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Can’t blame them for doing what they have to do in a desperate situation.
Of course, if Zelensky had been more pusillanimous / conciliatory to the Russians the same online dissident rightists would be decrying him as a disloyal Jew who sold out brave Ukrainian nationalists to Putin and the (((Oligarchs))) in exchange for shekels wired to his Israeli bank account, so ¯\(ツ)/¯
This is just excuse for any form of bad behavior showing motivated reasoning.
There is obviously a big difference with promoting people who are seen as Satanists with being a more traditionalist figure.
If Zelensky managed to avoid war while being more conciliatory towards the Russians most of the people complaining today about him would ignore him. Generally, you must be a massive prick to get plenty of the online right to hate on you. And especially a massive prick in a manner that offends right wingers. Even during the war he could have done certain things differently and been more likeable that is certainly the case.
The number of rightists who will hate any figure just for their ethnicity no matter what they do is rather small. There is a bigger number of people who will excuse any form of bad behavior because of the ethnicity of the person involved and pretend rightists are just full of blind prejudice.
Politicians and influential people who in any way pander even to some extend to the desires of rightists end up with rightists liking them more. Including some of the far right crowd. Suspicions exist for valid reasons. This is the big issue among all the people whining about rightists haters and bigots. They are the hateful ones actually and their complaining is nonsensical. Do you and the people you whine of being unfortunate targets of excessive hatred, ever try to be friendly to at least some of the people you complain about? Of course not.
You can choose to hate on the rightists and excuse pandering to who Zelensky panders towards but then don't complain when they hate back. You aren't owed nor deserve unconditional support.
In the case of Zelensky, the man banned political parties, betrayed the promises he was elected for, shelled civilian areas and let loose war criminal groups and will not allow elections in 2024. Moreover by making his country a thrall to the extreme agendas of factions of western establishment he is doing his country a great evil.
I would have hoped people would have realized by now that it matters who you put in charge in key institutions and it does change the trajectory of a country. The model of these far left circles has self negation of national identity, that is cultural genocide, self hatred, mass migration and promotion of all sorts of far left pathologies which include in the mix discrimination against the natives, hate speech laws, and promotion of LGBT ideology and preferential treatment for them.
Choosing to do this because it is a desperate situation is a stupid choice, but also it downplays Zelensky own complicity.
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Do you mean before or after the war broke out?
After, as before he was comparatively pro-Russian by the standards of post-Maidan Ukrainian politicians.
In that case it's clear that your assumptions about dissident rightists bear little resemblance to reality.
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Considering that Zelenskyy won the 2019 election in a landslide on a peace platform, committing to peace talks with the Russian separatists in Donbas, I wouldn’t call ‘following up on his campaign promises’ to be selling out the large majority who elected him for that purpose.
As John Mearsheimer has noted, it was only once Zelenskyy departed from his peace posture, sabotaged by NATO minion Boris Johnson in April 2022, that he no longer represented the wishes of the Ukrainian electorate and only then betrayed them.
I would hazard a guess that a peace platform with "Russian separatists in Donbass" in 2021 and a peace platform with Russia shelling you and rolling the tanks in in 2022 are two different peace platforms.
Politicians should follow election platforms blindly without regard to changing circumstances like enchanted broomsticks from "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" until an election gives them the opportunity to adopt a new platform.
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There is evidence Russia was positioning for a large scale war and being isolated for years. They cleaned up their finances a lot since 2014. Still had 350 billion to be claimed out there but they had positioned their budget to be able to handle being cutoff.
The whole peace thing makes sense if Russia was willing to take a deal on Crimea plus breakaway republics but their actions indicate their peace condition was Ukraine not being in the EU and orienting their trade to Russia instead of the richer west.
I don't understand why this makes them less likely to want a peaceful solution. If I wanted peace and felt threatened that's what I would do, were I big or small.
It’s evidence that Russia wasn’t looking for a “reasonable” peace deal but were always angling to conquor the whole thing.
Yes Ukraine should want peace. Nobody disagrees with that but it feels a bit like a Jew wanting peace with Hitler. He was only offering them the gas chamber.
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Once you've invested sufficiently in military build-up, you need to somehow translate that buildup into some sort of gain for yourself, or you've wasted a lot of money for nothing. Armies have inertia.
That's fair enough, although one would expect that using them as leverage in negotiation and the odd colonial intervention would be enough right?
This is why I didn't expect the war to happen in the first place. Sustained wars have the ability to sap your military standing and it is almost always better to use strength as a diplomatic tool if you can.
I guess Boris was sent to call the bluff, and not without reason when we look at the Russian performance.
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Do you think that Zelensky's attitude to Russia changed because a disgraced British politician sat on him, or because the Russian army invaded his country and committed the normal (i.e. large) number of atrocities that ill-disciplined armies commit when they invade a country.
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Wait, so is supporting the hardcore Ukrainian Azov/Banderite nationalists who want to fight to the end and never surrender the democratic or non-democratic decision now? It’s hard to keep track with the endless flip-flopping of ‘realist’, isolationist and general contrarian Twitter takes. Should Zelensky have been a citizen-of-nowhere globalist who sold out to the Russians and expat-ed to Israel at the earliest opportunity, or should he have stayed and allowed the hardcore nationalists to fight to the end (and tried to get them more weapons) as he has done?
There’s no real consistency to criticism of him. His detractors can’t seem to decide whether he’s too weak, too stubborn, too much of a NATO cuck or too powerful and humiliating western governments who are trying to rein in his maximalism. Usually it’s whatever’s convenient for their argument. To me, he seems to be committed to doing what the people of Ukraine want, which is to exercise their bloodlust and to fight, whatever happens and whatever is strategically ‘right’, to the last man.
There is no such thing as popular will. Nor is there any such thing as the people, of Ukraine or anywhere else.
Zelensky is a fairly standard if aesthetically eccentric eastern european politician who will do whatever it takes to stay alive and in power, in that order.
To that end, and like every politician, he has to reach an equilibrium between the interests of national and international powers and factions, which leads him, like every politician, to seemingly contradictory policy and criticism for said policy. You should expect contradiction, since it's inherent to the exercise of power.
If you want to get an analytical answer as to why Zelensky makes a decision and if that was effective for his goals, you need to look at those actions in the context of interacting with those surrounding established factions and powers. Not ask theological questions such as "what do the people of Ukraine want".
What do you call the 1991 independence vote in which 84% of people voted and 92% of those voters voted for independence?
A justification ritual.
Only someone who believes in the metaphysical claim that votes can reveal the will of the people feels bound by them. Since I understand the mechanics of democracy, I believe no such thing. People can be made to vote for anything.
Voting is a justification ritual. The question is if that's only what it is.
What, in your world, does it mean Ukrainians to overwhelmingly vote in favor independence? Is the concept incoherent because Ukrainians, like all others, are not collectively anything?
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What utter Thatcherite nonsense.
Remember September 11? Did Americans go "Huh, something happened over there in New York? How about that, good thing it's got nothing to do with me"? Or did they go "OH YOU WANT A FIGHT BOY, LET'S GO"?
Was that before or after they were told how to think about it by the authorities and who the object of their ire should be, at times on completely false pretenses?
The media demanded a war neocons had wanted for a while and they got it. Had the elite of the time been radically against the intelligence community instead of for it they probably would have asked for the dismantling of the CIA and got it on also perfectly justifiable grounds.
"Americans" are perfectly unable to "want" anything because they are a category made up by a civil religion whose "will" is tied to the interests of institutions. They "want" what the NYT says they want and if they do not are ignored and marginalized.
Individual Americans may have wanted a whole lot, including a full investigation of those events, but they only got what they were told they wanted and what few they could organize to make happen. Because that is how power works.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember that day, but...before. Absolutely 100% before.
Just because you have a nice, coherent model of how society works that fits neatly in your head, that doesn't mean your model is correct.
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Somehow the Ukrainian electorate has no idea about it... That's no problem, there are enough Americans who can explain Ukrainians what they really want.
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