8 ms·

There are old stories of the Russians planting mines inside children's toys during some of the later cold war conflicts. This is starting to feel a bit like th

There are old stories of the Russians planting mines inside children's toys during some of the later cold war conflicts. This is starting to feel a bit like that. Nobody had any way of knowing who was holding those pagers when they sent that packet but they still distributed thousands of munitions throughout the populace and pressed the red button. Now there are probably at least a hundred or so still out there that haven't exploded and are just live UXO sitting in people's desk drawers. I'd say it's pretty fucked.

EGreg 2y ago
[flagged]
- Aeolun 2y ago
  It's a bit silly to think the Ukrainians would do something like this, because any such thing would instantly lose them the war as all western support is withdrawn. Russia meanwhile... they just seem like they want to see the world burn. Given the fact they're fighting using convicted criminals, it doesn't seem all that far fetched.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - aguaviva 2y ago
      which has now escalated into 1 million dead in Ukraine So mere hours after appearing in the WSJ, "1M are now dead or injured (but actually about 80k Ukrainian, 200k Russian dead)"[0] is being misquoted as simply "1M dead", and not so coincidentally in tandem with another misconception (that gets repeated on HN almost daily it seems): when it could have been resolved w Minsk Accords or anything negotiated in Normandy or Turkey since then. "Could have been resolved", that is, by granting to Putin permanent sovereignty over whatever territories he happened to be sitting on at the time, if not then some, and other non-viable concessions (with no guarantees that they would even work to stop him from simply grabbing more land and/or just keep bombing Ukrainian cities whenever it might suit his fancy): [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41568861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41568861
      - Aeolun 2y ago
        > by granting to Putin permanent sovereignty over whatever territories he happened to be sitting on at the time I think the one thing I can agree with is that it’s debatable whether it’s ultimately worth it. Is Putin’s Russia so much worse that it’s worth 80k deaths to prevent it becoming reality in those regions currently occupied?
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        I guess it depends on whether you think it's OK to be forced at gunpoint to abandon your culture and language and adopt your invader's, and to live in a totalitarian autocracy rather than a very imperfect democracy.
        EGreg 2y ago
        I mean, that’s literally what has happeneed throughout history everywhere? Lots of groups currently live as part of a larger country - Basques, Catalonians, Kurds, Tibetans etc. does this mean they have to lose millions of people fighting for total independence and sovereignty? In Ukraine, for instance, Crimea was an unwilling particpant, ever since 1991 we know 94% voted to break away from Ukraine. Ukraine invaded them in the 90s, arrested their leaders and changed their constitution. Going further back, Galicia was part of Poland, but then Ukrainian communists took it. And Poland used to rule Ukraine, which Ukrainians chafed under (Bogdan Khmelnitsky revolt). Ukraine has been a tinderbox of many cultures, incouding Kossacks, Orthodox Christians, Greeks, Russians, Catholic Poles, religious and secular Jews, Red athiest Communists, and more. In 1919 it was briefly a Cossack Hetmanate, if you can believe that! Actually, communist Bolsheviks (except for Stalin) are the ones responsible for reviving Ukrainian language and culture, as part of their program of “korenizatziya” throughout the USSR. The opposite of what you’d expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainization The culture of “hating Russians” was there among some nationalists, such as Petliura, Bandera and Schuhevych, who took the opportunities around world wars to try to fight for independence. But they were also deeply wrapped up with hatred of Jews, Poles etc. The two guys I mentioned are responsible for killing many Jews, Poles, etc. After WW2, the Soviet Union had lost 30 million people but emerged a victor over nazis. The USA in a few scant years had made NATO with formerly-nazi Germany as a founding member, against USSR. In 1954 USSR formally asked to join, before starting the Warsaw Pact. Incidentally that same year Khrustchev’s Presidium unilaterally gifted Crimea from Russian SSR to Ukrainian SSR “in a spirit of deep friendship”. USA and CIA preferreed to work with literal nazis against the eastern bloc. (Operation paperclip, Pinochet in Chile, etc etc.) Radio Liberty was a CIA-funded program to keep the opposition to USSR alive in Ukraine, usually among the far-right elements who sympathized more with the nazis who had lost, and whose grandfathers fought on that side. It didn’t matter to USA, because USSR was their geopolitical rival now. Same as it didn’t matter about sponsoring jihadists (which is what “mujahideen” means in Arabic) in Afghanistan and getting 2 million civilians killed in a needless civil war, spending billions radicalizing and arming people together with Saudis and leading to the explosion of Wahhabist Islam around the world, ending up later ravaging Iraq, Syria, Nigeria etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwpR6ngoSjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwpR6ngoSjQ It’s not about “preserving culture”. That’s the cynical explanation. It’s about proxy wars and weakening the rivals throuh endless quagmires. USA and its architects of proxy wars do not actually care about the people on the ground: https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and-i-started-the-mujahideen/ https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and...
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      I never thought I’d say this, but there is a distinction between neo-nazis and criminals/murderers. The first have the potential to do bad, the second have proven beyond a doubt that they’re evil.
  - yonaguska 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      I think the one thing that I think completely turns me off this logic is that it’s only proponents seem to be the ones that feel like it’s fine for Russia to keep what it’s unlawfully taken. Sure, there’s a bunch of drone footage of Ukraine dropping shit on barely moving Russian soldiers, but I’m not sure if that’s an indictment of Russia or Ukraine.
  - anavat 2y ago
    Western media has full control over information and if Ukrainians would do something like this, no one would even know. There were multiple cases of Ukrainians doing something evil or borderline evil that were swept under the rug. One of the recent examples is the cassette munition explosion over a beach in Sevastopol, which killed few children and wounded a hundred of people. I stopped following the war closely but it got my attention because that's my home town. And in this case I even agree that the rocket wasn't specifically targeting the beach (that would be stupid), it was likely targeting the nearby airbase; but that's not the point.The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced. There are multiple high-quality videos of the explosion recorded from different angles. On Reddit, a high-quality video of an even like this, surreal and frightening, would otherwise have been upvoted to skies. But not when it puts Ukrainians in bad light! One the next day, as a random Reddit user, you'd never even know about this event (I wonder how many people know about this at all). And again, this is just one example. I can probably collect few hundreds of cases likes this over the first two years of the war, where as a Western media consumer you would never know about something that could potentially change your opinion on the conflict. And just like this, you're being manipulated. Of course, so are the Russians who solely rely on Russian news sources. The only way to know the truth is to follow both sides closely, especially to what each side hides and silences. You'd be surprised.
    - DecoySalamander 2y ago
      Why would that specific video be up-voted into the skies? It's just another piece of misery porn and we had at least 2 years of that on almost daily basis at that point.
    - aguaviva 2y ago
      The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced. Except it doesn't. Stuff like this gets reported all the time (for exactly what it is), also when Ukrainians do it. Like the EW-intercepted drone that hit that apartment outside Moscow, killing (according to local reports) someone inside. Even RFE/RL reported it. Not every single incident of course -- but they do get reported, very frequently. People tend not to dwell on it, of course -- because they know these things are bound to happen to some degree (and anyone with more than a completely casual understanding of WW II knows that inadvertent civilian casualties, even in allied countries, were extremely high). And that there are far too many perfectly deliberate atrocities happening, and at far greater scale (and except for a few isolated cases, all coming not so coincidentally from one side). And because they understand the far bigger point, which is that at the end of the day, the war (and all the suffering that will be required to end it) is Putin's fault anyway. But that's very different from the simple matter of these events being "silenced". Because plainly they're not. The reason they don't get more column inches or newsroom chatter is because, by any level-headed analysis -- they just don't deserve any. And attempting to describe the state of affairs that way, when clearly it isn't, is well -- manipulative.
WillPostForFood 2y ago
It is morally fucked to compare trapping children's toys with trapping the communications devices of soldiers in a war.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  So you can guarantee every single pager went to a solider of war? By that logic, soldiers in the Ukraine war also use cellphones and drones so it's A-OKAY to implant bombs in those products too?
  - jojobas 2y ago
    There are acceptable levels of collateral damage. You can bomb an ordnance storage facility even if there's a hospital right next to it (or, in fact, right not on top of it). They've made sure the pagers were used by Hezbollah first and foremost, tough shit if few were given to kids to play. And yes if Ukrainians were able to blow up all drones within say 50km of the front lines on the Russian side they'd be justified to do that, even if some were in civilians' hands.
    - loceng 2y ago
      You've been victim of what's called manufactured consent. Why hasn't Israel allowed any investigations in Gaza, not showing evidence they're using to obliterate practically all of Palestine now, not allowing foreign journalists in either to document things?
      - jojobas 2y ago
        This is just a bunch of non-sequiturs.
        loceng 2y ago
        It logically fits, you're just avoiding and trying to control the goal posts/scope of what's talked about. You'd prefer we mostly only talk about Oct. 7th and afterward, right?
primroot 2y ago
"Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others." https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/ https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/

EGreg 2y ago

[flagged]

Aeolun 2y ago
It's a bit silly to think the Ukrainians would do something like this, because any such thing would instantly lose them the war as all western support is withdrawn. Russia meanwhile... they just seem like they want to see the world burn. Given the fact they're fighting using convicted criminals, it doesn't seem all that far fetched.
- EGreg 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - aguaviva 2y ago
    which has now escalated into 1 million dead in Ukraine So mere hours after appearing in the WSJ, "1M are now dead or injured (but actually about 80k Ukrainian, 200k Russian dead)"[0] is being misquoted as simply "1M dead", and not so coincidentally in tandem with another misconception (that gets repeated on HN almost daily it seems): when it could have been resolved w Minsk Accords or anything negotiated in Normandy or Turkey since then. "Could have been resolved", that is, by granting to Putin permanent sovereignty over whatever territories he happened to be sitting on at the time, if not then some, and other non-viable concessions (with no guarantees that they would even work to stop him from simply grabbing more land and/or just keep bombing Ukrainian cities whenever it might suit his fancy): [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41568861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41568861
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      > by granting to Putin permanent sovereignty over whatever territories he happened to be sitting on at the time I think the one thing I can agree with is that it’s debatable whether it’s ultimately worth it. Is Putin’s Russia so much worse that it’s worth 80k deaths to prevent it becoming reality in those regions currently occupied?
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        I guess it depends on whether you think it's OK to be forced at gunpoint to abandon your culture and language and adopt your invader's, and to live in a totalitarian autocracy rather than a very imperfect democracy.
        EGreg 2y ago
        I mean, that’s literally what has happeneed throughout history everywhere? Lots of groups currently live as part of a larger country - Basques, Catalonians, Kurds, Tibetans etc. does this mean they have to lose millions of people fighting for total independence and sovereignty? In Ukraine, for instance, Crimea was an unwilling particpant, ever since 1991 we know 94% voted to break away from Ukraine. Ukraine invaded them in the 90s, arrested their leaders and changed their constitution. Going further back, Galicia was part of Poland, but then Ukrainian communists took it. And Poland used to rule Ukraine, which Ukrainians chafed under (Bogdan Khmelnitsky revolt). Ukraine has been a tinderbox of many cultures, incouding Kossacks, Orthodox Christians, Greeks, Russians, Catholic Poles, religious and secular Jews, Red athiest Communists, and more. In 1919 it was briefly a Cossack Hetmanate, if you can believe that! Actually, communist Bolsheviks (except for Stalin) are the ones responsible for reviving Ukrainian language and culture, as part of their program of “korenizatziya” throughout the USSR. The opposite of what you’d expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainization The culture of “hating Russians” was there among some nationalists, such as Petliura, Bandera and Schuhevych, who took the opportunities around world wars to try to fight for independence. But they were also deeply wrapped up with hatred of Jews, Poles etc. The two guys I mentioned are responsible for killing many Jews, Poles, etc. After WW2, the Soviet Union had lost 30 million people but emerged a victor over nazis. The USA in a few scant years had made NATO with formerly-nazi Germany as a founding member, against USSR. In 1954 USSR formally asked to join, before starting the Warsaw Pact. Incidentally that same year Khrustchev’s Presidium unilaterally gifted Crimea from Russian SSR to Ukrainian SSR “in a spirit of deep friendship”. USA and CIA preferreed to work with literal nazis against the eastern bloc. (Operation paperclip, Pinochet in Chile, etc etc.) Radio Liberty was a CIA-funded program to keep the opposition to USSR alive in Ukraine, usually among the far-right elements who sympathized more with the nazis who had lost, and whose grandfathers fought on that side. It didn’t matter to USA, because USSR was their geopolitical rival now. Same as it didn’t matter about sponsoring jihadists (which is what “mujahideen” means in Arabic) in Afghanistan and getting 2 million civilians killed in a needless civil war, spending billions radicalizing and arming people together with Saudis and leading to the explosion of Wahhabist Islam around the world, ending up later ravaging Iraq, Syria, Nigeria etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwpR6ngoSjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwpR6ngoSjQ It’s not about “preserving culture”. That’s the cynical explanation. It’s about proxy wars and weakening the rivals throuh endless quagmires. USA and its architects of proxy wars do not actually care about the people on the ground: https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and-i-started-the-mujahideen/ https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and...
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    I never thought I’d say this, but there is a distinction between neo-nazis and criminals/murderers. The first have the potential to do bad, the second have proven beyond a doubt that they’re evil.
- yonaguska 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    I think the one thing that I think completely turns me off this logic is that it’s only proponents seem to be the ones that feel like it’s fine for Russia to keep what it’s unlawfully taken. Sure, there’s a bunch of drone footage of Ukraine dropping shit on barely moving Russian soldiers, but I’m not sure if that’s an indictment of Russia or Ukraine.
- anavat 2y ago
  Western media has full control over information and if Ukrainians would do something like this, no one would even know. There were multiple cases of Ukrainians doing something evil or borderline evil that were swept under the rug. One of the recent examples is the cassette munition explosion over a beach in Sevastopol, which killed few children and wounded a hundred of people. I stopped following the war closely but it got my attention because that's my home town. And in this case I even agree that the rocket wasn't specifically targeting the beach (that would be stupid), it was likely targeting the nearby airbase; but that's not the point.The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced. There are multiple high-quality videos of the explosion recorded from different angles. On Reddit, a high-quality video of an even like this, surreal and frightening, would otherwise have been upvoted to skies. But not when it puts Ukrainians in bad light! One the next day, as a random Reddit user, you'd never even know about this event (I wonder how many people know about this at all). And again, this is just one example. I can probably collect few hundreds of cases likes this over the first two years of the war, where as a Western media consumer you would never know about something that could potentially change your opinion on the conflict. And just like this, you're being manipulated. Of course, so are the Russians who solely rely on Russian news sources. The only way to know the truth is to follow both sides closely, especially to what each side hides and silences. You'd be surprised.
  - DecoySalamander 2y ago
    Why would that specific video be up-voted into the skies? It's just another piece of misery porn and we had at least 2 years of that on almost daily basis at that point.
  - aguaviva 2y ago
    The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced. Except it doesn't. Stuff like this gets reported all the time (for exactly what it is), also when Ukrainians do it. Like the EW-intercepted drone that hit that apartment outside Moscow, killing (according to local reports) someone inside. Even RFE/RL reported it. Not every single incident of course -- but they do get reported, very frequently. People tend not to dwell on it, of course -- because they know these things are bound to happen to some degree (and anyone with more than a completely casual understanding of WW II knows that inadvertent civilian casualties, even in allied countries, were extremely high). And that there are far too many perfectly deliberate atrocities happening, and at far greater scale (and except for a few isolated cases, all coming not so coincidentally from one side). And because they understand the far bigger point, which is that at the end of the day, the war (and all the suffering that will be required to end it) is Putin's fault anyway. But that's very different from the simple matter of these events being "silenced". Because plainly they're not. The reason they don't get more column inches or newsroom chatter is because, by any level-headed analysis -- they just don't deserve any. And attempting to describe the state of affairs that way, when clearly it isn't, is well -- manipulative.

WillPostForFood 2y ago

It is morally fucked to compare trapping children's toys with trapping the communications devices of soldiers in a war.

hypeatei 2y ago
So you can guarantee every single pager went to a solider of war? By that logic, soldiers in the Ukraine war also use cellphones and drones so it's A-OKAY to implant bombs in those products too?
- jojobas 2y ago
  There are acceptable levels of collateral damage. You can bomb an ordnance storage facility even if there's a hospital right next to it (or, in fact, right not on top of it). They've made sure the pagers were used by Hezbollah first and foremost, tough shit if few were given to kids to play. And yes if Ukrainians were able to blow up all drones within say 50km of the front lines on the Russian side they'd be justified to do that, even if some were in civilians' hands.
  - loceng 2y ago
    You've been victim of what's called manufactured consent. Why hasn't Israel allowed any investigations in Gaza, not showing evidence they're using to obliterate practically all of Palestine now, not allowing foreign journalists in either to document things?
    - jojobas 2y ago
      This is just a bunch of non-sequiturs.
      - loceng 2y ago
        It logically fits, you're just avoiding and trying to control the goal posts/scope of what's talked about. You'd prefer we mostly only talk about Oct. 7th and afterward, right?

primroot 2y ago

"Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others." https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/ https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/