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Pretty funny seeing Hasan slowly learning the core of international politics with this one event
(www.youtube.com)
Still softballs the fuck out of this for Ukraine as if they haven't been a proxy this whole time. Wake up baby boy its time to go to school 
The comments are special as well
Ukraine is pretty much the only 'western' country with a legitimate grievance against Iran, Iran has for years supplied Russia with munitions that they fire at Ukraine, and that is one accusation that Trump and his admin never make against Iran to justify their warmongering.
Ok so bombing kids is ok if your reasoning is different? Logistics chains all start in China so are you going to advocate for nuking China next? Radlibs please read a book
I know so many people who are perfectly willing to accept that the US are the bad guys except when it comes to Ukraine. Somehow history started with Russia entering the ongoing Ukrainian civil war, not with the start of the civil war or the coup in 2014 that caused it or even the coup in 1991 that overthrew the Soviet Union.
We’re all familiar with “Progressive except for Palestine” but that one is at least mostly due to the pressure of powerful groups, “Progressive except for Russia” is much more entrenched in leftist communities and comes from regular people.
Regular conversation in the TrashFuture discord: “Killing children is bad!””Yes!””Killing children is bad when Israel does it!””Yes!””Killing children is bad when Ukraine does it!””Well okay slow down it’s complicated…”
The issue with Ukraine is very little leftist pre-work for the eventual break out of the conflict. We fucked up by misreading that Russia would invade over it and saying that Russia would not.
Compare this with Palestine, where there are literally decades worth of leftists talking about the issue, the ongoing problems, the open air prison conditions, etc etc.
With nothing to point to but a handful of BBC clips covering the nazis there and the immediateness of the BBC flipping the script and acting like that was just a few of them and Ukraine doesn't actually have a problem, the bourgeois media took control of that narrative and set in the minds of the people a clear story that has solidified. Once the story is set and gains traction it's almost impossible to dislodge.
With Palestine on the other hand, years of leftist content and no mistakes about what Israel would do made it very easy for the left to secure the narrative.
If we had years worth of discussion about Ukraine and Donbas before Russia stepped in, with correct analysis and a correct assessment that Russia would step in and proper reasoning for that before it happened, the left could have won that narrative. The left however spent years largely ignoring what was happening there and then acting like Russia would never do what they did. It was a collective fuck up.
I am guilty here as well but so were Russian comrades. I was literally talking to a Russian friend on discord the day it happened as it happened and we were both completely taken off guard.
I don't think anyone thought they were going to do a full scale invasion. And for we know maybe neither did they.
it's certainly been very costly and most of the "nah they wouldn't" was predicated on an unwillingness to pay those costs in materiel and blood.
So was I. We all kinda fucked up.
The only part of the left that didn't fuck up was the one writing about russian imperialism, which contributed to the benefit of the western media narrative taking hold.
The lesson we need to take from it is not to ignore conflicts happening and to make sure we analyse them better from the perspective of what narratives the west will want to push and pre-preparation against those narratives. People must be primed BEFORE the bourgeois media starts to make up their story. If they're not primed, the bourgeois media will win narrative wars.
No that's November Kelly's OTHER podcast
Part of the Nate Bathea extended universe
I’ll keep repeating it: There are very clear analogs in the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts. Ukraine and Israel are Nazi countries backed by the US that love ethnic cleansing. The Donbas republics and Palestine are the small, unrecognized victims of the US backed countries. Russia and Iran are the reluctant opposition who only got involved when the US backed side forced them to, but are nonetheless on the side of good.
If you think Iran is justified in attacking Israel, why would you not think Russia was justified in attacking Ukraine? Is it just ignorance of their ethnic cleansing in the Donbas? Is it ignorance of other Ukrainian provocations? Is it just Russophobia? A lot of the people I’m referring to are publicly fans of the Soviet Union so I wouldn’t think it was the last one but I really don’t know.
The comparison is just not that simple, even if the points you raise are correct. An important complicating feature is that Ukraine is not a Nazi country by its fundamental nature, unlike Israel. There's no non-Nazi version of Israel that could ever exist. Ukraine has a Nazi government that was recently imposed by foreign powers. The Israeli population is a bunch of nazi psychos. The Ukrainian population, until the war, was the most pro-Soviet of any post-Soviet country. It's much easier to paint a picture of Ukraine as the victim given that. Israel is not the victim of anything but its own suicidal ideology, while Ukraine is the victim of a geopolitical game that has hijacked its government repeatedly in living memory in order to stew up nationalist sentiment and put Nazis in power in order to advance imperialism. Edit: another important note, the Ukrainian people are in fact the victims of this conflict in a way the Israeli people could never be.
The other major piece is that Russia took the initiative in its conflict while Iran did not. Iran practiced almost unreasonable patience while Russia acted decisively before it could be on the receiving end of an invasion. To someone who doesn't know the history (and how on earth would the average American?) it appears that Russia was an unprovoked aggressor, and therefore the comparison looks more like Russia = US and Iran = Ukraine. If you actually want to convince anybody, you need to think of these important dynamics.
Not that you're wrong, it is complicated and people are indoctrinated, but It is generally a waste of time trying to educate liberals with low literacy skills and no concept of historical materialism, the moment the media demonstrates that X is bad... most liberals will change their stance as follows. It's more useful to try to organize in an effort to try to change the mainstream narrative or advance literacy skills of people. This is a self-crit btw I've wasted way too much time debating people online when I should have been doing better and I regret not using my time for a cause. So maybe I can share this as a learning experience for others.
I do sometimes notice people talking about conversations they had with others about Russia/Ukraine and being like "how do I get this lib to understand?"
Answer is you don't! The territory is pretty muddy and murky and there a ton of other topics you can use to kore clearly and definitively establish a socialist or anit-imperialist viewpoint. Just shift over to one of those, and everything gets a lot easier. I wouldn't get into it with someone who didn't already understand the basics of where im coming from (learned that lesson before)
If it's a waste of time to try to educate people, then what the hell are we doing?
There's certain topics where the juice isn't worth the squeeze at the current moment. People's opinions on to engrained, if you try and change them immediately they'll just get defensive and close themselves off.
You gotta pick your battles.
Ukrainian nationalism is as fundamentally reactionary at its very core and nature as Israeli nationalism. Luxemburg was 100% right about this and Lenin was wrong. Ukraine as an entity is defined by its opposition to Russia.
Ukraine is not a settler entity. That's a preposterous comparison.
Why shouldn't it be? Ukrainian nationalism formed historically in the OG prisonhouse of nations. And what's the prescription? Crush it? That would only stoke it more.
Idk the last 12 times they tried it was fascism. It's just locked in now, the ruts are worn in and all nationalist projects will follow the banderite path
Ukraine thrived as an autonomous republic within the USSR. As always, the model for real national sovereignty demands socialism, whether in a federation of republics or an independent socialist state. I'm not sure what the alternative path forward besides trusting a capitalist state pursuing its own (legitimate!) security interests to do anything other than dismantle Ukraine to the degree necessary to preserve its own safety.
I think when this awful war is over, it'll be pretty easy to make the case that the USSR was the best situation Ukraine ever had and was the greatest ever flourishing of Ukrainian language and culture, and therefore Ukrainian nationalism should be recast as a socialist project that rejects the west and purges the Nazis. Especially since the goal of the imperialists right now is full-blown colonization of Ukraine as though it were 1900s Africa, the creation of a decolonial socialist nationalism is plausible.
A republic within a socialist union is specifically not a nationalist project, and Ukraine also received massive amounts of exterior subsidization and was gifted huge portions of land that never belonged to them formerly. The USSR chose it for the industrial hub, it’s success had nothing to do with Ukraine as a nation state and instead with the USSR as a union
A lot of people don't know about Ukrainian ethnic cleansing (modern or historic). The ethnic cleansing in the Donbas was always depicted as just being a war against Russian outside agitators. And, of course, it's very hard for any American to lose their anti-Russian racism. Just like in Europe, it's a foundational part of our modern culture.
they don't know about and dismiss or downplay the ethnic cleansing, but i'm a certified analogy hater because it just turns into arguing about the analogy for no value.