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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Yet again, showing that you have no awareness of the world, despite participating in news streams about the world and choosing to engage with the content. What's wrong with you? We've been working with a definition of imperialism for over a century at this point and that definition is not "invading and annexing territory". The only people who use this definition are people in the imperial core who want to engage in whataboutism every time they get called out for dominating 80% of the world's people. "Oh, but what about Russia! They invaded a place, they must be imperialist too!" Fucking garbage ignorance.
I use imperialist in every other sentence because you imperialists need it drilled through your skulls, apparently, that in point of historical fact the North Atlantic is the evil empire you keep fantasizing about when you call for the blood of "Russian orcs" or the death of the "brain washed Chinese". You can't seem to fathom the idea that the reason BRICS is on the rise is because the entire world is tired of being dominated by the white supremacist minority that rules from the North Atlantic. You refuse to see that white Eurocentric men dominated 80% of the world's population for multiple centuries and that it's not ancient history but rather the major force driving contemporary geopolitics. You think Russia invading Ukraine is an act of imperialism but have zero position on the School of the Americas and probably don't even realize it exists, what it is, or how it spreads Euro-imperialism. You claim Russia and China are fascists when quite literally all fascism that we've seen historically has emerged from the white supremacist North Atlantic axis, that the Third Reich was literally emulating and advancing programs they lifted from the USA and that the USA continued those programs well past the end of the war. So yes, I constantly reinforce the point that the North Atlantic are the imperialists in this world, they are the ones who have carved up the entire world into their vassals, markets, and subjects, and that they have been so difficult to resist that extreme measures have been shown to be the only thing that works to resist and fight back against them.
Again, why do you even both engaging in this community if your only goal is to maintain cognitive dissonance by refusing to learn anything, repeating mindless drivel, and fantasizing about the way world works. You don't need world news for that. You can just watch Prager U videos and get the same effect. And you'd save all of us the headache of having to contend with your deliberate and contented ignorance.
Bruh
You keep saying "cognitive dissonance" but I don't think you know what that actually means
LOL, fucking typical liberal. Yes, by all means, use a web dictionary to engage in political analysis. It's totally useful. Why don't you look up Webster's definition of "race" and tell me how useful it is when discussing the actual socio-political system of race in its historical context? Saved you the work: it's worth less than dick.
Imperialism is a complex phenomenon that has been studied extensively and the current best definition we have comes from Lenin's work on the topic. All other definitions of imperialism are exactly what you described, and that definition is useless in distinguishing between imperialism and anti-imperialism. For example, let's say the British invade China and take over Hong Kong. That would be imperialism. But by the definition you have provided, if China uses diplomacy or military force to take back Hong Kong that would also be imperialism. The dictionary definition is useless.
Instead of conflating "extending power", which quite literally every single nation-state in the world does continuously, the shortest definition of imperialism that we have arrived at is the monopoly stage of capitalism. The analysis is pretty thorough on this topic and no one in the last century has managed to identify significant flaws in the analysis that would require a new definition. And you would know this if you actually engaged in this topic instead of just doing shit like pointing at dictionary definitions as though you're making an argument and then accusing people who disagree with you of whatever it is they accuse you of.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is quite literally the predicted response of the US extending their power and influence through diplomacy and military force. The awareness that NATO establishing nuclear capabilities in Ukraine was a red line for Russian national security was not only understood by all of the Western powers but was openly talked about. When Gorbachev is talking with Clinton about the dismantling of the USSR and the need for Russian security, Clinton assures Gorbachev that NATO won't expand but then immediately engages in talks internally to build a strategy to get NATO into Ukraine. It was well known for 30 years that Russia would eventually be forced to launch an attack if NATO kept expanding.
What is that NATO expansion if not the extension of power and influence through diplomacy and military force? (you know, like bombing the last socialist country in Europe with a defensive alliance dropping depleted uranium bombs on developed cities under the pretext of the world's first ever "humanitarian" war) If that's not imperialism to you, but Russia finally pushing back is, that is fucking textbook cognitive dissonance.
So even if we take your garbage definition which is completely useless for understanding the world (but maybe useful for 7th graders who need to understand a word in a novel they have to read for a book report), you're still the one exhibiting the cognitive dissonance here.
US didn't force anybody to join, countries in eastern europe applied to join because that meant they were less likely to be bullied by Russia. Look at what happened after Russia invaded Ukraine - both Sweden and Finland applied to join the alliance. Do you blame US for that too? It's Russia's aggresive stance towards it's neighbours that caused the expansion of NATO.
Ok, settle down there, Ivan. You have other posts to spread your apologist views to. Don't let this one detain you.
LOL. See, this is what I'm talking about. The only way people can disagree with you is if they are paid Russian shills. It's amazing that you don't see how this reflects on the weakness of your position. It's unimaginable to you that someone just like you, raised in the imperial core, educated in public schools, with a 4-year degree, who listened to the same radio and TV, watched the same movies, and read the same literature, dated in the same cities, and experienced all the same shared traumas as you could come to a different conclusion than you on this topic. So to maintain your fragile beliefs you have to disengage from the real world and enter into a fantasy realm where all of your opponents are paper dolls being managed by your imagined mortal enemy to push uninformed and evil narratives. You just can't handle the idea that someone who was in college thinking about how they could build a startup and if only the government would deregulate more, and yada yada that someone like this could actually study world history and end up believing something different than you. It's a fragile world view you have.
You say that as though lemmygrad and hexbear posters aren't constantly accusing anyone they disagree with of being FBI plants or Western shills lol
So far you've used a whole shitload of words to not actually disprove anything that anyone in this thread is asserting, while throwing strawmen around like they're confetti lol - in fact, you've actually agreed with the only claim this thread is making
But keep throwing around strawmen like
I'm sure it'll prove your point. So far on Lemmy (and yes I know the situation was different on Reddit, but we all left that shithole for a reason) the only references to "Russian Orcs" has been from lemmygrad and hexbear users who are pretending that it's common terminology among all Ukraine supporters. FWIW I totally agree with you that calling Russian Soldiers Orcs is both counterproductive and inherently unempathetic and even evil. My heart goes out to every Russian conscript who has been forced to march to Ukraine, either to die a pointless death, or to kill other humans all for Putin's idiotic ambitions. But the fact that Russian Conscripts are people too doesn't mean that Ukraine should just cede its sovereignty so that they don't have to kill the soldiers that Russia is using to try and take away their independence.
It's hugely ironic that you keep saying how other people are too fragile to accept that other's might have different world views, while showing yourself to be totally unwilling to consider anyone elses point of view on this subject. No one is telling you what you can and can't believe. If you choose to believe that Russia is the lesser of two evils in this conflict, despite objectively being the one who invaded the other, then by all means go ahead. But don't act like anyone who disagrees with you must just not understand the situation. Presuming that everyone who doesn't think the same way as you is just incapable of seeing the truth is a sure sign of a small mind.
Bleh. I had a long response and lost it somehow. I'll try to be brief:
If I can't get through to you on this, I don't know if you and I are capable of communicating. I literally held the opposing viewpoint in my past. I have changed my viewpoint by listening to opposing viewpoints and investigating them. I don't know how else to communicate this: I am a USian, I believed red scare rhetoric, I supported the USA, I wanted to join the Air Force, I had books with NATO war planes in them and built model air planes from them, I played red scare video games, I read red scare books, I believed the narrative. I literally held the opposing viewpoint. Then, I changed. I am so willing to consider other viewpoints that I literally believed other viewpoints. How much more consideration can you demand from me?
Next. You accuse me of strawmanning. Here are yours.
I have said clearly I don't believe morality exists. There is no good nor evil. You clearly don't know what I believe and you are putting a strawman in place that makes it easy to dismiss. So easy that you dismiss it in the same sentence. Do you know what strawmen are?
Another strawman. I do not presume that people are incapable of seeing the truth, I am reading their words and they are expressing either easily falsified claims or they are denying easily provable claims. There is no presumption here, Western libs are demonstrably not working from the same set of evidence that the rest of the world works from. They are excluding evidence that doesn't fit their narrative.
To tie this pack to other points of view, to assess the Russian invasion of Ukraine I have considered the view points of the following communities: Western liberals, the American state, the Russian state, the Russian people, Russian socialists, Chinese state, American MLs, American MLMs, Indian MLMs, American anarchists, American Republicans, American anti-war organizers, international anti-war organizers, and international academics. I did this, and continue to do it, because each group accentuates different facts and different narratives. They also draw upon different historical events to buttress their position. The ML position has been far and away the most comprehensive and the most consistent with events as they unfold. You can call that a small minded mentality, but I think you'll find that it's mostly liberals who refuse to even entertain arguments that run against their moral position and listening to alternatives is seen as a moral breach, and I can't really imagine a smaller minded mentality than that.
Come on. This is easily disprovable with a search for "orcs" in the Lemmy search feature.
Do I need to continue?
This is so perfectly crafted it's a thing of grotesque beauty. You virtue signal that you're not a racist by saying you agree with me when I have never said that the reason using the term "orc" is bad is because it is counterproductive, nor unempathetic, nor evil (I deny evil exists, remember). You just assume that's why I think it's bad because it's why YOU think it's bad. So you make yourself feel better by talking about yourself and projecting it onto me. Then you get deeper in your virtue signalling by saying your heart goes out to soldiers, but your reasoning is that their death is pointless and directed by an ambitious idiot. Psychologizing your enemies is classic liberal brain rot. Putin's being an idiot is clearly not supported by the decades of evidence, but you just have to say it to make sense of the world. And of course, you have to imagine that his invasion was launched due to his ambition because it would be impossible for you to consider it was launched for defense. In your mind there's nothing idiotic nor ambitious about NATO deploying nuclear capabilities on an indefensible border that was used to invade Russia twice already (Napolean, Third Reich). Nope, not idiotic even though literally the entire diplomatic community was discussing 30 years ago that doing so would provoke an attack from Russia. Nothing ambitious about deciding that the juice was worth the squeeze and let's go forward anyway and provoke that attack. Nope, only Putin is idiotic and ambitious and that's why you have to have empathy for Russian soldiers. In fact, you'd be doing them a favor if you destroyed their country with sanctions and warfare, took over their politics, and installed a Western puppet regime because then they wouldn't be led by an ambitious idiot.
And that's only half of the toxic waste you put in here. The other half is 2 strawmen. The first is that there's an argument that because enemy soldiers are humans therefore Ukraine should cede sovereignty, which no one is making. The second is that Russia invaded Ukraine to "take away their independence". I mean, that second one is about as close to "They hate us for our freedoms" as you can get. Nice job, Bush. Neither of these positions are positions of your opponents. They are strawmen that are easily dismissed. The reason calling Russians orcs is bad is because it is evidence of a propaganda campaign to instill irrational bloodlust in the population. Normally this is reserved for soldiers so they can dehumanize their opponents, but the fact that it's everywhere in social media is evidence that this racist structure is developing within society and it will result in completely irrational and destructive behavior. The fact that you liberals hate tankies more than bloodlusting racists is a tell.
But it only keeps getting better. You accuse me of being unwilling to consider alternate viewpoints, but you are fully committed to this narrative that Russia is invading Ukraine to take away their sovereignty when it is very clear that they are invading Ukraine to secure Russian national security and have stated clearly they have no aims to occupy Ukraine nor to absorb it. You don't consider the alternate viewpoint that Russia is acting based on its national security interest because you have assigned "evil" to the act of initiating the invasion, so you shutdown all conversation about how this alternate viewpoint could possibly be held because anyone who disagrees with you is immoral.
I don't need to respond to the rest. This was enough.
Oh, and while I was writing this, another one got posted: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/1585352
A very belated