Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "Channel 4 News"
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@Stefan Parocki : Why is the prefix of the definite article an, “insult,” as you say? If so, I never heard that before. To us in the west right now, Ukraine is, “THE Ukraine,” as in, “We salute you.” You know Angela Merkel is history now, right? Olaf Scholz (of the SPD) is Germany’s current Chancellor.
I was re-reading up on the famine, recently. After seeing a pretty good Vox video on YouTube about it. Stalin nearly wiped Ukraine’s people off the map, and he almost got away with covering the entire thing up! For all it matters, he did get away with it successfully, with barely a word of response from a sceptical west, which (once the proof had been rubbed in the western leaders’ faces) induced a coma of none committal and pusillanimity.
It seems to me that the last 100 years of history in Ukraine has been about withstanding Soviet (and now Neo-Soviet) aggression. The more I learn about them, the more my admiration spirals out of all proportion! Of all countries in the western world, Ukraine deserves our gratitude as well as our frank, uncomplicated admiration and committed support. Since their rejection of Putin’s puppet dictatorship and their loss of Crimea, they have shown nothing but sheer unalloyed courage in the face of all but hopeless odds.
And the average people of west are still not fully aware of how much their sacrifices have served to buffer the rest of the free world from Neo-Soviet expansion. The way I see it now, we simply cannot and MUST NOT allow Putin to, “save face,” as he retreats. Crimea HAS TO go back to Ukrainian hands and be protected by the UN. And the coal, oil and gas of the whole Donbas region (Putin’s real objective in both areas) must be rendered off limits to him.
If Putin loses more than he began this murderous slaughter with, and cannot maintain a plausible lie of, “victory,” to his own people let alone the rest of the world, we will be doing more to secure world peace and make Dictatorships think twice before attacking defenceless neighbours, than has been achieved since the end of World War II.
Ukraine has sacrificed too much for us all, for anything less to be acceptable now. We have the advantage and MUST press it home at all costs. And the gains from doing so will be both moral and strategic. That’s my view, at any rate. Do you agree?
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@christopherhitchens163 : The paradox being that people are wringing their hands over the morality of using cluster munitions because of their potential to do indiscriminate harm after the war is over, despite the fact that they will be used in this case by an army that is not firing them on foreign soil, but their own, will be logging every missile and where it lands and whether it went off, so as to later clean up all UXB’s and they want to do this because they are already losing innocent civilians to indiscriminate bombing and terrorism, every single day. Or haven’t you seen the missile attacks on the news? Haven’t you seen the mass graves? It is at times like this when human rights organisations risk rendering themselves unfit for purpose in the public’s opinion. And it is public opinion that makes them matter at all in the first place.
An analogy for you: It’s rather as if a doctor sited the section of the Hypocratic Oath that states, “Do no harm,” as a reason to ban all amputations, regardless of the lives they would save, simply because cutting off a limb is, ostensibly, “harm.” Paradoxical.
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@Poul Gin : It’s in China’s interests to see the west weakened, so they will attempt to take advantage of this. But, they have abstained from outright support, because they’re reliant on western trade; more so now that the world is heading back into a recession. They are still a Communist dictatorship, after all. But they’re no more insane than any leader of a dictatorship, and they know exactly what’s really going on in Russia, probably better than most of us do, actually.
Their people might be in the dark, but their government is not. And, sad but true, in a dictatorship, the people don’t matter. They have no power and cannot change anything, so their ignorance is academic.
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Johnson claims that he was, “exonerated,” by the Sue Grey report. It was seeing that tape, of that woman at the podium, laughing about the drunken antics of these scum, that set off in me, for the first time in my long life, a genuine revolutionary rage. My dad died of Covid and had already had a series of mini-strokes that made him unable to process the experience or understand why he was alone, without his four children. He asked for his wife, who had died the year before, but he kept forgetting that. He died hard. He died alone. And these bastards LAUGHED at us and said, “Let them eat cake.”
Any, “politician,” who can now look us in the face and say Johnson, “did not knowingly,” break policy or mislead the commons, is an evil LIAR. “Look at the evidence!” squeals this goon. The evidence shows that the police found he had criminally broken the law and fined him accordingly. Johnson was quoted as saying, “This is the least socially distanced room in Britain,” at his birthday party. The press staffer came out and laughed, looking drunk at the time! And this gaslighting psychopath only shows us how the Tories have flung open their doors to the type of scum that even Margaret Thatcher would have refused to tolerate!
If you want THE most powerful reason for voting for the opposition to the Tories in your county at the next general election, that interview was it!
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@neonk4068 : Not in personnel no. But they do have superior equipment and training, which is the game changer (we hope?) that has granted advantages to modern armies, having learned valuable lessons from WW II. I do not argue that it is precisely the same. I am simply drawing attention to the fact that some overwhelming successes take much longer than lay people expect. Especially when they have seen examples last year, of lighting runs across vast swathes of Ukrainian territory and built their expectations accordingly. This time, every village and town that goes back into Ukrainian hands will remain liberated, forever. These are not short term gains, but permanent. So, this is not a one-to-one comparison, simply a reason for understanding better and managing expectations.
But since you raise the matter, I hope you are writing to your representatives and demanding we do more for Ukraine, and giving them those F16’s they need?
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@armstrongcatherine : Surely there are no scales in which to weigh the balance? In every single war we learn of some war crime or other, committed by our own side, as we do here. It is to be expected from those who are walking among their own dead relatives in the rubble of their own homes, as much as it was from those who’d survived Hitler’s Blitz on London when they got to Berlin.
The difference, then as now, is that the Russian army uses rape, looting, torture and murder as their METHOD of warfare. And the very fact of their instantaneous gaslighting denials, before they could possibly have enough information to evaluate the truth of allegations, tells you all you need to know. Like our own armed forces, the Ukrainians must expect an occasional war crime, and they do, as we saw, acknowledge it, and deal with it through Courts Martial. They treat it as the, “exception,” because that’s what it is.
The Russian army (and I say this without value judgement) is made up of largely under educated, poverty stricken young men, with a Third World mentality. Russia still has the highest stats on alcoholism in the world, to boot. They see acts of terror and cowardice as, “normal,” not exceptional, and they believe that conquering a city grants them the right to rape, loot and murder. And their military culture is built around, “the spoils of war,” like medieval bandits.
They are so unlike us in their thinking and superstitious belief systems as to be practically aliens. And it must be GALLING for Zelensky’s advisor to have to even tolerate such a badly put question with its false equivalencies, its utter discounting of the suffering of Ukrainian citizens and its almost brutal blindness as to how it offers assistance to the Russian enemy by drawing those false comparisons.
It’s not the question that was wrong. It needed to be highlighted, to draw out the differences between the two armies for the world to see. It was the blundering, aggressive and frankly obtuse manner of its asking that was so offensively wrong headed.
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