“Russian imperialism”?
authoritarian left
*yawn*
[The authoritarian left believes] that all opposition to Assad are jihadi terrorists.
Keep supporting those “moderate rebels”, amirite?
:downbear:
these were probably the same “leftists” who were cheering the Libyan rebels and NATO bombing. There were plenty of them, lots of “progressives” and Trots.
The Syrians and Kurds both had their own leftist revolutions going.
But thanks for proving the point the journalist from the area made about people not from there saying shit
There’s no major people’s movement which stands in solidarity with the victims. They are instead slandered, their suffering is mocked or denied, and their voices either absent from discussions or questioned by people far away, who know nothing of Syria, revolution or war, and who arrogantly believe they know what is best. It is this desperate situation which causes many Syrians to welcome the US, UK and France’s action and who now see foreign intervention as their only hope, despite the risks they know it entails. There’s no major people’s movement which stands in solidarity with the victims. They are instead slandered, their suffering is mocked or denied, and their voices either absent from discussions or questioned by people far away, who know nothing of Syria, revolution or war, and who arrogantly believe they know what is best
It’s the same as people shitting on Hakim for saying shit against war in general as a dude who lived through it.
I stand in solidarity with the victims by calling for an end to the US onslaught and therefore the war. Not by supporting a phantom revolution that has no chance of taking power and will only lead to ISIS and the CIA controlling the state. The war is worse than Assad.
I’m sympathetic to much of what the article says, but stuff like this is just bullshit:
The US, UK and French intervention today is less about protecting Syrians from mass-atrocity and more about enforcing an international norm that chemical weapons use is unacceptable, lest one day they be used on westerners themselves.
I mean come the fuck on. The US gave Saddam a helping hand as he gassed the Kurds, and then used that as one of the pretexts for the second Iraq War when it was convenient for their geopolitical interests. This is just naive thinking.
I don’t think anyone here would claim those dudes are worth defending, pretty disingenuous dude.
That’s not just a few dudes, it’s Ukraine’s National Guard. The whole thing is rotten.
Pretty sure that reactionary assholes in a military isn’t equivalent to every civilian who will die from this but go off
I don’t really trust Putin to take care of those guys, Russia has it’s own issues with far right psychos in their military. Regardless this whole fucking thing is going to get a lot of Ukrainians and Russians killed and probably embolden ethno-nationalism on both sides.
Its like some people interpret revolutionary defeatism as “I must support my government’s enemy”. Its a sort of reactive thinking that accepts the liberals framing of “support Zelensky or you support Putin”. Likewise, anyone who points out that Putin is a capitalist dictator who is pulling a George Bush style invasion gets associated with defending Ukrainian Nazis.
Many international communist parties are able to thread the “both are bad” line. Even the DSA was capable of doing it. But the atomized online left keeps getting lost.
The only thing I think is that anyone saying that Russia did this unprovoked and out of the blue, or uses this as a reason to “critically support” NATO is a fuckin op.
We’re witnessing imperialism spilling over into war. We’re witnessing the machinery of global capitalism functioning as intended. We’re seeing the expenditure of human life in the pursuit of consuming enough military hardware to justify the military economies of NATO and Russia.
There is no good ending to this. There are no good sides on this. All you can hope for is that Ukraine enters negotiations soon and NATO doesn’t escalate, but that’s seeming more and more unlikely by the day.
It’s the scale of the invasion that’s surprised even the most ardent NATO critics.
Revolutionary defeatism as a concept is murky at best, and there’s a reason why Lenin abandoned it entirely in his later years. The issues you’ve laid out with parts of the left actively siding with Russia in this instance proves how confusing the term constantly becomes, especially when the geopolitical situation is hardly black and white, with no real socialist movement lurking to pounce.
"support Zelensky or you support Putin”
I think if anything, liberals prove how this is actually true. They see anyone not supporting Putin as supporting the US regime and its narratives. I’d rather side with “Putin” than reaffirm liberals belief that 7 billion people exist to make rich white people comfortable.
because liberals say I support Putin, I support Putin.
You’re literally a case study of my point. Don’t let the liberals define you. Do you think Lenin went around saying “fine, I guess I do really support the Kaiser”.
Yeah that’s true. But a lot of the “neither side” stuff I’ve seen comes of as unprincipled waffling. Wars are often won by one side, so people want to know which side you want to win. And I think the far better outcome is if Russia wins and to state that, and the actual reasons why. Most of these people on twitter and elsewhere aren’t looking to have a deep conversation, they’re looking to do a character assassination bolster the position of NATO as a “necessary” peacekeeping" “defensive” organization.
The only Russian imperialism I can stomach is Russian Imperial stout
