There are threads in the media that are probably government sponsored (topically, John Brennan going CIA->MSNBC or the Twitter files). The oversimplification is likely because people don't engage with complexity without shutting down. The refusal of the corporate media to learn that War is Bad is probably government sponsored. Even then, the military industrial complex and regulatory capture muddies the water somewhat about who is motivating the madness.
> War is Bad.
Come on!
The US has pretty much bankrupted itself and achieved not much useful for themselves with their global military expeditions. I think almost everything they've done in the last 50 years has been an embarrassment for them. I dunno, any successes? The worm is even starting to turn on Ukraine as people note the consequence, expense and general lack of good outcomes as the China-Russia-Iran axis gets welded together. They could have shortened the leash of the coup-organisers back in the early 2010s, left Ukraine as a buffer state and avoided the whole situation with better results for ... maybe literally everyone. I mean, it is starting to look like the 2024 Russia-Ukraine border will be the one that could have been settled on pretty early in the conflict with a bit of diplomacy; then everyone digs in and settles for the long stalemate.
It beggars belief that a neutrally motivated reporter would still be gung-ho about sending in the troops before thinking. I suppose reporters are a bit slow, but the track record is appalling and the alternatives - some more cooperative diplomacy - so obvious even Trump was talking about it. It was a mistake to demonise that part of his platform.
Unless the goal was more war, in which case well done another mission accomplished.
Assuming that the Russia-Ukraine conflict settles down, Iran doesn't act up and the South China Sea stays peaceful. Fingers crossed the US is about to enter a period of peace-by-lacking-affluence rather than something ugly happening.
Bonus graph: You can see China unloading their holdings [1] as fast as a trillion dollars can be moved. It makes entertaining viewing. Good luck to Japan who look to be the bag holders on this one. It'll be intriguing to find out who is on the other side of the tax havens too.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...
[1] https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...
EDIT Occasionally people bring up Japanese debt at this point in the conversation. For reference on that topic, note that on balance they are net creditors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_p...
And what happened to the US after WWII? Without looking it up I seem to remember it becoming the only superpower.
> It is going to get paid back banana-republic style.
Our debt is denominated in our currency and people accept that because they like our currency.
We have indicators of whether or not people trust us there and they look OK, unless you thought we were about to collapse in 1990.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REAINTRATREARAT10Y
> Fingers crossed the US is about to enter a period of peace-by-lacking-affluence rather than something ugly happening.
Who's lacking affluence? The 2023 US economy is the best US economy of my or most people's lives.
And since the economy isn't a morality play, good performance doesn't automatically mean it's about to fail.
I would rather use Argentina as an example. They've done as bad a job as you can possibly do managing their economy, defaulted several times, and even that result is not that bad. Everyone still lends to them even. When you're a country, you don't have to be on your best behavior, because there's no other planet for the lenders to move to.
It is clear that Putin wanted to occupy Ukraine - the whole lot of it - in some way and anex parts of it. Destroyed convoys with riot gear were biggest tell. The anexation was done according to plan even on lands not controled by ru.
There was no room for negotiations there. There is not much room in negotiations with russian anyway. They will take your wallet and then negotiate how much they should give back if you apologize for calling them thieves.
Nobody who was serious about geopolitics entertained idea of Ukraine joining nato or eu. Finland didn't join nato as to not provoke russian (but russian had forced their hand and they joined now for obvious reasons).
> It beggars belief that a neutrally motivated reporter would still be gung-ho about sending in the troops before thinking.
The media is to be used as source of facts, their opinions are not source of anything good. For most parts its either simplistic take or outright propaganda.
Russia underestimated how active the US was in Ukraine. They weren't expecting the level of resistance they encountered and it is pretty obvious that Ukraine would have folded immediately if the US wasn't backing them. Given that the Russians are probably moving from fear of NATO and it turns out NATO was conspiring against them in Ukraine, I have difficulty accepting that "Putin wanted this". It looks a lot more like "Putin thought he could find a diplomatic solution and realised the only option left was to invade, but it was too late and didn't send enough forces". If their rationale was the obvious one (fear of NATO moving in Ukraine) then the invasion revealed that not only are those fears justified, but they were in fact underestimating the threat.
I do not think diplomacy could have solved this, only way this could have been prevented if is Kremlin would not have been so corrupt and incompetent, if Putin would have known that the 3 day operation would be at least a 3 year one he would not have started this war. (or special operation if you live in that democratic country where you are not allowed to name a war a way ).
I was just reading this https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/12/28/russian-poet-sen...
Putinists explain how Russia was forced to put people in prison for their opinions.
Only if those poor people did not have opinions - said heartbroken krenlin apparatchik
It boggles my mind how people can come up with victim narratives for a conquest war, but here we are.
We can certainly think about that academically, but it matters about as much as why Hitler invaded Poland. The reason matters far less than the fact that sovereign nations have no valid reason to attack another sovereign nation without being attacked first or defending an ally who has been attacked.
Ironically, this is the simplification that you speak of. It is an extremely simple narrative that people are trying to sell as a sophisticated analysis. It completely ignores the immediate 70 years of history still in living memory, and the preceding five centuries. No "scholar" and "expert" pushing this narrative ever speaks about Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and others, about the secret protocol between the USSR and Germany that divided Europe for half a century; about occupied countries and genocide committed by Russians, and the legacy of all that and its influence on the present day. Completely missing.
For example, explain within your framework why in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sweden abandoned neutrality that they had maintained since the Napoleonic era.
It's different for the baltic states. They were lucky to be able to join NATO without any major trouble from Russia. Russia was still weak in 2004.
I think it was in 2007 that Putin felt strong enough to oppose NATO enlargements in eastern Europe (his speech at Munich security conference).
Georgia caved in in 2008, they don't like dying for Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The nationalists in Ukraine are less pragmatic, even Minsk 2 was too much for them.
https://www.thelocal.se/20220314/explained-what-are-the-argu...
Swedish military experts think otherwise. If Russia were to invade Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, then one could reasonably expect that they would close the Suwalki gap that connects Lithuania and Poland, to cut the land route between them end rest of Europe, and invade the Swedish island of Gotland, to prevent any supply over sea or air routes. It would require an effort comparable to Normandy landings to liberate the invaded countries; unlikely to happen.
Hence the Swedish reaction, to prevent that chain of events from starting in the first place:
> During the 20th century, infantry, artillery, air force and naval elements were stationed on Gotland as part of Sweden's defense system, until all permanent military units were stood down in 2005. With tensions in Northeastern Europe and Russia escalating in 2014–2015, the Swedish government has taken a new interest in remilitarizing the island. And in September 2016 regular troops were once again stationed on the island, albeit as an interim measure until a permanent garrison could be reestablished. As of 1 January 2018 Gotland has re-established the Gotland Regiment.
And even larger policy shift followed the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, from entry into NATO to establishment of joint air force command for Norway, Sweden and Finland - because the scale of Russian aggression against Ukraine made abundantly clear that none of them would be equipped to fight something like that off alone, and that Putin was willing to unleash it without provocation.
The typical "america bad" narrative pushed by useful idiots completely fails to explain these developments.
My intuition is that in the event of a war with Russia, the Baltic would be a no go area for warships anyway.
Attacking ships with missiles and drones is quite popular und succesful at the moment.
We can be glad that it was much harder for the Germans in WW II.
NONE of those countries were acquired,forced, or coersed by Nato, they all 'beg, borrowed and stole' in order to get into the Nato.
Because all of them knew acactly what will happen otherwise. Precisely to avoid what was happening to Ukraine (russia defacto controlling it via puppet politicians) and now being actively invaded by russia.
Russia complaining about 'nato expansion', is akin to wife-beater complaining his wife run away and got a restraining order.
I agree and it worked for many countries.
Though it did not work any more for Georgia and Ukraine.
The Ukrainian nationalist course may have been morally correct, but it was definitely risky and failed.
Because they're worried about being invaded by Russia, think NATO is substantially more powerful and likely to aid them? That seems like a pretty obvious one to me.
> Ironically, this is the simplification that you speak of...
Yeah. My argument is that only simple messages propagate. I don't know why people feel compelled to point out I'm pushing a simple message. Complex messages don't work.
The issue I'm pointing out is that the current in-vogue simple message is catastrophic in consequence. US foreign policy has managed to go from unassailable global hegemon to conceivably taken out in a 3 front war + debt crisis by 2035. Not likely, but uncomfortably possible and there was no need to be staring at a debt crisis or to provoke a 3-front war - in 2016 it looked like the US and Russia could even have become friends aligned lightly against the threat of the Chinese military going rogue. There are 350 million people in the US, surely they can find another Bismarck instead of the clowns that were responsible for the clown show that was 2000-2020.
Why should they be worried about being invaded by Russia, if their policy was to stay neutral and accommodate Russia as much as they could, like Putin's apologist recommend?
But the issue here is that Russia's actions if Ukraine joins NATO were very easy to predict. And we've discovered through the Ukraine war that Ukraine is already partially under the NATO defence umbrella. So Russia actions here are not random imperialism but actually fairly predictable from their long-standing defence interests. If the US (and maybe the EU, I dunno much about German/French politics) hadn't been flirting with coup support and closer military ties in the 2010s then war could probably have been avoided; especially if the diplomatic efforts of the Trump administration had been encouraged.
As it stands, the US has managed to piss off the people who control the world's largest nuclear arsenal and top-10 oil reserves, done who-knows-what long term to their relationship with Germany through the Nordstream sabotage, run Russia's military through a whetstone so they'll be a lot more battle-ready and is encouraging that package to form a China/Iran/whoever alliance because they have no other choice. And re-militarise Europe after 70 years of relative peace. It is obvious that the US doesn't see diplomacy as an option and will not negotiate in good faith. This outcome is so bad that it would be more sensible not to have been provoking a fight in Ukraine. We can only hope that the CCP doesn't know how to take advantage of the gift that the US State Department is handing them.
[0] Would probably have been a good idea to figure out a way to bring them in back when that was something they were trying to do.
Ukraine has not joined NATO, and is not going to in any foreseeable future. At Russia's request, Ukraine and Georgia were denied entry into NATO already in 2008. The topic was completely off the table. And yet Russia invaded both of them. Leaving Georgia and Ukraine out in the cold decreased the risk for Russia and increased the likelihood of aggression against them.
> I think you're reading something I didn't write; it is pretty obvious why they should be worried about Russia and why they'd want to join NATO.
It's not obvious to me, if I accept the notion that Russia merely reacts to NATO. Sweden was not in NATO and accommodated Russia every way they could. Why did they abandon this policy? Why did Finland do the same?
Finland is particularly notable, because its foreign policy gave birth to the term findlandization: "The term is often considered pejorative. It originated in the West German political debate of the late 1960s and 1970s. As the term was used in West Germany and other NATO countries, it referred to the decision of a country not to challenge a more powerful neighbour in foreign politics, while maintaining national sovereignty. It is commonly used in reference to Finland's policies in relation to the Soviet Union during the Cold War."
If we accept the idea pushed by Putin's apologists that countries in Eastern Europe should stay away from alliances, remain neutral, sit silent and hold their breath to avoid angering Russia, then Sweden and Finland were doing exactly that.
Why did this approach become utterly discredited in early 2022? What changed for Sweden and Finland?
This compares to the US invading Iraq where there was a sound like a rodent becoming flat. I mean, maybe there was a huge amount of Russian support during the war and NATO just flattened it, but as far as I recall Iraq stood very alone.
> It's not obvious to me, if I accept the notion that Russia merely reacts to NATO.
Aha, we have found the point of difference. You are incorrect in thinking that Russia only reacts to NATO. I think in the Ukraine war Russia is reacting to NATO. Although there is probably a roenxi-equivalent in Russia who is thinking "this invasion is damn stupid and dooms us all, we should have kept trying diplomacy", but in Cyrillic.
> Why did this approach become utterly discredited in early 2022? What changed for Sweden and Finland?
Well, I'm not sure what their strategists are thinking but my take is the US demonstrated that peace was not an option and they are going to keep increasing the temperature until Russia's red lines get crossed. With that context, it makes sense to be on the side that will win the upcoming conflict(s). It is better than risking a US-backed coup, although I doubt that would be necessary in the nordic countries.
They did not. It took 8 years, until the renewed invasion, before any meaningful supplies began arriving in Ukraine. Western leaders had to be shown mass graves before they were willing to provide heavy equipment.
> Well, I'm not sure what their strategists are thinking but my take is the US demonstrated that peace was not an option and they are going to keep increasing the temperature until Russia's red lines get crossed. With that context, it makes sense to be on the side that will win the upcoming conflict(s).
Sweden had been neutral since 1814: it went through both world wars and the Cold War without choosing sides. If we accept the premise that Russia is reacting to NATO and that the Americans are responsible for everything, then why would the events in Ukraine drastically change the outlook for Sweden?
You can't give a plausible explanation, because there is none, because the situation has nothing to do with NATO or the Americans.
Russia has begun violating agreements that even the USSR adhered to, such as the 1975 Helsinki Accords (in short: no violent territorial changes in Europe)[1]. For a long time, Sweden and Finland believed that they could avoid Russian aggression through careful diplomacy, and stand against Russia independently when required, but the war against Ukraine was unprovoked and far beyond Nordic military capabilities, dashing both hopes.
So now you have two key factors:
1. Increasingly hostile neighbour.
2. Insufficient military strength.
How do you respond?
Nordic military and political leaders concluded that tighter international cooperation is the only way to survive this situation. For example, a country with 5 or 10 million people can't afford air defense network that could protect their people from such drone and cruise missile attacks like Ukraine is experiencing; they need external help.
Nordic countries have a fair bit of history with Russia too and can see through the bullshit that many westerners don't immediately recognize. You know where "Molotov cocktail" came from? In 1939, Russians staged the shelling of Mainila[2], claiming that Finns were responsible. Four days later, Russians launched unprovoked war against Finland. As Russian planes were bombing Helsinki, Russian propaganda kept blasting that the planes were delivering food to starving Finns. Molotov cocktail was the hot drink Finns devised to go with the "bread baskets" that bombers were dropping.
And like the fake republics of Luhansk and Donetsk that Russians set up in Ukraine, Russians had established the Finnish Democratic Republic[3], ready to take over the entire Finland as soon as Russian tanks rolled over it. But Finns put up a stiff resistance and kept their independence.
All that is still in living memory, people still have grandparents alive to tell how it was back then. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, using the same methods, leaves no room for doubt for what's really going on and who's responsible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Accords
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelling_of_Mainila
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Democratic_Republic
That's a hell of a take, I will give you that. I am not even sure where to start off with it. Looking back to europe's past. Poor hitler was forced to attack poland and rest of europe due to Treaty of Versailles. Helpless uncle stalin did same as his oppressed people buckled to outside influences.
Your statement is hair away if not already trying to justify the invasion.
> The issue I have is that "Putin wanted to occupy Ukraine" is too simplistic
Its simplistic but the reasons that caused it are more complicated. For one putin is dreaming of recreating ussr. He made many statements about it, he wrote an academic paper about it too.
His power is slipping, he needed a distraction, a win. Dictators need to perpetuate image of being strong and successful - putin riding a bear with AK waving russian flag. That image was degrading as putin's popularity was waining.
Natural resource grab. The anexed republic are rich in new oil and other heavy industry. New source of money for putin and his mafia to loot.
Growing internal opposition, Navalny while not such saint himself exposed and fought image of putin as beloved ruler
If you assumed German policy was motivated by some level of cause-and-effect it is hard to avoid that treaty being an expensive mistake. And in the aftermath of WWII, note that the policies were occupation and rebuilding. Indeed, the US's learning "don't do another Versailles" lead to the peaceful reconstruction of Japan and Germany in a way that should be the gold standard for every post-war strategy.
2) Your statement is hair away if not already trying to justify the invasion.
If you take a holistic view, you'd probably guess (correctly) that I think this invasion is unjustified, but is in the same class of unjustified invasions as Iraq or Afghanistan - unjustified, they happen from time to time and the best that can be done is just calm the situation down ASAP. It was always a better option to go with more diplomacy and the US should be assisting in that.
But the Ukraine invasion wasn't a flight of fancy, everyone who has looked at the topic seriously agrees there is a long backstory of build ups. The only real debate point is which ones are more significant. I think US pressure, since the US is the most powerful entity involved in the war there and it is unlikely that started with Russia crossing the border.
Ukraine using its puppet US forced poor russia to attack them.Holocaust was jew's fault, and twin towers crashed into planes.
Truth is a lie, lie is a truth. A quintessential russian credo.
You are dressing simple victim blaming in fancy paragraphs, but it doesnt change your twisted logic.
One strategy of Russia is to say all the things. The West is not a homogenous political entity and in more radicalized nations like the US the opposition will almost always be against the opinion of the governing party. Then there are the isolationists that think sticking your head in the ground will make it all go away. So Russia will always flood the ether with all the things and many western parties will pick those up that fit them and ignore the rest.
But lets take a look at the acts Russia did, not the words.
It never ceased its occupation of part of Moldovia.
It reconquered its Chechen colony.
In 2008 it occupied part of Georgia, now it plans to build a military port and there are talks about a "referendum".
In 2014 it annexed part of Ukraine and started a proxy war in the east.
In 2022 it came back for the rest.
And yes, Putin wont attack NATO members right now. Next stop would most likely be Moldovia. But you can be sure that Putin will use his minions like Orban to break up the EU and NATO and wait for an opportune moment to grab another part of the lost Russian empire.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/strategy-policy-th...
Excerpt that’s relevant:
Russia’s scheme for war occurs in six stages, beginning before the war actually begins. At the low end—in peacetime and under military threat—Russia will conduct nonkinetic warfare (cyber and psychological operations) against enemies while publicly demonstrating new nuclear weapons, raising overall readiness and alert levels, and deploying weapons for potential use. In a “local war,” Russian strategy calls for “grouped use” of precision strike conventional weapons to inflict damage on enemy territory, strikes on conventional military targets, and threatening to use nuclear weapons.
Under “regional war”—war with NATO or China—Russia would employ “massed use” of precision weapons on enemy forces, adding “single or grouped use” of tactical nuclear weapons, possibly to demonstrate that Russia is willing to use them.
In “large-scale war,” Russia would make “large-scale use” of nonstrategic nuclear weapons, and conduct both strategic and nonstrategic nuclear strikes on enemy economic targets. Finally, under “nuclear war,” Russia would unleash “mass use” of its nuclear triad against military and nonmilitary targets.
The precursor stage to war—setting a favorable atmosphere for Russia to prevail—employs “nonmilitary means,” which broadly include “political, information (both psychological and technical), diplomatic, economic, legal, spiritual/moral, and humanitarian measures,” according to a 2011 Russian defense paper. Overt tactics in this stage include “implementing economic sanctions, imposing economic blockades, forming coalitions and unions, breaking off diplomatic relations, and conducting information warfare,” it said. Prevailing political conditions will determine when and to what extent these means are used, and they must be constantly adapted to the fluid situation, the authors note.
Nonmilitary means of war are a “force multiplier,” Russian doctrine holds, which “serve to weaken and reduce an opponent’s forces and capabilities, and even completely eliminating a military threat.” Coordination between military and nonmilitary means are a must. In fact, a 2013 defense article by Russian Army Gen. Valery Gerasimov, head of the military forces, contends that “in a number of cases,” nonmilitary means of coercion “significantly surpassed the power of weapons in their effectiveness.” Gerasimov said the ratio of nonmilitary to military methods of warfare is 4-to-1.
It’s important to separate the way that Russia fights from their strategic objectives, especially in light of maskirovka. With Russia, it’s often many levels of intent with hidden objectives.
Putin is a gambler that has inherited lots of resources and wants to make high probability low risk bets. If he loses a round he goes double or nothing since he can do that a few times. Of course that potentially opens him up to ruinous catastrophic losses if confronted by a competent adversary. Then he will cry: "but my nukes....." and hopes everybody backs off.
As for propaganda I think they just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. All is reactive post hoc information warfare unless there are meaningful consequences.
Btw to think that Russia would have taken any statement regarding NATO expansion seriously without it being written and ratified in a treaty is beyond comical.
Compared to what?
Say it again!
Traditionally: slaves and loot. Or new land to settle.
Today it is somewhat more complicated, but there are still winners in war. It usually just ain't those, who are fighting in it. And obviously not those, who just get bombed to death.
Respectfully, you can't "but" a statement as an effective rebuttal when the statement addresses the exact "but" that you claim.
I can make that statement because while all decision making is relative, characteristics of those decisions still have an absolute nature. War (intense pain, psychological destruction, mass violent death, generational effects, the freedom to commit evil acts only for the sake of them) is bad, period. Whether or not the decision to wage it is for a relative good (except when it isn't).
The only escape from this moral reasoning is nihilism. That is, giving up one's human nature.
Taoism aside.
One can't make the case that "everything arguably is bad", unless you are relativistic and reductionist to the point that any "arguable" negative consequence to anything is morally tantamount to the negative consequences of war. This is the type of moral absurdity that nihilists deal in.
Considering choices has nothing to do with the absolute characteristics of those choices.
Only nihilists feel the moral freedom to re-label absolute bad as not, if it is for their relative benefit.
I didn't say that you weren't free to do bad (I'm purposefully not using the word "evil" in order to maintain a tight reign on adjective use) in the service of what you feel is good. That might be an aspect of inescapable human nature (see factory farming).
What I imply is that human action isn't completely morally relativistic. Only nihilists or zealots with occluded moral reasoning think otherwise. No offense.
Maybe taoism is for you. It would allow you to resolve moral absurdity that you are otherwise trying to escape with nihilism. Personally, I'm not as atheistic as that. But at least it would be more consistent.
The corporations wouldn’t want a government created issue, like war, go to waste, and will play along to make some profit. The media will self-censor to avoid losing advertising customers.
As far as they are concerned war is bad sometimes, depending if doesn’t or does further their interests. I remember people watching the US invasion of Iraq invasion on CNN. CNN didn’t start it but it a great boost of views from it.
Ignorance is also carefully cultivated: God forbid to use one's smartphone to check an information publicly and easily available.
I'm not an apologist, I think Russia is currently [insert long list of bad things here], I'm just impressed at the speed we went from indifference towards Russians, or tacit approval (oligarchs in London), to sanctioned hatred.
The 2014 invasion was just that, but was dressed up as something else and didn't include massive Russian army deployments in the build-up. It also didn't look like something that could happen to Romania, Poland, the Baltics or Finland.
All of which have more in common with Ukraine than they do with say Afghanistan. So 2014 wasn't 'meh' for those that are more politically informed but it wasn't something that registered as a threat to the bulk of the EU and didn't include actual threats not to get involved on punishment of nuclear bombardment by the belligerent.
But even today there are a lot of idiots here who are still in 'meh' mode and who couldn't care less about what happens to Ukraine and who would rather think about this in financial terms than in loss of life or what it means for the future.
It’s only when Russia started protecting its GDP by eliminating its only meaningful competition for selling shale gas to the west did it become geopolitically critical to turn public opinion against it.
Russia’s GDP eventually collapses if Ukraine remains intact, as the west will buy gas from them instead. There are no meaningful quantities of petrochemicals in Georgia.
You don't care very much for most people by default. Even if you think they're not very good people, because caring takes effort. But once they punch you or a friend in the face? now you have a reason to care.
Everyone just thought that Russia was sabre rattling and that they weren't actually going to do it. Once they did it, that caused a lot of people to re-assess their views.
Yes, it's normal human behaviour, but it's normal human behaviour with a propaganda pump behind it (IMO). Of course, I can't prove this. Maybe it was all just completely organic and I've just watched one too many Adam Curtis documentaries.
Because Crimea is in a weird political situation where it sorta arguably belonged to Russia before Khruschev did a bizarre stunt with reassigning it to Ukraine, in a time when that didn't matter, which suddenly started to matter post USSR. That plus it having a huge Russian population.
All of that muddled the waters enough to make it very unclear who was in the right there, and that leaves the easy default of not caring.
Meanwhile, the current war was extremely unambiguous.
> Why don't a dozen other wars around the world get the same reaction? Why not the Uyghur genocide? Why this one?
Because it's physically closer, and because Ukraine is a lot more culturally closer to us. Uyghurs are Muslim, while Ukraininans are Christians and generally a decent cultural fit with the west.
And because Ukraine had been moving towards a more democratic government.
And I think Zelensky can take a lot of credit for being a great communicator at exactly the right time.
I'll definitely give you that one. Ukraine's social media game was... well, they could have taught Wendy's a thing or two.
And the rest of it sounds reasonable, but how do we prove it's not just a post hoc justification? This is why I'd hate to be a sociologist...
I don't think any of it is particularly controversial?
Crimea's situation is well documented, and you can easily search online for posts before the current war. It belonged to Russia since 1783, and Khruschev reassigned it to Ukraine in 1954, which I understand at the time was nigh practically meaningless and a sort of PR stunt more than something that was intended to actually do something.
It's also been a very common vacation spot for Russians, and has a huge Russian population, and it's arguable that if Russia did rig the referendum, they probably didn't need to.
So it's an already messy matter even if you're close to the issue. It's very hard to foreigners to clearly pick a "right side" in this conflict, and it's not hard to argue that Khruschev's action wasn't intended to actually do anything, and therefore should be disregarded.
All I'm saying (and it's not a particularly useful statement tbh) is that it's damn hard to tease out cause and effect here.
Lets not forget that there is more than enough reason for that hatred. As a European:
Russia regularly kills people on our soil. We do not kill people in Russia.
Russia supports extremist political groups in Europe with the sole aim to do damage.
Russia runs media organizations like RT that also have no ideological orientation but will always report the take that will do the most damage to society.
Russia used gas as a weapon to blackmail Europe. Already in summer 21 Gazprom reduced its supply to the spot market to increase the gas price and keep storage low. Later Gazprom rented storage facilities but kept them empty.....
Russia buys politicians like Orban to weaken and disintegrate EU and NATO.
There are many millions people in the EU who lived under and still remember the repressions of the SU and Warshaw Pact states....
Putins Russia had declared itself as an enemy of the western way of life and political order.
Also, Crimea voted 54% to stay with Ukraine in 1991 referendum.
> Why this one?
This one because it was a full blown invasion of the 2nd largest country by landmass in the European continent, it's a huge difference in level and degree... That's the simple why.
Of course the propaganda pump went full on when that happened, it was a major development compared to the annexation of Crimea or helping some militias on breakaway regions, a country tried to take over another country's capital in Europe. It doesn't mean no one would've cared if the propaganda machine didn't start turning but that was just to drum support, not to change completely the public's opinion.
Polls indicate that most Americans don't see the Press as free (trustworthy). They now view it more akin to how people do in authoritarian states. There are reasons for that outside of observer error.
What's more insidious? An openly captured press that is expected to lie or a captured press that claims the banner of freedom?
Last, objective observation of lock-step action of institutions over the past seven years or so, for example, seems to hint at a lack of independence.
As would any indication of a concrete lie that the press seems to be cooperating in hiding.
Usually when people make this claim they go on to list actually ambiguous or actually controversial topics.
These were universally believed by "the West".
Doesn't the lack of newer, more convincing examples tell you a lot about the veracity of the claim?
Edit: didn't see the missile gap thing, did you add it later? AFAIK, that was more of a lie by the US Air Force to increase their funding and actual government officials believed it.
I did add the missile gap later, I am sorry. What does it matter who's lie it was? Kennedy ran with it.
In retrospect the effort was comical enough, in light of the fact that none were found, that the one responsible for it (President Bush) famously joked about looking for WMD under a desk. He received no real political backlash for his joke or for being vile enough to start an unnecessary war that killed hundreds of thousands.
The propaganda surrounding the global war on terror was effective enough that when the U.S. performed terrorist acts on weddings that killed innocents it was labeled “drone strikes” and when the enemy performed acts that killed innocents they were labeled “terrorist attacks”.
People initially believed the b.s. the Pentagon said about Tillman’s death. People largely believed that Chalabi would be the political savior of a new Iraq until our government no longer liked him. There are people who still think we shouldn’t trade with Cuba because they are communist but see no problem trading with China. Criticism of Israel is often times labeled anti-semitism. Do more than a small minority of people understand that Jews aren’t the only semites in the world?
I can’t point to too many specific instances of U.S. media engaged in outright propaganda but there are some clear trends where the collective attitudes on certain topics/beliefs are engineered to be a certain way. The fact that people even ever seriously uttered the phrase “war on christmas” is enough know that opinions are deliberately being manipulated by media.
I think our overreaction to 9/11 is itself an example of manipulation by media. We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades and those nations didn’t get PTSD from our actions. This leads me to think that our over the top outrage was partially fueled by media narratives.
Please name a few examples of US peacetime attacks on civilian populations
Nevertheless, you should read up on the history of our shenanigans in Latin America. One example: while Americans didn’t do the actual killing and torture of Catholic priests and nuns our proxies did. You should also read up on things we funded the Iraqis to do in their war against Iran. Paying someone to do your dirty deeds is just as bad as doing them yourself. We did shoot down an Iranian airliner and later promoted the captain of the ship. We weren’t at war with Cambodia but did terrible things to that country during the Vietnam war. Bay of Pigs.
Look at who we funded and ended up enabling to gain control of Afghanistan during Soviet Union’s involvement there.
Even granting the premise of “paying is equal to doing,” none of your examples are anything like 9/11. The defining characteristics of 9/11 are obviously these: peacetime, intentionally targeted at civilians, killed a large number of civilians.
The best way to absolve a country of guilt is actually to make divorced-from-reality equivocations so that every less than ideal outcome looks equally evil, equally preventable, etc. The US has done plenty of truly atrocious stuff overseas and at home, silly arguments like “the US committed decades of 9/11-style acts” is counterproductive if your mission is accountability.
I can’t point to a single act that satisfies your criteria. The U.S. does not wage peacetime violence in the same way that terrorist groups do. We prefer to do the damage over time. We prefer to avoid headline capturing violence. But the victims don’t care and the point I made is not diminished by this. Our reaction to 9/11 was an overreaction. Lots of places have been devastated by U.S. actions and those people haven’t had similar overreactions.
2000 people weren’t killed in a single day in Nicaragua in the 80s. We did it over time and in a sustained way. The Nicaraguans don’t obsess about how this changed the whole world or desire to go on a 20 year killing spree in reaction to what we did.
Different claim than this one: “We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades”
And FWIW other places couldn’t overreact the way the US did even if they wanted to, and I’m sure on more than zero occasions they did. The US is a phenomenally dangerous giant lumbering around. Don’t presume that others would do much better if they were equipped the same way we happen to be.
I know why they invaded Iraq. It has nothing to do with 9/11 PTSD nor oil except as a secondary or tertiary benefit.
Whether or not the actual reason is a good one is another debate. But that doesn't change the fact of the WMD lie, but most importantly that of the observation that the Press is an in-total propaganda arm of at least one sect of the government. Which has a lot of downstream implications for the twenty plus years since.
The WMD lie shouldn't be the "well, it was twenty years ago" example. It should be the "look what they were willing to do, they can never be trusted" example.
Apologizing after the fact of a willful action of that type isn't an apology. It's a vain attempt to reduce consequence for themselves. If only reduced trust, which people like yourself try to still stem citing that lame "apology".
Ritter was last in Iraq in 1998 when he was denied access to several inspection sites. The question was always what happened between 98 and 03.
Blix gave his report of no WMDs in June 2003… several months after the invasion which he was deployed into to find WMDs. Again, question was what happened between 98 and 03.
So none of this was “obvious” at the time. There were bad decisions, bad information, and straight up liars, but it’s really counterproductive not to assess these decisions honestly in light of the available information of the time.
I truly can’t believe there are still people who buy the lies. They were lying about Afghanistan[1], needlessly because that war had plenty of support, so why would anyone suppose they weren’t lying about Iraq? FFS, half the important people in the admin signed and/or penned published documents advocating that the US look for any excuse to invade Iraq, in the late 90s. It was beyond plain they were bullshitting about the justification.
[1] example: the insane GI Joe playset diagrams of massive, secret, advanced underground bunkers they claimed that Al Qaeda had a bunch of, despite it being impossible to carry out that much earthmoving and concrete pouring (let alone buying all that equipment) without giving away the location to everyone with satellites. Tenfold as true if you tried to do that somewhere not right next to a city (because your supply lines for the huge hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars construction project would be even more plain, and the work itself would stick out like a sore thumb). It was clearly a lie.
Anyway you’re right that Blix was there prior to the invasion even though his report didn’t come until after. The report is not nearly as confident as you’re suggesting though. It wasn’t “no weapons,” it was “no evidence of weapons.” We all know, under circumstances less dire and less confusing than these, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I think it’s important not to write these situations off as “well duh they were lying because they’re Bad Guys and we all knew that” because these types of situations will continue to repeat themselves. We need a deeper understanding of what went wrong and how to do it better than “wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along.” It’s actually quite hard to know things, which is why this stuff happens!
I was claiming that before the invasion. Because it was. 100% for certain? Of course not. As knowable as anything like that is? Yeah.
That the guys who said a couple years earlier we should take any excuse to get rid of Saddam, who were already lying about a popular war (which I was also against, incidentally, for the practical reason that it was gonna be incredibly expensive, far outstripping any benefit, and wouldn’t result in a stable democracy in Afghanistan as the admin claimed it would—go figure) and funneling money their own direction all over the place, might be lying to get their excuse, and more opportunities to loot on a grand scale… yeah, far and away the most likely explanation, and their thin evidence was mostly laughable (I think I may literally have laughed at parts of Powell’s presentation, which was the point at which I gave up hope they had any real evidence)
For fuck’s absolute sake, a bunch of these chucklefucks running the show were Iran-Contra alums! Just… wild gestures of exasperation
Yes. IT WAS OBVIOUS.
And yeah, next time the same thing will happen. That’s just how we operate. We go to war on pretty weak lies every so often. All Iraq did (for me) was hammer home that that hadn’t changed (for some reason I supposed it had?) and, so, probably won’t. That anyone’s still treating that situation as oh so muddy and hard to read just confirms that. We’ll do it again.
Yeah it’s astounding anyone involved in Iran-Contra was allowed anywhere near a seat of power.
To be clear, I’m obviously not treating it as if it’s muddy now. I am saying that it wasn’t that clear then, for reasons that include people simply lying.
> Curious if you have any read on why Cheney et al were so fixated on WMDs at the time they wrote the memos. Was that all completely a ruse?
I think they may have worked themselves up a little with their what-if scenarios (their concern was what he might do with a bunch of ifs) and, further, selected that in particular for the infamous open letter to Clinton because most of the rest of what they were selling had no urgency, even by what-if standards.
They had a fundamental problem with that requirement, in fact, that there be exigent need for US intervention before we undertake it. Their whole deal was that we should embrace and proactively enforce hegemony (because the Pax Americana’s just that good for the world—it’d be immoral not to, you see!).
I would guess some mix of genuine ideology and connection to a MIC that wanted those sweet Cold War dollars back and to whom they were receptive (for those ideological reasons), were behind that, but I don’t know and it was enough people that I expect motivations varied.
[edit] I should perhaps add that I’m not categorically opposed to the kind of thing they were getting at. Is the Pax Americana some greater-good thing with breaking a few eggs for? Maybe! It really might be! I’m at least open to the idea. I pull the lever on the trolly problem all day long.
My opposition to their ideas had (has… a lot of these folks are still kickin’ around) less to do with some wholesale disagreement with the very notion of what they were about, and more to do with the specifics of what they wanted to do having a history of costly failure, of that being a risky sort of road to begin with, and of these people in particular having a history of making a huge mess of things while having their hand in the till and technocratically lying to manipulate a democracy into “what’s best for it” (consistent with the means-to-the-end greater-good thing! But far, far too dangerous)
It’s very hard to know things, and it’s easy to forget how hard it is to know things in retrospect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_March_2003_anti-war_protest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries
Still it was universal enough to invade a country for no proper reason whatsoever. Hell, much of the non-believers joined the conflict later on ( even the French ).
The fact Earth is a sphere isn't universally believed either.
Pretty much the opposite. In authoritarian states, people grow up under the culture of just accepting things as truth, you don't have the option of not believing. What you are describing is not about believing the press, but polarization / radicalization / isolation - the fact you're even pointing to the 'press/propaganda' is a symptom of it.
Can you give an example?
For example, "the War on Terror is necessary to protect America, democracy, and our freedoms" was a psyop driven by dubious foreign policy interest. "Kindness, dignity, empathy and tolerance are good, racism is bad" was a very benevolent psyop which you can recognize throughout elite cultural products (12 Angry Men, Mr. Rogers are just two examples), where the elite tried to cure the masses of their bigotry through psychological means (identity, social pressure, morality), with relative success. "Russia's invasion is morally wrong and must be defeated" is both aligned with US geopolitical interests, and aligned with defeating international anti-democratic anti-liberal forces, which is in our interest. There are obviously Russian/Chinese/Iranian psyops deployed against us, and some of our elites' psyops are just designed to counteract that.
I doubt the masses will ever have the ability to fight back against psyops, because in a battle between psychology PhDs and confused laymen, the PhDs will always win. We might learn the truth about specific psyops 30 years after the fact if we're lucky, and the well is highly poisoned by paranoid conspiracists. So a more realistic goal is to select trustworthy elites that are more likely to engage in benevolent psyops.
Yet another problem is that once people realize psyops exist, they tend to go off the deep end (if they already distrust any elite interest group) and reflexively disagree with all goals they attribute to those elites ("they say Russia bad = I'll support Russia"). Essentially the psyops are backfiring and creating a populace so distrustful that some people will reject domestic psyops only to replace them with foreign psyops, because they have a strong need for a narrative, and a great number of narratives are elite-created.
Which is a very stupid "strategic" move by the powers that be in the West, because if you control and strongly influence the discourse in the direction that you want that means that you impede the system the opportunity to self-correct. And that opportunity to self-correct in the past was one of the main advantages the West had, an advantage greatly facilitated by a reasonable open and free discourse.
Let that sink in.
And remember media bias and polarization is presented as a broad conflict that can’t be managed and is out of control to the point of causing extremism.
Consolidation of platforms and reach is much greater in the tech side of the arena.
Then there is the consolidation of independent media on tech company platforms like YouTube. If they ban someone, are they really running off to make a living on Rumble? No.
There are only 11 independent investigative journalism groups like ProPublica and The Center For Public Integrity but they are a shadow of their formers selves.
https://civilination.org/resources/investigative-journalism-...
You can check all the information sources you want, but primary source information means very little when the landscape lacks real diversity and the only substantive public oversight is underfunded or politically connected.
And then, there’s the research that shows fact-checker bias:
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-fact-checkers-tend-validity-ne...
Very much this!
And to the parents comment, they are seldom "lucrative" or "prestigious" gigs afaics.
The bind is that to remain silent, to not engage in counter-influence in a world where the Internet is "weponised", seems like giving tacit assent to mischief makers.
The mistake is to think that lies can be countered with more lies. The best that the "truth" can do, whether as science, education or accurate news media, is to de-escalate and neutralise information warfare itself.
Color me surprised... not.
Based on spending it's quite undeniable that vast majority of propaganda is commercial (ads most obviously, but also various lobby organizations).