This period of peace in Western Europe is pretty special and I would like to keep it that way, thx
This period of war in Eastern Europe is pretty shit and I would like Western Europe to take it more seriously, thx
So you’re saying we should invade Poland?
I mean there was a meme about the German Army was sending troops to Poland.
Jap, hier: https://lemmy.ca/post/29326078
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Western Europe getting involved could be so much worse.
Let’s remind ourselves you fight for your country, we on the other hand have nuclear weapons and rising fascism all over…
So in account of humanity thanks for keeping Russia’s shit out.
FYI, I’m not Ukrainian. I’m Romanian. We have more skin in the game than Germany or France though. If Ukraine falls, Moldova falls 24 hours later, and allowing our brother country to go back under Russian domination is pretty unthinkable.
Even without that existential issue, allowing democratically minded Europeans trying to walk the same path we walked 25 years ago get invaded by Russia without as much help as we can give them seems horrific to me.
To be clear i agree.
I do feel for the Russian people that will suffer Putin’s decisions, but i personally wouldn’t concede one bit of Ukrainian soil to that fucker.
I wish my country was helping. That said, as a French without any skin in the game, let me tell you we don’t even have skin in our own games. (If you followed any news of us you know)
It’s not like any of us are ever being asked what to do. And I do genuinely fear our so called democracies are gonna implode. And when they do, diplomacy with Russia will get bad for everyone.
That’s because the EU was created with the purpose of making an interconnected market where going to war is simply way too costly.
As the other commenter said, there is a war in Europe though.
Ah but don’t forget, we in the UK left the EU. Bo Jo already considered invading the Netherlands once.
Oh man, that’d go over well. I wanna see those battleplans.
This period of peace in Western Europe
France: “We haven’t gone to war with Germany in decades!”
Me: “What about Libya?”
France: …
Me: “Algeria? Argentina? Rwanda? The Ivory Coast? Somalia? Chad? Basque Country? Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia?”
France: sound of FAMAS F1 cocking
Achtually the french army doesn’t use FAMAS anymore and they replaced them with german made HK416.
Not gonna argue about the rest though
First Elsass-Lothringen, now Heckler & Koch… when are they going to stop taking our stuff?
(Yes, I know the actual history is more complex. I’m just memeing.)
American students every couple weeks
American Economics Professor: “We pulled ourselves out of the Great Depression by entering WW2”
American Economics Student: “I can’t afford my car payment and my rent just doubled. When can we re-invade the South Pacific?”
And nothing to do with those pesky socialist reforms of the new deal. No this social reforms ruined everything! Must kill for equity!
In fairness, if you get under the hood of the New Deal benefits, they relieved a lot of immediate suffering and mobilized a workforce that had been functionally abandoned by the private sector.
But they didn’t “grow the economy” in the same way as the enormous investment in the Military Industrial Complex achieved. The Citizens Conservation Corps and the Social Security Administration didn’t create the kind of high paying engineering and manufacturing jobs that state demand for thousands of new tanks and ships achieved.
WW2 full mobilization of the economy wasn’t just taking in the slack of a depressed market. It was a command economy in all but name, dictating every aspect of the industrial chain, from extraction to expenditure to recovery and recycling.
The tragedy of WW2 is that we could only permit this kind of logistical achievement for the purpose of joining a bloodbath in Europe, North Africa, and East Asia. As soon as Roosevelt passed, Truman began reprivatizing the economy as quickly as possible.
Yeah that’s fair. But the works and practice in mobilizing the workforce in the new deal played a big part in the US having industrial capability prior to WWII. Not mentioning other logistics, the power grid improvement alone may have made the difference in the war effort even being possible for the US. After the war private industry continued to benefit from cheap energy coming from those same projects. Hell if there’s a miuntain range in your state you’re almost certainly getting some of your power from a hydro plant made in the 30’s.
But the works and practice in mobilizing the workforce in the new deal played a big part in the US having industrial capability prior to WWII.
Hard to power the 1940s industrial economy without coal. And hard to generate coal without an electrification of the Tennessee Valley. Without a doubt.
Hell if there’s a miuntain range in your state you’re almost certainly getting some of your power from a hydro plant made in the 30’s.
Given his attitude towards public works, it’s very funny that Hoover has the nation’s largest dam named after him.
There’s also the west coast. The damming of the Columbia, while a natural disaster, made the region viable for manufacture and ship building. In some ways it lead to the possibility for the tech industry as well for better or worse.
I wish. Our students are kittens compared to European students. The police are going to riot anyways, stop bringing the kid’s gloves.
Just europe?
Yes, we have decades between (direct involvement in) wars!!
We didn’t even spend actual money on war stuff the last few decades.But we sure are gonna do it now, we need to protect our drinking water (for the coming water wars) and update our firewalls (for the coming Skynet wars).
in the US we call that 9th grade
You misspelled “capitalists”.
Everyone in Europe killing each other every generation predates capitalism. Capitalism did increase the scale though; after the fall of the western roman empire, we didn’t see armies of that size until Napoleon managed to draft a million men in a country of 30 million.
Perhaps you would prefer “the ruling class”?
Lmfao, sorry (not sorry), I should have included feudalists too I guess, to avoid bootlicking pedants… 🙄
The point stands - war is waged for profit by profiteers, not by random civilians trying to live their lives, always was, always will be.
One exception to it : fascists managed to convince people who can only lose stuff to a war that it’s good for them too.
One exception to it :
fascistscapitalists managed to convince people who can only lose stuff to a war that it’s good for them too.Fascism is capitalism in decay, there is no exception.
I’d say facsism is just capitalism when you try to say no.
As in literally, people tried to say no via socialism and then fascism was invented.
don’t worry, the soviets joined ww2 as well
Yep, and beat the Nazis.
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I mean invading poland side by side with the nazis, they weren’t interested in getting rid of the nazis, why do you think they had a nap?
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You missed the part in between where they made a deal with the nazis and invaded eastern Europe
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∞🏳️⚧️Edie [it/its, she/her, fae/faer, love/loves, null/void, des/pair, none/use name]@lemmy.ml4·7 months agobut Romania and Poland denied pass to Soviet troops
I thought Romania did?
“Rumania had agreed to permit Russian troops to pass through her territory to the assistance of Czechoslovakia as soon as the League of Nations had pronounced Czechoslovakia to be a victim of aggression” - Munich, Prologue to Tragedy by John W. Wheeler-Bennet, p. 100
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∞🏳️⚧️Edie [it/its, she/her, fae/faer, love/loves, null/void, des/pair, none/use name]@lemmy.ml2·7 months agoI’m not really sure how much more I can elaborate. I haven’t read the book—I read Flemmings book, see below, and found it to reference “Munich, Prologue to Tragedy”, so I went ahead and quoted it. Here is the full footnote which that part came from (with my own inserts in []):
quote
On September 11 [1938] M. Bonnet, at Geneva, conferred with M. Litvinov and M. Comnen, the Rumanian Foreign Minister. On this occasion M. Litvinov repeated his assurances that Russia would support France in accordance with the Pact of 1935 and informed him that Rumania had agreed to permit Russian troops to pass through her territory to the assistance of Czechoslovakia as soon as the League of Nations had pronounced Czechoslovakia to be a victim of aggression. He therefore advocated to M. Bonnet the urgent necessity of a joint démarche to the League. M. Bonnet again refused this suggestion and, in reporting the results of his conversation to the French Cabinet on the following day, said that the Russians and Rumanians had “wrapped themselves in League procedure” and had shown little eagerness for action
France didn’t uphold their part of the 1935 Pact, so the Soviet Union never came to help Czechoslovakia under the Pact. And President [of Czechoslovakia] Benes didn’t call upon the Soviet Union “outside” of the Pact:
The Cold War and Its Origins, Denna Frank Flemming, p. 84
In justification of the crucifixion of Czechoslovakia at Munich it was said that Russia could not be trusted and that her assistance would not be worth much in any case. On the points there could be honest difference of opinion, but not about the diplomatic record. Certainly the Czech Government did not doubt Russia’s sincerity. At a session of the Harris Institute at the University of Chicago in August 1939 I asked President [of Czechoslovakia] Benes whether Russia would have supported him had he decided to fight in September 1938. He replied, without an instant’s hesitation: “There was never any doubt in my mind that Russia would aid us by all the ways open to her, but I did not dare to fight with Russian aid alone, because I knew that the British and French Governments would make out of my country another Spain.”
The rest of your comment is quite consistent with my own understanding of how things went down, which I got from Flemmings book.
There a whole article about Russian disinformation on this topic here. They certainly did have a pact with the Nazis. Your argument is basically “it didn’t happen, but if it did then it the West forced us into it” which is a 100% classic disinformation line. It’s like when Putin says there is no war with Ukraine, but if there is it’s because the West forced us to do it.
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So you are straight up denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?
To be clear I don’t fault them for signing a NAP, I fault them for invading a bunch of eastern European countries with whom they had no quarrel because they wanted to do imperialism.
But I guess the fact that you dodged the question and immediately started spewing whataboutism proves that you’re not really interested in a discussion.
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I’d say the “exchanges” they had with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland etc. were quite unequal. Expanding your territory through force is the purest form of imperialism, no matter what color your flag is.
That declaration wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, as the USSR immediately turned around and tried to forcefully annex these newly independent states (and when it failed tried again some years later).
Yes Finland joined forces with the nazis after the winter war, but the USSR started the winter war attempting to conquer Finland. To blame them for joining forces with the enemy of their enemy after being invaded and losing territory is just wild.
So the argument is that the USSR was so scared of Poland joining the nazis that they made a deal with the nazis to invade it together and divide it between them? How does that make any sense?
The USSR didn’t withdraw their troops from the baltic states until the 90s, a good 45 years after the end of WWII.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a deal between the USSR and nazi Germany detailing who would get what parts of eastern Europe. The existence of other deals and treaties that you think are worse does not change that reality.
If the USSR had been the staunch defender of the slavic peoples from nazis aggression that you claim they were, they would have entered into a defensive pact with the eastern states, not invaded them.
Talk of freedom and brotherhood means nothing when cooperation is gained at the barrel of a gun.
He already said capitalists, state capitalism is still capitalism, no matter if you call it communism.
The USSR was Socialist, what on Earth are you talking about?
and North Korea is democratic, it’s in the name after all.
When did I say names determine structures? Even then, the DPRK is fairly democratic in actuality.
oh you are a fucking tankie, makes sense.
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, if you equate taking theory seriously to whatever caricature of a tankie you hold in your mind-palace then I don’t know what to tell you.
Calling something state capitalist when capitalism heavily relies on the state by default shows you need to hit the books on how capitalism actually functions.
Calling something state capitalist when capitalism heavily relies on the state by default
I have no idea what you are trying to say with this, but perhaps you should look things up before pompously trying to diss people.
Perhaps you should read theory. The USSR was State Capitalist with respect to the NEP, but was Socialist for its entire existence
People’s theory is just fine. The problem for you is that they kept reading theory that was written after thr 1970s.
I can only read 2 pages from what you linked, and am not paying 40 dollars to read the rest, certainly not when they already display a gross oversimplification and anti-Marxist definition of Capitalism (critically leaving out competition, Capital accumulation, and so forth), and therefore take a vulgar revisionist stance. There’s no analysis of class dynamics, just an over-reliance on the presense of Wage Labor.
Please read theory, I can make recommendations for the basics if you’d like.
Wikipedia
Lol, you mean the state capitalists? You’re not making the (weak, “whatabout”) point you think you are, but hey, your confidence in your wilful ignorance in defence of those exploiting you for profit* is almost impressive! (but not really) 🙄😂
*E: and guess what, I don’t even need to know where you live to say this, because every working class person on the planet is currently being exploited for profit through both labour and war, but don’t let that get in the way of the bootlicking you’ve come here to do in self-destructive defence of your beloved capitalism (I threw up in my mouth a little)…
Calling something state capitalist when capitalism heavily relies on the state by default shows you need to hit the books on how capitalism actually functions.
Pretending something that was never stateless, classless, and moneyless but rather quite the fucking opposite (E: and was never going to end up there, either) was communism, shows you need to hit the books on how communism is actually intended to function.
The USSR never pretended it was Stateless, Classless, or Moneyless.
You have no clue what you’re talking about, how Communism is “supposed” to function, how Marx, Engels, Lenin, and so forth believed it to come into function, or how the USSR functioned.
If you want basics on how the USSR functioned, I can recommend some books, or if you want a basic intro of Marxism I can recommend some works as well.
I didn’t call it communism, and neither did the ruling communist parties. Transitional socialism is the proper word.
Humanity every few months
Humanity is not intrinsically violent to this scale.
The US constantly:
Yeah but at least we limit ours to small scale atrocities committed by civilians, and not all-out civil war. And proxy wars. And not-a-war-wars. And helping others with their own
warsgenocides.Fuck. Nevermind I guess.
The Purge.
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It usually involves trying to start some shit with Russia.
Falschrum Brüder
That’s how you keep practice
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It’s US English I think …
The other one that I notice is “write your representative”, instead of “write to your representative”