To me, it is remarkable how many things we think utterly unthinkable today are actually quite recent, very much in living history.
Western Europe had an officially fascist government 50 years (+1 day) ago. ~60 years ago Black people in the US were officially discriminated, enshrined in law. Franco-Algerian wars also finished 62 years ago, and saw atrocities worthy of the worst ethnic cleansing of WWII. Balkan wars are still more recent and depressingly deadly too. Alan Turing committed suicide 70 years ago, being pursued after the "crime" of homosexuality. Not to mention some of the stuff going on today...
We take so much for granted, the world really is a nicer place than it used to be.
> We take so much for granted, the world really is a nicer place than it used to be.
And because we take it for granted, we act as though it'll be around forever. There are still people who don't want these things. If we get complacent, they'll be gone before we know what we've lost.
It's incredible just how long the Iberian fascist regimes lasted. I imagine that if you polled a set of random people from the street, and asked when they thought the last war for colonial indepence from a European power was, very few would answer "the 1979s" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Colonial_War
France is still being kicked out of African states. In recent times it's been Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. [1] There haven't been any wars over this yet, but France (as well as the US) was very much intimating that there would be. That was meant to intimidate the government and/or populations, but instead it just resulted in widespread demonstrations (against France) and people enlisting in the military en masse. So France waved their other flag and went home. It wasn't just troops and bases either. France was also exploiting these countries and extracting their mineral wealth (like uranium in Niger) while offering well below market rate royalties. I assume these 'agreements' have changed, but I haven't been following the exact events there lately.
I'm sure there's plenty of others as well. The tentacles of colonialism are getting scarcer, but are still very much there.
In case of Mali and Niger, it seems that the locals have simply traded French boots on their necks for Russian ones, so I doubt that things will get any better for them wrt foreign exploitation of their resources.
I see no reason to think this is the case. Time had a reasonable article with some relevant back history here. [1] But beyond this I'd also add that I think colonialism has been an abject failure. It's been a story of small-short term gains for massive long-term losses, the MBA mindset of geopolitics. As soon as colonies start to become successful, they seek their independence. So you just end up with expensive adversarial relationships with anything resembling successful colonies, while getting bankrupted by your unsuccessful colonies. Basically - the story of the rise and fall of the British Empire. It's not something anybody is looking to recreate.
It's very simplified back history, though. Lest we forget, those "socialist governments" that Soviets provided support to were themselves very oppressive in many cases, and not particularly socialist in most. And while Russian presence there today does enjoy popular support overall, the families of people who get summarily executed by Wagner might not be so enthusiastic.
As far as gains and losses, you're correct when looking purely at the economic aspect of it, but that's not all there is to it. Indeed, my fear is that the West is finding it very hard to understand (and believe in) what Russia is doing precisely because it is so focused on economic cost-benefit analysis, and ignores the ideological aspects, which dominate the Russian political elites today.
The point I'm making is that there's simply no evidence to suggest that Russia is interested in colonialism. It's neither in their ideological nor economic best interest - by contrast a strong and independent Africa that has good relations with them, absolutely is! Also, the US has not been in the least bit caught off guard by anything Russia has done. Here [1] is a fun cable dating back to 2008, describing in detail how NATO looking to take in Ukraine would likely lead to war.
---
"NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains "an emotional and neuralgic" issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene."
---
That's just one paragraph. The whole cable is an easy read, interesting, and full of evidence. But what makes that cable fun is not only how clearly it emphasizes we knew exactly what would happen, but also who wrote it. It was written by William J Burns - the current head of the CIA.
Ukraine has flirted with NATO since it split from the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t until the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas war that it began seriously pursuing membership. Now Finland and Sweden have joined, and whatever’s left of Ukraine after the war will probably join too. If Russia doesn’t want countries to join NATO, it should stop giving them reasons to.
> It was written by William J Burns - the current head of the CIA
When Burns joined the CIA in March 2021, Russia was already building up troops for the invasion. I’m not sure what, if anything, you’re insinuating here.
The annexation of Crimea didn't happen until the situation predicted by Burns played out exactly as expected. And the catalyst there was us backing a coup that overthrew a [democratically elected] Russian leaning President, sending the largely ethnic Russian regions (including Crimea and Donbas) into outright rebellion, starting the exact civil war Burns had predicted. Conveniently for furthering US interests in Ukraine, this predictable consequence also resulted in the disenfranchisement of a very large chunk of the entire Russian leaning voterbase in Ukraine, the normalization of groups like Azov, and so on. It's easy to see how such things could be alluring with a myopic analysis of the situation.
The importance of it being written by Burns is that there are a lot of cables written, often shooting in many different directions. But in this case, the intelligence on what would happen with Ukraine not only remained consistent, but the individuals writing it were and remained extremely high level players within the government. So the idea the US was, in any way, surprised by what happened can be quite safely discarded as false.
> The annexation of Crimea didn't happen until the situation predicted by Burns played out exactly as expected.
Except Ukraine wasn't seeking NATO membership, they were going to sign the EU cooperation agreement until Russia bullied and threatened them into backing out. Again, Russia is ultimately the one encouraging NATO expansion.
> And the catalyst there was us backing a coup that overthrew a [democratically elected] Russian leaning President, sending the largely ethnic Russian regions (including Crimea and Donbas) into outright rebellion, starting the exact civil war Burns had predicted.
The US didn't want Yanukovych ousted. The Nuland tape shows that the US was trying to set up meetings between him and oppo leaders after he opened up spots in his interim government (because both sides wanted a neutral mediator and the EU was dragging it's feet, hence the famous comment). He chose to flee, though, and was voted out by parliament.
Reuters had an uncharacteristically informative article [1] on why Ukraine backed away from the EU. Joining the European Union, and joining the Eurasian Customs Union [2] are mutually exclusive. Essentially Yanukovych wanted to join the EU, but wasn't getting what he was after. He was looking for $160 billion to make up for what he argued Ukraine would have gained from joining the Eurasian Customs Union - the EU offered him $0.8 billion. Like always it most likely just comes down to corruption - seeing where he could butter his belly the most.
It wasn't the EU that was desperate for Ukraine to join, it was the US. We wanted to use them as a strategic tool against Russia, whereas them actually joining the EU would cause nothing but problems for the EU because it'd result in a mass flooding of labor, cheap grain, and so on. Flooding the EU with cheap grain sounds awesome, but it would imperil farmers and agriculture, in general, in other countries. It's an issue that persists to this day with numerous countries banning the import of Ukrainian grain - something that could not be done if Ukraine was in the EU. The only relevant reference from Nuland regarding Yanukovych was a desire to "see if he wants to talk before or after." [3]
> It wasn't the EU that was desperate for Ukraine to join, it was the US. We wanted to use them as a strategic tool against Russia, whereas them actually joining the EU would cause nothing but problems for the EU because it'd result in a mass flooding of labor, cheap grain, and so on.
The US has no interest in bolstering one of their main economic competitors with millions of skilled workers, don't be silly. European industries drool at the prospect of getting access to a skilled metal worker for a few hundred euros per month.
In this paragraph, you unintentionally reveal why Ukraine saw mass protests when Yanukovych sabotaged closer relations with the EU after last-minute Russian pressure. Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe, but opening up to the EU for movement of goods and labor would've meant sharp and massive rise in the living standard of Ukrainians - as has happened everywhere else in Eastern Europe.
Poland is roughly the same size as Ukraine in terms of population. Poland requested EU membership in 1994 and started implementing reforms required for membership soon thereafter. It joined the EU as a full member in 2004. Here's what the process did to the GDP: https://i.imgur.com/008Ynan.png
Ukraine was on the verge of similar explosion of economic development. Imagine your wage rising five to ten times in mere ten years.
And naturally, that massive rise in living standard would've alienated Ukraine from Russia and greatly reduced Russian influence on Ukraine because they have nothing comparable to offer. In the worst case scenario for Russia, seeing the prosperity in Ukraine could've mobilized their population to demand change and topple Putin.
Plain human greed and desire for "more stuff" was one of the key drivers behind USSR's collapse too. When Gorbachev loosened censorship in the late 1980s, people learned how Europeans and Americans lived, and wanted the same things for themselves and their children: nice clothes, Sony stereos and German washing machines. A very simple, natural instinct.
> He was looking for $160 billion to make up for what he argued Ukraine would have gained from joining the Eurasian Customs Union
That's disingenuous. He was looking to offset the damage caused by Russia's trade restrictions done in retaliation for considering or signing the agreement. The Reuters article mentions this:
> Next year Ukraine will have to cover foreign debt payments of $8 billion, according to its finance ministry. It was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, partly because Moscow was blocking sales of Ukrainian-produced meat, cheese and some confectionery, and scrapping duty-free quotas on steel pipes. Some officials said the restrictions showed what life would be like if Ukraine signed the EU agreement.
Also, three months before the summit in which it was supposed to be signed, Russia essentially stopped all imports from Ukraine[0] but resumed them after the agreement failed[1]
Thanks for the links - those are interesting and great resources that I hadn't seen before. But I am not arguing that Russia was not trying to apply pressure to Ukraine, but rather that it had basically nothing to do with their decision. Yanukovych wanted to go with the EU because he thought he could get tens of billions of dollars doing so. When a country sends tens of billions of dollars to another extremely corrupt country, that's going to make the political leaders of that country (as well as their associated friends/businesses) extremely rich. But it turns out the EU was not at all interested in such a thing, nor was the IMF - whom he also approached. Russia, to a lesser degree, was.
I think the timelines also support this. As per your link, the customs arrangement between Ukraine and Russia was terminated on August 14th. As per the Reuters link, Yanukovych was actively hostile to joining the Eurasian Customs Union a month later, and only sided with Russia about 4 months later. He only seems to have only finally changed his mind once it became clear that not only was he not going to get rich(er) off the EU or the IMF, but he also got Russia to offer him $15 billion as well as sharply lowering the prices paid by Naftogaz - a Ukrainian state run gas company that was headed by a Yanukovych appointee - Yevhen Bakulin, who has a fun rabbit hole to go down, in his own right.
> And the catalyst there was us backing a coup that overthrew a [democratically elected] Russian leaning President, sending the largely ethnic Russian regions (including Crimea and Donbas) into outright rebellion, starting the exact civil war Burns had predicted.
The catalyst was shooting of peaceful protesters that killed over 100 people, and the president fleeing as soon as he realized that he had lost the support even among his own party and would be facing criminal charges. You mention that Yanukovych was a democratically elected president, but you conventiently fail to mention that he was removed from office by the parliament with unanimous 328-vs-0 votes.
And there was no civil war. It was entirely manufactured by Russian military and special services from the start. From a judgement by the European Court of Human rights:
The Court held, on the basis of the vast body of evidence before it, that Russia had effective control over all areas in the hands of separatists from 11 May 2014 on account of its military presence in eastern Ukraine and the decisive degree of influence it enjoyed over these areas as a result of its military, political and economic support to the “DPR” and the “LPR”. In particular, the Court found it established beyond any reasonable doubt that there had been Russian military personnel present in an active capacity in Donbass from April 2014 and that there had been a large-scale deployment of Russian troops from, at the very latest, August 2014. It further found that the respondent State had a significant influence on the separatists’ military strategy. Several prominent separatists in command positions were senior members of the Russian military acting under Russian instructions, including the person who had had formal overall command of the armed forces of the “DPR” and the “LPR”. Further, Russia had provided weapons and other military equipment to separatists on a significant scale (including the Buk-missile used to shoot down flight MH17). Russia had carried out artillery attacks upon requests from the separatists and provided other military support. There was also clear evidence of political support, including at international level, being provided to the “DPR” and the “LPR” and the Russian Federation had played a significant role in their financing enabling their economic survival.
By the time of the 11 May 2014 “referendums”, the separatist operation as a whole had been managed and coordinated by the Russian Federation. The threshold for establishing Russian jurisdiction in respect of allegations concerning events which took place within these areas after 11 May 2014 had therefore been passed. That finding meant that the acts and omissions of the separatists were automatically attributable to the Russian Federation. /---/ In the absence of any evidence demonstrating that the dependence of the entities on Russia had decreased since 2014, the jurisdiction of the respondent State continued as at the date of the hearing on 26 January 2022.
The Russian commander mentioned here, Igor Girkin, an operative of Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and hero of radical Russian nationalists, has boasted in public how without his actions in Sloviansk[1], the protests in Eastern Ukraine would've fizzled out after a few arrests or fines to troublemakers - instead of exploding into a large war.
If you get your facts straight, the story changes completely.
I actually agree with most of that. But you're missing some important timelines. The breakaway regions did not breakaway in May, they broke away immediately after the coup in March. And yes at that point Russia began plying them with support. The only thing that happened in May was the Donbas referendum. And that referendum was indeed most almost certainly illegitimate. Consequently, it was officially recognized by nobody - including Russia, who instead simply opined, somewhat tongue in cheek, that they "respect the will of the population of the regions." [1] Russia even tried to encourage the leaders of the breakaway regions to hold the referendum later (probably knowing they could not legitimately obtain the support required for action), but they chose to move ahead with a sham referendum anyhow.
But the point here is that the civil war began in March. Could Ukraine have snuffed out the rebellious regions without Russian interference? Most likely, but countries feeding arms and support to rebellions that they support is pretty run of the mill geopolitics stuff (and was also 100% expected by the US per the diplomatic cables). Similarly, it's highly unlikely that the Ukrainian coup would have succeeded without US backing and direct involvement. In the 8 years that followed (until the invasion) Russia repeatedly tried to organize some sort of a cease fire and mutually agreeable solution for the breakaway regions - basically letting them have some sort of special administrative status while remaining part of Ukraine. This resulted in the Minsk accords. Those accords were then repeatedly violated, with both sides blaming the other, until the situation reached a climax in 2022.
In the first stage, they captured Crimea. Then, on 12 April 2014, the war broke loose in Eastern Ukraine after 50 Russian commandos led by Girkin captured the town of Sloviansk. Sabotage groups sent to rile up people and sow confusion were active even earlier than that (Ukraine managed to detain a number of them).
There were no separatists, no rebels, no break-away regions, nothing before Russia manufactured them to create an appearance of a civil war and deprive Ukraine of foreign support. That was all a cover story for the military operation - on of the most effective deceptions in the history of warfare.
The point I'm making is that there's simply no evidence to suggest that Russia is interested in colonialism.
A very strange thing to say, given that war against Ukraine is an extremely blatant attempt at re-colonization (with a heaping dose of full-tilt racist ethnic cleansing to boot).
Putin's designs in Africa are clearly different, and "colonialism" probably isn't the right conceptual model to apply there. But this insinuation you're making that he's on some kind of "anti-colonial" mission there (or that that he's lending the people in those countries a helping hand in any other way) is equally bizarre, an fundamentally quite naive.
Russia's motivations were spelled out plainly in the diplomatic cables, both in their own words and then in our analysis of them. Obviously it has nothing to do with colonialism. Similar for this nonsense about the Ukraine war being an ethic cleansing. The UN has put the total civilian death toll in Ukraine at 10,675 [1] in the more than 2 years of fighting. That number is a minimum, but it's not going to be orders of magnitude higher. The Ukraine War has had one of the lowest civilian casualty ratios of any significant scale war.
Russia's motivations in Africa obviously aren't anti-colonial or whatever. It's the same stuff that's going on with South Africa, Brazil, China, and so on. They're simply pivoting towards the 85% of the world, the 'global south' - a pivot that began many years ago, but which the conflict has accelerated due to strained relations with the 15%. The stronger and more independent the global south, the more beneficial and productive the pivot.
It's not just the European powers .. Dutch colonialism in the East Indies was replaced with Indonesian colonialism.
For anybody unfamiliar the many many islands in the East Indies historically have had easily distinguishable cultures and largely seperate rule until the Dutch consolidation.
The Dutch were replaced as "rulers" by a small group, the most overtly colonial act being the invasion of West Papua following the west largely shrugging their shoulders when independance was sought and "free elections" were rigged via torture.
I'm sure there's good writing on the subject, a cursory search turned up
They have all of these big monuments to their "Guerra do Ultramar" too, I don't think there was any sort of nationwide realization of what that implies.
If you spend any time in Portugal, one thing youll learn is that they are very proud of their past. No self-reflection whatsoever.
And I said they even though Im one of them because I hate the culture of the country. Foreigners arent any depper, of course. They go "ohhh lisbon is so beautiful" and that's as far as they go.
They should be proud of their past. Every civilization in the world (including the ones they conquered) at the time would have done what the Portuguese did if they could. All from a tiny country of a few million people.
It can be argued that the Vietnam war was a colonial war. Even though the original colonial power, France, had (mostly) withdrawn from the conflict after the First Indochina war concluded in 1954. Vietnam was still partitioned with the South having a puppet government from the western colonial powers. By the same logic it can be argued that the Troubles are an extension of the Irish war for independence and as such colonial war. Although I would admit both those examples are quite stretched.
Less stretched though is the struggle to end South Africa’s apartheid and the Israel Palestine conflict. Both Apartheid South Africa, and modern day Israel are fighting to legitimize a settler colonial state (preferably ethno-state of European descendants) which unevenly allocates land and rights to the descendants of the European colonizers (see also Northern Ireland before the good Friday agreement).
And finally we have Western Sahara, which is a full on colony just like Angola, and has an ongoing colonial war for liberation (just like Algeria). The only difference is that the colonial power is Morocco, which is not a European power.
I mean, if you count Russia as a European colonial power - and you should! - then it's far more recent. Chechnya fought a war over its independence in 1994-96, then another one with an active phase in 1999-2000 that tapered off into guerrilla warfare that lasted until mid-2010s.
I referenced Chechnya because it is a very traditional case of colonialism that very obviously parallels other European colonies in Africa etc: acquired through straightforward territorial conquest in 18-19th century with no justification other than "might is right" (with a dash of "white man's burden" thrown in for good measure), specifically to exploit as a colony.
Ukraine is a bit different in that both the official Russian ideology and the prevailing public opinion don't see it as a colony, but rather as "lost heartland" that is inhabited by what are still fundamentally Russians who have "strayed". So the long-term goal there isn't to acquire a new colony for the metropole to exploit - it's to forcibly assimilate its Ukrainian population into the metropole in its entirety. Now in practice this isn't that simple either, because of course the occupied territories are exploited. However, one could argue that it is still not colonial exploitation, because its economic nature is fundamentally the same as the relationship between Moscow and basically every other Russian region. That is, it would make sense to say that occupied Ukraine is a colony if you're also willing to say that pretty much all of Russia is also effectively a colony of Moscow (which is not an unreasonable way to describe it, to be fair - just not a conventional one in Western historiography).
The Chechens may not be nice, but there was nothing humanitarian about the Russian invasion. Indeed, Russian atrocities during that war were unthinkably cruel.
"The enemy of my enemy" may be a great way to run a hegemony, but it's lousy foreign policy in general.
I sometimes wonder what the world might have been like if the USSR had occupied afghanistan in the early 1980s, re-secularising it in the ~decade before 1992, leading to a post-USSR afghanistan suffering no worse than an armenian/azerbaijani (<40'000) level of violence after collapse?
(Let's take the upper end of estimates for the tajikistani civil war: 150'000 dead, as a benchmark. That'd still be better than 2'000'000 for the Soviet-Afghan war and another 200'000 for the US-Afghan war?)
> Let's take the upper end of estimates for the tajikistani civil war: 150'000 dead, as a benchmark. That'd still be better than 2'000'000 for the Soviet-Afghan war and another 200'000 for the US-Afghan war?)
2.5% of the Tajik population died during the civil war, and it absolutely would have spread to Afghanistan, as 20% of Afghans are Tajik.
> I sometimes wonder what the world might have been like if the USSR had occupied afghanistan in the early 1980s
Afghanistan would have anyhow fallen into civil war even if Najibullah remained in power because Pakistan, Iran, India, China, Turkiye, Iran, Saudi, UAE, Qatar, and other regional powers all meddle there.
There's a reason most of Najibullah's and Massood's family live in New Delhi and not Moscow or NoVA.
(but 2.5% of 12,5 million is still only <320'000. I guess the tajiks didn't have MANPADs, but in this scenario neither would the afghans)
How much did the USSR and US spend on their two wars? What if that amount had been invested in regional development? Or would that also have been a non-starter?
(why is everyone meddling there, anyway? it doesn't exactly seem to be on the way to anywhere. China-Arabian Sea doesn't go through it, and china-russia [Novosibirsk?] doesn't either. Is iran a big enough trading partner [and is there sufficient transport capacity through xinjiang?] that china-iran would be worthwhile? more worthwhile than just going to Bandar Abbas like everyone else?)
One of the countries listed would have ended up sending them anyhow.
> why is everyone meddling there, anyway
The same reason Russia meddles in Ukraine and Belarus - for these countries it's their near abroad.
For Pakistan and India, majority of Pakhtuns actually live in Pakistan, and the 3rd largest diaspora is in India, and Kabul used to be the Mughal capital for much of it's history, and there is a lot of cultural and economic relations between both countries and Afghanistan (there's a reason most Afghan politicians - Taliban and resistance - studied in Pakistan or India, and have family and assets there)
For Iran, a similar story - Herat was the primary Persian city in Khorasan for much of their history, and multiple Safavid-Mughal wars were fought over Kandahar.
China entered the region in the 1700s when the Qing Dynasty began their expansion into Central Asia (eg. The Dzungar Genocide - who's survivors founded Kalmykia), and multiple wars were faught between the Mughals, Safavid, Qing, Uzbeks, and Sikhs over Central Asia. In more recent history, a lot of the militancy in East Turkestan was sparked from Uyghurs (eg. Baren Uprising) supported by their Afghan Uzbek brethren.
Turkey was always a major defense partner of Afghanistan (as a kingdom, under the Taliban, the US, and today) due to a mix of Pan-Turkism (Uzbeks), Pan-Islamism, and the large Afghan and Pakistani diaspora living in Turkey.
The Gulf states are significant players as well because Pakhtuns, Balochs, Tajiks, and Uzbeks make up significant minorities in those countries, and Gulf states are stuck in great power conflicts with each other and with Turkey, India, Pakistan, etc.
The Russians only entered Central Asia and the Caucasus in the late 19th century, and their presence was always minimal, like the French in Algeria (look at how many are left after 1991), and memories of them are very bitter (eg. Circassian Genocide, Chechen War a la Tolstoy, the Uzbek campaigns, dekulakization of nomadic herders, etc)
The Caucasus was always a borderland between the Safavids and Ottomans, and Afghanistan+Central Asia was a borderland between the Qing, Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans (who supported the Uzbeks)
> How much did the USSR and US spend on their two wars
The USSR spent high double figures of GDP %age on military spending in Afghanistan, but the US's spending was minimal.
There were grand plans for post-Napoleonic Europe, and some of them didn't work out so well (did the supplement banning the international slave trade inspire a regional power in the other hemisphere to declare the Monroe Doctrine?), but some of them are still going to this day.
In particular, faced with which of the major powers should control the alpine passes, a very Solomonic decision was taken: none[0] of them.
I'm not sure if the afghans could manage a multi-confessional multi-cultural democracy[1], but I am pretty sure they'd be happy to do armed neutrality.
[0] there's a Nasruddin story in which he and his son try all four possible configurations of who rides the donkey and who walks, each time facing passersby with complaints, only to come to the conclusion that you can't simultaneously please everyone. I submit that the configuration in which no regional power has much control over a flashpoint may be more stable than the configuration in which all regional powers have some control.
[1] on the one hand, in one of the Retief stories the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne arrives on some planet and no sooner has the delegation explained the principle of "one three-eyed green thing, one vote" than the local Wise Offworld Gentlemen immediately derive a corollary: one less three-eyed green thing, one less vote.
On the other hand, I note that when I watch buzkashi, it seems that, for a sport which in principle is every man for himself, in practice the young guys in their 30s with excellent horses ride such that the old guys in their 50s with easy horses win the matches — a clear testimony for the ability and habit of horsetrading required to come to mutually beneficial arrangements?
When you read into Wagner, they’re clearly a neo nazi PMC committing atrocities in Eurasia.
When you read about their African exploits though, they seem to be the most anti-colonial colonial project on the continent yet. They support and arm the local strongmen, but unlike the traditional colonial powers they don’t seem to lord it over them, just build independent Russia aligned states with anti western attitudes.
In fact a chunk of 20th century history was the USSR supporting independence movements and pushing them towards communism whereas the US supported the colonial hegemon such as the French in Vietnam. If the US supported the independence movements but pushed them towards liberalism instead… geopolitics now would be a lot less cynical but probably even more anti-US from the European powers.
Theres double standards. Catalonia tried to gain independence from Spain, the EU and the USA condemned it. But when Chechnya or Kosovo are in question, then its totally fine.
I don't know what a "run of the mill HN-er" is, but I'm ethnically Russian and a Russian citizen who was born in USSR and lived in Russia for >20 years of my life. Those wars (and the associated terrorist activity) were my background as a teenager growing up.
Indeed, "Wahhabi radical Islamic terrorism" was how Russian agitprop described it at the time. It is also rather obviously false when you look at the background of people involved. The original Chechen independence movement (1991-1996) was led by Dzhokhar Dudayev, who, before resigning from the armed forces, was a Major General in the Soviet Air Force, and had personally flown combat sorties in Afghanistan against the mujahideen. The notion that he was a "Wahhabi radical" is laughable; by all accounts, he wasn't even religious.
Now, there were many factions among Chechen rebels, and some of them - associated with people like Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab - were indeed Salafi (not Wahhabi) extremists. Those were also the guys carrying out terrorist attacks in Russia proper, and invading Dagestan in 1999. However, at no point during the existence of Chechnya as a de facto independent entity those forces had overall control of it. The dominant faction was always the nationalists, who were indeed mostly Muslim, but representing Zikrist Sufi Islam (an offshoot of the Qadiriyya tarikat) that has been the traditional Chechen religion since Kunta-Hajji Kishiev introduced it there in early 19th century. Notably, Aslan Maskhadov, who was the president of Chechnya after Dudayev, was of that faction. Again, the notion that those guys were radical Salafis is laughable because, if anything, Salafis hate Sufi almost as much as they hate Shi'a. As a matter of realpolitik, the Salafi faction did have some positions in the government, including those created specifically for them, such as the Ministry of Sharia Security.
During the second war when Russia re-occupied Chechnya, parts of the nationalist faction have defected to Russia; most notably, the Kadyrov family. In independent Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov was the Grand Mufti (the similarity of his last name to "Qadiriyya" is not a coincidence). After defection, he became the first president of Chechnya as constituent republic of the Russian Federation, and, of course, his son is still the president today. Nationalists who did not defect were either wiped out or left to establish a government-in-exile, leaving Salafi extremists as the predominant force to wage guerilla war under the flag of their self-proclaimed "Caucasus Emirate".
TL;DR is that the people who are running Chechnya today for the Russians are largely the same people whom Russia was describing as "radical Islamic terrorists" in 1994-1996 while bombing the hell out of civilian population.
There's an interesting sidestory to Dudayev. In the late 1980s, he was a divisional commander with HQ in Tartu, occupied Estonia. He had good relations with the local population and Estonian independence movement greatly influenced his views on Chechen independence. Five years later, the extremely brutal methods used by Russia to extinguish Chechen independence influenced Estonia (along with Latvia and Lithuania) to seek NATO membership.
I’m also having a hard time seeing how the IRA “failed”.
The Good Friday Agreement brought both Civil Rights and equal political representation for Northern Irish Catholics. It also gave a political avenue for further decolonization (including their ultimate goal of reunification with Ireland), making more terrorist activities kind of unnecessary.
I would consider that a pretty good results of violent resistance against your colonizer.
Supported by western democracies, USA and UK have always supported dictatorships while they are useful to them, economically and politically, and using the fear of communism they both supported both fascist regimes till the last minute.
The entire European Union project is a direct result of the failure of colonialism - if we cannot be colonisers competing over far away resources then it makes sense that we should start playing nice together, without war, and present ourselves externally as a single, more powerful organism. Colonialism itself did not stop in 1945, not at all, in fact the very last European (or European/Asian) empire is on its last stretch trying to re-colonise Ukraine. Timothy Snyder explains it perfectly here: https://youtu.be/JVs2y-YeiFM?t=3682
EDIT: Given the replies below that I suggest reading my comment perhaps more than once. It seems some people are quick to jump onto some wrong conclusions after grep'ing two or three words from the paragraph I wrote :)
If EU "colonization" was so bad, why did formerly developing countries like Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, etc work so hard to join the EU, and currently developing countries like Armenia, Georgia, Serbia, Bosnia, etc still try to ascend into the EU?
And also the fact that HDI metrics of most of Eastern and Southern Europe only broke the 0.9 (very very highly developed) because of EU funding and support.
Edit: you aren't arguing that the EU is a neo-colonial/imperialist project. I answered as such assuming you are anti-EU. +1 on Snyder btw - highly recommend reading "Postwar" if anyone has the time.
I don't think the claim is that the EU is colonizing people, but rather the impulse for the large European countries was basically "we can't be relevant by having huge colonies any more so let's try being relevant by being a unified block"
Which is basically true, though the primary motivator was to interlink economies to avoid another war in Europe as started ww1 and ww2
Ok. That can be argued (and was a major impetus behind the Benelux Pact which turned into the EEC), but you cannot deny the amount of development the EU brought to countries that ascended to it.
Just look at Croatia versus Serbia despite having the same ethnicity, language, and civil war, or Romania versus Moldova, or Poland versus Belarus despite both sharing the same HDI in the early 1990s.
Sure, small European countries had a different motivation than the large ones, but also having a say on the world stage was even less possible for them disunited.
Imagine how little the US might care about possible threats to the Baltic states from Russia if the borders to the EU and NATO were still at Germany.
Croatia is hugely dependent on tourism. Serbia does not have access to nice beaches and islands on the Mediterranean. In addition, its exports to the EU are taxed quite heavily
Yet the average Croatian has a higher household income, life expectancy at birth, and literacy rate than Serbia - despite Croatia having a lower HDI than Serbia in the 1990s, and lacking any major cities or industries (which were concentrated in Bosnia and Serbia during the Yugoslav era)
Oh also to add, regarding literacy rates, even before WW1 because Croatia and Slovenia were Austro-hungarian, and the rest was Ottoman, the literacy rates were way different, with the former being much much higher. Currently, its probably about the same with Croatia and Serbia.
There's a pretty big difference between how the Spanish Empire worked, and how the EU works. For one, it's not like heavily armed conquistadors are setting out from Brussels to Tblisi or something to forcibly indoctrinate Georgians into the brilliance of the EuroZone.
Insofar as the EU relationship to its member states is extractive, its not principally extractive, nor is it primarily parasitic in nature. And anyway, EU expansion is driven entirely by applications to join, not efforts to annex.
That's not to say that anything like the EU is necessarily good, just that its unambiguously not a colonial/imperialist project, and its a weird non sequitur to act like it is.
> The entire European Union project is a direct result of the failure of colonialism - if we cannot be colonisers competing over far away resources then it makes sense that we should start playing nice together, without war, and present ourselves externally as a single, more powerful organism.
Why wage war in Europe when you can peacefully exploit the Global South?
> Colonialism itself did not stop in 1945,
Yeah I guess France has its whole neocolonialism—
> not at all, in fact the very last European (or European/Asian) empire is on its last stretch trying to re-colonise Ukraine.
> Yeah I guess France has its whole neocolonialism—
It's over for France. Putin sent Wagner to set former French colonies on fire. Why do you think Macron is talking about sending French weapons and soldiers to Ukraine? Payback for dismantling the French order in Africa.
> present ourselves externally as a single, more powerful organism
Except in 1989 Germany got the keys to Europe and jumped in bed with Russia screwing over Europe in the process. Because once you get away with murder, you don't fear doing it again.
Never forget Spanish, Portuguese, French, British, Danish, and Dutch, and later, American mercantile colonialism led to the exploitation, suffering, and deaths of ~100 million indigenous and ~15 million African peoples for profits that built the US and Europe and the fortunes of a small cadre of elite landowners.
US colonialism lived on through economic and military interventionism through Manifest Destiny in N America and Monroe Doctrine in the greater Americas for more than 2 centuries, and still continues to meddle to this day. An explicit policy of American military supremacy post-WW2 is one of the fundamental genesises of the Cold War.
Finally, in the recent few years, Africa countries are becoming more self-aware and escorting colonial vestiges of control out the door to forge their own paths.
Would you say the same thing if Canada tried to join a military alliance with Russia? Of course what would happen is a total overnight invasion of Canada by the USA. Something similar happened in the 70s with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Total overnight naval blockade of Cuba with imminent threat of escalation.
Even if it had been occupied by the US for 300 years, I (a US citizen) would be angry with my government if it didn't use military force to stop Canada (or Mexico) from forming a military alliance with Russia (or China) (provided diplomatic avenues had been exhausted). Letting such an alliance persist and flourish would permanently drastically degrade the security of the US.
Thats exactly Russia's reasoning right now. What is essentially happening is that the US is the aggressor and Russia is simply defending itself from NATO expansion. I am not sure why everyone is just bashing Russia without thinking for 2 seconds about this topic.
That's bullshit. The aggressor is the one who is invading and bombing another country.
The only reason why Ukraine even wants to get into NATO is because Russia has never stopped viewing it as a core part of its Greater Russia imperial restoration project. This is also why the entire Eastern Europe rushed to NATO as soon as they could - because they didn't want to end up like Ukraine did.
The reason eastern europe rushed to NATO is simply because the west was quite wealthy as a capitalist bloc, and the former communist countries viewed the west as a holy grail. If the eastern europeans wanted access to the european markets, they would have to go through EU integration, and of course NATO. Its not like they could join the EU if they still were in a warsaw-pact like military alliance. The truth is, the west had more influence because of their economies.
And the argument still works. Even in that hypothetical scenario the USA would still reasonably not allow Canada to join that military alliance. In addition, saying Russia occupied Ukraine for 300 years is like saying France occupied Occitanie, or Germany occupied Prussia, or even Spain occupied Catalonia. There's so many of these occasions in recent history that its basically not an argument. On that note, thinking the same way did also the US maybe occupy Utah?
TBF US attempted to invade/annex Canada twice when Canada was British Canada, AKA nascent US's existential geopolitical enemy. It wasn't until British got displaced from NA (thanks to French) that Canada learned it's better to play nice with juggernaut that is US and eventually integrate with US system, because there is no other path to serenity.
Point still stands. Better yet, imagine Texas leaves the union and joins military alliance with Russia. That would be more similar than the scenario with Canada.
> imagine Texas leaves the union and joins military alliance with Russia
That'd be awesome. They're nothing but trouble anyway: fought wars to keep slavery twice* in a row, yet still somehow keep installing US presidents with deep security apparatus ties — they're worse than Georgians with moustaches. Как тебе такое, Илон Маск?
I'd miss Austin, but am now imagining all the great mashups to be sung on one of {1 Feb, 2 Mar, 9 May}:
The Yellow Rose of Texas Sobiraet Vinograd
All my Katyas live in Texas
Ne Valay Duraka, Oklahoma
Oy, To Ne Betcha
On the Road is Long Again
Seven Spanish Tankista
No, it does not stand, because they are not comparable examples at all. Since the end of the Cold War, European militaries have seen a reduction of up to 10 times in everything from personnel to equipment. Germany went from 3800 tanks in 1980s to 200 in 2015. Since Putin's rise to power in early 2000s, Russia has been continuously creeping forwards. They started massive army modernization program, and have placed nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad, an enclave in the middle of Europe[1][2], and in Belarus, an unstable dictatorship right on the EU border.[3] They have launched the largest war in Europe since Hitler invaded Poland, and are currently forming two new armies larger than the ground forces of major European countries COMBINED.[4]
Instead of a strong reaction to this creep like during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have seen nothing of this sort. It has tipped the balance of military power in Europe deeply in favor of Russia and emboldened them to launch land grabs against Ukraine.
In 2024, we are living the scenario where Russia placed missiles in Cuba, saw no reaction, and then invaded Florida "to protect Cuban minorities".
I went in the last few years to Porugal with my partner and it was so beautiful and modern history was so dark and rich and self aware. I loved Lisbon and Porto. I immediately went back to the site of what I call the Museum of Torture in Lisbon which was essentially the old political prison with the worst rep. They did a fantastic job breaking down torture and the collapse of the end of Portuguese colonialism and fascist rule. Now that I think of it maybe one of my top three museum experiences. Do go if you ever have a chance.
Portugal is perhaps the best example of how colonialism doesn't really benefit the common man. The colonial wars only made sense to those few rich portuguese who had land in Africa.
The whole Salazar period was one of stagnation and many people (my family included) had to leave Portugal for better (or just some) opportunities elsewhere.
IIRC... In the Yom Kippur War (1973), (fascist) Portugal was the only country that allowed American heavy lift (C-5's) to land & refuel whilst ferrying armor & supplies to Israel.
It's interesting that societies accidentally mimic Roman Dictatorship. Periods of change result in the populace voluntarily handing over power to some sole authoritarian that they hope can cut through the coordination problem and fix some big problem. Then inevitably that person overreaches and we have to overthrow them.
Those soldiers were part of the outer siege [more precisely at the beginning of Rua de Serpa Pinto] to the crowd-packed Largo do Carmo where Marcello Caetano (the successor to Salazar) went to seek refuge from the rebellion - inside the GNR (sort of Gendarmerie) barracks there.
Portuguese state broadcaster RTP has a documentary called “Os Olhos da Revolução” about the ‘lost footage’ of the Revolution.
It seems in a lot of europe people are over the cycle and are thinking that going ultra right is a Good Plan again. Portugal voted way too right these elections.
"us vs them" is always the easiest thing to sell, probably because parochial altruism is biologically hardwired in us monkeys (or at least that's what the ethologists say their experiments show).
Populist nationalist fascism with a flavor of racism is all the rage again in most of North America and Europe. The masses seek scapegoats and quick fixes to their manufactured discontent and declining fortunes, but somehow they believe narcissistic strongmen promise to fix everything if they just give them total power on day 1.
I think it's a general vulnerability of democracies when things go sideways.
Hardships bring fear for oneself and fear for oneself is psychological reason why people are conservative and right-wing. Those people vote in right-wing parties. And leaders of those parties are not very smart because position they achieved is solely due to psychology of their voters, not actually earned by their own political merits. So the only way those leaders can imagine for retaining power is to dismantle democracy that handed them this power on a silver plate. If they only cultivated fear in the populace they won over (whist avoiding the blame for the hardships) and create political alliances to avoid being replaced with somebody more right-winged they could retain power indefinitely.
Ford and Hearst were Nazi sympathizers who almost push the US into the arms of fascism against Britain. The US wasn't flirting with catastrophe, it was banging it 2x a week. FDR saved America not once, but twice.
Let's not forget Charles Lindbergh in that group either. He was wildly anti-semitic, and spoke glowingly of Hitler frequently, even into the 40s. Maybe it was due to that medal he received from Hermann Gohering.
The sustainable growth of hate groups (or even cults) requires they remain within proscribed bounds of decorum while blowing their dogwhistles discreetly and tricking the unaware to support a cause they don't realize is terrible.
History won't be kind to show the KKK, AFC, and MAGA as anything other than softer and cuter forms of the same troglodyte venom.
Inversely, the silencing of starving and dying civilians by discriminatorily and ignorantly, and outright lying with fabricated stories, painting an entire people as barbaric monsters by falsely weaponizing cultural sacred lambs like the Holocaust is another form of evil that threatens both Judaism and Zionism.
Aye. Ford and Hitler were BFFs. And Smedley Butler stood up to an alleged cabal of industrial fascists who believed he would support an American domestic coup.
The German-American Bund (American Nazis org) held a rally of 20k in NYC @ MSG in 1939.
Political scapegoating, violence, and propaganda twisting narratives and history are as old as time. Recall the fate of the Cathars, Armenians, Romani, and the Holocaust.
maybe americans should try do sometyhing about the obvious messing with fair elections.. perhaps it could start by copying the EU system of voter ID and paper ballots
those are not the risks to fair elections. politicians who deny the election results and use lies and misdirection to convince their followers that the election was "stolen" are the true risks.
most definitely, but of course, that might also include deporting illegal aliens that are significantly skewing the seats each state gets, but yeah. I dont care if its inconvenient for one or the other party, it has to be PROPER
Or we could just allocate voting districts proportional to the number of actual voters. I always found it rather weird as a legal immigrant that my presence in my district somehow increased the voting power of all the citizens there. Or we could just switch to an electoral system where that point is altogether moot...
However, none of this is going to happen because federal politics is pretty much completely deadlocked at this point. We can't even pass regular legislation on critical matters reliably, never mind constitutional amendments.
And yet every time claims of large scale voter fraud have been brought to courts where actual evidence is required, it has been found to be bogus. Perhaps the “proper” part should be in how politicians honor actual elections instead of lying and claiming fraud when they lose.
As a gun owner with a bunch of ARs in the safe, I used to run in hardcore pro-Trump far right circles for many years. What I've seen there is, quite literally, people preparing for war.
I'm not saying that all or even most Trump voters are like that. But there are definitely quite a few people like that basically just sitting and waiting for a clear go-ahead signal from someone whom they trust, and they are already well-armed and somewhat organized. And they all seem to trust Trump.
Western Europe had an officially fascist government 50 years (+1 day) ago. ~60 years ago Black people in the US were officially discriminated, enshrined in law. Franco-Algerian wars also finished 62 years ago, and saw atrocities worthy of the worst ethnic cleansing of WWII. Balkan wars are still more recent and depressingly deadly too. Alan Turing committed suicide 70 years ago, being pursued after the "crime" of homosexuality. Not to mention some of the stuff going on today...
We take so much for granted, the world really is a nicer place than it used to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo
And because we take it for granted, we act as though it'll be around forever. There are still people who don't want these things. If we get complacent, they'll be gone before we know what we've lost.
I'm sure there's plenty of others as well. The tentacles of colonialism are getting scarcer, but are still very much there.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/france-pull-troops-out-niger-f...
[1] - https://time.com/6301177/niger-african-support-russia/
As far as gains and losses, you're correct when looking purely at the economic aspect of it, but that's not all there is to it. Indeed, my fear is that the West is finding it very hard to understand (and believe in) what Russia is doing precisely because it is so focused on economic cost-benefit analysis, and ignores the ideological aspects, which dominate the Russian political elites today.
---
"NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains "an emotional and neuralgic" issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene."
---
That's just one paragraph. The whole cable is an easy read, interesting, and full of evidence. But what makes that cable fun is not only how clearly it emphasizes we knew exactly what would happen, but also who wrote it. It was written by William J Burns - the current head of the CIA.
[1] - https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html
> It was written by William J Burns - the current head of the CIA
When Burns joined the CIA in March 2021, Russia was already building up troops for the invasion. I’m not sure what, if anything, you’re insinuating here.
The importance of it being written by Burns is that there are a lot of cables written, often shooting in many different directions. But in this case, the intelligence on what would happen with Ukraine not only remained consistent, but the individuals writing it were and remained extremely high level players within the government. So the idea the US was, in any way, surprised by what happened can be quite safely discarded as false.
Except Ukraine wasn't seeking NATO membership, they were going to sign the EU cooperation agreement until Russia bullied and threatened them into backing out. Again, Russia is ultimately the one encouraging NATO expansion.
> And the catalyst there was us backing a coup that overthrew a [democratically elected] Russian leaning President, sending the largely ethnic Russian regions (including Crimea and Donbas) into outright rebellion, starting the exact civil war Burns had predicted.
The US didn't want Yanukovych ousted. The Nuland tape shows that the US was trying to set up meetings between him and oppo leaders after he opened up spots in his interim government (because both sides wanted a neutral mediator and the EU was dragging it's feet, hence the famous comment). He chose to flee, though, and was voted out by parliament.
It wasn't the EU that was desperate for Ukraine to join, it was the US. We wanted to use them as a strategic tool against Russia, whereas them actually joining the EU would cause nothing but problems for the EU because it'd result in a mass flooding of labor, cheap grain, and so on. Flooding the EU with cheap grain sounds awesome, but it would imperil farmers and agriculture, in general, in other countries. It's an issue that persists to this day with numerous countries banning the import of Ukrainian grain - something that could not be done if Ukraine was in the EU. The only relevant reference from Nuland regarding Yanukovych was a desire to "see if he wants to talk before or after." [3]
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-russia-deal-speci...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customs_Union_of_the_Eurasian_...
[3] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
The US has no interest in bolstering one of their main economic competitors with millions of skilled workers, don't be silly. European industries drool at the prospect of getting access to a skilled metal worker for a few hundred euros per month.
In this paragraph, you unintentionally reveal why Ukraine saw mass protests when Yanukovych sabotaged closer relations with the EU after last-minute Russian pressure. Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe, but opening up to the EU for movement of goods and labor would've meant sharp and massive rise in the living standard of Ukrainians - as has happened everywhere else in Eastern Europe.
Poland is roughly the same size as Ukraine in terms of population. Poland requested EU membership in 1994 and started implementing reforms required for membership soon thereafter. It joined the EU as a full member in 2004. Here's what the process did to the GDP: https://i.imgur.com/008Ynan.png
Ukraine was on the verge of similar explosion of economic development. Imagine your wage rising five to ten times in mere ten years.
And naturally, that massive rise in living standard would've alienated Ukraine from Russia and greatly reduced Russian influence on Ukraine because they have nothing comparable to offer. In the worst case scenario for Russia, seeing the prosperity in Ukraine could've mobilized their population to demand change and topple Putin.
Plain human greed and desire for "more stuff" was one of the key drivers behind USSR's collapse too. When Gorbachev loosened censorship in the late 1980s, people learned how Europeans and Americans lived, and wanted the same things for themselves and their children: nice clothes, Sony stereos and German washing machines. A very simple, natural instinct.
That's disingenuous. He was looking to offset the damage caused by Russia's trade restrictions done in retaliation for considering or signing the agreement. The Reuters article mentions this:
> Next year Ukraine will have to cover foreign debt payments of $8 billion, according to its finance ministry. It was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, partly because Moscow was blocking sales of Ukrainian-produced meat, cheese and some confectionery, and scrapping duty-free quotas on steel pipes. Some officials said the restrictions showed what life would be like if Ukraine signed the EU agreement.
Also, three months before the summit in which it was supposed to be signed, Russia essentially stopped all imports from Ukraine[0] but resumed them after the agreement failed[1]
[0] https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/economic/164137.html
[1] https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/economic/182691.html
I think the timelines also support this. As per your link, the customs arrangement between Ukraine and Russia was terminated on August 14th. As per the Reuters link, Yanukovych was actively hostile to joining the Eurasian Customs Union a month later, and only sided with Russia about 4 months later. He only seems to have only finally changed his mind once it became clear that not only was he not going to get rich(er) off the EU or the IMF, but he also got Russia to offer him $15 billion as well as sharply lowering the prices paid by Naftogaz - a Ukrainian state run gas company that was headed by a Yanukovych appointee - Yevhen Bakulin, who has a fun rabbit hole to go down, in his own right.
The catalyst was shooting of peaceful protesters that killed over 100 people, and the president fleeing as soon as he realized that he had lost the support even among his own party and would be facing criminal charges. You mention that Yanukovych was a democratically elected president, but you conventiently fail to mention that he was removed from office by the parliament with unanimous 328-vs-0 votes.
And there was no civil war. It was entirely manufactured by Russian military and special services from the start. From a judgement by the European Court of Human rights:
The Russian commander mentioned here, Igor Girkin, an operative of Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and hero of radical Russian nationalists, has boasted in public how without his actions in Sloviansk[1], the protests in Eastern Ukraine would've fizzled out after a few arrests or fines to troublemakers - instead of exploding into a large war.If you get your facts straight, the story changes completely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sloviansk
But the point here is that the civil war began in March. Could Ukraine have snuffed out the rebellious regions without Russian interference? Most likely, but countries feeding arms and support to rebellions that they support is pretty run of the mill geopolitics stuff (and was also 100% expected by the US per the diplomatic cables). Similarly, it's highly unlikely that the Ukrainian coup would have succeeded without US backing and direct involvement. In the 8 years that followed (until the invasion) Russia repeatedly tried to organize some sort of a cease fire and mutually agreeable solution for the breakaway regions - basically letting them have some sort of special administrative status while remaining part of Ukraine. This resulted in the Minsk accords. Those accords were then repeatedly violated, with both sides blaming the other, until the situation reached a climax in 2022.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/world/europe/ukraine.html
In the first stage, they captured Crimea. Then, on 12 April 2014, the war broke loose in Eastern Ukraine after 50 Russian commandos led by Girkin captured the town of Sloviansk. Sabotage groups sent to rile up people and sow confusion were active even earlier than that (Ukraine managed to detain a number of them).
There were no separatists, no rebels, no break-away regions, nothing before Russia manufactured them to create an appearance of a civil war and deprive Ukraine of foreign support. That was all a cover story for the military operation - on of the most effective deceptions in the history of warfare.
A very strange thing to say, given that war against Ukraine is an extremely blatant attempt at re-colonization (with a heaping dose of full-tilt racist ethnic cleansing to boot).
Putin's designs in Africa are clearly different, and "colonialism" probably isn't the right conceptual model to apply there. But this insinuation you're making that he's on some kind of "anti-colonial" mission there (or that that he's lending the people in those countries a helping hand in any other way) is equally bizarre, an fundamentally quite naive.
Russia's motivations in Africa obviously aren't anti-colonial or whatever. It's the same stuff that's going on with South Africa, Brazil, China, and so on. They're simply pivoting towards the 85% of the world, the 'global south' - a pivot that began many years ago, but which the conflict has accelerated due to strained relations with the 15%. The stronger and more independent the global south, the more beneficial and productive the pivot.
[1] - https://ukraine.un.org/en/264355-report-human-rights-situati... (page 10, note 38)
You're way off base on that. Just look at any of Putin's numerous (and incredibly obnoxious) pronouncements on the topic of Russia-Ukraine relations.
I don't think further discussion will be productive here. I'll have to leave you to sort these issues out on your own.
For anybody unfamiliar the many many islands in the East Indies historically have had easily distinguishable cultures and largely seperate rule until the Dutch consolidation.
The Dutch were replaced as "rulers" by a small group, the most overtly colonial act being the invasion of West Papua following the west largely shrugging their shoulders when independance was sought and "free elections" were rigged via torture.
I'm sure there's good writing on the subject, a cursory search turned up
https://www.e-ir.info/2015/12/17/neo-orientalism-indonesias-...
which seems adequate as a starting point.
And I said they even though Im one of them because I hate the culture of the country. Foreigners arent any depper, of course. They go "ohhh lisbon is so beautiful" and that's as far as they go.
It is also wild seeing how people are reacting to the President talking about reparations.
Less stretched though is the struggle to end South Africa’s apartheid and the Israel Palestine conflict. Both Apartheid South Africa, and modern day Israel are fighting to legitimize a settler colonial state (preferably ethno-state of European descendants) which unevenly allocates land and rights to the descendants of the European colonizers (see also Northern Ireland before the good Friday agreement).
And finally we have Western Sahara, which is a full on colony just like Angola, and has an ongoing colonial war for liberation (just like Algeria). The only difference is that the colonial power is Morocco, which is not a European power.
Ukraine is a bit different in that both the official Russian ideology and the prevailing public opinion don't see it as a colony, but rather as "lost heartland" that is inhabited by what are still fundamentally Russians who have "strayed". So the long-term goal there isn't to acquire a new colony for the metropole to exploit - it's to forcibly assimilate its Ukrainian population into the metropole in its entirety. Now in practice this isn't that simple either, because of course the occupied territories are exploited. However, one could argue that it is still not colonial exploitation, because its economic nature is fundamentally the same as the relationship between Moscow and basically every other Russian region. That is, it would make sense to say that occupied Ukraine is a colony if you're also willing to say that pretty much all of Russia is also effectively a colony of Moscow (which is not an unreasonable way to describe it, to be fair - just not a conventional one in Western historiography).
I sometimes wonder what the world might have been like if the USSR had occupied afghanistan in the early 1980s, re-secularising it in the ~decade before 1992, leading to a post-USSR afghanistan suffering no worse than an armenian/azerbaijani (<40'000) level of violence after collapse?
(Let's take the upper end of estimates for the tajikistani civil war: 150'000 dead, as a benchmark. That'd still be better than 2'000'000 for the Soviet-Afghan war and another 200'000 for the US-Afghan war?)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaK_CZk-0Rg
2.5% of the Tajik population died during the civil war, and it absolutely would have spread to Afghanistan, as 20% of Afghans are Tajik.
> I sometimes wonder what the world might have been like if the USSR had occupied afghanistan in the early 1980s
Afghanistan would have anyhow fallen into civil war even if Najibullah remained in power because Pakistan, Iran, India, China, Turkiye, Iran, Saudi, UAE, Qatar, and other regional powers all meddle there.
There's a reason most of Najibullah's and Massood's family live in New Delhi and not Moscow or NoVA.
(but 2.5% of 12,5 million is still only <320'000. I guess the tajiks didn't have MANPADs, but in this scenario neither would the afghans)
How much did the USSR and US spend on their two wars? What if that amount had been invested in regional development? Or would that also have been a non-starter?
(why is everyone meddling there, anyway? it doesn't exactly seem to be on the way to anywhere. China-Arabian Sea doesn't go through it, and china-russia [Novosibirsk?] doesn't either. Is iran a big enough trading partner [and is there sufficient transport capacity through xinjiang?] that china-iran would be worthwhile? more worthwhile than just going to Bandar Abbas like everyone else?)
One of the countries listed would have ended up sending them anyhow.
> why is everyone meddling there, anyway
The same reason Russia meddles in Ukraine and Belarus - for these countries it's their near abroad.
For Pakistan and India, majority of Pakhtuns actually live in Pakistan, and the 3rd largest diaspora is in India, and Kabul used to be the Mughal capital for much of it's history, and there is a lot of cultural and economic relations between both countries and Afghanistan (there's a reason most Afghan politicians - Taliban and resistance - studied in Pakistan or India, and have family and assets there)
For Iran, a similar story - Herat was the primary Persian city in Khorasan for much of their history, and multiple Safavid-Mughal wars were fought over Kandahar.
China entered the region in the 1700s when the Qing Dynasty began their expansion into Central Asia (eg. The Dzungar Genocide - who's survivors founded Kalmykia), and multiple wars were faught between the Mughals, Safavid, Qing, Uzbeks, and Sikhs over Central Asia. In more recent history, a lot of the militancy in East Turkestan was sparked from Uyghurs (eg. Baren Uprising) supported by their Afghan Uzbek brethren.
Turkey was always a major defense partner of Afghanistan (as a kingdom, under the Taliban, the US, and today) due to a mix of Pan-Turkism (Uzbeks), Pan-Islamism, and the large Afghan and Pakistani diaspora living in Turkey.
The Gulf states are significant players as well because Pakhtuns, Balochs, Tajiks, and Uzbeks make up significant minorities in those countries, and Gulf states are stuck in great power conflicts with each other and with Turkey, India, Pakistan, etc.
The Russians only entered Central Asia and the Caucasus in the late 19th century, and their presence was always minimal, like the French in Algeria (look at how many are left after 1991), and memories of them are very bitter (eg. Circassian Genocide, Chechen War a la Tolstoy, the Uzbek campaigns, dekulakization of nomadic herders, etc)
The Caucasus was always a borderland between the Safavids and Ottomans, and Afghanistan+Central Asia was a borderland between the Qing, Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans (who supported the Uzbeks)
> How much did the USSR and US spend on their two wars
The USSR spent high double figures of GDP %age on military spending in Afghanistan, but the US's spending was minimal.
How about this idea: take a page from the 1815 Congress of Vienna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_Vienna#Later_criti...
There were grand plans for post-Napoleonic Europe, and some of them didn't work out so well (did the supplement banning the international slave trade inspire a regional power in the other hemisphere to declare the Monroe Doctrine?), but some of them are still going to this day.
In particular, faced with which of the major powers should control the alpine passes, a very Solomonic decision was taken: none[0] of them.
I'm not sure if the afghans could manage a multi-confessional multi-cultural democracy[1], but I am pretty sure they'd be happy to do armed neutrality.
EDIT: Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fNW8OrEsn0
[0] there's a Nasruddin story in which he and his son try all four possible configurations of who rides the donkey and who walks, each time facing passersby with complaints, only to come to the conclusion that you can't simultaneously please everyone. I submit that the configuration in which no regional power has much control over a flashpoint may be more stable than the configuration in which all regional powers have some control.
[1] on the one hand, in one of the Retief stories the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne arrives on some planet and no sooner has the delegation explained the principle of "one three-eyed green thing, one vote" than the local Wise Offworld Gentlemen immediately derive a corollary: one less three-eyed green thing, one less vote.
On the other hand, I note that when I watch buzkashi, it seems that, for a sport which in principle is every man for himself, in practice the young guys in their 30s with excellent horses ride such that the old guys in their 50s with easy horses win the matches — a clear testimony for the ability and habit of horsetrading required to come to mutually beneficial arrangements?
When you read about their African exploits though, they seem to be the most anti-colonial colonial project on the continent yet. They support and arm the local strongmen, but unlike the traditional colonial powers they don’t seem to lord it over them, just build independent Russia aligned states with anti western attitudes.
In fact a chunk of 20th century history was the USSR supporting independence movements and pushing them towards communism whereas the US supported the colonial hegemon such as the French in Vietnam. If the US supported the independence movements but pushed them towards liberalism instead… geopolitics now would be a lot less cynical but probably even more anti-US from the European powers.
Indeed, "Wahhabi radical Islamic terrorism" was how Russian agitprop described it at the time. It is also rather obviously false when you look at the background of people involved. The original Chechen independence movement (1991-1996) was led by Dzhokhar Dudayev, who, before resigning from the armed forces, was a Major General in the Soviet Air Force, and had personally flown combat sorties in Afghanistan against the mujahideen. The notion that he was a "Wahhabi radical" is laughable; by all accounts, he wasn't even religious.
Now, there were many factions among Chechen rebels, and some of them - associated with people like Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab - were indeed Salafi (not Wahhabi) extremists. Those were also the guys carrying out terrorist attacks in Russia proper, and invading Dagestan in 1999. However, at no point during the existence of Chechnya as a de facto independent entity those forces had overall control of it. The dominant faction was always the nationalists, who were indeed mostly Muslim, but representing Zikrist Sufi Islam (an offshoot of the Qadiriyya tarikat) that has been the traditional Chechen religion since Kunta-Hajji Kishiev introduced it there in early 19th century. Notably, Aslan Maskhadov, who was the president of Chechnya after Dudayev, was of that faction. Again, the notion that those guys were radical Salafis is laughable because, if anything, Salafis hate Sufi almost as much as they hate Shi'a. As a matter of realpolitik, the Salafi faction did have some positions in the government, including those created specifically for them, such as the Ministry of Sharia Security.
During the second war when Russia re-occupied Chechnya, parts of the nationalist faction have defected to Russia; most notably, the Kadyrov family. In independent Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov was the Grand Mufti (the similarity of his last name to "Qadiriyya" is not a coincidence). After defection, he became the first president of Chechnya as constituent republic of the Russian Federation, and, of course, his son is still the president today. Nationalists who did not defect were either wiped out or left to establish a government-in-exile, leaving Salafi extremists as the predominant force to wage guerilla war under the flag of their self-proclaimed "Caucasus Emirate".
TL;DR is that the people who are running Chechnya today for the Russians are largely the same people whom Russia was describing as "radical Islamic terrorists" in 1994-1996 while bombing the hell out of civilian population.
The Good Friday Agreement brought both Civil Rights and equal political representation for Northern Irish Catholics. It also gave a political avenue for further decolonization (including their ultimate goal of reunification with Ireland), making more terrorist activities kind of unnecessary.
I would consider that a pretty good results of violent resistance against your colonizer.
EDIT: Given the replies below that I suggest reading my comment perhaps more than once. It seems some people are quick to jump onto some wrong conclusions after grep'ing two or three words from the paragraph I wrote :)
And also the fact that HDI metrics of most of Eastern and Southern Europe only broke the 0.9 (very very highly developed) because of EU funding and support.
Edit: you aren't arguing that the EU is a neo-colonial/imperialist project. I answered as such assuming you are anti-EU. +1 on Snyder btw - highly recommend reading "Postwar" if anyone has the time.
Which is basically true, though the primary motivator was to interlink economies to avoid another war in Europe as started ww1 and ww2
Just look at Croatia versus Serbia despite having the same ethnicity, language, and civil war, or Romania versus Moldova, or Poland versus Belarus despite both sharing the same HDI in the early 1990s.
Imagine how little the US might care about possible threats to the Baltic states from Russia if the borders to the EU and NATO were still at Germany.
Insofar as the EU relationship to its member states is extractive, its not principally extractive, nor is it primarily parasitic in nature. And anyway, EU expansion is driven entirely by applications to join, not efforts to annex.
That's not to say that anything like the EU is necessarily good, just that its unambiguously not a colonial/imperialist project, and its a weird non sequitur to act like it is.
I thought it was to unite EU to prevent another World War happening and to join coal resources?
Why wage war in Europe when you can peacefully exploit the Global South?
> Colonialism itself did not stop in 1945,
Yeah I guess France has its whole neocolonialism—
> not at all, in fact the very last European (or European/Asian) empire is on its last stretch trying to re-colonise Ukraine.
Oh. I guess that too.
> Yeah I guess France has its whole neocolonialism—
It's over for France. Putin sent Wagner to set former French colonies on fire. Why do you think Macron is talking about sending French weapons and soldiers to Ukraine? Payback for dismantling the French order in Africa.
Except in 1989 Germany got the keys to Europe and jumped in bed with Russia screwing over Europe in the process. Because once you get away with murder, you don't fear doing it again.
US colonialism lived on through economic and military interventionism through Manifest Destiny in N America and Monroe Doctrine in the greater Americas for more than 2 centuries, and still continues to meddle to this day. An explicit policy of American military supremacy post-WW2 is one of the fundamental genesises of the Cold War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Haitian_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Government_of_Cuba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Ni...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Ha...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PBFortune
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Brazilian_coup_d%27état
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f... (School of the Americas)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Banzer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_FUBELT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27état
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Honduran_coup_d%27%C3%A9t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Salvadoran_coup_d%27%C3%A...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Venezuelan_uprising_attem...
Finally, in the recent few years, Africa countries are becoming more self-aware and escorting colonial vestiges of control out the door to forge their own paths.
The only reason why Ukraine even wants to get into NATO is because Russia has never stopped viewing it as a core part of its Greater Russia imperial restoration project. This is also why the entire Eastern Europe rushed to NATO as soon as they could - because they didn't want to end up like Ukraine did.
Unfortunately, having worked together to defuse it, both Kennedy and Khrushchev were cancelled soon after.
That'd be awesome. They're nothing but trouble anyway: fought wars to keep slavery twice* in a row, yet still somehow keep installing US presidents with deep security apparatus ties — they're worse than Georgians with moustaches. Как тебе такое, Илон Маск?
I'd miss Austin, but am now imagining all the great mashups to be sung on one of {1 Feb, 2 Mar, 9 May}:
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwFpV80ASjw&t=30s* three times, if you count the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican–American_War ? Anyway, I'd reckon they'd love them the Novorossiya flag.
Instead of a strong reaction to this creep like during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have seen nothing of this sort. It has tipped the balance of military power in Europe deeply in favor of Russia and emboldened them to launch land grabs against Ukraine.
In 2024, we are living the scenario where Russia placed missiles in Cuba, saw no reaction, and then invaded Florida "to protect Cuban minorities".
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37597075
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/files/2016/11...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65932700
[4] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/new-russian-military-ex...
https://www.museudoaljube.pt/en/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrafal_concentration_camp
The whole Salazar period was one of stagnation and many people (my family included) had to leave Portugal for better (or just some) opportunities elsewhere.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/25/everyone-was-i...
1 Fidel Casto Cuba 52
2 Chiang Kai-shek Republic of China 47
3 Kim II-sung North Korea 45
4 Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal Mongolian People's Republic 44
5 Muammar Gaddafi Libyan Arab Republic 42
6 Paul Biya Cameroon 41
7 Omar Bongo Gabon 41
8 Enver Hoxha People's Republic of Albania 40
9 Mohamed Abdelaziz Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic 39
10 Francisco Franco Spanish State 39
11 Eamon de Valera Ireland 37
12 Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo Equatorial Guinea 37
13 Gnassingbe Eyadema Togo 37
14 Jose Eduardo dos Santos Angola 37
15 Robert Mugabe Zimbabwe 37
16 Josip Broz Tito Yugoslavia 36
17 Antonio de Oliveira Salazar Second Portuguese Republic 36
18 Todor Zhivkov People's Republic of Bulgaria 35
19 Ali Khamenei Iran 35
20 Alfredo Stroessner Paraguay 34
What is context?
Those soldiers were part of the outer siege [more precisely at the beginning of Rua de Serpa Pinto] to the crowd-packed Largo do Carmo where Marcello Caetano (the successor to Salazar) went to seek refuge from the rebellion - inside the GNR (sort of Gendarmerie) barracks there.
Portuguese state broadcaster RTP has a documentary called “Os Olhos da Revolução” about the ‘lost footage’ of the Revolution.
ca. 28m53s:
https://www.rtp.pt/play/p13273/os-olhos-da-revolucao
(the whole thing is worth to watch ;)
I found this:
https://blogdelviejotopo.blogspot.com/2014/04/40-aniversario...
Once the WW2 veterans started dying, people on the "right" started drifting back to the old, shitty ideas of fascism.
I wish the greatest generation was still around to verbally tear the fascist demagogues apart.
And the socialists and communists, 1945 to 1990 wasn't fun either under the soviet rule. From one shit to another.
Hardships bring fear for oneself and fear for oneself is psychological reason why people are conservative and right-wing. Those people vote in right-wing parties. And leaders of those parties are not very smart because position they achieved is solely due to psychology of their voters, not actually earned by their own political merits. So the only way those leaders can imagine for retaining power is to dismantle democracy that handed them this power on a silver plate. If they only cultivated fear in the populace they won over (whist avoiding the blame for the hardships) and create political alliances to avoid being replaced with somebody more right-winged they could retain power indefinitely.
For hard numbers on how quickly that happened in 1933: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39305877
“Portugal Overthrew its Fascist Regime 50 Years Ago Today to Become a Democracy”.
The Iranian attack on Israel seems to have had similar (but milder) effect on MAGA as Pearl Harbor had on AFC.
History won't be kind to show the KKK, AFC, and MAGA as anything other than softer and cuter forms of the same troglodyte venom.
Inversely, the silencing of starving and dying civilians by discriminatorily and ignorantly, and outright lying with fabricated stories, painting an entire people as barbaric monsters by falsely weaponizing cultural sacred lambs like the Holocaust is another form of evil that threatens both Judaism and Zionism.
In 1934, America Nazis even had their very own summer camp for boys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Wille_und_Macht
The German-American Bund (American Nazis org) held a rally of 20k in NYC @ MSG in 1939.
Political scapegoating, violence, and propaganda twisting narratives and history are as old as time. Recall the fate of the Cathars, Armenians, Romani, and the Holocaust.
However, none of this is going to happen because federal politics is pretty much completely deadlocked at this point. We can't even pass regular legislation on critical matters reliably, never mind constitutional amendments.
Do not fall into the trap blaming a demagogue, where did they come from? Why?
Not much to do with politics, much to do with culture
After Trump: America is over if Trump gets re-elected, for realsies this time
He was a bad and incompetent president and a loose enough screw to make anything happen, but the liberal imagination has a tendency to be hyperbolic.
eg "stand back and stand by"; cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
At least the SA pretended not to be a paramilitary organisation, but masqueraded as a "gymnastics club" before they got into power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung#:~:text=More%20...
I'm not saying that all or even most Trump voters are like that. But there are definitely quite a few people like that basically just sitting and waiting for a clear go-ahead signal from someone whom they trust, and they are already well-armed and somewhat organized. And they all seem to trust Trump.
What changed for you?