To anyone who believe Putin’s right hand is controlling Trump’s mouth:I know where Putin’s left hand is — allow me to introduce German AfD party leader Alice Weidel.The full interview with this Kremlin proxy is mind-blowingly scary — especially from 18:00 where she starts unfolding her Kremlin script about Ukraine.If you want to know what happens if she and Marine Le Pen in France get the power, watch the full video here:youtu.be/_cGGDu8sgXY

  • RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    5 hours ago

    This would carry a modicum more weight if Russia’s military wasn’t embarrassing themselves on a daily basis for the past 4 years against that ant hill.

    • DillDough@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      5 hours ago

      Also…like the actual largest military on the planet always gets fucked up by “small countries”, hell look at what Iran is doing to them right now lol, the smaller country with an actual reason to fight does win fairly frequently.

      Edit: I didn’t pay attention to the community, just the post itself, please ignore the lost American.

  • Janx@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    7 hours ago

    Ukraine is winning! Obviously, the much smaller country is (was?) considered a weaker military might, yet Russia’s “two-week” invasion is still ongoing, almost 5 years later. When you consider Russia’s actions prior to the full-scale invasion, it’s taken about 13 years, cost 1.5 million Russian casualties, and still Ukraine has basically fought them to a standstill defending its homeland. And that’s just soldiers. Russia has also lost around a million pieces of equipment, including vehicles and tanks and planes and helicopters and even a couple submarines. According to most estimates, every day of the war in Ukraine costs Russia $500 million to $1 billion. Russia is a rabid dog, attacking her neighboring countries, yet Ukraine is bleeding Europe and the US’s enemy for them, and all they need is our continuing support…

    • JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org
      cake
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      7 hours ago

      Totally - whatever will happening, Russia is coming weaker out of this war. They’ve lost their old soviet stockpile of tanks, planes, weapons. They have lost so many people and really expensive things like a big chunk of their airforce or their refineries and a lot of important industrial plants. They’ve gained the ability for geran drones, but that is something that every country will copy in short time.

      • potatohead@feddit.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        4 hours ago

        If Ukraine got betrayed and dropped by its allies, I do think here is a time window where Russia still can do A LOT of damage to the Europe, especially in the Baltics. It has a already mobilized and now experienced army along with a war economy. Denying Ukraine the support it needs now to keep Russia at bay would be a blunder for the ages.

  • rhubarb@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    14 hours ago

    They always tell on themselves when they refer to it as “The Ukraine” Maybe when speaking to the AFD we should refer to Germany as “The Germany” show them the same disrespect

    • baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      12 hours ago

      in german ukraine is called “die ukraine”, it’s even on the german wikipedia just to prove a point: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine

      that’s just what ukraine is called in german, and she’s just translating a bit literally

      there’s plenty of reasons to hate her, her party, and her base, but poor english shouldn’t be one of them

      • CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        12 hours ago

        That used to be the case in America too but there was a push to stop calling it that and refer to it simply as Ukraine. Just because a country chooses to call it one thing doesn’t mean it should or that it has to keep doing it.

        • baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          11 hours ago

          i suppose so, but calling it ukraine without an article in german just seems off to me. i don’t like saying it, it feels wrong, and speech is often about vibes. in english I’m perfectly fine calling it ukraine. i guess it’ll take a few years for me to adapt.

          • Log in | Sign up@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            7
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            10 hours ago

            The vibes of “the Ukraine” are that it’s a region rather than a self-sovereign country. That’s why there’s been a push to stop adding the the.

            • optional@feddit.org
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              6 hours ago

              For English it’s true that calling it “the Ukraine” feels like you’re talking about a region instead of a country, because that’s the (historical) reason for the article. So in English “the” does have that implication.

              In German however, we use the article for very different, purely grammatical reasons: Every noun in German has one of three gramatical genders, that have nothing to do with its physical nature. A pouch isn’t more male than a bag, but nonetheless, we say “der Beutel” and “die Tüte”. The same applies to country names. Some are male (der Iran), some are neutral (das Syrien) and some are female (die Türkei). And for countries that are neutral, you just leave out the article in almost every case1. It has nothing to do with wether something is a region or an independent country.

              A good illustration of this: In German the same country can sometimes be refered to in two different ways with two different genders. “Die USA2” is female*, “Das Amerika” is neutral. So you would say “ich fahre nach Amerika” but “ich fahre in die USA”. Or an even more obvious case: The Netherlands are often called “Holland” in German, even though Holland is just one region in the Netherlands. But Holland is neutral and Niederlande female. So we say “ich fahre nach Holland” but “ich fahre in die Niederlande”. Here the country has the article, while the region does not.

              1 In some cases the neutral article shows again. For example, if you’re talking about a specific version of a country: “Das Frankreich der 50er-Jahre” or “Das Spanien unter Franco”

              2 The USA are female because they are plural, and every plural is female in German – “Der Mann” but “die Männer” – showing that gramatical gender has no physical reasoning.

              • Rikkard@lemmy.zip
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                7 hours ago

                Still, I think you are right. In German we put those articles for some Countries… including USA.

                • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  4 hours ago

                  Well USA actually contains the word “The” when you expand the acronym.

                  If not officially, then at the very least by necessity of the English language

      • Magnum, P.I.@infosec.pub
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        11 hours ago

        Why is it the case that it’s Die Ukraine, Die Niederlande, die Schweiz, die Türkei, die Tschechei, der Libanon but not das Russland, das China, das Peru, das Ungarn, das England, das Luxemburg, das Kroatien, das Serbien, das Kasachstan, das Polen, das Italien, das Frankreich, das Spanien, das Schweden, das Norwegen, das Finnland, das Island, das Grönland, das Bosnien, das Brasilien, das Argentinien, das Portugal, das Sri Lanka, das Indien, das Vietnam, das Thailand, das Japan …

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    23 hours ago

    My god The Economist interviewer is as useless as ever… She didn’t seriously press her on any of the bread-and-butter issues because she’s in agreement with economic austerity, she just disagees on some of the details. This interview made Alice look pretty decent.

  • excral@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    114
    ·
    1 day ago

    She’s defending Russia’s imperialism in broad daylight. She’s saying Ukraine is to small to defend themselves from Russia. If that argument was valid, who else wouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves from Russia? Belarus, Georgia, Estonia. Is Russia entitled to invade and conquer all of them simply because they are significantly larger? Ukraine didn’t start an unwinnable war. They are defending themselves and fighting for their very lives

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      4 hours ago

      But if Ukraine didn’t defend themselves there wouldn’t be a war, so they started it!

      (/s, because I know there’s people on this platform who would actually make this argument.)

    • pet the cat, walk the dog@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      8 hours ago

      Belarus is already just short of merging with Russia. Their entire law and bureaucracy are tuned to Russian ones, except of course for the death penalties for dissenters. They straight up have this thing called Union State.

    • steel_for_humans@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      27
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 day ago

      A good solution to that problem is making Russia small again. It should be split into sovereign nations giving back the land and cultures that they took forcibly.

      • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 day ago

        That would even mean there’s another officially Jewish state, which would be helpful in distinguishing between antizionism and antisemitism (assuming [read: really, really hoping] that it doesn’t ally itself with Israel regarding Palestine)

          • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            22 hours ago

            exactly. It’s currently only officially Jewish, in that the populations of ethnic and religious Jews are both tiny, but I could see future migration from people who are morally opposed to what the Israeli government is doing, but are afraid to move to a non Jewish state (I imagine they’re hearing a lot of propaganda right now about how unsafe everywhere else in the world is for Jews).

            That’s not what I mean though- in all sorts of situations, people accuse those opposed to the state of Israel of antisemitism, because they’re opposed to the only Jewish state. Because there is only one though, it means either Israel’s actions determine objective morality or that argument is nonsense (hint, hint), but the existence of another Jewish state with different politics would still be helpful in shutting it down.

  • rynn@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    44
    ·
    1 day ago

    Russia is a pretty weak country but their influence and propaganda game is S tier.

    They are going for the mind fuck win and it’s working.

  • NoFearFrontier@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    40
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    Since she is a lesbian married to a POC and living in Switzerland being a leader of nazis afd party, the leopard eating face phase is not too far away.

    • AgentRocket@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      9 hours ago

      I’m still not convinced she believes a single thing she’s saying and instead is just saying whatever will give her more voters in order to funnel government money into her swiss bank account. when things get serious and nazis take power and threaten to look more closely at her lifestyle, she is out of there, ready to live a happy queer life with her wife and children and bank account in swiss.

      That’s also why she often has that disgusting grin, when holding a speech to her followers, like she is thinking: “i can’t believe these nazi idiots are buying this and keep voting for me”

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 day ago

      I always wonder about those spouses…

      You are married to a Nazi. You are brown, so to speak. Do you not understand? What exactly atebyou expecting will happen over time? Like, what is your endgame here?

      • Čauky Mňauky@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        6 hours ago

        Plenty of immigrants are supporting anti-immigrant parties. It happens everywhere. They probably think that by openly siding with these parties, they will somehow be exempted from any future atrocities.

      • HaiZhung@feddit.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        14 hours ago

        There were several documented relationships of high ranking nazis with Jews in the third reich; and those Jews were left alone.

        That’s the whole point of their ideology. They are absolutely fine carving out exceptions for themselves whenever it benefits them directly.

        You can’t get nazis with logical gotchas or uncovering their inconsistencies. They don’t care about those inconsistencies. They care about getting power and using it for their advantages, and they will say and do anything to get it. For all we know, Alice Weidel’s wife is 100% in on it and probably just doesn’t like publicity.

  • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    1 day ago

    Finland is a small country, it could never win against russia. Also does german call ukraine “the ukraine” or did she also read that straight from the script? Cause if im correct calling ukraine “the ukraine” is a common thing amongst people who dont believe ukraine is independant from russia.

    • sexy_peach@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      13 hours ago

      I used to say die Ukraine as well. But just Ukraine also works in German so me and many people adopted that. This one not so much, who would have guessed

    • You@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      24 hours ago

      Might be a dog whistle, might be a simple mistake stemming from her being German. Your guess is correct, in German the country’s name has an article and is called “die Ukraine” (no, not meant as a Bart Simpson reference).

      • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        8 hours ago

        Yeah, some already pointed out the German mistranslation. BUT there’s no “the” or “a” in Ukrainian nor in Russian, yet a dogwhistle exists of using “on Ukraine” instead of “in Ukraine”.