AgentR11 wrote:I do think it is true enough that Western folks love to mock and make fun of Russians;
Russia has a bad rap with a lot of its neighbors, but it's not all these other peoples' fault.
If real people living in villages in Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Ukraine and even Sweden, have a bad opinion / genuine fear of Russia -- it's because of things Russia has done. Or specifically, Putin.
Russia is not some special place that everyone just has to bow down to. Russia is just another country, like any other country in the world, and there is an onus on Russia to IMPROVE relations and start making friends with its neighbors.
To get those people in villages in Poland to have a better opinion of Russia.
That's just the reality, folks. Let me give an analogy, with all this Trump stuff going on. *We actually have to be mindful of how our neighbors view us*, as well. Let's say Trump is prez and then he starts doing a lot of things pissing Mexicans off. Well guess what, Mexico may wind up hating us. It's not okay to just be a bully in the world. EVERYONE has an onus to get along well with their neighbors, and care about relations, you can't just be standing there all alone and all your neighbors are scared / pissed off and you're blaming all the neighbors -- but never looking in the mirror.
Russia has a responsibility, I'm just making an objective rational fact of the matter point of it, that Russia should try harder to be NICE and improve relations with all these countries. And it's gonna have to be NICE for a LONG TIME for attitudes to change in these neighboring countries.
The US is the superpower and Russia doesn't pick on us much, because it can't, but a lot of these smaller countries really do feel picked on / have fear of Russia. Only RUSSIA can turn that around, and a be a friend to people.
and Russians have been our "designated enemy" for a bit over a hundred years now,
That's not quite true. The West stood back and watched as they had a civil war, and the thing was horrible and went on so long, and then finally there was some attempt to help the czar versus the bolsheviks.
And then we had relations with the new USSR as well. It was American philantrhopists that singlehandedly SAVED the Russian people from famine. Lenin's men would come in and seize all the grain, leaving villagers with NOTHING. Just to starve. And then it was the American relief effort that had Russia divided up into districts to feed all the people.
I've posted about this before, it's an interesting historical quirk. The great Russian famine relief effort. Churches all over the USA contributed pennies and nickels and dimes. People were just reading about the famine in the newspapers, and they cared. Almost every Russian alive today, has America to thank -- because Lenin left their great grandparents NO FOOD.
America was always a bit skeptical of this "communism" over in Russia, but relations never turned bad until the USSR started pushing out and spreading it and became a real adversary post WWII and that's when NATO was formed.
However, don't mistake NATO with Ukraine idgits.
Ukrainians aren't "idgits." They are people. There's no difference between them and Russians, or Poles or Czechs.
All Ukrainian people wanted is to be a country in Europe and move up in the world. "Europe" isn't perfect, but the total package of it is what most Ukrainians would like to have. It's democracy, it's human rights, it's being European. It's the American Way. It's what they want and chose, versus dictatorship and a Putin-esque system.
Agent -- you can't tell Ukrainians that they should want to be like Russia, no matter however much you think they should want it, there's a lot of people in east Europe that just do not want it.
ON THE TOPIC OF THIS THREAD --
I'm not being a jerk, this is just a rational objective point and I'd say it about my own country too -- Russia can't just complain that everyone is making Russia hate them. RUSSIA has to be NICE and make FRIENDS. Seriously. At some point it would help, if they'd start doing that, just be a nice and be a good neighbor and it may take a while but over time Russia could turn around the attitudes in east europe and elsewhere.
"Americans" actually don't have the deep-seated issues and fears and grievances about Russia, that its smaller nation neighbors do. And America forgives and forgets quickly. Russia actually has the most work to do regarding its smaller nations.
There's even a lot of people in the UK that don't like Russia. It's just things all added up, like Russian mafia stuff, and Russian bomber flights, and like back when Russia spread polonium around London to get a hit on that spy.
I don't even know what this thread is about. What's the point of it.
Is it saying, "you not liking us is making us hate you. The more you don't like us, the more things we are going to do to make you not like us even more."