Ukraine
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stowpirate
skinflintish camera nut
Is another "Pact of Steel" possible? Russia, China and Iran would be the obvious players?
http://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20140313-The-Xi-show/Viewpoints/0310VPS3Putins-Novy-Russia-plan
http://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20140313-The-Xi-show/Viewpoints/0310VPS3Putins-Novy-Russia-plan
tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
Unilateral recognition, the Northern Cyprus solution, on a larger scale but with less bloodshed.
It's a hangover from the cold war. Putin is likely the world's most evil leader - he props up other states like Assad's Syria, is ex-KGB, and uses a shell of a impractical ideology and memories of the 'good old days' to garner populist vote in Russia.
tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
He plays the same game as everyone else. He props up Assad, Britain props up the Saudis. As to the memories of the good old days-that's a British speciality.
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
Well yes the reconquest of Chechnya in the 90s, indiscriminate air and artillery attacks on civilians etc - I mean you're obviously familiar with the facts. It gets "close" by the following standards -
So according to this: http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/officialtext.htm
I think you've got the mental element and 3 out of 5 of the physical ones. But I've had this argument elsewhere on U75 and some people have argued that the definition is therefore too broad and should be saved for special cases like the weird combination of savagery and bureaucracy in the Nazi attack on the jews. I can see something in that argument which is why I located the Chechen case (and you could put the Tartars in there too) in the context of a century long war by the Russian state on the Caucasian peoples which has been characterised by extreme cruelty, massive atrocities, mass deportations, destruction of religious sites and schools, and generally looks at times like the only thing missing from a full extermination campaign has been the degree of organisation capable of pulling it off. The mass deportations and exoduses into the Ottoman Empire/Turkey look a lot like the sort of things that happen when a power elite attempts to completely destroy an ethnicity.
Personally I think there's not much doubt that for most of the last 150 years the Russian state elite would have wished the Caucasians could just be vanished. It just turned out to be quite tricky actually doing it, there are other priorities etc etc, so with that as the backdrop then the Chechen war of the 90s and the quisling regimes since do (to me) get close to being part of a genocidal campaign - although I can see it clearly falls a little short of the legal definition.
In terms of the Soviet element of Russian history, I am probably less knee-jerkily anti-Soviet than most posters on here, and it seems to me that the Soviet history of many of the marginal peoples begins with a period of relatively benign treatment, certainly compared to what happened before. As for Stalin, many of his actions could be called genocidal in some aspects but they also seem characterised by a weird capriciousness that is the antithesis of the 'normal' ends of genocide, ie the complete destruction of a people and culture. He'd banish the lot and then let them back after 10 years of hell. Hard to make sense of.
tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
How do you know what kind of things they were getting up to with their fags in the 80's? As to the present day our glorious leaders have shown little compunction about sending British troops to foreign climes to slaughter and be slaughtered. .
What I meant was, Putin is re-elected because it was not a great thing to be a Russian after the fall of the wall and before his re-election, mainly due to the Russians not being very good at capitalism (understandable, it is not within living memory for them), very good at corruption, and having little (benevolent) help from western countries after the wall. Consequently, the Putin gov, with it's memories of the 'good old days' (where goods and services were provided by the state) present in it's ideology and image (Putin being ex-KGB, etc). If the west had helped them do well as a free nation, they wouldn't have to go back to a time of dreaming about rotten food and crap trabant cars, which are better than no food and no cars.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
The British state isn't above torture when it suits.
bit hawkish that.
The reason Obama is "accepting it" so to speak is that an "activist" president (another Bush) would struggle to get elected in the United States.
And if by "activist" he means mean butcher, by that measure Obama's not exactly lacking.
Besides the US is still largely getting it's way. They have Kiev. A massive geopolitical prize that's been hignly soughtafter since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia can take Crimea as consolation, a sign perhaps that US power is on the wane somehwat, but the US/EU still sets the agenda, Russia just reacts.
Who said anything about "fags"? Not sure what you mean there... gays or cigarettes? I think that there is a big difference between signing up to the forces and being thrown in a gulag. Whilst Putin may have been a pencil pusher at his time in the KGB (so says the Putin gov), anyone implicit in a secret police force surely has blood on their hands to some extent.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
these days they get ISI to do it while they leave the room, then come in and ask questions after
I know. I'm not making apologies for Britain's human rights breaches, I'm having a go at Putin. It's interesting that as soon as Russia/Putin gov is criticised, the response is to criticise western governments.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
Fascinating mate. No criticisms of Putin allowed on this thread, oh no.
The GWOT is a very very complicated subject - to simply paint the western govs as the bad guys trivialises a lot of the history and context to it. Terrorists blow people up, oppress women (GWOT terrorists, that is) and are generally not nice people. Is it reasonable to use forceful methods on confirmed terrorists to find out the plans of future attacks? Obviously it is not as clear cut as this, but then again my point is the GWOT should not be over-simplified.
Well that was the reaction I got, so....
I never said that anyone here though Putin was some God-like head of state, I just merely criticised the vigorous defending of him.
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
It's complicated if you want to be but I was responding to your claim that Cameron and co "didn't torture British civilians in the 1980s". You were right about the 1980s bit, wrong about the other bit.
Sure, perhaps Cameron was a bad example, I'm no Tory. But I still think that someone who opposed the fall of the wall in the first place and held a job in the secret police is worse leader material than an over-privileged toff with a morality deficiency.
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
It's true that Cameron was never a secret policeman and probably hasn't ever actually conducted an enhanced interrogation in person but that's probably only because it would technically count as manual labour and a proper toff would flinch in horror from the social implications of getting his hands dirty in the work place.
seventh bullet
sovietwave
Thanks. It's the intent to destroy above, with regards to what I regard as 'brutal subjugation,' as ViolentPanda put it earlier, that I am not convinced by.
I am not knee-jerk with regard to Stalinism, or looking at it seriously, and importantly on its own terms as well to understand it. For example, the way in which people can easily dismiss Stalin in crude, and often inaccurate personal terms, or the system of state ownership in the USSR and the organisation of Soviet society wasn't properly socialist, or it simply doesn't count without convincingly going into why they think that. It just doesn't. See the poster ayatollah's reactions to people who say otherwise but certainly aren't arguing the case for Soviet 'socialism.'
Stalin wasn't a very nice man, it was a question of personal power. But if that was the case then there would have been easier ways of gaining and exercising such power. But keeping on topic, my talk of Soviet history earlier was on that particular conception of socialism within the old multi-ethnic empire and nationalism, and on how long nations would remain into what they believed was a coming era of socialism (as they understood it) on a worldwide scale. An eventual fusing of all peoples was seen as being a far-flung development. There was indeed the creation of 'nations' within the USSR, which in some cases was against the history of a given part of the old empire in terms of the people who lived in those areas, and whether you see it as genocide or not (and I don't personally), it's still devastating from that point of view, in forcibly dispersing populations within the framework of that socialism. By doing so are you also in a sense destroying them as a 'people'?
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
Well yes, destroying national identities would have been very much part of the Soviet project as part of creating a universal human identity, hence all the stuff about forcing Mongolian nomads into settled living and so on, and the assumption that attacking islam was just part of the general attack on religion - that it was primitive and needed tackling without seeing that it was also a form of cultural imperialism which - say - attacking the orthodox church wasn't.
Whether that kind of cultural project counts as a part of a genocidal project (ie 'destroying them as a people') is a bit hard to call now since we know what happened to the whole thing.
Iranians would be very foolish to jump into bed with the Russians who are totally unreliable. Deliberately delaying the nuclear plant they were building, not going a head with the missile deal-after the Israelis bribed them with drone technology. Can't see it happening.
classicdish
Well-Known Member
Private school thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging
seventh bullet
sovietwave
No, you misunderstand what I was on about before re Stalinism and the establishment of socialism, in that I was referring to the encouragement and indeed flourishing within Soviet-imposed limits of ethno-cultural diversity based on the definition of a nation, how and why it 'exists' and the people who make up a given nationality. Indeed the carving of territories and the creation of new 'nations' to fit the peoples of the old Russian Empire (a decent example of how this engineering played both a progressive and destructive role is in Central Asia).
Nationalities, under socialism (according to the Stalinists), were here to stay for a long time, perhaps even after the final of 'victory' of socialism across the surface of the earth, not just within the Soviet Union. The fusing of all peoples on a world scale would occur even further into the future. You're aware of 'national in form, socialist in content'? The conditions of that would change of course as what they saw as the progressive role of Russian leadership and a long experience of state centralisation would take hold in place of the previous Great Russian imperialist dominance of Tsarist times, although seen as qualitatively different.
Is your example of Mongolia (or the Mongolian People's Republic) a good one? Considering the above and also that the MPR was never a part of the Soviet Union but a satellite (the first?), and became so after Red Army intervention in the final stages of the civil war, when the Bolsheviks were in pursuit of White remnants in the east (although to be more accurate the nutcase Baron Ungern-Sternberg). The later forced sedentarisation was part of one of the first examples of an external 'proletarian power' assisting a so-called backward society directly to socialism. This kind of involvement (military at first) and the theory underpinning it, was revived later in post-WWII central and eastern Europe, however those societies under Soviet dominance were far from 'backward,' so some theoretical re-jigging was required, but that's where it originated.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
A significant majority of Latvian-speakers voted no. They voted to replace the suppression of their culture with the suppression of Russian culture. They voted to be no better than the Soviets.
Forgive me if I am more than a little disappointed by such a vote. Do Latvians themselves not think that they can do better than this? I certainly think they can do better.
This is an aggressive form of nation-building that has been done many times in the past in various places. You speak Russian, but your children will be educated in Latvian. They will speak Latvian at school and then at work. They will speak Russian at home with you, but their children will not. Their children - your grandchildren - will grow up speaking Latvian at home. Within two generations, your language will be gone.
That is the project. It is more or less explicit. If you and your Latvian friends support that, at least be honest about what it is that you are supporting.
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Casually Red
tomorrow belongs to me
um..the right sector leader is walking into council offices openly brandishing a Kalshnikov . Arms depots have been looted all over the place . Literally thousands of weapons have now fallen into nazi hands .The other night the nazis shot 2 dead and wounded 14 others after they attacked an anti Kiev demonstration . Dimitry Yarosh and other nazi leaders being incorporated into the states security apparatus . The nazi footsoldiers are being incorporated into a Ukranian National Guard . Theyre being armed to the fucking teeth .
So while my sympathy for the Baltic Russians is limited
you fucking hate russians , lets not be shy about it.
