Jeff Danziger for March 09, 2022

Pretty sure no one will forget Marx, Lenin or Stalin anytime soon.

I’m sure Karl Marx is rolling in his grave while people associate his name with the likes of Lenin and Stalin.

I have a dream that some day our children will have no NEED to hear of Molotov cocktails because they have no NEED to use weapons against each other.

For those who do not know, besides being a weapon, Molotov was the guy who signed the nonaggression pact with Germany during World war two.

It IS handy to know how to improvise weapons…

This is a quote from Wikipedia:

The name “Molotov cocktail” was coined by the Finns during the Winter War, called Molotovin koktaili in Finnish. The name was a pejorative reference to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who was one of the architects of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed in late August 1939.

The Hungarians in Budapest in 1954 got more than 300 Soviet T-38’s, mostly with Molotovs. The price per tank was…high. I very highly recommend Michener’s “Bridge at Andau”. This book was not a novel. He writes of personal experiences Hungarians had with the AVO, the Hungarian equivalent to the KGB, of how the uprising began with no planning and no warning, with one young man, a student, standing up in a large meeting hall, and saying something other than the general remarks about inconsequential things, and of how the hall, which was filled with buzzing conversation, went deathly silent, because the crowd knew there would be agents of the AVO amongst them, and that the young man had just given himself a death sentence. Read it, I guarantee it is not dated. A more intense telling of how much so many common people treasure freedom, and how madly much they are willing to pay for it, has very rarely ever been written. You will learn things. The Russian officer standing up in the turret of his tank, crying, and cursing the AVO riflemen on a roof, slaughtering a peaceful crowd, and what he did then is worth reading the book just for that.

Destroy a million $ tank with a half liter of petrol. More bang for your buck.

By the time Marx and Lenin become household names, the work of Danziger will be forgotten.

…and the favorite soap used in these bottle-bombs was “Duz”.

I dream of the day when the name trump will fade away with time…

Send Mitch Rapp to Moscow.

Has Kyle Rittenhouse volunteered to go to Ukraine yet?

Ironically, the name “Molotov cocktail” was coined by the Finns, after the pact between Hitler and Stalin was made by Molotov, freeing Stalin to attempt to crush the Finns – which was about as successful as Putin in Ukraine.

A few other names may fade with time but not Molotov.

Tanks for the memories.

Putin doesn’t carpet bomb. Russians and Ukrainians are one face, one race. Biden is the Dr. Strangelove of our era. Biden should be put in the insane asylum. 25th Amendment.

Amen, sir.

As well as the guillotine was named after old Joe Guillotine, his instrument easily adjusted for human measurements, even for tiny squirts of giant horrific proportions.

Some people now are calling that device a “Ukrainian smoothie.”

Freshly declassified – perhaps to help Ukrainians learn how to deal with Russian military?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taHFUKKKmJM

“The Z sign is the symbol for people who cannot even draw a swastika properly.”

Molotov is one of the best against tanks and armored vehicles.

From The Economist:

IT DID NOT take long for Pravda, a trendy microbrewery in Lviv, to switch from brewing beer to mixing Molotov cocktails. It began churning out these improvised incendiaries on February 25th, the day after Russia invaded. Equipment previously employed for brews that won awards in Brussels, Munich and Prague now blends and bottles a concoction made from six parts machine oil, three parts petrol, four parts expanded polystyrene dissolved in a solvent called thinner 646, and a sprink­ling of powdered aluminium. The result (see picture above) is soupy, sticky and burns like crazy—the better to disable any Russian military vehicle it is hurled at. After running out of its own bottles, the brewery even stooped, jokes Yuri Zastavny, Pravda’s owner, to filling empties that had once held the likes of Corona and Miller.

Nor are Pravda’s employees content only to mix Molotovs. They are also fashioning caltrops. These are tetrahedral structures with a spike at each vertex, which means that, however they fall, one spike points upwards. Caltrops have been used as “area denial” weapons on battlefields since ancient times (Alexander the Great employed them to beat the Persians at Gaugamela in 331BC). Originally, they were intended to bring down charging cavalry and war chariots. Now their targets are vehicle tyres and soldiers’ boots. Pravda’s people make them out of “rebar”—the lengths of twisted steel used to reinforce concrete.

cont’d:

Points of contentionFor rapid deployment on city streets that need barricading, caltrops can be welded to chains. Elsewhere in Lviv, other forms of barricade are being prepared. These are six-vertex anti-tank devices called hedgehogs, made from lengths of surplus train rail. They look like giant versions of children’s jacks. Deployed en masse they can halt tanks in their tracks, opening them to attack by the men and women with the Molotovs. And the workshops of Lviv are not alone. Defences of this sort are being cranked out all across Ukraine. Those without access to rebar fashion caltrops by bending and welding nails. And rows of spikes fixed to sheets of thick rubber will also make infantry think twice.

Ukraine has many engineers, computer programmers and other technical specialists who are used to getting things done with limited resources. Sviatoslav Yurash, a young parliamentarian from Lviv, who is in Kyiv to fight, attributes this inventiveness to the country’s distinctive cultural heritage. The “bureaucratic mayhem” of Soviet rule, he says, pushed people to devise creative workarounds. That served as a foundation for the three decades of market-oriented reforms that followed independence. These rewarded an entrepreneurial spunk which, he observes, is “coming in handy right now”. Vladimir Yatsenko, a film producer also in Kyiv to fight, describes this inventive spirit as “our national DARPA”, a reference to a famous American military-research agency.

cont’d

As for the profusion of Molotov cocktails, Ukrainian mixologists are testing a variety of recipes and designs. Some have a divider separating two stages, one filled with kerosene and the other with home-made napalm. And Molotovs are not merely hand-thrown weapons. One Ukrainian army colonel in Kyiv, who requested an­onymity, has a photograph of a Molotov-launching crossbow, fashioned from scrap steel and a bed spring.

With or without such improvised launchers, Molotovs can be extremely effective in urban combat. In particular, they make invaders chary of passing within a bottle’s throw of upstairs windows. That is both a constraint on movement and a call on attention that might make a soldier vulnerable to attack from another direction. And makeshift arms which are the fruit of greater technical expertise than that needed to fill a bottle with liquid are also cropping up in Ukraine. These “craft-produced weapons”, as experts call them, are mostly modifications of things that go boom. In Mr Jenzen-Jones’s view two, in particular, stand out in the fighting in Ukraine.

(There is more, but I will stop here.)

I think it’s totally unfair to include Marx in that lineup.

What did Groucho ever do to anyone?

Seriously, Karl Marx was a social scientist. He wasn’t a political leader like the other two. They—and others—used weird versions of Marx’s communism to their own despotic ends. That’s why there is a difference between the real culprit—Stalinism—and the economic theory of communism.

Ironic that Vyacheslav Molotov was a Russian, no?