I can hear all the hexbears stroking out as they furiously type five paragraph replies on why this is NATO propaganda, followed by an essay on why Tiananmen Square never happened, and even if it did it wasn’t that bad.
Gotta love when the Subjectively Objective Academic says it’s all NATO’s fault because they expanded too close to Russia and there was an agreement during the Cold War to not expand into Ukraine.
Which ignores the very simple fact that NATO is application based. Countries apply to join and then the member states have approve it in a vote. It’s ironically imperialist to have an agreement with Russia that Ukraine can’t join, because it strips away all sovereignty and self determination from Ukraine.
This type continues to forget that. They only see the world as the US and Russia. They don’t consider that Ukraine has autonomy.
It was actually fairly equal, with Russians making up around 60% of the SovUnion's population and 60% of the Red Army.
Ukrainians were around 20% of the SovUnion's population and 20% of the Red Army, but much of Ukraine was under Nazi occupation - thus, Ukrainians of military age still under Soviet control necessarily were drawn from more heavily or volunteered more readily to get to 20% of the Red Army.
It’s particularly irate because tradition is a finicky thing that means whatever to whoever is arguing wants it to be. Go far back enough and Russia was a Viking kingdom ruled from Kiev. So Russia traditionally belongs to Ukraine. Checkmate, enlightened faux-academics.
IMO, it’s often not even “war bad” but “fighting bad”. Thus wanting the defender not to defend because that would be just as bad as attacking.
I consider myself a pacifist, so I prefer peaceful and diplomatic ways before going to war. But if you are attacked, you have the right, if not the duty, to defend yourself and your citizens.
Reading your edit not gave me the mental image of a country being attacked and their military just surrounds and protects one singular confused random citizen
We tend to think of the aggressor when we say war is bad. It makes sense, they’re the ones who initiate the conflict and make the war exist.
Defending yourself in a war though is, well, defensible. Being anti war can never be an absolutist position. Otherwise, those who are fine with war only need threaten war to get what they want. Do you truly live in peace if it’s because you give the aggressor everything they want? I’d argue no.
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