Total Kievan Debellation

Substack ^ | 1/9/25 | Big Serge

[EnderWiggin1970]

On March 5, 2022, the wreck of the sailing ship Endurance was found in the depths of the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. This, of course, was the vessel lost in Ernest Shackelton’s third expedition to Antarctica, which became trapped in the ice and sank in 1915. The story of that expedition is an extraordinary tale of human fortitude - with the Endurance lost to the ice, Shackleton’s crew evacuated to a loose ice flow where they camped for nearly 500 days, drifting about the Antarctic seas, before making a desperate dash across the open ocean in an open 20 foot lifeboat, finally reaching the southern shore of inhospitable and mountainous South Georgia Island, which they then had to cross on foot to reach the safety of a whaling station.

The story itself has an essentially mythic quality to it, with Shackleton’s crew surviving for years on free floating ice floes in the most inhospitable seas on earth. For our purposes, however, it is the story’s coda that is particularly interesting. In Shackleton’s memoirs, he remembered that, upon finally reaching the safety of the Stromness whaling station, one of his first questions was about the war in Europe. When Shackleton first set out on his ill-fated expedition on August 8, 1914, the First World War was less than a week old, and the German Army had just begun its invasion of Belgium. There was little expectation then that the war would proceed as it did, unleashing four years of slaughterous positional warfare that engulfed the continent.

Shackleton, having been adrift at sea for years, clearly did not imagine that the war could still be raging, and asked the commandant of the whaling station “tell me, when was the war over?”

[EnderWiggin1970]

These posts by Big Serge are always long and always filled with good insight. Key takeaways from this article:

1. Ukraine prioritized creating new units over replenishing existing ones in the field, to create a mirage of a power army forming up to retake lost ground. In reality this weakened their frontline forces, and the "on paper" new units have simply been broken up and deployed scattershot - or simply are deserting.

2. For all the talk of all the $$$ being sent to Ukraine, actual weapon deliveries have been drying up as NATO has little left to send. "In 2023, Ukraine’s backers pledged 384 tanks. This dropped to just 98 in 2024" and "of the 500 ATACMs sent by the United States, perhaps 50 are left in Kiev’s stockpiles."

[Red Badger]

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The war, therefore if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that the hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word “war,” therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that is exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This—although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense—is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
― George Orwell, 1984