It's amazing to me that Russian espionage has been able to turn Western media against itself. Russia, China and every other advanced nation do the same things to the limits of their capability. Russia, in particular, killed a bunch of journalists over domestic intelligence operations, though. But people just eat up the stories about the US uncritically.
I think the fact that the US is engaged in open warfare around the world has a lot to do with it. Russia has its problems - but it hasn't deployed $Trillions of military assets around the world in order to project power, like the USA has.
Yes, almost 30 years ago the US invaded Panama to depose a dictator who had turned Panama into an international money laundering and drug smuggling center.
The USA has a policy of not invading local countries, because they're too close to home. So, its mostly power projection "fighting them over there, so we don't have to fight them .. here".
Really, this is a fundamental issue to understand. USA is not a peace-bringing nation - it is a war-projection nation. In the same way that one can use fire to fight fires, the USA thinks its war-making is actually bringing peace to the world.
I know - it doesn't make any sense. But, the military-industrial complex which runs the USA doesn't care if you think it makes sense. It only cares about dropping bombs, clearing the shelves of inventory with short half lives, and replacing it with new inventory.
EDIT: the claim that USA's wars are "just, righteous wars" is highly specious and, frankly, risible. The USA has toppled more democratically elected officials than any other nation in the history of mankind. I urge you to consider the hubris of the statement: "the USA only fights good wars", because there is fiction, and there is fact.
The fact is, a lot of people in democratic societies around the world feel that the USA hasn't fought a good war since WW2, and in fact that the opposite is true: the USA fights to put its own dictators into power. Even a casual investigation of this fact yields more than enough evidence to support the statement: the USA is up to no good.
I'm not going to judge the people that did it, bceause it was another time, but I hope the US public opinion has evolved so that some of US antics in that period could not happen now.
e.g.: involvement in the fall of Mossadegh, support to the Pinochet regime, support to the Shaddam regime, including the sale of chemical weapons during the Iran-Irak war, support to the contras...
Usually it's a salvation to be occupied by US compared to Russia - they just kill, steal and trash territory making it doomed (Transnistria, Osetia, Ukraine teritories, Kuril islands) - a true Mordor.
Yeah, the USA did do some good for the world. 80 years ago.
But what it is doing today is a terrible, atrocious tragedy, and its far beyond the point where the means justify the ends.
I mean that as someone who follows closely the cost of American warfare, and as someone who refuses to ignore the human tragedy it is bringing to current generations of people who really, really do not deserve to have had their infrastructure utterly destroyed, their lives ruined, their children left in rubble, on a daily basis, because some smart American decided it had to be so.
The problem is, we wanted to do Iraq and Afghanistan and get out. If we had done a Marshall Plan in Iraq, we would have had maybe 100,000 troops there for a decade, but it would have been stable when we left.
Look, if Russia would be the top dog of the Game, then there would be much more focus on them. When Putin says they are good guys in some conflict, only brainwashed russians who only watch state TV take him seriously, rest of the world just smiles and moves on.
If US claims constantly they are good guys while supplying arms basically straight to pure evil like ISIS just to play the Game, well that deserves a bit of attention. Plus add other stuff like total internet surveillance and you end up with a feeling that US holds too much power. Without a record of action showing that we should trust them any more than others.
Banana Republic. Cuba. Let's not pretend the world superpowers don't all do this stuff to advance their position. Russia does it to advance it's national position. China does it to advance it's national position. US does it to advance their corporate position (largely tied to national position, just a vaguely alternative setup of the same stuff).
Tribalism, to feudalism, and any point in between we see the same situations play out. Look at all the empires over the ages. We're all just incrementally advancing the same playbook each time.
I don't have any suggestion as to how this cycle would ever be changed. The only thing that differs is the move makers. The moves all look pretty similar. One nation crumbles, proffers change, wants to avoid repeating/continuing discovered atrocities, another nation/empire is ready to take it's place.
We can call out the atrocities globally as we see them. Try to fight each individual fire. There's no pretending that every nation isn't guilty of trying to advance it's position by any means necessary. Offering the humanitarian excuse as a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" deal is universal. Doing what you can to avoid the aforementioned "calling out".
It's honestly not even close. Have you read about the events in detail? I too was under that impression until looking more into it. Are you aware of the unknown sniper agitators?
You mean in order to safeguard the global peace. Peaceful nations around the world depend on US support to ensure their defense from hostile nations like Russia
I presume you are joking, right? If we call Russia hostile (which is a fair description), then how would you call US? Super-aggressive war-mongering evil overlord empire?
I think you might have a different definition of "peace" than many people because we haven't had "world peace" for 50 years at all. Just look at how many conflicts are currently ongoing in the world (and how many of those are caused by US meddling...)
Actually.. if you look at the "We-are-not-involved"-strategy obama tryied- im not so sure, the world would be much peacefuller without the US. Those saudi-iran proxi wars - the various religious conflicts- they would all continu, if the US vannished today.
Im not so sure if UN Involvement is really helpfull either. I start to see the seperation solution that pakistan and india drove as quite a good solution for the meddle-east.
one mans peace is another mans tyranny. why are you ignoring the dozens of brutal dictatorships the US has instituted and kept in power over the past century +?
Remember peace is most probably a byproduct of total US hegemony. Russia and China have been very peaceful last 30 years and they were not dominated. So I wouldn't attribute the peace of the world to the "invisible US hand"...
In fact, a larger majority of the world consider that the USA is the very power that has kept the world at war for the last 80 years .. and they're kind of right.
Syria, Ukraine/Crimea, Georgia/Ossetia, Chechnya/Dagestan... they brutally (not used lightly, Google it) put down N. Caucus uprisings and they've flat out stolen land from Western border countries. That's not counting their own cyberwarfare efforts, which is presumably where they are investing heavily out of a recognition of the asymmetries. They sell weapons all over the world and are 2nd worst in that respect to the US.
I have no idea why people need to set up good/bad dualities. Whatever bad things the US has done, none of them make Russian any better.
Russia is not invading and destroying foreign sovereign nations around the world. It is protecting its borders and its local territory.
The USA has invaded, and destroyed, far, far more territory, resulting in 100x more human suffering and misery.
Its not a duality - but if you want to be honest about the hostile intentions of nations, you have to look at the most hostile state there is: the USA. The stats are not pretty.
What part of "Russia needs the Black Sea to protect its sovereignty" do you not understand?
What part of "Iraq is essential to the sovereign protection of the borders of the USA" do you .. not understand?
I'm not trying to justify Russia's military action in Ukraine - living quite close to this action, it horrified me. But, on the other hand, I'm not ever going to be compelled to agree with someone who says that the mass destruction of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen .. and so on .. is vital to the defence of the USA. Because, I know where those places are on a map, and they are nowhere near the USA ...
> What part of "Iraq is essential to the sovereign protection of the borders of the USA" do you .. not understand?
What are you talking about? Iraq was not mentioned in the original comment.
Also, this "The USA has invaded, and destroyed, far, far more territory, resulting in 100x more human suffering and misery." is grossly untrue. Neither country is free of fault here, but for every Afghanistan, or Iraq, there is a North Korea or East Germany.
The point is, Russian military action in Ukraine was for the purpose of protecting its sovereign borders and access to the Black Sea. While I agree that it was a heinous action, it is more justifiable than any military action the USA has projected, if but for the simple fact that it was close to home - literally on Russias' doorstep.
America, however, projects power around the globe - not for its own protection of sovereign assets, and certainly not as a consequence of needing to defend its sovereign border. Rather, American power projection is done in order to interfere with nations that the USA has decided, for some other reason, mostly psychology, is its enemy.
>"The USA has invaded, and destroyed, far, far more territory, resulting in 100x more human suffering and misery." is grossly untrue.
Sorry, but a lot of the world see it as being very, very true.
Perhaps you should pay more attention to the refugee children walking across Europe to get away from American wars.
>Russia, and the Russians in the region that was invaded, can justify its mis-deeds as protection of its sovereignty.
America, and thus Americans, cannot.
There were no Americans to protect in Iraq.
And there was no Russians to protect in Crimea, so stop whitewashing Kremlin lies.
Ummm, Crimea has been majority ethnic Russian for over 100 years, Ukranians weren't even the dominant minority in the region for most of the last two centuries. You really should learn some history before commenting
Lol you completely ignore the fact that the Ukraine as a country did not exist until 1991, and the only reason Crimea was made a part of the Ukraine after the dissolution of the USSR, is because of a fluke of history whereby Crimea was transferred from the Russian Soviet Federation to the Ukrainian Soviet Federation as meaningless token in celebration of 300 years of the Ukraine as a part of the Russian Empire.
Prior to Russo-Turkish war Crimea was a part of the Ottoman Empire, after Russia won that war it conquered Crimea and absorbed it into the fold in 1783. Crimea has not been a traditional part of the Ukraine since before the existence of the United States of America.
Failure to grasp reality does not change the fact that a Crimea filled with ethnic Russians, host to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, in a city founded over 250 years ago by Russia, which holds extreme strategic importance to the nation could never be allowed to fall under the sphere of NATO.
Are you ignorant to the fact that the port of Sevastopol is host to Russia's Black Sea Fleet? Do you realize that Sevastopol was founded as a Russian naval port in 1783 and that Crimea has been Russian for over 250 years?
Also even it had Crimea for thousand years before, it still won't matter - they've signed numerous international agreement s which stated that Crimea belongs to Ukraine.
You might want to brush up on your history, mainly the part where the Ukraine has been part of Russian territory for most of the last 350 years, and while you're reading maybe you'll discover the reason Russia had to act with regards to Crimea.
Right, they could have made the choice to let their strategic naval base in Crimea fall under the sphere of NATO, despite the obvious problems with that
WTF are you smoking? You're completely ignorant of both the past and the present when it comes to the Crimean region. Sevastopol was founded in 1783 by Russia, the Black Sea Fleet has run out of there under the Russian Flag even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
It truly is astounding, the level of dire ignorance that defenders of America's right to destroy nations, seem to employ in their effort to hinder truth. Astounding, and also, enlightening. No wonder their nation is allowed such free hand to destroy other nations: their citizens truly do not give enough of a damn to gain any insight into the history of the world.
But the USA has erred by a factor of 500x the sins of Russia, yo. If you can't understand that, I've got 1000 kilometres worth of walking refugee children to show you ..
The death toll from soviet communism was pretty steep: they killed millions and committed genocide and ethnic cleansing on many opinions. stop spreading this stupid whataboutism
The one doing all the killing and murdering of innocent civilians, now, is America and its allies, the so-called "Coalition", who have decided that only they have the right to start world war three. And, so they did.
"Whataboutism" = we are talking about the situation where America has invaded and destroyed countless sovereign nations over the last 4 decades, willingly and with utter contempt for international law. Russia defended its territorial integrity, and thus sovereignty, during the Crimea crisis - and little else.
America, however, has done nothing in defence of its sovereignty, and everything in attack of other sovereigns. It is a wholesale exporter of death, destruction, and injustice in the world, and .. once again .. I must remind my American readers that the facts on the ground are not pretty. America's statistics are not great. It is a dire, evil situation, and the continued 'whataboutism' from Americans (coz: "Soviet Russia") is precisely one of the ways this evil persists.
American citizens - Australian, Canadian, British and Kiwi too - MUST start accepting responsibility for the crimes of their states. The war is coming to you, whether you like it or not, eventually.
>but it hasn't deployed $Trillions of military assets around the world in order to project power
They would definitely have done this, if they could. At the expense of social programs, schools and healthcare, like they always do [1]. They just don't have $Trillions, only $Billions. A big chunk of which goes into botnets, orchestrated propaganda and cyber-sabotage.
Do we have evidence of the discussed vulnerabilities in certain hard drives? If so, I'm perfectly fine with the Russian state doing the NSA's job in securing American digital assets.
And CIA under Obama administration killed Andrew Breitbart when he started talking about Podesta's closet (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBvPx4CvhI). But of course he died of a "heart attack" just like Russian journalists seem to do.
But yeah, it was just a coincidence. Only powerful people in Russia and China kill journalists. In the US, they just die of accidents and natural causes.
Long way to go to get up to the Clinton Body Count, famously debunked by Snopes. IIRC dead coroners are not a novel ingredient of such conspiracy theories.
I apologize for the rabbit hole. But I must ask:
the "democratic public" of North Korea? or just "mob rule" in general?
the "authoritarian power brokers" of the US? or Russia (i.e. Ukraine, Odessa, etc...)?, China (i.e. India, Tibet, Myanmar vs. Rohingyas, etc...)?
The line has to be drawn somewhere. The UN has proven to be quite useless.
>> Peter Swire, one of five members of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, said the Kaspersky report showed that it is essential for the country to consider the possible impact on trade and diplomatic relations before deciding to use its knowledge of software flaws for intelligence gathering.
“There can be serious negative effects on other U.S. interests,” Swire said.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadHint: Snoden is in Russia.
That has definitely got to count for something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...
Its just that, the USA has its hand in the pie now. And that is the true reason for that heinous war.
Really, this is a fundamental issue to understand. USA is not a peace-bringing nation - it is a war-projection nation. In the same way that one can use fire to fight fires, the USA thinks its war-making is actually bringing peace to the world.
I know - it doesn't make any sense. But, the military-industrial complex which runs the USA doesn't care if you think it makes sense. It only cares about dropping bombs, clearing the shelves of inventory with short half lives, and replacing it with new inventory.
EDIT: the claim that USA's wars are "just, righteous wars" is highly specious and, frankly, risible. The USA has toppled more democratically elected officials than any other nation in the history of mankind. I urge you to consider the hubris of the statement: "the USA only fights good wars", because there is fiction, and there is fact.
The fact is, a lot of people in democratic societies around the world feel that the USA hasn't fought a good war since WW2, and in fact that the opposite is true: the USA fights to put its own dictators into power. Even a casual investigation of this fact yields more than enough evidence to support the statement: the USA is up to no good.
1. Preventing the spread of Soviet backed Authoritarian Communism.
2. Removing brutal dictators from power.
Both noble and justifiable goals.
I'm not going to judge the people that did it, bceause it was another time, but I hope the US public opinion has evolved so that some of US antics in that period could not happen now.
e.g.: involvement in the fall of Mossadegh, support to the Pinochet regime, support to the Shaddam regime, including the sale of chemical weapons during the Iran-Irak war, support to the contras...
Syria?
Iraq?
Afghanistan?
Cambodia?
Pakistan?
Yemen?
Nigeria?
Germany
South Korea
Every Western nation supported by the Marshall plan
You're right, but it goes both ways and not 100% one way or the other
But what it is doing today is a terrible, atrocious tragedy, and its far beyond the point where the means justify the ends.
I mean that as someone who follows closely the cost of American warfare, and as someone who refuses to ignore the human tragedy it is bringing to current generations of people who really, really do not deserve to have had their infrastructure utterly destroyed, their lives ruined, their children left in rubble, on a daily basis, because some smart American decided it had to be so.
The US has had north of 100k troops in Iraq for 7 years, then about 50k for 3 more years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_troop_surge_of_2007#/...
Fuck, its 2017, are we really still explaining this? Of course we are. We must.
Just look at Germany, Japan, Korea, Iraq, ...
If US claims constantly they are good guys while supplying arms basically straight to pure evil like ISIS just to play the Game, well that deserves a bit of attention. Plus add other stuff like total internet surveillance and you end up with a feeling that US holds too much power. Without a record of action showing that we should trust them any more than others.
Tribalism, to feudalism, and any point in between we see the same situations play out. Look at all the empires over the ages. We're all just incrementally advancing the same playbook each time.
I don't have any suggestion as to how this cycle would ever be changed. The only thing that differs is the move makers. The moves all look pretty similar. One nation crumbles, proffers change, wants to avoid repeating/continuing discovered atrocities, another nation/empire is ready to take it's place.
We can call out the atrocities globally as we see them. Try to fight each individual fire. There's no pretending that every nation isn't guilty of trying to advance it's position by any means necessary. Offering the humanitarian excuse as a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" deal is universal. Doing what you can to avoid the aforementioned "calling out".
You mean in order to safeguard the global peace. Peaceful nations around the world depend on US support to ensure their defense from hostile nations like Russia
I think you might have a different definition of "peace" than many people because we haven't had "world peace" for 50 years at all. Just look at how many conflicts are currently ongoing in the world (and how many of those are caused by US meddling...)
Im not so sure if UN Involvement is really helpfull either. I start to see the seperation solution that pakistan and india drove as quite a good solution for the meddle-east.
By 'world' you mean Mars, right?
I have no idea why people need to set up good/bad dualities. Whatever bad things the US has done, none of them make Russian any better.
The USA has invaded, and destroyed, far, far more territory, resulting in 100x more human suffering and misery.
Its not a duality - but if you want to be honest about the hostile intentions of nations, you have to look at the most hostile state there is: the USA. The stats are not pretty.
For a split second I did believed you, that Russia haven't invaded Ukraine, it merely 'protected it's local territory'.
What part of "Iraq is essential to the sovereign protection of the borders of the USA" do you .. not understand?
I'm not trying to justify Russia's military action in Ukraine - living quite close to this action, it horrified me. But, on the other hand, I'm not ever going to be compelled to agree with someone who says that the mass destruction of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen .. and so on .. is vital to the defence of the USA. Because, I know where those places are on a map, and they are nowhere near the USA ...
What are you talking about? Iraq was not mentioned in the original comment.
Also, this "The USA has invaded, and destroyed, far, far more territory, resulting in 100x more human suffering and misery." is grossly untrue. Neither country is free of fault here, but for every Afghanistan, or Iraq, there is a North Korea or East Germany.
America, however, projects power around the globe - not for its own protection of sovereign assets, and certainly not as a consequence of needing to defend its sovereign border. Rather, American power projection is done in order to interfere with nations that the USA has decided, for some other reason, mostly psychology, is its enemy.
>"The USA has invaded, and destroyed, far, far more territory, resulting in 100x more human suffering and misery." is grossly untrue.
Sorry, but a lot of the world see it as being very, very true.
Perhaps you should pay more attention to the refugee children walking across Europe to get away from American wars.
But I find the argument that "USA is not bad, because Russia did bad" to be highly specious.
Russia, and the Russians in the region that was invaded, can justify its mis-deeds as protection of its sovereignty.
America, and thus Americans, cannot.
There were no Americans to protect in Iraq. In Afghanistan. In Syria, Yemen, Libya.
Seriously, Americans are liable for some deep, deep shit. Russians, less so.
And there was no Russians to protect in Crimea, so stop whitewashing Kremlin lies.
And I completely deny that Russia has the right to speak for ethnic Russians of other nationalities, and to invade their countries on their behalf.
Prior to Russo-Turkish war Crimea was a part of the Ottoman Empire, after Russia won that war it conquered Crimea and absorbed it into the fold in 1783. Crimea has not been a traditional part of the Ukraine since before the existence of the United States of America.
Failure to grasp reality does not change the fact that a Crimea filled with ethnic Russians, host to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, in a city founded over 250 years ago by Russia, which holds extreme strategic importance to the nation could never be allowed to fall under the sphere of NATO.
Without Crimea Russia won't have access to Black Sea? Or it will lose her borders?
Please clarify.
Also even it had Crimea for thousand years before, it still won't matter - they've signed numerous international agreement s which stated that Crimea belongs to Ukraine.
That was most wonderful comment so far.
So you're not aware that fleet's flag was changed at least 4 times during last 100 years and half of the time it was nothing to do with Russia?
But the USA has erred by a factor of 500x the sins of Russia, yo. If you can't understand that, I've got 1000 kilometres worth of walking refugee children to show you ..
The one doing all the killing and murdering of innocent civilians, now, is America and its allies, the so-called "Coalition", who have decided that only they have the right to start world war three. And, so they did.
"Whataboutism" = we are talking about the situation where America has invaded and destroyed countless sovereign nations over the last 4 decades, willingly and with utter contempt for international law. Russia defended its territorial integrity, and thus sovereignty, during the Crimea crisis - and little else.
America, however, has done nothing in defence of its sovereignty, and everything in attack of other sovereigns. It is a wholesale exporter of death, destruction, and injustice in the world, and .. once again .. I must remind my American readers that the facts on the ground are not pretty. America's statistics are not great. It is a dire, evil situation, and the continued 'whataboutism' from Americans (coz: "Soviet Russia") is precisely one of the ways this evil persists.
American citizens - Australian, Canadian, British and Kiwi too - MUST start accepting responsibility for the crimes of their states. The war is coming to you, whether you like it or not, eventually.
They would definitely have done this, if they could. At the expense of social programs, schools and healthcare, like they always do [1]. They just don't have $Trillions, only $Billions. A big chunk of which goes into botnets, orchestrated propaganda and cyber-sabotage.
[1] https://themoscowtimes.com/news/russia-to-increase-military-...
[0]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/iratemonk_nsa...
But yeah, it was just a coincidence. Only powerful people in Russia and China kill journalists. In the US, they just die of accidents and natural causes.
Yes, because it's tried and true and works for them.
So it wasn't the spying that hurt the relations, it was Snowden. Okay. I'll stop reading now. This news source just discredited itself.
Realistically though, authoritarian power brokers.
The line has to be drawn somewhere. The UN has proven to be quite useless.
Edit - Link Added: http://www.independent.ie/world-news/china-endorses-myanmars...
It can be from defense to big attack.
Only the big one can really have the budget to do so.
>> Peter Swire, one of five members of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, said the Kaspersky report showed that it is essential for the country to consider the possible impact on trade and diplomatic relations before deciding to use its knowledge of software flaws for intelligence gathering.
“There can be serious negative effects on other U.S. interests,” Swire said.
>Snowden’s revelations have hurt the United States’ relations with some allies and slowed the sales of U.S. technology products abroad.
it's no accident and it puts unnecessary emphasis on the mensager.
obviously it can be parsed to the correct meaning. but the subjective one should be considered too.