I was up late one night having a few cocktails last week and fired off a couple of tweets:
I hate Putin. What an annoying piece of shit.
— Rafi (@OverpricedVodka) February 19, 2022
Minding your business is so much easier than just POKING AROUND at stuff all the time. You have more money than god. Just buy some toys and read a book and leave the world alone.
I just don't understand the urge. I hate bothering people. I think it's so rude to disturb people who aren't doing anything to you let alone being all in their space. I can't fathom what it feels like to say "I want this country, I think I'll go take it and whoever dies, dies."
— Rafi (@OverpricedVodka) February 19, 2022
The next morning, I woke up, and here come the anti-American liberals to tell me I don’t understand the region because I don’t recognize the US is trash. Ergo, if the US is trash, anything the US supports must also be trash.
This is such a U.S propaganda understanding of the issue that ignores the U.S capitalist push to expand NATO. It also lacks any real understanding of Ukraine https://t.co/QEim9A4EXj
— Achmat X 🪂 (@AchmatX) February 19, 2022
The United States is literally building and expanding military bases across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa with military troops in Colombia
— Achmat X 🪂 (@AchmatX) February 19, 2022
It’s interesting to me that, in being accused of lacking a nuanced understanding, the response is to show absolutely no nuance in failing to recognize that two things can be true!
This is how I continued that conversation last week:
You can be anti-American-military-industrial-complex and anti-American-pseudo-colonialism and still agree that Putin is an asshole. Both things can absolutely exist in the same conversation. You can also debate about the US’s motives behind wanting to expand NATO, but it belongs in a separate conversation since the majority of Ukraine wants to join NATO while Putin sees NATO as a personal insult to his Russian strongman ideology.
NATO does not care about Russia as much as Putin cares about NATO. He still has pipedreams of bringing the USSR back, and every former Eastern Bloc country that aligns with the west is an insult to him personally. Ukraine wanting to join NATO 8 years ago was crossing a line. That’s why we’re here. Yes Crimea is messy and they’ve been teetering between independence, autonomy under Ukraine, and rejoining Russia for the past 30 years, but the fact is, Putin only cared about Crimea as a launchpad to take back Ukraine. Putin absolutely would not have walked into Crimea and claimed it for Russia if it wasn’t the best chess piece to position him for Ukraine, regardless of the ethnic Russians in Crimea asking to join Russia after Ukraine threw out its Russia-loving president.
Now Putin is playing a “will they/won’t they” game of cat and mouse because he wants a war that will ultimately give him Ukraine. He knows the US can’t stay out of anybody’s business and the US appearing in a large scale fashion will be his justification to “protect” himself.
That’s what I said last week, and by now, the “will they/won’t they” has become war. This morning I was on IG and I saw this story:
I basically responded with a condensed version of that ^ block up there, because it was early and I didn’t even have on my glasses, but I was told there was no need to have this conversation if I wasn’t willing to watch the video.
I don’t want to watch the video. I’ve been watching Putin’s Paranoia for most of my life. There’s nothing he’s going to tell me that I haven’t heard before, but you know what…I watched it anyway. None of it’s new, but I understand the anti-American urge to sympathize with him because the United States is a hypocritical war machine. We do march into other people’s backyards, cause problems, and then walk away. We destabilized the entirety of Latin America. Crack was a scourge in our own country because of Iran-Contra. There is a whole generation of American youth raised against the backdrop of the US fighting a war thousands of miles away that we can’t remember the purpose of. It’s tempting to use that as an explanation of Putin’s actions, but it doesn’t actually wash. From his own mouth the man is living in the past.
It’s only 8 minutes. You can drink your morning coffee and have a quick listen to this summit from a couple of months ago.
This is my off the cuff reaction. I was typing during the video so I could send a quick response to my friend, but I had too much to say for an Instagram message.
1. Putin says he’s just protecting himself.
NATO/the US has zero intention of attacking Russia. Putin has this idea that the West wants to walk into Russia and steal his country but we do not care about them.
2. Putin says how would the US react if Russia put missiles on the Mexican border.
If Mexico walked into Texas to reclaim it for Mexico and the threat is there for Mexico to continue walking into the US to take more territory, would it be unreasonable for our allies to put missiles on the border of Mexico and the US? Putin is framing it like the US decided to put missiles on the border to attack Russia when we sent missiles to prevent Russia from expanding further.
To make this analogy really work, Texas would have to be an independent country. The US wants Texas back, so we annex that top square part that doesn’t have any cities. To keep us from taking the rest of Texas, Mexico (who Texas likes way better than the US), calls Russia and Putin puts a bunch of missiles in the area. Would the US then start bombing Dallas? Probably so. And we would be wrong. The decent, humanitarian response would be to stand down, give that square back to Texas, and go back home.
3. Putin says California was stolen too.
You can be anti-American-imperialism and still agree that Putin is an asshole. The simple fact that the US is supporting something doesn’t make the opposition correct. Everything in the US is stolen territory. That’s a separate conversation from what is happening in this moment where Putin is bombing a sovereign country as a reaction to that country’s allies trying to protect it from being bombed! He’s doing the thing that made the protection necessary!
4. Putin says we promised we wouldn’t expand NATO.
NATO doesn’t *do* anything anymore. NATO is so unimportant that people don’t even know what it stands for. NATO is so inconsequential the governing body was just saying “do we even need this? It’s been like ten years before we did anything.” Putin made NATO relevant because in his mind NATO is a proxy for the US and he thinks the US wants to take over Russia. We are not conquering lands in Europe. Countries voluntarily want to join NATO and they get approved or they don’t. Russia wants to expand the USSR by force and by death.
5. Putin says the US armed rebels in the Caucasus Mountains.
He wants to repaint history as if the USSR was so gracious in its split like they didn’t go to war to keep control of territories they thought they could crush. Chechnya declared their independence in 1991, but Russia decided to fight them to keep them in the fold. Putin can pretend that the US caused a rebellion in the Caucasus, but the Chechens were fighting for their independence through three wars before any arms allegations of US interference. I’m not in favor of the US fighting everyone’s “wars for independence” but there would have been no war to fight if Russia respected the boundary Chechnya drew in 1991.
The point is, Putin is still paranoid and working on an unfounded belief that the US’s overarching dream is to attack Russia because Russia’s overarching dream is still to defeat the the US, piece the USSR back together, and be the superpower it used to be. His talking points are mired in the early 20th century as if the landscape hasn’t changed since then. Putin sees all of the former Soviet Union as part of Russia. When he says Lenin created Ukraine, he’s saying Ukraine owes its very existence to Russia and that’s his justification for taking it back. Nevermind that it is a sovereign country — everything belongs to Russia because it’s still 1922 for Vladimir Putin.
So we have a strange alliance in the US right now and it’s maddening to navigate. On one extreme, the far right Trump Republicans are anti-America because Biden is in charge of America so they align with Putin. On the other extreme, the far left Wokest Democrats are anti-America because America genuinely sucks and we start wars everywhere so they sympathize with Putin.
In the middle are the regular people watching Russia invade an independent country where the citizens were just minding their business and now have to go to war because of a paranoid autocrat still living in the Cold War. And that’s why I said Putin was annoying. So many people are going to die because he won’t just spend his money and mind his business.
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