Here’s how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe
If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn’t make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.
If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.
We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs
The US funding and arming far right militias as a means of attacking a geopolitical rival has historically always been a good idea and resulted in very few consequences
I hope liberals are happy with themselves when the jet they’re flying to the bahamas on gets downed by an azov stinger missile system.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
HaTiNg NaZIs MaKeS U tHe ReAl NaZi
I don’t support Russian or Ukraine Nazis. Eat my ass please!
Removed by mod
The funny thing about Zelensky is not only is he Jewish, but he is a Russian speaking Jewish man. The parts of Ukraine that overwhelmingly voted for him were not the nazi hotbeds in Lviv but the Russian separatist regions of Donbass and Luhansk. Turns out support for Zelensky was strongest in the regions that wanted to leave in the first place? Why is this? Because Zelensky ran on a peace platform, and presented himself as in favor of Minsk II, against escalation with Russia, and not as much of a rabid reactionary as the (US-backed, nazi-glorifying) Petro Poroshenko, who was put in power through a transparent US-backed right-wing coup during Euromaidan in 2014.
The people in the Donbass and Luhansk regions mostly speak Russian. They were part of Russia historically, but Lenin, Stalin, and Khruschev all granted more land to the Ukrainian SSR in an attempt to keep them happy and better integrate the agriculture with the industry.
This is why there was strong Russian identity in those regions, and strong separatist tendencies. The west half of Ukraine meanwhile, especially near Lviv, is the home of the most far right parts of Ukrainian society, who want to be part of NATO, who glorify nazi collaborators like Bandera, who join fascist street gangs like C14 and ethnically cleanse Roma people living in tents.
Zelensky presented himself as wanting to prevent the Ukrainian civil war (going on since 2014) from escalating into a full scale war with Russia, but after he got in office, he made few efforts to actually do this, and rather turned out to be a quite willing collaborator with the United States, and was willing to turn a blind eye to the reactionaries despite himself being a Russian-speaking Jewish man. He made a big show at the beginning of the presidency of filming himself “confronting” Azov battalion and telling them to put down their weapons. But guess what? He had no mechanism of enforcement. They didn’t take him seriously, and made clear their intention to violate any and all attempts to de-escalate. Zelensky, being a man who is Jewish and speaks Russia, is actually the perfect mascot this shit, because his surface appearance covers up the underlying reality. of the Banderite situation in Ukraine.
“How can you say America is racist, they had a black president!”
Nice bit
you had me for a second there but them you did the “But I have black friends” thing, complete with boomer Facebook emotesAnd I take it there is zero racism in America after Obama became president?
Zelenskkkyyyy is a Nazi, his name literally starts with “Z” and you dare call us Z apologists lol
You wouldn’t know a Nazis if they were goose stepping right in front of you. Nazis obviously do not care for Jewish people but their real enemy is and has always been the left. Otto Skorzeni litterally worked on behalf of the Israeli government. Walther Rauff, the inventor of “gas vans” also worked for Israel. About a dozen Nazis war criminals worked for Israel, and both the Nazis and the Israeli government knew this. Contemporary Nazis fucking love Israel because they’ve created a white ethnostate and admire their ability to have done so.
So to answer your question can Ukraine have a Nazi problem with a Jewish head of state? Absolutely, Nazis have no problem working with Jewish people when it serves their interests and it has served their interest to work with Zelensky because people such as yourself who are incapable of seeing through this thin veil guzzle the propaganda willingly and supported giving them a fuck ton of weapons to carry out pogroms on Roma and Russians.
Do you know who Röhm was?
Do you think that anti-black racism stopped existing in America while Obama was president
Good to know everything a fascist movement needs to gain the unconditional support of unwitting liberals is to put a token jewish person on top. They could literally march all the others to the camps you would be cheering them saying “well the president is jewish so they cant be fascist.”
Lol. Does anyone have that video of the fascist leader talking about how Zelensky makes great cover for their activities?
The “explicitly leftist” midwest.social sure aren’t sending their best
Ever hear of Emil Maurice, friend and bodyguard to Hitler, Founding member of the SS, Jewish, Honorary Aryan by decree?
Jewish people can, have, and do support nazis. Its actually racist to think that because of their heritage they are incapable of doing such. Its as bad as saying “African Americans love fried chicken.”
The letter Z isn’t the new swastika, the swastika is still the swastika and the people who wear the swastika are still the nazis
You are the only nazi supporter here you bootlicking fascist scum
The only analogy libs can even make between modern Russia and the nazis is invading another country, as if that was the worst thing the nazis ever did
Funny how the entire premise of your side relies on minimizing and whitewashing the horrors of the Holocaust
are you deliberately or only accidentally unable to distinguish between being a “Z apologist” and simply recognizing that the United Snakes created the current geopolitical situation by pitting former Soviet countries against each other and pouring money into the most reactionary ghouls in both Russia and Ukraine?
don’t actually live in Russia?
I’m not Russian, but you know people besides Americans use the internet right?
Removed by mod
america bad
See? You can still be right even as you spew nonsense and false equivalencies.
props to your dentist for dealing with the consequences of the raw sewage propaganda you happily choose to slurp down.
your keyboard has a button to place breaks between sentences. Please utilize it.
The fact that you’re typing and posting so quickly that you can’t even use punctuation also implies you’re not putting a lot of thought into reading and understanding what people are telling you. And now I’m editing in a second sentence so that I need punctuation. I don’t feel like getting a childish comeback in my inbox.
do you know what “literal” means? maybe the “literal nazis” are the people literally sporting nazi symbols, literally conducting pogroms and segregation on Roma people, and literally using cluster munitions against civilians in the Donbas
btw i used all western sources
Removed by mod
notice how my argument is well sourced while yours has zero evidence presented. ur comeback doesnt even make sense— use some damn punctuation! and “civilian trenches”? lol! please try to be coherent
Hey please allow yourself a Peak on the Real story , if you have the Curage …
you can repeat fascist lies as well , its your choice ,we try to help you …
Oh hey I think you dropped this
civilian trenches
if your front yard is a trench the HOA is gonna get mad
Why do people keep doing this? Why this deflection against admitting that there are many Nazis in the UA military establishment? Is it that important for you that UA be as pure and white as driven snow?
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/19/zrjy-j19.html
UN report confirms Ukrainians’ use of civilians as “human shields”
In March, the Ukrainian government blamed Russian forces for the deaths of more than 50 elderly and disabled residents of a care home in the village of Stara Krasnyanka in the eastern province of Lugansk. According to Ukrainian officials, a fire broke out in the facility following a supposedly unprovoked attack on the innocents by Russian forces.
In reality—in a case the report found to be “emblematic” of the war—on March 7, days before the attack, Ukrainian forces had taken up positions within the care home “as it had strategic value due to its proximity to an important road.” Previous requests by the facility to local Ukrainian authorities to evacuate residents were denied due to the fact that Kiev had mined the surrounding area and blocked roads, thereby preventing anyone from fleeing.
Do you see what’s happening? These fucking nazi fucks who have absolutely zero respect for human life are manipulating you with lies about atrocities by deliberately putting their own citizens in the crossfire of a war. This is the kind of shit nazis do. And your own institutions are the ones calling them out for it, not just the other side. And you just don’t hear it.
you need to watch this emoji gif in it’s entirety as it explains the war.
Probably gonna end in another 7/11
If there are ever consequences the US will leverage the consequences into justification for their next imperial project. They literally cannot lose in this particular dynamic. Only multipolarity or the ceiling of profit they can extract via financialization will stall this empire. Luckily both are beginning to happen. Also I’m dumb, there’s probably other stuff too.
Yea but multipolarity almost always guarantees global war between competing capitalist powers
I’m a bit out of my depth here, I don’t know history enough and don’t retain knowledge well. I feel like monopolarity hasn’t been a great thing for anyone who isn’t part of the NATO aligned countries. The US has intentionally bombed and blockaded countries to the point of infrastructure collapse and kept them in this state sometimes for decades. We’ve supported and instigated coups that have been followed up with death squads murdering hundreds of thousands. On the other hand world wars have a huge death toll and a higher likelihood of life ending nuclear war. I feel like any perceived stability that comes with monopolarity is a mirage that only exists for a fraction of the population, and multipolarity while potentially deadly also represents a world where less powerful people and nations may find new options for support. Like many countries turning to the Chinese Yuan for global trade. Yet nuclear war and world war with their massive potential death toll seems real bad. Someone better at history and geopolitics help me determine what’s worse.
Afaik the hope isn’t for stable mulipolarity, it’s more that a multipolar world has a chance to free the planet from USian domination, and if the US hegemony further collapses it opens up the possibility of seriously addressing global warming, amidst other things.
So like you were saying, its more about opportunities for change, rather than an end unto itself. Believe me, I have really mixed feelings about this. I live in America, and am disabled, so a serious collapse or destruction of American power will probably be really bad for me personally, despite creating hope for the world. : p
as a wise man once said, we’re trapped in belly of this horrible machine and the machine is bleeding to death.
Im not arguing for unipolarity and regardless of what anyone thinks or wants we’re heading in the one direction towards american decline and the rise of alternative power blocs. I just feel that people should have sober expectations about what that has historically meant
Oh yeah. That makes sense. I’m with you.
The general intensity and frequency of wars hasn’t actually increased or decreased since the bipolar world ended in 1991
Tens of millions died during the Cold War and tens of millions have died under US unipolarty
The matter isn’t decided by the number of players, but by nuclear deterrence, military buildup and class conflict in the Third World
Ukrainian 9/11 when?
Removed by mod
someone shits on the USA and you pretend it was a statement of uncritical support for Russia
nobody here thinks Russia is a “good country” (as much as that means anything)
You’re replying to a comment that doesn’t even defend Russia, much less uphold it in any respect, get a grip.
colonization is when russians aren’t genocided and get to live in russia
wanna decolonize eastern ukraine and crimea? give them to kazakhstan
You know how on your liberal forums there would always be some MAGA guy who just came in and unloaded all of the deranged shit that they bounce around in their echo chambers in one compressed buzzword soup?
racist
Show me links to prove this. I have read multiple interviews from Putin all the way down to soldiers on the front line who all say that this whole war is stupid because they see Ukrainians as their brothers. There are multiple ethnicities in Russia and somehow they manage to get along quite well.
facist
That’s not how you spell the word “fascist.” “Fascism” is a is a word with a meaning. It does not apply to Russia as it is now. Maybe don’t use words that you don’t understand and cant spell.
I’ve collected a list of YouTube videos from western news sources on Ukraine’s neo-nazi problem, I’m gonna post it whenever the topic comes up, others feel free to do the same
BBC Newsnight - Neo-Nazi threat in new Ukraine (2014)
VICE News - Under Fire with the Azov Battalion (2014)
The Guardian - Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp (2017)
NBC News - Ukraine’s Hyper-Nationalist Military Summer Camp for Kids (2017)
DW Documentary - Women and the Azov battalion in Kyiv, Ukraine (2017)
BBC Newsnight - Ukraine: On patrol with the far-right National Militia (2018)
Associated Press - Nationalist camp in Ukraine trains kids to kill (2018)
TIME - Inside A White Supremacist Militia in Ukraine (2021)
VICE - Why the Far Right Joined the 2013-14 Ukraine Crisis (2021)
btw you can bet your ass I’ve downloaded these all with yt-dlp in case they ever get memory-holed. honestly a miracle they’re all still up lol
I need to start doing this yesterday.
There’s so many deleted videos in my youtube playlists and I don’t even know what some of them were anymore
One of my criticisms of oppressive censorship programs is they don’t really seem necessary. You don’t have to hide this stuff, people aren’t going to go looking for it.
Nice, I saved this. Thanks for the good work!
bless up
There’s a content restriction on the last one. You should use a Piped link for it.
someone already got the videos archived with web archive, see this reply
This is RUZZIA style PUTLER propaganda sweetie
Can’t wait to be gassed for being queer by Nazis while being told not to worry because the gas is just propaganda sweaty
I love how liberals view the war in a vacuum, like Ukraine hasn’t been carrying out pogroms on ethnic Russians (and other minorities) since Euromaidan kicked off and gave absolute literal neo-nazis power and backing from the west. No it’s just Russia are the real nazis, Ukraine is an innocent child baby country, war crime yada yada
somebody should tell all these
s- their principled opposition to the Iraq war in 2003-20?? was actually Baathist propaganda sweetie
- they were all just bots shilling for Saddam Hussein
- and also how dare they stand against the freedom loving and liberation focused Coalition of The Willing which is there to STOP torture and extrajudicial executions
- there will be no consequences for backing violent extremists in the region because their thirst for the blood of our geopolitical rivals is well under control and easily manipulated
- what’s ISIS? you mean the thing from TV’s Archer?
Attention. Class is now in session. Professor Dirt Owl presiding
stalin shouldn’t have stopped at berlin
😠
Excellent post
Pfft we’re on the unavoidable thing on Maui now, but slava until we mark them as terrorists and then have to invade and seize the remains of their private sector…a few bad apples
The only good thing an Azovite ever did was starve to death in the basement of a steel factory
that’s NOT true and it’s VERY fucked up to say!
they’ve also been turned into chunky soup by artillery fire
Mfw most of the bozos in the article are dead
me every time i learn about another dead nazi
deleted by creator
One of the most disgusting trends of the last 5 years has been western militaries and intelligence agencies doing liberal identity politics to whitewash their crimes. In the case of Azov, you can just see the playbook operating in real-time.
: I HATE AZOVskeddadle skadoodle! A federation has occurredMe:
Removed by mod
so he could commit cultural genocide.
look, zelensky is a jewish person who sees israeli apartheid as a model to be followed but i wouldn’t go so far that as to say he wanted to do cultural genocide. it’s just azov and the right sector who wanted to.
and as we all know azov and the far right militias are now in command of the ukrainian army / government. they don’t exist anymore. so it’s all good.
Removed by mod
Exactly. And why would Putin talk about denazification? We read the same articles from CNN and MSNBC about Ukraine’s nazi training camps, about Zelensky’s inability to get the far right militias to stop killing eastern ukrainians, or the constant and widespread worship of nazi iconography combined with a redemption of banderism. None of this add up to a need for denazification.
One would have to be a cynic to exploit words like those of the security council of Ukraine, when they claimed that asians are subhuman and that russians are are asians.
The Russian government is truly mad if it believes it must do something just because tens of thousands of russians were killed by genocidal militias. Why, in international community tems those don’t even add up to a single american life.
Removed by mod
satire
What are you a Trump bot? There’s nothing satirical about Reuter’s reporting. These are extremely serious journalistic outfits.
This is so disappointing. That people like you would deny ethnic cleansing of eastern ukrainians. You are definitely a Trump voter.
What does being a “tankie” (lol) have to do with supporting Russia as it exists today? It is no longer a communist country. Did you fall asleep in 1990 and just now wake up? That would explain a lot
You’re a child
doing a satire
Why do libs talk like this?
to understand that you must do a growth
You’re rooting for people who made the person who committed the holocaust in that region their hero.
You want to stand shoulder to shoulder with literal fucking nazis and call anyone who has a problem with you a ‘tankie’
Well you dumb motherfucker, the tankies were the ones who defeated the nazis in the first place.
Never forget that the tankies liberated Auschwitz
I’m something of a moron myself.
“I’m concerned you’re doing a satire, and I’m concerned that it means you’re being a tankie”
Who do I talk to about new site taglines?
Fuck America. You don’t get to whitewash the murder and torture and deportation of civilians as a justified war on crime/terrorism in the region.
It’s almost impossible to tell you liberals apart from the fascists these days with how much fascist rhetoric you use without knowing what you’re doing. I’m begging you to stop doing the work of fascists trying to diminish the holocaust. Stop using the word genocide so fucking cynically. Appending ‘cultural’ to it isn’t a fucking wildcard that makes it valid in any situation. When you continually use the word ‘genocide’ for things like there just being a war, you reduce what happened in the holocaust to those lesser things. YOU’RE MAKING IT OKAY TO BE A NAZI BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T THAT BAD.
I think this is because the liberal west is fascicizing, and has always had these tendencies somewhat but they are deffo intensifying imo. It’s true tho that when u compare modern Democrat imperialist bureacrats to those of the past it seems to be that they’re more nationalistically mask off now and more willing to openly support Neo-Nazis. Before it seemed a bit more surreptitious.
fuck all nazis. doing anything about them is super bad though, we should simply debate the nazis out of existence
Death to America
Russia was appealing to their former WWII allies about the Four Ds: demilitarization, denazification, decentralization, and democratization that came out of the Potsdam Conference.
Russia was saying hey, former allies, don’t forget what we have all promised about Nazism. Why are you promoting, arming and supporting Nazi activity in our doorsteps?
As you will note, the words denazification and demilitarization were specifically chosen to remind the Western powers of their promises.
Why wouldn’t Putin want to purge Ukrainian Nazis? As diehard nationalists who were spearheading attacks on Donbas to begin with, it makes sense to purge them.
Could you give me a source or any proof that to show that Nazis amongst the citizens are significantly more numerous than any other European country? Or that Nazis are in any significant numbers within the country or celebrated by the government like Ukraine does?
They constantly crack down on fascists all the time ever since Putin was in office. Russia probably has the strongest anti Nazi culture of any country
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/world/europe/24iht-russia.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-medvedev-nationalism-idUSTRE70G4DP20110117
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/9/23/behind-russias-ultra-nationalist-crackdown
Yeah Russia is a weird case because it is a very nationalist country and has swung massively to the right on social questions since the fall of the USSR, and there were may fascist groups that emerged there after that, similarly to the rest of Eastern Europe (National Bolsheviks are only the most well-known example), and it has had problem with racism and racist violence.
Nevertheless it’s interesting that the Russian state’s nationalism, due to its history, and due to the pragmatism of the state, is willing to crack down hard on these groups.
I’d add tho that fascists can dislike other fascists, especially of other nationalities, and that Nazism is just one type of fascism. There has legitimately been an issue with far-right individuals in groups like Wagner, which should surprise no-one if you’ve ever actually met or interacted with people who have experience as private security, many of whom are ex mercenaries, etc…
Nationalism is simply the inevitable outcome for any country that has been colonized by a foreign imperialist power.
It is a very potent weapon, that can be harnessed for chauvinist purpose (as in European imperialism where the concept was first originated) or for anti-colonial struggle (nearly all of the post-war decolonization and independence movements had strong component of nationalism - from the Chinese communists and nationalists fending off Japanese invaders in the early 20th century, all the way to today’s West Africa’s struggle against their French colonizers).
Without nationalism, your state will be quickly disintegrate into dozens of provincial authorities and constant civil war between various warlord factions. Like it or not, national consciousness is what holds the state together when it comes to resisting foreign colonial powers.
I agree with you pretty much completely, if by nationalism we simply mean an ideological position or sets of policies which emphasize most immediately the importance of securing the interests of the nation-state as a polity or of acquiring it in the first place. Nationalism as a short-to-medium term tactic is often politically necessary, but in the long-term is has to be overcome. We shouldn’t underestimate the dangers of the fact that, for most nationalists, nationalism has more substantial content and is more final as an objective than this very deflated, tactical definition I’ve just given.
Pragmatically I agree that there are fairly clear reasons why, historically, national-liberation movements, even when Marxist, have also been equally nationalist, or have had bases of their political movements which are more nationalist and less Marxist than their leadership. Namely, that the securing of the national interests is a first priority and is understood by the people of that region as such, and so if the most useful means of ensuring popular support. But this is a pragmatic consideration and depends on the content of the nationalism, which can go beyond the pretty deflationary characterization I gave above.
This is also, from what I understand, why there is continued immense respect in the PRC for Sun Yat-Sen and why there is even a remnant of some degree of respect for the Kuomindang and Jiang Jieshi, given the importance of the latter in the unification of China during the Warlord Period. But the Kuomintang is also the best example of the risk of nationalism, especially when it is not guided by communists. Indeed the Kuomintang became more and more fascist as time went on. One of the reasons why nationalism is so problematic is that if the movement ends up more nationalist than communist then it risk moving towards accommodation with capitalism and imperialism. You see this all over the Global South since the postcolonial period after WW2. Nationalist third world governments, dominated by their petit-bourgeois, have continuously proven willing to cowtow to Western imperialist interests by serving as local elites in neocolonial economic arrangements. Nationalism, unless it is pragmatically utilized by revolutionary Communists/Marxists, greatly risks devolving, especially if the base of the support of the nationalist movement is not largely proletarian and so, as Marx, Lenin and Stalin noted, risks identifying their interests with small property and land-ownership and kulak social ascension, as opposed to the socialization of the means of production.
An even more spectacular and important example is the Khmer Rouge, which was in no way substantively Marxist or Communist save in name, and closer to fascistic, but which shows the extreme dangers of nationalism even when there are communists in the movement.
We should also note that the Bolsheviks were not initially nationalistic at all, despite Russia’s underdevelopment, tho we can see the stalinist policy of ‘Socialism in One Country’ as a form of tactical nationalism as a response to the failure of permanent international revolution.
Apart from war crimes, I take this as one the most unforgivable things from an antifascist point of view. Putin, as the head of the russian state is completely dragging through the mud the glorious legacy of the big patriotic war.
80 years ago, russians lost millions to save the world. Now, it’s all being turned into a an excuse for imperialism an tyrany.
Russians lost millions of live to whom? And who was engaging in eight years of pogroms and direct attacks on civilians in the Donbass? It’s almost like exactly because of the history of Nazism as it relates to Russia, modern neo-Nazis doing ethnic cleansing on their borders might be of some concern to the Russians.
As if Russia didn’t have plenti of full-fledged fascists among his footmen. Can you explain me why Putin, an anti-comunist nationalist would have the slightest shit to give about ukrainians having the same ideology that serves him well domestically?
Footmen don’t call the shots, unlike in Ukraine.
My point isn’t that russia is fascist. My point is that if Putin wasn’t lying about his antifacist justifications, he wouldn’t be sending nazis to “de-nazify” Ukraine.
We’ve got every photo of Ukrainian troops as evidence they’re largely Nazis. We’ve even got public statements by Ukrainian senior leadership about exterminating Russians and sympathizers in any territory they recapture. What’s your proof the same is true about Russian troops or leadership? As far as I’m aware, this “Wagner are Nazis” theory comes from one single picture of the shit bag who used to be in charge of Wagner but isn’t any longer.
edit: while I’m thinking about it - what is your obsession with Putin? Do you understand that the war is popular in Russia? That Putin is more popular now than he was before the war? That a very common sentiment in Russian elected government and the citizenry is that the war hasn’t been prosecuted hard enough? If Putin were couped by Russians the war would almost certainly get kicked into high gear and the Russians would start honestly trying to capture all of Ukraine. This great man theory obsession with Putin himself is just off the mark.
You’re right that the Ukrainian military is filled with Nazis (this doesn’t mean all of them or a majority are consciously, but it does seem to be getting difficult to deny that now given the amount of evidence, at least when not of Ukrainian kids just pulled of the street).
However the idea that there is not a far-right presence in the Russian military is also not very believable, not least because we are still talking about a military state of a quite right-wing, nationalist, capitalist country. This in no way makes it equivalent to Ukraine however, because in Ukraine it appears to be far more integrated at every level of the military and state to be point where it appears like ultra-nationalism, bleeding into fascism, are the status-quo ideology.
I don’t agree with your analysis, but to take your example for a moment I’d argue that sending nazis into a meat grinder of a war to fight other nazis is a pretty good way to kill two birds with one stone.
Isn’t about protecting russophones and access to a warm-water port that’s historically been theirs?
And you take his official justification at face value?
You should check out parenti he has a quote about this:
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
You’re just going to assume anything Putin or Russia says is wrong and bad. There’s no logic or rationality in your worldview - you have decided Putin is a Bad Man and will for any new information into this preconceived notion.
imperialism an tyrany
wasn’t expecting a hexbear to be regurgitating this ‘words for emotion not content’ nonsenseusing “imperialism” as if it just means “war”
Marx is in your username, where is the awareness of political economy in your brain?
I’m not using imperialism as meaning war, I’m using imperialism as: using of nationalism along with military might in order to assert regional domimance. If you dom’t call that imperialism, I would be curious to hear your definition
You’re bringing shame to Hexbear
You do actually have to do the reading I know we post a lot about anime and video games but there’s work involved too. It’s called the Belden Program
The bright side is eventually you gain this superpower where you tend to know more about everything than most regular people.Ok not trying to be a lib here but doesn’t Russia have concentrated capital in the hands of its bourgeoisie, and is using the very real existence of Ukrainian Nazis to justify asserting control over its Ukrainian oil interests? To my eyes there’s really not a good guy in this situation, it’s imperial territorial pissing all the way down, comparable the first world war. In fact I would say the shock therapy Russia went through in the 90s locked them into an imperialist political economy, since it was essentially an exact reversal of what Lenin is advocating here
Russia already had a majority control over Ukrainian oil interests because they have the bargaining power of being (and this is still true btw, during wartime) Ukriane’s main supplier of natural gas. They could have, and it probably would have been smarter economically, for them to, bargain with the Ukrainian government, trading the political rights of the Donbass for control over the oil. But that is not what this war is about. This war is primarily about NATO, geo-political control, and the fact that it would have been massively unpopular and incredibly disruptive for Russia to give up the Donbass, and what they were doing was not a long-term solution as long as Ukraine continues to arm themselves and politically bang the drum for a full-scale invasion. Whether or not that invasion was imminent in 2022 is unclear, as the Kiev government was completely taken by surprise by the Russian invasion, but also had been making huge rhetorical speeches about retaking the Donbass regions. It’s very unclear at the moment, and history may or may not provide clarification.
You aren’t incorrect that capital is concentrated in the hands of a national bourgeoisie, but that an imperialist economic model does not strictly make. As @panopticon@hexbear.net pointed out, being imperialist is about separating a ‘core’ from a ‘periphery’ and treating them as exclusive zones for exploitation. The development of Crimea for the last decade has shown that that isn’t what Russia does in areas they annex, they are simply incorporated into the ‘core’. Now we can argue about if their exploitation of the Chechens is imperialism, but even then, Russia is almost always trying to be an honest broker in their deals (with the continued natural gas trading to Ukriane is evidence for). They are capitalists and exploiters of their own people, but imperialists is abit of a stretch, from a Marxist-Leninist definition.
using of nationalism along with military might in order to assert regional domimance
So war then
What I don’t get is why the GOP is siding with Russia? I’m dumb, shouldn’t they be supporting Ukraine?
What do you mean? Trump was the one who resumed arming the Azov after it was stopped during the Obama administration. They are all on the same page, and Trump is far from clean when it comes to Ukraine. The only reason for the opposition comes from the fact that they are now the opposition and the Dems are in charge. If the GOP wins it will still be the same, maybe less fanatical about it because Biden is dead set on setting the world on fire.
What the hell did I even do in a past life where I am imprisoned in this reincarnation to only watch in a world run by psychopathic nihilists? Even much of my fellow man are selective nihilists, they know nazism is wrong, but they support it anyways because it’s “funny”.
What the hell did I even do in a past life where I am imprisoned in this reincarnation to only watch in a world run by psychopathic nihilists?
You invented raisin biscuits.
- raisin biscuits are delicious
Hexbear raisin biscuit struggle sessions will be the next big thing
can’t wait for a 1.5k comment thread about raisin biscuits
Is this some kind of teaboo thing? Raisins are good in Biscut’s
The other reasons people listed aren’t wrong. But I think primarily it is political opportunism, which is true of every bourgeois politicians anyway. In that sense it is unsurprising.
Plus there isn’t a coherent anti war stance in the mainstream. There’s zero to no risk of this escalating to let’s actually stop the war. It’s just the war is being mismanaged and money spent badly. Not life inherently has value
They’re not, republicans have supported every Ukraine bill so far have they not?
For two reasons. The standard cause is Republican detraction from the sitting president. Americans tend to align in favor of wars on partisan terms. Republicans favored Iraq and Afghanistan, Democrats favored Syria and Libya. So it all amounts to Liberal infighting. If the president is on the other side of the aisle your guys, your media people, and your grifters get to pretend to be competent realists, shepherds of american reputation, or even anti-war activists. But it’s all an illusion. One of the ways Trump fucked Hillary over was due to her record voting for the Iraq War, and then leading the wars in Syria and Libya. Things that she was always quite proud of. Trump might even genuinely believe that Iraq and Libya and so on were stupid. By and large however Americans are not an anti-war culture. So the actual impulse isn’t so much ‘waging war is bad’, but ‘waging this war in this way was bad’.
The more complex issue at hand is that far right grifters online tend to see Russia as a means to get China. In their perfect world the United States would ally with Russia and integrate it into it’s world order as a means to encircle and destroy the ‘communist Chinese’. That is because Russia is idealized as a neo-conservative, hyper religious promised land that hates feminism, lgbt+ rights, and so on.
One good example of this worldview is how back when Trump was elected far right circles online went on a nonstop frenzy of meme-making where Trump and Putin would ally to invade Turkey and genocide all the muslims from ‘Constantinople’. In that case it was less about China and more about destroying the 2000s-2010s boogeyman of, well, every muslim in the world.
They’re kinda divided on the issue between the establishment neocons and the MAGA faction
Removed by mod
Materially, there are a lot of ties between Russian capital and right-wing American think tanks which support the GOP. But I doubt it’s that nuanced for most Republican politicians. I think, for the most part, being opposed to whatever the Democrats want on a hot button topic is more than enough reason for them to be pro-Russia.
Similarly to the fucked up, twisted irony that descendants of the Holocaust were modern pioneers of settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, it’s completely and utterly fucked that Eastern Europe has fallen so deeply into the grip of fascism. It’s true that the Ukrainians were treated somewhat differently out of pragmatic considerations by the Nazis, but they were still considered ‘Untermenschen’.
It’s especially galling when the Ukraine was the economically best off part of the Soviet Union, and center of incredible culture, science, technology. But you don’t see these fucks praising an iota of what was unequivocally the best time to be alive in Ukrainian history. Because they don’t care about the quality of life of ordinary people. They’re predatory, nihilistic death-cultists who should be wiped from the face of the earth.
History often has a sick sense of humor.
