I think your premise is wrong. It’s more plausible that because war is beneficial for the 1 percent, that this song and dance of political theater is purely to keep you and I entertained and in line.
Or we could go with your idea that Putin thought it was a good idea to piss off the most powerful nations because he wanted to conquer some land. He was like A) I could peacefully hang out on my massive yacht or B) become enemies with a country that is notorious for stealth drone strikes.
War is beneficial for the 1% and there is no doubt about it. That doesn’t change anything that I wrote, and it’s not at all incompatible with Putin being an aggressor and a stupid asshat.
As someone put it: dictatorship is a job with amazing benefits, but a terrible retirement plan. Putin can never retire and chill on his yacht, he needed to be at war for his regime security.
He never meant to piss off the most powerful bloc in the world, he thought he could just snatch Ukraine and get away with it with a little frown from the west, like he did with parts of it before (Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk), like he did with Georgia (South Ossetia, Abkhazia). He miscalculated Ukraine’s response, and the west’s.
He is not the first dictator who believes his own bullshit about the rest of the world you know? Do you think Hitler wanted to go to total war with UK, France, USA and USSR all at once? Or do you think he was secretly in cahoots with Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin to have a nice little war together to enrich their 1% and historians are conspiring to hide this?
I think your premise is wrong. It’s more plausible that because war is beneficial for the 1 percent, that this song and dance of political theater is purely to keep you and I entertained and in line.
Or we could go with your idea that Putin thought it was a good idea to piss off the most powerful nations because he wanted to conquer some land. He was like A) I could peacefully hang out on my massive yacht or B) become enemies with a country that is notorious for stealth drone strikes.
War is beneficial for the 1% and there is no doubt about it. That doesn’t change anything that I wrote, and it’s not at all incompatible with Putin being an aggressor and a stupid asshat.
As someone put it: dictatorship is a job with amazing benefits, but a terrible retirement plan. Putin can never retire and chill on his yacht, he needed to be at war for his regime security.
He never meant to piss off the most powerful bloc in the world, he thought he could just snatch Ukraine and get away with it with a little frown from the west, like he did with parts of it before (Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk), like he did with Georgia (South Ossetia, Abkhazia). He miscalculated Ukraine’s response, and the west’s.
He is not the first dictator who believes his own bullshit about the rest of the world you know? Do you think Hitler wanted to go to total war with UK, France, USA and USSR all at once? Or do you think he was secretly in cahoots with Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin to have a nice little war together to enrich their 1% and historians are conspiring to hide this?