I did read a bit of that tankie garbage and this is the funniest bit I reached:
For Russia, the war is existential.
Russia can stop murdering Ukrainians at any time without anyone caring for Russian land or the existence of Russia. It’s nothing more than a paranoid fantasy that anyone in “the West” would want to invade Russia. They could have just stuck to selling resources to Europe and the rest of the world, but instead they chose to attack their neighbour.
If you really build your world view on a foundation like this article you are completely lost - at least outside Russia. You might make a career in Moscow, though.
It’s nothing more than a paranoid fantasy that Russia will invade Poland, but it seems like most people here think they will if we don’t send Ukranians to their deaths…
Can you show me where the West threatend to invade Russia? Because Russians do so regularly. Calling that “paranoid” is just willfull ignorance for the sake of being an asshole.
Same for your casual insinuation that the West is “sending Ukrainians to their deaths”. The only one forcing them to fight is Russians crossing the border and murdering Ukrainians.
Haha you adding that disclaimer “since 1991” is the funniest thing. Russia losing their occupation of Poland does not undo anything that happened before. But here are some examples for you to completely ignore:
We are already working on a plan for the demilitarization of NATO countries, and Poland is the first in the line after the capture of Kiev
We are ready to take Kyiv and NATO countries without any problems on orders. Our combat-hardened units will not be able to resist any army in the world. We have experience, arsenal, faith, patriotism, idea and truth! The West does not yet understand how strong we are
I’m sure you’ll manage to find more if you care.
So why do you believe that Russia’s selfimposed fear of invasion is not a paranoid delusion?
Oh of we’re just talking about random senators or TV personalities then yeah Russia has lots of people that want to restore the Soviet union. I meant from people at their MOF or MOD, or in the presidents office, people who’s threats would carry weight beyond playing to domestic politics.
It’s cute that you try to talk it down but prominent figures in Russia are talking about invading Europe, murdering its people and eradicating cities.
And no one West of the Russian border cares one bit about moving the Russian border even a meter eastwards. The claim that Nato is a threat to Russia is a sad lie it tells itself to justify its imperialism.
You still have not provided any proof for the idiotic claim that anyone wants to threatens Russia. It remains a fantasy to justify Russian imperialism, nothing more. Just like a bot you only spew more and more of your BS hoping anything would stick without ever acknowledging that you have been called out for your lies.
Are you trying to rebrand useful idiot to no longer mean dumbasses who repeat Moscows fairytales 😂? That’ll be as successfull as Russia claiming it did not start WW2 together with the Nazis to eat up Poland.
Also your link is a fictional opinion piece by some “journalist”. The comment below the article gives a great summary:
JHC this is one of the worst examples of ‘fantasy realism’ I’ve ever seen. I don’t doubt that the US motives aren’t stellar and never have been but good god man, russia has shown itself for over 400 years to be a brutal imperialist terrorist state and is slaughtering, raping, torturing Ukrainian civilians (men, women, AND children) in a godawful genocide (can’t say that word here? I don’t see a trace of it). You know damn well what would happen in occupied territories if ‘negotiations’ were carried out before russia was thoroughly kicked out of Ukraine and defeated. Putin apologist/tankie is what I see here.
So still no one in the West threatening Russian territorial integrity. (Because no one gives a shit about that crap land, all we ever wanted was to just buy your resources and let it be)
Just a bit of education for you. When engaging in a discussion with someone, like you replying to my comments and me to you (that’s a discussion), attacking the individual instead of the argument is called an Ad Hominem attack. Look it up. You’ve already lost your position and my respect, I’m just trying to help you out here.
You ignoring any arguments that don’t align with your worldview while not providing any yourself is not a discussion. Also note that I don’t care about the respect of a Russia apologist - to me you are just as pathetic as the nazis running around these days. Your “position” was lost from the start but you really cannot see it - or just don’t want to.
I actually do get Russia having a violent response against a hostile alliance coming up right to their borders. That side of it makes sense to me. But also, NATO and EU membership was much less of a priority for Ukraine before Russia started invading their borders and killing their citizens. Once Russia has rolled their military into neighboring sovereign nations and started killing and raping and blowing up homes, I think they’re forfeited their right to whine about the unfairness if their neighbors decide to join a mutual-defense alliance that can beat the shit out of them.
Invading Russia = making political inroads into their historical sphere of influence. The “existential” threat to Russia is that it loses its historic colonial outposts.
Jesus Christ read a fucking book. Russia was invaded twice through its border with Ukraine. Want to guess who did it and why?
The first invasion was Napoleon, of France, of Western Europe, of the North Atlantic. Why? Because it would be beneficial to the Western order to control the resources, eliminate competition, and subjugate the people.
The second invasion was the Third Reich, of Germany, of Western Europe, of the North Atlantic. Why? The same reasons as Napoleon plus two more. One, because European fascism arose in response to the successful creation of the world’s first workers’ state, the Third Reich was hell bent on not merely controlling Russia but also ending the project for worker states. Second, because the Third Reich sought to replicate the great success of the USA in subjugating natives and blacks and extracting hyperprofits from them without giving them opportunity for revolt and wanted to apply the same program to the Slavs of Eastern Europe and Russia.
In both of those invasions, Russia was under an existential threat and lost a massive number of lives. Both of these invasions were across the border with Ukraine.
Now we have NATO, helmed by the USA (who the Third Reich emulated) staffed originally by literal Nazi officers as part of the USA’s leave-behind project which distributed Nazis all over Europe, as part of the larger pattern of the USA’s participation in the Nazi project through Operation Gladio and Operation Paperclip. Now we have a nuclear army staffed by Nazis by the country the Nazis emulated that trained Nazis and used Nazis and voted against condemning Nazis and currently has Nazis marching publicly domestically and has been arming and funding Nazis for decades. And that nuclear army has been expanding its presence and logistics and supply chains and recruiting and training operations across Europe and after training and arming Nazis in Ukraine for years and after supporting a coup and hand picking the leader to take the place of the democratically elected leader, after all that, NATO finally has a chance of moving its military presence into Ukraine.
And you don’t think that represents an existential threat to Russia? You think the motivations of Napoleon and the Third Reich are gone? You think the economics and geopolitics have changed so much that no one could possibly have any further interests that would lead them to attempting to subjugate Russia?
Read. Do everyone a favor and stop putting your ignorance as though it’s a position and read something.
The article describes Dina Boluarte as Peru's "unelected president" — but a different description would be that she was vice-president at the time that president Pedro Castillo attempted a self-coup to elevate himself from president to dictator, failed, and was then impeached & removed by Congress.
As a US citizen, I have to wonder if there's an analogy there with Mike Pence, who was VP to president Donald Trump but did not cooperate in Trump's attempted self-coup on January 6 2021. Pence's non-cooperation arguably saved the US from a Trump dictatorship.
Peruvians, or other folks who know more about Peruvian politics — is that an entirely terrible analogy?
The situation is pretty complex. I don’t have my finger on it entirely, but I get the feeling he was going to be forced out whether he self-couped or not. They seemed to be looking to remove him from the get go and were obstructionist
i love how the people he's screwed hard enough to be forced out of politics continue to publicly insist that they're best buddies with him in the hopes of continuing to woo some kind of base; especially pence. lol
This article reads like a China/ Russia propaganda greatest hits album. What does a Y2K worker revolt have to do with WW3? What does some hedge fund selling rare earth mining have to do with the price of tea in China?
NATO didn't allow Russia into NATO because Russia had been the one who invaded the Eastern Block (huh, sounds oddly prescient what with them invading Ukraine nowadays). Maybe if Russia had gone through “shock therapy” and not given all of their state owned assets to a few oligarchs, who then installed who they thought was going to be a weak president, who then provoked a false flag attack on his own people to incite a war, which eventually culminated in that president becoming dictator for life…perhaps then Russia would have transformed into a healthy capitalist state with less corrupt politicians, and perhaps then NATO would have included them. But alas, change is hard and it is easy fall into such traps along the way.
China on the other hand. For one, TPP for the US didn’t happen, so it’s fairly toothless. The author seems to argue that the US sending some of its manufacturing to China was a bad thing, but I’d argue that it helped to form the Chinese middle class. Shanghai was a little more than a backwater in the 80s, Hong Kong was the crown jewel of East Asia. Those manufacture jobs made China what it is today.
So far as including the US in belt and road, it could have been great idea, but there were some concerns with that. For one, China continues to steal US businesses IP, they don’t seem to value the concept of IP in their country, especially of the foreign type. Without IP protections, fewer people are encouraged to innovate or share their knowledge with the public. Secondly, the US already has the World Bank and IMF for such initiatives. The money comes with strings attached to incentivize countries towards the path of democracy, probably why China went a different path.
And that’s the rub isn’t it? Democracy scares the hell out of countries with centralized government (and the dictators as well.) Can’t be putting all of that political power in the people’s hands can we? (Oh the irony).
To close, I’ll ask you this. Is any of this really worth fighting WWIII for!? Chinas butthurt, Russias butthurt, the US, also butthurt. But ultimately my take is that we’re all here to give a better life to our citizens. Is WW3 really going to deliver on that?
I wish I had the time to rip apart your fractally wrong wall of text, but 1) it would have no effect on you as you’ve clearly mainlined the Kool-Aid, and 2) not enough people would see it for it to be worth the time & effort.
It’s very sobering seeing our American left wing party compared to European left wing parties, and realizing those parties are considered to be ineffective and moderate.
Our “left wing” party would lean fairly conservative amongst the rest of the developed world.
The trouble with our left is that they are incredibly ineffective and increasingly have no idea how to promote their ideas to the population. We’re lucky to have a fairly strong socialist political heritage to live off of but it’s dwindling quickly and the current left has not been able in the least to gain new political capital.
In the last elections in my country the key issue was considered to be living wages, in light of the extreme inflation as a result of the Ukraine war. This is supposed to be the left’s wheelhouse. The previous center-right government made a huge mess of things, ended their run with a few major scandals right before the election. This should have been slam dunk for the left.
But they made no concrete statements about anything, presented no clear party program, just some generic polite and well-meaning “we should take care of everyone and oh yes racism is bad” They got absolutely hammered by a coalition of center-right and extreme-right.
Wagenknecht, in my eyes, is a very questionable figure, with very questionable views.
This article frames the issue as identity politics vs class-based politics, and while I feel that it is very valid to want to focus on the latter, the former is also important, and she doesn’t eshew it, she just holds views different from what I feel is the lefty ‘mainstream’, if such a thing exists. She has, for example, gone on record against the new German self-determination law, citing the well worn argument that it’d allow ‘men’ to enter ‘female spaces’. She’s also gone on record calling some gender-affirming surgeries ‘mutilation’.
The things she says on migration have already been cited in this thread.
I’m not opposed to the idea of a new left party, but to me, Wagenknecht’s certainly isn’t it.
BSW is openly copying fascist rethoric. Die Linke actually gained support and members after Sarah Wagenknecht and her followers left the party, she was the one most damaging the party’s image with her open contempt for minorities and support for Russia. This article is garbage
Wagenknecht’s BSW doesn’t just get it from what’s now referred to as the German “center” (i.e., the parties of warmongers and anti-working class policies).
It also gets a lot of criticism from the left – especially [Jacobin article] on the immigration issue.
The modern left is never effective. To be fair, it is even questionable if the left was ever effective - besides of course in sending economies down the toilet.
What? Did the left colonize the global south, destroy their economies and slaughter their populations?
The only two countries, the USSR and China, to ever pose a genuine threat to the imperial core have been socialist. The modern capitalist Russia is a disgrace to its Soviet legacy.
As opposed to the right which is extremely adept at sending its own people to the poorhouse in order to slave for the super wealthy. But hey the economy is flying!
Ahaha yes, because Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela and friend that are typically full left are giving their people very good conditions indeed. lol
If you haven’t already, you could give Michael Albert’s Parecon: Life After Capitalism a read. This text lays out what he calls participatory economics, which includes the values and vision of the system as well as a walkthrough of how life would work in such a system.
Nurse Practitioners do diagnosis, especially in Primary Care, just as well as an MD after a couple years of real world practice. The reason those people become NPs instead of MDs is because of the outrageous cost of schooling. We should make being an MD less daunting and make mid levels more respected.
Going from a Senator who is a Republican 40% of the time to one who will be Republican 100% of the time. It would be nice to have at least a Liberal Republic, but all we have is this pay to win Oligarchy enabled by the decision of the Supreme Court to legalize bribery in 2010. Capitalism doesn’t mix with Democracy.
nakedcapitalism.com
Hot