Posted on 08/11/2023 10:09:13 PM PDT by Cronos
To understand Russia’s current obsession with Ukraine, it is important to recognize that Russia was never a state in the common usage of the term. Unlike the modern Turkish state that emerged from the Ottoman Empire, or Great Britain, which acquired and lost an empire, Russia never had an identity separate from empire. As British historian Geoffrey Hosking observed, “Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire.”
The Kremlin’s preferred narrative of Russia rising from present-day Ukraine (“Kyivan Rus”) is a Moscow-concocted fairy tale. The officially endorsed 1000-year history of Russia is a self-created and self-perpetuated myth that generations of Russian dictators have promoted to justify their external expansion and internal repression.
Instead, what we think of today as Russia started out as a loose collection of independent city states that included Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk, Tver, and Moscow, the last of which attained particular significance toward the end of Mongol rule a little over 500 years ago. Kyiv was no more a part of Russia then than it is now. There was no common language, no common administration, and no joint identity. Indeed, it would be centuries before the rulers of Muscovy attempted to assert their dominance over Kyiv and the lands of today’s Ukraine.
...Under Ivan III (“The Great”), Muscovy established itself as the strongest of the city states to emerge from the Mongol period. Ivan called himself “Tsar of all Rus,” but he was actually more like the mayor of Greater Moscow. It was Ivan who started the expansion of Muscovy, initiating the so-called “gathering of Russian lands.”
...Expansion demands inward Russification and repression, and further outward expansion. As Catherine the Great famously said, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.”
I don't know who you are, maybe you are a very kind, generous person offline. But what you have done here is not. I would not get all worked up about this issue at all if it weren't for the rhetoric. I think I could have a reasonable conversation on the Ukraine situation, even if I don't agree with your position. I have said many things over the past year and past 24 hours that I regret. I don't think anyone is happy about the state of the world, even those who are getting their way seem more miserable now than when they started.
There is something dark going on. I have tried to train myself not to be superstitious, or mystical over the last 20 years plus. I have tried to live as a rationalist, without crossing over the line into atheism.
But apparently there is a lot going on that doesn't make sense to me. I have seen people change, and not for the better. There seems to be a tide turning against the left, but I am scared that we are going to muck it up.
There isn't the optimism of Ronald Reagan in conservatism anymore. There is a spirit of vengeance and retribution. I have seen it in myself. You are aware of the situation in Canada. Sometimes I have been so enraged, that I have actually wondered what I am turning into. I can see the "mistakes of the past", and can see myself repeating them.
I don't want to replace one darkness for another. There is merit in the left's fear of us. The anger has boiled in me for decades. I don't want to become something worse than what I have replaced.
I really value my time on Free Republic, but I think it has had the effect of turning my attention to all the things that worry me. I have become someone I don't like. There seems to be little of the joy that there once was, if only in fits and starts.
I remember when I first joined here, and I stated that even though I was only 19, I was scared for the future. Someone sent me the advice "don't take this place too seriously. Go out, have fun, and live your life" (not a direct quote). I wish I had taken that advice. For better or worse FR has been one of the biggest influences on my life. I am 43 now, well into middle age. I have wasted my life, and that is on me, not FR. But be that as it may, I sometimes wonder what effect being here has had on me. I have always had a sense of the end of the world. A sort of vague sense. I don't know if all my worrying and reading an fretting made any difference whatsoever. Likely not.
Globohomo doesn’t offer any future except open borders and faggotry.
Putin rejects them both, and that is good enough for me.
Write something original?!! I write the truth. Moral absolutes are not original but they are worth repeating. You stand on evil cheering evil.
The boy-kisser Putin is the protector of Moscow’s absolute decadence. One must divorce Putin’s actions from his rhetoric. How many political opponents has he murdered? How many hundreds of millions does he need in new palaces?
Russian domination of Europe would result in a loss to the US of the immense benefit of Europe’s economic, technological, and scientific talent and a skilled population larger than the US. Contrary to your belief, in the event of war, the US Navy would destroy the Russian Navy, with the Chinese Navy mostly ineffective and vulnerable outside of Chinese littoral waters.
The current Globohomo Regime is collapsing under its own incompetence.
We won’t be able to build anything new until it is gone.
When we do build new, racial and sex difference realism has to be part of it.
Pretending there are no sex or race differences locks us into a Leftist civil rights framework where any “disparate impact” creates an unlimited ability for them to force unqualified people into positions - and we are right back into th leftist tyranny incompetence spiral.
“Russian domination of Europe would result in a loss to the US of the immense benefit of Europe’s economic, technological, and scientific talent and a skilled population larger than the US.”
Why is this necessarily the case ?
Before 2014, Russia benefitted from Europe’s economic, technological, and scientific talent while Europe was dominated by the USA.
The civil rights movement originally started with some merit, but like all successful movements, it had to morph in order to survive. Whatever Martin Luther King's flaws, what came after him was much worse, at least in its public persona. I don't think pinning our hopes on Russia is the right tack. We have unique problems, they have unique problems. They aren't known for treating people particularly well on an individual level. I don't want the current "globohomo" culture, but I also don't want to have to toe the company line anytime the government makes a decision.
I don't know if there has ever been a virtuous and prosperous society. There certainly have been compassionate and permissive ones. If anything our civilization proves the postulate that anything in too much a measure becomes a vice.
There certainly are, but what is the practical effect of that? I have met lousy white people and good white people. I have met lousy black people and good black people.
I have met incompetent men and incompetent women and vice versa. Sorry to be cliché, but I think we all still don't really believe it.
I think a lot of us are still really mad about being treated as pariahs by the left and are looking to get some justice. Some people think that includes treating them like they treated us. Remember though, that is how they came about themselves. The entire left was invented pretty much to get revenge on the French aristocracy, then morphed to get revenge on the slave masters, then the patriarchy, then the straight people. Theoretically, we could go on like this for several more cycles.
“Russia Under the Old Regime”, Richard Pipes
A classic of Cold War historiography. Read that over 40 years ago.
BTW the title itself is evocative, among historians, it calls back to the classic “L’Ancien Regime”, Hypolite Taine, a classic of conservative historiography.
Atlantic Council: The Who’s Who of leftist Globalists
“racial and sex difference”
There certainly are, but what is the practical effect of that?
The practical effect, for example is that blacks may be 12 percent of the US population, but they are not going to be 12 percent of the Physics faculty in American Universities unless they are forced in there by some diversity regime.
And when you have a disparate impact based civil rights law that says, less than 12 % = systematic racism, that is exactly what you get.
That’s just a natural reaction of the nations who were once subjugated by Russia and who don’t want to be subjugated by Russia ever again. What is there not to understand? Why did President Reagan say “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall”? President Reagan wanted these nations to be free. Some Freepers want them to be Russian serfs again.
Oh gee. NATO might have come about because of that small thing called the Second World War
Aren’t you charming
Then perhaps y’all should’ve saved the world without US help
And where and by whom was this so called prophecy?
“You, me and almost everyone in FR live in that regime. If it goes, we likely go with it. I have young family members and I don’t want them to go down too.”
This thing is collapsing whether we like it or not. There is a competence crisis of the entire elite in every sphere that is just getting worse and worse and worse.
For example, things that worked perfectly fine 50, 60, 70 years ago like the electricity grid are on the verge of failing every summer.
And they are reducing base load power supply while adding to grid load (banning natural gas appliances, EV mandates).
They are just going to keep pushing the grid until it breaks, and then... I don’t know.
But I suspect that some regions will defy DC and their regulations, and try to get the power back on for their area.
You seem very confused
Then explain to me why so many Canadians come across the border into Washington for healthcare??!
People in North America should not be writing unlimited liability security guarantees for people in Europe.
That is the folly of NATO and it should have been disbanded in 1991.
The EU has a greater population and GDP than North America, and if they can’t organize themselves to deal with Russia, that is on them - not our circus, not our monkees.
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