I’ve noticed that in both Belgium and The Netherlands there has been an increase in war talk lately, saying how we need more military personnel and that we need to be wary of Russia. I’ve seen some British articles about it too.
Now, I hope it is purely coincidental otherwise I’d have to get worried about EU+UK being complete idiots and preparing for war.
Germany is discussing reintroducing the military service requirement.
The German defense minister is clearly saying that Germans must prepare for war, not just in the material sense of getting the Bundeswehr into fighting shape but in the socio-political sense of “the government and military can’t go to war if the people are against it, and the government damn well wants to go to war so we better get the propaganda rolling.”
It’s a scary time to be alive.
Well it’s not just a coincidence then it seems, because the same talks are happening in other countries. They must have decided something behind the scenes.
Seems like they’re going to pull a Russian Civil War type of scenario should Ukraine lose. All the propaganda points to this idea of Russia going after the Baltics and then all of Europe after beating Ukraine.
Or it could be the result of electing right-wing nationalists that do nothing but saber rattle when they haven’t fought a conventional war since the boomers were children.
This one is genuinely scary… but I have no idea how they’d introduce it without massive resistance, and it blowing up in their faces.
It’s just gonna happen, without resistance.
Fascists like it, because of nationalism and the prospect of having a huge army to “defend” ourselves. The liberals will be very easy to convince to toe the line. Leftists are a small group, and half are basically liberals anyway.
It’s scary how little debate this entails. Our countries are in war in Yemen, and I’d say 80% of the public doesn’t even know it.
Poland. Loud sounds of sabers rattling, though if you listen more closely, those are actually sounds of coconut shells and spurs being worn on bare feet.
Spain. No drums here, probably because they know that as always no one is willing to die for this mess of a country lmao.
Regional separatism is quite strong, to the point of having leaked into the culture itself of those regions, but those movements are non-violent, to the point in which organized acts of violence have been virtually nonexistant since almost a decade and a half ago in the Basque Country and for even longer in Catalonia. No, the truth is that very few people would not get angry at the prospect of being forced into conscription (a concept that, if it wasn’t awful enough by itself, is also tightly associated with the Francoist regime), and being on the other side of the continent no one really believes that Russia is any threat to us in particular. Moreover, the Spanish government has been pulling some moves that are very unpopular with the right-wing sector of the country by attempting to reach a compromise with the Catalan separatist movement and granting amnesty to the political prisoners of the Referendum of the 1st of October, so threatening the population with war mobilization is pretty much the worst thing they could do right now.
Gracias por la sabía de los dentros.
(Eso no aparece correcto. ¿Cómo se dice <insider knowledge>?)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Spain making a killing off the switch to LNG since nordstream was killed? iirc y’all have like one of two LNG import ports in Europe so Spain’s actually one of the few EU countries to come out ahead on this war economically
What I can say is that we have been importing a lot of Russian LNG, and for what I see at some point we were their 2nd largest clients worldwide only behind China. I couldn’t find any information regarding how well has Spain’s economy fared with this, but in other sources I found that only 5% of what we are buying goes to other members of the EU, so there’s also that.
Czechia, same here. Same old Russia wants to invade all of Europe so we have to defend ourselves.
