Meaning they all used to come bearing gifts but we indiscriminately mistook them for invaders, right? Why did you leave out the Germans? Didn't we unleash the war and do an injustice to the well meaning Germany? Isn't the Canadian parliament not batting an eye hailing the SS "warrior" a good enough proof of that? I wonder why they didn't salute him Hitler stile?
What nonsense you write. Do you think I supported invading Nazis from the West or Mongols from the East?!
Again you show that you aren’t interested in a serious discussion at all and have nothing to add besides paranoia and fever dreams. You are not defending Russia by attacking and laying waste to Ukraine. Putin was simply resorting to the same sort of imperial conduct that the old Czars and Stalin resorted to in the past. Putin tried even to deny that an authentic Ukrainian nation existed. You think you are defending Russia by invading Ukraine?
So long as you cannot even conceive of the concept of “Russian imperialism” — either under the Czars or under Stalin or Putin, you will find yourself defending the indefensible. “Holy Russia,” like “Red Russia,” took over many lands where the natives today see their own history very differently than do you. In many of those cases they have shown they will fight Russian chauvinism and control.
I do not want to break up the Russian Federation. Most of the major nations that were forced to remain imprisoned under Czarist or the USSR’s control have already broken away, as have of course those in the old Warsaw Pact. Much of that happened without too much violence when Russia abandoned its collectivized economy.
The idea of “Socialism,” bastardized by Stalin as “Socialism in One [huge backward] Country” actually served for several generations as a genuine threat to Western-style capitalist imperialism … and an inspiration for many more or less naive anti-imperialists in the West.
Today, however, Russia is poor, corrupt, dictatorial, and lacks basic political & free speech rights that we Westerners all take for granted.
It amazes me that U.S. popular disgruntlement with our own inegalitarian and unfair system has produced some sympathy for such a horrible authoritarian system as Russia’s. But then Donald Trump, the U.S. cult leader of the Republican Party, has always been especially enamored with strong man authoritarians — which goes a long way in explaining at least this factor.
Today Russia is a declining — but still huge — dictatorship of central and local “siloviki” with a declining population and a class of mafia-like capitalist oligarchs, many of whom are now themselves being purged as the state tries to rebuild its centralized war economy at the cost of everything else.
Russia cannot revitalize itself as a civilization in this way, even if it gets more support from China, North Korea, and Iran. Perhaps with their help and by mobilizing local warlords, far-flung minorities, prisoners and ever more mercenary types, Russia can somehow still ultimately “succeed” in devastating much of Ukraine.
A lot depends on whether Russia can exploit normal class and other divisions found in most free, richer, more-or-less democratic Western countries, where there are serious economic and social problems. I doubt it, but it is possible Ukraine will “lose” this war.
But what would Russian civilization really gain in this way? What have they really gained under Putin’s 24 years of one-man rule? Who will take over after him?
