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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Russia has to spend blood and treasure to secure the rest of Ukraine. We just have to spend treasure to make their cost go up! And we’ve decided the exchange rate looks pretty good.

Who's "we", and what was the calculus? Because I have a strong suspicion that the "we" is just seething third-generation Russian emigrants still mad that great-grandpa was run off the shetl, lobbying and donating until the US's pay-for-play foreign policy let's them use America like a golem to smash their ancestral enemy.

I'm a citizen of the West and certainly no-one asked me about sending all my money to Kiev.

I was thinking of the American military-industrial complex, of which I am doubly part. The Pentagon, Lockheed Martin have some obvious incentives to keep the government buying more HIMARS or whatever.

shtetl

golem

Are you just hinting that support for Ukraine is driven by Jews? There are 50 years of other reasons why Americans like to stick it to the Russkies. Just watch the classic documentary, TOP GUN.

I see this all the time, this kind of comment that Americans hate Russians. I, frankly, am genuinely put off by this.

I always believed my country’s enemies to be the Communists, the Soviet Socialists who inherited their ill-gotten rule from the Bolshevik revolutionaries; my enemies were never the poor Russians in government bread lines in knee-deep snow. I have as little ill will toward the Slavs of the Russian Federation as I do the Khasi people of West Bengal, India, or the Mushuau Innu First Nation people of Canada; that is to say, none at all.

Who said anything about hate?

When Russia does something that reminds Americans of the Cold War, we are more likely to object. Invading a neighbor fits that stereotype. As far as I know, the Khasi or Mushauau Innu lack both the military power and the historical trend.

Really, I will agree with Nybbs that most of the blame falls on Putin. Average Russians don’t seem to get much of a say in their foreign policy.

Of course the problem was the communists, but they didn't ever really go away. They changed their outfit and their choice of lies. The country is still run by a dictator with secret police, it still has a huge stockpile of nukes, it's still attempting to secure an empire. Most of the bad aspects are still there. And yes, this is mostly an issue of the sociopaths in charge, not the regular people.

Putin's government is seen by many, and not without cause, as a partial extension of Soviet rule. But yeah, it ain't the Russian people most pro-Ukraine Americans have a problem with.

I was gonna suggest Red Dawn.

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