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Tankies ignoring the agency of other countries so they can blame anything and everything on the US is just a repackaged form of American exceptionalism. They don’t believe Russians or Ukrainians are actually people with agency beyond what the US “makes” them do.
I don’t recall many people blaming the US as far as I am aware; the common sentiment I hear is mostly blame towards NATO which I can’t claim to be particularly educated about. Also you will commonly hear the phrase “critical support” among us communists emphasis on the critical.
A statement so disingenuous it should run for Republican office.
I’m not sure what you mean? I didn’t make any claims?
NATO has nothing to do with it. Even worse, NATO was created to prevent this kind of thing happening to countries, and Ukraine was “forbidden” to join NATO to make the Russians happy.
Look how that turned out to Ukrainians.
Woah hold on now, hold your horses. NATO has nothing to do with it?
Then why do they openly claim that they did?
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/nato-chief-openly-admits-russia-invaded
Decided I’d atleast look into it if you are going to make such a brazen claim
This is especially interesting https://archive.is/stMC4
Just the damnedest thing https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/us-officials-keep-boasting-about
The only way that reading Stoltenberg’s comments and then blaming the invasion on NATO makes sense is if you think that Russia has an actual right to decide how other countries choose to align themselves. Putin showed up at NATO’s door threatening to beat up a random non-NATO country if NATO didn’t kick out half of its members. Russia has no right to demand that countries that willingly signed up to NATO be kicked out. Most of them signed up specifically because of how Russia has frequently acted in the past.
If I come to you and say “do this or I’ll punch that guy” and you say “no, fuck off”, is it your fault when I then follow through and punch the guy?
Holy shit stop trying to justify what the russians did. Theyre not even communist you dumb tankie
Idk how much I gotta say I don’t like Russia, I can hate NATO and their involvement in the war while also hating the war crimes Russia is committing. How can you read that and not see the the war is more complex than a Russian land grab?
Dude all you’ve ever done in every single conversation is pretend dog whistles arent dog whistles and blame NATO for what Russia did. People can see you post a lot to hexbear. You aren’t sneaky.
Dude… I feel this sentiment so hard.
I don’t understand why criticising NATO for pressuring Russia to invade is pro Russia. Russia didn’t HAVE to invade. Both sides can be at fault here.
It’s like these people arguing against you have a vision of the world that’s as complex as a gi-joe cartoon. One groups perfectly good and the other is perfectly evil.
No one pressured Russia to invade Ukraine. Being an edgy contrarian does not make what you say nuanced. It makes you a useful tool.
You sound like the communist equivalent of neoconservatives and every bit as insufferable.
I never even made a single claim regarding support for Russia or Ukraine. I’m not educated enough on the topic to take a proper stance, though I’m working on that where I can.
What exactly is being “supported”?
To put it into perspective, I can claim to be a “critical supporter” of the effort to repel Russia’s attack on Ukraine, except that unlike people who claim to “critically support” the other side, I’m not claiming to “support” the aggressive oppression of a sovereign country at all.
As such, ostensibly “critical support” for something must mean that you’d rather this shit happen than not. You can’t claim “emphasis on the critical” as though that absolves you of that burden. If you were really more critical than supporting then you’d be “critically supporting” the other side.
Fighting nazis I think, most I’ve heard atleast
Critical support for the fascist regime because there was a group of a couple nazis in Ukraine
Endless civilian bombings, rape and torture of Ukrainians by invading Russians?
“I heard they were just fighting nazis, bro. I’m just coincidentally ignorant about a horrifying war that’s been all over the news for years.”
I think it’s even more abhorrent to claim to “critically support” something while being ignorant, as you claim to be, of what you’re supporting. In what world does ignorance and being critical go hand in hand?
Saying you’re a critical supporter, then backpedaling to say you’re just asking questions, either suggests wilful ignorance, which is the worst kind of disingenuity, or plain laziness in endorsing things you don’t care enough to know about, which in the age of internet-fuelled extremism is arguably worse.
The old tankie dilemma - are they assholes or just incredibly stupid?
Trick question, it’s usually both.
I really didn’t claim any support, as I mentioned to someone else it was a “they say this”, “no, it is more accurate to say they say this” situation
You’re trying to characterise it as such now, but saying “emphasis on the critical” - that’s your input suggesting that this support had merit. Hardly just saying it’s a different terminology. You’re backpedalling again.
Regardless, a lot of people have chimed in explaining to you exactly why this is so damaging and how little merit your qualification has. If you’re as uneducated on the whole situation as you seem to be, why are you so unwilling to accept that it’s probably wrong?
The emphasis on critical was meant to suggest hesitatancy or the acknowledgment of nuance to their actions not necessarily my personal beliefs. I do however believe that NATO had a lot to do with the start of this was as I’ve quite recently discovered since the beginning of this thread.
As for my argumentative nature, I don’t like when my words are misinterpreted and used to claim things I did not say so it made me instinctually hostile. I also have trouble just letting things rest or ignoring situations. Anyway I’m working on educating myself I just think strawmans are dumb
Critical support of genocide, just sounds like support of genocide with extra steps to me.
NATO just means the US for most of them.
What’s hilarious about this is that the Tankies are kind of right, that Russia invading Ukraine is at least partially the US’ fault. Of course, this is more of a “A broken clock is right twice per day” kind of thing. The US promised Ukraine that it would defend them from Russian aggression in order to get them to sign the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in 1994, which got them to destroy their nuclear stockpile. Until that point, Ukraine actually had the world’s 3rd largest stockpile of nuclear weapons due to their Soviet heritage. Then, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, and the US did nothing. So Russia felt confident in invading once again in February of 2022. If the US had stuck to their word in the Budapest Memorandum, Russia would not have attempted to invade them again. But, alas, the US was too concerned with Russia’s nuclear stockpile to do anything other than send Ukraine MREs back in 2014. So, here we are.
Personally I feel the US supplying Ukraine weapons fulfills the Budapest Memorandum. I feel we had an obligation to supply F-16s and Abrams earlier to guarantee security of their land.
I mean, better late than never. Still, I would have loved to see us doing what we’re currently doing back in 2014. If we’d done that, Russia would probably not have invaded a second time.
Edit: Alternatively, we could have not induced Ukraine to destroy its nuclear stockpile, in which case Russia would never have invaded them in the first place. Of course, I’m torn on this one, as more nuclear weapons = more chance for the total annhiliation of all humanity. So, I’d prefer they remove their nukes, and we defend them as promised.
They couldn’t use them, they could leverage them against either side but spinning up a nuclear program in the years of the fall of the ussr was very very unlikely given the cost, material expense and rarity of some of the necessary items.
supplying Ukraine weapons
Disposing old stockpiles in Ukraine.
Show me where it is written about “defend in the case of aggression”. At least in the page you linked there is nothing about it.
What do you think “security assurances” means? The entire article is about this very thing and which countries agreed to provide these assurances.
It’s even more interesting to look at it from the other side: if “security assurances” does not include “defend in the case of aggression” what else is there that could possibly qualify as a “security assurance”?! A warning sternly delivered with a strong finger wagging???!
You are entirely correct that the agreement itself did not obligate the US to take any action in the case of aggression against Ukraine unless it included the use of nuclear weapons. However, the main point of the agreement was that the US, the UK, and Russia all made a commitment to Ukraine to respect its independence, sovereignty, and territorial borders. A lot of diplomatic negotiations had to occur behind the scenes to make that happen. For Russia to sign this treaty, then 20 years later violate it without the other signatories even so much as lifting a finger in protest is pretty unconscionable.
But you are right. I worded my initial post poorly by implying that the US had obligations to defend Ukraine. In the legal sense, they did not. I will argue, however, that in a moral sense, they very much did.
The United States consistently backed Putin, and then the US didn’t really anything when Russia invaded another former soviet republic as well in 2008.
Based and true
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Go on Hexbear and tell them
How can I possibly compete with the intellectual powerhouse that is their shitty emojis?
I mean the first gulf war was far from “imperialism” from “aggressor states”. Post 9/11 wars were arguable
Iraq was completely fabricated.
Afghanistan was a multi trillion dollar to service of an arrest warrant.
First gulf war absolutely was based and morally correct.
It was pretty avoidable if US diplomats had told Hussein that America would intervene if he invaded Kuwait. Instead, April Glaspie told him:
We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie#Meetings_with_Saddam_Hussein
This meeting took place a week before the invasion.
Uhh? That makes invasion of Kuwait and gassing kurds ok and immoral to intervene? What
No, but if America told Iraq not to fuck with Kuwait, then they might never have invaded at all. Then Saddam wouldn’t have attacked the Kurds for helping us during the invasion.
Not to mention how we bravely stood by and let him use mustard gas on Kurdish civilians after they helped us.
We might have avoided a lot of death and destruction by being more assertive before the invasion started. I don’t think it’s as simple as calling our intervention based if our mishandled foreign policy caused the invasion to happen in the first place. Like, yeah it was good that we did one thing right, but we did things wrong that made the situation bad in the first place.
So the USA was imperialist for…
NOT telling other countries they’re gonna attack under certain circumstances?
Please
It would’ve been so if they invaded Pakistan, which is were Bin Laden was.
Strangelly, the “world police” not only knocked down the door and invaded the wrong house, but they stayed in the wrong house for years knowing he wasn’t there and refused to go right next door which they they knew was the house were the perp was located.
It’s almost as if the “arrest warrant” thing was nothing more than a shallow excuse and the real reasons were very different.
That is some piss poor revisionist history, that is 100% WRONG. Bin Laden was in Afghanistan when 9/11 happened. He had been operating in Afghanistan for 15 years or more. When several bombing attacks on US Embassies in Africa in the late 90s happened, he was in Afghanistan. When the USS Cole was bombed, Bin Laden was in Afghanistan. The Taliban gave open refuge to Bin Laden for almost two decades. Bin Laden escaped the battle of Tora Bora, and fled into Pakistan. He then hid in Pakistan until he was killed later. And yes half of the Pakistani government was complicit in his hiding there, but Bin Laden and Al Qaeda did not operate out of Pakistan until after they were pushed back out of Afghanistan. Just about every single thing you said is false.
Iraq, that was a total and complete farce that many of us were against from the start.
No it wasn’t, it is clearer and clearer day by day that we knew from the start Osama was not in Afghanistan but rather at the Pakistan border.
If the US invaded Saudi Arabia where most if the terrorists came from and where Osama bin Laden was hiding, it would be arguable.
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In the very beginning of this war, I actually convinced an aged marxist acquaintance of mine to overcome is knee-jerk pro-Russia reaction exactly by pointing out that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was wrong for the same reasons as the US invasion of Iraq was wrong and thus if one was trully a person on Principles, one would judge the actions of Russia now just like the actions of the US were judged back then.
It helps that, as I don’t do mindless tribalism, I feel not compulsion whatsoever to judge some nation more leniently than other, and could just point out the question of principle (the strong attacking the weak to take their stuff using made up self-serving excuses) with no hypocrisy as I’ve been pretty consistent in judging actions by their own merits and demerits independently of who is doing the deed.
Anyways, the point being that IMHO the lefties who remainin tankies by now are the ones either in a thick closed bubble of ideas and who thus never get things presented to them like this by other lefties or the ones who are little more than ideological parrots with a below average intelligence.
I think it’s a solid D grade. They recognize the US has some responsibility given its foreign policy, but in doing so they fail to properly demonstrate Putin’s Russia is an aggressor state that invaded a sovereign nation, albeit former Soviet state(s). Like a 20% answer. Super fail.
So I blame that freebie starter example boosting up that averaged grade. Blatant US imperialism helps give Russian aggression a pass.
I am a humble European who never cared too much about politics too much, so I don’t really know what this is about. Could someone please explain it to me?
