Yeah that’s what I’m talking about. You have to really be tuned out of this war to think Russian leadership is just turning a blind eye to atrocities, as opposed to actively leaning in.
the developing discussion on russian language anti-war telegram channels is about total civilian deaths in mariupol. the mayor claimed 20k. which would be approximately twice the number civilians killed by german forces when taking mariupol. it might not fit the definition of extermination based on a trait, it’s getting hard enough to not call it a willful ignorance to inflicting collateral damage based on where the person lives.
i am not saying you have to agree that’s genocide, but it seems bigger in scale than srebrenica. it’s a really big claim, that will get checked out. so we’ll revisit this argument in a few weeks and reflect if the claims held up.
https://twitter.com/kofmanmichael/status/1526219837013385216
https://twitter.com/kofmanmichael/status/1526219858026930178
Um, Belarus? That’s a lot more than a slight exaggeration.
Kaliningrad tho…
What the US did in the ME from 1991-now has forseeably led to tragedy, death and destruction and refugees on par with just about anything in history, but no, the US did not directly carry this out (although the US did obliterate Raqqa and maybe some other cities). US actions in SE Asia from the mid 60s through early 70s were directly on par with such evil. Massive bombing of civilians far far far greater than anything seen since anywhere in the world were carried out and there were also US run concentration camps. And, the concentration camp itself was pioneered by the US in The Philippines during the Spanish American War.
So, anyway, you don’t even get to caveat your statement with “within our lifetime” if you’re talking about old people like you and me.
eta: And as you well know, really unspeakable things were done to hundreds of thousands of people in Central America with direct US support in the 80s.
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They could go through Lithuania and Latvia instead of Belarus.
I agree with that and I don’t think it contradicts what I said.
post rendered moot.
You can change your vote.
Ok. So take my whole post minus the last sentence.
How does past US evil apply to “Russophobia” and why we shouldn’t be helping the Ukrainians?
Or are we just arguing about the last sentence? If so I concede. The bombing of Cambodia was evil. In Vietnam, US soldiers committed atrocities that were basically encouraged by army brass. I’ve made this point many times as a comparison to what Russia is doing now.
What the Russians are doing with camps and deportations is exactly what the US did to Native Americans in the 1800s.
It doesn’t. The Serbian general in charge of forces in Bosnia was convicted of genocide at the Hague for Srebernica. Killing every last person is impossible, some will get away, attempting to do so is enough.
The Bosnian War also led to coining a term for the non murder removal of an ethnicity from a region: ethnic cleansing.
It doesn’t. People could read comments about US atrocities and say “Ok, that’s true. That doesn’t mean these aren’t atrocities in Ukraine carried out by Russians” or they could get defensive and suggest the US hasn’t done anything like that and then the conversation can go on when people point out that it has.
You’ve also pointed out some very true things about how war hardens and traumatizes people and understandably causes them to dehumanize the people attacking them. But, no one in this thread has been attacked and no one is Ukrainian and yet there has been dehumanization up to and including suggestions that Russian have been bred to be brutal. Empathy and support are great, but vicarious nationalism and sympathetic dehumanization understandably get some push back.
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We disagree on a lot, but I’ll push back on that stuff too.
You’re picking a few worst examples out of 1000s of posts and acting like the whole thread is nothing but bashing Russians as people. The “bred” argument was rightly called out by a bunch of posters on both sides of this issue.
Like any time I call out a Russian war crime - am I supposed to first qualify that I’m not saying all Russians are evil?
It’s offensive to me that we have to spend time arguing about some harsh words leveled the aggressors in a war of conquest who are literally torturing, raping, killing, and deporting 10s of 1000s of civilians.
I refuse to believe anyone itt seriously thinks “Russophobia” is in remotely the same category as Islamophobia or anti-Semitism.
I suspect this is just a proxy argument for everyone taking Meatsheimer’s side that the US shouldn’t be helping Ukraine, and/or posters who think life under a capitalist democracy is just as bad as life under Putin or Lukashenko. Or life in the occupied territories, which by all accounts is even worse, and what Ukrainians face if they surrender.
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Moving beyond the galaxy brain PC posts:
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1526218812114321408?s=20&t=mJMsW202xyq_gOwYW2nAcg
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1526221254348374016?s=20&t=mJMsW202xyq_gOwYW2nAcg
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1526224489520017408?s=20&t=mJMsW202xyq_gOwYW2nAcg
Praying for a red wave in the US midterms.
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Weird I thought Finland would apply first.