- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
We need to learn from history. Appeasement emboldens fascists. Russia in Ukraine is like Germany in the Sudetenland.
I know it’s edgy and cool to say “USA bad” at every opportunity, but this is too serious for edge lord posturing. We need to be honest here.
Putin is the aggressor. Ukraine is defending itself and needs help.
There is a lot to learn from history beyond WWII. For example, one thing we can learn from is the history of the exact analogy you’re using being employed to justify wars. High ranking officials used that analogy to justify the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror. Looking back, the analogy doesn’t hold up at all in any of those cases. But in each case, the propaganda push at the beggining of the war convinced large majorities of Americans to support it when it started. I don’t think there’s been a war since WWII that the US has been involved in where someone wasn’t invoking that analogy. Quotes
Another thing to learn from history is the direct context of the war. The conflict began between Ukraine and the separatists in 2014, and a cease-fire was signed to stop the bloodshed. Ukraine violated that cease-fire, and that’s what prompted Russian intervention.
The third point I want to make is that there’s another lesson that can be drawn from the abandonment of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Unlike Ukraine, the Czechs were actually in a military alliance with the Allies. They did not just stand by while a neutral country was invaded, but broke an agreement to throw them to the wolves. And the Czechs had no recourse to hold them accountable, because when you’re the dominant hegemon, rules don’t apply to you. And yet somehow, this is constantly being used as an example of why we should trust our leaders, in the same powerful and unaccountable position, to have the best interests of the people of other countries at heart?
I find that absurd. The lesson I take from that is that people in those positions can sacrifice huge numbers of people, entire countries, to horrible fates, just to serve their own interests. And feuling the conflict in Ukraine, while refusing to consider any peace negotiations, is doing exactly that. They’ll feed Ukrainians into the meat grinder the same way they’ll abandon Czechs to the Nazis, and the same way they brought death and destruction to the people of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and many more.
Oh, and one last lesson from history:
Does that remind you of anything? Because it sounds a lot like US foreign policy to me.
Excellent comment. It’s revealing that those final words came from someone as reactionary as Schumpter who, I’ll add, was not only a conservative monarchist aristocrat, but at several points expessed deep sympathy for the Nazis and Fascisti. Also, by-the-bye, a pedophile.
The comparisons of the American Empire to the Roman are a cliché but I’m often still struck by how applicable they are.
In the run-up to the third Punic War, the Romans used their ally, the King of Numidia, Massinissa, to encroach on the little remaining Carthaginian territory, as they were increasingly unhappy with the recovering Carthaginian commerce and economy. Hence Cato the Censor’s famous words when seeing an economic rival, even when completely outmatched at this point by Roman imperial might: Carthago delenda est.
When the Carthaginians inevitably declared war against Numidia, the Romans used this as a pretext to claim that they were obliged to intervene to to protect their ally from Carthaginian aggression. Carthage was raised to the ground, the inhabitants massacred or enslaved to the last man, woman and child.
A generation or two later, the grandson of Massinissa and king of Numidia, Jugurtha, had now become an enemy of Rome. Rome would eliminate him without qualms (notably by Sulla, who would go on to become dictator), especially once he started intervening through bribes in the corrupt politics of Rome. As Kissinger pointed out, it is dangerous to the Empire’s enemy, but it is sometimes even more dangerous to be their ally.
indeed learn from history, this geopolitical conflict has been ongoing for about 9 years now.
Self-defense is when you bomb Russia for 8 years
NATO is the aggressor and Russia is defending itself and the people of the Donbass against literal genocidal Nazis.
Your attempted comparison of Russia to Germany rings especially hollow when Ukrainans are the ones adopting Nazi symbols/slogans and worshipping Nazi collaborators and holocaust perpetrators as their national heroes.
Yes appeasing the US does tend to embolden fascists. Wonder why that is 🤔
Self-defense is when you commit terrorism against a country that won’t tolerate NATO encirclement
It’s not about being “edgy and cool”, it’s about not denying the realities of the world we live in.
What i assume you slept the last 30 years? Because those are two very different situations. The Ukranian war was deliberately provoked by Washington and its vassals for over 8 years. After having broken treaty after treaty the years before.
If anything, it was Russia doing the appeasement and is now stopping.
Stop assuming you are on the “good” side a-priory.
behold my children, the smoothest of brains
NATO moves towards Russia for 30 years in an attempt to finally bring down their hated enemy for good, without the democratic input of the people inside those countries, marching their troops and equipment forward and building military bases as they go: this is not aggression
Russia takes a stand at basically the last possible moment in almost the last possible country: WE MUST TAKE HELP UKRAINE DEFEND ITSELF FROM AGGRESSION
it’s particularly funny because when this happened to NATO with the Soviets marching westwards, the threat of them taking them rest of Europe spurred massive amounts of funding from America to Europe and the creation of Gladio and propaganda campaigns about the Soviets and all this is seen as totally justified, meanwhile Russia watches NATO do what NATO feared the USSR would do to them and essentially decided to let it happen without the threat of conventional or nuclear war until it reached a breaking point in 2022
or like the Cuban Missile Crisis - how did we respond when a bordering state was perceived to be receiving arms from a foreign superpower?
It’s also worth noting that the soviets placed nukes in Cuba in response to NATO placing nukes in Turkey.
Ugh that line of thinking is fucking despicable. ‘helping’ my ass. Enabling thousand of deaths through blowing up peace treaties sure as shit isn’t ‘helping’, neither is sending thousands of Ukrainian conscripts to their deaths only to realise counter insurgency taxtics don’t work against heavily defended positions. The only one you’re helping with your current line of thought is the defense industry, filling pockets to the tune of billions, getting richer and richer while standing on a pile Ukrainian bodies. And you’re here fuckin cheering that on. Gullible
like you are the problem.
The USA do be extremely awful though
https://hexbear.net/post/315650?scrollToComments=false
You guys always talk like you walked into a room full of supporters, ready for your speech.
Is there a reason these line-broken mix-and-match Statements always seem prepared? Like you could put them on a numbered list, hand it to a room of naval intelligence lackeys on their break and tell them to go wild? You don’t have to engage with the material, just find the right combo of lines from the ‘Ukraine’ section of the excel doc and it’ll look like a comment. Move on, post again, collect paycheck. How easy would that be?
Having a stance is “edge lord posturing”. Ukraine doesn’t need shit because they can kill 500,000 Russian soldiers with their pinkies according to the ministry of defense. Fuck off
The U.S. is illegally occupying Cuba RIGHT NOW. Not China. Not Russia. The U.S. There’s this thing called “good will.” You build that up before demanding people to go along with your shit. It is 1000% easier to fuck off from Cuba right now than it is to go to war against Russia or China. But instead I have to be worried about countries thousands of miles away occupying each other. Because democracy. If Cubans do to the US what Ukrainians are doing to Russia right now, I know you and everyone else will be calling for the glassing of Havana.
And this is honesty. I don’t give a shit about any of these supposed “threats to democracy” by the “enemy” when every time a mention of the U.S. currently violating democracy is met with “whataboutism”. If Putin is no different than Hitler, then like Hitler, he’s inspired by US policies. It has NEVER been punished for its crimes against foreign countries because it has enough guns and bombs to tell the world to fuck off - if you’re Putin, then why shouldn’t your country enjoy the same power? Why do you think so much of the global south supports Russia or reluctant to immediately denounce them? It’s because the US has not built any good will with them. Don’t blame me. It’s diplomacy 101, they should teach that alongside your economics 101 classes.