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To rephrase/edit a comment I posted here 3 months ago: I think this whole sh*tshow is yet another consequence of Western Europeans generally lacking a perspective on their own continent’s history and acting accordingly. It has been true in almost all cases that the Russian army blunders and stumbles during the initial phase of any war, even regardless of it aggressing or defending, but then shows itself to be capable of gradually learning and adapting even if the final outcome is defeat, as in WW1 for example. See the Brusilov offensive of 1916 in that case, characterized by John Keegan as “the greatest victory seen on any front [of WW1] since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before” (as quoted in Wikipedia). And there are cases when the important lessons are only learned after the war, such as the war against the Japanese in 1904-5 (which, by the way, wasn’t a cakewalk for the Japanese army by any means). I assume this is the consequence of the intellectual sloth and naïve romanticism that generally characterize the Russian people, the legacy of languishing as slaves for centuries etc., probably the Mongol yoke also has something to do with it, but this is largely beside the point. There are also a few cases when that initial period of incompetence is rather short, like during the naval war against the Ottomans in 1788-91, whom were soundly beaten.
In the case of WW2, the Red Army clearly demonstrated an ability to gradually gain competence, although the results generally appeared only in the final phase of the war. The offensives in the territory of present-day Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Poland in the summer of 1944 or the invasion of Manchuria in 1945 were impressive by anyone’s standards. The Russians are slow to learn maybe, but they do learn. Even the Afghanistan war wasn’t just a series of one blunder after another, just look at the battle for ‘Hill’ 3234 for example.
It seems that Western Europeans apparently have this usual tendency to concentrate on Russian blunders while ignoring every other factor and then assume that winning against them will be easy, and also have a way of convincing their big American brother of this.
I would say it is a result of hyper moralism, a view of history that reads francis fukuyama as a prophet and the dumbing down of politics. The way Russians are being treated is similar to how transphobes were treated during peak wokeness. They can't be acknowledged to have any legitimate concerns, they are motivated by evil and we all have to performatively show our disgust on social media. It becomes impossible to have a sane, rational and calm debate regarding topics when they go BLM 2020.
We can't have a debate regarding war aims, what the security architecture of Europe should look like, whether pax Americana is feasible in a world in which the US is 17% of global GDP or whether Ukraine in NATO even makes sense. Just like we couldn't have a calm, rational debate about what defund the police will actually look like. There is just people performatively screeching slogans.
This has some roots back to the Afghanistan war. We could never have a debate or calm discussion. It couldn't be treated like a normal war because we were fighting "terrorists" and that apparently justified anything. Nobody could explain a path to victory, just slogans. It is amazing that it took five months from 20 years of Afghanistan fiasco to the start of the next forever war. At least after Vietnam there was a long cool down period.
Also it took years for the true scale of lying and issues in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq to be revealed by whistle blowers. During those wars the media was far more critical than they are now. Sooner or later there will be a Daniel Ellsberg of Ukraine and most likely we will find out the lies and propaganda for this war were at least as spectacular as they were in the previous wars.
I think it's more people just not really being able to handle getting live footage of any bad thing happening in the world without wanting to intervene and completely disregarding any sort of a cost-benefit analysis or nuanced view of human conflict. Ukraine and Palestine are both dragging out beyond any sane historical need since there's an overwhelming need to keep rehashing them in the court of public opinion.
If live footage of atrocities motivated anyone at all there would have been a scorched earth campaign to clease Brazil and Mexico of gangs, followed by seperatists in Ethiopia and Sudan. Funkytown remains one of the most gruesome videos out there of human suffering being gleefully meted out by enthusiastic participants fully aware of what they were doing, and there are countless amputated corpses scattered in the vast Brazillian forests where the flayings and murders were filmed specifically to be shared with the families of the deceased. Ukraine and Palestine are relevant for retarded domestic political reasons in any country that professes to care, and for that reason livestreamed mass murders in Sudan are just dismissrd as sandshit.
It’s funny you should mention that. I vaguely remember the bygone days when ISIS captured the attention of the Western media for a relatively short period of time, and the antics of the ISIS executioner ‘Jihadi John’ were getting plastered all over television and online news. There was one TV report after another, segments, outrage, basically just an insane amount of attention, at least for a short time and I was like…really?! Not even 50 or 100 miles away from some of these TV studios, Mexican cartels were torturing, beheading, dismembering and flaying their victims on camera like it was just another Tuesday, and still pretty much nobody in the West cared besides the regulars of a few gore websites. I get it that their victims weren’t white but the imbalance was still sort of crazy.
The unspoken gentlemans agreement of western inviolability actually does hold some weight: do whatever you want to your own people just dont attack whites. ISIS hung up dozens of men on meat hooks and then slit their throats so that their blood ran in rivers down the drain, but its Kayla whateverherface that captured global attention because some white do gooder didn't enjoy the normal aura protection they had during the hippie traip era. Mexican cartels just slaughter paisas in villages so urban fresas (white girls) don't even pay attention. Ukrainians and Russians and that entire warsaw pact area aren't thought as White, they're slavs doing slavshit, so they're unimportant.
Jihadi John and ISIS mistake was to openly declare war on the west and encourage actual action domestically to kill whites. If they stuck with killing Sunnis and Kurds they'd be dismissed as sandshit barbarians unimportant to the west. Kill your own and don't kill the westerner and no media will pay attention. This obviously means Taiwans only line of defense is encouraging as many whites to migrate there as possible, and so their courting of MAGA influencers is to raise the hostage value of white sexpats.
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