Ukraine

[ralfy]

Not only that, but also more of the denial about Putin's Russia being a much worse State, much more toxic, much more dysfunctional than anything western. That is, a dictatorial State that one would want to shift away from (and that only other totalitarian regimes support).

Apparently Ukraine would only have "outside", engineered, illegitimate reasons to turn towards Europe rather than Russia. This is like an abusive man freaking out about some rival having "put ideas in the head" of the girl he's beating up to keep her under his control. The same discourse, the same blame shifting, the same legitimation of violence ("look what you made me do, you traitor, look what they make me do to you when you listen to them"). And the same bro support.

The fact that it accelerates other countries' shift away from that Russia is a deserved bonus. Putin's reaction is just the illustration (as if internal political violence and ideology wasn't enough) that distancing themelves from that madman's State is the thing to do. And Ukrainians are aware of this more than ever now.

It really takes a special kind of Putin admirer to blame a country for shifting away from that regime.

Florence Gaub said something related:


That is, Russia is not "European" and therefore not civilized. The implication is that there is no way to reform it.

The one sharing the video adds that some Americans said similar about Asians during the Vietnam war.

Not surprisingly, the same U.S. is insisting on the same Reaganite "evil empire" narrative for Russia, just like what it said about Afghanistan, China, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and more.

The reality, on the other hand, is that the same self-expectional country that claims that it's the beacon of "freedom and democracy" turns out to be not only the No. 1 arms dealer but also the main warmonger:

Jimmy Carter: US ‘Most Warlike Nation in History of the World’

The only US president to complete his term without war, military attack or occupation has called the United States “the most warlike nation in the history

www.counterpunch.org

And more so for Ukraine:


Finally, I'm certain at least the progressives and leftists in this board will recognize several of these sources, and too some extent a few liberals. For the rest? It's all rehash, "Ruzzian" propaganda, and pro-Trumpists and Qanon talking points. They will never listen to anything that will destroy their chicken hawk narrative of the situation.

 

[ralfy]

I guess 49 was the charm then.

A combination of neoconservatism and neoliberalism in order to maintain the dollar as a global reserve currency. Similar happened to Iraq: they attacked based on false flags involving WMDs but the intent was to control Basra and stop Middle Eastern countries from shifting from the petrodollar.

Too late now.

Is Saudi Arabia preparing for the collapse of the petrodollar and US dollar dominance?

One of the most illusory phenomena in our current existence is the money we use for buying, selling and hoarding on a daily basis. It is, to put it simply,...

www.middleeastmonitor.com

 

[ralfy]

Quite a good analogy - including that the abusive man should be allowed to continue battering his wife just so long as he hates a richer guy down the road.

In this case, the richer guy was seducing the wife,


who in turn was beating the stepkids:


which the rich man ironically knew about but conveniently ignored later because it turns out he was also abusing others:


and who, earlier, was also seducing the abusive man,

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how-shock-therapy-created-russian-oligarchs-and-paved-the-path-for-putin

And as the abusive man starts beating the wife, the richer man who couldn't fight the abusive man directly, which is why for decades he seduced others to fight against other abusive men

America’s 25 Most Awkward Allies

But Obama, an idealist at home, has turned out to be more cold-blooded than most recent presidents about the tough choices to be made in the world.

www.politico.com

begins to arm the wife

For Western Weapons, the Ukraine War Is a Beta Test (Published 2022)

Though the battle for Ukraine remains largely a grinding artillery war, new advances in technology and training there are being closely monitored for the ways they are starting to shape combat.

www.nytimes.com

but for a price

Tempting The Banksters: Zelensky Courts US Companies| Countercurrents

The transformation of Ukraine into untarnished, saintly victim, symbol of democracy and civil society savaged by brutish Russia, has been nothing less than

countercurrents.org

which should be the case because it turns out that richer man turns out to be just another abusive man

Bill Clinton’s Role in the Crisis Over Ukraine

The militarization of American foreign policy has evolved over the past thirty years. Ironically, this took place in the wake of the dissolution of the

www.counterpunch.org

and the same goes for the wife

High stakes for Ukraine as clampdown on corruption comes under scrutiny

Critics argue some cases have highlighted serious issues with the way officials are targeting people

www.theguardian.com

President Zelenskyy Bans Opposition Parties in Ukraine - Left Voice

On Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced a ban on at least 11 opposition parties under the guise that they have links to Russia. This amounts to censorship, and is stirring up even more Russophobia.

www.leftvoice.org

 

[ralfy]

Not really. Putin too brazenly paraded the Ukrainian president as a puppet to surrender Ukraine to him, and as it turned out Ukrainians didn't accept that. Putin forced Yanukovitch to self destruct. No American efforts needed on that front. Its not NATO presence in Ukraine that's the threat to Russia, its Russia that's the threat Ukraine is responding to by securing western protection.



Not really. Russia is quite open about waging war for the glory of Empire. Their Imperial past of terrorizing eastern Europe is repeatedly used as an argument for why they should have special ownership over their neighbors, and Putin's pre invasion speech was chuck full of pseudo historical ramblings about how Russia deserves a special imperial status. It also stressed quite clearly that blood and soil were the leading motives of the Kremlin

Of course, they didn't accept that, as the U.S. wouldn't have allowed it:

Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call

A transcript of the alleged conversation between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt discussing the crisis in Ukraine.

www.bbc.com

As for NATO presence not being a threat, that's an old neocon story, together with the claim that Russia only wants to form an empire. You have the same story by replacing Russia with China.

Finally, that's not surprising, because if you have a country that only has a hammer, then everything will look like a nail.

About blood and soil, reminds me of Gaub:


Crickets from the liberals on that, which shouldn't be surprising if they are in reality chicken hawks.

 

[ralfy]

"If I don't beat her, he will!"

What's notable is that the "I" refers to the U.S. and "he" to Russia. The difference is that one is right beside Ukraine, which in turn was being used together with other countries to turn NATO into a sword, while the other is across the pond sending money and giving instructions.

And the latter is doing similar to China:


For a country that now has over 900 military installations worldwide and military spending that eclipses those of several countries combined, you can't expect otherwise. Outwardly, it will proclain "freedom and democracy," but its actual intent is to beat anyone who gets in his way:

 

[Silvanus]

Ukraine: The CIA’s 75-year-old Proxy - CovertAction Magazine

Joe Biden “is fueling the fire in the Ukraine.” -- Roger Waters of Pink Floyd It takes a musical artist to cut through the morass of propaganda to educate American mainstream media (MSM) about the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the roleof the United States in instigating that conflict for its own...

covertactionmagazine.com

https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf

So what exactly do we have, here? One link that's just... moaning about a few US pols supporting protests, as if that's anything meaningful or unique. And another link speculating about Poroshenko's motivations in signing Minsk, based on some pretty specious interpretation of something he said. Even though A) he was voted out years ago, and its not the same government; and B) Russia broke Minsk anyway.

All in all, another load of nothing.

 

[Silvanus]

Your read the sources wrongly! Kennan argued that the West should not interfere, and he was referring to NATO enlargement.

Dude, he said both things. Why are you acting as if they're mutually exclusive? He said the west should not interfere... and also said that Russia would seek to reclaim Ukraine by force regardless.

Your own source explicitly says this. Did you even read it?

The Global South is answering back, which is why dollar use has been eroding, but ten times faster for the past year:

Do you only speak in buzzwords? "The global south is answering back"! Grow up.

A global trend in trading preferences shifting away from the US has precisely fuck-all to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You'll notice that the drivers of this change In trading attitudes are not Russia; that Russia is a country in the global North, and a successor to a pillaging European empire; and that the global south widely condemns the invasion.

Dollar use has been eroding... not in favour of the rouble. The rouble remains weak as hell, and the Russian economy remains dismally focused on fossil fuel, just as the World moves away from it. Russia has not diversified. The beneficiaries of this global trading shift have been countries that are far more dynamic and responsive-- China, India, Japan.

Ukraine following a legal process? It was attacking its own people by 2014, manipulated by Nuland and co. (similar to what happened in Russia, where "shock therapy" recommended by American economists led to democracy falling apart and the rise of oligarchs), and is now banning oppositionists while making deals with Wall Street.

You mean neocon process.

The Ukrainian legislature voted unanimously to remove Yanukovych when he went AWOL. That included his own party. If you want the president to overrule and suspend parliamentary sovereignty, then you're essentially openly calling for dictatorship.

And when you say "attacking its own people", you're presumably referring to the right-wing insurgency created by Russia in Donetsk and Luhansk. You know, the one that shot down a Malaysian passenger plane, killing hundreds; the one that was found out to be manufacturing false flags; the one that had disguised Russian troops among its numbers. Uhrm, no, Ukraine has the right to fight foreign insurgencies within its own borders.

 

[tstorm823]

A combination of neoconservatism and neoliberalism in order to maintain the dollar as a global reserve currency. Similar happened to Iraq: they attacked based on false flags involving WMDs but the intent was to control Basra and stop Middle Eastern countries from shifting from the petrodollar.

Too late now.

Is Saudi Arabia preparing for the collapse of the petrodollar and US dollar dominance?

One of the most illusory phenomena in our current existence is the money we use for buying, selling and hoarding on a daily basis. It is, to put it simply,...

www.middleeastmonitor.com

I might suspect you're a robot if ChatGPT hadn't demonstrated that robots are way more genuinely interactive than this.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I might suspect you're a robot if ChatGPT hadn't demonstrated that robots are way more genuinely interactive than this.

I disagree, but solely due to being unimpressed with Chatgpt.

 

[Hades]

Of course, they didn't accept that, as the U.S. wouldn't have allowed it:

So citizens of a country would only object to their president being a traitor selling them out to a brutal dictatorship if America tells them to? You don't think citizens of a country would have their own reason to object being chained to Putin's Russia?

 

[Thaluikhain]

So citizens of a country would only object to their president being a traitor selling them out to a brutal dictatorship if America tells them to? You don't think citizens of a country would have their own reason to object being chained to Putin's Russia?

Bit off-topic, but I'm reminded of the Indian Mutiny supposedly being solely due to greased cartridges. About a quarter of the world rebelled against the English/British for various reasons, but it was just (at the time) strange foreign religions and their hang ups about grease and nothing else. And people still choose to believe that.

 

[Absent]

Florence Gaub said something related:
That is, Russia is not "European" and therefore not civilized. The implication is that there is no way to reform it. The one sharing the video adds that some Americans said similar about Asians during the Vietnam war. Not surprisingly, the same U.S. is insisting on the same Reaganite "evil empire" narrative for Russia, just like what it said about Afghanistan, China, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and more.

So you just confirm, after having eluded direct references to it, your brand of hypocrisy. No only you try to establish an equivalence between the western democracies and the straightforward dictatorial regimes of Putin and his supporters, but when anyone points out their characteristics (the jailing and murder political opponents, the homophobic crackdown, the control of media and criminalization of dissenting voices, etc), you just sweep all of it under the carpet and present it as "racist prejudice". Any criticism of the dictatorship is, as the dictatorship itself presents it, an insult to The Race.

I don't know if your anti-american and anti-UE tirades are aimed at governments, administrations, cultural climates, or if you are yourself in this full racialist, essentialist perspective you conveniently assume others to be. If you are, you lose the right to reproach it to others. If you aren't, you are stupid for randomly assuming it from other, with no other reason than your usual "i found a good sounding video about it maybe i could use that".

In all cases, it's a grotesque excuse that has been the defense line of all totalitarianisms (including poor hitler's, which regime and societal model was only ever criticized by a global antigermanic conspiracy, or even american conservatives who love branding as "antiamerican" any national contestation - in that specific case without shotting down jailing, murdering every dissenting voice, mind you). But it shows what matters to you. Pure rhetoric, pure victimizing deflection. If you and tstorm aren't the same person, you should really get married.

You'll never address the human right issues of the regimes you side with. You'll keep denying them, minimizing them, normalizing thm through false equivalencies, or trying to pass their accounting for fabrications or irrelevantly dismiss them as racialist discourses - anything goes. It's pure trollfarm playbook.

Honest humans weight political shortcomings and come to conclusions in lucid assesment of all of them. The people who truly criticize the geopolitical and political history of the West (and, in this forum, the three most active threads are dedicated to that) are also those who criticize all the more the States that act in even more caricatural fashion abroad and within their borders. You do not do that. You do not care for values, society, people. You care for flags and sides, the ones you support blindly versus the rest. You're the opposite of a honest person. You're a blood-oiled propaganda cog.

 

[Ag3ma]

So you just confirm, after having eluded direct references to it, your brand of hypocrisy. No only you try to establish an equivalence between the western democracies and the straightforward dictatorial regimes of Putin and his supporters, but when anyone points out their characteristics (the jailing and murder political opponents, the homophobic crackdown, the control of media and criminalization of dissenting voices, etc), you just sweep all of it under the carpet and present it as "racist prejudice". Any criticism of the dictatorship is, as the dictatorship itself presents it, an insult to The Race.

This vaguely reminds me of reading an article which claimed objections to whaling were nothing more than anti-Japanese racism.

 

[CM156]

So you just confirm, after having eluded direct references to it, your brand of hypocrisy. No only you try to establish an equivalence between the western democracies and the straightforward dictatorial regimes of Putin and his supporters, but when anyone points out their characteristics (the jailing and murder political opponents, the homophobic crackdown, the control of media and criminalization of dissenting voices, etc), you just sweep all of it under the carpet and present it as "racist prejudice". Any criticism of the dictatorship is, as the dictatorship itself presents it, an insult to The Race.

Asking Russia to stop committing atrocities is Russophobia, dontchaknow?

This vaguely reminds me of reading an article which claimed objections to whaling were nothing more than anti-Japanese racism.

Or an attack on some element of their culture, motivated out of nothing but pure hatred and spite.

 

[Dalisclock]

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/21/1171244401/russia-bombed-own-city-belgorod-border-ukraine

So this happened.

Yes, I know Russia isn't the first country to bomb itself during a war, or even not during a war(I'm looking at the USAF accidently losing Nukes on the US SOIL VERY VERY ANGERILY RIGHT NOW). But it's still fucking embarrassing nonetheless and I can only point at laugh at the ineptitude on display here.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

...but when anyone points out their characteristics (the jailing and murder political opponents, the homophobic crackdown, the control of media and criminalization of dissenting voices, etc), you just sweep all of it under the carpet and present it as "racist prejudice".

Russia has the right to murder anyone it wants because the USA did bad things!

 

[Ag3ma]

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/21/1171244401/russia-bombed-own-city-belgorod-border-ukraine

So this happened.

Yes, I know Russia isn't the first country to bomb itself during a war, or even not during a war(I'm looking at the USAF accidently losing Nukes on the US SOIL VERY VERY ANGERILY RIGHT NOW). But it's still fucking embarrassing nonetheless and I can only point at laugh at the ineptitude on display here.

Belgorod is (from my quick look at the map) about 20km from the Ukrainian border.

I totally get why WW2 bombers managed to bomb the wrong city, but with 21st century navigation tools, that's one hell of a miss.

 

[Dalisclock]

Belgorod is (from my quick look at the map) about 20km from the Ukrainian border.

I totally get why WW2 bombers managed to bomb the wrong city, but with 21st century navigation tools, that's one hell of a miss.

You're assuming the Russians have 21st century navigation tools on their planes at this point.

Real Russian Men navigate by the stars, as God Intended.

 

[Ag3ma]

You're assuming the Russians have 21st century navigation tools on their planes at this point.

Real Russian Men navigate by the stars, as God Intended.

It certainly makes you wonder. That said, air losses have been extraordinarily low on either side from what many might have expected - maybe they just never upgraded.

An assumption was that Russia would have easily established air superiority. Having a read around, it has been suggested that this is not really Russian doctrine. Apparently, the USSR (and thus later Russia) believed NATO's air force superior, so did not seek to contest the skies. Instead, it sought to deny access to its airspace with high quality air defence, with its own air force rarely operating beyond the frontlines. Ukraine, with ex-Soviet equipment, could be assumed to be well set up for air defence even if its air force was heavily inferior. As a result, the air war has been very modest proportionally to the ground war.

 

[Dalisclock]

It certainly makes you wonder. That said, air losses have been extraordinarily low on either side from what many might have expected - maybe they just never upgraded.

An assumption was that Russia would have easily established air superiority. Having a read around, it has been suggested that this is not really Russian doctrine. Apparently, the USSR (and thus later Russia) believed NATO's air force superior, so did not seek to contest the skies. Instead, it sought to deny access to its airspace with high quality air defence, with its own air force rarely operating beyond the frontlines. Ukraine, with ex-Soviet equipment, could be assumed to be well set up for air defence even if its air force was heavily inferior. As a result, the air war has been very modest proportionally to the ground war.

The other possibility is that Ukrainian Air Defenses make it far too risky to send their planes across the frontlines. Most strikes into Ukraine seem to be lobbing missiles from planes safely in Russian controlled airspace, including Russian Heavy Bombers such as the Tu-160.

I'm sure Russia would dearly love to strike at Ukrainian industrial and military targets more then they actually are, but have had to settle for mass missle bombardments and even those have tapered off, presumably because they don't have enough to keep on doing that.