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Comment by wakawaka28 | Hacker News Reader

Do you hear yourself? YOU are a propagandist on a mission of suicide via nuclear holocaust. Three years of fighting and Ukraine has made zero progress. It's high time to give up the delusions of victory before more people get killed. We CAN peacefully coexist with Russia, and they may help us reign in China.

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This is exactly what the Kremlin have been saying. That said, they do have any army of online trolls that heads into forums like this...

So what do you propose? What is Ukraine's path to victory? Conscript the 18-24 range so that when Russia's economy collapses in 1-2 years time they'll have no male population left?

During WW2 a lot of US propaganda was based around things like showing full store shelves stocked with cheap goods. The best sort of propaganda is the truth, because ultimately there's no argument against it beyond attacking the person who said it 'Blah! That's just filthy imperial capitalist propaganda!'

But the briefest glance at history (or the past few years) will emphasize that the 'good guys' don't always tell the truth and the 'bad guys' don't always lie. Such is the nature of war that in reality the person most likely to be telling the truth is the person winning, and the person most likely to be lying is the one that's losing. It's in large part for this reason that wars often end only years after they've been really decided, which ultimately achieves little beyond hurting the losing side even more.

More like we had Galba, this is Otho, now who is next? Will it be Vespasian a little early?

Why on earth would Russia reign in China? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve read today.

Nuclear holocaust? lol

You may not have realized but China needs more room and resources, and Russia has them. Russia is a natural ally with us against China, if we let them be.

>Nuclear holocaust? lol

The left used to march to stop nuclear war, now they laugh about it maniacally on the Internet... You are truly unhinged.

> The left used to march to stop nuclear war

#NotAllLeftists

“Peace for our time”

We can't defeat Russia in a regional squabble, much less strategically (as the risk is too high if we let it escalate). The potential for more conflict in the future is not an excuse to never seek peace. If you think there is another conflict coming, we can prepare for that, but this crap can't go on. There won't be any Ukrainians left at this rate.

Ask actual Ukrainians how they feel about your faux concern for their lives.

Do you mean the soldiers dying by the thousands, their girlfriends partying in nightclubs as it falls apart, the ones profiting from the war, or the ones who fled the country? Regardless of what anyone thinks of my concern for the Ukrainians, they aren't winning and continuing to fight will impoverish the US and lead to perhaps millions of additional deaths.

I care about Ukrainians but not enough to start WW3 over. If you're not suicidal, you'll think the same.

The reason the western allies wanted to make peace with Hitler was because they had a role in creating him and re-arming Germany in order to create an anti-communist bulwark state. They were surprised when this Frankenstein creation backfired on them and then told a big story about how they are the good guys.

If you think about Poland, they were probably psyched that this insane anti-communist regime was moving eastward.

Do you hear yourself? You are being hyperbolic, Putin made the same threat that is _always_ looming by any nuclear power, and now the leadership in the right-wing side of our party, who have had a clear connection to the Russians, are kowtowing to the Russians, destroying our government, and ruining the shred of reputation America had in the process.

You’re either a propagandist or delusional.

The threat is always looming. Do you think fighting a war with another nuclear power makes that threat go away, be diminished, etc.? War between nuclear powers is supposedly inconceivable yet it's happening before our eyes.

>the leadership in the right-wing side of our party, who have had a clear connection to the Russians

The only clear connection is through the false allegations manufactured by the left. Why do they want this war so bad?

>destroying our government, and ruining the shred of reputation America had in the process.

The right is presently trying to fix all the damage done over decades by politicians from both parties. We were on an unsustainable path leading to ruin, and now maybe the country can be saved. It won't be painless but it must be done.

Fighting proxy wars against Russia is kind of our bread and butter, we've been doing it for decades and nearly always win.

Russia on the other hand has had far more success with injecting propaganda in Western institutions, recruiting assets, and getting people in the west to parrot their propaganda.

Hollywood makes a movie about every other year about the blacklist under McCarthyism as if this was all in their paranoid imaginations. The truth is that the Soviets DID get numerous people into both high ranking positions within the US government and other influential positions in American life, especially in entertainment and higher education, the effects of which linger to this day.

The major proxy wars against the USSR were Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Korea was a stale mate, Vietnam was a loss, and then there's Afghanistan. It was certainly a victory, but I think that was more about the Afghans than us - the same reason we'd also go on to lose to them. They are one ridiculously hard and hardy people with completely unbreakable spirits. And of course the exact people we trained there would go on to form Al Qaeda, and generally form the backbone of radical Islam, which adds some further asterisks to that 'victory.'

Similarly the Soviets have pretty much always sucked at propaganda. The idea of a worldwide worker revolution attracted no more than fringe contingents. But US 'propaganda' of freedom of speech, capitalism, and so on played a key role in the eventual decline of the USSR. I remember listening to an ostensibly stoic Russian chess grandmaster who lived through the fall of the USSR. Him slightly choking up while talking about how grown men were tearing up over Donald Duck media, which had become a symbol of the end of one era and the beginning of another, was extremely memorable. Similarly this [1] is media from the opening of the first McDonalds in the USSR. They served some 30,000 people on day 1 at exceptionally high (relative) costs, with McDonalds flags working as thinly veiled proxies for flags of capitalism.

[1] - https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/first-mcdonalds-moscow-sovi...

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