Nota bene for the 80 IQ contingent, once their fingers come out of their ears:
This does not therefore = "Ukraine Is Winning", something which we've never said, unless you think France "won" WWI, after having its countryside obliterated, sacrificing 40% of its domestic production, as well as 1.4M military dead, 4.2 million wounded, with 1M of those crippled for life, as well as another 250K civilian casualties, and thousands of pieces of unexploded ordnance from both sides littering the countryside, still going off to the present day. Furthermore scarring the French national psyche to the point it has never really recovered, and tilting the economic slope straight into Depression as soon as the euphoria of the end of the conflict wore off, and teeing up an even bigger battlefield do-over in just 20 years. That's the "winning" Ukraine has to look forward too, even if Putin retreated tomorrow unilaterally.
It simply points out that Putin's ongoing megalomaniacal folly has Russia headed to the exact same place now, and at warp speed. The dictionary is going to have to make "Putinic victory" the upgrade from merely "pyrrhic".
But hey, what's a little thing like 40-60x the casualties of their ill-advised 1980s Afghanistan debacle in only 1200 days, between friends? Keep huffing that hopeium hookah, kids.
Related: Russia is now tying ending their latest Ukrainian invasion with NATO withdrawing troops from the Baltic NATO-member states. Sh'yeah, that'll happen, when monkeys fly outta Trump's butt.
This is like a surrounded third-strike bank robber saying he'll only release the hostages if the police throw down their guns and go home. Clearly, Put-poleon isn't the only delusional psychotic in the Russian government.
12 comments:
No. No, I’m quite sure you accusing of stupidity when you said Russia would lose. You’re a little late backpedaling
Putin's second best move was to pull out when the air assault folded like a cheap lawn chair. (1st was not to start.) But now with a million dead or wounded Putin will be hard pressed to find any avenue to getting out that does not include a free skydiving lesson from a 6th story window.
UA has followed their strategic drone strike with an air on air victory downing a SU35. Most likely the conflict will continue till one of the combatants economies collapses.
First of all, that was almost English. Keep working on that GED, buddy.
Second, I'm not backpedalling on anything.
Third, for your memory which is almost as broken as your attempts at grammar:
Russia can never win.
Russia can lose.
Both countries can lose (Hint for the reading impaired, like you: that would be where things are now).
None of these have changed.
If this still stumps you, find someone smarter, and have them explain it to you. Maybe with crayon pictures, IDK.
Fair.
You are correct as to the epic fail that is Russian military methods, but your historiography vis-a-vis France in WW1 is misleading.
A costly victory is still a victory; France & the Anglosphere effectively broke the German Army in the One Hundred Days Offensive, and Germany agreed to an armistice before Allied Armies set foot in German soil. This came right on the heels of the March 1918 German Offensive which resulted in a little over 250,000 casualties on both sides, with Germany’s losses being their elite troops (gutting their army) and the Allies losing only regular troops. Furthermore, the French countryside was not “obliterated;” northeastern France was ravaged, but everywhere else was spared. The catch is that northeastern France was where most of its industrial base was located, but even this was able to recover fairly quickly. The victory/massive death toll also did not create the depression, since that occurred over a decade after the war ended; ironically, France had basically zero unemployment following the war. Finally, the 20-year truce was achieved at the negotiating table; General Foch repeatedly argued that France should not squander an opportunity to annex the West Bank of the Rhine, thus depriving Germany of staging grounds, while France had the upper hand. The demilitarization was a compromise solution, not a military one.
The casualties didn't create the depression; post-war debt and inflation did that. And WWI was ultimately an own-goal, settling nothing, leading directly to teeing up WWII, destroying Franc's worldwide concerns, which birthed another century-plus of post-colonial disasters in nation after nation that mankind is still paying for (Vietnam, Lebanon, Haiti, Iraq, Syria, and the bleeding ass-wound that is Quebec being six obvious examples) , and giving France a case of Stockholm Syndrome that has lasted virtually unbroken from 1919 to the present day.
Pretty much anything France touched after the monarchy is shit, including France itself. It's like a family sending its retarded children to race in Formula 1. Forever.
Roy
Sifting thru information that one's experience has trained might--or might not-- have multiple layers of both deception and self-deception demands draining effort. Especially so when one is persuaded that the analysis has more than 'well, that's interesting...' importance. As in affecting one's children and grandchildren via a shaping of economic reality and thru that political options and from that culture.
My own conclusion: from the second day of the assault on Ukraine, certainly by the second week, several sources convinced me that the outline Aesop advances had, if not precision, significant probability.
And leads me at least figuratively if not actually to weep at what war is doing yet again. And that not only because of the vast squandering of resources, the many dead and the many who will therefore never be born, the defacing of humanity. The whole picture reminds me of me. It encourages/warns me to pursue humility in thinking thru how to recognize my own self-deception, advance my caring for others, all while maintaining the strength to do so.
All the while, echoing in my mind I hear "Some trust in chariots and some in horses" and appreciate even more the next line: "...but we will remember the name of the Lord."
France is a pretty country. Wait, WAS a pretty country. They imported a jillion moslems and that's gonna ugly it up pretty bad.
Worst problem I had in France, was all the frenchmen.
Don't need to go back, me.
The Great Depression wasn’t caused by WW1 in any country; it would still have happened so long as government interventionists were in charge. Same with post-colonial problems; the socialists were there before the war, and were still there after the war.
Arguing thusly is specious. There are always booms and busts, but the Great Depression was out of all proportion exactly because of WWI, beyond any other excuse. Post a timeline graph of the debt of the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany from 1840-1940. The debt of all the participants because of the war was massively disproportionate, and while it did, in fact, result from their pre-war policies, those too were all turned up to 11, exactly and solely because of the Great War (before we started numbering them).
Wars always destroy kingdoms, because winners and losers.
And it always trades an immediate problem for a permanent one.
Huge wars destroy entire empires, for the same reason.
WWI eliminated the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires.
WWII eliminated the British, French, and Japanese.
The Cold War eliminated the Soviet empire.
And so it goes.
And France's colonial problems had little to do with socialists, and everything to do with being France. The French are simply pigs, and cannot even rule their own country adequately, anytime since they beheaded Louis XVI, and not really for quite some time before that either. The French never made provision for making their colonies self-governing or self-sufficient, instead simply sucking out all the resources and then departing once their presence became untenable. (Spain had the same problem.) This is why former French colonies always turned into post-colonial sh*tholes, whereas former British colonies had a fighting chance not to do so. Any socialism before or after was a serendipitous appearance by communist opportunists, never letting the inevitable post-colonial crisis to go to waste, and simultaneously compounding the results.
Au contraire, the crisis of 1921 was more severe than in 1929. World War 1, and the ending thereof, had more to do with the first than the second, and during the “Roaring Twenties,” nations could and did pay down their debts. That they stopped doing so was a deliberate choice, not one forced upon them.
“Wars always destroy kingdoms, because winners and losers” only applies in a total war setting. World War 1 didn’t destroy the French or British or Belgian or Japanese empires; their demise was not made inevitable by winning the war in 1918. Their postwar choices over the next 30 years did that; it would be better to call it “squandering” rather than “they didn’t actually win in the first place.” Poland made the same mistake when it squandered victory in 1920 against the Bolsheviks and didn’t establish Belarusian/Ukrainian allied governments/buffer states. Same with the USA’s left-wing government fostering the growth of the Soviet empire after WW2.
France has had a large socialist footprint for nearly 2 centuries by now; dismissing them as pigs who can’t run a country/empire is simplistic and ahistorical. Algeria got most of the attention, as it was integrated into Metropolitan France, and their departure from Syria/Lebanon was as painless as Britain departing from Egypt. The savagery in their sub-Saharan colonies matched the savagery of India-Pakistan, which Britain made no effort to un-f*ck before leaving.
I’m also curious as to why you included Iraq in your six previous examples; France never colonized Iraqi provinces.
The world economy didn't collapse in 1921.
WWI destroyed the empires named. That it didn't destroy everyone's empire is proof of nothing in particular.
And total war is not a requirement. France self-destructed simply by supporting our revolution to the point of bankruptcy.
And the proof of France's incompetence is their serial self-destructions, and every colony they ever had. Their departure from Lebanon and Syria were only painless to France. The aftermath in each of those former colonies has made them top-tier shitholes unto the present day.
Including Iraq was my mistake; it was a British mandate, cobbled together much like Yugoslavia, with monumental indifference to conditions on the ground.
The savagery in regard to India/Pakistan has nothing to do with British colonial incompetence, and everything to do with Islamic zealotry, which couldn't be unfucked anywhere short of nuclear annihilation.
NTTAWWT.
If you look at almost every current trouble spot on the planet, in nearly every case the problem is militant Islam, unable to get along with anyone, anywhere.
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