Russia Surrounded
- Thread starter Woebot
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- craner boobs disco dasha nekrasova good old obsessive antiamericanism gullfire over leningrad j. h. prynne jamaican voodoo gang from predator 2 my indian mate in year 11 with downs syndrome oliver ukrainer sanctuary of apollo shaka's secret mission snake island the black sea the good old party spirit of desert storm the gust of kiev the russo-ucranerian war wagner man falling out of the sky we're all neocons now whatabouastic whataboutery whataboutish whataboutism whataboutistic who controls the serpent
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
"...and then, in 1999, the USSR implodes..."
Uh, not in my timeline it didn't.
Edit: "Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania... now they've changed sides, they're allied with the Americans now". JFC, is this guy for real? Those countries were not "allied" with Russia during the Soviet era any more than Ireland was "allied" with Britain in the 19th century. They were invaded and occupied.
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luka
Well-known member
it should go without saying that tea is one of the most strident voices on facebook. hes shouting at this young boy with a russian girlfriend saying we need to nuke russia now and this poor young lad is so upset at the thought of war and tea is going
well you shouldnt have married the fucking enemy then.
it's very volatile the social media at the moment
well you shouldnt have married the fucking enemy then.
it's very volatile the social media at the moment
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
"No major media outlet covered this" - does the Express count as a 'major media outlet' these days? I know it's not the publishing phenomenon it once was, but including the website it still has over 11 million readers a year, apparently - hardly a fringe media channel.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/722203/US-Russia-Putin-WW3-nuclear-war-vladimir-putin
Sorry Woebot, I mean sure, the USA's policy with missile bases is provocative but this guy is a fucking bullshit merchant.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/722203/US-Russia-Putin-WW3-nuclear-war-vladimir-putin
Sorry Woebot, I mean sure, the USA's policy with missile bases is provocative but this guy is a fucking bullshit merchant.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
"This young boy" being... a certain associate of ours who will remain nameless.
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Woebot
Well-known member
i dunno... i mean, how the USSR took those territories in the first place is sort of immaterial. what it seems undeniable is that they don't really control them in the same way any more.
i mean, in the cold war russia had a clear aim to spread communism throughout the world, but it doesn't really have a goal like that any more. it's interesting in the light of that to hear putin saying "america has interfered in our domestic politics for decades on the basis that they were "spreading democracy""
on the other hand when he insists "russia can not be contained" there is an imperial subtext to that.
certainly i'm not one of the crowd who believes the USA is "evil" but i do think it's useful to think this through from the opposite perspective too.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I guess it's easy enough to say that if you don't live there!
Which is not to say they wouldn't dearly love to - witness the cyber-attacks on Estonia a decade ago, the annexation of eastern Ukraine, threats against Poland and potential ramifications of a Russian-Turkish rapprochement for Armenia. Russia has never not been an imperial power.
I hear you about the limited usefulness of describing the USA as "evil". I mean, it certainly has done, and still does, terrible things - as does Russia. Each country is an imperialist state with a vast military and the means to destroy the world many times over, controlled to a greater or lesser degree by self-interested plutocrats and with an interest in projecting its power around the world. But a vast asymmetry between them is apparent when you consider that millions of people in America, and in the West more generally, despise their own government to the extent that they're willing to lend a sympathetic ear to Russia, even while Russian jets bomb Syrian hospitals: where are their Russian equivalents? As far as I can tell they simply don't exist - or if they do exist, they are small in number and keep their heads down, with good reason. Can you find me a Russian, in Russia, giving a talk like the guy in the video above, about the USA's "justified paranoia" over Soviet missiles in Cuba? I suspect anyone brave enough to do that would not be long for this world.
luka
Well-known member
the facebook thing was this young boy with a russian wife going, well, there's no hard evidence yet, maybe we should chill out before we start playing into the war hysteria machine and mr tea and his mates all piling in on him calling him a massive cunt ans saying he should have thought first before marrying the enemy. like i say it scared me off getting involved. too volatile. temperatures running very high.
Luke, this was on my wall right? Your characterisation of it is absolute balls.
No one called anyone a cunt, there was no swearing or personal abuse, it just turned out everyone else was better read and had better arguments.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah I know. But I thought it needed saying, still.
The bit I quoted made me laugh a bit though - "the beleaguered innocent"
Unsurprisingly, I agree with this. I think it's a false equivalence to compare the two, just because of the super-power status. Russia is a much more oppressive state by pretty much any metric - journalistic freedom in Russia is non-existent, and the heads of any organised opposition that looks like gaining any purchase tend to end up in jail if not killed - look at the fortunes of Alexi Navalny for an example. I kinda forget that not everyone has read up on the post-modern nature of Russian power projection - trolling as state policy, basically - as well as the endemic corruption and state-sanctioned violence - so threads like this always surprise me somewhat. A world with increased Russian power is one on a rapid downhill slide to fascism in my view. We can see what this looks like in practice in Syria right now.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Short answer: for me, that's the overwhelming likelihood, but I wouldn't want to say yes for certain. But surely it's clear by now that cultivating uncertainty is a Russian aim in itself? I wouldn't go as far as to assert that the sloppiness of the attack was intentional, precisely in order to sow doubt about Russian culpability, but even that can't be discounted with certainty.
And while it is of course true that Blair lied about WMD to provide a false justification for the Iraq invasion, it's also true that many people openly doubted the claim as soon as he'd made it and an official investigation eventually proved them right. So Blair's conspiracy, such as it was - and bear in mind it involved only words, not actions (such as attempted murder) - may have helped enable his short-term aim but it unravelled with a fairly pathetic rapidity. It also didn't really involve anyone but him and his spin team, whereas you can imagine the complexity of pulling off a false-flag double poisoning using an ultra-toxic Russian nerve agent in arguably the most intensely surveilled country in the world. (Or maybe you can't - I'm not sure if I can.)
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