- cross-posted to:
- ukraine_war_news
- cross-posted to:
- ukraine_war_news
Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
Russia invades a neighbour who dares to attempt to have stronger ties to the west.
West supplies neighbour with weapons to defend itself.
Tankies on Lemmy: “oh no, Russia is being oppressed”
Angry libs on lemmy downplay CNN poll showing majority of Americans oppose more US aid for Ukraine
Heckin wholesome democracy, ignoring the will of the people to keep doing what you wanted anyway, after doing that for decades in Afghanistan and Iraq
Imagine not helping your Allies when they’ve been invaded, unprovoked, and are fighting for everything.
To be fair, we tend to take US military help to Europe for granted in retrospect. Both FDR and Churchill fought hard battles at home to ensure the opposition to Nazi Germany, and at the time it is far from obvious that they would succeed. There’s also an element of luck to the fact that we had FDR and Churchill at the helm of these countries in these years - weaker leaders would have crumbled like France.
US military involvement in the postwar era has been a fucking mess, but we (Europeans) are eternally grateful for this - far from obvious - determination to help your allies when they’re being invaded.
Post script since there’s a bunch of Russian shills in this thread: We’re grateful for the efforts of the Red Army as well. The fact that Stalin was happy to cooperate with Hitler all the way until the invasion of the Soviet Union, combined with a common distaste for Soviet postwar policies in many liberated areas, however makes our appreciation of the Soviet political leadership at the time a bit more strained. Soviet military tactics were also inefficient and caused unnecessary suffering and losses within the Red Army - history does repeat itself.
Avengers theme plays
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The White House must be angry libs on lemmy then.
They’re angry libs, yes.
Good thing we listened to a few things Alexis Tocqueville had to say and we don’t simply follow majority opinion on everything, because sometimes the majority is wrong.
At a 2008 summit, NATO stated that it would attempt to expand to include Georgia and Ukraine, despite Russia having stated that NATO membership for those countries was a red line for them. Georgia was immediately invaded by Russia in response. Imo this makes it clear that NATO membership for either of those countries was so unacceptable that Russia would rather invade.
If we assume that Russia (and Putin in particular) is acting violently and irrationally like a wild animal, why did NATO continue to agitate Russia when the only possible outcome would be violence? Surely a neutral or even Russia-aligned Ukraine would be preferable to a war-torn Ukraine? This is proof that the US and NATO don’t care about the average person actually living in Ukraine, and indeed don’t care about the Ukrainian state beyond it being a useful (and profitable) proxy against a geo-political rival.
To be clear, I’m not excusing Russia here, but geo-politics aren’t about what’s “fair” or “right”, and if they were, the US would be a global pariah.
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To clarify my stance, I want the war to end as soon as possible so that all the people on the ground can stop killing each other for no reason. I also agree that Russia invading was, in addition to being wrong because war is bad, incredibly stupid and needlessly damaging to their own position (I was one of the people saying they wouldn’t launch an invasion because it seemed like it would backfire). We’ll see how the economic and geo-political damage ends up shaking out in a decade or so, I imagine. And of course it’s understandable for Ukrainians to take up arms to defend their land, though it will likely only prolong the suffering, especially if we agree that life on the ground under the Ukrainian state would be little better than living under the Russian one. I also recognize that Putin claiming the war was necessary for de-nazification etc was the equivalent of pretending to care about human rights to sell the war to the populace; yes there are nazis and the far right is a huge problem in Ukraine, but that isn’t something Russia actually cares about (beyond a potential insurgency, anyway).
However, the point of my comment was not to condemn Ukraine. Instead, it was to point out that the US is not interested in helping Ukrainians (something we clearly agree on), and that in fact they are more than willing to sacrifice them in a conflict to achieve their own ends, namely isolating/weakening Russia and opening up Ukraine to even more voracious imperial extraction.
Do you support the right to self-determination for Ukrainians in the Donbas region? Do you support their right to live in peace, free from artillery bombardment and being terrorized by far-right paramilitary groups? Or do you only support the rights of Ukrainians that the state department tells you to care about?
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Ukraine had even better terms than that under the Minsk agreements. They refused to hold to the terms and stop shelling Donbas, even after they signed a ceasefire twice. After the invasion there was another attempt at peace talks, it ended with Ukraine dragging their own negotiator into the street and shooting him in the head. Late last year Zelensky signed a decree making it illegal to negotiate peace with Putin. The few times Ukraine has retaken a major area they immediately begin purging “collaborators and traitors”. If Russia pulled back it’s military Ukraine would just immediately invade those areas, regardless of any agreements they signed.
I’m not philosophically opposed to your idea, it really would be the best outcome. It’s just impossible to actually implement.
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Then why did Ukraine sign the two separate Minsk agreements if they never intended to follow them?
Peace with Donbas was popular with Ukrainians. In the most recent elections the candidate that ran on a platform of peace with Donbas won the election and became president. Zelensky then went to the front and gave his “I’m not some loser” speech to Ukraine’s militants on the front to try to deescalate the war. Once he failed to reign in his paramilitaries he began agitating for more war.
You are correct that it’s unlikely that a Ukrainian government could survive implementing peace with Donbas. This isn’t because it was unpopular with the people of Ukraine but because it was unpopular with the people in power. After the US-backed coup far-right elements were placed in positions of power in the Ukrainian government, especially in the police and military. If that failed, the US could have once again opened the floodgates of money from NGOs to anti-government protestors and replaced whoever the Ukrainian people elected with a more “pro-democratic” leader.
You’re right that overall the central Ukrainian government wanted war too much to abide by the ceasefire treaties they signed. I just don’t think that excuses them. Wanting war too much to do peace is literally what I’m criticizing Ukraine for.
You can’t write two paragraphs excusing Russia and then say “I’m not excusing Russia btw.”
No country should be able to force ‘my way or a military invasion’ ultimatum on another non hostile sovereign state. If a government interprets a neighboring country joining a purely defensive treaty out of their own volition (no, Ukraine is not secretly run by the CIA after Maidan) as a hostile act, that only means the nationalism levels went out if control.
I’m normally very critical of the US, but neither them nor NATO can be blamed for this conflict.
For the first 40 years of NATO’s existence it sought to offensively undermine democracy and reinforce the states of NATO aligned countries in Europe through terrorism.
They then rather offensively carpet bombed Yugoslavia killing and wounding thousands of civilians ( many of whom were from Kosovo the people they purportedly wanted to help), 3 foreign diplomats by bombing a foreign embassy not in anyway involved in a conflict and completely destroying the infrastructure of Serbia.
They then offensively invaded Afghanistan where they destabilized the country, toppled the government and then put pedophile psychos in charge because they were the ones willing to work with us, killed nearly 100,000 civilians, and then ended up putting the original government back in charge 20 years later.
Finally they offensively took the most prosperous country in Africa, a country with universal college, healthcare, jobs programs, and housing, a desert country that had a 200 year supply of water and bombed the fuck out of it, destroying the water supply, plundering the gold, supporting the precursors to ISIS, and turned the country into a place with fucking slave auctions.
But yeah NATO is a defensive alliance.
Ok, I will not be defending those actions of NATO - I protested against my country involvement when possible and do agree about them being either dumb decisions (Kosovo) or straight up war crimes (Afghanistan). They shouldn’t have happend.
My point still stand though. NATO doesn’t threaten Russia borders. It could be called ‘Anti-Russia-Country-Club’, but even then the only things threatened by existence of NATO are post-USSR legacy and economic interest. Not exactly arguments to mount a large scale invasion/ethnic cleansing.
You’ll just ignore their relevance to why NATO approaching your doorstep is, in fact, hostile and aggressive.
NATO was literally created to oppose the USSR and the left in Europe generally, and did not disband after the fall of the USSR, instead taking up further aggression and at greater range, and keeping a very clear encirclement position around Russia. The bases got larger, the spending increased, and membership was sought to undermine any countries stepping out of line of the American-imposed order.
If NATO, as we both agree, is an aggressive group of countries that has a contemporary history of attacking countries that are not aligned with the West, despite many of these countries trying to align themselves with the West in good faith (Libya, Russia, and Iran all helped the West in the war on terror), then what is the appropriate way for Russia to react to the expansion of NATO to their doorstep? And I’m asking this as a genuine question, you’re Russia how are you reacting to the West surrounding you despite assisting them, when do you stop tolerating increased military encroachment?
I don’t think that Russia invaded Ukraine because of only NATO expansion, but it obviously played a role given that the peace agreement that was nearly agreed upon April 2022 had Ukraine agree to neutrality. I think a lot of it came down to the genocide of ethnically Russian Ukrainians in the East and Ukraine’s increased shelling of the region in February 2022 is probably what escalated the war into what we see today.
That’s a good question. Let me tackle it from a different angle though - why do ex USSR/Warsaw Pact countries actively want to join NATO?
As a resident of one, I think it’s because they feel that Russia after Yeltsin has the exact same imperialistic principles USSR did. And it doesn’t matter to them that Russia did cooperate with the West, because they see those principles as enough threat. Thus, they have the same reason to fear Russia as Russia has to fear NATO.
Perhaps if NATO disbanded before 1999 we wouldn’t have current Russia, but that’s alt history.
Because they are run by right-wing oligarchies that want to consolidate and protect their accumulated wealth and power? The imperialism is coming from inside the house.
Disappointing. The other Hexbear folk at least tried to have a discussion, you just show up with the old ‘everything left of my position is fascist’ argument, expecting what exactly?
Russia during Yeltsin rolled in the tanks on its own parliament. The absence of foreign invasions was not for lack of malice, but for lack of capability.
The reason why ex-Warsaw Pact countries are flocking to NATO is because when the communists left power, the reactionaries resurged. And naturally the reactionaries in power wanted to be part of a right-wing alliance. But no matter what revanchists might tell you, living standards across Eastern Europe were better in the 1980s than they were in the 2000s.
Yeah, Russia had nukes. That’s the only thing that will stop NATO.
I live in eastern Europe, and I agree that the 90s and early 2000 sucked for us. Big time. My country government absolutely botched the transition to free market economy.
Still, I feel we traded stable but shit for volatile yet hopeful.
Because the US starts color revolutions in those countries until a pro-western government is in power.
Fellow ex Warsaw Pact resident here.
They wanted to join NATO because after the dissolution of the USSR these countries were pushed into a deep economic crisis, to which one of the solutions, apart from relentless austerity programs was the privatization of the shit ton of public assets they had. Of course lots of western companies were in on this since for them these assets were really cheap and they had a lot of money. The city hall of the town i went to university to became a fucking McDonald’s.
Thing is, a lot of people didnt like this, not just the austerity, but the handing of domestic assets to western companies. And they were not even that wrong about it! In Albania, in 1997 a series of bankruptcies of asset managing companies (most western owned) who were basically scamming people who barely came into contact with capitalism, telling them theyll get 50% interest rates for their money, led to a brutal uprising where ordinary people were sacking military bases, setting up machine gun nests in the borders of cities and overthrew the government (after half a year of protests).
In the meantime Russia was led by well-known alcoholic, Boris Yeltsin, who doesn’t strike me as the napoleonic conqueror people make him out to be.
So why did these countries join NATO? Because they DESPERATELY needed the money, but western companies wouldnt invest in (exploit) them if they dont have insurances (troops that could be sent against the people anytime an Albanian-type revolt breaks out or an anti-western government come in power who would try to renationalize assets) that their investments (exploitation) runs as smoothly as possible. And it works. People like to say that “ackshually the living standards went up in Eastern Europe”, but they never stop to check that it only went up because the rich got richer, pulling the average up. The working class’ lives stagnated at best, except the social net around them is rapidly brought down. Older people are not nostalgic for socialism here because theyre becoming senile, but because they see every time that they go to a hospital that the increasingly privatized healthcare system is crumbling.
Don’t believe me? It’s fine. But i would suggest that you examine who the current pariahs are in NATO: Hungary, whose government has to rely in a lot of things to the cheapest due to a ravaged economy (both by corruption and privatization), so they rely a lot on domestic production and trying to hand off as little stuff to western corporations as possible (and still fail at it, hence why they are still intact), and Turkey, who makes no secret of wanting to standing on its own feet and not rely on western corporations.
probably worth mentioning that I think he also couped the government to prevent the Communist party from being voted back in to power in I want to say '94.
NATO weapons are bombing Russia literally right now.
Are the Russians sincerely supposed to believe that NATO isn’t a threat
That’s sort of a hard reality to contextualize away
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For the past several decades NATO has utterly destroyed various countries around the world, while maintaining ruthless tradewars against the peoples of Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, as well as a brutal colonial regime across much of West Africa. NATO won’t stop at invading your country either. They’ll maintain occupations in Syria and blockades of Afghanistan from now until the end of time.
NATO would rather see the people of Niger and Mali starve to death rather than pay market rates for their resources.
NATO will crow that countries in South America are too defiant, why, they didn’t even try and coup the brazilian elections last year!
NATO is, simply put, a defensive alliance of the world’s preeminent warmongerers.
Hosting NATO troops is the epitome of hostility.
Unfortunately for you some countries can actually resist. And resist they shall.
Oh I’d forgotten that Biden seized Afghanistan’s soveriegn wealth, causing a famine.
That famine was an investment in democracy.
Non-hostility is when you do ethnic cleansing against the ethnicity the neighboring country is named after, engage in a war right by the borders to support that ethnic ckeansing, violate your treaties to end that war, and cozy up your coup government to the military organization intended to encircle that country, an org that regularly engages in aggression.
Ethnic cleansings in those territories are a fabricated casus beli for Russia ‘green man’. There were tensions between Russian and Ukrainian nationals in those territories, but I’ve seen no data on large scale extermination operations.
Ukraine engaged in a defensive war with a force clearly backed by their stronger neighbor that just laid claim to another piece of their land (Crimea). This was a land grab in all but name, no matter how much propaganda tries to paint it as a legitimate independence movement. Blame for casualties of that war lies entirely on separatists and Russia.
The ethnic cleansing was and is part of official Ukrainian policy. Do you think the sneaky Rooskies infiltrated and forced Kyiv to drop Russian as an official language, one that could be learned and used in schools in Donbas? Did they cleverly rename the streets to Bandyerite fascist names? Did they create the Azov Batallikn, Righy Sector, etc - the Ukrainian fascist groups weaponized against the ethnic Russian civilians of Donbas and now directly incorporated into the government and armed forces? Did Russia secretly create the entire Kyiv side of the civil war that heavily targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure on the Donbas side?
Cool to learn, I didn’t know that.
Ukraine has used internationally banned cluster munitions in the donbass since 2014. A six year old playing in a field and dying to unexploded ordnance, whether that child is a Russian or Ukrainian speaker, is a horrific tragedy. These bombs are a form of terrorism sponsored by the post-coup Ukrainian state, and the nazi paramilitaries active in the area were and are state-sponsored terrorists.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions
But I never said I support cluster munitions. Fuck them, and fuck the Nazis.
I did not just engage in a few hours of discussion to try and convince anyone that Ukraine is the shining beacon of hope and democracy. It isn’t, they have problems. So does every state. Some (like Russia) just seem to have comparatively more of those, or are not particularly good at dealing with them.
The problem though is that these issues are self-perpetuating. Both the current Russian and post-2014 Ukraine governments are the products of US interference. If we were truly spreading Democracy, then they would be capable of mediating these conflicts peacefully. Since Capital dictates the terms of our international intervention, it puts its own interests first, and it’s very interested in selling weapons. I just can’t accept the premise that selling more weapons will lead to any sort of long-lasting peace or democracy in the region.
there have been reports of Ukranian paramilitaries shelling the Donbas going back almost a decade. multiple peace treaties were signed over it, all aiming to stop the ethnic cleansing. each and every one of those treaties were violated. this is all extremely well-documented. can you even prove that a single of these reports is fabricated?
I meant pre 2014 conflict though.
the person you replied to was talking about the last 9 years
How many people do you have to exterminate before it becomes bad?
They can, because hexbear. They’re Russian apologists.
Yeah yeah, I know Hexbear. I don’t agree with their pro-imperialism, but at the same time they are not wrong with their socialist takes.
That’s why it’s worth debating them - they are not inherently evil like fascists are.
In fascists’ defence, they have no theory to fall back on, it’s all just kneejerk reptilian brain brute force and brute words and brute cult of personality. That’s why I am befuddled whenever I see a leftist take an offensive realist perspective :/
“How dare ex soviet nations try to ensure their own protection after Russia showed multiple times they like to invade ex soviet nations!”
Ok, according to what you’re saying, Mexico can never join BRICS if the US says no. Is that what you think? The US can be a pretty rabid animal too, as you say.
What do you think would happen if, hypothetically speaking, a nearby state such as, let’s say, Cuba started hosting the military assets of a hostile power?
What about even a distant nation such as oh I don’t know maybe Iran or one of the koreas started making weapons the US felt threatened by?
Just thinking aloud here I don’t know.
Nobody is offering Ukraine nukes, that’s what the Budapest memorandum was all about, knock it off.
Cuba had its revolution and had its own arsenal provided by the USSR and has survived everything the US threw at it so far and Ukraine will survive russia too, but a moat would be handy :)
The point being the US threw a lot of shit at it because of course the US wouldn’t tolerate those missiles being there, and Russia won’t tolerate NATO being in Ukraine.
If China made a defensive alliance with Mexico that included a military base in Tijuana, Mexico would suddenly be in need of some democracy and freedom.
Continuing to deny this basic reality means your position isn’t connected to reality.
Peace requires a sustainable security situation for Russia not just for Ukraine and for Russia that means no NATO since NATO is hostile to Russia. It’s clear and denying this is just putting your head in the sand.
Yes, but the point is with Cuba, missiles were removed, peace deal was reached.
Does the US have to place nukes in Ukraine so that by removing them russia will stop attacking it?
But by all means, if Trump starts threatening Mexico with some bullshit invasion to clean out the cartels, they should by all means ask China and anyone else to help out, sure! That’s how it works in a bipolar world (there is no multipolar world, russia’s empire is gone and China+US will make sure it never returns)
NATO is not hostile to russia, NATO prevents russia from invading its western neighbours, which is obviously a bummer to russia.
The sustainable security solution is: russia respects borders and other countries’ sovereignty. The end.
Yeah so the obvious conclusion is that peace in Cuba required satisfying the US’s demand to not have a Soviet military presence there.
Likewise peace in Ukraine requires not having a NATO military presence there.
Pretending that NATO isn’t hostile to Russia is also simply disconnected from reality. You need to connect your world view to reality.
Also we have been punishing Cuba with an embargo which has crippled their economy ever since just because we can.
Well, the weapons are still in Cuba, thank god :) and Cuba has an air force, which I suppose was given/sold to Cuba by the USSR/China, so maybe the US can also give some F16 to Ukraine. The USSR also sent planes and soviet crews to fight the Americans in Vietnam, so there is precedent for all that.
NATO is hostile to russia’s imperial ambitions and so are all of its neighbours.
You get that in this analogy Ukraine is taking the place of Cuba, right? Like NATO is using Ukraine as a disposable proxy to bleed Russia… okay well the metaphor falls apart because the details are really different, but Cuba was threatening the US in a vaguely similar way to how Ukraine is threatening Russia, and the peace deal was that Cuba would remove all the missiles and in exchange the US would remove it’s missiles from Turkey and not massacre the Cuban population. So the equivalent would be Ukraine agreeing not to join NATO (not that NATO was ever going to let them), disarm, and stop trying to wipe out Russian speaking Ukrainians.
NATO’s explicit purpose is and always have been the destruction of the Russian state and the pillaging of it’s resources and it’s beyond bad faith to state otherwise.
Ukraine’s coup government was threatening to construct nukes shortly before the US proxy war there began. I would cite my sources but I know you won’t care 😉
Well, BRICS isn’t really a formal alliance but if it were? Yeah, joining a hostile alliance while sharing a border with the US is asking for trouble, and the US has committed all matter of atrocities in latin america. I do think an outright invasion would be less likely than their usual method of military coups and death squads.
So just to reiterate, you are okay with America invading Mexico to enforce its will on them?
Half of Mexico is still under US military occupation, they already have a buffer zone between them.
Mate, it’s not hard.
It’s a yes or no question.
Your question wasn’t for me. And no, USA should give back all the land they stole from Mexico. And until they do that, it’s ridiculous for them to expect Russia to return land that’s populated with Russian ethnics to a fascists state that tried to exterminate them before the war.
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NATO and BRICS are fundamentally different. You cannot compare them in good faith. NATO exists for the explicit purpose of destroying Russia. BRICS does not exist for the explicit purpose of destroying NATO, or America for that matter. It’s an extremely bad faith comparison.
Also yeah America would flatten the Mexico City if Mexico tried to join BRICS. They’ve already agitated for a coup a number of times in the last decade.
?
What component of BRICS is a military alliance? That’s a nonsensical comparison.
And the Mexican president just said that Mexico is unable to join BRICS because of the geopolitical situation.
NATO and BRICS are just not comparable? Like… they’re both acronyms I guess.
If Mexico was given an army by China and started bombing Texas and committing ethnic cleansing, it would not be imperialism to try and stop that
If the lines on a map are an issue for you, just imagine a world where the Us broke up and lost Texas to Mexico before the ethnic cleansing started
Fuck that bully shit. They don’t own Ukraine and Georgia and they can make their own decisions. If Russia wanted a nato buffer zone they should have offered incentive. Look what they got instead…
I remember another time when some dictator wanted a bigger sphere of influence and started occupying other countries. Appeasement didn’t work than and it didn’t work with Russia.
The US dares to coup a democratically elected government, and then its neighbor invades at the behest of people the new government were persecuting after two different ceasefires are broken by Ukraines puppet government.
Dronies be like “oh no our wholesome smol bean azov fighters are being oppressed”
You straight up butchered that straw man
He is in pieces
How could you do this
“And that’s all I have to say about that.”
Literally no one thinks this, but by all means, have fun in your fantasy land lol
You’re commenting on an article explicitly saying the US isn’t sending weapons for the purpose of defending Ukraine…
Even some otherwise good regular leftists have absolute dogshit takes on Ukraine. It’s like they’re allergic to even being coincidentally on the same side as the US State Department that they start falling all over themselves to be like “Remember guys, US Bad,” and start like saying that we should be pushing Ukraine to give up territory to appease Russia so they don’t use nukes. When we already know because of Crimea that Putin will almost certainly just regroup and try again if they give him anything.
Yes, I couldn’t understand it, because to most NATO members, NATO is the backbone of their security, but I’ve realised that many lefties’ reaction to NATO is akin to atheists’ emotional-dogmatic view of religion: They’re ever suspicious, never forgive nor forget past crimes, they reject all redeeming qualities and twist themselves to oppose benefitting them at the axiom level.
I would say most leftists (specially the libertarian type), are not on the side of Russia on this.
Tankies have just been really loud with their mental gymnastics lately.
It’s amazing how much they support imperialism when it’s “their people” doing it.
Read Settlers
Siri, what’s imperialism?
Yes, you really should ask her what imperialism is if you don’t think what Russia and China are doing is imperialism.
Imperialism is when china and russia and the more china and russia the imperialister it is
Siri please help the red fash tankies keep telling me to read Lenin.
That’s because you don’t understand what imperialism means. US/EU capital is looting and exploiting the former socialist block and controlling it through western capitalist media, NGOs, and military bases. That’s imperialism. The Russians preventing Nazis from doing ethnic cleansing along their border and demanding not to be threatened with a gun to the head is not imperialism.
Funny how living standards in the ex-soviet countries have improved considerably since joining the EU, but that has not been the case for the ones that chose to be kept under Russia’s sphere of influence. 🤔
Looks like the EU is really bad at looting, they should learn from Russia.
Yeah the living standards sure did improve after one of the worst demographic disasters in that era. Easy for things to get better when you start from the bottom I mean come on do better.
Have some compassion, some people just want to crank their knob to exploitative porn without questioning why so much of it comes from Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.
Thank you for calling this out. It’s fucking gross how that happens. If I speak about what should happen to “sexpats”, I’ll be in trouble. Big big trouble.
Feel like clawing your eyes out?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/26/ukrainian-refugees-increasingly-targeted-for-sexual-exploitation-research-finds
So, why didn’t Belarus improve at the same rate as the Baltic countries?
They both started from the bottom, right?
If you think that the answer to this is simply “because Russia bad” you have the mind of a child.
Eastern European countries that opened to western trade and diplomatic relationships improved significantly.
Eastern European countries that became Russian puppets didn’t.
Explain that.
imagine ignoring the absolutely ruthless, western led cannibalization of the former soviet union and pretending history’s baseline started AFTER the largest decline of living standards in global history.
human trafficking, prostitution, alcoholism, food/energy insecurity, diseases of despair all exploded when the west forced capitalism and privatization onto the former soviet union in the immediate aftermath. Gorbachev thought he was going to get some easy-going nordic social democracy, but instead the west carved up their public sector like a christmas ham. maybe you were too young, but in the 1980s the propaganda portrait the west had of russian women were all heavy-set, ugly babushkas. suddenly, after 1989, the mail order beautiful russian bride phenomenon exploded. they were fleeing the gutting of the public sector and the shattering of the social safety net, which made it near impossible to raise a family in the eastern bloc without becoming a sex worker.
the west sponsored every retrograde nationalist reactionary psycho to undermine any hint of democratic resistance to economic liberalization schemes and bombed the shit out of infrastructure (Yugoslavia) whenever they could get away with it. the west has the most blood on its hands for the aftermath of the USSR, but people like you want to ignore those early days and then claim credit for the “winners” the west propped up in the aftermath of all that chaos. like a killer who torched a town but kidnapped a few kids and now touts his heroic rescue of them. the most ignorant and disgusting take.
Babybrain
The Balts were immediately used as forward positions for NATO and were allowed to keep their state programs and industry. Belarus got the same treatment as Russia.
You should probably know the answer to your own snarky questions before you ask them.
So, what you’re saying is that the countries that sided with the West got a better deal than the ones that became Russian puppets?
When a country joins the western bloc, they join them.
When a country joins any other multinational pact, they’re puppets.
I’m not influenced by western propaganda
Two capitalist nations fucking over their subjects is not the own you think it is
They didn’t improve at all. The rich are better off, thanks to mass privatization of public property. For the middle/working class, quality of life stagnated at best.
Source: I live in an ex-soviet country.
There was a massive dip in all those places in the 90s with shock therapy. A lot of people are still worse off in a lot of ways and angry. Hence AfD, Orban, PiS and all those other angry nationalists.
Also, if you want to be fair, you should compare for example Poland to west Germany. Polish workers toil for German capitalists, and yet, somehow, they’re getting exploited way more than the German workers. Less pay, worse services, worse infrastructure, less worker’s rights. That whole arrangement is super-exploitative. Meanwhile foreigners bought most of that country. Treated like a colony basically.
The Russians got fucked even worse than Poland in the 90s, which resulted in a backlash which Putin made himself the head of. What Russia is doing is self-preservation. Any state with the means to preserve it’s sovereignty from a hostile takeover would try to do so, it’s not just something an imperialist state would do. Hence Russia is not doing an imperialism here.
Hell, compare East Germany to the
reichWest Germany. West Germany’s economic conquest of East Germany was incredibly ruthless and brutal, and East Germany never recovered from having it’s entire economy pillaged and burned.And east german lgbt rights and women’s rights lost half a century of progress during reunification.
Yeah. It’s still technically illegal to get an abortion in the reich afaik. It was really something finding out that the gdr had gender parity in most fields before the west crushed it, and that western germany had to give women a bunch of rights to try to manage to political turmoil.
Reading those east German men be like “yeah I prefer it now that women have to stay with me for economic reasons, before you had to be like, interesting and care about them or something” really drives it home in a different way too.
I hope you understand how this is an incredibly cherry-picked range. It’s like saying “look how steadily the American economy grew from the period of 1930 to 1940”.
Many Eastern European countries in the EU are still being hollowed out and suffering massive brain drain. The model of “tributary state” accurately applies here.
Are these nazis in the room with us right now?
no they’re not here. they’re over in ukraine putting up statues of Bandera and wearing nazi symbols all over their military uniforms. were you not listening, or…?
Don’t forget putting the OUN… er… ukrainian trident on that old monument.
And the Blood and Soil flags that are very common.
I mean, you’re not gonna like it, but;
CW: Like over a hundred fotos that all have some kind of Nazi imagery in them, except one where I think they mistook a patch for the 14th Waffen SS Grenadiers 1st Galacian patch because it has similar elements
https://imgur.com/a/8Oo74F9
They’ve been open and pretty frank about their goals. I can explain all the symbols and their history and significance for you if you’d like.
I’m sorry to break it to you but are you aware of the Wagner group that has been fighting for Russia? They’re pretty Nazi as well and yet hexbear keeps cheering for Russia anyway, saying the only way to end the war is to have Ukraine give in to them. For some reason Ukraine has to be the bigger man, but Russia, the actual aggressor, who is also employing Nazi fighters, can’t?
1.) Killing Nazis is not a tit for tat thing. Everyone should kill all the Nazis they can.
2.) Most of us are not cheering for Russia. This is not a sports game. There is not a goodguy and a badguy. The only thing I want out of this war is for the killing to stop and NATO’s hegemonic power diminished. No one is going to “win” this. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead. Nazis are emboldened and proliferating throughout Eastern Europe. Vast amounts of weaponry have gone missing and will begin being used in terror attacks in the next few years. Much of Ukraine’s last remaining state industries and farmland have been sold off the multinational vultures. The massive infrastructure damage in Ukraine is never going to be repaired. You’re treating this like a movie with a hero and a villain where someone wins and someone loses. That’s not how geopolitics work. The idea that Russia is an “aggressor” shows both ignorance of history and a failure to understand the security concerns of modern states and how conflcit is conducted. So many people have this very naive model un view that the lines on the map are real and you can be sovereign when you don’t have nukes. There’s a studious refusal to engage with the reality that NATO routinely engages in hostile wars of aggression and that countries all over the world will defend themselves from that to the best of their ability, regardless of your concept of morality or rule of law. Russia is intensely aware of what NATO did to Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria. They’re intensely aware of NATOs decades of sabotage and subversion, of death squads and assassins, of coups and coercion. And you can refuse to engage with that or understand it if you want. I can’t force you to acknowledge the world as it really is. But this ridiculous “oh Russia has Nazis so it” s okay that Nazis occupy positions of influence throughout Ukraine" thing is obnoxious. Round up all of Wagner and shoot them. I don’t care. Mercenaries are scum. I don’t care what happens to them. Nazis should be hunted down and killed regardless of where they are, not armed and emboldened.
Your words don’t match your attitude. You guys constantly berate Ukraine and defend Russia, even when it has similar problems. The only actual solution you have is to have Ukraine give up and surrender sovereignty to Russia. The only place I agree with you is that all Nazis are bad.
And Russia is the one who attacked, that makes it the aggressor. Ukraine wasn’t even joining NATO until they made it seem more alluring, and even then their membership is still an open question, so none of that matters. And if NATO did attack Russia, then they would be the aggressor, and I would be arguing against them, because Russia would have the right to defend itself, just like Ukraine does. But it wasn’t. They just wanted territory. You guys also seem to just take Russian propaganda as truth, generally taking their reasons as good faith, claiming genocides against Russian speaking people’s (even though the President is one) just because they specified the official language or saying some Nazi terrorists are a reason to obliterate the country (even though Russia has some, too, as does the US. It doesn’t mean I want someone invading to stop them, destroying my house and shit). It would be like if some terrorists attacked the US and that was used as a reason to obliterate a country, or two. You claim you see the world as it really is, even though Russia didn’t have to attack and none of this had to happen. It reminds me of conservatives who are always telling people on the left to open their eyes and see how the world really is.
I mean you’re here so, kinda yeah
You mean a western led coup with assistance from neo nazis to remove the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014. With the explicit goal of “Latin Americanising” Eastern Europe and privatizing and selling off all their assets. The Ukrainian government still has a website up today for selling off anything not bolted down to the highest bidder. Shock doctrine 2.0.
You mean forcing Ukraine to start a counter offensive using NATO combined arms tactics for witch Ukraine had neither the equipment or required training to execute. And with no will from the west to give Ukraine the required equipment (F-16 saga anyone?). How do you do a combined arms offensive without a fully functional air force? The worst part being that the west knew this, and still forced Ukraine to go ahead with the offensive anyways, knowing there was little chance of success.
More like people saw this coming and think the loss of life over this attrition war is tragic. How does Ukraine win an attrition war against Russia? What is the exit plan? This is just Afganistan all over again in some ways.
The west forced Ukraine to defend itself?
Were they supposed to welcome the Russians with open arms?
I believe they mean by continuously sabotaging peace accords and talks
Yeah exactly. What has Ukraine accomplished since the sabotaged peace talks by Boris Johnson? Is the territory gained vs Russia since then worth all the life lost, the economic cost, etc.
They were supposed to not ethnically cleanse Russian speaking people in the eastern provences for 8 years, repeatedly breaking treaties and making threats about hosting nuclear weapons for NATO.
And the US was supposed to not support a violent coup to overthrow the democratically elected government and replace it with a one aligned with the fascist militias they used in that coup.
If this had happened to a weastern ally we would be at war to liberate the entire country let alone protect the regions facing immediate violence.
Like just little things.
Do you know that the Russian Black Sea Fleet is based in Sevastopol? Did you know that it’s an incredibly important strategic asset? What do nation states do when an incredibly important strategic asset is threatened? Do they defend it?
Did you know Crimea has a 30 year long history of seeking more autonomy, or even independence, from Ukraine?
Do you know what the very first action of the coup Rada was?
Do you know what “encirclement” means?
I know Plato’s Allegory of the Cave gets used a lot when discussion the hegemonic power of western propaganda over western people, but come on bruv.
Do the words “Minsk II” mean anything to you?
Are you aware of the tariff agreements in place between Russia and Ukraine in 2013?
Do you know who Bandera was?
Do you know what the Russian Federation’s stated causus belli for the invasion is?
What do you know?
I don’t have the time for the classic tankie “reply with a wall of text and deflections”, I actually have a real job to attend to. But some main points.
Do you also know that Russia took Sevastopol from Ukraine back in 2014?
Tell me, do you also support Israel’s claims on Palestinian territory?
Yes.
Do you know what the causis belli for the US’s invasion of Iraq was? Are you stupid enough to believe that one as well? Or does believing causus belli only applies to whatever country is not an ally of the US?
I know you should get a gold medal on mental gymnastics and double standards.
What you call “reply with a wall of text and deflections” is 90% of the time well informed and sourced discourse, you just dismiss it cause you can’t argue with it.
It’s crazy how quick they turn into Westworld robots, you can show them the most airtight, well-sourced case to counter their empty vibes-based conjecture and they’ll just go “That doesn’t look like anything.”
jokey one-liners: you have no arguments
well-reasoned point: I’m not reading all that, I have a job
nonfalsofiable orthodoxy intensifies
Yes? Because the Black Sea Fleet is station in Sevastopol and Sevastopol is a vital strategic resource? Are we speaking the same language?
Non-sequitor?
… Okay so you know that UA was shelling Donbass and killing people for years, and the Rada was very openly hostile to the Russian speaking Ukrainian minority, right?
Could I get a sticker instead?
Also that’s not a wall of text you dork it’s like 10 sentences.
So if the US has a fleet statinoned in another contry’s territory, should they just be allowed to take it?
What don’t you follow?
Do you also support US-backed countries to take territory as they see fit? Or does that only apply to countries you like?
A Russian-backed separatist group starts a conflict and Ukraine responds.
Does Ukraine not have the right to defend their territory?
You can get some crayons to munch on.
Do eastern ukrainians have a right not to be ethnically cleansed?
Do eastern Ukrainians have a right to defend their own territory and invite guests to help?
You’re a very foolish person.
Did the American-backed separatist group count in your brain too or the us backed razing of the USSR
Shit, if all you have to do is park a fleet at a region and it’s yours, I have been playing paradox games wrong this entire time
This is literally a deflection to avoid dealing with the (inconvenient) basic facts you should’ve learned before having any opinion on this topic in the first place.
I’ll make it easier for you
Can’t be that important if you’ve got all this time lose arguments on the internet
And here I thought that the classic tankie reply was low-effort trolling and shitposting.
This whole “unlike you tAnKiEs I have a job” thing just makes you look insecure and childish.
You know that, right?
It really is the strangest appeal to authority I’ve ever seen.
My ex father in law would always harp that he was more intelligent than my mom (he wasn’t) cus he had more jobs than her
To the degree the Palestinians have used their self determination to say they want to be Israel and not Palestine
You’re really bad at analogies. You shouldn’t lean on them to avoid direct investigation.
You know you’re dealing with a pro-NATO bot when they say stupid boomer jokes like “well I have a job to go to”
Hi bot! 👋
Hi first-world revolutionary LARPer. 👋
Hello, World!
Eli5 that Pluto shit I toned out the Cave hard when I took a philosophy class
I found this funny and topical example.
Basically some dudes are tied up in a cave so they can only look forward. Behind them some other dude’s are making shadow puppets. The tied up dudes think the shadow puppets are the real world because they can’t look anywhere else and don’t think there is anything else. But then there’s something about if you’re skeptical you can escape the cave and see the real world outside.
The second part is important too: when someone escapes the cave and sees the outside world for the first time, it’s painful because things are so bright. After a while, the escapee’s eyes adjust, and they come to see how much better and more real the outside world is. They decide to go back and free their friends in the cave. But when they descend back down, their friends make fun of them because they can’t see very well in the dark anymore and so aren’t very good at talking about the shadows. Their friends think that they are just making up a big story about some magical “outside world” to cover for how bad they’ve gotten at talking about the shadows.
I hope we can keep supporting Ukraine. This is one of the few times in history when the scenario is so clear cut good vs evil. The Ukrainians fought hard to get out from under the thumb of Russia and the Russians just couldn’t have that so they invaded. The support the world provides to Ukraine is support provided for all Democracies.
Democracy is when you ban all left-leaning parties in your country and burn a hall full of trade unionists alive, and the more parties you ban and trade unionists you burn alive the more democratic you are. I don’t see what’s so hard for these tankies to get!!
They didn’t just ban the left-wing parties they also seized all their assets.
Plenty of communist countries ban all but one party, and some even suppress trade unions, and you guys are still willing to call them democratic.
Interesting, do you have a source for this? Any particular countries you’d like to critique?
China, Cuba, Vietnam all allow only one political party. As for suppressing trade unions, there’s the Jasic incident in China in 2018, where they tried to organize a union and strike and they fired all of them. Despite being Maoist in nature, they were detained, arrested, beaten, and disappeared by the police. And they generally have low rates of trade unions participation.
Yeah, clearcut good is when a government starts building monuments to Holocaust perpetrators, and banning minority languages including Yiddish, followed by a decade of bombing ethnic minorities in a border region.
Did they ban Yiddish, too? I hadn’t heard that, and it’s weird given that almost all Ukrainian Jews fled long ago to get away from, you know, Ukrainian Nazis.
The 2019 language law has carve outs for English, and national minority languages that are EU languages. Russian, Belarusian and Yiddish specifically don’t get exempted.
It’s cool though there’s definitely no ethnic cleansing component to this war, nosiree.
I liked that part of the unalloyed good where your heroes locked a hundred ethnically unalloyed bad people in a building and burned them alive
I really don’t think a lot of the libs know that happened, or anything about the racial animosity of the right wing nationalist *cough* Nazi *cough* Galacians, or the ethnic makeup and goals of the coup Rada, or really much of anything about what’s happening.
What?
Euromaiden!?!??? Like a major defining moment in Ukrainian history!
The one where NATO backed coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine? That seems like the opposite of fighting to get out from under foreign thumb
The one that happened because their leader was passing laws making him a dictator and violently putting down protesters leading to more protests causing him to flee. Also any support came after that was over, not before.
See, if he were a legitimate leader he would have let the west supplant him in a violent coup WITHOUT reacting to it. That makes it justified post hoc.
You have to let the nazis march. It’s the rules.
So people in their country should never fight if their leader is working to surpress their rights and become a dictator. They just have to wait for elections that will never be fair again if they even happen. Also he did react to it by fleeing, Putin is not the leader of Ukraine, he has no business reacting to anything.
Putin did march his nazies into Ukraine after that if that’s what you mean.
Were you at the January 6th riots, per chance? Your sure have the same reasoning as them.
I mean there’s a recording of Victoria Neuland talking about setting it up from months before but whatever.
Ah yes, the same point 30 other have brought up as well even though what was said was who they would think the leader is going to be which they, to no ones surprise, said the leader of the opposition, ya know, the guy who would be in power if their system worked like it should. That’s like someone saying they like the guy as leader that got all the votes.
But the guy who actually got all the votes was yanukovich.
I mean yeah, if you ignore like 200 years of history, then entire history and purpose of NATO, any understanding of the nature of geopolitics and power whatsoever, everything about the economics and politics of all the involved parties, the entire timeline of events between 2013 and now, and a number of other things, it would be clear cut.
Ukraine is Harry Skywalker and Russia is ebil Darth Voldemord. How much more clear could it be?
Said literally no one here, besides you trying to frame communism as war loving imperialists.
Now that I’m speaking of war loving imperialists, what does that bring to mind?..