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ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   Edited 3yr ago   41371 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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As for Armenia and Azerbaijan - of course, my sympathies are entirely with Armenia. It's barely a third the size of Azerbaijan with fewer allies and no petro revenues. It's an ancient bastion of Christianity in a part of the world that's been hostile to it for the last thousand years. They've already endured one genocide. But there's very little the West can do here - Armenia is landlocked, has no land corridors to the EU, is a CSTO member, and the EU is in no position to start using energy sanctions on Azerbaijan (the US has more freedom to act, and I'm still holding out hope for Pelosi's visit). I have quite strong feelings about the conflict nonetheless, and if anything, Russia's abject failure to protect its own client state from a genuine case of unwarranted aggression and ethnic cleansing further diminishes my opinion. If there was ever a time Russia could deliver on its promise of upholding Christianity in Asia or of constituting an alternate source of global order, this is it: a small long-suffering Christian nation on Russia's doorstep is under attack from a larger richer Turkic Muslim aggressor, and they have every legal right to intervene, and could do so easily. At the current time, of course, they have the excuse (!) that any potential intervention might provide a distraction from their very important and sincere commitment to several more months of sustained militarised slaughter of Slavs up and down the Dnieper. But what of the 2020 war, when they could have quickly bitchslapped Azerbaijan into accepting the status quo, and proven themselves Armenia's saviour? But no, Putin was greedy and stupid and had no real ideological commitment to helping Armenia, so waited until most of Artsakh had been reconquered by Azerbaijan, then belatedly tried to insert himself as a 'diplomat' (except it turns out, people need to take you seriously for that to work, as we're seeing now). Yet more evidence that Russian civilisation would be a good idea.

Azerbaijan and Turkey consider one another as 'two states, one nation', so naturally Turkey was backing Azerbaijan which is arguably the reason Armenia is losing. Turkey is a decently young country with one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with a GDP per capita of $37k compared to Russia's stagnant economy with GDP per capita of $30k. In short, Russia can not compete with Turkey in West Asia. Also you seem to missing a lot of nuance about the origin of this conflict, basically it started around the time of the dissolution of the USSR, where Armenians living in western azerbaijan wanted their land to become part of the state of armenia while azerbaijan wanted to keep the borders of their national subdivision during USSR. There was a lot of ethnic cleansing on both sides and a lot of people got kicked out of their land. What should have happened was the territory should have been divided along property lines to bring ethnic group holdings into their respective ethnostate as much as possible barring 'islands' within the other's land.

This is all fair, and I'm aware of the complex situation underlying the conflict including the first war in the 90s, and was gliding over complex nuances. Interestingly, back in the early 1920s, Artsakh was going to be been awarded to the Armenia SSR based on predominant ethnic makeup, but Stalin personally intervened to prevent it.

And you're right about Turkey. Armenia has been very unlucky with its neighbours.

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