Genocidal/Politicidal history doesn’t predict political opposition though (e.g. Kazakhstan being struck by starvation campaigns as well, but juggling neutrality now)
Remember that elderly women that offered seeds to russian soldiers “so that at least some sunflowers will grow where they are going to die”. I think that kind of counts as greeting with flowers?
Oh my god how did I forget about sunflower grandma.
Imagine being a fresh-faced recruit to what you still believe to be a noble mission to liberate your own oppressed people. An easy mission at that - go in, march on Kyiv, overthrow the “nazi regime,” go home heroes. You show up, head held high, waiting for the cheers and thank-yous from those you think you’re here to protect. A sweet old lady walks up to you offering a gift! Sunflower seeds - peaceful, bright, lovely sunflower seeds. Then she says it. “At least some sunflowers will grow where you die.”
Russian warship: “Snake Island, I, Russian warship, repeat the offer: put down your arms and surrender, or you will be bombed. Have you understood me? Do you copy?”
Ukrainian 1 to Ukrainian 2: “That’s it, then. Or, do we need to fuck them back off?”
Ukrainian 2 to Ukrainian 1: “Might as well.”
Ukrainian 1: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”
Best part, that Russian warship was the Moskva. Pictured top-left, with the red X through it.
Most people get impossible to "work with" if you force them out of their homes and start randomly killing their family and friends whenever you feel like
Hamas is a corrupt and violent organization, and I won't defend their murder and rape of the innocent any more than I would Israel's. But only one party to the conflict has such an overwhelming military advantage that they're able to (and do) kill with impunity, and one particular party created the conflict in the first place by seizing land and resources from some people who had no earthly reason to have any type of feeling one way or another towards them before that all happened. Feels unfair to assign much responsibility at all to the other party given all that as background to the situation.
one particular party created the conflict in the first place by seizing land and resources from some people who had no earthly reason to have any type of feeling one way or another towards them before that all happened.
So, Hamas killed 1500 non-combatants on 6 October, right?
And Israel has killed about 34,000 people in Gaza so far, at least 15,000 of them children, with a total of over 27,000 non-combatants killed by Israeli forces?
Someone tell me again who is supposed to be the better side here?
I dunno man, if someone shot my dad, and said that he was just between them and their target, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t make me feel warm-and-fuzzy about them shooting my dad.
I have a hard time condemning Hamas, given that they’ve seen their land stolen for three generations now while the world did nothing, and they’ve seen three generations of Israel indiscriminately killing them. When they protest peacefully, they are ignored. When they riot, they’re murdered. When they try to fight back–and yes, that includes acts of terrorism–they’re bombed indiscriminately.
What’s the right thing for them to do? How should they act in order to regain the land that was stolen from them by Israelis?
Is asking for their land, that was taken by violence from their parents and grandparents, to be returned to them unreasonable? And, TBH, people in the US have a hard time addressing this because we did exactly the same things to Native Americans.
IDK, I don’t have a hard time condemning Hamas. As soon as you target non-combatants, you lose all sympathy from me. And yes, that goes for Israel as well.
What’s the right thing for them to do?
Reject Hamas and form a peaceful government to demonstrate they can keep the terrorist factions at bay. Then appeal to the UN for negotiations to happen.
You have a lot more chips at the bargaining table if you’re not murdering the citizens of the country you’re negotiating with.
Is asking for their land… unreasonable?
Absolutely not! I have a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians and believe they have a lot of justified claims that need to be addressed.
That said, it’s a very different situation than in the US because it’s much more recent for Palestinians. The native tribes were displaced almost 200 years ago so nobody alive actually remembers it, therefore reparations, imo, have passed the statute of limitations. The state of Israel was created less than 100 years ago, so the Palestinians alive today are absolutely directly impacted.
I have my own opinions about how things should be settled, but that’s honestly not for me to decide, that’s between the Israelis, Palestinians, and any relevant coalitions of nations (UN and perhaps the Arab League). At the very least, non-Israelis need to have direct access to East Jerusalem, and it should probably not be directly under Israeli control.
First: they had one. Hamas was funded by Israel in order to siphon votes away from their democratically elected gov’t that was gaining significant international support. (Remember Yassar Arafat, that guy that won a Nobel Peace Prize for trying to negotiate…?) Since Hamas took power, there has not been an election in Gaza. Even if they wanted to, Palestinians don’t have the ability to form a new gov’t. But even if they did, Netanyahu et al. have said that they aren’t going to negotiate, and have rejected *all Palestinian demands.
They literally have nothing to bargain with. Violence is the only tool that they have left.
The native tribes were displaced almost 200 years ago so nobody alive actually remembers it,
That is so very, very not true. Abuse of Native Americans was happening through the 80s (!!!) , and it was only very recently that they were permitted to speak their own languages, preserve their culture, and so on. Don’t you remember the whole pipeline thing that Native Americans were protesting because it took yet more of their land? This shit is happening NOW, and we-like the Israelis–ignore it.
Yeah, he was way better than Hamas. I can’t condone the attack on Khartoum, but Arafat turned it around and denounced terrorism, recognized Israel’s right to exist, and sought peace.
Here’s what I’d like to see:
UN pressure Israel to give the West Bank more autonomy - they’re currently doing the opposite
Israel open a corridor for Palestinians to evacuate to the West Bank, in coordination with the West Bank (i.e. West Bank helps in screening and sets limits)
move toward recognition of the West Bank as Palestine, with internationally recognized claims to Gaza
But I doubt that’s going to happen, at least right now with Israel.
Abuse of Native Americans was happening through the 80s (!!!)
Yes, and that’s what discussions should be around: actual harms experienced by living people today.
Yet the conversion tends to be muddied by things that happened a long time ago. So it’s often punishing the current generation for things their ancestors (or people completely unrelated to them) did. The same goes for other minorities, though those have very different claims compared to native tribes.
I have opinions on how to move forward here, but it’s very different from what to do about what’s happening to Palestinians today.
You see the problem, right? With Israel working to oust Arafat and get extremists like Hamas in power in Gaza? Israel is creating their own monster, and then killing civilians indiscriminately when they fight the monster they’ve created.
Hamas is absolutely a bad guy here, but Israel’s actions, and their death toll, is far, far worse by an order of magnitude.
It’s always amusing when some CHUD suddenly realizes that the Pentagon is one of the largest single employers in the middle of one of the most liberal places in the country.
Because Putin is bankrolling two or three minor political parties and the front runner of a major political party. That fucking anti-war protest in DC was the dumbest shit. Yeah let’s have two political parties that agree on absolutely fucking nothing except for hating Ukraine co-host an event where Ron Paul’s bitch ass makes up stories about how congresspeople told him that they needed to start a war to fix the economy while some limpdick tankie waves the Soviet flag around in the background
Most people posting as tankies today aren’t tankies.
As someone who has done extensive reading in modern Marxism, Rawlsian doctrine, anarchism both historical and modern, and so on and so on (and yes that was a Žižek reference), many of those posting as far leftists are coming from wholly self-constructed positions. They’re either deliberately playing the role of an agent provocateur or they’re people who have unwittingly become broadcast nodes with the same effect.
One of them on chapotraphouse said “I’m gonna vote for Trump just so see the US finally burn to the ground” and I replied “horseshoe theory: confirmed” and the mods removed my comment lmao
Crazy how tankies support Russia (despite them not even being communist, domestic abuse, treatment of gay people, and ties with conservatives). And are just okay with Russia killing entire villages of Ukraines because their supposed Nazi government (didn’t let a Russian puppet in government).
I opened accounts on multiple instances due to the instability (and information propagation dynamics) of individual ones. I figured “why not?” I had several Reddit accounts, after all, and it just seemed to make sense.
I thought lemmy.ml was for machine learning. The UI I was using didn’t include self-descriptions.
They’re either deliberately playing the role of an agent provocateur or they’re people who have unwittingly become broadcast nodes with the same effect.
That’s… a tankie, at least functionally. If they’re spouting the propaganda, I don’t care where it came from or whether it’s officially certified as doctrine.
God that website is disgusting on mobile. There is ads just popping in and out of existence causing the site to just bounce up and down make it near impossible to read
Al Jazeera aren't Qatari shills, Al Jazeera are Qatari.
Al Jazeera was founded by Sheikh Hamad ibn Khalifa Al Thani, emir of Qatar, in 1996 and is wholly owned by the State of Qatar. Qatar funds Hamas and Hezbollah to kill Jews, and all the news from Al Jazeera is meant to convince the world that Jews have no place in the Middle East, and no claim to Israel. It was the singluar reason the Emir of Qatar founded Al Jazeera in the first place.
It's a single purpose propaganda organization.
None of this matters to the Jew baiters in the Fediverse though.
I block anyone posting Al Jazeera anything, you might well as title your post "Yalla, rape, kill, and burn all the Jews". Fuck Al Jazeera, and fuck anyone that posts from it, knowing they target Jews for murder.
This is why the government keeps secrets from people…because people don’t read or fully understand things before making potentially dangerous accusations/suggestions and do the whole “just asking questions bro” BS.
Yeah Russia, India and china should start addressing climate change. People should stop buying Russian gas and oil while screaming about the environment.
look around there and in /r/noncredibledefense. feel like home if you want to, but don’t expect this place to change significantly
and no, i’m not afraid of russian nukes specifically because nato also has nukes. this logic worked for 70 years already, and it will work now (on top of some of these russian nukes probably not working, that is)
The best predictor for the future is the past. Until it isn’t
It’s not like we’ve had nuclear weapons for centuries. It’s still relatively new in a geopolitical sense. Eventually someone will get an itchy trigger finger
so now that you are properly introduced to ncd, let me lay out an argument for escalation. since you’re not willing to watch that presentation by former australian military analyst, i’m gonna explain its main point there anyway
but first of all, you need to understand why russia initiated this war at all. in a way, this is not a new thing; in fact, it’s fourth attempt at this from putin’s side, it’s just that it worked three times in the past and it made little noise in the west, and this includes your info bubble.
attempt number one starts somewhere in 1999. yeltsin government is falling apart; he knows he’s gonna rot in prison until end of his days for corruption unheard of even in soviet times. boris needs a cover; a way out. he needs a presidential pardon, and for that he needs a trusted man to become a president. there’s this young man, pretty high up in the party structures and trusted by yeltsin, vladimir putin, at the time prime minister, but also virtually unknown by the wider public. yeltsin wants him to win presidental election, and for that putin needs a story.
so one beautiful autumn day in 1999 several apartment blocks were blown up. it attracted obvious and warranted attention, and such a heinous crime calls for prosecution and punishment. without much doubt in party controlled state media blame was squarely laid on chechens, putin declared war on them, and subsequently he won presidential elections with some 80% of vote.
some people that paid attention were able to point out that it’s very obvious setup and it’s actually FSB, agency putin worked in before and had buddies in, that is behind bombings. but this didn’t really matter: critical voices got silenced 12345 and anyway, entire country was set in nationalist fervor. what, are you against war? are you siding with chechen terrorists?
propaganda flows. it turns normal people into tribal nationalists; it’s the lazy way - repeat after me - us good, them bad. are you going against glorious leader? then you’re one of them, the others, the enemy. criticism puts target on your back, fear alone silences opposition. our nation is great and good, and woe to anyone that goes against it. this was a fertile ground for expansionist nationalism. there were ever so louder claims for reestablishment of former soviet union, not for its socialist ideals, but because it was big. nationalists liked this, and the same people were groomed for years to be putin’s base, because, again, it’s easy propaganda. it’s also kind of propaganda putin himself seems to believe in
so it turns out that global economy doesn’t ride on patriotism and in 2008 people’s lives got shit in russia for reasons. putin’s ratings dropped significantly, and now we have situation where solid chunk of his voter base are nationalists. the solution is obvious:
attempt number two: invasion of georgia (2008). this is when south ossetia and abkhazia were formed. also at the same time georgia had govt favourable to general west, instead of russia. in eyes of nationalists, it was a success, even if not full: georgia was weakened and humiliated, even if not subjugated completely. putin’s ratings went up again.
somehow west remained silent on this act of blatant aggression. georgia was even considered nato candidate, but as you can’t get in as a country with undetermined borders, georgia was left alone after 2008.
years pass, lives of common russian people go to shit again, nationalism is always high, and what better tool is to make people happy again than invasion of neighbour? the solution is obvious:
attempt number three: invasion of donbas (2014)and crimea (2014) i don’t think i have to explain this one to you. pro-russian ukrainian president stopped from signing association agreement with EU, which is first step of getting in EU; people didn’t like that for a long time; this lead to change of government; new govt had to deal with punitive invasion. again, nationalists were very happy with this development, and putin’s ratings again went up.
years pass, global economy goes to shit again, this time because of pandemic, thoroughly cooked with nationalist propaganda russian population is unhappy again. putin, believing in military might of his army, chooses the obvious:
in 25 february 2022 full scale invasion of ukraine begins. initially, putin’s ratings go up again; however this time they bit much more they could chew, and we’re now in this situation.
i think several things should be clear to you. first of all, primary objective of putin is to hold power in russia. it’s not as fun when all you have is nuclear wasteland. second of all, you should clock by now that this is rise of fascism, and failing to react to it amounts to appeasement. historically, this is a bad thing. historically, people also don’t learn this.
another thing is that putin’s voters are by now unhinged nationalists. putin can’t win, he’s unable to; he can’t use nukes, because there’s already nuclear bunker buster with his name somewhere in the midwest; he can’t escalate, because he has nothing to escalate with; and can’t back down, because he’d lose all support. the only thing putin can do is to keep war at this level or lower, that is, to deescalate, most specifically he wants western military aid to be as low as possible.
in other words, putin wants a ceasefire; some sort of situation like war in donbas was in before 2022. this would allow him time to regroup, regenerate forces, train new conscripts, manufacture weapons. maybe even it’d be enough time for the western population to lose interest. then, after another few years, he would try this shit again
on the other hand you have nato, which has unique opportunity of completing their long running strategic objective of removing russian threat on budget and without risking their own soldiers. it’s pretty straightforward that it is in nato’s interest to escalate aid and it’s in putin’s regime interest for aid to go down. it’s also favourable from humanitarian viewpoint, as more military aid to ukraine means shorter war
another thing that follows: there can not be peaceful coexistence between current russian government and ukraine, and other western countries more generally. sustainable international situation would require both change of government and cultural shift in russia away from nationalism, not unlike denazification in germany after ww2. unfortunately, while you can change government relatively easily, that second part will remain a problem for some decades from now, because there seems to be no one willing to push for that kind of changes right now. all these small time nazbols and neotsarists won’t disappear even if all of current russian high command hangs in hague today, this would require time and massive effort
and yet another thing: because no peace or ceasefire negotiations with russians would be held in good faith (currently), you should talk to them in language they understand. arming ukraine allows for sustained negotiations that russians can’t dodge or skew: on battlefield. because nationalism of this kind rides on cult of power, defeating them cracks that worldview ever so little and might plant a forbidden thought in them: maybe it’s glorious leader that is wrong
and by the way, the deep deep shit belarus is in right now can be traced to late 90s, when lukashenko proposed union state. this was a trick that was supposed to land him position of president of both belarus and russia. he got in the deal with expectation of replacing yeltsin, but didn’t expect putin to come up
and when it comes to supporting militarily a country that was attacked, i have to quote general Sherman:
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace.
Good write up but I don’t really think the fascist - appeasement thing is a valid comparison.
Just because a country aggressively invades a country does not mean they will necessarily invade another. For example US invasion of Iraq. US obviously is a dangerous country but there hasn’t been any other invasions in the last 2 decades and it doesn’t look like there will be another in the foreseeable future. (I know Afghanistan is an invasion too but not on the same scale. Hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed in Iraq, similar to Ukraine)
Second, we must look at the context behind the invasion. Like you pointed out, this is essentially a war of independence. Ukraine has always been in Russian sphere (if not outright part of Russia) and is considered a geostrategic + ideological priority for Russia. Kiev for example is the birthplace of the Russian people.
So it makes perfect sense that they would try to keep the country in chains and we see the start of the invasion back in 2014 because of the coup that took out the pro-Russian government.
These circumstances are not really going to crop up again. No country but Ukraine (to a lesser degree, Belarus, but that is firmly in Russian sphere) holds as much significance to Russia.
The only realistic thing Russia would go to war for going forward is to keep old Soviet Republics (like Georgia) in line.
Keep in mind if we’re reciting 20th century history as if it’s the Bible on how to act towards aggressive countries - that Germany annexed Austria peacefully. They annexed Sudetenand (sort of) peacefully. When they invaded Poland they did so with relative ease and without losing a significant amount of their fighting power. Iirc it only took them about a month to finish their invasion of Poland. Contrast that to the Ukraine v Russia War where we’ve entered the 2nd year with no signs of stalemate easing up.
Throughout all of their territorial expansions before WW2, the Germany military force did not get significantly weakened.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, has been a disaster for Russia. They are desperately burning through Soviet stockpiles of tanks from the 50s or even earlier. It might take decades for them to return to their previous fighting strength.
I really don’t think it’s likely Russia starts another war any time soon. So trying to compare this with Nazi Germany and “appeasement” I think is a bit reductionist. The circumstances are different.
eh my main point was to explain how russian external politics mesh with russian internal politics. it’s not 1:1 by any measure, but through all of this russian govt was going through far right playbook, line by line
spoilerand i had opportunity to step on my soapbox for five minutes
yeah this might be a stretch, but do you remember if there were anything close to weapon transfers like now in 2014 or 2008? chechen wars weren’t even really reacted to, except for 1. human rights abuses, and 2. for countries that already had a grudge with russia. in both cases, the most common response was strongly worded letter. for example, poland accepted 90k of chechen refugees; however this did exactly nothing against destruction of grozny, and most importantly was no impediment to gaining internal recognition for putin
Throughout all of their territorial expansions before WW2, the Germany military force did not get significantly weakened.
and we’re in very good situation that russians are this incompetent. and it’s not the first time either: secondary objective of chechen wars, aside from that above, was remaking public image of russian army as a capable force, because failure in afghanistan was still a fresh memory. results were, so to speak, suboptimal
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, has been a disaster for Russia
now, after 1.5 years of full scale war you can say that, but it was far from obvious two years ago or on 2014
1991 iraq war and invasion of afghanistan at least had clearly stated rationale and objectives, nothing like nebulous drivel you’ll hear from russians about satanist gay nazis threatening russian sphere of influence
Ukraine has always been in Russian sphere (if not outright part of Russia) and is considered a geostrategic + ideological priority for Russia. Kiev for example is the birthplace of the Russian people.
through history ukraine had much more western influence than russia, you can see borders of historical states even today if you know what you’re looking for. election results, railway density, dominant religion, language, types of industry present and many other factors delineate cleanly former borders of polish-lithuanian commonwealth, for example. especially for some last 300 years or so ukrainians got increasingly strong opinions on whether they are part of that russian world or not. (i’d like to notice that this line of propaganda, the one when novorossia was introduced and such was only heated up after 2010 or so, i don’t know exactly why)
this propaganda for internal consumption is not the only russian objective however. they still can try to stir shit in moldova or pollute western information space with their psyops, i don’t think they have ever stopped, probably they take overtime instead, even if prigozhin’s part is out. if you haven’t heard of this man, look up konstantin malofeev
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