Ukraine was founded on a promise to crush corruption. Now Zelenskyy's closest chief of staff is charged with laundering nearly 9 million euros in war funds. The money went toward luxury residences while soldiers lacked equipment on the front line. The West sees a hero in an army green t-shirt. They don't see the ledger
Article on my profile..
https://t.co/KML52NSAsV
#ukrainewar
@JamesLucasIT Its so interesting to have a view at these lovely theatres. I made an article about modern media, how it controls us and how it was developed. The history behind mindcontrol started with entertainment, and the Roman Empire were the founders..
@BallinFFB@philski68 Its interesting to me that americans call the sport where you physically carry the ball 'football' and the sport where you kick it for 'soccer'.
This whole framework collapses on one observation: nearly every country on Earth has a religious majority. List crime statistics for any 50 countries and you'll find 'Christian' or 'Muslim' or 'Buddhist' next to almost every single one, because that's just demographics, not causation. Denmark has theft and Norway has alcohol issues because they're wealthy, well documented welfare states with low reporting barriers, not because of Lutheranism. The actual interesting question isn't 'which religion produces more crime.' It's why people need religion to explain social outcomes that economics, history and state capacity already explain perfectly well.
Worth sitting with for a second: at its peak the British Empire controlled roughly a quarter of the Earth's land and a quarter of its population. Most of the wealth extracted from these countries never stayed there. It built London, funded the Industrial Revolution, and became the foundation of modern British institutions. The countries on this map are still dealing with the economic and political aftermath today. Empire isn't ancient history. It's the operating system most of the modern world was built on top of.
'Most extensive plunder in history' is doing a lot of heavy lifting though. That's a strong historical claim against things like the transatlantic slave trade or colonial resource extraction across entire continents for centuries. Worth being precise about scale even when the underlying criticism is fair.
That's a pretty thin read of how industrialisation actually works. Plenty of countries had access to the same technology and didn't replicate China's growth, technology transfer and even IP theft explain acceleration, not the entire outcome. Also worth saying, China had functioning bureaucracies, written language and large scale infrastructure projects centuries before the West did. 'Riding donkeys' isn't really the historical baseline you think it is.
Another fair point. The rural-urban pension gap in China is genuinely stark, and it traces back to exactly that same extraction logic, just internal rather than colonial. Doesn't really undercut the original point though. Extracting from your own population to industrialise is a different category of harm than extracting from colonised continents for centuries. Both are real. Not the same thing.
That's a fair addition. The scissors differential is real, China extracted from its own rural population to fund industrialisation rather than from foreign colonies. Internal extraction rather than external. Still a meaningfully different mechanism than what built European and American wealth, but you're right it wasn't some clean, victimless process either.
@undecommission@theepicmap That's true, diplomacy was effective for modern China. But they were handed these resources through cooperation, not forced colonisation.
Fair question. It probably shouldn't change anyone's support for Ukraine's sovereignty or opposition to the invasion. That's not really what the article is arguing. What it's arguing is narrower, the image most people in the West have of Zelenskyy is incomplete, and an incomplete picture makes for worse public judgement, even if the conclusion ends up the same. You're right that Russian leverage over Transnistria and the broader region is arguably the bigger strategic issue. I'd just push back gently on the framing that it's one or the other. Corruption inside Kyiv affects how effectively aid gets used and how much public trust holds up over a long war. Both things matter, just at different scales.
@SPutinism@0TulsiGabbard2 My article is completely based on factual confirmed information, and theories surrounding the information that we don't know. My account is not biased, and I only question the narrative without picking sides.
Dont stay blind to the truth my friend.