I feel like these takes are getting more unhinged with each passing month.
sending the Russians back to Russia
EXCEPT THESE PEOPLE ARE LITERALLY UKRAINIAN! Like that's the whole fundamental problem driving this conflict (well, really it's NATO and this is just the tool being used, but anyway) - the Ukrainian fascists want to supress and eventually ethnically cleanse the Russian-speaking population of their country, and those people, big surprise, didn't want to fucking die and fought back. That's the crux of the problem, and indeed, it's not solvable until either the fascists achieve their goal (whether by death or deportation), or they're all killed, or at the very least weakened to the point where they can no longer take military action. "Sending the Russians back to Russia" is just... literally doing what the fascists want.
sending the Russians back to Russia
so you agree the people of the Dombass are Russian and therefore it isn't a Ukrainian territory
As a dirty zoomer yung'un, I keep hearing about people talk about what a "cultural shift" it was after 9/11 when everyone suddenly turned into turbo jingos. Is the Ukraine invasion sort of what this was like? Because now I'm watching white liberals absolutely froth at the mouth at the thought of dead civilians in a way I would have thought unthinkable 2 years ago
Sort of, except 9/11 was even worse. There was extreme anti-arab racism and Islamophobia. If you were arab you were a terrorist. It was all over the media. There were calls to ban burkas and Islam in schools and I recall hearing stories on the new of people going ip to Muslim women and ripping their face covers off.
Have you seen that episode of South Park with Osama Bin Ladin?
If you were arab you were a terrorist.
And if you had skin darker than pasty-white, you were an arab.
Those were dark times. The incompetent clown show running the USA today pales in comparison to the pure evil of the PNAC crowd. They were dangerously competent.
Socially yes, but 9/11 had much more institutional movement.
The patriot act was passed to legalize and publicize the spying they'd been doing
FISA courts, black sites, and NSA were made public knowledge
Airlines went from no security (my grade-school teacher brought a sword back on a plane) to banning non-ticket holders from going up to the gate and metal detectors to making you take off your shoes to banning liquids.
The tightening control on children since the 80s also kicked up a notch; cameras, metal detectors, school cops, students not being allowed to leave school during the day all became more prevalent.
There was a big shift in movies and country music, portraying a soldier or a cop in negative light used to be acceptable in fiction.
It was so comprehensive and massive it's almost difficult to describe how all encompassing everything changing was...another point, during 'the surge' in 2004-ish, they started playing the anthem before every sporting event; iirc, that only used to happen sporadically beforehand (the department of defense paid a bunch of professional leagues to start doing it 'to help recruitment')
I was pretty young still but basically, yeah. I remember coming home to my parents crying and being like... you didn't even know those people and strangers die all the time? It was very confusing. In my young mind, that's just what the news was - a channel where you heard about which strangers dying. I didn't get what made these strangers any different than the ones who died in fires or of starvation or from cancer, and I heard about those people on the news all the time.
And then what feels like the very next day, all of my little class friends were singing jokey songs about killing Osama Bin Laden in the cafeteria. Their liberal parents had flipped the script overnight and pretty much all of them followed.
But after a few years, the anti-war movement started to gain more steam. There were more dissenting voices back then in general, too. I think part of that has to do with George W Bush being the president... Imagine what liberals would say if Trump were still in office running this war and you'd probably have a pretty accurate depiction of liberals post-9/11. They hated the man in charge but ultimately the war itself could have been justified if it wasn't for the guy perpetrating it. This became super evident when Obama was in office.
And then there's the fact that Americans aren't directly directly involved in this conflict. The narrative that this was an unprovoked war of expansion from Russia is a lot easier to sell when you don't have a bunch of shellshocked veterans from the conflict lining the street corners of every major city.
And lastly, I think the post-Trump media landscape combined with two years of pandemic-fueled escapist fantasy has just left people a little disconnected from reality. It's one big Marvel movie and Ukraine is just the current storyline. Biden won, fascism is over, hoorah, now let's get back to the grill. It's ideological booze - a way for people to numb their pain as a collective without actually having to examine the problems that drove them to the drink in the first place. You never have to feel bad if you never sober up.
I was pretty young still but basically, yeah. I remember coming home to my parents crying and being like... you didn't even know those people and strangers die all the time?
I can understand being in shock because the significant destruction and spreading of carcinogens in a population center in a country that hadn't suffered a notable attack since Pearl Harbor (I know there were some smaller terrorist attacks) can make you abruptly feel extremely unsafe. I do think the way people mourn it is a little strange because an outsized amount of the victims would have been finance ghouls (it was the "World Trade Center!"), though there were worthwhile people in the building and especially who died trying to help.
Oh definitely, but as a kid I didn't understand any of that. It just felt like some arbitrary new set of social rules had gone into effect and only the adults got the memo. All of the information we got from our schoolyard peers was gossip passed down from the most vocal and reactionary parents, with maybe a tiny bit of pushback from the early internet dorks and the kids whose parents obviously had organic gardens.
Every lib i've spoken to about Ukraine genuinely believes there were no Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea before the war and all the Russian civilians started occupying these regions after the Russians invaded.
deporting an Australian to England
That's far too cruel
The takes start with the premise "i support ukraine" and this one overriding thought drives them to make justifications for literally anything and everything.
They will justify genocide to remain supporters of ukraine. That is how far gone they are.
I think the core problem is nationalism. American nationalism has been transposed into Ukrainian nationalism. The people are irrelevant, the state religion is what matters.
American liberals were never this nationalistic. Ever.
I think Trump and his triumphant patriotism made them burn with envy. The chuds were having so much fun! It looked like a laugh riot. So they grabbed the next military adventure by the US government and made it theirs. Now they get to wave the flag and cheer while the chuds are angry and saying "No War!"
So much of liberalism can be defined by "find out what the right is doing and oppose it." I can see why it's popular. You don't have to lift a finger and you get to have a morally correct position on everything.
How do we fix that?
Obviously the previous anti-nationalism that they had was not real. How do we make nationalism uncool? It should be embarrassing but I see liberals saying deeply nationalistic things all the time without a hint of self awareness about it.
It's all fun & games until one runs into Palestinian nationalism, Bolivian nationalism, Venezuelan nationalism, South African nationalism...etc, etc, etc.
I do not believe that opposing bourgeoise-nationalism does anything to harm proletarian-nationalism. They are easily distinguished, and when people don't intuitively see that they're different things they are easily explained. Opposing nationalism in the imperial core will always be about bourgeoise-nationalism because there is no proletarian-nationalism within it.
So much of liberalism can be defined by "find out what the right is doing and do 90% of the same thing while pretending that's opposition.
didnt this war start partially because ukrainians were already doing paramilitary harassment organizations against russian speaking ukrainians?
this shit is the present, not the future...
Take this in good faith, as a person who is attempting to make a marxist analysis of anti-imperalism. What sort of analysis distinguishes this claim from settler colonies? Is it about what sort of reason/goals/sorts of actions there were which resulted in Russians being a majority in Crimea/Donbas? Your justification here can be applied to both, and justify support of Israelis, as the most common current example
It should be noted that there was more to the debate between Lenin and Luxembourg in terms of Marxist theory itself, though I don't quite understand what the disagreement was.
did Russian speakers displace the locals? I'm not that familiar with this history - it's a genuine question. if they've been there awhile, it's kind of obvious how this differs from settler-colonialism - before the advent of nation states, it was pretty common for regions bordering a major power to speak the language of that power. people used to be a lot more free to move around and borders were largely theoretical.
And modern languages only standardized fairly recently, like within the last 100-200 years. I think this is especially true with the USSR, which did a lot of language standardization in the 1920s so you could do widespread education.
No, the territory was in the hands of several nomadic tribes and then the Tatar Khanate of Krim, although there was a small slavic/greek/italian presence for a long time. After Muscovy conquered large parts of Ukraine from Lithuania (who claimed it as the new Kievan Rus) and later Poland, a process under Tsarina Elizabeth I saw the joint settlement by Russians, Ukrainians and several other European ethnic groups (germans, french, serbians) of the underpopulated lands back then known as the Wild Fields. The identity of modern Ukraine was not a unified project but a regional identity similar to Novgorod or Pskov. Ukrainian nationalism began when Poland and later Austria forced the orthodox population of western Ukraine to reconnect with the papacy and bind them to the state, the population was however still pro-russian before WWI.
Real question: Isn't "ethnic cleansing by mass deportation" a form of genocide?
Yes.
But not when the US government's favored groups do it. Ukraine, Israel, whoever is fighting the Syrian government.
Real question: Isn't "ethnic cleansing by mass deportation" a form of genocide?
Only if you're a Russian government official trying to find safe housing outside of a war zone for orphans.
At this point it's best just to be clear about what's actually happening and explain why it's bad. "Genocide" is thrown around for everything.
If it is enforced with violence, including killing parts of the population that resist deportation, then certainly.
Yes but don't look up Chagos Island, nothing happened there!!
Every single week on this website I learn about some new atrocity committed by a Western nation that has just been hidden away in the back of a closet, never spoken of before. Every fucking week.
Ethnic cleansing is its own category of crime against humanity. There is no legal hierarchy for crimes against humanity. As far as international law is concerned, ethnic cleansing is just as bad as genocide.
Is it the case that Ukrainians are returning to find their homes occupied by strangers? or is this user just imagining that Russia is 100% indistinguishable from Nazi Germany?
Seems like it's liberal Ukraine Flag Emoji delusion.
I work with refugee charities, follow this stuff reasonably closesly, and have never seen anything on this except vague unattributed accusations of this from UK/US twitter libs. I'm sure there might be individual cases of people made homeless by the war squatting etc, but the UNHCR published the results of a study and survey on this month on the intentions of and challenges facing Ukrainian refugees to return home. There's no mention of people's homes being occupied or given to other people. In fact, more than 50% of refugees have returned to their homes for short periods to either see family who didn't leave, get or update important documents, retrieve sentimental items etc.
I think this is unconsciously misplacing how Israeli settlers will literally kick out palestinians and then squat their houses, and identifying that as Ukraine/Russia
new type of guy: tells you to read settlers for not supporting the Ukraine war
I feel like these takes are getting more unhinged with each passing month.
Maybe the medium Unhinged ones have realised (at least to some degree) that they are on the wrong path .. therefore they shut up , leaving only the "True belivers" Maximum Unhinged ones left.
Fascism but woke is going to be evil just cause it's fascism but it's also going to make me roll my fucking eyes
Over a hundred years ago the French colonial empire in the Middle East and Africa explicitly invoked feminism and the need the emancipate women from those savages as a justification for their colonialism.
And the British / Australian genocides of indigenous Australians were the paternalistic and caring “white mans burden”.
“Woke fascism” isn’t even a new thing.
White supremacism for the right, cultural supremacism for the left. If you don’t accept that our race is superior, then you might be willing to accept that our values are superior giving us a right to rule.
I love deporting people with a butchered workforce, a birthrate of 1.0, and an emigration rate of a million people per year. Ukraine is literally depopulating worse than Lithuania, in 20 years russian will have to just walk in.
How about Ukraine gets it's old borders back but Sevastopol or Donetsk becomes the capital and gets to have a riot which can coup the government whenever they feel like it? That way nobody gets to throw a hissy fit about borders, and the right to not be genocided of the people in Novorossiya has some vague chance of protection.
How dare he blatantly copy my post-revolution de-crackerization plan?!
