Originally published at: "Russian warship, go f*ck yourself!" declares Latvian parliament member at United Stations security session | Boing Boing
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Good for him! Latvia has got to be very worried about their sovereignty.
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Of course the representative of a tiny Baltic state that shares a border with Russia is opposed to Russia annexing a smaller neighbor.
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I do so love that the warship that quote refers to has subsequently become good and thoroughly fucked.
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The OSCE is not a UN body.
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I am still surprised by how much of the world is either ambivalent or somewhat pro-Russia in this conflict. Not just China and Iran, but South Africa and India, too!
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Yeah, United Stations should really say OSCE in the title here. And if you weren’t familiar with the acronym (like me), you’ve just been informed.
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many diagrams like the one in the inset were shown. (gift link)
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It’s not a huge surprise to see somewhere like India, which does a great deal of business with Russia(imports, exports; and a pretty substantial reliance on Russian weapons systems for a lot of their more complex requirements), treating brutal violence against a bunch of people who aren’t them as secondary to their economic interests; that’s probably more the rule than the exception in terms of historical human behavior; it’s similarly not a huge shock to see people who would really prefer a thumb in NATO/the EU/the US’ eye in favor on those grounds.
The ones I can’t understand, though, are those who act like Team Moscow is actually where the moral case is.
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“Nations do not have friends, they have interests.”
– Beau of the Fifth Column
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I can see where some countries are looking at this, then looking at the west/the global North’s many, many regrettable and/or heinous escapades and going ‘hold on a minute, sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander…’ for sure.
Not saying I agree, but I can certainly see why they might think that way.
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Yeah, I get that “The West” and especially the USA isn’t seen super fondly around the world, given the long history of European colonialism and the CIA sponsored coups/dictatorships. But, as you say, it’s one thing to be critical/dismissive of “European land wars” and quite another to think that Russia is the “good guy” in this conflict.
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I can understand the half of that that involves saying “The US is against imperialism now? Let me laugh even harder!”; or “Oh, a humanitarian crisis happening to white people; I’m shocked that those are now a problem…”; I just can’t make the jump any further toward the ‘so I guess we should throw in with the other imperialist aggressor this time’ side; especially when(to the best of my knowledge) Ukraine largely missed the boat on the big era of European colonial expansion; so there isn’t an obvious “haha, let’s see how they like it” constituency.
I can absolutely see why import-dependent countries with limited budgets might have a purely interested preference for the war to wrap up nice and quickly(it’s less obvious that this desire translates into support for Russia at this point; though it originally probably would have); or why ‘global south’ countries generally might be purely uninterested; but, again, cant’ really see the case for actively preferring the Russian case beyond a potential pragmatic level.
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In the sense that it was colonised itself.
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Russia is standing up against Western Hegemony!
Narratives are strong. The republicans are still trying to conflate actual invasion by tanks with human migrants "invading across the “southern” border.
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It’s tankieism as foreign policy. The United States is the only imperialist power in the world, and all its adversaries are ipso facto anti-imperialist and should be supported.
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South Africa is currently engaged in naval exercises with Russia. So much for the anti-colonialist ANC.
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The USSR helped the ANC fight against the apartheid regime, which was supported by Western neo-colonialsm, therefore (by tankie logic) Russia is an anti-imperialist ally.
Because of the USSR’s support for African anti-colonial movements, many Africans really do see Russia as a friend. They miss the fact that Russia was and is a land empire.
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