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America did something that was wrong 60 years ago does not preclude that Russia is doing terirble things for terrible reasons right now. No, not 60 years ago.

by EGreg 3y ago

America did something that was wrong 60 years ago does not preclude that Russia is doing terirble things for terrible reasons right now. No, not 60 years ago. Now. They are embargoing Cuba now and UN votes overwhelmingly to condemn them every year, we US citizens just don’t care and our media doesn’t show it. But as far as Kennedy’s reaction to nuclear missiles on Cuba - no, what he did was RIGHT! His “peace speech” convinced the Russians to establish a direct line and de-escalate LIKE ADULTS. All the lies were exposed and dealt with (such as US missiles in Turkey). That is GOOD and I WISH that Biden and Putin would have done it this time. Kennedy gave a stark warning in his speech: * Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy--or of a collective death-wish for the world.* https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-university-19630610 https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-k... Our administration’s explicit policy IS EXACTLY THE FLOUTING OF THIS WARNING and they push anyone who suggests peace to shut up and retract it: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/25/democrats-joe-biden-ukraine-war-russia-letter https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/25/democrats-jo... Tell that to the Russians who just continually do terrible things when people try and de-escalate. The Russians will only de-escalate when they have a foot to their throat or a rope around there neck. That’s exactly what every side in every war said, ever. “Those Arabs only understand power.” “Those Red Indians have no honor and they kill women and children” — it is right there in the Declaration of Independence, which I read yesterday on July 4th. This type of nationalistic thinking about “the russians” or “the arabs” is a TRAP. And happens that the people who pay the price are the ones in the proxy war country 3000 miles away, not us. So our public doesnt care. Whats this cost to do with Russias brutal invasion of Ukraine? your whataboutism is commendable but ultimately useless. Everything to do with it. If you have a playground bully going around punching people, or trying to flip all their friends against them, someone is bound to react. If they react, it is not “whataboutism” to point out what they are reacting TO, and hkw the bully did it elsewhere. It is explanation so we can understand how things look outside the NATO bubble and how to end it. Otherwise 5 years from now you’ll be saying the same about China. But the concerted effort is to put the word “unprovoked and unjustified” behind the words “invasion of Ukraine”. Do you think it is an accident that this phrase is repeated faithfully on official websites and all mainstream media? It is coordinated. Same as “weapons of mass destruction” and “hacking the election” and “they hate us for our freedoms”. Stop and think about it for a moment! Do you not see a pattern? > The reality is simple: USA wanted this war to happen, to weaken its geopolitical rivals. Wow so Russia can just pull out of the war then right? so it doesn't fall into Americas trap?. Sure, they would have if Naftali Bennett was allowed to conclude a peace agreeemnt JUST LIKE NIKOLAS SARKOZY DID in the Russo-Georgia war. The question to you is WHY DID THE US BLOCK IT? Answer that directly, don’t dodge! Sure, Russia could just allow US to go 3000 miles away, flip all its neighbors against it, put nuclear missiles aimed at Russia on its borders, successfully regime-change and flip everyone against Russian speakers. Heck, why doesn’t Russia and China just let USA build bases all around them, surround them economically, militarily, after all NATO is just a defensive alliance. Any other thing — like diplomacy - is unacceptable. Whenever someone insists that ONLY fantasy scenarios can end this war — and kills PEACE AGREEME TS — we know they don’t act in good faith. The worst part is, the fantasy scenario is exactly the one Kennedy warned about will bring about the destruction of humanity. And our leaders have it as an explicit policy! It’s a game of chicken where they are actively chasing down the cornered animal with larger and larger escalations until it reacts. And we are all held hostage. Why ?

chrysler 3y ago
>> Sure, they would have if Naftali Bennett was allowed to conclude a peace agreeemnt JUST LIKE NIKOLAS SARKOZY DID in the Russo-Georgia war. The question to you is WHY DID THE US BLOCK IT? Answer that directly, don’t dodge! This is a misrepresentation of events. The Israeli PM has clarified that his comments were taken out of context: https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-bennett-walks-back-claim-west-blocked-ukraine-russia-peace-deal-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-bennett-walks-back-cl... When the war started, the West was pressuring Ukraine into a peace deal with Russia at any cost. When the Bucha massacre was uncovered, the pressure stopped. Russian propaganda has tried to paint this change as "the West forcing Ukraine into war", which is blatantly false.
- EGreg 3y ago
  I don’t follow “Russian propaganda”, I think for myself. Every source I have shared with you is a mainstream Western source, including experts whose JOB it was to deliver analyses for their governments. If I lived in Russia, I’d be surrounded by Russian propaganda and also would have to cut through it like any independently-thinking person. If anything, I am constantly exposed to “US propaganda” since I live here, and it is a concerted effort to shut out anything that is even slightly away from the predetermined, official line, (in this case that the invasion is “unjustified and unprovoked”). After 9-11 it was going to be “Islamofascism” but that didn’t poll well, so they switched to “they hate us for our freedoms” and “weapons of mass destruction”. You can sometimes tell propaganda by how contrived the phrase is (eg “hacking the election”) and how it is repeated verbatim like it was normal and not contribed at all. In Russia it is “special military operation”. Everyone has propaganda. The attempt to label what half the world believes as “Russian Propaganda” is itseld a deligitimization tactic. Even within the most hawkish countries (like UK) there have been tons of voices clearly not on Russia’s payroll, but just as systematically ignored. This is a systemic problem: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KqE7UTptgGg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KqE7UTptgGg https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-blames-nato-russia-ukraine-11651598988 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-blames-nato-russia... https://theconversation.com/amp/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-warnings-that-nato-expansion-into-eastern-europe-could-provoke-russia-177999 https://theconversation.com/amp/ukraine-war-follows-decades-... The Israeli PM walked back No, that lame attempt by someone at Business Insider to try to spin it was already addressed in the Krystal Ball video I posted. Did you watch it? They argued that it was a mistranslation and the US “stopped” the peace deal, rather than “killing” it. Oh great. Not exactly “walking back” anything, the title is misleading. Any other sources for this? When the war started, the Weat was pressuring Ukraine into a peace deal with Russia at any cost. This seems… untrue. Nah, stronger than that, every available piece of evidence points the other way. Almost like Ukraine was led down a path where all pro-Russian doves were sidelined or eliminated, and all hawks were promised EU and NATO membership if they stayed the course. What you said can’t possibly be true starting with the fact that the real-life timeline doesn’t match up. Bucha happened in late March, while the US killed the Bennett negotiation in early March. Even solidly pro-Ukrainian media in Ukraine admitted that Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv to kill any peace deal. To quote this Ukrainskaya Pravda article: As soon as the Ukrainian negotiators and Abramovich/Medinsky, following the outcome of Istanbul, had agreed on the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning. "Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. We can sign [an agreement] with you [Ukraine], but not with him. Anyway, he will screw everyone over", is how one of Zelenskyy's close associates summed up the essence of Johnson's visit. Behind this visit and Johnson's words, there is much more than a simple reluctance to get involved in agreements with Russia. Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/ https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/ This totally contradicts your narrative, but to any person who’s been following the events since 2014 it makes sense that US and UK promised great things to Ukraine if they would leave Russia’s orbit up to and including having their population having a war with Russia. That’s been their MO since the beginning so it would be very strange if suddenly they would be “pressuring” Ukraine into an agreement. 2013: Before any invasions, armed conflicts, here is USA’s top people (including the very recently candidate for President, who hated Russia as he was a PoW in a USSR prison) fomenting a revolution against any Pro-Russian government — in this case Yanukovich who killed the extremely unpopular NATO integration that pro-NATO Yuschenko was pushing through against the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians … so McCain openly advocated for regime change: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg 2015-2019 Angela Merkel, Zelensky and Poroshenko all admitted that Minsk II was just “a way to give Ukraine the time it needed to build up its armed forces”. Poroshenko even calls the army “his baby”. The same army that is now conscripting and sacrificing huge numbers of men to double down on the counteroffensive: At least they stopped the nonsense about people “lining up around the block to fight” and saying Ukraine doesn’t need to forcibly draft men into the war, while most propaganda says that Ukrainian men lined up around the block to fight: https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-stepping-up-mobilisation-is-not-so-easy https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-st... 2015-2018 - constant training and arming of radical groups, including neo-nazi elements, just as we have been arming radical groips with jihadist elements in parts of the world: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-09/ty-article/rights-groups-demand-israel-stop-arming-neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine/0000017f-e080-d7b2-a77f-e3870e1c0000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-09/ty-article/ri... 2019 - Arestovich openly says Ukraine needs a big war with Russia so it can emerge victorious as part of NATO. He eerily predicts all the elements of the war (like Dick Cheney 1994 video about Iraq) and then says it is preferable to being in Russia’s orbit 10 years later. He became the advisor to Zelensky, like Kellyann Conway was to Trump: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8 2021 - Ukraine absorbed the radical paramilitary groups into its army and they have been trained and armed for years to take on Russia. USA wants to avoid the “failure scenario” of how the Russo-Georgian war was brought to a quick end by Sarkozy. There has been peace and relative prosperity ever since. (I was in Georgia a few weeks ago, and it’s still a very poor country, but its economy was not destroyed, its population didn’t flee in the millions, and it doesn’t fear Russian attack at all. That is the result most reasonable people would want.) US killed the deal with Bennett, and Boris Johnson personally told Zelensky to keep fighting since Russia appeared much weaker to the West than thought. Here we are a year later - and USA doesn’t want any peace agreements to happen. Non-mainstream media in US, such as The Hill, Kim Iverson, Krystal Ball, progressive voices, conservative voices, Tulsi Gabbard, etc. are not all “Russian Propagandists”, despite what major hawks like Hillary or John Bolton would say, neither is the pope or the entire population or India or China or the heads of state if Brazil etc. Something else is going on here.

by EGreg 3y ago

chrysler 3y ago

>> Sure, they would have if Naftali Bennett was allowed to conclude a peace agreeemnt JUST LIKE NIKOLAS SARKOZY DID in the Russo-Georgia war. The question to you is WHY DID THE US BLOCK IT? Answer that directly, don’t dodge! This is a misrepresentation of events. The Israeli PM has clarified that his comments were taken out of context: https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-bennett-walks-back-claim-west-blocked-ukraine-russia-peace-deal-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-bennett-walks-back-cl... When the war started, the West was pressuring Ukraine into a peace deal with Russia at any cost. When the Bucha massacre was uncovered, the pressure stopped. Russian propaganda has tried to paint this change as "the West forcing Ukraine into war", which is blatantly false.

EGreg 3y ago
I don’t follow “Russian propaganda”, I think for myself. Every source I have shared with you is a mainstream Western source, including experts whose JOB it was to deliver analyses for their governments. If I lived in Russia, I’d be surrounded by Russian propaganda and also would have to cut through it like any independently-thinking person. If anything, I am constantly exposed to “US propaganda” since I live here, and it is a concerted effort to shut out anything that is even slightly away from the predetermined, official line, (in this case that the invasion is “unjustified and unprovoked”). After 9-11 it was going to be “Islamofascism” but that didn’t poll well, so they switched to “they hate us for our freedoms” and “weapons of mass destruction”. You can sometimes tell propaganda by how contrived the phrase is (eg “hacking the election”) and how it is repeated verbatim like it was normal and not contribed at all. In Russia it is “special military operation”. Everyone has propaganda. The attempt to label what half the world believes as “Russian Propaganda” is itseld a deligitimization tactic. Even within the most hawkish countries (like UK) there have been tons of voices clearly not on Russia’s payroll, but just as systematically ignored. This is a systemic problem: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KqE7UTptgGg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KqE7UTptgGg https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-blames-nato-russia-ukraine-11651598988 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-blames-nato-russia... https://theconversation.com/amp/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-warnings-that-nato-expansion-into-eastern-europe-could-provoke-russia-177999 https://theconversation.com/amp/ukraine-war-follows-decades-... The Israeli PM walked back No, that lame attempt by someone at Business Insider to try to spin it was already addressed in the Krystal Ball video I posted. Did you watch it? They argued that it was a mistranslation and the US “stopped” the peace deal, rather than “killing” it. Oh great. Not exactly “walking back” anything, the title is misleading. Any other sources for this? When the war started, the Weat was pressuring Ukraine into a peace deal with Russia at any cost. This seems… untrue. Nah, stronger than that, every available piece of evidence points the other way. Almost like Ukraine was led down a path where all pro-Russian doves were sidelined or eliminated, and all hawks were promised EU and NATO membership if they stayed the course. What you said can’t possibly be true starting with the fact that the real-life timeline doesn’t match up. Bucha happened in late March, while the US killed the Bennett negotiation in early March. Even solidly pro-Ukrainian media in Ukraine admitted that Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv to kill any peace deal. To quote this Ukrainskaya Pravda article: As soon as the Ukrainian negotiators and Abramovich/Medinsky, following the outcome of Istanbul, had agreed on the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning. "Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. We can sign [an agreement] with you [Ukraine], but not with him. Anyway, he will screw everyone over", is how one of Zelenskyy's close associates summed up the essence of Johnson's visit. Behind this visit and Johnson's words, there is much more than a simple reluctance to get involved in agreements with Russia. Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/ https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/ This totally contradicts your narrative, but to any person who’s been following the events since 2014 it makes sense that US and UK promised great things to Ukraine if they would leave Russia’s orbit up to and including having their population having a war with Russia. That’s been their MO since the beginning so it would be very strange if suddenly they would be “pressuring” Ukraine into an agreement. 2013: Before any invasions, armed conflicts, here is USA’s top people (including the very recently candidate for President, who hated Russia as he was a PoW in a USSR prison) fomenting a revolution against any Pro-Russian government — in this case Yanukovich who killed the extremely unpopular NATO integration that pro-NATO Yuschenko was pushing through against the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians … so McCain openly advocated for regime change: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg 2015-2019 Angela Merkel, Zelensky and Poroshenko all admitted that Minsk II was just “a way to give Ukraine the time it needed to build up its armed forces”. Poroshenko even calls the army “his baby”. The same army that is now conscripting and sacrificing huge numbers of men to double down on the counteroffensive: At least they stopped the nonsense about people “lining up around the block to fight” and saying Ukraine doesn’t need to forcibly draft men into the war, while most propaganda says that Ukrainian men lined up around the block to fight: https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-stepping-up-mobilisation-is-not-so-easy https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-st... 2015-2018 - constant training and arming of radical groups, including neo-nazi elements, just as we have been arming radical groips with jihadist elements in parts of the world: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-09/ty-article/rights-groups-demand-israel-stop-arming-neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine/0000017f-e080-d7b2-a77f-e3870e1c0000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-09/ty-article/ri... 2019 - Arestovich openly says Ukraine needs a big war with Russia so it can emerge victorious as part of NATO. He eerily predicts all the elements of the war (like Dick Cheney 1994 video about Iraq) and then says it is preferable to being in Russia’s orbit 10 years later. He became the advisor to Zelensky, like Kellyann Conway was to Trump: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8 2021 - Ukraine absorbed the radical paramilitary groups into its army and they have been trained and armed for years to take on Russia. USA wants to avoid the “failure scenario” of how the Russo-Georgian war was brought to a quick end by Sarkozy. There has been peace and relative prosperity ever since. (I was in Georgia a few weeks ago, and it’s still a very poor country, but its economy was not destroyed, its population didn’t flee in the millions, and it doesn’t fear Russian attack at all. That is the result most reasonable people would want.) US killed the deal with Bennett, and Boris Johnson personally told Zelensky to keep fighting since Russia appeared much weaker to the West than thought. Here we are a year later - and USA doesn’t want any peace agreements to happen. Non-mainstream media in US, such as The Hill, Kim Iverson, Krystal Ball, progressive voices, conservative voices, Tulsi Gabbard, etc. are not all “Russian Propagandists”, despite what major hawks like Hillary or John Bolton would say, neither is the pope or the entire population or India or China or the heads of state if Brazil etc. Something else is going on here.