https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2135509

this is practically a child’s view of the world. good guy vs bad guy. Russia = bad, NATO = good. plus, someone should tell her she has it completely backwards: ending russia is kinda natos entire thing

  • stratoscaster@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    Maybe I’m drinking stupid juice, but I think that people hating Russia isn’t really a valid reason for them to invade Ukraine. I know that’s not specifically what you’re saying, but in essence that’s the line of reasoning that I’ve heard throughout this thread.

    That said, Russia can’t be painted as “innocent” like so many posters here are stating. They routinely violate human rights. See:

    Russian censorship of, among many other things, the internet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Russia

    Russia’s anti-lgbt policies: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/30/europe/russia-upper-parliament-lgbt-propaganda-law-intl/index.html

    Russia’s anti-protest laws: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_assembly_in_Russia

    Russia’s general laundry list of human rights violations: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/russia/report-russia/

    I’m not saying the US is much better, although it is marginally, but claiming that Russia is just “scared and defending itself” doesn’t really track. It’s an authoritarian regime.

    If I’m misunderstanding this, somehow, please let me know.

    • KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Yes boss, you have catastrophically misunderstood the point.

      The point isn’t that people were mean tk Russia and therefore they’re allowed little a invasion as a treat. The point is that they’ve been encircled by hostile nations since the 1990s despite all attempts at overture to them, and that the encirclement continues to get worse. NATO was formed explicitly to take on Russia, and the point of this thought experiment is to try and see this not from an emotional point of view (aka Russia bad) but from a geopolitical point of view of a nation’s leader.

      Go back and read my post again. If you were the leader of Russia, knowing that decades of attempted détente didn’t work and that the organization who’s express goal is to break your country apart, and that that organization is doing its best to place troops and nuclear armaments on every inch of your border, would you accept that, or would you perhaps try and prevent that?

      We know what happened when the shoe was on the other foot. The US placed nuclear missiles a thousand miles from Moscow on the Black Sea. When the USSR understandably got annoyed and placed nukes in Cuba, the US was seconds away from ending the entire world despite the Soviets repeatedly saying the nukes were defensive response to the Black Sea nukes.

      So if we know that the US won’t accept hostile nations arming up on their border, why do we expect others to just kowtow to that?

      • Vncredleader@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Passing laws against use of the Russian language and bombing a linguistic minority is just “not liking someone” don’t ya know?

    • Just to reiterate if the other post is not clear upon first reading, I could not imagine missing the points all over this thread more than the way you did in this comment. I would re-read it many more times. It’s a huge disagreement at basic ways of understanding geopolitics that the gap is either unbridgeable between you and these thoughts or it will seem like a mindfuck when you get what’s being said