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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35955 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Ok, try to imagine that China is unified and vaguely democratic. It'd still be China and an enemy country of the US out of sheer rivalry. Hegemons hate competition, China is simply too big. "Democracies aren't enemies is a BS concept" - UK and USA almost came to war before WW1.

Then try to imagine Texas secedes because it's fed up with D.C. and signing up a mutual defence treaty with this alt-history China, that would probably also involve basing Chinese military. Would D.C. crowd acquiesce to this?

That's about how Ukraine becoming an American ally looks like to Russia. Absolutely unacceptable to Russian state.

The US and UK didn't have global competition like anything the US has done against the USSR or China. The UK just stepped down as world hegemon and let the US take the reigns without any war. There might be some light competition, but if China was truly democratic then the US-China relationship would look very different.

The UK just stepped down as world hegemon and let the US take the reigns without any war.

The UK just lost the biggest war there ever was. Without WW2 which put two great powers very keen on decolonisation onto the world stage, it'd not have given up its empire so easily.

It ended the war broke and in a large amount of debt to Americans, who then gleefuly proceeded to 'decolonise' the empire and snap up the resulting quasi-states for its own sphere of influence.

It probably would look very different, but not necessarily more friendly.

Democracies are vulnerable to demagoguery and there's plenty of genuine grievances for a Chinese demagogue to get people riled up about.

Yeah, well, Russians didn't give up in '41 when their position was far worse, and they're really not likely to give up now.

Maybe they'd have considered it once, but all the talk of 'decolonisation' made it impossible.

'41 was existential for the Russians. This is, at worst, existential for Putin and the die-hard nationalists/imperialists.

You really think a median Russian would be fine withe the partitioning of Russian federation ?

More fine than dying at war or from a nuclear exchange, I reckon. Many countries were partitioned over the course of history without their entire combat-able population dying in one final hoorah. Many of them, I suspect, more patriotic and less concerned about the value of their lives than a median Russian who just wants to grill.

Median Russian remembers the 1990s when the West was happy with what was going on in Russia and shudders.

Hence the idea of 'decolonisation' and 'denuclearisation' is most likely not popular at all with Russian population.

It's not like nuclear weapons prevented what happened in the 1990s, though, and after the fall of Soviet Union few Westerners gave any particular support to the idea currently talked as "decolonization" in the Russian context, ie. supporting subject nation independence within the RF. Most Westerners didn't give two craps about the First Chechen War, after all, and the Second Chechen War was seen by a number of Western leaders as a potential subject of collaboration within the framework of War on Terror.

What happened in the 1990s didn't involve military pressure from a foreign power, but the final stages of decay of a rotten system of planned economy.

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