I’m not going to waste much more time on this topic, since you’re not really listening. Arguing proper English translation from gender endings in Russian is… bizarre. English has no gender endings, and you’re going to look pretty silly if you try to replicate them by putting “mother” in front of all feminine words. You know what else takes the feminine form in Russian? “Kartoshka,” meaning “potato.” I suppose that means the proper translation for it is “mother potato,” eh?
Look, if you want to pretend to be the resident expert in languages you cannot even begin to comprehend, knock yourself out. Whatever floats your boat. Also, feel free to dismiss all claims regarding my heritage if you so wish; it’s no skin off my back.
Comm: You already embarrassed yourself with pretending to know so much about languages. Why are you doing so again with pretending to know about other things so much when you obviously have no clue about it?
I actually had in mind the unilaterally aggressive actions of the Soviet Union towards Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania in 1939-40, during which time - it should be noted - the Soviet Union was an ally of Nazi Germany, supplying it with vast quantities of valuable resources, particularly petroleum.
Whatever the USA has done or is currently doing has nothing to do with your assertion that, “The civilized world, by definition, does not interfere in the affairs of other nations.” Unless you wish to claim that the USSR was not a civilized nation at this time, in which case we are not in disagreement.
Eh? Wouldn’t pre-Revolutionary Russian soldiers have called each other tovarisch? I always assumed the Communists adopted it because of militaristic connotations, comrades-in-the-revolutionary-struggle and all that.
And I specifically left those incidents out of the equation, because it is my position that good-faith territorial disputes with one’s neighbors do not diminish one’s status as a civilized nation. Sure, sometimes it would be better to resolve such differences in non-military manners, but that’s a relatively minor issue.
Let’s take your Poland example, for I’m particularly partial to that topic. You see, my ethnically Belorussian paternal grandparents were born in what was then Polish-occupied Belarus, and lived under the Polish yoke until the liberation of that part of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War. They actually found the NAZI occupation to be no worse than the Polish one. Both were equally oppressive and saw systematic attempts by their overlords to eradicate their Belorussian heritage.
The point is that the USSR-Poland conflict was not some sort of barbaric socialist plan. Rather, it was the natural apex of a centuries-long war of regional hegemony, which resulted in the liberation of half of my family. This was a just war with a just outcome. Now compare this to something like the Imperial adventures in, say, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq twice, Afghanistan… None of these were bona fide border disputes. None of these was just. Say what you will about the USSR, but we never flew soldiers halfway around the world to oppress people in Latin American, for example. That is what makes us different. That is what makes us civilized.
Also, fuck Poland.
Precisely [edit: referring to the “pre-Revolutionary” part]! The word predated its Soviet usage, and so should not be saddled with a translation that captures ONLY that portion that had something to do with its Soviet revolutionary usage. At its core, the word means, roughly, “friend.” “Comrade” does not adequately capture this meaning, and hence is not a very good translation at all.
Commissar is, by his own claims, an American. His language about what “we” did is somewhat odd, considering that he voted for Obama.
In any case, Commissar is also playing more than a little fast and loose with the facts. I won’t touch on the amusing concept that the Soviets’ imperial ambitions were all “good faith” wars, but the idea that the USSR wasn’t acting to oppress the people of Latin America is laughably ignorant and wildly factually deceptive. The USSR sponsored proxy forces throughout Central and South America, provided arms shipments, acted to destabilize and subvert governments, etc…
2a. It is, of course, a very amusing rationalization that Empire Empire Empire Empire Empire Amerikkka is bad for oppressing people X miles away from their mainland, while the Soviets were civilized because they just oppressed people within their own borders and/or closer to home. Civilization, after all, is the mileage you rack up while oppressing people.
A history moment: one of the tragic things of the Second World War was the taking of ethnic nationalism to its logical conclusion. Prior to the war, ethnicities and national borders were only vaguely related to each other. During the war, people from non-dominant ethnic groups were thrown out of their homes or murdered outright, to the point that post-war Europe is extraordinarily ethnically homogeneous. Of course, I use the word “non-dominant” to make a point: who got thrown out and who stayed didn’t depend on any sort of moral right-to-the-land or even which group was a majority; it depended just on whose respective nation-state was winning*. This homogenizing of Europe, while probably helpful to Europe’s current peace, constitutes one of the most tragic episodes in human history.
Well, either that or it was a just war. Whichever.
*Unless local partisans got to you before your nation-state’s army did.
“The civilized world, by definition, does not interfere in the affairs of other nations.”
I am starting to draw the conclusion that you are not arguing in good faith. Finland, Poland and Romania had significant amounts of their territory confiscated by the USSR at the point of a gun (in the case of Finland and Poland, there was armed conflict) which was retained by the USSR until its dissolution five decades later. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were annexed in their entirety for the same duration. I fail to see how, by any reasonable standard, this does not consititute “interference” in the affairs of these nations.
Your historical perspective is neatly limited to that time, after 1922, when the eastern borders of the Second Polish Republic were formally established. You make no mention at all of the Soviet invasion of Poland 1919-1921, nor of course to the period between 1815-1919, when those parts of Poland not under Prussian/German or Austrian/Austro-Hungarian jurisdiction formed part of the Tsar’s lands, nor to the westward expansion of the Russian Empire at the expense of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Your Belarussian chauvinism and anti-Polish racism are duly noted. Though I have not a drop of known Polish (or any Eastern European) ancestry, I find the latter particularly nauseating.
I know perfectly well what my own words were, and I stand by them, thank you very much. Look, I gave you a general rule that I subscribe to, and then I expanded on it by fleshing out the applicable exceptions. So, yes, civility is non-interference. Just interference in good faith shall not be construed to violate this rule. That’s really as plain as I can make it.
Incorrect, as I will demonstrate in the next segment of this response. However, I must point out that you have completely ignored what I posted. The fact that Poland was brutally repressing my ancestors contradicts your own views, so you sweep these inconvenient facts under the rug and proceed to pretend that they don’t exist. In other words, you’re essentially doing the exact same thing that you accuse me of doing.
Thank you for proving my previous point. As I explicitly stated, “it was the natural apex of a centuries-long war of regional hegemony, which resulted in the liberation of half of my family.” The USSR did not wake up one day, look around, and decide to invade a neighbor from sheer boredom. The geopolitics of the region have pitted Russia/USSR and Poland against each other for many centuries, and have cost many thousands of lives on both sides. Ignoring this past so that you can pretend that the Soviet response was unprovoked is to look at European history with massive blinders on. If you ignore the context, you lose the substance.
Kufra, in southeastern Libya (really isolated in the Sahara; historically important desert crossroads; historically and recently a center for human trafficking).
So, whoever wins the civil war is gonna have to deal with the Sudanese next, I guess, or else just let 'em keep it.
BBC and Al Jazeera aren’t reporting it yet —and it’s been a couple hours. We’ll see if this amounts to anything, but I’m a little dubious. Invading a country where NATO is conducting kinetic operations isn’t a great long-term survival strategy. Actually, it isn’t a great short-term survival strategy, either.
According to this analysis, NATO doesn’t really want the rebels to take Tripoli, which would entail a lot of killing on and off the battlefield; rather, it wants the Gaddafi regime to collapse from pressure, fall to a coup d’etat, and then the coup leaders can reach a negotiated settlement with the rebels, and then the new government will be full of old-regime figures (minus the Gaddafis) who know how to run things, and whom everybody knows and knows how to deal with.
The Beeb said something recently about the rebels awaiting some sort of uprising within Tripoli that their information leads them to expect. Once that occurs, they’ll move more quickly.
Hmmm . . . Now it gets more complicated.