Posted on 10/22/2022 6:49:53 PM PDT by AndyJackson
Outside of that giant laundry machine.
Yes. They handled it so well in 1939-40.
You wanted a short answer. My real answer to you is for you to conduct a great homework - to research and contemplate the nature of power, the behavior of great powers, the history of conflict, modern history, economic history, etcetera ad infinitum.
"...even though insulated and at idle, you sense something, something so illusive that you're not quite sure it even exists, something so close to the edge of reality that it mocks you for faith in it and mocks your skepticism: a misfire, or rather a hint of a misfire." And then the Ecoboost dual turbo badass engine goes into auto shutoff mode to save fuel, and now you can hear the whole universe laughing.
Thanks again!
Your history of the origin of WWII is pathetic.
Putin told the west not to extend NATO and the west agreed.
You wanted a sentence. You got your wish, and more, as I just gave you a date.
Now feel free to explicate the complexities around my answer.
My WW2 library is at over 500 print volumes on my bookshelves as of the moment. I’ve gotten rid of much more prior to an international move. I read all volumes of the US Army “Green Books” and Morisons “US Naval Operations” in high school, plus Shirer, all volumes of Churchills history, Purnells history, etc and etc. and redundant etc. And I went on from there.
Go on, explain yourself.
Not anymore... Today it's being reported that he has said that U.S. military support of Ukraine should continue until a cease-fire. But there's more...
“Before this war, I was opposed to membership of Ukraine in NATO, because I feared that it would start exactly the process that we are seeing now,” ... “The idea of a neutral Ukraine under these conditions is no longer meaningful. I believe Ukrainian membership in NATO would be a[n] appropriate outcome.”
A fair question should be, why has he changed his mind? Cynics will say, he's at Davos and that's GloboHomo NWO so there's your explanation.
People who know Kissinger of old will point out his ceasefire approach is classic realpolitik and it would legitimize Russian control over Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk (Kissinger himself seems to acknowledge that this will be a very difficult sell to Ukraine OR the former Warsaw Pact countries, most of which take the view that Moscow's gotten away with mass murder in terms of the sheer number of hostile takeovers it performed over the Soviet era, and since - so gifting it a win again won't resolve anything).
It also doesn't address at all the last ten months where Russia's propaganda mill has been selling the invasion of Ukraine to the people of the RF as a determined attempt to protect thousands of ethnic Russians from a genocide that amounted to 2 people a month tops, by purging the region of (originally about 900) Nazis. Also, they keep saying, Ukraine's only the first country that needs to be de-Nazified. Kissinger's ceasefire leaves the Kremlin free to keep on trolling its own people with this ludicrous, unsupported narrative. If Russians are truly convinced that Hitler's Nazis are already back and they're all wearing rainbow jackets and changing genders while killing more Russian speakers in the Donbas than Russia is, they'll eventually work themselves up into fully invading Ukraine again to take out another 900 card-carrying nazis, or invading somewhere else on an equally bullshit pretext..
Kissinger's solution has red lines for Russia too. Firstly, Sweden, Finland AND Ukraine are likely to all get the NATO Article 5 protection - not because America demands they join the alliance, but because almost all of eastern and northeastern Europe (those countries included) are now convinced the only deterrent that ever did hold Russia back was NATO Article 5. Secondly, Ukraine keeps Zaporizhzia and Kherson, so the land bridge to Transnistria is a bust. Thirdly, he insists there has to be a way back for Russia to "rejoin the international system" (Which one? NWO? UN Charter?) but whichever one he's talking about, it's likely to be the exact same international system that Russia's been telling us for months it wants to not just leave, but replace.
A club that insists on holding onto the membership card for an anti-social member who's trashed the furniture before flouncing out in a massively gay, flamboyant strut, is all the weaker for not slamming the door shut behind him. The only reason to even consider talking about MAYBE leaving the door open for Russia to return to the "international system" is, Russia's alternative "international system" scares the living bejesus out of most of western Europe, central Europe, Asia, and more.
If North Korea, Syria, Iran, Russia and China end up in a stronger position to set up their New World Order Wot Looks Like the 18th-19th Century World Order Really, then we'll have done something very VERY stupid. Two ways that can happen - one is we give Russia the win to spare it from the butt-hurt it deserves, and it sells that to like-minded totalitarian dictators, islamist despots and trigger-happy hermit kingdoms as a glorious moral victory against the West, the other is we beggar Russia so much that it finds itself with nothing more to lose and decides with Kim Jong Un, "in for a penny, in for a pound."
NATO hasn’t expanded eastward. Putin can whinge about it all he likes, and pound sand.
It’s far more accurate to say, the east and northeast of what was once Soviet territory has expanded NATO applications westward.
Putin knows full well that in the 90s, several former Warsaw Pact countries told Moscow that if Russia made binding assurances of non-aggression in their general direction, LIKE THEY’D DONE FOR UKRAINE, they’d see no need to join NATO. Russia refused to make any such assurances. Any doubts that Moscow really was attempting to enter the post-Soviet modern era were confirmed by Putin flattening Grozny. Even more of eastern Europe had doubts after Georgia was invaded. By 2008 Poland was actively warning Ukraine, it would be next.
And finally, with Russia invading Ukraine militarily (for the land, the offshore oil, the minerals, and a whole host of other reasons - but most definitely not because of biolabs or nazis) despite Russia itself having signed possibly the most comprehensive, stringent, ironclad, copper-bottomed, binding eternal pledges ever committed to the United Nations treaty library that it’d NEVER do that to Ukraine (this all goes back to Helsinki 1975 by the way - it’s not a concept that the West imposed on post-Soviet Russia), proved to the whole of eastern Europe that a lasting peace treaty sent from Putin’s Russia with love is about as bent as a three dollar bill.
MalPearce: [Not anymore... Today it’s being reported that he has said that U.S. military support of Ukraine should continue until a cease-fire. But there’s more...
“Before this war, I was opposed to membership of Ukraine in NATO, because I feared that it would start exactly the process that we are seeing now,” ... “The idea of a neutral Ukraine under these conditions is no longer meaningful. I believe Ukrainian membership in NATO would be a[n] appropriate outcome.”
A fair question should be, why has he changed his mind? Cynics will say, he’s at Davos and that’s GloboHomo NWO so there’s your explanation.
People who know Kissinger of old will point out his ceasefire approach is classic realpolitik and it would legitimize Russian control over Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk (Kissinger himself seems to acknowledge that this will be a very difficult sell to Ukraine OR the former Warsaw Pact countries, most of which take the view that Moscow’s gotten away with mass murder in terms of the sheer number of hostile takeovers it performed over the Soviet era, and since - so gifting it a win again won’t resolve anything).]
But Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, learned the lesson up close and personal. In 1953 he travelled to Crimea with his son-in-law, the prominent Soviet journalist Aleksei Adzhubei. The trip was no vacation. According to Adzhubei, Khrushchev had a series of awkward encounters with crowds of post-war Soviet settlers, who made desperate pleas for more material assistance. Khrushchev was frustrated by all the complaints. “Why did you come here anyway?” Adzhubei recalls Khrushchev asking the settlers. “We were tricked!” they replied.
Adzhubei described Crimea at the time as a deeply “desolate” region still struggling to rebound from Nazi occupation and what he called Stalin’s “Tatar genocide,” which had not only depopulated the peninsula but deprived it of agricultural know-how in the cultivation of vineyards and tobacco fields.
By all accounts, the bleak conditions in Crimea shocked Khrushchev. According to Dmitrii Polianskii, who served as head of the Communist Party in Crimea between 1953 and 1954, Khrushchev came to the conclusion that “Russia had paid little attention to Crimea’s development” and that “Ukraine could handle it more concertedly.”
Khrushchev and other Soviet authorities learned the hard way that Crimea is not an “island” or a “jewel,” as Russian metaphors would have it, a beautiful but self-sufficient swath of territory. Instead, to reach for another metaphor, Crimea is a flower whose blossom floats in the Black Sea and whose stem reaches deep into the Ukrainian steppe, into the territory around today’s frontline cities of Kherson, Melitopol’, and Mariupol’.
The Crimean Tatars used to refer to this steppeland as the Özü qırları or Özü çölleri, the “Dnipro fields.” The reference to the Dnipro (or Dnieper), Ukraine’s largest river, was not ornamental. The Crimean peninsula is largely arid and warm, lacking abundant fresh water of its own. For centuries it has thirsted for the Dnipro’s water and relied on resource flows from mainland Ukraine.
In February 1954, Khrushchev’s regime took action to rejoin the blossom to its stem, announcing the formal transfer of the Crimean oblast from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine. During the formal Politburo proceedings, Soviet Russian politician Mikhail Tarasov justified the transfer by describing Crimea in the way we should understand it today: as “a natural continuation of Ukraine’s southern steppe.”
Adzhubei called the transfer a “business transaction” directed toward Crimea’s economic development. It produced quick dividends. In 1957, Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv oversaw the launch of what had been decades earlier merely a Russian pipedream: the construction of the North Crimean Canal, which expedited flows from the Dnipro river near Kherson to irrigate the entire peninsula. Crimea’s economy, particularly its agricultural sector, improved dramatically. So did its tourism industry. High-rise sanatoria for the Soviet elite popped up along the southern coast, driving the image of a Soviet Shangri-La along the Black Sea.
Only in later years would Ukraine’s success in developing Crimea be denigrated and mythologized as Khrushchev’s “gift” of Crimea to Ukraine – or worse, as Khrushchev’s “mistake.” The transfer of Crimea to Ukraine was no mistake. It was a rescue. ]
And freaking Trump was messing up their plans, they had to get him out of there and get Biden instead. Once done, the plan was back on track.
Good history of Crimea! With Khruschev, who was Ukraine born. Actually, born in Russia very close to Ukraine border.
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