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And now some news from Ukraine: Gonzalo Lira is dead.
More details about his demise in Ukrainian prison.
You probably heard about him. Former pickup artist guru who turned into journalist/propagandist lambasting Ukraine and Zelensky - from Ukraine in war time. Whatever you think about him and his opinions, this tooks serious guts (and GL was well aware of the risks).
English Wikipedia finds him not enough notable and deleted him at 4th attempt, but, strangely enough, simple English Wikipedia keeps his article.
Now, he is notable enough to be noticed by Tucker Carlson and notable enough make it to Twitter worldwide trends (as for now), notable enough to be added as another reason for Red tribe to oppose supporting Ukraine.
Not smart move from Ukrainian government. You gained a little bit of sadistic revenge and even smaller bit of intimidation of people inside Ukraine (who already know well what will happen to them if they open their mouth too much). You lost rather bigger piece of credibility with people whose support you desperately need.
RIP Coach Red Pill. Whatever you were in your life, now you are symbol and martyr.
Western supporters of the Kiev regime tend to allow Ukrainians many things that they would generally not put up with closer to home and would criticize if they happened in a state that is one of the West's enemies. Things such as overthrowing a legally elected government, having numerous Nazis in their ranks, supporting chauvinistic nationalism, forcing men to fight in the army by beating them in some cases, blowing up allies' infrastructure, having kill lists of civilians who oppose them, and so on.
It is what it is. I gave up on expecting consistency from people's political attitudes a very long time ago. And finding someone who is genuinely neutral on this war rather than being a rabid partisan of either one side or the other seems to be about as rare as finding an oasis in the desert.
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I have my doubts that Ukraine would be getting Red Tribe's support any time soon with or without imprisoning their activists who advocated against them.
Plenty of republicans support funding Ukraine war. 13% said of republican leaning it's not funded enough, 20% that funding level is about right.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/12/08/about-half-of-republicans-now-say-the-us-is-providing-too-much-aid-to-ukraine/
Congressman Crenshaw and Linsey Graham, iirc, were selling it specifically as paying for killing Russian soldiers.
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My strong initial reaction is that anyone who has a clue who this guy was is a lost cause for Ukraine's lobbying.
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No, he's not, he's an object lesson in why you don't go to a corrupt shithole under military rule by Nazis and start advocating for the country they're in a state of total war with.
If I went to Ukraine(which doesn't seem like a great idea to me, but IDK maybe I decided to get a mail order bride or something), I would keep my opinion that Crimea is part of Russia because it voted for annexation to myself in the interest of not getting murdered or imprisoned.
Reports:
While this isn't antagonistic enough for me to care, it does seem a bit excessive to call the Ukrainian government Nazis.
Hyperbole? Well, that's okay, to a degree, and I think it's evident that you're implying they're authoritarian rather than literal card-carrying National Socialists. The rules regarding providing justification for one's claims are not meant to be taken quite that literally as far as I'm concerned, even if this is a subpar phrasing. You do acknowledge they're corrupt (a subjective standard, but true enough, even if less than they used to be), and that there are restrictions on speech and political affiliation because they are, in fact, in a state of Total War. I suggest the people who reported you read between a lines a tad bit more, even if you exaggerate.
Anyway, I deem this comment only mildly inflammatory, within the bounds of what I'm willing to tolerate, but I would prefer you try and be a little more polite and less pejorative in your phrasing. This isn't a warning, more of a tut-tut.
Sigh. One day the mods will be freed from accusations that we are biased in favor of Liberals/Ukraine/The Jews/Rightists and other mutually contradictory groups, but not today.
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Nazis? Do you believe that Zelensky is a Pythonesque Jewish Nazi or are you using the Russian government's definition of Nazi?
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For you and most of us here, or Soldo. For plenty of others that might be true. People swalloved Ghost of Kyiv and Sam Hyde as Ghost of Kyiv..
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Being stupid, putting oneself at risk, being naive all seem like things that are more likely to make someone a martyr. I think he won't become a martyr because regime media in the west will simply ignore it. Or at best right wing media will cover it while regime media ignores it so it becomes a polarizing culture war issue, he'll be an Ashli Babbitt basically.
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For maximally cynical, conspiratory and blackpilling take, seek, as usual Rolo Slavski.
Gonzalo Lira Was Abandoned to His Death
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Gonzalo Lira was the biggest journalist covering the war from an anti-Ukrainian perspective for the first few months. I saw him everywhere and watched his content. The idea that he doesn’t deserve a Wikipedia page is crazy. He was also threatened with death early on by Ukrainian military operatives, which coincided with his long stretch of not posting.
Was he ? I've looked at what he was saying and it was either derivative/trite- what skeptics have been saying for years, and what was readily apparent from numbers etc or flat-out wrong.
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What was the gist of his reporting? Anything contradicting the propaganda coming out of Moscow and Kiev?
The gist (as much as I can remember) was that Ukraine is destined to lose, and that the conflict was the result of Western-backed influence in Maidan / the failure to declare no NATO membership. But yeah, anything seriously critical of Ukraine is going to be labeled “propaganda coming out of Moscow”, and this in no way justifies harassing and possibly killing an ideologue and reporter.
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One thing that comes to mind is comparing this with the treatment of Miles Routledge by the Taliban.
Of course it's not apples to apples, but as far as "westernized sperg goes on stroll in country where real shit is going on" it's at least somewhat comparable.
I suspect that the main difference is Miles just plays the part of an idiot whiles CRP may legitimately have been one. But the difference between pneumonia gulags and forced movie marathons is a bit stark. Especially factoring in which country had a diplomatic mission from the UK/US.
The real lesson in all this is that you don't start telling people how to run their business when you're a guest, and that goes double when they're at war.
It's too late for him, but I hope Lira's family makes it okay out of this mess.
Miles never really criticized the Taliban in-country in a way that threatened them, he was swept up as a generic Westerner whose nationality put him on the ‘enemy’ side, but he wasn’t a critic.
The US also locked up hostile propagandists in wartime (in much less desperate situations, it must be said, than Ukraine is in today). Lira knew the risks.
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TBH, you're a nicer guy than I am because my knee jerk reaction was a Nelson Muntz-esque point and laugh.
Soljenitsyne has this passage in Gulag Archipelago that describes people that were fully propagandized supporters of the regime but still ended up in the system, and how they were convinced that they were the one mistake but that everyone else was deported for good reason.
As he describes them and how even more pathetic they are than your average political prisoner, you can't really summon any schadenfreude because no naive idiot deserves such a horrid fate, Marxist bandit or not.
CRP, in all his lolcow glory, is spiritually the same as those people in many ways.
Think about it though, will we really be laughing when Chris-chan finally kicks the bucket?
They were the average political prisoner. That's how Gulag endured for so long: the average political prisoner was a communist that agreed that enemies of the USSR deserved to be sent to labor camps, they just knew they themselves weren't one. When the WWII brought in a fresh haul of nationalists from the limitrophe states and literal anti-Communist Russians keelhauled by the British, it became much harder to manage the camps, as these new prisoners rejected the very legitimacy of their punishment under article 58 and would riot whenever possible.
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The difference is that some measure of sympathy for the most hardcore Stalinists who got Gulaged is ‘justified’ by the fact that they grew up in the system (even pre-1917 many were early members of Bolshevik groups and so on, had parents who were etc), were brainwashed by years or decades of propaganda, and had no frame of reference for the outside world. You can’t be too judgmental of the morality of a core Kim loyalist in the DPRK whose entire fifty-year lifespan has been dominated by an ideology that worships his lineage, at least without some hypocrisy in most cases.
Going to an extremely corrupt shithole country fighting an existential war as an enemy propagandist is just unbelievably stupid. Even in the most ‘civilized’ Western countries that aren’t directly at war with Russia Lira’s behavior wouldn’t be tolerated (see the treatment of Russia Today in recent years), and Ukraine isn’t in that group.
It's not fighting an existential war, it's fighting a proxy war on behalf of western powers.
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It would be stupid if GL thought it was safe, but he was well aware of the danger. You can call it foolish/self sacrificing deed if you wish, but not dumb.
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For my part, probably, but as a guy who's got all three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago along with Cancer Ward and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich sitting on his bookshelf I've got to admit that you got me. As much as I have joked about it on reddit, I may really have lived long enough to become the villain.
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Bad moves from both sides here. Coach literally livetweeted that he was going to cross at a specific border checkpoint with Hungary hours before he actually did so, and surprise surprise, he was caught and jailed. Ukraine should've kicked him out instead of keeping him because it's not like he could do actual harm to the war effort.
I don't know if this will have significant material repercussions for Ukraine. I was under the impression that Ukraine funding was slowed if not dried up entirely due to the focus on the new hot thing, the Israel-Palestine conflict.
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Seems to me that Muggeridge's law has struck again. Dude who advocates radical self-interest killed by other people's radical self-interest.
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“Middle aged redpill e-celeb moves to BAYSED Eastern Europe to fuck Slavic teenagers; gets himself killed by advocating publicly for the military conquest of the country he’s currently in” is such a hilarious sequence of events.
Can anybody convince Rollo Tomassi to move to Taiwan?
It is objectively absurd that of all people this petty online schemer is a matter of international record, but if you put it as "55 year old American dies of pneumonia in a foreign gulag funded by his own government for political speech, leaves widow and child" it sounds more like Boulgakov than Seinfeld.
The US regularly threw Westerners (including Americans) jailed by US-allied conservative governments under the bus in the Cold War. It’s nothing new, if you were a good American Marxist and decided to start shit in a friendly reactionary Latin American country the CIA wasn’t going to bail you out.
In fact the CIA famously approved Pinochet’s killing of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, both American journalists in Chile sympathetic to Allende. And they were ex-Harvard, ex-Philips Exeter, high status and well-connected Americans, let alone washed up former pick up artists.
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You're not wrong and yet...
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