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Mark Oglesby's avatar

Rob Urie, thanks for mentioning Howard Zinn and his magnificent work of 'A People's History' a must read for stupid AMERICANS!

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Rob Urie's avatar

Thanks Mark. Zinn’s description of the early encounters between indigenous populations and Western imperialists has haunted me since I first read it. It should be required reading in American schools.

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Mark Oglesby's avatar

Rob, if you haven't, you need to read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's 'An Indigenous Peoples' History of The United States' and her 'Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and A History of Erasure and Exclusion' both beyond excellent. And yes, required in schools for certain, all three.

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Rob Urie's avatar

Thanks again Mark. I just downloaded the first book and will come back to the others as I have time.

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Mark Oglesby's avatar

I would like to say "enjoy" but there's nothing enjoyable concerning content, but hey, we should always continue to educate ourselves and what we face in this world. I appreciate your dedication to advancing the knowledge and history of our world in which we were thrusted through no fault of our own. Continue to write and others will (hopefully) continue to read and become aware.

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JustPlainBill's avatar

As (I think) Kissinger once said, "To be America's enemy is dangerous; to be its friend is fatal."

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Hermes the goat's avatar

"The gist of the Times piece is that the Americans would have won the war if it hadn’t been for the Ukrainians."

Jeez. Reminds me of last year's elections: "the Democrats would've won if if it wasn't for their voters."

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John A. Joslin's avatar

“… ( perhaps )Times readers like their news several years after the fact… “-R. Urie

You can picture a master news-maker scurrying around in an abandoned subway tunnel, tending to plastic vats of mashed paragraphs , adjusting the temp & humidity while glancing @ the calendar.

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Rob Urie's avatar

Excellent John! What an image you conjured.

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Tom's avatar

"I wrote early on in the US war in Ukraine that the Ukrainians ‘would rue the day that they ever heard of the United States.’"

As you know this project has been ongoing for a long time now. While it may have kicked into high - or a different - gear once Putin consolidated power and began to pull Russia back up out of the post-USSR muck, the US (well, let's just throw in NATO) has always been meddling in Ukraine and promoting nationalistic/ethnic supremacist narratives and policies. First as a means of undermining Soviet power/unity and later as a means of "de-colonizing" the Russian Federation.

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Rob Urie's avatar

Thank you for the comment Tom. I wrote an essay called something like ‘how there came to be fascists in Ukraine’ shortly after the SMO was launched that traces the history from WWII to the present. It should be on this substack. I wrote another that featured Woodrow Wilson sending the American Expeditionary force to reverse the Russian Revolution so as to seize Russia’s resource wealth. I agree with your point that the history is long and remarkably one-sided. with the US acting as imperialists against Russia for the last century.

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Tom's avatar

Nice. I will definitely look for them. The history of US clandestine and not-so-clandestine ops in Soviet satellite states is long and ugly. As it is in post-WWII Europe.

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