Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.

Exact full quote from CNN:

“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063

Funny how living standards in the ex-soviet countries have improved considerably since joining the EU, but that has not been the case for the ones that chose to be kept under Russia’s sphere of influence. 🤔

Looks like the EU is really bad at looting, they should learn from Russia.

There was a massive dip in all those places in the 90s with shock therapy. A lot of people are still worse off in a lot of ways and angry. Hence AfD, Orban, PiS and all those other angry nationalists.

Also, if you want to be fair, you should compare for example Poland to west Germany. Polish workers toil for German capitalists, and yet, somehow, they’re getting exploited way more than the German workers. Less pay, worse services, worse infrastructure, less worker’s rights. That whole arrangement is super-exploitative. Meanwhile foreigners bought most of that country. Treated like a colony basically.

The Russians got fucked even worse than Poland in the 90s, which resulted in a backlash which Putin made himself the head of. What Russia is doing is self-preservation. Any state with the means to preserve it’s sovereignty from a hostile takeover would try to do so, it’s not just something an imperialist state would do. Hence Russia is not doing an imperialism here.

Hell, compare East Germany to the ~~reich~~ West Germany. West Germany’s economic conquest of East Germany was incredibly ruthless and brutal, and East Germany never recovered from having it’s entire economy pillaged and burned.

And east german lgbt rights and women’s rights lost half a century of progress during reunification.

Yeah. It’s still technically illegal to get an abortion in the reich afaik. It was really something finding out that the gdr had gender parity in most fields before the west crushed it, and that western germany had to give women a bunch of rights to try to manage to political turmoil.

Reading those east German men be like “yeah I prefer it now that women have to stay with me for economic reasons, before you had to be like, interesting and care about them or something” really drives it home in a different way too.

That was physically painful when I first saw some of those quotes. We’ve just lost so much potential.

living standards in the ex-soviet countries have improved considerably since joining the EU

Yeah the living standards sure did improve after one of the worst demographic disasters in that era. Easy for things to get better when you start from the bottom I mean come on do better.

So, why didn’t Belarus improve at the same rate as the Baltic countries?

They both started from the bottom, right?

So, why didn’t Belarus improve at the same rate as the Baltic countries?

If you think that the answer to this is simply “because Russia bad” you have the mind of a child.

Eastern European countries that opened to western trade and diplomatic relationships improved significantly.

Eastern European countries that became Russian puppets didn’t.

Explain that.

imagine ignoring the absolutely ruthless, western led cannibalization of the former soviet union and pretending history’s baseline started AFTER the largest decline of living standards in global history.

human trafficking, prostitution, alcoholism, food/energy insecurity, diseases of despair all exploded when the west forced capitalism and privatization onto the former soviet union in the immediate aftermath. Gorbachev thought he was going to get some easy-going nordic social democracy, but instead the west carved up their public sector like a christmas ham. maybe you were too young, but in the 1980s the propaganda portrait the west had of russian women were all heavy-set, ugly babushkas. suddenly, after 1989, the mail order beautiful russian bride phenomenon exploded. they were fleeing the gutting of the public sector and the shattering of the social safety net, which made it near impossible to raise a family in the eastern bloc without becoming a sex worker.

the west sponsored every retrograde nationalist reactionary psycho to undermine any hint of democratic resistance to economic liberalization schemes and bombed the shit out of infrastructure (Yugoslavia) whenever they could get away with it. the west has the most blood on its hands for the aftermath of the USSR, but people like you want to ignore those early days and then claim credit for the “winners” the west propped up in the aftermath of all that chaos. like a killer who torched a town but kidnapped a few kids and now touts his heroic rescue of them. the most ignorant and disgusting take.

You seem to be ignoring the fact that after the fall of the USSR, Russia didn’t want their assets to be sold or leased to western companies (understandably), so they let corrupt officials take them for pennies of what they were actually worth. Those officials became the oligarchs.

Russians cannibalised Russia.

The Balts were immediately used as forward positions for NATO and were allowed to keep their state programs and industry. Belarus got the same treatment as Russia.

You should probably know the answer to your own snarky questions before you ask them.

So, what you’re saying is that the countries that sided with the West got a better deal than the ones that became Russian puppets?

When a country joins the western bloc, they join them.

When a country joins any other multinational pact, they’re puppets.

I’m not influenced by western propaganda

Two capitalist nations fucking over their subjects is not the own you think it is

Have some compassion, some people just want to crank their knob to exploitative porn without questioning why so much of it comes from Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.

Thank you for calling this out. It’s fucking gross how that happens. If I speak about what should happen to “sexpats”, I’ll be in trouble. Big big trouble.

They didn’t improve at all. The rich are better off, thanks to mass privatization of public property. For the middle/working class, quality of life stagnated at best.

Source: I live in an ex-soviet country.

since joining the EU

I hope you understand how this is an incredibly cherry-picked range. It’s like saying “look how steadily the American economy grew from the period of 1930 to 1940”.

Many Eastern European countries in the EU are still being hollowed out and suffering massive brain drain. The model of “tributary state” accurately applies here.

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