This is just a piss poor understanding of history, nationalism, and geopolitics.
Let’s take the Ukraine war as an example. Russia is not a nation state, it’s an empire. Empires are usually multiethnic, hierarchical, and expansionist, ruling over diverse peoples through centralized authority and often unequal legal or political status. Ukraine, on the other hand, is a nation state because it’s organized around a shared national identity that is defined by common language, culture, or ethnicity, and it treats all of its citizens as equals under the law. This war is basically between Russian imperialists who want to expand the empire and Ukrainian nationalists who want to defend their nation.
Using your flawed logic, Ukrainians are bad people because they believe in and are actively defending an ideology that you falsely attribute to everything bad to has ever happened in the world and in history. That’s just nonsense.
Your example is very bad, to be honest. Both Russia and Ukraine are states. All states today claim to be nations. Every nation is a social construct, made by inventing or at least warping history to explain the creation of a nation. States tend to equalize the people living on it’s territory by introducing things like law, language, traditions or education. And they are actively trying to tell this story of “the people” to legitimate themselves. But the people are not the same. Look at your own country, wherever you live. There are always vast differences between places in different cardinal directions or at the borders vs. inland, between richer and poorer regions or between urban and rural areas. In Russia, that becomes very obvious, but it is the same everywhere.
Nationalism is the root of everything, I described. Nothing of that would have existed without a strong nationalist movement. Sure, there can be more or less extreme forms of nationalism, but this ideoligy is always dividing territory and people into the inside and outside.
Every Ukrainian fighting against Russian imperialism is fine. But at the end, I hope there are more people left to rebuilt the country, who fought for their freedom and not for some fucking glorious Father/Motherland.
This is just a piss poor understanding of history, nationalism, and geopolitics.
Let’s take the Ukraine war as an example. Russia is not a nation state, it’s an empire. Empires are usually multiethnic, hierarchical, and expansionist, ruling over diverse peoples through centralized authority and often unequal legal or political status. Ukraine, on the other hand, is a nation state because it’s organized around a shared national identity that is defined by common language, culture, or ethnicity, and it treats all of its citizens as equals under the law. This war is basically between Russian imperialists who want to expand the empire and Ukrainian nationalists who want to defend their nation.
Using your flawed logic, Ukrainians are bad people because they believe in and are actively defending an ideology that you falsely attribute to everything bad to has ever happened in the world and in history. That’s just nonsense.
Your example is very bad, to be honest. Both Russia and Ukraine are states. All states today claim to be nations. Every nation is a social construct, made by inventing or at least warping history to explain the creation of a nation. States tend to equalize the people living on it’s territory by introducing things like law, language, traditions or education. And they are actively trying to tell this story of “the people” to legitimate themselves. But the people are not the same. Look at your own country, wherever you live. There are always vast differences between places in different cardinal directions or at the borders vs. inland, between richer and poorer regions or between urban and rural areas. In Russia, that becomes very obvious, but it is the same everywhere.
Nationalism is the root of everything, I described. Nothing of that would have existed without a strong nationalist movement. Sure, there can be more or less extreme forms of nationalism, but this ideoligy is always dividing territory and people into the inside and outside.
Every Ukrainian fighting against Russian imperialism is fine. But at the end, I hope there are more people left to rebuilt the country, who fought for their freedom and not for some fucking glorious Father/Motherland.