Posted on 08/14/2023 5:54:41 AM PDT by zeestephen
Russia's Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that he wants to wage a perpetual ideological, economic and physical war against the West. It is time for Congress to step in and sever U.S.-Russian space station cooperation...
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
LOL. In the 1970s, when Soviet aggression was on the march, the MSM looked for any opportunity to have the US do things jointly with the USSR. “Russians love their children too!!!!”
Seems to me that Obama’s fundamentally transformed America is not so different than Putin’s Russia.
(Sigh)
His ideology is not conservatism or patriotism, it’s political revanchism + chauvinism.
Revanchism is about seeking revenge for an imagined humiliation. It’s delusional, in Putin’s case. It’s his malfunction not ours that he can’t distinguish between the USSR being broken up in 1991 (by its own membership) and the Russian Federation which wasn’t smashed up in 1991.
Hitler in the 30s was quite revanchist, in the sense that he blamed the Jews and others for the humiliation of the Versailles settlement. Germany was crippled by the punishment. And he sought revenge.
The same excuse doesn’t fly for Russia. It went into massive decline after the collapse of the USSR because corrupt ex FSB/KGB officials and oligarchs were all robbing their own country. Ukraine and Belarus also got held back by the FSB crooks and the oligarchs.
Everywhere else that wasn’t balls deep in Soviet era gangsterism grew up and got better.
Putin actually got elected on an anti corruption ticket, and yet he’s just another klepto KGB throwback who’s looted and imprisoned anti corruption rivals.
How does he get away with such blatant hypocrisy? Easy. Revanchism. It’s not HIS fault that 20% of Russian Federation families don’t even have indoor toilets let alone luxuries like washing machines, their roads haven’t been resurfaced since Stalin died and now look like they’re in warzones because their potholes are craters...
No, it’s the fault of the West.
Just ignore all those other countries with Slavic populations that aren’t Mafia states, where the rich have 21st century amenities and the poorest families at least have amenities on a par with America in the 70s. Some rural towns in Ukraine had better living standards in 2013 than big Russian towns an hour away from Moscow.
The only thing holding Ukraine back from catching up with Hungary and Poland was Russia refusing to let go.
And that’s where the chauvinism comes in. Putin just can’t abide the idea that any country that used to have to put up with Stalin’s sociopathic nonsense inside the USSR, has a legitimate right to not tolerate Russian bullshit OUTSIDE of the USSR. Knowing he can’t rehabilitate Stalin in the Warsaw Pact’s or Ukraine’s eyes any more than Germany could rehabilitate Hitler, Putin goes back a few decades more to talk about Peter the Great...
The guy who had his own son tortured and killed.
Have you read “On unity”? It’s on the Kremlin website. How about “What to do with Ukraine”, a Russian editorial invoking Putin’s dream? How about Dugin’s philosophical works?
If you’ve read any of that stuff you don’t need to read any western press.
Putin’s philosophy is there for anyone who wants to read it. It’s about as benign as Mrin Kampf.
Yeah, we should have left that to the Russians, the Chinese, and other countries looking to collaborate, like Iran, India, Saudi
What could possibly go wrong?
“Russia’s Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that he wants to wage a perpetual ideological, economic and physical war against the West”
The US’s Joseph Biden and the Democratic Party and the European Union have demonstrated that they want to wage a perpetual ideological, economic and physical war against the West.
Just catch them unaware and boot them out an air-lock.
So what? As long as the people of the EU and the coastal metropolises of the USA want it, they’ll vote for it.
But we know that Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia, and the UK, aren’t on board with the Franco German superstate. And we know large swathes of the USA don’t want a Globohomo superstate either. There’s an ideological gulf but it doesn’t have to be fixed by waging a hot war.
It’s a bit different to Russia imposing Russification on its neighbors at gunpoint. Putin took out Navalny and Khordokovsky just like Biden’s trying to take Trump out. He tried to take Yuschenko out to keep Yanukovych in. He propped up Lukashenko when Luka lost the election.
The ONLY difference between Biden’s perpetual war and Putin’s is, Putin’s been at it for twenty years without any real opposition.
The U.S. space program needs the Soviet space program.
“There’s an ideological gulf but it doesn’t have to be fixed by waging a hot war.”
I hope that you are correct—but at this point that is a major assertion based on speculation.
Old saying “People in glass houses should not throw stones.”
“SIGH”
OK, Putin’s ideology is “revanchism” - which simply put, is restoring the perceived (or fake) old glory and power of Russia to former USSR lands that do not want it.
That makes me ask: what then is the present “American” ideology, especially as the article tells us Putin is against it?
How to define it? Just on Friday I read how the World Bank (controlled by the USA) cut off all loans and aid to Uganda, due to its anti-LGBTQ domestic policies. Last month, we sent Samantha Power, head of USAID, to Hungary to specifically meddle in Hungarian politics, meet opposition figures, and accuse their elected populist/nationalist President of “totalitarianism.” I’ll only briefly mention places like Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Panama, Niger, Somalia, and yes, Ukraine, to have you tell me where these fit in to “American” ideology.
It can’t be “revanchism” because those places were never historically part of the USA. Its a very active and aggressive ideology - so what is it?
Its certainly globalist, its based on race/gender/climate distinctions, its secularist if not specifically anti-Christian, its highly centralized, its elitist, its often violent, and it furthers the interest of their empire.
Its almost like old-school “Marxism,” but updated for the 21st century
So the choice is - Putins Russian “Revanchism” or DC neo-Marxism.
I live in the USA, so you can guess which one has a higher chance of destroying us.
Instead of ending the joint space program, what if both countries found other programs in which they could work together.
When the USSR was dissolved, I believe both sides had that in mind. The reason it hasn’t happened was not Russia’s fault alone. Read the following archives:
“What exactly is Putin’s “ideology” that is such a threat to the West?”
Threatening the West, mostly. You know, like the daily threats of nuclear war that puke has issued over the past eighteen months and that people like yourself have breathlessly amplified?
I do not have enough practical knowledge about Hydrogen 3 to have a helpful opinion.
As to man in space - for the next 100 years - I see no possible profit generating activities except Space Tourism and Space Thrill Rides.
Where can we go, besides our Moon and Mars?
Venus - deadly heat, deadly atmosphere, and deadly atmospheric pressure.
Jupiter moons - bathed by deadly concentrated solar radiation in Jupiter's huge magnetosphere, as well as by several deadly radiation belts.
If we had committed all of our ISS funds to the robotic exploration of our own Solar System, I think we would have learned essential facts about human survival in space, other essential facts about planetary mineral wealth, and essential knowledge about space robotics.
Excellent post!
Puke?
Clever!
I think man needs a beta site, of course only the elites will get to go, but still. Besides, if we don’t, the Chinese and Russians will.
A moon base could have ushered in asteroid mining and harvesting of rare elements, but most likely some tree hugging, throwback hippies would have found a way to stop that.
The thousands of russian warheads aimed at the USA?
We know how to explore these planets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t564HRXeS6o
I understand you won’t believe these folks the first time you are exposed to what they are saying.
Just file this back in your memory and save a bookmark—when the time is right it will make sense to you.
“Soviets destroyed religion and the family in Russia and it never recovered.”
You are trying to apply US standards and morals to their country. If you start that then you will have to blame many countries, if not all of them, for the same thing. And this includes the US in either misrepresenting, replacing, or ignoring our morals and rules like the law. And by the people that are supposed to be enforcing it. The inmates are in charge of the asylum. And the asylum only cares when it hits them in the pocketbook enough to turn off their electricity so they can’t play their video games. Complacency: A complacent person is very pleased with themselves or feels that they do not need to do anything about a situation, even though the situation may be uncertain or dangerous. They’re everywhere.
wy69
Putin wasn't anti America until the War on Terror; maybe he just didn't like Team America: World Police and was rooting for Durka Durka Stan. He doesn't like America interfering in other countries, but at the same time doesn't seem to have any problem with Wagner and other Russian actors taking up the cause of the hard cases in Serbia, Lybia, Iraq, Syria, Niger etc.
Have you ever noticed that whenever Russia can be bothered to get involved in other countries (which is only very rarely in the form of humanitarian intervention - Putin's more likely to be "arms length" involved with paramilitary intervention, fuel/food blackmail, bribery/kompromat at the government level, cyber warfare, and corruption), it's always on the side of propping up a despot, a strong man, the wannabe dictator, the military coup?
Or, we could point to cyber warfare:
I live in the USA, so you can guess which one has a higher chance of destroying us.
Sorry, you're just wrong. The USA has been under attack by post-Soviet Russia for well over twenty years - in fact, it's getting closer to 25 years. And you have done, as a country, the cube root of bugger all about it because for some masochistic reason, you're hell bent on "don't poke the bear" even when the bear's spent years cyber attacking the hell out of your healthcare system, infiltrating your government, and attacking your allies.
Which is one of the reasons why a Forbes Magazine article asked this exact question in December 2020:
Why would the United States allow any nation state to attack U.S. government agencies and departments and electronically steal from U.S. companies for 25 years without retribution? This is basically what has happened. This has to stop.
Its a very active and aggressive ideology - so what is it?
Neocon stuff. World Police stuff. George W Bush took it personal, for him it was Daddy's Unfinished Business. Don Rumsfeld was a hawk. It's quite possible to have more than two ideas in your head at the same time though... By all means the USA shouldn't need to play World Police and I'd be just as happy if it didn't, but ultimately SOMEONE has to defend the UN Charter and we know for a fact neither Russia nor China would ever do it against their own interests, despite both of them sitting on the Security Council. So maybe the UK and USA should take a back seat, but then it begs the question, what's to stop China or Russia just drawing a circle round Taiwan or Japan, or South Korea, and say "Sorry, world, we've just had a bullshit meeting where we annexed those countries, and they belong to us now!"?
I’ll only briefly mention places like Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Panama, Niger, Somalia, and yes, Ukraine, to have you tell me where these fit in to “American” ideology.
I assume you don't mean Iraq in the sense of the First Gulf War.
Serbia is a tricky one because Slobodan Milosovic's ethnic cleansing policy was producing flows of refugees and internally displaced people, and there'd already been reports of mass executions of men and boys because of their ethnicity. The UN Charter didn't allow the use of force against the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, but the UN Charter also obliges the Security Council to do something a bit more productive than sit around with a thumb up its ass when someone's about to or already is committing genocide.
Even the Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia concluded that the case for the NATO action was "subject to legal debate". So Putin might be right on some bits of it, but the USA was right on others - and EU NATO was not prepared to have another genocide in Europe, so that's why it largely went along with the "short sharp shock" treatment.
The same cannot be said of Russia's action inside Ukraine - especially if you take the ICTY report as precedent, because at least one of Putin's reasons for the war is subject to a definition of genocide:
If one accepts the figures in this compilation of approximately 495 civilians killed and 820 civilians wounded in documented instances, there is simply no evidence of the necessary crime base for charges of genocide or crimes against humanitySo consider the Donbas, where even Russia's own statistics suggested that from summer 2019 to Feb 2022, fewer than 10 civilians a month were killed as a result of ongoing firefights between LPR/DPR separatists and the Ukrainian batallions. Those that did die were more likely killed by stepping on landmines laid years earlier, being accidentally hit by a car, or dying in a car crash. So the "genocide" argument wouldn't stand up by international legal definitions; the scale was nothing like as big as what Milosevic was already doing - and even then, what he did failed to meet the definition of "genocide".
So the choice is - Putins Russian “Revanchism” or DC neo-Marxism.
Actually, the choice is between "international rules of law and war are enforced by the UN Security Council" (which applies to both of the above) or "Superpowers can do what they like.".
Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity guaranteed in writing by more agreemens signed multilaterally than ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD has ever had. It is literally a watershed moment for the planet. If Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity is thrown under a bus because Putin Wants It, Precioussss, despite the sheer weight of goodwill, trust, legal and moral backing behind all those past agreements, then LITERALLY no country is safe from a neighbor with a grudge and a leader who's a complete sociopath. That will lead to more wars, not fewer wars.
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