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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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Yes, actually. Just in the opposite direction as suggested in the screenshots. Libs aren't ready for that, but yes.
We're talking about a country that's been at war for over 90% of its history since 1776, versus a country that, for a long time, was the wet dream of US foreign policy. America welcomed the Russian federation into existence. America loved the Russian federation because it meant the end of the Soviet union. The fact that Russia went from "welcome to the democratic free world" to Enemy Number 1 in two decades is more a matter of NATO needing new regions to destabilize, balkanize, and loot, and less a matter of Russia being "just as imperialist as" The United States. Russia's crime wasn't imperialism. Russia's crime was freezing the liberalization of its economy and refusing to let Yeltsin-style privatization continue at the same speed it had in the 1990s. Russia could have been imperialist 930242903490 times and the United States would have been OK with it as long as Russia was doing imperialism with weapons they bought from Lockheed Martin. After all, the US had no qualms about what Saudi Arabia did to Yemen.
Russia is a reactionary bourgeois nation, but they're also a 2nd world nation. They're hollowed out. They're poor. They're hounded by sanctions. ~~They got kicked off the UN security council.~~ (wrong; see below) Most of the wars they've waged since 1980s (Afghanistan when they were still USSR, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine) were proxy wars at their borders that they were baited into because a certain Globe-spanning empire was arming violent reactionaries and terrorists in the region in order to destabilize it.
Ukraine is a country that has close historical ties to Russia, a country that borders Russia, a country full of people who speak a language very similar to Russian, use the same Cyrillic alphabet as Russian, and formerly were part of one nation (The USSR, and before that, the Russian Empire), a country that had about half of its current land granted to it by Vladimir Lenin (Donbass), Joseph Stalin (Lviv), and Nikita Khruschev (Crimea).
It is absurd to suggest that Russia assisting separatists in Ukraine is the same as the USA killing random civilians in Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, having aircraft carriers in the South China sea, torture dungeons on Cuban soil, etc.
More than that, a large number speak Russian as their first language!
lol I know but didn't want to a complicate a sentence that already had too many clauses and parenthetical asides, but yes, that is a very important point
I occasionally think about what an alternate universe would be like where Russia was allowed to join NATO after the dissolution of the USSR. a world where maybe China was as ascendant as it is today and so scared NATO enough to allow Russia in.
None of Russia's actions in the decades since the 90s are particularly egregious when compared directly to what NATO countries have done everywhere in the world. Their actions in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria are really not that much different than what the US did in Iraq/Afghanistan, parts of South America, and Libya. There probably exists a parallel universe where Russian troops are sitting in Coalition FOBs in Iraq alongside American troops, and nobody is shredding them for foreign actions (this isn't said wistfully, mind, just a thought). Ideology unfortunately just couldn't leave Russia alone.
If I remember correctly, Putin offered George W. Bush search and rescue missions for the war on terror, but wasn't ready to commit troops. Ukraine however, committed 5000 troops to the NATO coalition in Iraq. That's how long Ukraine has been courting NATO for nothing in return.
wait what? really? I hadn't heard about this
I was wrong about that one. I had remembered it happening, but turns out it was a lot of discussion that never came to fruition.