It’s not as if Russia (or the Soviet Union before that) was ever a beacon for liberty. They may have had periods or Governments that were more liberal than others, but the conservative nature of that region didn’t start with Putin, and nor will it end with him when/if he goes, unless it becomes a puppet state of the West. You only have to look at Eastern Europeans tolerance at street level of things like homosexuality and immigration to realise that the only reason a lot of those countries don’t follow suit with what we call oppressive laws is because they have the carrot of EU membership dangling in front of their faces. Russia have no such considerations. On top of that, Bush & Blair invaded more countries that Putin has, and you only have to look at the Snowden revelations, or read about Camp X-Ray, which is still open to see just how oppressive, if not as overtly, that regime is. Yet I never heard cries of ‘Hitler’ aimed at them? Why? Because we are using our version of ‘oppressive’, and not necessarily theirs.
Furthermore, I think you underestimate nationalist fervour within Russia, even amongst the educated. Putin’s support levels are the highest they’ve ever been, and it would be a mistake to assume that it is only, or even mainly, amongst the uneducated. Of course, there is a correlation with education and liberty, but there have been plenty of highly educated people who have supported, in huge numbers, what would be considered oppressive leaders, and their aims, in the past.
Would that be the same Israel that the West props up?
Yes it's the same Israel, it's off topic and more importantly you give yourself away every post. The reason you hold these Russian sympathies is obvious, is because you are anti American.
ask yourself when you write a post "am I writing this to try and justify my earlier stance" or " am I writing this because it's what I truly believe"
Russia has engineered, fomented, funded, supplied and openly encouraged this war since February. We are not dealing with a civil war, it's Russia's proxy war and they are in so deep, there seems to be no way back.
So stop with the... Tony Blair, George Bush, America, Iraq, Afghanistan arguments, western foreign policy because it's not relevant and has nothing to do with the current situation.
UK, America, or and EU nation are not the aggressors, so stop trying to paint Putin as some normal character, he's not.. he is a dictator and his country is a collection of corrupt super rich and under educated disparately poor, all being stoked and fueled by lies on the TV daily. He controls all the news papers and TV stations... all under the cloak of a modern democracy.
Russia has a worse rating for democracy than Egypt. It is one of the most oppressive places in the world today. Those that speak out are killed or jailed. So stop making him out to be a normal world leader... he is a dictator, ethnic cleanser in charge of the biggest country in the world.
He must be stopped.
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begs the question, how many missile systems have they got now, I will guess it's more than they got from their Ukrainian hoard.
I also read Shaktar Donetsk are moving to Kiev for next season.
And when and how often have you been at "street level" because you already admitted you've never been to Ukraine. Tell me more about your street level expertise please.
Snowden, a true stalwart of any avid Russia Today viewer.
Yes, but take into account he does control the opinion polls, election results and peaceful protestors are arrested in Russia. The rich and educated have a very large vested interest in keeping the status quo, most of them got rich on his watch and a large number are personal friends.
Your arguments get more and more credible.
We should have learned after Georgia.
j1979 (23-07-2014)
I’m not anti-American, I’m anti-imperialist, whoever the imperialist might be. That you call me anti-American bothers me not at all. It’s the kind of base, ‘if you don’t support us, you are against us and pro the enemy’ argument that you come to expect from people who have a rather simplistic, black and white view of the world.
What I won’t do though, and what is clear that you are happy to do, is ignore the hypocrisy of the West. I don’t want to listen to Western Government spokespeople telling me how bad Putin is, whilst they continue to sell him arms. Or tell me how bad Putin is now, when we knew full well how bad he was before, yet it was they who supported and emboldened him in Chechnya, with little call for him to answer for the war crimes perpetrated there. Or tell me what an oppressive and terrible dictator he is, whilst continuing to cosy up to the regimes of China and Saudi Arabia. Or tell me that Putin is an aggressor, and aggression cannot be tolerated, whilst the world is still dealing with the fallout of their own aggression over a decade on, in a country that posed no risk to them or their interests, without so much as an iota of an apology.
And you say it’s not relevant? To say that it is not ‘relevant’, or that it has nothing to do with the current situation, betrays a complete lack of understanding of the complexities of geopolitics. Do you think the hypocrisy of the West has gone unnoticed by Russia and its allies? Do you think that perceived hypocrisy, along with the more pressing economic situation, hasn’t influenced China and their lack of response, which could possibly be the one external influence that would force Putin to change course, which is what we all want? But no, like you say, none of that’s relevant, is it? The short-sightedness is staggering.
YES 100% yes!
I read the old posts on here over the years... we should have known sooner
Apart form my threads, here are some others over from Hexus.
June 2014
http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/3...tel-chips.html
August 2007
http://forums.hexus.net/general-disc...r-patrols.html
Feb 2006
http://forums.hexus.net/question-tim...race-moon.html
There was a massive thread on the Georgia invasion / annexation on here but I can't find it. I only read it a few months back. Maybe it got pruned
What, does the term ‘Eastern Europe’ only comprise of Ukraine? If you had remembered the sentence that followed when I said I hadn’t been to Ukraine, I also stated that, as someone who followed a football team all over Europe, I have been to a lot of Eastern European countries.
As for the actual point, The Pew Research Centre released a report on Global-Attitudes-Homosexuality in 2013. In that report, it stated ‘Tolerance (towards homosexuality) seems to decline further East in Europe’. Read the reports on numerous gay pride marches that have been attacked all over Eastern Europe in the past few years. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_ri...Eastern_Europe, and compare it to others parts of Europe.
What has Snowden, or his motives for that matter, got to do with the original point? Are you suggesting that the Wikileaks are false?
He controls the polls? All of them? Like Gallup?
http://www.gallup.com/poll/173597/ru...vel-years.aspx
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My sample has been tainted by the selection bias that is St Petes, being far more European than most of Russia. But from that, very few who are educated support him, many directly feel scared by him.
As for the ideas of Blair or even Clinton (who somehow gets a free pass for his disastrous foreign policy) I'm fairly sure I've seen a lot of people cry fowl.
The fact is, there are definitely a lot of people who support the strong leader, many of whom, as you say, want nationalism, some I've met definitely believe that the way to be a proud nation is via strong acts, whilst avoiding any critique, as admitting something that's bad makes you weak.
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Anti imperialist ... yet you think Putin is doing the same as any other world leader in his situation.
As for the American aggression a decade ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait and the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan refused to give up the man that openly took the credit for killing 3000 people in USA.
The first Iraq war was an invasion into one of America's allies for Oil... it was going to happen, the second Iraq war was a mistake, and so was Afghanistan. Injustices happened in both wars, it has had a massive knock on effect.
However if you think back, regardless of the errors of judgment, all Saddam had to do to avoid the second war was let the weapon's inspectors in, and all the Taliban had to do was hand over Osama. After all what would you expect if 3000 were killed in your country and the leaders of another country were protecting that individual. America were in a bad position, should they have simply said. Ok to the Taliban, and said sorry and held peace talks? Should they have simple let Saddam stay, even though he had expressed his desire to destroy Israel, and had already fired a number of Scud missiles before? What did expect would happen after 9/11? What approach should America have taken?
As this current crisis has shown the Security council is impotent. Ban ki-moon is effectively useless. All we see is Veto, Veto, Veto. There never would have been a weapon inspector and eventually Saddam may have gained the weapons he needed to wage war again.
I did not agree at all with Afganistan or Iraq but please tell me... what should the US have done after 9/11 to protect their nervous allies.
Russia and its allies??? Have you not been watching any of the security council meetings of the last 6 months? There are no allies on the security council. And in the whole world Russia can 100% rely on Kazakhstan, Belarus, and at a push China and Iran. Hardly solid democratic states are they.
You're a blind man walking in a world of luminous signs.
They say the collective mind of the internet can predict the future with 100% accuracy
maybe they are taking a peek..
It's pretty hard as individual to force the governments hand on issues classed as "National security", but taking the US as an example, people have changed their tones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest...t_the_Iraq_War
People in the UK has spoken out against the war too. So as a nation there are people who go through the trouble of speaking out.. despite our busy every day life. And online too you can easily find lots criticism of the West criticising the West on various issues. So even if some State may be accused of hypocrisy for their actions, us individuals, so long as we are consistent with our beliefs of right and wrong.
Besides, this is not about the "ignoring the hypocrisy of the West". If you were to start a thread about something the West has done something similarly bad, you will most certainly get people agreeing with your view. You can easily find Western articles talking about the US downing the Iranian commercial airliner. And though the US never apologised for it, I doubt that you will find many Americans saying that was okay.
But this thread, is about the MH-17, and the central focus of the story is the diplomatic chess game Ukraine and Russia surrounding this tragedy.
Absolutely. His actions are entirely consistent with the leader of a country that is engaged in geopolitics. The reason I keep bringing up things that you say are irrelevant, is to example this. Yet it is me who is blind.
Your conflating lots of issues. Firstly, the West encouraged Saddam to invade Iran, to further their own interests and then complained when he done the same with Kuwait later on. The Scud missiles that you talk about were first fired by Iraq when they were supported by the US. It’s exactly this type of scenario that is, aside from entirely predictable, infuriating.
What America definitely shouldn’t have done after 9/11 is invaded Iraq, a country with virtually no terrorist organisations, wasn’t involved at all in 9/11, who posed no real threat to the West and didn’t have any WMD’s. What they should have done was what the UN weapons inspectors suggested – more time. Instead, they invaded a sovereign nation on the flimsiest pretence to advance their own political agenda. Does that remind you of anyone? The problem is, now instead of pro West leader Bush, we have Putin. I think we’re starting to realise how a lot of the rest of the world felt when Bush was pulling the strings.
As for the State’s nervous allies – do you think they are now safer, or not, as a result of US actions?
What difference does whether they are democratic or not make? Any potential alliance of China and Russia make it almost impossible to see how this will be resolved militarily.
Oh no, I see all the signs alright. It’s just I’m not picking and choosing which ones I look at.
Bush Snr, Vice president at the time said, regarding the Iranian commercial liner ‘I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy’. Afterwards he was voted in as President. So yes, whilst I too doubt you will find many Americans saying that was okay, I think it safe to assume that not apologising for what was an accident isn’t a deal breaker either. It also makes the US Governments protests that somehow Russia should be held to account rather contradictory, don’t you think? Is a little consistency too much too much to ask for from Western Governments, especially when they are preaching about how others should behave?
And as for this being about diplomatic chess game between Ukraine and Russia, that’s fine, but when people start posting links to the British Army, enquiring whether we need to ready British troops to go and fight (always find it funny how blasé people are when it’s other peoples sons, yet are often less enthusiastic when it comes to signing up themselves), then I think it important to remind people about the inconsistencies, certainly if they are using that premise and advocating sending people to their deaths.
Just narrowly on that point, Iraq did have WMD's. We know that because they used them, they admitted it, they handed over some, others were found by WMD inspectors.
What they didn't have, by the time of the invasion, was stockpiles of viable weapons, or active production capabilities. However, countless examples of old weapons were found, as were chemical precurors, etc. Similarly for the nuclear program, the program itself had been shut fown but 2 tonnes of low-enriched uranium and 550 metric tonnes of "yellowcake" were removed. The active nuclear program had been shut down years earlier, but the necessary technical documents for starting up again were found, hidden and buried.
Certainly, no "smoking gun" WMDs were found, and the picture painted for us, the public, (especially by Blair) was grossly wrong. But WMDs were found, albeit legacy weapons that, apparently, had escaped earlier destruction.
What's also true is that Saddam played silly beggars with the UN and inspectors for YEARS over the issue.
It’s a given that Saddam had previously possession of WMD’s. We know that because the West helped him procure them, and then turned our faces when he used them. I was of course referring to post 9/11 and pre-invasion, and he didn’t have any WMD that could be deployed in a militarily sense, and given what was stated after Saddam was captured, he certainly didn’t think that they had them, didn’t know they had them or, genuinely didn’t view them as a WMD, and had expressed as much to both the Inspectors and his own regime. So yes, whilst he may have still had WMD’s in a technical sense, he didn’t in any practical sense, and certainly nothing whatsoever like the smoking gun sense nor in the widely accepted sense of an actual deployable weapon.
As for him playing silly beggars, I don’t think he is alone in ignoring, or picking and choosing which resolutions to comply with.
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