and other members of Washington’s pro-war elite gloated that America had finally overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome.” When the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 left the United States as the sole remaining global power, that development eliminated the last restraint on U.S. military adventurism.

The painful lessons of the defeat in Vietnam have been largely forgotten, and the current generation of U.S. policymakers is at least as reckless as any of its predecessors. The prevailing approach to international conflicts has a dreary, formulaic aspect: exaggerate the severity of the threat to both international peace and America’s security; portray Washington’s adversary as the epitome of evil; and portray any beleaguered U.S. client as both an innocent victim and a proponent of freedom and democracy. Washington’s dishonest propaganda regarding the war between Russia and Ukraine—both corrupt autocracies—is almost a caricature of that strategy.

The litany of Washington’s military interventions and proxy wars since Vietnam—Afghanistan, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan (again), Libya, Syria, Yemen, and most dangerous of all, Ukraine—all convey the extent to which U.S. policy elites and much of the U.S. public have remained impervious to the deeper meaning of the Vietnam debacle. As one cynical observer said to me, “The only enduring lesson from the Vietnam War appears to be ‘don’t go to war in a country called Vietnam.’” Such a pervasive failure of policymakers and the American people to learn more substantial lessons may be that horrible conflict’s most tragic and lasting legacy.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Don't throw stones, dummy.

You fucking goofballs can't define what a woman is in 2025, and it's one of the many, many, many reasons why the Democratic Party died in 2024.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Don't throw stones, dummy.

You fucking goofballs can't define what a woman is in 2025, and it's one of the many, many, many reasons why the Democratic Party died in 2024.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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This will be for the thousands time, but Trumptards never understand: All the Trumptards I know are burdened by tragedy. I will whisper its nature: you are defective in body and mind.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

And as I've told you a thousand times before, nobody gives one single shit about your judgements.

Why don't you tell us who you'd like to assassinate today, Second?

We love watching you lose your mind and I honestly can't wait until the day that you finally do something really stupid IRL and you're locked away for good in a padded cell where you belong. Be sure to write to us if they give you the opportunity and let us know how hard it is to type with your nose.

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

And as I've told you a thousand times before, nobody gives one single shit about your judgements.

Why don't you tell us who you'd like to assassinate today, Second?

We love watching you lose your mind and I honestly can't wait until the day that you finally do something really stupid IRL and you're locked away for good in a padded cell where you belong. Be sure to write to us if they give you the opportunity and let us know how hard it is to type with your nose.

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I understand why Russians are poor compared to Europeans because I have seen why Trumptards are poor compared to other people. It is not because Europeans were destined to be high achievers, but because Russians and Trumptards are conspicuously defective.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You've never provided a single shred of evidence that you have more money than you need to pay rent next month.

You could easily show us all today by sending Haken a couple hundred bucks for keeping this site up, but you won't do that. You steal every movie, book and comic book you can get your hands on when you're not outright plagiarizing other people's work.

Nobody believes anything you say about yourself, and this is one of the many reasons why nobody cares about any of your judgements.

Another reason is that you show us all the time exactly who you really are by the way you carry yourself and the things you write.

I can judge you entirely based off of your chronic awful actions you put on display here all the time. All you spew here everyday is broad generalizations of a fictional monolith of people you've constructed in your tiny brain cavity over the years, and you apply that to anybody who doesn't kiss your ass and agree with everything you say.

Your mental problems are not my problem.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
He will be dead soon.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You have never thought about anybody but yourself 24/7/365 for your entire life.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Russia’s former president claimed NATO’s newest members are potential targets for revenge strikes using nuclear weapons in the event of war — as the Kremlin expands its military bases along the Finnish border.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Russia’s former president claimed NATO’s newest members are potential targets for revenge strikes using nuclear weapons in the event of war — as the Kremlin expands its military bases along the Finnish border.

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OMG!! NATO members are at risk if NATO attacks Russia!
Whooda thunk?!?


Not, apparently, Sweden or Finland.

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Originally posted by second:
Is Putin secretly one of the world’s richest men? Experts estimate a $200 billion net worth

By Mahnoor Khan and Jane Thier | November 23, 2024 at 5:01 AM EST

https://fortune.com/article/russian-president-vladimir-putin-net-worth
-worlds-richest-people/

On paper, Russian President Vladimir Putin seems like a humble statesman with a modest income.

The Kremlin claims that Putin earns an annual salary of $140,000. His publicly disclosed assets include an 800-square foot apartment, a trailer, and three cars.

But according tosome experts, he may be the wealthiest man in the world with assets totaling up to $200 billion.

While that is a ridiculous amount of money for anyone to have, this figure may not be so far-fetched for Putin. Here’s why:

Luxury watch collection

Putin is often seen sporting high-end luxury watches [plural] that are retailed for multiple times his supposed annual income.

[But] He has been pictured wearing [only one] Patek Philippe’s Perpetual Calendar watch worth $60,000 and allegedly owns a $500,000 A. Lange & Sohne Toubograph, as well as other fancy designs.

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$1.4 Billion Black Sea mansion

Putin is rumored to be the owner of a beautiful 190,000 square-foot mansion sitting atop a cliff that overlooks the Black Sea. This coastal property is reputed as the largest private residence in the country and serves as his private palace endearingly called

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“Putin’s Country Cottage”.

The estate is

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Putin’s playland...blah blah blah

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The Black Sea Mansion was designed by Italian architect Lanfranco Cirillo and cost $1.4 billion to construct. According to a Reuters investigation, the money for this extravagant project was supposedly laundered through the country’s 1.3-trillion-ruble national project called “Health”

The Kremlin denies Putin’s ownership of the palace saying it belongs to a wealthy businessman. But Russian analysts call it a blatant lie, saying that no businessman can have properties guarded by the FSB (Russia’s federal security service) with a no-fly zone over it.

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Aircraft, helicopters, and car

Apart from the

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Black Sea Mansion and

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19 other houses and

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700 cars, Putin supposedly has a collection of 58 aircraft and helicopters including a $716 million dollar plane called “The Flying Kremlin” that has a toilet made of gold. Not surprising considering his taste for grandiose, neoclassical architecture.

And to keep his options open by land, air, or sea, he also has a

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$100-million-dollar megayacht designed by a nuclear submarine maker from the Russian navy.

$200 Billion Dollar Blackmail

The $200 billion figure was estimated by financier Bill Browder who,

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in a testimony to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017, said that Putin amassed most of his wealth after a Moscow court jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003 for fraud and tax evasion:

“After Khodorkovsky’s conviction, the other oligarchs went to Putin and asked him what they needed to do to avoid sitting in the same cage as Khodorkovsky. From what followed, it appeared that Putin’s answer was, “50%” He wasn’t saying 50% for the Russian government or the presidential administration of Russia, but 50% for Vladimir Putin personally.”

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On top of all this, the famous Panama Papers revealed a network of secret offshore deals and loans worth $2 billion pointing to in 2016. Putin

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But of course, Vladimir denies all these allegations, only admitting to a different form of riches:

“I am the wealthiest man, not just in Europe but in the whole world: I collect emotions. I am wealthy in that the people of Russia have twice entrusted me with the leadership of a great nation such as Russia. I believe that is my greatest wealth.”

And despite all the paper trails

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and testimonies

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stacked against him, the Russian president continues his charade of being a dutiful bureaucrat with a simple, middle-class lifestyle.

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