Comments by "George Carty" (@GCarty80) on "Jake Broe" channel.

  1. Which Americans (other than the Rosenbergs) got the death penalty for working with Russia?
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  2. "The Russian state is not based on treaties." -- Sergey Kiriyenko, 2017
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  3.  @nevco8774  I'm not convinced this notion of a northern Chinese outlet to the Pacific makes much sense: if Russia collapsed to the point that the Chinese moved on outer Manchuria, wouldn't the US be likely to greenlight Japan taking Sakhalin and the Kurils (both of which were Japanese prior to World War II)?
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  4. Yup -- they reminded me of inmates liberated from Nazi concentration camps.
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  5.  @JakeBroe  The "March of Ukrainian Nationalists" (the song that you had a soldier play on a recorder on one of your videos a few weeks back) actually concludes with a call to create a "united Ukrainian state, free and strong from the San to the Caucasus". I often thought of that line myself, especially when Russia was plotting to use a Black Sea naval blockade to cause a famine in the Middle East (presumably as a means to flood Europe with starving Arab refugees).
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  6. Note that the USSR was the only country to be actually kicked out of the old League of Nations (in 1939 for invading Finland) as opposed to leaving voluntarily like the other aggressor nations did.
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  7.  @admiralmonocle3874  No, but their battle experience against Russia would be invaluable for training NATO soldiers.
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  8.  @JakeBroe  One of my big worries is that a defeated Russia will go full death cult, with a Russian Hitler (possibly Putin but more likely not) who embraces the prospect of nuclear war. The arguments pointing to that possibility are: * Russia has always relied on military might rather than soft power to project its influence, * The only military might Russia will still have by then is its nukes, as its conventional military will have been well and truly trashed in Ukraine, and * Even Russia's nukes will likely have a limited shelf-life, due to the same all-pervasive corruption that did so much to cripple Russia's conventional military. Perhaps they'll start thinking "use 'em or lose 'em"?
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  9.  Johnny H Johns  Isn't the United States full of dead shopping malls too, due to a frenzy of overbuilding during the noughties?
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  10. Wasn't Belarus (at least prior to 2020) a heavily subsidized propaganda showcase for Russkiy Mir (much as during the Cold War Cuba was for the Soviets and West Berlin was for NATO)? AIUI Russia sold Belarus vast quantities of oil and gas for a nominal price (far more than Belarus needed itself: most was re-exported for full price to the EU) and the profits were used to pay for a generous Soviet-style welfare state.
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  11. As a Brit I now hate Trump almost as much as I hate Putin himself.
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  12. Which non-Tesla, non-Chinese EV brands would people here recommend?
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  13. Indeed it is: Gazprom is a (state-owned) natural gas company.
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  14.  @CMY187  To be exact, Tsar Alexander II was one of the first people to be killed by a suicide bomber.
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  15. ​ @BabyBird691  I'm not sure Chamberlain was even a pacifist: my impression was that he was trying to buy time to re-arm.
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  16. "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlement to a McHouse and a McCar" -- James Howard Kunstler, 2005
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  17. The main reason why NATO hasn't fired a shot is because Russia is so hopelessly (and obviously) outmatched in conventional weaponry that they'd go nuclear immediately.
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  18. The Western world stands with Ukraine, but Russia is still pretty popular in much of the global South, perhaps due to OPEC-style solidarity between commodity-exporting nations?
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  19.  @matthewg2530  I'd advise anyone in such a blood-red state or congressional district to register as a Republican so they can vote against any pro-Russia candidates in the Republican primary elections.
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  20.  @xcrockery8080  Surely if British ground-based air defences in 1940 were more dangerous to their own people than to the Germans, it was because of the limitations of technology at the time? The invention of the proximity fuze meant that by 1944 (when the Nazis started launching V-1 flying bombs at London) the British defences were far more effective.
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  21. The main reason the Wehrmacht relied on trains and horse carts for its logistics was because Nazi Germany was desperately short of oil: the whole point of 1942's Fall Blau was to capture Soviet oil supplies in the Caucasus.
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  22. Didn't donate last time, but I decided to chip in £50 this time!
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  23.  @garnertempest4069  And Labour won back in July largely because those people split the right-wing vote, much as Bill Clinton won two elections largely because Ross Perot split the vote.
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  24. A Marshall Plan for Ukraine and a Morgenthau Plan for Russia, perhaps?
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  25.  @fluffcrunchmini4572  My point was more that the Rosenbergs were a really extreme case, given that they gave the Russians literal nuclear weapon secrets.
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  26.  @TheFeldhamster  Another thing that really hurt Russia during the '90s was the economic division of labour within the Soviet Empire: most of the consumer manufacturing industries were in the satellite states, while Russia proper produced mainly oil and gas (whose price was low during the '90s, and rose during the early Putin years bringing the prosperity that legitimized his regime) along with weapons (for which there was no market during the '90s, as countries worldwide were looking to cash in on the "peace dividend" meaning that anyone who did want weapons could buy second-hand ones dirt cheap).
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  27. Although the fact that Poland welcomed Chechen refugees while refusing Middle Easterners suggests their issue is with the cultural values of the Middle East rather than with Islam per se. Tying in with your own good point about gender balance, I wonder if it's down to the misogyny of Arab and Afghan cultures? I do believe that Putin was trying to flood Europe with more Middle Eastern refugees too, by causing famine there with a Black Sea grain blockade: good thing the Turks seem to have faced him down on that point!
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  28.  @matufamenulis8527  It seems like the US is being let down by the biological frailty of its current President: that's a surprising failure mode that I wouldn't normally have expected in a republic. (Although it is of course common in traditional monarchies: for example if the king fails to produce an heir there can be a war of succession when he dies.)
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  29. Kind of off-topic, but do you think this war in Ukraine will result in the WWII Eastern Front falling out of fashion as a setting for video games (such as the Call of Duty series)?
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  30. It's a real pity that the EU doesn't have provisions to kick out a member which has gone bad like this.
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  31. Vance's entire rise to power was suspicious, almost like he was groomed for the job.
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  32.  @sateentuoksu  Associated Press, a news agency based in New York City.
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  33.  @theresa1305  Do you think Putin may have a hand in America's crisis with asylum seekers crossing the Mexican border? I'm thinking of how Putin got his toady in Minsk to fly Middle Eastern refugees into Belarus and then push them across the Polish border.
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  34. Surely Ron DeSantis would only be able to gerrymander boundaries in Florida not in any of the other 49 states?
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  35.  @onerva0001  I think he's classing the whole Euromaidan thing as "picking a fight with Russia".
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  36. The definition of "treason" in US law is extremely narrow, pretty much only applying to collaborating with a country in a state of hot war with the US (so Russia wouldn't count). Even the Rosenbergs were (strictly speaking) executed for espionage rather than treason.
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  37. Russia won't be able to "pay trillions USD equivalent in reparations" once this war is done: maybe they should lose part of their own territory? Karelia to Finland, Kaliningrad for auction between Germany, Poland and Lithuania, Kuban to Ukraine and Sakhalin Oblast to Japan...
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  38. Stalin would be proud.
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  39.  @martinlatvian5538  Wow, didn't realize Kyiv was that old! That would mean it was founded very shortly after the death of Attila the Hun.
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  40. Although I'm surprised there weren't more WWII-obsessed Brexiters who fell for Russian propaganda about "Ukrainian Nazis".
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  41. Ukraine's "Sudetenland" was Crimea.
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  42. You were a staunch Republican when it was the party of Reagan, not when it was Russia's fifth column in the US.
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  43.  @FredrikLimegård  I'd say ONLY that: hasn't Russia pretty much always been ruled by expansionist tyrants?
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  44.  @valiant9563 I thought the concern about attacking Russian oil infrastructure wasn't that it would risk a nuclear response, but that it would help Trump retake the White House by causing gasoline prices to skyrocket in the US.
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  45.  @cplcabs  I wonder if Japan is hoping that Russia will collapse in the near future, allowing them to reclaim the island of Sakhalin (or Karafuto, as they call it)?
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  46. Although there is the complication that in the eastern half of pre-war Poland the ethnic Poles were a minority: most of the people were Ukrainians and Belarusians.
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  47.  @riversandrds  Peter Thiel?
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  48.  @user-vg9tt4ut1f  Which non-nuclear escalations do you think Western leaders may be afraid of in particular?
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  49. One reason why there are no Arab democracies is that the culture there is still built around tribes, clans and extended families. Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq (to give one example) was basically just the rule of his Tikrit-based clan.
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  50. A-10s are slow by jet standards and would be no match for the advanced air defense systems which both sides in this current war have available to them.
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