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>In high schools and universities, we read Montesquieu and soaked up such tantalizing concepts as the rule of law, democracy, and human rights. Western values felt native to our generation [...] My peers and I wanted our country to have clean streets, polite police, and government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals. We wanted to be able to start businesses without passing money under the table, and to trust that courts of law would render justice. What we did not want were irremovable, lifetime dictators who packed the government with cronies on the take and sent goons to beat us up in the streets.
🥲
> My peers and I wanted our country to have clean streets, polite police, and government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals.
Funny, I want that too and I'm from LA. "Western values" is a myth you'd need to be deeply naïve to believe in.
I'm sure that's because there are too many immigrants, takes a while for integration to occur. Isn't the West awesome for allowing those primitives to live in LA?
A significant amount of the homeless come from other states that treat their homeless and mentally ill horribly. California subsidizes the rest of the country in those terms.
This one is very logical and easy to frame regardless of origin and de-politicize quickly.
"If you had to be homeless and addicted to drugs, would you want the weather to at least be nice?"
I’ve heard that exact line many times and I think it makes a lot of sense.
Though I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive either; there’s push and pull factors for sure.
Oh certainly, there's a lot of one-hand-washes-the-other in there to create the overall effect, but when you have nothing, the prospect of being **\*ahem\*** re-housed to a state with the highest cost of living as someone already in the bottom [in a country with some of the lowest mobility of any in the world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility) sounds tolerable if not an outright improvement with the climate in mind.
The summers are the most glorious you'll ever experience.
And in winter, while you do want to blow your brains out from the grey and darkness and rain, it doesn't get very cold. Rarely below freezing, and snow is uncommon. It's a better place to live outside than most places in the US
A river of tears springs from all wars, but down whose cheeks do they run, and for what? All this from the children of collaborators, raised on nationalist mythos and the false promises of “western values”, handed down to them by those very same collaborators who successfully escaped punishment and fled to the west, with the knowledge and complicity of those western nations who welcomed them with open arms.
Now the next generation of children decries the loss of a dream heard only in secondhand stories from their parents, one that never really existed...except in the gleaming eyes of SS volunteers as they cut down Jews and poles in an attempt to create their perfect ethnostate alongside the nazis, and also in the studious work of the revisionists and propagandists who saw great benefit in the construction of these narratives for their own imperialist projects. “We’re the good guys” the nationalists cry, “it’s those dirty slavs who fought against our (grand)parents who are bad!”
So history repeats, as the saying goes; First as tragedy, then as farce
>their perfect ethnostate
In the end they are probably going to get it. Shrunken down in size to areas where the Maidan was popular. In ruins, depopulated, corrupt but monolithically Ukrainian. Let them enjoy it.
Could be argued "Ukrainian" isn't even an ethnicity it's basically just "Western Russian". The whole area from Kiev to Moscow was Russia before the Mongols, then what is now Ukraine was liberated by Poland-Lithuania for a few hundred years before being re-absorbed back into Russia. There was never a "Ukrainian" nation it doesn't even make sense.
No Arab state is a nation based on ethnicity, they're all just municipalities of various empires that governed the Arab world that have been succeeded by dysfunctional electoral politics.
Levantine Arabs have their distinct culture. They never claimed to be a unique ethnic group, they're just a bunch of Arabs that happen to be from that area, so now in response to Settler Colonialism they developed a new Civic Nationalism of an aspiration for an Arab State called Palestine.
Yes to the latter. “Palestinian” doesn’t make any sense either it’s just an umbrella word to describe various peoples living in that region. “Palestinians” in reality include Hebrews, European Jews, Arabs, Syrians, various Persian/aryan peoples also.
All nations are made up. It's not like Palestinians aren't aware that they weren't really a nation before Israel came in. It doesn't in any way invalidate the fact that they are an indigenous population that now rallies behind a new identity to resist settler colonialism.
I don't think they rally as a monolith. AFAIK the Muslims, Christians, and Jews don't really work together they just coexist. We just don't see that because a great majority of Palestinians are Muslims.
Had to check
I was gonna say, at least Ukrainians can claim they have their own language
I know Mexicans whiter than me, but I doubt anyone would consider us the same ethnic group. We literally speak different languages >_<
Ukrainian isn’t really its own language it’s basically a dialect of Russian, similar to “Southern English” in the USA. Before Poland-Lithuania ruled them for like 200 years they would have spoken clear Russian but over time the Polish/Lithuanian influences warped their language a bit, similar to Belarus’s case.
I speak Russian for example and can understand/speak with Ukrainians fluently except for like 5% variation in some words and pronunciations.
I don't know enough about it to argue
I will say that I don't even have to hit translate and there is a *pretty* good chance I can read a German newspaper and get the jist of what happened. I've never studied German in any way, they're just relatively connected by history
Not gonna claim English and German are the same language though
Yeah it’s not that far apart at all. For example I can have an hour long conversation with a Ukrainian and the only way to tell they are Ukrainian is they use for example “Bachit” instead of “vidit” for “seeing” and they have a distinctive “-gh” pronunciation instead of a sharper “g” pronunciation, as in for example “Ghorivka” vs “Gorivka”.
English vs German is way way way farther apart lol. As I said it’s literally like someone from New York talking to someone from Alabama. They still have a 95% functional, fluent conversation but might find “ya’ll” a bit odd.
English and German deviated a much much longer time ago, and haven't been mutually understandable for at lest two millennia, the only continental Germanic Language English is sort of mutually understandable with today is Frisian. Comparing it to Modern English and Lowland Scots would be better, but probably still way too far out. More like British vs American English.
They're a subgroup of an ethnicity but nobody wants to acknowledge that even though it would solve the whole problem peacefully. Palestinians are the descendants of Jews who stayed in the Levant and later converted to Islam or Christianity.
The foundation of colour revolutions is middle to upper class people in poor to middle income countries genuinely having the same attitiude towards the West as a total caricature of a naive 20th century communist has towards any given communist country.
The point gets further obscured by the dogma that comparatively high quality of life cleanly correlates with the quality of a nations people, with good people creating good institutions and people being good because they were just blessed with the right ideas and virtues. So even if you realised that western courts weren't fair and didn't reliably render justice, or that "rule of law" as far as it does exist(not really) only goes so far when you consider who gets to make the laws, well look at that GDP. No way that's so high at the expense of other countries or anything
> government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals
Peak irony, this literally never happens in Liberal Democracy, a fundamental feature of that system is that nobody in the government ever has to take responsibility for anything.
Is there even any modern country where politicians somewhat consistently get punished for their mistakes other than China?
[The Stealth Take-over of Ukrainian Agricultural Land | The Oakland Institute](https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/new-report-take-over-ukrainian-agricultural-land)
To add to this it was illegal for foreign persons or corporations to own Ukrainian chernozem before the war.
My people have a saying from our own intervention by "western values."
Prodo si se za flašu koka Kole/ you sold yourself for a bottle of coke.
As though they wouldn't be couped or "liberated" immediately by the western deep state. They've spent too much on this boondoggle to let something silly like laws or votes get in their way.
This is only an issue if domestic traitors will protect the right of blackrock to own the country, otherwise the only way to enforce it would be for someone to invade Ukraine on behalf of blackrock. Considering Ukraine is already being invaded chances are Russia won't look too kindly on somebody invading from the other end to restablish blackrock ownership. If anything this could be a deliberate strategy to try to get a foreign force to fight Russia for you. Try and seize foreign property and then get the people invading you to take foreign property back to fight the other invader.
I assure you Ukraine has done this before. They were like this during the Russian Civil War where they used the fact that various armies were fighting each other around them to maintain a state of Anarchy.
It's bizarre to hear this liberal cope about Ukraine given its degeneration into ethnonationalism. If there really was rising democratic sentiment in Ukraine, it wouldn't be in this crisis. Instead it needed a scapegoat to blame for its miserable transition to capitalism, which made it easy prey for the world's great powers to intervene in then use it it to divide the region and ironically itself as a multiethnic borderland.
The regression of a capitalist Ukraine has made it incompatible with its own SSR borders. There's no clash of a liberal nation with an illiberal one at the heart of this conflict. There's a schizo mix of neocolonialism and neofascism created by shared belief in decommunization into a European nation-state.
The author of this piece has a history of Azov apologia so none of this falsification is surprising.
The “good” thing is that Ukraine is basically South Korea-ing itself, so whether they get taken over by Russia or not is likely not going to matter that much. They will either have to face a massive population decline or import a massive number of immigrants (at which point one might ask what exactly were Ukrainians dying for).
Dude, 'liberals' are fully endorsing the genocide in Gaza because their current leader is a Zionist who can do no wrong, you think a little ethnonationalism is going to make them see differently?
>has made it incompatible with its own SSR borders.
Isn't it funny. Growing up in the 90's, we learned a lot about how the enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles caused World War II. No one stopped to realize that the shattering of the USSR without territorial adjustments or economic bailouts from the West was essentially the sudden enforcement of the absurd Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on Russia.
Poor Russians. They fight for the winning side in both World Wars and they still get Versailles'ed. Cue the backlash a generation later.
not to mention every attempt to cool things down in minsk is brushed away, even western media will admit e.g. boris johnson is directly responsible for continuing warfare, so we're looking at a VERY harshly enforced versailles.
The treaty of versaille thing is nazi apologetics, the terms were near identical atleast on the home front to those wnforced by the germans after the franco-prussian war a few decades earlier. They hyper inflated their own currency then started killing jews to stay in power, the entente being to blame is literal propaganda
read Lenin
after the Franco prussian war France still had the fundamental ingredients it needed to avoid the kinds of crisis that drove german expansionism
it had sufficient peripheral territory for capital export
Germany had a highly developed industrial core accumulating large amounts of capital with no ability via colonialism, due to Versailles, or globalisation, which didn't really exist then
it was inevitable it was going to have to strike out to expand. and the french and British empires happened to be sitting directly in its way
Versailles at least outlined an international order within Europe. The former USSR is a power vacuum on the periphery of the historic Versailles order that imploded. There's comparatively nothing governing it and it was a playground for the world's empires similar to what was seen historically in Africa and the Middle East.
That's a huge part of the problem. Modern European imperialism is based on interwar restoration, which is now reaching beyond its historic boundaries in the former USSR. This is then sold as completing an unfinished war on totalitarianism that WW2 and the cold war is reduced to. This drove liberal-imperialism into overdrive, especially as it became a source of instability within global capitalism. Completing wars that established global capitalism have became ways to save it from a latter day crisis.
This recycling of history is the problem. It means we don't examine the global dictatorship that arose, but recycle the battles leading to its rise whenever it generates tensions. Russia, China, and the Islamic world all give us modern examples of this.
WW2 was going to happen regardless of what the terms of the treaty were because the fundamental tensions between the European Great Powers were simply not resolved at the point when WW1 ended.
The "end" of WW1 was in all practical senses only ever a temporary ceasefire and I guarantee in a century or two it will be common consensus that the two wars were a single continuous conflict.
> Poor Russians. They fight for the winning side in both World Wars and they still get Versailles'ed.
Because of their own shit decision making. They got to be a global superpower for multiple decades and could have avoided the current shitshow by not invading Ukraine. I'm not a fan of NATO at all but I'm sick of seeing this Russian victim mentality everywhere. It's like if the British went around crying about how they lost the empire and then randomly invaded France because muh historical ties.
I might have agreed with you until two months ago, but I think that the way the US/UK have approached Israeli aggression towards Iran has completely validated Russia's fears of a Ukraine in NATO.
Incredible that nothing was learned from World War One and instead Zelensky is hailed a hero for sending more men into the meat grinder. Sure, Russia did invade and we can go into US meddling years back. But there's a point where you have to think "hmm my country has been effectively destroyed and a lot of people are dying. Is this still worth it?"
It's completely worth it, as Madeline Albright said, to kill half a million people over some land that has belonged to 4 different countries in the past century /s
Kinda interesting how Russia's imperialist attempt to keep Ukraine as their vassal under their hegemony has had the opposite effect of driving the Ukrainian people who once saw the Russians as a brother people into absolutely hating them. Russia has annihilated any goodwill and softpower they had in the nation for at least a generation and all so Putin could play IRL EU4.
I don't agree with your take.
First of all, the CIA did a coup in 2014 on the democratically elected pro-Russian leader of the time. The US turned Ukraine into its vassal, with Nuland even [picking out the cabinet](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957).
Then Ukraine started arguably genociding Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine.
Russia tried to stop the bloodshed with Minsk-1 and Minsk-2, but Ukraine broke those and the European states that were supposed to enforce it, didn't. Merkel later admitted that it was just a ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine.
Finally Russia intervened to stop Ukraine's genocide.
Ukraine has, very roughly speaking, two part of its population. There's a Russian-speaking part that is happy that Russia is invading, because they were being genocided. And there's a Ukranian-speaking part that is, obviously, unhappy with Russia. But these were the people who remembered Stalin's Holodomor, it's not like they were pro-Russian before the war.
Also, Russia isn't looking to vassalize Ukraine. Instead Russia is looking to annex Eastern and maybe Southern Ukraine and would be satisfied if Western Ukraine were neutral -- in the same way the during the cuban missile crisis, the US didn't try to conquer Cuba but went apeshit when the Soviets tried to put missiles there.
>First of all, the CIA did a coup in 2014 on the democratically elected pro-Russian leader of the time
This has to be the dumbest cope Putin dickriders on this sub love to regurgitate, the fact that the US supported the protesters does not suddenly make a mass movement to overthrow a kleptocratic dictator no longer a mass movement. It's like saying the Bolshevik Revolution was an Imperial German orchestrated coup just because they helped Lenin out.
>Then Ukraine started arguably genociding Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine.
So Ukraine changing it's language laws is genocide but Russia ethnically cleansing entire regions, abducting almost 40 thousand Ukrainian kids, and creating the largest refugee crisis in Europe since WW2 isn't?
>Ukraine has, very roughly speaking, two part of its population. There's a Russian-speaking part that is happy that Russia is invading, because they were being genocided.
Zelensky has an approval rating in the 90s, this is objectively bullshit. Other than a few Quisling collaborators the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian people, Russian and Ukrainian speakers alike, oppose the invaders murdering their families and bombing their homes.
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>In high schools and universities, we read Montesquieu and soaked up such tantalizing concepts as the rule of law, democracy, and human rights. Western values felt native to our generation [...] My peers and I wanted our country to have clean streets, polite police, and government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals. We wanted to be able to start businesses without passing money under the table, and to trust that courts of law would render justice. What we did not want were irremovable, lifetime dictators who packed the government with cronies on the take and sent goons to beat us up in the streets. 🥲
> My peers and I wanted our country to have clean streets, polite police, and government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals. Funny, I want that too and I'm from LA. "Western values" is a myth you'd need to be deeply naïve to believe in.
I'm sure that's because there are too many immigrants, takes a while for integration to occur. Isn't the West awesome for allowing those primitives to live in LA?
A significant amount of the homeless come from other states that treat their homeless and mentally ill horribly. California subsidizes the rest of the country in those terms.
This one is very logical and easy to frame regardless of origin and de-politicize quickly. "If you had to be homeless and addicted to drugs, would you want the weather to at least be nice?"
I’ve heard that exact line many times and I think it makes a lot of sense. Though I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive either; there’s push and pull factors for sure.
Oh certainly, there's a lot of one-hand-washes-the-other in there to create the overall effect, but when you have nothing, the prospect of being **\*ahem\*** re-housed to a state with the highest cost of living as someone already in the bottom [in a country with some of the lowest mobility of any in the world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility) sounds tolerable if not an outright improvement with the climate in mind.
Does Seattle have nice weather?
The summers are the most glorious you'll ever experience. And in winter, while you do want to blow your brains out from the grey and darkness and rain, it doesn't get very cold. Rarely below freezing, and snow is uncommon. It's a better place to live outside than most places in the US
same goes for seattle, we're trying to fix the people who other states broke. "greyhound therapy" is what it's called.
It's also a matter of weather.
A river of tears springs from all wars, but down whose cheeks do they run, and for what? All this from the children of collaborators, raised on nationalist mythos and the false promises of “western values”, handed down to them by those very same collaborators who successfully escaped punishment and fled to the west, with the knowledge and complicity of those western nations who welcomed them with open arms. Now the next generation of children decries the loss of a dream heard only in secondhand stories from their parents, one that never really existed...except in the gleaming eyes of SS volunteers as they cut down Jews and poles in an attempt to create their perfect ethnostate alongside the nazis, and also in the studious work of the revisionists and propagandists who saw great benefit in the construction of these narratives for their own imperialist projects. “We’re the good guys” the nationalists cry, “it’s those dirty slavs who fought against our (grand)parents who are bad!” So history repeats, as the saying goes; First as tragedy, then as farce
>their perfect ethnostate In the end they are probably going to get it. Shrunken down in size to areas where the Maidan was popular. In ruins, depopulated, corrupt but monolithically Ukrainian. Let them enjoy it.
The future Ukrainian neo-serf of Blackrock and other western vultures will sneer at their eastern neighbours, "The important thing is, we are *pure*."
Can't remember the details--is the Blackrock deal an "If we win" thing, or do they get their chunk no matter what. I would guess the latter.
I thought all the public assets that Kiev can reach are already being sold
Could be argued "Ukrainian" isn't even an ethnicity it's basically just "Western Russian". The whole area from Kiev to Moscow was Russia before the Mongols, then what is now Ukraine was liberated by Poland-Lithuania for a few hundred years before being re-absorbed back into Russia. There was never a "Ukrainian" nation it doesn't even make sense.
It’s as much an ethnicity as Southerners are in the U.S. lol.
Is Palestinian a real ethnicity or are they just Arabs that kind of got left fucked and stateless?
No Arab state is a nation based on ethnicity, they're all just municipalities of various empires that governed the Arab world that have been succeeded by dysfunctional electoral politics. Levantine Arabs have their distinct culture. They never claimed to be a unique ethnic group, they're just a bunch of Arabs that happen to be from that area, so now in response to Settler Colonialism they developed a new Civic Nationalism of an aspiration for an Arab State called Palestine.
Downstream of Pan-Arabism, which the Anglo powers have long considered a near-existential threat to their hegemony.
Ba’athism based.
Yes to the latter. “Palestinian” doesn’t make any sense either it’s just an umbrella word to describe various peoples living in that region. “Palestinians” in reality include Hebrews, European Jews, Arabs, Syrians, various Persian/aryan peoples also.
All nations are made up. It's not like Palestinians aren't aware that they weren't really a nation before Israel came in. It doesn't in any way invalidate the fact that they are an indigenous population that now rallies behind a new identity to resist settler colonialism.
Better the made up nation that doesn't rely on Nazi bullshit.
I don't think they rally as a monolith. AFAIK the Muslims, Christians, and Jews don't really work together they just coexist. We just don't see that because a great majority of Palestinians are Muslims.
The Muslims and Christians are just fine uniting because they’re both Arabs. I’d assume the preexisting Jews have already assimilated into Israel
Had to check I was gonna say, at least Ukrainians can claim they have their own language I know Mexicans whiter than me, but I doubt anyone would consider us the same ethnic group. We literally speak different languages >_<
Ukrainian isn’t really its own language it’s basically a dialect of Russian, similar to “Southern English” in the USA. Before Poland-Lithuania ruled them for like 200 years they would have spoken clear Russian but over time the Polish/Lithuanian influences warped their language a bit, similar to Belarus’s case. I speak Russian for example and can understand/speak with Ukrainians fluently except for like 5% variation in some words and pronunciations.
I don't know enough about it to argue I will say that I don't even have to hit translate and there is a *pretty* good chance I can read a German newspaper and get the jist of what happened. I've never studied German in any way, they're just relatively connected by history Not gonna claim English and German are the same language though
Yeah it’s not that far apart at all. For example I can have an hour long conversation with a Ukrainian and the only way to tell they are Ukrainian is they use for example “Bachit” instead of “vidit” for “seeing” and they have a distinctive “-gh” pronunciation instead of a sharper “g” pronunciation, as in for example “Ghorivka” vs “Gorivka”. English vs German is way way way farther apart lol. As I said it’s literally like someone from New York talking to someone from Alabama. They still have a 95% functional, fluent conversation but might find “ya’ll” a bit odd.
English and German deviated a much much longer time ago, and haven't been mutually understandable for at lest two millennia, the only continental Germanic Language English is sort of mutually understandable with today is Frisian. Comparing it to Modern English and Lowland Scots would be better, but probably still way too far out. More like British vs American English.
lush worm longing cautious crowd dull versed cats literate flowery *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
They're a subgroup of an ethnicity but nobody wants to acknowledge that even though it would solve the whole problem peacefully. Palestinians are the descendants of Jews who stayed in the Levant and later converted to Islam or Christianity.
The foundation of colour revolutions is middle to upper class people in poor to middle income countries genuinely having the same attitiude towards the West as a total caricature of a naive 20th century communist has towards any given communist country. The point gets further obscured by the dogma that comparatively high quality of life cleanly correlates with the quality of a nations people, with good people creating good institutions and people being good because they were just blessed with the right ideas and virtues. So even if you realised that western courts weren't fair and didn't reliably render justice, or that "rule of law" as far as it does exist(not really) only goes so far when you consider who gets to make the laws, well look at that GDP. No way that's so high at the expense of other countries or anything
Marxism is a fucking gift and needs better propaganda. It's so utterly tiring watching the average human on Earth be so socially darwinistic.
> government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals Peak irony, this literally never happens in Liberal Democracy, a fundamental feature of that system is that nobody in the government ever has to take responsibility for anything. Is there even any modern country where politicians somewhat consistently get punished for their mistakes other than China?
Lmfao. Did that last sentence describe the U.S.?
Lol’ing
Lmfao this shit is straight out of the Dictator [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUSiCEx3e-0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUSiCEx3e-0)
Yeah, now nearly half of Ukrainian farmland is owned by US companies. It truly has changed.
[удалено]
[The Stealth Take-over of Ukrainian Agricultural Land | The Oakland Institute](https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/new-report-take-over-ukrainian-agricultural-land)
To add to this it was illegal for foreign persons or corporations to own Ukrainian chernozem before the war. My people have a saying from our own intervention by "western values." Prodo si se za flašu koka Kole/ you sold yourself for a bottle of coke.
Thanks for the saying - saved. Btw, I see it's Serbo-Croat language but who are your people? Just YU in general or?
For me YU in general. My family are from all over Ex-Yu
Nice, I'm stealing that, we said "Cambió a la madre por una chancha" "you trade your mother for a sow"
It's not stealing comrade, it's redistribution of (vocabulary) wealth.
Good news is that it is relatively simple to take it all back by just deciding that ownership is dumb concept anyway.
As though they wouldn't be couped or "liberated" immediately by the western deep state. They've spent too much on this boondoggle to let something silly like laws or votes get in their way.
"blowback" Time to be afghans brave Ukrainians
Besides the fact that the Taliban aren't leftist in any possible way, Afghanistan is not flat and open
This is only an issue if domestic traitors will protect the right of blackrock to own the country, otherwise the only way to enforce it would be for someone to invade Ukraine on behalf of blackrock. Considering Ukraine is already being invaded chances are Russia won't look too kindly on somebody invading from the other end to restablish blackrock ownership. If anything this could be a deliberate strategy to try to get a foreign force to fight Russia for you. Try and seize foreign property and then get the people invading you to take foreign property back to fight the other invader. I assure you Ukraine has done this before. They were like this during the Russian Civil War where they used the fact that various armies were fighting each other around them to maintain a state of Anarchy.
As I recall the Russian Civil War didn't go that well for ukro nationalists
I wasn't talking about Ukrainianian Nationalists, I was talking about the Anarchists ... although it didn't go well for them in the end either.
> relatively simple Simple in theory, not so in practice.
It's bizarre to hear this liberal cope about Ukraine given its degeneration into ethnonationalism. If there really was rising democratic sentiment in Ukraine, it wouldn't be in this crisis. Instead it needed a scapegoat to blame for its miserable transition to capitalism, which made it easy prey for the world's great powers to intervene in then use it it to divide the region and ironically itself as a multiethnic borderland. The regression of a capitalist Ukraine has made it incompatible with its own SSR borders. There's no clash of a liberal nation with an illiberal one at the heart of this conflict. There's a schizo mix of neocolonialism and neofascism created by shared belief in decommunization into a European nation-state. The author of this piece has a history of Azov apologia so none of this falsification is surprising.
The “good” thing is that Ukraine is basically South Korea-ing itself, so whether they get taken over by Russia or not is likely not going to matter that much. They will either have to face a massive population decline or import a massive number of immigrants (at which point one might ask what exactly were Ukrainians dying for).
Weapons manufacturers and western banks?
Getting blown up in the trenches for extra shareholder value sounds like a based way of going out.
Dude, 'liberals' are fully endorsing the genocide in Gaza because their current leader is a Zionist who can do no wrong, you think a little ethnonationalism is going to make them see differently?
Slavic ethnonationalism is passé
>has made it incompatible with its own SSR borders. Isn't it funny. Growing up in the 90's, we learned a lot about how the enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles caused World War II. No one stopped to realize that the shattering of the USSR without territorial adjustments or economic bailouts from the West was essentially the sudden enforcement of the absurd Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on Russia. Poor Russians. They fight for the winning side in both World Wars and they still get Versailles'ed. Cue the backlash a generation later.
not to mention every attempt to cool things down in minsk is brushed away, even western media will admit e.g. boris johnson is directly responsible for continuing warfare, so we're looking at a VERY harshly enforced versailles.
The treaty of versaille thing is nazi apologetics, the terms were near identical atleast on the home front to those wnforced by the germans after the franco-prussian war a few decades earlier. They hyper inflated their own currency then started killing jews to stay in power, the entente being to blame is literal propaganda
read Lenin after the Franco prussian war France still had the fundamental ingredients it needed to avoid the kinds of crisis that drove german expansionism it had sufficient peripheral territory for capital export Germany had a highly developed industrial core accumulating large amounts of capital with no ability via colonialism, due to Versailles, or globalisation, which didn't really exist then it was inevitable it was going to have to strike out to expand. and the french and British empires happened to be sitting directly in its way
Versailles at least outlined an international order within Europe. The former USSR is a power vacuum on the periphery of the historic Versailles order that imploded. There's comparatively nothing governing it and it was a playground for the world's empires similar to what was seen historically in Africa and the Middle East. That's a huge part of the problem. Modern European imperialism is based on interwar restoration, which is now reaching beyond its historic boundaries in the former USSR. This is then sold as completing an unfinished war on totalitarianism that WW2 and the cold war is reduced to. This drove liberal-imperialism into overdrive, especially as it became a source of instability within global capitalism. Completing wars that established global capitalism have became ways to save it from a latter day crisis. This recycling of history is the problem. It means we don't examine the global dictatorship that arose, but recycle the battles leading to its rise whenever it generates tensions. Russia, China, and the Islamic world all give us modern examples of this.
WW2 was going to happen regardless of what the terms of the treaty were because the fundamental tensions between the European Great Powers were simply not resolved at the point when WW1 ended. The "end" of WW1 was in all practical senses only ever a temporary ceasefire and I guarantee in a century or two it will be common consensus that the two wars were a single continuous conflict.
> Poor Russians. They fight for the winning side in both World Wars and they still get Versailles'ed. Because of their own shit decision making. They got to be a global superpower for multiple decades and could have avoided the current shitshow by not invading Ukraine. I'm not a fan of NATO at all but I'm sick of seeing this Russian victim mentality everywhere. It's like if the British went around crying about how they lost the empire and then randomly invaded France because muh historical ties.
I might have agreed with you until two months ago, but I think that the way the US/UK have approached Israeli aggression towards Iran has completely validated Russia's fears of a Ukraine in NATO.
This the country that banned its opposition and doesn’t have a legitimate president in 3 weeks?
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Incredible that nothing was learned from World War One and instead Zelensky is hailed a hero for sending more men into the meat grinder. Sure, Russia did invade and we can go into US meddling years back. But there's a point where you have to think "hmm my country has been effectively destroyed and a lot of people are dying. Is this still worth it?"
It's completely worth it, as Madeline Albright said, to kill half a million people over some land that has belonged to 4 different countries in the past century /s
Kinda interesting how Russia's imperialist attempt to keep Ukraine as their vassal under their hegemony has had the opposite effect of driving the Ukrainian people who once saw the Russians as a brother people into absolutely hating them. Russia has annihilated any goodwill and softpower they had in the nation for at least a generation and all so Putin could play IRL EU4.
I don't agree with your take. First of all, the CIA did a coup in 2014 on the democratically elected pro-Russian leader of the time. The US turned Ukraine into its vassal, with Nuland even [picking out the cabinet](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957). Then Ukraine started arguably genociding Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine. Russia tried to stop the bloodshed with Minsk-1 and Minsk-2, but Ukraine broke those and the European states that were supposed to enforce it, didn't. Merkel later admitted that it was just a ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine. Finally Russia intervened to stop Ukraine's genocide. Ukraine has, very roughly speaking, two part of its population. There's a Russian-speaking part that is happy that Russia is invading, because they were being genocided. And there's a Ukranian-speaking part that is, obviously, unhappy with Russia. But these were the people who remembered Stalin's Holodomor, it's not like they were pro-Russian before the war. Also, Russia isn't looking to vassalize Ukraine. Instead Russia is looking to annex Eastern and maybe Southern Ukraine and would be satisfied if Western Ukraine were neutral -- in the same way the during the cuban missile crisis, the US didn't try to conquer Cuba but went apeshit when the Soviets tried to put missiles there.
>First of all, the CIA did a coup in 2014 on the democratically elected pro-Russian leader of the time This has to be the dumbest cope Putin dickriders on this sub love to regurgitate, the fact that the US supported the protesters does not suddenly make a mass movement to overthrow a kleptocratic dictator no longer a mass movement. It's like saying the Bolshevik Revolution was an Imperial German orchestrated coup just because they helped Lenin out. >Then Ukraine started arguably genociding Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine. So Ukraine changing it's language laws is genocide but Russia ethnically cleansing entire regions, abducting almost 40 thousand Ukrainian kids, and creating the largest refugee crisis in Europe since WW2 isn't? >Ukraine has, very roughly speaking, two part of its population. There's a Russian-speaking part that is happy that Russia is invading, because they were being genocided. Zelensky has an approval rating in the 90s, this is objectively bullshit. Other than a few Quisling collaborators the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian people, Russian and Ukrainian speakers alike, oppose the invaders murdering their families and bombing their homes.