It’s as if leftists do not actually like Putin or any of the other ghouls on the Russian side, but are instead critical of NATO and willing to consider NATO opponents as rational actors instead of cartoon villains.
Ah, so you want newer examples? Fine. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and now Pakistan in Asia, Libya in Africa, Brasil and Bolivia in South America. All in the last twenty years or so.
I think Iraq is a fair point. The rest are weak sauce as fuck for a variety of reasons that I’ll not trouble myself to enumerate.
That said, I myself was never onboard with the US invasion of Iraq or our long time presence in Afghanistan. They were both bullshit and never would have happened had it been up to me.
The rest are weak sauce as fuck for a variety of reasons …
The invasions may have been half-hearted failures, but they still caused enormous suffering. And the Libyan invasion did not fail if I remember correctly.
That said, I myself was never onboard with the US invasion of Iraq or our long time presence in Afghanistan.
I was explaining why a lot of countries would see NATO as the biggest threat. For this, what matters is what NATO governments do. What the people of NATO countries think or do is, while important from a moral point of view, unlikely to be reflected in foreign policy.
Russia is a country run by cartoon villains. Can you not picture Shoigu sneaking up behind someone with a large round bomb that says ACME on it, only to discover that the fuse has been accidentally lit by a soldiers cigarette?
I think most people of the left or right can see the situation for what it is. However Russia is obviously crafting messages to appeal to those on the extremes. When you see people on the hard left screeching about Ukrainian Nazis or advancing absurd peace deals then they’ve been gotten at. When you see people from the hard right screeching about Ukrainian immigrants or the cost of the war vs America / Europe first then you know they’ve been gotten at.
As for Prigozhin, I think most people, even Russians are glad that he is dead but for different reasons. Seems clear that Putin murdered him for his disloyalty but nobody in Ukraine is going to mourn his loss for the spent force that is Wagner.
People think Ukraine has a Nazi problem because western media was shouting about it from the rooftops for a decade before the invasion. Then they only whispered it if they mentioned it at all but they kept on posting pictures of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi insignia plastered on their faces or their equipment. Or photos of politicians with a portrait of Bandera on the wall above their desk. The gullible liberal journalists didn’t even know what they had to censor out at the start of the war.
Unlike libs, the ‘hard’ left didn’t start looking at Ukraine on the date of the invasion and they didn’t wipe their memories clean of the historical context. A conspiracy involving Russian propagandists isn’t needed to explain this.
Neither are Russian propagandists needed to explain that racist westerners are going to be racist against immigrants and refugees, wherever they’re from.
Ukraine has had a far right problem but lots of countries do. Doesn’t mean it’s more than the fringe as it is in other countries and it’s CERTAINLY not a credible talking point or justification for war to invade a sovereign democracy. And the stupid part is that this shit still goes onto today, even to this comment where you attempt to justify it.
The collective west does have a Nazi problem, it’s acute in Ukraine.
Ukraine has been getting shelled for over 8 years now, it’s been the Ukrainian government doing it, and that specifically has been what provoked the invasion.
It’s just observable reality, idk what’s so hard about remembering events from a few years ago for liberals
Svoboda having one seat in the Rada kind of acute?
As far as general patriotism is concerned sure that’s on an all-time high in Ukraine but guess what, that kind of stuff happens if you get invaded. Which started in 2014, don’t forget that, and Ukraine has been under hybrid attack from Russia since at least 2000, the 90s being only a brief respite from centuries of colonialism and that only because Russia didn’t know WTF it was doing.
The important part is the type of nationalism you see. And that’s much closer to the likes of the SNP than to Nazis.
“general patriotism” I see swastikas, things that sub in for swastikas, iron crosses, and totenkopfs.
You can fuck right off with the “centuries of colonialism” that’s literlly the west repackaging its own history to accuse others of.
I thought you guys were the ones who said that portions of a country can unilaterally vote to leave and its okay. That was what you lot pulled with Serbia, why does it suddenly no longer apply here?
So the Bundeswehr is a Nazi org because it’s using the iron cross as emblem?
You can fuck right off with the “centuries of colonialism” that’s literlly the west repackaging its own history to accuse others of.
So Russia suddenly isn’t European? That would come as news to Europe.
That was what you lot pulled with Serbia, why does it suddenly no longer apply here?
I was a bit too young to have much of an opinion or impact there. In any case very much unlike Ukraine, Serbia actually was genociding people. “Get genocided by your central state, get independence” is more than fair if you ask me.
I was a bit too young to have much of an opinion or impact there. In any case very much unlike Ukraine, Serbia actually was genociding people. “Get genocided by your central state, get independence” is more than fair if you ask me.
The Ukrainian state has been killing civilians indiscriminately in its two breakaway regions, they were just doing it for much longer than it took for any kind of intervention in Serbia.
When the west starts to pretend to care about muslims, you know they’re full of shit about any purported genocides. They went from pretending to care about Kosovar Albanians to murdering millions of muslims over the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
So the Bundeswehr is a Nazi org because it’s using the iron cross as emblem?
It’s pretty funny having iron crosses constantly showing up on all the UA vehicles- I think we all know what they’re going for, they just left off a few lines.
So Russia suddenly isn’t European? That would come as news to Europe.
Russia has not been a part of ‘the west’, certainly not as far as most of the EU is concerned unless you’re trying to be intentionally obtuse
Do you realize how sociopathic this sounds? Are all separatists deserving of being bombed by the country they live under? Would you say the same to the people of Yemen, or Palestine or Ethiopia? “You’re being bombed, so just leave”?
Would you say the same to the people of Yemen, or Palestine or Ethiopia?
Depressingly for many libs the answer is yes because guy with blue tie was president and responsible for bombing them. Guy in red tie too but that’s less relevant. Kosovo and Syria are better examples.
But it’s okay for neighbors to pull their neighbors into IMF debt servitude, to say nothing of couping the government because it wasn’t pro-west enough. Really letting the euro chauvinism fly there.
I guess you didn’t pay attention. Whenever they post pictures of Ukrainian soldiers there’s a good chance that you will see a Totenkopf or a Black Sun badge. When western news interviews lesser known Ukrainian politicians, there’s a good chance that you will see a Bandera portrait in the background.
The rise of the ukrainian far right has been well documented in western media before the invasion. Hell, google “Western media before February of 2022”
a sovereign democracy[Citation needed]
In fact it’s neither sovereign, since the US couped Ukraine in 2014, nor it is a democracy, but an extremely corrupt oligarchic capitalist country. The contrast with Russia lies in the absence of a single pivotal leader like Putin, and they fully adhere to Western interests.
This doesn’t make the invasion “good” as in “Aragorn is a good guy”. The NATO encroaching makes it understandable. Which is completely different from “good”. Understandable means that there is some kind of rationality at play. Which means it was probably preventable. Which means that some kind of solution is to be had. Hopefully…
spoiler
"Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, many of these same institutions had plunged into an Orwellian stampede to persuade the West that Ukraine’s neo-Nazi regiment was suddenly not a problem.
It wasn’t pretty. In 2018, The Guardian had published an article titled “Neo-Nazi Groups Recruit Britons to Fight in Ukraine,” in which the Azov Regiment was called “a notorious Ukrainian fascist militia.” Indeed, as late as November 2020, The Guardian was calling Azov a “neo-Nazi extremist movement.”
But by February 2023, The Guardian was assuring readers that Azov’s fighters “are now leading the defence of Mariupol, insisting they have shed their previous dubious politics and rapidly becoming Ukrainian heroes.” The campaign believed to have recruited British far-right activists was now a thing of the past.
The BBC had been among the first to warn of Azov, criticizing Kyiv in 2014 for ignoring a group that “sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia.” A 2018 report noted Azov’s “well-established links to the far right.”
Shortly after Putin’s invasion, though, the BBC began to assert that although “to Russia, they are neo-Nazis and their origins lie in a neo-Nazi group,” the Azov Regiment was being “falsely portrayed as Nazi” by Moscow." link
I see the cognitive dissonance is kicking in for you. Hopefully you will recover, and you’ll read western mainstream narratives more critically.
How funny is this bit though?
"The BBC had been among the first to warn of Azov, criticizing Kyiv in 2014 for ignoring a group that “sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia.” A 2018 report noted Azov’s “well-established links to the far right.”
Shortly after Putin’s invasion, though, the BBC began to assert that although “to Russia, they are neo-Nazis and their origins lie in a neo-Nazi group,” the Azov Regiment was being “falsely portrayed as Nazi” by Moscow."
They suddenly became not-nazis in February 2022? But they kept the wolfsangel? Was BBC spouting Russian misinfo in 2014? Or was it a Russian time travelling double agent who wrote all those articles for prominent western papers about the concerning rise of neonazis in Ukraine? If they are so fringe, why are they giving them so much airtime?
Azov has been getting denazified ever since it became an official battalion. A huge number of Nazis left, regular people joined, are there still Nazis left? Probably, yes, but they’re not running around with SS runes on their helmets that shit doesn’t fly.
As far as the Wolfangel is concerned: It’s not a clear Nazi symbol. Tons of German tows have it on their coat of arms.
Stop trying to rehabilitate the wolfsangel. If your town had it for three centuries then maybe that’s not nazi symbolism. If you join a nationalist right wing regiment and get it tattooed on yourself, that’s Nazi symbolism.
Think about it like the swastika. If someone is choosing it now, in Europe, in a right wing military organization, they’re nazis, not fans of Indian symbols and culture. Do you know how I can tell?
I don’t know what you think I’m trying to justify. You said:
When you see people on the hard left screeching about Ukrainian Nazis or advancing absurd peace deals then they’ve been gotten at.
I explained that the ‘hard left’ has been concerned about Nazis in Ukraine for a long time. You can understand that communists are going to keep a close eye on countries that ban communist parties. Yes other places have a far right problem too. Communists keep an eye on reactionaries elsewhere as well but it’s hardly germane to a conversation about the circumstances of a war in Ukraine, is it?
It’s not the historical “concern”, it’s the constant parroting of Russian talking points by useful idiots on the far left. “Oh look at these Nazis [showing picture from 2014]”, meanwhile Ukraine is actually a pluralist democracy and has a professional / conscript army fighting an invasion. They’re not Nazis in aggregate or even substantially. It’s sort of shit I’m obviously referring to.
The pictures I’m taking about have been taken and shared since the invasion. This is not ‘historical’ in the sense of pre-dating the invasion.
In any event, if the people you’re talking to are discussing reasons for the invasion, the salient facts are the ones that pre-date the invasion. Nobody had the benefit of being able to see facts or pictures taken after the invasion before it occurred; these newer details could not have factored into the equation beforehand. Which may explain (I have no idea because you’re talking in the abstract and not providing receipts) why people would bring up the (highly relevant) historical context.
Will things improve after the war? It’s hard to say now but considering that Ukraine went after the communist party eight or more years ago, it’s unlikely. The fate of ‘pro-Russian’ parties depends on who wins the war. They’ll either be demonised or praised for being ‘right all along’. You can guess how the narrative will be rewritten, either way.
Unfortunately, the aftermath of this war will be terrible for years. That outlook is even bleaker if Ukraine loses with any kind of quasi-military intact. They are now even more heavily armed than before, they will be pissed at losing, and they will be more battle hardened than ever. So even if Russia wins, the political landscape will look different throughout the region, but it’s unlikely to become a pluralist democracy. (Please notice the ‘ifs’ in this paragraph, I have made no prediction as to who will ‘win’.)
You can refer to whatever you like. You are imputing motive on people for saying things you don’t like. That does not mean that the imputed motive is the real motive. Some people have a more nuanced take on the war than you are willing to accept. Having a nuanced understanding of a complicated issue requires an understanding of as many factors as possible.
Looking at a process (e.g. war) in all its relations (internal, historical, political economic, to start with) is the basic Marxist approach and yet is alien to the liberal/bourgeois approach, so I understand if this is unfamiliar to you. If you want to see whether communists do this kind of thing with any other topic (it’s literally every topic) please pick up almost any Marxist text. Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ is a good example of this ‘historical materialism’.
I don’t want to impute motive to you, so I’ll just say that I don’t understand why you’re trying so hard to erase or apologise for the fact that Ukraine had and has a Nazi problem. Nobody that I know of is claiming that the Nazis are in control of every state civil or military organ. Usually, the claim is that the yanks funded anti-Russian, pro-west separatists and the Nazi militias to provoke Russia. Read that how you will.
most people of the left or right can see the situation for what it is
I couldn’t disagree more. In this thread I have someone telling me Ukraine is currently pushing Russia back despite the front not moving appreciably for nearly a year now. It’s also common to hear Putin described as a mustache-twirling villain who just woke up one day and said “I will conquer the whole of Ukraine in three days,” a take similarly detached from reality.
advancing absurd peace deals then they’ve been gotten at.
You do realize that in order to minimize (working class) casualties some kind of peace deal needs to be signed? And in order to sign a peace deal first there needs to be a ceasefire? The sooner the ceasefire starts, the better.
Are you saying that western politicians torpedoing any kind of truce and/or peace deal is “Russian misinfo”?
spoiler
Russia and Ukraine may have agreed on a tentative deal to end the war in April [2022], according to a recent piece in Foreign Affairs.
“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.
The apparent revelation raises some key questions: Why did Western leaders want to stop Kyiv from signing a seemingly good deal with Moscow? Do they consider the conflict a proxy war with Russia? And, most importantly, what would it take to get back to a deal?
JACQUES BAUD: * In fact, in my book I mention only Ukrainian sources, and Ukrainian sources said explicitly that Boris Johnson and the West basically prevented a peace agreement. So that’s not an invention from some Putin partisan here the West; that’s also what the Ukrainians felt. And you had a third occasion when that happened, that was in August, when you had this meeting between [Turkish president] Erdoğan and Zelenskyy in Lviv. And here again, Erdoğan offered his services to mediate some negotiation with the Russians, and just a few days after that Boris Johnson came unexpectedly in Kiev, and again, in a very famous press conference he said explicitly, ‘No negotiations with the Russians. We have to fight. There is no room for negotiation with the Russians.’
the cost of the war
Should we ignore the significant human and economic costs of the ongoing war and the support for the military-industrial complex? Why? Is this some kind of noble war against Sauron or what?
Yeah no-one is against a peace deal at this point. Just against the one where you let they totalitarian agressor win. Anyone who knows anything about history knows you have to stop those kind of regimes at the earliest possible moment.
Here’s the kicker: Assuming Russia is willing to negotiate a deal, would it honor that deal? It did, after all, guarantee security in exchange for Ukraine relinquishing its nuclear weapons, and it broke that commitment.
Ukraine has very good reason to believe that Russia would only use a deal to stop the war as an opportunity to build its strength for another invasion, later. There’s strong evidence that it’s not the capture of separatist territories that is Putin’s goal, but the denial of Ukrainian as a distinct cultural identity, and to prevent it from aligning culturally with the West (even leaving aside the issue of NATO).
If you think the enemy won’t honor a deal, and won’t stop its aggression long-term—and Ukranian leadership has said that that’s exactly what they believe loudly and often—what’s the incentive to negotiate for a ceasefire?
On your first point: Russia’s argument for why they have gone back on the security exchange for Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament is one of the very same arguments NATO uses when claiming that they never promised russia that they wouldn’t expand NATO east of Germany… The US either lies, and denies making the promise (they did) or they say that they promised the soviet union, which is not the same thing as Russia. Ukraine had a discontinuity in government in 2014: this is something they and the EU acknowledged officially during Ukraine’s application to join the EU… So idk if the government of Ukraine today is a distinct entity from the political formation in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, but that is what Ukraine and the EU have said as much.
Your first point in your second paragraph is something that could be said of Ukraine/NATO just as well. If anything, Ukraine has completely expended its reserve of weapons and now relies on a dwindling supply of old weapons from NATO… it may have just gone through a 3rd army in this last offensive… if anything a peace agreement would give NATO more time to arm Ukraine for another time when they decide to break the peace agreement… This isn’t based on speculation or a belief that Ukrainians are dishonest (unlike most speculation about Russia) because this is exactly what Angela Merkle said Minsk I & II were for: to use a peace deal to give NATO time to arm Ukraine for war… In order for peace to be achieved, both sides are going to have to accept some sort of good faith. If that can’t be done then more people will continue to have their lives thrown away.
I’ve been following the history of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and NATO’s involvement for decades, so I hear what you’re saying. I just think it’s irrelevant to the prospect of peace talks now. Ukraine now has a people and government who do not want to be part Russia. Whatever good reasons Putin feels he had to launch a pre-emptive invasion are irrelevant. Dubya thought he had a good reason to attack Iraq. I called that, and him, evil. I’m applying the same standards to Putin: The other side’s bad behavior does not excuse his response.
Ukraine is now facing invasion by an enemy that’s made it clear by its actions and rhetoric that the goal is cultural extinction of Ukraine, that’s proved itself faithless in past agreements (whatever its internal reasoning), and that shows no sign of willingness to negotiate. They have the support of the West now; who knows about the future? What is their incentive to sue for peace?
(Withdrawing Western support from Ukraine now to force them to the negotiating table has a high likelihood of resulting in a genocide, given the evidence. The thing that might bring Putin to the negotiation table for actual peace at this point is threats backed more directly by Europe and NATO, and that seems like bad news.)
The Soviets weren’t removed from Afghanistan any more than we were – they left because they lacked popular support and kept taking losses (because we were arming terrorists who would go on to do 9/11, but I’m sure that type of blowback won’t come from arming Ukranian neo-Nazis!). The parts of Ukraine Russia is occupying largely wanted to leave Ukraine before the war even started. It’s not the same scenario.
Even your best case scenario is “fight a bloody stalemate until one side runs out of troops,” which is incredibly destructive to Ukraine even if they win, and of course they won’t, because the smaller country that can’t just sit back behind extensive defenses isn’t going to win a bloody stalemate.
Just against the one where you let they totalitarian agressor win. Anyone who knows anything about history knows you have to stop those kind of regimes at the earliest possible moment.
So you are against a peace deal?
You do know that the fabled ukrainian counteroffensive has failed completely? How many more regular ukrainians should die in hopeless counteroffensives?
Btw it seems like you don’t know what totalitarian means. Actual academic historians tend to avoid this term since the seventies.
The Ukrainians are the ones who can decide if and when they want to surrender. They are gaining ground every day and have all the time they want to kill as many invaders as they want. Let’s see how many men, women and money Putin is prepared to waste before he eventually retreats, Afhganistan style
I’m sorry, are you the same person I’ve been talking to? Because it seems like you haven’t actually read anything I’ve written.
The Ukrainians are the ones who can decide if and when they want to surrender.
Western politicians actively sabotaged peace talks. Read previous comments for sources.
They are gaining ground every day
This has no basis in reality. Even overly optimistic western sources have admitted the failure of the spring counteroffensive.
have all the time they want
How can you be this wrong? They have limited manpower and more and more soldiers die every day. Every week spent warring is a huge burden on their economy.
I’m not gonna answer you again since you are completely out of touch with reality. Even prowar western journalists are more careful with their wording.
You do realise that a peace deal / ceasefire which involves Ukraine giving up land, sovereignty or anything else is horseshit being pushed around by useful idiots? And who is feeding the far left with this crap? Russia because of course they are. And you only have to look at prior deals by Russia to see how believable any peace would be do. Or ask Yevgeny Prigozhin how deals work.
You do realise that a peace deal / ceasefire which involves Ukraine giving up land, sovereignty or anything else is horseshit being pushed around by useful idiots?
The counteroffensive failed spectacularly, even western sources admit this.
How many more people you want to send in the meat grinder?
Here’s an idea: call a ceasefire and let the diplomats negotiate, and let’s see what happens. Let’s see what actual ukrainians want after a few months of negotiation. Maybe Boris Johnson should fuck off. At least people are not dying until then. Outlandish, I know.
And who is feeding the far left with this crap?
Now this is qanon level conspiracy theory. I am against war between capitalist nations in general. On one side you have an extremely corrupt oligarchic capitalist country, and on the other side you have an extremely corrupt oligarchic capitalist country.
Since I live in a NATO country I criticise NATO more, since they are the ruling class above me and there’s enough criticism of Putin around here anyway.
As far as deals go, US/Ukraine isn’t trustworthy either. The Minsk agreement was bullshit. What happened to nord stream btw?
Ghouls can be rational actors without not being ghouls.
If a ghoul’s fundamental values involve control, domination and power, doing everything they can in a bid to control a strip of land recently found to have plenty of energy natural resources would be a rational action from their point of view, even if it involves provoking immense suffering upon millions of people. You don’t get to say that US presidents’ actions can only be explained by the hubris of people and systems that want endless growth and control, but Putin’s actions cannot.
If NATO has historically sucked, but countries surrounding the country led by that ghoul rationally feel the need to protect themselves, it’s logical they’ll want to join NATO.
The question here is why you’re far more willing to accept the rationality of Putin than the rationality of his victims when they legitimately ask for NATO’s support to defend themselves, and instead attribute them the category of sheep easily manipulated by NATO rather than accepting their autonomy and sovereignity to make their own decisions.
You don’t get to say that US presidents’ actions can only be explained by the hubris of people and systems that want endless growth and control, but Putin’s actions cannot.
This is the start of a cogent argument but it needs to be followed through.
The flip side of the coin is that you don’t get to accept that “US presidents’ actions can … be explained by … want[ing] endless growth and control” and reject any notion that it would use Ukraine to secure endless growth for itself. This may not be you. But it follows logically for those who understand that the US/NATO is the greatest threat to world peace.
If profit drives Putin, why Ukraine and not another neighbour who hasn’t been courting NATO and accepting western money, weapons, training, etc since at least circa 2014? The answer is because the US chose Ukraine to provoke Russia.
If profit drives Putin, why Ukraine and not another neighbour who hasn’t been courting NATO and accepting western money, weapons, training, etc since at least circa 2014? The answer is because the US chose Ukraine to provoke Russia.
Well, there’s really no reason to use hard power on any country that hasn’t been courting NATO. You can just use soft power (Belarus, Kazakhstan) in that case. Precisely when this ceases to work and a country does starts approaching Russia’s rivals, Russia appears to employ their military power (Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine).
Good points. Soft power seems to have been starting to work in Ukraine, too, until Maidan in 2014. For me, the key thing is ‘approaching Russia’s rivals’.
On the one hand, Russia’s not going to like that. On the other hand, if we accept that Russia exercising soft power in e.g. Belarus and Kazakhstan means hard power isn’t necessary – they’re already within its orbit/under it’s wing – then when e.g. Ukraine approaches the US and turns away from Russia, the US has already effectively taken control of Ukraine before Russia invades. Albeit through soft power.
And that throws a different light on the civil war in which Ukrainian militias are shelling ethnic Russian Ukrainians for being ‘separatists’. Because it means it’s being supported by Russia’s arch-rival, the US, a country well known for such destabilising and provocative antics, as the recent history of West Asia attests.
The Donbas separatists were already well supplied, and the Crimea was already well invaded, by RU, well before the West really started pouring support. I hope this sheds a different light on things for you
I have no idea what timeline you’re working with. The US was meddling in Ukraine since at least 1994. This ramped up in 2005. It supported a coup in 2014. Then the civil war started. The US was involved from before and throughout.
I’m glad you’ve brought that up. Because it, too, suggests that Russia invaded Georgia for the same reason: yank meddling and provocation:
Though Georgia is located in a region well within Russia’s historic sphere of influence and is more than 3,000 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, Bush nevertheless launched an ambitious campaign to bring Georgia into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Russians, who had already seen previous U.S. assurances to Gorbachev that NATO would not extend eastward ignored, found the prospects of NATO expansion to the strategically important and volatile Caucasus region particularly provocative. This inflamed Russian nationalists and Russian military leaders and no doubt strengthened their resolve to maintain their military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. …
Amid accusations of widespread corruption and not adequately addressing the country’s growing poverty, Saakashvili himself faced widespread protests in November 2007, to which he responded with severe repression, shutting down independent media, detaining opposition leaders, and sending his security forces to assault largely nonviolent demonstrators with tear gas, truncheons, rubber bullets, water cannons, and sonic equipment. Human Rights Watch criticized the government for using “excessive” force against protesters and the International Crisis Group warned of growing authoritarianism in the country. Despite this, Saakashvili continued to receive strong support from Washington and still appeared to have majority support within Georgia, winning a snap election in January by a solid majority which – despite some irregularities – was generally thought to be free and fair.
Now where have we seen that kind of thing before—I mean since?
In remarks likely to infuriate the Kremlin, Bush said Ukraine should be invited during this week’s Nato summit in Bucharest to join Nato’s membership action programme, a prelude to full membership.
He also said that there could be no deal with Moscow over the US administration’s contentious plans to locate elements of its controversial missile defence system in eastern Europe.…
Bush said after talks … in Kiev[:] “I strongly believe that Ukraine and Georgia should be given MAP [Membership Action Plans], and there are no tradeoffs - period.”…
Germany and France are leading opposition from within the EU to such a move, arguing that it would needlessly antagonise Russia and provoke a new crisis between Russia and the west. …
In central Kiev, several hundred protesters defied a court ban and shouted anti-Nato slogans in Independence Square, the focal point of the 2004 pro-western “orange revolution” protests, which swept Yushchenko to power. A few thousand protesters were massed in the square today ahead of Bush’s arrival.
For many Ukrainians, joining Nato is not a priority. Only 30% of respondents in the former Soviet state support the move.
Who knows why Germany and France changed their tune by the time it came to Ukraine a few years later? We know why Ukrainians wanted the yanks to gtfo; they saw the writing on the wall and didn’t want to be sacrificed for US goals. Unfortunately, corrupt officials sold the people out.
Turns out it’s hard to point to a war that doesn’t have grubby US fingerprints all over it.
So country wants to leave Russian SOI: arm local separatists, wait until country intervenes, then send in military and push for regime change. #noimperialism
It seems they also have a tendency to consider NATO as cartoons villains. Also, tankies are not the average lefties, they are at the extreme of the left.
The bombs he was fleeing from were decided by NATO, the militias were funded and supported by NATO; the same one that eventually found him and sodomized him to death with a bayonet. What will be evidence enough for you? Hillary’s “we came, we saw, he died.” quip?
Yes. Gaddafi was also certainly killed based on French intelligence, and there is substantial evidence that the men who assassinated him were French assets. Part of the reason, apart from the broader geopolitical aim of annihilating a country which wanted to engage in the construction of international monetary and commerical systems outside of the orbit and control of the American petro-dollar, Gaddafi had essentially bribed Sarkozy at a certain point and was holding this over the latter’s head (Sarkozy is infamously corrupt). See:
Hegemon’s have to rule by fear. Read any bloodsoaked page from the history of the Roman Empire. Fear is best instilled through unimaginable atrocity. What do you think the rulers of the rest of Africa and the Middle East thought after they saw how Gaddafi, head of the most prosperous (per-capita, quality of life, standard of living, etc.) state in Africa, ended up?
“Cartoon villain” here means “a villain who is just intrinsically evil and does evil things as a result.” Contrast this with real people, who generally have material or ideological motivational for the actions they take.
The left views NATO as evil not because it’s full of cartoon villains, but because it is an organization that consciously, due to material and ideological motivations, chooses to immiserate the global south for the benefit of its constituent countries’ ruling classes.
I use it similarly to what is described in this Wikipedia article, in particular the last paragraph of the introduction is what disturbs me the most with some Lemmy users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
The last paragraph quotes fucking Ross Douthat, come on now
Lots of terms need defining. “Illiberal” just means not capitalistic, which yeah that’s all leftists. What is authoritarian? Usually a definition that gets thrown around applies more to capitalist countries vs those listed.
So it’s just a western communist that supports non Western communist projects? 🤔
I love it when liberals use ‘illiberal’ as a criticism. Begging the question much? Of course we’re illiberal we’re anti-capitalists!
Don’t whisper it in hushed tones as if we’re being shy about it and might be embarrassed. Liberalism is the cause of so much misery in the world I’d be more embarrassed to be called a liberal.
The best of it is that even liberals accept that liberal society is atrocious; they just throw up their hands, claim that it’s the only option, and benefit decadently from the system while the world burns as if nothing could or should be done about it. The nerve.
It’s essentially cope for them not just supporting “nominally” socialist countries because their stance is one of anti-imperialism. Iran should have nukes.
Isn’t Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russo-Georgian war imperialism? I still don’t get them, except being blinded by their hate of USA’s war crimes, which I can understand, but it still seems like an irrational conclusion to become a tankie. They end up supporting or refusing to criticize regimes that generate similar war crimes.
Wait, are you saying Saakashvili has done an imperialism?
Because even western/EU reports have confirmed that Georgia started that war, not Russia.
They end up supporting or refusing to criticize regimes that generate similar war crimes.
“From 24 February 2022, which marked the start of the large-scale armed attack by the Russian Federation, to 30 July 2023, OHCHR recorded 26,015 civilian casualties in the country: 9,369 killed and 16,646 injured”
Almost 10 thousand civilians killed is horrible.
But compare this to Iraq: it’s less than the first month of the war in Iraq, and no US politicians was tried for war crimes. Maybe you should ponder this factoid.
If you live in a NATO country maybe you should demand Blair and Bush to be tried for their war crimes. If you live in the west you should spend more energy of criticizing the ruling class above you.
“supporting or refusing to criticize” This is a made up leftist. Per definition there is no leftist that uncritically supports a right wing capitalist country.
Marxists, following Lenin, define imperialism as the monopoly of finance capital. Not as a synonym for ‘conquest’, ‘annexation’, ‘empire’ (not that I’m saying all three necessarily apply to Russia in Ukraine—a conclusion on that isn’t relevant, here).
When US (Anglo-European) finance capital dominates the world through the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and petrodollar, supported by a network of however many hundreds of military bases, all paid for by it’s vassals and enemies due to said dominance, there’s little to no room for anyone else to even consider being imperialist.
We can discuss that if you like. I’ll likely need others to chip in. I’m not proposing that I have all the answers. It’s not something with a clear answer. But we can’t have the debate at all unless we agree on common definitions and frames of reference. Otherwise it feels as though liberals simply do not understand what’s being said. It’s just talking past one another, where one side has a coherent definition and framework and the other side… doesn’t.
I’ll let you decide whether you can honestly say you have a theoretically sound concept of imperialism depending on how much dedicated literature on imperialism you’ve read.
Yeah it’s important that we, as Marxists, therefore proceeding scientific,ally, make very clear from the onset as to what we mean when we use the term ‘imperialist’ with this more specific, narrow, Leninist definition which only really applies to modern capitalism, or more precisely the modern capitalist world-system. Conceptual clarification is essential for any scientific endeavor, including Marxism.
Even on this definition however, we can note that it is perfectly possible (and concretely, empirically, historically confirm this possibility by looking at the international situation pre-WW1) that there be several powers or polarized groups of powers each of which behaves imperialistically in the Leninist sense. The difference today is that we currently still have a more or less unipolar as opposed to multipolar imperialist (Leninist sense) world-system.
If someone calls Russia ‘imperialist’ in a different sense, then they might not be wrong, and saying that they are because our definition doesn’t apply isn’t relevant beyond the fact that there’s confusion over the concepts being used because people are equivocating between them, simply because we are using the same term/sound/word/signifier. If we do the latter we are engaging in a semantic debate disguised as, because confused with, a substantive debate.
Good points. I also wouldn’t be opposed to accepting that capitalists in Russia would/will try to become imperialistic in the monopoly of finance capital sense. In the one hand, the logic of capital might force their hand. On the other hand, capitalists are gonna capitalist, in part because they fetishise the hoarding of wealth like everyone else living under capitalism.
Whether Russian imperialism becomes a realistic possibility, though… I’d be interested in seeing some stats on that, interpreted in light of the idea that the next type of multipolarity will be quite different to the one at the turn of the twentieth century. Ig if anyone’s done that leg work it’d be Michael Hudson but I’ve not come across it if he has.
There’s a concept called “critical support”, which most “tankies” are practicing. You have criticism of a side but its the lesser evil so you support it despite your criticism. You won’t hear much of that criticism publicly though because that’s counterproductive.
Like if I want the US to recognize the DPRK as a sovereign state so we can at least begin discussing Korean reunification, why would I bother mentioning my criticism of Juche?
I would avoid saying “lesser evil” for critical support cases, because revolutionary defeatism exists for lesser evil situations where nothing is progressing against the primary contradiction. It’s more a recognition that a shitty thing can be progressive/forward moving relative to its opposition. Russia winning/getting a peace deal with Donbas and Crimea out of Ukraine gets us much closer to ending global imperialism than Ukraine getting it’s land back or worse.
We want the larger capitalist empire to loose to the smaller capitalist empire because that leads to better outcomes. Saying otherwise is telling half truths at best.
You’re in a thread with half a dozen comments like “wow libs and tankies are celebrating this?”, followed by a bunch of “tankies” explaining (again) that they do not actually like modern Russia.
The general “tankie” position is that the people of Donbas, who mostly do not want to remain part of Ukraine, will not stop suffering attacks without Russia fighting Ukraine off. Russia does not seem interested in siphoning resources from or subjugating the people of Donbas, as they did not the people of Crimea, who merely became Russian citizens. This is very different from US carpetbombing for oil.
It’s as if leftists do not actually like Putin or any of the other ghouls on the Russian side, but are instead critical of NATO and willing to consider NATO opponents as rational actors instead of cartoon villains.
I oppose NATO over other Ghoulish countries because it’s a greater threat to the world right now.
How is it a threat to anyone outside of Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America
You can also find similar examples for Africa and Asia.
The Cold war ended more than 30 years ago.
Ah, so you want newer examples? Fine. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and now Pakistan in Asia, Libya in Africa, Brasil and Bolivia in South America. All in the last twenty years or so.
I think Iraq is a fair point. The rest are weak sauce as fuck for a variety of reasons that I’ll not trouble myself to enumerate.
That said, I myself was never onboard with the US invasion of Iraq or our long time presence in Afghanistan. They were both bullshit and never would have happened had it been up to me.
The invasions may have been half-hearted failures, but they still caused enormous suffering. And the Libyan invasion did not fail if I remember correctly.
I was explaining why a lot of countries would see NATO as the biggest threat. For this, what matters is what NATO governments do. What the people of NATO countries think or do is, while important from a moral point of view, unlikely to be reflected in foreign policy.
Russia is a country run by cartoon villains. Can you not picture Shoigu sneaking up behind someone with a large round bomb that says ACME on it, only to discover that the fuse has been accidentally lit by a soldiers cigarette?
I think most people of the left or right can see the situation for what it is. However Russia is obviously crafting messages to appeal to those on the extremes. When you see people on the hard left screeching about Ukrainian Nazis or advancing absurd peace deals then they’ve been gotten at. When you see people from the hard right screeching about Ukrainian immigrants or the cost of the war vs America / Europe first then you know they’ve been gotten at.
As for Prigozhin, I think most people, even Russians are glad that he is dead but for different reasons. Seems clear that Putin murdered him for his disloyalty but nobody in Ukraine is going to mourn his loss for the spent force that is Wagner.
People think Ukraine has a Nazi problem because western media was shouting about it from the rooftops for a decade before the invasion. Then they only whispered it if they mentioned it at all but they kept on posting pictures of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi insignia plastered on their faces or their equipment. Or photos of politicians with a portrait of Bandera on the wall above their desk. The gullible liberal journalists didn’t even know what they had to censor out at the start of the war.
Unlike libs, the ‘hard’ left didn’t start looking at Ukraine on the date of the invasion and they didn’t wipe their memories clean of the historical context. A conspiracy involving Russian propagandists isn’t needed to explain this.
Neither are Russian propagandists needed to explain that racist westerners are going to be racist against immigrants and refugees, wherever they’re from.
Ukraine has had a far right problem but lots of countries do. Doesn’t mean it’s more than the fringe as it is in other countries and it’s CERTAINLY not a credible talking point or justification for war to invade a sovereign democracy. And the stupid part is that this shit still goes onto today, even to this comment where you attempt to justify it.
The collective west does have a Nazi problem, it’s acute in Ukraine.
Ukraine has been getting shelled for over 8 years now, it’s been the Ukrainian government doing it, and that specifically has been what provoked the invasion.
It’s just observable reality, idk what’s so hard about remembering events from a few years ago for liberals
Svoboda having one seat in the Rada kind of acute?
As far as general patriotism is concerned sure that’s on an all-time high in Ukraine but guess what, that kind of stuff happens if you get invaded. Which started in 2014, don’t forget that, and Ukraine has been under hybrid attack from Russia since at least 2000, the 90s being only a brief respite from centuries of colonialism and that only because Russia didn’t know WTF it was doing.
The important part is the type of nationalism you see. And that’s much closer to the likes of the SNP than to Nazis.
“general patriotism” I see swastikas, things that sub in for swastikas, iron crosses, and totenkopfs.
You can fuck right off with the “centuries of colonialism” that’s literlly the west repackaging its own history to accuse others of.
I thought you guys were the ones who said that portions of a country can unilaterally vote to leave and its okay. That was what you lot pulled with Serbia, why does it suddenly no longer apply here?
So the Bundeswehr is a Nazi org because it’s using the iron cross as emblem?
So Russia suddenly isn’t European? That would come as news to Europe.
I was a bit too young to have much of an opinion or impact there. In any case very much unlike Ukraine, Serbia actually was genociding people. “Get genocided by your central state, get independence” is more than fair if you ask me.
The Ukrainian state has been killing civilians indiscriminately in its two breakaway regions, they were just doing it for much longer than it took for any kind of intervention in Serbia.
When the west starts to pretend to care about muslims, you know they’re full of shit about any purported genocides. They went from pretending to care about Kosovar Albanians to murdering millions of muslims over the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s pretty funny having iron crosses constantly showing up on all the UA vehicles- I think we all know what they’re going for, they just left off a few lines.
Russia has not been a part of ‘the west’, certainly not as far as most of the EU is concerned unless you’re trying to be intentionally obtuse
You mean they’ve been fighting Russian backed separatists that were trying to join their regions with Russia
If they want to live under a totalitarian regime they were always free to move to Russia themselves
Ah yes the ever popular “they should have self deported instead of getting ethnically cleansed”
How come you guys were okay with kosovo ‘voting’ to leave Serbia, but suddenly this is a bridge too far?
The trick is they know zero specifics of either situation
You guys
Do you realize how sociopathic this sounds? Are all separatists deserving of being bombed by the country they live under? Would you say the same to the people of Yemen, or Palestine or Ethiopia? “You’re being bombed, so just leave”?
Depressingly for many libs the answer is yes because guy with blue tie was president and responsible for bombing them. Guy in red tie too but that’s less relevant. Kosovo and Syria are better examples.
If they are trying to join Russia, yes. No need to pull their neighbours into that
But it’s okay for neighbors to pull their neighbors into IMF debt servitude, to say nothing of couping the government because it wasn’t pro-west enough. Really letting the euro chauvinism fly there.
Word for word right-wing talking point
Ok boomer
Upgrade your insults from the 2019 edition
deleted by creator
Wait so you believe paramilitary groups were ethnically cleansing ethnic Russians in the Donbas in/pre 2014? Do you have any sources for this?
Careful not to let your MAGA hat fall when you yell at the clouds.
What does totalitarian mean?
Well for one example: if you pose a real political threat to the regime, you get thrown into prison or out of a window
How is that different than any functioning state?
I see. So are you going to follow this line of thought to it’s natural conclusion and become an anarchist? /s
I guess you didn’t pay attention. Whenever they post pictures of Ukrainian soldiers there’s a good chance that you will see a Totenkopf or a Black Sun badge. When western news interviews lesser known Ukrainian politicians, there’s a good chance that you will see a Bandera portrait in the background.
The rise of the ukrainian far right has been well documented in western media before the invasion. Hell, google “Western media before February of 2022”
In fact it’s neither sovereign, since the US couped Ukraine in 2014, nor it is a democracy, but an extremely corrupt oligarchic capitalist country. The contrast with Russia lies in the absence of a single pivotal leader like Putin, and they fully adhere to Western interests.
This doesn’t make the invasion “good” as in “Aragorn is a good guy”. The NATO encroaching makes it understandable. Which is completely different from “good”. Understandable means that there is some kind of rationality at play. Which means it was probably preventable. Which means that some kind of solution is to be had. Hopefully…
spoiler
"Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, many of these same institutions had plunged into an Orwellian stampede to persuade the West that Ukraine’s neo-Nazi regiment was suddenly not a problem.
It wasn’t pretty. In 2018, The Guardian had published an article titled “Neo-Nazi Groups Recruit Britons to Fight in Ukraine,” in which the Azov Regiment was called “a notorious Ukrainian fascist militia.” Indeed, as late as November 2020, The Guardian was calling Azov a “neo-Nazi extremist movement.”
But by February 2023, The Guardian was assuring readers that Azov’s fighters “are now leading the defence of Mariupol, insisting they have shed their previous dubious politics and rapidly becoming Ukrainian heroes.” The campaign believed to have recruited British far-right activists was now a thing of the past.
The BBC had been among the first to warn of Azov, criticizing Kyiv in 2014 for ignoring a group that “sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia.” A 2018 report noted Azov’s “well-established links to the far right.”
Shortly after Putin’s invasion, though, the BBC began to assert that although “to Russia, they are neo-Nazis and their origins lie in a neo-Nazi group,” the Azov Regiment was being “falsely portrayed as Nazi” by Moscow." link
Sorry but this is utter bollocks.
I see the cognitive dissonance is kicking in for you. Hopefully you will recover, and you’ll read western mainstream narratives more critically.
How funny is this bit though?
"The BBC had been among the first to warn of Azov, criticizing Kyiv in 2014 for ignoring a group that “sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia.” A 2018 report noted Azov’s “well-established links to the far right.”
Shortly after Putin’s invasion, though, the BBC began to assert that although “to Russia, they are neo-Nazis and their origins lie in a neo-Nazi group,” the Azov Regiment was being “falsely portrayed as Nazi” by Moscow."
They suddenly became not-nazis in February 2022? But they kept the wolfsangel? Was BBC spouting Russian misinfo in 2014? Or was it a Russian time travelling double agent who wrote all those articles for prominent western papers about the concerning rise of neonazis in Ukraine? If they are so fringe, why are they giving them so much airtime?
Azov has been getting denazified ever since it became an official battalion. A huge number of Nazis left, regular people joined, are there still Nazis left? Probably, yes, but they’re not running around with SS runes on their helmets that shit doesn’t fly.
As far as the Wolfangel is concerned: It’s not a clear Nazi symbol. Tons of German tows have it on their coat of arms.
Stop trying to rehabilitate the wolfsangel. If your town had it for three centuries then maybe that’s not nazi symbolism. If you join a nationalist right wing regiment and get it tattooed on yourself, that’s Nazi symbolism.
Think about it like the swastika. If someone is choosing it now, in Europe, in a right wing military organization, they’re nazis, not fans of Indian symbols and culture. Do you know how I can tell?
Surely you can’t be this gullible
oh, okay, good talk
I don’t know what you think I’m trying to justify. You said:
I explained that the ‘hard left’ has been concerned about Nazis in Ukraine for a long time. You can understand that communists are going to keep a close eye on countries that ban communist parties. Yes other places have a far right problem too. Communists keep an eye on reactionaries elsewhere as well but it’s hardly germane to a conversation about the circumstances of a war in Ukraine, is it?
It’s not the historical “concern”, it’s the constant parroting of Russian talking points by useful idiots on the far left. “Oh look at these Nazis [showing picture from 2014]”, meanwhile Ukraine is actually a pluralist democracy and has a professional / conscript army fighting an invasion. They’re not Nazis in aggregate or even substantially. It’s sort of shit I’m obviously referring to.
Pluralist democracy is when you seize power through force and then ban opposition parties.
“Seize power by force and other things that only happened in my imagination”
Sometimes I forget just how little y’all know about the history of this conflict.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/17/ukraine-bans-communist-party-separatism
The pictures I’m taking about have been taken and shared since the invasion. This is not ‘historical’ in the sense of pre-dating the invasion.
In any event, if the people you’re talking to are discussing reasons for the invasion, the salient facts are the ones that pre-date the invasion. Nobody had the benefit of being able to see facts or pictures taken after the invasion before it occurred; these newer details could not have factored into the equation beforehand. Which may explain (I have no idea because you’re talking in the abstract and not providing receipts) why people would bring up the (highly relevant) historical context.
Ukraine is under martial law. Eleven opposition parties have been suspended. The communist party was banned and it’s assets seized. This is not what democracy looks like. It is in no way pluralist. Maybe you have a different definition of pluralist democracy than I do.
Will things improve after the war? It’s hard to say now but considering that Ukraine went after the communist party eight or more years ago, it’s unlikely. The fate of ‘pro-Russian’ parties depends on who wins the war. They’ll either be demonised or praised for being ‘right all along’. You can guess how the narrative will be rewritten, either way.
Unfortunately, the aftermath of this war will be terrible for years. That outlook is even bleaker if Ukraine loses with any kind of quasi-military intact. They are now even more heavily armed than before, they will be pissed at losing, and they will be more battle hardened than ever. So even if Russia wins, the political landscape will look different throughout the region, but it’s unlikely to become a pluralist democracy. (Please notice the ‘ifs’ in this paragraph, I have made no prediction as to who will ‘win’.)
You can refer to whatever you like. You are imputing motive on people for saying things you don’t like. That does not mean that the imputed motive is the real motive. Some people have a more nuanced take on the war than you are willing to accept. Having a nuanced understanding of a complicated issue requires an understanding of as many factors as possible.
Looking at a process (e.g. war) in all its relations (internal, historical, political economic, to start with) is the basic Marxist approach and yet is alien to the liberal/bourgeois approach, so I understand if this is unfamiliar to you. If you want to see whether communists do this kind of thing with any other topic (it’s literally every topic) please pick up almost any Marxist text. Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ is a good example of this ‘historical materialism’.
I don’t want to impute motive to you, so I’ll just say that I don’t understand why you’re trying so hard to erase or apologise for the fact that Ukraine had and has a Nazi problem. Nobody that I know of is claiming that the Nazis are in control of every state civil or military organ. Usually, the claim is that the yanks funded anti-Russian, pro-west separatists and the Nazi militias to provoke Russia. Read that how you will.
I couldn’t disagree more. In this thread I have someone telling me Ukraine is currently pushing Russia back despite the front not moving appreciably for nearly a year now. It’s also common to hear Putin described as a mustache-twirling villain who just woke up one day and said “I will conquer the whole of Ukraine in three days,” a take similarly detached from reality.
You do realize that in order to minimize (working class) casualties some kind of peace deal needs to be signed? And in order to sign a peace deal first there needs to be a ceasefire? The sooner the ceasefire starts, the better.
Are you saying that western politicians torpedoing any kind of truce and/or peace deal is “Russian misinfo”?
spoiler
Should we ignore the significant human and economic costs of the ongoing war and the support for the military-industrial complex? Why? Is this some kind of noble war against Sauron or what?
Yeah no-one is against a peace deal at this point. Just against the one where you let they totalitarian agressor win. Anyone who knows anything about history knows you have to stop those kind of regimes at the earliest possible moment.
Russia has won, though. They have taken the separatist parts of Ukraine and cannot be removed. So the choices are:
Here’s the kicker: Assuming Russia is willing to negotiate a deal, would it honor that deal? It did, after all, guarantee security in exchange for Ukraine relinquishing its nuclear weapons, and it broke that commitment.
Ukraine has very good reason to believe that Russia would only use a deal to stop the war as an opportunity to build its strength for another invasion, later. There’s strong evidence that it’s not the capture of separatist territories that is Putin’s goal, but the denial of Ukrainian as a distinct cultural identity, and to prevent it from aligning culturally with the West (even leaving aside the issue of NATO).
If you think the enemy won’t honor a deal, and won’t stop its aggression long-term—and Ukranian leadership has said that that’s exactly what they believe loudly and often—what’s the incentive to negotiate for a ceasefire?
On your first point: Russia’s argument for why they have gone back on the security exchange for Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament is one of the very same arguments NATO uses when claiming that they never promised russia that they wouldn’t expand NATO east of Germany… The US either lies, and denies making the promise (they did) or they say that they promised the soviet union, which is not the same thing as Russia. Ukraine had a discontinuity in government in 2014: this is something they and the EU acknowledged officially during Ukraine’s application to join the EU… So idk if the government of Ukraine today is a distinct entity from the political formation in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, but that is what Ukraine and the EU have said as much.
Your first point in your second paragraph is something that could be said of Ukraine/NATO just as well. If anything, Ukraine has completely expended its reserve of weapons and now relies on a dwindling supply of old weapons from NATO… it may have just gone through a 3rd army in this last offensive… if anything a peace agreement would give NATO more time to arm Ukraine for another time when they decide to break the peace agreement… This isn’t based on speculation or a belief that Ukrainians are dishonest (unlike most speculation about Russia) because this is exactly what Angela Merkle said Minsk I & II were for: to use a peace deal to give NATO time to arm Ukraine for war… In order for peace to be achieved, both sides are going to have to accept some sort of good faith. If that can’t be done then more people will continue to have their lives thrown away.
I’ve been following the history of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and NATO’s involvement for decades, so I hear what you’re saying. I just think it’s irrelevant to the prospect of peace talks now. Ukraine now has a people and government who do not want to be part Russia. Whatever good reasons Putin feels he had to launch a pre-emptive invasion are irrelevant. Dubya thought he had a good reason to attack Iraq. I called that, and him, evil. I’m applying the same standards to Putin: The other side’s bad behavior does not excuse his response.
Ukraine is now facing invasion by an enemy that’s made it clear by its actions and rhetoric that the goal is cultural extinction of Ukraine, that’s proved itself faithless in past agreements (whatever its internal reasoning), and that shows no sign of willingness to negotiate. They have the support of the West now; who knows about the future? What is their incentive to sue for peace?
(Withdrawing Western support from Ukraine now to force them to the negotiating table has a high likelihood of resulting in a genocide, given the evidence. The thing that might bring Putin to the negotiation table for actual peace at this point is threats backed more directly by Europe and NATO, and that seems like bad news.)
They could not be removed from Afganistan either. Until they were.
Ukraine can grind up Russian conscripts and free their country inch by inch if they have to.
Meanwhile the rest of the world can help continuing to destroy the Russian economy as best as we can
The Soviets weren’t removed from Afghanistan any more than we were – they left because they lacked popular support and kept taking losses (because we were arming terrorists who would go on to do 9/11, but I’m sure that type of blowback won’t come from arming Ukranian neo-Nazis!). The parts of Ukraine Russia is occupying largely wanted to leave Ukraine before the war even started. It’s not the same scenario.
Even your best case scenario is “fight a bloody stalemate until one side runs out of troops,” which is incredibly destructive to Ukraine even if they win, and of course they won’t, because the smaller country that can’t just sit back behind extensive defenses isn’t going to win a bloody stalemate.
The soviets lost the popular support they had in parts of Afghanistan after 10 years of war. They never ‘ran out of troops’.
The US never ‘ran of troops’ in Vietnam.
Great, call a ceasefire now.
So you are against a peace deal? You do know that the fabled ukrainian counteroffensive has failed completely? How many more regular ukrainians should die in hopeless counteroffensives?
Btw it seems like you don’t know what totalitarian means. Actual academic historians tend to avoid this term since the seventies.
The Ukrainians are the ones who can decide if and when they want to surrender. They are gaining ground every day and have all the time they want to kill as many invaders as they want. Let’s see how many men, women and money Putin is prepared to waste before he eventually retreats, Afhganistan style
I’m sorry, are you the same person I’ve been talking to? Because it seems like you haven’t actually read anything I’ve written.
Western politicians actively sabotaged peace talks. Read previous comments for sources.
This has no basis in reality. Even overly optimistic western sources have admitted the failure of the spring counteroffensive.
How can you be this wrong? They have limited manpower and more and more soldiers die every day. Every week spent warring is a huge burden on their economy.
I’m not gonna answer you again since you are completely out of touch with reality. Even prowar western journalists are more careful with their wording.
Bad argument
You do realise that a peace deal / ceasefire which involves Ukraine giving up land, sovereignty or anything else is horseshit being pushed around by useful idiots? And who is feeding the far left with this crap? Russia because of course they are. And you only have to look at prior deals by Russia to see how believable any peace would be do. Or ask Yevgeny Prigozhin how deals work.
The counteroffensive failed spectacularly, even western sources admit this.
How many more people you want to send in the meat grinder?
Here’s an idea: call a ceasefire and let the diplomats negotiate, and let’s see what happens. Let’s see what actual ukrainians want after a few months of negotiation. Maybe Boris Johnson should fuck off. At least people are not dying until then. Outlandish, I know.
Now this is qanon level conspiracy theory. I am against war between capitalist nations in general. On one side you have an extremely corrupt oligarchic capitalist country, and on the other side you have an extremely corrupt oligarchic capitalist country.
Since I live in a NATO country I criticise NATO more, since they are the ruling class above me and there’s enough criticism of Putin around here anyway.
As far as deals go, US/Ukraine isn’t trustworthy either. The Minsk agreement was bullshit. What happened to nord stream btw?
Ghouls can be rational actors without not being ghouls.
If a ghoul’s fundamental values involve control, domination and power, doing everything they can in a bid to control a strip of land recently found to have plenty of energy natural resources would be a rational action from their point of view, even if it involves provoking immense suffering upon millions of people. You don’t get to say that US presidents’ actions can only be explained by the hubris of people and systems that want endless growth and control, but Putin’s actions cannot.
If NATO has historically sucked, but countries surrounding the country led by that ghoul rationally feel the need to protect themselves, it’s logical they’ll want to join NATO.
The question here is why you’re far more willing to accept the rationality of Putin than the rationality of his victims when they legitimately ask for NATO’s support to defend themselves, and instead attribute them the category of sheep easily manipulated by NATO rather than accepting their autonomy and sovereignity to make their own decisions.
This is the start of a cogent argument but it needs to be followed through.
The flip side of the coin is that you don’t get to accept that “US presidents’ actions can … be explained by … want[ing] endless growth and control” and reject any notion that it would use Ukraine to secure endless growth for itself. This may not be you. But it follows logically for those who understand that the US/NATO is the greatest threat to world peace.
If profit drives Putin, why Ukraine and not another neighbour who hasn’t been courting NATO and accepting western money, weapons, training, etc since at least circa 2014? The answer is because the US chose Ukraine to provoke Russia.
Well, there’s really no reason to use hard power on any country that hasn’t been courting NATO. You can just use soft power (Belarus, Kazakhstan) in that case. Precisely when this ceases to work and a country does starts approaching Russia’s rivals, Russia appears to employ their military power (Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine).
Good points. Soft power seems to have been starting to work in Ukraine, too, until Maidan in 2014. For me, the key thing is ‘approaching Russia’s rivals’.
On the one hand, Russia’s not going to like that. On the other hand, if we accept that Russia exercising soft power in e.g. Belarus and Kazakhstan means hard power isn’t necessary – they’re already within its orbit/under it’s wing – then when e.g. Ukraine approaches the US and turns away from Russia, the US has already effectively taken control of Ukraine before Russia invades. Albeit through soft power.
And that throws a different light on the civil war in which Ukrainian militias are shelling ethnic Russian Ukrainians for being ‘separatists’. Because it means it’s being supported by Russia’s arch-rival, the US, a country well known for such destabilising and provocative antics, as the recent history of West Asia attests.
The Donbas separatists were already well supplied, and the Crimea was already well invaded, by RU, well before the West really started pouring support. I hope this sheds a different light on things for you
I have no idea what timeline you’re working with. The US was meddling in Ukraine since at least 1994. This ramped up in 2005. It supported a coup in 2014. Then the civil war started. The US was involved from before and throughout.
Every party was involved since at least the cold war. Do you think the separatists would have started the civil war without backing from RU?
No idea what you think I’ve been trying to say, here, I’m afraid.
You seem to live in a fantasy timeline where Putin didn’t invade Georgia for the same reason
I’m glad you’ve brought that up. Because it, too, suggests that Russia invaded Georgia for the same reason: yank meddling and provocation:
Now where have we seen that kind of thing
before—I mean since?Bush was also involved in provoking Russia in Ukraine, btw, before his eventual successor went ahead and pulled the same stunt again, knowing what the result was in Georgia:
Who knows why Germany and France changed their tune by the time it came to Ukraine a few years later? We know why Ukrainians wanted the yanks to gtfo; they saw the writing on the wall and didn’t want to be sacrificed for US goals. Unfortunately, corrupt officials sold the people out.
Turns out it’s hard to point to a war that doesn’t have grubby US fingerprints all over it.
So country wants to leave Russian SOI: arm local separatists, wait until country intervenes, then send in military and push for regime change. #noimperialism
I don’t know what you think I’ve been trying to say. And I don’t know what you’re trying to say.
It seems they also have a tendency to consider NATO as cartoons villains. Also, tankies are not the average lefties, they are at the extreme of the left.
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Thank you for confirming.
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NATO does more good than ruZZia for the world
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Wait so are tankies anti-NATO? All leftists are anti-NATO lmao
Tankies are more specifically pro-dictatorship and pro-oligarchy so long as the countries claim to be Communist.
gaddafi was sodomized to death with a knife. i can hardly think of a more cartoonishly evil organization.
Was that decided by NATO?
You’re saying that the NATO bombings and the NATO-backed rebels had nothing to do with it…? He was fleeing a NATO air strike.
Nope, you’re shifting the subject, you were talking about how he died precisely.
The bombs he was fleeing from were decided by NATO, the militias were funded and supported by NATO; the same one that eventually found him and sodomized him to death with a bayonet. What will be evidence enough for you? Hillary’s “we came, we saw, he died.” quip?
lmao this is like saying if I push someone off a cliff, I’m actually innocent because the ground killed them.
Yes. Gaddafi was also certainly killed based on French intelligence, and there is substantial evidence that the men who assassinated him were French assets. Part of the reason, apart from the broader geopolitical aim of annihilating a country which wanted to engage in the construction of international monetary and commerical systems outside of the orbit and control of the American petro-dollar, Gaddafi had essentially bribed Sarkozy at a certain point and was holding this over the latter’s head (Sarkozy is infamously corrupt). See:
Hegemon’s have to rule by fear. Read any bloodsoaked page from the history of the Roman Empire. Fear is best instilled through unimaginable atrocity. What do you think the rulers of the rest of Africa and the Middle East thought after they saw how Gaddafi, head of the most prosperous (per-capita, quality of life, standard of living, etc.) state in Africa, ended up?
By his people, yes. Not sure what that has to do with NATO or even why that was a bad thing.
Funny and horrific ends for genocidal dictators is overall a good thing.
Yes, what could NATO-funded rebels and NATO bombings have to do with the brutal execution of a man fleeing both.
Sexual violence isn’t funny.
“Cartoon villain” here means “a villain who is just intrinsically evil and does evil things as a result.” Contrast this with real people, who generally have material or ideological motivational for the actions they take.
The left views NATO as evil not because it’s full of cartoon villains, but because it is an organization that consciously, due to material and ideological motivations, chooses to immiserate the global south for the benefit of its constituent countries’ ruling classes.
Define tankie
I use it similarly to what is described in this Wikipedia article, in particular the last paragraph of the introduction is what disturbs me the most with some Lemmy users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Lmao who tf is
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The last paragraph quotes fucking Ross Douthat, come on now
Lots of terms need defining. “Illiberal” just means not capitalistic, which yeah that’s all leftists. What is authoritarian? Usually a definition that gets thrown around applies more to capitalist countries vs those listed.
So it’s just a western communist that supports non Western communist projects? 🤔
I love it when liberals use ‘illiberal’ as a criticism. Begging the question much? Of course we’re illiberal we’re anti-capitalists!
Don’t whisper it in hushed tones as if we’re being shy about it and might be embarrassed. Liberalism is the cause of so much misery in the world I’d be more embarrassed to be called a liberal.
The best of it is that even liberals accept that liberal society is atrocious; they just throw up their hands, claim that it’s the only option, and benefit decadently from the system while the world burns as if nothing could or should be done about it. The nerve.
someone who uses tankie is almost always someone who claims to be a socialist but has not read marx
20 yards of linen, now put down the knife before someone gets buttered
It’s essentially cope for them not just supporting “nominally” socialist countries because their stance is one of anti-imperialism. Iran should have nukes.
Isn’t Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russo-Georgian war imperialism? I still don’t get them, except being blinded by their hate of USA’s war crimes, which I can understand, but it still seems like an irrational conclusion to become a tankie. They end up supporting or refusing to criticize regimes that generate similar war crimes.
Wait, are you saying Saakashvili has done an imperialism? Because even western/EU reports have confirmed that Georgia started that war, not Russia.
“From 24 February 2022, which marked the start of the large-scale armed attack by the Russian Federation, to 30 July 2023, OHCHR recorded 26,015 civilian casualties in the country: 9,369 killed and 16,646 injured”
Almost 10 thousand civilians killed is horrible. But compare this to Iraq: it’s less than the first month of the war in Iraq, and no US politicians was tried for war crimes. Maybe you should ponder this factoid.
If you live in a NATO country maybe you should demand Blair and Bush to be tried for their war crimes. If you live in the west you should spend more energy of criticizing the ruling class above you.
“supporting or refusing to criticize” This is a made up leftist. Per definition there is no leftist that uncritically supports a right wing capitalist country.
Marxists, following Lenin, define imperialism as the monopoly of finance capital. Not as a synonym for ‘conquest’, ‘annexation’, ‘empire’ (not that I’m saying all three necessarily apply to Russia in Ukraine—a conclusion on that isn’t relevant, here).
When US (Anglo-European) finance capital dominates the world through the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and petrodollar, supported by a network of however many hundreds of military bases, all paid for by it’s vassals and enemies due to said dominance, there’s little to no room for anyone else to even consider being imperialist.
We can discuss that if you like. I’ll likely need others to chip in. I’m not proposing that I have all the answers. It’s not something with a clear answer. But we can’t have the debate at all unless we agree on common definitions and frames of reference. Otherwise it feels as though liberals simply do not understand what’s being said. It’s just talking past one another, where one side has a coherent definition and framework and the other side… doesn’t.
I’ll let you decide whether you can honestly say you have a theoretically sound concept of imperialism depending on how much dedicated literature on imperialism you’ve read.
Yeah it’s important that we, as Marxists, therefore proceeding scientific,ally, make very clear from the onset as to what we mean when we use the term ‘imperialist’ with this more specific, narrow, Leninist definition which only really applies to modern capitalism, or more precisely the modern capitalist world-system. Conceptual clarification is essential for any scientific endeavor, including Marxism.
Even on this definition however, we can note that it is perfectly possible (and concretely, empirically, historically confirm this possibility by looking at the international situation pre-WW1) that there be several powers or polarized groups of powers each of which behaves imperialistically in the Leninist sense. The difference today is that we currently still have a more or less unipolar as opposed to multipolar imperialist (Leninist sense) world-system.
If someone calls Russia ‘imperialist’ in a different sense, then they might not be wrong, and saying that they are because our definition doesn’t apply isn’t relevant beyond the fact that there’s confusion over the concepts being used because people are equivocating between them, simply because we are using the same term/sound/word/signifier. If we do the latter we are engaging in a semantic debate disguised as, because confused with, a substantive debate.
Good points. I also wouldn’t be opposed to accepting that capitalists in Russia would/will try to become imperialistic in the monopoly of finance capital sense. In the one hand, the logic of capital might force their hand. On the other hand, capitalists are gonna capitalist, in part because they fetishise the hoarding of wealth like everyone else living under capitalism.
Whether Russian imperialism becomes a realistic possibility, though… I’d be interested in seeing some stats on that, interpreted in light of the idea that the next type of multipolarity will be quite different to the one at the turn of the twentieth century. Ig if anyone’s done that leg work it’d be Michael Hudson but I’ve not come across it if he has.
There’s a concept called “critical support”, which most “tankies” are practicing. You have criticism of a side but its the lesser evil so you support it despite your criticism. You won’t hear much of that criticism publicly though because that’s counterproductive.
Like if I want the US to recognize the DPRK as a sovereign state so we can at least begin discussing Korean reunification, why would I bother mentioning my criticism of Juche?
I would avoid saying “lesser evil” for critical support cases, because revolutionary defeatism exists for lesser evil situations where nothing is progressing against the primary contradiction. It’s more a recognition that a shitty thing can be progressive/forward moving relative to its opposition. Russia winning/getting a peace deal with Donbas and Crimea out of Ukraine gets us much closer to ending global imperialism than Ukraine getting it’s land back or worse.
We want the larger capitalist empire to loose to the smaller capitalist empire because that leads to better outcomes. Saying otherwise is telling half truths at best.
You’re in a thread with half a dozen comments like “wow libs and tankies are celebrating this?”, followed by a bunch of “tankies” explaining (again) that they do not actually like modern Russia.
The general “tankie” position is that the people of Donbas, who mostly do not want to remain part of Ukraine, will not stop suffering attacks without Russia fighting Ukraine off. Russia does not seem interested in siphoning resources from or subjugating the people of Donbas, as they did not the people of Crimea, who merely became Russian citizens. This is very different from US carpetbombing for oil.
US bombing is bad, but Russian bombing is ok? Why do you not apply the same critical spirit to both the USA war crimes and the Russian war crimes?
Ukraine was bombing the Donbas since 2014. Is Ukrainian bombing okay?
Yeah it’s just like they’re Sudeten-Russians, happy to become real Russians once again
I don’t think that the Germans had the popular support of Sudetenland in their annexation.
I assume that means you haven’t read “Left-wing” communism, an infantile disorder by Lenin.