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Samizdata quote of the day

A no fly zone is actually pretty similar to zero covid.

A nice “feel good” solution & very easy to demonise anyone who disagrees with it. But as soon as you consider the practicalities, it becomes clear that both are entirely unrealistic without huge negative consequences.

Amy the Sceptical Zebra

24 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Zerren Yeoville

    Is there any credible scenario for a NATO-imposed ‘no fly zone’ over Ukraine that doesn’t go something like this:

    1. NATO declares ‘no fly zone’ over Ukraine.
    2. Russia ignores it, sends fighters / bombers in anyway.
    3. NATO shoots down Russian aircraft.
    4. Later the same day, several hundred million people are dead and most of Europe plus significant areas of the USA and Russia are radioactive ash.

    That would be a ‘huge negative consequence’ if ever there was one.

  • Martin

    Completely agree

  • bobby b

    Mutual nuclear annihilation would probably end mandatory vaccination laws, so it has that going for it.

  • rosenquist

    Maajid Nawaz is also worth a read on this, There are really no good guys in this fight.

    if Zelensky had his way with a no fly zone Europe and America would almost certainly be dragged into a world war.

  • NickM

    Mutual nuclear annihilation woulhael?d probably end mandatory vaccination laws, so it has that going for it.

    bobby b, are you taking the Michael. I hope you are. I really do.

  • There are really no good guys in this fight.

    As unbearable as you find it, actually there are. Are the Azov battalion actually Nazis? Sure do look like it. What share of the vote do actual neo-Nazis get in Ukraine? Really small.

  • bobby b (March 6, 2022 at 9:41 pm), IMHO Tracey’s thread is written in an intemperate style which lowers its value. The Ukraine, having been attacked, of course asks for every kind of help it can think of.

    (In WWII, the Russians demanded invasion of France long before it was feasible, in part maybe from genuine fear, desperation and ignorance, but also so they could treat all the help they did get as a pitifully inadequate substitute for it, instead of having to say thank you. Zelensky is and will be more courteous.)

    Michael Tracey’s stuff about ‘choreography’ strikes me as merely getting in the way of understanding the situation. I’m reluctant to offer Claire Berlinski as the voice of (relative) reason, but I follow her remarks about making Putin worry about our sanity, rather than just we about his – in part because Trump would not need Claire’s help to think of that. Claire simultaneously thinks implementing a non-fly-zone would be very unwise and said it would have its uses if ‘no fly zone’ is heard from people in polls, and journalists in opinion columns, and of course Zelensky (who has a propaganda war to fight as well as a shooting war).

    Claire is advising the well-known “strategy of the weak negotiating position”, where politicians sell Putin on the idea they know it’s unwise “but my voters are putting me under increasing pressure – you know what voters are like” and so Russia has to concede something. Trump would do it better, but it may be as good as it gets, as far as any current western leader is concerned.

  • bobby b

    “bobby b, are you taking the Michael. I hope you are. I really do.”

    Had to look that one up. “Taking the Michael . . .” Huh. Never heard that one before. “Separated by a common language . . . ”

    Yes. Oh, yes.

  • bobby b

    “There are really no good guys in this fight.”

    I suspect that there are, but like in most coalitional fights, there are no sides without some bad people. So we all see the bad people we expect to see.

    (I had one of those “read the room, dad” talks in a bar out east a month or so ago, sitting and drinking with offspring’s friends and co-workers. The talk came around to Ukraine, and she wanted me to know that one woman’s husband was in Kiev, one guy’s friends and roommates were in a boat offshore, and none of them knew for sure where another friend who was shuttling around was, and they were expecting trouble, so she told me to just avoid the politics in it. It was a good time for black and white. Might still be.)

  • Chester Draws

    Russia would not escalate to nuclear war over a no-fly zone. That would be, literal, suicide for Putin. Moreover it would be suicide for everyone involved in the nuclear process, so I would be bet that no missiles would be fired.

    Now if tanks rolled into Russia proper, he might.

  • Snorri Godhi

    The notion of Nazis taking orders from a Jew would be quite intriguing, if i could bring myself to take it seriously.

  • bobby b

    Niall Kilmartin
    March 6, 2022 at 11:33 pm

    bobby b (March 6, 2022 at 9:41 pm), IMHO Tracey’s thread is written in an intemperate style which lowers its value.

    I do recognize that it’s more of a polemic than a dispassionate essay, but I figure that, in a time where polemics have sort of occupied the field, it’s good to get them from several views. That may be all you get. The dispassionate essays are . . . thin on the ground right now.

  • Henry Cybulski

    @Snorri Godhi,
    Not necessarily taking orders from a Jew, but allied for mutual benefit. My understanding is the Azov Battalions are strident anti-Russian nationalists first, Jew-haters second.

  • Paul Marks

    Good post – and, mostly (not all), good comments.

    Mr Putin is an evil Dictator and he has attacked the Ukrainian people – that is the media narrative and it happens to be TRUE. The media do lie (they lie lots and lots) – but that does not mean that they lie about EVERYTHING. Assuming that because the “Great Reset” international establishment (the media and so on) lie a lot, means they lie about EVERYTHING is a mistake that some of my brothers and sisters on the right are making.

    If Dr Klaus Schwab or the BBC say “1+1=2” it does not mean that it does NOT make 2. They are, on this occasion, telling the truth.

    That does not mean that they (the international establishment) are not lying totalitarians – it means that in this particular case they are telling the truth.

    As for thermonuclear war – I think that, on balance, thermonuclear war would be a bad thing. So, again on balance, I am not in support of a “no fly zone”.

  • I do recognize that it’s more of a polemic than a dispassionate essay, but I figure that, in a time where polemics have sort of occupied the field, it’s good to get them from several views. (bobby b, March 7, 2022 at 2:09 am)

    +1 to all that – and indeed my response, quoting the views of a Claire Berlinski I’d just been rubbishing, was rather in the same style. 🙂

  • There are really no good guys in this fight.

    A fight like the one in Ukraine is never going to bring out the better angels of our nature, but the Russian forces are clearly the aggressors as they have been multiple times since Putin’s rise (Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, etc.).

    Sure, the troops might have been misled about going from a training exercise to a full-on invasion, but I’m guessing the commanders knew what was going on, even if they didn’t know why.

    As for Russian justifications, these seem so weak and unlikely that even the most pro-Putin observers are struggling to pull them off with a straight-face. A more honest assessment is that they are at best “exaggerations” as with the supposed “Nazis” of the Azov Battalion (and Russia has it’s own problems with the Wagner Group) or outright falsehoods.

    On the charges that Ukrainian forces had made incursions into the separatist territories within their borders, that wouldn’t surprise me, but I would argue that is justifiable on the basis of attempting to reclaim their own sovereign territory, albeit the methods chosen might be questionable to Western sensitivities, it is at least arguable that Ukraine has the right to do that.

    All told, the balance of “evil doing” seems to be firmly on the Russian side and where the Ukrainians are busy “evil doing” it is in response to the provocation of the invasion itself rather than simple maliciousness. There are definitely parallels with the 1939 invasion of Poland by the Nazis here, as if Putin was playing from a revised edition of the same songbook as Hitler, Ribbentrop and the rest of that execrable bunch. It ain’t a good look.

  • Snorri Godhi

    The media do lie (they lie lots and lots) – but that does not mean that they lie about EVERYTHING. Assuming that because the “Great Reset” international establishment (the media and so on) lie a lot, means they lie about EVERYTHING is a mistake that some of my brothers and sisters on the right are making.

    There are (non-fake) news that the Western media could not possibly hide, eg they could not possibly deny that there are Russian troops in the Ukraine.

    Then there are news that cannot be hidden forever, but can be falsely labeled “fake news” until people lose interest.

    Usually, it is possible to decide whether news are fake or not, by looking for internal contradictions or falsification by know facts, such as the price of energy.

    The fact that Obama and Biden drove up the price of energy, while Trump drove it down, falsifies the media narrative that Trump is pro-Putin.

    But it also falsifies the pro-Putin “”rightist”” narrative that the American establishment wants to destabilize Russia.

    Some people, however, are extremely impervious to the logic of falsification. I call it delusional insanity, but it could be called an extreme tolerance of cognitive dissonance.

  • Paul Marks

    Snorri Godhi.

    “extremely impervious to the logic of falsification” is, I think, the better way of putting it.

    And it is just as true of (for example) the Economist magazine (which is carrying on its lie-fest about President Trump being pro Putin) as it is of those people making excuses for Mr Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Here is a Trump supporter “making excuses for Mr Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine”, as Paul neatly puts it. (via Instapundit.)

    The cognitive dissonance is so blatant that it hurts.
    3rd paragraph:

    Biden is the one who funded Russia’s invasion. Biden killed our pipelines, killed coal and banned drilling, which made us dependent on Russian oil — which made Russia filthy rich and arrogant. Biden paid for this war.

    (So far, so good.)

    6th paragraph:

    George Soros pulls Biden’s strings. Soros is on the side of Ukraine. Soros recently said the whole world must support Ukraine.

    So this twit believes that
    A. Soros pulls Biden’s strings;
    B. Soros is on the side of Ukraine;
    C. Biden is paying Russia to wage war on Ukraine.

    It takes a special kind of brain to tolerate such dissonance.
    A kind of brain that i hope i shall never have.

    —- For good measure, the twit goes on to say that

    It’s been reported Soros funded Volodymyr Zelenskyy and then installed him as president of Ukraine

    In other words, Soros pulls the strings of a president of Ukraine who is investigating the family of the president of the US whose strings Soros also pulls.

    All of which further supports my views on the effects of the modern diet on the human brain.
    Trump himself seems to be immune, but not all his supporters are.

  • In other words, Soros pulls the strings of a president of Ukraine who is investigating the family of the president of the US whose strings Soros also pulls.

    I went long on tin futures after reading that as tinfoil hats will be the must-have fashion accessory for 2022 😀

  • Paul Marks

    I despise George Soros – but I suspect that, these days, he is an old wreak of a man (and I know the feeling) rather than the Puppet Master of the world.

    His son is (as I have said before) more Marxist than liberal – but his son is also DUMB. If someone as dumb as Soros Junior is the ruler of the world, then the world deserves its fate.

  • GregWA

    Paul, “If Dr Klaus Schwab or the BBC say “1+1=2” it does not mean that it does NOT make 2”. It also does not mean they believe it!