"Putin thinks that Ukraine is part of Greater Russia . . . Some people in the Ukraine don't think that and they are willing to fight him for that. However, I am not one of those people who is going to pronounce whether one group is right or the other is wrong in this case. There's no real ethnic difference, there's no religious difference (between Ukrainians and Russians) . . . .
"Putin's not posing apartheid for Ukrainians. There's not going to be a big land grab like we just kind of gave the Palestinians' land to Israel and now support Israel in securing that land and growing and securing that land. No, it's not like that. These are Ukrainians and they're going to be Ukrainians/Russians at the end of this, too.
"There's no ethnic difference, there's no big religious difference. We don't have to worry about concentration camps and apartheid because there's no real difference (ethnically or racially), and this is a real empire, which means that Russia's not going to take anything except they're going to just redirect where they pay their taxes. And so this idea that there's a human rights violation going on in Ukraine . . . well, no, there's a political rights violation going on, but political rights are fickle things, which means that you might not be a sovereign nation if you're right next to Russia.
"One of the conditions of sovereignty is not being next to a bigger power that wants to eat you. So like you don't get to be a sovereign nation (in that case). For example, when the Civil War happened and South Carolina wanted to fight against Mr. Lincoln's army, I'm glad that the rest of the nation didn't come in and save South Carolina. There was a human rights violation because one of the reasons they were fighting was to enslave black people, but the conditions in sovereignty in real life are really, actually kind of tricky. And part of it means being able to defend your borders. And I don't want to be stuck in a forever war in Ukraine if it can't defend its borders, and they are Russian.
"So there's no reason to believe that there are going to be mass human rights abuses after the Ukraine's taken over. Because it'll be like what they're doing in Chernobyl.
"So right now in Chernobyl there's a big worry that like, 'Oh, no. If the Russians bomb Chernobyl then it could be the case that there's a nuclear fallout and there's going to be all this delays and all that stuff.' What they did was the Russians took over Chernobyl and then put the Ukrainian engineers back to work, so like, nothing changed except who the boss is, right?
" . . . you saw a little bit of this before 2008 where in the U.S. you talked to people - every now and then they'd get a letter in the mail saying that they used to pay their mortgage to this bank, but now they pay their mortgage to this bank. There's the same mortgage, just to a different bank. That's kind of what, for most of the Ukrainian people, that's going to be their life under Russia.
"And that's non-ideal, but it's not something you go to war and threaten world extinction over, right? It's one of the facts of having nation states with asymmetrical power and no world government. To protect borders as is.
" . . . from time to time there are going to be skirmishes, and the bigger power is going to win. And when the bigger power is Russia sometimes you've just got to negotiate a surrender. So I wish we would be all for let's negotiate a surrender. Forget the sanctions, let's negotiate surrender and let's stop pretending . . . . because what I don't want at the end of this - a war zone's an awful place - I don't want Kiev after two years of war. That's unnecessary.
"And I don't think we should be giving weapons to the Ukrainians. I don't think that's necessary. I think we should be all about telling (Ukrainian president) Zelensky 'All right, well, we can't get you back, we will help you surrender and give you political asylum so you don't have to worry about getting disappeared. But pretty much that's a wrap. We're not going to support you. Which means you should surrender, because they're bigger, stronger, and have just more resources than you do, right?
"But instead we're going to give weapons for a ground war, that the Russians are going to win because they're a superior force, speaking the same language, and aren't that foreign to Ukraine. I say that there's not going to be pogroms or genocide because there's not really a difference in the church, either. Like they're all Eastern Orthodox . . . . it's cousins fighting, belligerent cousins fighting, and it's a place we shouldn't get involved.
"And now with these sanctions in Russia everyone's prices are going to go up, which is de facto a regressive tax. We don't have to put these sanctions on, right? Instead of just trying to negotiate full-bore surrender, we've launched economic war against Russia. There are going to be sanctions, these sanctions are going to tax everyone, everyone's going to take a hit, and so pretty much we are now paying the price and subsidizing Ukrainians, the Ukrainian war, and I don't think that we should do that, I think we should encourage him (President Zelensky) to surrender and work out favorable terms. . . . .
"I don't understand why suddenly we take national borders so seriously when we were so casual about them before. We need to deal with the fact of this kind of politics. If you actually care about the war and the suffering, you want this to end. You just want it to end, right? So this is different than like the Civil War when the issue was slavery. This is just a territorial dispute between one power and another power."
--------Irami Osei-Frimpong, "Ukraine and the American Negro"
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