Hey, comrades. I am new to lemmygrad and find it odd that there are so many marxist-leninist defending a war of agression started by an oligarch, possibly the richest man in the world. I get that you want to say that NATO is a source of evil on the global stage, but in this particular case you are defending Putin, a warlord, who has invaded many of his neighbouring countries and has stated plans to continue his campaign for megalomanial reasons.

No war but class war. Enabling an autocrat fascist oligarch does not do anything to counter the bad stuff done by NATO and the community should take a firm stand against the use of war for the sake of satisfying the dreams of a tyrant.

This is not a troll post or anything to that extent. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, but I think it needed to be said.

  • Mintopia System@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I agree that there is a great deal of magical thinking and rationalization at play. This war has been a catastrophe all-around. It has led to countless civilian deaths, the revitalization/expansion of NATO and a significant depletion of the forces and materiel of the Russian Federation.

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Literally every one of your premises is false. It is not a “war of aggression” and while we obviously do not support Putin, for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that he is an anti-communist, a liberal and he encourages reactionary social tendencies, he is also none of the things you described him as.

    It is hard to believe that this is not a troll post when in the span of a few sentences you managed to regurgitate such a high number of western imperialist propaganda talking points and repeated a half dozen of the silly names they call Putin to demonize him: “oligarch”, “richest man in the world”, “warlord”, “megalomanial” [sic], “autocrat fascist” and “tyrant”. But i’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain.

    Let’s start from the top: firstly, there are oligarchs in Russia with close ties to the government but Putin himself is not an oligarch. You may want to look up the definition of the term if you are confused. In Russia the oligarchs are primarily those opportunistic capitalists who after the fall of the USSR managed to amass great wealth and economic-political power by gaining ownership over a significant portion of the old state industries. Putin was not among them. Putin was a bureaucrat first and then a career politician.

    Secondly, there is not a single shred of evidence for the liberal media concocted myth that he is “the richest man in the world”. These allegations have never been substantiated by anything factual. They are based solely on the argument that “well, the Russian state owns X property and Putin controls the state, therefore Putin owns all of X”. It is nonsense.

    Further, calling him a “warlord” is just silly, i shouldn’t even have to explain why. He does not lead a military government, he is an elected president and head of state of a civilian government. Whether or not his election was or was not legitimately democratic (by whichever measure we want to judge that) is beside the point. Like all elections in bourgeois democracies Russian elections underrepresent the working class and favor the interests of the bourgeoisie. But he is no less legitimate than any western elected official,

    In fact it could be argued he has more legitimacy than most of his western counterparts as even western conducted polls that are biased against him show that his popularity is genuinely quite high. As communists we understand that this does not change the class character of his bourgeois government but it shows that many people in Russia at least in part associate the recovery that Russia has experienced since the disastrous 1990s with Putin’s governance.

    As for “autocrat” that depends on whether you consider the executive powers of a president inherently autocratic. That would make the US or French presidents also autocrats. However this is a meaningless accusation anyway and unbecoming of a socialist because if Putin is an autocrat then so was and is every leader of any socialist state. Liberals accuse any leader they dislike of being an “autocrat”.

    So let’s simplify the discussion and look at the literal definition of “autocrat” as meaning a sole ruler with absolute power. Doing even cursory investigation of how the Russian government works we find it simply does not apply. Putin does not have unchecked autocratic power, he is checked by the Russian parliament and a number of various other governing bodies of the Russian Federation. The decision making is very much collaborative and involves a whole strata of political elites. The problem is that as in all bourgeois democracies these governing bodies and elites represent and advance the interests of the bourgeoisie first and foremost.

    As for whether or not he is a fascist this opens up a whole discussion about what fascism actually is. Is social democracy just social fascism? Many leftists would also argue that the US is and has been fascist since its inception, if not towards everyone to begin with then at least toward black and indigenous people. Where even is the difference between fascism and the regular dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that we have in every capitalist country?

    However if we assume for the sake of this discussion that the western liberal bourgeois democracies are not what we mean when we say fascist then neither is Russia. Russia is not in any qualitative or quantitative way more authoritarian or reactionary than the US, and in many ways it is less so. And no, fascism is not simply when people have reactionary tendencies. Otherwise most of the world would be full of fascists.

    Of course we can never know what someone truly believes but at least overtly Putin himself does not seem to be ideologically fascist. He can be best described as a moderate nationalist liberal. There are people and groups in Russia with legitimately fascist ideology and the centrist Putin government sometimes flirts with them but on the whole it seems to want to keep them marginalized. Russia is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, if a real fascist, ultra-nationalist political movement was to gain traction Russia would almost certainly devolve into internal chaos. It is not in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie to allow that.

    And as of late fascist ideology has become even more unpopular in Russia as they are at war with an actually fascist state. A state that openly worships Nazi collaborators as its national heroes, which has adopted fascist slogans and a racist, genocidal, fascist ideology, and whose soldiers are covered in Nazi insignia. A large number of Russian neonazis have gone over to the side of Ukraine and are now fighting against Russia.

    Finally, calling Putin a “tyrant” is just a repeat of the accusation of being an autocrat which is simply not factual. All of these cliche expressions you have used that are lifted straight out of western media’s anti-Russian propaganda are essentially rehashings of the old racist “oriental despotism” trope. As communists must understand our class enemies and to understand what they are and what they are not. And Putin is many things we dislike and oppose but he is not the caricature that the West paints him as.

    Enough about Putin, on to the war itself. The claim that it was started solely by Putin for “megalomanial” reasons is simply infantile. Not only is it embarrassing and unserious to engage in this sort of individualizing, psycho-pathologizing of complex geopolitical conflicts, it is evidence of either intent of deception or catastrophic ignorance. Conflicts between nations do not start because one person felt like starting a war. They are the result of complex processes and contradictions, often having built up for a long time.

    This conflict did not start in 2022, it started at least as far back as 2014. I won’t repeat the history, you can read about it elsewhere, but suffice to say there was already a conflict happening way before Russia intervened. And Russia intervened because it was left no other choice. Not only was the expansion of NATO into the now fascist state of Ukraine becoming an existential threat, but the ethnically Russian Donbass region of Ukraine, which in 2014 rebelled against the US orchestrated fascist coup d’etat, had come under serious threat of being attacked and overrun by the spring of 2022. No Russian government could have stood by and allowed this.

    Putin himself in fact was among the most reticent in Russia about taking direct military action to resolve the problem. For many years forces in Russia that sympathized with the Donbass had been pushing the Russian government to do more, to intervene directly. Multiple different diplomatic approaches were tried, none of which led anywhere, not least of all because the West, as has now been admitted, never had any intentions of negotiating in good faith and did everything it could to push Russia toward war in hopes that this would result in the fall of the Putin government and the renewed subjugation of Russia to western imperialism.

    For all intents and purposes this is an act of self-defense by Russia, on behalf of itself and on behalf of the Russians in the Donbass. By the precedent that NATO itself set during the Yugoslav wars Russia recognized the secession of the Donbass republics and invoked the UN article on collective self-defense, making their intervention legal by international law and defensive.

    We support Russia’s anti-fascist intervention not only on moral and legal grounds but more importantly because it is a major blow against US imperialism itself, and we recognize it as a fact that US imperialist hegmony is the biggest obstacle to socialism and socialist states everywhere. A defeat for NATO in this proxy war is a victory for the global proletariat. Anti-imperialist, anti-fascist struggle IS class war. Like the first cold war, this new cold war of the US against Russia and China represents a global dimension of the class war.

  • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I think c/leftistinfighting would’ve been a better place for this.

    I do admit that the whole Ukraine discourse gets rather tiring as somebody who should not by any means be affected by it (but is because of shitty global economy). I am generally not concerned about gringos dying due to dumb gringo shit, so all that matters to me is whether the capitalist class will become weaker from this war, which doesn’t seem to be the case to me (please correct me though).

    I wish we talked more about other conflicts and struggles going on around the world rather than hyperfocusing on the one the eurolibs are so obsessed with. This war has been a huge distraction for politics worldwide, which is why any electoral party and corporation can just shore up support by putting a blue-yellow somewhere in their branding.

    As a very mild example, the WGA writers, y’know the guys who write most of our USA propaganda movies, have been on strike for 40 days now and are being boycotted by the same corporate news that can’t shut up about Disney. Additionally Sinn Féin on NI just became the largest NI party, which was also boycotted in favour of Charles 3 and how hot he is. Recently Brazil’s supposed socialist president adopted the anti-Cuban trend and reinstated the “Mais Médicos” program but focusing instead on paying fat salaries to Brazilian physicians, rather than providing actual care to rural areas. Those are not huge things by any means, but are way closer to home to those who speak Anglo than yet another imperial war in Eastern Europe. Yeah killing Nazis is fun, but there’s other fun stuff out there.

    • WageSlave@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      I wholeheartedly agree that the news of the war in Ukraine is taking the attention away from a lot of important issues. However, denying the fault of Putin invading Ukraine does not help anyone anywhere. If anything, the war in Ukraine should be a reminder for the west of the suffering caused by conflict and the need for peaceful resolutions, cooperation and solidarity.

      I do not think the capitalist class will get weaker from this, most definitely not the arms manufacturers. Pretending the war is good and just however is great for the capitalist overlords in Russia.

      • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Oh, I sure don’t deny (or affirm for that matter) the fault of Putin in it. If I were to go full conspiracy theorist, I’d say that the capitalist classes of Russia and NATO are actually working in tandem to draw out and prolong this war, if not the governmental administration of Russia/NATO/Ukraine. Neither Biden, Zelensky or Putin are gonna die from this war, no matter how much they like to cosplay in camo. I think a lot of the users here are reacting at how extreme and reactionary the narrative over this war has been in liberal circles. The overall NATO fanclub has been blindly dreaming about a prospect of an unlikely massive Ukranian victory, which is a really good way to sell arms and entrench foreign capital in Ukraine.

        If I were to care at all about this war, it would be from the perspective of using all this training, equipment and personnel towards an actual communist front in the war (correct me if there actually is one). Or if we were to take the centrist route, the third world could just collectively close its ports for resources used in the war, like steel, or just food, and let the gringos starve until they sort it out. Less people will die that way. None of the solutions to this war proposed by liberals, like increasing military funding and donating tanks, do anything but increase the human death toll of the war.

        I may be an odd duck here on this forum as I don’t really care much about whether Russia wins or loses (and definitely am not holding out for a Soviet revival coming from East Europe), and am somewhat amenable to the ceasefire proposals from socdems all over, but those will just get shouted down as “pro-Russia” whenever they pop up. Putin is the least of our problems down south, and we should be wary of getting baited into the European’s wars just because white people died on it.

  • Raphael@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    It’s a simple 1-2-3 process.

    • I hate nazis more than anything, I’ll bash Ukraine but I won’t defend Putler.
    • However, should Russia fall, the United States would be even more powerful.
    • I hate the US more than I hate Putin and for this reason I’m rooting for Russia even though I wish Putler died.

    And Russia needs to stay alive and relevant, someone over there will eventually revive the Soviet Union.

    • WageSlave@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      1 year ago
      • Do you really think that the millions of displaced and I do not dare guess how many killed were all nazis? The reason socialists in general oppose war is that it is a tool for the bourgeoisie to continue and extend their oppression of the masses. How many innocents need be sacrificed for one nazi in your opininion? I think zero.

      • Russia is in decline and has been since the fall of the Soviet Union. The power of the US on the global stage is mainly checked by China, and if anything there are other developing countries in far better positions to challenge US hegemony than Russia. Root for someone else worth rooting for.

      • Countries fighting for global hegemony will always be at the expense of the working class and even more so for those in the smaller countries in their spheres of influence. If you think there is something to be gained from this I think you should reconsider.

      I do not think the Soviet Union will be revived and surely not by Putin winning his wars. Creation is done through peace not conquest. Socialism is done by and for the many, not the few.

      • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Do you really think that the millions of displaced and I do not dare guess how many killed were all nazis?

        When one nazi sits at a table with nine others, and they don’t either get up or stomp that motherfucker out, then the table has ten nazis. Simple as.

        • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          I’m no Ukraine/NATO supporter by any means, but I wouldn’t completely fault random civilians for the rise of Nazis in Ukraine. Even actual Nazi Germany had a bunch of non-nazi people in it (who either fled or were promptly imprisoned/killed, but you get my point). To use your analogy, it’s more like the Nazis are in the city, own the government and are a big part of the military and are pervasive in society, rather than physically at every table and not every person will have the opportunity or capability to stomp them out. I sure wouldn’t enjoy getting killed by enemies of my government over here, even though I would fully support it ending. Of course, I don’t think we should hold this same leniency towards the actual military personnel.