These people would rather be dead than under Russian rule. Why would 97% of them support continuing defense if not?
And don't forget that when Russians still thought they're going to win, they brought in mobile crematoriums and started filtrating people and sending them off to Siberia if not torturing and murdering them. It was never a question of "no war and survive" VS "die in war" - but "no war, die anyways" VS "war, possibly survive"
> These people would rather be dead than under Russian rule. Why would 97% of them support continuing defense if not?
Certainly this is not true of Crimea, where people have been independently polled by Western NGOs and the weight of the evidence is they want to be part of Russia.
> It was never a question of "no war and survive" VS "die in war" - but "no war, die anyways" VS "war, possibly survive"
Your thesis is that if Russia won they would murder a substantial %-ge of the population in mobile crematoriums?
> Certainly this is not true of Crimea, where people have been independently polled by Western NGOs and the weight of the evidence is they want to be part of Russia.
You mean "a very slightly bigger half of them", right? And that was before all this shit went down and Russians started to mobilize them. I wonder how they feel now, don't you?
> Your thesis is that if Russia won they would murder a substantial %-ge of the population in mobile crematoriums?
Nah, my thesis is that Russia started with it immediately.
Seems like we just don't know much about what they did there, yet. Let's see how many mass graves are there once Ukraine gets the land back. Are you going to put your money on it being 0? Or maybe they simply planned the genocide for later, you never know with these crazy dictators.
I mean, murdering and cremating isn’t the only bit of genocide. They’ve also bern taking Ukrainian children and adopting them out to Russian families, and filtrating out Ukrainian adults across Russia.
At the beginning and through most of the invasion they Russian stance was that Ukrainians are a fake people and don’t actually exist. If I was getting invaded by a group saying my people weren’t real I probably wouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt that they’d treat me well or let me live if I laid down Armstrong
It looks like the thread got stuck on a technicality around the cremations. I think I still agree with the initial, wider hypothesis the poster had with
> It was never a question of "no war and survive" VS "die in war" - but "no war, die anyways" VS "war, possibly survive"
Especially if, like most groups of humans as were tribal, the dissolution of your tribe is almost equivalent to not surviving
> I view this as dehumanizing. I would rather live and not be an American than die while being an American. I suspect most people are the same.
Humans are tribal on average. I also suspect that there are >zero groups of which you are a member, that you wouldn’t be willing to make sacrifices for.
It may be the case that you personally are an outlier, but it doesn’t change the group dynamics and we are discussing aggregate group behavior and their in this thread, not specific individuals
> After seeing Ukraine turning into a WW1 quagmire
Ukraine is nowhere near a WW1 quagmire. The lines are far from static, and we've seen one dramatic rout a month ago resulting from a competently-executed war of maneuver operation that was completely impossible in the WW1 situation.
It looks less like WW1 (a war that ultimately came down to bleeding men until one side ran out, at which point the war effort came flying off the rails extremely rapidly) and more like WW2 (a war of maneuver where applying sufficient overwhelming force in a narrow front could and did produce overwhelming breakthough--even if it took a very large stack of operational successes to ultimately prove victorious in the war).
Taiwan have been preparing for this war since its inception. Taiwan will be going to war without Western support and I think most Taiwanese would prefer Taiwan burnt to the ground before surrendering without a fight.
If someone invaded my country there would be two outcomes: we win or I’m dead.
