this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Believe it or not, history didn't actually start in 2021, and Nazi collaborators didn't all suddenly disappear in 1945 after enthusiastically carrying out the holocaust. Many German Nazis went right back to work at NATO, the West German government, and various US intelligence and military projects. The Ukrainian fascist organizations, Stepan Bandera's Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists among them, that directly participated in the murder of over a million Jews, Poles, and communists operated continuously through the 2014 coup where they overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian government with the backing of the United States. The coup government had been waging continuous open war on Russians living in Luhansk and Donetsk for 8 years before Russia came to their defense at the explicit request of their democratically elected governments.
Of course, you either already know this and don't care, or you're going to choose to ignore it to substitute with some cartoon fantasy about how there was peace in the world until Putin and his orcs arbitrarily decided to blacken the land with their unclean hordes and wipe out the good, clean, pure Men of the West for absolutely no reason and with no strategic objective beyond embodying the metaphysical concept of evil.
Fun fact, they went to the Soviet Union too. Paperclip was very much mirrored by Osoaviakhim. So whatever point you're trying to make by bringing this up, I'm afraid it's very much a both sides thing. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make though. None of what you said makes the comparison I was responding to any less ridiculous. Hitler and his party, funnily enough, were not defined as fascists by protecting the sovereignty of Vichy France, not least because they didn't actually do it.
Thanks for at least confirming you're not operating in good faith. No, I think Putin has a variety of goals here that include securing a more defensible land route to the peninsula that Russia previously stole in 2014 and attempting to place a puppet (or at least friendly) regime in charge. That you're uncritically buying the justifications of a warmongering dictator is proof positive to me that you based your entire opinion here on "whatever the opposite of America is" as if it's a playground football game. I don't need to like how America acts to also not like how Russia acts.
Pure projection. I treat Russia as an ordinary liberal democratic state led by ordinary human people with rational self-interested motives rather than a cartoon villain with an army of mindless robots. My refusal to treat them as fundamentally evil, irrational, or inhuman doesn't suggest that I think they're "good", selfless, or beyond criticism. It means I judge them by the same standards I'd use to judge any similar state with a similar political and economic system in similar circumstances.
If you're an American as I am, then your taxes funded the 2014 coup of Ukraine, the ongoing war on Donetsk and Luhansk, sabotaging the Minsk agreements, and prohibiting a negotiated end to the ongoing conflict. You're not some unbiased neutral observer if you're pretending to claim "both sides bad" while actively funding and voting to maintain the war and block every local attempt at peace. Absent continuous US intervention for over a decade, this war never happens.
I don't care where Russia and Ukraine decide to put lines on a map between them. That's exclusively up to the people that actually live there, and Euro-Americans like me aren't entitled to an opinion about it. I care that my government stop using money generated by my community's labor to murder the people that live there.
I only agree that we shouldn't view Russia or Russians as fundamentally evil of dehumanize them with language like "orcs". But really... do you view Russia as a liberal democratic state? I'm sorry but are you out of your mind? And surely they are not led by ordinary people but by a class of oligarchs under the lead of the godfather of this mafia state.
Also you say you don't care about border disputes between countries. You're wrong that this is up to the people sharing this border. Legally that's a very ignorant statement as there are very good reasons that the UN member countries are extremely reluctant to accept any changing of borders, especially not by force. International law puts emphasis on stability of borders. Also it makes border conflicts every countries' business. So yes: Even as a Euro-American you're very much entitled to have an opinion about it and legally it's your countries' duty to have a stance on it. No one is on the sidelines here.
All liberal "democratic" states are ruled by a class of oligarchs/capitalists, and not by ordinary people. Why are you citing evidence that's perfectly compatible with a liberal "democracy" as if it was somehow at odds with it?
That might be the case in the US where capitalists have much more influence over election outcomes and politicians themselves are often part of dynasties that accumulated enormous wealth. This is however not comparable to many European countries. Sure, you have capitalists in all capitalist societies. But their direct influence on election results is much smaller and politicians are very often ordinary people and not obscenely rich or privileged by their ancestry.
A whole different aspect is that these ordinary people, once they came into power, lend their ears way too much to capitalist interests and the likes of lobbyists, often ignoring the problems and needs of ordinary people and focussing instead on catering to the industry.
The people could however not vote for these politicians if they realized that their policies thwart their own interests. If they fail to do so, it's their own fault that the conditions for the majority are not improving. How can you fix the stupidity?