Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
That’s because you don’t understand what imperialism means. US/EU capital is looting and exploiting the former socialist block and controlling it through western capitalist media, NGOs, and military bases. That’s imperialism. The Russians preventing Nazis from doing ethnic cleansing along their border and demanding not to be threatened with a gun to the head is not imperialism.
Funny how living standards in the ex-soviet countries have improved considerably since joining the EU, but that has not been the case for the ones that chose to be kept under Russia’s sphere of influence. 🤔
Yeah the living standards sure did improve after one of the worst demographic disasters in that era. Easy for things to get better when you start from the bottom I mean come on do better.
Have some compassion, some people just want to crank their knob to exploitative porn without questioning why so much of it comes from Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.
Thank you for calling this out. It’s fucking gross how that happens. If I speak about what should happen to “sexpats”, I’ll be in trouble. Big big trouble.
Feel like clawing your eyes out?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/26/ukrainian-refugees-increasingly-targeted-for-sexual-exploitation-research-finds
So, why didn’t Belarus improve at the same rate as the Baltic countries?
They both started from the bottom, right?
The Balts were immediately used as forward positions for NATO and were allowed to keep their state programs and industry. Belarus got the same treatment as Russia.
You should probably know the answer to your own snarky questions before you ask them.
So, what you’re saying is that the countries that sided with the West got a better deal than the ones that became Russian puppets?
When a country joins the western bloc, they join them.
When a country joins any other multinational pact, they’re puppets.
I’m not influenced by western propaganda
Two capitalist nations fucking over their subjects is not the own you think it is
If you think that the answer to this is simply “because Russia bad” you have the mind of a child.
Eastern European countries that opened to western trade and diplomatic relationships improved significantly.
Eastern European countries that became Russian puppets didn’t.
Explain that.
imagine ignoring the absolutely ruthless, western led cannibalization of the former soviet union and pretending history’s baseline started AFTER the largest decline of living standards in global history.
human trafficking, prostitution, alcoholism, food/energy insecurity, diseases of despair all exploded when the west forced capitalism and privatization onto the former soviet union in the immediate aftermath. Gorbachev thought he was going to get some easy-going nordic social democracy, but instead the west carved up their public sector like a christmas ham. maybe you were too young, but in the 1980s the propaganda portrait the west had of russian women were all heavy-set, ugly babushkas. suddenly, after 1989, the mail order beautiful russian bride phenomenon exploded. they were fleeing the gutting of the public sector and the shattering of the social safety net, which made it near impossible to raise a family in the eastern bloc without becoming a sex worker.
the west sponsored every retrograde nationalist reactionary psycho to undermine any hint of democratic resistance to economic liberalization schemes and bombed the shit out of infrastructure (Yugoslavia) whenever they could get away with it. the west has the most blood on its hands for the aftermath of the USSR, but people like you want to ignore those early days and then claim credit for the “winners” the west propped up in the aftermath of all that chaos. like a killer who torched a town but kidnapped a few kids and now touts his heroic rescue of them. the most ignorant and disgusting take.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that after the fall of the USSR, Russia didn’t want their assets to be sold or leased to western companies (understandably), so they let corrupt officials take them for pennies of what they were actually worth. Those officials became the oligarchs.
Russians cannibalised Russia.
the word you are striving not to say is capitalism. capitalists did this to russians, using the playbook developed and advocated for by western institutions.
God you’re just… so fucking close to getting it.
What would have happened if instead of the Russian capitalists privatizing all the people’s assets the western capitalists did?
Do you think it wouldn’t just be western oligarchs cannibalizing Russia?
yes, capitalism is marked by class war, between the class who own things, and the class who labor. liberalizing the Soviet bloc destroyed the prospects of the working class.
Babybrain
They didn’t improve at all. The rich are better off, thanks to mass privatization of public property. For the middle/working class, quality of life stagnated at best.
Source: I live in an ex-soviet country.
There was a massive dip in all those places in the 90s with shock therapy. A lot of people are still worse off in a lot of ways and angry. Hence AfD, Orban, PiS and all those other angry nationalists.
Also, if you want to be fair, you should compare for example Poland to west Germany. Polish workers toil for German capitalists, and yet, somehow, they’re getting exploited way more than the German workers. Less pay, worse services, worse infrastructure, less worker’s rights. That whole arrangement is super-exploitative. Meanwhile foreigners bought most of that country. Treated like a colony basically.
The Russians got fucked even worse than Poland in the 90s, which resulted in a backlash which Putin made himself the head of. What Russia is doing is self-preservation. Any state with the means to preserve it’s sovereignty from a hostile takeover would try to do so, it’s not just something an imperialist state would do. Hence Russia is not doing an imperialism here.
Hell, compare East Germany to the
reichWest Germany. West Germany’s economic conquest of East Germany was incredibly ruthless and brutal, and East Germany never recovered from having it’s entire economy pillaged and burned.And east german lgbt rights and women’s rights lost half a century of progress during reunification.
Yeah. It’s still technically illegal to get an abortion in the reich afaik. It was really something finding out that the gdr had gender parity in most fields before the west crushed it, and that western germany had to give women a bunch of rights to try to manage to political turmoil.
Reading those east German men be like “yeah I prefer it now that women have to stay with me for economic reasons, before you had to be like, interesting and care about them or something” really drives it home in a different way too.
That was physically painful when I first saw some of those quotes. We’ve just lost so much potential.
I hope you understand how this is an incredibly cherry-picked range. It’s like saying “look how steadily the American economy grew from the period of 1930 to 1940”.
Many Eastern European countries in the EU are still being hollowed out and suffering massive brain drain. The model of “tributary state” accurately applies here.
Are these nazis in the room with us right now?
no they’re not here. they’re over in ukraine putting up statues of Bandera and wearing nazi symbols all over their military uniforms. were you not listening, or…?
Don’t forget putting the OUN… er… ukrainian trident on that old monument.
And the Blood and Soil flags that are very common.
I mean, you’re not gonna like it, but;
CW: Like over a hundred fotos that all have some kind of Nazi imagery in them, except one where I think they mistook a patch for the 14th Waffen SS Grenadiers 1st Galacian patch because it has similar elements
https://imgur.com/a/8Oo74F9
They’ve been open and pretty frank about their goals. I can explain all the symbols and their history and significance for you if you’d like.
I’m sorry to break it to you but are you aware of the Wagner group that has been fighting for Russia? They’re pretty Nazi as well and yet hexbear keeps cheering for Russia anyway, saying the only way to end the war is to have Ukraine give in to them. For some reason Ukraine has to be the bigger man, but Russia, the actual aggressor, who is also employing Nazi fighters, can’t?
1.) Killing Nazis is not a tit for tat thing. Everyone should kill all the Nazis they can.
2.) Most of us are not cheering for Russia. This is not a sports game. There is not a goodguy and a badguy. The only thing I want out of this war is for the killing to stop and NATO’s hegemonic power diminished. No one is going to “win” this. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead. Nazis are emboldened and proliferating throughout Eastern Europe. Vast amounts of weaponry have gone missing and will begin being used in terror attacks in the next few years. Much of Ukraine’s last remaining state industries and farmland have been sold off the multinational vultures. The massive infrastructure damage in Ukraine is never going to be repaired. You’re treating this like a movie with a hero and a villain where someone wins and someone loses. That’s not how geopolitics work. The idea that Russia is an “aggressor” shows both ignorance of history and a failure to understand the security concerns of modern states and how conflcit is conducted. So many people have this very naive model un view that the lines on the map are real and you can be sovereign when you don’t have nukes. There’s a studious refusal to engage with the reality that NATO routinely engages in hostile wars of aggression and that countries all over the world will defend themselves from that to the best of their ability, regardless of your concept of morality or rule of law. Russia is intensely aware of what NATO did to Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria. They’re intensely aware of NATOs decades of sabotage and subversion, of death squads and assassins, of coups and coercion. And you can refuse to engage with that or understand it if you want. I can’t force you to acknowledge the world as it really is. But this ridiculous “oh Russia has Nazis so it” s okay that Nazis occupy positions of influence throughout Ukraine" thing is obnoxious. Round up all of Wagner and shoot them. I don’t care. Mercenaries are scum. I don’t care what happens to them. Nazis should be hunted down and killed regardless of where they are, not armed and emboldened.
Your words don’t match your attitude. You guys constantly berate Ukraine and defend Russia, even when it has similar problems. The only actual solution you have is to have Ukraine give up and surrender sovereignty to Russia. The only place I agree with you is that all Nazis are bad.
And Russia is the one who attacked, that makes it the aggressor. Ukraine wasn’t even joining NATO until they made it seem more alluring, and even then their membership is still an open question, so none of that matters. And if NATO did attack Russia, then they would be the aggressor, and I would be arguing against them, because Russia would have the right to defend itself, just like Ukraine does. But it wasn’t. They just wanted territory. You guys also seem to just take Russian propaganda as truth, generally taking their reasons as good faith, claiming genocides against Russian speaking people’s (even though the President is one) just because they specified the official language or saying some Nazi terrorists are a reason to obliterate the country (even though Russia has some, too, as does the US. It doesn’t mean I want someone invading to stop them, destroying my house and shit). It would be like if some terrorists attacked the US and that was used as a reason to obliterate a country, or two. You claim you see the world as it really is, even though Russia didn’t have to attack and none of this had to happen. It reminds me of conservatives who are always telling people on the left to open their eyes and see how the world really is.
I mean you’re here so, kinda yeah