A country's divisions do not magically justify exploitation of those divisions

I see a tremendous amount of "Ukraine was wearing a short skirt" thinking.

Many, many nations have internal divisions that are subject to exploitation by outside powers.

Just because some country CAN have a civil war doesn't mean that it SHOULD have a civil war.

If some white supremacist nation invaded the southern USA a lot of Americans would rally to their cause. That does not mean the invasion would be an act of liberation.

We would see many American southerners who had been working and going to church and drinking with friends, suddenly taking over government buildings... because conditions had been created wherein they take over government buildings. They weren't doing it yesterday, but today they are... because the vast military might of Whitesylvania is there and has their back.

So what is happening is not natural. It is created through exploitation of existing divisions.

If France blockaded Quebec there would be Canadian defectors to France. What changed? The presence of the French navy. The practical ability to defect. A crisis.


Why did Iraq have a civil war? One could say it was because of the Shia, Sunni, Kurd divisions and that would be true in a sense. But that is more the how than the why. The WHY was because we invaded Iraq. They had not had a civil war in 2001. They were in civil war in 2005.

The fact that there were conditions under which we could create a civil war doesn't make a civil war right or warranted or even inevitable.

Not every place with the same divisions will have a civil war, or separatism. Historically, events play a role. Some places work through serious divisions. Other places explode or break apart. And that is not predetermined. A lot has to do with events and environment. Divisions become unendurable in the face of stress, Options to harmony are created by interested parties.

Many troubled nations have broken apart due to, for instance, a fammine that would not have broken apart had the weather been better during a key period of poltical stress. It would be easy to smuggly say, "The Grunaks just hate the Brunaks," but if the crops hadn't been killed by drought that long-standing fact would not have been explosive. A lot of folks "just hate" some other folks.

What if that fammine was induced? What if it was created by a naval blockade rather than weather? The same divisions would come into play... and we would hear that the induced civil war was the *natural* outgrowth of existing divisions. But it isn't.

(Recall how often the attitudes of various Iraquis were used to wash our hands of the Iraq civil war... as if we were just spectators to some inevitability.)


Russia and the USA has destabilized a lot of nations over the years. There's no mystery to it... a nation that is destabilized becomes unstable, and open to exploitation of that instability.

And then, if one is a total stooge for some power or ideology, point to the divided mess created and say that it was inevitable and natural and is at its heart right.

That is how the game is played, and in this instance it is Russia that is playing it.

(I get that a lot of folks think that the USA destabilized Ukraine and will thus read this OP backward... and god bless you all. If blaming America requires equating EU outreach to the Russian army massing on borders and Russian operatives acting in the streets then that's just what you think and I can't fix it.)