Economic liberalism did away with the divine right of kings and rule by bloodlines. Replacing it with something ultimately, arguably worse.
Come on, man! The serfs/peasants/slaves had it way worse than anyone living under "economic liberalism". There is no comparison! Not even close.
I will agree that zero tolerance policies oligarchs (all well as senior associates, propagandists and enablers) does benefit everyone.
Her foreign policy and her statesmanship on the other hand was widely respected.
FWIW, in Ukraine (and many other parts of Europe), her foreign policy w.r.t russia is seen as de-facto enabling russian genocidal imperialism (as a conscious and pre-mediated decision). She nurtured and enabled putin every step of the way.
I am of course not speaking for German public, since I've never lived in Germany.
Better late than never, but it is almost funny that Lenta.ru and especially Zvezda TV just got sanctioned. I will add that Lenta.ru was somewhat sane before 2014, but the editors got kicked out and were replaced by genocidal imperialists.
It would have been far more effective to immediately sanction all russian and russian-adjacent companies and then whitelist the ones that can prove beyond reasonable doubt that their business is not involved with the military.
Shitpost all you want, just don't act like you're actually being legit.
At the very least a strong majority of russian are genocidal imperialists (if not an overwhelming majority). The victim/junkie positioning merely provides cover for their actions.
They know what they are doing. They know what they are doing is bad and they will keep on doing it until they think they can get away with it.
This is enablement of russian genocidal imperialism.
Rather than taking a sober and realistic look at their actions and attitudes, we get this bullshit.
If you actually had to deal with russians, you would never in a million years behave in such a manner.
Be thankful you don't have to deal with them.
I’m not excusing, I’m explaining because without understanding there’s even less chance of changing anything. There’s a reason Russians don’t want to do anything, and it’s not because they would be comfortable within their culture. They don’t see a way out, they’re trapped in there, if you even try to get out you get beaten up so many decide that as you can’t change anything anyways, you can just as well acquiesce, that’s less mental load. That’s taking the big picture at face value.
You're playing into their victim-hood narrative that the russians openly use for misinformation and promotion of their imperialist goals. Who is responsible for the current state of affairs in russia? The people of Botswana? The people of Uruguay?
No, it's the russians who voted Putin into power in 2000 (even though they knew the nature of the KGB) and then elected him again in 2004 when he shut down most mass scale independent media. And the elections of 2000 and 2004 are generally seen to be fair.
It's the russians who went with the comical Medvedev seat warming exercise and supported the invasion of Georgia in 2008.
Yet you keep trying to sweep this all under the rug, with claims such as "they are trapped there" to try and position them as innocent victims. When in reality they only have themselves to blame for the state of affairs in their country.
This is too much essentialism for me.
Everything the russians do is explained by cultural context. Any and all alternatives are not viable because of the cultural context. We shouldn't judge russian for being proud of putin because of the cultural context.
This is not a viable approach. At the end of the day, all positive social/cultural change is driven going against the grain. If the russians don't want to do anything, we should take it face value and not come up with excuses.
I genuinely hope something will come out of this, but knowing the slowness and reactive approach of European institutions I don't have any hope.
Rather than talk, it would make much more sense to hold a formal conference after achieving results in agreed upon behind the scenes negotiations. Something along the lines of:
I recognize that this may sound unrealistic, but most (all?) geopolticial achievements/breakthroughs/realignments were done with courage and a desire to win. Not "bla bla" or "but what about this or that".
Ah the classical "I don't believe this research because it doesn't align with what I think". You'll be surprised how often I've heard this. It's actually one of the reasons I don't bother posting detailed sourcing. Don't give me this "it's complicated" bullshit, you have no clue what you are talking about.
You quote Minialo from the NPR article. Let me tell you a little story about Minialo. So he had some sociological research about russian support for the war. Since the numbers were high (i.e. they didn't align with goal of white washing russian genocidal imperialism), he decided to massage the numbers. There were three questions around related to genocidal imperialism (continuing the war to take Kyiv, the role of occupied territories and something else). So to lower the "support war" stat he only counted the responses that said yes to all three questions. So you could say, let's continue the war to take Kyiv, but have a more ambiguous view on the role of occupied territories - that would disqualify you from supporting the full scale invasion of Ukraine (in Minialo's view that's a fair approach).
I've actually interacted with Minialo on Twitter (don't use it anymore). He said pretty typical russian BS "what about iraq?" and "many russians want to stop the war" (and he of course ignored that would also imply annexation of 20% of Ukraine, including my home town). I posted this rather provocative vignette questioning how he would feel if Ukraine did everything russia has done to us and then suddenly some part of the population would call for peace (with 20% of European russia occupied, bombing of Volga dam, razing Rostov to the ground like they did to Mariupol, Russian style torture of everyone involved with government or military in occupied territories and so on). He immediately started getting aggressive and dismissive (even though I merely suggested a completely equal scenario).
Minialo is a russian imperialist.
“The majority of Russians do not want to seize Kyiv or Odesa,” What great humanists! Occupying 20% of the country and holding ten thousands of civilians in torture camps, banning Ukrainian, banning Ukrainian churches and implementing a policy of settlers colonialism (I am from Donbas, so I know what goes on there). I wonder how russians would view a symmetric situation (similar to what I described to Minialo).
This is really the best you have?
A country prosecuting people with dissenting views does not mean a majority of the population hold dissenting views. On the contrary, broad support makes it far easier to prosecute dissenting views. If truly most of the country is opposed to something, you'll eventually get pushback and local resistance.
I think it’s a little more complicated than that, and I suspect a majority of Russians supported the war for the first few months, but currently support Putin and not all of his actions, including the war. The list experiment uses data from 3 years ago.
Sources my man. You were acting all high and mighty about sources and now we have to believe your opinion?
~85% stable support for the annexation of Crimea (cross validated with list experiment studies showing no preference falsification) is not a sign of support for genocidal imperialism? I hope you realize that for people in Ukraine the war started in 2014, the full scale invasion started in 2022.
Surprise, surprise. You russian genocide white washing shills are all the same. What are you even saying? You clearly didn't read anything I shared and simply assume that it all magically aligns with your worldview. If you did, you'd actually have meaningful arguments of my position. You didn't address a single point that I made and just went with "Nah, all that stuff actually shows I am right!1!1!!!"
That's why I labelled you as fake humanist.
I am done here.
Fascinating stuff. You can't really fight back against a criminal, oligarch regime if you're not interested in upholding the rule of law and are open to working with oligarchs.