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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25016 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Depends on how you're defining "it"

"Russia invaded Ukraine" Is a fact.

"Russia started it" (the invasion) Is a fact.

"Russia started it" (the war) is not a fact.

The definition of starting something isn't as clearly defined and the cause of the Ukraine war is more complicated than who threw the first major blow. They were already in a frozen proxy war after the events of 2014 with occasional shelling prior to the larger invasion.

Finding the exact causes for historical conflict is always more complicated. This is why the propaganda machine keeps trying to reduce it to simplistic terms. "Mommy! Timmy punched me!!!" type child reasoning. Any unbiased adult with any experience with people is going to question what Jimmy did to piss off Timmy.

Like Incanto I find the patronizing obnoxious.

As a parallel I’d bring up other wars.

Look at any narrative about the Six Day War / Third Arab-Israeli War that isn’t written by open anti-Zionists. None of them dispute that Israel started the war, in the narrow sense of the word, with a massive surprise attack. They also mostly see it as self-evident that Israel was merely preventing an impeding war of extermination by her Arab neighbors. In other words, they agree that Israel is either blameless or at least shares only part of the blame for the entire war, even though militarily they attacked first.

Or look at Atlanticist or Atlanticist-adjacent narratives about the South Ossetian War of 2008. It’s accepted as fact that the Georgians attacked first but also had no other acceptable choice.

Russia started the war in 2014 by invading Crimea. This should be a question of little doubt.

NATO started the war in 2014 by instigating a color revolution and replacing the elected leadership of Ukraine with western puppets. This should be a question of little doubt. Round and round.

Whether one considers the pre-Crimea events in Ukraine as a coup, a revolution or something else, they were, in the main, internal events within Ukraine, not war. The Russian invasion of Crimea, on the other hand, was a clear act of aggression by one state against another (and, counter to the Russian narrative of bloodless takeover, there were several clashes between Russian and Ukrainian troops), meaning that is when fighting between the states, i.e. war, started.

No.

When we instigate a revolution, it's in support of the people, of democracy and of freedom. When we invade foreign countries, it's to topple dictators and stop warlords. When Russia instigates separatism, it's aggressive hybrid warfare. When Russia invades a country, it's imperialism.

It's not difficult.

Seriously though, given that both sides do questionable things, can't they just all be bad?

No, that’s the propaganda. No country on Earth is so virtuous and only acting in the defense of others.

We’ve been mostly a benign empire, but make no mistake, we are an empire in the same sense as most other empires. Most of the “removal of dictators” and “support for democracy” have been in defense of our global hegemony. In fact, the biggest predictor of us removing a dictator is not what they do to their own people, or how they treat their neighbors. The invasions come when a dictator goes against our hegemony. Duerte can be as brutal as he likes, we don’t care because he’s a Western aligned dictator.

I think @Southkraut is being sarcastic.

I was, and I apologize for it.

I agree with you, in any case.

Mongols started it when they invated Kievan Rus, in my opinion.

Kiev was always burning since the world was turning.

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