Kaiserschmarrn wrote:You and I both know that this is not Russia's primary motive. However, I do believe it is quite likely important for Russians and Russophiles which is why it is such an excellent pretext. But personally I like the justification that "Russia is defending a minority against brutal oppression by Fascists" best.
I'm just wondering where all the world-weariness and cynicism has gone that is so consistently applied whenever these arguments come up in other circumstances.
Not so long ago, you've said that Putin shouldn't stoop so low and use the language of liberals, something I first noticed during the Syria conflict. But since then you've often abandoned your own amoral position and posting style in favour of the kind of language and reasoning that Putin has adopted. Since I don't think that you have genuinely and fundamentally changed, it seems this is just a case of learning and using your opponent's weapons. So it looks like Putin and you have both acknowledged that, considering how effective these moral arguments are, it would be silly to give them a pass. It's a bit ironic in your case, since it works best if some references to Fascism are thrown into the mix.
There are two different points here.
I concur that it is not Russia's (as in the Russian government's) primary motive, but I do absolutely believe actual national defense/security concerns are in the face of an expanding military alliance rolling up to their borders. The comparison (though it's certainly not a matter of being limited to deployment of strategic weapons systems) would be stationing Soviet missiles in Cuba, which absolutely was a legitimate threat to U.S. national security, or the U.S. deployment of missiles in Turkey against the USSR which actually preceded that incident. In all cases, the country concerned had justifiable reasons to fear a looming encirclement and take bold defensive measures to curtail this.
This cannot be compared to, for example, a superpower-led coalition with the usual EU poodles in tow flying warplanes across the Mediterranean to bombard and utterly destroy another country of no threat, Libya, for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with defense, security, or even pursuit of genuine national interests.
As to what you're saying about using the language of liberal internationalists on faux-humanitarian interventions acting as pretexts and smokescreens for invasion and control, a la Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and their fortunately failing attempt against Syria, not to mention the countless successful and failed color revolutions from Georgia to Belarus to Iran to Venezuela to Ukraine itself, I unequivocally believe that as Russia is the weaker party and thus for the time being has to learn to properly utilize the double talk and weaving of narratives in the same fashion that the chief global exploiters do, wielding it and their utterly hollow bankrupt claim to a moral monopoly as a lethal sword against them, that this is a wise and effective strategy to follow. I support Moscow's penchant for adaptation to its environment.
On the second point about myself and what I actually believe, you know of course my motives for wanting to see the world's most repugnant manifestation of a military wing of international finance-capital, NATO, a serpent of unparalleled toxicity responsible for ruin the world over and ravaging of some of the most beautiful of national projects, being dealt a crippling blow and its machinations stopped cold in Ukraine.
Again though, as a natural and vocal supporter of those of a shared ethnicity seizing and enjoying the privilege to live under one state as a united polity and thus achieve full sovereignty and agency on the basis of common blood and presumably of purpose, I also support Russian annexation and incorporation/increased control over and ties with ethnic Russian territory outside its legal borders and re-adjustment of those legal borders where appropriate (a la Crimea) for genuine ideological reasons.
It just so happens in that case that my geostrategic interests happen to marry nicely my ideological ones. On a more grandiose level I have nothing against the Ukrainians as an ethnic group or the identity they derive from their wealth of cultural traditions, as well as respecting the more basic principles held by many nationalist factions on Ukraine's far-right, but simply see no reason why the East Slavs should be divided into three or more states rather than being united as a people which will give them, as it did in Soviet times (and this time fortunately without the prospect of a communist agenda), greater ability to shape their Eurasian space and project power internationally. Brzezinski and his student American and Western European policymakers know and understand this, and it is why they consider the splitting of tens of millions of white East Slavs from the influence of Moscow and a leadership that exists independently of Western designs a geostrategic imperative for the 21st century which will see Russia retreat to Asia.
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:And most of us know that you do not object to any of the above in principle. It's just that you are opposed to the US, or more generally the West.
You saying this is a fundamental misunderstanding of my position, for I have both served and given a lifetime of work and of raising a family to the U.S. and have roots and family still living in Germany, so to say I am opposed to "the West" is extremely misleading and inaccurate. I am not opposed to
any nation per se. What I am opposed to, as I feel I've repeated many times and made myself quite clear on here, is neoliberal globalization and the pursuit with increasing rapidity post-1991 of a liberal internationalist-led world monoculture which places all primacy on the post-modern materialist value system, stateless financial interests which pillage and pervert the direction of ethnic population groups not their own, and the push to eradication of the differentiation and consideration of race, ethnicity, nationality, language, culture, and the spiritual, traditional, and philosophical agency of whole peoples across the planet. To the extent that the political and economic establishment which stands not for the sovereignty of the population or territory it governs but their further integration into the bile known as the international system stands for pushing for this future for the nations I love and the whole of the world, in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere, then absolutely 100% those regimes and institutions are my enemy and I support their position being undermined by
any means necessary.
If I didn't care about the future of "the West", which couldn't be further from the truth, I wouldn't be so adamantly opposed to the inundation of the European people's space with unrestrained waves of colored immigration. I support the resistance of nationalist, pan-ethnic, and independence-minded revolutionary movements to a great extent in the global-south and developing world with hope in mind for a brighter, freer future for European civilization both on the mother continent and in the New World, a post-liberal, ethnically and racially sovereign, post-Judeo-Christian "West".
To the extent that Russia can subvert and fragment the international system while halting some of its odious advances as it has done in Syria and to the extent that its actions in Eastern Europe which have earned it Western wrath see it further withdraw from the artificial global "consensus" and chart a more independent course, its resistance to the advance of neoliberal rodent droppings in Ukraine has been nothing short of glorious.
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:Locations of interest are not magically limited to neighbouring countries. But regardless, Ukraine shares borders with several EU member states anyway.
True, but it's beyond question for anyone who lends even a scintilla of weight to ethnic concerns and ethnic autonomy and unity that a Russian state and leadership has far far
far more business overseeing the affairs of ethnic Russians in an area that was recently Russian territory officially than do Brits, Frenchmen, Italians, or a faceless soulless post-nationalist bureaucratic apparatus polluting Brussels.
"I am never guided by a possible assessment of my work" - President Vladimir Putin
"Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin." - Muammar Qaddafi
Six major mutually-hostile nationalist factions and not a single representative of the country's east, from Odessa to Dnepropetrovsk, set amidst the backdrop of military defeat and rapidly declining economic fortunes. Sounds like a recipe for Stability and Democratic European Future. Personally, I expect a liberal paradise akin to Libya post Gaddafi.
The EU's economy is stalled and in deflation. Their share of the global GDP even on the most benign assumptions is forecast to drop by 5 or 6 percent by 2020 (perhaps even below 20%). The Association Agreement locks Western Ukraine into loans from European banks and cuts them off from the growing Eurasian market. Throw in the expensive conditional reforms stipulated in the 900 page document (which no one who talks or riots about it has ever even read) and add on the need to find or develop a new source of gas and heating.
- By Pants-of-dog