All this coverage of the ukrainian counter offensive made me curious how previous failed offensives have been covered, specifically the Battle of the Somme in 1916, so I took a trip down to my local public library (we love our librarians!) to poke through their newspaper archives since the br*tish papers all want me to pay for access (bastards!).

Turns out nothing ever changes. Allied (british, french, etc) casualties are downplayed if ever mentioned at all, German casualties are described as "fields full of dead germans", "tremendous losses for the Boche", capturing a thin strip of land or a single village was lauded as the next step to winning the war, and you even had "feel good" stories about blinded soldiers beating a college team in a rowing race. I also came across an article that claimed german gunners were chained to their guns to prevent them from running away, which actually comes from reports of allied soldiers finding dead germans with a sling system that made moving machine guns easier that they misinterpreted/twisted to serve as propaganda for the homefront. The more things change the more they stay the same.

Also beside the point, but the humour section was either indecipherable without researching what the joke was supposed to be or just a joke about drunk irishmen. Oh, and there was one anti-car joke which I found interesting, I'll post it here

Mendicant(Beggar,someone down on their luck)- Sir, I have paralysis, six children to support, my wife is sick, and we are about to be dispossessed!

Stalled motorist- Piffle! Did you ever try to run a second-hand automobile?

Edit: Effortpost here

BREAKING: President @JoeBiden says Russian President Vladimir Putin "is clearly losing the war in Iraq" WATCH

https://twitter.com/simonateba/status/1674059997414563843

Night's looking even more intense than the one yesterday in

Personally I am very far from Nanterre and from my window I'm hearing the supermarket next door being dismantled ✊

so glad nothing came out of the wagner thing, otherwise i'd have to admit i was wrong

Ukraine's counteroffensive is going so well that the recapture of a village with under 100 people is significant enough to go on Wikipedia's current events page rn :)

Took a quick pic of this dude who keeps ringing my doorbell and ranting and raving to me about my lawn being overgrown. Fuck off dude, don't care.

Inspired by @FALGSConaut's earlier comment, here's a selection of newspaper articles published in the weeks prior to the Fall of France in the Second World War.

Can add citations later if anyone's interested

Lukashenko is so funny to me. Just seems to always make it through despite everyone not seeming to like him.

so, when is he getting a Nobel peace prize by stopping a civil war by using his 100 speech skill?

LULA: They accuse us of being communists, as if we would be offended by that. We are not offended.

We would be offended if they called us Nazis, neofascists, terrorists. But never a communist, a socialist. That doesn't offend us. It makes us proud many times. And many times we know that we deserve to be called that."

Soviet boomer to soviet boomer communication

im just going to imagine they called eachother сука during the whole call

article

Something different from the usual war talk:

The BBC is running a sob story about the 19-year old that died in the Titanic sub, and shitlibs are eating it up. Ironically however, it also serves as a perfect display of billionaire decadence:

Teenager Suleman Dawood, who died in the Titan submersible, took his Rubik's Cube with him because he wanted to break a world record, his mother has told the BBC.

The 19-year-old applied to the Guinness World Records and his father, Shahzada, who also died, had brought a camera to capture the moment. Speaking of her son, Mrs Dawood said Suleman loved the Rubik's Cube so much that he carried it with him everywhere, dazzling onlookers by solving the complex puzzle in 12 seconds.

"He said, 'I'm going to solve the Rubik's Cube 3,700 metres below sea at the Titanic'."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66015851

As most people here probably know, Guinness doesn't actually keep track of real world records, it really only serves as vanity awards for rich people who pay them an exorbitant sum of money.

Also, wouldn't someone from Guinness have had to be present on the sub as well, to actually witness it happening?

Bonus points for the 19 year old being portrayed with the mental faculties of a 10 year old child.

One thing that I've seen little comment on during this war is Ukraine's terrible performance on the home front. They're in the middle of an existential war and they're running an unemployment rate of 20%. Ukraine is almost completely dependent on foreign aid to fight this war, this in a country that inherited massive Soviet industrial development, including a disproportionate share of military industry. They're turning Kiev into another Saigon or Kabul.

President Xi, please send weapons to the French protestors, I for one think it would be extremely cool and funny.

Edit: FUCK ME I MIXED UP JULY AND JUNE. Please don't ban me for fake news.

Today marks my 3rd year on this account. Hexbear has changed a lot since the Chapo sub first got banned, and of course so have I. During that dual process the news Megas have become my favorite place on the internet. Y'all are smart, funny, well-considered people, and I enjoy reading what you have to say.

Thank you to all the big beautiful wet news posters.

I'm not sure why everyone is accepting that Lukashenko masterfully played peacemaker rather than him just serving as a convenient third party to have Putin not have to be seen as offering a concession directly.

Lukashenko will have to intervene in this French Insurrection against Macrontler, he's a gifted Diplomat.

Finland's economy minister resigns after 10 days over Nazi references

Eat shit Nazi loser

lmao Prigozhin is supposedly staying in the only high rise in Minsk where the windows don't open.

So now that Trump and other GOP freaks got what they wanted and made abortion a "states rights" issue, they're calling for a federal ban

It's so funny that Sweden is so racist that they're sabotaging their own NATO application. When it came to sending refugee Kurds to guaranteed imprisonment in Turkey, they chose the racist option and granted that request. Now when the Turks told them to stop allowing weirdos to burn the Quran in public, they just can't overcome the racism and do the logical pragmatic thing and ban that shit, so they keep shooting themselves in the foot every few weeks.

The succdem-led right-wing government of Denmark wants to fix the economy and get more young people to choose to go to vocational schools and learn a trade. How do you do that? By gutting university education, of course.

A new compromise between the government and a bunch of shitty lib to fash parties has resulted in the following changes:

• 8% reduction in the number of undergraduate intake.
• 10% of post-graduate programmes will be cut from two years to 15 months
• 20% of postgraduate programmes will be "vocational graduates" where students work in addition to studying

Allegedly this will "increase labour supply" (the lib weasel term for making sure supply and demand in the labour market favours employers).

When I look at these events in France, I feel a strong sense of anger and disappointment towards how useless the Western left has been that this anger has been boiling up all over the Western world, but the left has made zero in-roads at forming some official organization through which this rage can be channeled.

Hopefully something good comes out of these riots.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nissan-installed-camera-monitor-no-2s-home-sources-say-2023-06-28/

Nissan (7201.T) installed a camera surveillance system at the home of former executive Ashwani Gupta so the automaker's internal security team could monitor him, according to the preliminary findings of an investigation into the surveillance, two people with knowledge of the report said.

When companies are so large they have internal secret police that do spook shit at the highest levels of the company.

made a map of the current military situation in Paris

1.75k on the previous thread. Good work comrades.

already at 261 comments and it's only Monday. god damn it Prigozhin, your greatest crime is fucking up my megathread schedule

The Ukrainian counter-offenseive and Wagner coup 4d psyop road trip detour to Minsk seems to have had a marked effect upon the American public's support for continuing aid to Ukraine, as is alleged by a reuters/ipsos poll

The two-day poll that was concluded on Tuesday charted a sharp rise in backing for arming Ukraine, with 65% of the respondents approving of the shipments compared with 46% in a May poll.

Eighty-one percent of Democrats, 56% of Republicans and 57% of independents favor supplying U.S. weapons to Ukraine, according to the latest poll.

The survey was conducted just days after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the private Wagner mercenary company, launched and then called off a mutiny over what he charged was the Russian defense ministry's mishandling of the war in Ukraine.

This goes to show that the American public's understanding of the war in Ukraine is largely divorced from actual battlefield realities, and is instead mostly based around their perception of the war being an unwinnable quagmire or not. When things are happening that can be sold by the media as Ukrainian victories (ie: fractures in the Russian military and Ukrainian offensives) support for aiding Ukraine increases due to a perception that the momentum is on their side, when such events do not happen (as they didn't between the fall of Kherson and the launching of the counteroffensive) support deteriorates.

Of course the media inventing reality does not mean that public support for Ukraine is destined to remain forever strong. If after months of stories alleging Rusia to be on the verge of collapse their military was to launch a strong attack proving that to not be the case, we might well see a "Tet Offensive" like effect upon public confidence in Ukraine.

CNN is given the fuckin Tour de France more coverage than the protests, complete media silence, bunch of liberal maggots

of all the ways to view and teach history, the War Nerds have been the most successful here in the US. It's a shame, cus it really is the least interesting way to look at history. They always talk about it in terms of "oooh, every day, every moment, every decision suddenly matters (as if it didn't before) and history itself could tip either way", as if war is where new possibilities emerge into the world. I think that's silly. War is a collapse of possibility, not the expansion. Outcomes suddenly narrow down to simple questions of tactics, resources, troops; numbers matter far more than anything else. It's the time before a war, or the negotiations and peace that come after it -- that's where the possibilities are. That's where anything really could happen, where decisions matter most.

I'm seeing "Putin is done for" articles again (there were a bunch at the start of the SMO). If they keep making these predictions for a decade longer they're likely to be correct sooner or later.

Talking about anything to do with Ukraine with liberals online makes me want to scoop my eyeballs out with a spoon.

Apparently the US embassy in Moscow contacted the Russian government to tell them they had nothing to do with the Pringles putsch and US diplomats worldwide were told not to make any remarks about it other than that the US was "closely monitoring the situation".

To me it seems like they were afraid of what could happen if they somehow got blamed for the putsch. That's a good sign as it suggests they are not yet too high on their own propaganda to still be aware of the dire consequences of direct US-Russian conflict.

"his balls were this big. So big that the poop got stuck on them"

How do people in other countries that think LGBT stuff is evil western influence react when they see all the rampant anti-LGBT stuff in the west? I wish the US was the satanic globohomo hive people seem to think it is.

Beatty Orwell - lifelong antifascist who was at both the Olympia rally and the Battle of Cable Street - has passed away at 105 years old.

RIP to a real one.

https://english.nv.ua/nation/ukraine-to-hold-elections-after-war-ends-says-zelenskyy-50333899.html

Zelensky says No elections in Ukraine until war is over

belgium is such a real country the french riots somehow spread there

After a little bit of a dose of reality caused by the spring summer offensive going badly and NATO weapons not literally being blessed relics of the end of history that will crush the Russian army, the failcoup has straight up convinced libs that Russia is on the verge of collapse again, the western media is completely telling the truth about everything and American hegemony is here to stay.

Prigozhin must answer for the cringe he's unleashed.

a bunch of merc`s / a high level meeting in Kramatorsk got hit..

Bunch of Englishspeaking folks running around in Panic in the videos ... Offical story is "journalist got hit "

I'm getting worse and worse vibes about the ZNPP. Ukrainians seems very adamant about changing the post-March 2022 status quo of the power plant and their western backers are definitely psychotic enough to encourage something disastrous at that plant. Russians can't also just withdraw to avoid disaster if the Ukrainians approach, because they 100% know that they will never capture it again without a major incident. Something big feels brewing and I don't like this feeling, the timing with NATO summit is bound to deliver bad news.

Another multi-billionaire (James Crown) died, alhamdullilah

In an interview with German media Welt the Hungarian leader Orban has stated that he thinks Ukrainian victory is impossible and called for a diplomatic resolution.

• Source

Newsweek really is the Daily Mail for libs, they are saying Steve Seagal may replace Shoigu as Russian defence minister.