Noam Chomsky on NATO...

[BlueOak]

@Gushu

'The West' didn't exist as a collective concept in the minds of most people in the west. Not over my lifetime and i'm in my 40's. Sure they listen to themselves being called it but it didn't mean much. It is meaning more, the more it is referenced and they accept it. There are/were far more differing perspectives even in just the EU for example, than a collective identity. Just look at Europe's map for example at how fractured it is.

So to blame the west as a collective is not understanding the nature of the west. Again i've been trying from the start of this conflict to draw a great big red box around Eastern Europe as the focal point, because it is a large part of why we have reached this point.

Individual countries wanted collective security from an increasingly belligerent expansionist Russia, so they joined NATO. Russia became this way because NATO expanded and interfered in its own sphere of influence over decades. They did this because Russia was becoming more belligerent.. because the west was expanding or interfering etc. In a loop. So its a two way dynamic that has gone on since the cold war, it can't be anything but that, because things don't happen in a vacuum. 

Fear is at its center and you describe that, I think i've described eastern Europe a lot, with the various invasions from the USSR they have suffered over the decades. Lot of meddling in Eastern Europe politics from Russia as well, lot of meddling in Russia's sphere politically from the west.

Any speaker who doesn't describe both sides of the equation in at least this surface depth either can't see it or has taken a side and is constructing their viewpoint around that identification.
 

[Ryan_047]

On 3/23/2022 at 3:17 AM, Lyubov said:

but you are just wrong thinking Ukraine as an identity was distinctively looked at as substantially different from Russian up until 30 years ago.