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Finland will seek NATO membership immediately

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Re: Finland will seek NATO membership immediately

#981

Post by timeon »

zsombor wrote: post #818
mariuolo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can Russia pressure and disrupt the process when NATO members are the ones most afraid of Putin? Hungary is also a NATO member and yet its president (Mr. Orban) has been quite chummy with Putin.

Orban is the prime minister not the president. As for being chummy no Hungarian prime minister or president current or former has ever served as board member for Gazprom, nor served as head of shareholders for Nordstream AG, or director of the board for Rosneft the Russian oil company. All these positions were/are held by a former german chancellor Gerhard Schröder whom had put Germany onto the path of closing perfec…

You are trying to shift the blame, but Germany was not blocking the airspace for weapons delivery to Ukraine or blocking the sanctions. Ration of dependence of Germany on Russian Gas/Oil is way lower then ratio in Hungary.

Re: Finland will seek NATO membership immediately

#982

Post by fsloth »

nicce wrote: post #690
jka wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very likely, although it still makes the decision to upvote a little more difficult than it should be; the current title ("Finland will seek NATO membership immediately") isn't really true (yet). From the English-language translation: "We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days."

Yep, it is also one type of information warfare and influencing. It gets harder and harder to present opposite opinions when there is huge pressure created with misleading titles. People think that something is already agreed on when they are not.

My intent was not to be misleading by posting this.

More context on the political situation would perhaps been relevant, but also very hard to give concisely in an understandable form since different countries work quite differently.

The political situation is such that this was basically the expected "go ahead" for the parliament to formulate the official NATO application, since you have start a formal process at some point.

The only party in the government that had not made it's position public was the prime ministers own party Social Democrats (SDP). It would be quite impossible for them to hold any other position than Prime Minister has. Plus - public opinion was heavily loaded for NATO (76%) already. This was not due to propaganda, but a very grass roots shift simply caused by the Russian attack to Ukraine. There are still people alive who had to abandon their childhood homes to areas ceded to Russia in WW2, and most people have veterans of that war in their family. Previous situation in Ukraine and Georgia were more "obscure" combined with seditionist movements. The attack on 24th February was an all out war.

I am not sure how well versed finns are of the tactical situation, but most of the units formerly positioned on the Finnish border are now tied in Ukraine or already neutralized there, so from a tactical perspective, given Russians rabid empire building stance it has taken recently, this was an excellent window to act due to impossibility of military response.

Re: Finland will seek NATO membership immediately

#983

Post by zsombor »

timeon wrote: post #981
zsombor wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orban is the prime minister not the president. As for being chummy no Hungarian prime minister or president current or former has ever served as board member for Gazprom, nor served as head of shareholders for Nordstream AG, or director of the board for Rosneft the Russian oil company. All these positions were/are held by a former german chancellor Gerhard Schröder whom had put Germany onto the path of closing perfec…

You are trying to shift the blame, but Germany was not blocking the airspace for weapons delivery to Ukraine or blocking the sanctions. Ration of dependence of Germany on Russian Gas/Oil is way lower then ratio in Hungary.

I'm putting things into perspective. Hungary has 136 km shared border with Ukraine, it also represents only 0.25% of the global GDP, and it is a small country of less than 10 million inhabitants that took in 700'000 Ukrainian refugees. It is okay to disagree with some of their positions, but to put blame one them for the current mess is ridiculous. As for ratio of dependence I have no idea how you did measure it, but it was certainly not per capita gas consumption.

Re: Finland will seek NATO membership immediately

#984

Post by eru »

pasabagi wrote: post #966
eru wrote: post #932

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people in the colonies wanted to change who's governing them. > Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution. From https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html > Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Oh…

Is this surprising? The standard marxist account of nationalist revolution is that they are an attempt by local elites (the national bourgeois) to outmaneuver foreign elites. You see the same thing all over the place (even, perhaps, Ukraine).

I don't hold much stock in Marxism. My country of birth tried that for fourty years. Didn't work so well.

However, public choice theory has a--perhaps similarly--dim view of politics.

Re: Finland will seek NATO membership immediately

#986

Post by nevermindiguess »

rich_sasha wrote: post #575
jcranberry wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be realistic fallout from vetoing their application?

Well, plenty of potential things. In strictly defence terms, they buy weaponry from US and Germany. Hungarian air force operates Swedish Gripen fighters and thus most likely relies on Sweden at least for spare parts (which military jets need lots of) so here's another pressure point. They are big beneficiaries of EU funding (not a NATO thing but this is all intertwined) and already at odds with EU rules, which could…

Didn’t the US/EU take the high moral of self determination for every country, when supporting Ukraine’s actions? So, if Hungary “self determines” to veto access to NATO, which is its right according to NATO’s rules, why punish it and suffer consequences? It would be the same as Russia invading Ukraine to punish it for “self determining” its choice to join NATO or the EU. I don’t care about rhetoric and window dressing. I want to argue the raw facts. I feel most people here are hypocrites. Let’s agree that the US and EU are equal bandits as Russia. Let’s all drop the hypocrisy.

Re: Finland will seek NATO membership immediately

#987

Post by nevermindiguess »

serpix wrote: post #109

As a Finnish citizen, reservist this has been a very emotional spring. Both of my grandfathers were in the war with Russia. Both of my grandmothers had to leave and burn their homes in the areas annexed by Russia. Twice. I am 100% for Nato.

This is great. You will enjoy fighting Russia then. Although they never had any intention to fight you country just until you government was about to give it a reason now. But I respect your right to self determine your future - no matter how foolish.

Re: Finland will seek NATO membership immediately

#988

Post by nevermindiguess »

mcv wrote: post #509
tremon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia has been threatening Finland/Sweden with consequences for years. As the Finnish PM mentioned in his speech with Boris Johnson a few days ago, Russia has shown with Ukraine that complying with Russia's threats is not a guarantee that the future will be consequence-free.

If somebody tells you: "I'm going to beat you up if you ask for help", you should probably ask for help. It's not an effective kind of threat, because he's probably going to beat you up at some point anyway.

Actually no! You should probably notask for help because it has a non zero probability that you will not be beat up, whereas if you do it has an almost certain probability that you will since you have just been warned.

Re: Finland will seek NATO membership immediately

#989

Post by kkfx »

My fellow HN-ers that's simple: Finnish and Scandinavians have historical reasons to be anti-Russians and to have a more or less deep inferiority sense due to demography and resources, they have choose neutrality in the past because that was their best option to remain in peace and prosper as much as possible, being tied mostly to UK.

No UK and USA have demanded local neoliberal rulers to join or being considered not much friend anymore, and then their government, as for instance Italian Gov. choose to betray their Citizens interest for their own economical ones, choosing to apply, of course without any public debate and vote.

IF their Citizens decide that's time to remember what Democracy means they'll organize a quick massive general strike ordering immediate resignation of their own government to go to vote and after with a new government starting the debate, if not they'll get the consequences and we from the EU as well since so far not so many Citizens start acting to going out of NATO...

Oh, no, I'm not pro-Putin, I'm a Citizen who came from a WWII Partisans family and so I recognize and can't support nor original nazis nor new one, no dictators included so while I can't support Putin being a dictator who also choose religion as a way to stay in power, I can't support as well and more (since they are here, not in another country) anglo-neoliberals and their subjects, local neoliberals traitors of their own people and countries for the sake of someone else.

I understand that neoliberals need a war to remain in power and committing a mass murder crime to make their new dream society, a copy of actual Chines one with minor variations (choosing suite&tie + black color instead of uniform and red color) but us the people need the exact opposite and seeing actual effect of propaganda... Well... I understand that due to the extreme vulnerability of many I can't live myself in a democracy, a thing that behind anger push me toward not really nice sentiments and considerations about old-classic government model with a deeply divided population and the historic outcome of such division.

Re: Finland will seek NATO membership immediately

#990

Post by pasabagi »

eru wrote: post #984
pasabagi wrote: post #966

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this surprising? The standard marxist account of nationalist revolution is that they are an attempt by local elites (the national bourgeois) to outmaneuver foreign elites. You see the same thing all over the place (even, perhaps, Ukraine).

I don't hold much stock in Marxism. My country of birth tried that for fourty years. Didn't work so well. However, public choice theory has a--perhaps similarly--dim view of politics.

I guess there's a traditional division between 'really existing socialism', which is often messy, and marxism as a body of work for understanding society.

One observation I would make is that, for a social revolution to occur, you actually need a lot of people from basically every corner of society to want it to happen: even elites. So when they have occurred, it has generally been because the preceding situation was so awful that basically nobody, even the relatively privileged in it, felt it was tolerable. China and Russia both clearly qualify, but also countries like Haiti, or France. People tend to forget the mess preceding the revolution, and focus on the mess during and after.

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