This reads like one of those simpbears seeking to be relevant on lemmy lately, the whiff of perceived superiority, the condescending dribble, strangely similar…
They call them “Pickmes”, but personally I prefer the term “Ernst Rohms”, it puts into historical context how this kind of thing tends to go…
For those who don’t know - Ernst Rohm was a gay Nazi who was considered to be one of Hitler’s closest friends. He believed he would be spared even as the Nazis were gathering up homosexuals and burning research centers, because Hitler was his homie ya see.
To make a long story short he was gassed to death in a concentration camp…
We need more of this sort of dreading up of the recent past. I remember this was not an uncommon statement at the time, but all of a sudden its like everyone is trying to gaslight us into a different past.
Russians have a slur specifically for Ukrainians. They couldn’t even tell half of the countries in Europe. But they’ll go out of their way to go after Ukraine.
I’m German of Russian descent and I’ve been hearing this slur since I was a child, but I only understood the meaning once the Russians invaded. It’s very commonly used among Russians, unfortunately. Fuck em.
Americans always seem to think that there is some kind of pan-ethinc bond between people in completely different counties, as if we weren’t all killing each other until that whole “world wars” thing.
For people in America who aren’t racialized it’s hard to maintain a separate cultural identity after a few generations. You wind up with a few trinkets of the culture your family came from if you don’t wind up so thoroughly blended it’s impossible to care. Like my grandpa was an immigrant and while that culture is important to me I make no mistake that if I went back to his home country I’d just be some stupid American who barely even speaks the language. What did I get from his culture? Some comfort foods, a handful of holiday traditions, and the branch of Christianity I was raised in.
And the cultures that try to have their cake and eat it too like Irish-American and Italian-American are looked at as weirdos by the countries they came from.
That’s because of how hard your family assimilated, like many from Western Europe. All those cultures, being predominantly Catholic and Protestant easily blended. There isn’t this kind of problem in the Greek American community.
For a lot of us, Russia and Ukraine were literally parts of the same country when we were growing up, and we used the terms Russia and the USSR pretty much interchangeably. I wasn’t aware until pretty recently that places like Baikonur, Minsk, and Chernobyl are not in Russia. Actual misdeeds committed by Russia in the Soviet era were described in vague terms and were very hard to separate from exaggerated fear mongering about communism, so I ended up knowing very little about that era. Even big things like the Holomodor were just not part of the public consciousness.
So yeah, we were very ignorant of the situation, and in many of our minds Ukraine may as well have been southwestern Russia. But those of us who aren’t idiots do at least know that the possibility of going to war with a neighboring country is inherent in the existence of separate countries, and we know from our own civil war that people of the same or similar ethnicities will absolutely go to war with each other.
Wasn’t this the same thing that Ukraine was saying in the lead-up to the invasion though? Maybe not the “join the Russians before they shoot a brother” part, but saying that the invasion wouldn’t happen. It’s been a year and a half, but I thought it was the US sounding the alarm bells in the run-up to the invasion, while everyone else was saying it wasn’t going to happen.
That was probably done to calm the population. Because they did had mobilization when Russian troops were “exercising” near Ukrainian border that winter.
IIRC they were saying publicly that they didn’t think Russia would invade, but in retrospect it’s clear they knew it was coming. I think they were just doing everything they could to deescalate the situation in the hope that Putin might be talked out of it.
Whether it was meant to keep their population from panicking is a valid discussion, but saying that Ukraine was not saying the invasion was unlikely is a total lie.
Merkel played Putin for a fool with the Minsk treaty. Putin was dishonest in accepting the treaty, he always planned for a larger scale landgrab later on and started preparing for it. What he didn’t see coming was that the west, especially Merkel (these two really hated each others guts) saw right through his lies and NATO started preparing Ukraine for the coming invasion. Add to this the lies and corruption of the russian agents in Ukraine, who pocketed funds meant to prepare the landgrab by paying off locals, and you have the gigantic failure the planned “one week special military operation” has become.
Well the gas thing is complicated. Nearly every middle european country heavily relied on russian gas bc it was so damn cheap and gave them a competitive advantage. Europe was like a junkie on the needle “oh its not so bad nothing will happen”. But the invasion was a wake up call, and action was taken. There is still much to do, dont get me wrong, but we have come a long way. Russian invasion finally paved the way to collective european action and acquisitions on the gas market and that has helped to prevent blackouts (that Russia no doubt wanted) and tame the insane prices we had for a while a little. Thing is, there isnt many good reliable options for the amounts of gas europe needs. Norway stepped in big time (and they are the only really reliable and democratic country delivering large quantities). Middle east countries come with their own problems and unreliablities and american LNG is very expensive bc of transport (and building LNG terminals in the capacity now required takes time). In the long run, we just need to use less fossil fuels and more renewables, but that cant be done in a year or even 10 years.
I’m sorry but appeasing Russia by building another gas pipeline after they invaded Ukraine in 2014 was an awful thing to do, and it bit them on the arse, rightfully so.
One of your senior politicians involved ended up working for Gazprom.
Before the full-scale invasion, UK, US, and Polish intelligence were saying a war was imminent. Germany (and France tbf) were calling the US/UK/Poland warmongers. Aged quite poorly didn’t it?
And at the start of the war, Germany’s response was “we’ll send 5000 helmets, which will take months to arrive”. A piss-poor level of support. Thankfully they started stepping up as the war progressed and it became clear it was popular to do so.
Add to that Germany, despite being by far the richest country in Europe, isn’t even the biggest supporter of Ukraine in Europe.
Idk why you’re painting Merkel/Germany in such a positive light here. They appeased Russia for ages, Germany only took a tougher stance on Russia well after Merkel was gone.
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