The Putin verstehers (hard to translate but a sort of indirect criticism of the bosses) People like the social demokrat Schröder an Christian Democrat And Putin puppet Schröder as wel as Merkel finally are getting more flak in Germany.
Germany is still buying lots of Russian energy to protect its heavy industry and laughed off the previous US administration. Also oil which is 49,99 or less percent Russian is not considered Russian oil, OK. Maybe if Western Europe sacrifices a bit more instead of just sending words of support and weapons and money?
Waldheim was scum and a disgrace. After it was known he still got a Papal and some Austrian Catholic prize. The picture of the “good West” needs nuance. not to mention the IMO despicable Rommel kazerne in Germany. As he was a very willing Holocaust enabler until he found out to be on the losing side. Another indifferent career maniac.
As for NATO, I think there were Warhawks on that side as well. Also the question of a 20 year war/nation building/destroying in Afghanistan on the old Soviet border is legally a bit fishy for a purely defensive alliance.
Yes Putin should not have invaded the Ukraine but I don’t adhere to the clean person West theory either.
Me neither. Even looking at Soviet subversion, part of it was fueled by our own naivety and, in worse cases, fellow travelers in our midst and those who wish to govern on feelings (look at our academia). So the West isn’t totally off the hook here. The Soviets merely add more fuel to the fire.
This can be said for every major civilization that ever existed. I don’t argue democracy is perfect, but at least in a democracy you can argue about how imperfect it is. That is a luxury Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China doesn’t grant you.
Chauvinism and National Pride shouldn’t blind you to the imperfections of your own government, much less so to the imperfections of your supposed allies.
Believe me if I tell you that I am also concerned about democratic backsliding and the exploitations of capitalism in the West, but I don’t have to praise some bullshit dictatorship to prove my point.
From information I have, both of those societies are leaning towards their own forms of democracy. One just needs to look beyond western MSM. People who actually live and work there have different story to tell.
As I said, democracy is always conditioned on someone’s slavery - while you might like your democratic options and prosperity, you will very gladly close your eyes to various juntas in Latin America, less than democratic governments in S-E Asia or even apartheid in South Africa. Not to mentioned Arab world or Iranian regime. Lot of those regimes replaced democratic governments who objected to Neo-colonialism through various regime changes.
Living in a democracy is not always easy , in a democracy you have a lot of freedom.
With that freedom also comes responsibility and for some people that is too hard and they do not want to take responsibility
Also very important in a democracy is too always fight to reduce corruption as corruption is the path to the dark side.
Democracies are also run by people so they are not perfect and mistakes have been made and will continue to be made.
Also a big problem is that idiots also have the freedom to voice their opinion.
Living in a democracy has to be a choice or it will not work ,history has shown it can not be forced on people.
The Ukraine people want to try and live in a democracy and even without Putin that would have been hard for them but they were willing to put in the effort.
They have done the living under a murdering regime for the last century and it has cost them a lot so they now want to see if they could make it as a democracy
America almost lost their democracy in 2020 when Trump tried to take over after he lost the election.
Russia made some steps in the democracy direction but they failed hard
What secret information do you possess that I don’t?
And as I said before, most great civilizations of history have done so too. Whether it’s called a peasant, a serf, a slave or a commoner, the wealth of the rich and powerful has always been built of the work of the poor. That is not inherent to democracy, it’s inherent to society. It’s not a great thing and I would very much like to see it changed, probably no different from you, but you fool yourself by just blaming democracy and idolizing some bullshit kleptocratic system that will only make it worse if anything.
I wouldn’t consider a staunch ally of Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela to be “pure fashist[sic]”. Putin is far closer to Maduro and Diaz-Canel than he is to any religiously conservative dictator or wannabee dictator.
Fascism is far more than just lots of nationalism and religiously conservative social views. The closest thing to “Fascism” these days is probably Erdogan in Turkey. Viktor Orban in Hungary has a couple of Fascist leanings, particularly in how he rants against the Treaty of Trianon, but modern-day Hungary isn’t remotely close to a Fascist country. For starters, Hungary has perfectly legitimate elections.
Putin is a murderous dictator who wants to impose a tyrannical bureaucracy on Ukraine while murdering millions of innocent Ukrainians in the process. Perhaps such insipid bloodlust transcends ideology.
The idea that Trump supported Russia while in office, or colluded with Russia during either of his campaigns, appears to be a completely unfounded myth. Russia, for various reasons, seems to have supported Trump in his 2016 election, but many media sources appear to have grossly exaggerated the extent of this material support, while also flat-out lying about the existence of any reciprocal nature of it. The biggest sources of this exaggeration are probably the Krassenstein twins, Christopher Steele, Louise Mensch, Brian Ross, and Seth Abramson.
When media personalities push false narratives, it leads to some like Marjorie Taylor Green becoming pro-Russia, which is a problem. They think that since so many media sources lied about Russia before that they must be wrong now, which is catastrophically wrong. Russia is slaughtering Ukrainian civilians and sending many to so-called “filtration camps”.
Seems like humanity always fails to learn time and again about the very real consequences of false narratives, gaslighting and misleading, generally egregious lies from the media. In fact, I’m covering an especially heinous case of the latter here:
The Soviets before 1989: “This is a fake story because the Nazis said it and muh Nazi bad, don’t ya know?”
Yes, fashism is more than simple nationalism but a vision of the own nation to be a cheated people who have to get back to their destiny. Mussolini (more futurismo than conservative) talking about recreating the ancient Roman Empire and Putin today recreating a Russia that has never existed. Cuba, North Korea Venezuela and who else disliking “the West” are yust usefull.
The Late-Roman/Byzantine system of Caesaropapism, which Russia adopted, puts any believing and communicant member of their church who is head of state at the head of their church. For practical purposes, Putin is the head of the Russian Church.
News from Ukraine:
The Kiev Independent:
“Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that two months ago no one expected the country’s Armed Forces to become proficient with NATO weapons and swiftly adopt alliance’s standards. “Initially, howitzers were brought to us, but this is just the beginning, we will get much more,” he said.”
Interesting video you posted there. It poses some interesting ideas, but as I expect you are a critical thinker, you would not just accept it because someone said so. Luckily TedX helps us a bit with this and posted a critigue of this talk as well. I expect you read that piece as well right? If not, here it is: A critique of Eric X. Li’s “A tale of two political systems” | TED Blog
I agree that from what I could quickly see she makes pretty decent content and has somewhat of a credible basis to back up her claims. I also don’t see her promoting the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a good thing as you have done here in this channel. Actually, she doesn’t really have much content on Russia-Ukraine at all after her last post on the matter on the 28th of February where she mentioned two different perspectives and then stated she will make more content on the matter in the future. This has not happened yet, so I am still curious as to how you can justify the invasion.
You can accuse me of cherry picking and sure I may be, but you haven’t provided very specific citations either, just broad links to outlets with content on diverse topics. You also (wrongly) assume I don’t watch and read leftist opinionators and only binge state TV. Whenever you did cite specific claims, they turned out to be twisted narratives or plain falsehoods, so now I challenge you to do more critical thinking.
If you want to be a socialist, that’s fine by me and I see compelling reasons to identify as such, but remain critical, especially on concentrations of power.
This was expressed by many non-westerners, leaders, political experts, statesmen, scientists, … and even some western ones - I already posted links for “False promise of liberal hegemony”.
Western blindness for diversity, unilateralism and desire for hegemony has created situation that we face, verge of WWIII.