It's truly remarkable how badly the whole energy sector was managed in the past 16 years of Angela Merkel and her conservative-lead coalitions. It's not about nuclear or no nuclear really, Germany started out with a strong wind and solar industry and has lost all of it to China over the past decade. New wind turbines and (importantly) new power lines connecting the wind-heavy north to the power hungry south have been continuously delayed by nimby politics, also mostly pushed by conservative parties. Meanwhile the coal and nuclear industry got huge compensation payments and issuing new debt to finance investments was basically made unconstitutional by the horrible "Schuldenbremse" legislation. How bad can you fuck up country and still be seen mostly positive in the world??
In 10 years or so, maybe everyone and their mother is back to burning coal. I'm convinced that even in the face of prolonged economical downturn, we'll still be able to increase our greenhouse gas emissions.
For fucks sake, in The Netherlands, we are burning WOOD for """green energy""", while everyone NIMBYs the fuck out of any windmill or power grid expansion project.
Sometimes we, as a species, act in a monumentally stupid manner.
Solar/wind is highly overrated in Europe. Nuclear is really the only option in Europe that's climate change friendly. Incredible that there's been a push away from it.
Realistically, in this new world (since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's coordination and complicity in it), there's zero reason for China or Russia or any of their allies to coordinate with the rest of the world to reduce greenhouse emissions, especially when their economies are so heavily dependent on greenhouse gas for their energy sources and GDP. Deglobalization is going ahead full-speed, and the forces based upon globalization were the only real way to rein in other countries' behaviors in a peaceful way.
So why should the US and EU cripple themselves? The world is in a state of war, and we need to start acting like it. Nuclear energy is a great solution that solves both climate change and energy demands, but it will take a long time for any country to get there.
Ironically, after decades of laughing at the West for worrying about flimsy global warming affecting poor fishermen in the Pacific, Russia is feeling the pinch itself.
Huge amounts of their infrastructure are built in permafrost, now better characterized as "thawing bog". We're talking cities, roads, power lines, gas and oil pipelines (har har), airports, ports, mines... And it's all literally melting away. Slowly for now of course but steadily. Not to mention Taiga fires which seem to be getting worse and worse.
It's carbon neutral if you don't consider time. But take wood which took 10-50 years or more to store up carbon, and then release it all at once... and now, while we're already releasing too much.
We can't grow it (absorb carbon) as fast as we can burn it (release it), so it's effectively NOT carbon neutral in our time.
Woody biomass covers more than trees. Corn stover, sugar cane bigasse, rice hulls and a load of other agricultural and waste plant materials that are produced annually, and can be gasified and burned cleanly to produce electricity and heat.
The core proposal isn't to replace all energy production from burning wood alone, but to explore all renewable energy sources at our disposal. Producing high value heat and energy when the sun doesn't shine through biomass gasification or anaerobic digestion helps us to fill in the gaps and utilize fuel sources that are just otherwise rotting and releasing methane in the atmosphere.
It is wise to look at all waste which each region has and seek ways to use it better. In the case of the Netherlands, I'm not sure how much of those opportunities there are beyond manure (which could perhaps be very big).
Let's be real here, this is Europe we're talking about. It's not like those trees were holding carbon from 500y ago. Wood is pretty ok in terms of carbon. It's the same carbon going around and around again over the course of a century. The tree doesn't grow out of nothing.
What is definitively clear by now: They never did a proper "worst case" planning. They haven't thought through that case (no more Gas coming from Russia).
It is ok to take some risks. It is not acceptable to be without a plan once these risks materialise.
I have been discussing this with friends in-loco, and they witness - especially bewilderingly to the many of us that strongly plan in terms of business continuity - that backup plans are culturally not a priority in current Germany.¹ Friends report that it is seen in daily live in firms and elsewhere. Quite a strange note.
¹Consistently, they apparently put backup plans for worst-case scenarios "there where they must" (there where they must only - where it is part of the scripted plan, there where it is consolidated practice), not as a general consideration.
It was public doctrine in textbooks, taught at university. The warnings about moves at the chessboard (which in diplomacy often are issued in advance, contrary to chess) have been stated for decades, publicly and face to face. The products of the propaganda machine were quite reachable, and not really ambiguous.
Really, that «few saw» is farcical.
Edit: and it is quite worrisome to think that said "doctrine" is now implemented only up to a small fraction, and those expressions suggest blindness not just about the current actions, but the openly planned, stated future ones.
Of course! I think you just should (or at least that it makes full sense to ask).
I remember - to the best of my memory, it was probably well over five years ago when I read the articles - it was the geopolitics course at Uni Moscow; the professor is/was an ideologist influential in the circle of the core decision makers. The list included a pretty large number of objectives, of which the current topic is just a line.
When, after the war really started¹ and of course you think of the tick-mark in the list, I looked for the original article, I found it definitely not the most immediate needle in the haystack. A few weeks later, though, as the ideologists started to present their point of view to the western public, one interview emerged which I have good reasons to believe was from the above said professor.
I will check for you later when I will have some contiguous time: the name of that interviewed professor (easier to find: I have it in my RSS harvest) should be a better lead to retrieve the articles about his course about the national geopolitical objectives.
¹With reference to those commentators which gave it for a fact well before the actual border trespassing - e.g. Niall Ferguson.
Correctly, as I remembered, he was one of the voices that gave interviews to spread the "creed" in the past weeks - I recognized the name. And he stated in the interviews: "We will get hurt immensely, but we will reach the goal" - this shall be an intellectual warning to the adopters of naïve rational-agentism ("homo oeconomicus would never").
I see that I remembered the wrong faculty: he worked at the Department of Sociology (I probably confused the book name with the department). And I see that the use as textbook has been sparse - adopted and celebrated here and there.
I must recommend that readers go through that list: it is "quite strong". The presence of the UK in the list as an entity that should be separated from Europe is what woke up some commentators after Brexit, with the question "Could they have helped it - surely they expressed they wanted it".
Reported words of that author, that may give a sketchy profile:
> I think that Internet as such, as a phenomenon is worth prohibiting because it gives nobody anything good
> If we want to liberate ourselves from the West, it is needed to liberate ourselves from textbooks on physics and chemistry
...And those lines should again be flashing hints to those who like to consider the players at the chessboard agents following a common rational framework.
War is always unthinkable. Yes, there were warning signs that, in retrospect, were obvious, but Russia invading Ukraine was so profoundly dumb it was difficult to expect for Putin to really go through with it. He did, his country is suffering in result, and he wants to make it mutual, WWI style. You can't really blame Germany for doing their best on making a war unthinkable through economic interdependence.
Quite the contrary, you can and should blame Germany for hiding their head in the sand for the past 10+ years, while a massive threat was growing next to them. It was obviously a catastrophic policy failure. They must have some intelligence services warning the leaders what Russia is really up to. They were being warned by Poland's leadership for quite a while as well. They chose to ignore all that and instead chose to pretend that the threat isn't real - for the sake of short-term convenience and, no doubt, some profits under the table as well.
An intention spelt out in textbooks?! Quite an understatement.
Q: "So the part had been expressing an explicit, literal intention, public, codified, written, divulgated, explained et cetera?" // A: "...Heart, Hope, Daily routine, Expectation, Being alike..."
You are defending a perspective of intentional removal of reality, and the principle of reality constraint, from conscience.
> You can't really blame... for doing their best on making a war unthinkable through
In that '«unthinkable»' you show the whole point. It was very much duly thinkable.
Surely those who overrode reality, and in favour of illusion, and clinging unprepared in a cage of "que será", are to blame, and to blame, and to blame.
> The onus on you to show is this supposed 'doctrine' in 'textbooks' or we should assume you're wrong
Illogical. You could do your own research. Hint, anyway: some material was found as "most interesting" by investigative journalism after Brexit.
Likewise,
> Nothing about this invasion is obvious or doctrinal
is a fully irrational statement.
--
About the substantive part of your post: you are committing the error of confusing reasoning, under subjective value assumptions, as a ground for prediction. You do not go "certainly they would not do that" projecting in others the role of "rational agents" according to criteria you defined for them. Generic actors do not act "like you would", they act like _they_ would.
No, it's not illogical for us to ask you to validate your completely made up, speculative claims that have no basis in reality.
I've already 'done my research'. I know there is nothing 'doctrinal' about Russia's invasion.
You're making claims about other's rhetorical posture (i.e. "you are committing the error of confusing reasoning") - at the same time you're unsubstantiated fantasy statements.
Your claims about 'Russian doctrine' are a bit outrageous and I suggest you might not even know what the term 'doctrine' even means.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, so again, provide evidence for your wild claims.
Looking forward to it (I really am actually, prove me wrong ...).
"In the days leading up to Russia's February invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin gave a televised address that rejected the idea of Ukraine as an independent country. It never had the 'stable traditions of real statehood,' Putin said. Instead, modern Ukraine was 'entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.'
More than prelude and pretext for a bloody war, Putin's words echo the writings of a man who has proselytized this idea for almost three decades: Aleksandr Dugin. A Russian political philosopher, Dugin has been influential with Russian military and political elites — even with Putin himself."[0]
Dugin's textbook in question, translated from Russian:
"On the key question of Ukraine, Dugin underlines: 'Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning. It has no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness" (377). 'Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions,' he warns, 'represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics' (348)"[1]
A book "influential" with Russian elites doesn't mean it's teachings are in textbooks or doctrine. The mere fact that many soldiers sent into Ukraine in the first days were surprised, and at least one whole unit surrendered, indicates that popular as Dugin might be among the elites, the common people didn't really know or care.
Why should the "«common people»" be relevant? They have been indoctrinated in other ways - as emerged also through recent reports and as I reminded with «The products of the propaganda machine were quite reachable, and not really ambiguous».
What is relevant are the decision makers - although to the analyst all phenomena are differently relevant, but to reconstruct decision making - and said mention of «teachings [] in textbooks or doctrine» is obscure with regard to the point.
I wrote «It was public doctrine in textbooks, taught at university». I very clearly intended to mean that those doctrines were shown in the open, and that they should have "rung warning bells" together with many other puzzle pieces. Nothing secret, not "documents in safes". And there have been occasions to remind analysts of them.
When the "Ruler formerly known as Mr" (the intention of a change of title was news of the past few hours) took Presidents one by one and clearly spelt out conditions - as they witness -, when doctrine was formulated in clear words and infographics available at your best bookstore (but you can probably attend a lecture), it becomes farcical to act as if Las Vegas had no signs.
If she is wearing a T-shirt, read it: it may contain a message. Otherwise they will complain rightfully you do not listen.
The one chief question about the "book" is how extensive analysts valuated its penetration. Being there, it was there.
It was absolutely not 'doctrine' on either side, in any sense, either military or economic, that dependency on Russian Oil would bring war.
Nor was it 'doctrine' that Russia would ultimately invade Ukraine 'full on'. Even most Russian elite were surprised.
The only 'doctrine' we have to rely on is a) how Russia will use nuclear weapons, b) how they generally operate on the battlefield (aka heavy on Army, esp. Artillery), and how they basically 'lie about everything' in foreign policy.
It was in many ways rational to contemplate that economic ties would diminish hostility, it mostly worked for the rest of Europe.
Were Putin to have eventually retired, his replacement would not have had the power necessary to do, almost alone, what he and a very small cadre of people did.
Why didn't the German government massively subsidize Green energy?
How on earth is it right to criticize a government for subsidizing green energy in the face of climate change? The reason why solar panels are so cheap today was because Chinese companies achieved economies of scale due to governmental support. This is a GOOD thing.
European countries were way ahead of the curve 10 years ago in terms of these green technologies but chose to do nothing. Their solar companies could have been world leaders as long as governmental policies supported them too. They would have been wiping others out. How can anyone blame China for investing/subsidizing in green energies? The way I view it, it's their just rewards for at least taking this aspect of green technology seriously while others did next to nothing in terms of subsidies.
> Why didn't the German government massively subsidize Green energy?
But they did? (Sorry if Iʼve misunderstood you.)
“According to a 2016 study commissioned by a neoliberal think tank, €150 billion have been spent so far, and the bill is estimated to reach half a trillion euros by 2025.”[1]
That was started by the Schröder government (1998–2005) and rather half-heartedly continued by the Merkel government (2005–2021), decreasing the subsidies.
China has even benefitted from German subsidies.
“Germany long aimed to be a front runner in the solar energy industry, but waning subsidies and rising competition from China have clouded its outlook. To add insult to injury, the Chinese boom has been generously supported by German financial aid.” … “According to KfW officials, it was precisely the subsidy policy's goal to help Chinese solar producers achieve a breakthrough, in order to promote the environmentally friendly technology internationally.”[2]
The "green" parties around Europe also tried to get people to switch to solar/wind and other renewables. But the parties in charge (with their oil company lobbyists) didn't want that.
And now those parties are blaming the greens because "you told us to get rid of nuclear".
Wilful blindness is a thing in international relations. Churchill plowed a lonely furrow in the 1930s. We were sure the bad old days were over in 1992. Etc. Policymakers and the public /wanted/ to believe that the era of aggression was over (or perhaps, more cynically, that the only permissible aggressor would remain the US).
>>and entering the war against Russia is because we believe that Russian values are WRONG and only our values are RIGHT.
I genuinely believe HN is being inflitrated by Russian bots left and right(or, alternatively, that people who live far far away from the conflict somehow feel compelled to voice their opinion).
My family is housing multiple Ukrainian families of refugees - the stories of their close ones, their towns and homes being blown to pieces by Russians, of having to search for your dead relatives on empty streets, of mourning your children killed in the strikes - that's the reality. It's not about ideals or agreeing with or disagreeing with Russia.
>>Those who say "this is not my war" (me and millions and millions and millions of other Germans) should get the good, clean, warm gas from Russia.
I literally can't explain how angry your statement makes me. I think in the last century you'd happily support a certain German regime as long it made sure your house was warm in winter, right? After all, all you need to do is say "it's not my war" and suddenly any moral questions don't apply any more, right?
Here's something that makes me angry:
We (as in Europe) were in a refugee crisis for a long time. And yet, many countries washed their hands clean of it - with the most demeaning and undignified rhetoric.
For instance, the majority of Polish citizens have not shown a single bit of decency towards refugees from Syria and Iraq - for decades. Almost no refugee was allowed in, and other were treated like subhumans.
Now there is a sudden sympathy for refugees - and we ALL know the true reason for it: They are white Christians.
If you'd listen to Syrians, they'd tell you the same horrible stories about war. But a good portion of Europe, especially the portion of Europe that suddenly has discovered its morality, did not listen.
The hypocrisy of it all makes me angry - and I am not particularly interested in treating this war as any more - or any less - horrible than the last one.
>>Here's something that makes me angry: We (as in Europe) were in a refugee crisis for a long time. And yet, many countries washed their hands clean of it - with the most demeaning and undignified rhetoric.
And I actually agree with you. I'm absolutely abhorred by how Poland has treated refugees in the years prior to this. Even just in weeks prior, at the Belarussian border - it was an absolute shitshow and I hated my country for it.
But at the same time, I don't think this is helpful right now in any way.
If I had to explain it right now, I wouldn't say it's because Ukrainians are white christians - I think(and this is my personal opinion) that it's because we look at what's happening in Ukraine and we recognize all the awful shit that Russia did to us in the past. Forcing Russian history and language on us? Check. Kidnapping and moving citizens deeper into Russia for "integration"? Check.
I have equal amount of stories from my own family about suffering from the hands of Nazis as I do about suffering done by the Russians.
And then on top of that - that conflict is really close to home, while the Syrian one just.....wasn't. The Russian advance to the West through Ukraine strikes fear in the Baltic states like not many other things.
I personally think Poland handled Lukashenko regime very well. There is no reason why migrants should be robbed by Belarus and then dumped into Western Europe trough Poland. Strong response discouraged more tragedies.
And don't get me wrong. We can have discussion about how many migrants from the whole world we can host in Europe. As someone with strong libertarian leanings I'm personally quite divided on it myself. But it's not up to Belarus to decide.
> For instance, the majority of Polish citizens have not shown a single bit of decency towards refugees from Syria and Iraq - for decades. Almost no refugee was allowed in, and other were treated like subhumans.
Also worth noting that, unlike Ukrainian refugees, the Syrian and Iraq refugees are the direct result of the war that Poland and other nations waged against Iraq, destabilizing the entire area and leaving it a war zone.
Polish people in few cases did offer help to middle east refugees. But they do not want to stay in Poland. Many of them will just disappear into thin air. They want social welfare of Western Europe and are very vocal about it.
On the other hand, Ukraine is protecting us from Russia. Most men are not allowed to leave and are expected to fight if necessary. The last we can do is to provide them with weapons and take care of their families.
BTW - Poland participating in US wars is also due to fear of Russia. We need powerful ally or we will become refugees once more. In quite naive way we also saw US as a moral leader.
No, they are neighbors that speak a close language that share history and that are facing a common enemy. Nobody gives a flying shit about religion in that matter, what do you think, atheist Ukrainians are sent back to die from Russian artillery?
Syria’s far away from Europe and in reality no refugees from there have the right to protection from Europe. The EU being the moral superpower that it is helped them anyway, so I think it deserves praise, not criticism.
Well, at least deserves praise for the intensions which were good. It completely bungled the implementation and deserves all the criticism in the world for that.
> Now there is a sudden sympathy for refugees - and we ALL know the true reason for it: They are white Christians.
That explanation does not make sense. We are talking about Europe, after all, where xenophobia routinely targets white European Christians, because their language / culture / nationality / brand of Christianity is different.
Ukrainian refugees receive different treatment, because they are fleeing a mutual enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, or something like that. It's not a matter of right and wrong or some abstract principles but that of self-interest. People in East Europe generally consider the current Russian regime a threat, and they are willing to help those facing the threat.
Or, to give a more recent example, consider the discrimination East Europeans faced after their countries joined the EU and many of them immigrated to the West.
Europe is not the US. People from other European countries (and from many traditional minorities in the same country) are obviously different as soon as they start speaking. Many Europeans live outside their home country and most visit other European countries once in a while. There is a huge number of encounters between Europeans from various cultural backgrounds every day, and sometimes your background marks you as a member of an outgroup. And nobody is really excluded from that.
I think OP means that people in Europe hate each other for various reasons other than being "white christian" even if a lot of them are that. See how Romanians are treated almost anywhere in Europe, despite a lot of them being as white as they come, and Christian too. See how Poles are still perceived in a lot of places.
So yes, I actually agree with that statement - in Europe white christians will be primary recipients of xenophobia, but it's neither because they are white nor because they are christian.
> I genuinely believe HN is being inflitrated by Russian bots left and right
This is ruscism -- a revisionistic, psychopatic, hateful, denenerate, cleptocratic, idiotic, savage, uneducated fascist state.
These people have been brought so low, that the only thing left for them is to destroy everything that is not "rusian" as a last ditch cogntive action before complete implosion.
The only thing keeping the russian society from imploding is the ability of Russia to brutalize others. When Russia loses this ability, all hell will break loose in Russia because all those destructive forces will turn inwards.
It is like a completely canibalistic society -- when they'll run out of outsiders to tear apart, they will tear themsevels apart.
At least in the USSR times, there were straight thinking elites, because the Party made the "mistake" of more or less letting those people be, because those did not have the ability to spread their ideas and organize.
The amount of well educated people that mostly support ruscism in Russia is staggering. This has never been the case in Russia, not during the czars, not communism.
Christ what an embarassing message. Here’s a quote from Galeotti about modern Russia to help get you out of the dark place you’re in:
“According to some more hostile foreign commentators, Russia is near enough an earthly Mordor, North Korea with balalaikas. However, walk the streets of Moscow, and you’d find yourself in a modern, dynamic and frankly fun European city. Even out in the provinces, where money is tighter and the new middle class are rather thinner on the ground, there is ample evidence of change. By this I don’t just mean coffee houses, Wi-Fi and branches of Marks & Spencer (thirty-six in Russia so far), but also real debate, investigative journalism and even civil society.”
We need to be taking this as an object lesson in the destructiveness of propaganda. So many Russian people have been so brainwashed by state propaganda over the last two-some decades that they cannot even comprehend that there's a different way.
Why does she support the invasion of Ukraine then? Because she considers them to be 'our brothers that strayed'? Or because she considers them to be less than, after all, they're just hohols?
The propaganda in the last two-some decades is just the latest stage of russian propaganda against Ukraine. It started centuries ago. The czars peddled it, the soviets peddled it, now the 'federation' peddles it. Le plus ca change.
> Why does she support the invasion of Ukraine then?
Mostly because she thinks the jewish nazis were killing russians in Donbas, but that's the only thing she can articulate to someone from outside.
If I was to speculate, I'd think it's a lot more to do with a general attitude of russians that they are invincible in war and how much they've been brainwashed about WW2 about how heroic it was, how the other side was so evil and how they prevailed, that they now have a pavlovian/PTSD reaction to war -- they're in WW2 again, thus the war is just, thus Russia will prevail, thus those that kill the glorious russian soldiers are subhuman-nazi-scum-devils.
I'm sure she doesn't even realize how deeply she's affected by the propaganda.
> Mostly because she thinks the jewish nazis were killing russians in Donbas, but that's the only thing she can articulate to someone from outside.
So, state propaganda.
> If I was to speculate, I'd think it's a lot more to do with a general attitude of russians that they are invincible in war and how much they've been brainwashed about WW2 about how heroic it was, how the other side was so evil and how they prevailed, that they now have a pavlovian/PTSD reaction to war -- they're in WW2 again, thus the war is just, thus Russia will prevail, thus those that kill the glorious russian soldiers are subhuman-nazi-scum-devils.
My question before was somewhat rhetorical actually, but you managed to basically hit the nail on the head here. This is the exact attitude I encounter in many Russians of the previous generation. This is exactly how the older members of my family see it. Most of them have never had a chance to live anywhere outside of the sphere of influence of that propaganda. They have been marinading in it since the womb.
> I genuinely believe HN is being inflitrated by Russian bots left and right
Honestly that's the better and reassuring option. The alternative is that HN has many soulless humans that can't be bothered to care about a genocide next door if that means they might be inconvenienced.
I find these accusations quite interesting. There’s 150+ comments, most thoroughly following what’s the official EU/US stance and there’s probably less than 5 people here slightly diverging from that, without even supporting Russia. And then there’s two callous, but in the real world probably quite wide-spread opinion comments from this guy.
And the inevitable conclusion’s that HN was infiltrated by the Russians.
In the rush to identify and expose enemy propaganda you don’t even stop to think that the most dangerous propoaganda is the one from our own governments, which are steering us to an economic catastrophe after declaring economic war on their main energy supplier without first securing an alternative.
This framing by EU/US media and politicians is so shockingly efficient that most people on the internet at least can’t even concieve of anything else than full support, more money and more weapons for Ukraine and more sanctiona against Russia.
Winter will be very interesting indeed. We may get to see what happens when the EU moral superpower collides with the amoral reality.
You’re recommending the exact thing that brought us to where we are: doing business with mafia. Putin’s Russia is a kleptocratic state and will pull out of any deal as soon as it thinks it can afford to ’renegotiate’. Not planning for this obvious alternative which all of Eastern European countries cried about for the last decade or two is idiocy mixed with hope and superiority complex.
Where is the evidence? The Russians are delivering as it was ordered.
It is us (the "rule based" loving West) who did not open Nord Stream 2 although it was finished. The pipeline is filled with 200bar right now and it is us who are ignoring all contracts. We are going that far that we expropriate Russian companies and seizing their assets. Sorry, I see populism there, not the rule based bs that the propaganda is telling me.
No, my friend. I do not support the Western war against Russia. Perhaps Russia has started the war against Ukraine, but it was us who entered the war against Russia.
And we should be thankful that they still deliver!
This shit move "pUtIn HiTlEr.. we get your gas, but we pay only in Euros, but you cannot use the Euros xDDDDDDDD demoncrency wins" was so much trash.. we should be thankful that we can any cubic meter right now.
I can sympathize with your point of view and it’s fair if people want to only care about their own back yard. But if we take that path and give up on Ukraine, the EU as a project is fucked. I won’t repeat what other commenters mentioned, but our (EU) energy strategy has been pretty bad. Hopefully we can turn things around.
A state’s responsibility is first and foremost to its people. European states collectively messed up by going against their interests: sanctions on Russia were colossally stupid. The people are starting to wake up and see through the charade leading to an interesting winter. I predict mass protests in a number of places.
Is there a reason to believe that this was done on purpose and not because of stupidity? High energy prices stimulate transition to the green energy, and there are literally $trillions to be made there.
Declaring war to Hitler over invading Poland was colossally stupid.
No, relying on oil and natural gas was stupid.
We had so many warnings -- Moldova, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine in 2014 and Ukraine now -- the only explanation possible is that Merkel and her cronies are russian agents.
The much simpler explanation is that Merkel is not an independent agent but the agent of her party, even if the was running it with an iron fist, she was beholden to the whims of the voter base. And the party advertised itself on a platform of "no change". So reliance on gas built up by Gas-Gerd Schröder was never built back but only strengthened as to not endanger status quo.
The sanctions must be taken back, Ukraine must be divided and de-militarized, relationship with Russia and China MUST be improved. All this as long as we can.
Unfortuntatly, we only have trash politians in Germany.
Once there are demonstrations against this shit system, I will join. For the first time in my life. I am sick and tired of this system that knows it better and just hurts us. No thanks.
Ukraine first, then Poland then the baltics, then all the way to Berlin, and when we're there, all the way to the Atlantic ocean.
Russian shills, do you think we're that stupid?
Russia must be split.
During the Soviet times, the main enemy of the Soviet State was their own people which could revolt.
The russian people today are sadly 90% behind Putin with his ruscism because of the effective propaganda -- today, the only real enemy of Russia is Reality and Truth itself and that's what Russia is really fighting. The only way to postpone reality & truth from emerging is perpetual war.
Russia must be stopped in Ukraine in order for the reality of things to take hold in Russia and for Russia to be rebuilt on sane values.
Actually I was just trolling with the "Russia must be split".
Giving parts of a country to another country is a bad idea. Greater autonomy and less central power was what I actually meant.
While we're at it, why don't we split up and de-militarize Germany too? You wouldn't mind being under the Russian yoke again would you? Actually, better yet, why don't we go ahead and have Russia just directly annex the eastern part of Germany and send all the Germans living there to the far east. After all, if you're willing to dish out such terms to another sovereign nation, you should accept the same being done to yours.
I would prefer to split Russia between China and Europe, and split their gas resources while we’re at it. Their military is trash anyway and everyone hates Putin. I’m sure the Russians won’t mind being part of Europe and being ruled by normal people instead of thugs.
