Photo By Tt+ On Flickr.

We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.

Unknown

"Putin was wrong to invade, but Europe and US should negotiate peace instead of fueling warmongering Zelenskyy" - this is the message I've been getting almost every day. So I decided to respond with a thread.

First of all, dear peacemakers, do you have a clue what are Putin’s demands for peace? I will tell you: Russia is allowed to invade and control Ukraine’s government, resources, and legislation for an indefinite time.

Ukraine’s army must be demilitarized and almost destroyed. This means leaving no weapons, and no means to respond to any future threat from Russia. All damage Russia brought to Ukraine must be rebuilt by Ukrainians and Europeans.

All criminal accusations, all sanctions must be lifted. All crimes must stay unpunished. Territory, Russia took over by force, must stay under Russia no question. Russia does not agree to draw its forces out of Ukraine.

It still insists it is allowed to deport Ukrainians from their homeland and instead let Russians move in. Look at what is going on in Mariupol. This will be all of Ukraine.

At the same time each attack, each mass murder committed by Russians in Ukraine is blamed on Ukraine. Logic: Stop protecting yourselves, you are not allowed. We are allowed to shoot anti-ship missiles at your cities.

But it is you who’s guilty, bloody warmongers. Stop resisting. Let us turn you into the colony. Because we have the right, because we used to have you and want to have you back by force in 21st century.

Meanwhile, the ones, you call warmongers from EU and US: provide weapons on their own schedule, do not provide any means we can use to attack Russia or even Crimea. Strictly forbidden to use any of their weapons to bring war to Russia. Still are afraid of Russia losing

Agree to lift sanctions from Russian oligarchs, put Russian banks on Swift, buy Russian nuclear energy even at times Russians keep largest NPP in Europe hostage.

But let's think we agreed on Russia's peace terms after all it did to us. After it destroyed our cities, and industries, killed, raped, and kidnapped our people. Because "every war ends with negotiations", right?

NATO indeed got a boost because Russia attacked Ukraine. So they do have a plus. We got weapons to stand and retake our territory. Also a plus. But let's go into the "negotiations camp". Imagine this war ends on Russian terms, and that's the terms Russia agrees to negotiate.

What message do we send to the world: If you are a bigger power that wants to colonize neighboring countries, you can do it. You can come and kill the natives, destroy their houses, kidnap their kids, and turn them into your new citizens to replace those killed in war.

You can send natives to filtration camps, take away their property and send your own people from depressive regions to live in better conditions in the colonized country. and that is fine. You will still be at UN, still will be doing business as usual.

You might suffer from sanctions for a while, but you can always use loopholes or kill even more natives to pressure the world to lift the sanctions and let you continue your war. it will work. You will consolidate power at home, showing how strong you are.

You will use mindblowing propaganda efforts, mixing historical conflicts to get allies in modern times, making people previously colonized by others that now the sovereign state you still see as your breakaway colony, is somehow guilty for this war.

You dare to blame Ukraine, the West for this war, but not the one who actually has boots on the ground. not the one who destroys food destined maybe for your countries. This all because when you were suffering, nobody helped you. now you think it is fair for this to continue.

and the most mindblowing thing here is that if Putin's peace will happen, you will all remember us, like we now remember Syrians, Georgians, Chechens, and Afghanistan. World ignored all warnings, and kept business as usual, while one by one Russia was destroying us.

Now Putin, feeling the Ukraine fatigue and upcoming election year moods shits, feels blood and already reminds Poland that Stalin presented her lands. WEAK UP!!!!

The ones, who strip us of agency, because we need help fighting on our own with the largest army on the continent, please get a life. Read history. read about Ukraine. We have free and fair elections, even now there are openly pro-Russian lawmakers in parliament.

Yes, during the war we got a bit less democratic, but as did ANY OTHER COUNTRY during the war in history.

Our parliament still has heated debates about laws, we got rather strong institutions. We are older than Russia, we just had different names, like most of the countries in their history. Please read, and educate yourselves more. don't just write "independent thinker" in your bio

if you think that just letting Russia win will end this and it will be good, you should stop also in your daily life: standing for yourself or your loved one when someone's abusing him or her. Let bully at school to abuse your kid, and ask your kid what did he do to provoke it?

Stop writing quotes of great leaders about justice in your bios. Because you clearly are not ready to fight for justice, so be truthful. Write something about surrendering for the sake of peace. be honest to yourself. END.

Me, and many others like me probably will not survive to live in the new world, where surrendering to an aggressor who's murdering is right, cause you might get the chance that not all of you will be murdered, some might be enslaved and live happily ever after.

And honestly, I start thinking it is fine that I might not survive to live in this new "wonderful" world our place will turn if Russia is not defeated in Ukraine.

-- by Nika Melkozerova Source

untitled by reapingwhatwesaw on Flickr.

The thing is, I have nothing against socialism or communism as a political ideology; trust me, I'm as anti-capitalist as they come. The leftism is really not the problem here.

The problem is when in their leftism, people – Americans, really, and western Europeans – use the ussr as this sort of goal, this complete antithesis to the modern capitalist society, this almost-utopian place to live. They use hammer and sickle symbol, the ussr anthem; sometimes, as a joke, sometimes, not so much.

Not only that clearly shows that they know absolutely nothing about the ussr – it's also spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not, which is especially insidious now, when russia is literally committing a genocide.

The ussr wasn't a socialist utopia where everyone is equal. It was a totalitarian dictatorship, responsible for colonisation and genocide of multiple people and cultures. Just like the russian Empire before it. Just like modern russia continues to do now.

For many Eastern European and Central Asian people, hammer and sickle is not just a symbol of a political ideology. It's the symbol, under which people were starved to death, imprisoned or executed for daring to write in their own language; in which cultures were erased, people – forcefully assimilated, stripped of their own national identity.

It's the propaganda of being "the same people, the same nation" that russians love to use; that westerners love to believe, for the sole reason of the oppressed daring to look similar to the oppressor; for the sole reason of Americans being unable to look past their own history and realize oppression comes in many shapes and forms.

By using the ussr symbols in your political movement, you're denying the atrocities commited under that symbol and spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not.

It's not "progressive" to wave around a hate symbol.

Do your research.

…unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (via naranzarian)

The reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.

Mark Rippetoe

Despite its green image, Ireland has surprisingly little forest. [...] [M]ore than 80% of the island of Ireland was [once] covered in trees. [...] [O]f that 11% of the Republic of Ireland that is [now] forested, the vast majority (9% of the country) is planted with [non-native] spruces like the Sitka spruce [in commercial plantations], a fast growing conifer originally from Alaska which can be harvested after just 15 years. Just 2% of Ireland is covered with native broadleaf trees.

Text by: Martha O’Hagan Luff. “Ireland has lost almost all of its native forests - here’s how to bring them back.” The Conversation. 24 February 2023. [Emphasis added.]

---

[I]ndustrial [...] oil palm plantations [...] have proliferated in tropical regions in many parts of the world, often built at the expense of mangrove and humid forest lands, with the aim to transform them from 'worthless swamp' to agro-industrial complexes [...]. Another clear case [...] comes from the southernmost area in the Colombian Pacific [...]. Here, since the early 1980s, the forest has been destroyed and communities displaced to give way to oil palm plantations. Inexistent in the 1970s, by the mid-1990s they had expanded to over 30,000 hectares. The monotony of the plantation - row after row of palm as far as you can see, a green desert of sorts - replaced the diverse, heterogenous and entangled world of forest and communities.

Text by: Arturo Escobar. "Thinking-Feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South." Revista de Antropologia Iberoamericana Volume 11 Issue 1. 2016. [Emphasis added.]

---

But efforts to increase global tree cover to limit climate change have skewed towards erecting plantations of fast-growing trees [...] [because] planting trees can demonstrate results a lot quicker than natural forest restoration. [...] [But] ill-advised tree planting can unleash invasive species [...]. [In India] [t]o maximize how much timber these forests yielded, British foresters planted pines from Europe and North America in extensive plantations in the Himalayan region [...] and introduced acacia trees from Australia [...]. One of these species, wattle (Acacia mearnsii) [...] was planted in [...] the Western Ghats. This area is what scientists all a biodiversity hotspot – a globally rare ecosystem replete with species. Wattle has since become invasive and taken over much of the region’s mountainous grasslands. Similarly, pine has spread over much of the Himalayas and displaced native oak trees while teak has replaced sal, a native hardwood, in central India. Both oak and sal are valued for [...] fertiliser, medicine and oil. Their loss [...] impoverished many [local and Indigenous people]. [...]

India’s national forest policy [...] aims for trees on 33% of the country’s area. Schemes under this policy include plantations consisting of a single species such as eucalyptus or bamboo which grow fast and can increase tree cover quickly, demonstrating success according to this dubious measure. Sometimes these trees are planted in grasslands and other ecosystems where tree cover is naturally low. [...] The success of forest restoration efforts cannot be measured by tree cover alone. The Indian government’s definition of “forest” still encompasses plantations of a single tree species, orchards and even bamboo, which actually belongs to the grass family. This means that biennial forest surveys cannot quantify how much natural forest has been restored, or convey the consequences of displacing native trees with competitive plantation species or identify if these exotic trees have invaded natural grasslands which have then been falsely recorded as restored forests. [...] Planting trees does not necessarily mean a forest is being restored. And reviving ecosystems in which trees are scarce is important too.

Text by: Dhanapal Govindarajulu. "India was a tree planting laboratory for 200 years - here are the results." The Conversation. 10 August 2023. [Emphasis added.]

---

Nations and companies are competing to appropriate the last piece of available “untapped” forest that can provide the most amount of “environmental services.” [...] When British Empire forestry was first established as a disciplinary practice in India, [...] it proscribed private interests and initiated a new system of forest management based on a logic of utilitarian [extraction] [...]. Rather than the actual survival of plants or animals, the goal of this forestry was focused on preventing the exhaustion of resource extraction. [...]

Text by: Daniel Fernandez and Alon Schwabe. "The Offsetted." e-flux Architecture (Positions). November 2013. [Emphasis added.]

---

At first glance, the statistics tell a hopeful story: Chile’s forests are expanding. […] On the ground, however, a different scene plays out: monocultures have replaced diverse natural forests [...]. At the crux of these [...] narratives is the definition of a single word: “forest.” [...] Pinochet’s wave of [...] [laws] included Forest Ordinance 701, passed in 1974, which subsidized the expansion of tree plantations [...] and gave the National Forestry Corporation control of Mapuche lands. This law set in motion an enormous expansion in fiber-farms, which are vast expanses of monoculture plantations Pinus radiata and Eucalyptus species grown for paper manufacturing and timber. [T]hese new plantations replaced native forests […]. According to a recent study in Landscape and Urban Planning, timber plantations expanded by a factor of ten from 1975 to 2007, and now occupy 43 percent of the South-central Chilean landscape. [...] While the confusion surrounding the definition of “forest” may appear to be an issue of semantics, Dr. Francis Putz [...] warns otherwise in a recent review published in Biotropica. […] Monoculture plantations are optimized for a single product, whereas native forests offer [...] water regulation, hosting biodiversity, and building soil fertility. [...][A]ccording to Putz, the distinction between plantations and native forests needs to be made clear. “[...] [A]nd the point that plantations are NOT forests needs to be made repeatedly [...]."

Text by: Julian Moll-Rocek. “When forests aren’t really forests: the high cost of Chile’s tree plantations.” Mongabay. 18 August 2014. [Emphasis added.]

Blink by Johnny Lucus on Flickr.

Iceland II, 2024, oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm