It’s as if leftists do not actually like Putin or any of the other ghouls on the Russian side, but are instead critical of NATO and willing to consider NATO opponents as rational actors instead of cartoon villains.
Ah, so you want newer examples? Fine. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and now Pakistan in Asia, Libya in Africa, Brasil and Bolivia in South America. All in the last twenty years or so.
I think Iraq is a fair point. The rest are weak sauce as fuck for a variety of reasons that I’ll not trouble myself to enumerate.
That said, I myself was never onboard with the US invasion of Iraq or our long time presence in Afghanistan. They were both bullshit and never would have happened had it been up to me.
The rest are weak sauce as fuck for a variety of reasons …
The invasions may have been half-hearted failures, but they still caused enormous suffering. And the Libyan invasion did not fail if I remember correctly.
That said, I myself was never onboard with the US invasion of Iraq or our long time presence in Afghanistan.
I was explaining why a lot of countries would see NATO as the biggest threat. For this, what matters is what NATO governments do. What the people of NATO countries think or do is, while important from a moral point of view, unlikely to be reflected in foreign policy.
Russia is a country run by cartoon villains. Can you not picture Shoigu sneaking up behind someone with a large round bomb that says ACME on it, only to discover that the fuse has been accidentally lit by a soldiers cigarette?
I think most people of the left or right can see the situation for what it is. However Russia is obviously crafting messages to appeal to those on the extremes. When you see people on the hard left screeching about Ukrainian Nazis or advancing absurd peace deals then they’ve been gotten at. When you see people from the hard right screeching about Ukrainian immigrants or the cost of the war vs America / Europe first then you know they’ve been gotten at.
As for Prigozhin, I think most people, even Russians are glad that he is dead but for different reasons. Seems clear that Putin murdered him for his disloyalty but nobody in Ukraine is going to mourn his loss for the spent force that is Wagner.
most people of the left or right can see the situation for what it is
I couldn’t disagree more. In this thread I have someone telling me Ukraine is currently pushing Russia back despite the front not moving appreciably for nearly a year now. It’s also common to hear Putin described as a mustache-twirling villain who just woke up one day and said “I will conquer the whole of Ukraine in three days,” a take similarly detached from reality.
advancing absurd peace deals then they’ve been gotten at.
You do realize that in order to minimize (working class) casualties some kind of peace deal needs to be signed? And in order to sign a peace deal first there needs to be a ceasefire? The sooner the ceasefire starts, the better.
Are you saying that western politicians torpedoing any kind of truce and/or peace deal is “Russian misinfo”?
spoiler
Russia and Ukraine may have agreed on a tentative deal to end the war in April [2022], according to a recent piece in Foreign Affairs.
“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.
The apparent revelation raises some key questions: Why did Western leaders want to stop Kyiv from signing a seemingly good deal with Moscow? Do they consider the conflict a proxy war with Russia? And, most importantly, what would it take to get back to a deal?
JACQUES BAUD: * In fact, in my book I mention only Ukrainian sources, and Ukrainian sources said explicitly that Boris Johnson and the West basically prevented a peace agreement. So that’s not an invention from some Putin partisan here the West; that’s also what the Ukrainians felt. And you had a third occasion when that happened, that was in August, when you had this meeting between [Turkish president] Erdoğan and Zelenskyy in Lviv. And here again, Erdoğan offered his services to mediate some negotiation with the Russians, and just a few days after that Boris Johnson came unexpectedly in Kiev, and again, in a very famous press conference he said explicitly, ‘No negotiations with the Russians. We have to fight. There is no room for negotiation with the Russians.’
the cost of the war
Should we ignore the significant human and economic costs of the ongoing war and the support for the military-industrial complex? Why? Is this some kind of noble war against Sauron or what?
Yeah no-one is against a peace deal at this point. Just against the one where you let they totalitarian agressor win. Anyone who knows anything about history knows you have to stop those kind of regimes at the earliest possible moment.
Here’s the kicker: Assuming Russia is willing to negotiate a deal, would it honor that deal? It did, after all, guarantee security in exchange for Ukraine relinquishing its nuclear weapons, and it broke that commitment.
Ukraine has very good reason to believe that Russia would only use a deal to stop the war as an opportunity to build its strength for another invasion, later. There’s strong evidence that it’s not the capture of separatist territories that is Putin’s goal, but the denial of Ukrainian as a distinct cultural identity, and to prevent it from aligning culturally with the West (even leaving aside the issue of NATO).
If you think the enemy won’t honor a deal, and won’t stop its aggression long-term—and Ukranian leadership has said that that’s exactly what they believe loudly and often—what’s the incentive to negotiate for a ceasefire?
On your first point: Russia’s argument for why they have gone back on the security exchange for Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament is one of the very same arguments NATO uses when claiming that they never promised russia that they wouldn’t expand NATO east of Germany… The US either lies, and denies making the promise (they did) or they say that they promised the soviet union, which is not the same thing as Russia. Ukraine had a discontinuity in government in 2014: this is something they and the EU acknowledged officially during Ukraine’s application to join the EU… So idk if the government of Ukraine today is a distinct entity from the political formation in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, but that is what Ukraine and the EU have said as much.
Your first point in your second paragraph is something that could be said of Ukraine/NATO just as well. If anything, Ukraine has completely expended its reserve of weapons and now relies on a dwindling supply of old weapons from NATO… it may have just gone through a 3rd army in this last offensive… if anything a peace agreement would give NATO more time to arm Ukraine for another time when they decide to break the peace agreement… This isn’t based on speculation or a belief that Ukrainians are dishonest (unlike most speculation about Russia) because this is exactly what Angela Merkle said Minsk I & II were for: to use a peace deal to give NATO time to arm Ukraine for war… In order for peace to be achieved, both sides are going to have to accept some sort of good faith. If that can’t be done then more people will continue to have their lives thrown away.
I’ve been following the history of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and NATO’s involvement for decades, so I hear what you’re saying. I just think it’s irrelevant to the prospect of peace talks now. Ukraine now has a people and government who do not want to be part Russia. Whatever good reasons Putin feels he had to launch a pre-emptive invasion are irrelevant. Dubya thought he had a good reason to attack Iraq. I called that, and him, evil. I’m applying the same standards to Putin: The other side’s bad behavior does not excuse his response.
Ukraine is now facing invasion by an enemy that’s made it clear by its actions and rhetoric that the goal is cultural extinction of Ukraine, that’s proved itself faithless in past agreements (whatever its internal reasoning), and that shows no sign of willingness to negotiate. They have the support of the West now; who knows about the future? What is their incentive to sue for peace?
(Withdrawing Western support from Ukraine now to force them to the negotiating table has a high likelihood of resulting in a genocide, given the evidence. The thing that might bring Putin to the negotiation table for actual peace at this point is threats backed more directly by Europe and NATO, and that seems like bad news.)
The Soviets weren’t removed from Afghanistan any more than we were – they left because they lacked popular support and kept taking losses (because we were arming terrorists who would go on to do 9/11, but I’m sure that type of blowback won’t come from arming Ukranian neo-Nazis!). The parts of Ukraine Russia is occupying largely wanted to leave Ukraine before the war even started. It’s not the same scenario.
Even your best case scenario is “fight a bloody stalemate until one side runs out of troops,” which is incredibly destructive to Ukraine even if they win, and of course they won’t, because the smaller country that can’t just sit back behind extensive defenses isn’t going to win a bloody stalemate.
Just against the one where you let they totalitarian agressor win. Anyone who knows anything about history knows you have to stop those kind of regimes at the earliest possible moment.
So you are against a peace deal?
You do know that the fabled ukrainian counteroffensive has failed completely? How many more regular ukrainians should die in hopeless counteroffensives?
Btw it seems like you don’t know what totalitarian means. Actual academic historians tend to avoid this term since the seventies.
The Ukrainians are the ones who can decide if and when they want to surrender. They are gaining ground every day and have all the time they want to kill as many invaders as they want. Let’s see how many men, women and money Putin is prepared to waste before he eventually retreats, Afhganistan style
I’m sorry, are you the same person I’ve been talking to? Because it seems like you haven’t actually read anything I’ve written.
The Ukrainians are the ones who can decide if and when they want to surrender.
Western politicians actively sabotaged peace talks. Read previous comments for sources.
They are gaining ground every day
This has no basis in reality. Even overly optimistic western sources have admitted the failure of the spring counteroffensive.
have all the time they want
How can you be this wrong? They have limited manpower and more and more soldiers die every day. Every week spent warring is a huge burden on their economy.
I’m not gonna answer you again since you are completely out of touch with reality. Even prowar western journalists are more careful with their wording.
You do realise that a peace deal / ceasefire which involves Ukraine giving up land, sovereignty or anything else is horseshit being pushed around by useful idiots? And who is feeding the far left with this crap? Russia because of course they are. And you only have to look at prior deals by Russia to see how believable any peace would be do. Or ask Yevgeny Prigozhin how deals work.
You do realise that a peace deal / ceasefire which involves Ukraine giving up land, sovereignty or anything else is horseshit being pushed around by useful idiots?
The counteroffensive failed spectacularly, even western sources admit this.
How many more people you want to send in the meat grinder?
Here’s an idea: call a ceasefire and let the diplomats negotiate, and let’s see what happens. Let’s see what actual ukrainians want after a few months of negotiation. Maybe Boris Johnson should fuck off. At least people are not dying until then. Outlandish, I know.
And who is feeding the far left with this crap?
Now this is qanon level conspiracy theory. I am against war between capitalist nations in general. On one side you have an extremely corrupt oligarchic capitalist country, and on the other side you have an extremely corrupt oligarchic capitalist country.
Since I live in a NATO country I criticise NATO more, since they are the ruling class above me and there’s enough criticism of Putin around here anyway.
As far as deals go, US/Ukraine isn’t trustworthy either. The Minsk agreement was bullshit. What happened to nord stream btw?
Ghouls can be rational actors without not being ghouls.
If a ghoul’s fundamental values involve control, domination and power, doing everything they can in a bid to control a strip of land recently found to have plenty of energy natural resources would be a rational action from their point of view, even if it involves provoking immense suffering upon millions of people. You don’t get to say that US presidents’ actions can only be explained by the hubris of people and systems that want endless growth and control, but Putin’s actions cannot.
If NATO has historically sucked, but countries surrounding the country led by that ghoul rationally feel the need to protect themselves, it’s logical they’ll want to join NATO.
The question here is why you’re far more willing to accept the rationality of Putin than the rationality of his victims when they legitimately ask for NATO’s support to defend themselves, and instead attribute them the category of sheep easily manipulated by NATO rather than accepting their autonomy and sovereignity to make their own decisions.
It seems they also have a tendency to consider NATO as cartoons villains. Also, tankies are not the average lefties, they are at the extreme of the left.
You seem to be under some kind of belief that people should be ashamed of an accurate assessment of NATO, and that it is some sort of mistake to stand by it.
This is weird
“Cartoon villain” here means “a villain who is just intrinsically evil and does evil things as a result.” Contrast this with real people, who generally have material or ideological motivational for the actions they take.
The left views NATO as evil not because it’s full of cartoon villains, but because it is an organization that consciously, due to material and ideological motivations, chooses to immiserate the global south for the benefit of its constituent countries’ ruling classes.
I use it similarly to what is described in this Wikipedia article, in particular the last paragraph of the introduction is what disturbs me the most with some Lemmy users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
The last paragraph quotes fucking Ross Douthat, come on now
Lots of terms need defining. “Illiberal” just means not capitalistic, which yeah that’s all leftists. What is authoritarian? Usually a definition that gets thrown around applies more to capitalist countries vs those listed.
So it’s just a western communist that supports non Western communist projects? 🤔
It’s essentially cope for them not just supporting “nominally” socialist countries because their stance is one of anti-imperialism. Iran should have nukes.
Isn’t Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russo-Georgian war imperialism? I still don’t get them, except being blinded by their hate of USA’s war crimes, which I can understand, but it still seems like an irrational conclusion to become a tankie. They end up supporting or refusing to criticize regimes that generate similar war crimes.
Wait, are you saying Saakashvili has done an imperialism?
Because even western/EU reports have confirmed that Georgia started that war, not Russia.
They end up supporting or refusing to criticize regimes that generate similar war crimes.
“From 24 February 2022, which marked the start of the large-scale armed attack by the Russian Federation, to 30 July 2023, OHCHR recorded 26,015 civilian casualties in the country: 9,369 killed and 16,646 injured”
Almost 10 thousand civilians killed is horrible.
But compare this to Iraq: it’s less than the first month of the war in Iraq, and no US politicians was tried for war crimes. Maybe you should ponder this factoid.
If you live in a NATO country maybe you should demand Blair and Bush to be tried for their war crimes. If you live in the west you should spend more energy of criticizing the ruling class above you.
“supporting or refusing to criticize” This is a made up leftist. Per definition there is no leftist that uncritically supports a right wing capitalist country.
There’s a concept called “critical support”, which most “tankies” are practicing. You have criticism of a side but its the lesser evil so you support it despite your criticism. You won’t hear much of that criticism publicly though because that’s counterproductive.
Like if I want the US to recognize the DPRK as a sovereign state so we can at least begin discussing Korean reunification, why would I bother mentioning my criticism of Juche?
I would avoid saying “lesser evil” for critical support cases, because revolutionary defeatism exists for lesser evil situations where nothing is progressing against the primary contradiction. It’s more a recognition that a shitty thing can be progressive/forward moving relative to its opposition. Russia winning/getting a peace deal with Donbas and Crimea out of Ukraine gets us much closer to ending global imperialism than Ukraine getting it’s land back or worse.
We want the larger capitalist empire to loose to the smaller capitalist empire because that leads to better outcomes. Saying otherwise is telling half truths at best.
The general “tankie” position is that the people of Donbas, who mostly do not want to remain part of Ukraine, will not stop suffering attacks without Russia fighting Ukraine off. Russia does not seem interested in siphoning resources from or subjugating the people of Donbas, as they did not the people of Crimea, who merely became Russian citizens. This is very different from US carpetbombing for oil.
You’re in a thread with half a dozen comments like “wow libs and tankies are celebrating this?”, followed by a bunch of “tankies” explaining (again) that they do not actually like modern Russia.
It’s as if leftists do not actually like Putin or any of the other ghouls on the Russian side, but are instead critical of NATO and willing to consider NATO opponents as rational actors instead of cartoon villains.
I oppose NATO over other Ghoulish countries because it’s a greater threat to the world right now.
How is it a threat to anyone outside of Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America
You can also find similar examples for Africa and Asia.
The Cold war ended more than 30 years ago.
Ah, so you want newer examples? Fine. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and now Pakistan in Asia, Libya in Africa, Brasil and Bolivia in South America. All in the last twenty years or so.
I think Iraq is a fair point. The rest are weak sauce as fuck for a variety of reasons that I’ll not trouble myself to enumerate.
That said, I myself was never onboard with the US invasion of Iraq or our long time presence in Afghanistan. They were both bullshit and never would have happened had it been up to me.
The invasions may have been half-hearted failures, but they still caused enormous suffering. And the Libyan invasion did not fail if I remember correctly.
I was explaining why a lot of countries would see NATO as the biggest threat. For this, what matters is what NATO governments do. What the people of NATO countries think or do is, while important from a moral point of view, unlikely to be reflected in foreign policy.
Russia is a country run by cartoon villains. Can you not picture Shoigu sneaking up behind someone with a large round bomb that says ACME on it, only to discover that the fuse has been accidentally lit by a soldiers cigarette?
I think most people of the left or right can see the situation for what it is. However Russia is obviously crafting messages to appeal to those on the extremes. When you see people on the hard left screeching about Ukrainian Nazis or advancing absurd peace deals then they’ve been gotten at. When you see people from the hard right screeching about Ukrainian immigrants or the cost of the war vs America / Europe first then you know they’ve been gotten at.
As for Prigozhin, I think most people, even Russians are glad that he is dead but for different reasons. Seems clear that Putin murdered him for his disloyalty but nobody in Ukraine is going to mourn his loss for the spent force that is Wagner.
I couldn’t disagree more. In this thread I have someone telling me Ukraine is currently pushing Russia back despite the front not moving appreciably for nearly a year now. It’s also common to hear Putin described as a mustache-twirling villain who just woke up one day and said “I will conquer the whole of Ukraine in three days,” a take similarly detached from reality.
You do realize that in order to minimize (working class) casualties some kind of peace deal needs to be signed? And in order to sign a peace deal first there needs to be a ceasefire? The sooner the ceasefire starts, the better.
Are you saying that western politicians torpedoing any kind of truce and/or peace deal is “Russian misinfo”?
spoiler
Should we ignore the significant human and economic costs of the ongoing war and the support for the military-industrial complex? Why? Is this some kind of noble war against Sauron or what?
Yeah no-one is against a peace deal at this point. Just against the one where you let they totalitarian agressor win. Anyone who knows anything about history knows you have to stop those kind of regimes at the earliest possible moment.
Russia has won, though. They have taken the separatist parts of Ukraine and cannot be removed. So the choices are:
Here’s the kicker: Assuming Russia is willing to negotiate a deal, would it honor that deal? It did, after all, guarantee security in exchange for Ukraine relinquishing its nuclear weapons, and it broke that commitment.
Ukraine has very good reason to believe that Russia would only use a deal to stop the war as an opportunity to build its strength for another invasion, later. There’s strong evidence that it’s not the capture of separatist territories that is Putin’s goal, but the denial of Ukrainian as a distinct cultural identity, and to prevent it from aligning culturally with the West (even leaving aside the issue of NATO).
If you think the enemy won’t honor a deal, and won’t stop its aggression long-term—and Ukranian leadership has said that that’s exactly what they believe loudly and often—what’s the incentive to negotiate for a ceasefire?
On your first point: Russia’s argument for why they have gone back on the security exchange for Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament is one of the very same arguments NATO uses when claiming that they never promised russia that they wouldn’t expand NATO east of Germany… The US either lies, and denies making the promise (they did) or they say that they promised the soviet union, which is not the same thing as Russia. Ukraine had a discontinuity in government in 2014: this is something they and the EU acknowledged officially during Ukraine’s application to join the EU… So idk if the government of Ukraine today is a distinct entity from the political formation in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, but that is what Ukraine and the EU have said as much.
Your first point in your second paragraph is something that could be said of Ukraine/NATO just as well. If anything, Ukraine has completely expended its reserve of weapons and now relies on a dwindling supply of old weapons from NATO… it may have just gone through a 3rd army in this last offensive… if anything a peace agreement would give NATO more time to arm Ukraine for another time when they decide to break the peace agreement… This isn’t based on speculation or a belief that Ukrainians are dishonest (unlike most speculation about Russia) because this is exactly what Angela Merkle said Minsk I & II were for: to use a peace deal to give NATO time to arm Ukraine for war… In order for peace to be achieved, both sides are going to have to accept some sort of good faith. If that can’t be done then more people will continue to have their lives thrown away.
I’ve been following the history of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and NATO’s involvement for decades, so I hear what you’re saying. I just think it’s irrelevant to the prospect of peace talks now. Ukraine now has a people and government who do not want to be part Russia. Whatever good reasons Putin feels he had to launch a pre-emptive invasion are irrelevant. Dubya thought he had a good reason to attack Iraq. I called that, and him, evil. I’m applying the same standards to Putin: The other side’s bad behavior does not excuse his response.
Ukraine is now facing invasion by an enemy that’s made it clear by its actions and rhetoric that the goal is cultural extinction of Ukraine, that’s proved itself faithless in past agreements (whatever its internal reasoning), and that shows no sign of willingness to negotiate. They have the support of the West now; who knows about the future? What is their incentive to sue for peace?
(Withdrawing Western support from Ukraine now to force them to the negotiating table has a high likelihood of resulting in a genocide, given the evidence. The thing that might bring Putin to the negotiation table for actual peace at this point is threats backed more directly by Europe and NATO, and that seems like bad news.)
They could not be removed from Afganistan either. Until they were.
Ukraine can grind up Russian conscripts and free their country inch by inch if they have to.
Meanwhile the rest of the world can help continuing to destroy the Russian economy as best as we can
The Soviets weren’t removed from Afghanistan any more than we were – they left because they lacked popular support and kept taking losses (because we were arming terrorists who would go on to do 9/11, but I’m sure that type of blowback won’t come from arming Ukranian neo-Nazis!). The parts of Ukraine Russia is occupying largely wanted to leave Ukraine before the war even started. It’s not the same scenario.
Even your best case scenario is “fight a bloody stalemate until one side runs out of troops,” which is incredibly destructive to Ukraine even if they win, and of course they won’t, because the smaller country that can’t just sit back behind extensive defenses isn’t going to win a bloody stalemate.
The soviets lost the popular support they had in parts of Afghanistan after 10 years of war. They never ‘ran out of troops’.
The US never ‘ran of troops’ in Vietnam.
Great, call a ceasefire now.
So you are against a peace deal? You do know that the fabled ukrainian counteroffensive has failed completely? How many more regular ukrainians should die in hopeless counteroffensives?
Btw it seems like you don’t know what totalitarian means. Actual academic historians tend to avoid this term since the seventies.
The Ukrainians are the ones who can decide if and when they want to surrender. They are gaining ground every day and have all the time they want to kill as many invaders as they want. Let’s see how many men, women and money Putin is prepared to waste before he eventually retreats, Afhganistan style
I’m sorry, are you the same person I’ve been talking to? Because it seems like you haven’t actually read anything I’ve written.
Western politicians actively sabotaged peace talks. Read previous comments for sources.
This has no basis in reality. Even overly optimistic western sources have admitted the failure of the spring counteroffensive.
How can you be this wrong? They have limited manpower and more and more soldiers die every day. Every week spent warring is a huge burden on their economy.
I’m not gonna answer you again since you are completely out of touch with reality. Even prowar western journalists are more careful with their wording.
Bad argument
You do realise that a peace deal / ceasefire which involves Ukraine giving up land, sovereignty or anything else is horseshit being pushed around by useful idiots? And who is feeding the far left with this crap? Russia because of course they are. And you only have to look at prior deals by Russia to see how believable any peace would be do. Or ask Yevgeny Prigozhin how deals work.
The counteroffensive failed spectacularly, even western sources admit this.
How many more people you want to send in the meat grinder?
Here’s an idea: call a ceasefire and let the diplomats negotiate, and let’s see what happens. Let’s see what actual ukrainians want after a few months of negotiation. Maybe Boris Johnson should fuck off. At least people are not dying until then. Outlandish, I know.
Now this is qanon level conspiracy theory. I am against war between capitalist nations in general. On one side you have an extremely corrupt oligarchic capitalist country, and on the other side you have an extremely corrupt oligarchic capitalist country.
Since I live in a NATO country I criticise NATO more, since they are the ruling class above me and there’s enough criticism of Putin around here anyway.
As far as deals go, US/Ukraine isn’t trustworthy either. The Minsk agreement was bullshit. What happened to nord stream btw?
Ghouls can be rational actors without not being ghouls.
If a ghoul’s fundamental values involve control, domination and power, doing everything they can in a bid to control a strip of land recently found to have plenty of energy natural resources would be a rational action from their point of view, even if it involves provoking immense suffering upon millions of people. You don’t get to say that US presidents’ actions can only be explained by the hubris of people and systems that want endless growth and control, but Putin’s actions cannot.
If NATO has historically sucked, but countries surrounding the country led by that ghoul rationally feel the need to protect themselves, it’s logical they’ll want to join NATO.
The question here is why you’re far more willing to accept the rationality of Putin than the rationality of his victims when they legitimately ask for NATO’s support to defend themselves, and instead attribute them the category of sheep easily manipulated by NATO rather than accepting their autonomy and sovereignity to make their own decisions.
It seems they also have a tendency to consider NATO as cartoons villains. Also, tankies are not the average lefties, they are at the extreme of the left.
If NATO did not want to be considered cartoon villains, they shouldn’t be so cartoonishly evil.
Thank you for confirming.
You seem to be under some kind of belief that people should be ashamed of an accurate assessment of NATO, and that it is some sort of mistake to stand by it. This is weird
NATO does more good than ruZZia for the world
What good does it do? When was the last time they did good? The current Russian state and NATO can both burn as far as I’m concerned.
Wait so are tankies anti-NATO? All leftists are anti-NATO lmao
Tankies are more specifically pro-dictatorship and pro-oligarchy so long as the countries claim to be Communist.
“Cartoon villain” here means “a villain who is just intrinsically evil and does evil things as a result.” Contrast this with real people, who generally have material or ideological motivational for the actions they take.
The left views NATO as evil not because it’s full of cartoon villains, but because it is an organization that consciously, due to material and ideological motivations, chooses to immiserate the global south for the benefit of its constituent countries’ ruling classes.
Define tankie
I use it similarly to what is described in this Wikipedia article, in particular the last paragraph of the introduction is what disturbs me the most with some Lemmy users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
The last paragraph quotes fucking Ross Douthat, come on now
Lots of terms need defining. “Illiberal” just means not capitalistic, which yeah that’s all leftists. What is authoritarian? Usually a definition that gets thrown around applies more to capitalist countries vs those listed.
So it’s just a western communist that supports non Western communist projects? 🤔
It’s essentially cope for them not just supporting “nominally” socialist countries because their stance is one of anti-imperialism. Iran should have nukes.
Isn’t Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russo-Georgian war imperialism? I still don’t get them, except being blinded by their hate of USA’s war crimes, which I can understand, but it still seems like an irrational conclusion to become a tankie. They end up supporting or refusing to criticize regimes that generate similar war crimes.
Wait, are you saying Saakashvili has done an imperialism? Because even western/EU reports have confirmed that Georgia started that war, not Russia.
“From 24 February 2022, which marked the start of the large-scale armed attack by the Russian Federation, to 30 July 2023, OHCHR recorded 26,015 civilian casualties in the country: 9,369 killed and 16,646 injured”
Almost 10 thousand civilians killed is horrible. But compare this to Iraq: it’s less than the first month of the war in Iraq, and no US politicians was tried for war crimes. Maybe you should ponder this factoid.
If you live in a NATO country maybe you should demand Blair and Bush to be tried for their war crimes. If you live in the west you should spend more energy of criticizing the ruling class above you.
“supporting or refusing to criticize” This is a made up leftist. Per definition there is no leftist that uncritically supports a right wing capitalist country.
There’s a concept called “critical support”, which most “tankies” are practicing. You have criticism of a side but its the lesser evil so you support it despite your criticism. You won’t hear much of that criticism publicly though because that’s counterproductive.
Like if I want the US to recognize the DPRK as a sovereign state so we can at least begin discussing Korean reunification, why would I bother mentioning my criticism of Juche?
I would avoid saying “lesser evil” for critical support cases, because revolutionary defeatism exists for lesser evil situations where nothing is progressing against the primary contradiction. It’s more a recognition that a shitty thing can be progressive/forward moving relative to its opposition. Russia winning/getting a peace deal with Donbas and Crimea out of Ukraine gets us much closer to ending global imperialism than Ukraine getting it’s land back or worse.
We want the larger capitalist empire to loose to the smaller capitalist empire because that leads to better outcomes. Saying otherwise is telling half truths at best.
The general “tankie” position is that the people of Donbas, who mostly do not want to remain part of Ukraine, will not stop suffering attacks without Russia fighting Ukraine off. Russia does not seem interested in siphoning resources from or subjugating the people of Donbas, as they did not the people of Crimea, who merely became Russian citizens. This is very different from US carpetbombing for oil.
US bombing is bad, but Russian bombing is ok? Why do you not apply the same critical spirit to both the USA war crimes and the Russian war crimes?
Ukraine was bombing the Donbas since 2014. Is Ukrainian bombing okay?
Yeah it’s just like they’re Sudeten-Russians, happy to become real Russians once again
I don’t think that the Germans had the popular support of Sudetenland in their annexation.
You’re in a thread with half a dozen comments like “wow libs and tankies are celebrating this?”, followed by a bunch of “tankies” explaining (again) that they do not actually like modern Russia.