AI-generated videos promoting Poland’s exit from the European Union have appeared on Polish-language social media, featuring non-existent, attractive young women advocating for “Polexit”.
One TikTok account called “Prawilne Polki” published content showing women dressed in T-shirts bearing Polish flags and patriotic symbols, European analytics collective Res Futura said. The content targeted audiences aged 15 to 25.
The videos featured statements including: “I want Polexit because I want freedom of choice, even if it will be more expensive. I don’t remember Poland before the European Union, but I feel it was more Polish then.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard
This shows how big the potential of the EU is. The USA cannot allow a strong EU to emerge.
They used to have a specific strategy for accomplishing this:
The USA provided military security for Europe so that Europe would not have any need to spend money for military. The USA’s goal was to minimize EU countries’ military spending so that USA would remain an uncontested military hegemon. That gives it a lot of influence that can be translated into actual cash.
At the same time, EU countries saved several percents of their GDP and could use it for the good of their own populations. It was a win-win situation.
But then the Russia organized this movement called “MAGA”, and that movement successfully cancelled the arrangement. (Funnily enough, the abbreviation “maga” comes from “make America great again”, which would suggest strategies for increasing USA’s influence, not diminishing it. But what do I know.)
That is because the MAGA/P2025/neofascist plan is not to maintain hegemony against near-peers (which is expensive on the citizen), it is to return to the mythologized post-war boom by letting the rest of the world go to shit again and then to swoop in to “save” everyone (again) while selling them weapons and industrial stuff (but not to let them reindustrialize again, like during the cold war).
What is preverse is that it was the reindustrialization and social state of Japan, Germany/EU that was the poster child that helped keep these blocks from turning fully socialist and win hearts and minds abroad during the cold war. I guess that was too successful and is making russia/US look bad.
PS: btw, this “strategy” is risky, because there is no way to guarantee that WW3 won’t reach US soil this time, you can’t just sit it out.
They saved it in US government bonds which gave the US the money to finance the weapons.
Which could make one wonder if the US politicians are that stupid. There would be one reasonable reason to end the arrangement: if there is another war to be fought.
China is the bigger threat to US hegemony and the way things are, we will fight with the US against China and Russia. All the drama exists to prevent the population from objecting to a war that inevitably will become nuclear.
Not stupid; cowardly. Nobody dares to challenge the herd.
Rump is incredibly stupid. A very very very very stupid man, who believes most of his own bullshit. But he understands how stupid racist Americans think and it’s very plausible to those ears.
Are you sure it’s not “Muzzle America for Global Autocrats”?
There is a much more obvious country that has a vested interest in dividing western democracies, and weakening organizations that unite them, such as NATO and the EU, a country that’s currently in a proxy and hybrid war with Europe, and a country that has long understood the importance of information warfare: Russia.
Of course with the Trump administration, you never know, but then you could also ask yourself: if Trump was a Russian agent, how different would his actions be? Not very different I think.
Trump wouldn’t have sent arms like Javelins to Ukraine in 2018 and he would have stopped messing around in Syria.
Only in the short term, to gain advantage in the war. Which other option than cooperarion would have been better for Russia? As the other submission about carving up Russia by China shows, China is only the second best option.
https://feddit.org/post/23648591
Putin had no reason to stop Trump from doing that.
Remember, until February 2022 Putin knew that Ukraine will become a part of the Russia in 2022. He had a lot of intel from actual Ukrainians living in Ukraine. He had spent billions for bribing various Ukrainian military officials. He knew that those Javelins will all be in the inventory of the Russian armed forces in spring 2022. Why would Putin have forbidden Trump from sending them?
Of course, Putin had not understood how much 2014 changed the Ukrainian thinking. The Russia was still more or less a friend until that. After it attacked Crimea, it absolutely was not. And suddenly very very few people would coöperate with the Russia even to the least extent. It’s difficult to explain how abrupt the change was! It was not possible for Putin to understand what had actually taken place, because the Russian heart is so very different from the Ukrainian heart. Russians would never have had a Maidan. It would absolutely not fit the Russian culture to do anything like that. The feelings behind that were simply unfathomable for a member of the nation Putin hails from. But in any country there are a few percents of the population that really wants to see shit where there is none. And those felt uncomfortable in Ukraine. And those people really did think their country was going to hell and that’s what they told Russians. That was really how for example Medvechuk saw things. While extremely unrepresentative of Ukrainians, those people were practically 100 % of those who gave any intel to the Russia.
And of course…
Putin rules through corruption. He gives people power by electing that for certain people no corruption will ever be noticed by the authorities. And at the same, he has the power to make the authorities see the corruption whenever Putin needs to get rid of those people. But if you choose only public officials who are corrupt, of course they will steal all the billions they were supposed to use in Ukraine. Especially since Putin told everyone around him, even Shoigu, that there will not be an attack against Ukraine – that everything is just training for the worst of the worst case scenarios. Preparation in case that EU goes crazy and attacks. And everybody knew EU won’t attack and they trusted Putin when he said he has absolutely no plans to attack anything in the western direction.
But yeah, Putin has done his homework. He had made a lot of effort to get it right. And therefore he knew it doesn’t matter what weapons Ukraine has. He “knew” that Ukrainians overwhelmingly want to join the Russia and he “knew” that all military districts in Ukraine had been bought with those billions he had spewed there. The more weapons Ukraine gets in 2018, the more weapons the Russia has in 2022 when it’s time for the next step of the plan – the Suwałki gap, next to which there had been several very very big wargames when the future events of 2022 seemed crystal clear to Putin.
It’s just… Sometimes you put a huge effort into your homework and still get a wildly incorrect answer, if you have unknowingly slept through the most crucial lessons.
That sounds too much like a story in which everything just happens to happen as needed. It’s still possible and I am grateful for the insights but I cannot imagine that much ignorance.
To mention one thing, the USSR must have insisted on controlling the Suwałki gap because they knew that the Capitalists were out to get them. But why conquer the gap now if that triggers the war that the gap is supposed to prevent?
Putin suggested the economic union from Atlantic to Pacific. He must know that it will lead to a dissolution of the nations so he can’t be that hung up on Russia.
Dissolution of what nations?
Russia, or rather the Russian Federation and its members, like EU member states are losing significance, e.g. by having to implement EU regulations.
The economic union suggested by Putin would have the same kind of power dynamics that USSR did. In EU independent member states lose their significance as the significance of EU grows.
When it comes to an economic union from Atlantic to Pacific, it would be strongly led by the Russia. It would have compulsory Russian in schools for those who don’t speak Russian as their mother tongue. Any increase in significance of an economic union led by the Russia would translate to increase in significance of Moscow. Dissolving the nations into something led by an autocrat in Moscow would not mean dissolving the Russian nation, but rather more assimilating them into the Russian nation. Just like nobody talks about the Mari and the Komi and the Sakha now, even though those are nations of their own, in a future Atlantic-Pacific economical union nobody would talk about Finns or Lithuanians. Those nations would be seen the same way as the Komis are seen now.
Suwałki gap did not exist when Soviet Union did.
Suwałki gap is the border area between Poland and Lithuania. It’s a narrow stretch of land with the Kaliningrad enclave of the Russia on one side and Russia-controlled Belarus on the other side.
During the Soviet times Lithuania was a part of USSR, meaning that it was not a gap between two parts of USSR, just a short and insignificant part of the long Soviet-Polish border.
How is the Suwałki gap supposed to prevent a war? A war between Belarus and the Russia?
I thought that there were not only political but also topological reasons for the significance of the gap but I can’t find anything besides that some historic battles happened there.
So the question is why he would be conquering the Baltics. For Russia’s glory seems to be the preferred answer. But strategically it doesn’t make sense to conquer more land for Russia, without, as it seems, any security improvements at all.
There are three security improvements to this:
Firstly, a flat land is difficult to defend. The Russia would want to bring their western borders to seashores and mountain chains. The Russia used to have pretty much those borders until 1917. I’m attaching a map of what would give the Russia the least amount of flatland to defend in case that the EU ever wanted to attack it.
(Of course there’s the wee question of why would we want to attack them, but a Russian mind would want to attack others if it can do so without getting into too much trouble and therefore assumes others are the same)
Secondly, Baltic countries and Finland are simply very close to St. Petersburg and even to Moscow. It would be easy to bombard especially SPb with missiles from Finnish and Estonian territory. Or even Moscow from Latvian territory.
And thirdly,
if there lots of Russian speakers in an area and it still manages to be democratic and prosper, it shows that Russians are capable of living under democracy. Putin has put a big effort into painting an image of Russians not being capable as a nation to live in a democracy. If anyone people in the Russia identify as “Russian” prospers outside the rule of the Czar, that someone is a threat to the Czar.
The thing is, Putin has made a decision to never use Internet for anything. He has never done anything in it, because for him it’s a tool full of propaganda. His first contact with Internet was that his underlings were able to shape opinions across the globe extremely efficiently using Internet. He doesn’t want his brain to rot like that, so he absolutely refuses to use Internet.
Now, what sources exist for him, then? He doesn’t know what he is missing, so he is unaware of how pervasively all information exchange takes place over Internet.
Putin gets his information from TV-news, newspapers and from assistants that he has meticulously hand-picked, personally. He knows his own TV and newspapers are full of propaganda and therefore not very useful as sources. And he seems to honestly assume the same applies, to the same high extent, even, to foreign media as well. That means, he is basically left at his most trusted assistants for all information. He vets new recruits against the earlier ones: If the new one is telling things that are in agreement with what the older assistants, he can be trusted. If not, he has been compromised by American propaganda.
Also, it’s good to keep in mind where Putin comes from. He was the second child of a single-mother. The first child died, largely of hunger, during the siege of Leningrad. They had no food there, which meant that cannibalism was very common. You can figure out what happened to a child that died at a young age in that city. It’s either: He gets buried and another child starves. Or the other child is given food that will keep it alive. A single mother traumatized by such an experience, in post-war USSR in devastated northwestern USSR. No time for the child, really. The guy grew on the streets. And there’s nobody who doesn’t get traumatized by that kind of an experience.
Because of this personal history, Putin really believes deeply in the concept of thugs being able to trust other thugs. Because of his early development, where he has had to play the role of an adult at an age when he should still have been an innocent child for many more years, his brain is wired differently than that of an adult without a traumatic background. He truly does not understand that the people around him who lie to everyone else, also lie to him. And because of his vetting system, he has ended up hiring only assistants that coördinate their lies with the other assistants. If anyone steps away from the line and starts saying something different, Putin knows that the assistant has been compromised by CIA and fires him. And when Putin fires an assistant, that also means that the assistant’s children will lose their study places, etc. The family’s life will be derailed completely. That’s a type of a punishment for betrayal.
So, Putin seriously is entirely disconnected from real world actions. He gets information from his assistants, but has personally made sure that they all lie. And that they lie all the time. At the same time, Putin is giving orders that must be implemented verbatim. He gets information that there are 1000 soldiers in the centre of Pokrovsk and then he gives an order for 150 of them do some specific thing. And in reality there are 30 soldiers, and they are at the outskirts of Pokrovsk. Yet the command will be relayed and implemented verbatim. And then those 30 soldiers die for nothing.
I do not think “ignorance” is really the correct word for this phenomenon, though. So, in the end I do agree with you, in a way.
What’s your source? I could only find that Putin doesn’t use a smartphone which is very rational in his position.
The German Wiki states that his parents gave him a car. So he is not the child of a single-mother. He is also the third child, not the second.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin
What are your sources for Putin’s self-isolation?
Making an internet search for putin doesn’t use internet brings a lot of results from 2023, but I did read about it around the mid-to-late 2022. It was told by a person I do trust, but I cannot find the precise source now, over 3 years afterwards.
Still, if you read through the various articles you find with that search, they together give a reasonable good image of what’s going on. (Beware, of course, that many of the sites are more than just fishy!)
Sorry for not taking time to dig through them more precisely!
Thanks, that’s good enough for me.