Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
Mar 18 4 tweets 1 min read
I'm curious if the Russians are doing this because they don't have anything else that seems feasible right now, or if there's a strategy behind it. If they think that by doing this they might cause Ukrainian morale to collapse and sue for peace on disadvantageous terms, history
suggests that civilian bombing campaigns (and let's throw artillery and missiles in there) don't often have that effect. British morale did not suffer because of the blitz, nor did the British "de-housing" night bombings of Germany cause German morale to plummet. During the
VIetnam War, the U.S. bombed the heck out of North Vietnam--without significantly affecting North Vietnamese resolve. I'm leaving out some historical exceptions and caveats, but given Ukraine's morale so far, it doesn't seem likely to succeed (again, if that is the intention).
Meanwhile, that sort of destruction is likely to make Russia seem ever more a pariah, with no corresponding military advantage. A rubbled Kiev is not really any less defensible than an intact Kiev.

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More from @egavactip

Mar 19
It’s Saturday, so let’s enjoy it with a profile of another American extremist. Up this week? Colonel Eugene Nelson Sanctuary.

Never heard of him? Not surprised. But white supremacists and other antisemites today are still influenced by his poison-in-print. Image
One journalist described him as “one of the suspicious, psychoneurotic old men.” Another called him the “Grand Old Man of Anti-Semitism.” Yet another as “an old fundamentalist with a long, grey lifeless face.” A fourth wrote of his “long face, austere, froze in its gray pallor.” Image
Who is this man?

Eugene Nelson Sanctuary, aka E. N. Sanctuary, was born in Vermont in 1870. He went to the Univ of Vermont, where he was quite the baseball star, and became a civil engineer. He had several engineering jobs before joining the Army Corps of Engineers, where he
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Mar 16
Today I've been doing research, for my book, on so-called "warehouse banks" used by tax protesters, sovereign citizens & other ne'er-do-wells for nearly 40 years as a way of hiding income from the IRS and other prying eyes.

I thought you might be interested in this phenomenon.
I suspect non-ideological warehouse banks of one sort or another may have been in existence longer, but "patriot"-style warehouse banks began to emerge in the 1980s. The most prominent of them was the National Commodity and Barter Association (NCBA), operated by John Grandbouche
and, after JG's death, John Voss. It also had affiliates and spin-offs in other states, like the Mid-States Exchange and the Northwest Community Exchange. The idea behind the NCBA was that it was a "bullion" bank. You would send money to the NCBA and it would convert your $$$
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Mar 16
Today I came across someone I had completely forgotten about--the last member of The Order (aka Silent Brotherhood) to be arrested. The Order was a white supremacist terrorist group that operated roughly from 1983-1985, engaging in armored car robberies, bombings, and murders.
The feds eventually took them down, killing their leader in a shootout and arresting a large number of other members on various charges. Many spent/will spend the rest of their lives in prison. The group was defunct by 1985.

One of those arrested was James Arthur Wallington. He
had been hiding out at the Arkansas compound of the white supremacist group called The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA). Unfortunately for him, in April 1985 the feds surrounded that compound, because of illegal deeds being done there, and after a week-long
Read 7 tweets
Mar 11
Ukrainian history is not an area of expertise of mine, but I do have areas of interest/expertise that involve Ukraine: World War II, partisan warfare, the Holocaust, & the Eastern Borderlands region of Europe. So I thought I'd share some of the books I have, for those interested.
I have many books on the Eastern Front in World War II and, obviously, the region of Ukraine figures in many of them. But they're not *about* Ukraine. So I won't include them. But I will mention one book, as it focuses on one of the most important battles that took place there.
This is David Stahel's book Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East. It is the second of a series of revisionist (I mean that in the scholarly sense) books on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. It's interesting but it helps to already be familiar w/the battle.
Read 25 tweets
Mar 10
If this is being done intentionally, it is most likely a defensive effort on the part of Ukrainians; most military flooding events are defensive in nature.

"Satellite images show flooding north of Kyiv in possible sign of ‘hydraulic warfare’"
washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/…
This was a tactic that was used extensively in World War II. The Germans, for example, blew up dams over the Roer River to cause flooding to interfere with the American invasion of Germany in 1944-45. Image
In Italy in 1943, the Germans flooded the Pontine Marshes south of Rome to slow the Allied advance there. The Germans also flooded parts of Normandy in anticipation of a possible Allied invasion and parts of the Netherlands to hinder the Canadian liberation of that country.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 10
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Defense attorneys are variously claiming that it was "all talk" and no action, and that it was entrapment.
Of course, two people have already pleaded guilty.

This trial is the federal trial. This case is unusual in that some of the defendants were charged (only) federally and the others were charged (only) by the state of Michigan.
"Whitmer kidnap plotters wanted to help spark second Civil War, feds say"

detroitnews.com/story/news/loc…
Read 7 tweets

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