[Hiro]

Kaliningrad is a Russian enclave to the west of Lithuania. It appears the EU and NATO have approved the blockade preventing Russia from shipping goods across Lithuania into Kaliningrad.

It sure looks to me like NATO is creating a pretext to enter the war against Russia. And our leader apparently can't even stay on a bicycle without falling over. I wonder what Lithuania was promised to do something so stupid?

Lithuania remembers Russians orc behavior. Any nation has the right to determine who crosses their border and why.

Also, we don't know who our "leader" is.

 

[Hiro]

Do you really think Lithuania all of a sudden decided to blockade goods from Russia? Did you know EU leaders just met in Ukraine and Ukraine is expecting word on EU approval this week? Looks like blackmail to me.

This is the EU and NATO pulling the strings, not Lithuania acting as an independent nation. Things must be looking very bad in Ukraine.

I don't care who is pulling the strings in this case. These former colonies and slave states of Russia are not going quietly into slave state again. There are too many of the current residents that endured that hell. I really don't believe it is anymore complicated than that even if you don't.

The timing is of interest with everything else, but the timing is of less interest when you are living it rather than observing it.

 

[Hiro]

Perhaps Neville Chamberlain can be resurrected to show a piece of paper again and declare peace in our time and it will all go away...

 

[Hiro]

I think someone wants WWIII and it's not me.

Appeasement is not a strategy for keeping evil at bey.

 

[Hiro]

Goods have been flowing across Lithuania for years. The fact the blockade started almost concurrently with Ukraine likely getting admitted to EU is too big a coincidence for me. Who is trying to escalate the war and why? What does the WEC hope to gain? There is no benefit to EU, NATO, Ukraine, or Lithuania that I can see and potentially a lot of bad things.

There is one possibility, although it would appear to be a desperate one. For all practical purposes, Ukraine has lost the war and needs a negotiated settlement, but it has little leverage. I think the blockade and the possible entry into the EU are both nothing more than bargaining chips, at least I hope they are. We have already thrown $40 billion down that hole with nothing to show for it but more dead and wounded.

It is an escalation of the war when you live this far away. When you have lived under Russian oppression and atrocities, it may appear differently.

 

[Hiro]

Iraq is an interesting case for you to bring up. The first time we went into Iraq, it was in response to them doing EXACTLY what Putin has done in Ukraine. Hussein concocted a story about how Kuwait was a threat to Iraq’s sovereignty, and how Kuwait rightfully belonged to Iraq anyway. We (the international coalition) was justified in smacking the despot back into line. In fact, Hussein should have been put on tribunal and hanged after his first stunt.

The second trip into Iraq was a more complicated story, and not as clearly justified, but we weren’t without cause. Everyone likes to recall the story about how it turned out that Hussein didn’t have WMD, but everyone conveniently forgets that he intentionally acted like he did. He did everything in his power to convince the world that he had WMD. And, after we went through Iraq, there was loads of evidence that he’d had WMD there very shortly before our (again, the international coalition, NOT just the US) invasion- but let’s not let historical facts get in the way of a well-crafted media retelling of history.

So, you might ask why it was any of our business that Hussein had WMD, and why we’d be justified in taking them from him. The answer to that is much more clear-cut. Hussein had demonstrated his willingness to use WMD against his neighbors, and to conduct a genocide within his own borders. Part of the agreement that we wouldn’t stretch a new length of rope with his corpse was that he wasn’t to be trusted with WMD ever again, and had to submit to inspections to prove that he didn’t.

The key to understanding Iraq II was that it was in direct response to Hussein’s prior despotism, and that it wasn’t a US invasion. It was a coalition invasion conducted mostly with US assets because we’re one of the few nations on earth with the balls to actually hold a despot accountable.

Afghanistan is easy: they harbored a criminal who waged war on us, on our soil. We told the Afghani government that they could either turn him over to us or face our wrath as if they were the ones who’d attacked us themselves. They chose the latter and they lost their sovereignty for it. They chose poorly.

Russia in Ukraine is nothing like the invasions of either Iraq or Afghanistan. Putin is dying, and dying to be known for being the one to rebuild the Soviet Union. Since shortly after taking the throne, he’s repeatedly invaded former slave states of the Soviet Union in order to claim their resources and land. His adventurism in Ukraine is no different. Ukraine, while imperfect, is an ally of the United States, and deserved no different response than we showed when his ilk tried to steal Kuwait. Even if we didn’t respond directly to the invasion, we should have maintained our embassy, and, when the first bullet hole showed up in one of our walls, we should have destroyed every Russian asset in Ukraine. If they put a second bullet hole into our assets there, we should destroyed every Russian military asset within 100 miles of their border.


Any other burning questions you’re having trouble getting a straight answer to?

Many folks don't want straight answers that go against their preformed or ill informed opinion. Carry on.

 

[Hiro]

That was an almost unintelligible mish-mash of disconnected “points”. You managed to throw a bunch of things together but failed to assemble them into a cogent, or, for that matter, even coherent point.

For lack of any better direction on where you were trying to lead that Jackalope, I’ll respond to what I saw as your two most noteworthy points. If there was something in there you were earnestly trying to draw out, please let me know, and I’ll see if it’s something I can respond to.


If this was some basis for a point you were trying to make, you couldn’t have been more wrong from the start.

The USSR was not “Communist”, unless you meant in the sense of the difference between “Communist” and “communist”, which I suspect you didn’t, because you said that Russia is not “Communist”.

The USSR was not communist. It was an oligarchy. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Khrushchev and all the other more-equals were very wealthy men. I’m not aware of any State that has pulled off real communism. Every government labeled as such as been either an oligarchy, a terrestrial theocracy, or some mix of the two.

Russia is, today, what the USSR was, in 1990, minus the number of slave states they held for the financial benefit of their oligarchs. In 1990, the el jefe oligarch was Gorbachev. Today it is Putin. Under both, the average Russian was allowed to have what the oligarchy was willing to spare them, and drew breath at the pleasure of their leader. Under neither was communism practiced. Neither was communist. Both were/are Commies.

Trying to make a distinction between Russia, today, and the USSR is just pandering to the propaganda they publish about them being “Under New Management”



And you pro-Russian sympathizing apologist sycophants get your information from the same office that issued all of the Soviet propaganda. When you get your talking points, for which you find yourself so clever and sophisticated in parroting, from RT, it comes right off of Putin’s desk, so don’t try to sell your “knowledge” of the situation as being somehow more truthy than the anti-Putin media. It just makes you look silly and simple.

The Tsars never left. They just changed their 'religion' that justified their rule.

 

[Hiro]

Heaven forbid the US engage Russia in a conflict.

It has been going on non stop even before 1945. The story is from the Korean conflict. But, the US occupied parts of Russia after the commies overthrew the aristocracy for their own brand of aristocracy.

Quit clutching your pearls and stand up to authoritarians where ever you can here at home and where warranted far away. Here is a cheat sheet. If you do it farther away, it will be less likely to be a problem next door.