BootsAndBenedictus

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@Brcremer How can I contact you? I have a question

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

This is inhumane, cruel, and evil.

All while this administration continually claims to “uphold Christian values.”

There is nothing Christ-like about this. There is nothing human about this.

“Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me.”-Jesus

[Chief Nerd @TheChiefNerd]

🚨 Sylvester Stallone Goes Off on the U.S. Engaging in Foreign Wars

“Now I realize all war is futile. It's stupid. It's a mechanism to make tons of money for the War Department and its manufacturers. These kids just going out there into a grist mill, being chopped up — and then when they come back with no arms, ‘Oh sorry, you're on your own.’ I hate it and I'm bitterly opposed to it.”

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@slantchev Бронислав Ебланцев

[Marta Havryshko @HavryshkoMarta]

ON CLASS AND WAR

People like Meaghan Mobbs, a representative of the American establishment, cannot understand why I defend Ukrainian working-class men against forced conscription.

Let me explain.

I was born into a working-class family.
I grew up in a village.

My father worked as a driver, a builder, and a construction worker. Now he has cancer. And a pension of 80$ per month.

My mother, in the brutal post-Soviet 1990s, traveled to Russia to sell products made by our local glass factory just to keep our family fed. Hauling those heavy loads destroyed her back. She suffered from spinal hernias for the rest of her life. She died of cancer at 60.

We lived in a village, in a house without indoor plumbing. While other kids went to art classes and extracurricular activities, I worked in the fields because my family had to do it to survive.

All my life, I dreamed of escaping poverty and getting an education. Fight for change.

And now that I am a mother to a son, I am not prepared to sacrifice him to a war while the Mindiches, Zuckermans, Zelenskys, and others count their money — while my son is expected to fight in a war they refuse to bring to an end.

And there are many Mothers, Sisters, and Daughters like me. Hundreds of thousands of us. Millions.

Among them are my own relatives who have lost their husbands. They were ordinary working men without university degrees. They did not have the money or connections to buy their way out when the draft officers came for them.

Now they lie in the cold, damp earth.

We are tired of graves.

We are tired of being told to surrender the most precious — and ultimately the only — thing Ukraine’s corrupt political class has left us: Our Lives.

This war has a class dimension that establishment voices would rather not discuss.
Those with money, connections, influence, foreign passports, and powerful friends have options. Working-class men have far fewer.

And then the privileged have the audacity to lecture working-class families about sacrifice.

No.

That is why I will continue to defend ordinary people's right to resist forced conscription. I will defend the people who refuse to become expendable bodies for a political class that demands sacrifices it so often does not make itself.

Glory to the Deserters!
Glory to Peace!
Glory to Life!

The photo was taken in my son’s room in Lviv before the war. A room he will probably never return to.

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@mobbs_mentality Aren't you useless too? And morally corrupt as well

[Marta Havryshko @HavryshkoMarta]

@mobbs_mentality Meaghan Mobbs, the daughter of retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, Donald Trump’s former special envoy for Ukraine, calls me a “Marxist” because I criticize Ukraine’s busification that disproportionately shifts the human burden of this war onto poor and working-class Ukrainian men,

They are expected to pay for the geopolitical ambitions and military calculations of political elites with the only currency they possess: their bodies and their lives.

So let’s talk about Class.

Let’s ask whether class really has nothing to do with this war — or whether dismissing class is considerably easier when you happen to occupy the right one.

♦️Meaghan is the daughter of a powerful American general who advised a U.S. president.

I am the daughter of a driver and construction worker who spent his life doing hard physical labor so that I could get a university education in Ukraine. Today, he survives in Ukraine on a pension of roughly $80 a month.

♦️Meaghan runs several foundations and organizations, with publicly reported compensation reaching into millions of dollars a year.

I was a professor at Clark University, earning roughly $73,000 a year. I do not own a car — something that, in much of the US, is less a luxury than a survival tool. My son takes the school bus. Once a year, his school gives him a Food Stamp gift card through a program for children from low-income families.

♦️Meaghan is an American citizen and a member of the American establishment. I am a Ukrainian citizen in the United States — a refugee, an Eastern European immigrant, and a mother.

While she speaks about sacrifice, I live with death threats from Ukrainian neo-Nazis with ties to American neo-Nazis — threats serious enough that the FBI and state police advised me not to open suspicious mail.

Perhaps this is "Marxism". Or perhaps it is simply arithmetic.

But nowhere is the arithmetic of class more brutal than in war.

Every relative of mine who has been killed in this war came from the working class. They had no money, connections, foreign passports, prestigious surnames, or means to buy distance from the front.

So they went.
Now they are in the ground.

Their kids are growing up without fathers. Their wives are living without husbands. Their families will carry the consequences long after the people who speak most enthusiastically about sacrifice have moved on to another conference, another panel, another strategic objective.

And we are told this is “heroic.”

Of course it is heroic. The courage of the men who fight and die is not what I question. What I question is the obscenity of a political order that turns the heroism of people with the fewest choices into a renewable strategic resource.

It is remarkably easy to demand more heroes when someone else supplies the corpses.

That is the class question at the heart of this war.

Who gets to formulate the grand strategy, and who gets dragged into a van? Who speaks about “victory” and a “just peace” from Washington offices, conference stages, and well-funded institutions — and who leaves a widow and children behind in a Ukrainian village? Who gets a salary, a title, and a platform for explaining why the war must continue, and who gets a military funeral?

Those are not Marxist questions.

They are moral questions.

And calling the person who asks them a “Marxist” is a convenient way of avoiding the answers.

There is something particularly grotesque about affluent members of the foreign-policy class romanticizing the sacrifice of working-class Ukrainians. They speak reverently of courage, resilience, heroism, and the necessity of continued sacrifice. Yet the “sacrifice” remains curiously abstract because it is almost always somebody else’s.

Someone else’s father.
Someone else’s husband.
Someone else’s son.
Someone else’s grave.

The people whose lives become units in geopolitical calculations have names, families, mortgages, frightened children, aging parents, unfinished kitchens, ordinary jobs, and plans for next summer.

Their lives are not cheap because they are poor. Their deaths do not become morally inexpensive simply because someone in Washington, London, or Brussels can fit them into a theory of deterrence.

And this is precisely why class matters.

It matters because wars may be described in the universal language of nations, democracy, security, sovereignty, and justice, while their costs are distributed with extraordinary inequality.

Some people debate war.
Other people become its raw material.

So yes, Meaghan, let’s talk about class.

Because before asking Ukraine for another generation of “heroes,” perhaps the people making that demand should be required to look directly at who is actually being asked to die — and to explain why the lives of men they will never meet should remain the cheapest available currency for purchasing their preferred version of a “just peace.”

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@RobynUrback Don't even try to rob my back!

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@RnaudBertrand It's a man

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@HavryshkoMarta OMFG, how can he be so dumb and yet so self-righteous?

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@mobbs_mentality When will it be your turn to die a hero’s death, if that is the most valuable thing in the world?

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

Polish Radio published and then deleted an English version of an article about Ukrainian losses - 27k a month. The Polish version is still available. The Polish prime minister revealed the number when speaking to the Polish parliament. No major Western outlet published this.

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@EvanKirstel @factpostnews They are still giving Zelensky weapons and intelligence. On the other hand they started deporting Ukrainian refugees. Huge win for MAGA.

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@AvivaKlompas Genocide is not funny

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@6ixbuzztv Ask him about press gangs. If there's one normal journalist left in Canada, they should ask Zelensky about gross human rights violations in Ukraine. Stop pretending he's a hero. He leads the Ukrainian people to the slaughter.

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@SStricklandMMA Fuck the US. I'm done with even looking at this country or caring about its news. When you go from Sodom don't look back.

[Jacob Wendler @jacob_wendler]

Scoop: Israel has launched a new effort to sway public opinion in the US by influencing how LLMs paint it in response to chatbot queries. The foreign influence campaign includes a fake think tank set up to feed content to tools like ChatGPT. More below @politico 🧵

[🪰 Fly 🪰 (parody account) @Walter_Bl4ck]

@haider1

[BootsAndBenedictus @BootsBenedictus]

@LifeNewsHQ Americans are fucking crazy. Both sides of this debate in the US are lunatics that should be isolated from the world. No abortions at all is barbarism. Abortions up to birth is barbarism.

[Israel Exposed @xIsraelExposedx]

This is Mathias Döpfner, the man responsible for running a disinformation campaign in the EU for Israel.

He runs Axel Springer and controls roughly 95% of the group. Through it, he shapes the reality that millions of people read every single day. Bild. Die Welt. Politico. Business Insider. The Daily Telegraph in Britain. Fakt in Poland. Dozens of outlets across the continent, all drawing from the same source.

In a leaked email, Mathias Döpfner unapologetically names the country he's working so hard for: "Zionism uber alles. Israel my country."

For that kind of service, Israel awarded him the Presidential Medal of Honor. He received it alongside Miriam Adelson.