Latest Ukraine/Russia Thread

[Elliott]

3 hours ago, zazen said:

@PurpleTree @Scholar @Lyubov   I think this is mistaking focus for bias, and clarity for having some anti-West agenda. Maybe the reason the West gets critiqued more is because it does more criticizable things? At a scale incomparable to others.

The Western centric view wants people outraged about headscarves in Iran while the countries surrounding Iran are reduced to moonscapes by the West. They want you crying about artistic suppression in China - which, in reality is China refusing to let foreign backed protest movements destabilize its governance - while they turn a blind eye to ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

 

Uh, no.

 

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Edited yesterday at 07:02 PM by Elliott

[Husseinisdoingfine]

What’s especially tragic is that I don’t predict that Ukraine will ever get its land back. The parts that Russia annexed are too fortified with dragon’s teeth, barbed wire, trenches, mines, etc… and it’s getting too expensive to support Ukraine. Even the NATO general secretary admitted that Russia produces more (military equipment, artillery, and more) in three months than NATO in a year.

 

[Husseinisdoingfine]

1 hour ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

What’s especially tragic is that I don’t predict that Ukraine will ever get its land back. The parts that Russia annexed are too fortified with dragon’s teeth, barbed wire, trenches, mines, etc… and it’s getting too expensive to support Ukraine. Even the NATO general secretary admitted that Russia produces more (military equipment, artillery, and more) in three months than NATO in a year.

And to make it worse, Vladimir Putin has made it explicitly clear that in any future peace negotiations, they get to keep all of the land they annexed.

Pete Hegseth in a recent speech said that Ukraine reclaiming this land was highly unlikely, implying that demanding the return of this land was not on the table in upcoming negotiations.

 

I don't know what to say, other than why?!?!  The Russian Federation is already the world's largest country in land mass. America has only four time zones, Russia has eleven. And yet, in terms of per capita income, Russia's not just worse of than us or Italy, its worse off than the Maldives or Palau. Its a massive country, with an economy roughly the size of Italy's. Its only economic output, is oil and gas [as well as organized crime, private military mercenaries, and corruption]. And even their oil and gas sector is so lame, that it relies on foreign companies to build the technology to extract oil.

Instead of fixing and developing the land we already have, we for some reason need to annex more. Why? Is that going to increase our living standards? Don't we already have enough land and natural resources?

Edited yesterday at 08:33 PM by Husseinisdoingfine
Reason for edit: typos

[Vynce]

1 hour ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

Even the NATO general secretary admitted that Russia produces more (military equipment, artillery, and more) in three months than NATO in a year.

 

Thats almost criminally wrong. NATO's military spending is about 10 times as much as Russias. The only reason NATO doesn't need to "produce" is because its not actively losing its equipment. So what exactly is your point here?

[Vynce]

14 minutes ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

And to make it worse, Vladimir Putin has made it explicitly clear that in any future peace negotiations, they get to keep all of the land they annexed.

Pete Hegseth in a recent speech said that Ukraine reclaiming this land was highly unlikely, implying that demanding the return of this land was not on the table in upcoming negotiations.

 

I don't know what to say, other than why?!?!  The Russian Federation is already the world's largest country in land mass. America has only four time zones, Russia has eleven. And yet, in terms of per capita income, Russia's not just worse of than us or Italy, its worse off than the Maldives or Palau. Its a massive country, with an economy roughly the size of Italy's. Its only economic output, is oil and gas [as well as organized crime, private military mercenaries, and corruption]. And even their oil and gas sector is so lame, that it relies on foreign companies to build the technology to extract oil.

Instead of fixing and developing the land we already have, we for some reason need to annex more. Why? Is that going to increase our living standards? Don't we already have enough land and natural resources?

Yes, Russia does not need anymore land per se. The entire war seems to be a geo-political statement against the "collective west". Its a cold and hot war against the perceived growth of the west limiting their post-soviet-russian realm and people. And to think that Russia is able to fight against any more nations is totally not believable. After they haven't even claimed 20% of a non-NATO state like Ukraine (after three years of hot war that is). 

That isn't against your points, I just wanted to add to it. 

[Husseinisdoingfine]

7 minutes ago, Vynce said:

Thats almost criminally wrong. NATO's military spending is about 10 times as much as Russias.

https://censor.net/en/news/3521597/pistorius-compares-the-number-of-weapons-produced-by-russia-and-the-eu

Edited 23 hours ago by Husseinisdoingfine

[zazen]

16 hours ago, Elliott said:

Uh, no.

 

The Guardian

www.theguardian.com

More than 300,000 Syrian civilians died. Any attempt to rehabilitate Assad is ...

May 14, 2023 — The return to the Arab fold of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is deeply shameful,

 

NPR

www.npr.org

Russia's wars in Chechnya offer a grim warning of what could be in Ukraine

Mar 12, 2022 — Russia unleashes a heavy bombing campaign. Cities are reduced to rubble. Thousands of civilians are killed. Russia did that twice in 

 

 

 

Amnesty International

www.amnesty.org

China: Draconian repression of Muslims in Xinjiang amounts to ...

Jun 10, 2021 — Hundreds of thousands of Muslim minority men and women subjected to mass internment and torture Millions of Muslims subjected to 

 

Council on Foreign Relations

www.cfr.org

China's Repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang

Sep 22, 2022 — More than a million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in China's Xinjiang region. The reeducation camps are just one part of the ..

 

 

ABC News

List of Saddam's Crimes Is Long - ABC News

Dec 30, 2006 — Saddam Hussein was hanged for ordering the deaths of 148 Shiite men and boys in the village of Dujail after an assassination attempt there in

 

 

NPR

www.npr.org

Alexei Navalny dies: Putin opponent, 47, passed out in prison, Moscow says

Feb 16, 2024 — Alexei Navalny, Russia's most prominent political opposition figure, has died in a remote Russian prison at age 

 

 

 

www.npr.org

A Russian anti-war politician is blocked from running against Putin

Feb 8, 2024 — Antiwar politician Boris Nadezhdin was rejected Thursday as a candidate in next month's presidential balloting

 

 

Uh, don't forget what Saudi's done to Yemen or Turkeys treatment of Kurds while your at it. The point isn't that non-Western actors are angels and Western actors are uniquely bad - it's that their typically bad. Read the first part of the comment you quote posted: '' at a scale incomparable to others''. It's not that others don't do critizable things at all. It's that the West and in particular the US, does more criticizable things.

The scale, scope, and systemic nature of Western crimes are unmatched by anything else on the planet. No other power has violated entire continents the way the West has and continues to do. We can critique authoritarians violating human rights in their countries, meanwhile the West authorizes entire regions to be destabilized and decimated.  It authorizes a entire system of violence, exploitation and subjugation to exist - there is no equivalence. 

You bring up Iraq, Syria, China, Russia, as if these examples exist in a vacuum, but every single one of your talking points is dripping with Western fingerprints - which only further proves the point that the West is the primary engine of global violence, destabilization, and imperialism.

- Saddam Hussein was armed, funded and propped up by the West for years while he did what he did, just as Saudi is doing what its doing in Yemen now. The West manufactures its villains, only to destroy them later when it’s politically convenient. Lets not even get into WMD and the aftermath of the Iraq war which pales in comparison to what Saddam did. This isn't to say abuse, atrocity or violations don't exist separate from the West, they just don't exist at a scale and scope comparably committed by the West.

- The US actively weaponized the Uyghur Issue to attack China. They have zero evidence of genocide whilst backing a plausible one in Gaza. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is a Uyghur separatist terrorist group who carried out deadly attacks in China for years. Even the UN officially designated it as a terrorist organization - until the US conveniently delisted it in 2020 as part of its anti-China strategy. There are no mass graves, no refugee crises, no evidence that even remotely compares to actual genocides. China pursued counterterrorism policies after a wave of violent Islamist separatist attacks, which even Western media reported on before this issue was turned into an anti-China talking point. Is it morally ideal? No. But how did the US handle terrorism? They bombed entire nations, tortured people in black sites, and slaughtered civilians with drones. This was all done beyond their borders to places and in places that are no existential threat to the state itself.  

The difference is that China and Russia had violent separatist groups who were domestic and did threaten the national security and territorial integrity of the state. If the KKK become violent and large enough to separate Texas do you think the US would sit by and let it happen? No nation naturally cedes territory to separatist groups because it sets off a domino effect of other groups who think they can do the same. If China deserves outrage for re-education centers, what does the US deserve for Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay?

- Russia dealt with their own separatists (Chechnya) but much more brutally. Again, that was nearly 30 years ago and was more about internal consolidation and state control after the fall of the Soviet Union. A bloody internal battle. It wasn’t Russia marching into Latin America, Africa, or the Middle East to overthrow governments for resource extraction.  Similarly, China’s policies in Xinjiang, as harsh as they may be, are not imperial the way Western actions are - they are domestic counterinsurgency measures, responding to terror attacks and separatists that the West love to show they care about but frankly just weaponize in a bid to weaken China and Russia through balkanization.

- The idea that Assad just woke up one day and decided to kill his own people is absurd. The Syrian war was not a simple “government vs. peaceful protesters” conflict - it was a complex, multi-sided insurgency fueled by foreign intervention. They included al-Qaeda affiliates, ISIS, and other extremist factions. Of course Assad went beyond in order to maintain control, and committed atrocities in the process. Western propaganda ignores that every government responds to armed insurgencies with force. The US itself would never tolerate an armed rebellion within its borders. Assad is condemned for using force against foreign funded jihadists trying to overthrow his country, while the US gets a pass for destroying entire nations in the name of "counterterrorism"? Both are wrong (Assad for cracking down on innocents) but the US's violence goes to regions which pose no actual threat to state security, and if they do, they're dealt with disproportionately the same way Israel has dealt with Hamas and Gaza. It's trying to blow out a candle with a fire extinguisher. 
 

———————————————

While other nations have committed atrocities in specific moments of history, Western imperialism is a relentless, ongoing, never ending machine of destruction. It is not a phase, or a event, or a response to internal threats - it's the defining characteristic of Western power itself. There hasn't been a a single year in modern history where the US or its allies are not actively engaged in war, coups, proxy conflicts, sanctions, or regime change operations. Not one. And they continue to do so today.

Chechnya was an event. Xinjiang was a policy. Western imperialism? That's a operating system, a way of being - the West doesn’t just occasionally commit crimes - it exists through them. When something is so constant and omnipresent, it stops being perceived as an aberration and instead becomes the default state of the world. It just blends into the background. Something abnormal has become so normative we barely flinch at it, especially when living in the imperial core from which its orchestrated.

It's why a one time brutal crackdown in another country gets more attention than the systemic, relentless destruction Western imperialism carries out on a daily basis. We are just numbed by the scale of it and seduced away from the devastation of it through a sophisticated media apparatus that seems to have done its job well - going by how even actualized members still toe the official empire narrative.

Edited 9 hours ago by zazen

[zazen]

14 hours ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

I don't know what to say, other than why?!?!  The Russian Federation is already the world's largest country in land mass. America has only four time zones, Russia has eleven. And yet, in terms of per capita income, Russia's not just worse of than us or Italy, its worse off than the Maldives or Palau. Its a massive country, with an economy roughly the size of Italy's. Its only economic output, is oil and gas [as well as organized crime, private military mercenaries, and corruption]. And even their oil and gas sector is so lame, that it relies on foreign companies to build the technology to extract oil.

Instead of fixing and developing the land we already have, we for some reason need to annex more. Why? Is that going to increase our living standards? Don't we already have enough land and natural resources?

Perhaps because it isn't primarily about material gain but about security. We keep swapping the primary cause of this war for the secondary incidental gains that may come from it in material, resources etc. I mentioned this on the previous page.

Look at it another way: Putin laid it all out in his 2007 Munich speech at the security conference - the same one that just passed and is held annually. He wasn’t vague but explicit in warning that NATO expansion up to Ukraine was a red line, and that encroaching on Russia’s sphere of security would have serious consequences. What was the Western response? To not take it seriously. The West treats other nations existential security concerns like a child's crayon drawing they can just wipe away. Only their concerns matter.

Western arrogance is why we’re here. Its not a lack of information that's the problem, but a lack of humility. Arrogance doesn’t process reality. It doesn’t allow facts to form a coherent, reality based perspective. Instead, arrogance bends reality around itself, forcing everything into a self-serving narrative. In this case, the narrative is the fantasy that the West is the sole arbiter of global order, that only Western nations have agency, and that countries like Russia are just obstacles to be managed, not equals with their own security concerns.

The empire's arrogance is so complete in its self-delusion, that it literally cannot process information that contradicts its divine right to do whatever it wants, wherever it wants, whenever it wants. Geographic buffer zones and historical vulnerabilities are very real things that have shaped nations for millennia. But in Western imperial thinking, they're just inconvenient obstacles to be brushed aside on the march toward total dominance.

The biggest scam isn’t just that trickle down economics never worked but that trickle down imperialism did. The same elitist, exploitative, and supremacist mindset that drives Western imperialism at the top has trickled down into the general population, shaping how even ordinary citizens like us view the world. This is why imperial talking points get parroted so effortlessly and we're baffled at the actions of non-Western actors.

Edited 9 hours ago by zazen

[PurpleTree]

14 hours ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

https://censor.net/en/news/3521597/pistorius-compares-the-number-of-weapons-produced-by-russia-and-the-eu

Yea the biggest part in NATO is obviously USs portion by a lot.

Unfortunately they turned evil and stopped being an ally.

[Elliott]

3 hours ago, zazen said:

Uh, don't forget what Saudi's done to Yemen or Turkeys treatment of Kurds while your at it. The point isn't that non-Western actors are angels and Western actors are uniquely bad - it's that their typically bad. Read the first part of the comment you quote posted: '' at a scale incomparable to others''. It's not that others don't do critizable things at all. It's that the West and in particular the US, does more criticizable things.

The scale, scope, and systemic nature of Western crimes are unmatched by anything else on the planet. No other power has violated entire continents the way the West has and continues to do. We can critique authoritarians violating human rights in their countries, meanwhile the West authorizes entire regions to be destabilized and decimated.  It authorizes a entire system of violence, exploitation and subjugation to exist - there is no equivalence. 

You bring up Iraq, Syria, China, Russia, as if these examples exist in a vacuum, but every single one of your talking points is dripping with Western fingerprints - which only further proves the point that the West is the primary engine of global violence, destabilization, and imperialism.

- Saddam Hussein was armed, funded and propped up by the West for years while he did what he did, just as Saudi is doing what its doing in Yemen now. The West manufactures its villains, only to destroy them later when it’s politically convenient. Lets not even get into WMD and the aftermath of the Iraq war which pales in comparison to what Saddam did. This isn't to say abuse, atrocity or violations don't exist separate from the West, they just don't exist at a scale and scope comparably committed by the West.

- The US actively weaponized the Uyghur Issue to attack China. They have zero evidence of genocide whilst backing a plausible one in Gaza. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is a Uyghur separatist terrorist group who carried out deadly attacks in China for years. Even the UN officially designated it as a terrorist organization - until the US conveniently delisted it in 2020 as part of its anti-China strategy. There are no mass graves, no refugee crises, no evidence that even remotely compares to actual genocides. China pursued counterterrorism policies after a wave of violent Islamist separatist attacks, which even Western media reported on before this issue was turned into an anti-China talking point. Is it morally ideal? No. But how did the US handle terrorism? They bombed entire nations, tortured people in black sites, and slaughtered civilians with drones. This was all done beyond their borders to places and in places that are no existential threat to the state itself.  

The difference is that China and Russia had violent separatist groups who were domestic and did threaten the national security and territorial integrity of the state. If the KKK become violent and large enough to separate Texas do you think the US would sit by and let it happen? No nation naturally cedes territory to separatist groups because it sets off a domino effect of other groups who think they can do the same. If China deserves outrage for re-education centers, what does the US deserve for Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay?

- Russia dealt with their own separatists (Chechnya) but much more brutally. Again, that was nearly 30 years ago and was more about internal consolidation and state control after the fall of the Soviet Union. A bloody internal battle. It wasn’t Russia marching into Latin America, Africa, or the Middle East to overthrow governments for resource extraction.  Similarly, China’s policies in Xinjiang, as harsh as they may be, are not imperial the way Western actions are - they are domestic counterinsurgency measures, responding to terror attacks and separatists that the West love to show they care about but frankly just weaponize in a bid to weaken China and Russia through balkanization.

- The idea that Assad just woke up one day and decided to kill his own people is absurd. The Syrian war was not a simple “government vs. peaceful protesters” conflict - it was a complex, multi-sided insurgency fueled by foreign intervention. They included al-Qaeda affiliates, ISIS, and other extremist factions. Of course Assad went beyond in order to maintain control, and committed atrocities in the process. Western propaganda ignores that every government responds to armed insurgencies with force. The US itself would never tolerate an armed rebellion within its borders. Assad is condemned for using force against foreign funded jihadists trying to overthrow his country, while the US gets a pass for destroying entire nations in the name of "counterterrorism"? Both are wrong (Assad for cracking down on innocents) but the US's violence goes to regions which pose no actual threat to state security, and if they do, they're dealt with disproportionately the same way Israel has dealt with Hamas and Gaza. It's trying to blow out a candle with a fire extinguisher. 
 

———————————————

While other nations have committed atrocities in specific moments of history, Western imperialism is a relentless, ongoing, never ending machine of destruction. It is not a phase, or a event, or a response to internal threats - it's the defining characteristic of Western power itself. There hasn't been a a single year in modern history where the US or its allies are not actively engaged in war, coups, proxy conflicts, sanctions, or regime change operations. Not one. And they continue to do so today.

Chechnya was an event. Xinjiang was a policy. Western imperialism? That's a operating system, a way of being - the West doesn’t just occasionally commit crimes - it exists through them. When something is so constant and omnipresent, it stops being perceived as an aberration and instead becomes the default state of the world. It just blends into the background. Something abnormal has become so normative we barely flinch at it, especially when living in the imperial core from which its orchestrated.

It's why a one time brutal crackdown in another country gets more attention than the systemic, relentless destruction Western imperialism carries out on a daily basis. We are just numbed by the scale of it and seduced away from the devastation of it through a sophisticated media apparatus that seems to have done its job well - going by how even actualized members still toe the official empire narrative.

You can't blame the u.s. for the things that other nations do just because the u.s. trades with them, they sell weapons and buy oil, they don't supply and fund entire regimes, they just don't sell to ones they don't trust.

Iraq and Afghanistan are so destabilized now huh?..... Panama, destabilized? Not that I'm suggesting what was done was right, i think it was wrong. The West is the global trader and protects it's trade routes, foreign assets, investments, and attacks groups that attack any of those.

China is supplying Russia against Ukraine, and African Rebels, along with Russia, you don't see them with American weapons, it's Russian and Chinese, same with South America.