173rd Airborne Brigade at Grafenwoehr

Anyone familiar with U.S. foreign policy is familiar with the fact that the American public isn’t familiar with the facts. We arm this one and that one, then that one against this one, and then the one we didn’t arm against the one we did, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You can’t tell our enemies without a scorecard, and no one’s telling Americans the real deal about Uncle Sam’s involvement in, well, anything. All this Free Syrian Rebels and anti-ISIS Shia stuff makes you long for the days when the Russians had their guys and we had ours. OK there was the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon. But it used to be like it is now, in the Ukraine . . .

As part of a joint Department of Defense-State Department effort to bolster Ukraine’s internal defense capabilities, the United States will be sending Army paratroopers to train Ukraine’s National Guard, a U.S. Army Europe spokesman confirmed to The Daily Signal Monday.

U.S. Army Europe spokesman Donald Wrenn said paratroopers from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade, which is based in Vicenza, Italy, will train six Ukrainian National Guard companies on internal security and territorial defense beginning at the end April . . .

According to Ukrainian media reports, following the training exercise, the U.S. military trainers will hand over ammunition and communication equipment to the Ukrainian troops.

Wrenn confirmed that communication equipment would be given to the Ukrainians, but added, “[W]e at Army Europe are not aware of any ammunition being provided following the training.”

The report from dailysignal.com reckons the U.S. has been hanging back on military aid to the Ukrainians for fear of escalating the conflict. That’s the official line. What’s the bet the “freedom fighters” facing the our old nemesis have plenty of ammo, guns, anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons? What’s the bet your tax money paid for it? Not that I’m complaining. I’m just sayin’ . . .

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

140 COMMENTS

  2. We really don’t need a world war over Ukraine. Not that there isn’t 10 other places it could start….

    • We promised to defend them in exchange for their disarmament…sound familiar?

      We need to get out of the UN! Our involvement will lead to our demise!

        • still, the UN is a piss poor and morally bankrupt world police force. If the system is broke, why bother with involvement on any level. These things are always more interesting to watch from a distance anyway.

  3. Motherphucker. We never learn. Tanks to Isreal and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Nothing like gasoline on a fire.

    And I’ll bet the guys with the 173rd are just happy as shite to leave Italy for the Ukraine.

    • I don’t have any issues with aid to Israel. If anything, I think we should do more to help them. They have been a pretty good ally to the U.S. for quite some time.

      • Sure they have. Them and “their amen corner in the U.S. Congress.” They’ve also been spying on us pretty steadily since their country was carved out of the previous Arab territory by the British, who are darned good at that sort of thing, and their Likud Party evidently dictates our foreign policy to State and the White House. When wunnerful Bibi the war criminal shows up, he gets standing ovations from the krew of perverts, liars, thieves, and fellow war criminals in that Congress.

        So on one hand we supply them with money, weapons systems, and that hallelujah chorus in our government and media, and we kinda wink-wink at them about their sturdy arsenal of nuke warheads, while we also also ship money and weapons systems to the surrounding Arab barbarians.

        Cui bono?

        Let us count the ways…

        Lawyers, lobbyists, heavy arms merchants, various corporations, banks, oil companies…

        Not the kids I see mangled six ways from Sunday in the VA hospitals.

        • So who in the Middle East do you want to have power? Iran? Iraq? Syria? Palestinians? Israel isn’t perfect but they do help keep some nations in check. And I do certainly have some respect for the King of Jordan. Although I don’t know him very well other than the fact he give out sweet custom Benchmade knives and executes terrorists.

          I am admittedly not an expert in foreign policy by any stretch. I don’t have the time to penetrate through the rhetoric on the left or the right. While internal US policy seems pretty obvious to me (follow the Constitutuion), foreign matters are a whole lot more complicated.

          Other than the Keystone pipeline, which is pretty much a no-brainer.

          • Frankly, I couldn’t possibly care less “who has power” in the Middle East. It’s none of our business. Most of our problems there would end if we got the eff out and quit sucking up to Israel and its amen corner here in the U.S.

            And if there is a next time here for a terrorist attack, we ID the perps and send spec ops teams after them. If it’s a state actor, we obliterate them from the earth. Trade on a level playing field and be friends with those who want to do likewise, and other than that, give a very wide berth to the various hornets’ nests in the Sandbox and the Suck.

            The Israelis can take care of themselves; I wouldn’t lose a nanosecond of sleep over those bastards.

        • “Frankly, I couldn’t possibly care less “who has power” in the Middle East. It’s none of our business. ”

          When a country that has loudly and repeatably announces their desire to attack the US with a weapon of mass destruction, not taking them for their word is unacceptable and reckless.

          When the US was founded enemies had to cross vast oceans to strike us. Today they can do it in 30 min. or less.

          It’s not pleasant, but it is stark reality.

        • Excellent post. I would like to say that davidx summed it up pretty well….
          but when you dig a little deeper you’ll see this barely scratches the surface of the problematic Israel US relationship.

          They have spied on us CONSTANTLY resulting in some of the most damaging intelligence leaks in our history. Special interest groups and thinktanks like AIPAC, and the Project for a New American Century work to insert their proxies into positions of power within the framework of western governments and wage their own agenda with other countries military and intelligence resources.

          I have no problem with Judaism, or jewish folks but political Zionism and the “Israel First” creedo has been instrumental in getting the US involved in what may be perpetual war. If you were to read some of the likudnik strategy and policy advisory whitepapers like “Securing the Realm: A Clean Break” or the PNAC document “Rebuilding America Defenses” it becomes apparent that we have been following these blueprints for invasion and occupation of Iraq, Afganistan, Sudan, Libya, and Syria, Iran, and a host of others are still on the “To DO” list.

          Here’s the problem. Every time the discussion of Israel comes up any constructive discourse is immediately drowned out by the noise from the opposing camps of Israel firsters and Israel apologists, and the “jew haters”.

          Everyone is always afraid to speak out for fear of being branded anti-semitic. Isn’t it possible to rational discussion about the problematic relationship between our nations without bringing religion into the discussion?

        • Israel’s strategy for survival is to keep the rest of the arab world in turmoil so they cannot unite against them. This works very well. The problem with this though is they have been pulling the strings of the US to create a lot of this turmoil. The GOP are desperately playing along with Bebe and it is hard to tell if they know the game or are being used.
          What exactly does Israel give back in return though That isn’t playing along with their strategy?

        • DavidX, I disagree with your assignment of SpecOps teams, if we have a bad actor in sight, just send the military after them. A foreign army might be able to whup all our SpecOps at once, laughing all the way. With heavy bombers followed by a fleet of Abrams, then by SpecOps, not so much, and not funny at all.

          • For just a handful of terrorist bad actors like on 9/11? We know now that most of them were from Saudi Arabia; how should we have done it back then? My inclination would have been to strike there. Not in Iraq.

            Your solution would seem to be more in line with a response to clearly identifiable STATE actors. Like if we knew for sure that the source of the attack/s was Pakistan, North Korea, whatever. In that case, yeah, laissez les bon temps rouler, mes amis!

      • How exactly had them being an ally actually helped US? I mean, I can see why they’d be saying “oh we’re allies!” all this time, since that means they get free guns and a veto vote in UNSC, but what does US get out of that relationship?

      • The defense of Israel is no responsibility of the US government or the American tax payer. Write them a check out of your own pocket. Quit borrowing money my kids will have to pay back.

        • +1

          And quit sending our kids as proxies to get mangled and killed for Israel’s Likud party and our own banking and oil interests. Send your own.

        • +1

          And all the espionage cases.

          The Liberty caper has never been fully investigated or its complete details revealed.

          Classified.

          Survivors and their families still beg for justice and are still shat on and then ignored.

      • In what way ?

        If anything Israel has been mischievous and has acted against American interests.

        One only has to look at the cases where they pretended to be American spies , or the current bullshit situation where We are trying to broker a peace deal with Iran and they are doing anything in their power to stop it.

    • “Tanks to Isreal and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Nothing like gasoline on a fire.”

      You might find a history of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) an interesting read. The world is filled with bad guys who’ll try to kill if they get the chance. Ignoring them, trying to appease them, won’t make them go away. The war in Spain was a precursor to World War II. Withholding military support for the Spanish government just allowed the Fascists (who had full support from Germany and Italy) to win. Isolationism is a huge fail. We may already be in WWIII. Think we can ignore that?

      • I’m not an isolationist. But pick a side and stay the course with it. We’re supposed to be the good guys. Start acting like it.

        And we never think past the next coffee break. No way sending man portable anti aircraft missiles to Afghan “freedom” fighters could come back to hurt us, right? Just as there are no good guys in Syria. We don’t need to train or arm them. Period.

        • +1

          Oh but then we’re accused of anti-Semitism and being Holocaust deniers. We must never question the holy “Crusade for Europe.”

          I’ve talked with ancient Good War vets from this country, Germany, and Russia, and the impression I get is that they know they were suckered, and for nothing. Oh sure, a lot of vets are totally invested and wrapped up in the standard party lines; to believe anything else would blow their minds and totally disrupt their versions of reality. This goes on to the present day.

          • In fact, US stayed out of Europe even after Pearl Harbor. It was Germany that declared war on US, not the other way around.

        • @ int19h:

          And Pearl Harbor was provoked by the Th. Roosevelt-Administration’s oil embargo on Japan, because US-Big Business was not so happy about the Japanese creating their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere without wanting the US to interfere. Also US-intelligence services were informed about the fact, that there would be an attack. That’s why there were only old WWI ships in the harbours and the hearts of the fleet, the aircraft carriers, were not there “by chance”.
          So, “Human rights” and the lifes of hundred thousands of slaughtered Chinese and Korean people were not the reason, the US entered the war with Japan. And the reason for NS-Germany declaring war on the US was their alliance with Japan, because the NS-leaders expected the Japanese to attack the UdSSR on its eastern front, if Germany did take care about the US (which was ridiculous). Both did never happen, Japan never open a second front on the UdSSR and NS-Germany never got the capacity to strike even the US-coast with bombers. A worthless alliance, in my eyes.

        • The agreement between Germany and Japan stated that Germany only was obligated to come into the war on Japans side if the US atacked Japan first. Japans attack on Pearl harbor voided the agreement. But Hitler went ahead and declared war anyway.

          Smart fellow, that.

          Had the US remained isolationist during the war the war would have ended with one superpower in the world. Stalins Russia. With only an isolationist US, unprepared and untested for war to balance that power how do you think the world would look today?

          • I agree that in your hypothetical scenario USSR would be the war winner, occupying the entirety of Europe (probably except for UK). But it would also take it several more years to do so, and significantly weaken it in the process. The winning strategy for US, if it wanted to be the king-of-the-hill after WW2, would be to let Germans and Soviets fight it out, then strike at the exhausted winner immediately (some US generals actually wanted to do just that IRL, but USSR was too strong by the end of the war to pull that off, and US leadership recognized that).

        • Remove American forces from the scene and I doubt it would have taken long at all for the soviets to roll up the rest of Europe. As you stated the Russians were too strong to tempt the wiser amongst us to hit them once Germany was belly up.

          Imagine a world where the isolationist Americans ceded the pacific to a militiristic Japan and Europe to the winner. Hitler or Stalin. Unprepared and untest American forces turning inward from the world stage. Would we have split the atom or left that to Hitler or Stalin?

  4. There already is a world war going on. It is just not declared by any government but the ISIS governing bodies. Whoever they are today. It’s called the muslim religion against everyone else.

    • >> It’s called the muslim religion against everyone else

      Is that why ISIS has been killing Muslims by the thousands?

      • You would do well to recognize the vast chasm between secular / moderate / “peaceful” Islam and those who would proudly murder infidels in a “Holy War.” And basically any unbeliever is an Infidel. Also, Muslims believe women are second class citizens and hang gays. They bring a special blend of violent intolerance to a world living most of their lives in condition clueless.

        • Crazy Semite sandcults of all stripes are just that: crazy.

          Bunch of nonsense from Bronze-age goatherders. I care not one whit what those eff-tards thought about anything. Jeebus is an invention, just like the rest of the nonsensical Semite belief systems.

        • >> You would do well to recognize the vast chasm between secular / moderate / “peaceful” Islam and those who would proudly murder infidels in a “Holy War.”

          My point exactly.

          >> Also, Muslims believe women are second class citizens and hang gays.

          You would do well to heed your own advice. How many gays are hanged annually in, say, Turkey or Indonesia?

        • I think we owe all these in the people in the middle east a debt, since we intruded on their happy, clueless lives and drug them, kicking and screaming, out of the 12th century into the 14th, and for some ridiculous reason inflicted the toys of the 20th on them. To redeem ourselves we should embark on a campaign, first, to destroy all motor vehicles in the area, along with all cell towers and telephone/electric poles, and generating capacity. Once they get back to camels and swords, let them live in peace.

      • Moderate Islamic apostates fit into the category of “everybody else” for ISIS and similar groups.

  5. Well, we seem to have had only a handful of years without some kinda war by this country since the very earliest days; and pretty nearly every generation throughout. With my family it started with King Philip’s (Metacomet’s) War in New England in the 1670s, through the War of Independence and on down through the last century.

    But we keep believing that every war is a just war, that our cause is 200% right and everyone else is dead wrong, and we have the power to blow up the solar system and every single one of our troops in all branches, dead or alive, is a genuine warrior-hero, and without them we wouldn’t enjoy the wunnerful freedumb and liberty we have here today. And we keep signing up in every generation and we keep coming home mangled in body and spirit and mind or in a box.

    If you don’t subscribe to all that, you must be some kind of treasonous yellow bastard who doesn’t deserve to live among all this splendid freedumb and liberty. And if you question why we arm Peter to slay Paul and then reverse it the same year you must be some kind of lunatic who doesn’t know what the real special high-up intel officials know so you should just STFU.

    I was in three U.S. wars as a soldier; we’re good buddies now with every one of the countries whose guys were shooting at me and I was shooting at them. So what was the point of all that?

    • We’ve only had 3 or 4 “good” wars-the revolution, freeing the slaves and WW 2. Everything else is highly debatable.

      • I consider those three highly debatable also.

        But I recognize I’m in a teeny-tiny minority.

        • are you saying you regard freeing this nation from foreign tyranny, preserving the union, and destroying fascist aggression in europe as causes unworthy of armed conflict? if so, your credibility could only slip further if you started in with talk of lizard men and chem trails.

        • Not if you’re BLACK, an enslaved European( or Filippino<etc.) or thought not having a USA is worth debating…

      • The invasion of the Confederate States of America was not a “good war”. It was brutal, naked aggression for the sole purpose of making sure the Southerners kept paying taxes to the Federal government.

        • Fighting to prevent the break-up of nation by traitors is not “naked aggression”, it’s protecting your country from domestic enemies. (And if shelling federal troops and declaring your state is a sovereign nation isn’t treason I’m not sure what is) Just as Washington did in the Whiskey Rebellion and Jackson almost did during the Nulification Crisis.

  6. There’s no such thing as “good” wars. There are wars you plan well and wars you lose. Sometimes you get your way and it allows you to decide how history sees the outcome of your actions.

    I don’t think fights were any less confusing in the Cold War. We started to play a game of arming shadows and sometimes it worked, often times it didn’t.
    Now we’ve continued this indirect way of fighting and it’s as unreliable and prone to backfiring as it ever was. You just hear about it sooner.

  7. So where exactly are they getting the ammo? Ukrainian standard is 5.45×39, same as Russian.

  8. Its be very heard to supply ammo to the Ukrainians. They use Soviet calibers still most front line Ukrainian units use AK-74s and 2nd line troops use both AK-74 and AKM-47 rifles. We would have to buy out Red Army commercial ammo and Romanian made ammo imports, to supply just part of there army. Most CIS and even some East European NATO nations use older Soviet calibers still. Romania uses 5.45mm and Bulgaria switched back to the AK-103 in 7.62mm. Thye don’t want M-4s, or M-16s, FALs, M-14s G-3s, G-36s period there not trained or have the support force to go NATO over night.

    Overall this is all Obama’s fault ISIS is from Obama Muslim views to support Jihadists against Syria’s government in 2010-2012, ISIS formed and now he cant decide who to back. face it Democrats and Liberals are screwing the whole world up, when the fire starts blame liberal jerks for it.

    • Are you serious?

      The US would have no problem buying containers worth of 5.45 surplus from Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, etc. Nearly a quarter of the world manufactured that cartridge for 40 years, we will have no trouble obtaining large quantities of it and funneling it into Ukraine.

      And FWIW if you have been watching the Ukraine videos, they are starting to get interesting weapons showing up to supplement the AK-74. Ukraine even manufactures their own Tavor clone in various calibers via RPC Fort armory. Some Ukranian army are seen using it now.

    • Ukraine has been fighting the Reds since before WWI. They kept it up till the late 1950s. Kyiv was founded hundreds of years before St Pete’s or Mockba.

      • They weren’t fighting the reds from WW1 to 1950s. They fought a brief war with the Bolsheviks, which they basically lost, but then Poles intervened, toyed with an independent government for a while, got their ass whipped by Bolsheviks as well, but then actually managed to counterattack and take large swaths of Ukraine (and Belarus). This all ended in 1920, and from that period and until 1939, Ukraine was basically split between the USSR and Poland. The Polish part actually saw more guerrilla warfare type resistance from Ukrainians (and Poles build some concentration camps to “deal with the problem”). The Soviet part didn’t see much until Germans invaded, and some of the Ukrainian resistance saw it as an opportunity to rise and decided to collaborate.

        • From even the early days, there was a fair amount of underground resistance to the Reds, the OUN was founded in the 1920s. For the post 1940s dig around on the OUN/OUN-B/OUN-M/UPA. As soon as WWII ended, the UPA went back to fighting Poles and Russians, which led the Poles to deport 150K Ukrainians and the Russians to do the same with about 500K just to try to get UPA under control in ’47.

          Those concentration camps the Poles built to ‘deal with the problem’ had a nasty blowback in the form of ethnic cleansing after WWII by the UPA. Oops.

          CIA funded and supported OUN throughout the cold war.

          • My point is mainly that their resistance was really very, very low key in 1920-41, and more talk than walk at that. It wasn’t a single guerrilla campaign from 1917 to 1950s.

        • I;m no defender of the Nazi’s allegedly embedded with the Ukrainians, but you left off Stalin starving millions of them in the 1930s…

          • Who cares? None of our concern.

            They all love to slaughter each other from generation to generation over there and we’ve done a pretty good job here at home with our own people so why get involved?

            Watch it on the tee-vee and cheer on your fave team.

          • @joe: my intent was not to give a complete outline of Ukrainian history in the first half of the 20th century – Wikipedia does a good enough job of that – but only the key dates and points of their resistance movement. Holodomor wasn’t one of those, curiously enough.

            BTW, one thing that many people aren’t aware of is that Bolshevik attitude towards Ukrainian (and other) nationalism actually varied significantly over time. History books usually focus on Holodomor, which was the consequence of Stalin’s rapid industrialization policies (he basically starved the countryside to build up industry in the cities), combined with his desire to root out any and all “bourgeois nationalism” that he perceived as separatist and hence a security threat to the country as a whole.

            But policy under Lenin was remarkably different, because Lenin believed in “proletarian internationalism” – which in his interpretation meant that communists must encourage the development of cultures, especially those that were historically suppressed in empires, including Russian Empire (one of Bolsheviks’ slogans during the revolution was to demolish the “prison of the peoples” that was the Empire). Consequently, once he was in control of the country, he started korenizatsiya – a program involving significant monetary investment backed by force of law to promote local cultures and languages, including Ukrainian culture. Ukraine was actually one of the primary beneficiaries, as Ukrainian culture was heavily suppressed in the Empire. A lot of translations and prints of Ukrainian books date to that period.

            Unfortunately, in the end it proved to be a trap (though I don’t think Lenin intended it to be that way) – it all made the people engaged in cultural development very visible, and then Stalin did a 180 turn and started suppressing it, they had all the lists they needed; and as all the typographies, newspaper presses etc were state-run, they could be shut down on a moment’s notice, or just switched to Russian.

  9. Yea though I walk thru the valley of death I shall fear no evil. However, the government scares the crap out of me.

  10. All it will do is get a lot of Ukrainians on both sides killed in a war that NATO and our CIA started.

    Not that killing other people to achieve the United State’s goal of military hegemony worldwide has ever really concerned the people who really run this country – our Armed Forces are basically the enforcers for international business and political organizations.

    I know – I served six years in the Marine Corps. It’s something you do when you are young, because it takes you about 20 years of adulthood to figure out how things really work.

    • +1

      There it is.

      Good point, too; they got me at 17. Got my dad at 17 for The Good War.

      It’s only been in the last few years that a lot of scales fell from my eyes, forty years on.

      Another ‘Nam vet in my group down at the VA said the other day that “maybe we didn’t kill enough Vietnamese,” this in discussing some Vietnamese woman locally, working and embezzling at the Social Security offices up here. I said we haven’t been killing enough people in Washington. I would have gone on to add: “While we were over there, our contemporaries back here were going to college and getting ahead in jobs and so forth and for the last twenty years these people have been running the country. We should have been killing them back then instead of the Vietnamese.”

      The enemy is inside the gates, people. Has been for a very long time.

    • “Not that killing other people to achieve the United State’s goal of military hegemony worldwide . . .”

      You mean like keeping the sea-lanes open with our navy, insuring that a vertically integrated economic and social system designed to provide freedom and liberty to those nations willing to embrace free-market capitalism while opposing those nations which were dedicated to creating a new dark-age? Like it or not, the US created and maintains the modern world. That’s a hegemony I’ll take.

      • “insuring that a vertically integrated economic and social system designed to provide freedom and liberty to those nations willing to embrace free-market capitalism while opposing those nations which were dedicated to creating a new dark-age?”

        That’s a nice bedtime story.

      • Keeping those sea lanes open so our jobs can be shipped overseas and China can flood our nation with cheap crap? No thanks. Let China police Asian waters.

        • Here we go again with that pablum about freedumb and liberty and free-market capitalism. Frankly, it looks to me like if we can get that going here first, maybe we can discuss exporting it to Turd World shit-holes run by maniacal dictators.

    • The Russians invaded the Crimea and annexed it to Russia and then a war to break away the East and have it annexed to Russia was started by an army of Russians led by a Russian intelligence agent named Igor Girkin. He admitted it. What did the CIA have to do with that?

      • Crimea is an s-hole, but one has always been Russia’s warm-water port. There was a “deal” much akin to the US base in Cuba in place,

    • “Not that killing other people to achieve the United State’s goal of military hegemony worldwide”

      Thanks for your service, did you memorize that marxist garbage then or later while drinking sterno?

      F*CK the LEFT, F*CK JIHAD.

      • Country has changed since I served in the 80’s. When the Marine Building in Lebanon was bombed, Reagan did the right thing – dropped some symbolic bombs and naval shelling to kill a few of the perpetrator’s supporters, and then got out of Dodge.

        If Lebanon happened in the 2000’s, we would still have 100,000 troops on the ground killing a lot of people from all sides, while espousing the necessity of spending billions in blood and treasure due to “terrorism”.

        The Cold War was brutal, but since it has ended, new enemies have been needed to keep the status-quo power structure in place. Terrorism is the perfect foil – because it will never be considered over.

        I will grant you one point – I guess it is better they spend their attention on creating external enemies, else they would find new domestic enemies, like gun owners, people who believe in property rights, etc. That will eventually happen.

    • Six years as a Marine gave you the big picture on what is happening among governments around the world, huh? Sounds like you still have a lot of growing up to do.

  11. We’re at war with Eurasia today and Eastasia tomorrow. Then back again next week. It never changes.

  12. I like the nuclear armegeddon option spoken of. Let’s do that. I’ve got plenty of RAD-X.

  13. Too bad the USG did not have some “extra” green tip to dispose of…………..makes ya wonder huh?

  14. As long as Iowa farmboys are dying to save people that spit on them, American foreign policy is right on track.

    • +1 again.

      There it is.

      And the people who send us have nothing but contempt and loathing for us. We are eminently expendable, and some of them will actually come right out and say that that’s how societies get rid of their excess young males, who don’t fit in anywhere else. Good to know now, but more 17-year-olds should hear this.

    • I graduated high school right as South Vietnam fell, and your above post had something to do with me not joining the military.

  16. and the Army guys yelled “Yeah White Hookers!!!!” Now they can bypass “Russian Bride . Com” and get them direct!

  17. Please mr. CIA jerks, do not send Ukraine any of our 22lr ammo, at least not until we are back to pre-Newtown prices/supply all around…that would just not be right.

    • So all of our .22LR ammo is going to the Ukraine? Now I know why I can never find any at Wally World.

  18. The net effect of this will probably that the ammo will go to the rebels (that have been properly trained by the Russians in large enought numbers) as they steamroll through, but not before the UKR forces have commited their fare share of war crimes.

  19. “are you saying you regard freeing this nation from foreign tyranny, preserving the union, and destroying fascist aggression in europe as causes unworthy of armed conflict?”

    Wow, that sounds like it was cribbed from a 1950’s Murkan elementary school history textbook. Our War of Independence was fomented by a minority of hotheads and we could have negotiated over time with our British overlords; they had their own hotheads and their hearts weren’t really in it, crossing the ocean repeatedly to deal with a collection of cussed pirates and brigands and rebels. Why bother? Could have been avoided. “Preserving the Union?” Seriously? Again, that’s what Murkan history textbooks taught us in the North back in the 1950s through the present day, evidently. That was fought so that the Northern industrial interests would have utter political and economic hegemony over the South, and after a murderous and genocidal war, the South was punished further, brutally. The repercussions are still banging on us today. And oh yes, The Good War, fought to destroy fascism in Europe so that it could be overpowered by Soviet communism and enable massacres and tyrannical repression on a whole other order of magnitude beyond what the Nazis did. What a resounding success that was, eh? At the end of which we massacred German POW’s, and then the Germans became our best buds in the whole world and our former allies, the Soviets, became our worst enemies. We dropped the atom bombs on mostly Japanese civilians, twice, and since then they’ve also been our best buds in the whole world.

    As someone else here said, and as I’ve said myself, it looks more and more like the wars and Two-Minute Hates of Orwell’s “1984.”

    Find us a truly good and justified American war. Good luck.

    “if so, your credibility could only slip further if you started in with talk of lizard men and chem trails.”

    Always a nifty tactic, just like the Soviets and Red Chinese use/d: imply that an opposing viewpoint is somehow tarnished by some level of insanity, craziness, lunacy, etc. But hey, thanks for playing!

    • Wow. What liberal university did you read that revisionist history in? You seriously need an education. A real one. Esspecailly on the Revolution.

      • Yeah, OK, bud.

        I’ve studied the War of Independence for over forty years, after two years of AP American History in high skool. I was born and raised within walking or horseback distance from where it all began. It’s in my bones, blood and DNA, sport. Along with probably over a thousand books read, many of them primary texts.

        If nothing else, take a look at Mercy Otis Warren’s contemporary history of the Revolution. Then meander on over and see if you can find the four volumes of it by the late Murray Rothbard at your local library. Probably won’t find either one; the liberal establishment that runs the colleges and universities in this country find such texts Anathema, writ large.

        Not to worry; I wasn’t brainwashed by libturds and commies and was in that struggle long before you were born, most likely.

        • Massachusetts public schools? Well that explains it then. I can trump you with my family anyway, they fought in the Pequot War but nobody in my direct line has fought since Archie Bunker’s “Big one”, WW2. They fought on the “right” side in all of the wars, too. For the colonists in the Pequot, King Philip’s, and French and Indian Wars, for the Americans in the Revolutionary War, for the Union in the Civil War, and for the US in WW2.

          • Yeah, OK. I ditched all the Maffachufetts publik skool brainwashing many decades ago.

            There was no “right” side to any of our stinking wars.

        • Negative. You are the epitome of arrogance. Because of your age and location to “where the shit went down” you think you happen to know exactly what, when, why, and where things happened? Please. To sit back in hind sight and belittle every US war as the “evil governments” fault it also a supremely arrogant position. If you for one second would take into account time frame, you’d have a better understanding. But you don’t, you simply hurl out what you’ve read. Even Vietnam can be considered a just war in some respects. I can trace my family history back as far as I want, that doesn’t mean I was there, or know anything about what went down.

          • I guess we have different points of views, perspectives, whatever, on Murkan military history.

      • AllAmerican, You really need to dig deeper than the glossy stuff they feed you in public school. As one with a similar family history to Davidx, there’s many inconvenient facts in our history. Even though both sides of my family were 3%ers, and one used to meet covertly with Jefferson, there is a very real chance we could have avoided the “war” aspect to our independence – but it would have likely taken more time.

        • Public school? heh, glad you know so much about me there 16V, where did I grow up again? Oh and you know the funny thing about history is, theres about a million different accounts about what happened. Just because you “feel” like one argument makes sense doesn’t make it true. And who cares about your family? I sure as hell don’t, I don’t care if he was Washington himself. You. Weren’t. There.

        • AllAmerican, Public school is where you learn the bright and shining lie. If you got it somewhere else, do tell. I did some PS and when I got to Catholic school, I learned actual history and how to use religion to keep the masses in line.

          Regardless, I don’t have to have “been there” to be able to ascertain what happened through the preponderance of the evidence. Occam’s Razor and all that.

        • 16V, I find it hilarious that you think a catholic school told you the truth about anything. Did you bend over a lot?

      • Right.

        Keep reading your “Sergeant Rock” comic books, Grasshopper.

        I killed supposed Marxists for Uncle in three U.S. wars.

          • Which three U.S. wars?

            The “Cold War.”

            The First Indochina War.

            The Second Indochina War.

            All three were basically just continuations of the two earlier world wars anyway. A century of war. For what?

            And while I was opposing Marxists overseas, my contemporaries back here, Marxists themselves, were taking control of the colleges and universities, publik skool systems, media, and a very large chunk of the government bureaucracy. Instead of killing southeast Asians I should have been killing them; they or their acolytes have been running the country for the past twenty years.

            So don’t get mad at me; I was a simple 17-year-old dupe. Like countless other poor bastards over the centuries.

      • He’s a fake. No “3 war veteran” would go around toting about “the kills” he’s made. And though veterans certainly have their own political opinions, they often don’t make the outrageous claims this child is making.

        • Hey sport, I was accused of spouting “Marxist scum talk.” My point was that I was radically opposed to Marxists and still am. I was not bragging about the kills I made; just that they were made. And again, for what?

          You obviously don’t like my opinions but we’re probably on the same side with regard to other issues here.

          Pax vobiscum.

        • DavidX, I served on the front lines for the last 10 years of the cold war, and never heard of anyone killing anyone, except for some hatchet work on the border between the Koreas, which I don’t believe you were involved in. I think you’re filled to the brim with stolen valor.

          • There was no “valor” about it. People got killed during the Cold War. A LOT of people.

            I don’t give a rat’s ass whether anyone believes in or vets my military and cop service. Have at it. I did eight years, total, in both Air Force and Army, starting out in the military police and ending up with the 56th Special Operations Wing in Thailand. Those eight years encompassed the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the Cambodian War.

            Incidentally, the Cold War didn’t technically “end” until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and then the dissolution, finally, of the Soviet Union.

  20. I have no idea what, if anything, to do about Ukraine, but I do know complete isolationism doesn’t work. Someone else fills that vacuum, and that someone is always worse than we are. I agree we should back off some from some of things we’ve been doing, but withdrawing completely makes the world worse for the most part.

    Also, the double standard used against Israel has to be because of anti-semitism. Arab and other nations spend as much lobbying our government, and all the nations spy on each other. We were recently caught listening in on Angela Merkel’s phone. To say those crafty Jews are uniquely bad for spying on us when everyone else is doing it has to be anti-semitism.

    I lean more libertarian all the time, but this hatred for Israel and the nutty isolationism repels me from joining them.

  21. Nothing outside the Western Hemisphere is any business of the US government. It is well past time to bring all of our troops home and end all aid to every other nation.

    • …and close our borders, secure our coasts and air space and mind our own business. Stop killing generations of young men, and now young women, too, in the interests of rich old fossils and chickenhawk Metternich wannabes.

      • …and then those foriegners’ Chickenhawk whatevers will conspire and destroy us in their own costly, pointless wars. You may not be interested in the world, but it is interested in all of us.

  22. So I dated this really hot chick from Ukraine back in the day and she quickly broke me of the habit of saying “THE Ukraine”. She hated that. It was always “Ukraine”. Not “THE Ukraine”. Just FWIW.

    • There’s a reason why. Country names (like any other proper names) don’t have a “the” in front of them, unless the name itself is descriptive and the article applies to one of the words in it. E.g. it’s France and Germany; and it’s the USA only because it is the United States.

      Now here’s the thing… the word “Ukraine” – or rather, Ukraina, which is the original spelling – itself etymologically derives from Old East Slavic (preserved in modern Russian and Ukrainian) “okraina”, which literally means “the edge”; when it pertains to land, it becomes “borderlands” – similar to English & Scottich “march”. The implication, of course, is that it is the Russia’s borderlands, since for a long time after the annexation it was the area where border expansion was most prominent, against Poles and Ottomans, and where most settlers went.

      So when you say “the Ukraine”, you’re saying “the borderlands [of Russia]” – which is implied to deny the separate Ukrainian national identity, relegating their country to merely a geographical region of Russia. Whereas if you just say “Ukraine”, you’re treating it as a proper noun that is devoid of any additional meaning, same as e.g. “Denmark” (the latter word is similar as it was historically a contraction of “The Danes’ Mark”).

      There is a similar distinction that can be made in Russian and Ukrainian language, with the equivalent of “the Ukraine” being normative in Russian, and “Ukraine” in Ukrainian. Hence why it’s such a sensitive subject for many Ukrainians, as they’re faced with it routinely when talking to Russophones.

      • Which is all (relatively speaking) recent history. Russia, Moscow, all of it was founded by wandering citizens of Kievan Rus. The ‘Motherland’ is Kyiv – just like the US ‘motherland’ is England.

        Moscow is barely founded before the Americas were discovered by Euros. Kyiv and it’s Czech roots go back many more centuries.

        • Kievan Rus was so called because its capital was in Kiev for most of its history, but it wasn’t founded there as a state (Kiev itself was founded much earlier, but that’s a different thing). Kievan Rus was effectively founded by Rurik and his vikings when they took over Ladoga (according to some, were invited to rule; more likely, invaded, since history is written by the victor and all that). Rurik himself only managed to conquer Novgorod in his lifetime, and it was his successor Oleg who steadily conquered all the various Slavic and Finno-Ugric lands to the south, ending up with Kiev and moving his capital there.

          So southern Eastern Slavic tribes (inhabiting the territory of what is today Ukraine, and bits and pieces of Belarus and Russia) were not really any more special in that regard then other Eastern Slavs (the rest of Russia). They didn’t found the state – the viking conquerors established it, with themselves as a ruling caste, and then gradually mingled with the conquered until they lost their identity (took just 3 generations for the rulers – the grandson of Rurik, Svyatoslav, already had a Slavic name, albeit created by translating the two Norse names of his predecessors; his son, Vladimir, had a purely Slavic name, and all the descendants from there).

          So it cannot be said that “Ukrainians founded Kievan Rus” – back then there were no Ukrainians and there were no Russians, there were just various Eastern Slav tribes that spoke a single mutually intelligible language, and the borders between which didn’t correspond to any modern borders. When they were unified in a single state, they intermingled even more heavily, and not just Slavs, but also the Finno-Ugric tribes that were (and still are) present in abundance in central and northern Russia – Karels, Izhora, Merya etc.

          Russians and Ukrainians – and the corresponding languages – only truly appeared as separate identitiess after the Mongol-Tatar conquest of Kievan Rus. Mongols sacked most of it, but only truly occupied most of today’s European Russia, and eastern parts of Ukraine. Western and central Ukraine, meanwhile, was conquered by the rising Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and annexed into their empire. That caused a strong geographic separation, and so language, culture etc was developed apart, with Mongol-occupied parts being under the influence of Mongol culture and language (and other Eastern cultures assimilated by Mongols, esp. Tukric), while GDL-occupied parts got an influx of Lithuanian, and later, when Poland joined Lithuania to form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a very strong Polish influence. Also, since Poland was strongly Catholic, Catholicism largely displaced Eastern Orthodoxy in Western Ukraine and started making some inroads into the central parts, while Russia remained staunchly Eastern Orthodox, causing further divide.

          Anyway, it wasn’t until about 14th century that distinct national identities developed from heretofore unified Eastern Slavic people to separate Muscovite and Litvin (Slavic Lithuanian) identities, with the corresponding culture and language split – the language of Muscovy becoming Russian, and Litvin eventually branching into Ukrainian and Belarusian.

          I have no idea what you mean by “Czech roots” of Kiev. There are no proper historical records of its founding, and by the time it appears in the annals for the first time, it’s already firmly settled by East Slavs (in particular, the Polans tribe). There’s a bunch of mythological accounts of the founding of Kiev, but all that I know also ascribe it to various ancient Polan leaders. Czechs are West Slavs and have split off much earlier.

    • Great. Now if we could just break people of calling highways, for goodness’ sake “THE 405” or whatever. What is up with that?

  23. Follow all the money
    Japan looked around the world and saw Russia, Great Britain, France, German with empires. So, they attacked China, they were just slower than the rest. Great Britain, the Dutch and the US stopped supplying Japan oil. They only had 18 to 24 months of steaming oil for their fleet (we sold them steel for their fleet). What was their choice? Submit to our demands that they leave China? They thought their attack would force the US to negotiate. Oh well.

    Just after the Japanese attack, Germany declared war on the US, closing the circle.

    We have virtually been at war since the late 1800’s., Spanish American War, WWI, our putting troops in the Banana Republics, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, now we generated the Arab Spring. How’s that working out for you, Hillary ?

    Read 1984, that’s what our masters want. Continuous WAR!

    Time to get a gun, the State Dept vetted the Boston Bombers, as we speak, they are vetting more.

  24. I support giving the Ukraine forces any kind of munitions they want. Russia has been doing it for their side for far too long now, including sending in their own army units. They’ve had Russian soldiers in Ukraine posting pictures on Facebook of themselves there.

    “Oh but it always backfires. Always does! We never learn!” – There’s a difference between supplying arms to some rebel group that we really don’t know and supplying arms to a standing military of an established, sovereign nation.

    • “…supplying arms to some rebel group that we really don’t know and supplying arms to a standing military of an established, sovereign nation.”

      There is a lot of of discussion/doubt as to whether or not Ukraine is actually a separate, sovereign nation, but in any case that is none of our concern. And from looking at various reports and pictures and other discussions, it would appear that Ukraine’s forces are simply neo-Nazis anyway.

      We don’t have a dog in that fight and don’t anywhere else, either. Time to pack up, go home, and leave the squabbling savages to their own devices once and for all and give up the idea of Empire.

      Unless we’re prepared to emulate the Romans, that is. Which we are clearly not. That would entail, for example, rounding up all the radical imams and hadji thugs we can find and crucifying them by the tens of thousands on the Beltway surrounding Mordor-On-The-Potomac.

      I suggest we just give it up and mind our own business; how freaking hard can it be? Don’t we have enough issues right here? Like the barbarian scum inside our own gates???

      • >> it would appear that Ukraine’s forces are simply neo-Nazis anyway.

        I know that I posted some of those photos, but don’t oversimplify it. Ukrainians are not neo-Nazi as a whole, and their government isn’t nazist or fascist. What they do have is a bunch of volunteer National Guard battalions which seem to have a strong affiliation with neo-Nazis. In particular, Azov, which has an openly neo-Nazi commander, and uses the Wolfsangel and the Schwarzesonne on their shoulder patch (note that the designs originate in the battalion, the government merely lets them use it). Basically, those guys see the ongoing conflict as a struggle of “pure blooded Slavonic Aryans” against “the Mongol horde”, and so they have been the most enthusiastic volunteers.

        So the problem isn’t that Ukraine is Nazi. It’s that some of their armed units are, and they will get at least a part of any military aid. Personally, my main worry is that after they lose this conflict (which they already all but did, but I think there’ll be another major military push by the rebels to grab some of the coast – Mariupol etc), what we’ll get is something like 1920s Weimar Germany. A republic, defeated and badly bruised, with a lot of bitterness in the population, and veterans returning from the front with their guns in hands eager to find those responsible and deal some vigilante justice to them – and then take over the country and turn it into an authoritarian direction to mobilize for a comeback war. Given that quite a few of those veterans are Nazis, you can see how exactly this might play out.

        • Thanks for the informative clarification, int19h; I would hope we could keep our meddling mitts out of it. The librul media here tends to portray one side as entirely Nazi and I should know better, but those pics kinda cemented the image for a bit there.

          • Note also that half of those photos that I’ve posted were from the other side – i.e. local Donbass insurgents and Russian volunteers helping them.

            • Yeah, I did notice that; what a mess.

              But maybe we could send Lurch over with James Taylor to sing that tune again without actually shipping them any weapons systems.

    • Did you see photos of some of the troops of that “established military” that I’ve posted above?

    • “I support giving the Ukraine forces any kind of munitions they want.”

      I support allowing them to take weapons from their adversaries. If they are in a big fight and need new weapons, yet cannot pick up the weapons of their adversary, they are using their weapons against the unarmed, or firing FA blindly over berms and around corners (check the evening news). Either way, I have no tolerance for giving them more. If anything. SELL them more.

      • It’s kinda hard to pick up weapons if you’re retreating all the way.

        And they don’t really have the money to buy weapons. Hell, they don’t have the money for basically anything right now, which is why they are trying to squeeze the IMF for more loans.

  25. YAY! Our proxy-war with Russia is out of the alpha stage and now in beta trials. If all goes well we can launch WWIII right on schedule and save the dollar!!! YAY!! *eats own bullet*

    • I don’t recall anyone here “Jew-bashing.”

      But hey, cool; now that we know there are cute Israeli chicks doing that OC thang, we can give the Likud Party and Bibi continued free reign over its ‘amen corner in the U.S. Congress’ and our foreign policy.

      And it gets old after a while that anytime someone dissents from Holy Writ concerning our relationship with our great ally Israel, they get accused of “Jew-bashing” and anti-Semitism. I call b.s.

      Likewise we ought to stay the hell out of the weapons business with the surrounding Arab shit-holes and in Ukraine. Is it just so terribly hard to mind our own business? What the hell is wrong with us?

Comments are closed.