Sometimes (when I'm in a masochistic mood), I head on over to youtube and check out what Haz is saying. Last night, along with much nonsense, he had on a Chinese guest from Shanghai who said that the protests are all very small -- the biggest ones maybe a thousand people (out of a city with a larger population than all of north Korea), most more like a dozen. I'm guessing that's probably representative of the real nothing-burger these protests are.
I don't like this, but my view is, it's an issue for the Russian people to solve. Reason: me talking in the west about Russian state-sponsored homophobia is not going to change the government's policies, but it will tend to swell the 24/7 anti-Russia hysteria in American and Europe, which is a real danger insofar as it gears people up for war. I certainly wish Putin wouldn't hand the west talking points. But Russia right now is an important ally of AES states, and so it's best to hand that entire fight to comrades living in Russia -- nothing we do will make the situation better, and could very likely actually make things worse.
I honestly do not get German foreign policy since... well, unification. For a whole lot of her history, Germany was an underdog in western Europe, constantly manipulated by more powerful neighbors like France. Then political unification happens, and what does the German government do? Try to integrate into the same "western community" that has continually shown itself to have no good will toward Germany; or, failing that, devote all their efforts toward become the bigger, badder imperialist on the block. It's like that bullied kid on the playground who tries hard to make friends with his bullies, and then occasionally snaps and becomes a mass shooter.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like economic integration with Russia would have solved so many of Germany's problems a long time ago.
Washington has no loyalties whatsoever. They'd absolutely do to Germany or France what they did to Yugoslavia and Iraq, and are currently doing to Ukraine, if it benefitted them and if they thought they could pull it off. And a cynical part of me thinks that liberals in Berlin and Paris would still be licking American boot, and talking about NATO as the peace-shield of freedom against Russian aggression.
That makes sense. Honestly, I never understood how close liberalism is to fascism until this year. Pretty much from birth, it was drummed into me that "liberal democracies" like Britain and the US defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan (role of USSR was glossed over), and that liberal "constitutional government" is the only defense against Hitlerism. Seeing the mainstream press openly refer to Russians as subhuman orcs is horrifying and surreal.
In about ten years, Ukrainian Nazis will be launching terror attacks in New York city, and the US media will be wringing their hands and wondering how it could possibly have happened.
Sometimes (when I'm in a masochistic mood), I head on over to youtube and check out what Haz is saying. Last night, along with much nonsense, he had on a Chinese guest from Shanghai who said that the protests are all very small -- the biggest ones maybe a thousand people (out of a city with a larger population than all of north Korea), most more like a dozen. I'm guessing that's probably representative of the real nothing-burger these protests are.