An American tourist in Russia
There is a new War on the Rocks article making the rounds on pro-Russian channels as proof that the Ukrainian armed forces are in disarray. Maybe, but I read the article and I find it ridiculous and unhelpful. Keyboard warriors and armchair generals really will believe anything if it confirms their pre-existing biases.
Why is All Quiet on the Western Front parroted as a great anti-war message when it didn’t even work on its original audience? It didn’t work on the second, third, or fourth audiences either. What do you call a person who tries the same thing over and over again expecting a different result?
My guess is that All Quiet on the Western Front isn’t really about the futility of war, regardless of how the author tried for that to be the message. Unfortunately, in the real world, an artist’s intended message doesn’t matter. All that matters is what the audience interprets the message to be. The interpreted lesson, the real lesson, of All Quiet on the Western Front is not that war is bad. It is losing a war that is bad.
Actually, just my top ten stories about anything, but it was February/March 2022 that this site first got “big” so it’s the same thing. I try to push a certain style of messaging, and by “messaging” I mean the Russian perspective, which I try to relay the best I can in the most collected manner possible. It’s nice and flattering that I accumulated a decent amount of readers over the past 15 months, but unfortunately, this perspective never quite gained the traction I would have liked. In part that’s because I didn’t post as consistently as I would have liked, but it’s mostly because I said quite a few things that the “pro-Russia” echo-chamber simply does not want to hear. This collection of personalities only want to hear certain things and, frankly, those things do not include what’s true. They want confirmation bias for their own “western civilization” narrative that excuses their own inaction, and conveniently lumps responsibility for action on an imaginary Eurasian alliance. Regardless, it’s good to look back at some topics that were forgotten and sidelined over time.
