news
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today/ . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
view the rest of the comments
I often see criticism of Ukraine lumped in with Russian justifications for invasion, in which case, the war is also warping your views.
The US got heat from other supporters of Ukraine for that even. Russia is also using them. Further cause to support peace negotiations.
Especially because the actual reason Russia invaded wasn't over any concern about ethnic Russians in Ukraine (that's literally one of the oldest bullshit excuses for war) was to prevent NATO from being on it's borders, and now Finland and Sweden have joined, so Russia's already lost the geopolitical battle. All they're fighting for now is dirt.
Sure. but that's a lot of dead people to defend the principle of not letting Russia get what they want. We could have said "fine, we won't expand NATO" and either Russia would have backed down or been forced to abandon that "pretense". But we didn't. We got into this dick measuring contest of "Ukraine can join if they want to 😤" and provoked a war. Which we wanted, in order to fight Russia without using American troops. But it's completely to the detriment of citizens in both Ukraine and Russia.
Russia could have stuck with the accepted modern method of Imperialism though, wherein you don't invade countries with armies but instead you use soft power and economic integration. That's what the US was trying to do even in Russia, what with how American Hollywood movies and TV shows being released there and American companies moving in there. It was supposed to change Russian public opinion and enable the subordination of Russian capital to Western capital but Putin was able to co-opt Russian capitalism so when all the Western companies like McDonald's left, there was domestic alternatives.
Problem was the west was more succesful in Ukraine and other former Soviet states, and the Russians losing at that method as Western Ukrainians looked at the EU more and more, feeling culturally closer to Poland than Russia.
We can go round and round over past decisions that are the "real" culprit for war in Ukraine but it won't stop the fighting today. Sure, Ukraine could've surrendered in the first 24 hours and saved lives, but historically speaking, occupations also result in loss of life as the people who didn't want to be part of Russia would still be Ukraine and wouldn't just accept a Moscow-aligned Kyiv government.
The fighting would also stop if Russian troops turned around and went back to Russia, but I think some people are more interested in hurting US foreign policy than they are in peace.
You are unsurprisingly distorting the past. Ukraine circa 2014 had two offers on the table for economic integration, one with the EU and one with Russia. The EU deal demanded the exclusion of Russia, the Russian deal did not demand exclusion of the EU. The sitting President chose the Russian deal, and then there was a west-backed coup that put him out of office and put in someone who would take the EU deal.
The "game" was one that Russia was not allowed to succeed at.
There are many countries caught between two powers that manage ok (see Taiwan and South Korea as examples) -- Northern Ireland is different because it's not its own country and was brought along with the rest of the UK out of the EU with zero preparation despite one of its main trading partners being Ireland, which still is in the EU.
Russia says reactionary things about western Europe, but you are just kind of asserting that it refused to let Ukraine be involved with trade relations.
This is true, but it seems to me that the west pushed too hard on this from a strategic standpoint by refusing to let Russia join NATO back when it tried. I'm glad that they made this mistake -- it's better for multipolarity -- but for them it was surely a mistake.
China's situation can hardly be compared, or else must be compared from a much earlier state. While there are criticisms to be made of Deng's policies, he did not allow for the wholesale gutting of domestic industries the way that most of Eastern Europe did. He allowed foreign capitalists to take ownership but kept the manufacturing power where it was, allowing it to be used for development of the country rather than selling it off. It should be unsurprising that traitors like Yeltsin had no interest in preserving long-term national sovereignty in this way.
Perhaps China, too, will one day be hijacked by compradores and turned back into a backwater like the former USSR states and Yugoslavia were, but that's not how things are now.
If you're talking about neocolonialism, neocolonialism still requires boots on the ground. Why do you think AFRICOM has military bases throughout Africa or why jihadist separatist groups like Boko Haram curiously always align with the strategic goals of the US state department? There were Danish troops rampaging around Mali before post-coup Mali told the Danes to fuck off back to Scandinavia. Just because Western troops were "invited" to those countries by neocolonial puppets doesn't mean they don't represent just another form of foreign occupation. At least when Russia invaded Ukraine, you could argue that Russia was trying to safeguard the Russian minority. Not sure what kind of excuse you could pull for French troops in "ex" French colony Niger (despite the coup, French troops are still in Niger).