• @____
    link
    148 months ago

    I appreciate the separation between those two concepts, and find that too few people look at it that way.

    Every last one of them needs to be booted off Ukrainian soil, of course - that also goes without saying - but the Russian Army has a long history of lying to their citizens, promising money that never appears, and pulling small numbers of people from e.g., remote villages so that surviving families believe they’re one of the few and don’t see the larger losses at scale.

    I can’t locate my well-thumbed copy of Grau at the moment, but I’m reasonably sure he substantiates the above at least as far back as Afghanistan.

    • @captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      fedilink
      48 months ago

      Thanks it comes from coming to terms with the reality of America as an American. I watched people get roped into a jingoistic furor to die in the sand on the other side of the world for what? Oil profits? In a time that we desperately needed to be decarbonizing and instead were being sold bigger and bigger cars. Most of our troops survived and they were invaders who deserved to be shot at, but we didn’t get back the folks we sent out, we got shattered and broken versions of them. They didn’t profit off it, rich folks who wouldn’t send their kid within any distance of an IED did. It was the poor and desperate who fought, just like in Vietnam.

      Poor folk from all over the world keep getting sent to kill each other.