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Well, it's easy to say that now. I remind you that shortly before the war, 55% of Germans still were for operating NS2 "despite the ongoing conflict with Russia". Can you say with confidence that if a CN-TW war starts, after three years of nonstop war propaganda in the media, where Chinese atrocities and Taiwanese valour are frontpaged in the papers every day and every expert agrees that China will no doubt attack Europe eventually if it is allowed to win in Taiwan, which will presumably percolate through the social strata until everyone you know agrees and only obviously disgusting and sketchy outgroup people argue for moderation and non-interference, you will still think that Germany should stay neutral and mind its own economic interests?
Do they? I don't think I've seen much of that messaging at all, and to begin with, was this before or after their people were being killed with military hardware that we donated?
What trespasses were there against Germany? You can of course extend the set of trespasses that count to include any arbitrary rule concerning anything anywhere in the world, but that sort of approach does not converge to a notion of national interests that allows equilibria that are not global dictatorships.
In the prison hierarchy metaphor, Russia is bending over for Germany pants down. I mean, again, German tanks are currently being used to take towns that had been Russian for centuries, and what's Russia doing in retaliation? Making unhappy noises?
Ugh. We can have the same argument from a non-morally-nihilist standpoint, which would be much closer to my actual standpoint, if you want - I've done that many times here (with my line being that unchallenged American hegemony is a far greater evil upon the world, and to put checks on it, barring a miraculous inversion of firepower, you need to support lesser evils with opposing interests, so their capacities are tied up with each other and they are compelled to do good to gather third-party support), and apart from the uninteresting responses that selectively assign low moral weight to targets of US evildoing, the dominant retorts always turn out to be the morally nihilistic ones ("sure, grant that the US hegemony kills millions and results in even greater non-killing injustice around the world, but why should I as a citizen of $european_country care about that?").
They did counter-coup; the result was Crimea and the Donbass and the whole 2014-2022 period. To begin with, are you suggesting that coups are not "violence"?
Conflicts. That‘s like saying: before pearl harbor, the american public‘s view of japan wasn‘t all that negative. Then the propaganda came along, and ruined that beautiful friendship.
Earlier, you admitted that the neighbours of russia are correct to fear it. So 200 km from the russian border, around the Oder, that justified true belief magically turns into US-implanted false consciousness. And then, if you go further, past the channel and the atlantic, russia‘s threats, largely nuclear, become real once again. But we in the middle have nothing to fear. We‘re sitting in a bubble of peaceful russian intentions, sadly filled by american propaganda.
I hope this is a rhetorical question. Yes, obviously, I think I can tell the difference between truth and falsehood. I assume the same of you.
This is nothing. Under realist/19th century rules, we should be at war the moment russia sent troops against our vassal‘s government. And threatening us with nukes for that would still be beyond the pale.
Constantly using war and war threats as your main foreign policy tool, especially on peripheral countries who want to join our sphere/EU, and against our allies, like the baltics. Threatening to nuke us, them, and the world.
So you support an amoral russian regime and the oppression of russia‘s neighbours as a counterweight to the seemingly greater evil of american hegemony?
That‘s a convoluted and dangerous gambit. Can you refresh my memory, which ones are your preferred victims, proving america‘s evil? The palestinians, I think you appreciate particularly. Chomsky had a problem with the US bombing the serbs and pol pot. Do you have a number in mind, like 10 million murdered by uncle sam, therefore a few hundred thousands ukrainians are small fries?
They're certainly far less violent than what's going on. I'm also judging some decisions made later than crimea. There is a moment after the grab-zelensky attack on kiev failed, where russians could have gone home. Instead putin decided to fight a real war, with the blood cost this implies. Here was a moral decision of far greater consequence than to coup or not to coup.
Another thing: You claim to be able to explain russia‘s policy because you know how the country ‚ticks‘; Does this mean that the man on the street, or whoever you hear tick, is in charge? Or would have acted the same as putin? When you imply the honest muzhik would never attack germany, did he attack ukraine, or was it someone else‘s idea?
That's not really a reasonable counterargument here. We have one data point (Russia was attacking Ukraine a bit, Germans were fine arranging themselves with Russia, Russia attacked Ukraine harder and Germans were exposed to lots of propaganda, Germans now want to support proxy war with Russia, with many thinking German involvement should be raised without limits until Ukraine wins). I claimed that in the case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, we should expect a similar change of attitudes, leading to Germans wanting to cut ties with China and fight for Taiwan. You were arguing that that wouldn't be the case, because... the Americans were right to turn on Japan after Japan attacked the US in Pearl Harbor, and therefore it was perfectly reasonable for Germans to turn on Russia in the Ukraine case? How is this an argument against the Germans seeing it as perfectly reasonable to turn on China in a hypothetical future Taiwan case?
Well, I would refine that statement as saying that I don't think that this applies to all neighbours (Finland's fear, I argued in the other post I linked earlier, I consider unreasonable), but... yes, there are evidently some "magic lines". The historical record shows that there are certain territories (beyond its current widely accepted borders) that Russia considers as historically theirs, and is only reluctantly willing to accept in foreign hands, especially when they are still settled by Russians whose experience amounts to "we settled here as normal Russians moving within their own country, and then suddenly some random thing happened and we were under foreign suzerainty". Countries that control territories like that are quite right to be worried, because Russia draws some fairly intrusive red lines regarding their dissociation from the motherland (as Ukraine has been finding out). For lands beyond that, the historical record has shown amply that Russia has little interest in seizing them even if it could fairly easily do so; even for forcing them under occupation/proxy regimes, Russia has only really done that once under the highly unique conditions around WWII (devastation + globalist ideology + revenge card) which are just unlikely to return anytime soon. Incidentally, even Poland's fear seems to me to be unjustified/manufactured - their leadership is just driven by its own revanchism and builds on a national mythos that is built around centuries of bloody rivalry with Russia where both sides were utterly ruthless to each other.
I completely reject the conflation with nuclear threats. Nobody, in this conflict or generally since WWII, has used nuclear threats offensively, in any way that resembles "let me have my [minor interest] or I nuke you" - they are always defensive, following a format of "if you do this thing that I consider to be an existential threat to myself, I will nuke you and trigger MAD". (The closest anyone got was Douglas MacArthur, who wanted China nuked if they didn't let him win on their doorstep in Korea!) These threats are not actually dangerous unless you can't help yourself but existentially threaten the nuke-holder, because you can just back off, and so in this case they are only really threatening to Ukraine (because it has kind of glued itself to the tracks and made its own survival existentially threatening to Russia) and to a lesser degree the US (because it has kind of glued itself to the tracks and made the survival of its empire dependent on maintaining the appearance of always getting its way).
No. I don't think I can tell the difference between truth and falsehood, and I assume the same of you, and I take your response in the positive as a sign of hubris and bad calibration.
By virtue of being able to read most of the languages of the warring and supporting parties, I am constantly exposed to way more than two confidently held, extensively backed by compelling sources perspectives that can't be simultaneously true. The reasonable thing to assume is that they all failed to discern between truth and falsehood, rather to accept one random party's special pleading that they are privy to the truth and everyone else is falling for transparently false propaganda. Humans have evolved to have a socially mediated epistemology, which is completely helpless in the face of modern propaganda.
I thought I already said I'm not particularly interested in playing 19th century reasoning, but if Ukraine is "our" vassal now, when did it start being one? Does it mean that we at some point caused a coup in their vassal and vassalised the resulting state ourselves? What do 19th century rules have to say about that?
I wasn't intending to argue primarily based on victim-counting, but if we do that, sure, the US comes out looking pretty bad. Is it not generally accepted that civilian casualties are a greater evil than standing military? Well, the latest civilian casualty figures for the Ukraine war seem to be estimated at ~13k on both sides (I don't know if that includes Russian civilian casualties or not, given our representatives' belief that Russian civilians are not dying). Iraq alone had 66k civilian deaths even in the estimation of US military (everyone else estimates more) and let's not get started on Palestine, US allies like Yemen, ..., Vietnam, all the civil wars and coups they sponsored in South America, and so on. The effects I care about go well beyond direct killings though. They cause untold misery in Cuba through their petty sanctions regime, impose copyright laws and favourable conditions for their megacorps all over Europe, change our politics for the worse by imposing their memes, forced us to spend money and lives for them in Afghanistan, (...). All of this was while Europe was still relatively friendly with Russia and China - now that Europe has made it clear that it will not choose to side with them over the US no matter what the US does, I expect that the US will be free to do far worse.
More generally, I believe that there is no such thing as a benevolent power - to rise to significant (top whatever small percentile) power under any conditions that have been real so far requires will and effectiveness to perform actions that are negative-sum for the totality of humans whenever the opportunity arises. The only way to get powerful entities to perform positive-sum actions is to threaten and coerce them into doing so - and the only real threat that we as small-time individuals hold over entities like the US state or Russia is our collective allegiance, as countries (for now) still require a broadly compliant and cooperative citizenry to instantiate their power. The US government can only be motivated to act in the interest of the German (or, on that matter, the American) citizen by the threat that this citizen, and masses of others like him, will align with another government that can threaten it otherwise; the same is of course true for the Russian government.
German history actually has one of the best examples of this, in the form of Bismarck's social laws. We know quite well what fate the staunch monarchist Bismarck thought the rabble rightfully deserved, and we know what kind of society the communists instantiated when they got their way - but because the workers credibly threatened Bismarck that they would align with the communists, he was forced to grit his teeth and pass what were at the time among the most generous aid and redistribution laws in any industrialised nation. Just imagine if, following the argumentation now being made for siding with the US, the workers of the 1870s had been convinced that life under the communists is worse than under the emperor, and therefore renounced the socialist movement. Would Bismarck have voluntarily improved their condition?
It's fairly clear that the outcome for them would have been even worse if they had backed off at that point. Since I think it's a good thing morally if fewer of what is considered the US objectives for Ukraine are attained (with most positive terms being mediated by the expected humiliation of the US), I think they actually made the morally good choice.
That's putting some strange words in my mouth now. I think that a big part of the country supports their current foreign policy, and would have acted about the same at each junction if they got to sit on Putin's golden toilet for a day. That also includes my projections about who they would and wouldn't attack or aim to conquer or vassalise.
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