"whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."

i'll take the latter, up to the caveat that the classical conception of a god was not an omnipotent, monolithic force but a being with faults and strengths.

i very well may cite this, in the future, as an argument for my continued claims of not belonging to your species.

it took me a while to getting around to watching it, but this is an important speech, historically, that will be cited for decades to come. you have to get through a little bit of propaganda to come to it, but putin is announcing a drastic shift in russian foreign policy: an end to american appeasement. that is provocative language, but in the era of over the top propaganda the truth is indeed often provocative. and, like churchill before him, putin is too late: this is the end of the russian empire. what remains to be seen is whether the new regional power is going to be europe or china, or whether they just split russia down the middle.

see, here's the thing i was worried about and we've seen confirmed in the east of ukraine: russia may have been forced into crimea by threat of losing it's strategic regional bases (if one pushes a spring, it does indeed bounce back at you, as vlad said), but it cannot simply stop with that reaction. it's like setting a string of dominoes in motion. russia now has no choice but to attempt to reassert it's hegemony over all of eastern europe, which will lead to it's imminent collapse..

likewise, once assad has rooted out the rebels he will have no choice but to launch a counter-attack against saudi arabia. there's a major proxy war in the region on the horizon with a less certain outcome attached to it.

now, it's a new century. generally speaking, excluding the middle east, tactics are very different now. nobody wants to set off a war of alliances. i'm not suggesting that russia is planning an invasion of poland, which would start a nuclear war. i'm suggesting that russia is moving into a period where it attempts to control events in eastern europe through economic leverage and covert intelligence operations, like we're seeing in the east of ukraine. goals include taking power in these countries long enough to pull them out of nato, and crucially long enough to prevent the construction of that missile shield, which will reduce russia to a slave of nato. i think annexations like we've seen in crimea will be exceedingly difficult to organize.

it's a race against time, and one russia is destined to lose. especially if it continues to waste time in eastern ukraine, while nato further fortifies the baltics.

none of this is really new. it's in the pnac. supposedly, books have been written about it (i haven't read them). but let's be clear what the theatre is in this war: it's the famous resources triangle of instability. what's changed is that a serious front is opening in eastern europe.

one of the different aspects of this front is that nato and america are on the defensive, which i think is unique in the post cold war world. that's not to assign the russians a position of strength. it's very illusory.

so, this is what has changed: russia has reacted, and now cannot reverse the machinery it has set in motion until every former warsaw pact member has resigned it's membership in nato. which will not happen.

warsaw is the new moscow.

dontlaughtoomuch11
"russia now has no choice but to attempt to reassert it's hegemony over all of eastern europe, which will lead to it's imminent collapse.."

====>Retard bitch, you made the TERRIBLE mistake but TERRIBLE mistake of confusing Sovjet Russia with Modern Russia, seriously??? Has the USA yankee propaganda made your brain that weak that you can't even think straight?!

deathtokoalas
well, no. i'm equating modern russia with soviet russia with czarist russia, actually. all of these things are different stages of a russian empire. none of these stages were communist or capitalist in any meaningful way, they all shared the ideology of empire.

there was no such thing as the cold war. there was a conflict between london's empire and moscow's empire that heated up a little after the french revolution, when they became the two dominant empires vying over global control. london was replaced with washington, but this is an insignificant detail; the american empire is the lineal descendant of the british empire. and, one can maybe extrapolate that back further, by connecting london to rome and moscow to constantinople. there has always been a conflict between the empire to the east and the empire to the west.

such is the nature of a world broken up into states.

that is not a result of propaganda. i don't watch western media, but i doubt there's many western talking heads comparing putin to churchill or voiding the american revolution by reducing it to a civil war within the british empire. it's the result of having a solid understanding of history, and being able to see when an empire is on the brink of collapse.

the reason russia cannot reverse the attack is that, if it does, nato will become more aggressive. every sign of weakness from russia merely strengthens america's kill reflex.  if they do not take control of latvia, nato will place missiles there directed directly at moscow that will eliminate all russian sovereignty. if they do not take control of poland, it will be used to retake latvia. and etc. there is no end to this, other than the west changing it's mindset out of this endgame/final-kill/conquer-russia mode and into one that respects their boundaries.

but all of this is completely impossible. putin is fifteen years too late to reverse the collapse of the russian empire - which he is responsible for by not reacting to the expansionism by the american empire. all he can do is watch helplessly as his allies turn against him in a rush to steal the country's resource wealth.

the kill is approaching, and the world will feast on the carcass.

note that there's always the possibility that the russians have some secret weapon, or are covertly aligned with an inter-galactic empire (i think it more likely that an alien species would initiate contact with communists than capitalists) or something. but, by all open and earthly appearances, russia is pretty much mated in five or six.

i mean, putin's gotta pull a heraclius or something, here.

---

Beastinvader
Go Putin! Funny how people will talk about the injustice of the Tartars being forced to leave. Yet they won't mention that those tartars supported the NAZIs.

marcwhatever
Stalin was same criminal as Hitler was. In USRR there was a lot of people who supported Hitler in because they thought he bring them more freedom. I don't know how i'd act if I was a Ukrainian (for example) just after Holodomor and face chance to kill soviets. Btw. half of Tatar population was killed or deported before 1933, repressions after WWII only ended up whole thing.

deathtokoalas  
but the history is always stated in a vacuum, as though it's an unprovoked aggression. nobody talks about the brutality of the mongol invasions, or how russia and ukraine were enslaved by mongol hordes for centuries. slave and slav have a common root in the english language, due primarily to the slave trade that existed in the period. millions upon millions of slavic speakers were rounded up by crimean tatars and shipped south to the ottomon empire, where they were sold as slaves within the islamic world. it's actually one of the greatest atrocities in the history of mankind, up there with the extermination of american indigenous populations and the transatlantic slave trade. and, western media has the audacity to suggest that the crimea was the "ancestral homelands" of the tatars? after they invaded from east of the caspian and depopulated and enslaved the indigenous inhabitants? herodotus makes it clear that the indigenous peoples of the crimea were the agricultural ancestors of the modern slavic groups. when you put stalin's deportation orders in context, it's as a process of revenge that is difficult to actively condemn.

Keeper Web
It was political change, what Stalin did I can't even start on something to defend his actions, but compare it to the change in US civil war, how many human rights violations and human tragedies you can find there. You can find it repeating it many times in history, but Stalin had more "recognition" on the subject.

Beastinvader
I didn't realise the problems began before WW2. My mistake. I have to learn more about that period in history. Thanks for letting me know.

deathtokoalas
to get to the root of the history, begin by googling the term "harvesting the steppe". it's hard to condone what stalin did, but when you understand the history it's also hard to condemn it.

we could talk about native american tribes potentially rising up against american settlers, but that's maybe hard to put under any concrete basis. however, if you look at land redistribution in africa, that's maybe a more concrete way to understand it. the anc (under mandela) toyed with the idea of redistributing land from white settlers to indigenous blacks. in the end, they didn't. could anybody have condemned them if they did? this has actually happened in zimbabwe (under mugabe). there's no doubt that rights abuses have occurred. but, it's also very difficult to condemn, given that black africans obviously have a greater right to the land.

what's annoying, to me, is the lack of context in discussing a complicated issue. instead, it's consistently framed in a lingering cold war narrative.

Beastinvader
I agree. I happen to be South African and I'm well aware of what Mugabe did and what the ANC is trying to do.

Two decades of Black Economic Empowerment and they are pushing for more. But in South Africa it's more complex. The Zulus were in the East when the Dutch arrived in the cape. Under Dutch (and later British) rule we expanded to incorporate the whole of West South Africa and the East coast. The only people there were nomadic people who wanders around.

I admit that the wars against the Zulus might have been wrong.

My point is just that the white people here has as great a right in this country than black people.

Also, thanks for the info. I'm at this moment looking at the history of the tartars.