You’re right, Donetsk and Luhansk doing what it took to protect their citizens from genocidal Galician fascists by inviting Russia into the civil war was exactly the correct course of action.
It’s such an interesting way of phrasing it, right? As though Russia is incapable of defending itself, only attacking others. As though the security needs of a large state with massive porous borders are the same as a small state. As though the only things that can be considered aggression are the one day in 2022 and the entire 8 years before it cannot be considered aggression, nor can the entire 30 years before that be considered aggression.
It amazes me that you can use the word nuance in one sentence and then immediately formulate a sentence that amounts to “History started at 2022 when Russia launched an unprovoked hot conflict for reasons other than national defense where previously exactly zero aggression was happening.”
Chauvinist and ultranationalist indoctrination of children is good actually, as long our guys do it!
Hitlerjugend? Nah mate, only Russia would do that! The free western world is only preparing to defend it’s culture from asiatic hordes seeking to destroy it and imposing authoritarian rule over us!
Because the idea that people in Russia will not be dying for their country but instead be dying for the fantasy of the president is either completely universal for all countries, and therefore not notable, or it’s an attempt to demonstrate how this situation is notably different than in other contexts.
That’s a false dichotomy, but honestly even if you granted it I don’t think it affects the validity of the original statement. People dying for one thing when they think they’re dying for another is sad, even if it happens everywhere all the time. I also don’t really get the contention, that saying “a particular aspect of Russian nationalism is bad” is not notable, when this is literally a post about a particular aspect of Russian nationalism?
You don’t see the problem with an article picking a universal experience, accentuating it by writing an article about it, omitting any mention of other examples of it in any other country, and doing it in the context of war mongering, war profiteering, proxy warfare, distribution of weapons to neo-Nazi groups that were supported as part of a multi-decade pro-Nazi leave-behind system (Operation Gladio), as part of th expansion of the world’s only transnational nuclear military that is unaccountable to any citizens of any country that has launched multiple wars of aggression and occupation?
You don’t see how an article like that contributes to a narrative of othering and dehumanization by it’s silent ommission and lack of acknowledgement? You don’t see how that narrative of othering and dehumanization leads to mass murder, ecocide, and escalation towards nuclear conflict?
You think everything is just a spherical frictionless ball in a world without air resistance that has no interactions with anything else and isn’t informed by nor informs other major trends?
I mean I straight-up didn’t say any of that, nor is it reasonable to infer that I take those positions from what I did say. I’m not even talking about the article; I’m talking about your initial critique of OPs comment. Now if you think that their comment is wrong or misleading then ok, sure, but that’s not what you said (or at least it didn’t seem to be).
This seems like it would be better suited as a top-level response to the post rather than as a response to something that I never said. There are enough libs on the internet that excuse or ignore fascism/imperialism such that you don’t need to invent new ones to argue with.
I'm not from the US, and have no real interest in defending their history on military matters, but your talking about their entertainment industry not their education system. The article is about how Russia is going to use its education system to get their kids to be good soldiers in the future, not about how they're going to make more action films
Fair point. I’ll counter with that there’s very little useful difference because the DoD produces those movies and has full script control over scores of movies every year, while simultaneously the head of education in the USA was very recently the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of the Blackwater mercenary army. Education has been manipulated for propagandizing children in the West since forever, and in the USA we have groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy writing curriculum.
Further, the USA has been glorifying soldiers in schools for decades with high school recruitment, ROTC, letter writing, fund raising, special events featuring soldiers and veterans.
It’s just not that hard to see that whatever the West accuses other countries of doing it’s something that the West has been doing and doing far worse.