Are you really located in Shanghai? If so, that's also really interesting.
What are your thoughts about China's treatment of the Uyghers?
Do you accuse your Chinese neighbors of xenophobia or genocide? Or do you only do that kind of thing in the safe confines of an anonymous message board?
Not sure what your deal is, but I'm not wasting time on that kind of toxicity and have no interest in derailing the thread.
I understand people being emotional about war and needless human suffering, but I stand by my comment and hope in time you'll change your mind about blaming an entire population for the suffering caused by a few.
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That same rant against Russia posted above could easily be made by someone living in Iraq or Afghanistan against the U.S.A. No country has clean hands and war breeds atrocities, full stop. It is not unique to Russia or the Russian people. It's a pretty obtuse position to have.
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The war crimes committed by Putin and Russia are not an aberration. They are raping, murdering, torturing and pillaging in Ukraine just like they did under Yeltsin, Stalin and the Tsars. This is standard operating procedure for the Russian military.
Who is to blame? Where do we draw the line?
Putin doesn't give every order. That's the officer corps. He doesn't pull the trigger. That's the enlisted soldiers. Russian war crimes have been documented going back centuries.
Putin is the chief, he knows exactly what's going on, everything from bombing hospitals, daycares and residential apartment buildings. the atrocities his soldiers are doing against the Ukraine civilians could be stopped with one swift order. it's on him.
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That same rant against Russia posted above could easily be made by someone living in Iraq or Afghanistan against the U.S.A. No country has clean hands and war breeds atrocities, full stop. It is not unique to Russia or the Russian people. It's a pretty obtuse position to have.
War is ugly but what Russia is doing to civilian citizens is on a different level than what the west has done in those places, Since WWII the west hasn't targeted civilians in this manner, at least back then it was a real war on many fronts.
One thing to invade a country. But why be absolute dickholes while you're at it.
It was solely #### Putin to start, but we're moving towards #### Russia with each bit of news that comes out.
Refusing orders is always an option. You're probably ####ed, but at least your not annihilating maternity wards, shooting/burning civilians and desecrating graves.
rape and killing civilians has been a fairly common tactic by Russia for, well for ever, maybe because they have developed as a country in a constant religious and ethnic war but Russia has always used ethnic cleansing and barbarity as a tactic rather than as an unfortunate side effect
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War is ugly but what Russia is doing to civilian citizens is on a different level than what the west has done in those places, Since WWII the west hasn't targeted civilians in this manner, at least back then it was a real war on many fronts.
This isn't a war, it's invasion and genocide.
I would imagine that a good number of Vietnamese would not concur with that sentiment.
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I would imagine that a good number of Vietnamese would not concur with that sentiment.
Hanoi and Haiphong could have be flattened but fact is the targets were bridges, fuel depots and military operations, yes, civilians died but remember these were dumb bombs back then. If Nixon had the smart weapons of today the civilian casualty's would have been a lot less.
That same rant against Russia posted above could easily be made by someone living in Iraq or Afghanistan against the U.S.A. No country has clean hands and war breeds atrocities, full stop. It is not unique to Russia or the Russian people. It's a pretty obtuse position to have.
The My Lai massacre was one of the most horrific incidents of violence committed against unarmed civilians during the Vietnam War. A company of American soldiers brutally killed most of the people—women, children and old men—in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. More than 500 people were slaughtered in the My Lai massacre, including young girls and women who were raped and mutilated before being killed.
Quote:
In addition to killing unarmed men, women and children, the soldiers slaughtered countless livestock, raped an unknown number of women, and burned the village to the ground.
Calley was reported to have dragged dozens of people, including young children, into a ditch before executing them with a machine gun. Not a single shot was fired against the men of Charlie Company at My Lai.
Once they fix their own society, they can once again have the privilege of participating in ours.
Russians widely support the war they are being told about, not the one that is actually happening in Ukraine. And is it totally the Russian's people's fault or their political elites who have become experts at information control and indoctrination? Even in the West we are very susceptible to this (see right wing movements/Trump and that was only for a few years), but the Russians grew up in and have been subject to it for a hundred years.
Modern Russia didn't/couldn't really throw away the indoctrination of the Soviet Union is a huge of the problem because it was useful to those who ended up in power after the Soviet Union collapse. To this day war and the state are still institutionally glorified and the enemies of the state are almost sub-human. Compare war and armies in most Western nations which are view more as a necessary evil and a price paid for freedoms enjoyed.
In Russia tho, there are still huge military parades going on yearly in the Kremlin, something that no western nation practices. Some schools in Russia also still heavily emphasize their Soviet past, the glories of the great Patriotic war, and children are still indoctrinated about the military and personal sacrifice for the country at an early age. Really bugs me to see small children repeating this type of propaganda. See the DW video on this:
This type of indoctrination, pride in the state, coupled with the collective economic trauma they've experienced from the 90s really were the perfect conditions for Russians to give their power to strong leaders who take away their freedom for perceived economic stability and "growth", much like the deal Pointman has repeatedly stated Russian's have made. And in turn further fuels political elites who indoctrinate the population. How does that cycle get broken?
Sadly for Russians, the type of economic stability under an unconstrained government is always an façade. Video below goes over the bad economics of this type of growth in Russia.
Last edited by FlameOn; 04-04-2022 at 09:50 AM.
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Hanoi and Haiphong could have be flattened but fact is the targets were bridges, fuel depots and military operations, yes, civilians died but remember these were dumb bombs back then. If Nixon had the smart weapons of today the civilian casualty's would have been a lot less.
Nixon is one of the worst examples in history you could have picked for a leader favouring precision bombing of military targets. Civilian deaths under Nixon were far from just the result of dumb bombs missing their targets. People in Laos and Cambodia are still being blown up to this day by cluster bombs Nixon had dropped on those countries. Between him and Johnson Laos is the most bombed country in history, largely using cluster bombs and with untold volumes of civilian suffering.
Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not posting this as an argument of which side's history of war is worse or whose suffering has been worse at whose hands. I am strongly anti-war regardless of the aggressor. War is mostly the dehumanizing suffering of normal people caused by struggles for power between those far removed from their lives. It's horrific, and I understand being angry about it. War itself is the enemy. It is always full of 'collateral damage'.
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Last edited by JohnnyB; 04-03-2022 at 07:12 PM.
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Nixon is one of the worst examples in history you could have picked for a leader favouring precision bombing of military targets. Civilian deaths under Nixon were far from just the result of dumb bombs missing their targets. People in Laos and Cambodia are still being blown up to this day by cluster bombs Nixon had dropped on those countries. Between him and Johnson Laos is the most bombed country in history, largely using cluster bombs and with untold volumes of civilian suffering.
Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not posting this as an argument of which side's history of war is worse or whose suffering has been worse at whose hands. I am strongly anti-war regardless of the aggressor. War is mostly the dehumanizing suffering of normal people caused by struggles for power between those far removed from their lives. It's horrific, and I understand being angry about it. War itself is the enemy. It is always full of 'collateral damage'.
Yeah, I'll never understand people who try to prop the West up as examples of sparing civilians when there's tons of examples of the opposite. The Laos example is an excellent one as they are still slowly looking for and detonating mines left in their country where civilians live. One of my ex's family was from Laos and hearing the stories from her grandparents about the West and the things they did and how they left their homeland is heartbreaking. Every country has done terrible, terrible things during war.
Yeah, I'll never understand people who try to prop the West up as examples of sparing civilians when there's tons of examples of the opposite. The Laos example is an excellent one as they are still slowly looking for and detonating mines left in their country where civilians live. One of my ex's family was from Laos and hearing the stories from her grandparents about the West and the things they did and how they left their homeland is heartbreaking. Every country has done terrible, terrible things during war.
Correct, and the USA has done more bad things than most.
Every major power in history is guilty of the worst type of atrocities. There are no privileged positions.
Not to minimize in any way the awful situation in Ukraine, but Russia would have to carry this on for a lot longer to even get close to equalling the damage the US did in Afghanistan and Iraq.
To be fair, the regimes that were toppled in Iraq and Afghanistan (albeit temporarily, ultimately) were an absolute horror show of atrocities, such that at least in those cases there was some justification for being there in the first place, and in at least the case of Afghanistan you had a broad coalition involved in response to a direct attack on the USA... You can't say the same types of things about the Ukrarine at all. There was no provocation and there's no justification whatsoever for attacking it. I don't think they're really comparable military actions.
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To be fair, the regimes that were toppled in Iraq and Afghanistan (albeit temporarily, ultimately) were an absolute horror show of atrocities, such that at least in those cases there was some justification for being there in the first place, and in at least the case of Afghanistan you had a broad coalition involved in response to a direct attack on the USA... You can't say the same types of things about the Ukrarine at all. There was no provocation and there's no justification whatsoever for attacking it. I don't think they're really comparable military actions.
You can definitely pick it apart if you want to highlight specific differences in the military actions, but it doesn't change the reality that hundreds of thousands of people were killed. It also doesn't change the fact that in both cases (and US in Vietnam, and Soviet Union in Afghanistan), the military actions were wars of imperialist aggression. Saying that the regimes that were toppled were bad is not relevant to the discussion.
This was a huge worry for me as this invasion dragged on. As Russian frustrations grew from being repelled, I knew they would turn to targeted attacks on civilians to try destroy morale.
All I can say is I hope peace talks prevail quickly. The human suffering has to end.
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