[parcifal]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door tomm

Met zo'n neokoloniale ingesteldheid moet het toch pijn doen, levende in HK, dat die Aziatische "apen" het beter doen dan U, dat U "very much the past" bent en zij "very much the future"?

Rusland en Poetin-knuffelaars als jij zijn de ECHTE neo-kolonialen en Rusland is het enige koloniale rijk (eventueel ook China afhankelijk van hoe je het bekijkt) dat nog overgebleven is op deze aardbol.

Helaas heeft men na 1991 dat (neo)koloniale imperium niet definitief afgebroken, men had er toen de kans toe, maar men dacht -vergeefs- natuurlijk dat Rusland kon en zou evolueren zoals de Westerse landen dat decennia eerder hadden gedaan.

Rusland en Russen zijn incapabel om te evolueren uit zichzelf, het zal dus met zware externe druk moeten gebeuren.
Zo zij het.

De Oekraieners hebben ondertussen zeer duidelijk gemaakt wat ze denken van hun Oude Koloniale "heersers" :



Een zeer goed stuk in The Atlantic deze week over dit thema:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...echnya/639428/

Decolonize Russia
To avoid more senseless bloodshed, the Kremlin must lose what empire it still retains.

Russia’s history is one of almost ceaseless expansion and colonization, and Russia is the last European empire that has resisted even basic decolonization efforts, such as granting subject populations autonomy and a meaningful voice in choosing the country’s leaders. And as we’ve seen in Ukraine, Russia is willing to resort to war to reconquer regions it views as its rightful possessions.


During and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Russian empire hit its modern nadir, the United States refused to safeguard the newly won independence of multiple post-Soviet states, citing misplaced concerns about humiliating Moscow. Emboldened by the West’s reluctance, Moscow began to reclaim the lands it lost. Now Russia’s revanchism—aided by our inaction and broader ignorance of the history of Russian imperialism—has revived the possibility of nuclear conflict and instigated the worst security crisis the world has seen in decades. Once Ukraine staves off Russia’s attempt to recolonize it, the West must support full freedom for Russia’s imperial subjects.

...
Cheney “wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.”
...
In 2022, as Putin tries to restore the Russian empire by littering corpses across Ukraine, Bush’s position appears myopic. He—and American policy makers after him—failed to see the end of the Soviet Union for what it was: not just a defeat for communism, but a defeat for colonialism. Rather than quash Russia’s imperial aspirations when they had the chance, Bush and his successors simply watched and hoped for the best. As Bush’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft later said about the Soviet collapse, “In the end, we took no position at all. We simply let things happen.”

We no longer have that luxury. The West must complete the project that began in 1991. It must seek to fully decolonize Russia.

...
Chechnya’s story is one of many. Nation after nation—Karelia, Komi, Sakha, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Kalmykia, Udmurtia, and many more—claimed sovereignty as the Soviet empire crumbled around them. Even regions that had been colonized by the Kremlin for centuries pushed for independence. In a 1992 referendum in Tatarstan, nearly two-thirds of the population voted in favor of sovereignty, even though Soviet authorities had drawn the republic’s borders to exclude some 75 percent of the Tatar population. As election observers wrote, the republic was motivated by “years of pent-up resentment” against Russian colonialism, and saw “huge support” for the referendum in ethnically Tatar regions.

..
The result: Chechnya remains dominated by a Kremlin-appointed despot. Tatarstan saw any pretense of sovereignty snuffed out by Putin. On and on Moscow marched, reclaiming nations desperate to escape its embrace. In Ukraine, we see the same story. Moscow is unlikely to stop there..

ecolonizing Russia wouldn’t necessarily require fully dismantling it, as Cheney proposed. The push toward decolonization could instead focus on making the kind of democratic federalism promised in Russia’s constitution more than a hollow promise. This would mean ensuring that all Russian citizens, regardless of region, would finally be given a voice in choosing their leaders. Even simply acknowledging Russia’s colonial past—and present—would make some difference. “As much as decolonizing Russia is important for the territories it formerly occupied, reprocessing its history is also key for the survival of Russia within its current boundaries,” the scholars Botakoz Kassymbekova and Erica Marat recently wrote.

Until Moscow’s empire is toppled, though, the region—and the world—will not be safe. Nor will Russia. Europe will remain unstable, and Ukrainians and Russians and all of the colonized peoples forced to fight for the Kremlin will continue to die. “There is no way for Russia to move forward with Putin and there is no way for Russia to move forward without addressing its imperial past and present,” the analyst Anton Barbashin recently tweeted. “Give up empire and attempt to thrive or hold [on] to it and continue degrading.”

Russia has launched the greatest war the world has seen in decades, all in the service of empire. To avoid the risk of further wars and more senseless bloodshed, the Kremlin must lose what empire it still retains. The project of Russian decolonization must finally be finished