Don’t be silly! They never said any of that! Ghost of Kiev? Why that was just a metaphor for…uhh…you damn tankies just don’t get it! History and reality aren’t important, what is really important is that this Star War is fought between the Jedi and the Sith and the Jedi always win, so it doesn’t matter how many things we make up about it, good guys always win and we’ve deemed ourselves the good guys! You’re all morons for caring about reality and material conditions!
I do wonder now actually. Looking back at the early days of the Iraq war, the yanks seemed to be honestly convinced that their “shock and awe” would win the war in a matter of weeks. That they would face no real opposition and the Iraqi people would just roll over and let them steal their resources.
And in turn with this war, the western narrative has always been “Russia is behaving like the US did in Iraq” when they never did, specifically because they’ve learned from that conflict and learned what not to do. The US meanwhile doesn’t seem to have learned a damn thing.
Or more accurately, they knew Ukraine would never win, but they could still profit. They didn’t care.
How could I forget! He turned the 5 loaves and 2 fish into enough to feed most of a crowd of people, for a very reasonable price! He didn’t feed all of them though, that would go against supply and demand and lower the prices.
It really is fucked up that they both block contraceptives and baby products. I guess it is that puritan mentality that everyone just needs to suffer. Ironic that they worship a guy who told people to give everything they own to the poor.
Something that blows my mind about US infrastructure is how so many suburbs can only be accessed by underpasses that are specifically designed to be too low for buses. Because minorities tend to use public transportation more.
Blows my mind how they will actively design their living environments to be worse just so they can be more racist.
Possibly, it certainly would’ve eased tensions and delayed any actual conflict.
I think Russia is also too concerned about NATO presence on their largest European border to really allow anything other than Ukraine not joining NATO and the cessation of shelling in the Donbass (and honestly, probably annexation of them too). Plus they would probably want Ukraine to officially recognize Crimea as Russian territory. So basically everything they’ve been trying to do diplomatically for the past decade and have been ignored on. This war could’ve been easily avoided had the west and Ukraine been willing to work diplomatically. But the west can’t profit from that.
Sadly, this one has a terminal case of the “smug” and won’t actually listen to anything you have to say.
It is really frustrating to see it everywhere and have everyone around you just…not notice. Politicians will say the most blatantly racist shit, but because they say it in a “civil” way, no one notices.
Think tanks are really awful things. I always liked to imagine think tanks as like…a bunch of brains floating in a jar. But in reality they’re always just the same dozen or so white guys in suits getting paid 6 figures to kiss the ass of their boss.
One of my biggest “epiphany” moments that led me to becoming a communist was realising that the “white man’s burden” rhetoric never went away, it just got cleaned up and modernised.
Right now at least there are a fair few lib lurkers. They’ve been told we’re all evil Putin puppets who hate freedom and love violence. We need to clarify our positions for the sake of the “audience” I guess. (Only if you feel like it though, this is just my personal perspective on how to deal with the reddit influx).
Yeah, they already call us “red fash” and try to lump us in with PatSocs. The semantics are annoying, but it is important to clarify our positions and resist easy answers.
I wouldn’t say they are “in the right” just that they have reasonable wants and have tried every diplomatic option already. The west backed them into a corner and they stood their ground. At least more people are realising that this war isn’t just Frodo taking the ring to Mordor to defeat Sauron. (Do libs read LOTR? I guess they’ve watched the movies.)
The amount of weapons shipped to Ukraine that went “missing” only to appear in the hands of various fascist groups throughout Europe is a pretty major clue as to what will happen next.
Yeah, it’ll probably just claim that Ukraine “tricked” the west, and austerity measures pushed onto whatever rump state remains will be justified with “they tricked us, so it is ok to basically have them as slave labour, they have different values to us.”
I think this is one of the biggest hurdles for any revolution in the west. There are so many people that have been trained to think that empathy is a weakness and cruelty is a strength. There’s so many people who only see the world through empty, transactional interactions. I don’t know if you can teach empathy to an adult.
It’s like that over here in Australia too. The amount of people complaining about “Wegers” in camps while our own country has literal concentration camps for refugees is just astounding. The sheer lack of self awareness is uncanny.
Oh, I didn’t even think of that. You’re right, they’ll probably blame Ukraine for “fumbling” what should’ve been an “easy victory” They’ll be demoted back to “Asiatic horde” status soon enough I suppose.
No it’s fine, you’re making sense. The US military industrial complex is filled with a lot of different people with different interests. Some only focused on short term profit, some on longer term profit. Losing a war now means greater long term profit for some, and less for others, winning a war flips those two groups. So it seems chaotic and self-contradictory because it isn’t a monolith, with lots of different groups vying for power. And of course, they’re all human, and make human mistakes, errors and overestimates of their own strength. So there are probably plenty who honestly believed that western weapons would win easily, and those that didn’t.
The one thing they do seem to be lacking is anyone who actually understands how dangerously ineffective their “wars for profit” system is, probably because anyone who points that out doesn’t end up in the higher echelons of a military production company.