I'm not sure how to write this without it sounding like ragebait or a fed post.
But why do most fellow Marxists critically support Russia today?
I can understand having seen Russia as a potential temporary ally or a necessary power that can stand against US / NATO hegemony over the globe. In short I can understand it from a strategic standpoint.
But what about morals of this?
To explain I've seen seen Russia as a necessary potential ally in the past too. But that has changed with the Ukraine war and concurrent events in Russia.
The way I see it, even with a CIA coup, a full scale invasion of a country still isn't justified. It's bordering on insanity in my mind to start such a war. The way the war and conscription is handled in Russia is also highly critiquable. The way people who fall from grace, also "fall out of windows" too.
The other major event that made me doubt Putin more was part of the leaks that happened with Navalny's death. Specifically the revelation of how Putin spend hundreds of millions not just on a palace like so many corrupt leaders and dictators do, but essentially what amounts to an own private town.
This is what lead me to believe that Putin devolved into insanity and paranoia from what he used to be, a calculated sensible dictator.
With all this in mind, why should we offer critical support to Russia instead of Ukraine?
Yes you can argue that Ukraine has been taken over via a pro-western coup regime, but they're still not the aggressors in the war.
I find it morally questionable to support an aggressor in such a clear scenario. And purely strategically speaking with how Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, I find their military capabilities not great either for any conflict with NATO.
Do any of you have any moral reasoning to critically support Russia? Or do you support it out of strategic reasons despite moral objections?
Sleepless One - 5mon
But what about morals of this?
I find it morally questionable to support an aggressor in such a clear scenario.
Do any of you have any moral reasoning to critically support Russia? Or do you support it out of strategic reasons despite moral objections?
There's a lot to dislike about modern Russia but I'm not sure why a Marxist would strongly object to them for being at war with a US aligned, neo-nazi aligned NATO proxy that was running an ethnic cleansing campaign right on the Russian border.
47
RedPandaRedGuard - 5mon
The issue is you can say all the same about Russia in this case, except for not being NATO aligned.
My objection is starting a war and attempted full scale invasion with the intend of territorial expansion and installing a pro-Russian government (not much different from the CIA couping a pro-Western government to power).
I'm asking for reasons as to why to critically support Russia as opposed to Ukraine and if the strategic advantage is worth the moral repercussions.
To me it's a case of two condemnable states at war with each other. Where the aggressor is still less moral due to being the invader.
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TheLepidopterists [he/him] - 5mon
Full scale invasion is a phrase that you keep using, and it makes you sound like you're getting all your information from redditors, because it just means invasion but sounds worse, like regime vs government.
The issue is you can say all the same about Russia in this case, except for not being NATO aligned.
First of all, that's not true. Russia wasn't overthrown a decade ago by neo-nazis and they weren't creating neo-nazi brigades within their military and using them to harass minority language speakers while also banning them from public life.
Secondly being NATO aligned is an incredibly big deal. For one, it puts you within the political bloc that's committing a modern Holocaust, amongst a bunch of other horrific crimes.
And trying to destroy a Nazi government is much different than the CIA couping a country to install a Nazi government what are you talking about?
I'm asking for reasons as to why to critically support Russia as opposed to Ukraine and if the strategic advantage is worth the moral repercussions.
You sound like a liberal. I've pretty much only ever seen good posts from lemmygrad so this is shocking to me.
35
RedPandaRedGuard - 5mon
Now this is just an irrational and insulting response, calling me a lib.
All you're doing is throwing the word nazi around.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine is run by nazis.
But both have nazis and other fascists running rampant in their society and army.
Wagner quite famously had many far right elements. The only difference between Wagner and Azov was that Wagner was a mercenary troop and not directly part of the Russian army.
What you're describing essentially draws no difference between the two countries, except that one has been aligned by NATO.
So again I have to ask, why support Russia in this case? And as it seems from your comment, why so uncritically on top of it?
Russia is not struggling against western imperialism, it's trying to cling onto it's past sphere through it's own imperialism which just so happens to put them up against the expansion of the US hegemony.
As I said before I can understand the strategic interest in Russia winning. But again morally I do not see how this justifies it. Neither government is worse than the other, both filled with corruption, far right elements, oligarchs, oppression and massacres. But only one is defending.
I'm not defending Ukraine. I'm saying they have a right to defend themselves against aggression. As any nation does with the rare exception of countries that commit massive atrocities and genocides (Cambodia, Nazi Germany (ofc tho they were in fact the aggressor), Rwanda, Myanmar).
Furthermore if not a full scale invasion, then what was the push for Kiev when the war started? Its goal was the quick overthrow and surrender of the Ukrainian government and armed forces. After that failing Russia is still occupying probably around 1/4 to 1/3 of Ukrainian lands since the war started.
Troop movements and the front lines are objective facts.
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TheLepidopterists [he/him] - 5mon
I strongly disagree with almost everything in your post, but I don't want to get into a huge line by line discussion about everything, so I'm just going to address the emotionally loaded propaganda phrasing that you keep using.
Furthermore if not a full scale invasion, then what was the push for Kiev when the war started?
An invasion. You can just say invasion. You know that that accurately describes what happened, but "full scale" makes it sound more sinister while providing zero information.
What does full scale even mean? Total war like in WW2? Troops in every part of the invaded country? All of the invading country's armed forces entering the invaded country?
It clearly can't be any of those because none of those are true. It doesn't mean anything. Russia invaded Ukraine is a fact. "Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine" is a propaganda line from a Washington Post article.
35
TankieTanuki [he/him] - 5mon
Real war fans know that Russia's invasion was actually O scale.
Ukraine is run by Nazis. Sorry but you are out of your depth in this conversation. You won't understand why we critically support Russia until you get your basic facts straight and stop listening to the western propaganda around this issue. Even the verbiage you are using is straight out of their propaganda playbook. You are repeating unserious cliche phrases while entirely ignoring the actual reality and history of this conflict.
Listen to the voices of people from the Donetsk and Lugansk regions who actually lived through the Nazi terror bombing. And they were the lucky ones because they are now in liberated territories. Countless Russian speaking Ukrainians continue to be terrorized and abused by Nazi thugs every day, be forced into trenches with a gun at their back, and have their friends and relatives abducted, tortured and murdered in the torture dungeons of the Kiev regime.
I don't even want to get into the whole NATO expansion argument because to me that is secondary. Russia's intervention was not only strategically correct from an anti-imperialist perspective, it was a moral imperative! And i'm tired of mincing words on this issue so i'll say it straight up: The Kiev regime is a terrorist Nazi entity with zero legitimacy that is held up only by Western money and weapons, and through brutal violence, terror and repression. Ukraine as a sovereign state does not exist anymore.
This didn't start in 2022, it started in 2014 when the US and EU orchestrated a coup and installed a puppet regime that launched a war against its own people. They are the aggressors. Russia isn't invading anything, it is liberating a brotherly nation that has been taken over by a Nazi cult and turned into a pawn of imperialist aggression against Russia. Russia is doing in Ukraine what the whole world should be doing in occupied Palestine: stopping a genocide and eliminating a rabid, fascist, out-of-control US proxy regime.
34
TankieTanuki [he/him] - 5mon
Listen to the voices of people from the Donetsk and Lugansk regions who actually lived through the Nazi terror bombing.
You can hear those voices in this documentary: 8 Years Before
20
eldavi @lemmy.ml - 5mon
All you’re doing is throwing the word nazi around.
nazi is the right word; the ukrainian brigades fomenting the violence pride themselves in following in the footsteps of the 3rd reich and have even adopted their imagery.
it seems like you're intentionally ignoring this very important point.
22
TankieTanuki [he/him] - 5mon
why so uncritically on top of it?
This tells me you're not here in good faith.
Read the opening phrase of this comment chain again.
There's a lot to dislike about modern Russia
21
Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them] - 5mon
I'm asking for reasons as to why to critically support Russia as opposed to Ukraine
One is allied with the world's colonial hegemon that has been committing genocides and invasions everywhere, is openly run by nazis, has been involved in helping NATO conquer at least Syria and Iraq, and has been carrying out terror attacks on behalf of the genocidal empire of NATO.
Where the aggressor is still less moral due to being the invader.
Attempting to join NATO, threatening to bring NATO's weapons and troops to the borders of is targets, and threatening to engage in terror attacks is an act of aggression. Furthermore, Ukraine has also invaded at least Syria and Iraq.
Also, seriously, what's with the 'full-scale invasion'?
25
mendiCAN [none/use name] - 5mon
op, this entire post can be boiled down to your need to look up what "critical support" actually means.
42
TheLepidopterists [he/him] - 5mon
That might help if the whole thing wasn't in bad faith but I'm not confident of that.
38
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ - 5mon
This post has been reported for obvious trolling, but I think it's worth leaving it up for the discussion as people have explained what critical support means here.
40
201dberg - 5mon
I like how feds come in here with their lib upvotes bots thinking they will achieve some overall negative impact upon the community with type of shit, but all it does is act as a massive info dump for all sorts of source material for arguing better against this lib brained bullshit in the future. They may think "well I'm making them waste all this time and effort responding to the troll post." Like we all aren't sitting around wasting our time online anyway but now we have an actual point to focus on. Like the majority of us aren't just sitting here waiting for this exact scenario to infor dump our collective communist autism onto whatever poor soul dares to say something like this in our community.
14
CriticalResist8 - 5mon
they just exhaust themselves replying to 20 different people on all fronts and lemmygrad comes out of it having perfected its understanding of the issue at hand.
8
Commiejones - 5mon
It's not just wasting our time. They are giving us a stone to sharpen our rhetoric.
8
RedPandaRedGuard - 3mon
Thanks for that. I feel like way too few people were willing to have a discussion that wasn't in bad faith and instant dismissal.
I could not conclude much except that the main disagreement is over critical support which is something I cannot support in the form it's lived in.
1
小莱卡 - 5mon
But why do most fellow Marxists critically support Russia today?
Because they're fighting the US through their proxy in Ukraine, it do be as simple as that honestly. The NATO encirclement, the banderite stuff, the ethnic cleansing, etc just further strengthens the support, but the main reason is their alignment with the US, the global imperialist hegemon. The US having to allocate more resources into Ukraine opens up space for progress all around the world.
But what about morals of this?
What does that have to do with Marxism? Even if we appeal to morals, a "bad" moral conflict could be "good" in the grand scheme of things, that being fighting US imperialism. If revolutionaries cared about every morally troublesome decision, there wouldn't be any revolution.
38
Munrock ☭ - 5mon
The US having to allocate more resources into Ukraine opens up space for progress all around the world.
This is the biggest thing, for me.
If the US wasn't directing all of its effort toward Ukraine and Israel, there's no way Burkina Faso and the rest of the Sahel would have been able to make so much progress with such little pushback. And that's just in the Sahel.
16
小莱卡 - 5mon
also they could be straight up doing more warmongering in China if they weren't so tied up in all these conflicts.
14
Kras Mazov - 5mon
What does morality has to do with this? Marxism is not a moral compass. Sure each of us have our own moral compass that is influenced by our own cultures, but that is not a part of Marxism.
We can disagree with Russia all we want, the reality of the matter is that, at the end of the day, they are still fighting and resisting NATO's imperialism.
Also, if you're going to bring morality into this, then you can't only talk about Russia invading, you also needs to weight in the ethnic cleansing Ukraine was doing, their Nazi military that are now officially recognized, their rehabilitation of figures like Estepan Bandera and their erasing of Soviet symbols in the country.
36
queermunist she/her - 5mon
I think what NATO did to Ghaddafi explains Russia's behavior. They could no longer treat NATO as a defensive alliance, it proved itself to be an arm of imperialism. If they allowed Ukraine to become a staging ground for NATO bombers it would be begging for color revolution. They couldn't just wait, they had to act preemptively.
32
PolandIsAStateOfMind - 5mon
NATO was never an defensive alliance, USSR at the time of its forming had no doubt about that, Warsaw Pact was a defensive alliance created explicitly as defense from NATO. And later history proven this to be 100% correct.
11
queermunist she/her - 5mon
Sure, NATO didn't transform into a tool of imperialism, it merely revealed itself to have always been a tool of imperialism.
5
PolandIsAStateOfMind - 5mon
Yeah, but this revelation is repeated every single time NATO does anything, some people like Molotov got it even before its creation and some people like every fucking lib out there never get it even when it's right in their face like the cake toss.
4
queermunist she/her - 5mon
Putin himself expressed desire for Russia to join NATO as late as 2000, and in 2005 he said that Russia would respect Ukraine's choice to join NATO. Those aren't the actions and words of someone who understands what NATO is.
Was this rhetoric? Maybe, but I don't think so. I think the bombing of Libya was when everything changed. Only a few years after that, Crimea was annexed.
1
PolandIsAStateOfMind - 5mon
Yes, Putin is a lib but the fact he can learn politics and history, even late, rather than never still put him in entire another cathegory.
We were libs of this or that kind too once :(
1
vovchik_ilich [he/him] - 5mon
Oh boy this is gonna be a spicy comment section.
Essentially, the point is that Russia has no choice. The western empire has expanded eastwards and aims to control increasingly the former "Russian sphere of influence", which used to be the eastern block for the most part. The west can do this because it has the economic and geopolitical supremacy, and can do this through so-called"soft" power, political power and economic power.
This process progressively weakens the Russian empire in favour of the western empire. This leads to a stronger western empire over time, and this is something patently bad for the entire global south and all nations suffering under the yoke of western imperialism. Fighting against the western imperialism, even by means of military struggle, is considered positive by many socialists, even if done by a reactionary nationalist force. For example Mao famously allied with the Kuomintang during the Japanese invasion, because the priority was the elimination of imperialism, followed by the revolution. Edit: this is to me the epitome of critical support: having good analysis that lets you fight side by side with an anti-imperialist force, but after dealing with imperialism being able to fight the reactionaries and win.
Furthermore, history didn't begin in 2022. Tens of millions of Ukrainians have suffered the oppression of the west since 1990, becoming the poorest country in Europe and losing millions of lives to poverty, malnutrition, stress, unemployment, alcoholism and suicide since then. If you're concerned about the wellbeing of Ukrainians, you should primarily be concerned with the western role in the fucking up of the entire country over the past 35 years, which arguably affected it much greater than the ongoing invasion.
29
materialanalysis1938 - 5mon
I wouldn’t call myself a supporter of Russia or Putin. But any country that stands up to U.S./NATO imperialism should have support from Marxists. Ukraine a proxy for U.S. intervention in Eastern Europe. Their military is also full of Nazis who have been trying to exterminate ethnic Russians in the Eastern regions of the country.
26
Hestia [she/her, fae/faer] - 5mon
NATO is violating a deal they arranged with russia to not expand their influence to countries in the Russian sphere of influence. Allowing Ukraine to become a part of the NATO poses a significant security risk for Russian sovereignty and National security. Even as things stand now, Ukraine was capable of briefly pushing into Russian lands and raising havoc. If they were a part of the NATO they would’ve been capable of doing much more damage. A country at war is not allowed to join the NATO, as it would force all the other countries in it into its mess.
The western world remains the enemy of Russia, even after the fall of the Soviet Union.
22
stink - 5mon
I think you mean NATO
9
Hestia [she/her, fae/faer] - 5mon
Oh, yeah. Rip
8
Conselheiro - 5mon
This is a bad post and all, but take this moment to both consider what "critical support" means and in which contexts you should use it.
It depends on your broader strategical goals. If you are a Venezuelan or Haitian communist/socdem for example, critical support for Russia means taking some pressure off of your back while gaining a potential ally. If you support Chinese Socialism, the war also depletes NATO before it can go against China.
If there were conditions for a revolution in Ukraine when the war broke out, it might make sense for those revolutionaries to align with either or neither army tactically for the broader strategical goal.
Morals are secondary, as they define your strategy, not your tactics.
21
redchert - 5mon
Morals are secondary, as they define your strategy, not your tactics.
Yes, Marxist dont act on good morals, they analyse which acts bring forth the rising class consciousness and class antagonism amongst the working class and act accordingly. "Good Morals" is just a byproduct of that process, as is oxygen to photosynthesis.
8
m532 - 5mon
Morals? Full scale invasion? Russia bad? Fall out of windows? Nazivalny mentioned? Irrational putin?
That's not just a bingo, that's a full bingo board of liberalism
21
ButtBidet [he/him] - 5mon
This potentially could be a bad opinion for this place, I'm not sure. I've talked online with Russian communists in Russia and they were risking arrest to organise against conscription in their own country. My feeling (God I could be wrong) is that this a correct and noble thing for them to be doing as Russians in Russia.
All the anti Putin arguments made in the West just can the flames of imperialist war here. It seems like we're rehashing all the mistakes of the socdems during WW1 by rallying around our national bourgeoisie instead of calling for revolutionary defeatism.
21
小莱卡 - 5mon
Russian communist interest can be different than communists from elsewhere, i find it that russian communists are in a very tough spot at this moment because if a civil war in Russia were to happen at this point of time, its very likely that the West would pounce and completely carve Russia. The very nation is at stake here, kinda opposite to how it was at stake with their participation in WW1, the revolution was the only way to save the russian nation in 1917, but what about now?
14
RedPandaRedGuard - 5mon
That is specifically why I'm asking.
I see the majority of Marxists critically or sadly sometimes uncritically supporting Russia in this conflict.
That is something I do not agree with or understand on a moral level. And on a strategic level I do not see Russia as a reasonable or competent potential ally anymore after the recent years. I cannot support Russia without any arguments for it that I'm not aware of, without any cognitive dissonance.
-15
ComTur - 5mon
That is something I do not agree with or understand on a moral level.
Why are you bringing morality into this though? Putin is not a communist to my knowledge, so I doubt people are studying his every word to guide their praxis as if he was the second coming of Lenin.
Putin is an ally against Western imperialism and its unipolar world order. That should be THE single most pressing issue to focus on for any Marxist in my opinion.
And on a strategic level I do not see Russia as a reasonable or competent potential ally anymore after the recent years.
Why not? Isn't Russia literally fighting the West and supporting anti-west movements in the global south?
You might be seeing this through a more static lense maybe? As in, thinking that just because he's an ally now, he's always going to be an ally. But that's not really a Marxist mindset. Things constantly change and evolve.
(I'm answering to "test" my knowledge on this as well. I promise I'm not attacking you, only the ideas, to see if what I write makes sense because I too am learning)
21
haui - 5mon
I'm reading about this a lot recently. Especially outside of western "free speech media" (read: propaganda outlets), the view is kinda different. Some people from donetsk were reporting their native russian language and ideology being forcefully repressed. I'm not saying that is what actually happened. It is what I heard from people claiming to be from there. Paired with accounts of ukraine being allegedly coup'd twice by the west and building up arms, allegedly to repress separatist movements and preparing to sell off most of the country to the west (something I read today but no idea if it is what happened).
So, in my humble opinion, there is no clear morality to this. Compared with videos of men in ukraine being kidnapped off the street and brought to the front to be detonated by a drone, russia isn't great either but I dont see the moral binarity that you seem to do.
17
RedPandaRedGuard - 5mon
I would never defend the actions of the Ukrainian government in ending the protests in the east following the Maidan coup.
Put putting down the opposition is still on a different level from invading a country.
-16
stink - 5mon
Putting down the opposition? Being able to speak one's native tongue isn't opposition. They were committing genocide to ethnic Russians within their borders. To think Russia had no reason to invade seems more like a libertarian isolationist ideology.
I don't have much time right now, but I know there have been previous threads on this with good answers. Here is some context on Ukraine and the nature of its administration:
I’m not sure how to write this without it sounding like ragebait or a fed post.
You very clearly failed at avoiding that.
12
redchert - 5mon
So the people who fight the genocidal empire which spreads banderites-nazi propaganda inside Ukraine, are bad? Zelensky who has said he basically wants to be like Israel and made azov into the official army is the guy one should support?
RedPandaRedGuard in asklemmygrad
Why critical support for Russia?
I'm not sure how to write this without it sounding like ragebait or a fed post.
But why do most fellow Marxists critically support Russia today?
I can understand having seen Russia as a potential temporary ally or a necessary power that can stand against US / NATO hegemony over the globe. In short I can understand it from a strategic standpoint.
But what about morals of this?
To explain I've seen seen Russia as a necessary potential ally in the past too. But that has changed with the Ukraine war and concurrent events in Russia.
The way I see it, even with a CIA coup, a full scale invasion of a country still isn't justified. It's bordering on insanity in my mind to start such a war. The way the war and conscription is handled in Russia is also highly critiquable. The way people who fall from grace, also "fall out of windows" too.
The other major event that made me doubt Putin more was part of the leaks that happened with Navalny's death. Specifically the revelation of how Putin spend hundreds of millions not just on a palace like so many corrupt leaders and dictators do, but essentially what amounts to an own private town.
This is what lead me to believe that Putin devolved into insanity and paranoia from what he used to be, a calculated sensible dictator.
With all this in mind, why should we offer critical support to Russia instead of Ukraine?
Yes you can argue that Ukraine has been taken over via a pro-western coup regime, but they're still not the aggressors in the war.
I find it morally questionable to support an aggressor in such a clear scenario. And purely strategically speaking with how Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, I find their military capabilities not great either for any conflict with NATO.
Do any of you have any moral reasoning to critically support Russia? Or do you support it out of strategic reasons despite moral objections?
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/24b4b7ac-5049-4137-993d-4121844aca51.png
There's a lot to dislike about modern Russia but I'm not sure why a Marxist would strongly object to them for being at war with a US aligned, neo-nazi aligned NATO proxy that was running an ethnic cleansing campaign right on the Russian border.
The issue is you can say all the same about Russia in this case, except for not being NATO aligned.
My objection is starting a war and attempted full scale invasion with the intend of territorial expansion and installing a pro-Russian government (not much different from the CIA couping a pro-Western government to power).
I'm asking for reasons as to why to critically support Russia as opposed to Ukraine and if the strategic advantage is worth the moral repercussions.
To me it's a case of two condemnable states at war with each other. Where the aggressor is still less moral due to being the invader.
Full scale invasion is a phrase that you keep using, and it makes you sound like you're getting all your information from redditors, because it just means invasion but sounds worse, like regime vs government.
First of all, that's not true. Russia wasn't overthrown a decade ago by neo-nazis and they weren't creating neo-nazi brigades within their military and using them to harass minority language speakers while also banning them from public life.
Secondly being NATO aligned is an incredibly big deal. For one, it puts you within the political bloc that's committing a modern Holocaust, amongst a bunch of other horrific crimes.
And trying to destroy a Nazi government is much different than the CIA couping a country to install a Nazi government what are you talking about?
You sound like a liberal. I've pretty much only ever seen good posts from lemmygrad so this is shocking to me.
Now this is just an irrational and insulting response, calling me a lib.
All you're doing is throwing the word nazi around.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine is run by nazis.
But both have nazis and other fascists running rampant in their society and army. Wagner quite famously had many far right elements. The only difference between Wagner and Azov was that Wagner was a mercenary troop and not directly part of the Russian army.
What you're describing essentially draws no difference between the two countries, except that one has been aligned by NATO. So again I have to ask, why support Russia in this case? And as it seems from your comment, why so uncritically on top of it?
Russia is not struggling against western imperialism, it's trying to cling onto it's past sphere through it's own imperialism which just so happens to put them up against the expansion of the US hegemony.
As I said before I can understand the strategic interest in Russia winning. But again morally I do not see how this justifies it. Neither government is worse than the other, both filled with corruption, far right elements, oligarchs, oppression and massacres. But only one is defending.
I'm not defending Ukraine. I'm saying they have a right to defend themselves against aggression. As any nation does with the rare exception of countries that commit massive atrocities and genocides (Cambodia, Nazi Germany (ofc tho they were in fact the aggressor), Rwanda, Myanmar).
Furthermore if not a full scale invasion, then what was the push for Kiev when the war started? Its goal was the quick overthrow and surrender of the Ukrainian government and armed forces. After that failing Russia is still occupying probably around 1/4 to 1/3 of Ukrainian lands since the war started. Troop movements and the front lines are objective facts.
I strongly disagree with almost everything in your post, but I don't want to get into a huge line by line discussion about everything, so I'm just going to address the emotionally loaded propaganda phrasing that you keep using.
An invasion. You can just say invasion. You know that that accurately describes what happened, but "full scale" makes it sound more sinister while providing zero information.
What does full scale even mean? Total war like in WW2? Troops in every part of the invaded country? All of the invading country's armed forces entering the invaded country?
It clearly can't be any of those because none of those are true. It doesn't mean anything. Russia invaded Ukraine is a fact. "Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine" is a propaganda line from a Washington Post article.
Real war fans know that Russia's invasion was actually O scale.
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/be17ca0b-013a-47dc-b1da-abbdc4994744.jpeg
If Putin had recruited an army of Smurfs he could have done the funniest thing ever and made a Z-scale invasion
Damn. It was right there! https://hexbear.net/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchapo.chat%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2Fb642072c-3cef-4832-b9a2-6991271b46e7.png
Ukraine is run by Nazis. Sorry but you are out of your depth in this conversation. You won't understand why we critically support Russia until you get your basic facts straight and stop listening to the western propaganda around this issue. Even the verbiage you are using is straight out of their propaganda playbook. You are repeating unserious cliche phrases while entirely ignoring the actual reality and history of this conflict.
Listen to the voices of people from the Donetsk and Lugansk regions who actually lived through the Nazi terror bombing. And they were the lucky ones because they are now in liberated territories. Countless Russian speaking Ukrainians continue to be terrorized and abused by Nazi thugs every day, be forced into trenches with a gun at their back, and have their friends and relatives abducted, tortured and murdered in the torture dungeons of the Kiev regime.
I don't even want to get into the whole NATO expansion argument because to me that is secondary. Russia's intervention was not only strategically correct from an anti-imperialist perspective, it was a moral imperative! And i'm tired of mincing words on this issue so i'll say it straight up: The Kiev regime is a terrorist Nazi entity with zero legitimacy that is held up only by Western money and weapons, and through brutal violence, terror and repression. Ukraine as a sovereign state does not exist anymore.
This didn't start in 2022, it started in 2014 when the US and EU orchestrated a coup and installed a puppet regime that launched a war against its own people. They are the aggressors. Russia isn't invading anything, it is liberating a brotherly nation that has been taken over by a Nazi cult and turned into a pawn of imperialist aggression against Russia. Russia is doing in Ukraine what the whole world should be doing in occupied Palestine: stopping a genocide and eliminating a rabid, fascist, out-of-control US proxy regime.
@RedPandaRedGuard@lemmygrad.ml
You can hear those voices in this documentary: 8 Years Before
nazi is the right word; the ukrainian brigades fomenting the violence pride themselves in following in the footsteps of the 3rd reich and have even adopted their imagery.
it seems like you're intentionally ignoring this very important point.
This tells me you're not here in good faith.
Read the opening phrase of this comment chain again.
One is allied with the world's colonial hegemon that has been committing genocides and invasions everywhere, is openly run by nazis, has been involved in helping NATO conquer at least Syria and Iraq, and has been carrying out terror attacks on behalf of the genocidal empire of NATO.
Attempting to join NATO, threatening to bring NATO's weapons and troops to the borders of is targets, and threatening to engage in terror attacks is an act of aggression. Furthermore, Ukraine has also invaded at least Syria and Iraq.
Also, seriously, what's with the 'full-scale invasion'?
op, this entire post can be boiled down to your need to look up what "critical support" actually means.
That might help if the whole thing wasn't in bad faith but I'm not confident of that.
This post has been reported for obvious trolling, but I think it's worth leaving it up for the discussion as people have explained what critical support means here.
I like how feds come in here with their lib upvotes bots thinking they will achieve some overall negative impact upon the community with type of shit, but all it does is act as a massive info dump for all sorts of source material for arguing better against this lib brained bullshit in the future. They may think "well I'm making them waste all this time and effort responding to the troll post." Like we all aren't sitting around wasting our time online anyway but now we have an actual point to focus on. Like the majority of us aren't just sitting here waiting for this exact scenario to infor dump our collective communist autism onto whatever poor soul dares to say something like this in our community.
they just exhaust themselves replying to 20 different people on all fronts and lemmygrad comes out of it having perfected its understanding of the issue at hand.
It's not just wasting our time. They are giving us a stone to sharpen our rhetoric.
Thanks for that. I feel like way too few people were willing to have a discussion that wasn't in bad faith and instant dismissal. I could not conclude much except that the main disagreement is over critical support which is something I cannot support in the form it's lived in.
Because they're fighting the US through their proxy in Ukraine, it do be as simple as that honestly. The NATO encirclement, the banderite stuff, the ethnic cleansing, etc just further strengthens the support, but the main reason is their alignment with the US, the global imperialist hegemon. The US having to allocate more resources into Ukraine opens up space for progress all around the world.
What does that have to do with Marxism? Even if we appeal to morals, a "bad" moral conflict could be "good" in the grand scheme of things, that being fighting US imperialism. If revolutionaries cared about every morally troublesome decision, there wouldn't be any revolution.
This is the biggest thing, for me.
If the US wasn't directing all of its effort toward Ukraine and Israel, there's no way Burkina Faso and the rest of the Sahel would have been able to make so much progress with such little pushback. And that's just in the Sahel.
also they could be straight up doing more warmongering in China if they weren't so tied up in all these conflicts.
What does morality has to do with this? Marxism is not a moral compass. Sure each of us have our own moral compass that is influenced by our own cultures, but that is not a part of Marxism.
We can disagree with Russia all we want, the reality of the matter is that, at the end of the day, they are still fighting and resisting NATO's imperialism.
Also, if you're going to bring morality into this, then you can't only talk about Russia invading, you also needs to weight in the ethnic cleansing Ukraine was doing, their Nazi military that are now officially recognized, their rehabilitation of figures like Estepan Bandera and their erasing of Soviet symbols in the country.
I think what NATO did to Ghaddafi explains Russia's behavior. They could no longer treat NATO as a defensive alliance, it proved itself to be an arm of imperialism. If they allowed Ukraine to become a staging ground for NATO bombers it would be begging for color revolution. They couldn't just wait, they had to act preemptively.
NATO was never an defensive alliance, USSR at the time of its forming had no doubt about that, Warsaw Pact was a defensive alliance created explicitly as defense from NATO. And later history proven this to be 100% correct.
Sure, NATO didn't transform into a tool of imperialism, it merely revealed itself to have always been a tool of imperialism.
Yeah, but this revelation is repeated every single time NATO does anything, some people like Molotov got it even before its creation and some people like every fucking lib out there never get it even when it's right in their face like the cake toss.
Putin himself expressed desire for Russia to join NATO as late as 2000, and in 2005 he said that Russia would respect Ukraine's choice to join NATO. Those aren't the actions and words of someone who understands what NATO is.
Was this rhetoric? Maybe, but I don't think so. I think the bombing of Libya was when everything changed. Only a few years after that, Crimea was annexed.
Yes, Putin is a lib but the fact he can learn politics and history, even late, rather than never still put him in entire another cathegory.
We were libs of this or that kind too once :(
Oh boy this is gonna be a spicy comment section.
Essentially, the point is that Russia has no choice. The western empire has expanded eastwards and aims to control increasingly the former "Russian sphere of influence", which used to be the eastern block for the most part. The west can do this because it has the economic and geopolitical supremacy, and can do this through so-called"soft" power, political power and economic power.
This process progressively weakens the Russian empire in favour of the western empire. This leads to a stronger western empire over time, and this is something patently bad for the entire global south and all nations suffering under the yoke of western imperialism. Fighting against the western imperialism, even by means of military struggle, is considered positive by many socialists, even if done by a reactionary nationalist force. For example Mao famously allied with the Kuomintang during the Japanese invasion, because the priority was the elimination of imperialism, followed by the revolution. Edit: this is to me the epitome of critical support: having good analysis that lets you fight side by side with an anti-imperialist force, but after dealing with imperialism being able to fight the reactionaries and win.
Furthermore, history didn't begin in 2022. Tens of millions of Ukrainians have suffered the oppression of the west since 1990, becoming the poorest country in Europe and losing millions of lives to poverty, malnutrition, stress, unemployment, alcoholism and suicide since then. If you're concerned about the wellbeing of Ukrainians, you should primarily be concerned with the western role in the fucking up of the entire country over the past 35 years, which arguably affected it much greater than the ongoing invasion.
I wouldn’t call myself a supporter of Russia or Putin. But any country that stands up to U.S./NATO imperialism should have support from Marxists. Ukraine a proxy for U.S. intervention in Eastern Europe. Their military is also full of Nazis who have been trying to exterminate ethnic Russians in the Eastern regions of the country.
NATO is violating a deal they arranged with russia to not expand their influence to countries in the Russian sphere of influence. Allowing Ukraine to become a part of the NATO poses a significant security risk for Russian sovereignty and National security. Even as things stand now, Ukraine was capable of briefly pushing into Russian lands and raising havoc. If they were a part of the NATO they would’ve been capable of doing much more damage. A country at war is not allowed to join the NATO, as it would force all the other countries in it into its mess.
The western world remains the enemy of Russia, even after the fall of the Soviet Union.
I think you mean NATO
Oh, yeah. Rip
This is a bad post and all, but take this moment to both consider what "critical support" means and in which contexts you should use it.
It depends on your broader strategical goals. If you are a Venezuelan or Haitian communist/socdem for example, critical support for Russia means taking some pressure off of your back while gaining a potential ally. If you support Chinese Socialism, the war also depletes NATO before it can go against China.
If there were conditions for a revolution in Ukraine when the war broke out, it might make sense for those revolutionaries to align with either or neither army tactically for the broader strategical goal.
Morals are secondary, as they define your strategy, not your tactics.
Yes, Marxist dont act on good morals, they analyse which acts bring forth the rising class consciousness and class antagonism amongst the working class and act accordingly. "Good Morals" is just a byproduct of that process, as is oxygen to photosynthesis.
Morals? Full scale invasion? Russia bad? Fall out of windows? Nazivalny mentioned? Irrational putin?
That's not just a bingo, that's a full bingo board of liberalism
This potentially could be a bad opinion for this place, I'm not sure. I've talked online with Russian communists in Russia and they were risking arrest to organise against conscription in their own country. My feeling (God I could be wrong) is that this a correct and noble thing for them to be doing as Russians in Russia.
All the anti Putin arguments made in the West just can the flames of imperialist war here. It seems like we're rehashing all the mistakes of the socdems during WW1 by rallying around our national bourgeoisie instead of calling for revolutionary defeatism.
Russian communist interest can be different than communists from elsewhere, i find it that russian communists are in a very tough spot at this moment because if a civil war in Russia were to happen at this point of time, its very likely that the West would pounce and completely carve Russia. The very nation is at stake here, kinda opposite to how it was at stake with their participation in WW1, the revolution was the only way to save the russian nation in 1917, but what about now?
That is specifically why I'm asking.
I see the majority of Marxists critically or sadly sometimes uncritically supporting Russia in this conflict.
That is something I do not agree with or understand on a moral level. And on a strategic level I do not see Russia as a reasonable or competent potential ally anymore after the recent years. I cannot support Russia without any arguments for it that I'm not aware of, without any cognitive dissonance.
Why are you bringing morality into this though? Putin is not a communist to my knowledge, so I doubt people are studying his every word to guide their praxis as if he was the second coming of Lenin.
Putin is an ally against Western imperialism and its unipolar world order. That should be THE single most pressing issue to focus on for any Marxist in my opinion.
Why not? Isn't Russia literally fighting the West and supporting anti-west movements in the global south? You might be seeing this through a more static lense maybe? As in, thinking that just because he's an ally now, he's always going to be an ally. But that's not really a Marxist mindset. Things constantly change and evolve.
(I'm answering to "test" my knowledge on this as well. I promise I'm not attacking you, only the ideas, to see if what I write makes sense because I too am learning)
I'm reading about this a lot recently. Especially outside of western "free speech media" (read: propaganda outlets), the view is kinda different. Some people from donetsk were reporting their native russian language and ideology being forcefully repressed. I'm not saying that is what actually happened. It is what I heard from people claiming to be from there. Paired with accounts of ukraine being allegedly coup'd twice by the west and building up arms, allegedly to repress separatist movements and preparing to sell off most of the country to the west (something I read today but no idea if it is what happened).
So, in my humble opinion, there is no clear morality to this. Compared with videos of men in ukraine being kidnapped off the street and brought to the front to be detonated by a drone, russia isn't great either but I dont see the moral binarity that you seem to do.
I would never defend the actions of the Ukrainian government in ending the protests in the east following the Maidan coup. Put putting down the opposition is still on a different level from invading a country.
Putting down the opposition? Being able to speak one's native tongue isn't opposition. They were committing genocide to ethnic Russians within their borders. To think Russia had no reason to invade seems more like a libertarian isolationist ideology.
Nazis were shelling civilians in eastern Ukraine for almost a decade for the crime of being ethnically Russian and you're talking about morals. Go fuck yourself https://hexbear.net/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchapo.chat%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F4c081b2f-52d9-4e9c-b0de-a92d2e4030bb.png
With Artillery? For someone so obsessed with morality you don't seem particularly worried about the morality of shelling people who voted against you.
Since people seem interested in the morality angle, allow me to introduce U. of Macao philosophy professor Hans-Georg Moeller.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Link 3:
I don't have much time right now, but I know there have been previous threads on this with good answers. Here is some context on Ukraine and the nature of its administration:
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7112898
https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2022/10/24/ukrainian-army-war-crimes-include-shelling-of-ambulences-firetrucks-and-rescue-workers-in-the-donbass-republics-similar-to-israelis-and-u-s-backed-terrorists-in-syria/
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/8044328
And a thing on debunking the idea of Russian "imperialism":
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Russian_"imperialism"
You very clearly failed at avoiding that.
So the people who fight the genocidal empire which spreads banderites-nazi propaganda inside Ukraine, are bad? Zelensky who has said he basically wants to be like Israel and made azov into the official army is the guy one should support?