I don't know what to tell you. It's the equivalent of saying "but he is not angel" about a country that is a direct product of an American war against USSR, when it is now engaged in a proxy war against America. I don't find it relevant or helpful to understanding why the war took place.

They also say this to their largely western audience. It's just my opinion but I don't think this tendency to divide the world in good and bad camps then voicing support for good ones is a helpful strategy especially when Americans and other westerners do this. God knows how many bad countries are bad because of western colonialism and imperialism. People are aghast that the Taliban is rescinding what little women's rights there were in Afghanistan. There is a very long chain of events that puts western involvement directly as the culprit of Afghanistan's current situation. What is point of a westerner supporting or not supporting Afghanistan or Taliban? I doesn't make sense to me. It's more reasonable to oppose western involvement wholesale rather than trying to sieve the good from bad in an imperialised world.

i agree with the anarchist, the difference between the RSFSR and the parasitic corpse of it are two very different things

I think so. I think one could say that Russia could have held off on a military response and I don't have any strong feelings about that because there is a lot of specifics that I don't know. But NATO has been prepping up Ukraine to be its proxy in its goal to contain Russia for a decade. This starts off with the Maidan coup and then NATO's empowerment of Ukraine's Banderite neo-nazis by the way of providing them arms and training. The neo-nazis had been waging a war against their Russian speaking border regions for about a decade. NATO then blocked any diplomatic solutions to the ensuing tension between Russia and Ukraine. Merkel straight up said that the Minsk Accords that were agreed upon and signed were meant to buy Ukraine time rather than be honoured.

Given this Russia had the options of doing nothing and endure the containment or stymie NATO's expansion through a pre-emptive invasion. I would have liked if there was no need for a war. But this is just the continuation of USA's cold war that never ended even after USSR's dissolution. The fact is that Russia's mere existence as a sovereign country is something that USA and NATO find deeply offensive. A war like this was bound to happen at one point or another.

I'm thinking it's less "the invasion was justifed" and more "turns out actions have consequenses"

More justified than the US invading Vietnam or Cuba. In all three instances, a smaller country has declared its alignment to a certain ideology and wishes to become closer to superpowers with said ideology. The difference is that North Vietnam was prevented from even holding elections because the west knew that their government wasn’t corrupt and that they’d win legitimately against the cucks in the south. Cuba also had a popular revolution that tortured the souls of multiple administrations. Cuba (and Vietnam) didn’t have desires to be pushed around by the USSR just because they supported their causes, and because they have sympathy for the west whereas the USSR had a more militant mentality. The fucking Cubans cooperated with the FBI because they earnestly believed that they would help arrest Cuban exile terrorists, only for their spies and informants to get arrested and realize the US was helping said terrorists. Honestly you can add just about every fucking non-Warsaw Pact socialist country and non-aligned countries that got invaded or couped to this list.

Compare to modern Ukraine where westerners have declared it to be near the top of corruption indexes until after they got invaded, then magically they were democratic. Or how westerners were reporting on the huge Nazi influence in modern Ukraine until it got invaded, then suddenly it was a wholesome, pro LGBT, pro democracy imperfect nation. Ukraine, like most NATO members, have shown that they’re willing to do whatever the US wants, and the US has shown that it only seeks hostilities and suffering whether they pursue it themselves or with the alliance or with select members. Adding Ukraine as a member, right on the border of Russia, is a much more hostile move than most countries aligning with socialism and the USSR because Ukraine and NATO countries are willing to be a lap dog. And it’s funny because Russia and Putin were literally willing to be NATO lapdogs after the USSR fell, and yet the west rejected them because Russia as a concept needed to be punished for even daring to challenge the west.

Also, Putin keeps rattling his saber and warning the west and Ukraine if they cross XYZ line, and when they do, Putin just condemns them and maybe shoot a missile or two lol. He understands the existential stakes of nuclear warfare. The US, and Ukraine, do not care. To them, eternal damnation in nuclear holocaust is a small price to defeat Putin and Russia. They have a child’s mindset, whereas Cuba only escalated nuclear tensions because it was a non-hostile country that kept getting invaded and terrorized by the US.

Why do you believe people can't change? I believe life experience + propaganda + material conditions will move people left.

I used to be a lib that phone banked for Obama

I think your view of the world is a bit static and deterministic. There are a lot of people just on hexbear who used to be chuds and liberals and they talk about their transition.

I don't mean to imply that those three guys could spark a revolution by following the line that I view as correct. But voices that break the echo chamber that propagates the West's destructive ontology are very valuable in my opinion precisely because there are so few of them. Subreddits like ChapoTrapHouse and GenZedong had to be booted off Reddit because of how influential they had become. No one could have seen this coming a couple of months after they were created.

In the end I sympathise with their desire to maximise their income as opposed to being the no. 1 enemy of the state. But it does not mean they should be spared criticism at least when its honest.

It's almost entirely because of second thought, Deprogram, and leftist YouTube that I developed the language I needed to understand the way things are, and was able to find books that I should read.

And even more important, have been doing praxis with local comrades.

A dissenting voice is incredibly important, and to believe that any positive change can come from a few thousand principled people in the west is absurd.

People watch idiot lib shit all the time, look how many of those exist.