• emzillain@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I absolutely LOVE how you’re shitting on Americam imperialism here, when Russia is doing the exact same thing you’re complaining about? You know, the whole invading Ukraine to steal their resources and destabilize it politically thing, or is it OK when the country is next door instead? 🙂

    Russia should continue to be glad they aren’t actually fighting NATO yet, they can hardly beat the Ukrainians as it is.

    • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      Out of curiosity, have you read any of the following authors’ works on imperialism, empire, or the development of capitalism? Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin, David Harvey, John Smith, Michael Hudson, Zac Cope, Anievas and Nisancioglu, Samir Amin? If not, what have you read? Maybe Giovanni Arrighi, Paul Kennedy, or Niall Ferguson? I’m not saying this as a rhetorical ‘gotcha’. I’m curious as to how you define imperialism.

      Russia should continue to be glad they aren’t actually fighting NATO yet, they can hardly beat the Ukrainians as it is.

      I have three questions.

      1. At what threshold of involvement can it be said that NATO is involved?
      2. What’s NATO’s excuse for Afghanistan or almost any of its other wars against third world countries? I use scare quotes here because while it usually fails to achieve it’s surface-level, publicly-stated aims, I don’t think it did ‘fail’ in it’s real goals. That is, it’s impossible to fail by participating in a war when the point of the war is merely to participate in war to make profits for the MIC.
      3. If Russia’s stated aims are demilitarisation and denazification, what does ‘beating Ukraine’ look like? I.e. are you judging Russia’s success or failure according to metrics in which it has no interest?
      • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        – Russia shouldn’t invade other countries and kill people there actually
        – Yeah, but what about that other time other countries killed people? Also, had you read Lenin? Lenin has something to do with this actually, also here’s a bunch of names. As you can see, that means Russia should invade other countries and kill people actually

        • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          I agree, this war is terrible. I wish it could be stopped today. I wish it didn’t happen. Yet it has happened and is ongoing. It won’t stop, and we can’t hasten that end, without a rigorous analysis and understanding of what’s actually going on.

          Yes, I have read Lenin. Well, I’ve read a lot of Lenin. Not everything. What do you think he has to do with this war? You know he’s been dead for a long time, right?

          That bunch of names represents the state of the art in imperialism studies, give or take a few others. I’m listing then because I’m curious about what people have read. It’s no use me going off on one about this or that theory if the people I’m talking to haven’t read the theory.

          Also, you should know, that those writers aren’t all in agreement. Hobson, Ferguson, and perhaps Cope and Harvey, for example, would likely be critical of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Like I said, I didn’t list them as a rhetorical ‘gotcha’; that part of my comment means it cannot be read as something like a trump card to close down the discussion. It’s meant to open up the discussion.

          I take it that you haven’t read any of them and considering your position, I suggest starting with Ferguson and Hobson.

    • ghost_laptop@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      The invasion of Ukraine cannot be compared in terms of war crimes to what the US did in West Asia, have you heard of Operation Awe and Shock? I’m not saying that what Russia is doing is perfectly fine, my point is that you all people sound crickets when it’s about a non-white, non-imperial core country, you give a fuck, you are just paying attention to this because Russia has been made enemy number 1 of the West during the last hundred years. You don’t give a fuck about Hawai’ian independence, you don’t give a fuck about a Puerto Rican independence, you don’t give a fuck about any of the West colonies. When you all people really get a grip of reality and can manage to evaluate everything as equals then a real conversation can happen around the current events in Ukraine, otherwise it’s just you all excusing about the West atrocities and saying it’s not so bad but making a lot of noise when this shit happens.

      How are they not fighting NATO if NATO trains soldiers, provides weapons, provides support, money and basically everything? What does fighting NATO looks like, then? Because as far as I know it’s the same. What’s the difference, the US goes thermonuclear and eliminates the human race with nukes, is that fighting NATO enough?

      • emzillain@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Only a fraction of the currently active troops in Ukraine have received training from NATO, only a fraction are armed with NATO weaponry, and Ukraine hasn’t received significant amounts of aircraft, which is the linchpin to the entire NATO offensive strategy.

        So if Russia is struggling to make the progress it has against a force that ISN’T fully armed with NATO weaponry and strategy, it stands to reason they would fare even worse against NATO itself.

        The rest of your post is lot of words without much of a point. So Russia should be allowed to invade Ukraine and commit atrocities against their people because… the United States did bad things in the past? But if its awful when the United States does it why would you support Russia also doing it?

        • ghost_laptop@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          No, I want to see you on some post that doesn’t include the West, you give a fuck about the rest of the world, you just pinpoint whatever your nazi bourgeois overlords tell you to, the rest of us can die and you won’t blink an eye.

          • SIGSEGV@waveform.social
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            1 year ago

            Don’t talk to this asshole. They don’t argue in good faith and love to shit on the west with their whataboutism. This isn’t the first post I’ve seen this joker in.

            • emzillain@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              People like this are rarely worth engaging with but I believe there’s value to the community when their statements are publically challenged.

              But yeah you’re right, I’m definitely not changing any minds here ha

          • emzillain@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            This is literally the first post I’ve made on this platform haha.‘nazi bourgeois overlords’ is a meaningless word-salad, and by this point you’re really reaching.

            You don’t care about the rest of the world, you would laugh watching Africans and East Asian’s die, all you do is swallow the propaganda your fascist elitist masters tell you to.

            Didn’t that sound crazy? How that sounded to you, is how what you said sounded to me.

      • tooting_lemmy@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        America is better at war. Shock and Awe was effective. War is an atrocity, to be good at it you have to be willing to commit atrocities. If Russia had started out with a similar strategy Ukraine might be an occupied territory of Russia right now. I don’t support any invasion, but if you decide to invade a country you need to hit them hard before they have time to organize their defense. I think Russia had some weird Idea that Ukraians were going to welcome them as liberators. I think this is because the Russian government began to believe their own propaganda. Putin surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear.