What does Putin want (and whatabout it)
nan said:
Never said Russiagate was all of life. You are accusing me of not realizing I'm influenced by Russian propaganda. And then you can't state what you mean. So you were just going for a personal attack. Got it.
I'm not accusing you of anything. Nor am I attacking you.
You have said Russian propaganda in the US is not a thing, which is, of course, absurd. I'm merely reiterating that fact.
nan said:
They were all part of the USSR. It was a different world. Russia is not the same Russia. The whole system changed. Also,the Ukrainians were brutal to Jews during WWII and thanks to the Russians we won that war. Half the country speaks Russian and identifies with Russia. The other half seems to identify with Stepen Bandara or puts up with Stepan Bandara celebrations. So, yeah I struggle with imagining that Russia is what you should be worried about when you streets are named after nazis. As Jerry Seinfield once said "if your clothes are covered in blood, maybe laundry is not your biggest problem."
So half the country likes Russia and then there is a Nazi group that wants to kill all Russians and then "All you others." Why do you always focus on the theoretical "all you others group" that supposedly dislikes Russia in a western way as though they speak for the whole country? We don't even know if they exist.
Given that WWII started with Moscow and Berlin making a pact and jointly invading Poland, don't the Russians have at leas as large of a laundry problem as the Ukrainians?
It's this sort of thing that makes me feel you have a loose grasp on history. How is it that you can declare that any Ukrainian who is not pro-Russian must be a supporter of the far-right, but somehow Russian cooperation with Hitler -- and Russian mass murder of Ukrainians, including of Ukrainian Jews -- doesn't seem to factor into your thinking at all?
Ukraine sought independence from Russia three times during the 20th century -- once during the Russian revolution, then again during WWII, and finally at the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Clearly, there's a persistent and long-standing desire on the part of many Ukrainians to break away from Russia. Yet for you, the only possible explanation for thousands of people to have demonstrated for months on the Maidan is Nazi sympathy and CIA propaganda.
I suppose the Holodomor is a small incident of little importance in your understanding of Ukrainian history.
drummerboy said:
nan said:
Never said Russiagate was all of life. You are accusing me of not realizing I'm influenced by Russian propaganda. And then you can't state what you mean. So you were just going for a personal attack. Got it.
I'm not accusing you of anything. Nor am I attacking you.
You have said Russian propaganda in the US is not a thing, which is, of course, absurd. I'm merely reiterating that fact.
We have had multiple instances of great media attention paid to "Russian Propaganda" which turned out to be false. So where is the real Russian propaganda?
dave said:
nan said:
I agree. It should have been Zizek's book.
Just a little obvious for whom this interview was plugging. He read their standard script, as it if were on a teleprompter. The money must be very good. But, anyway, thanks for posting this because I did not know this guy and I enjoyed listening to it. I looked up the Christian Atheism thing and I'm just going to stick with plain vanilla atheism.
PVW said:
I suppose the Holodomor is a small incident of little importance in your understanding of Ukrainian history.
Yeah, I figured you were going to bring that up. As I said, that was a different country. Putin is not Stalin.
again nan - I have the simplest of questions - who is the current Nazi leader in Ukraine? Where are they located - and how can the US assist in eliminating the worst Nazi scourge since WWII. We've defeated nazism in the past - just let us know who they are - where they are and what you would do to assist Russia in this "special operation"?
nan said:
drummerboy said:
nan said:
Never said Russiagate was all of life. You are accusing me of not realizing I'm influenced by Russian propaganda. And then you can't state what you mean. So you were just going for a personal attack. Got it.
I'm not accusing you of anything. Nor am I attacking you.
You have said Russian propaganda in the US is not a thing, which is, of course, absurd. I'm merely reiterating that fact.
We have had multiple instances of great media attention paid to "Russian Propaganda" which turned out to be false. So where is the real Russian propaganda?
thank you for continuing to prove my point.
nan said:
PVW said:
I suppose the Holodomor is a small incident of little importance in your understanding of Ukrainian history.
Yeah, I figured you were going to bring that up. As I said, that was a different country. Putin is not Stalin.
if this is a joke, it's kind of funny.
if not, then you're pretty much implying that we can simply discount all of Ukrainian/Russian history prior to Putin, because, you know, different countries.
drummerboy said:
nan said:
PVW said:
I suppose the Holodomor is a small incident of little importance in your understanding of Ukrainian history.
Yeah, I figured you were going to bring that up. As I said, that was a different country. Putin is not Stalin.
if this is a joke, it's kind of funny.
if not, then you're pretty much implying that we can simply discount all of Ukrainian/Russian history prior to Putin, because, you know, different countries.
But Nan said previously that Russia is a conservative place with a lot of focus on history. So while history for Nan apparently started with the collapse of the USSR, for Russians it seems to go back much farther.
it might not be strictly apropos, but nan's view of history made me think of this
nan said:
PVW said:
I suppose the Holodomor is a small incident of little importance in your understanding of Ukrainian history.
Yeah, I figured you were going to bring that up. As I said, that was a different country. Putin is not Stalin.
It's relevant if you're discussing the views of the Ukrainian people about Russia.
drummerboy said:
nan said:
PVW said:
I suppose the Holodomor is a small incident of little importance in your understanding of Ukrainian history.
Yeah, I figured you were going to bring that up. As I said, that was a different country. Putin is not Stalin.
if this is a joke, it's kind of funny.
if not, then you're pretty much implying that we can simply discount all of Ukrainian/Russian history prior to Putin, because, you know, different countries.
Putin's long discourse to Tucker Carlson roots his whole rationale, for his invasion of Ukraine, on the long sweep of Russian history (including the Soviet Union). That includes this part, where Ukraine isn't really a country in his eyes, but is "an artificial state that was shaped at Stalin's will":
The Soviet Ukraine was given a great deal of territory that had never belonged to it, including the Black Sea region. At some point, when Russia received them as an outcome of the Russo-Turkish wars, they were called “New Russia,” or Novorossiya. But that does not matter. What matters is that Lenin, the founder of the Soviet State, established Ukraine that way. For decades, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic developed as part of the USSR, and for unknown reasons again, the Bolsheviks were engaged in Ukrainianization. It was not merely because the Soviet leadership was composed to a great extent of those originating from Ukraine. Rather, it was explained by the general policy of indigenization pursued by the Soviet Union. Same things were done in other Soviet republics. This involved promoting national languages and national cultures, which is not bad in principle. That is how the Soviet Ukraine was created.
After World War II, Ukraine received, in addition to the lands that had belonged to Poland before the war, part of the lands that had previously belonged to Hungary and Romania (known today as Western Ukraine). So Romania and Hungary had some of their lands taken away and given to the Ukraine and they still remain part of Ukraine. So in this sense, we have every reason to affirm that Ukraine is an artificial state that was shaped at Stalin’s will.
nan said:
nohero said:
nan said:
Here is an article on a frequent MOL Ukraine thread topic.
The author, Gordon Hahn challenges you to: Read it all and test your faith that the war in Ukraine was unprovoked and began in February 2022.
I'm reading it now, but I did not have that faith.
It's the same old stuff. It ignores the fact that Ukraine wasn't in NATO, and Russia invaded instead of negotiating.
"Ukraine might join NATO to attack Russia" is the same kind of threat as "Saddam might get WMDs". Putin and Bush launched pre-emptive wars with the goal of regime change. Supporting Putin's rationale is the same as supporting Bush's excuses for invading Iraq.
Your post is the same old stuff. The comparison to Iraq is false because Iraq was based on a lie. The Russian had legitimate reasons for invading. It's true the Ukrainians were not in NATO but they were being armed and trained up to NATO levels. They were being armed up to the teeth. They were talking about being in NATO (and Zelensky went all over the Munich security conference and said he was going to get nuclear weapons and no one told him to shut up), and MOST IMPORTANT - they would not say they would remain neutral. That's what the Russians wanted -- for the Ukrainians to promise to stay neutral.
If NATO was off the table for Ukraine, why did they not promise to be neutral? That would have stopped this whole war.
This question is a based on a lack of understanding of the actual facts:"If NATO was off the table for Ukraine, why did they not promise to be neutral? "
Russia had invaded, occupied, and annexed Crimea. Russia was arming and supporting anti-government fighters in the Donbas. And, instead of continuing negotiations in early 2022, Russia invaded.
Finally, and most important, Ukraine was in no way even close to being in NATO. Putin launched a pre-emptive war based on a fiction, that Ukraine was going to be in NATO and threaten Russia if Russia didn't invade first.
nan said:
PVW said:
nan said:
If NATO was off the table for Ukraine, why did they not promise to be neutral? That would have stopped this whole war.
Russia didn't give the new Ukrainian government much of a chance, did it? It invaded in Feb 2014.
For Crimea only. And it was not the Ukrainian government. It was a western backed government. They knew what that meant.
Of course it was the Ukrainian government. Don't repeat and rely on ridiculous propaganda like that.
Just two days earlier, you were given a link to the basic facts of the formation of that government, in this post: https://maplewood.worldwebs.com/forums/discussion/what-does-putin-want-and-whatbout-it?page=next&limit=14070#discussion-replies-3645621
"When the new government was formed, [Prime Minister] Yatsenyuk was the overwhelming choice among all of the political parties."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Yatsenyuk_government#Parliamentary_voting
Stalin was not around in 1991, and Putin was still in the future, yet Ukraine still decided to break from Russia. Per Nan, I guess Ukraine's decision to be independent was just random, with nothing from history informing it? And this choice of independence has no connection to later points in Ukraine's history when it has opted away from Russia?
PVW said:
Stalin was not around in 1991, and Putin was still in the future, yet Ukraine still decided to break from Russia. Per Nan, I guess Ukraine's decision to be independent was just random, with nothing from history informing it? And this choice of independence has no connection to later points in Ukraine's history when it has opted away from Russia?
That reminds me of one of the other ridiculous non-facts in Ms. Nan's "Gish Gallop" stream of posts. From yesterday -
nan said:
Oliver Stone made at least one other film about Ukraine after the first one. In that one, "Revealing Ukraine," they show how Ukraine was founded in 1991 and how they managed to get it approved. The thought was that they had the kind of industries/people/agriculture/ they would need to be successful and they wanted to be a prosperous European city. Things never worked out and the country was plagued by corruption and poverty.
"Ukraine was founded in 1991" is something one writes if they're either not conscious of actual facts or deliberately trying to mock people from Ukraine (some of whom, or their children, are in our community, as I've mentioned here before). As for the economic comparison between Ukraine and Russia, everyone has seen a lot of more factual discussions of that.
dave said:
Ha! The "most dangerous man in the West" starts out by giving huge praise to Piers Morgan. And then Piers Morgan says he agrees with everything the "dangerous man" says. He then proceeds to give his "dangerous" view which is, no surprise, as mainstream as it gets. This guy has quite the shtick! Great marketing - "moderately conservative communist" serving up CNN platitude, Julia Davis-like tweets, and conventional tenets of liberalism used as propaganda. Those are dangerous thoughts, but that's not the intention.
For contrast, here is someone who really challenges Piers Morgan and conventional Western views.
PVW said:
nan said:
They were all part of the USSR. It was a different world. Russia is not the same Russia. The whole system changed. Also,the Ukrainians were brutal to Jews during WWII and thanks to the Russians we won that war. Half the country speaks Russian and identifies with Russia. The other half seems to identify with Stepen Bandara or puts up with Stepan Bandara celebrations. So, yeah I struggle with imagining that Russia is what you should be worried about when you streets are named after nazis. As Jerry Seinfield once said "if your clothes are covered in blood, maybe laundry is not your biggest problem."
So half the country likes Russia and then there is a Nazi group that wants to kill all Russians and then "All you others." Why do you always focus on the theoretical "all you others group" that supposedly dislikes Russia in a western way as though they speak for the whole country? We don't even know if they exist.
Given that WWII started with Moscow and Berlin making a pact and jointly invading Poland, don't the Russians have at leas as large of a laundry problem as the Ukrainians?
It's this sort of thing that makes me feel you have a loose grasp on history. How is it that you can declare that any Ukrainian who is not pro-Russian must be a supporter of the far-right, but somehow Russian cooperation with Hitler -- and Russian mass murder of Ukrainians, including of Ukrainian Jews -- doesn't seem to factor into your thinking at all?
Ukraine sought independence from Russia three times during the 20th century -- once during the Russian revolution, then again during WWII, and finally at the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Clearly, there's a persistent and long-standing desire on the part of many Ukrainians to break away from Russia. Yet for you, the only possible explanation for thousands of people to have demonstrated for months on the Maidan is Nazi sympathy and CIA propaganda.
Again, before the war, half of Ukraine spoke Russian and Identified with Russia. About 30-40% (without counting Crimea + Donbas) wanted good relationships with Russia. The Nazi group is the biggest group that hates Russia and they are racists who consider Russians subhuman.
Sure there were people on the Maidan that were not Nazis and wanted change in Ukraine. Ukraine was the poorest city in Europe -- the economy was a mess and the government corrupt. But, the Maidan/Color Revolution was a false flag created by NGOs who used propaganda to stir up anti-Russian views. The Nazis shot and killed many innocent protesters and then blamed it on the police. This was backed by the US, who then armed and trained Ukrainians with the purpose of starting a war with Russia and causing regime change. That's the Main Idea. You focus on details.
You also seem to want to ignore anything related to Stepan Bandera and why he is so admired and celebrated in Ukraine. It's like they are just a few rouge elements and the majority of people who live there are NATO loving Russia critics, irreparably wounded by Stalin's crimes in the USSR.
jamie said:
again nan - I have the simplest of questions - who is the current Nazi leader in Ukraine? Where are they located - and how can the US assist in eliminating the worst Nazi scourge since WWII. We've defeated nazism in the past - just let us know who they are - where they are and what you would do to assist Russia in this "special operation"?
I don't know. I'm thinking maybe these guys:
Meet Centuria, Ukraine’s Western-trained neo-Nazi army
A uniquely Ukrainian strain of Neo-Nazism is spreading throughout Europe, which openly advocates violence against minorities while seeking new recruits. With Kiev’s army collapsing and a narrative of Western betrayal gaining currency, the horror inflicted on residents of Donbas for a decade could very soon be coming to a city near you.
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/04/07/centuria-ukraines-western-neo-nazi-army/
drummerboy said:
nan said:
drummerboy said:
nan said:
Never said Russiagate was all of life. You are accusing me of not realizing I'm influenced by Russian propaganda. And then you can't state what you mean. So you were just going for a personal attack. Got it.
I'm not accusing you of anything. Nor am I attacking you.
You have said Russian propaganda in the US is not a thing, which is, of course, absurd. I'm merely reiterating that fact.
We have had multiple instances of great media attention paid to "Russian Propaganda" which turned out to be false. So where is the real Russian propaganda?
thank you for continuing to prove my point.
When was the last time you actually posted about the topic in this thread and not some petty attack on me?
nohero said:
nan said:
PVW said:
I suppose the Holodomor is a small incident of little importance in your understanding of Ukrainian history.
Yeah, I figured you were going to bring that up. As I said, that was a different country. Putin is not Stalin.
It's relevant if you're discussing the views of the Ukrainian people about Russia.
As we discussed before, Ukraine is a divided country and at least half of the country identified with Russia. Winning presidential candidates have campaigned on better relationships with Russia. We know the Nazi element considers Russian's subhuman, but what is the percentage of non-nazi Ukrainians that have a legit beef with Russia? Do you think that is a majority? And how are Ukrainians feeling these days now that a good number of their men have been fed into a meat grinder. Do you think they want to continue this war which they are not going to win.
Ivan the Terrible with Ivan. Here is some great Russian painting that we will never get to see because we don't know how to play nice with other countries.
nan said:
nohero said:
nan said:
PVW said:
I suppose the Holodomor is a small incident of little importance in your understanding of Ukrainian history.
Yeah, I figured you were going to bring that up. As I said, that was a different country. Putin is not Stalin.
It's relevant if you're discussing the views of the Ukrainian people about Russia.
As we discussed before, Ukraine is a divided country and at least half of the country identified with Russia. Winning presidential candidates have campaigned on better relationships with Russia. We know the Nazi element considers Russian's subhuman, but what is the percentage of non-nazi Ukrainians that have a legit beef with Russia? Do you think that is a majority? And how are Ukrainians feeling these days now that a good number of their men have been fed into a meat grinder. Do you think they want to continue this war which they are not going to win.
"Ukraine is a divided country and at least half of the country identified with Russia." Just because a Ukrainian is a Russian-speaker does not mean they "identify with Russia". You're ignoring a lot of facts to make that unsupported allegation.
"We know the Nazi element considers Russian's subhuman, but what is the percentage of non-nazi Ukrainians that have a legit beef with Russia?" What a contemptible thing to write about the Ukrainian people, that if they oppose Russian control they're probably Nazis.
Just to remind everyone of this once again -
nohero said:
The people of Ukraine have been defending their country from attack, it's not the other way around.
Do you realize that there are fellow residents of Maplewood and South Orange who are Ukrainian, who would be grievously insulted by your ridiculous claims?
No, you probably don't. I doubt that you actually know any of them.
nan said:
The Nazi group is the biggest group that hates Russia
Citation needed. Actual numbers will make your claim more convincing.
World's #1 philosopher on Ukraine/Russia