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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • There was no buffer zone. Poland, Slovakia, the Baltics were under Russian military occupation for most of the last century.

    Russian soldiers were on the NATO border even back then. Soviet troops suppressed multiple revolutions aimed at creating an actual buffer zone, in 1956, in 1968 and so on. The bullet holes are still there. Some who fought are still alive.

    When the Wall fell, all these “buffer zone” countries wanted to join NATO because they knew the Russians will come back.

    Ukraine was indeed a buffer zone. Ukraine wanted to be one. Everyone signed that in Budapest. And yet when Ukraine wanted to do something and go its own way separate from Russia, but not into NATO either, Russia invaded in 2014.

    Russia broke that buffer zone. And sincerely, Eastern Europe has agency and can decide who its allies are. Russia has always been an enemy, and if you look at Finland, even dealing with the devil itself had better outcomes than giving an inch to Russia.



  • How does this relate to Afghanistan wanting to have NATO neighbours or not? The original debate was whether Russia was justified to be hostile to neighbours joining NATO, and you brought up Afghanistan as an example.

    Yet the Afghanistan neighbours involved in the NATO invasion were not NATO members, they were in fact NATO-hostile. So the lessons seems less “don’t have NATO neighbours” but “ally with your trustworthy neighbours that won’t sell you out”.

    And all that said, NATO and the US in the Middle East and Asia is not the same as NATO in Eastern Europe. I agree that the US should fuck off all the way back to where they came from, but Russia is more of a clear and present danger than the US is. At least here. There are no good guys, only the bad one near you with a rifle and the one far away with a loan.

    Linkerbaan, put yourself into the shoes of any Eastern European country in 1930, and decide who to ally with. I bet however you answer that question, there will be a nice example why it was a dogshit choice. It is not that much different now, except the collective West seems less bad than the Third Reich was.










  • Of course, but if you put those few hundred into jail for the night to cool off, the paper will run that you are putting hundreds of Turks into jail, you racist.

    Easier to just put in earplugs to ignore it, and pay for driving lessons so your wife can avoid the metro in the evening, but you ignore it for a decade, and now somehow nazis have the vote, and we are afraid of being caught in the crossfire as we already are, facing workplace discrimination and such.

    I know it’s not an easy problem with a clear solution, but it’s a problem.



  • So here’s an immigrant perspective; as an Eastern European in Western Europe I see that the wealthy are using me as a cudgel to keep the locals down. I’m paying quite high rents in a market where a lot of the locals in different careers can’t, and there is a housing crisis. The place I’m renting could be where someone’s kid would move out to.

    And it’s partly German neocolonialism that fucked up Eastern Europe, so thank Merkel I’m here, since it’s this or the VW factory.

    That said, the people who kept the whole literal city awake honking their horns last midnight while waving Turkish flags, or the Moroccan teenagers accosting everyone near my place, including hurling abuse at my Asian or queer neighbours don’t scream peaceful coexistence.