Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.

Exact full quote from CNN:

“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Leftists: The US doesn’t care how many Ukrainians get shoved into the meat grinder, they just want war because it’s profitable for the defense industry

    Libs: Fuck off with your Russian disinformation, tankie!

    Mitch McConnell: We don’t care how many Ukrainians get shoved into the meat grinder, we just want war because it’s profitable for the defense industry

    • Eat_Yo_Vegetables69@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      Years later they’ll say the same shit as they did after the devastation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria etc…

      Libs: how could we have known? We didn’t vote for this so it’s not our fault.

      Then watch them have selective memory while they cheer on the next war.

      • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
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        11 months ago

        Don’t a lot of USians actively defend the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, even Vietnam?

        • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
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          11 months ago

          As a burger muncher, finally, I’m qualified for something!

          Iraq: some, but not that many. It’s kind of attempted to be forgotten about it seems. The few who do defend it will make undefined arguments to the tune of “Saddam was bad (they don’t mention that the US propped up Saddam until he wasn’t convenient anymore… oops), the war was moral/just but executed poorly.” I don’t think I need to spend energy further on this genocidial, dogshit mentality. A lot of it hinges on strategies such as “make Iraq a glass bowl!” circa 2005.

          Afghanistan: generally regarded as “just” or at least “required” as a direct result of 9/11. Some warmongers still say it was correct for Biden to finally leave, but he did it wrong… somehow. They can’t explain how. They just wanted the war to go on forever.

          Vietnam: mixed bag, but outside of insane reactionaries, the sentiment has shifted during my lifetime (in my mid 30s) from some vaguely half-ass justifiable (communism!) war that tragically killed a lot of American boys (ignoring the Vietnamese deaths as per usual) BUT AMERICA DIDNT LOSE (reeeee). Now shifted to basically all of that same stuff but now many people, especially from my generation and younger, realize it was, indeed, a massive fat loss to the American military.

          I think this is obvious, but in case it somehow isn’t, I’m summarizing the general vibes I’ve encountered from fellow hogs. I absolutely do not agree with them. (I have to post a disclaimer now because I’m pretty sure someone read a post similar to this by me and thought these were my opinions and responded with simply “wow”)

          • Beat_da_Rich@lemmygrad.ml
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            11 months ago

            Pretty accurate about Vietnam and really every American intervention. The civilians murdered and raped by the US military are never centered in most American’s regrets about war. The focus is generally always on the American deaths. The layer of American chauvanism is disappointingly thick.

        • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          I googled polls and I think there’s a clear majority (roughly 60-70%) that think each of them was a mistake, but there’s 25% who don’t say that about Vietnam so that’s probably a hard floor of psychos that will support any war in any context. That’s pretty consistent with the 20% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans who support bombing Agrabah, the fictional country from Alladin.

          I’d like to think we don’t have a lot of those types on here but if we do they’re probably unreachable. But initial support for Iraq was around 80%, so a large number (possibly the majority) of USians followed the trajectory of being lured in by propaganda and then later turning against it, and those people I think are reachable if you can make them realize the same thing is happening again.

          • lemmyseizethemeans@lemmygrad.ml
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            11 months ago

            Have to remember who is getting polled as well. Nobody under 25 answers phone from unknown, they are polling land lines which assumes a certain class, many poorer people working at night when such a call would come, and they also have a tendency to poll certain districts over others.

            Consent ain’t gonna manufacture itself

    • WayeeCool [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Or all the new stars that have been popping up at a faster rate than ever in the CIA building lobby? Then again, I guess JSOC soliders assigned to the CIA special activities group don’t count as Americans killed in combat. All of them die in tragic training accidents, lmao.

  • Drstrange2love@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    They literally say they don’t care about Ukraine and are using and letting Ukraine die for US self-interest.

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    11 months ago

    We need to learn from history. Appeasement emboldens fascists. Russia in Ukraine is like Germany in the Sudetenland.

    I know it’s edgy and cool to say “USA bad” at every opportunity, but this is too serious for edge lord posturing. We need to be honest here.

    Putin is the aggressor. Ukraine is defending itself and needs help.

    • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      We need to learn from history. Appeasement emboldens fascists. Russia in Ukraine is like Germany in the Sudetenland.

      There is a lot to learn from history beyond WWII. For example, one thing we can learn from is the history of the exact analogy you’re using being employed to justify wars. High ranking officials used that analogy to justify the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror. Looking back, the analogy doesn’t hold up at all in any of those cases. But in each case, the propaganda push at the beggining of the war convinced large majorities of Americans to support it when it started. I don’t think there’s been a war since WWII that the US has been involved in where someone wasn’t invoking that analogy. Quotes

      Another thing to learn from history is the direct context of the war. The conflict began between Ukraine and the separatists in 2014, and a cease-fire was signed to stop the bloodshed. Ukraine violated that cease-fire, and that’s what prompted Russian intervention.

      The third point I want to make is that there’s another lesson that can be drawn from the abandonment of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Unlike Ukraine, the Czechs were actually in a military alliance with the Allies. They did not just stand by while a neutral country was invaded, but broke an agreement to throw them to the wolves. And the Czechs had no recourse to hold them accountable, because when you’re the dominant hegemon, rules don’t apply to you. And yet somehow, this is constantly being used as an example of why we should trust our leaders, in the same powerful and unaccountable position, to have the best interests of the people of other countries at heart?

      I find that absurd. The lesson I take from that is that people in those positions can sacrifice huge numbers of people, entire countries, to horrible fates, just to serve their own interests. And feuling the conflict in Ukraine, while refusing to consider any peace negotiations, is doing exactly that. They’ll feed Ukrainians into the meat grinder the same way they’ll abandon Czechs to the Nazis, and the same way they brought death and destruction to the people of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and many more.

      Oh, and one last lesson from history:

      …That policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest — why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs (Joseph Schumpeter, writing in 1919)

      Does that remind you of anything? Because it sounds a lot like US foreign policy to me.

      • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        Excellent comment. It’s revealing that those final words came from someone as reactionary as Schumpter who, I’ll add, was not only a conservative monarchist aristocrat, but at several points expessed deep sympathy for the Nazis and Fascisti. Also, by-the-bye, a pedophile.

        The comparisons of the American Empire to the Roman are a cliché but I’m often still struck by how applicable they are.

        In the run-up to the third Punic War, the Romans used their ally, the King of Numidia, Massinissa, to encroach on the little remaining Carthaginian territory, as they were increasingly unhappy with the recovering Carthaginian commerce and economy. Hence Cato the Censor’s famous words when seeing an economic rival, even when completely outmatched at this point by Roman imperial might: Carthago delenda est.

        When the Carthaginians inevitably declared war against Numidia, the Romans used this as a pretext to claim that they were obliged to intervene to to protect their ally from Carthaginian aggression. Carthage was raised to the ground, the inhabitants massacred or enslaved to the last man, woman and child.

        A generation or two later, the grandson of Massinissa and king of Numidia, Jugurtha, had now become an enemy of Rome. Rome would eliminate him without qualms (notably by Sulla, who would go on to become dictator), especially once he started intervening through bribes in the corrupt politics of Rome. As Kissinger pointed out, it is dangerous to the Empire’s enemy, but it is sometimes even more dangerous to be their ally.

    • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      indeed learn from history, this geopolitical conflict has been ongoing for about 9 years now.

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      NATO is the aggressor and Russia is defending itself and the people of the Donbass against literal genocidal Nazis.

      Your attempted comparison of Russia to Germany rings especially hollow when Ukrainans are the ones adopting Nazi symbols/slogans and worshipping Nazi collaborators and holocaust perpetrators as their national heroes.

    • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      Self-defense is when you commit terrorism against a country that won’t tolerate NATO encirclement

    • REEEEvolution@lemmygrad.ml
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      What i assume you slept the last 30 years? Because those are two very different situations. The Ukranian war was deliberately provoked by Washington and its vassals for over 8 years. After having broken treaty after treaty the years before.

      If anything, it was Russia doing the appeasement and is now stopping.

      Stop assuming you are on the “good” side a-priory.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      NATO moves towards Russia for 30 years in an attempt to finally bring down their hated enemy for good, without the democratic input of the people inside those countries, marching their troops and equipment forward and building military bases as they go: this is not aggression

      Russia takes a stand at basically the last possible moment in almost the last possible country: WE MUST TAKE HELP UKRAINE DEFEND ITSELF FROM AGGRESSION

      it’s particularly funny because when this happened to NATO with the Soviets marching westwards, the threat of them taking them rest of Europe spurred massive amounts of funding from America to Europe and the creation of Gladio and propaganda campaigns about the Soviets and all this is seen as totally justified, meanwhile Russia watches NATO do what NATO feared the USSR would do to them and essentially decided to let it happen without the threat of conventional or nuclear war until it reached a breaking point in 2022

    • Flaps [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Ugh that line of thinking is fucking despicable. ‘helping’ my ass. Enabling thousand of deaths through blowing up peace treaties sure as shit isn’t ‘helping’, neither is sending thousands of Ukrainian conscripts to their deaths only to realise counter insurgency taxtics don’t work against heavily defended positions. The only one you’re helping with your current line of thought is the defense industry, filling pockets to the tune of billions, getting richer and richer while standing on a pile Ukrainian bodies. And you’re here fuckin cheering that on. Gullible LIB like you are the problem.

    • Grimble [he/him,they/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      You guys always talk like you walked into a room full of supporters, ready for your speech.

      Is there a reason these line-broken mix-and-match Statements always seem prepared? Like you could put them on a numbered list, hand it to a room of naval intelligence lackeys on their break and tell them to go wild? You don’t have to engage with the material, just find the right combo of lines from the ‘Ukraine’ section of the excel doc and it’ll look like a comment. Move on, post again, collect paycheck. How easy would that be?