Ukraine Crisis - Page 14

On December 17 2013 07:20 KwarK wrote:

Serbians wanting the rest of the world to not look too closely at what a nation does to its people and its neighbours.

My point is that the West being more civilized is questionable at best

And, if anything, it's a very recent thing.

Your comment that the West was better is unfounded

It very well might be the fact that it has been for the past 20-30 years, but that's just too short of a period of time to be meaningful, imo.

The only reason why the establishments do nott have to resort to physical violence in Western countries is because there is no real social unrest, despite all the pathology, as people are relatively well off regardless.

Britainians trying to push everyone around.

Colonialism and the Holocaust are this moral superiority? You can keep it to yourself, buddy. 200-300 years my ass. You're ridiculous.

Final Solution? Like with Native Americans?

And do I have to remind you that we got within the soviet occupation zone thanks to our great allies, Brits and Yanks?

The anti-Cummunist Uprising lasted until 1963.

And 99% of history? You are just reinforcing the stupid American stereotype, haha.

On December 17 2013 07:58 DeepElemBlues wrote:


Only if you completely ignore, well, everything.



I can't disagree, 300 years is pretty recent if you're talking about human history.



Only if you completely ignore, well, everything.



I agree, 200-300 years of clear and undeniable Western material and moral superiority is too short a time to make a judgment.



You can always tell the difference between people who live in a country where the government has been subordinate to the people for a while in law and custom and people who live in a country without that history. 'The only reason the government doesn't put a boot on your neck is because you don't bother it.' A proper attitude if you lived in a country that for 99% of its history was precisely that, but not for Western countries that are "questionably" superior to countries whose history is precisely that.



As opposed to you and zeo trying to push him around because his country didn't try to go Final Solution and wasn't a murderous repressive Big Brother country as little as 15 years ago for Serbia and 25 for Poland? And it's Britons, or British, or if you want to be hipster and anachronistic, Britishers. Britainians is not a word.

In reality you consider only your 'bloc' civilised, and everything else inferior, because you are most likely completely ignorant to the reality that goes on in the other bloc.

People bashing CIS (and also Middle East but that's another subject) countries are the ones who tend to place Tallinn, Warsaw and Kiev just a one hour car trip away from Moscow, and declare they've been inferior to the West for 300 years because they were "Russians anyway".

On December 17 2013 09:25 DeepElemBlues wrote:


Colonialism and genocide are not exclusive to Western countries and never have been. At the same time one Western country was committing the genocide of the Holocaust, literally every other Western country in the world was at war with it. Colonialism? A fact of human life since the creation of civilization. For thousands of years before there was a "West," there was imperialism and colonialism. Countries that were "colonized" by the West had been colonized and were colonizing their neighbors ever since they had neighbors to colonize or be colonized by. Preceding - and overlapping - the three centuries of Western colonization, the societies we today lump together as "the West" had been attacked and colonized by imperialists under the flag of Islam. Before that, it was centuries of assault and colonization by such groups as the Huns, Magyars, Avars, Mongols, etc. Who came from parts of the world that have never been classified as being part of the "West." What were "Eastern" countries like Russia, China and Japan doing during this time of Western colonialism's hey-day? Oops, being imperialists themselves, killing a lot more people than Western imperialists did.



90% of Native Americans died within a century of Columbus landing in the West Indies with never even seeing a white man. 90% of Native Americans had been dead for a century before the British used smallpox blankets as a weapon a half-dozen or so times, in a limited fashion, against tribes they were at war with. What killed them? Exposure to European diseases they had no immunity to, diseases the Europeans at the time barely recognized existed, much less how they worked. The Indians practiced ethnic cleansing and yes even genocide against each other for thousands of years before the Europeans showed up. There was never a comprehensive policy of exterminating or ethnic cleansing of Indians except for the 1820s-1840s with the Indians in the southeast. Whites migrated to an area, tried to push the Indians out, the Indians tried to push them out, the same as Indians had been doing to each other since time immemorial. Only difference is white men won in a very convincing fashion. So somehow that makes them worse. Mass migrations result in war and ethnic cleansing, it seems unavoidable. I'm not going to take responsibility for shit people did when my ancestors were still being oppressed by the British back in Ireland and that I do not agree with and would not have done if I could go back to that time unchanged from who I am now.

You gonna bitch out the Danes and the Germans because 1500 years ago people living there mass migrated to the British Isles and culturally cleansed the hell out of large areas of it? You gonna bitch out the Norwegians, Swedish, and Danes because 300 years after that the people living there did it all over again, in Britain, and France, and Russia, and basically anywhere the dragon ships could reach? You gonna bitch out everyone in Hungary because 1600 years ago their ancestors (Magyars, Avars, etc.) ethnically cleansed the people living there? You gonna bitch out the descendants of the Huns because they were annihilating the Magyars which made the Magyars go west in the first place? You gonna bitch out the Mongolians because 800 years ago they ethnically cleansed and massacred more people than anyone else did in history? Gonna bitch out Iraqis because 3000 years ago they ethnically cleansed the Jews from the Levant (they did let them come back 70 years later). Gonna bitch out Italians because 2000 years ago Romans cleansed the Jews from the Levant again to such a degree that they were basically a nonentity in their own homeland for 1900 years?

The simple fact is you can lay this shit at the door of every and any nation, culture, or society that has ever existed on the face of the planet earth. So which nations, cultures, and groups have done the most to reduce it? Hint: those nations, cultures and groups lumped together under a four-letter word that starts with "W" and ends with "est."



Brits and Yanks drove Soviet tanks into Warsaw in 1944? Brits and Yanks made the Soviets hold back so the Germans could annihilate the Home Army? Funny that you blame the countries that didn't march soldiers into your country for other countries marching soldiers into your country.

And why did they last so long? Because the Brits and Yanks were smuggling money and guns into your country for the resistance to use against the Soviet occupation.

Why did Solidarity succeed? Because the Brits and Yanks went to the Pope and they agreed to use Vatican channels to smuggle a ton of money to Solidarity, and the Brits and Yanks made an international environment where the USSR couldn't simply drive tanks into cities and crush dissent anymore the way they had in Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and Poland itself two decades before.

And 99% of history? You are just reinforcing the stupid American stereotype, haha.

Yes, for 99% of Poland's history, since a Polish national consciousness arose, it was either a feudal and oppressive confederation ruled by Poles, or non-Russian Slavs, or Germans, or Austrians, or Russians, or a quasi-fascist nationalist government under the Pilsudski types that tried to ethnically cleanse Ukrainians out of southeastern Poland, or a communist dictatorship run by Russians that tried to ethnically cleanse Poles out of southeastern Poland.

On December 17 2013 10:03 Nyxisto wrote:
Well then take it from someone who has relatives coming from the East Germany, it was utter shit. I guess you're convinced the Berlin Wall was built to keep all the envious Westerners out because it was so awesome on the inside. There's nothing more idiotic than this new age West hate from people that had it so bad that they were occupied playing video games all day and spending their parents money.

On December 17 2013 09:01 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
How did this turn into X country/region is more civilised that Y country/region?
I blame Kwark.
Whether or not people in different cultures are more or less "civilised" whatever than means has nothing to do with the events in Ukraine. Talk about that please.

On December 17 2013 10:11 EtherealBlade wrote:


And do you feel the Berlin Wall has made your relatives less civilized than the average BRD citizen?

On December 17 2013 10:11 EtherealBlade wrote:


And do you feel the Berlin Wall has made your relatives less civilized than the average BRD citizen?

On December 17 2013 10:18 KwarK wrote:

East Germans are part of the same westernised liberal culture as West Germans. Poles have also historically been much more westernised than the Russians who repressed them and conform quite readily with the rest of the Northern European cultural sphere. I have little doubt that had anyone given the Poles a chance for more than a few decades their attempts at a modern nation state would have succeeded and I am optimistic for their post Soviet and now EU future. And the Balkan states are still a post Ottoman mess after a hundred years. There are different cultural histories with their own legacies across Europe and the liberal western civilised one has shallower roots in some places than others.

The Baltic states though, not so much. Different cultural history and influences, more Asiatic than European.

On December 17 2013 10:58 EtherealBlade wrote:
Exactly, and this is why I don't like anyone being the judge of a culture distant from their own. The motto of the EU is united in diversity. Was it ever intended to reshape the continent in its founders image? Even though many EU politicians have cultural issues, perceived human rights etc. on their agenda, the EU itself does not have strong institutions to control these areas so these are the members' internal issues.
I like to think that the EU should stay what it was meant to be in the early post war era, a cooperation to foster trade, the free movement of labor and capital, while letting everyone mind their own business.[...]

But I feel Russia has been antagonized too long over issues that really don't concern the EU anyway, and this time Ukraine is the victim of the sour relations.

Nice, entertaining read!
I especially like the part where you state the Huns were annihilating Magyars. Sorry but you mixed that one up, the Huns disappeared over 400 years before the Magyars showed up at Europe's doorstep.

Interesting sense of justice might I say, the region suddenly becoming that important when the USSR was showing signs of weakness.

Too bad their sense of justice wasn't so strong during 1956 or 1968.

Funny how this sense is now working for the "benefit" of Aghanistan, Iraq and we already have a US senator working his senses in Ukraine.

This sense seems to work selectively against some strategically less important countries though.

Sorry but Poland was one of the most enlightened countries in the early modern age, electing their own king, ruled by a Parliament, long before the bloody revolutions took place in the West.

No they didn't, re-read your history books man. smh. Magyars started showing up at Europe's doorstep in the late 4th century. There are several different phases of Avar and Magyar migration from approx. 380 to approx. 910. The earlier movements caused mostly by pressure from the Huns and later by the Mongols.

The Western powers were sending covert aid to Hungarian and Czech resistance the same as they did to Poles. So now it's our bad for not starting World War III to save them from the Red Army? You are not a reasonable person. If we had, you'd be sitting there bitching about how we started World War III and how half of Europe still glows in the dark because of our warmongering.

We do something, we wrong. We don't do something, we wrong. We act in our interests, we greedy bastards who don't care. We act not obviously in our interest, we just on the hunt for new ways to cheat people. Why should we care when your standards clearly shift so you can always criticize us?

You are aware that these elections of the king and this parliament were solely for the benefit of the aristocracy, and in the end so guaranteed the dominance of the aristocracy over both king and peasantry (and townsfolk) that Poland was easy pickings for neighboring countries as its national strength had been sapped and misdirected for centuries by that aristocracy? Sure the rights and liberties the aristocracy gave themselves are similar to many modern ones that are extended to everybody, but sorry at the time they existed to give the aristocracy free reign to do more or less whatever they wanted, hamstrung the king so he didn't have the power to stop them, and helped legalize the exploitation of the masses by the aristocracy, whose short-sighted greed eventually destroyed Poland's vitality and left it open to being carved up.

Germany had elections for its "king" too, it sure as hell wasn't a progressive system of political enfranchisement there either. It was solely for the purpose of strengthening the aristocracy at the expense of the king and the masses. At the time, towns were starting to make a comeback, and kings viewed townspeople as their natural allies against the aristocracy, as the townspeople viewed the king as a natural ally of theirs as well. So all across Europe, and at about the same time (later in the East than the West of Europe), you find aristocrats creating associations and 'parliaments' where they created laws to strengthen themselves at the expense of the king and the commoners.

On December 17 2013 09:25 DeepElemBlues wrote:


Colonialism and genocide are not exclusive to Western countries and never have been. At the same time one Western country was committing the genocide of the Holocaust, literally every other Western country in the world was at war with it. Colonialism? A fact of human life since the creation of civilization. For thousands of years before there was a "West," there was imperialism and colonialism. Countries that were "colonized" by the West had been colonized and were colonizing their neighbors ever since they had neighbors to colonize or be colonized by. Preceding - and overlapping - the three centuries of Western colonization, the societies we today lump together as "the West" had been attacked and colonized by imperialists under the flag of Islam. Before that, it was centuries of assault and colonization by such groups as the Huns, Magyars, Avars, Mongols, etc. Who came from parts of the world that have never been classified as being part of the "West." What were "Eastern" countries like Russia, China and Japan doing during this time of Western colonialism's hey-day? Oops, being imperialists themselves, killing a lot more people than Western imperialists did.



90% of Native Americans died within a century of Columbus landing in the West Indies with never even seeing a white man. 90% of Native Americans had been dead for a century before the British used smallpox blankets as a weapon a half-dozen or so times, in a limited fashion, against tribes they were at war with. What killed them? Exposure to European diseases they had no immunity to, diseases the Europeans at the time barely recognized existed, much less how they worked. The Indians practiced ethnic cleansing and yes even genocide against each other for thousands of years before the Europeans showed up. There was never a comprehensive policy of exterminating or ethnic cleansing of Indians except for the 1820s-1840s with the Indians in the southeast. Whites migrated to an area, tried to push the Indians out, the Indians tried to push them out, the same as Indians had been doing to each other since time immemorial. Only difference is white men won in a very convincing fashion. So somehow that makes them worse. Mass migrations result in war and ethnic cleansing, it seems unavoidable. I'm not going to take responsibility for shit people did when my ancestors were still being oppressed by the British back in Ireland and that I do not agree with and would not have done if I could go back to that time unchanged from who I am now.

You gonna bitch out the Danes and the Germans because 1500 years ago people living there mass migrated to the British Isles and culturally cleansed the hell out of large areas of it? You gonna bitch out the Norwegians, Swedish, and Danes because 300 years after that the people living there did it all over again, in Britain, and France, and Russia, and basically anywhere the dragon ships could reach? You gonna bitch out everyone in Hungary because 1600 years ago their ancestors (Magyars, Avars, etc.) ethnically cleansed the people living there? You gonna bitch out the descendants of the Huns because they were annihilating the Magyars which made the Magyars go west in the first place? You gonna bitch out the Mongolians because 800 years ago they ethnically cleansed and massacred more people than anyone else did in history? Gonna bitch out Iraqis because 3000 years ago they ethnically cleansed the Jews from the Levant (they did let them come back 70 years later). Gonna bitch out Italians because 2000 years ago Romans cleansed the Jews from the Levant again to such a degree that they were basically a nonentity in their own homeland for 1900 years?

The simple fact is you can lay this shit at the door of every and any nation, culture, or society that has ever existed on the face of the planet earth. So which nations, cultures, and groups have done the most to reduce it? Hint: those nations, cultures and groups lumped together under a four-letter word that starts with "W" and ends with "est."