Oh really It didn't play out to well for many south and central Americans, did it? Not to mention Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine etc.
Ukraine on verge of civil war?
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Oh really It didn't play out to well for many south and central Americans, did it? Not to mention Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine etc.
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I am simply thankful my grandfather fled from the communist regime. It could only be described as cruel.
For those that romanticise, I simply ask; why did they prevent their citizens from crossing the border if it was so good? why did people line up in queues for non existent goods including food? why were poets executed?
Out of interest, how many people starved to death or were executed under communist Russia?
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yep
Thank god Stalin stopped Hitler but thank god my grandparents chose Australia over Stalin. Every time I go back, I thank may lucky stars they fled circa 70 years ago.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/04/demonisation-russia-risks-paving-way-for-war
The demonisation of Russia risks paving the way for war
Seumas Milne
Politicians and the media are using Vladimir Putin and Ukraine to justify military expansionism. It’s dangerous folly
On the ground, it has meant the rise of Ukrainian fascist militias such as the Azov battalion, now preparing to ‘defend' Mariupol from its own people. Photograph: Alexander Khudoteply/AFP/Getty Images
A quarter of a century after the end of the cold war, the “Russian threat” is unmistakably back. Vladimir Putin, Britain’s defence secretary Michael Fallon declares, is as great a danger to Europe as “Islamic State”. There may be no ideological confrontation, and Russia may be a shadow of its Soviet predecessor, but the anti-Russian drumbeat has now reached fever pitch.
And much more than in Soviet times, the campaign is personal. It’s all about Putin. The Russian president is an expansionist dictator who has launched a “shameless aggression”. He is the epitome of “political depravity”, “carving up” his neighbours as he crushes dissent at home, and routinely is compared to Hitler. Putin has now become a cartoon villain and Russia the target of almost uniformly belligerent propaganda across the western media. Anyone who questions the dominant narrative on Ukraine – from last year’s overthrow of the elected president and the role of Ukrainian far right to war crimes carried out by Kiev’s forces – is dismissed as a Kremlin dupe.
Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long – it must wake up to the danger
Volodymyr Ishchenko
Read more
That has been ratcheted up still further with the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. The Russian president has, of course, been blamed for the killing, though that makes little sense. Nemtsov was a marginal figure whose role in the “catastroika” of the 1990s scarcely endeared him to ordinary Russians. Responsibility for an outrage that exposed the lack of security in the heart of Moscow and was certain to damage the president hardly seems likely to lie with Putin or his supporters.
But it’s certainly grist to the mill of those pushing military confrontation with Russia. Hundreds of US troops are arriving in Ukraine this week to bolster the Kiev regime’s war with Russian-backed rebels in the east. Not to be outdone, Britain is sending 75 military advisers of its own. As 20th-century history shows, the dispatch of military advisers is often how disastrous escalations start. They are also a direct violation of last month’s Minsk agreement, negotiated with France and Germany, that has at least achieved a temporary ceasefire and some pull-back of heavy weapons. Article 10 requires the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Ukraine.
But Nato’s hawks have got the bit between their teeth. Thousands of Nato troops have been sent to the Baltic states – the Atlantic alliance’s new frontline – untroubled by their indulgence of neo-Nazi parades and denial of minority ethnic rights. A string of American political leaders and generals are calling for the US to arm Kiev, from the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey, to the new defence secretary, Ashton Carter. For the western military complex, the Ukraine conflict has the added attraction of creating new reasons to increase arms spending, as the US army’s General Raymond Odierno made clear when he complained this week about British defence cuts in the face of the “Russian threat”.
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Ukrainian government soldiers dig trenches east of the port city of Mariupol. Photograph: Scott Peterson/Getty Images
Putin’s authoritarian conservatism may offer little for Russia’s future, but this anti-Russian incitement is dangerous folly. There certainly has been military expansionism. But it has overwhelmingly come from Nato, not Moscow. For 20 years, despite the commitments at the end of the cold war, Nato has marched relentlessly eastwards, taking in first former east European Warsaw Pact states, then republics of the former Soviet Union itself. As the academic Richard Sakwa puts it in his book Frontline Ukraine, Nato now “exists to manage the risks created by its existence”.
Instead of creating a common European security system including Russia, the US-dominated alliance has expanded up to the Russian border – insisting that is merely the sovereign choice of the states concerned. It clearly isn’t. It’s also the product of an alliance system designed to entrench American “leadership” on the European continent – laid out in Pentagon planning drawn up after the collapse of the Soviet Union to “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival”.
Russia has now challenged that, and the consequences have been played out in Ukraine for the past year: starting with the western-backed ousting of the elected government, through the installation of a Ukrainian nationalist regime, the Russian takeover of Crimea and Moscow-backed uprising in the Donbass. On the ground, it has meant thousands of dead, hundreds of thousands of refugees, indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas and the rise of Ukrainian fascist militias such as the Azov battalion, supported by Kiev and its western sponsors, now preparing to “defend” Mariupol from its own people. For the bulk of the western media, that’s dismissed as Kremlin propaganda.
Most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand ‘because of their experience of the past 25 years'
Boris Kagarlitsky
Russian covert military support for the rebels, on the other hand, is denounced as aggression and “hybrid warfare” – by the same governments that have waged covert wars from Nicaragua to Syria, quite apart from outright aggressions and illegal campaigns in Kosovo, Libya and Iraq.
That doesn’t justify less extreme Russian violations of international law, but it puts them in the context of Russian security. While Putin is portrayed in the west as a reckless land-grabber, in Russian terms he is a centrist. As the veteran Russian leftist Boris Kagarlitsky comments, most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand against the west “not because of patriotic propaganda, but their experience of the past 25 years”.
In the west, Ukraine – along with Isis – is being used to revive the doctrines of liberal interventionism and even neoconservatism, discredited on the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, Angela Merkel and François Hollande have resisted American pressure to arm Kiev. But when the latest Minsk ceasefire breaks down, as it surely will, there is a real risk that Ukraine’s proxy conflict could turn into full-scale international war.
The alternative is a negotiated settlement which guarantees Ukraine’s neutrality, pluralism and regional autonomy. It may well be too late for that. But there is certainly no military solution. Instead of escalating the war and fuelling nationalist extremism, western powers should be using their leverage to wind it down. If they don’t, the consequences could be disastrous – far beyond Ukraine.
The demonisation of Russia risks paving the way for war
Seumas Milne
Politicians and the media are using Vladimir Putin and Ukraine to justify military expansionism. It’s dangerous folly
On the ground, it has meant the rise of Ukrainian fascist militias such as the Azov battalion, now preparing to ‘defend' Mariupol from its own people. Photograph: Alexander Khudoteply/AFP/Getty Images
A quarter of a century after the end of the cold war, the “Russian threat” is unmistakably back. Vladimir Putin, Britain’s defence secretary Michael Fallon declares, is as great a danger to Europe as “Islamic State”. There may be no ideological confrontation, and Russia may be a shadow of its Soviet predecessor, but the anti-Russian drumbeat has now reached fever pitch.
And much more than in Soviet times, the campaign is personal. It’s all about Putin. The Russian president is an expansionist dictator who has launched a “shameless aggression”. He is the epitome of “political depravity”, “carving up” his neighbours as he crushes dissent at home, and routinely is compared to Hitler. Putin has now become a cartoon villain and Russia the target of almost uniformly belligerent propaganda across the western media. Anyone who questions the dominant narrative on Ukraine – from last year’s overthrow of the elected president and the role of Ukrainian far right to war crimes carried out by Kiev’s forces – is dismissed as a Kremlin dupe.
Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long – it must wake up to the danger
Volodymyr Ishchenko
Read more
That has been ratcheted up still further with the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. The Russian president has, of course, been blamed for the killing, though that makes little sense. Nemtsov was a marginal figure whose role in the “catastroika” of the 1990s scarcely endeared him to ordinary Russians. Responsibility for an outrage that exposed the lack of security in the heart of Moscow and was certain to damage the president hardly seems likely to lie with Putin or his supporters.
But it’s certainly grist to the mill of those pushing military confrontation with Russia. Hundreds of US troops are arriving in Ukraine this week to bolster the Kiev regime’s war with Russian-backed rebels in the east. Not to be outdone, Britain is sending 75 military advisers of its own. As 20th-century history shows, the dispatch of military advisers is often how disastrous escalations start. They are also a direct violation of last month’s Minsk agreement, negotiated with France and Germany, that has at least achieved a temporary ceasefire and some pull-back of heavy weapons. Article 10 requires the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Ukraine.
But Nato’s hawks have got the bit between their teeth. Thousands of Nato troops have been sent to the Baltic states – the Atlantic alliance’s new frontline – untroubled by their indulgence of neo-Nazi parades and denial of minority ethnic rights. A string of American political leaders and generals are calling for the US to arm Kiev, from the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey, to the new defence secretary, Ashton Carter. For the western military complex, the Ukraine conflict has the added attraction of creating new reasons to increase arms spending, as the US army’s General Raymond Odierno made clear when he complained this week about British defence cuts in the face of the “Russian threat”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Ukrainian government soldiers dig trenches east of the port city of Mariupol. Photograph: Scott Peterson/Getty Images
Putin’s authoritarian conservatism may offer little for Russia’s future, but this anti-Russian incitement is dangerous folly. There certainly has been military expansionism. But it has overwhelmingly come from Nato, not Moscow. For 20 years, despite the commitments at the end of the cold war, Nato has marched relentlessly eastwards, taking in first former east European Warsaw Pact states, then republics of the former Soviet Union itself. As the academic Richard Sakwa puts it in his book Frontline Ukraine, Nato now “exists to manage the risks created by its existence”.
Instead of creating a common European security system including Russia, the US-dominated alliance has expanded up to the Russian border – insisting that is merely the sovereign choice of the states concerned. It clearly isn’t. It’s also the product of an alliance system designed to entrench American “leadership” on the European continent – laid out in Pentagon planning drawn up after the collapse of the Soviet Union to “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival”.
Russia has now challenged that, and the consequences have been played out in Ukraine for the past year: starting with the western-backed ousting of the elected government, through the installation of a Ukrainian nationalist regime, the Russian takeover of Crimea and Moscow-backed uprising in the Donbass. On the ground, it has meant thousands of dead, hundreds of thousands of refugees, indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas and the rise of Ukrainian fascist militias such as the Azov battalion, supported by Kiev and its western sponsors, now preparing to “defend” Mariupol from its own people. For the bulk of the western media, that’s dismissed as Kremlin propaganda.
Most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand ‘because of their experience of the past 25 years'
Boris Kagarlitsky
Russian covert military support for the rebels, on the other hand, is denounced as aggression and “hybrid warfare” – by the same governments that have waged covert wars from Nicaragua to Syria, quite apart from outright aggressions and illegal campaigns in Kosovo, Libya and Iraq.
That doesn’t justify less extreme Russian violations of international law, but it puts them in the context of Russian security. While Putin is portrayed in the west as a reckless land-grabber, in Russian terms he is a centrist. As the veteran Russian leftist Boris Kagarlitsky comments, most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand against the west “not because of patriotic propaganda, but their experience of the past 25 years”.
In the west, Ukraine – along with Isis – is being used to revive the doctrines of liberal interventionism and even neoconservatism, discredited on the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, Angela Merkel and François Hollande have resisted American pressure to arm Kiev. But when the latest Minsk ceasefire breaks down, as it surely will, there is a real risk that Ukraine’s proxy conflict could turn into full-scale international war.
The alternative is a negotiated settlement which guarantees Ukraine’s neutrality, pluralism and regional autonomy. It may well be too late for that. But there is certainly no military solution. Instead of escalating the war and fuelling nationalist extremism, western powers should be using their leverage to wind it down. If they don’t, the consequences could be disastrous – far beyond Ukraine.
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but that is the issue, Stalin was not unique. My grandfather fled a village on slovak hungarian border and my grandmother Czech republic (they met here in Oz in a work concentration camp).
It wasn't Stalin but local communist leadership that run amok in Czech. but it would be fair to say the power brokers were the USSR but they didn't take over until the spring uprising and Stalin was long gone by then but not their brutality.
I will never forget when our family was re-united with elements who fled (to the US and Oz) and those trapped behind the iron curtain met in Adelaide. The Czechs couldn't believe we had food in our shops waiting for customers (not the other way around) and we could say what we liked about our leaders and didn't fear being arrested.
The US was once a great nation but it too has scars and carrying baggage from the cold war. It has become too paranoid and militant. Hopefully they become the rational force for good that they were leading into WW2 (other than their own internal treatment of African Americans). That said, I do suggest the world would not be as good as it is if the Russians, Germans, Chinese, Japanese or the British had ruled the planet post WW2.
Assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland has admitted the US considers Russia’s actions in Ukraine “an invasion”, in what may be the first time a senior American official has used the term to describe a conflict that has killed more than 6,000 people.
Speaking before the House committee on foreign affairs, Nuland was asked by representative Brian Higgins about Russia’s support of rebels in eastern Ukraine, through weapons, heavy armor, money and soldiers: “In practical terms does that constitute an invasion?”
Nuland at first replied that “we have made clear that Russia is responsible for fielding this war,” until pressed by Higgins to answer “yes or no” whether it constitutes an invasion.
“We have used that word in the past, yes,” Nuland said, apparently marking the first time a senior official has allowed the term in reference to Russia’s interference in eastern Ukraine, and not simply its continued occupation of the Crimean peninsula.
Obama administration officials across departments have strenuously avoided calling the conflict an invasion for months, instead performing verbal contortions to describe an “incursion”, “violation of territorial sovereignty” and an “escalation of aggression”.
In November Vice-President Joe Biden, who has acted as one of Obama’s primary liaisons with the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, rapidly corrected himself after breaking from the White House’s careful language on CNN, saying “When the Russians invaded – crossed the border – into Ukraine, it was, ‘My god. It’s over.’”
Barack Obama has so far declined to use the term, as have US ambassadors, the secretary of state, John Kerry, and EU leaders such as the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. The leaders have probably avoided the word to prevent it from complicating already difficult diplomatic efforts, since it would probably exacerbate antagonistic rhetoric between the parties and diminish the Kremlin’s will to compromise.
Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN warned in August that continued Russian intervention would “viewed as an invasion”, but has not used the term since.
Major James Brindle, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to characterize Russia’s actions as an invasion, using terms like “serious military escalation” and “blatant violation of international law”.
“To be clear we care much less about what you call it, we’ve been focused on how to respond to it,” he said.
The congressmen who grilled Nuland on American policy did not shy from their own heated rhetoric. Representative Ed Royce, the committee chair, not only said Russia had invaded Ukraine but said the Kremlin “has recruited every skinhead and every malcontent in the Russian-speaking world and tried to bring them into the east” of Ukraine.
Representative Eliot Engel accused Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, of spreading “lies, lies and more lies” and representative Albio Sires called the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, “a KGB thug who happens to be the head of another state”.
Nearly all called for the US to immediately arm the Ukrainian government with “lethal defensive weapons”, such as anti-tank guns and counter-artillery radar, to help combat an estimated 12,000 well-supplied Russians fighting with and coordinating rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Nuland refused to deviate from the administration’s position that Obama has yet to decide about supplying Kiev with weapons, and provided no timeline for that decision. Asked about what she thought would change Putin’s behavior, Nuland said: “I can’t speak to what’s in President Putin’s head, that’s a place that I don’t think I can go.”
The assistant secretary said she supported the representatives call to reform the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and boost its US-funded affiliates in eastern Europe and Russia, such as Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, in order to counter Russian propaganda abroad and at home. Royce said: “If we can’t begin to change minds then the struggle over Ukraine today will become a generational struggle.”
Royce and others angrily questioned Nuland, and were indignant that some sanctions would be lifted while Crimea will remain in Russian hands for the foreseeable future. “If you’re Vladimir Putin how seriously do you take that?” representative Gerry Connolly asked.
But Nuland defended the Obama administration’s strategy of financial support for Kiev, as it struggles with corruption and financial chaos, and sanctions on Russia, saying that the State Department is in talks with EU leaders for another round of sanctions on Russia.
Only California representative Dana Rohrabacher broke with the tough talk of the committee, implying that Ukrainian revolutionaries “ignited this situation” by ousting President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. Rohrabacher has long carried on an iconoclastic defense of Putin, and said that the US should not seek “to humiliate Russia again and again and again”.
Nuland briefly won infamy for a phone conversation leaked online last year in which she said “* the EU” to the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, while discussing a new government in then revolutionary Kiev. Nuland then became a bugbear of Russian state media, which often used the recording as evidence of direct American meddling to orchestrate a coup. The recording made clear that Nuland and Pyatt were involved in negotiations with prominent Ukrainian leaders, but at the time Russian and European intermediaries were as well.
A career diplomat, Nuland has navigated through the Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies, focusing on Russia and former Soviet republics. She served as an adviser to former vice-president Dick Cheney as well as a State Department spokeswoman for the Obama administration, and is married to Robert Kagan, a historian often called a neocon (he rejects the label) for his generally interventionist policies. Nuland herself appears to have taken a more diplomatic approach to intervention, and declined to tell the committee in “an unclassified setting” about her own views on whether the US should arm Ukraine.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/04/victoria-nuland-russia-actions-ukraine-invasion
So do they want peace to hold, or do they want to embolden Kiev to have another crack at attacking Donetsk? Nuland seems to be the one with the power in this theater and she appears to be unrelenting in her drive to de-stabilize the situation.
Speaking before the House committee on foreign affairs, Nuland was asked by representative Brian Higgins about Russia’s support of rebels in eastern Ukraine, through weapons, heavy armor, money and soldiers: “In practical terms does that constitute an invasion?”
Nuland at first replied that “we have made clear that Russia is responsible for fielding this war,” until pressed by Higgins to answer “yes or no” whether it constitutes an invasion.
“We have used that word in the past, yes,” Nuland said, apparently marking the first time a senior official has allowed the term in reference to Russia’s interference in eastern Ukraine, and not simply its continued occupation of the Crimean peninsula.
Obama administration officials across departments have strenuously avoided calling the conflict an invasion for months, instead performing verbal contortions to describe an “incursion”, “violation of territorial sovereignty” and an “escalation of aggression”.
In November Vice-President Joe Biden, who has acted as one of Obama’s primary liaisons with the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, rapidly corrected himself after breaking from the White House’s careful language on CNN, saying “When the Russians invaded – crossed the border – into Ukraine, it was, ‘My god. It’s over.’”
Barack Obama has so far declined to use the term, as have US ambassadors, the secretary of state, John Kerry, and EU leaders such as the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. The leaders have probably avoided the word to prevent it from complicating already difficult diplomatic efforts, since it would probably exacerbate antagonistic rhetoric between the parties and diminish the Kremlin’s will to compromise.
Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN warned in August that continued Russian intervention would “viewed as an invasion”, but has not used the term since.
Major James Brindle, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to characterize Russia’s actions as an invasion, using terms like “serious military escalation” and “blatant violation of international law”.
“To be clear we care much less about what you call it, we’ve been focused on how to respond to it,” he said.
The congressmen who grilled Nuland on American policy did not shy from their own heated rhetoric. Representative Ed Royce, the committee chair, not only said Russia had invaded Ukraine but said the Kremlin “has recruited every skinhead and every malcontent in the Russian-speaking world and tried to bring them into the east” of Ukraine.
Representative Eliot Engel accused Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, of spreading “lies, lies and more lies” and representative Albio Sires called the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, “a KGB thug who happens to be the head of another state”.
Nearly all called for the US to immediately arm the Ukrainian government with “lethal defensive weapons”, such as anti-tank guns and counter-artillery radar, to help combat an estimated 12,000 well-supplied Russians fighting with and coordinating rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Nuland refused to deviate from the administration’s position that Obama has yet to decide about supplying Kiev with weapons, and provided no timeline for that decision. Asked about what she thought would change Putin’s behavior, Nuland said: “I can’t speak to what’s in President Putin’s head, that’s a place that I don’t think I can go.”
The assistant secretary said she supported the representatives call to reform the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and boost its US-funded affiliates in eastern Europe and Russia, such as Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, in order to counter Russian propaganda abroad and at home. Royce said: “If we can’t begin to change minds then the struggle over Ukraine today will become a generational struggle.”
Royce and others angrily questioned Nuland, and were indignant that some sanctions would be lifted while Crimea will remain in Russian hands for the foreseeable future. “If you’re Vladimir Putin how seriously do you take that?” representative Gerry Connolly asked.
But Nuland defended the Obama administration’s strategy of financial support for Kiev, as it struggles with corruption and financial chaos, and sanctions on Russia, saying that the State Department is in talks with EU leaders for another round of sanctions on Russia.
Only California representative Dana Rohrabacher broke with the tough talk of the committee, implying that Ukrainian revolutionaries “ignited this situation” by ousting President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. Rohrabacher has long carried on an iconoclastic defense of Putin, and said that the US should not seek “to humiliate Russia again and again and again”.
Nuland briefly won infamy for a phone conversation leaked online last year in which she said “* the EU” to the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, while discussing a new government in then revolutionary Kiev. Nuland then became a bugbear of Russian state media, which often used the recording as evidence of direct American meddling to orchestrate a coup. The recording made clear that Nuland and Pyatt were involved in negotiations with prominent Ukrainian leaders, but at the time Russian and European intermediaries were as well.
A career diplomat, Nuland has navigated through the Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies, focusing on Russia and former Soviet republics. She served as an adviser to former vice-president Dick Cheney as well as a State Department spokeswoman for the Obama administration, and is married to Robert Kagan, a historian often called a neocon (he rejects the label) for his generally interventionist policies. Nuland herself appears to have taken a more diplomatic approach to intervention, and declined to tell the committee in “an unclassified setting” about her own views on whether the US should arm Ukraine.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/04/victoria-nuland-russia-actions-ukraine-invasion
So do they want peace to hold, or do they want to embolden Kiev to have another crack at attacking Donetsk? Nuland seems to be the one with the power in this theater and she appears to be unrelenting in her drive to de-stabilize the situation.
Proving Putin is a savage dictator and he needs to be replaced. They could have joined the world , but this little dicked turd has turned them once again into the cold miserable hard sad effing place it always has been.
Yes someone said to me once, "some "people " will kill you if you mess with their wife or family or children.
But the English , they won't just kill, you , they'll annihilate your whole family, everything."
So yep, thank heaven for the Yanks , sooner be a friend than an enemy. They know, like the Brits , how to wage total war.
They may have to wage it against ISIS, and that will see some collateral damage , let me tell you. Everywhere!
But ISIS will be gone, if they do that. They don't need boots on ground for that either.
takes two to tango, if the US wasn't sending their agents of subversion aroud the world to destabilize every regime that did not kowtow to its greed maybe paranoid dictators might not A) get into power as much in the first place and B) be so brutally repressive. The US has lost every scrap of moral high point they ever had when they committed the world's largest civilian attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they have danced over corpses shouting freedom and democracy ever since.
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you can be both simultaneously
To be fair that probably saved a million lives
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Difficult one to say. Do you think there was any other way to stop the rampaging Japanese? If the answer is yes then perhaps it was the wrong thing to do. Generally though history looks upon Hiroshima & Nagasaki favourably.
Bringing it up now is irrelevant though. Clearly Russia will always have interests in Ukraine but fighting an unofficial war is not the right way to go about it. It is crippling Russia's economy. It is crippling Ukraine's economy. It is the reason 298 innocent passengers were killed on MH-17 along with nearly 6000 deaths on the ground.
The right thing to do for Russia is pursue political links to Ukraine through negotiations. Russia must cease it's unofficial war immediately.
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Personally I feel it was the right choice at the time given this was the 7th year of war costing 60m lives equating to 3% of the worlds population at the time. Not to mention the battles for neighbouring islands had already cost the Allies 50,000 in deaths and casualties, 110,000 japanese soldiers and another 50,000-100,000 civilians.
The real issue though is the cost of an invasion:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymi...of-japan-was-a-tactical-and-moral-imperative/
The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that an invasion of Japan’s home islands would result in approximately 1.2 million American casualties, with 267,000 deaths. A study performed by physicist William Shockley for the staff of Secretary of War Henry Stimson estimated that the invasion of Japan would cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000-800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese deaths.
I think the yanks showed their position in the bombing raids in Europe where they refused to bomb German cities at night. As they felt the risk of civilian deaths was too high. That suggests to me the US decision in japan was not an easy one.
I would also suggest the decision wasn't based on a cost benefit alone rather it included an opportunity to test the bomb. That additional consideration doesn't make it a bad decision, rather it highlights that war is not something to be proud of or celebrated (including ANZAC day).
Well you can rubbish the US forever it seems , people forget , and Japan weren't the nicest people in those days ,America has done lots of bad and silly things they have also done countless good things. If you forget that you are the blind one . I remember when Darwin got clobbered by cyclone Tracy who turned up almost immediately , a huge Us cargo plane with supplies and people .
The USA has a lot to answer for, but also a lot for the world to be greatfull for. George Bush Jr began the dislike people have of this nation, his war in Iraq on a lie, that has caused most of the hatred now, it is not needed , America has now to cope with the garbage from those actions created by Buush , Rumsfeld , Cheney, Rice , even Powell the general, these are the ones that stuffed up badly. Afghanistan was the only place to go , after 9/11 , Al Qaeda should have been hunted down covertly and maybe there'd be no ISIS.
But if you want to look at Putin the w***er , as Americas fault , well fair dinkum , he's a man living in another time that will never come back. And he always was from whenever he became a KGB man , he is his, and Russias own problem , brutally repressive why????? he's like that to his own people , the stupid paranoid pea brain, could have brought them into the modern world.? they better solve it. Because no one but the Russians caused that dick head.
Better having America as an ally mate.
I celebrate the soldiers sailors and airmen and women, war is nothing to be celebrated that's for sure. But that's how I look at Anzac day , its about the people and remembering that even though their leaders were incompetent in some areas of world war1 young blokes just went and did it.
But I am sure the USA had many many hard days weeks and months deciding to create hell on earth in Japan. Saved lots of life.
Wonder what we would see today, perhaps the same , the mindset is different now, I think Australians would defend their homeland until there were none of us left, but going overseas is more about helping a big big ally, no choice there.
PS no offence meant for people with this illness , but I believe Stalin was a very unstable mentally ill individual.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/04/demonisation-russia-risks-paving-way-for-war
The demonisation of Russia risks paving the way for war
Seumas Milne
Politicians and the media are using Vladimir Putin and Ukraine to justify military expansionism. It’s dangerous folly
On the ground, it has meant the rise of Ukrainian fascist militias such as the Azov battalion, now preparing to ‘defend' Mariupol from its own people. Photograph: Alexander Khudoteply/AFP/Getty Images
A quarter of a century after the end of the cold war, the “Russian threat” is unmistakably back. Vladimir Putin, Britain’s defence secretary Michael Fallon declares, is as great a danger to Europe as “Islamic State”. There may be no ideological confrontation, and Russia may be a shadow of its Soviet predecessor, but the anti-Russian drumbeat has now reached fever pitch.
And much more than in Soviet times, the campaign is personal. It’s all about Putin. The Russian president is an expansionist dictator who has launched a “shameless aggression”. He is the epitome of “political depravity”, “carving up” his neighbours as he crushes dissent at home, and routinely is compared to Hitler. Putin has now become a cartoon villain and Russia the target of almost uniformly belligerent propaganda across the western media. Anyone who questions the dominant narrative on Ukraine – from last year’s overthrow of the elected president and the role of Ukrainian far right to war crimes carried out by Kiev’s forces – is dismissed as a Kremlin dupe.
Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long – it must wake up to the danger
Volodymyr Ishchenko
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That has been ratcheted up still further with the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. The Russian president has, of course, been blamed for the killing, though that makes little sense. Nemtsov was a marginal figure whose role in the “catastroika” of the 1990s scarcely endeared him to ordinary Russians. Responsibility for an outrage that exposed the lack of security in the heart of Moscow and was certain to damage the president hardly seems likely to lie with Putin or his supporters.
But it’s certainly grist to the mill of those pushing military confrontation with Russia. Hundreds of US troops are arriving in Ukraine this week to bolster the Kiev regime’s war with Russian-backed rebels in the east. Not to be outdone, Britain is sending 75 military advisers of its own. As 20th-century history shows, the dispatch of military advisers is often how disastrous escalations start. They are also a direct violation of last month’s Minsk agreement, negotiated with France and Germany, that has at least achieved a temporary ceasefire and some pull-back of heavy weapons. Article 10 requires the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Ukraine.
But Nato’s hawks have got the bit between their teeth. Thousands of Nato troops have been sent to the Baltic states – the Atlantic alliance’s new frontline – untroubled by their indulgence of neo-Nazi parades and denial of minority ethnic rights. A string of American political leaders and generals are calling for the US to arm Kiev, from the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey, to the new defence secretary, Ashton Carter. For the western military complex, the Ukraine conflict has the added attraction of creating new reasons to increase arms spending, as the US army’s General Raymond Odierno made clear when he complained this week about British defence cuts in the face of the “Russian threat”.
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Ukrainian government soldiers dig trenches east of the port city of Mariupol. Photograph: Scott Peterson/Getty Images
Putin’s authoritarian conservatism may offer little for Russia’s future, but this anti-Russian incitement is dangerous folly. There certainly has been military expansionism. But it has overwhelmingly come from Nato, not Moscow. For 20 years, despite the commitments at the end of the cold war, Nato has marched relentlessly eastwards, taking in first former east European Warsaw Pact states, then republics of the former Soviet Union itself. As the academic Richard Sakwa puts it in his book Frontline Ukraine, Nato now “exists to manage the risks created by its existence”.
Instead of creating a common European security system including Russia, the US-dominated alliance has expanded up to the Russian border – insisting that is merely the sovereign choice of the states concerned. It clearly isn’t. It’s also the product of an alliance system designed to entrench American “leadership” on the European continent – laid out in Pentagon planning drawn up after the collapse of the Soviet Union to “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival”.
Russia has now challenged that, and the consequences have been played out in Ukraine for the past year: starting with the western-backed ousting of the elected government, through the installation of a Ukrainian nationalist regime, the Russian takeover of Crimea and Moscow-backed uprising in the Donbass. On the ground, it has meant thousands of dead, hundreds of thousands of refugees, indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas and the rise of Ukrainian fascist militias such as the Azov battalion, supported by Kiev and its western sponsors, now preparing to “defend” Mariupol from its own people. For the bulk of the western media, that’s dismissed as Kremlin propaganda.
Most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand ‘because of their experience of the past 25 years'
Boris Kagarlitsky
Russian covert military support for the rebels, on the other hand, is denounced as aggression and “hybrid warfare” – by the same governments that have waged covert wars from Nicaragua to Syria, quite apart from outright aggressions and illegal campaigns in Kosovo, Libya and Iraq.
That doesn’t justify less extreme Russian violations of international law, but it puts them in the context of Russian security. While Putin is portrayed in the west as a reckless land-grabber, in Russian terms he is a centrist. As the veteran Russian leftist Boris Kagarlitsky comments, most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand against the west “not because of patriotic propaganda, but their experience of the past 25 years”.
In the west, Ukraine – along with Isis – is being used to revive the doctrines of liberal interventionism and even neoconservatism, discredited on the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, Angela Merkel and François Hollande have resisted American pressure to arm Kiev. But when the latest Minsk ceasefire breaks down, as it surely will, there is a real risk that Ukraine’s proxy conflict could turn into full-scale international war.
The alternative is a negotiated settlement which guarantees Ukraine’s neutrality, pluralism and regional autonomy. It may well be too late for that. But there is certainly no military solution. Instead of escalating the war and fuelling nationalist extremism, western powers should be using their leverage to wind it down. If they don’t, the consequences could be disastrous – far beyond Ukraine.
What is it about those words military expansion. WHY? Why not just expansion for the good of humanity. We are a stuffed up creature aren't we?
Russia has some nukes thats its power threat , but economically it is being destroyed, by who? Putin. Believe it!
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Whilst at uni for the second time I worked as a recruiting officer for the ADF. You would be shocked at the number of nut bags who want to join after ANZAC day.
I would prefer this day to be a quiet time of reflection by individuals individually. The modern ANZAC day is fast becoming a commodity for media, politicians and holiday makers as well as a recruiting drive for the ADF.
I am not anti-war, I am not anti ADF but I am very anti any celebration of war, nationalism or participants including servicemen and the dead.
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