Is WWIII inevitable?

[uls]

the West wants to cancel anything russian

Cancel Russian musicians! Stop playing Tchaikovsky!

[tsupermario]

the West wants to cancel anything russian

The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is. And that West, which we expanded in the nineties, in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and nato, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected.

…

We’ve been hearing voices both past and present saying that the reason for what has happened is, as George Kennan put it, the strategic blunder of the eastward expansion of nato. The great-power realist-school historian John Mearsheimer insists that a great deal of the blame for what we’re witnessing must go to the United States. I thought we’d begin with your analysis of that argument.

I have only the greatest respect for George Kennan. John Mearsheimer is a giant of a scholar. But I respectfully disagree. The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had nato not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before nato existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.

I would even go further. I would say that nato expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today. Where would we be now if Poland or the Baltic states were not in nato? They would be in the same limbo, in the same world that Ukraine is in. In fact, Poland’s membership in nato stiffened nato’s spine. Unlike some of the other nato countries, Poland has contested Russia many times over. In fact, you can argue that Russia broke its teeth twice on Poland: first in the nineteenth century, leading up to the twentieth century, and again at the end of the Soviet Union, with Solidarity. So George Kennan was an unbelievably important scholar and practitioner—the greatest Russia expert who ever lived—but I just don’t think blaming the West is the right analysis for where we are.

When you talk about the internal dynamics of Russia, it brings to mind a piece that you wrote for Foreign Affairs, six years ago, which began, “For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of fifty square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass.” You go on to describe three “fleeting moments” of Russian ascendancy: first during the reign of Peter the Great, then Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon, and then, of course, Stalin’s victory over Hitler. And then you say that, “these high-water marks aside, however, Russia has almost always been a relatively weak great power.” I wonder if you could expand on that and talk about how the internal dynamics of Russia have led to the present moment under Putin.

We had this debate about Iraq. Was Iraq the way it was because of Saddam, or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq? In other words, there’s the personality, which can’t be denied, but there are also structural factors that shape the personality. One of the arguments I made in my Stalin book was that being the dictator, being in charge of Russian power in the world in those circumstances and in that time period, made Stalin who he was and not the other way around.

Russia is a remarkable civilization: in the arts, music, literature, dance, film. In every sphere, it’s a profound, remarkable place—a whole civilization, more than just a country. At the same time, Russia feels that it has a “special place” in the world, a special mission. It’s Eastern Orthodox, not Western. And it wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. It’s always in a struggle to live up to these aspirations, but it can’t, because the West has always been more powerful.

Russia is a great power, but not the great power, except for those few moments in history that you just enumerated. In trying to match the West or at least manage the differential between Russia and the West, they resort to coercion. They use a very heavy state-centric approach to try to beat the country forward and upwards in order, militarily and economically, to either match or compete with the West. And that works for a time, but very superficially. Russia has a spurt of economic growth, and it builds up its military, and then, of course, it hits a wall. It then has a long period of stagnation where the problem gets worse. The very attempt to solve the problem worsens the problem, and the gulf with the West widens. The West has the technology, the economic growth, and the stronger military.

The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with a personal ruler. Instead of getting the strong state that they want, to manage the gulf with the West and push and force Russia up to the highest level, they instead get a personalist regime. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism. They’ve been in this bind for a while because they cannot relinquish that sense of exceptionalism, that aspiration to be the greatest power, but they cannot match that in reality. Eurasia is just much weaker than the Anglo-American model of power. Iran, Russia, and China, with very similar models, are all trying to catch the West, trying to manage the West and this differential in power.

A Scholar of Stalin Discusses Putin, Russia, Ukraine, and the West | The New Yorker

[uls]

tsupermario:

The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is. And that West, which we expanded in the nineties, in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and nato, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected.

maybe you thought when i say "the west" i was only talking about US/Europe

[uls]

malinaw na siguro ito

[Yatta]

[tsupermario]

tsupermario:




maybe you thought when i say "the west" i was only talking about US/Europe

maybe its the west that respects rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion etc., that is cancelling russia

[uls]

oh western values

First Biological Male Wins '''Miss Greater Derry,''' A Beauty Pageant Held By The Miss America Organization | Evie Magazine

[tsupermario]

freedom of expression, another western value that may be in short supply in mother russia

oh western values

First Biological Male Wins '''Miss Greater Derry,''' A Beauty Pageant Held By The Miss America Organization | Evie Magazine

LGBTQ+ —> existential threat to Russia

In Vladimir Putin’s speech on February 24, announcing what would be a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine (in his official Orwellian euphemism, a “special military operation” in the Donbas region), a whole paragraph was dedicated to the West’s supposed undermining of “traditional values”…

To anyone following Russian politics and society, these words ring familiar. When Putin entered office for a third presidential term in 2012, in the wake of massive protests and declining popularity, his government wholeheartedly embraced the notion of “traditional values” as official ideology guiding both domestic and foreign policy. While a usefully vague and often undefined concept, “traditional values” are seen as encompassing patriotism, spirituality, rootedness in history, respect for authority, and adherence to heteronormative and patriarchal ideals of family and gender. In the rhetoric of the Kremlin and state-loyal media, LGBT rights, feminism, multiculturalism, and atheism are identified not only as foreign to Russia’s values, but as existential threats to the nation.

The narrative that LGBT rights are a weapon used by the West to weaken and destabilize Russia has been a recurring grievance.

Speaking to students in Belarus in 2018, Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov spoke of the need to protect Christian values from “same-*** values that are being imposed . . . coarsely and openly.” According to this logic, the facts that NATO expands into territories Russia considers part of its “sphere of influence” and that European and American leaders talk of gay rights as universal human rights are two sides of the same coin.
In this way, “traditional values” and ***ual politics become linked to geopolitics and, in effect, to the status of Ukraine and other post-Soviet states. In 2013 the Russian newspaper Izvestiya warned that West-sponsored LGBT activism could spark a “gay revolution” risking to throw Russia back to the societal chaos of the 1990s. This must be seen against Putin’s repeated warnings about a possible “color revolution” in Russia, similar to those that had taken place in Ukraine in 2004–5 and in Georgia in 2003. As the Maidan protests against the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych began in Ukraine in late 2013, Russia’s largest newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda claimed that the protests were co-organized by “nationalists, anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and homo***uals.”

…

In the geopolitical worldview of the Kremlin, Russia is standing up for “traditional values” in the face of a morally corrupt West weakened by ***ual liberalism. In numerous speeches, Putin has positioned Russia as an international leader in the defense of “traditional values.” In this way, gender conservatism contributes to carving out a meaningful geopolitical role for Russia in a world order where LGBT rights have become international politics and increasingly framed as a question of civilization and modernity—an indicator of who, in the words of Hillary Clinton in her speech to the UN Office in Geneva on Human Rights Day in 2011, is “on the right side of history” and who is not.

Just a moment...

[uls]

ok yan

support ko ung dismantling ng traditional values in western societies

gender?

marriage?

the nuclear family?

all of those are social constructs that need to be deconstructed

para mapabilis ang decline ng western civilization

-

the West right now is already way past peak, already past sodom and gomorrah

[uls]

watch this to understand why china is doing what it's doing in the SCS



it's not personal

it's not coz China wants to bully the Philippines as many pinoys think

there's a much, much bigger picture

[Yatta]

[tsupermario]

watch this to understand why china is doing what it's doing in the SCS



it's not personal

it's not coz China wants to bully the Philippines as many pinoys think

there's a much, much bigger picture

[uls]

if there's still any doubt the US is preparing for war against China

this should remove all doubt

Subscribe to read | Financial Times

"setting the theater"

[uls]

bakit pumunta si kamala harris sa palawan last nov

kinausap si bbm to make sure da pilipins is on board

to make sure on whose side da pilipins is on

-

tapos pumunta sa china si bbm itong january

-

hirap maging presidente

ewan ko ba bakit tumakbo

gusto kasi ni meldy

[uls]

kaya mabuti ung tumagal ang gera sa ukraine

para hati ang attention ng US

pag wala ung gulo sa ukraine 100% nakatutok sa region natin ang US

[Miles_on]

Nasa isip ko lang:
The Gulf War, this one in Ukraine and other conflicts- are actually testing grounds lang for US weapons in a real world situation.

Iba ang design on the drawing board vs. experience in actual use.

Back in the day, the Germans did this during their involvement w/ the Spanish Civil War and in supplying assistance to the Finns against Russia...

[tsupermario]

Nasa isip ko lang:
The Gulf War, this one in Ukraine and other conflicts- are actually testing grounds lang for US weapons in a real world situation.

Iba ang design on the drawing board vs. experience in actual use.

Back in the day, the Germans did this during their involvement w/ the Spanish Civil War and in supplying assistance to the Finns against Russia...

featuring the iranian shahed, turkish bayraktar and american switchblades

[Athrunzala]

Dontarius Vs Ukrainian Protestors

[jojopad]

https://youtu.be/uQzAjUW2jis

Sent from my SM-S901E using Tsikot Forums mobile app

[uls]

the video posted above:

even if you remove taiwan from the equation the US is still determined to go to war against china

simply coz the US has become very uncomfortable with what china is today



the goal of the US is push china down the stairs

to bomb china back into the past

it will be war 2025 or earlier