AnarchoMLDialectic [comrade/them,any]
So a Swedish dude donated a plane to Finland starting their Air Force.
He used the swastika as his personal symbol…
Because he was an aryan supremacist and adopted the symbol due to the popular myth it united the aryan race. Not exactly a Nazi but he was drinking from the same well of aryan race theory and white supremacism, Nordic supremacism, as the most pure aryans, in particular.
Edit: having read the rest of this thread I see I am one of about a dozen people pointing this out. Doing my part.
Ah well you see it’s because Russia are the bad guys.
Russia does bad things to the good guys which makes them the bad guys. We are the good guys because we do bad things to the bad guys.
It’s good to do bad things to bad guys. It’s only bad to do bad things to good guys. This makes them the bad guys and us the good guys.
You see?
Fascist authoritarian political round up of your political opponents was definitely on the cards but to have it come from the democrats is just, that’s just excellent writing.
We were all so focused on who the bad guy was but this was merely a trick, a canny use of Lacanian gaze. Deflection.
Brilliant, the 2022 season is tense high drama and now brilliant plot twists. Let’s fucking go.
To some extent it was true. Sometimes the empire was a net positive and sometimes a net negative. It really depended on how much steel they needed to turn into battleships.
The thing is though that the costs of empire were socialized. Taxes paid for the military and the colonial administration. Often a colony was paying for its own occupation but often it was the British public paying for it as well. These costs were socialized.
The profit of empire was privatized. Big capital got cheap land, government enforced monopolies, cheap and often actually slave labor, and they got to keep the profits.
For the British public as a whole often the empire was a net drain. It was never a net drain for the elite of Britain though. For them it was constant and immense profit. So they kept doing it. British imperialism was also extractive from the British workers, although the workers still got some less direct benefits from being higher up the supply chain and closer to the core, but they were still outside the core and were also exploited by it.
IMO as just another armchair geopolitician who doesn’t really know anything, that will come down to public opinion more than military reality.
If Ukraine collapses then that’s a humiliation for the USA. They will step in to prevent that and make concessions. But I think a total collapse of Ukrainian forces is unlikely (my estimation.)
Or let’s say something crazy like Zelenskiy goes on a rant about being betrayed by the west, kind of a fantasy since he is totally dependent on the west so he’s unlikely to bite at them but it’s at least conceivable his frustration at Ukrainians dying to achieve US geopolitical goals might get to him. He has real star power in the west and that gives him political leverage. If he threatened a Biden or BoJo re-election he would get big concessions from them.
Neither of these seem likely to me but it’s within the world of the plausible.
Honestly I think if the peace deal was all-encompassing about the security relationship between Europe, Russia, and the USA you probably could get close to it. But I agree it’s hard to see Russia making big concessions if the peace deal is limited to the immediate conflict.