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talkpoliticshttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60967463
Now that Russians are withdrawing to their satrapies in Donetsk and Luchansk, having utterly and totally proven that their heroism in blowing up Arab and Chechen women and babies (which isn't a war crime or targeting actual human beings because U.S. bombs did not do it and Arabs and Muslims only count as human beings in Western eyes if their bloody dishdashas can be waved to shame the USA, after all). But who can really claim shock here? This is what Muscovy has always done since Ivan Kalita became the lapdog of the Mongol Khans of the Golden Horde. This is the military that brought the world the sackings of Novgorod and Pskov, with horrors with little parallel even in the long annal of barbarism in other cultures.
This is the military that makes heroes of ogres and monsters like Yermolov and Paskevich and Muraviev the hangman. This is the military that went on a mass deportation spree targeting the Jewish people it incited the murders and rapes of in pogroms and then sat smoking a makhorka cigarette watching the blood flow. This is the military whose 'if Cain sevenfold, Lamech seventy-sevenfold' vengeance on the Axis repaid them in compound interest for the war crimes done unto the USSR. This is the military that halved the population of Afghanistan and did so again in Syria, to global apathy because some cultures are allowed to be rampaging monsters leaving victories of ashes and pyramids of skulls and this is called 'respecting value systems that are not like those of the West' (the tens of millions of dead Congolese and the ravaging of the Americas and other empires might have a bone to pick with that, but the West is ever good at pretending mass butchery only counts when the current boogeymen do it and is holy and righteous when it does it).
The ravaging of Mariupol and the scenes unfolding in Kyiv Oblast, the mass rows of executed men and raped and executed women, the deportation of 30,000 Ukrainians? This is the result of centuries of lies from the time of Ivan Kalita to Vladimir the Butcher of Grozny turning the unlovely tools of war that leveled and ravaged Chechyna and Syria on white Europeans the EU is likely to still pretend don't count because the USA isn't stopping a genocide and thus ten times worse than the Serb rampaging hordes in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Given Russia has nukes there is a hard limit where this institutionalized barbarism cannot be challenged lest the entire world burn. But if we are to discuss 'honoring different value systems' we should not look away from what those value systems actually are. Moscow has been good at weapons and murder for centuries and shit at everything else, not least among them valuing and treating its own people as human beings.
There is nothing atypical in the aftermath of Russian 'de-Nazification; of Ukraine that hasn't been since since the Danilovichi decided to bid to be 'regatherers of the Russian land.' Moscow learned well from the sons of Genghis Khan. To be sure, the world will have to live with Russia and give it a license to mass murder on a gargantuan scale, while not even pretending to count the victims of rape and murder as human, as is done with the USA. But that does not mean people should be allowed to lie to themselves about what the heirs of Ivan Kalita have always been and will always be.
This is Russian power, red in tooth and claw, and grinning with the aftermath of the murders of its victims. Feeble in conquest but able to rival the Mongol hordes of the Borjigins in slaughter in defeat as well as victory. This is what took Russia from a tiny strip of the Grand Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal to reaching the Pacific and planting fortresses upon it. Nobody should do anyone the disservice, least of all the Ivans who are drawn into this litany of atrocity by a regime that has always planted an iron boot on their necks and shot them for objecting to being choked to death, of pretending that this is unusual or exceptional in Russian political or military culture.
It is not, and it never will be. It is simply sacred autocracy in its standard levels of cruelty and horror, no more and no less.
Now that Russians are withdrawing to their satrapies in Donetsk and Luchansk, having utterly and totally proven that their heroism in blowing up Arab and Chechen women and babies (which isn't a war crime or targeting actual human beings because U.S. bombs did not do it and Arabs and Muslims only count as human beings in Western eyes if their bloody dishdashas can be waved to shame the USA, after all). But who can really claim shock here? This is what Muscovy has always done since Ivan Kalita became the lapdog of the Mongol Khans of the Golden Horde. This is the military that brought the world the sackings of Novgorod and Pskov, with horrors with little parallel even in the long annal of barbarism in other cultures.
This is the military that makes heroes of ogres and monsters like Yermolov and Paskevich and Muraviev the hangman. This is the military that went on a mass deportation spree targeting the Jewish people it incited the murders and rapes of in pogroms and then sat smoking a makhorka cigarette watching the blood flow. This is the military whose 'if Cain sevenfold, Lamech seventy-sevenfold' vengeance on the Axis repaid them in compound interest for the war crimes done unto the USSR. This is the military that halved the population of Afghanistan and did so again in Syria, to global apathy because some cultures are allowed to be rampaging monsters leaving victories of ashes and pyramids of skulls and this is called 'respecting value systems that are not like those of the West' (the tens of millions of dead Congolese and the ravaging of the Americas and other empires might have a bone to pick with that, but the West is ever good at pretending mass butchery only counts when the current boogeymen do it and is holy and righteous when it does it).
The ravaging of Mariupol and the scenes unfolding in Kyiv Oblast, the mass rows of executed men and raped and executed women, the deportation of 30,000 Ukrainians? This is the result of centuries of lies from the time of Ivan Kalita to Vladimir the Butcher of Grozny turning the unlovely tools of war that leveled and ravaged Chechyna and Syria on white Europeans the EU is likely to still pretend don't count because the USA isn't stopping a genocide and thus ten times worse than the Serb rampaging hordes in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Given Russia has nukes there is a hard limit where this institutionalized barbarism cannot be challenged lest the entire world burn. But if we are to discuss 'honoring different value systems' we should not look away from what those value systems actually are. Moscow has been good at weapons and murder for centuries and shit at everything else, not least among them valuing and treating its own people as human beings.
There is nothing atypical in the aftermath of Russian 'de-Nazification; of Ukraine that hasn't been since since the Danilovichi decided to bid to be 'regatherers of the Russian land.' Moscow learned well from the sons of Genghis Khan. To be sure, the world will have to live with Russia and give it a license to mass murder on a gargantuan scale, while not even pretending to count the victims of rape and murder as human, as is done with the USA. But that does not mean people should be allowed to lie to themselves about what the heirs of Ivan Kalita have always been and will always be.
This is Russian power, red in tooth and claw, and grinning with the aftermath of the murders of its victims. Feeble in conquest but able to rival the Mongol hordes of the Borjigins in slaughter in defeat as well as victory. This is what took Russia from a tiny strip of the Grand Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal to reaching the Pacific and planting fortresses upon it. Nobody should do anyone the disservice, least of all the Ivans who are drawn into this litany of atrocity by a regime that has always planted an iron boot on their necks and shot them for objecting to being choked to death, of pretending that this is unusual or exceptional in Russian political or military culture.
It is not, and it never will be. It is simply sacred autocracy in its standard levels of cruelty and horror, no more and no less.
(no subject)
Date: 3/4/22 11:54 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/4/22 12:53 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/4/22 17:24 (UTC)In reality I suspect that the answer would be the same lack of sympathy and empathy given to anyone in the USA who doesn't endorse our own culture's arrogance and that we just don't exist or count because it dings the 'some cultures have a license to barbarous genocide as a cultural practice and others don't' brand of cynicism pretty hard.
(no subject)
Date: 3/4/22 20:00 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/4/22 17:22 (UTC)Why is that? Why is this cultural arrogance and violence cultivated from Muscovite Third Rome exceptionalism and China's Uighur Genocide are acceptable cultural deviations and the plantation culture of the City on the Hill are not? Are Russians too alien to count for any kind of moral or cultural standard besides 'barbarians will be barbarians'?
(no subject)
Date: 3/4/22 20:01 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/4/22 21:01 (UTC)One can also see this from the Euro-liberal reaction to the Bosnia and Kosovo Wars, where stopping genocides is infinitely morally worse than doing them, so long as the victims are comfortably non-Christian, that is. The anti-Yugoslav Wars crowd would be the same people whose grandfathers no doubt piously sang hymns louder when the Jews herded off to die were wailing in trains and then two generations later pretending that had nothing to do with their families at all.
What is the line where 'different cultural values' becomes 'cultural license to commit genocide on a colossal scale and call it righteous' and how many have to die before that line is crossed?
(no subject)
Date: 4/4/22 10:13 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 4/4/22 11:06 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 4/4/22 18:13 (UTC)In your own trademark way, you arrived from:
"The West will have to live with cultures with different values to its own" directly
to:
"clearly genocide being a bad thing is simply a morally and culturally relative point which people can presumably agree to disagree on in good faith"
I never said anything like that, hence a strawman. And a blatant one at that. And not your first one. Not even your 100th one.
You do those a lot. And it's beyond frustrating. You get carried away with your own train of thought, in which you feel forever and ever right and everyone else completely wrong, then you over-react to whatever anyone who dares to come in the path of your train of thought would say, and ascribe words to them, then you wonder why they quickly lose interest debating with you and you accuse them of evasion, whereas it's mere exasperation with your ceaseless fallacies.
You don't debate in good faith. You use all sorts of conjecture and distortion to funnel the discussion into your preferred course, at the expense of everyone else you converse with.
So no, I'm NOT playing this game. Believe me, I'd have loved to debate on the subject, but you'll forgive me for not being interested into being drawn into an endless and fruitless back and forth with you and playing this game by YOUR rules, unless you fundamentally change your ways and demonstrate that we can have a constructive conversation.
And you'll note I'm not the first one to tell you this.
Here. I've been lured into wasting time and effort into explaining something you already knew, and acknowledged more than once yourself, and yet we're back to square one where we've always been. Do you not realize how discouraging this lack of progress is?
(no subject)
Date: 4/4/22 18:39 (UTC)If that’s not the cultural difference you meant, one can feel inclined to ask why those specific states and not other nuclear armed states like Israel, North Korea, or Pakistan. One can also ask what “living with it” means. You will never answer that because it’s nice to make a cynical generalization shitting on the USA and ignoring Russian barbarism as what it was. You did that back in 2016 when I was asking why Russian atrocities in Syria didn’t meet the same objections.
I see people claiming fallacies because they apply ghoulish standards and are too squeamish to face the literal meaning of their own words. This is the same community that sees people dismissing Romani as rapists and thieves like good Nazis and thinks Muslims in Europe are illegitimate.
So I’m not surprised people don’t want to come out and say, “Holy Russia and All Under Heaven can call genocide a cultural difference but the USA drone bombs one wedding and all people in that wretched abomination deserve to die.”
(no subject)
Date: 5/4/22 18:30 (UTC)Ok.
I think we're done here.
Ps.
> You did that back in 2016
Wow.