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So if something doesn't make sense, it is possible (but not necessarily so) that it is a skills or ideology issue with the reader.
Note also that detecting ideological bias in oneself is a very difficult thing to do, but it seems like the opposite.
By who? Propagandists trying to rationalize invading a sovereign nation?
If I join one neighbor's neighborhood watch group, another neighbor doesn't get to say I provoked them and burn my house down.
The question is, why should we avoid doing it rather than let them escalate and use this opportunity to stomp the bully. Which is in the works and will happen in few years.
There were people talking like you among JFK’s chief of staff during the Cuban Missile crisis. Same argument. Had JFK listened to them, we very likely would not be here today.
But unlike in a computer game, in the real world, that would you have labeled your enemy, does not simply disappear. If anything, you’ll create a vacuum. And I am not sure where you are taking the confidence that who or what ever feels that vacuum will be better than the status quo. The Americans have tried that in Iraq and Syria. The Vietnam war as well. And I believe the result, in every case, has been anything but that nice clean victory that “finishing off” of your enemy in a computer game promises.
In my view, this comes down to Chesterton’s fence. Before you tear down a fence, it would be helpful to understand how it came to be erected in the first place.
Please do correct me if I’m wrong, but pretty much the only time the strategy of killing of an enemy regime worked was Hitler. That was a man who applied industrial processes to murdering humans - rail networks, assembly line processing, gas chambers. This is not the level of evil we are facing here, at all.
If Putin is anything as evil as you think he is, he will surely have systems in place that will ensure the destruction of major cities in the United States in case of anything happening to him or his regime. You schoolyard, bully, metaphor, while having the benefit of being easy to understand, carries with it a risk - 1%, 5%? - that our children will find themselves in the world of A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Putin is just as evil as hitler and even more stupid and inept. While the West was developing, russia deteriorated. Nuclear capacity of russia is no longer believable. Attempts at demonstrating capacity for delivering icbm payloads ended up with crater on the launch site. The best they could do was Oreshnik that they try to sell as a new weapon which it isn't. The degree they try to lean into it and present it as a credible threat clearly shows that they have nothing else at this point and very few of that. 45 nuclear threats all ignored without consequence don't look good either.
It's even debatable how much of a threat Soviet Union really was at the height of its power because myth of its power was mostly manufactured and reinforced by USA that could use it as an excuse to funnel money to military industrial complex which otherwise would be hard sell with largely isolationistic public. It could be plainly seen when Soviet Union collapsed and USA was briefly aimless until it found new enemy to blow out of proportions in the form of terrorism. It was crap so they switched quickly to China. They no longer have a need for russia so they no longer are going to be doing marketing for putin.
Bully had a gun but he kept in in damp cellar. So the time to stomp him is now, even if there's some risk remaining, before he steals some money, to buy some solvent and oil to clean the gun he thought he won't ever need to use.
Some nukes might fly, and even a few might land but it's the best time there will ever be to turn russia to ex nuclear power. History doesn't stand in place. Thousand of nukes were already detonated on Earth. Few more from russia arsenal that might still actually launch and explode will make a very small difference. And retribution for using any nukes will be more terrible than what anyone can even imagine.
> Please keep it an intra-slavic conflict!
Here's that pesky isolationism that had to always be circumvented in order for USA to dominate the globe the way it did and getting rich of this the way it did.
What makes you think russia has any intention to keep the conflict intra-Slavic with constant talk about multipolar world with them in one of the leading roles? Trying to cosplay it a little bit already with BRICS? Why the biggest hit to their ambitions since 2022 was them getting pushed out of Syria? How's that intra-Slavic? Domination over their self-appointed zone of influence is just a stepping stone as it always was.
Putin is not even on the same axis as Hitler in terms of evil. I can only take your words to mean that you have no idea who Hitler was - making you, ironically, much closer to a Chamberlain than a Churchill.
The idea that intelligent people like you can draw such conclusions makes me unspeakably sad.
It reminds me of a passage in Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday” in which he is shocked to see how, weeks before WWI, peasants in a French village cinema turn into a war hungry mob the moment the German Kaiser appears on the screen.
Quote:
> At the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm appeared in the picture a storm of whistling and stamping broke out entirely spontaneously in the dark hall. Everyone was shouting and whistling, men, women and children all jeering as if they had been personally insulted. For a second the kindly people of Tours, who knew nothing about the world beyond what was in their newspapers, were out of their minds. I was horrified, deeply horrified. For I felt how far the poisoning of minds must have gone, after years and years of hate propaganda, if even here in a small provincial city the guileless citizens and soldiers had been roused to fury against the Kaiser and Germany—such fury that even a brief glimpse on the screen could provoke such an outburst. It was only a second, a single second. All was forgotten once other pictures were shown. The audience laughed heartily at the comedy that now followed, slapping their knees loudly with delight. Only a second, yes, but it showed me how easy it could be to whip up bad feeling on both sides at a moment of serious crisis, in spite of all attempts to restore understanding, in spite of our own efforts.
> The entire evening was spoilt for me. I couldn’t sleep. If it had happened in Paris, it would have made me just as uneasy, but it would not have shaken me so much. However, seeing how far hatred had eaten into the kindly, simple people here in the depths of the provinces made me shudder.
Primal hatred towards such people is warranted and even necessary.
It's not that civility is thin layer over savagery.
Instead savagery is the underlying foundation of civility, held back savagery is what makes civility possible.