293
Fuck Ukrainian Azov Nazis and fuck anyone who defends them
(www.thenation.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
293 points (100.0% liked)
news
24653 readers
590 users here now
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
-
To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
-
To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
-
To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.
Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
-
Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
-
Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
-
Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
-
Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
-
Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
-
Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
-
American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
-
Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
-
AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
ah sorry i had no idea i have to spell out exact numbers of combatants, casualties, displaced persons, and length/area of combat zones or it's "subjective". don't be obtuse, this isn't western spin to say more people are getting hurt in the expanded war than were in the Donbass.
when the separatists you arm & operate your military alongside hit a civilian target with those weapons you do have a measure of culpability. just like NATO has responsibility for the weapons they've given ukriane.
its not abt numbers. on one hand is the ethnic cleansing of civilians during an agreed upon ceasefire, on the other is a war between two modern armies. trying to compare the two is obtuse.
this is not materialist. numbers & scale matters. a murder is not the same as a mass murder. a different legal framework doesn't magically make a many times increase in human suffering and death irrelevant and incomparable to the smaller-scale violence earlier in the same conflict.
we're leftists, right? we agree that social murder is an aspect of capitalist society, but the capitalist legal system does not recognize this. we're capable of separating material effects of policy from their legal definitions. i'd urge you to focus less on the legal character of the war and more on material effects on people. legalism is a tool the ruling class uses that obscures & excuses human suffering in our society. the civilians in the donbass were excused by the ukrainians with legal definitions of traitors or dissidents, as russians who were not part of the state & not deserving protections. i don't accept that and i won't accept fictions about scopes of operation and who is technically aggressing whom, when a kid gets their leg blown off by a mine that is a life permanently changed or erased whichever legalese you slap on it.
its not abt legal framework, its attacks on civilians vs attacks on combatants. numbers dont make these comparable, they are too entirely different
Russia has attacked civilian targets and infrastructure.
"OHCHR verified a total of 9,444 civilian deaths during Russia's invasion of Ukraine as of August 13, 2023. Furthermore, 16,940 people were reported to have been injured"
you're still making a legalistic distinction "attacks on civilians" vs. "attacks on combatants" these attacks on "combatants" clearly contain civilian deaths, ~~so what actually is the difference to you besides who's doing the murder?~~ e: this is combative, not how i intended it. but i think the fact of civilian deaths emerging from the category of 'attack on combatant' is very destabilizing for using that as a discrete category from 'attack on civilian', is it not?
im going to disengage after this bc i dont think either of us have anything to gain by continuing. i do respect ur opinion on this tho, and even tho i have some disagreements, i also agree with much of what youve said and dont think our difference in opinion is a dealbreaker.
the last rebuttal ill give is this: combatants and civilians are materially different— one has and is using weapons. and intentional civilian attacks have a higher rate of success than accidental civilian attacks, so intent matters. also the supposed russian attacks on civilian targets are spurious and fog of war makes it difficult to make value judgements at this time. what i was focusing on is what we know: the situation in the Donbas before February 2022.
thank you for ur input, its helpful to have differing views heard to prevent this place turning into an echo chamber
Ukraine certainly likes to destabilize it: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/19/zrjy-j19.html
i straight up used ukraine's violence against civilians as an example earlier in the thread
Obviously they do that to, but my point there was specifically the human shield thing
A measure of culpability, as compared to the bad faith characterization of full-scale offensive war that lib is making.