Do you not see the similarities between Russia / Ukraine and Nazi Germany / The Sudetenland. Both countries that have decided to invade and occupy areas that hold native speakers that may want to be aligned with the invading country.
I’m not saying that Russia is the same as the nazi state but the principle is the same. Read up on the Munich Agreement and the Sudeten Crisis. Appeasing Putin is not the solution.
The Munich Agreement was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, Great Britain, the French Republic, and Fascist Italy. The agreement provided for the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, where more than three million people, mainly ethnic Germans, lived. The pact is also known in some areas as the Munich Betrayal (Czech: Mnichovská zrada; Slovak: Mníchovská zrada), because of a previous 1924 alliance agreement and a 1925 military pact between France and the Czechoslovak Republic.
Much of Europe celebrated the Munich Agreement, as they considered it a way to prevent a major war on the continent. Adolf Hitler announced that it was his last territorial claim in Northern Europe. Today, the Munich Agreement is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement, and the term has become "a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudete...Sudeten_Crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement
Originally Posted by txdot-guy
OK, Say we agreed with esteemed board member Winn Dixie that the primary reasons the North and the South split up in 1861 were states rights and tariffs. We don't, we both believe slavery was the culprit. But for the sake of argument assume WD's right.
Say instead of merely trading with the South, Britain and France had armed the South to the hilt. Wouldn't that be a better analogy as to what's happening now than Hitler and the Sudetenland?
At the time of the break up of the USSR, Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders never dreamed NATO would expand the way it has.
From an interview with Gorbachev in 2014:
The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.
https://www.rbth.com/international/2...lls_40673.html
Another Gorbachev quote, from a 2008 article in Britain's mainstream newspaper The Independent, titled "Gorbachev: US Could Start a new Cold War"
Kohl (Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of Germany), US Secretary of State James Baker and others assured me that NATO would not move an inch east. The Americans didn't stick to that, and the Germans didn't care. Maybe they even rubbed their hands at how well the Russians were ripped off. What did it bring? It's just that the Russians no longer trust Western promises.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...-Cold-War.html
The NSA archive at George Washington University provides lots documentation for western assurances about NATO enlargement. Quoting from the archive,
USA Secretary of State James Baker's famous "not one inch eastward" assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified USA, Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-b...-leaders-early
Circling back to the headline in the Independent from 2008, "Gorbachev: US could start new Cold War," that's what happened. Putin wanted Russia to be part of NATO. But the military industrial complex in the USA needed an enemy to justify huge military spending.
Since the break up of the USSR, the only foreign incursions by Russia that I recall occurred in Soviet Republics and Syria. Their involvement in Syria has been small scale. We on the other hand have no qualms about sending soldiers halfway across the world to fight senseless wars in places like Iraq and Vietnam. And yeah, Ukraine is pretty senseless too. But it is on Russia's doorstop. Combine proximity with a little paranoia and you end up with a war. The idea that Putin's set on world wide domination, or annexing the Baltic States and Eastern Europe, just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
