Watching TV shows or movies that display Russia as a military superpower is almost surreal nowadays.
Watching TV shows or movies that display Russia as a military superpower is almost surreal nowadays.
Was just watching Jack Ryan Season 3 and seeing the display of force and their movements causes some interesting dissonance given what we know now.
Could be worse OP, could be a movie about the North Koreans successfully invading America, you know, North Korea, a country that barely has a navy and who's Air Force is mostly old Migs from several decades ago, a country who starts threatening their neighbors whenever their food supply runs low because their chubby leader eats too much while the rest of the country is at famine levels of hunger.
At least the original version of the movie was against the Russians while they were a super power.
The remake was originally going to feature a Chinese invasion, but they wanted it to still release and sell in China, so they made North Korea the bad guy instead.
It never did release in China.
Same sort of reasoning for NK being the baddie in the game Homefront. North Korea just isn't a credible threat when it comes to invasion. Helped if you imagined it was the Chinese
Daily reminder that kowtowing to CCP is never a good choice, not even in business.
a country that barely has a navy
North Korea has the largest submarine fleet of any nation. Of course most of those are old diesel subs, but the point still stands.
We've seen what the Russian military has been like in Ukraine, if you think most of those subs aren't rusting piles of garbage then you're probably drinking that tankie Kool aid. They've probably had to cannibalize the majority of them just to keep what few they have running, because it's not like they just idly make parts for 1950's era subs, especially not for a country that barely has enough money to feed themselves and spends most of that on their nuclear program.
Also they're loud ass diesel subs, every modern navy will know exactly where they are and how many they have easily, and it's not like 1950's weaponry is going to make up the difference.
There's also the video game series, Homefront, where a unified Korea under northern rule invaded the US and occupies it.
I get your point, I really do, but Homefront was also about the economic collapse of the American system caused by its own corruption.
I always got the idea that Korea wasn't incredibly overpowered united, but America was already broken and a step away from being conquered already and the first army to invade happened to be Korea. The rest of the world just wanted to see what would happen.
Kind of like having Russia invade Ukraine only to have it's nose beaten in and globally embarrassed. Doesn't mean Ukraine is going to invade and conquer, just that a global super power can be defeated by a smaller united nation after decades of corruption.
At least that's the idea that got me through the game. It was honestly just a COD reskin of a game and wasn't actually that good in retrospect
At least the original version of the movie was against the Russians
You're forgetting the real beef behind that invasion: Nicaragua.
Every time this movie comes up, I feel obligated to point out that despite being under occupation by
ChinaNorth Korea - Subway is somehow still open with uniformed staff and a well stocked sandwich bar, all while having dine-in customers for convenient ad placement..Ad placement that, get this: goes as far to even have the characters use the official 'Sandwich Artist' job title while robbing them ಠ_ಠ
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I thought it was a North Korean movie for propaganda reasons, turns out it's an American movie 😭
Wasn't russia also a part of the remake? I vaguely remember that movie and can't recall much other than a mustang with a m134 or some goofy shit like that.
Rewatching Stargate and international cooperation feels so strange and bereft somehow. A kinder path.
I often times wonder if an extraterrestrial threat would be a unifying factor or if people would still be selfish unless it affected them. The pandemic was the closest we've seen to a world level threat recently and it just increased selfishness IMO (at least in the US)
I thought Marvel's Secret Invasion had an interesting quote on this that I'll paraphrase: nothing makes humans stronger than uniting against a common enemy, but as soon as that enemy is gone, they always devolve into tribal bickering again. It'll be a miracle if we ever reach Star Trek levels of global unification and peace.
The aliens would just hack the internet and flood it with bots more advanced than ChatGPT faking support to surrender to the alien overlord, then sit their asses watching humanity fought among themselves.
If aliens can reach us, they aren't a threat. They either kill us without any issue or they don't want to. There is no fighting back against it.
I do think it'd be interesting to see what happens if we do discovery alien life, particularly of the intelligent variety. So many religions are based on the assumption humans are the only intelligent life, and that earth is that place that can support it. Do they mostly all collapse, or do they evolve? Do people finally recognize the stupidity? It'd be fun to see.
If we're comparing to human history, the Aztecs weren't singlehandedly defeated by the Spanish. The conquistadors had plenty of assistance of other nations that wanted to see the Aztecs gone. We all know what happened afterwards, but even if you went back in time you wouldn't convince a single Tlaxcala warrior that their newfound awesome ally against their sworn enemy was actually the "bad guy" - until much later, that is.
So, if the aliens started an attack against whoever the superpower happens to be, they would have plenty of assistance as well. It's human nature.
Ozymandias, is it you?
Depends on so many factors. Sometimes the external enemy doesn't unite people at all. Sometimes it becomes a race of who can suck up to them so when the war is over they can run things. Traitors and collaboration.
Also I am betting if there was a threat it would be over in hours. As they hit us with a million nukes while our governments spend the last few minutes wondering why we pointed out best gear at each other instead of up.
Or heck they could be creative and just block out our sun for a decade and use bunker busting bombs looking for infrared to kill off the stranglers. That way they have a nice non-nuclear wasteland to work with.
It's also surreal (for a different reason), to hear lines like
Why attack Russia? Aren't they our friends now?
from Terminator 2.
On the other hand, the Simpsons did a not-so-funny-now with this:
Still pretty funny.
Seeing more than one tank on the red square feels surreal now
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Modern Warfare 2/3 where Russia not only manages to successfully invade the US, but brings it to it's knees.
Even if you set aside the fact that the US has the world's most powerful military and a heavily armed civilian population, geographically it would be virtually impossible to invade from another continent.
But fiction is fiction. And the Modern warfare trilogy was outstanding.
I think the Swiss population might be more heavily armed in the sense of "percent of people with a military-grade weapon"
"Number of military-grade weapons per person" is almost certainly the US, but guns being primarily fetish items / personality markers in the US means the distribution is very top heavy.
Getting into a random house and found guns to loot was the most realistic part of the Russian invasion plot in MW2.
Stargate thinks the Russians could get a gate up and running lmao
They did screw it up completely and needed to be saved though so that part was accurate.
Well how else do you justify maintaining defense spending at 5x the next biggest military? You need a boogeyman to keep the nation spending like WW2 never ended.
Now I'm hearing there isn't enough money for Medicare or social security...
I was just thinking that as I was reading this post. Yeah, so they're not "right behind the US" in overall ability and preparedness, and NOW they're drained financially and their populations morale is at a low point with the drafts and the prisoner-units, who else do we have all these guns for then? Who will be the next boogeyman, and have we already laid the groundwork to say it's China?
The next boogeyman is definitely going to be China. But with their looming demography crisis, it'll be quite unpredictable how's the world geopolitical state going to be in 20-30 years. For all we know some country like India or Indonesia managed to solve their internal corruption and be a superpower.
Y'all seem to be forgetting the "axis of evil" — the justification conservatives used to double military industrial complex spending, the last time they faced cost cutting...
Only a fool would disregard the formidable economic powerhouses of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea!
TL;DR they have successfully manufactured boogeymen as needed. Realistic adversaries are unnecessary.
Its the ametican way
I watched Red Dawn the other day.
Y'all were some paranoid mfs in the 80s.
The "they want to invade us" aspect feels more real than ever. The "they credibly threatened our independence" aspect feels less real than ever.
Russia under Putin is somehow both a worse neighbor and a less credible threat on the world stage.
Agreed, russia has proven themselves more dangerous, and more laughable at the same time. Their ability to underhandedly destroy us from within is far stronger than we ever were allowed to believe. Their ability to mount an actual attack, is far more laughable than we thought.
Though I do suppose the real scary part of it is. The potential death throws kind of attack. Putin's immaturity, narcissism etc... is far scarier than we have ever understood. Russia quite frankly is the superpower that I could easily see hit the point of "If I can't run the world, I'll destroy it so you can't have it", and quite simply we've never seen or understood the potential of Nuke vs Anti-Nuke warfare.
I was in the Air Force in the late 70s. Worked in the flight surgeon's office, so if anything went down on the flight line, we were there.
If you wanna see Kegels In Action, watch what happens when many many gallons of JP-4 gets spilled on nukes inside a B-52D on the alert pad.
Fun times!
By far the funniest part of that movie was fucking Nicaragua's involvement, not the Soviets'. Shit worked, too - I knew many conservatives back in the '80s who genuinely thought Nicaragua was a threat to invade us.
Also prety dumb with our own geography. Starting an invasuon via colorodo
It's important to have a powerful enemy, otherwise why would the US pay for an $800 billion per year military?
I recently saw the Rambo movies for the first time, and yeah I laughed about how they portrayed the russians.
Really goes to show that perception management is an effective strategy as long as thats all you do.
Yeah, but isn't that American propaganda?
We needed a bbg to justify our actions. I'm not saying it was out of nowhere, but the scale of the thing certainly played well for certain politicians.
I'm old enough to remember when movies like 'Firefox' and 'The Hunt For Red October' first came out.
The US was always miles ahead of the Soviets. It was so bad that during the Reagan Era the Right had to come up with a new metric that let the Reds look tougher than they were. "Throw weight" was the measure of how big a load an ICBM could carry. Because the Russians had inferior tech, they had to build bigger missiles. Kind of how a 1700's musket had a higher caliber than an M-16. It was actually a symbol of soviet inferiority, but you'll hear people talking about it to this day.
And here come all the angry tankies
Just how powerful was soviet Russia in its heyday compared to today? Without allies, was it ever a true threat?
Yes. Yes it was. The USSR has very little in common with kleptocracy Russia. My wife was raised under their educational system and she was studying organic chemistry in the eight grade. Today she is one of the top people in her field (easily top ten) and she says that most of her career she's mostly leaned on her early education. Especially math and science.
Not to mention the space race was dominated by Russia until it came to a moon landing.
It is wild to see this. It's amazing how quickly things change.
Yeah, Russia was incredibly powerful in its heyday, both in global influence and military power. Think about how people are worried about climate change now, then double it. That was the threat of nuclear war that kept people awake at night for decades.
After the time of the collapse we found out how empty a lot of their power was. How much of their achievements were less an unstoppable train and more of a rocket that couldn't be refueled. They had power but they never figured out how to make it sustainable.
How much of their achievements were less an unstoppable train and more of a rocket that couldn’t be refueled.
Love the analogy. I'm aware they were and still are a threat from a nuclear perspective. I was just more curious about their ability to successfully mount a tactical battle strategy, logistics to supply said strategy, etc.
In its heyday under Peter / Catherine the Great, depending on who you ask, Russia was a true world superpower. Richest royals, biggest population, massive food supply.
In the 50s and 60s, if the nuclear deterrent hadn't existed they could have taken over most of Europe through a combination of capture of democracy and invasion.
Even after than, Russian hard-science education was extremely good (biology they got screwed by ideology).
On the other hand, it does make the player character in certain Modern Warfare/Battlefield single player campaigns mowing down Russian mooks by the dozens seem a bit more realistic 😅
They come under the fantasy genre
All of this was apparent since Afghanistan at the very least. Probably says a lot more about the US and NATO trying to justify maintaining itself after the USSR collapsed than it does about Russia.
Why would you voluntarily watch CIA and DoD propaganda and take it at face, or even second degree, value?
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Tl;dw
Essentially the CIA and DHS are highly involved in the production, including script writing. Pretty much like everything Tom Clancy's was ever involved with (including posthumously). Tom.Clancy used to give talks at the NSA, had his books reviewed by the intelligence agencies before publishing, etc.
Pretty sad how quickly Lemmy turned into a shitlib space that pointing out that stuff literally done in collaboration with the intelligence and militaries agencies is fucking propaganda.
I don't think you have any clue what the military power of the Russians are. I bet you've watched your telly and just trust whatever you are told by western 'analysts'. Currently, Russian military is the strongest military in the world, and are winning against the third Nato backed army. Deal with it. Watch 'The Duran' on YT, or follow some real news channels on Telegram..
