Should the global community have targeted all Americans for the actions of the Bush Presidency invading Iraq under false pretenses? Or how about Vietnam?
Realize that our next Iraq or Vietnam this new standard could be applied to us or any other country. Will bloodthirsty Twitter be cheering on the digital and economic destruction of civilians then? Cooler heads need to start prevailing.
That's what sanctions do. That's what military responses do. There's no real way out of the box. If a country responds forcefully to an aggressor's actions, the aggressor's civilians will pay a large part of the price.
Wrong question. Whether they "should" in any moral sense is not a useful way to think about things because geopolitics isn't a morality play. Clearly effective sanctions against USA were a non-starter because it is too big and rich a country and does a lot of trade with the outside world.
> Realize that our next Iraq or Vietnam this new standard could be applied to us or any other country.
Nope. Effective sanctions won't happen against big powerful countries (or coalitions of countries, e.g. EU, NATO).
While I personally agree with this Realpolitik view, I don't believe it's actually universal among leaders. Many things that have happened historically did because leaders felt some grand moral imperative (national unification, stopping an atrocity, helping one's close ethnic allies in a defensive war, offensive "defences" when the momentum felt like it was being lost -- take your pick).
A moral imperative (although one rather out of place in the 21st century) seems to be behind Putin's actions, IMO. Restore the glory of the Russian empire, practical barriers to that will be ignored. It just must be done, for the sake of itself. Righteous causes eventually sort themselves out, right?
Which brings me to the sanctions. I've not actually seen much discussion on whether sanctions against Russia will achieve Western geopolitical goals. Much of the discussion is presently framed as a moral imperative. We must act to punish Putin.
I agree, actually. For example, the original Islamic expansion, and later the crusades that were a response to it, were both explained in moral terms. (these demonstrate how manipulating consensus reality is a core competency for rulers). And the people who fought in these wars genuinely honestly believed they were acting morally and serving a higher purpose.
Or, a more recent example: part of the reason NATO intervened in Kosovo in 1999 was that they were ashamed they hadn't done so in Bosnia a few years earlier.
Right now Zelinskyy and Ukraine are covering themselves in a lot more glory than Putin and Russia.
> Righteous causes eventually sort themselves out, right?
I think Putin psyched himself up into believing his own propaganda. He's probably surrounded by yes-men who tell him what he wants to hear, too. Oops.
> Much of the discussion is presently framed as a moral imperative. We must act to punish Putin.
Sure. Morality is intuitive game theory, after all.
The Saudis have been waging an offensive war for years in Yemen. Yet there hasn't been a single peep about cutting them off SWIFT, sanctioning their royal oligarchs, freezing their western assets, etc, etc.
It seems to send a message that yes, repressive petrostate dictatorships can get away with waging offensive wars... Well, at least some of them can.
A head-and-shoulders decapitation of a regime change in Russia, Chinese irredentism over outer Manchuria, a Han-supremacist lebensraum movement targeting Asia east of the Urals…
> On February 15 [2003, before the invasion started], millions of people protested, in approximately 800 cities around the world. Listed by the 2004 Guinness Book of Records as the largest protest in human history, protests occurred among others in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Republic of Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Syria, India, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and even McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
I don't think "the largest protest in human history" qualifies as "mostly shrugs and silence" ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
Lack of actual policy making to me is more that the US empire was at the peak of its power. Being punished by America at the time would be worse than trying to maintain a rules based.
The US is applying sanctions to China. The US doesn't see any limits to the target of their sanctions, as you seem to believe.
Your complete inability to be a fair global hegemon is the reason nobody respects or trusts your government. Cuba is still needing to ask Uncle Sam for permission to import syringes during a global health crisis, we're still backing a genocide in Yemen, doing all of these terrible things while acting like global arbitrage. USA isn't the global police. If you're going to undercut the WHO, the UN, etc. then you don't get to act like it's about freedom and democracy or the rule of law.
Might makes right is an inane policy for Machiavellian wonks. Just because you can do whatever you want doesn't mean you should. The US imports a lot of things too, and a concerted global effort would at the very least require an isolationist USA. Where are you going to get your silicon chips from if the Republic of China reunifies with the People's Republic of China?
US wants to play by different rules than everyone else, not sure that works long term. Either invasions are globally kosher or they aren't, over a million dead and 38 million displaced over a "war on terror" that didn't do shit is a war crime. If we're not going to call an invasion on false pretexts that killed and displaced millions of civilians a war crime the word has no meaning and the discussion is moot.
And if the US can do war crimes but only China/Russia/Iran face consequences for them because we're a "big powerful country" I hope you're ready for the era of multiple US-hostile nuclear powers. Almost ruined the Earth when only two nuclear powers were butting heads in the 20th century and now we've got several to pick from :)
If they want to, that's up to them. It wouldn't surprise me if China did do something like this.
> Your complete inability to be a fair global hegemon
Hey, (1) I personally am not a global hegemon. (2) I was describing the way things are not how they ought to be. You should work on distinguishing is from ought; if you can't you'll never understand anything.
FWIW I personaslly think a fair bit of US policy is both immoral and self defeating. But, again, that's irrelevant, because as I said, geopolitics isn't a morality play.
> Where are you going to get your silicon chips from if the Republic of China reunifies with the People's Republic of China?
I'm European and I think the EU should be self-sufficient in chips. This is because any polity that isn't won't in the long term be fully independent.
> US wants to play by different rules than everyone else, not sure that works long term.
"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" is a rule thast's worked so for for all 5000 years of recorded history (with a few counterexamples). Is that lnog term enough for you? Is that just? No. Does it matter (i.e. affect the course of events)? Not usually.
> I hope you're ready for the era of multiple US-hostile nuclear powers.
A world with lots more nuclear powers may well happen, depending on the result of the present Russia-Ukraine war.
That isn't always true. Obviously, if the actions of the government are bad enough, it sometimes becomes necessary to kill many of its citizens. Since that's morally justifiable, lesser economic damage is morally justifiable.
It sucks. They're innocent. If damage can be avoided, great. But if it's necessary, the blame falls on the aggressor nation.
I'm guessing the word "complicit" is not in your moral vocabulary. Or for some reason you don't feel it applies to doing business and helping to enrich a society that is murdering their neighboors.
Apparently refusing to be complicit with Russian aggression is "punishment".
Let's just same I'm less than impressed with this moral argument.
(Arguably, 9/11 indeed backfired badly for the perpetrators.)
Its already accepted that non violent means that nevertheless still negatively impact civilians are appropriate measures to apply political pressure. That's what economic sanctions are. I don't see how that can be considered acceptable yet cutting off digital communications is a bridge too far. I consider economic sanctions more severe than blocking the Russians from the global internet. One means you lose access to information. The other means your economy may collapse and you might not be able to afford food.
As for the 9/11 attacks, they were deliberate attacks on civilian targets which are traditionally considered war crimes when carried out by state actors and terrorist attacks when not. They are definitely far worse than softer measures like sanctions and not directly comparable.
And there is nothing arguable about it. They definitely backfired. Bin Laden did not hide his intentions or feelings. In fact he wrote extensively and publicly on it. He expected that the American public, who were broadly ignorant to US foreign policy at the time would empathize with him and blame their government. The opposite happened.
Since it wasn't I see your response as pretty irrelevant.
(On that matter, the last major instance of another country confiscating Western assets I'm aware of was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company, which was answered with a CIA-instigated coup.)
Another completely irrelevant non sequetor.
Maybe it's true of Americans for the war in Iraq or whatever but my objection is specifically to the weird (to me) use of the word "punishment" in the post I replied to.
I'd say don't talk about "punishment" as if your position has a moral high ground. Let's talk about being complicit.
The post above argues we should help fund the war efforts to kill Ukrainians through profitable business relations with the Russians, and the poster apparently thinks they have the moral high ground given the use of the word "punishment" to describe the the idea we shouldn't help the Russians continue to fund their efforts to kill people.
Yes. If anything people in democracies are more culpable for the misdeeds of their government than the people of autocratic states.
btw, I was and remain anti-Iraq war but your equivocation is clearly wrong.
Do you really think you were the first person to come up with the idea of assassinating a head of state as a means to end a war? It doesn't really work that way.
It wasn't 1M, it was about 1/5 of that. I'm not of course justifying the loss of life, however it behooves us to speak precisely instead of hyperbolically. [1]
> I did hear a rumor that it was all about the oil anyway LoLz.
That rumor makes no sense if you actually dig in. 72% of America's foreign oil imports come from Canada and Mexico. Only about 3% from Iraq. And Iraq was exporting oil before the war, too. [2] 2T was spent in the Middle East. That buys you a heck of a lot of market-rate oil.
[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
Oil is sold at a global price. The US has an incentive to keeping prices low so Americans have cheap gas. Plus it strips away power from oil financed nations which is in the US interest.
> If you dig in a little more you realize control of the oil and contracts went to US and British firms after the war where previously other nations had those contracts.
And that return is pennies on the dollar compared to the two trillion spent on the war. $2T buys you a whole whack of oil you can subsidize for your people.
The economic arguments just don't hold up.
The 2T doesn't disappear it goes into jobs and new technology. Those oil contracts employ many in the US.
More important is the US gains control.
Yeh? Source pls.
> So what if it was based on a lie?
Jeez, it's that easy for you to say that eh. Say that to a person who lost his family in that invasion.
You could make the argument that the world could have stood up and sanctioned the US - but likely they did not because they probably agreed with the action, whether they could say so directly or not. 'Should' is not the bar. The fact it took a lie to convince folks to go in is neither here nor there, IMO. Again, I was against the war.
> Jeez, it's that easy for you to say that eh. Say that to a person who lost his family in that invasion.
Say that to someone in Kurdistan who suffered life-long debilitating injuries due to the sarin and VX gas attacks that were then followed by a Napalm run. [1] Saddam launched some of the worst chemical attacks in history against his own citizens. We can go back and forth on this all day.
It was life frozen. Life had stopped, like watching a film and suddenly it hangs on one frame. It was a new kind of death to me. (…) The aftermath was worse. Victims were still being brought in. Some villagers came to our chopper. They had 15 or 16 beautiful children, begging us to take them to hospital. So all the press sat there and we were each handed a child to carry. As we took off, fluid came out of my little girl's mouth and she died in my arms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_massacre#Chemical_atta...
We supported him when he did that. And during the 90s, we instituted sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children. That's 100 children for every single person who died in Halabja. If the question is would you rather be a modern country ruled by the iron will of a belligerent despot, or bombed into medieval times with every cultural institution shattered and orders of magnitude more body count than your dictator ever generated, spawning ISIS...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2001/10/are-1-million-ch...
And that's irrelevant to whether taking him down was a good decision. Either before or after. Once again, I didn't support the war at the time, and I think the casualties are horrifying. However, it's not even close to the same thing.
> And during the 90s, we instituted sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children. That's 100 children for every single person who died in Halabja.
You don't really weigh moral wars this way. For instance, the Nazis killed 6 million in the concentration camps. However, an estimated total of 70–85 million people perished in World War 2, or about 3% of the 1940 world population. However, nobody frames World War 2 as "costing 10 lives for everyone who died in the camps" and therefore a bad idea.
Your framework allows for invasions over fake WMDs and fake Nazis alike. Russia didn't sanction the US over Iraq, in the spirit of peace and cooperation between nuclear states the US could afford them the same courtesy.
If you can justify Iraq you can justify Ukraine. Personally I don't agree with invasions anywhere for any reason not do I believe in the concept of "world police". That's just forcing one people's will upon another and denying them the right to destroy their own tyrants and seize their own destiny.
Absolutely, unequivocally not.
My framework does no such thing.
Also it's pretty apparent that you view a white life is greater than a brown life and you view invading middle eastern countries as something that's okay and are going to justify no matter what, so there really is no point in this discussion.
Re: your source, go do some more digging, it was the CIA that helped Saddam deploy those chemical weapons.
You have no idea what my positions are, and you're doing a bunch of wild finger pointing.
US invasion: For Democracy, Freedom and Kumbaya!, Millions died for the Greater Good. (hugs & kisses)
This is not realistic due to the fact that the US is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than Russia, both economically and militarily. We also made it look less sketchy by bribing/begging Britain (and others) to join the Iraq invasion and invoking Article 5 for Afghanistan. Sanctions against the US were not tenable.
I wish people would realize that this is what most of our sanctions do as well.
Except in the case of sanctions, you aren't even actively engaging in violence (which some moral systems would take issue with). You're simply choosing to not cooperate.
They can of course go much further than any of this, but we need to make it clear how we feel about their regime and it's actions. We need to provide a motivation to resist. Yes it sucks, the Russian people are not our enemies, I know and work with Russians, including close colleagues. Sanctioning the Russian state, and struggling against it from within are two sides of the same coin. It sucks that anyone has to do any of it, but that's the fight we're in whether we chose it or not.
The suffering of Russian civilians is nothing compared to what is happening to civilians in Ukraine.
Some brave Russian people are now suffering in Putin's prisons for speaking out against war. Some mothers will never know how or where their children died. Some African students in Ukraine are suffering from racism perpetrated by other war victims.
It's all bad and they all deserve compassion.
Is that a bad thing?
For the wealthy and powerful who make the decisions? No.
Assuming we haven’t all been convinced via propaganda that this is all a conspiracy to weaken us and we need to band together under $glorious_leader anyway.
I disagree. This is war - it's not meant to be comfortable - and a government does represent the people. Putin's approval rating over the years has been really high, in the mid-high 70s [1]. The only way this ends with minimal bloodshed is if the populace exerts sufficient pressure against leadership. That means protests, that means civil disobedience.
If the populace doesn't feel the impact of the war, then there's no pressure for the administration to end it.
Think of it more like less-lethal weapons. Yah you don't want to get hit by a rubber bullet but you certainly don't want to get hit by a real bullet. If things escalate then the people may get hit by real bullets metaphorically and literally.
[edit] > Punishing civilians for the actions of its government is absolutely insane and will backfire badly.
This is an interesting argument, especially for a representative government.
"You can't blame me for what the people I pick do!"
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...
And ‘punishing civilians’ when they are part of a society (yes, society) who is allowing a dictator to hungrily invade a neighbor is about the only way anyone can do anything here.
Sanctions CAN impact the economy enough that it starved the ability of the nation to make war - but if the country keeps doubling down, that is going to require extreme measures and produce extreme misery. It would be a blockade essentially.
Russia has experience switching to a war time economy, and if anything it makes a ‘strong dictator’ more appealing. Stalin did quite well during this time, despite making massive mistakes that cost an insane number of Russian lives.
In the west we seem to be under the impression some relatively cheap to us financial sanctions will solve this, but don’t bet on it.
The equivalent post WW1 in Germany just stoked WW2. Not the same scenario, but there are similarities.
That doesn't sound like a country that is rallying behind the flag in support of an offensive war against Ukraine.
At this point, I also doubt anyone (including Putin) has reliable data - from what I do know, it’s common place for all the low level folks (equivalent of mayors, low level bureaucrats, city police departments) to fudge numbers the way it’s expected to look.
Even opposition politicians, independent reporters (even those that have fled the country), and folks I know with family there have been pretty straightforward in saying he has historically been very popular however.
The 60-70% polled support number has seemed quite legit to them. Propaganda is powerful, and most of the base of support he needs to keep the country running isn’t (ever) going to hang out on Twitter, post on Reddit, etc.
And the propaganda for a long time has been how the west is trying to bring otherwise strong Russia down. Which is, rather explicitly what the west is doing now (albeit for legit imo reasons).
If the opposition can muster enough support to meaningfully impact things, then that’s awesome!
That he does seem to be sweating means maybe it will work, I hope it does.
I’m just hoping to make the dynamic more visible, and caution against the same kind of thinking that had everyone seemingly convinced that Trump wouldn’t get elected in 2016.
... first? Why first? Which western country is actively invading anyone right now? Which western country started a land-war in Europe last week? Why would I cut off someone not doing anything for something that happened 20 years ago when there's a land-war in the Ukraine now?
> You've US who voted to invade Iraq based on a lie (along with UK).
On bad pretenses sure, but to overturn a despot who used chemical weapons against his own people. He wasn't a threat to the US, and the pretenses were wrong - and I didn't support the war at the time. But is it the same thing? Not even close.
> Or are you implying that Russian invasion of Ukraine matter more than all these examples, and if you do so, I wonder why that is? (fyi, it's a rhetorical question, I know why that is)
Yeah because the Russians launched an un-provoked land war in Europe to re-create the Soviet Union - on the premise of "de-Nazifying" a country run by a Jewish PM.
Save your whataboutism for once this is resolved.
> On bad pretenses sure, but to overturn a despot who used chemical weapons against his own people. He wasn't a threat to the US, and the pretenses were wrong - and I didn't support the war at the time.
Yeah, looks like US actively knew and helped him gas his own people though because Iran would've been too powerful otherwise, and US can't have that.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-pro...
> But is it the same thing? Not even close.
Yeah it isn't, while the world looks to sanction Russia (which they should btw), US blackmailed other countries into invading Iraq and no country got sanctioned. But like you said, US only got pretenses wrong, s who whore cares that millions of lives were lost as a result and a country has been destabilized and destroyed.
> Save your whataboutism for once this is resolved.
Reddit's favourite term to use when you point out double standards. I don't support this invasion either, it's just the hypocrisy in the outrage that is astonishing. But hey I guess, as the media puts it, world cares more when it's white people with blonde hair and blue eyes that are dying and not brown people you've in middle east, so it's different this time.
I can oppose Yemen, I can support Palestine, I can oppose the coup in Guatemala - all while I reject the actions of the Russians in Ukraine. These are not mutually exclusive positions and there is nothing hypocritical about it.
Having Russia missile a few steps away frim Germany has caused them to bring back their military.
People act in their own self interest. What other lives do you think did not get their due?
i know and understand that governments are supposed to be acting in their own interests. This does not surprise me one bit.
What bothers me ( again I understand this is selfish), is that the same people that preach about democracy/human rights/freedom know their governments are guilty of egregious crimes like Russia’s and arguably worse. I find it hypocritical when they started lecturing and posturing about respecting a country’s independence.
I hope this explains my pov better.
It can absolutely be a moral good/evil situation. As would such a war on the other side of Russia even if folks reacted differently.
> I find it hypocritical when they started lecturing and posturing about respecting a country’s independence.
They can be right this time, and wrong other times. I do think supporting them when they're right and opposing them when they're wrong is the play.
Iraq? Evil dictator. Libya? Evil dictator. Syria? Gruesome terrorists/evil dictator.
Israel/Palestine? Messed up and the world still doesn't like it, but not on the same scale and certainly more complicated.
You’re wildly out of touch if you actually believe if those dictators didn’t do everything with blessings from the US..
yemen is also 100 times worse off than ukraine its not even close
Look at what Iraq and Libya is right now. Libya has literal slaves right now, I'm sure US feels pretty good about themselves. Heck Obama won a noble peace price for it.
US supported Pakistan in 1971 when Pakistan was committing mass genocide in East Pakistan (Bangladesh now). They overthrew a government that people wanted in Iran because that govt. was going to nationalize oil and take it away from western oil companies. These things have been happening forever in the third world, but because it's brown people dying, people didn't care as much.
Anyways my enitre point is again, it's dumb to blame an average Russian person for the actions of Putin like how it would be equally dumb to blame american person for the actions of US govt. and military industrial complex.
That's not the fault of civilians. That goes even more so for those under authoritarian regimes. That's Russia. The people are under the thumb of a dictator and bathed in propaganda 24/7. And who the hell knows how many actually support him or do so out of fear.
How about North Korea? Should we punish their citizens too for not rising against their dictator? I think it's clear that we shouldn't.
Yes, it is, in the specific case of Iraq. The debunkings of the propaganda (and even the internal documentation of the propaganda effort) were widely published in US/UK media prior to the war.
The war was able to be sold not because the truth was concealed, but because enough people didn't want to hear the truth, they wanted a story which provided an easy outlet for their racist bloodlust.
Was that average pro-war citizens as guilty as the people actively marketing the war? No. But they weren't innocent, either.
Citizenship comes with responsibility.
No, it's not, because most terrorism is, as was the thing for which the name was coined, state terrorism directed at citizens of the state (states who engage in such terrorism tend to prefer to put the focus on other terrorism, of course.) But, even for the kinds of terrorism for which it is true, this part of the rationale is not the problem with terrorism, in the same way that “people are responsible for their own actions” is central to the justification for cruel and unusual punishment for crimes, but is not the problem with that punishment.
To quote the New York Times' ombudsman (a position that doesn't exist any more) [0]:
> To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable.
This was the message that the US government, the New York Times, and countless other media organizations were pushing. People who objected were viewed as eccentric, naive, or possibly even cowards who were doing the bidding of a dictator.
0. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/weekinreview/the-public-ed...
If this is what you want then cutting Russians out of the Internet is a terrible idea: consider that most are just now learning that they are actually at war and not in a freedom military operation (as the state media is making them believe).
I agree. I don't think they should be cut off from the Internet. But I do wholeheartedly support economic sanctions.
If you're in any country but Ukraine think about WHY you're picking sides and who told you to do that.
The countries near Russia expect to be next. Part of Germany was under Russian control prior Fall of USSR. Which is why European countries care. NATO has multiple members that are members for this reason. EU has multiple members that see this as an active threat to them.
The USA should care, because they promised protection to Ukraine in exchange of Ukraine getting rid of nuclear arsenal back in nineties. Not that USA would be reliable, but they should not be completely unreliable.
And that USA is member of nato for own interests and that first time there is actual threat to nato they should not ignore it entirely is also fascinatingly ignored argument.
And they surrounding countries taking in refugees is not not particular oddity since surrounding countries always have to take refugees when aggressor goes in is also ignored argument.
Is this about the chemical weapons, that were confirmed to exist by the NYT itself, as well as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons?
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/world/middleeast/question...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/middleeast/thousand...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/03/world/middlee...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...
This would not set up a precedent, it's almost the entirety of US foreign policy.
Fuck yes they should have. Absolutely
Americans were complicit because it didn't (immediately and viscerally) effect them, just like Russians have been so far. If it effects them enough they'll stop working.
> Punishing civilians for the actions of its government
With few exceptions, governments serve the people under them. Pray tell, How popular is Putin in Russia right now?
I mean, yes?
America is a functioning democracy. The leaders have been elected, and stay in power based on the mercy of the electorate. Some recent challenges in that respect notwithstanding, I feel it's almost a tautology that America and Americans should be held responsible for things that America and Americans do - even MORE than in authoritarian countries. Same for Canada and UK et cetera et cetera.
I don't know what viable alternative to sanctions affecting citizenry anybody is proposing - targeted assassination of heads of state one disagrees with? Mlitary response? Just ignoring it? Yelling loudly? How else do we propose to send a message to a state "Please don't DO that" without involving the electorate that either demanded, participated, or allowed such actions?
..in Russia
The "West" response need to be carefully thoughtout to not trigger an escalation while protecting our borders like a knife wielding psycho that somehow still tolerates "mistakes".
Todays western politicians are acting in an insane way. Look how India and China instinctively stay out of this.
Putin will be dead or out of power in 10 years. There is a tomorrow without him too.
Because money, not cooler heads.
I donno how instinctive it is given the hard lessons they have been learning.
The countries have stationed tens of thousands of soldiers backed by artillery, tanks and fighter jets along their de facto border, called the Line of Actual Control. In 2020, 20 Indian troops were killed in a clash with Chinese soldiers involving clubs, stones and fists. China said it lost four soldiers.
So, as the planet, shall we let him be? Or what's the right course of action?
The important part is to give the Russian state a fake victory. They know it is fake. We know it. But it is still a victory.
Prepare for a post-Putin Russia and prevent chaos when he dies by economic support and a hug. We don't want those nukes in the hand of a regional warchief ...
This clearly doesn't work if you look at the history, both with Russia and other similar states.
They are power hungry and will try to take more land after a few years, all the while engaging in psypops and propaganda to destabilize their enemy and its allies
I feel many people think this happening is Hitler invading Checkoslovakia were he should have been stopped with the benefit of hindsight. There is no reason to believe history has to be repeating it self. A fair warning, yes. A profetia, no.
I don't know what we should do, but take it chill and cold is one of those things.
You shouldn’t censor yourself because of meaningless internet points. Getting downvoted doesn’t hurt, I promise.
Seems like the initial anger is being replaced with fear among people, which gives room for cold reasoning. A good thing I guess ...
That is what I meant with I was glad I was not downvoted.
I'm also to really sure why should it be different when Russia decides it wants to invade, say, Estonia? Obviously, they'e in NATO, but so what? Why shouldn't we throw them to the wolves as well? Better that than to risk nuclear war, yeah?
Regarding second paragraph, would existence of NATO even make sense if it won't defend one of its members?
They’re crazy/brave enough to defend their democracy and organize militias to bolster their armed forces and have already taken out a Chechen special forces unit and a Spetznaz Maj Gen.
I’ll let you explain your plan to them.
Ukraine is not a vital interest to the West nor NATO, but it is to Russia, and short of WWIII which generates a very real risk of a nuclear exchange in Europe the situation in Ukraine is not changing. This is the same opinion Barack Obama held in 2014. People need to think about this on a timeline longer than their emotional attachment to this issue demands.
Recall when prominent American leaders, Hillary Clinton among them, demanded a NATO enforced no-fly zone over Syria as an addendum to arming Islamists in the country. This absolutely would’ve resulted in NATO and Russian direct combat, and with it war. Cooler heads prevailed then and I pray they do so now.
IMO the best reasonable outcome I see for this war is for Russia to annex the Donbas, and possibly the Azov coast. Ukraine will commit to neutrality from NATO and no missiles, but leave open the possibility to join the EU as an economic partner.
Ukraine is shattered right now. There is no good reason to further seal their fate by handing Zelenskyy to that short arsed madman on a silver platter and turning them into a shithole like Russia.
This looks "nice" on paper, but how would this neutrality be actually enforced? I'd imagine that a situation where Ukraine has a relatively small army and commits to not hosting either NATO or Russian military bases would be a) quite uncomfortable for Ukrainians and b) highly unstable, with the balance bound to tip to one of the sides sooner or later. Are there any historical precedents of a similar arrangement that worked?
Their analysis does not have to be correct for them acting on it. Was Iraq a significant security threat to the US? Or, did the war decrease it?
I agree on your best outcome.
Biden and Putin are the only players with agency here.
Furthermore, RemarkEon's answer is excellent.
Somebody already told that, but when one looks to Russia's history, they'll see that, the goal is to get bigger and bigger for centuries. They want access to warmer waters (i.e. Mediterranean waters) for at least two centuries now.
So, there's no fake victory, and there's no stopping for them. Also, this is not related to Putin only. Russia is one of the countries which have a stable strategy for at least a century, and they just want to make their goals a reality.
This reads like a personal take on things. Russia doesn't have a strategy lasting much longer than the life of its current leader. It is as chaotic as any other large organization.
Except neither the cabinet nor the oligarchs are the one doing the killing, it's the grunts at the bottom.
If every Russian deposed arms, there would be no war.
I don't think it's fair to compare the democratically elected government of an European country to a blood thirsty middle eastern dictatorship. At least, they certainly didn't garner the same sympathy from people.
As for Vietnam, it’s interesting to see that the loosing side was where people desperately fled, often risking their lives in makeshift rafts. That the people would risk their lives for a shot at maybe getting refugee status in America rather than live in a communist nation should tell us a lot. Same goes for failed states like Venezuela and Cuba.
America is a democracy, so influencing the citizens is effective. Cooler heads still need to prevail - you can't use all your non-war tools, or you'll only be left with going to war
Who realistically could have done this, keeping in mind the Coalition of the Willing [0]? The global "community" was clearly not of one mind about this. Sanctions are working against Russia because most of the richest countries are behind the sanctions.
Other commenters have alluded to sanctioning US/UK over Yemen, which sounds reasonable, however, in that the case, too, why would European countries impose sanctions for conflicts they're taking part in themselves [1]?
Also, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is merely the (very large) straw that broke the camel's back with regards to these sanctions. Russia went it alone. Let's not pretend that Russia was on good terms with NA/EU or that Putin had any built up good will, either. The situations are vastly different. I'm not sure the precedent being set is what you think it is.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing
1 - https://www.adhrb.org/2021/01/european-involvement-in-the-hu...
Of course the Russian people are morally responsible for their culture and its products (including the war in Ukraine). That culture has produced the conquest obsessed Russian state (including Putin, he is a product of that culture). The Russian people have reveled in the atmosphere of power, greatness, empire, return to glory, and all that bullshit propaganda that Putin has been feeding them for two decades. They cheerily rode the highs with him during the good oil years, applauding as he stripped away human rights one after another, refusing to go against him en masse. They now bear the moral responsibility for tolerating him from the very beginning (dictators quite often only get more difficult to remove with time). Oh now you can't get rid of him? No kidding. Oh now a lot of people would have to die to remove him from power? No kidding - like the people being killed in the name of the Russian people in Ukraine.
The Russian people are responsible for what ideas they hold, what they believe, who they follow, what propaganda they accept or reject (and they've been willingly drinking the propaganda by the liter for a very long time). They tolerated Putin's power grab and abuses for many years early on and did next to nothing to try to stop him. They have celebrated him often, he has been widely popular for most of his reign. How many more centuries of authoritarianism need to go by before people figure out that the Russian people are responsible for their culture and their culture is producing the authoritarianism. It's not bad luck producing those repeat results. Raise your hand if you think the Nazi ideology magically, spontaneously appeared - no, it was an assembled mash of ideas that were popular at the time, prevalent in the culture of the German region, commonly held by the people there. Putin's authoritarianism, his obsession with the Russian ethnic superstate (which is quite similar to Hitler's obsession with the German ethnic superstate), also did not appear out of nowhere, it's directly from their culture.
And - speaking as an American - of course the American people are morally responsible if their government does something similarly horrible as what Russia is doing in Ukraine. That very obviously also goes for what happened in Vietnam. The US Government and its presidents are the product of the American culture, which the American people are responsible for.
If the other empires of Europe changed (Germany, Spain, Britain, France, etc) - their people changed those empire, conquest obsessed cultures - then Russia too can and must change. Russia is the last major power in Europe still clinging to those decrepit, backwards ways. Russia must give up the notion of empire culturally and that means its people must fully abandon all the related ideas that propel and sustain that ideology (which endlessly spawns monsters like Putin (who is just another Russian Tsar type)). Until the people of Russia change their beliefs, the authoritarianism will just keep repeating.
It's not an 'if'. The US did a lot of stuff on par with what Putin is doing now in Ukraine. The people and government of the US never were held responsible. Yes, they went through the motions of getting the UN approval, etc., but that does not make the actions morally justifiable. And this is what Russian propaganda uses to justify its actions.
I don't like pinning Putins actions on ordinary citizens. Putin is a dictator. In 2012 there was a big rally against him, and it was suppressed pretty violently, and since then there were no attempts on the same scale. Look at how Belorussians tried to topple Lukashenko. They made a much stronger attempt, but sill it did not work out. Are they morally responsible for the Belarus participation in this war? Are the people like me who moved out are responsible? When does that moral responsibility start? 2000s or 2010s?
Sure, there is a large chunk of population that supports Putin. They maybe are morally responsible for supporting the war. But I don't think they will actually be swayed by economic sanctions. Their culture won't change. They will be happy to severe ties with 'rotten West' -- they will feel like they are soldiers of the economic war. What will happen, I am afraid, is Russia turning into a second North Korea (or Venezuela).
> If the other empires of Europe changed (Germany, Spain, Britain, France, etc) - their people changed those empire, conquest obsessed cultures - then Russia too can and must change. Russia is the last major power in Europe still clinging to those decrepit, backwards ways. Russia must give up the notion of empire culturally and that means its people must fully abandon all the related ideas that propel and sustain that ideology (which endlessly spawns monsters like Putin (who is just another Russian Tsar type)). Until the people of Russia change their beliefs, the authoritarianism will just keep repeating.
In my rather uneducated opinion, the culture did not go away. The US is an empire. It is built differently, but it effectively is. China is or is becoming one. European culture is dominating the world in many subtile and not so subtile ways. Russia wants to be an empire, but it fails to recognize that empires are being built differently now, and tries to build a 19-th/20-th century one.
Disclaimer: I am from Russia, and live in the US. Have extended family in Russia. Unfortunately, some of them are brainwashed by the propaganda. Some are unable to leave as their whole life is to work in government-funded research (thankfully not military in any way). Fuck Putin and fuck the war. My best wishes to Ukrain and its people -- you will will regardless of how this war turns out.
PS. Apologies for the long rant...
Putin is an evil authoritarian dictator who commits far worse atrocities than removing people's internet access. That should be obvious, but apparently has to be pointed out with a disclaimer before any remotely nuanced statement? I didn't realize this was Twitter!
Your comment is a bit funny since you are forectly contradicting yourself. When you (wrongfully) thought that russians couldn't access twitter anymore, the russian bots just seemed to have... disappeared for you. But in reality, nothing changed, so maybe they weren't there to begin with, and this is a weird example of a placebo effect, lol.
Or it could be the collapse of western democracy from the inside. After all, the alternative is a bunch of people genuinely believe for 3 weeks that Trudeau was Hitler because he waited 3 weeks, asked people nicely to stop unlawfully occupying the capital and stopping international commerce, then had the police move in and as peacefully and quietly as humanly possible, removed them. Last I checked, this is not the behavior our mustachioed friend was known for. So that would leave politics in a sad state indeed.
Your so-called take-down isn't the victory you think it is haha. Either I'm right, and we lost recently, you're right, and we lost a long time ago.
Sadly I think I agree with the last part of your comment. It's actually why I really dislike the "russian bots are everywhere" narrative, because it distracts or obscures from the real problems we actually have. I think it's a cop out to blame foreign interference for very real tensions and disagreements we have in our society. My point wasn't to attempt a take down or to win an argument, it was mostly to drive home the point that it's all maybe deeper than just russian trolls after all ;)
The restrictions in place were lawful and in keeping with the charter. Canada is a rule of law jurisdiction and judicial avenues existed for the resolution of these grievances. As did normal protests. I welcome normal protests, and I welcome the truckers to return to Ottawa and picket - without their trucks. Their goal though was to overturn the results of the last election - of a minority government they only have to wait an average of less than a year to see fall on its own.
I didn't vote for Trudeau last time, I won't vote for him next time, and I completely agree with his use.
> My point wasn't to attempt a take down or to win an argument, it was mostly to drive home the point that it's all maybe deeper than just russian trolls after all ;)
It might be, but it could also be normal disagreements that are having a wedge placed in them by foreign adversaries.
Or it could be completely unrelated. I am very open to that.
Sure. This time it really was the Russians. Because in the middle of the largest military intervention Russia had since the fall of the USSR they would devote resources and care about what happens in Ottawa.
It all makes sense.
I guess my question to you is: do you think a 16 year veteran of the KGB - a warmonger with a lust for the Soviet Union - and a vendetta against the west for brining it down, with total control over an enemy state is more likely to or not to be conducting destabilization campaigns in enemy states? I think a study would be interesting and I would be happy to hear either outcome. However, I strongly suspect there's nothing anyone would tell you that would change your mind one way or the other.
Before you answer, remember, he is currently trying to set fire to Europe's largest nuclear reactor.
Further, you seem to be alluding to American politics, I am not talking about America at all.
I'm sure it was the KGB behind the thousands small amount donations from verifiable United States and Canadian citizens.
The Spetnaz are probably behind the bouncy castle and hot tub the protester brought! Look at these dangerous criminals! [0] [1]
> Further, you seem to be alluding to American politics, I am not talking about America at all.
And yet it’s the same tactics and media spin across the borders. "but this time it really is the Russians! Just trust us..."
[0] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/02/07/14/53878649-10480717...
[1] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/02/07/17/53885525-10480717...
These are exactly the kinds of operations the KGB carried out during the cold war, and is a core part of Russian military doctrine to this day. [1] The fact is, if you refuse to accept that it's a possibility (even as I accept it may not have been) then the system works doesn't it.
The thing is, when it works, people don't realize they have been influenced and they flat out refuse to believe it could have been by a state actor. The only politicians people complain about at work are bad politicians - the good ones already convinced you their idea was right. Ditto here.
> And yet it’s the same tactics and media spin across the borders. "but this time it really is the Russians! Just trust us..."
What do you mean "this time?" The Russians have never come up in the context of Canadian politics in my recent memory. Not as far as I can recall. Can you, or are you projecting American politics again?
You know for all the pictures of bouncy castles, they also built a shack downtown and filled it with diesel and propane [2], were arrested with significant quantities of weapons [3] and also the leadership has ties with white supremacist organizations and white nationalists [4]. They pissed all over national monuments. [5] They stole food from homeless shelters. [6] And they fought people inside the Rideau Centre mall forcing it to close to protect workers. [7] All while blocking international commerce. This is just a choice few selections. Good riddance I say.
For the record, 2/3 of Canadians support the Trudeau government's use of the Act, and only 1/3 voted for him - so I'd say that's a heck of a broad base of support.
But go on. Tell me more about my people. You're not Canadian, are you?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation#Russian_disinfo...
[2] https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/protesters-build-wooden-structure-...
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/canadian-police-arrest-11-batch-wea...
[4] https://globalnews.ca/news/8543281/covid-trucker-convoy-orga...
[5] https://www.blogto.com/city/2022/01/trucker-convoy-protest-u...
[6] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/convoy-tru...
[7] https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/egan-trucker-right...
The Canadians feds were also notorious for planting bombs back in the 70’s and try to pin it down on political opponents.
> The Russians have never come up in the context of Canadian politics in my recent memory. Not as far as I can recall. Can you, or are you projecting American politics again?
Absolutely. 4 years of “the Russians have to be behind this” and nothing happening here in America. And then suddenly we start hearing the same thing from the (liberal) media over there. What a coincidence. Almost as if they tried everything to see what would stick!
> You know for all the pictures of bouncy castles, they also built a shack downtown and filled it with diesel and propane
How else were they supposed to fuel their trucks? The city could have offered to hook them to the power grid but they preferred the trucker bring fuel apparently.
> were arrested with significant quantities of weapons
Second amendment & Legal weapons. Notice no crimes were committed using said weapon and they refrained from answering the question whether these were legally owned.
> and also the leadership has ties with white supremacist organizations and white nationalists.
Are those organizations illegal? Or just not liked by the government and state media?
> For the record, 2/3 of Canadians support the Trudeau government's use of the Act
They had a vote on it?
> But go on. Tell me more about my people. You're not Canadian, are you?
No.
Or how about aggression on Yugoslavia?
It would have zero impact on normal residential and business internet connections inside the country, and would not impact anything sovereign within the country itself. It likely wouldn't prevent the government from getting and using the general internet as they'd just have to switch over to a normal business account, but their hosted services can't switch that quickly.
I would feel really bad for the IT staff that had to figure that out and work around it...
That could be perceived as a posture of war by adversaries. And it's a really bad idea. Have you considered for the innocent Russian people who doesn't agree with the war? What about their daily lives in Russia where they need to get driver's license online to be renewed but couldn't because their DMV website is inaccessible?
Economical / sports / Internet sanctions are double edge sword. There are unintended consequences and unfortunately no way to do it without collateral damages.
I struggle to imagine a less consequential outcome... A whole country of people are being bombed out of their houses, vs some portion of people maybe won't be able to renew their driver's licenses?
You've convinced me; cut the internet.
https://twitter.com/mathieuvonrohr/status/149952892745850880...
Also, why should Ukrainian cities be bombed every day, while Russians just happily go about their daily lives? It's morally inexcusable.
> they need to get driver's license online to be renewed but couldn't because their DMV website is inaccessible
Perhaps, they can go to the DMV office?
You don't _choose_ a dictator..
Dictators stay in power by force: they kill, torture, jail and brainwash people. They control the media and monitor all communications and anyone who speaks against them will suffer dire consequences.
Perhaps you ask, well why don't people just "rise up"? Take up arms and overthrow the regime? Well in that case, the government would rather flatten the entire nation with airstrikes than let the rebels win..
Even after painting the streets with their own blood and somehow accomplishing this, there is no guarantee that a democracy would take place if the central government is weakened..
Still don't believe me? Look at the Arab spring and where it led the people of Egypt and Syria.
Honestly, the comments on HN regarding this matter are very naive..
PS: If you think you have the stomach for it and want to _actually_ see what this path ends up looking like, have a look at The Cave: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7178226 (Warning: very graphic)
Do you not see how dangerous that rhetoric is?
I assume that a Russian accessing a Russian website would be unaffected by any such measures.
Also, I wonder what backdoor facilities the NSA put into Apple and Android phones? The US would very much like to continue getting any such intelligence.
IMHO, Putin's Russia has gotten really good at exploiting "fears about perceptions" to get away with a lot of shit, because it's "sensible" adversaries pull their punches.
> Have you considered for the innocent Russian people who doesn't agree with the war? What about their daily lives in Russia where they need to get driver's license online to be renewed but couldn't because their DMV website is inaccessible?
I doubt a Russian DMV site is running on a foreign sever. Didn't Russia itself do some kind of test disconnection from the internet a year or two ago?
2. isn't it useful that people on the west at least know what kind of propaganda people in russia consume?
This would be a very tricky thing to "punish" and a tricky thing to implement in practice because this isn't a single government that would need to stop announcing these networks, but each private internet organization that is peering with Russia (think oversea cables and international peer exchanges). It could be mandated by governments for their own country, but to be actually effective it would have to be all the organizations peering with Russia agreeing to implement this. If one country or organization decides against the announcement filter you'd have to expand the route filtering to everyone that organization peers with. There would never be one target for the punishment.
As for learning about the propaganda, a large part of what we learn is from Russian state TV and actors inside of Russia itself which this wouldn't impact. Since the major official propaganda channels have already been blocked on YouTube and the social media platforms, this would likely only impact the propaganda being spread through much smaller and harder to track sites if at all since posting of that propaganda could still be done from a cell or normal business internet connection. Some official government supported programs (such as the GRU hacking operations) already operate on regular business connections to avoid the direct association with government IP blocks, I have to imagine their propaganda machines do likewise.
2. They could always know. But they don't, because they don't care. And for the sake of their brains, I wouldn't recommend it. Besides, are you proposing to feed Russian propaganda to western public?
How, in the past similar propaganda happened in the west, when the average american thought civilians in afganistan or iraq weren't really hurt when the US "surgically" tried to punish the "bad guys". I get it; and in the same vein I wouldn't think that the solution for that propaganda was to cut off the american population from actually getting information from abroad.
I think you just don't remember or know about the general opinion back in 2003 so you think this sort of complete disconnect is unique to Russia. Yes the opinion later changed and anti war sentiment became mainstream but that wasn't in 2003 or even 2004.
We aren't talking about just ignorance about civilian casualties in the Middle East but an almost complete belief that the invasion of Iraq was righteous and that they were actually freeing the country. You can't just downplay how pervasive that belief to claim that it is a false equivalency.
I get that Americans had a diverse media and that it wasn't state controlled, but does that matter when you get a 80-90% public support for such a disgusting act of aggression?
But it's also easy to find opposition points of view. Case in point, mask mandates and convoys. Propaganda still works, same as marketing and advertisements, but it really does not seem equivalent when it's so easy to access information critical of what your government is doing.
Unlike when all media critical of the government gets banned. No one tried to arrest me for protesting the Iraq war, or Guantanamo, or Afghanistan, or...
But the "mainstream" media definitely has huge blind spots, implicit racism, and other nasty features from either habit or laziness.
That said, I'd take this hypocrisy every day instead of people being actually killed.
I mean it's not a videogame for cry ing out loud, these are people's lives. War is a fucking hell.
I've been quite shocked when I moved to Europe and noticed that very strong Anti-Russia stance that's openly spoused here... if I were Russian, I would be genuinely worried about them having facilities to hold nuclear weapons, which is what happens when you join NATO [1]. NATO already borders Russia directly in the Baltic states, nearly touches it with Poland (the historic gateway of Western armies into Russia), and if Ukraine joined NATO, the Russian heartland would become vulnerable not only to nukes but to large-scale ground invasion, as the border with Ukraine is very long and completely devoid of geographical obstacles... so even though I despise Putin for starting this war (I despise anyone who starts a war... war is a remnant of our primitive, violent past where force was accepted as a viable solution to problems), I definitely don't hold the West as being blame-free in this story. Everyone involved knew there was no bigger provocation to Russian than installing nukes on its closer, until very recently friendly, neighbours.
John Pilger has been warning us that NATO/USA expansion even into the Chinese sphere [2] is making the world incredibly more dangerous, not less.
“American bases form a giant noose encircling China with missiles, bombers, warships – all the way from Australia through the Pacific to Asia and beyond,” Pilger says.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/12/6/john-pilger-qa-...
"Allied leaders also agreed at Bucharest that Georgia and Ukraine, which were already engaged in Intensified Dialogues with NATO, will one day become members. In December 2008, Allied foreign ministers decided to enhance opportunities for assisting the two countries in efforts to meet membership requirements by making use of the framework of the existing NATO-Ukraine Commission and NATO-Georgia Commission – without prejudice to further decisions which may be taken about their applications to join the MAP."
>NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm
Russia is the only country in the world with a massive formal alliance of major world powers reigned against it. This is because of continued Russian aggression and atrocities going back a long time.
April 2008 [1]
>NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.
After the meeting Putin said NATO expansion was a direct threat to Russia.
The Russo-Georgia War was August 2008.
So Georgia being attacked was clearly after attempted NATO expansion east.
In November 2013 the president of Ukraine, Yanukovych, decided to not agree to an EU deal. There were protests in Ukraine which would end in a coup. Some of the European countries try to work out a deal for an election but the protesters aren't going for it. Yanukovych then flees the country.
The new government is very pro West / EU. What then happens in Ukraine starts making anti-Russian moves like removing minority (Russian) language laws.
Russia then attacks Crimea in February 2014.
Again, Russia only attacked after Ukraine was attempting to work out a deal with the EU and after they showed they would use force (the coup) to get it.
Don't get me wrong. I am against Russia attacking both Georgia and Ukraine, but it seems quite clear that Russia only attacks after they start getting too cozy with the West.
[1] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm
Interesting. As a young kid in the early 80's (USA), I remember going to a Disney movie with my mom and brothers called "Night Crossing," which was about a family in East Germany escaping to West Germany via a hot air balloon in the middle of the night that they constructed. Being less than 10, I had no clue what was going on in Europe or the effects of post-WW2, but that movie sure stuck with me even to this day. It prompted many healthy discussions as a child that would probably never have been brought up, or at least for another 10 years.
> Products that use the words 'Russia' or 'Russian' in the brand name, advertising, or product description—along with products that depict Russian architecture or symbols colloquially associated with Russia—are all considered to be Russian-branded products and have been removed under the Governor's Executive Order[2]
It’s hard to see how that’s anything other than emotional. And, I would imagine, illegal.
[1](PDF)https://www.governor.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt336/files/in...
[2]https://www.newsweek.com/vodka-brands-remind-they-arent-russ...
Also, they are rightly concerned about the longer term effects of sanctions and instability as even if Russia pulled their troops out of Ukraine today (not going to happen), tensions aren't going to ease in the near term and sanctions are likely to remain in place for at least months, if not years. So it's not like business is going to come back in the short term. For the brands that depend on a 'squeaky clean' image, trying to keep as far from controversy as possible is good business.
[1] See, I just did it.
Which could have a clear biological explanation as far as USA is the most diabetic country in the wolrd and diabete leads to Alzheimer (that some specialists call diabete Type3).
Associated with third world education system, and high level of self esteem, it's easy to brainwash braindead peoples such as USA citizen.
We all remember this Collin Powell little bottle of Anthrax.
But what surprise me more is how true american can be so proud of themselve as far as they are such liitle dog of Israel... That's a pitty.
Companies that don’t severe ties with Russia as fast as possibly seem to be at a very real risk losing their customer bases here in Europe in the wake of the invasion.
I can’t even claim to be above it. I cancelled my Netflix subscription when it was aired that they complied with Russian broadcast laws. Something Netflix no longer does by the way.
I’ve never had an issue buying products from Russia before, so if I’m not the only one reacting like this, and it seems like my reaction has been amongst the milder here, then you may find some of the answer in that.
That wasn't the main reason for my action. The main reason was to cease doing business with a nation behaving in brutal and barbaric ways we have long considered completely and utterly unacceptable, and haven't seen the like of since WWII. There has to be a cost, and this is an additional cost, albeit minor, on top of the existing sanctions. I'll consider re-subscribing when this is all over, perhaps. I might not have been able to renew the subscription in any case, now that making payments is nearly impossible.
We haven't even begun to see the full economic cost of the sanctions yet, but from what I can see I suspect it will be significant, way beyond what's been reported so far. Within just a few days of the freezing of the payments systems, commercial contracts can no longer be honoured and are being cancelled wholesale. That business is going to be redirected to other countries, and I'm afraid that's going to be extremely painful for the affected companies, employees and families. And that's including for internal business projects, and is on top of companies which are explicitly pulling out of consumer-facing Russian markets. Whether this will actually effect any change in policy I don't know, I hope it does, but doing nothing would have been worse.
Drone striking middle eastern children didn't do it for you? Something about this rhetoric I keep seeing is just so.. selective. So nakedly biased. If people feel so strongly about Russias actions in Europe, how is it that millions of dead Muslims are inconsequential?
That question is rhetorical, I think it's obvious why that really is
"How does this action help end the war in Ukraine?" should be the litmus test, and if the logic to get there is too tortured, maybe rethink the action.
Now, those products are ubiquitous and it’s their withdrawal that might have some effect. Most kids through middle age adults in Russia don’t know what it’s like without those Western products.
The West seems happy to give Putin the full USSR glory days experience.
How did consumer goods and food distribution actually happen in (commun|social)ist economies? As in, the last mile experience as a consumer?
Despite the reputation, the government usually was very sensitive to the issue of keeping meat or at least a lot of bread on the table. When the DDR ran out of money to import coffee in the 70s, it was one of the more serious threats to their rule and it stimulated the development of the Vietnamese coffee industry in "socialist cooperation". (Fun fact: to this day Germany is still Vietnam's largest coffee buyer.). Prices were quite low in proportion to wages, effectively government subsidised. Hence shortages, though rarely for staples. Hunger was rare after 1950. Dietary boredom was not.
In the not so good economic years, or in many parts of the Soviet Union or less wealthy socialist countries, similar story, except meat shortages and too many turnips and your wages might not afford too many restaurant visits. Out in the country there was some subsistence agriculture in the poorer places like Vietnam. Some places never Stalin-style collectivised the farms, and there you saw small market or at least barter economies in small towns and rural areas consuming local product locally, farmer's markets basically.
Check this photo of a "bodega" in Cuba (first image in this page): https://www.cibercuba.com/noticias/2018-08-01-u1-e192519-s27...
I'm so flabbergasted people can't see past their nose regarding current events, it all reminds me very much of OIF/OEF propaganda levels. Be vigilant for real psyops (as opposed to the soft army stuff that hit frontpage recently)
Really makes you think...
Ukraine is a (mostly christian) democratic country who's main exports are not drugs or oil. The leadership doesnt declare holy war on other countries.
Also there's the focus on the history of the USSR and Ukraine in europe, alongside their efforts to join western alliances. Afganistan or Saudi Arabia or Iraq never tried to join the EU or NATO.
Cultures that are alike tend to by sympathetic to each other. That's it.
In regard to US vs Latin America - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America%E2%80%93United_S...
Commercial interest and local defense. When Putin fueled separatist armies prior to the invasion, this was equivalent to the banana wars in Latin America, fueled by the US. The world stage generally ignores these kinds of regional 3rd party conflicts.
We shouldn't downplay the war in Ukraine just because US does what US does. Also what's happening there is not important just because "Ukraine is a (mostly christian) democratic country who's main exports are not drugs or oil." but because Ukrainians are fellow humans, like the rest of us, and are victim of an unfair confrontation against a bully few times bigger than them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Edit: grammar
There was no internet during these periods and the media was either complicit in omission or narrative (they were BAD democracies corrupted by the drug cartels!) so the outrage was limited. Again, this isn't some mystery to ponder. Tribalism is alive and well and the narratives do their job.
> Also what's happening there is not important just because "Ukraine is a (mostly christian) democratic country who's main exports are not drugs or oil."
I didn't say anything about importance. Please don't misquote me to push your agenda.
>Cultures that are alike tend to by sympathetic to each other. That's it.
So Saudi Arabia is like the US and that's why it is supported by them?
It is abhorrent what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Thankfully the international community is reacting appropriately. It is also equally abhorrent what is going on in Yemen (which the US has a part in). Unfortunately, the international community is not reacting appropriately here. It was also abhorrent when the US invaded Iraq (on false pretenses).
Afghanistan supplies drugs(opium poppy) to pharmaceutical companies for turning into American painkillers. I don't know why it should matter if a countries main export is oil anyways?
Also who exactly declared a holy war on other countries? That seems like a vaguely anti Islamic charge that doesn't really apply to most countries in the middle east. Perhaps Iran(long after western intervention I should add) and one or two others.
>Ukraine is a (mostly christian)
I think you said the quiet part out loud.
Makes me think EU and allies want to stop this war as early as possible, for some reason, and all these reactions is how they think that will happen.
Such an attack isn't something comparable to any war from WW2. If the world can't punish attackers painfully enough, we will see more similar events...
Which countries are the UK in bombing civilians right now?
And realistically, there is nothing UK can do that would prevent KSA killing people in Yemen, even if UK did want do.
The only losses televised were American soldiers. People are nationalistic to the bone.
> The Iraq Body Count project documents 185,000–208,000 violent civilian deaths through February 2020 in their table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
> About 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...
Perhaps if an incredibly comprehensive package of sanctions could have been part of the package, it would have changed more minds faster.
[1] He's rehabilitated his political image, somewhat, since then, but man, oh man, that was quite the foreign policy plan.
Russian media is purely State controlled and is preaching justifications for the invasion of Ukraine.
This is not a free speech situation.
The US media is often a propaganda arm of the government. The Russian government tries to ensure their propaganda is all you see. There's a massive difference.
Just one of many examples:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/chi-city-offers-62-m...
There's a failure of vision, a failure to understand differences in scale that is driving these false equivalences, that then leads to a bunch of equivocation about whether the unlike comparisons can be similar. I think the original point stands and this remains a false equivalence.
800 illegally arrested in a single city, on a single day after the invasion. San Francisco had 2,200 protest arrests in the two days. [1]
> The biggest antiwar eruption in the U.S. took place in San Francisco, where protesters had vowed to shut down the city, and the police reported making more arrests than any time during the past two decades. The protests began during the morning rush hour, when activists used duct tape for purposes that Tom Ridge at the Office of Homeland Security would never recommend: blocking the intersection at Battery and Columbus, while handing out stickers that said "No War in My Name."
> During the morning rush hour, the city's Financial District was shut down by human blockades that stretched from the Embarcadero to Van Ness Avenue, stopping cars and bus traffic for hours and provoking a wave of arrests.
> By 4:30 p.m., several thousand protesters began sitting down at the busy intersection of Fifth and Market, where police began carting off dozens of them to a MUNI bus that had been commandeered as a paddy wagon.
The scope of the arrests in Russia is much wider (as a percentage of those protesting and in raw numbers), and they're legal.
I know the scope is different, but it is also good to keep in mind that bad things don't only happen in Russia.
edit: s/mass protest/mass arrest
Do you have a source for this? The only instances of arrests I can find are things like the above (illegal arrests) or people who trespassed on private property and were arrested for that. Meanwhile I can find plenty of stories of perfectly legal thousands-strong protests, which sounds like "mass protest" to me.
> I know the scope is different, but it is also good to keep in mind that bad things don't only happen in Russia.
Yes, but it depends on the purpose of placing that emphasis. "Even in a democracy we must be vigilant" is one thing. "We shouldn't condemn Russia for their human rights abuses because we're no different" is a very different message, and one that is manifestly false.
This is the hinge on which false equivalences turn. The scope is different, they shouldn't be compared, and being able to correctly grasp and differentiate different scales of moral offense shouldn't be interpreted as "I guess they don't know bad stuff happens elsewhere." Those comparisons do more to obfuscate than clarify.
Then nothing can ever be compared, there is always going to be differences between situations. Even just cultural differences between Russia and the US.
Afaik, you are probably thinking of Assange (who is currently under arrest in the UK). Snowden is a refugee in Russia for exposing NSA's surveillance.
Only 3% of media coverage was anti-war, they didn't need to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_War...
That study says only 3% of individuals who were interviewed on the 6 studied channels were opposed to the war. They only studied coverage across 6 mainstream media outlets:
> The news programs studied were ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume, and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.
This doesn't tell me anything about the state of independent news outlets at the time.
Again, I agree that the US acted in a different way than Russia does right now, but the situation itself is also different. The US did not need to take the actions Russia has to take, because the majority of people in the US where pro-war during the invasion, with only 17% strongly opposing the illegal war [1].
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-america...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_pNIGoCybk https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk0Ktc21_lgVNiZRY9Py1Fg/vid...
https://twitter.com/ilya_shepelin/status/1499298510394601474
(I guess a result of the state media control)
They have been preparing for it for many years, and they had an exercise in 2021, which was based on the law introduced in 2019.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-disconnected-globa...
Do you want to be cutting off Russia's anti-war protesters from the world?
Honestly, I'm not surprised. Though they were going to march under a neutral flag, they'd have still been emissaries of their governments. That's what the Olympics and Paralympics are for. Plus, the IPC's decision was probably easier because of repeated incidents of Russian athletes doping, which is why they were already under a neutral flag.
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/russian-athletes-par...
The request wasn't to cut off Russia from the net.
It was to let .ru domains expire, and not issue SSL certificates for them. It would only affect .ru and .рф websites.
Russians would still be able to get their news from bbc.com — but maybe not ria.ru
We all would have been better off. There's currently little-to-nothing of value on .ru websites.
You have three big search engines: google, bing and yandex (4 if you count baidu).
To be honest, not much would change then as of today.
Agreed. Keeping the net open helps the West win this war. Russians turn to e.g. the BBC, because they know its more reliable than their own media.
They are already doing this, Russian media is going full propaganda everything they say is a blatant lie simply to reduce the signal to noise.
The more important aspect is their cyber attacks on Ukraine that prevent civilians and militias from organising to escape the violence or repel it.
Russia's state sponsored cyber attacks show it has no interest in contributing to a healthy internet, they should be banned.
A primer on this subject is Sontag's "Regarding the Pain of Others".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52373.Regarding_the_Pain...
> We can not allow Russia to run the narrative by cutting of the internet. We need our pictures and videos to reach them.
Completely agree. I think popular website owners should go even further and target content specifically to Russian IP informing them of the causalities in Ukraine and protests going around in Russia.
not to everybody at once, ideally to selected audiences, so it would be spotted & counteracted latter than sooner.
Exactly. IIRC, Russia is actually taking steps to build a great firewall to do that deliberately. They're just not there yet.
But once they have the technology to connect to the internet on Putin's terms, cutting them off will make more sense. Maybe not enough sense to actually do, but the option should be re-evaluated.
But like with the Chinese firewall, information find its way. Unless Russia wants to set itself back to 70s, they still need to access Github, Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, etc. For the Russian IT business to work.
Software development and Internet were built on scientific principles, criticism, criticial thinking. This requires free flow of information. You cannot have one without the other, or you are going to end up with very inferior and inefficient software ecosystem.
Don't be so optimistic. It isn't the 90s anymore. "Information [will] find its way [through]," but probably not in ways that can change anything.
> Software development and Internet were built on scientific principles, criticism, criticial thinking. This requires free flow of information. You cannot have one without the other, or you are going to end up with very inferior and inefficient software ecosystem.
It's doubtful if that's true, but even if it is, the response of dictators everywhere is: "so?" A strong "software ecosystem" might be a top priority for you, but they care more about other things.
The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them, no way to resist.
The Russian people are not a mechanism by which the Russian leadership can be affected.
> We can not allow Russia to run the narrative by cutting of the internet.
I may be wrong, but I understood the request was to remove ".ru" and two other related top levels. It was not to cut them off from Internet access.
I am in favour of both the removal of ".ru" and related domains, and also of cutting Russia off from the net, if such a thing were possible, which I think it is not.
We've been having our fair share of anti-Russia propaganda as well, we're not innocent of what we're accusing Russia of.
> The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them, no way to resist.
What exactly do you think would happen to the west if we censored Russian "propaganda"?
> I am in favour of both the removal of ".ru" and related domains
... And they'll move to another TLD just as easily as they were booted off the .ru or even worse; it moves outside the scope of the "accessible" web where their ideas are not challenged. Overall, a bad idea, IMO.
No. These are not comparable. In the West, you have a range of views and there is no deliberate censorship of views by the State. In Russia, you get and only get what the State produces, and what they've been producing over the last several years has been crazy; Ukraine is not a country, and we have a holy mission to liberate them.
> Overall, a bad idea, IMO.
It is sometimes better to act than not to act, even if what you do is not perfect; it all adds pressure and expresses that you are serious about what you're doing.
I would argue that big tech is making an effort to sway public opinion in certain favorable directions, if not outright censor them under the guise of safety or whatever generic excuse we've heard over the past decade. The information we've been digesting is essentially only what big tech allows to be heard.
Yes, there are several ways to access information from alternative methods but from what it seems like, only a fraction of both the West and Russia do that.
By censoring an opposing agenda, albeit anti-west propaganda, you will create exactly the same vacuum as you accuse the Russian government of.
> It is sometimes better to act than not to act, even if what you do is not perfect; it all adds pressure and expresses that you are serious about what you're doing.
Strong disagree. We should do the right thing rather than just anything that could put pressure on them.
You say that while thousands if not more Russians are protesting on the streets each night against this war, despite brutal repression. In any kind of regime, the consent of the people does matter - the way that consent is obtained just varies. Russia is not the USSR or China and it is certainly not North Korea - it is an authoritarian country, but nowhere near the level of dictatorial control where they can completely ignore their populace.
You are extremely, even naively optimistic. The gap between what you understand under the term democracy and what is "Russian democracy" is several times bigger than the difference between Russia's and N.Korea's "democracies".
You're the only one using the term "democracy".
Even under an authoritarian dictatorship without any pretense of democracy, the consent (or at least acquiescence) of the populace is necessary for the dictator to rule. Civilians far outnumber the rulers, after all, or even the military. Even if the entire Russian military sided with Putin—and against their own friends and relatives—there is no way he could stay in power in the face of a mass civilian uprising.
And even in the worst dictatorships, mass public protests will almost always lead to the regime being toppled (perhaps only to be replaced by a worse regime, unfortunately, but still toppled). The population of any country is simply too huge to completely ignore, if it turns against the regime en masse.
If you don't believe any of this, then tell me - why do you think Russia is investing so much resources in internal propaganda? Why are they pretending to hold free elections? Why does Putin pretend he has a noble goal in Ukraine? It's certainly not fooling world leaders, so if his own population can't do anything about it, why even bother?
IMHO, shut off their internet, send their economy and comms back to the effin dark ages. Block all flight over Russian air space (we can legit shoot planes down from well outside the country). See if putin survives 6 months then. Russians like comfort. Russians like a modern life. Strip it from them for their actions. They will fight to get it back on their own soil.
Until them. F russia. F putin. F the russian people for letting this happen. They are complacent. They are responsible. The behavior you walk past is the standard you set.
China isn't hiding anything. They try, but it's a fool's errand. The more they try the more people want to know about it. No one in China that lived during that atrocity is unaware.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/us/texas-history-1836-pro... - Texas, Idaho, etc
do you think their propaganda might just be reciprocal to what you people are doing?
sure. pictures and videos of guantanamo bay are everywhere, so are the works leaked by wikileaks. they paint a similar picture of the american exceptionalism the way russians and the chinese do to their own people.
remember instead of trying the culprits of that helicopter video leaked by wikileaks, the us government is shooting the messenger and not targeting the message itself.
what i am saying is, every side of this mess has dirty laundry. there are no good or bad sides. you are taking one side because you live there or whatever.
how is it free speech if "russia today" is banned by youtube or facebook or twitter in the US or EU but if russia blocks facebook or CNN in russia then its "attack of free speech?" you want your agenda, your propaganda be heard by your enemies but you dont want your people to know the enemies agenda. sure fine. you can do that but its not exceptionalism.
Here's the thing about free speech in America that people miss in these arguments. The U.S. government can neither compel nor deny your right to say or platform your speech as long as it isn't a call to act as a threat of violence or hate speech. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are private companies and don't need to platform anyone they don't want to, technically. They might be sued for discrimination, I guess, but not for infringement on your right to free speech. They aren't viewed as a "public square", as they aren't funded by the government.
Huh? The comment you are replying to literally argues for less restrictions on information.
Free speech does not include using speech to lie and defraud.
The Russian State controls the Russian media and what you get is and only is propaganda. It is there purely to defaud and deceive. This is not about freedom of speech, it's about crime.
If you meet a man lying through his teeth to sell you fake insurance, you do not protect his actions on the basis of freedom of speech.
The same rhetorics is used by Russian government when it tries restricting pro-western sources.
And it's not like they don't have a rather solid ground for it. Anyone living in Russia and reading western reports on it knows how much the real life is different from and image painted by journalists in some captivating (almost mythological) narrative way.
Does this mean that Russian government does good when it restricts access to information? Or does it rather teach us that universal unrestricted accees to information is imperative, and people should be able to make their own decisions, rather then consume what was provided by a local journalist?
It literally does. It also includes "hate speech" and all kinds of other stuff we find abhorrent. Otherwise it's not free speech.
The social media is full of misinformation published by the Ukrainians, eg:
https://observers.france24.com/en/europe/20220301-video-debu...
https://www.bbc.com/news/60554910
https://www.bbc.com/news/60554910
So, should we cut off Ukraine's internet access?
And we barely see any information from the Russian side. Is it not better to see the propaganda and expose it? Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
> Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I used to believe that, too, but there's evidence that silencing misinformation results in less misinformation overall.
>If you meet a man lying through his teeth to sell you fake insurance, you do not protect his actions on the basis of freedom of speech.
strawman argument. media isnt selling you fake insurance. even if it did, you have the power to change the channel and not buy it. by not allowing the fake salesman on the street, you are not letting market forces to decide for themselves.
why do you fear market forces would favour their lies over your alleged "truth"? if that is the case, the end users must surely be able to see white and black. let them decide.
Plato gives Socrates' answer in Gorgias. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html
They need to see the misery of the war they are inflicting and the only way is via an open internet. Yes they will push their own propaganda to the west but we can deal with that.
Fire-walling them off will result in the people not knowing what is going on. Just look how China is able to hide what happened at Tienanmen square.
We can not allow Russia to run the narrative by cutting of the internet. We need our pictures and videos to reach them.