Shit happening in r/socialism

I think this one is my favorite answer so far, besides the ones people have already posted by Monkey_DDD_Luffy:

The primary contradiction in the world is imperialism vs anti-imperialism.

Socialists come down on the side of anti-imperialism.

A lot of the soft-left has an incorrect analysis that Russia is imperialist, this is not correct. It is aspirationally imperialist but the imperialist bloc in the world is the nato block led by the US. Russia in its opposition to this bloc also provides arms and helps in the defence of all the other opponents to the imperialist bloc.

It doesn't do this out of goodness. It is aspirationally imperialist. But this does not matter. The primary contradiction in the world is imperialism vs anti-imperialism. Everything that harms the imperialists increases the sovereignty in the rest of the world. Increasing the sovereignty increases the potential for revolution unimpeded by the mass genocide that the imperialists have carried out dozens of times against communists.

Another way to look at this problem is to do a thought experiment:

Tomorrow, let's say a EU country has a socialist revolution. Who are its enemies? Who are its potential allies? The first thing this new socialist country needs is the capability to defend itself from counter-revolution, they are immediately about to be attacked. Ask yourself who is going to do that attacking, and who and where this new socialist nation is going to get weapons, supplies, logistics and allies from. Is the nato block going to be nice to this new communist-led country? Or is it immediately going to throw it out and start attacking it? Are the nato countries going to arm it or sanction it? Is Russia going to view it as useful to support or as an enemy? China? DPRK? Iran? The global south? This thought experiment will lead you to making the correct analysis about who our potential friends are and who our real enemies are. I don't need to point out what the correct answers are, they are self-evident realities of the current time. Your enemies will become the nato countries, you will need weapons and you will be getting them from russia, and you will need many other things that are going to come from iran, china, potentially the dprk among others.

This is the reality of the world and a lot of the soft-left has never performed this thought experiment to come to the conclusion that while Russia is absolutely not a good country, it is a strategic necessity to socialists and anti-imperialists in the current moment.

Does that mean everyone should become loud mouths about it? Also no. That would be a tactical mistake.

This is a good analysis, wtf, I expected a shit response from reddit
- i wont say who but that account is run by a beloved hexbear user lol
- And the libs don't reply at all to comments like this.
Russia’s finance capital is actively impeding Putin’s effort for implementing import substitution and self-sufficiency. Their central bank follows IMF orders and uses high interest rates (20%) to kill off the government subsidies for re-industrialization.
If anything, Russia is imperialist in the sense that it is helping to advance American imperialism lol.
Any discussion about imperialism that doesn’t include an analysis on the expansion of finance capitalism is just vibes-based and not rooted in Lenin’s theory on imperialism.
- begging putin on my hands and knees to harden his heart and kill these people
Of course literally none of the libs in the comments are willing to engage with this comment.
- I noticed that lol. Weird...
- Haha nice!

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine meets the core definitions of settler colonialism, imperialism, and arguably genocide.

how?
no
lmao

Liberals love finding a new group and maxing out it's lingo into meaninglessness. Next they'll call communists imperialist dogs or something, with no trace of irony. Epistemological tourists trying on every kind of drama.
- "Epistemological tourists" is my new favorite term
If you told them Lenin handed over the Donbass region to Ukraine for the sake of nation-building their heads would explode
If you told them the vast majority of the population of eastern Ukraine speak Russian as a first language, they wouldn't believe you
If you told them neo-nazis took over the government in 2014, burned union workers alive in a warehouse, attacked the city of Donetsk and disappeared 15,000 Ukrainian citizens they'd call you a liar
These ultras, radlibs or whatever the hell they are don't know anything about anything

You should ask yourself why it is that the countries that are arming Ukraine are the exact same countries that are arming Israel. You think it's just a coincidence or something?

The ideology of just opposing everything the western bloc supports is continually vindicated

Exactly right. The US leverages sometimes legitimal struggles, like the kurds in Syria, to meet their goals in the region and we should be able to see past this. A locally progressive struggle can be part of a globally reactionary. This is something baby leftists simply cannot comprehend.

someone deployed maoist standard english and they are not happy about it lol

I assumed it was someone from here

Some leftists claim Russia was just reacting to NATO expansion. But: Ukraine offered to stay neutral before the 2022 full-scale invasion. They were willing to discuss security guarantees without joining NATO. Russia invaded anyway. Why? Because the issue wasn’t NATO. It was Ukraine’s independence.

This is just selectively ignoring all the important events that led up to Russia’s invasion:

The Ukrainian civil war erupted in 2014 when the new fascist coup regime repealed the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Law that granted the status of regional languages to minority languages including Russian, on the very first day of taking power. This was seen as the beginning of Ukrainian ultranationalist move to ethnically cleanse the Russian minorities and hence the Donbass separatist uprising.
After the civil war, both Minsk Agreements explicitly planned the return of both Donbass oblasts to Ukraine, under the condition that the local governments will be given more autonomy on cultural rights such that minority rights cannot simply be repealed by the central authority, which we all know is ultimately to ethnically cleanse the Russians from the lands of Ukraine. Crimea, however, will not be returned for obvious reasons.
Ukraine rejected the implementation of both Minsk Agreements (because then they will not be allowed to ethnically cleanse the Russians), and instead, over the next 7 years, allowed NATO to openly train and arm its military.
After Biden came into office in 2021, Zelensky (overwhelmingly elected as the peace president) went to the White House and met with Biden, and came out with a completely different, much more aggressive stance, including openly flirting with joining NATO, overturning the Budapest Memorandum for non-nuclear proliferation etc.
Alarmed by the development, Russia called for an immediate security meeting with the US, which culminated in the US-Russia Summit in Geneva in June 2021. Russia proposed resolving their security concerns but was ignored by the US side.
Not two months after the Geneva “peace” summit, the Biden administration began sending Javelins and Stingers to Ukraine under the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) in August 2021, then again in December 2021. A clear provocation to the Russians for attempting to deescalate.
By February 2022, artillery shelling against the pro-Russian Donbass provinces had increased in intensity by an order of magnitude. Peace would not hold. The rest is history.

I'm having trouble finding news articles on it, but didn't Zelensky openly offer to host NATO nukes in the months and even days leading up to the invasion?
- A lot of articles related to Ukraine have been “scrubbed” from the internet over the past 2-3 years. I have only managed to track down a portion of the sources and these days, I only write stuff that I have firm sources on. There are a lot more shenanigans that have to be omitted because it is so difficult these days to track down the original articles I’ve read years back.

to:

Ambitious_Hand8325
Monkey_DDD_Luffy
Alarmed_Plant_9422

I just assume they're Hexbear or Lemmygrad alts lmao

Responses have been pretty good atm

/r/socialism rhetoric these days is mostly ML friendly. It's definitely the dominant strain. They just have a lot of incoming liberals due to being on Reddit, baby socialists with varying degrees of brainworms, and an ultra leftist/Maoist minority.

But what Russian forces did to civilians in Bucha and in Mariupol and in many other places was a genocide too.

Pretty sure there's more to the definition of genocide than when you kill a bunch of people.

- Straight up they say its only a genocide when the killers explicitly talk about genocidal intent, it doesn't matter what they do but only what they say. And even when Israeli goverment officials straight up talk about genocidal intent, it's not a genocide.
"Fascism is when country we don't like kills people. And the more they kill, the more fascism it is. And when they kill a real lotta people, that's genocide. Economic violence? I barely know'er!!"
-Libs probably
- "And when they don't actually kill people we will make it up!"
- When we kill people it's liberation!
Also Bucha was done by Ukrainians and their foreign mercenaries and Mariupol was ukronazis holding civilians hostage.
Stephen Paddock? Genocider, believe it or not
It's almost if like war crimes and genocide are different things

I made multiple comments and had a feeling they were invisible.

Yup, if I view the thread in an incognito tab, my comments don’t appear. Shadow banning, another reason Reddit is a dead end

What did you write?
- Vivid_Sea_7685:
  While I myself do support Ukraine. The main point brought up in support of Russia is that any kind of resistance against Western Imperialism by the US and NATO is always a net positive.
  Me:
  This isn’t a common view at all. No one thinks anything goes as long as it opposes the US. That’s anti communist nonsense intended to convince people that socialists are into unthinking, team-based politics. There are concrete reasons to oppose NATO in general and specifically in this conflict, far beyond a reflexive “the US doesn’t like it.” u/Alarmed_Plant_9422’s comment explains that fairly well

Alarmed-Plan has the only good take here

It's amazing how so many western "socialists" have their brains mushed so bad that they consider Russia as "post colonial" because of the USSR

Shit, in my sleepy state I read the name wrong, the comment below is still a good comment, but not the one referenced.
I'm archiving the exchange here:
ambitious_hand:
Let’s be clear: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine meets the core definitions of settler colonialism, imperialism, and arguably genocide.
I don't think you understand any of these terms, what right do you apply them?
The difference between Ukraine and Gaza is that there is no progressive faction in Ukraine, unlike with Palestine. Ukrainian nationalism after the fall of the Soviet Union has been devoid of any progressive content, with the current regime trying to distance Ukraine as much as possible from its socialist past, rehabilitating fascist collaborators like Bandera as national heroes, repressing all communist parties, and excluding the ethnic-Russian minority in the east, who are mostly working-class communities, from the national project by way of genocide, using Neo-Nazi paramilitaries to police their communities, banning parties that represent their interests, demoting the Russian language as an official language, and brutally cracking down on Odessa and Donbass when they rose up in defense of their democratic rights in 2014. Ukraine has been cannibalizing itself since it left the USSR, and Russia’s invasion has only sped up the process; it did not catalyze it.
Palestinian nationalism, even with Islamist parties being the strongest political faction in Gaza, is an expansive nationalist project that promotes civic participation within the whole of the Palestinian people against the genocidal imperialism of Israel; Islamists and communists are in military cooperation, and there is no ‘minority’ that is persecuted in any significant degree by any Palestinian factions. George Habash, for instance, came from a Christian family. The only obstacle to unity is the Fatah government in the West Bank, which are compradors for Israeli interests, but they have little in the way of nationalist justifications and are despised by the vast majority of Palestinians; their rule would quickly collapse if Israel did not prop them up
OP:
Just parroting Russian propaganda
another_commenter:
Propaganda doesn't mean it's false. Why is it that there are so many streets in Ukraine named after Waffen SS members?
ambitious_hand: Just recently, they appointed a member of the Neo-Nazi Azov Brigade as the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, and this man had praised Hitler in the past and said that the Nazis gave Germans strong Christian ethics. These are the guys who are in charge of rewriting Ukrainian history and slandering the Soviet Union as "totalitarian"
- Here is the referenced comment:
  The Ukraine situation is more complex. Eastern Ukrainians had their (overwhelmingly supported) president ousted in a Western-supported coup, then their language banned, then spent 8 years getting artillery shelled by Western Ukraine, the two peace agreements signed (by Zelenskyy who was elected on a peace platform) were then ignored by Ukraine largely because it would've let them vote on self-determination, then increasing talk of bringing in Western military support to crush the rebels (and consequently set up NATO bases next to Russia), then the parliamentary parties they support got banned, and so on.
  So let's not count Russia's invasion and annexation as entirely unwanted by all East Ukrainians (or entirely unavoidable by Ukraine itself without very minor concessions). They have been utterly and undemocratically fucked over by Ukraine proper for over a decade. Ukraine didn't entirely not choose this path, admittedly with scary Western pressure.
  This doesn't justify Russia's actions, but let's dismiss the myth that the war is borne entirely of some random desire to conquer by Putin, there are some very real factors and unnecessary suffering caused by Ukraine that preceded invasion. If Russia hadn't invaded, we'd be seeing Ukraine, Azov, western arms and armies marching into the DPR/LPR and mass murdering plenty civilians, continuing to mass-oppress them, and setting up military bases there.
  There's more to be said about the worrying amount of Nazism, white supremacy, and anti-communism of the Ukrainian government, (see for example the UN votes on food rights and banning Nazi symbols, the US, Israel and Ukraine were basically the only ones to vote against). But these are the main points.
  No war but class war, Russia 100% sucks, NATO 100% sucks, they're both fascist, capitalist, and fucked up. Of the two options, it's better for the stronger, wider, 'more imperialist' NATO/US Hegemony to lose instead of win.
  Obviously the best outcome for leftists (and people in general) is for Russia and NATO to both equally lose and explode, but that's just unlikely. So when we don't want to emphatically chant for Russia's loss, it's just about the lesser of two evils.
  TL;DR: This meme from China: https://i.redd.it/nmi09294y5ub1.jpg
Oh right, that's my throwaway Reddit account trying to be placatory, not a local of the sub, whee but sorry.
- Ah, I knew it was too good not to be from a Hexbear
Link
There’s also this one by John_Jack_Reed
- OP calling Ukraine a genocide comparable to Gaza and then complaining when they get called out
- Reddit links were detected in your comment. Here are links to the same locations on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
  Link 1:
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I do enjoy a bit of dogpiling.

Woof!

Wouldn’t get your hopes up. But if someone here feels motivated to add a comment, I’ll upvote it

I commented a lot, but deleted most of it. There's no point when the mods are trots lmao

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