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The Hard Reality: Ukraine’s Last-Gasp Offensive Has Failed
(www.19fortyfive.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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What a long strange trip it's been. I remember back in the weeks leading up to the invasion I was posting about it and asking a Russian comrade and some other folks in the Marx Madness discord about the plausibility of all the fear mongering being drummed up by the west and we were all so sure that it was just bullshit noise like most other scare pieces written by western journalists, and then watching it happen in real time while knowing full well that this would be the inevitable outcome, and in spite of that all, this massive campaign of manufacturing consent to support Ukraine and stifle any attempts at peace talks has been pretty surreal.
It's almost an even more blatant example of drumming up nationalist fervor in the imperial core than even what I witnessed during the aftermath of 9/11. Like at least back then there was an actual attack on the US to point to as flimsy justification for war.
Do you acknowledge that russia invaded and started a war against Ukraine?
Allow me to answer your question with a question: Do you believe in the right to self determination of people in the Donbas?
Through properly monitored and implemented referendums, yeah.
By a random dictatorship well known for destabilising and invading its neighbors, absolutely not.
You say this shit like it isn't a euphemism.
Democracy
Dictatorship
Come now I am trying to ask questions in an attempt to get them to question the shit they have been immersed in from birth. As excellent a use of that emoji as that is I think we have a miniscule chance to maybe reach this person if we can get the gears turning.
And what gives you the right to determine what "properly monitored and implemented referendums" are?
Also Russia is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie just the same as the US so that argument holds zero water here.
I am genuinely curious what your metrics for what constitutes a legitimate referendum are.
Nothing to do with me. I'm a programmer lol
Nothing to do with the US. I wouldn't support them invading a neighbor after a bogus vote they arranged. Whataboutism.
Independent monitors to make sure the vote is fair.
And who are these independent monitors?
--Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds
This is more of a comment on radlibs and baby anarchists, but it strikes me as appropriate here. It's very easy to idealistically criticize everything that isn't the way it should be. At some point, though, you have to address reality.
Oh yeah I quote from that book all the time at the cash register lol
"When I pay for this Snickers I'm a glutton, but when I steal it I'm a thief! What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy saying that you judge me for eating a Snickers, so assiduously marketed by 7/11 that it affects cashiers across their entire national footprint."
No answer to that one.
Is this supposed to be a gotcha? There are tons of international vote monitor groups. Everyone uses them all the time.
Not to mention that since 2022 this hasn't been about just the Donbas any more.
Indeed, last I checked Crimea wasn't part of the Donbas either. This has never been about "protecting the self determination" of regions that so conveniently want to be invaded by Russia (according to Russia).
How does "the US is also bad" change anything about the argument? The argument was that Russia invading and annexing territory is not an expression of self-determination for the people whose homes are being annexed. The US also doing bad shit doesn't change anything about that because "the US annexes Donbas instead of Russia" isn't the alternative being presented here
Definitely not talking about the USA. You are also not aware of the fact that the USA is sending troops to Peru to back a government that is currently supported by 6% of its people. But I’m sure this has no relevance at all to the situation in Ukraine. Despite its many honest mistakes (centuries of ongoing slavery and genocide), the USA has been overall a force for good in the world!
In an ideal world where there was a good-faith international actor or organization who could take the role of moderating a referendum, and the outcome be respected by all parties, that would be ideal. However, no such organization exists. The institutions of the so-called "rules based international order" serve the interests of western hegemony. That is why, for example, Catalonia is not able to have an effective referendum for independence from Spain, and that is a perfectly fine state of affairs; just the way things are. Maybe a diplomatic complaint gets filed somewhere, maybe someone calls out how awful it is that police were interfering with the referendum in 2017, and they're not wrong. But ultimately, nothing fundamentally changes, and that is the point.
Should people just accept the way things are until an ideal situation allows them to improve their lives in a way everyone finds acceptable? What should people do if things are only getting worse, and there are no effective, good-faith actors to mediate the best possible solution?
Craziest part is that a lot of people that follow that line of thinking have also at least recognized the immediacy of police and prison abolition in the context of places like the US but can't seem to take the next step in applying the same logic to places outside the imperial core.
Large countries invading and annexing stuff is not a solution to any of those problems. It is a regression to an even worse system.
And zoom, wow those goalposts can move!
Russia invaded the Donbas in 2014. If they had simply sat there and kept just that, I suspect things would have stabilized in the long run. But Russia doesn't actually care about the "self-determination" of the people in the land it attempts to conquer, that's just a convenient excuse it used.
Define: People in the Donbas
Are we talking about Ukrainians living there or about Russian military in plain clothing being supplied by military trucks that accidently lose then re-find their plates with every border crossing with military good out of Russian stocks? 🤡
You're bastarding the theory (mind you this word matters here) of SDT and trying to use it as some escapist argument for murdering other humans. Crimea was taken by force by Russians. No psychological theory changes that fact. Everything past this point is moot. Russia invaded and 2nd time and aren't being allowed free reign this time. It has nothing to do with jingoism or theoretical psychological beliefs.
Liberals always try to force leftists to 'pledge allegiance' to hyperfocused truisms that they take in isolation and try to make determinative of the entire subject.
I'll bite. Yes. Russia invaded. No. Russia did not start a war with Ukraine. They joined an existing war with Ukraine in progress.
That they started by taking Crimea, exactly.
You folks are wild. You act as though history somehow emerged from a stagnant singularity in 2014.
This is what no historical materialism does to a mfer.
Crimea also voted on a referendum.
If you somehow uphold US/imperialist approved votes over any other countries' idk what to tell you.
So you just have no idea what I'm talking about, then?
I bet you watched Trump's impeachment with baited breath. Do you even remember what it was about?
Apologists always want to go back to who really threw the first stone, as if Russia has been a great world citizen this whole time and as if imperialist invasion was a great way to reduce sanctions or increase economic cooperation
You talk about Russia being a “good world citizen” as though western powers have universally dealt with Russia in good faith. You posit that Russia should turn to means like diplomacy in order to alleviate the sanctions that have been placed upon them and to increase economic cooperation with countries with are subject to NATO influences like Ukraine, but this ignores the fact that western powers have attempted to undermine Russia’s economy for their own benefit since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as well as the fact that measures such as the aforementioned sanctions placed upon Putin’s Russia have been put in place because of his refusal to completely open the country’s markets to predatory foreign interests.
If you’re interested, I suggest you read this article (which appears to be more sympathetic to NATO than myself and most other leftists on Lemmy), since it describes the economic devastation which occurred in Russia in the 1990s, the way in which Putin’s government has kept a complete catastrophe from happening again (although I wouldn’t say that Russia’s current right-wing, hyper nationalistic model for trade is ideal or that it’s anything to strive for, since inequality is still rampant in the country), and the way in which the United States and its allies pressure other countries into opening their markets to free trade only to exploit them once they do. If you don’t have the time to read it, just know that the west’s antagonizing of Russia is the cause of the latter’s lack of diplomatic cooperation with the former, and not the Russian government’s political or economic ambitions.
Well they were, for the most part, until the illegal dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Are you saying who started the war isn't relevant? Why would you not want to determine this to have a full picture of the situation?
Am I a liberal? News to me. I seek no pledge from you. Stop chasing shadows.
What war was Ukraine involved in with russia?
You sure sound like one.
The jingoism has definitely been beyond anything I'd seen so far, post 9/11 included.
Yeah it's wild because back then I was called a terrorist sympathizer for being against literally turning Iraq and Afghanistan into a sea of glass, and now I get called a Putin apologist for holding a consistent and principled stance on the right of self determination for people in eastern Ukraine.
I keep getting called a tankie on twitter by people that have no fucking idea what anarchism is (and no shade on tankies yall are my comrades and I am actually helping an indigenous friend build an org centered around indigenous struggle in the imperial core centered on scientific socialism/decolonial Marxism)
A terrorist sympathizer or a slur, remember it was the early 2000's
The amount of times I heard the phrase "sand n-word" still sticks with me.
'orcs' is just so much less jarring this time around right?
spoiler
Tfw you're one of te only principled anarchists online and trying to carry weight for an ideology consistently misunderstood by a b unch of teenagers.0
Why do you keep changing the topic?
This claim about “right of self determination” is completely absurd. If that was truly the issue, it wouldn’t be achieved by destroying apartment buildings with missiles, tanks and bombs in an entirely different area.