Originally Posted by
End
Sadly I did say at the beginning that this war would likely be fought down to the Last Ukrainian for very dark reasons. Now they (the Ukrainians) are considering a bill to place 60+ men into the draft pool.
I know there are other stories that also put the Russians in very bad places as well but let me tell you something even my LSE mum understands when I walk her through all the delicacies: "I don't approve of X, but I understand X"
Most of us don't really "get" local BS because, well, it ain't local to us and we all make the common mistake of projecting our own decision making process onto others in the mistaken assumption that other people are, at base, just like us. No, no they are not. Hard lesson to internalize but once ya do the world makes much more sense.
Heck, I'm American. The entire concept of centuries or even millennia long deep seated ethnic hatred is in truth alien to us. Oh yeah we can "imagine" it but a truly visceral understanding is beyond us. The whole "White Power" epitaph of the KKK and other American "White" Supremacists rings utterly bizarre and absurd to anyone whose bloodline never made the trip across the Oceans to any place like America and thus still resides in the Old World. Those people told those old conflicts and the duties/vendettas attached to "get fucked" and came here with the hope of a blank slate starting point.
They got exactly that and intermarried en masse in ways their ancestors would likely froth at the mouth at as a result. A French wedding a Prussian? A Scotts with an Irish? A Pole getting with a Russo-German hybrid? Happened. A lot. Often. As did any European/Native pairing. I myself am the result of such a bizzaro union. A pureblood German was my granddaddy from my mom's side. Hell, mum says I'm basically his reincarnation and laments that I never got to really meet him (i.e. He was an ILI) and he bailed on the old world right after he got done with WWI in a masterful display of doing what it does.
If you know what the "Russian" ethnicity went through from their first recorded histories, the land they currently occupy, and what they lost at the end of the Cold War. You'll get it. You'll also get why they did to the various lands and peoples what they did throughout their history as well. Approve? No. Understand? Yes.
This will, BTW, explain why Americans are the way they are. We are the most "blessed" nation to ever exist in ways that'd take me literal books to explain. Hell, one dude even did! Peter Zeihan is a filthy globalist but damned if I can't find a flaw in his argument as to why it is the Yankee who shaped the last century and will stand astride the next as an unassailable colossus.