• ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
    174·
    2 years ago

    That’s a really convenient narrative based on the fallacy of homogenizing Ukraine. Let’s take a look at a few slides from this lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and a proponent of US global hegemony. First, here’s the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:

    here’s how the election in 2004 went:

    this is the 2010 election:

    As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:

    Ukraine is clearly not some homogeneous blob, but a large country with complex cultural and ethnic situations.

    Furthermore, the idea that NATO threatens Russia doesn’t come from Russia. Plenty of western experts have been saying this for many decades. This only became controversial to mention after the war started. Here’s what Chomsky has to say on the issue recently:

    https://truthout.org/articles/us-approach-to-ukraine-and-russia-has-left-the-domain-of-rational-discourse/

    https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-us-military-escalation-against-russia-would-have-no-victors/

    50 prominent foreign policy experts (former senators, military officers, diplomats, etc.) sent an open letter to Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansion back in 1997:

    George Kennan, arguably America's greatest ever foreign policy strategist, the architect of the U.S. cold war strategy warned that NATO expansion was a "tragic mistake" that ought to ultimately provoke a "bad reaction from Russia" back in 1998.

    Jack F. Matlock Jr., US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, warning in 1997 that NATO expansion was "the most profound strategic blunder, [encouraging] a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat [...] since the Soviet Union collapsed"

    Even Gorbachev warned about this. All these experts were marginalized, silenced, and ignored. Yet, now people are trying to rewrite history and pretend that Russia attacked Ukraine out of the blue and completely unprovoked.

    • ksynwa@lemmy.ml
      81·
      2 years ago

      Americans struggle to comprehend the concept of complex, multi-ethnic and cultural nations. I wonder why.

  • PP44@lemmy.ml
    165·
    2 years ago

    This is a way to good representation of how I feel on Lemmy since this war began…

      • PP44@lemmy.ml
        6·
        2 years ago

        For sure that’s why I’m still here. I have a much friendlier disagreements with people’s here than the ones I would find on reddit for sure. (I never spent time there so I’m just guessing.)

    • Lien Rag@mastodon.tedomum.net
      71·
      2 years ago

      @vekku @tomasz

      Well, that was exactly OUN-B’s analysis and response (with the same mistake about who’s the most evil and who’s the second most evil), and it didn’t pan out well…
      I understand that having an ideological anti-OTAN stance in eastern Europe is politically inaudible now, but as Gandhi said, “worse than evil is justification of evil”.

    • tomasz@lemmy.mlOP
      38·
      2 years ago

      Indeed, Buryats and Crimean Tatars forced into the army in racist ethnic cleansing by Moscow’s millionaires now have a plethora of comedy.

      • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
        69·
        2 years ago

        racist ethnic cleansing by Moscow’s millionaires

        Oh yes let us just flip reality and practice Big Lie to hide Ukraine’s genocide of ethnic Russians since 2014. Riiight?