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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Did I miss all the Soviet invasions into Eastern Europe pre and post Cold War?

The logic of the world communist revolution and the Cold War had nothing to do with the opposition of the feudal states of Rus against the Polovtsians. Like the pan-Slavism of the Russian Empire. These are too different societies and states for inheritance to make any sense.

You know those referendums were not free and fair elections.

You strangely assume that the pro-Ukrainian population left, when in fact there were people who fled the war to Ukraine and Russia. The referendums sufficiently reflected the will of the majority of the population. Legal formalities are much less important.

US did cut military spending.

Show me this on graph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#/media/File:Defense_spending.png

And outside of Mitt Romney like I remember some guy named Obama making fun of Romney and the Cold War and everyone laughed.

The beginning of the Obama presidency was rather a strange exception, which quickly ended. As I understand it, the US was afraid that the 2008 crisis would turn their economy into Japan and began to behave like a good boy, normalizing relations with Russia and China. But it just ended in nothing when it became clear that quantitative easing was working. In general, the beginning of the Obama administration is a short and atypical period of change in rhetoric.

we never explicitly denied Russia from joining NATO.

And the EU has never denied Turkey membership. It is not in politics to publicly refuse such things. This does not mean that the de facto refusal did not occur.

And a lot of analysts are disappointed with Germany and a lesser extent Italy and a few others providing Russia with the machinery they needed to build weapons.

The Russian military-industrial complex has always remained quite separate from other countries. Except for buying electronics.

Germany built the Russian military infrastructure.

It was built by the USSR.

If some fled to Russia it only supports my opinion it wasn’t a real referendum. No one wants to vote in a war zone.

You really want to claim Obama was an exception? Versus America not caring?

Ya sorry Russian industry was built by the west.