I think a material difference between Iraq (v2 anyway) and Ukraine is that they can keep doing the “well Russia was the aggressor” thing indefinitely even if the reality is more complicated.
also yes obviously some libs are still stubborn about Iraq, the worst ones, but for the most part its generally agreed that the Iraq War was a bad thing.
Key difference: there’s no US boots on the ground in Ukraine. Like with Vietnam, a lot of the Iraq rhetoric is centered on the american soldiers who were killed and maimed. Notice how US/NATO intervention in Libya and Kosovo, which was accomplished primarily through air power and without significant losses, has not had any critical reexamination—I would think the lack of american corpses has a good deal to do with that
disclaimer: this is not financial advice, i am just a small worm
At first I thought that this was the one comment here I agreed with the most, and I might still think that, but the difference is that Libya/Kosovo were “over” much faster than Ukraine. The boogeymen were quickly taken out, while Russia just refuses to collapse, at least so far.
In my extremely limited experience, outside of the internet, libs don’t really care about Ukraine anymore and won’t push back if you criticize Biden giving tens of billions of dollars to Nazis. This in itself may be kind of a re-examination on their part? They also feel the same way about covid, though. It just doesn’t matter at all to them, even though it’s actually still extremely important (as is Ukraine). I do have to kind of wonder what they care about at the moment? They were so happy when Biden won the election, but I think most of us strongly suspected that this was going to be as good as it got for them for quite some time. Who knows, it might even be their last major victory.
I and a lot of others protested the Iraq invasion before it took place, and predicted the somewhat obvious quagmire that resulted. I would have protested the Russian invasion as well if I were a Russian citizen and if it would have been safe enough to do so (Putin’s dictatorship makes that purely hypothetical though).
Did you also protest the NATO coup in Ukraine in 2014?
I think we may disagree on the origins of the Maidan Protests, the Crimea annexation, and at this point probably even the end of WW2 and Soviet Union.
Edit: aw shit, I just realized where I am.
youre on the history channel motherfucker
Did you protest arming Nazi militias like Azov that posted videos of themselves crucifying people and burning them alive or giving them electric shocks while making them dig a grave?
?!?!
That’s a lot of words for “no.”
Just say you supported the Maidan coup.
Most Westerners who watched the news did
At the time my impression was “brave Ukrainian students ousting their corrupt Russian minion of a president so they can join the EU and become a proper European country instead of a depressing Soviet hellhole”
That’s still the level most people are operating on
I think a lot of people naivly-as-opposed-to-maliciously believe what doublepepperoni said.
I think people on Hexbear often forget how different the world looks to the average person in the West
I mean, I exist in the West, I’m well aware of how bad the typical person’s politics regarding foreign countries are.
One of us lives on Earth, the other lives on Planet CIA.
probably even the end of WW2 and Soviet Union.
???
The nazis were talked into defeat, it was the power of love obviously
Coward.
even the end of WW2 and the Soviet Union
Average Operation Unthinkable supporter
even the end of WW2 and Soviet Union.
ain’t that some shit. please enlighten us all what you meant by this? Do you think the wrong side won the war? Are you saying you think the world would have been a better place if Nazi Germany hadn’t been defeated by the Soviet Union? We are all ears.
Based on their other opinions, I dont think they would (openly) go that far which is why I’m kind of baffled by the statement and want to know what the hell they DID mean. Like maybe they dont think the USSR won the war alone. Or they believe Double Genocide Theory? Idk.
ETA: Oh maybe its that they think Operation Unthinkable was a good idea like another poster suggested.
Edit: aw shit, I just realized where I am.
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Naw, waste of time arguing with conspiracy nutters.
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Your side is the one giving ten minute standing ovations to veterans of the 14th SS volunteer division to own the ruskies and re-writing history
Conspiracy nutter is when you think history has more moving parts than a Marvel script
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Who took Berlin?
Who screwed it up and gave it all back?
Again ??? What the fuck does this even mean?
The western powers put ex nazis in control in West Germany but I dont think thats what you’re asking about.
remember after Ferguson when Putin had the US police murder several BLM leaders in separate incidents and then light their cars on fire?
Like with Vietnam, a lot of the Iraq rhetoric is centered on the american soldiers who were killed and maimed.
Even when they oppose war, it’s backed by nationalist reasons.
when they have a collective realization it usually comes long after it stops mattering (like denouncing the coup in Chile that happened 50 years ago)
The collective realization happened with Iraq before the war was over at least. But yeah there’s a lot of differences that mean that I dont think thatll happen here.
I feel like that realization had more to do with the part where it just kept going even after the whole overthrowing Saddam bit by a lot. Especially after all the reasons given for going in were one by one shown to be wrong from the jump. Even with all that, I think the libs were more embarrassed about how much money was used in “nation building” while the US economy tanked. And not so much for the reasons that we constantly hear from them about “cost of human lives” or whatever pretend moral shit. I think most of them would still resort to adding something to the effect of “well even if we were lied to, it was still worth getting rid of Saddam” after front loading how they were lied to.
So this time the big “gotcha” bit of smugness will still be about how “evil Russia has always been”. So it will be still considered America helping “protect freedom” is the “correct” and “moral” choice (even with the price tag that would never be treated as “sooo important” for helping poor US citizens at home). Hell, they still like to call the FSB the KGB. So real “lessons” will not matter outside the same talk but no actions shit they do every single time. They did all kinds of talking nice words for BLM protests (not the org), but their actions were to paint anyone that wasn’t “correctly protesting” as bad and over-funded the pigs more. And the cycle continues.
“well even if we were lied to, it was still worth getting rid of Saddam”
I dont hear this very often from libs. Usually they say getting into Iraq at all was a bad idea altogether. But thats just my experience.
I’ve heard Libs say this on more than four occasions
I really think a lot of that realization is due to the financial collapse of 2007-08 where a shit ton of people started pointing out how horrible the USA is.
Sadly that all seemed to die down when Obama hired that ferry guy to male him some low effort campaign posters that everyone wet their pants over.
They will not because they see Russia as the main reason why Trump became president instead of Clinton. “Russia kinda had a point in the invasion” will never be accepted by them. They desire the complete destruction of the Russian Federation, and when it becomes clear that the invasion is not leading to the downfall of the Russian state anytime soon, they will not only not come to see the truth but double down on their delusions. As the US and the rest of the west continues to decline, cope about Russia collapsing any day now will blend with cope about China collapsing any day now.
It’ll be like conservatives with Vietnam: a stab in the back narrative (albeit less visceral due to it being a proxy war.)
Yep, “they didn’t let us win” cope.
Another key reason it’s different - US troop involvement. A bipartisan part of anti Iraq war movements was the ‘save our troops’ angle, lamenting the poor American soldiers who stepped on mines while destroying Iraq.
Ukraine, with it’s new labour laws, and banderite sympathies will be either be under Ukrainian control a derelict country of exploited people, many scarred physically and mentally by war, with no social safety net. They will undergo an ‘economic miracle’ and the libs will say job done, when the miracle is really just further reappropriation of wealth to the rich through cheap labour. The top 1% and foreign ‘investors’ will make millions while the people starve. Under Russian control, probably much the same, but with a fuse lit, ticking away until the war starts again with new funding. The cycle may repeat.
In ten years every liberal who was frothing about russian orcs will confidently tell you they always said the neo-nazi problem in Ukraine was bigger than the invasion, and that they correctly predicted all these terror attacks all over Europe, and they’re definitely anti-fascists from way back.
In ten years they will still be demanding Russia cedes Crimea.
They don’t care about the Kurds is Syria after having been told they were out bestest friends in the middle east, I think they’ll completely abandon it
They’re already hate eastern Europeans for being poor “white” people (the thing a liberal hates the most), and truly do not see how the west is responsible for this poverty. My whole life I’ve heard them mock the cheap, durable housing that was built throughout the USSR with no appreciation for this mass, collective effort to house everyone after a devastating war. It’s almost like libs don’t actually recognize these people as humans.
Even more apparent is their failure to connect fascism with capitalist collapse and false scarcity. Libs hate that there’s visible fascists in eastern Europe, but think it’s an individual failing of these unenlightened people, not an obvious consequence of the west winning the so-called cold war.
These currents in liberal thought are so strong, and have been so prominent for decades, that I would say there’s no chance of reconsidering the narrative that is essentially bad things happen because Russia exists.
Edit: A lot of libs I think ultimately found the racism directed towards Muslims and Middle easterners to be unseemly, and this was a good starting point for reanalysis. I don’t see Slavs and their neighbors getting that same treatment.
No because the US invaded Iraq and thus is basically impossible to ever defend. They will literally ALWAYS say Ukraine support was justified because Russia started the physical invasion that all the western news agencies reported. Anything that’s more complicated than the Iraq invasion is going to be defended forever the same way they deliberately misinterpret Molotov-Ribbentrop, etc.
deliberately misinterpret Molotov-Ribbentrop, etc.
This is a good comparison I think, especially since when the invasion first started and I got into arguing with some libs in a small friend server I was in about it, the admin of the server brought up this very thing to justify the idea that Russia is always evil invasion country. I didnt have the material at the time to object to that idea. So my attempts to do so where met with “well I side with what the historians think”. I left the server voluntarily after that but it was treated like a ban for awhile. They let me back and we just dont discuss the Ukraine War at all ever. Politics channel is kinda dead in general lately.
I think it’s gonna be more like how cons dealt with Iraq. They eventually will just say it was bad strategy, we should have just started WW3 essentially. They will not examine it to understand that is what they are saying, but it will be a tragic failure of NATO not being strong or something like that.
I think there’s probably going to be some parallels with the Yugoslav wars with Russians occupying this spot of “group of irredeemable people predisposed to ethnic cleansing” that Serbs got (the Yugoslav wars being more complex and shitty than the popular narrative).
Everyone’s going to say arming Ukraine was the right thing that stopped a full genocide of Ukraine. Donbass, Crimea etc will be the new Tibet, Xinjiang.
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I think that they will continue to do the “russia was the aggressor” but they’ll almost certainly start saying “we should have negotiated sooner, it was obvious we had bad intelligence (or, if we’re lucky, ‘it was obvious the media was lying’) about how weak the russian army/economy was”
I actually don’t think they’ll ever change their minds about this one. They’ll just bury the nuance forever. In 10 years they’re not going to be saying “I always knew it was wrong” they’re going to be saying “what? a war in ukraine? sorry i havent read about that, i dont really know ancient history”
Part of me feels like it’s different this time, and Libs will keep going Ukrainian nationalist forever, but part of me suspects it will wash out the same and in a few years our position will creep closer to public acceptability.
The libs will still be anti-Russian in general, but the state and the media will definitely pull a 180 when Ukrainian neo-nazis begin their campaigns of violence across Europe, the libs will then pretend they never normalized global neo-nazism and decry Ukrainians in the same strident tone they currently decry Russians
The blowback from this war will be hideous and the libs are going to be extremely obnoxious about it the whole time, I suspect by 2025 the libs will all become Polish nationalists and start accusing the “tankies” of being neo-Nazis apologists for opposing the deportation and liquidation of every Ukrainian refugee for the actions of Nazis that libs armed, that’s the level of absurdity I’m expecting
Get ready for the whiplash
