Most younger people are quite skeptic of mainstream media so they don’t trust the narrative CNN and Fox News are trying to sell them.With the elderly it’s the opposite.
Further, most of the elderly lived at a time when the USSR was the clear and obvious enemy of “freedom”, so it’s not hard to fathom Russia being back into its usual shenanigans.
Gen Z is also more diverse and broadly anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”) so they’re less willing to blindly support US foreign policy and feel less connected to European conflicts than previous generations.
Finally Russia has, in my opinion, waged a fairly successful social media campaign to muddy the waters. Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. Same with the Azov Batallion which some people believe are the entire Ukrainian army. You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.
Gen Z has thus mostly understood this conflict through the propaganda wars that play out in social media and thus have conflicting and/or “both-sides” takes.
> Finally Russia has, in my opinion, waged a fairly successful social media campaign to muddy the waters. Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. Same with the Azov Batallion which some people believe are the entire Ukrainian army. You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.
On the other side of things, on Reddit, nothing unfavorable about Ukraine is getting attention. You don't see any posts about Russia gaining territory, or Zelensky censoring media outlets favorable to opposition parties.
And nowhere on reddit or in the media do I see a discussion of the pros and cons of a Ukrainian surrender. It's really hard to see how Ukraine will successfully fend off a country 10x its size. (If someone has an answer as to why that might be realistic, I'm open to hear it).
> And nowhere on reddit or in the media do I see a discussion of the pros and cons of a Ukrainian surrender. It's really hard to see how Ukraine will successfully fend off a country 10x its size. (If someone has an answer as to why that might be realistic, I'm open to hear it).
It's really hard to see that Ukraine by itself could defeat Russia and it definitely seems far fetched, even if the Russian army has shown itself more inept than expected.
But that isn't what is happening either, and a Ukraine bankrolled and armed by the west. That is something else, and that combination might definitely be abel to defeat Russia. So the question is more, is the west or parts of it willing to spend enough and accept escalating tensions with nuclear armed Russia by doing that?
If you look at what Zelensky is doing at the drumbeat of asks for more weapons is obvious that Ukraine is fully aware of this.
Assuming no direct western intervention, I think the crucial next steps for a Ukraine victory will center around whether NATO can transition from providing soviet surplus to modern western arms, and get Ukrainians the training required in time. F-16s or even 35s and modern air defenses could play a huge role in making russian territory gains largely impossible, but the operational training would be measured in multiple weeks at a minimum.
Russia has a ton of land (with most of it being unproductive land in Siberia), but that won't help them to win the war.
It is actually more of a problem than an asset, because they must guard very long shores and borders against unfriendly neighbors. And if they decide to redeploy a unit from Khabarovsk to Ukraine, it takes at least a week to move it by rail. Probably longer than that. Not exactly a recipe for flexibility.
> It is actually more of a problem than an asset, because they must guard very long shores and borders against unfriendly neighbors.
On the flip side they can afford to give up a lot of terrain while they get their act together. And now the other side has super long supply chains that they have to deal with.
Yes, for defense, it is great (on the other side of this scale would be Israel that lacks any strategic depth and thus must defend the border regions at almost any cost).
The Napoleonic wars were yet another great example of a strategic retreat and bleeding the enemy dry in the endless frozen steppe.
But for attacking someone else, the situation reverses and now it is Russia that faces serious logistical problems correlated to its sheer size.
Ukraine is approximately 603,550 sq km, while Russia is approximately 17,098,242 sq km, making Russia 2,733% larger than Ukraine.
The best effect of Russian admirers and propaganda alike is that people think it is bigger then it is and that everything Russian is better then it is. It is also country where huge amount of population does not have flushable toilet, have huge inequality and massive amount of internal issues.
Russian main advantage is that it does not value human life and is OK with massive looses. And that it has zero ethical limits with regards to civilians. That is amount of greatness.
This comment is really weird. It's written as though it's correcting an incorrect assumption in the parent. But it's literally confirming what the parent said.
Parent: russia is almost 30x the size of ukraine
This comment: what?! you're confused by russian propaganda! it's only 2733% larger than ukraine
And then, even if you adjust to claim that you were trying to reinforce parent's point, that's not plausible either since parent was actually pointing out that people's belief that russia was 10x bigger was actually a large underestimate of its size.
I didn't introduce the 10x figure. But if you look at GDP, 10x seems about right. GDP is often used to compare countries, and that the size, and quality of the army you can field is based on GDP of the country, seems somewhat reasonable.
The GDP doesn't really matter in this conflict, since the Ukraine is essentially getting all its weapons, intelligence and training for free.
That and, a lot of the Russian military (the reserves) and their equipment (ships, subs, intercontinental bombers, nukes, etc) are not really going to help the Russians win the conflict, since they're either not useful, or politically impossible to use.
I think if Putin can sell to the Russian people that this is a war, not a special military operation, and as such, they should call up the reserves, break the law about how those reserves are allowed to be used, etc, then they could probably win. Without that, I don't think it's that realistic: they're fighting against a totally mobilized country that's being flooded with high-tech weapons. Imagine afghanistan, if the taleban were armed for free by the western military-industrial complex. The US wouldn't be able to do it. Russia almost certainly won't be able either.
You should look at it from Putin's point of view. Escalating with the west is even less of an option. Militarily, I don't think he has any doubt about US, French and UK nuclear deterrence. Even if you take nukes off the table, if you look how poorly his troops are doing in Ukraine, imagine that against NATO, even without the US.
He might "escalate to de-escalate", i.e. make a lot of noise about escalation to intimidate Biden (so far it worked), but it can only be bluff. Whichever metric you use, the ratio of power between Russia and Europe is much greater than Ukraine to Russia.
While I tend to agree, reading through the various nuclear close calls as far as I can tell, there were far more on the Russian side than the American one, and while American nuclear incidents tended to be headed off with everyone following orders and working within established systems, Russian ones usually involve one guy literally refusing an order. It's hard to know how accurate all of this is, but it does imply deterrent through incompetence. The concern is not limited to intentional nuclear strikes, every time Russian forces get put on alert the threat of an accident grows. Putin likely knows this, and NATO is also very wary of it.
> if you look how poorly his troops are doing in Ukraine
s/are doing/have done/
History is replete with completely incompetent offenses that were highly useful and motivating learning experiences.
I'm not sure that Russia is culturally in a position to be their own schoolmaster here, but they could be. And they have virtually infinite domestic capacity to churn out, man, and power last-gen war materiel, even with sanctions.
Their war equipment is not "last-gen", they basically keep upgrading whatever was left of the USSR and they do sit on the huge stocks of non-modernized Soviet equipment, but eventually they will be left with a useless old and vulnerable hardware. Yes, they made some next-gen tanks and planes which are not combat ready yet but modern Russian industrial capability would be able to churn out only token numbers of those anyway, under sanctions and brain drain.
Russian equipment loss in this war won't be replaced for decades if not longer.
A ton of countries would join NATO ASAP (if allowed in, and several would be) or rush to form new collective defense coalitions that include at least one other nuclear power, which in many cases would likely come with significant concessions to that nuclear power (i.e. China gains a de facto, if smallish, empire overnight).
Everyone refuses to trade with Russia until they're reduced to one of the most miserable countries on the planet. If their nuke program falls apart, several countries take some territory from them and no-one minds. Possibly they're reduced to selling parts of the country (maybe on a lease-like arrangement, which isn't unprecedented) in exchange for re-opening limited trade with countries that are willing, but see that they really have them over a barrel (China, again, is a likely beneficiary)
Several countries start or re-prioritize nuclear programs. Turkey, Iran, South Korea, and maybe even Japan, all likely candidates. Maybe more.
That's roughly what I'd expect the world to do about it, if the result isn't a spiral into outright nuclear war, or a swift and decisive coup in Russia. No, it's not good, but it's especially not good for Russia.
That’s not what nuclear deterrence protects against. If he does that there will be other forms of escalation. A Iran/North Korean style set of economic sanctions possibly (I don’t think India and China would support Putin anymore at that point). Possibly a direct confrontation over Ukraine (no fly zone or a no fly zone by proxy, giving the Ukrainians the missile defence sufficient to clear the sky). Etc.
> You should look at it from Putin's point of view. Escalating with the west is even less of an option.
I see this differently.
My understanding of the Russian "heartland" narratives suggest Russia is dead if they cannot control Ukraine in the medium term. Their "multi polar" view suggests that they MUST be at the centre of an anti-US alliance extending across Asia, Europe and Africa.
From these perspectives they HAVE to fight this war now. Even if they lose now, they feel they have to keep trying.
Fair enough, I was thinking more of a classic win by defeating the Russian army on the battlefield. But the kind of loss the USSR had in Afghanistan might be possible without much if any help from abroad.
The kind of victory Afghanistant had also means ending up with deeply authoritarian and violent society. It implies complete destruction of democratic civil society, unfortunately.
>The kind of victory Afghanistant had also means ending up with deeply authoritarian and violent society.
The current Taliban are way, way more liberal than the 90s Taliban. They've embraced modern communication, dropped most of their Pashtun ethnic supremacy stuff and are a little less violent across the board. That's really a big change all things considered.
Depends on your definition of "fend off". Take back Crimea, I think not going to happen. Make it really hard for the Russians in Donbas, inflicting heavy losses, very achievable. Stopping the Russians from taking over the south, quite likely. The Russians taking over the whole country, that ship has sailed by now.
I don't know many western countries that would tolerate to be invaded, having some territory taken off without fighting back bitterly. I mean this is the whole story of ww1.
In the end it is up to the Ukrainians to decide how much pain they are willing to endure for their independence and freedom. But if they chose to fight, it's not our role to second guess their decision and it is our duty to help them (at least us Europeans - for US citizens, different story).
Russia is a paper bear, it makes up on quality with quantity but it's a vastly unpopulated country with an old population. Morale is low, equipment is old and in poor shape. Russia is an empire and have a large share of it's forces tied down to inner tensions and can't be employed. The gross of Russians soldiers are composed by ethnic and and poor soldiers thus some are more interested in stealing than fighting. Also Russian forces haven't been significantly employed in the last decades. It's no secret that poor equipped but combat experienced militia from Donbass/Lugansk are being more effective than better equipped and trained Russian forces.
This whole situation reminds me of the Spanish-American war. At the time Spain was thought to be a great world power, but in reality their ships were old and in disrepair, so much that a rag tag group of Americans defeated them in a few months. The whole Spanish empire collapsed afterwards.
> And nowhere on reddit or in the media do I see a discussion of the pros and cons of a Ukrainian surrender.
Isn't this up the ukranians themselves? I mean really.
Maybe the Americans should have just given up on their revolution in order to save more lives. There is no way they could win against the might of the british empire.
Yes, yes. Calling out the Russians for amassing 100k troops on the border of a single bordering nation was such an egregious escalation. If I was Putin and didn't plan on invading, what leaders up to half a world away were saying about my actions would absolutely make me change my mind and send them all over the border, anyway.
Not 10x. 146m vs 41m people… and a bigger percentage of Ukrainians are in the fight. Russia has only sent 200k troops to Ukraine.. ukraine has 500k active and reserve troops, not including civilians who take up arms.
Lest we forget how Joseph Stalin's military treated Russians who refused to fight (poorly armed and equipped, no less).
Just like many of the sportspeople who aren't in the country, even those who have left since the invasion, the majority of people who disagree with it are too afraid of the consequences for saying too much or saying anything against the Kremlin narrative.
As an example, a Nobel-winning journalist was assaulted by pro-Putin Russians in public, when he has even abided by the new laws.
Morale:
While the war is popular in Russia, that's mostly among older generation who won't be fighting in the war.
On the other hand Ukraine is highly motivated to not become a part of Russia.
Logistics:
The Russian military logistics are terrible, their military was built to wage a defensive war next to Russian railroads. They don't have much practice projecting power.
Kleptocracy:
The Russian commanders have been systematically stealing all of the money Putin was pumping into the military.
Training:
Since 2014 the Ukrainian military has undergone a revolution building a modern NATO trained military, the Russian military just isn't as good.
Command:
The Russian military does a lot of top down decision making, this means they can't react to news quickly. There observe -> decide -> act cycle is so long they can't really hit moving targets.
The only advantage Russia has is a larger population, and nuclear weapons. Every other advantage is to the Ukrainian's. Right now Russia has taken losses similar or worse than the absolutely worst his armies in the civil war. There are battalions where 80% of the soldiers are dead or wounded.
A large portion of the Russian military goes home in June, and they're going to have a tough time replacing them when Ukraine is viewed as a meat grinder.
Russian military conscript term of service is 12 months, and large chunk of the militaries conscripts will end their term of service and get to go home. They'll have to replace these conscripts with new ones but unless they declare a state of war it's going to be hard to find replacements because who wants to throw their life away walking into Ukraine which has had one of the highest casualty rates of any military in the last 200 years.
> And nowhere on reddit or in the media do I see a discussion of the pros and cons of a Ukrainian surrender. It's really hard to see how Ukraine will successfully fend off a country 10x its size. (If someone has an answer as to why that might be realistic, I'm open to hear it).
The status quo is far too advantageous for the pro-war segment of our national security establishment for that idea to get any traction. Currently we have a "moral" war for the first time since the Balkans, it's strengthening NATO, and Russia is being weakened at the expense of mere pocket change and outdated weapons. And from a PR perspective, the American public cares far less about Ukrainian casualties than dead American soldiers. Then there's the benefit of blaming Putin for inflation with "Putinflation" and advancing other goals like shutting down Nordstream 2 and selling LNG to Europe.
I'm pro-Ukraine, but I can't help but notice how average Ukrainians are being screwed by this conflict, while US foreign policy hawks are breaking out the champagne.
"average Ukrainians are being screwed by this conflict" because Russia decided to attack them and crush their resistance.
I feel sorry for the Ukrainians, having met a lot of refugees in Prague. But I don't believe that they would rather surrender and have "Russian peace". Some of them perhaps, but not the majority. They do not want to be yoked again.
Were "Russian peace" then means "comprehensive de-ukrainification and elimination of the intelligentsia to leave a braindead husk of a state behind", as publicly announced in Russia and partially implemented in occupied areas.
Are they going to end up with a better deal than what Russia was demanding before the war, or a worse one? Right now it's looking like worse, with Russia demanding territorial concessions in addition to Ukraine staying out of NATO.
And that's not even considering how Ukraine has taken thousands of casualties, has it's economy wrecked, had millions of people flee the country, and much of their infrastructure is ruined.
That compares the options as if the negotiation was a one-time thing. But game theory would say that giving in to Russian demands would get you … more demands.
Yes, any sort of demilitarization would make them into a satellite state, crushable at will.
They can possibly agree to territorial losses (though after all the bloodshed and murder I consider even that unlikely - not just that, but the West does not want Putin to gain anything from this war, so it will support Ukraine until victory, however long it takes), but not to any kind of hollowing out of their army. That would be a prolonged national suicide.
> You don't see any posts about Russia gaining territory
I have seen daily posts about Russia gaining territory in news. For weeks, it was daily report of Russian progression even with maps.
And Russia is not 10x bigger.
I have also seen more articles about nazi in Ukraine then nazi in Russia. In fact, Russian fascism and Putins rehabilitation of Stalin were oddly missing. For years, but also during this conflict.
It was only when invasion started to look like genocide journalists started to look more at who Russia actually is.
> It's really hard to see how Ukraine will successfully fend off a country 10x its size. (If someone has an answer as to why that might be realistic, I'm open to hear it).
Firstly, the size of a country doesn't immediately matter, it's more about the size of the army. E.g. China 50 years ago was bigger than the US, but couldn't "win" in a war with the US.
Having said that, wars are a political tool. For the most part, wars aren't about fighting until you "kill everyone" or anything like that. They are fought to achieve certain goals, and end when one side decides its goals aren't worth the price of the fight.
This is true in all situations - even in a war of conquest. Ukraine will put up a huge fight, because the goal is to stop themselves from being conquered. But there could come a point where they decide to surrender, because the death toll will be too high (or because the leadership is captured and threatened, or because the army is too fatigued to continue fighting and surrenders without the leadership, etc).
Likewise, it's possible that Russia decides to stop the fighting. This could be because they decide it's weakening the army too much (too many soldiers dying and munitions being used up). Or it could be because internal public opinion is too heavily against the war. It could even be for reasons that are only internally visible, like that Putin starts feeling that his position is threatened because of the war.
All Ukraine has to do is to keep up their resistance long enough for the war to not be worth continuing from Russia's side. Or for the rest of the world to decide to help more than they are, which is why Zelensky's main goal is to keep the front-and-center in the West's consciousness. How long that is (if it's even possible) nobody knows.
> don’t trust the narrative CNN and Fox News are trying to sell them
I've had a hard time with this one as for weeks it was "Russia is not advancing, yada yada" meanwhile the graphic they showed while saying this clearly showed a map with more occupied territory than the same map the day before and another city under siege which has deteriorated my trust where I was a skeptic before, I did at least think war reporting would be rather accurate. I really got the feeling they were trying to calm us down and getting those talking points from some unified source (the govt?) and worries me that this conflict does in fact have potential to get massively out of hand
The reporting on the war has been fairly consistent: that Russia initially captured a lot of territory in a rapid advance, but overextended themselves and bogged down. Now they're retreating from much of this territory and are trying to reinforce their forces in Donbas. That narrative seems to be well-supported by reporting, and it also perfectly explains what you observed. Don't think anyone is misleading you.
This is also what i have gathered, ive used mostly youtube and r/ukraine to get some views, i do realize they are highly skewed to ukranian side of the conflict, but i prefer it that way, the aggression is absolutely started by Russia so i have no sympathy for them.
Healthy skepticism is important, but I have so far been amazed at how much of the information circulated by the Ukrainian govt has ended up being independently validated. Much of what ends up on reddit is nonsense, but I have begun to trust the govt reports, as so far they seem to be less a distorted picture and more an up to date one.
For me, what makes it believable are the casualty numbers. Ukraine claims Russia lost ~750 tanks. Oryx visually confirmed about 500. The 2/3 ratio of confirmed kills, only via OSINT is insane. That makes claims about lost aircraft - which is way harder to confirm - at least decently believable.
It's amazing that someone can be better informed by purely reading Ukrainian official propaganda than by reading independent news agencies like Reuters. The first has incentives to not lie as to not lose international support while the latter for the sake of being impartial while being unable to verify what's really going on has to take Russian propaganda (which is vastly misinformation) at face value.
For the same reason it’s really easy to get a good idea of where Russia has been attacking, advancing, or retreating throughout the whole deal by simply monitoring the Ukraine propaganda telegram channel. They want to highlight any atrocities committed by Russia to the West on full blast so we get to hear about every missile in every town almost immediately after it happens.
Yes and even from Russia you can't get information if you read between the lines. TASS was quick to report that Moskva "suffered an accident" but the crew was evacuated and later that the ship sunken. It was a strong signal that the crew was NOT evacuated or at least suffered heavy casualties as it typical for this kind of thing. Though this yet to be proved.
Ukrainian propaganda for an instance is obviously not eager to report on their military losses but have to do so to counter-attack Russian propaganda. It's just that it makes sense to be truthful when you are morally justified and in overall winning.
>I've had a hard time with this one as for weeks it was "Russia is not advancing, yada yada"
Same here. I consider myself a big consumer of news from a variety of sources, and it's hard to get nearly any perspective except "Ukraine is dominating the battlefield". It's strange times, but this is the information war.
I think there is a natural instinct to not believe things that are obviously propaganda, so when confronted by a party telling an obvious fantasy it’s pretty important to get the other party’s version, even if also nonsense and hope to suss out the truth.
You don't have to look very hard for the other side's version though.
Question is whether you think "Russia made a planned withdrawal from the north of the country after completing all the objectives of this military exercise which definitely isn't a war" is a more plausible description of the short-lived invasion of the north of the country than "Russia's advances have slowed down... Russia stopped advancing... Russia is retreating...". Both narratives agree that the facts on the ground are that Russian troops made large scale incursions into the north of Ukraine but aren't there any more.
Yes, most Western media has sought to emphasize Russian casualties over Ukrainian ones and Ukrainian minor success over Russian ones, but it's not like Western media hasn't been free to predict Russia will have full control of Mariupol in a couple of days for over a month now and talk up the Russian convoy advancing on Kyiv which never made it there, or like the official Russian narrative isn't palpably absurd.
I mean, you don't fire large numbers of intelligence agents and generals in the middle of a war because you're winning.
Propaganda is one thing, but right now every report we have, incoming from Russian state media, points in the direction of "Russia is getting their ass kicked".
> The baseline expectation was Ukraine folding within 3-4 days
I think the West expected better but not lot better, it does seem that was about what Russia expected (possibly on bad political intelligence on how the population would respond to an invasion.)
To me, it seemed that west expected Ukraine to fold too. And the west also have circles that admire Russia quite a lot while Ukraine was not taken seriously until they started to be serious in battle field.
You still have fawning over Russian this and that, culture, shock over their army being disorganized and corrupt or looting etc, despite them being like that always. While Ukraine was mostly non-existent.
> To me, it seemed that west expected Ukraine to fold too
That was pretty explicitly stated by a number of officials, I just get the feeling that they thought the timeline would be longer than what the Russians were thinking, but probably in the 2-3 week window for the government, in any meaningful form, holding out, with the situation, at best being guerilla resistance after that.
It's funny, I don't recall seeing any pro-Russian sources stating that the goal was to capture all of Ukraine. In fact, they've publicly stated their goals since the beginning, and annexing all of Ukraine was never listed. Where did this idea in the media come from, since it didn't come from Russia..?
Because a state-run news site accidentally published a victory article.
"Ukraine has returned to Russia...It will be reorganized, re-established and returned to its natural state as part of the Russian world...[Russia, Belarus and Ukraine will now act] in geopolitical terms as a single whole,"
Also if you take the time to notice what Putin is saying and doing you will realize that denazification = genocide. The goal was not to arrest Hitler's fans but to destroy Ukrainian nationality.
Firstly, the claim that Russia is actually doing actual "denazification" is such obvious rubbish that no sentient informed person should come close to believing it.
What they do is far more informative than what they say. What they say also includes Mr Putin's frankly unhinged speeches calling for more Russian Lebensraum.
Second, the point of such disinformation is not necessarily to make everyone believe this story, but to muddy that waters so much that people are no longer sure where the truth lies, they either fall back to the "well, there must be truth on both sides" or just give up on ever finding out the truth.
Thus, this kind of disinformation does not need to even be self-consistent or even that believable. But it does need to be relentlessly sent out.
The Ukrainian Azov Battalion is very much proudly Nazi in their ideology, and they don't hide it. Where does this defense of them and their Nazi ideology come from? Nobody disputes they are Nazi's and yet we are supposed to defend them because Russia is the aggressor? Or is there another reason?
Yes, I did and they verify the Nazi ideology of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion. Nobody denies the Azov Battalion is full of Nazi's. That's why you're being coy with your responses, rather than providing a source that would dispute it.
> In fact, they've publicly stated their goals since the beginning, and annexing all of Ukraine was never listed.
Well, their publicly stated goal was "this is a training exercise how dare you accuse us of anything", and we all saw how much truth there was to that.
It makes perfect sense not to trust everything Putin says. That doesn't answer the questions though - where did our media get the idea that Russia ever intended on annexing all of Ukraine? They tell us this was a goal, but what is the source of that claim? Russia never made that claim. Only some in the media have, shouldn't we expect sources for claims like that?
..and the central city of Kyiv was the furthest east Russia ever went, which leads us back to the question of where people got the idea that Russia ever intended to annex all of Ukraine.
…you think the most likely explanation is that the Russians attacked Kyiv because that was the furthest west they wanted? They’d just leave the rest alone?
No, the most obvious answer is that they went there to destroy high value targets to weaken Ukraine militarily, making it far easier to do what they want to do in the Donbass/Crimean land bridge area. Now rather than having to deal with the Ukrainian air force, tank units, air defense etc. those obstacles are mostly gone.
> So to put it bluntly, if the 'clever plan' was to lose 10,000 KIA to set conditions to walk away with the Donbas, that's a stupid plan. That's winning the negotiation on a $15k car by cleverly offering an opening bid of $55k and throwing in your old car as a sweetener.
The Donbas isn't really the main target for Russia, since that is already essentially ruled by separatist pro-Russian forces for years. The prize is the area west of there and to the south, connecting Crimea by land and freeing up the water resources that have been blocked.
Admittedly I'm not a historian like the Twitter guy with the bad analogies, but I suspect the furthest west that Russia seeks to control is Kherson (not Odessa), then following the water going back NE of there to Zaporizhzhia & then all the way up towards Kharkiv in some fashion. This gives Russia a ton of natural[1] and industrial resources, plus significantly weakens Ukraine, without having to try and occupy the more populated and less Russian areas west of there towards Kyiv and further. Putin will likely try to sell this as necessary to provide a buffer zone for the heavily Russian Donbas region from Ukrainian shelling.
That being said, I'm just some turd on the internet so I'm probably wrong and nobody knows for sure what Putin's long term plan is.
Well according to the Russian media the west and Lviv particularly was the hotbed of Nazism (back a month ago some distinction was made that that was the particularly bad part of Ukraine, but now it's all teeming with Nazis), so denazification would have to involve the west too. I think it's pretty clear the goal was to replace the government at least, and if they could get another Lukashenko that in itself is almost "annexing"
Well the Azov Battalion was and is in Mariupol (not Lyiv), and they are the vanguard of the Nazi element in Ukraine. As to your point about Putin wanting a more pro-Russian government in Ukraine, of that I have no doubt.
"Azov's military and political wings formally separated in 2016, when the far-right National Corps party was founded. The Azov battalion had by then been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard.
An effective fighting force that's very much involved in the current conflict, the battalion has a history of neo-Nazi leanings, which have not been entirely extinguished by its integration into the Ukrainian military."
I note that they also say "Moscow has given the regiment an outsized role in the conflict" ... "Ukraine "is not a cesspit for Nazi sympathizers" ... "There are far-right actors prominent in Russia, too." ... "For its part, Russia also has a thriving ultra-nationalist scene that is tolerated by the authorities." ... " some experts say Russia's fixation on a minor player like the Azov movement serves a purpose -- allowing the Kremlin to frame the conflict as an ideological and even existential struggle. However remote from reality that may be."
> "Azov's military and political wings..."
And which one - military or political - is of interest to you?
The first, the military wing, is just another regiment (not a Battalion) under regular military command now.
There are _militant nationalists_ in a country's _national military_ ? No shit, that's literally the right place for them. Any country will be the same: people who want to fight for their country are a natural fit for ... fighting for thier country. Tell me that the USA doesn't have any gung-ho conservative patriots in the armed services ranks before you make a big deal out of this.
This is not remarkable about Ukraine outside of Russian propaganda, as the above CBS and CNN links make clear.
You say that the army is "very much involved in the current conflict"? No fooling, what else would the actual army be doing in wartime?
The second, political:
Myth: "Nazism is rampant in Ukrainian politics and society, supported by authorities in Kyiv."
Reality: "The candidate for the far-right nationalist party, Svoboda, won 1.6% of the vote in the 2019 presidential election."
That is not an indicator of widespread "neo-Nazi leanings".
So why do you continually bring this misleading scare story up? It's nothing but Russian propaganda talking points that don't have basis in current reality. The CBS link above made that clear, but you did not respond to it. Your own CNN report says the same.
Talk to us about the same in Russian military (e.g. Wagner Group) and society (Mr Putin's recent unhinged speeches calling for more Russian Lebensraum) before you say that this is a Ukrainian problem.
So first you say Azov no longer exists, and then when you get called out for spreading disinformation, you write a text wall explaining why although the Azov Nazi's are very much still prevalent in Ukraine and fighting in this conflict, that it doesn't matter.
no, I said that "the Azov Battalion" hasn't existed since 2015, when it ceased to be either independent of the military or a Battalion. This doesn't stop you using the misleading phrase.
> and then when you get called out
Cherry-picking quotes from a CNN article, without attribution, does not constitute a "call out".
> you write a text wall
I'm sorry if you didn't take the time to read it, but that is not a counter-argument in any way. First you say "you can't back up your claims with sources" then you change to "oh no, too many claims and sources, and thanks for locating my source for me, but let me fail to talk about any of them at all, but let's repeat a slur word and finish up with a 'zinger'!".
Well his take is a very polite and admirable way of calling Russia's arguments blatant lies without calling them blatant lies, and calling their perpetrators liars without calling them liars.
What you replied to said nothing about annexing all of Ukraine. Almost all evidence suggests Russia expected they would capture Kyiv and Ukraine would capitulate quickly.
Except Putin has publicly stated his goals since before the invasion and during, and they've not publicly changed. And at no point was annexing all of Ukraine a stated goal. I only bring it up because I'm curious where it came from.
> Except Putin has publicly stated his goals since before the invasion and during, and they've not publicly changed.
Sometimes what a person says and a person does don’t agree. In situations like that—you don’t need to believe what they say! You can just accept they lied and move on.
Maps of territory are a terrible way to show the state of the war. This article provides some color and might help underscore why the narrative could be correct even if the maps look otherwise: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/07/russia-war-ukraine-maps...
Maps of territory are a terrible way of showing ANY political conflict.
It's the same as the maps of county-by-county US election results that show a sea of red that equate to a population smaller than LA county.
People are the important unit in political conflicts and Russia is very much struggling to take any meaningfully populated area (See: Chernobyl, a place where sane humans refuse to go, being one of the first trophies)
I fully agree but it's my go to when my level of time investment is very low. First few weeks I was checking in maybe 5 minutes a day for the headlines, saw no real ground footage and only the maps and cities under siege. The next couple weeks I checked in less frequently but began seeing more imagery of the destruction/human toll. As of now, I haven't looked at any news on the topic this week at all.
The article you linked to disagrees: "Maps, after all, remain crucial for our understanding of conflicts. Even if they are abstractions, they remain immensely useful."
Maps should not be treated as simple visualizations. They can (and should) contain plenty of information, and interpreting them properly often takes a lot of skill and effort.
I can't remember a time in my life when war reporting was accurate.
I do find it interesting, though, that the media is willing to show the civilian casualties of this war, when there was a practical media blackout on the same type of reporting of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.
That's not surprising at all. American forces had a very bad experience with reporters that reported damning stories about them in Vietnam. In Iraq and Afghanistan they took actions to make that kind of reporting hard, and the reporting they wanted easy. It wasn't even that secret and I'm fairly sure I at least saw some reporting on that they where doing this in Norwegian, and possibly British media.
There is a lot of OSINT now, given that the war theatre is located in a developed country with network coverage and a dozen million smartphones. From this point of view, accuracy is probably better than in previous wars. We didn't have much OSINT from Hindu Kush.
> I did at least think war reporting would be rather accurate.
I can't imagine why. There are massive disinformation campaigns and only a psychopath could be an impartial observer while watching two sides kill each other.
The "fog of war" is hard to penetrate for anyone, from reporters to combatants.
Maybe accurate is the wrong word, but consistent based on the information available even if disinformation. I didn't expect the new to be the source of the disinformation in regards to war. It also seemed to me to take a very long time to get any real footage of what was going on, war correspondents and so on.
I recall with the early days of Iraq and the Baghdad invasion that I felt like I was getting the full picture. Perhaps because it was US forces with journalists in tow. The reason we were there was highly questionable and suspicious but I felt like I was getting a rather accurate picture of what happened on the ground.
I say all this but should also mention that my perception could also be significantly off. I am not a regular consumer of news and this just happens to be what I'd see when I decided to get a quick update on the situation.
If the Russian invasion of Ukraine has taught me anything, it's that a) while overt Russian propaganda seems to largely fail in Europe, the more subtle suggestions are widespread b) most people have genuinely horribly bad defense takes c) there are somewhat more tankies than I expected
The number of tankies has been impressive. I'm not sure how anyone can look at Russia and think "yea, they made some good points," and I study misinformation professionally. It's not even on the believable scale.
> Gen Z is also more diverse and broadly anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”) [...] and feel less connected to European conflicts than previous generations. [...] Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. [...] You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.
I've noticed this too, and I need to make a point:
In the long run, this will be a serious security threat to Europe.
In this, Europe took almost completely the wrong lessons regarding America's role in NATO. Yes a stronger NATO is good. Yes, stronger ties to America are necessary to counter Russia.
But now is not the time to abandon strategic autonomy. Just the opposite. Macron is right, just as DeGaulle before him was right. Yes, Europe should ally with the United States, but it also must begin to stand on its own two feet.
Why? Because the next American generations don't give a shit about Europe. In a very deep way, Europeans have not absorbed the social earthquakes that have hit the United States. In younger American minds, Europe doesn't matter. Ukraine doesn't matter.
Europe should maintain its alliances, but it also needs to plan for a future in which it depends only on itself for its defense. It needs to do this seriously and as though its life depends on it.
>In this, Europe took almost completely the wrong lessons regarding America's role in NATO.
I think you misinterpret what Europe is doing, because it's mostly doing exactly what you propose. Hell, even Germany seriously plans to overhaul it's dismal army.
It seems likely that "gen z" americans have few clues about what historic and present day russia is, and generally about the land mass between Poland and Korea.
They are just now waking up from two years of debating whether not wearing masks was a hate crime.
Maybe in their minds, the conditions on the opposite side of the world just seem too brutal to belong in the same reality. It looks and sounds too crazy to be real, so they can't decide if it's fake.
I was a high school student during the collapse of the SU and even before that had a bit of a fascination on Russia. When I went to college (~1992), I took a Russian Politics class because I wanted to understand the collapse and what was going to happen. at the end of the course the teacher asked if we thought that Russia was on its way to becoming a western democracy and we all nodded. He said "you learned NOTHING! Nothing has changed in Russia except a slightly newer generation is in power. Their leadership and government are still corrupt and are handing over the russian state assets to oligarchs who share little with the people of russia. By the way, keep your eyes on these guys Khodorkovky (the oligarch) and Zhirinovsky (the ultra-nationalist) as they represent two directions that Russia could go."
I don't recall putin or medvedev ever being mentioned in that class, but it's clear that's the time that mattered to them, defining their worldview.
>"you learned NOTHING! Nothing has changed in Russia except a slightly newer generation is in power.
Words of Wisdom. It is the same with China as well. On the surface your might think things are moving in the direction to whatever you viewed or desire, western democracy in this case. But as your professor stated. Nothing has changed.
Neither is correct. Gen Z, like all young generations, is idealistic, anti-status quo, and thinks their experiences and perspectives are completely unique and novel. As they get older they will transition, hopefully retaining some of their more progressive and forward thinking values, which will become imbedded in society and so the cycle will continue.
The problem is we are not seeing this "As they get older they will transition" that usually happens.
What we are seeing, is that the transition out of the idealistic world view, is happening at a much later age. That is already happening with Gen Y or Millennials, and especially those in Tech. People who are over 40s still have these simplistic world view.
I dont know what it is about Tech. But it is especially problematic in tech.
Former university lecturer here. In my experience, gen Z have ZERO understanding of history or geopolitics. I'm serious, they just don't know what happened before their lifetime and cannot hold a coherent conversation about historical events or the geopolitical realities which flow from them. So no, this is not true.
I have dealt with people on a large spectrum of literacy -- it is true that many people have little practical knowledge of even major international events, but a simple measure misses an important point. People care about those events to vastly different degrees; people know about those events to vastly different degrees; and then people know and care about parts of real history, in skewed and incomplete ways, as an inevitable part of the human condition.
by example -- I knew about ancient greeks partly due to interest in classics as a young intellectual.. most people at that age did not know any details of ancient greeks. But I did not care very much about military history, so even if I knew it, I didnt factor it into relevant thinking. Next, wrt middle ages history of Ottoman slave society, fluxes in military rule in North Africa, or endless tribal and cultural clashes in eastern Europe.. I just did not know many of those things, to this day. Maybe I might care, but I had literally not heard of certain things (like Mongols in Poland, or Napolean imprisoning a sitting Pope, or Vikings in Turkey) and did not know they existed, even as as active learner.
So to sum up, people may know a little bit, but do not care, therefore do not apply it to reasoning. Even people who do have greater capacity for details, may not know, due to incomplete learning and local teaching of history. Last, wikipedia really is a remarkable thing in our time.
what's really crazy is my 12 year old is watching a lot of political stuff on youtube and was asking me about what will happen with belarus, and the fate of all the other ex-soviet union countries. He also asks a bunch about world war II, which in my opinion is the most important historical event to understand because it's what led to the current situation.
> Or, maybe, they grew up talking to people from all over the world and have a far better understanding than boomers raised on television
I would argue precisely the opposite.
Support in tech for Ukraine is quite high because most people have worked with Ukranian programmers, generally find them to be decent human beings like all human beings, and seeing posts/pictures from someone you know in the midst of being attacked upsets you.
Most Americans working non-tech jobs, even the supposedly worldly younger-than-Boomers, have never had contact with somebody outside American borders. Tech can expand your world. Tech can also simply provide a safe bubble that never disturbs your delicate sensibilities.
Case in point, had a meeting at the beginning of this week where the meeting request 'accept' included "we might have to cut short this meeting should the sirens sound, thank you for your patience". Brings things into sharp focus.
>Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. Same with the Azov Batallion which some people believe are the entire Ukrainian army.
Maybe I'm old but I haven't seen any of these things. Where do you find all of these?
> It is not uncommon for Ukrainians to refer to African-Americans as “[N-Word]”. Volunteers of color may be called 'a monkey' or may see children’s games with Blackface. Being aware of the history of dehumanization for people of African descent may help inform where this comes from; it does not justify it. It will be at your discretion to determine the intent.
[2]
> "Problems arise when young foreigners are prioritised over women and children of Ukrainian citizenship who are trying to get on the same trains."
> "Maybe we will put all foreigners in some other place so they won’t be visible and there won’t be conflict with Ukrainians trying to flee in the same direction. This is something that has to be taken care of and we will be doing it."
[3]
> Ukrainian servicemen help evacuate civilians near Irpin, #Ukraine. Three civilians were killed as Russian mortar rounds landed, striking a route used by civilians fleeing southeast toward #Kyiv.
I haven’t personally watched any but I did see them thrown around in thread about India-Russian relations (videos of Indians being discriminated against by Ukrainians.)
As a younger millennial on the left, I am routinely frustrated by "anti-imperialist" attitudes (especially among my generation, and younger). I think "anti-imperialist" is one of the least useful labels for a political worldview in contemporary politics.
Prior to the invasion, there was rampant criticism of NATO, and calls for its dissolution, on left-wing media, as an instrument of American imperialism, despite the fact that Russia has a history of aggression against post-Soviet states (e.g. Georgia) in the 21st century. With the outbreak of the war (outside of east Ukraine), some have walked back the more extreme aspects of those statements (as NATO's potential usefulness has been illustrated), but American imperialism via NATO is still discussed in the same breath as Russian imperialism via a military invasion and territorial annexation.
The truth is we have very little choice in our great powers or global hegemonies, and I will always take the NATO brand of "imperialism" (e.g. where countries literally ask for American military bases to ward against actual aggression) over the Russian brand. Should we be skeptical of NATO? Of course, as we should with all power structures, especially when they engage in actual violence; but to not have a nuanced discussion about what actual imperialism looks like in the 21st century, and to simply be blanket "anti-imperialist," is juvenile, and I'd argue probably detrimental to those that actually feel its real world effects.
>Prior to the invasion, there was rampant criticism of NATO, and calls for its dissolution, on left-wing media
Can you provide examples? I have not seen this, and as dissolution of NATO or otherwise weakening NATO was a goal of the previous administration, I am confused at this claim.
You've vastly oversimplified the politics of the American left and right, which are themselves varied. Just because Trump criticized NATO member states and potentially weakened NATO with his rhetoric, does not mean it was ever actual policy of the mainstream Republican Party, or really even the Trump administration, to dissolve NATO. In fact, Trump himself now claims that, if not for him, there would be no NATO [1]. Trump is a president that ran on no clear platform (e.g. his 2020 presidential campaign did not even publish one) or real coherent policy.
With that in mind, here is an article from 2018 in Jacobin, a left-wing magazine, saying that, regardless of Trump's comments, NATO's continued existence remains a valid question [2]; in fact, the Democratic Socialists of America (the primary progressive/socialist/labor party in the US) has calls for the US to immediately withdraw from NATO as part of its stated policy, even after the Russian invasion of western Ukraine [3]. These are among the most well stated positions regarding NATO skepticism on the American left, but similar opinions were expressed throughout left-wing independent media in the months leading up to the invasion (and earlier).
When you state you are a "millennial on the left", In the context of US / Americans, does left here means Democrats, or does left here means left on the political spectrum. Or at least left in the US political spectrum. ( Since left in US and left in UK are largely if not completely different )
Because I have seen a lot of "NATO skepticism on the American left". I dont even think the word skepticism is correct. They literally wanted to cancel NATO.
Wouldn't your view, in this case be more aligned as what is called centre-left? Especially in the context of US. Because if an outsider were to judge the US Left purely from Internet / Social Media / TV / Mass Media, than being pro-NATO ( so to speak ) is very much a right wing or non left wing view.
I mean left on the political spectrum, and certainly far more left-wing than mainstream Democrats or "center" left (even in a British or European context). Additionally, I use the term skepticism here similarly to how the term euroskepticism is used to encompass varying degrees of criticism for the European Union (including criticism that involves full withdrawal of all member states), just in this case in regard to NATO. As I said in my initial comment, I'm well aware that many on the left want to see the dissolution of NATO.
I don't think I would describe myself necessarily as pro-NATO, I just don't think its dissolution is reasonable, and I think its actually quite arguable that NATO dissolution would be a net negative. With that in mind, it's not uncommon for people, who are otherwise very far off from one another on the ideological or political spectrum, to agree (or at least agree in policy outcome) on individual issues (especially foreign policy ones). That's the nature of using a relatively one-dimensional spectrum to describe a complex system of beliefs.
>That's the nature of using a relatively one-dimensional spectrum to describe a complex system of beliefs.
Yes. I mean internet discussions are already hard on any subject with just text and little context. And politics is possibly the worst of all subjects.
> despite the fact that Russia has a history of aggression against post-Soviet states (e.g. Georgia) in the 21st century.
The aggression against georgia was due to NATO. Just like the current aggression against ukraine. NATO's existence is a threat to world peace just like the soviet union was. Any sane person would be for the elimination of NATO.
> and I will always take the NATO brand of "imperialism"
Yeah because syria, libya, etc are doing so great. NATO's imperialism has murdered far more people than russia's. Even in europe - yugoslavia.
> (e.g. where countries literally ask for American military bases to ward against actual aggression) over the Russian brand.
There are ukrainians who asked russia to protect them too...
> The aggression against georgia was due to NATO. Just like the current aggression against ukraine. NATO's existence is a threat to world peace just like the soviet union was. Any sane person would be for the elimination of NATO.
A complete inversion of reality. Post-soviet states want to be part of NATO because they are afraid of Russian agression, and Russia is afraid of those states joining NATO, because that means it cannot agress against them. Hence, Russia starting border conflicts in countries that wish to join NATO in order to secure Russia's ability for further aggression later.
If you don't mind me asking, do you think the invention of the nuclear bomb was a mistake, and the world would be better off if nukes wouldn't have existed (1945-)?
> Post-soviet states want to be part of NATO because they are afraid of Russian agression, and Russia is afraid of those states joining NATO, because that means it cannot agress against them.
There is some truth in that. But you are conveniently leaving out the other part. These post-soviet states are threatened with economic isolation/attacks/destruction/etc from "NATO/EU/US". Lets not pretend we are saints. The empire that needs to go today isn't the soviet union or russa. It's NATO. The greatest source of destruction, death, instability around the world.
> because that means it cannot agress against them.
What exactly prevents aggression against post-soviet states? Nothing. All their membership means is that they get to serve as buffers/firing range. Instead of germany or france taking the brunt of the bombs, it will be poland, latvia, etc. If russia invaded a post-soviet state, which country in NATO will come to their defense if it meant getting nuked by russia? Do you think britain is willing to get london nuked over lithuania? Think france will sacrifice paris? Every international treaty has been broken for a reason. If russia marched into poland or lithuania tomorrow, we'd all say see you in another 60 years.
> If you don't mind me asking, do you think the invention of the nuclear bomb was a mistake, and the world would be better off if nukes wouldn't have existed (1945-)?
No. I think every country should get nukes. Who doesn't want ukraine to get nukes? Russia and NATO. Think about it. Who doesn't want poland, lithuania, estonia, etc from getting nukes? NATO. What would have kept ukraine safe? What would keep post-soviet states safe? Nukes.
Lonely north korea angrily firing missiles into the sea of japan is far more secure than any post soviet state in NATO. You would think these post-soviet states would have learned their lesson, but they apparently have not. The only thing these countries have going for them is russia's weak economic position and the lack of incentive to invade post soviet states. Simple as that. Is there any sane lithuanian who truly believes any country is willing to suffer nuclear destruction on their behalf?
I see a weird dissonance in your post - you clearly believe in nuclear deterrence, but also negate that NATO - a nuclear alliance - provides deterrence, and claim that it would be better for nations to not be part of NATO, but have their own small nuclear force instead.
The first point is something that you'll have to resolve yourself, so I'd actually like the time to disagree on your second point - that a small nuclear force provides deterrence against major powers, like North Korea. North Korea has a very small nuclear arsenal, and an even smaller number of carrier missiles; this is exactly the threat you counter with BMD, and indeed, if you look at a map of where the US's BMD is located, you will find that it's squarely pointed at North Korea. North Korea is safe for other reasons, not because it could lob a nuclear-tipped missile at the US; it could lob nukes at various US allies, this provides deterrence, and is more difficult to defend against (and, as you would expect from this line of reasoning, both Japan and South Korea have been investing and continue to do so a lot into BMD). And North Korea is of course in a range where it could glass Seoul using conventional weapons, which is virtually impossible to defend against. On top of that there is an unclear amount of China in the back of North Korea; it seems unlikely that you could intervene in NK without China doing something.
The situation is even worse for a country like Lithuania. Even assuming they bring up their own nuclear arms program without Russia or anyone else intervening, which seems like one heck of an assumption to me, deterrence requires that you're actually able to feasibly launch something. This essentially rules out land-based nukes, because Lithuania is too small and all possible locations are too close to Russian land forces or naval forces to be able to launch a missile without giving a large window to intercept it. Air-based nukes are out for similar reasons, the country is small enough that air defenses would cover most of it. So now you're looking at SLBMs and the submarines that go with them.
There is only country that managed to do something like this, and that's Israel. And it does not border on another nuclear country, not even close - in part because they actively prevent that from happening.
> Lets not pretend we are saints. The empire that needs to go today isn't the soviet union or [russia]. It's NATO. The greatest source of destruction, death, instability around the world.
This would have played a decade ago, or even after Russia's quasi-covert military actions in Ukraine in 2014 that were easily relativized away. But these days, tens of thousands of humans in mass graves and billions worth of destroyed civilian infrastructure say otherwise.
The USian economic empire is a malevolent force, for sure. But Russia's industrial genocide and concomitant domestic nosedive into totalitarianism is on a completely different level, on a scale that we thought was a relic of the 20th century. Equating the two demonstrates a staggeringly foolish lack of perspective.
The civilian casualties in ukraine since 2014 is about 3,000. Not sure where you get tens of thousands.
> But Russia's industrial genocide and concomitant domestic nosedive into totalitarianism is on a completely different level, on a scale that we thought was a relic of the 20th century.
You do realize that far more people died in iraq, afghanistan, etc than will ever die in ukraine right?
That fact that you have to outright lie shows that your position is wrong.
> The civilian casualties in ukraine since 2014 is about 3,000. Not sure where you get tens of thousands.
He is clearly referring to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
> You do realize that far more people died in iraq, afghanistan, etc than will ever die in ukraine right?
Iraq was notably not a NATO operation, and Afghanistan was a protracted twenty year long war that saw some ~50 000 civilian deaths. At this point, considering the intensity and very high casualty numbers in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it's hardly credible to claim to know how many will "ever die in Ukraine" if we don't even know where that war is going, let alone how and when it will end. Above you also brought up Syria, which is again not a NATO operation, and Libya, where some 10 000 NATO air-strikes ended up killing less than hundred civilians [1]. Would it be better if those 40-70-ish people not have died? Obviously. Is an amortized 0.7 % chance of a given air-strike killing one civilian showing that NATO targeted civilians? I think not. That brings up to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which if I recall is the only time NATO actually did something without UNSC (~everything) or Article 5 (~once) authorization, solely based on all NATO members agreeing to do it. Personally, I think it was the right thing to do, but it was done the wrong way legally and operationally.
[1] A popular claim on social media is that NATO killed over 500 000 civilians in Libya, which would amount to about 10 % of the population at the time.
Fog of war means there is no good count of casualties. Tens of thousands is my earnest order of magnitude based on rough estimations I've heard reading about various sites of atrocities. A good faith estimation is not a "lie". If anything, repeating an extremely conservative lower bound as if it were the full story is closer to being a lie (see also: the official USG Iraq body count versus unofficial ones).
The magnitude of the Iraq body count is horrendous, agreed. USG unilaterally deciding to attack Iraq is undeniably evil, agreed. If the US empire diminished, it would be a good thing - assuming it were due to underlying causes weakening the fundamental viability of large influence structures, and not simply different empires becoming more powerful.
But since we're talking about war, and not say cryptography bolstering personal liberty, then I'll begrudgingly accept the least-worst empire. And that is the role the US is playing in this situation, supporting Ukraine's self-defense against an aggressive totalitarianism-resurgent Russia. It does bother me to say that, knowing weapons manufacturers and other architects of USG's aggressive wars are making bank, and knowing the perverse incentive is for USG to string Ukraine along with just enough supplies to damage Russia but not make for a decisive end to the war. But I remember I am against Russia's imperialist attack on Ukraine for the same exact reasons I was against USG's imperialist attack on Iraq. The roles of the players have changed, so I must incorporate nuance to my views rather than leaning on the same old USG-bad heuristic.
If I may, my impression is also that the younger generations don't "get" war. Why would I, ever shoot someone just like me because his/her/xyr government has forced them to point a rifle at me?
They've been raised in a post-modernist neo-marxist environment that very clearly marks the Western order as evil. To them, there is no "good vs evil", because they are evil and the West has no redeeming factors.
Why would you fight to defend that? Why fight to spread that?
Add a keen awareness of the Elites (however you define them) as the sole beneficiaries or war. The conscript or recruit on the ground pays the price so some WEF-agenda shareholder gets to see a bigger dividend this quarter? Hard pass fam.
Add in a general anxiety about everything: from talking to a stranger to the impeding collapse of life on Earth due to climate change within X years (where X is always a handful of years away), and war doesn't make sense. There are Bigger Issues than some lines on the map drawn by Evil White Men.
Now obviously this is all a generalization, and all of it goes out the window the minute someone shoots at you, but it's going to be interesting to watch what tactics have to be used to get an unwilling generation in the metaphorical front lines.
I guess I'm part of that generation you're talking about, and it it really feels like only one of the things you listed matters:
> Why would I, ever shoot someone just like me because his/her/xyr government has forced them to point a rifle at me?
It's irrespective of the western order being evil or anything to do with climate change. Sure, there's a sense that the elites are the only beneficiaries of war, but even before that you'd have to explain why it's okay to shoot someone for someone else's _benefit_, even if it's our own. The very idea is absurd.
I think most millennial sorts are on board with the idea of a "war to stop atrocity", but that's about it. Why would you hurt someone to get what you want? How medieval.
This is somewhat shortsighted. You can replace 'country' by 'place where you live' and then you can decide what you're going to do about it, let it all happen, don't care while your family and children are being murdered because it doesn't really matter to you but that's not how it works in practice. In practice people will defend the place that they live in from external aggression.
Wherever your family lives, scattered or concentrated, when the place you live gets invaded a lot of the people around you die. You might be willing to flee all the time with no particular attachment to any place. This is uncommon but not impossible. Anyway war or submission will get you sooner or later.
Which is my point: if you don't care about "your" country, the theories don't go out the window. You might stay consistent and move instead of deciding that killing the invaders is what you do now.
My point is that at the end you won't have any place left to go, especially if a large part of the population behaves like you. No resistance whatsoever will make life much easier for invaders, so there will be more of them all around the world. The solution is not to flee, it's to eradicate the idea of prevailing using force or indoctrination.
That's all true regardless if your world is composed of houses, villages, countries, continents, or whatever else. What matters here is aggression, not aggression to countries, and focusing on countries only blurs the message.
That's why I pointed out that the position as stated is relevant only to the nationalist ideology.
I think in this case it's more than that... Russia (or at least Putin) is trying to impose a certain worldview that's very regressive: pro-oil, heavy censorship, against several human rights (including LGBT), autocratic regime. I think there's a lot of merit to resisting this regime, resisting being taken by force and turned into the opposite of what they want (which was to join more progressive European countries, from what I gather).
It's all connected... if you let oil-hungry autocrats rule the world, climate change is completely out of the window. Also human rights and ideals we should all stand for.
I do want peace as soon as possible. I believe a compromise might be necessary. I think Putin's worldview has been shown critically dated, so hopefully Russians can rise against this sort of government eventually. It's very difficult to rise up when your life is threatened by the regime though, but reason and truth tend to find their way through the cracks.
---
I am specially moved because of the parallels to Nazi invasions. Doing nothing proved a grave mistake, not standing up for human rights, giving fascists the benefit of the doubt cost so many lives. I've said "never again" too. It's easy to fact-check the fascist lies in this case.
I suggest any new generations read Anne Frank's diary if you can.
---
Also: don't believe narratives of doom. There's no doom incoming immediately, not from nuclear war (it's been shown it would doom civilization at least), not from climate change (we're in a pathway for significant damage, but it will be decades until it reaches its consequences, and it`s certainly no doom[1]). Doom narratives and hopelessness can create inaction, which is not what we want. Hope is the most powerful weapon for change.
Also, I don't want to come off as a cultural absolutist, I think other countries can have different cultures than standard western; but conquering and imposing culture with violence does not respect basic humanity. Also, we should be able to defend and evolve every culture with peaceful discussion, communication and schooling instead of bombs; and even incorporate other cultures as we see fit (this is a big theme here in Brazil related to our modern art week :) ).
Ideally, yes. But democratic countries have a fatal flaw that we don't really have a good solution for, democracy can vote itself out of existence to be replaced with fascism and the only way to reset it that we know about is through war. This is a real problem.
This attitude dissolves when the opposing army comes to your city. It's kill or be killed, and there are many people who do not share your pacifism. How detached from reality must you be to write this comment and the ones following? Frankly I'm surprised such genes have survived in the pool this long; your beliefs are dysgenic and suicidal. When the enemy comes, or they 'just' seize your farms, you fight or you die.
Not wanting to kill 'the enemy', even when under fire, is not a millenial invention. It's basic human nature. See "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" for more.
I feel like your post has a hint of disapproval in it--or maybe I'm just inserting that--but I find it describes my feelings (US born 1988) perfectly accurately, yes.
So you have no problem with Russia ultimately "winning" in Ukraine and then mass executing Ukrainians (like they did in Buscha and probably other towns) who don't want to be turned into Russian slaves and have their culture destroyed? You think NATO should roll over and let this happen when we can probably stop it by sending Ukraine weapons to fight back? Just don't care because it's "over there? I am just trying to understand this mindset. (Straddling millenial and gen-x age here)
There are few parts to this, but a lot of it comes down to non-interventionism and skepticism of the information provided. I can give a few thoughts that I hold to some degree.
I don't have a personal problem with Russia "winning". How could it possibly be "my" problem. It isn't impacting me and it not my responsibility.
I think that my country has a long history of intervention abroad, and it is nearly always shown to be negative and self interested in hindsight.
In past interventions, most of the information presented to the public is lies and propaganda, so I have essentially no faith any any of the reporting on the current war.
I think the US involvement in this war has resulted in escalated death and destruction, and prevented peaceful resolution.
If it were up to me (as a non-interventionist), the US would have agreed to keep NATO out of Ukraine, and thereby avoided the deaths that occurred. If it were up to me, I would have also offered this in negotiation for Russia pulling out of Ukraine after the war started.
I get war (kind of… never fought one). But I don’t get why this war is my war. It’s a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. We have no sworn defense pact with Ukraine, except that if nuclear aggression arises from some other power, we defend them from such.
Why do I care what the Russians and Ukrainians do? Now if the American world hegemony or whatever wishes to continue to exert control over Ukraine, fine. But, I have no stakeholdership in that, and it increasingly seems that I and people like me are quite disliked by said hegemony. If they want us to support their empire, maybe they ought to cut us in on a bit more of its spoils, and give us a bit more say in its aims.
You are correct in some immediate sense but this war is a bit different because it is actually revealing what using nukes or threatening to use nukes means in the context of war of conquest/genocide in 21st century. If the US completely abandoned Ukraine day one, then Russia would attack a NATO country next cause they would feel the nuclear threat is too much for the US to handle.
"If I may, my impression is also that the younger generations don't "get" war. Why would I, ever shoot someone just like me because his/her/xyr government has forced them to point a rifle at me?"
What does that mean? It seems like a contradiction in terms. How could you have someone who rejects modernist ideology but promotes a modernist ideology?
It's a common cliché from rightwing circles (initially I think the combination of the two was produced by Jordan Peterson). Not to be too mean, but you'll see a lot of the Ben Shapiro fan crowd snagging on to it because it sounds smart despite being mostly meaningless. It's a placeholder for terms like 'degeneracy' and 'cultural bolshevism' and other such social forces that might undermine the status quo.
It is. The ideology that's referring to which is popular amongst politically active young people is frankly a mess. In particular there's a gaping hole in their post-modernism where they just completely fail to apply any of its tools to their own ideological beliefs or power structures, instead using it to prop up their vaguely Marxist and not so vaguely anti-Western ideology.
Anyone who ever actually read Foucault would instantly realize he wasn't a Marxist because he thought it failed to sufficiently describe why the way we produce truth and knowledge shift historically, which more often than not tends to only be explainable as 'progress' after the fact.
> Most younger people are quite skeptic of mainstream media so they don’t trust the narrative CNN and Fox News are trying to sell them.With the elderly it’s the opposite.
That's a funny use of the word skeptical. I think you mean outright ignorant.
> You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.
This one really annoys me. Yes, people care more about people who look like them, and certainly those who are closer and where war is less common. Same reason predominantly Muslim diasporas in the west care about Palestine a lot
This particular refrain is one that's worth examining from the lens you're dismissing. Under what frame is "war less common" in Europe (or even "East Europe")? An extremely narrow one at best, IMO. A large proportion of pro-Ukrainian propaganda also outright contradicts this notion by referencing historical acts of Russian aggression.
There's a big difference between acts of aggression and war. With the exception of a Ukraine in 2014 and a week or two in 2008 in Georgia, most Europeans have to go back to the 90s for any conventional war. True, in Eastern Europe and the balkans things have been less peaceful but even so they've been living in times of almost no war.
I do concede that this is the least relevant point though, the similarity one is much more significant.
> Same reason predominantly Muslim diasporas in the west care about Palestine a lot
I don't think that's true. It's true the Muslims I know care about Palestine. But, for example, nobody cares about Uyghurs, who are Muslim. I don't know any Bangladeshis that care about the Rohingya, even though they're at least closely related to Bangladeshis (and "look" the same and speak a closely related language). My impression, being part of this "diaspora," is that the common support for Palestine is more about shared animosity against Israel. This animosity is partly just anti-Jewish, but also partly anti-Anglo-meddling, insofar as Britain was instrumental in enabling Jewish repatriation of Israel, and the United States continues to support Israel.
Absolutely false. We Muslims care about our brothers and sisters wherever they are, and regardless of their ethnicity or race. There are tons of material and videos online about prayers and donations and campaigns made in support of them. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=941duulDzOs
Maybe it's different there, but in the UK which has a significant Muslim population, concern for Palestine, Yemen and Syria (and even the Uyghurs to a lesser extent) is common. The Rohingyas also had support in the UK, which again has a lot of Bangladeshis.
I don't think this is a modern phenomenon. Certainly it was the younger generation that was against the war in Vietnam. It would be interesting to see polls from the Korean War and World War I. My guess is that we'd see a similar split between young and older generations.
> You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist”
It’s interesting that I’ve noticed many posts of “Ukrainian refugees were accepted, Syrian refugees weren’t; therefore, racism” since the outbreak. I wish Instagram, Facebook, Twitter would release more research on ad spend by company and not activity.
It’s pretty cheap to buy these kind of ads and market toward people who signal boost such causes. So I’m assuming that Russia is doing that.
Perhaps. The reason I hav the suspicion is because it seems like Russia benefits the most in this situation from have a narrative against Ukrainian refugees and conflating Ukraine’s issues with Syria’s issues.
Logically, there are so many differences between the two populations it wouldn’t make sense to actually make a racism claim (eg, Syrians were high percentage young male vs Ukrainian families; Syria over multiple years vs Ukrainians in weeks; 8M Syrians vs 1M Ukrainians; Syrians travel across multiple countries far away vs Ukrainians in neighboring countries; we’re only weeks in for Ukraine vs years for Syria; etc etc).
The two situations are very different so comparing the two and then saying that the reason is racism seems pretty silly. So I think “what’s more likely, silliness or Russian bots?”
I wasn't really trying to disagree with you on this. I've seen a sentiment from some "anti-imperialist" voices that end up being primarily anti-western voices, that assume that _only_ the US and the West behave with imperialist policy.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to disagree with you or anything. Just adding my own clarification around the context from some of the other discussions I've had on this topic. See, for example, macanchex's reply to my topic, which places all of the blame for this war on Western powers.
In India, even very right wing people are ambivalent or only somewhat supportive of Putin, whereas the supposedly "anti imperialist" Communists seem to have fallen in love with him. They go to great lengths to localize and translate Russian propaganda.
This might be a case of the enemy of my enemy (capitalist USA) are my friends. Actually they are only the enemy of their enemy and also capitalists, but the hopes of a lifetime can be self delusional.
The dramatic developments we are witnessing today have causes that we knew about but refused to see:
on the strategic level, the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here);
on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;
and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.
> on the strategic level, the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here);
This is an Orwellian distortion of language.
Expansion can be interpreted in a literal sense or a metaphorical one. Organizations expand in a metaphorical sense. When we say that a company "expands" by by entering a new market or hiring new talent, we know that this is metaphorical.
NATO is a defensive pact with voluntary membership, but by calling it "expansionist," Russia plays a trick where it evokes the literal sense of expand to transform NATO into the aggressor. It seems fairly plain to me that the real expansionists would be the ones who have literally, physically expanded into a neighboring country by annexing Crimea. The expansionists would be the ones who are currently occupying territory in three foreign nations against the will of those nations' governments.
> and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.
By third party estimates, the civillian casualties in the Russian invasion are about two to three orders of magnitude higher than the civilian casualties in Donbass prior to the invasion. This is like slaughtering an entire village because it contains a single murderer. There is absolutely zero ambiguity about where the moral high ground is here.
>By third party estimates, the civillian casualties in the Russian invasion are about two to three orders of magnitude higher than the civilian casualties in Donbass prior to the invasion. This is like slaughtering an entire village because it contains a single murderer. There is absolutely zero ambiguity about where the moral high ground is here.
This does not even include the fact that any civilian casualties in Donbass were either incidents when counterfiring to russian and separatist shelling, or russian provocations.
We can even see this right now in the war: Russia just randomly shells apartment blocks with Grads, while UA only targets real military targets on Russian soil, like Belgorod fuel depots or Taganrog airfield. Russian propaganda doesn't even try to claim that, at least yet.
> the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here)
A voluntary alliance isn't an imperialist agenda (assuming that the sovereign nations have the opportunity to make a truly voluntary decision, without outside coercion).
In fact, many nations have requested voluntarily to join NATO. Ukraine was one such nation, and wasn't allowed in.
Arguing that Russia should get a veto over which defensive alliances other nations join is a pro-imperialist position. You're taking the view that Russia gets to determine the behavior of other nations, because they are "in its security umbrella". I'm sorry, but that position is inherently untenable for an "anti-imperialist".
It's a coherent position for Russian Nationalists, or for believers in Super Power Imperialism.
Wasn't expecting the author to start with their time at Nato. It certainly doesn't match the western narrative, but seems far closer to the Russian narrative (explained cohesively).
He seems to be claiming there wasn't weapons transfer to Donbass, etc when they were initially acting as break away republics. How does he explain MH17? I spent too much time looking at this.
> on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;
and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.
To think that Ukraine was shelling Donbass and "provoking" after what we seen in the last 50 days is truly a mental distortion.
This is, of course, the Russian take on the war. The Ukrainian version is significantly different. (And given the whole genocide thing, I know which I lean towards. I mean really, NATO, the West, and the Ukrainian government is responsible for Russian war crimes? https://www.reuters.com/resizer/i8u1Zr3pjvon_ZDTHHfs5b6IwlE=...)
Jacques Baud is a former colonel of the General Staff, ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist on Eastern countries. He was trained in the American and British intelligence services. He has served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations.
Truly horrendous link. Your appeal to authority is nonsense, it doesn't take long to find someone with even more commas to dispute it.
> Anyone who is still pushing more weapons into Ukraine or tells Kiev to prolong the war is putting more Ukrainian lives at risk for zero potential gain.
Surely life under Russia will be blissful with no Ukrainians harmed.
It's 2022. Fire up TikTok, start liking videos, and choose whatever narrative you want. Everything you don't like is crisis acting and media bias? Sure! Digital reality is becoming schizophrenic.
In some left-wing circles anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism are indistinguishable. People like Max Blumenthal are the perfect representatives of this ideology.
I don't know anything about max blumenthal so sure.
But if you are american, those things pretty much should be the same. Anti-imperialism is not an abstract struggle, and for many around the world the US and its allies are a concrete enemy they've come by honestly.
If you live in the US, solidarity with those people means using whatever power you have internally to oppose the US's imperial actions.
The US is not the only imperialist force by any means. But particularly from inside one of these machines, it is hard to understand and act against other forms of imperialism without also assisting your own country's imperial projects.
Countries are adept at turning their own subversive and radical movements outward against their political enemies. An awareness of the mechanics of imperialism does I think lead to a "clean up your own house first" praxis and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
The US is currently helping Ukraine fight an invasion by a larger country whose soldiers have murdered and raped their way through its civilians. In this particular case, being anti-American is the exact opposite of being anti-imperialist. Either Ukraine gets weapons, or it doesn't.
Thankfully in this wonderful world you can both abhor and fight American imperialism and global stupidity AND also support America arming Ukraine to the teeth to fight off another imperial aggressor.
They are not opposing takes. Someone trying to tell you they are is trying to sell you a fiction that just so happens to benefit Russia
What you say here makes sense but it is not at all what is being practiced by some of the "anti-imperialist" left. Max Blumenthal's definition of anti-imperialism begins and ends with America. In his worldview opposing the US and its interests uncritically is the duty of every leftist. If the US supports Ukraine you must oppose it. If the US accuses China of genocide you must support China. If fascists oppose the US government you must side with them too. You must support any and every so-called enemy of the US regardless of what they do or who they are (after all it's all lies from the mainstream media). I am not saying every political commentator should be obligated to report on the abuses of every global power lest they be called "hypocritical", but some leftists will actively defend atrocities as long as they are done in opposition to the US.
Yeah I see what you're saying. Again without conceding that I share this view of this person, since I haven't read his works.
But while I don't think that position is correct, I do think it's probably valuable to have some people take that stance. It's similar to the social value in having non-political conservatism that will resist all change no matter what. We'll change anyway, but having to fight for it a little will slow down the changes, hopefully dodge some of the worst consequences, maybe prevent some changes that shouldn't actually happen.
The US should be opposed. Not because we are inherently bad, but because our interests aren't everyone's interests. An always-support, always-oppose, or case-by-case stance will each have different failure modes. I think we want a mix, as unpalatable as that can be sometimes.
If that's interpreted as can do no wrong, than always support and always oppose are just putting on blinders. I can see it as a media persona, but the intellectual dishonesty required to actually believe that is scary.
Apologists / accidents happen I can understand, but I wouldn't trust any individual pretending that they can do no wrong.
It's because kids are effed by the media. They have been fed a whole bunch of lies and propaganda one way or another in order to get them to support or denounce some cause or other so they don't know what to believe. So they throw their hands up and give up and "let them sort it out"
The media and establishment want it both ways. in the '80s imperialism was BAD. Now, rebranded as globalism, this imperialism is good, but that one over there by them is BAD! and so on it goes.
Can't blame them after the Iraq war and everyone getting on a bandwagon of lies including the left, right and center with the exception of Libertarians.
> so they don't know what to believe. So they throw their hands up and give up and "let them sort it out"
This is a result of a common propaganda attack by a party that wants to cover up the truth: seed multiple competing story lines through varying outlets to create a sense of confusion. That way, when the truth is reported, people will react to it like it's just 1 more among the many competing stories.
Russia in particular has been running this play both domestically and abroad. It's a formidable approach, and defense against it is difficult.
In some cases the above is true. But we have many examples of not just the same organ but the same author saying one things one day, and making a 180 the next time it's convenient. Why censoring blah blah is good! Why censoring blah blah is bad! Why sympathizing with blah blah is racist, Why sympathizing with blah blah is actually anti-racist.
You get enough of this and people tune out and don't give a lick any more.
> Can't blame them after the Iraq war and everyone getting on a bandwagon of lies including the left, right and center with the exception of Libertarians.
This is only true if your conception of 'the left' is just American liberals. Plenty of people and groups on the left were against the invasions from the get-go.
Sure and we also had a handful of people on the right who were against it too. I'm talking about groups that matter --those that make up more than 5% of a pop.
Main point stands though. the media want to have it multiple ways, like John Kerry, one day it's for something, then, the next, it's against the same thing, and a third day it's back on.
Ok, for groups that matter, a majority (61%) of US House Democrats formally opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2002. Even a majority of US Congress Democrats.
> Can't blame them after the Iraq war and everyone getting on a bandwagon of lies including the left, right and center with the exception of Libertarians.
The Left (including most of the center-left Democratic faction in Congress) was against the Iraq War, the more dominant Democratic center-right faction was for it (or, at least, against not giving the President the authority to wage it conditionally, which some of them will distinguish by suggesting that the required determinations made by the President under that authority were in bad faith, but that was pretty predictable...)
">Gen Z is also more diverse and broadly anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”)
An irony, considering that Russian imperialism is the one that actually performs land grabs and ethnic cleansing without even trying to cover it up."
you should learn about this thing called the 2003 invasion of Iraq, then the Vietnam war, etc.
At least Russia actually declares war when it places another country within its empire's sights. The USA just acts like it owns the entire american continent and the means to its imperialistic ends range from cultural exportation and massive economic leverage to literally teaching dictators how torture and repress dissidents. Look up School of the Americas for an example.
And the attempted assassinations of dissidents/defectors with nerve agents only available to one country seems a rather unambiguous way to declare it was a state-sanctioned hit, yet it was denied up and down.
As is this invasion portrayed as a 'special military operation', what distinction that actually is from an invasion is up to the rules lawyers, apparently.
> Gen Z is also more diverse and broadly anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”) so they’re less willing to blindly support US foreign policy and feel less connected to European conflicts than previous generations.
I don't think it's accurate to say they're "broadly anti-American" because they're "more diverse." The increased diversity in the younger generation is due to Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their kids.[1] First and second generation immigrants are equally or more patriotic than native born Americans, and are significantly less likely to say they are “ashamed” of any aspect of America: https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-polic....
All else being equal, immigration-driven population change is driving down "anti-American" sentiment. Indeed, the only political group where a majority say they’re “ashamed to be American,” progressives, is also amongst the whitest: https://hiddentribes.us/profiles.
I think what you see amongst immigrants is a less ideological view of foreign policy. They have often seen first hand that American has done a lot of harmful things abroad. At the same time, they compartmentalize that because they don't view foreign policy in terms of "good and evil." They may also feel less ownership of America's role and status as world "lawgiver."
I also think immigrants are more cynical than Americans. I'd describe my dad and myself as "pro America," but neither of us care about Ukraine. (And frankly I see no connection between being pro-American and supporting Ukraine.) As immigrants from Bangladesh we don't have idealistic notions about sovereignty and human rights. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” (It drives my Daughter of the American Revolution wife nuts when we say "some countries' fate is to be a buffer state.")
And of course "immigrants" are not homogenous but rather from a wide range of different countries that have various idiosyncratic positions on foreign policy. Some of the most rabidly patriotic people I know are kids of Vietnamese immigrants. Meanwhile in India and Bangladesh, there is a historical affinity with Russia from the Soviet times.
[1] The Black population share was 11% in 1960 and 12% in 2010, and is projected to rise to 13% in 2050. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2012/11/117.jpg. The white population share will decrease from 85% to 47%, with almost all of the delta due to Hispanics, and to a lesser extent Asians.
FOX News and CNN have been in complete lockstep from day one, with the exception of Tucker Carlson. Sean Hannity & Anderson Cooper are ideological twins at this point. The last time CNN and FOX News have been this much in agreement, it was when we decided that an invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do in order to get rid of WMD.
I appreciate the other threads here on this. My viewpoint may be a minority, but I fought in a war and live with the aftermath so I think my perspective might be of some value. I'm going to try to be careful with my wording but please realize this is a bit emotional even a decade later.
I fought in Afghanistan. Real authoritarians with a very real tyrannical streak that's comparable to cartels, with tactics to boot. I watched the Obama administration lie about how well the war was going. We were getting reports of Marines being shot in the back by their counterparts continually. We were finding posts abandoned. Our bases were getting attacked while understaffed, our patrols were minimized, and our ROE was changed such that we had to be shot at directly to return fire. I watched national rhetoric coalesce on "they signed up for these injuries" when veterans needed help the most, culminating in people comitting suicide outside of hospitals.
I will never for those reasons support sending another soul down range.
Don't compare your experiences with Ukraine. They fight a very different war, on their own territory (often their own cities). They literally defending their families, no less.
Why would you tell someone not to compare two things just because those things are different? What would be the point of making comparisons at all if everything was the same? You would already know the result.
The circumstances are not that different. The people of Afghanistan (by the time I arrived) were trying to defend their homes and communities from Taliban incursion that the US had partially reinvigorated by overthrowing their government (in that it made them worse, not that we created them which is common misinterpretation). The history of Afghanistan puts this kind of stuff pretty plain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Enduring_Freedom#The...
I do understand there is a wide knowledge gap that HN visitors have about Afghanistan, but please try to understand better.
Too bad that document was very high-level, without specific procedures, timelines and liabilities listed in case of a breach. But nevertheless, it's a very real and legal grounding for fighting for Ukraine.
> I will never for those reasons support sending another soul down range.
Even if Poland or a NATO ally gets attacked?
I don't think anyone major is proposing sending troops to Ukraine, so this discussion is sorta irrelevant for the current conflict, but it seems like this line of reasoning would necessitate pulling out of NATO as well.
This is quite sad that your reasons for lack of support of the wars are that you (an invader) had a bad time there, not that you were part of the force destabilising and destroying another country
People sign up for the military often with good intentions, yet they don't often get to choose what the military then does with them. You're seemingly assigning responsibility for an entire invasion to a foot soldier.
I didn't intend to put a blame of invasion on a single soldier. But I do put blame on a soldier, that he came to another country to kill people there for no good reason. There is a choice
This is a crucial and under-represented perspective. I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion, but it is hard to ignore the inherent callousness of arguing over a conflict that will have no direct impact on me or my family.
The difference is, Afghanistan was of negligible importance in comparison. Stakes here are different. Just listen to Putin and take his words literally, because he means them.
Either way, Ukraine needs weapons and bullets. They don’t need more soldiers.
This comment is weird. Who cares about the stakes? Dead people are dead people. Unless you want to get into a "realist realpolitiks" analysis, which coincidentally can also be used to justify the russian war of aggression. I've seen this take pretty often and to me it boils down to "ukraine is in europe and ukrainians are europeans so it's different and it makes this war so much worse" which to me sounds extremely... problematic?
Like the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan still make those wars and the Civil wars they caused much much more destructive than what's happening in ukraine. It's not a competition, for sure, but it's important to keep that in mind before dismissing or downplaying the consequences of American policy and the enthusiastic support for those wars of the American public .
> ukraine is in europe and ukrainians are europeans so it's different and it makes this war so much worse" which to me sounds extremely... problematic?
It sounds more practical than problematic to me. Afghanistan is 10 times farther away from Western Europe than Ukraine is. If Europe didn't feel a lot more threatened by Russia, they would be insane.
I agree, from a national policy perspective. But on an individual level, which I think was the scope of the discussion, I still don't think that it's okay to value ukrainian lives more than middle eastern/Muslim lives.
I don’t think it’s been a matter of lives dying or who lives are dying. Not for anyone who isn’t Ukrainian (after all then Palestinian, Yemenis, Ethiopian, and other states in conflict would matter as well). It’s about what it would mean if Russia is not only successful but met un challenged. The last time Europe as a continent allowed appeasement the whole world eventually got pulled into the second greatest conflict less in the span of 50 years. Another one would be devastating since a good some of the actors have world ending weapons to use against one another.
A generous interpretation of your parent comment is that, "because of the stakes, the government will take it far more seriously" and, e.g., stand with our soldiers.
I’m not from the US. I’m from Eastern Europe. Our grandparents survived the Red Army liberation from Nazi Germany. The Russians were much worse. This is an existential war for not only Ukraine, but whole eastern NATO flank. Putin more or less denies agency of all our countries.
How do we even know any of our aid is being used successfully? I have no problem giving aid that is used to fight a proxy war with Russia. I have a huge issue giving aid to a country whose politicians are trying to make money for themselves. Kolomoisky, who is one of Zelensky's main backers, was indicted in the US for bank fraud. He is also in the panama papers. The politicians in Ukraine are corrupt, not as corrupt as old putin imo, but still corrupt.
Now they are saying they need 7 billion dollar a month? I would be okay with this if everything was tracked and open for all to see. Buts it not. For all we know they are going to take 6 billion for themselves.
I think, regardless of the value of the point you're trying to make, saying this in this context is callous at best. The comment you're responding to was careful and vulnerable, and if you read between the lines even a tiny bit there is pain there.
We all know what happened in afghanistan right?. Anyone who spent significant time there witnessed horrific suffering. Watched friends come back completely different or not at all.
"Negligible importance" to who? Not to the people who died there, or killed and have to carry that with them forever, or who didn't when they think they should have and have to carry that. Have a little compassion come on.
However one can't simply say everything is Afghanistan. I never supported the war there. We had to many other ways to hit Bin Laden. However I completely support the war in Europe. This war of aggression is just the start if we just roll over for Putin. He won't stop at Ukraine, it will just be a pit stop to Poland and the Baltic states and who knows what after that. Ukraine doesn't stand a chance if we don't send them weapons, food, material, and intelligence reports. I also don't think my opinion is invalid just because I didn't serve on a battlefront. I pay taxes and vote so I get a voice too.
>He won't stop at Ukraine, it will just be a pit stop to Poland and the Baltic states and who knows what after that.
I find it hard to believe this narrative when the US and Ukraine has refused to negotiate on the terms that Russia offered to prevent, and then later stop the war. The rationale given is that Russia was not sincere, but I think we should have tried. From my perspective in the US, a NATO demilitarized Ukraine would have been a win-win for both countries.
Sorry we, as a society, failed our soldiers so badly. It's trite to say but thanks for serving. You'll carry those scars to the grave.
That said, what does this have to do with the article, which is talking about generational sympathies with either Russia or Ukraine? Is there a serious push to get US troops involved, a move which would surely spark WWIII? We're not talking about sending souls down range. Putin already did that. He is sending Russian souls down range and forcing Ukrainian souls down range.
>That said, what does this have to do with the article, which is talking about generational sympathies with either Russia or Ukraine.
The relevance is as an example of the broken trust people that grew up during Iraq and Afghanistan have in the narrative that we are the good guys in foreign policy. After being repeatedly sold a bag of Lies, many look for how we could be tricked into thinking we are the the good guys yet again.
This skepticism and openness to alternative narratives is at the center of the generational divide
The skeptics are primed to ask in what ways the US is complicit in brining about this war, and it what ways it stands to benefit. The dangerous part is that a long track record of lies and self interested foreign wars adds a lot of weight to otherwise less credible narratives regarding Ukraine.
With the youth I'd say this generation is more affected by any other by the sheer noise of modern media. It's also one of the first where there was less emphasis on indoctrinating people towards the government's view on the cold war, the first to grow up with a government that lied to them about a significant non-cold war war (Iraq), and the first that actually has the means to cheaply find other views on things.
So maybe it's not so strange that young people think this way.
I mostly blame the Iraq war. Yes, the west has done a lot of bad things in the past. But in recent memory Iraq stands out as where we blew any pretense of moral superiority. (It does happen now and again, but the Cold War is a really good excuse for a LOT of bad things). People would have seen this and seen that whatever our governments say, you gotta take it with a grain of salt.
Adding to this, young Americans have never seen anything gained from war. The war in Afghanistan lasted 2 decades and cost trillions of dollars, yet we have next to nothing to show for it.
It made stock prices go up so a bunch of retirees could live comfortably and also made several presidents look presidential while they heartfelt condolences over flag-draped caskets.
Add Libyan intervention (2011) as well - that put the country into 9 years of civil war (is it still peaceful there? IDK). Though this one is combined mess of NATO.
And liberated the Kuwaiti people from scud missiles, invasion, and occupation from a brutal Saddam regime? That's a pretty important benefit to miss, but maybe you're just limiting it to benefits for a US citizen. (of which selfless ones would consider it a benefit)
People who don't go to war always gained from war. Lots of jobs. The post-WWII afterglow is when we defined our middle-class mythologies. The good old days.
The US had 419K deaths from WWII. That's like half as much as covid thus far. Americans like to go to war because they sacrifice nothing. It's a game.
One problem with all these reviews is that we can’t see the counter factual. That said I agree Iraq war was likely a very bad thing for our country and certainly is responsible for much of our internal strife right now.
The Iraq war is mostly to blame in the recent past, but only because our attacks on Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere haven't received the media coverage they warranted. We utterly destroyed Libya, which was the most prosperous country in Africa, in 2014. Today Libyans are being sold there in open-air slave markets. How many Americans know this? Our troops are occupying Syria illegally, right now. Where is the outrage?
According to Gallup, the proportion of Americans who trust mass media a "great deal" or a "fair amount" dropped 10 percentage points during the Iraq war, and then never fully recovered.
Of course, broken down by political party shows Democrats have restored their trust in mass media just fine, especially since Trump...
Yes there is a solid 30% of america that is Trump america (and probably was before Trump even came on the scene and made them bolder). They don't trust the government (but gladly accept donations from the government), don't trust mainstream media, largely support alt-right news like Fox and OAN, tend towards white supremacy, fear "the other" and base most decisions around that fear, and will always vote Republican.
I'm not sure I would go that far. I can easily imagine a situation where the Republican party pulls out all the stops and ensures Trump doesn't win the nomination, only for Trump to run on the MAGA party ticket. I would expect him to easily get 10% of the vote.
We didn't get any democrats who really dared test this on the left in 2020, as even Bernie (the strongest cult of personality on the left, for comparison) fell in line behind Biden.
That is to say, strong personalities, more than institutions, seem to carry the most power. Perhaps this has always been true? How much of mass media's historical confidence was due solely to Walter Kronkite?
Obviously I don't actually know whats going on over there, but I find it hard to believe that the Russian military as a whole is "deliberately targeting civilians".
From the first estimate I found searching the web:
On April 10:
> Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 4,232 civilian casualties in the country: 1,793 killed and 2,439 injured.
<2000 civilian deaths in a full-scale invasion of a country with ~44 million citizens seems FAR too low to declare that targeting civilians is a goal. Mariupol is currently fighting to the bitter end, despite being surrounded for weeks and even bisected by Russian forces. This is a city that had a population of >400k at the start of the war.
If the goal was really to kill everybody in sight, the Russians would've just carpet bombed their targets day 1 and killed hundreds of thousands. It seems like everyone has forgotten what war is. There's no "humanitarian" way to commit war. It's always awful and always creates unintended death.
Again, not an expert here nor do I believe any statistics to be 100% accurate.
"deliberately targeting civilians" is not the same as "going out to murder everyone". Obviously, Russia could just nuke Ukraine. They haven't done that. However, they have verifiably used cluster munitions in cities; abducted, raped and murdered civilians in areas they control; bombed hospitals; shot and shelled civilians trying to flee; and so forth.
All of this is very much what they have form for in Syria. Is it not getting reported in the US? It is in Europe.
> OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), Popasna (Luhansk region), and Borodianka (Kyiv region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics.
Give a 20 year-old Russian conscript a gun and drop him in a warzone. Anyone not wearing a Russian flag is now a potential threat because he's in hostile territory. Then, at some point, the young man gets tired of all the potential threats and just starts eliminating them. At that point, Russian military as a whole is quite culpable.
But if you're going to make up a story, why not make up a different one? A nicer one where this person who doesn't exist isn't guilty of doing the thing that didn't happen, and the entire country of Russia wasn't to blame.
“The Mission is not able to conclude whether the Russian attack on Ukraine per se may qualify as a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population. It however holds that some patterns of violent acts violating IHRL, which have been repeatedly documented in the course of the conflict, such as targeted killing, enforced disappearance or abductions of civilians, including journalists and local officials, are likely to meet this qualification. Any single violent act of this type, committed as part of such an attack and with the knowledge of it, would then constitute a crime against humanity.”
“It is not conceivable that so many civilians would have been killed and injured and so many civilian objects, including houses, hospitals, cultural property, schools, multi-story residential buildings, administrative buildings, penitentiary institutions, police stations, water stations and electricity systems would have been damaged or destroyed if Russia had respected its IHL obligations in terms of distinction, proportionality and precautions in conducting hostilities in Ukraine.”
Why do you find that hard to believe? Targeting civilians doesn't mean wiping out the population. And if there wasn't such a large body of prior evidence I might be tempted to agree that some of what we are seeing is isolated, or simple incompetence. But it now seems undeniable that Russia is intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure. And although that may have been effective in Syria, I have no idea what they hope to accomplish with it in Ukraine.
how can you read what they did in Bucha (raping, torturing, execution style murders in the street) and say you don't think they're targetting civilians. That was a warning from Putin to Ukrainians about what happens if you fight back and don't surrender 100%
The graphic is important I think. It's not a binary. While the younger generation showed more support for Russia, most of the difference between the generations was due to the younger generation giving an "unsure" answer.
Excellent point. If the younger generation were not more often "unsure" about a foreign policy question, that would mean either:
1) they have spent a lot of time studying foreign policy questions (unlikely with any generation when young), or
2) they just accept whatever their elders tell them
56% of young people supporting Ukraine, is a result we would consider a crushing victory for either party in modern presidential elections, and that's when there's a lot fewer "unsure". There is a generational difference, sure, but it's a lot less dramatic than most of the posts here are suggesting.
They we born during the Bosnian and Kosovo wars. They were 7 years old or younger when they briefly experienced no war in 2000 and GWBush and 9/11 in 2001 they saw the Afghanistan war start and not end until only months ago. 20 years of war and a loss!
They only know war. Can you imagine their war exhaustion? Can you imagine how much they don't care about a war happening on the otherside of the world that the usa aren't officially involved in?
The USA is still officially involved in somali, yemen, and syria.
These young americans are probably more concerned with those 3 and you didn't even ask them? You don't need to ask. You know they'll universally say to stop being in all these wars.
Sidenote as someone who's a member of Gen Z -- I... didn't grow up knowing nearly anything about the USA's wars of aggression other than that we were fighting someone in the middle east. I knew there was fighting, but I didn't (and honestly still don't) understand what for. It was never explained to me and I never thought about it enough to go looking.
Not trying to disprove your point, just sharing my own anecdotal experience.
>Sidenote as someone who's a member of Gen Z -- I... didn't grow up knowing nearly anything about the USA's wars of aggression other than that we were fighting someone in the middle east. I knew there was fighting, but I didn't (and honestly still don't) understand what for. It was never explained to me and I never thought about it enough to go looking.
I know many Chinese Nationals and even people from Hong Kong and none of them know about Tiananmen Square. I bet you heard of Tiananmen Square massacre. I bet you didn't know that the Chinese military killed all those people at Tiananmen over capitalism.
Brief history: Terrorists attacked New York City and destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. This was huge and it completely shocked the
whole country. It really felt like a sucker punch.
A bunch of laws were implemented in the US to take away people's freedoms in exchange for security. For example this is when the TSA was created and you have to pose for a nude selfie to get into an airport, and if God forbid you have change in your pocket, you're wearing a metal belt buckle, or there's just a random scanner blip, a government employee will give you a search that would get any private business sued out of existence for sexual harassment. Also banks were required to ask a lot more intrusive questions to their customers, responses to potential terrorism and criminal penalties for terrorism related stuff were increased, all kinds of electronic government spying was increased -- sometimes illegally (including the stuff Snowden eventually revealed).
Soon after the attacks, the Al Qaeda terrorist group based in Afghanistan was determined to be responsible. The President told the government of Afghanistan to hand over Osama bin Laden, the leader of the terrorist group. The government of Afghanistan, called the Taliban, refused. The Taliban are religious fundamentalists; besides being responsible for the September 11 attacks, they're mainly famous for destroying irreplaceable historical temples over 1000 year old. So the US invaded and got rid of the Taliban government. After the invasion, the US briefly set up an occupation government, but then set up free and fair elections. Unfortunately the Afghans elected a corrupt and ineffective government, who ended up stealing most of the money the US put into rebuilding the country.
It took the US a really long time to capture Osama bin Laden. Even after bin Laden was captured, the Afghan government still didn't get its feet, it was constantly unstable, corrupt, untrusted by the people and reliant on US military backing. So the US military decided to stay until they could be sure Afgahnistan was stable collapse as soon as it left. Unfortunately Afghanistan never got that stable.
The Taliban fought with tactics like roadside bombs, car bombs, and child suicide bombers. Which led to a lot of psychological wear and tear on the US soldiers; a number of returning soldiers had mental issues or committed suicide. For example if a car looks like it's not going to stop for a checkpoint, or a child is running up to a group of soldiers, the soldiers have to assume it's a bomb and shoot to protect themselves, but 9 times out of 10 it was just an innocent civilian.
Eventually Trump decided to rip the band-aid by negotiating an exit date with the Taliban, to actually occur during Biden's first term, so Biden could be blamed if it went poorly. Which it did; the Taliban, being terrorists, ignored the peace agreement and attacked. The Afghan army quickly collapsed and the elected Afghan president disgracefully fled the country in the middle of dinner.
Now the Taliban are in charge. The Taliban won't quit with religious extremism like shooting women and girls if they don't want to wear a burka, or try to get an education beyond fourth grade.
The people of Afghanistan are starving because the Afghan economy completely collapsed because foreign companies don't want to work or invest in Afghanistan due to the violence and religious fundamentalism of the Taliban regime. We tried our best to help during our years in Afghanistan. The Afghan people responded by electing a corrupt government, stealing the money that was supposed to help them, running away instead of fighting, and supporting the Taliban despite their barbarity and terrorism. The Afghan people are starving, which is sad, but it's not our problem any more. The Taliban wanted to be in charge; now they're in charge, and this is their problem now.
Calling the US war in Afghanistan a war of aggression is absurd. Afghanistan sent in terrorists to hijack planes in a suicide attack that successfully destroyed two skyscrapers and killed thousands of random civilians. Another hijacked plane flew into the Pentagon, which was also severely damaged. September 11, 2001 was an act of war, pure and simple.
A bunch of really weird stuff came out of the war. For example, Osama bin Laden's been dead for a decade, we're out of Afghanistan, and nobody's launched a successful major terrorist attack on the US since 2001. But for some reason, no politician of either party is willing to even bring up the possibility of disbanding the TSA, rolling back the 2001 era regulations, and giving us our freedom back. This is kind of a sore subject with me.
There's also the story of Guantanamo Bay. For some weird reason, even though the US and Cuba hate each other, the US owns a tiny part of Cuba and has a military base there. Since it's owned by the US government and not on US soil, some terrorists were sent there. The US court system ruled that they're somehow outside the reach of US law and the Constitution there, and the US government is legally allowed to use torture and detain people indefinitely without charges there. A lot of people (in my view, correctly) claim the government shouldn't legally be allowed to do that, and even if it's somehow legal, it's still morally wrong and unethical to do it. And even if the government did it anyway in the past, in the present/future they should stop, close the prison, and either charge or release the prisoners. US intelligence claims the detainees are bad, bad people who would launch September 11 style attacks, but due to the exigencies of war they can't get enough evidence to convict them with normal legal procedure. Obama promised to close Guantanamo Bay but he didn't, and AFAIK there are still prisoners there to this day.
Iraq is a different story, but this post is already long and ranty enough.
Important to mention that not only have we been at war their entire lives, but that they've been absolutely pointless wars of aggression that ended in a whimper for the US, and absolute devastation for the countries invaded. And as you said, we lost all of them.
Not only that, but we've been too ashamed to declare them. No one wants to take responsibility, just reap the profits. Young people are cynical about war because it wasn't inculcated into them as a religion like it was for Boomers. Young people are cynical about war because they look at it, see its products, and see its profiteers. They lack the poetry to breathlessly admire the beauty of our weapons.
Another possible explanation is that younger people tend to rely more on far right or far left media, which tends to be much more pro-Russia than mainstream media (sometimes organically, sometimes through paid sponsorship like https://twitter.com/bamnecessary/status/1499162014895296516).
Hasan Piker for example, the #1 politics streamer on Twitch, is quite far left and is much more pro-Russia than say CNN.
>>far right or far left media, which tends to be much more pro-Russia than mainstream media
I wouldn't say pro Russian but anti-war. This kind of framing reminds me of GW Bush's "you're either with us or with the terrorists" accusation against people who opposed invading Iraq.
Also "far right or far left media" would be more accurately characterized as non-corporate non-MSM journalism. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, the MSM literally promotes every US war and foreign intervention no matter the cost or predictable disastrous consequences. It's as if they have become engulfed in the military industrial complex.
I'm not so sure that's true. The logic of both left and right people I've talked to is something like: Western elites are terrible, Ukraine colluded with those elites/is their puppet (wanted to join Nato/EU/etc), Russia is opposed to Western elites, and is therefore a positive force. I've talked to many people of both political persuasions and they try to minimize Russian wrongdoing and emphasize Western provocation (poking the bear).
Of course, they have different reasons for disliking western elites, but their arguments end up remarkably similar.
Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was spurred by America oil embargo on Japan, and 9/11 was spurred by American meddling in the middle east. None of those statements should be necessarily seen as minimizing or justifying those subsequent acts. There is nuance in the world, nothing happens in a vacuum.
Without American oil imports, Japan was forced to seize Dutch oil production in Indonesia to keep their economy running. That would drag the USA into the war, therefore it was a logical conclusion to strike the USA first.
It's not hard to see Russia's action as a logical action to protect their interests. That however is not the same as condoning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The US and the EU repeatedly told Japan to stop it's invasion. Japan did have some cassus belli initially but after several atrocities happened the response grew much louder - specifically after a pastor was killed by a stray bomb and the photograph made it's way back to western audiences with an accounting from his daughter.
Anti-war is the mainstream opinion in the US from pretty much top to bottom.
When I talk about something being pro-Russia or not I am referring to stuff like Hasan saying that Russia's annexation of Crimea was ethical, Nick Fuente's literal cheering for Putin, etc.
Anti-war might not even be entirely the right word, but it's possible that a more "anti-imperialist" sentiment is growing. Sort of along the lines of the old "world police" critique. A lot of these people are probably both sympathetic to Ukraine, but also not in favor of some countries extending their military and financial influence far beyond their borders.
I think Hillary Clinton said in an interview, something along the lines that Russia should be prepared for the West to turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan. Seems like a pretty harsh way to view the people that are supposed to be supported.
That's where you get into a muddy mess of where to draw the line between "imperialism," and something else. There are different takes on what constitutes imperialism, and whether one State trying to push back on what it perceives as creeping imperialism is legitimate.
The argument a lot of people are making, not just Russia or Russians, is that overextension of NATO influence was a major cause for the conflict. This might be something like if the Soviet Union had refused to deescalate military support to Cuba during the missile crisis and the US went ahead with military action there.
That's not to say that I personally would agree with US intervention in Cuba, or Russia in Ukraine, just trying to understand the logic that's being played by here.
The “nukes in Cuba” in this situation are democracy, free speech, LGBT rights and other Western principles. Yes, they are a threat to Putin and his system.
There are people out there who are weirdly pro-russia. Oliver Stone was gassing Putin up for years, defending his actions such as his anti-gay legislation. The Putin documentary he created was nothing short of a hagiography.
The ostensible reasons would be he wants to stick it to America or that he likes the attention his contrarian opinions give him (which is much less in our transgressive age). Maybe some people naturally gravitate to authoritarians. One interesting fact though is that his son worked at RT.
It’s all deeply weird to me. I try to grapple with it intellectually but it’s beyond my comprehension. If you are someone who truly believes America is irredeemable, why wouldn’t you esteem more peace loving nations over countries with overt expansionist intentions?
> For reasons that aren't entirely clear, the MSM literally promotes every US war and foreign intervention no matter the cost or predictable disastrous consequences.
It's almost like the CIA and NSA might use their unregulated surveillance to get leverage over the media.
I wouldn't go so far as saying it's blackmail, but when you read in the paper "official familiar with the matter say", it really should read "CIA/NSA asked us to tell you". It's hard to bite the hand that feeds you.
I agree. The younger respondents tend to consume media that's not only more politically diverse, but often a little more nuanced than many of the mainstream outlets. Less black-and-white thinking is bound to lead to opinions that aren't so easily reflected in a "Yes, No, Unsure" poll.
I don't think this particular clip shows a strong support for the Russian Federation in general. He seems to be saying that a majority of the people of Crimea want to be a part of Russia, having been more tied to Russia proper historically than any independent Ukraine, and they were able to make that switch without much violence.
It completely ignores the context (which you would see in more mainstream sources) for why most people see that annexation as unethical.
In particular, the lack of a "status quo" option for Crimea (the referendum only had two options, go independent or join Russia) and the lack of international observers (OSCE observers currently in the Crimea were asked to leave by the Russian authorities in the area) made the whole thing iffy from the get go.
And that's not even getting into the fraud allegations ...
That's definitely true. However, it's not really arguable that a majority or close to a majority of Crimea was moreso favourable to joining Russia than staying in an anti-Russia version of Ukraine. Independent polls confirm this : https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-a...
There was no status-quo option because at the time, according to the dominant legal opinion (as in, backed by force), Crimea had already seceded from Ukraine. To consider the status quo that Crimea was part of Ukraine would undermine the legal basis for a referendum without assent from Kyiv, which is why it was not included. It's for sure bullshit to the moral level, but it couldn't have been done differently while still being a referendum on joining Russia. They could have done a referendum on returning to Ukraine, I guess.
To be fair, it is a tiny clip of an off-hand response; hard to compare to focused articles and segments on the topic. I can see the criticism of piecing together an opinion from a bunch of off-hand comments vs fully expressed arguments. It might be better to compare a full discussion on the specific topic from the criticized party to the lauded one.
One problem with many mainstream outlets is that they are often give free passes to organizations like OSCE. For example, the OAS, an organization that serves a similar watchdog position in the Americas, completely bungled their duties in recent Bolivian elections. So much so, that they helped legitimize a violent far-right coup in 2019.
He glosses over the fact that native Ukrainians in those regions were displaced in the 1930s during the Holodomor and replaced with Russian settlers. That might explain why Russian sentiment in those regions is high.
The problem with that argument is that Crimea had been considered a part of Russia as far back as about the founding of the United States, and prior to that had nothing to do with a Ukrainian National project. Crimea isn't even mentioned by name once in the Wikipedia article you linked. Why would they be targeted as Ukrainians at that time?
He does not say "Russia was right", he said the annexation was justifiable and clearly not justifiable as in "right" but as in "defensible".
Saying he is "pro-Russia" is a big claim, because you're saying their position on Russia's action are overwhelmingly one of agreement. In that clip he appears to call Russia's actions defensible (which is not the same as agreement) on the Crimea issue, while being unclear but likely opposed on the Donbas issue.
Also given that many people are capable of more nuance than blindly supporting or opposing a country on every issue, you might as well be calling them a simpleton.
I mean his is the quintessential “both-sides” take that pushes (younger) people to be “unsure” about who they support, no?
Russia is bad, but so is Ukraine and NATO, too. Russia is bad but Ukraine does have a Nazi problem. People like him are probably the greatest contributors to the large amount of Gen Z who are unsure as to who they support.
Yes, in real life the truth is often that all participants in a conflict have morally ambiguous motivations and do bad things when they think they can get away with it. It's OK to acknowledge that while also acknowledging that in a certain narrowly focused issue one side is less wrong and one side is more wrong.
If you're arguing that young people should accept that Russia (which is already a complicated concept) is universally Bad and the western friendly powers (another nearly uselessly complicated concept) are universally Good then you're arguing for a false view of reality. Give the public a little credit, they can tolerate a little bit of moral ambiguity and still make a reasonable decision of right and wrong.
Yep. I am observing this interesting gap in political correctness for a long time now. When Russians are concerned nobody (in my perception) is using a politically correct formulas (formulae?) like "a Putin-paid disinformation campaign", usually it's "a Russian disinformation campaign". Since all gaps in political correctness are (in my humble perception) deliberate, I've always wondered why it exists.
1. Stealing and publishing DNC correspondence. A team of security experts, doing a magnificently fast work named exactly two culprits: a) Russian military intelligence, b) Russian political intelligence. Both these entities are directly under Putin’s control. Still it was “Russian interference in elections”, not “Putin’s interference in elections”. The latter is both correct and politically correct, and in no way reductive. Why not use it?
2. Placing Facebook ads during the election campaign. The official indictment named Prigozhin’s media company (forgot its name) as a culprit. Prigozhin is the closest buddy of Putin. So blaming Putin was not reductive in this case. Still, “Russian meddling” was used, not “Putin’s”. Any idea why?
It also makes people pretend like understanding the conflict is just a matter of doing amateur psychology with the image they get of Putin through the television as a James Bond-style bad guy.
Every time some plain old person tells me what Putin thinks or what Putin wants or what Putin can't stand, I have to leave or change the subject. The way they talk about the Ukraine conflict has no actual physical references. It's like they're telling fairy stories about an evil wizard.
A lot has changed in the three weeks since they took their poll, I'd be very surprised if some of these numbers hold true today (for instance, this claims only 47% under 30 believe Russia has intentionally targeted civilians)
I am a pro Ukraine millennial. I also came of age during our middle east forever war and saw all the lies that went into supporting that boondoggle. The irony is not lost on me one bit. Goat herders yesterday, babuskas today. The great powers play their games and we pay.
I'm in the same age group and mindset as you. In fact, none of [the] poll results tracks anything I've encountered since the war started. I do not know a single person who sympathizes with the Russian aggression.
If the polling numbers are representative of larger groups outside of my social circles, then it is every disconcerting.
> barely half of those under 30 said they care who wins...
Generally my mentality. This is a European war in Europe's back yard. CNN and Fox (with the exception of Carlson) are in lockstep, Google's demonetizing content that's dismissive of, or opposed to Ukraine.
Ukraine is the victim here, not the aggressor. I hope they win, I doubt they will.
But domestically, the rhetoric around the war has infuriated me.
A redneck shows up to a domestic political rally with his tacky Confederate flag, and everyone involved is a bigot, a fascist, or a potential domestic terrorist.
A country constitutionally bans same sex relationships, turns trans refugees fleeing the conflict away at the border because they're 'actually' men, supports the efforts of a pseudo-autonomous militia whose ~10k soldiers walk around wearing sonnenrads, and its only a tiny minority that we should overlook. Facebook even made an exception for their policy on supporting them.
I'm fine with nuance. It's important. But why is it only a thing when it means we might get to spill American blood in a police action for someone else's benefit?
I'm still disgusted that the US tolerated afghan allies who indulged in bacha bazi. Now people on my facebook feed and in the news who spent the last six years hyperventilating about neonazis and demanding restrictions on speech to stop them are telling me that supporting ethnonationalist militias is the price of democracy in Europe.
The EU is rich. This is their neighborhood. I've heard plenty of lectures from EU nationals that the US needs to stop enforcing its will on the rest of the world. If they want US arms in Ukraine, buy them from us.
I don't want American boots on the ground, and I'm leery of providing military aid with tax money that could be better used serving the people who paid it for a war that likely won't end in a win.
1) Who do you think started this violence? Did Ukraine invade Russia or did Russia invade Ukraine?
2) Who do you pull for when one person attacks another? The bully or the victim?
To me, these two questions and their answers determine my sympathies. You were lied to about Iraq and you are right to mistrust the US government, but the world media is not the US government. If you see reports from multiple news sources about mass graves and such, you should believe them.
The fact that Ukraine now defends itself means that we are in a very different situation. None of the countries Hitler annexed during the appeasement actually defended themselves, he got them for free through diplomacy. If they did defend themselves instead of joining the German side then Germany wouldn't have been threat, and there would be no need for an alliance against them and Germany wouldn't have been the biggest threat in WW2. That is the situation we see today, Ukraine is defending itself, there is no way Russia can continue invading like that, they can't afford it, so the WW2 scenario has already been averted.
yeah the problem is that these are obviously the wrong questions. You behave like a doctor treating the symptoms rather than the root cause. Why not ask "_why_ did Russia invade Ukraine?" The answer is that nobody wants to deal with the inconvenient truth that the US contributed heavily to the inflamed tensions.
You present a false dichotomy. I can have sympathies for Ukraine and distrust the US at the same time. Not viewing Russia as a cartoon villain is far more realistic than what the Western media is pushing.
Cited figures from Table-14, on (PDF/printed)-page-55.
Looks like they polled 4 age-groups: 18-29; 30-44; 45-64; and 65+. The results for 30-44 were pretty close to those for 18-29, and the results for 45-64 were pretty close to those for 65+. In fact, if we combine the two younger groups and two older groups, such that it's 18-44 vs. 45+, then the reported-results really don't change much.
Tangentially, it's really weird for news-articles to not link their sources.
Yea but it would also be a mistake to just assume that this is the case yet again, especially given that the United States has adamantly refused to put troops in Ukraine and has sought diplomatic solutions from the start. The US government has really pushed against inflaming the US population toward war. If recognizing atrocities, however, pushes people toward war than there isn't much you can do about that besides continue to do what the US has done which is not get into the war.
I went to Iraq. The war was probably misguided (although there is still a democratically elected government in Iraq... so... idk) - Ukraine is quite unlike Iraq and if this generation (which I think includes me?) is drawing comparisons than it's because of a lack of thought and education around world events.
This is sort of the Chomsky syndrome: Assuming that government A is always lying, and that therefore the opposite claim by government B has to be right.
Younger people are so far removed from actual war that they have the luxury of being ambivalent about it. It's become easy to believe that war is simply a thing of the past and Americans won't ever experience it again. Ukraine is just pictures on a screen, nobody is going to drive tanks into America or fire missiles at our hospitals.
Anecdotal counterexample (I'm Gen Z) -- Ukraine is pictures on a screen, and that's what brought my attention to it! I want Ukraine to win the war and I think what Russia is doing is extremely wrong and heinous, and I also wouldn't have become nearly as invested in the conflict were it not for the fact that this is the first major war to be broadcast on social media. I've seen video clips that made me angry, sad, and horrified, and have catalyzed me to make a firm stance on the issue instead of being ambivalent.
Also anecdotally, every other person I know in my age group is also very pro-Ukraine and not ambivalent, perhaps as suggested by one of the other comments the poll is outdated?
Gen Z kid here; my friend group largely doesn't care in the slightest about the war in Ukraine. We think what's happening is wrong, but we don't see the point in doing anything ourselves. The Middle East was bombed for decades while no one had the spine to really do anything about it. We didn't even have the virtue signalers that you see online today. Why should we care when it happens to Europe?
This is all without mentioning the fact that the war exposed a lot of the biases we knew were present in the media- how many reporters just straight up admitted that they care more because the people dying are white this time?
As someone else on this post said, Europe is a rich peninsula with enough money and manpower to handle Russia by itself. If they want American help, they can buy American weapons. America has committed enough war crimes over the past few decades. We don't need to expand that list and further risk the future of this country, which is already looking bleak.
I didn’t. But I had to check that you weren’t talking out of your rear. It was a damn condescending comment. “Young people don’t agree with the established foreign policy position, it must mean they’re weak,” kinda thing.
I mean the greatest generation didn’t support ww2. Hell, the Americans of the early 1900’s didn’t support ww1. Both times presidents were elected on the promise of keeping America out of war. Could you attribute that to being “detached from war”? They fought when they were called to do so. And until congress votes for war, I’m going to keep on saying that supporting Ukraine is a poor decision and outside the interests of America. I’m a zillenial for context.
Spoke with a young person who had an interesting take: He says he sympathizes with Russians because he feels like they're also getting dragged into pointless wars by their government. (memories of Iraq and Afghanistan)
I agree! I'm Gen Z and I sympathize with the "good Russians" because I know a few. I've talked to people living in Russia right now who are furious with Putin for the awful evil things he's doing. I want Ukraine to win the war, but I don't think the Russian people are evil, I think Putin is evil. I'd wager that many pro-war Russians are victims of propaganda and lies and would change their minds if they had access to verifiable sources of truth, but they don't.
Putin is horrible though and I want him and his cronies to be punished to the fullest extent of international law for their crimes against humanity.
I'm vouching for this comment, because it's an entirely reasonable thought that crippling debt and housing costs lead to apathy (graphs 3 "Do you care who wins?"). I do not believe it leads to supporting Russia, though.
Yeah, I wish these polls would also ask "null-hypothesis"-questions (for a lack of a better word). Like "Do you care about the war in Ukraine?" and then get more specific.
Young people are the Cheng Xin of this world. In the past, we did not know the lies that the mainstream media was attempting to broadcast as part of large scale population unification and pacification. Without control of that process, lots of these lies are now visible and faith has deteriorated in public sources of information.
It's like how everyone knows the NIAID is useless today. Unfortunately, another casualty of all this is truth. This is the problem with lying for what you think is the greater good. At some point, the fact that you lied ruins the future entirely and poisons the info well. If even the guys we chose to help us are going to bullshit us, we must live in a world of perpetual information mistrust.
This, plus, it's worth remembering that 16% of people have an IQ less than 85.
I am 31 so my age group is not represented at all by this graph. I am curious why they left out 30 to 64.
At least within my friend group (which I don't think any are younger than 29... not that I really talk about age often) we are universally against the invasion of Ukraine and want them to survive.
I don't feel like even at my age that I have experience or other events that are impacting my opinion. I also don't get most of my news from major news organizations.
I picked up this comment from a HN user in another thread but it got no traction, seeing Germany drag it's feet on sending arms and Zelensky's recent comments about blood money I think it's especially relevant...
"seeing as we're heading into spring, seeing Germany has quite a wealthy economy and QOL, that many if not most workers get 5 weeks of holiday, the chip shortage is leading to slowdowns in the automotive industry etc... why doesn't the government just go cold turkey, give people a month or 2 free holidays while drastically reducing public lighting, telling businesses to stop heating their premises at night etc etc... I mean we had a dress rehearsal 2 years ago with the onset of Covid, this would be better ,for a good cause, probably give a boost to domestic spending and send a f...U to the rest of the world saying we too can think outside of the box :-)"
Young Americans, in general, do not understand or internalize national security or great power competition; and instead project high ideals and generosity to countries whose _leadership_ does not share the same view of their nation or the world. With Russia, using OP example, there was & probably remains the very serious risk of food & energy dominance by Russia at the expense of democratic nations - none of whom can make the transition to so-called green tech in-time to avoid that outcome. There remains the risk of a Sino-Russian alliance that would result in a very different world from today's somewhat free & open societies. I could go on at length, but will sum it up by saying the world doesn't work the way we wish it would, and we have to face reality head-on and not wish it away.
This is a very condescending view of Young Americans. I think any analysis that does not start with an economic analysis of Americans today vs Americans 40 years ago is bound to end up on these soft attributes of "ideals and generosity".
It's abundantly clear for any Young American, that there is no upside to war. If American maintains her dominance, then they are still suffering under a gerontocracy and growing wealth inequality. What person would risk nuclear war for the privilege to struggle to pay rent every month? Likewise, the risk of a Sino-Russian alliance only effects those who stand to extract rent from "democratic" countries (in the form of foreign ownership). If capital is increasingly owned by a small few, why should Young Americans care if their oligarchs are American or Chinese?
I think most Young Americans don't have the luxury of wondering about power competition especially since so many of them don't have a stake in the game. It's hard to convince people the effects of what Russian oil dominance will have where they deal with much more pressing survival issues that are a lot closer to them.
this response IMO cherry-picks a single line, which is easily setup with an "appeal to USA flag-waving nationalism" rebuttal. Clearly capped off with a "love it or leave it" literally.. not intellectually honest in addressing the real point here, which is perhaps "young people have serious daily life and future adult life" problems which have nothing to do with Great-Powers, Great-Games manipulation. Similar discussions could have been had for three millenia of nationalistic warfare, and I side firmly with the parent post myself, empathy towards the young adults in the USA, not flag-waving "you people need to honor the flag that gave you all of THIS" type stuff
Those are all also things that the oligarchs of the enemy can promise to do better on (and perhaps even actually deliver) to buy off Americans away from loyalty to their hometown billionaires.
I really don't understand this response. Are you seriously implying that today most young Americans have an healthy environment? At least China is pretending to roll out some sort of universal health coverage. Minority rights? Let's ignore our own highly politicized conversations on minority rights and look to our allies, like Israel. I'm not sure I see too much a difference of the genocide of the Uighurs in China and the genocide of the Palestinians. So no, I don't get the point. The bullet points you have posted are shaky at best and don't convince me that anyone should risk nuclear war for "ideas" like "free-ish speech".
I'm not implying China is perfect; or that America is wholly evil. It's that you must consider the day-to-day implications for _most_ Americans (who are probably unlike you and don't make six figures working in tech or own any capital), and that the system doesn't provide any material returns to them; and therefore any "change in leadership" is likely immaterial. Risking nuclear war, and billions of tax dollars for such a war does not make sense, especially when it makes life harder at home.
People think they're being "enlightened" for holding such views, being able to hold up the magnifying glass to their own society...but it's far more likely that they just live in a bubble. It appears as something of an irony that these very same free societies they criticize not only permit but actually _encourage_ this kind of self reflection through their traditions and institutions.
I think that to truly appreciate life in a western democracy you need to have some real exposure to the alternative/absence.
As I've travelled more, gained life experience, I've become less and less impressed with the ACT of expressing such criticism (particularly the knee-jerk reflexive "whataboutism" sort so frequently launched in response to any criticism of authoritatian regimes) and more appreciative of the fact that it's freely allowed and part of the culture of the free world.
>I think that to truly appreciate life in a western democracy you need to have some real exposure to the alternative/absence.
Fine. Let's ignore the implication that I live in a bubble and let's focus on this right here.
Most Americans have never left the state they live in. Most Americans don't have the luxury to travel. Most Americans have been left with rising housing costs, food costs, and gas costs. Most Americans have increasingly taken an isolationist view point as the quagmire in the middle east spent trillions abroad with nothing to show at home. By your own yardstick, why is it surprising that many young americans aren't enthusiastic to jump into yet another foreign war?
Meh, it is what it is. Surprising? Maybe not, just unimpressive. Most people are a product of their environment and that's never going to change no matter what. I don't think there's much to gain here except perspective and appreciation at an individual level...and in my personal experience a great deal more happiness as a result.
If you live in America and this is what you believe you really need to live elsewhere for awhile. I recommend living in Fushun, China and getting to know universal healthcare there. It's close to the North Korean border where you can explore China's close ally. When you get there let me know how many Uighurs serve in the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party as compared to how many non-Jews serve in the Israeli Knesset. For extra credit rank for world genocide and let's see where Palestinian so-called 'genocide' falls.
I think in general, western democracies do a lot better on elite freedoms than China, or indeed eastern democracies. When it comes to the actual freedom enjoyed by normal people, it's more patchy. Living in contemporary America, or indeed any fast-paced, high-bill liberal democracy, is essentially a lot of work for most people: usually the vast majority of their waking time is spent at one or more jobs. This usually delivers no real security, they usually have no real control over what they do, to a very fine level (acceptable emotions to display, and so on) during this time.
China is like that too, but the only people that would really experience a night-and-day difference are the elite, who coincidentally write all the academic papers, news articles, etc.
> I think most Young Americans don't have the luxury of wondering about power competition
Precisely the opposite. Americans have the luxury of not worrying about great power competition. Eastern Europeans, for example, do not have this luxury. You think that great power competition does not affect you, but you are very wrong about that. You just think so because you are a citizen of the most powerful great power.
That had far more to do with Europe being destroyed and creating a dependence on American resources. It's not as clear cut for America pre and post the Vietnam war, or the Gulf war or War in Afghanistan.
This is very true. I think for young people it's very difficult to appreciate that we live on the knife's edge of peace. Peace is not the natural human condition, and vast numbers of people are ready and willing to commit incredible violence and atrocities in the name of their tribe. Absolutely nothing about human nature has changed since the uncountable wars we have fought since our very first moments as a species. Peace exists only in the liminal space between great violence and terrible powers.
Disagree. I'm in the 'young' bracket here but researching geopolitics/military is something of a hobby for me.
I'm not arguing that the young are all like me, but rather that I applaud my generation for being skeptical, at least from an intervention POV. I still side strongly with Ukraine but this is a complex issue and rolling the tanks against a country with less GDP than NY does not make the world inherently safer. The older generations, on the other hand, were raised in the context of Russia being a world power while at this time they've revealed themselves to be objectively not.
However, a Sino-Russian alliance would be an absolute nightmare scenario and direct military involvement would give China a possible excuse to back Russia. As long as they remain neutral-ish then it's safe to let this play out, particularly given how things are going so far.
Now, the area that concerns me is how many are openly supporting Russia. Skepticism is great but I don't think there's any reason to voice support for Russia at this time.
> I applaud my generation for being skeptical, at least from an intervention POV.
As I read it, the poll was not about the wisdom of intervention. I think even the older generation is extremely wary of direct military action by the West againt Russia. Rather, the poll is about the relative moral position of the two combatants. And I think the sympathy for Russia among the young reflected in the poll probably stems from comparative indifference and skepticism about world politics (leading to a tendency to simply ignore the subject), and different media consumption habits. Young people don't watch nearly as much television news, they tend to absorb their news through social media (which of course is filtered through their friends, who also tend to share the same indifference to global politics). It becomes a case of the blind leading the blind.
What about this issue is particularly complex? Other than nuclear weapons? Russia has spent the last 20 years acting with total impunity, relying on a western reluctance to intervene. Russia is a world power if they are allowed to throw their weight around without consequence. The only reason not directly aid Ukraine in securing their borders is the threat of nuclear war. China is not going to got war with Russia against the US because of military intervention inside Ukraine's borders. That is an insane claim.
That seems like a good reason in its own right... Right? That said, they're suffering a lot of consequence at the moment so it's worth letting that pan out. The west drastically overestimated their capability, by that standard NK is a world power. I get it, I don't think your position there is wrong but...semantics.
>China is not going to [go to] war with Russia against the US
Never claimed that. The game for China is if they don't provide material aid, they get to maintain better relations with the west. I think the west broadly misunderstands their goals for international standing. They want to be recognized but if push comes to shove they'll just buddy up with Russia. Best to not provoke that. If the US decides to world police some more, along with three EU, that makes world policing the standard for world power and China will happily rise to that. They're very much watching what we do here.
China's government, like Russia's uses the west as a tool to consolidate power. The western world, and specifically NATO (which is really just another world for America in this context) serve as a looming enemy. We have now clearly seen that the actual actions of the West do not matter. China and Russia suffer from intense corruption, low overall standards of living, and the massive income and power gaps that arise from these types of governments. Western democracy ain't perfect, but there is a good chance that given the ability to accurately compare their options the Chinese and Russian populace would start to push back against the power structures. You can see this in the case of Hong Kong, and in Ukraine's westward trajectory.
Thus the people in power need to control information and unify the population in order to stay in power. If the west doesn't directly provide ammunition for this information war, they will just make it up. And they already do this. I have come to realize over the last 5 years or so that China and Russia have ZERO information in maintaining a truly friendly relationship with western (there needs to be a word for this that doesn't ignore Japan and Korea) democracies. They will continue to act in whatever fashion preserves the power structure, and that will include simply inventing threats. Such as Ukraines doomed bid to join NATO.
You're a few steps behind the ball my friend. The overtures of Sino backing of Russia have been pretty loudly resonating over the last few years. The neutrality now likely being a consequence of trying to gauge whether the U.S. is actually willing to flex in response to an invasion by another nuclear power. They've had their eyes on Taiwan, and if their leadership thinks they can get away with it, they'll likely give it the old Hong Kong treatment.
Especially since Ukraine, being the leading source of neon, is also a sizable link in the U.S. semiconductor supply chain. Not quite as big ticket as TSMC, but big enough to serve as a useful gauge for strategists and planners.
Gen Z has little or no exposure to outright saber rattling. Just proxy wars, which globalization somewhat optimized for until realpolitik came back around to start biting once folks started understanding the soft power play of post cold war economics.
3 generation rule at play. We've got the direct witnesses of heavy geopolitical action on the way out.
The boomers->X->Millenial know the aftershocks, and at least know what didn't work for the "The Greatest Generation". Z and forward are a refreshing breath of fresh air in de-bullshitting, and have access the way more information than any previous generation had all at one time, but that's a vulnerability at the same time without strong bullshit filters, and a collective sense of both unity and the real. The Real* is not entirely a "here's your canned reality" from the media, but a collective and relatable ground truth experience that crosscuts the population. I'm afraid one thing we've really dropped the ball on is as teachers, and institutional raisers and propagaters of strong bullshit filters. Especially given the information augmented battlefield of today.
Definitely keep doing what you're doing though. Ain't no way to get the head for it but to do it.
Interesting points but I'm struggling to find the thesis here, at least with respect to military intervention.
Russia and China have a weird relationship. They were, in a way, born together into their current statuses, but Russia isn't Soviet anymore and they don't necessarily represent the image China is going for. Meanwhile Russia wants China for it's economic might and China probably has an interest in resources and land north of Beijing, but at the moment any agreement wouldn't net much for China and represents a great deal of risk in the long term.
China's aspirations go far beyond Russia. They will not be content with vast reaches of methane burping tundra as their international policy showpiece. They want true superpower status and to set the tone for the world order. They will wait decades more if they have to.
Do we have any reason to believe this "common knowledge," or are we just projecting from Western imperialist tendencies? China has a _long_ tradition of being insular.
One belt one road. Much ink has been spilled on China's recent international ambitions that will make infrastructure investments in 70 countries between now and 2050. The reason this is common knowledge is that their superpower ambitions are blindingly obvious.
why is the perspective that they are making these investments to secure their economic future against foreign interference less valid than "they are trying to control world affairs"? China has never been interested in pushing its ideology unlike certain actors today. And regardless of how Westerners feel about it, HK is indisputably a domestic issue, and Taiwan arguably so. There's never been any indication of China wanting to project military force abroad. Their stated aims of being a regional force in a multipolar world make much more sense.
I take great issue with Western portrayal of China as an antagonistic threat when it's the West that has done the lion share of provocation, the West that continues to believe it deserves a say in East Asian affairs.
>I still side strongly with Ukraine but this is a complex issue and rolling the tanks against a country with less GDP than NY does not make the world inherently safer.
Putin takes Luhansk and Donestsk, consolidates the southern coast, and links to Transnistria. Ukraine is now a landlocked welfare case for Europe, with millions of refugees streaming out and a government in collapse. Just like that, Russia has a salient into Western europe, and the world order of national sovereignty comes to an end. There is no complexity to the issue. This is the clearest, most mortal threat to Western civilization since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Do not fall for "let's hear both sides" whataboutism.
It doesn't happen often, but sometimes in life there is simply right and wrong.
That's why I left the "at this time" caveat in there. Yeah, if the Russian military actually gets its shit together and manages an offensive that achieves that we need to reevaluate but...I don't think they have any chance of pulling that off. Their troops have spent weeks retreating from a meat grinder with nonexistent morale and will be asked to do it all again, "but it'll work this time".
Further, would you take landlocked Ukraine and possible welfare state over a Sino-Russian axis? I think I would.
This isn't "let's hear both sides" it's "this will get really nasty if we pull the old so-i-started-blasting strategy."
>This isn't "let's hear both sides" it's "this will get really nasty if we pull the old so-i-started-blasting strategy."
It already is really nasty. Ask the people of Bucha. I think my overall point here is that the war has already begun, and we in the West are sticking our heads in the sand and praying for it to go away. History shows that evil men will stop at nothing short of a forced hand. And any talk of negotiation with Russia at this point sounds painfully like "peace in our time". There is no "choice" to avoid this conflict anymore. I wish to god that there was. But that choice was made 20 years ago when Ukraine was alienated from NATO. Our only option now is to accept the reality of our state of war with Russia, or to sit by and watch them win.
Okay. How do you get the two sides to come to an agreement? Right now, one side wants the other side to not exist [1], the other side appears to be willing to concede status quo ante bellum.
[1] To be more precise, they have given several conflicting answers as to what they actually want. I personally find this answer to be the most likely to be true, especially given that the other side is willing to agree to the demands implied by several of the other answers, and yet this side is unwilling to accept such agreement.
Negotiation isn't a way out against an aggressor who isn't convinced that you can and will use force otherwise.
What you have then is at best surrender to their current demands and hope they don't decide to see what they can take you for next after that. This isn’t novel territory.
>So you want boots on the ground? Whose? Yours? Your children's?
Boots are already on the ground. Ukrainians childrens boots. They are already fighting the largest land battle in european history since World War II at this very moment. Russia has already taken greater losses than Germany did with the invasion of Poland.
Ukraine's fate is our own. And the longer we pretend this is just another foreign conflict, the more danger we will be in.
I wouldn't because I don't believe that's the choice I have. You can sacrifice Ukranians, accept landlocked Ukraine, hope it will stop there and you are still unlikely to prevent Sino-Russian axis that has been building for years now and clearly has a more matching world view than other current combinations.
This was started in 2014 and thinking it will go away if only Putin gets a big enough chunk of Ukraine is, I think, wishful thinking.
> Further, would you take landlocked Ukraine and possible welfare state over a Sino-Russian axis?
Those are not alternatives, they are a package deal; if you accept the first, the second comes along free for the ride. The Sino-Russian axis exists now, the only way to disrupt it is defeating one of the poles in a way which results in a realignment (and, more likely, that weakens rather than fully disrupts it.) Permitting it victory just makes it stronger.
Sino-Russian axis is here, so get used to it. It wasn't started by this war, and it won't be stopped by stopping it. Russia and China have larger aligning geopolitical interests and that is the driver.
The world order of national sovereignty ends because Ukraine loses eastern territory?
There have been much greater refugee crisis' (Syria, for example) that has not resulted in the entire fall of civilization.
Having a prolonged conflict over Ukraine would be great for Northrup Grumman and Delloit. Finding a peaceful, quick diplomatic resolution will be better for the rest of the world.
> There have been much greater refugee crisis' (Syria, for example) that has not resulted in the entire fall of civilization.
Ukraine has, as of now, produced 4.7 million refugees, with another ~7 million internally-displaced people. That is over the course of 6 weeks.
The Syrian Civil War took 4 years to reach that refugee population, and currently stands at about 6-7 million refugees with roughly an equivalent number of IDP.
If the Ukrainian war persists for several months (which sadly seems likely), then the Ukrainian refugee count will eclipse the decade-long Syrian refugee count by the end of the year. Syria's refugee crisis--itself the biggest since WW2--isn't exactly "much greater" than Ukrainian's refugee crisis; if anything, it's the other way around.
Transnistria is the interesting one. If Russia eventually goes into Moldova to 'liberate the Russians there' then we know the narrative around Ukraine was total bullshit (it's absolutely true that Ukraine treated those in separatist areas poorly for years).
> (it's absolutely true that Ukraine treated those in separatist areas poorly for years).
The “separatist areas” are a product of the first wave of the current Russian invasion; they weren't pure homegrown movements, Russian troops, both regulars and the Wagner “private” military company that is Russian and appears to work exclusively for Russian state interests were involved in the fighting which established them, around the same time as the Russia also seized Crimea.
We’ve know the justifications of the wave of Russian invasions starting with Georgia in 2008 has been bullshit since the beginning, and people who haven't figured it out in the last 14 years aren't particularly like to click over with a new round in Moldova.
Given how Russia treats its own citizen and how the Russian state views human rights, I’m surprised anyone believe Russia’s claim that it’s defending its people.
This 'national sovereignty' and 'world order' degrade didn't start with this war. Russians are now just using our double standards. They don't recognise our sui generis. You can call it whataboutism or however you like. World order is a thing for powers to sort and national sovereignty is just an illusion for smaller and weaker countries.
I would argue a greater threat is the attack upon democracy in the United States. One of the major political parties now rejects election results they do not win. A fall of the United States to a fascism that is allied to Putin would very likely be worse for Europe and "Western" society.
>Do not fall for "let's hear both sides" whataboutism.
Your comment is spot on, but this is strange. It is complex; there are two sides. The ideals of "Western civilization" aren't held by the globe, so it's important to understand why things work the way they do. It isn't "good" versus "evil".
Nah. There is one side. Two collectives competing over influence and sovereignty. The West, advocating for everyone has their lines and we're good, and Russia now going imperialist/expansionist.
NAP. Don't start nothing, won't be nothing.
Russia started something. There is now something. Failure to respond and restore the equilibrium is tacit acceptance of Russia setting terms, which sets a precedent.
Though to be fair, the West 's position is everyone has their lines but plays by our rules. The western governments put huge pressure on the rest of the world to conform their laws and norms to be beneficial to the globalized world order they themselves invented. This world order includes good things like human rights and rule of law, but also questionable things like the deck being heavily stacked in favor of the incumbents and winner takes all hypercapitalism.
Watching the actions of the Russian and Chinese governments over the past few months I think the issue has gotten much more black and white than these things usually are. Not necessarily good vs evil, as that is too subjective, but definitely somewhat of an ideological standoff between truth and...not truth.
I am absolutely on the side of the Ukraine and the West, but that is too simple. We are also post-truth. I think we are much closer to the real truth than Russia state media, but the president calling Ukraine a genocide is inventing a new definition for the term.
Genocide: Noun. The deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group
"a campaign of genocide"
By that definition I would say quite a few more mass graves, along with a coordinated effort to stamp out Ukrainian language, customs, intelligentsia,
and identity. I understand that Russian state media calls Ukraine "one people" with Russians, but it's a far way to go between a talking point and indiscriminately killing civilians as part of a brutal war and genocide. It's pretty obvious that word is being said for political reasons, not because the current situation obviously meets the definition.
I am absolutely horrified by Russia's war, but I reserve the right to be vastly more horrified if they begin an organized campaign to exterminate the Ukrainian people.
It's not. Contrarian takes on the internet are 90% trolling and 9% clueless/bad faith arguments being presented as if they had the same weight of evidence behind them as the (usually) established view.
The 1% of actually contrarian arguments are usually well received, even if they differ significantly from the status quo or say something outside the Overton window.
Peace for who? America just formally ended a 20 year long war, with very little to show for it. Someone who is 18 today, has only known America in a time of war. How can you call this peace? (I know how, it's because you only talk about peace as peace for western nations.) Anyone would immediately be skeptical to the thought that we should immediately enter another war several thousand miles away.
It's only when majority white western christians are being blown up that we are at the "knife's edge of peace". What is it called when it's muslims in the middle east or northern africa being blown up? I'm not convinced America needs to be proactive in an engagement with Russia to hold up what you consider "the knife's edge of peace".
Afghanistan and Iraq were and remained local conflicts. Twice in the last century and once in the century before (Napoleon), a local conflict in Europe escalated into a world war in which millions died in the span of a few years.
That doesn't make the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq right or just (I don't believe they were), but Europe has long been an extremely dangerous powder keg. We have had relative peace in the last 70 years because European great powers have successfully avoided actively shooting at each other. This move by Russia is a major threat to that stability and is categorically different than the invasions in the Middle East not because of race but because of the likelihood of escalation.
> Afghanistan and Iraq were and remained local conflicts.
Sort of, but Pakistan might not agree.
The disastrous Iraq invasion had huge consequences for neighbouring countries and people argue over its contribution to significant knock on effects like the Arab spring.
I think you already know the answer to that. When the 20 year old war is mostly all about sending some soldiers over to the middle east to bomb it, then it doesn't really feel like a war. For people in the US who choose to ignore it, they absolutely live in peace every day.
Peace for me. And I want my government to prioritize that over peace for other countries at every opportunity. It ain't pretty, but it's how the world works.
And nobody gives a damn about "white western Christians." We set whole cities of white western christians on fire in WWII, and bombed white western Christians in the 90's on behalf of a Muslim population (Serbia / Kosovo).
You, too, may experience a difference if war comes not for a faraway people whom you like to feel indignant about, but to your own country, landing on your doorstep and destroying your neighbourhood. Perhaps it's very wrong that you will feel differently. But you will. That is what the knife edge means. Using the miseries of far-off people to encourage cowardice or putting your head in the sand is wrong, and foolish.
The conflict statistics bear out that we are in a lengthy era of peace. I am not being eurocentric, it's true for a vast stretch of the world since WW2. If you think we have not been in a time of peace, just wait till you find out what a time of war looks like. It will go from 3 ongoing conflicts to 100.
Peace is the natural human condition in small groups. As the groups increase in size so does competition, insecurity and conflicts of interest. Its this dynamic that gives rise to conflating our own peaceful orbits with tribal or state rivalry; and conversely its often an abused imbalance of our interpersonal relationships that gives rise to individual leaders with power compulsivity.
> Peace is the natural human condition in small groups.
I don’t think this is true. I read Sapiens by Harari and he presents lots of info on how early man, living in small groups was very violent. With gravesites from the time showing violent deaths at young ages.
I romantically would like to think this but believe the reality is that humans are violent and it’s large civilizations with complicated rule of law and interdependency is the reason for peace. Sort of the Leviathan argument that humans are evil and it’s a struggle to overcome and improve on that nature.
Although I hope that one day this changes and we eventually evolve to be more peaceful.
Evolutionarily speaking I think violence was too much of a shortcut to survival so mammals evolved against peace.
"It took thousands of years of human civilisation before we got relatively benign governments. Power structures are not inherently benign; they must constantly be pressured to prevent malignant people using them to leverage their actions.
A non-authoritarian government is an historical anomaly. It's a ball balanced on top of a hill, pushed there by the deaths of millions, and kept there by the vigilance of those who care.
Indeed. Or like the ISS in low earth orbit. It took enormous energy to put it into that decaying orbit and constant infusions of energy to keep it there. We will come crashing down to earth quite quickly if we can't keep up the balance.
Edge of peace. I like that phrase. I may end up borrowing it.
I think overall I agree with your post. We truly do suck as a species. The past few decades were a massive aberration in our history ( and even that relatively peaceful -- for a westerner -- period saw some horrifying conflicts that just did not make the front pages ).
I do not wish for another major conflict. No sane person does. We should do what we can to prevent it.
Still, I personally see one on the horizon. Best I can do is talk to my social circle, but even that seems futile. The actual decisions about matters like these happen way outside those.
The people who came of age after the internet but before it was censored into something safe enough to sell ads on are far more aware of how nasty things can be than the people before and since.
If anyone is gonna set out on a path of "real violence" it's likely going to be a subgroup of millennials.
> I think for young people it's very difficult to appreciate that we live on the knife's edge of peace.
That doesn't seem like thought that supports the position of the old, as characterized here, who are encouraging the escalation of a war against a nuclear power with a ruined economy.
I blame the generational gap on that particular US generation who has lived through major wars but never had to worry about war on their own territory, who have gone through wars where only an extreme minority have had to participate (and that being privileged enough to be in college or to have an important job was enough to get you out of participation), and who have been hammered by propaganda their entire lives that the final battle would be the commies vs the bootstrappers.
Half of them are praying that this will be the end of the world, like God said it would be.
They supported every war except Vietnam, because Vietnam was the only war they were in danger of participating in. Those wars didn't affect them badly at all, in fact the wars helped the economy because everybody got jobs creating expensive things that would be burned (in the occupied homes of Iraqi families.)
I would call them a reflection of Russian nationalist aggression, but they're really not, because Russians have known suffering from war. Russians have pretty good excuses not to want NATO weapons, missile defense systems, and troops stationed on their border. Americans are afraid of their vital fluids being corrupted by the demonic Russians and their sole goal of creating discord by spreading propaganda that the issues that everybody who isn't an old wealthy retired homeowner is concerned about aren't something that should be completely ignored.
Young people generally see them as insane chickenhawks that are useless domestically and hyperaggressive internationally, and rightfully so.
Maybe when life’s good it’s easy to ignore what one’s government is misspending on the military.
But when job security’s low, education costs a fortune and the social safety net barely exists, asking why one’s government is sending billions in help to a country at the other end of the world is not at all a crazy question.
Now that’s the US, but I’m in the EU and I’m still deeply disappointed at how much money the EU is spending on helping everyone except EU citizens. It’s unacceptable to spend money at such scale when we have areas which are dirt-poor in Europe and many children are severely materially and socially deprived.
Rather than a "fault" of young Americans I would just point out that they have never experienced a significant militaristic national security threat nor witnessed a great power competition, and old-fashioned tanks-and-bombs conquest has been rare from the first & second world countries for their entire lives.
This is a "fault" of almost everyone living in Europe and USA at the moment. Europe for a while neglected military spending because the great evil Soviet Union was gone. In the USA we got to the mode where Russia isn't exactly our friend but they are contained to their vast land and nobody cares. Our focus too was on the Middle East.
But now, I am not really old enough to know what it was like living under the threat from Russia, but I am old enough to know from 1 generation of separation family and friends what it was like. And 2 generations was WWII. So Russian aggression has me worried.
Now Gen Z is another generation forward. I have found that Gen Z as a whole seems to be more empathetic, and very anti violence. The thought of someone coming in and flattening your neighborhood is the last thing they would think of. The things they more empathize with at the moment are the issues in the USA with social justice. And seeing Russian minorities in Ukraine persecuted from Russian sources resonates with them more than the narrative from the USA that Russia is an imperialistic country. They are also deeply skeptical of that narrative from our government as reflections on the USA's own history in the middle east, and central/South America
The last 70 years of (relative) peace are the exception, not the norm. Remaining ambivalent when a great power makes it clear they are intent on upsetting the balance on which peace hangs is clearly a "fault". It doesn't matter if that fault is the result of ignorance of history, it's still a problem.
This is an example of the quip 'Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.'
The younger generations have grown up in a bubble. The Soviet empire was no more.
They were probably too young to remember or not even alive for 9/11. The modern wars the US was involved in could mostly be ignored. The economy was, for the most part, booming and full of distracting consumer goods and excess capacity leading to a full table of innovative goods and services.
I'm a late gen X. My wife is a late millennial. I try to relate to her how the world used to be when I was young(less wealth, less choices, more uncertainty) but until you've lived it you can't understand it.
The current generation is just barely eaking out of a nearly three year long 'once in a century' pandemic with broad impacts on education, employment, and housing costs... and yet, they apparently haven't suffered through enough 'hard times.'
OK.
Notwithstanding the constant ongoing war in the Middle East and that anyone born before 99' definitely remembers 9/11. I know people who still haven't adequately processed the trauma of the Great Recession -- and they weren't old enough to make the massive gains from the economy, either.
I think this is an extremely ungenerous take. I think more objectively young Americans simply have different ideological preferences than older Americans.
The cold war mentality, talk of "free and open" societies is in itself deeply ideological, not "facing reality head on". It's the wish to remake or maintain the world in America's image. If anything I think young Americans are the less ideological group here. They see America's domestic issues, international overreach, they have less of a preference for liberalism in the broad sense of the term, and they demand a foreign policy that is more focused on America's domestic interests in the face of a changing, more multipolar world.
the general opinion of younger Americans seems much more aligned with realist schools of foreign policy than with the moralistic, idealistic mentality of older generations.
There are levels of grey to open (e.g. free speech, expression, democracy) vs closed (e.g. prison for political speech, totalitarianism), but the US and EU are a world apart from Russia or China. I recommend speaking to someone (who isn't state sponsored as many Tiktok & Youtube influencers are) from that country to understand. Do not think that you will not be shot by a conscripted soldier who wants your stuff to take back to his impoverished family or that if you are it will make the world a better more "equal" place. Many Russians are afraid of the return of soldiers from this war (special operation?), because each time before it has led to more violence.
Having your pronoun misused by a teacher in school isn't right, but it is fundamentally different type of oppression from working in a prison camp in Siberia or Xinjiang.
My understanding is that--according to Western sources--Chinese people report high satisfaction with their government, much higher than US citizens. I feel that this metric should also be considered when evaluating the quality of life in a society.
As for the point on Xinjiang, I think the oppression of people there is real, but oppression of religious minorities isn't just a non-Western phenomenon; look at France, for example.
Consider the source of your information about other societies. The elites of Western society, who have a great interest in preserving Western societies as they are and who hold a lot of control of the media, want to align the populous against the enemies of the Western elites. The flaws of enemy countries will therefore tend to be exaggerated, sometimes highly so. Western societies will tend to be portrayed as the best anyone can hope for.
I've traveled to China for two decades. There is both great prosperity and astounding poverty there ($300=2000Yuan/year is defined as poverty). Whatever you may see on TV there is plenty of homelessness even in Shanghai/Beijing/Shenzhen (for many who lack an appropriate identity card) and also much greater destitution in the outlying regions. There is no free medical care. Of course "people report" high satisfaction with a government that can and does throw them in jail for disagreeing. That visibly happens even in independent Hong Kong. Be careful what "Western sources" are actually propaganda outlets. It is amazing what large monetary donations to journalism and research universities can buy in the US, EU, and Australia, but there is plenty of other documentation.
That you compare "religious suppression" (reeducation prison camps with forced labor and sterilization) in Xinjiang to not wearing a hijab in France is quite frankly shocking.
You shouldn't just evaluate governments based on reported approval, but approval does mean something. I don't think you have provided sufficient evidence to be able to dismiss the data.
I don't think my comparison to France is as shocking as you claim, but perhaps a better comparison would be Canada's treatment of indigenous people. I thought this video on the topic of Xinjiang was pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz9ICFDk8Js
You haven't even done basic research. Random sources you pulled from cursory web searches, with origins in _actual_ propaganda funded by the US government, are legitimate to you? You literally cite Adrian Zenz. But Harvard polls on government approval are "propaganda outlets" because they contradict your beliefs. Shocking indeed.
This is a matter of ideology? You're saying the principles of young people in the US say it's OK to invade another country that did not attack first? Or because they found some news sources saying Putin is justified?
I guess I just don't see any sense in that argument. Do kids today not think for themselves? Have they no principles of their own?
Wow. Today is definitely the right time to reinstate the US military draft.
If nothing else, the prospect of yourself dying in the mud of a distant foreign land should motivate US kids to finally give a damn about power-crazed politicians killing multitudes of human beings for... whatever platitude manages to get a million retweets.
An important aspect to understand is that "democratic nations" fighting together for their ideals is fiction created for the purpose of propaganda and of manufacturung consent. Countries fight for their interests, not for ideals.
Those seem an odd selection of questions, which made me immediately suspect they asked many other questions then skipped over them to generate a story.
Similar to how pharma companies have to pre-register research questions, do these polls have to publish their full methodology somewhere?
I was anti-military and anti-gun ownership, until I happened to be in Ukraine at the time of attack, and until I happened to be in Belarus at a time of dictatorship.
PS: although I think organization and coordination is thousands times more important than weapons.
Eh... without a breakout of their numbers it is hard to trust this poll.
That said, I think its fair to say half of 18-29 year olds have no interest in geopolitics and 65+ people have been around long enough to have some opinion on it.
The difference isn't that many more are supporting Russia. The difference is that many more don't have clear-cut sympathy for any side.
I personally are much more sympathetic to Ukraine on different principles than most, but I definitely understand why many are not willing to trust the main media line on this. We went from hearing about how Ukraine was a deeply corrupt country, barely a democracy, to immediately hearing about how they are only being attacked because of how democratic and amazing it is and that Putin is scared Russians will want to live like Ukrainians. Media started glossing over Nazi imagery on the very pictures of soldiers they spread, not even mentioning it. There were many more narrative flips that I won't get into as a matter of time.
Because of this, people that are less informed or that have a more traditional understanding of the morality of conflict will naturally get skeptical and decide that they don't want to sympathize with anyone.
> We went from hearing about how Ukraine was a deeply corrupt country, barely a democracy, to immediately hearing about how they are only being attacked because of how democratic and amazing it is and that Putin is scared Russians will want to live like Ukrainians.
Can't forget the regime change—excuse me, anti-corruption protests—in 2014 directly after the old regime chose economic partnership with Putin over closer integration with the EU. Much of the civil conflict within Ukraine, which Putin ostensibly invaded to pacify (remember, lying to justify a war isn't a US-only skill), is due to their residents/leadership not recognizing the results of the 2014 governmental changes.
>Media started glossing over Nazi imagery on the very pictures of soldiers they spread, not even mentioning it.
I think they genuinely didn't know what it was. Even on r/ukraine, they were promoting those picture at the beginning. It doesn't look like any of the more common nazi symbols and and it doesn't have any text on it that you can google.
It was quite interesting to see journalists using those pictures in their articles talking about how there was no nazi problem in Ukraine.
Turning off Javascript on the Economist website also shows the full article. I'm using uBlock for this. Besides the paywalls, I find that turning off JS improves the user experience on the vast majority of news sites.
A lot of sites will just break without JS. I just tried with my ublock origin and cnn.com with javascript disabled, and only the site map on the footer loads.
I visit some fringe political forums once in a blue moon just to take a pulse. I was surprised to see a sizable pro-Putin sentiment which is basically a result of the whole “Russia Russia Russia” thing.
I check out some of these forums too occasionally, out of morbid curiosity.
Within the last decade or so, many of various unrelated political fringes have sort of loosely joined forces together and organized, but instead of being organized in service of a goal, it’s just in service of vague contrariness for the sake of contrariness.
These various groups, no matter how far apart ideologically they are, have sort of all coalesced on “If the ‘Mainstream’ is for it, we are against it, even if we can’t articulate why!”
> a result of the whole “Russia Russia Russia” thing.
Can you explain who the "boy" was and how they "cried wolf"? Did you read the Senate Intelligence report? PBS: Senate panel finds Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election [1].
"The nearly 1,000-page report, the fifth and final one from the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee on the Russia investigation, details how Russia launched an aggressive effort to interfere in the election on Trump’s behalf. It says the Trump campaign chairman had regular contact with a Russian intelligence officer and says other Trump associates were eager to exploit the Kremlin’s aid, particularly by maximizing the impact of the disclosure of Democratic emails hacked by Russian intelligence officers."
That second quote you gave is just really slanted. The right framing here is Trump is not a smart man. Sure, his folks talked to Russian operatives. That's for two reasons:
1. They're stupid and easy to manipulate.
2. They urgently wanted negative stories to publish about Hillary.
Yes, Russia was trying to influence our election. But, no, Trump isn't some clever Manchurian Candidate taking over our country on behalf of another country.
The right framing here is that famous SNL sketch about Reagan from the 80s, where Reagan acts like a bumbler but then when the doors close suddenly becomes some kind of genius mob figure. That skit was funny, because the "mob boss" version of Reagan was obviously just not true. Same thing for Trump.
Turning to American media. Sure, they can dig up stuff about Trump's behavior with Russia. Along the same lines, there are tons of stories across decades painting the Clintons as pretty terrible people.
The difference here, and this is important, is that outlets like CNN do have a massive bias in favor of Democratic candidates. That's where the "Russia Russia Russia" narrative by Trump supporters is actually right. Mainstream media's treatment of events like the Russia story, Jan 6, BLM protests, etc. is absolutely biased. That's where the suspicion comes from.
The solution is for mainstream journalists to reduce their bias. Easy places to start:
* Tell the truth about the relative propensity of a white versus black suspect to be shot by police.
* Investigate political candidates in an evenhanded way, and be as honest as possible about errors on stories like Hunter Biden's laptop.
> But, no, Trump isn't some clever Manchurian Candidate taking over our country on behalf of another country.
A claim neither I nor the article made. The Trump Campaign, however, had many ties to Russia (Manafort, Rick Gates) and clearly served Russian interests (changing the party platform on Ukraine, ghost written op-eds). Some of them even went to prison for it and you are still trying to claim it never happened. Did we ever figure out why his campaign manager gave campaign polling data to a Russian oligarch?
> Sure, they can dig up stuff about Trump's behavior with Russia. Along the same lines, there are tons of stories across decades painting the Clintons as pretty terrible people.
Whatabout-ism in plain sight.
> The difference here, and this is important, is that outlets like CNN do have a massive bias in favor of Democratic candidates.
It was a PBS article, so this is not relevant comment. Even so, the article was referencing a release from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee. Why would they repeat Democratic talking points?
It wasn't whataboutism. I was pointing out that much of the media's objective is just to create controversy, not to clarify issues. They do it in both directions. Yes, the article didn't explicitly say he was a Manchurian Candidate, but that's the implication, and it's a bad read.
Someone can commit a crime without being a Russian agent. Same goes for Hunter Biden and his stupid laptop and weird deal with that company in Ukraine. I don't think he was a spy. I just think he's an idiot and greedy. He and Trump are the same.
The core issue here is thinking there's some real moral difference between left and right. There isn't. Think of the political spectrum in absolute value terms. People in the middle are the best people. People on both wings are the bad people.
Edit: Also, you know full well no one is going to read all 1,000 pages of this report. PBS is well known to have a large liberal bias. I downloaded the report and went through a bit of it. One thing I noticed is there's a big partisan split in the report itself about what the report means. Democrats say it essentially means Trump is a Russian spy. Republicans say it shows there was no collusion. Note which story PBS published.
> Yes, the article didn't explicitly say he was a Manchurian Candidate, but that's the implication, and it's a bad read.
The article is inconsequential, the report it is describing (and the evidence within that report) is the thing you keep dancing around. The report lays out in great detail all of the activities and connections.
> Someone can commit a crime without being a Russian agent.
Another thing nobody claimed. You have failed to engage in any of the substance. It's just deflection after deflection.
> The core issue here is thinking there's some real moral difference between left and right. There isn't. Think of the political spectrum in absolute value terms. People in the middle are the best people. People on both wings are the bad people.
Sounds like you've figured it all out. No need to continue.
The boy was the media and left wing politicians for about 1-2 years straight. The supposed wolf was something like a puppy was seen in one of Trumps cars once and it looked Russian, according to XYZ political enemies of Trump.
The Senate Intelligence Report was released by a Republican-led committee and clearly outlined the many connections between the campaign and Russia. That committee and it's findings had nothing to do with "the media", "left wing politicians", or "XYZ political enemies of Trump".
I guess you've decided not to count the letters in the report from Republican senators specifically saying there was no collusion as part of the report. Also, the word is "its" not "it's".
I didn't decide not to count anything nor have I used the term collusion. Are there particular excerpts in the letters that prove the campaign didn't work closely with Russians? Because the report provides plenty of evidence that they did.
Did we ever find out why Manafort gave Konstantin Kilimnik polling data from the campaign? Did we ever learn why he worked for "free" on the campaign?
just to come full circle, he went to prison, in part, for his fraudulent actions helping the Russian government (attempt to) destabilize Ukraine.
> Also, the word is "its" not "it's".
Thanks for that, hope it wasn't too confusing. FYI, the period should be inside the quotes for "it's."
The headline is very revealing of the incredibly slanted way the Ukraine war has been covered in "Western" media.
When I read the headline, I immediately thought to myself, "which war?", until I saw the article was from the Economist and I knew they were referring to Ukraine. Just the use the term "the war" implicitly implies that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the only war (or at least the only war worth mentioning by "western media") raging. In fact, there are numerous wars raging right now. As a US citizen and close observer of our foreign policy and actions around the world, I have been floored by the hypocrisy and double standards in the coverage of the Ukraine war (despite hypocrisy and double standards being the norm). This is not an endorsement of Russia's illegal war of aggression against Ukraine but an indictment of "western media" and "western" governments in general.
For example, we (the United States), illegally invaded Syria a decade ago. A war of aggression just as illegal under international law as Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There were no indignant outcries on NBC or CNN or by any of the pundits who are today absurdly crying about the "disruption of the post world war 2 order". Our troops are illegally occupying Syria, today. Over 350,000 people have died there since the war started a decade ago. We bombed (and continue to bomb) civilian infrastructure with absolutely no military value in Syria. How can politicians and pundits (not to mention my fellow citizens) cry about the depravity and the crimes of Russians when our own country is engaged in the same crimes, right now, today? Many will exclaim this is "whataboutism" to explain away their cognitive dissonance. But it's about universal standards, credibility, and hypocrisy. If we condemn Russia for their illegal war while at the same time prosecuting illegal wars of our own, we expose ourselves at liars and hypocrites who don't oppose illegal war, just Russia. It is quite sickening when our so-called leaders stand up and give sanctimonious speeches about defending "democracy and human rights" while prosecuting our own illegal wars and propping up the most vicious dictatorships in the world, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, where democracy and human rights are completely absent.
Again, this is not a defense of Russia's illegal war, although it will be taken as such by people consumed by the blanket propaganda saturating our society. This is a defense of universal standards, truth, morality and objective reality. If we want to be able to credibly condemn the wrongdoing of others and claim the moral authority to mete out justice, then we need to lead by example and actually earn the moral authority that we falsely claim.
Hit the nail on the head. Boomers grew up in an age without the internet, where government propaganda was spoonfed to them straight through their brand new living room television sets and doorstep newspapers.
Just imagine: the only bastion of information was your local library. Granted, information in libraries is curated and of substantially higher quality than the unfiltered garbage that you can encounter on the internet... but who was really going to libraries that often back in the day? Information was sparse, and that was exploited to manipulate people to an uncanny degree.
Having the option to do your own and the opportunity to engage in critical thinking (whether or not you take advantage of it) out of all of the available content on the internet is worse than being spoonfed propaganda on a few broadcast stations?
For the masses. Not for people who know how to think. It gives people a false sense of confidence and arrogance when they tell you they know how to research
You don't like the idea that the majority of people aren't very intelligent and that 90% of innovation comes from 10% of people.
That's okay. Reality often isn't easy to digest. I don't like the human species most of the time either. But if you want to create systems that redistribute wealth, knowledge, etc then first we must understand the reality of what we are dealing with.
And this has nothing to do with elitism. You just pulled the simplest term you could think of in order to justify for yourself why you're right and don't like the words I wrote. Now in your head you can attach my words to elitism and convince yourself that elitism is bad, rather than substance of the actual words I said.
Boomers were brainwashed with cold war propaganda all their lives and don't see Russians as people. Even millenials were exposed to the same propaganda as kids.
Younger Americans are more balanced so far... and newer propaganda is not as effective to anyone other than the laziest... because anyone interested can look for the information from other points of views just as easily because of democratization of media and information.
It doesn't have much to do with laziness. It has to do with your ability to filter and discern what is going on, your ability to hold multiple and opposing ideas in your head at once, etc etc.
> Boomers were brainwashed with cold war propaganda all their lives and don't see Russians as people. Even millenials were exposed to the same propaganda as kids.
What...? We absolutely do see Russians as people. We also see this as a unilateral war of aggression created by a corrupt autocrat which has resulted in the unjustifiable murder, rape, and destruction of Ukrainian people.
> Younger Americans are more balanced so far... and newer propaganda is not as effective to anyone other than the laziest... because anyone interested can look for the information from other points of views just as easily because of democratization of media and information.
I'd love to see what information justifies the rape of 25 women in a basement [1]. Or the widespread destruction of civilian areas, rampant rape and murder.
> I'd love to see what information justifies the rape of 25 women in a basement [1]. Or the widespread destruction of civilian areas, rampant rape and murder.
Any modern war is an information war more than anything... and I mean everything from the first world war.
You linking to a BBC website is very interesting because they were the first successful mass propaganda machine distributed all around the world via radio.
Even more intersting bit what the BBC doesn't report. The same things have happened in every war where the western forces and allies have been involved, and the real information only comes out, if ever, after it becomes irrelevant. If it comes out while it is relevant, we know exactly what happens to those who are responsible... look at Manning and Assange.
Ok, "Comrade". What you're doing here is classic whataboutism.
You have deflected any responsibility or acknowledgement of the facts: that Russia initiated the conflict without provocation, that it was under false pretenses (Nazi fear? against one of two nations led by a Jew?), and that it continues to brutalize, murder, and rape civilians.
Your deflection to talk about media treatment is just that: deflection. And frankly, destruction of civilians by US forces are rare (not 0, but rare). This is common behavior from Russian forces, there are a thousand similar reports from the last month.
So let's get back to talking about the behavior by Russia. An unprovoked war in which they are killing and hurting Ukrainians to fuel the ego and agenda of Putin, and Putin alone.
I can add a little bit more. When you are bringing up a value you think the other side has violated and when someone points out that you don't care about those values at all because the side you are defending does the exact same thing, boomers have been trained to pretentiously scream "whataboutism" and act as if that somehow makes their argument stronger. Boomer media just made that the last word and made it seem like it was a valid argument. It's not. It's like someone presenting a video evidence of your crime and you suing them for filming you without consent.
> Russia initiated the conflict without provocation
I saw plenty of provocation. I guess you are limited by your top-down media which filters out anything that doesn't align with their goals... so I understand why you would think that... but I'm inviting you to take a wider perspective and see it from the Russian side. If you think Russian action on Ukraine was unprovoked, do you also think the US acted disproportionately when the "Cuban missile crisis"? Or are you a hypocrite?
> there are a thousand similar reports from the last month.
Ukraine, NATO and the US have incentive to fabricate those reports... and Russia has reasons to deny them. The US has been caught hiding human rights abuses done by themselves and their allies while amplifying or even fabricating that of the enemy in the past. There's little reason to believe that they aren't doing it now.
Wars are messy and strategic advantage is paramount... and oftentimes, elements in them do things they think they can get away with... and these things are never fairly reported by either side. Amplification of wrongdoings of others and supperessing that of your own side is expected part of it. I expect both sides to do it for obvious reasons.
/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/LSULYN3DV5JMHPGUUYJOEHOCHU.jpg){kind=link}
Further, most of the elderly lived at a time when the USSR was the clear and obvious enemy of “freedom”, so it’s not hard to fathom Russia being back into its usual shenanigans.
Gen Z is also more diverse and broadly anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”) so they’re less willing to blindly support US foreign policy and feel less connected to European conflicts than previous generations.
Finally Russia has, in my opinion, waged a fairly successful social media campaign to muddy the waters. Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. Same with the Azov Batallion which some people believe are the entire Ukrainian army. You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.
Gen Z has thus mostly understood this conflict through the propaganda wars that play out in social media and thus have conflicting and/or “both-sides” takes.