freagle

US, UK, France. Italy, Germany, Finland... Who else is emerging fascist over there right now? I have to assume Belgium is not far behind. Spain? Portugal? Switzerland? Netherlands? Can we get a map going?

Whoa!!!!!!!!!!!

This is clearly the best counter to the current imperialist gambit - reshoring. If the imperialists think they need to divest from international production and invest domestically, than making it more profitable to invest internationally plays the bourgeoisie against itself and creates conflict between bourgeois camps. Internal conflict among the international bourgeoisie can only help the cause of communism and solidarity all over the world.

Let me try to answer you directly.

What is the positive outcome of defending an authoritarian regime like Putin's?

Caveat before I answer, you have asked a leading question that makes a few assumptions, mostly phrases in accordance with imperialist rhetoric.

Having said that, the only positive outcome of such actions on social media is the raising of the awareness of others of the task at hand - dismantling imperialism. The more people become aware of the need to dismantle imperialism AND the details of that struggle, the better.

I don't see how that advances socialist goals in any way.

It advances socialist goals by changing the conditions of under which socialism can develop. A world where the US and European powers are in decline, shown to be in decline, and lose the support of their own citizens is a world that has much greater potential for socialist projects to survive than a world where the US bombs any even vaguely socialist projects without any consequences.

I am learning that Zelenskyy and Ukraine are not as good as Western media describes, but I do not see how Putin is better.

Is this a moral framing or a practical one? If moral, then you have a problem with your analysis because assigning morality to a person or a state is a category error and leads to incorrect analysis. If a practical one, it should be pretty clear. Zelenskyy cooperates with the US militarily to extend the USA's lethal forces including nuclear first strike capabilities, and Putin opposed the USA militarily. It can be as simple as that.

I am interested in being part of lemmygrad.ml, but not if it depends authoritarian regimes, especially if they are not working towards socialism/communism.

Why do you want to be part of the community? What draws you to us? Why do you hold an unexamined standard and use it to judge the community you want to belong to? What does that keep you safe from?

In my experience, I started off with your position years ago. I eventually learned that I was repeating unexamined propaganda from my home country of the USA and that my entire framing was arrogant, self-righteous, holier-than-thou, moralistic, and ultimately founded in abject ignorance. Come here to learn when you're ready. It'll change your entire understanding of history and, thereby, the present.

I want to work towards socialist goals, but I don't want to be used as a tool in some authoritarian geopolitical mess.

You already are being used as that tool, based on your rhetoric. You already repeat unexamined propaganda from the West. You are on social media engaging in discourse while remaining deeply ignorant and completely immersed in imperialist propaganda, and you don't realize it.

What I have found is that spending time with communists, even when they hold positions that feel morally uncomfortable, ultimately develops within you the ability to spot propaganda from all sides and engage with it safely, because propaganda relies deeply on ignorance, faulty hueristics, and contradictory language. The project to counter all three is a huge part of communist discourse, and you'll be much safer sitting in discomfort and learning than using your comfort as a guide right now because your comfort is based on how you were raised within the imperialist project, not because you built it yourself through deep historical analysis.

Russia also gives me the impression of being colonialist but I'm not sure if that's accurate.

We don't operate on impressions here, we operate on analysis. The short answer is that Russia has no colonies so it's not colonialist. The long answer is incredibly long. AFAIK no one has written a definitive analysis on the topic yet. There are many books and essays on the topic, but none of them are comprehensive, and that means you and me are gonna have to read a bunch of things, both what other people have written as well as their sources and not just on Russian colonialism but on colonialism, neocolonialism, post-colonial theory, etc.

Don't get me wrong, we operate on vibes a lot here, but we don't go throwing around statements like "This nation-state is X" without serious digging.

Stick around and you'll learn more than you ever thought you could. If you're not ready, don't sweat it. We're not going anywhere. You can always come back and begin the learning process with us some other time.

Not just cages - solitary confinement

What a strange analysis. You think that the determinant of whether or not the USA is a world power is who is elected to a 4-year term? The USA still has 600+ military bases in 80+ countries, still has the world reserve currency, still has the influence over OPEC that requires it to trade oil in USD, still has ever world leader seriously considering their every word and deed through the lens of American hegemony.

What exactly about this election suddenly made America not a world power?

One country, two systems

We need to go back even further than those posts do.

Russia has been invaded over its Western border 3 times in modernity. The first was by Napoleon. The second was by a bunch of Western European nations. The third was by the Third Reich.

Every single invasion was bloody, but the first and third were devastating. Millions of Russians died fighting off Napoleon and millions died fighting off the Third Reich.

And both of those invasions followed the same route crossing into Russia in what today is the border between Russia and Ukraine.

It has been well established for centuries, therefore, that this specific area land is the most vulnerable spot of Russian national self defense.

So that's the first understanding that comes from history that is critical to our understanding of the present. The second is understanding how military campaigns like this work.

How did France invade Russia? What did Napoleon have to do? Well, take a look at a map and you'll see that it's not a short distance. The route goes through many sovereign nations. And we're not talking about just a bunch of soldiers walking to Russia and trying to cross a border. We're talking about a massive army. It requires supplies, which means it requires supply lines. It requires reconnaissance, communications, housing, ammunition, food, defensive positioning and fortifications, etc. This is no small feat. It's a huge undertaking. Napoleon enlisted a number of European countries along the route to support the campaign and historians study the logistics of this invasion very heavily.

How did the Third Reich invaded Russia? First, they made land grabs that were appeased. Then they invaded other countries. In both modes of expansion they built their logistics to support their military campaign of invading Russia.

Understanding the importance of logistics in these invasions gives us the background we need to understand NATO.

NATO is a military that was founded specifically to "counter" Russia. Among other things this includes plans for an invasion, because it has to. But unlike France or Germany, NATO is not a national military, it's transnational, and unlike any other anti-Russian army on the continent in history - it has nukes. NATO emerges just as all the great powers decide to stop warring amongst themselves and instead choose to fight proxy wars in the periphery. So NATO is a transnational nuclear military that forms in peacetime. And what does it do? It expands.

It gains land, money, soldiers, and sovereignty from other European countries as part of its treaty structure. It uses all of that to build a vast logistics network across Europe during peacetime. And it moves that logistics network ever Eastward towards Russia, eventually reaching Ukraine in late 2013 with the first ever joint NATO/Ukraine military exercise.

To Russia, this looks like a slow motion invasion. Which is made worse when we realize that the US worked with the Vatican to spirit away many Third Reich officers under Operation Paperclip, and then hand picked from among the Third Reich officers which ones would lead NATO. Yes. The US staffed NATO leadership with Nazis. Because Nazis were specifically oriented towards the invasion of Russia. It's made worse when we realize NATO conducted Operation Gladio where it established neo-nazi terrorist cells all over Europe as a contingency against Russian invasion. It's made worse when a supposed defensive alliance decides to bomb Yugoslavia for "humanitarian reasons" - the first ever war for humanitarian reasons - which included dropping DU bombs from airplanes into populated areas.

All of this history helps us understand the genuine national security threat that Russia is facing as part of a historical process, not merely a paranoid assessment or set of assumptions. And it helps us understand the rhetoric and logic of escalation since 2014 on both sides.

I encourage you to research the NATO exercises that involved Ukraine. It includes things like simulating and invasion of Kaliningrad and flying B-52 nuclear bombers in Ukrainian airspace.

All of this history fundamentally changes the framing of this particular conflict.

I wonder if this could be a path to Korean unification. If Russia and China both have trade relations with both Korea and occupied Korea, maybe there's a path to peaceful reunification

Well yeah, in that case I would imagine Japan realigning with China, which then encircles Korea. I doubt the DPRK wants to fight a civil war given how much suffering has already befallen the Korean people, it would be very difficult to justify even more suffering. More than likely SK will get pressured to push the last vestiges of the US military out in order to participate fully in regional cooperation, and that's the condition DPRK is looking for to begin pursuing peaceful reunification.

I don't think you know what a nation is. The Korean people are a nation - from the Latin root natus, they all share a common birth. However, there are two states, North Korea and South Korea. Both of them are internationally recognized states, meaning we currently have one nation (Korea) split between two states. The split between these states is entirely a construction of imperialism. The people in DPRK and the people in the occupied South do not constitute different nations nor is the 38th parallel a historical division within and among the Korean people that would constitute a meaningful boundary for their self-determination.

The Americans had no business being there at all nor demanding a partition of a nation of people. They did so as part of maintaining colonial occupation for the purpose of anti-conmunism both against the USSR and also against the emerging PLA in China. The US destroyed everything north of the 38th parallel to punish the portion of the Koreans who decided they would not allow their country to continue to be a colony. The USA bombed the countryside until pilots literally went on bombing runs and came back with full payloads because there were no more targets left to bomb. The USA used so much napalm that Koreans needed to live in caves.

The southern portion of the country (land) that was inhabited by the nation of Korea (people) was turned into a new state (South Korea) by the USA and purged of all people who would oppose them and their ideology. South Korea is ONLY separate because of an international legal fiction perpetrated by the US against the Korean people (the nation of Korea).

The leadership culture of the South was built entirely on subjugation to the US war machine. Leaders survived or failed or died based on their allegiance to the US military occupation. The transition from full occupation to what exists today is one of loosening the leash on a captive one inch at a time to confirm that the punishing dominance has had the desired effect - that effect being complete subjugation to the interests of the dominator.

You think the Korean people want US nukes on submarines in its waters? You think the Korean people want to have half of their homeland completely inaccessible to them? You think the Korean people want half of their people to be completely isolated from them? You think they like having the DMZ as an eternal reminder of the constant threat of readied lethal force directed at their own countrypersons?

One day, there will be one nation-state of Korea, and the division created by the imperialists will dissolve and the trauma of this period can begin to be integrated and healed by the Korean people, but it will not happen until the US loses its violent dominance over the Pacific region.

I feel like that would put the north in a hot conflict with the US pretty fast and China would not signal to the north that they would support.