You also said “you protect your own”. These people were not Russians. Russia had no right to declare these people were fellow citizens and then invade to liberate them from their own country. Just like the United States would have no right to declare British Columbia the 51st state and then invade to liberate it from Canada.
What’s Kim Jong Un’s?
Other than China’s limitations on freedom to vote, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of petition, freedom to own firearms, freedom of due process, freedom to own intellectual property, freedom of movement, freedom to have children, and freedom to emigrate they’re pretty much on an equal footing with us.
117%
My point was simply to establish that saying "they’re not ‘Russian’ " because they aren’t in Russia isn’t sufficient to address the issue. As I pointed out, the fact that there are “Russians” in Ukraina isn’t enough to justify what Putin did. But one should argue with reality in mind, not with made-up interpretations.
What do I think?
:Natasha! "
“Yes, Boris?”
“Have discovered New Fool-Proof plan to shoot Every American!”
“…Again?”
“Da! And THIS time, they’ll Pay For The Bullets!”
“They’d never be so stupid. Who would agree to that? Moose?”
“Even better. Even Stupider! And with Amerikanski, Comrade? Stupider is Better!”
I didn’t see coming that the party of Reagan capitulating to the Russians was the way the cold war would end.
Not that it really matters, but I’m curious why there’s such a distinction in your mind. Saddam started the brutal Iraq-Iran War, the Al-Anfal campaign, the Gulf War, torture and rape rooms, putting down any signs of resistance, and however much moral culpability you care to give him for staying in power while the U.N. sanctions wrecked the Iraqi populace. Saddam probably caused more deaths depending on what numbers you want to believe (all these events have wide estimate spreads).
I gotta give Saddam a pretty big edge in the monster department. Probably the most dangerous dictator of the post-war era when you consider his multiple aggressions against other countries. Not sure anyone’s matched that record, although some are worse domestic oppressors and others talk a more dangerous game(the Kims).
No one ties Putin’s hands. He has centralized power and his government and allies control a not insignificant chunk of the media, other political parties, and even social groups such as the Nashi. While the status of the people of Crimea has already been litigated above, they weren’t being oppressed or harmed by the Ukrainian government. That they were was just the necessary lie to be broadcast on Russian media to justify a “humanitarian intervention.” If it were actually true, Russian forces wouldn’t need to hide their identity and allegiance and only reveal it after the fact. Even openly identifying themselves at the time wouldn’t give them legal or political legitimacy to invade, but it would at least be consistent with their invented casus belli.
Believe it or not, things happen in other countries, including governments being toppled, that don’t involve the CIA. What happened in Ukraine, for instance. If the CIA were so powerful that they could topple foreign governments, particularly adversaries or allies of adversaries, where there was no widespread popular movement against them in the first place, Putin would’ve been toppled himself since toppling him would have been priority number one to any agency with such a power.
Well, it depends on the numbers. Also, you are counting a war between countries, and I was more focused on internal civilian deaths, since this would have been the contrast between when we supposedly ‘supported’ Saddam (i.e. the Iran/Iraq war). Assad hasn’t attempted a war of expansion against his neighbors…he’s merely been party to a horrendous civil war. Saddam did use chemical and possibly biological weapons against the Kurds, but I think Assad has been more systematic about killing his own people.
That said, Saddam was definitely a monster and probably does have a body count every bit as high or higher than Assad. But for most of that body count you can’t really say that the US ‘supported’ him…certainly we never sent in troops, ships and planes to help him do the deed, which is the connection UTJ was trying to make.
The US has certainly done some bad things, and we have supported questionable regimes, but it’s not really exactly the same as what China does, or what Russia does…which, again, was what the OP was trying to portray. And it would be VERY bad, IMHO, for us to take a course such as the OP is positing. It’s ironic that only an asshole president such as Trump would even have the potential to take us in such an insane direction as the OP is talking about. I really, really hope he doesn’t, however.
Do you have the slightest bit of evidence for this, uh, interesting claim?
It sounds like what you’re implying here is that Putin’s 82% approval rating isn’t ‘real’, in the sense that it’s the result of social desirability bias (i.e. people fearing retaliation, social ostracism, social shaming etc. if they express disapproval of the leader). The problem with that claim is that you can actually test for it: Frye, Gelbach et al., published a paper last year concluding that while there is a social desirability bias, it’s very slight: it overstates Putin’s support from about 80% to 85.
Putin is legitimately very popular in Russia, and more importantly, of the 20% of the populace that disapproves of them, they’re much more likely to believe he’s too pro-western and liberal, not the opposite. The main sources of opposition to Putin in Russia are either from communists who wish that they had a state-controlled economy back, or else from ethnonationalists who think Putin is too soft on the west, Islam, immigration, etc…
(Incidentally, social desirability bias also exists to some extent in the united states, as Frye and Gelbach point out in the linked paper: their example is that people are unlikely to admit to, e.g., racist ideas even when they hold them).
‘Russian’ means two different concepts (which actually are represented by different words in Russian): it can mean a citizen of the Russian Federation or before that the RSFSR, or it can mean an ethnic Russian (i.e. someone who’s Russian by genetic descent, language, affiliation with the Russian Orthodox Church, etc.). The eastern part of the Ukraine absolutely did contain a lot of people who considered themselves ethnically Russian and looked back fondly on the Soviet era, and who (at a minimum) feel more affiliation with Russia than the west.
You do know, right, that the Ukrainian civil war started as an uprising by disaffected people in the east in which Russia decided to intervene? Over three quarters of the people killed fighting for the DNR and LNR are Ukrainian citizens, not Russians citizens.
The new government in the Ukraine (which seized power under very controversial circumstances) banned the Communist Party (more popular in the east than the west), banned symbols of the Communist past (which was generally more favourably looked upon by people in the east), ended official use of the Russian language, and wanted to orient the Ukraine towards a bloc of countries that eastern Ukrainians felt very little affinity for. Eastern Ukrainians (or ‘Novorussians’, as they self identify these days) protested, vociferously, and ended up with an incident in which 42 of them were driven into a building which was set on fire. I’d say they had plenty to be upset about.
In any case, while independence was not especially popular among Donbass residents before the war started, it’s gotten much more popular since then. Even if you don’t believe the referendum that happened, there’s this:
“An opinion poll that was taken on the day of the referendum and the day before by a correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Washington Post, and five other media outlets found that of those people who intended to vote, 94.8% would vote for independence. The poll did not claim to have scientific precision, but was carried out to get a basis from which to judge the outcome of the referendum, given that independent observers were not present to monitor it. Even with those who said they would not vote counted in, a 65.6% majority supported separation from Ukraine.”
I don’t necessarily expect to convince you that the cause of the Donbass separatists is right- for one thing, I’m starting from very different premises than most Americans here- but here’s something that you may find more convincing, because Keith Gessen is more of a standard liberal: he doesn’t agree with the people fighting for a sort of retro-soviet statelet in the eastern Ukraine, but he does do his best to understand them as an outsider. This is, more or less, why the war started.
“In Donetsk I had expected to find a totalitarian proto-state, and I did. The Kremlin liked calling the government in Kiev a ‘junta’, but here you had a real one. Professional mercenaries in fatigues called the shots and even ministers of state felt compelled to cross the street at the sight of armed men, lest a misunderstanding occur. What I didn’t expect to find were so many people who believed in all of it with such certainty, and with such hope…Mishin and Bik were what the sociologists call the ‘losers’ of the post-Soviet transition. In Soviet times Bik had been a coal miner with aspirations to join the KGB. ‘They didn’t take Party bosses’ sons, you know,’ he said (wrongly). ‘They took working people like me.’ And Mishin was a mighty athlete. He recalled playing in a tournament in Leningrad and being promised a trip to the United States. ‘The USA!’ he recalled thinking. And then the whole world collapsed. Industrial regions like Donbass were hardest hit by the changes: it was the region’s industrial output that plummeted furthest in the 1990s; it was industrial plants over which the bloodiest turf wars revolved. And it was in these places that the loss of status was most extreme. Industrial work was championed by the Soviets, both in word and in deed: coal miners in Donbass earned on average two or three times what a software engineer like my father earned in Moscow. (In the early 1980s, Bik had been working as a miner for just a few months when he bought a motorbike. The girls went crazy for it.) When the Soviet Union ended, the entire country experienced what Nietzsche might have recognised as a transvaluation of all values: what had been good was now bad, and what had been bad was now good. Some people liked it and grew rich; other people were left behind. With the victory of protests that were still referred to by some of their supporters as Euromaidan, the people of this industrial region were being asked to endure yet another round of deindustrialisation – of austerity, unemployment and social death. They had balked at this and, what was more, they had an out. Deindustrialisation had gone hand in hand, the first time, with the collapse of the empire. But what if the empire could be restored? Maybe the jobs would come back? If the Russians felt they had ‘lost’ something in Ukraine, many people in Eastern Ukraine felt as if they’d been stranded from their motherland. ‘They call us traitors and separatists,’ Bik said. ‘But I don’t feel like a traitor. I felt like a traitor before, when I had to call myself Ukrainian. I don’t feel like a traitor now.’”
You are the first to mention equivilance - all I said was Obama was a laughing stock for trying to criticise China on human rights when the USA was, well, the USA.
And you don’t say too much about torture, Guantanamo, Abu Graib, imperial conquests, half a million dead Iraqi civilians, current UN criticisms of USA justice system, oppression of minorities, lack of basic health care for millions, epidemic homelessness, highest prison population in the world, … I don’t have te time, plus professional organisations do a far better job of this than I could:
Or in other words, and as in Russia itself, it’s a local version of the Trump/Brexit/populist phenomenon, as elsewhere in Europe, with the added complication of internal administrative boundaries suddenly becoming national borders that don’t map so tidily on to a sense of national identity, as in former Yugoslavia.
Several U.S. allies — Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia — along with the U.S. itself form a natural bloc to counter the power of Iran and militant Shi’ites. Iraq and Syria are the wild cards in this “Great Game.” (Russia is not a wild card: it naturally allies with Iran, nearly its neighbor, in order to oppose the West.)
Since Iraq is now controlled by Shi’ites, it will ally with the Russia-Iran axis if that axis is ascendant in the region. Thus the key country is Syria — a Sunni-dominant country, but with a government allied with Russia and the Shi’ites. If Assad, a heinous butcher, somehow prevails there will be a powerful axis — Russia, Syria, Iraq, Iran — dominating the Middle East. Note that, on the basis that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, Russia is temporarily in de facto alliance with Da’esh.
What OP suggests is that the U.S. turn its back on Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the citizens of Syria looking for relief from their heinous regime and switch sides completely, joining with Russia, Assad’s Syria, Hezbollah and Iran. :eek:
I’m not adept at playing “The Great Game” but this does NOT strike me as a move any U.S. policy makers would endorse. I don’t think even Trump would make this move, but I fear he may be tricked into helping the Russia-Shi’ite Axis.
TL;DR: I hope that OP just doesn’t understand the Middle East at all. Otherwise his suggestion seems … unusual.
With the big distinction that these are in a sense left-wing reactionaries rather than right-wing reactionaries: the golden age they want to restore is the 1970s under Brezhnev, when the social order was more left-wing than it is (in the Ukraine) today.
But yea, you’ve got it. This isn’t really a war about ‘ethnicity’ or ‘language’ as much as it’s a war about competing narratives of history.
Wait…why? Daesh is Sunni, Assad’s regime is Shia. 