• VonCesaw@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Only devil’s advocate in war I will ever advocate for is “what happens to the populace when their government eventually gets collapsed”

    Russian government is corrupt as hell and the military is fucked, dont get me wrong, but if we get a repeat of Brazil/Korea/etc. where a ‘west-friendly’ dictator is installed, I would rather them be under their current gov

    • PugJesus@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Whether a Western-backed dictator would be better or worse is hard to say. All dictators are, of course, terrible, but it’s difficult to discern just how terrible each one is before they come to power. In any case, we can and should demand better of our governments than that. We may be deeply flawed democracies, but we are still democracies, and must stand in support of our ideals, not dictators, no matter how West-friendly. Fuck, at least some of the time.

      • VonCesaw@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        From history, the dictators are never better than the alternative. USA owned West Germany hiring ex-Nazi elites to run the gov, Pinochet refining torture methods for the CIA, all of South Korea’s dictators post-Korean War

        • PugJesus@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I meant some dictators are better than others, not that some dictators are better than less autocratic forms of government.

        • PugJesus@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Compare American-backed dictators and non-American-backed dictators.

          Not a lot of difference.

          • orrk@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            there actually is, the amount of civilians killed, because unlike the soviets, the Americans kept a leash of theirs.

            like you want to compare dictators? while bad, Pinochet killed fewer people than pol-pot

            • PugJesus@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              the Americans kept a leash of theirs.

              Not really.

              like you want to compare dictators? while bad, Pinochet killed fewer people than pol-pot

              Pol Pot was supported by China, not the Sovs. What’s more, Pol Pot was hardly an ‘average’ outcome.

        • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Does it count if the last president wasn’t pro West and did everything a Russian asset would do?

      • VonCesaw@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        North Korea is as it is BECAUSE of what the US did to South Korea. When your neighbor, previous countrymen get taken over by a foreign occupying force and you have no allies to protect you, you get weird and reclusive in self-defense

        • orrk@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          what are you talking about? North Korea is literally the Chinese created Buffer state, if you want to talk about legitimacy, the state of Korea before the China/Russia backed civil war (North Korea somehow had modern Russian MIGs, and most of their army spoke only Chinese) is what because south Korea.

          North Korea is an isolationist because it is a despotic dictatorship.

    • Shalakushka@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s Russia. It will be a dictator or nothing, it is their culture and has been for centuries.

      • uis@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah-yeah. All Russian are genetic slaves and should be sanctioned, cross border naked and only on foot, except those who have millions of stolen money in bank account are definetly not genetic slaves, but honorary citizens.

        • Shalakushka@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          That’s not quite what I meant, but I understand how it could be taken that way. I’m just kind of sour because they had ridiculous strongman after ridiculous strongman in the Tsars, had a genuine worker’s revolt, and then squandered it on ridiculous strongman after ridiculous strongman, then that government folded only to be replaced by a ridiculous strongman. The Russian people deserve way better than that, but it sort of seems like they don’t feel like better is possible. I can sympathize, Americans are similar that way, and I think Americans will elect empty suit after empty suit, because American culture is superficial in the same way that Russian culture is fatalistic about power and corruption.

            • PugJesus@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              News flash that nobody knows: Nicholas II was not a strong man. He didnt even want the job, and his cousin Kaiser William had to teach him how to Czar.

              Okay, so everyone who is reading this but isn’t up on their early 20th century history knows - Nicholas II did not particularly want to be Tsar. But he considered it his duty and divine position to be an ‘unshakeable autocrat’ anyway who opposed democratic reforms at every turn. Nicholas had to have one of his close relatives threaten to shoot himself in the head with a revolver in front of Nicholas before Nicholas allowed the protesters their demands for a very defanged parliament in 1905.

              Also, it was not a genuine worker’s revolt. WWI happened because the German and Russian parliaments declared war while Nich and William were trying to find ways to avoid it.

              This is also hogwash. The February Revolution was a genuine worker’s revolt characterized by spontaneous mass strikes, riots, and refusal of orders by war-weary soldiers at the front once they heard of the unrest. WW1 was a tangled mess, but neither Kaiser Wilhelm nor Nicholas searched in earnest for solutions, because they thought the other parties would back down, or that it would be a short war. Neither, of course, was true. But they were genuinely friendly in their correspondence on account of the royal families of Europe being one somewhat inbred family tree, so some historical revisionists like to assume that they’re innocent.

              Germany could not compete against the sheer number of bodies that Russia could send to the front, so they exiled Lenin to Russia to destabilize it with the intention of assassinating him afterwards and taking over.

              Another inaccuracy. Germany didn’t have trouble with the ‘sheer number of bodies’ that Russia could send to the front. The Eastern Front in WW1 they were actually considerably successful in. It was simply a desire to refocus all of their forces, and Austro-Hungary’s, to other fronts by ending the war with Russia sooner. Lenin did not arrive in Russia until the February Revolution had already occurred.

              It did not go as planned, as Nicholas was glad to abdicate, thinking that one of the Eurpean royal family would allow he and his to retire in a countryside villa somewhere. That also did not go as planned.

              It was not a lack of offers from other royal families that condemned him, it was the fact that the workers soviets’ hated his fucking guts and would have killed him if the Provisional Government tried to ferry him out.

    • Deiskos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I personaly don’t give rat’s arse what happens to russians when their government collapses. They brought it onto themselves, both by being “apolitical about it all” or by supporting and cheering the government all the way back ten years ago when it was just “little green men” and “polite people”.

    • EternalNicodemus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      As a brazilian being screwed by our corrupt communist president but hate the US imperialism as well, we should just nuke Brazil ☺️