Level Zero: Extraction insta-bans player on launching the game.
(media.scored.co)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (36)
sorted by:
The cold war was a real war. We spent a lot of time and money attempting to damage Russia and her interests.
The USSR was most effectively defeated by their own KGB.
they were defeated by the clock running out on their fake and gay economic and social order, much like we're rapidly approaching ours.
All economic orders are fake and gay by design because they depend on people believing each other.
The source of that faith is the only real difference, and theirs ran out. But it wouldn't have if they had a unifying factor such as an aggressive enemy.
The point is that the populace wasn't united behind the whole apparatus and was kind of very much against it. And the apparatus itself was massively disjointed and working against itself. KGB generals wanted nice cars, soft toilet paper and jeans just as much as, if not more, than the general populace.
Had the US tried actual aggression in the 80s, the populace (as well as the KGB) would have had a unified purpose which superseded caring about having nice cars, soft toilet paper and jeans. All that is secondary to crushing the aggressor. It's a historical thing imho. Russia is pretty much defined by a model of growth against existential threats from outside aggressors. I think Siberia is pretty much the only place they took over without someone from there trying to raid their lands (and enslave their people) first and even then I don't really know.
Just as an example, the Crimean tartars burned down Moscow about 400+ years ago, which is why Crimea was some hundred+ years later conquered by Russia. Even having your capital burned down is nothing, really, in the scheme of things.
So this whole "lets scare those russkies with a couple dozen ATACMS!" is doubly retarded. You could literally wipe out all of Moscow from the face of the Earth and that will just make every single Russian determined forever to put eventual boots on the ground in Washington, like they did with Paris after Napoleon burned down Moscow.
You're viewing this through the lens of a "single USSR." Which is belied by it's own title. The union of states was already breaking apart, and as you said, aggression would have led to a unified purpose.
So.. the KGB applied that aggression against the states gaining more freedom, which unified the people against their coup, and setup Yeltsin to lead.
The deep irony of this, and the reason I put it all this way, is because Yeltsin ended up having to hand the Russian state back over to a former KGB officer.
In any case "we beat the because we were nice," even if it were kinda sorta true (it isn't), it misses the real plot. And even if it didn't, name me one country we could level with explosives and then walk away calling it "good diplomacy."
That isn't really true though, in terms of the actual population, as amply demonstrated by the referendum in 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum
The lowest result was in Ukraine and Russia itself.
The USSR broke apart because the elites wanted it broken apart.
Because the elites wanted what they got (massive wealth through corruption and graft and selling of privatized state enterprises for scrap, logistics control, etc. etc. etc.).
The elites were given this possibility because the USA basically promised them the possibility and provided bank accounts to store the wealth and yachts and houses in Italy to spend it on. Which is what I call being nice.
Russian elites today were instead promised pain and suffering instead of massive additional wealth. Given the stick instead of the carrot. Russian elites are pretty much 99% behind Putin and Xi, because anything is better than being a beggar under a bunch of whimsical sanctions applied willy-nilly by a bunch of fart-sniffing retards. And also they are ornery fucks who want revenge for having their stuff taken.
The war in Ukraine could have been won by the west in three easy steps 2 years ago, by being nice: