Pacifism is great and all, but Putin clearly shows that you need to be able to defend yourself, if you don’t want your rights and your freedom eroded away by foreign interests. Granted, no military will help you defend against threats to your rights from within, but it makes it at least less likely that those threats from within get backing from foreign threats.
While I really wish we would do more that Russia loses this war sooner rather than later and their economy is shattered, because that’s the only way I see out of this with Putin losing power, I have to say that Putin only got into the powerful position he’s in now due to mutual escalation for decades. This includes permanent provocations by NATO versus Russia. NATO is a bunch of warmongering pieces of shit, but Putin was so fucking stupid that he basically made the biggest PR campaign that NATO could ever have wished for, and now everyone wants to suck off Jens piece of shit Stoltenberg.
I despise NATO with every fibre of my being, yet I am fully aware that the stupid fucks have played their cards well enough that now even I see the need for a total econominal crushing of Russia. Only with a regime change we could then try to help the next Russian regime with humanitarian aid to prevent famines etc.
I want bootlickers to leave. Putin got into power because he was behind a terrorist attack that was blamed on Chechens and he was already a hardline anti Chechnya candidate, it propelled him to power. It was nothing to do with NATO. Countries bordering Russia have chosen to join NATO because Russia is a fuckawful neighbour.
see my other comment:
The time to support a peaceful regime in Russia was 1989ish, with Gorbachev. But that was when NATO chose to fuck over the moderates in Russia and demonstrate that cooperation with the west will be interpreted and exploited as weakness by NATO. So after a few years, we got Putler as a result.
Not only did Putin do excellent PR for NATO, Putin absolutely validated NATO’s entire existence. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would not be free, indepedent countries today without NATO. They certainly wouldn’t be supporting Ukraine as much as they have. And say what you will about individual countries, but NATO is proving itself once more a defensive pact. With people dying to rocket debris in Poland, russian drones going down in Romania, US drones being downed and UK planes being shot at over international waters, NATO would have plenty of reasons, if they wanted to escalate their rhetoric towards Putin. But they didn’t, because NATO isn’t interested in becoming an active participant in this war.
NATO isn’t interested in becoming an active participant because it’s way more profitable to fight a proxy war and let Ukrainians bleed in a war of attrition that hopefully will crush the Russian war machine and economy. If they wouldn’t worry about Russia’s potential and the nuclear arsenal, Moscow would be treated like Baghdad.
That’s bullshit and a cop-out. Every country in NATO joined willingly because every country should have some level of self-determination. NATO grew because decade after decade, the Russian government proved that they act in bad faith in nearly every interaction with the international community.
Maybe if Russia acted in good faith and was willing to be a partner in the region, neighboring countries wouldn’t have felt the need to join NATO, but here we are.
Pacifism doesn’t work. We’ve seen it time and time again that it just buys our adversaries time, and we end up where we’re at today.
It is sad how many upvotes a warmonger like you can get. You pick an arbitrary point in time and look at the state of things then and pretend the lead-up didn’t happen. That’s either propaganda, or an insane lack of functional brain cells.
You would join NATO too if you had Putler glued to your ass. We’re fucking terrified here.
The time to support a peaceful regime in Russia was 1989ish, with Gorbachev. But that was when NATO chose to fuck over the moderates in Russia and demonstrate that cooperation with the west will be interpreted and exploited as weakness by NATO. So after a few years, we got Putler as a result.
