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I find it so incredibly funny that the graph is basically “Yeah all opinions different from mine are pure evil, while mine is well-learned and righteous as always.”
Not even an attempt at nuance.
Also, my opinion is identical to the Russian propaganda.
anti-US = understands the core of international geopolitics. got it 🙄
Dude is almost directly quoting Russian state media and doesn’t even realize he is just parroting a narrative*.
This is why you don’t listen to state media, kids. If you hear something on repeat, over and over, you eventually begin to believe those words are true, without realizing it. Confirmation bias quickly kills any remainder of independent thought.
It’s a nasty process. If you have ever seen someone have their rational thought destroyed by MAGA, it’s the same thing. Rational discussions are pointless: They always degrade into pre-canned political talking points, whataboutisms and blaming others.
* I have often wondered if he parrots misleading narratives with purpose. ml is a perfect recruiting space for trolls and does function well enough to amplify fake or misleading news, after all.
He could easily be linked to one of the many Russian internet influence campaigns.
Yep. Could be parroting Russian state narrative because he’s getting paid by the Russian state to do so.
You are giving too much credit here. It reads to me more like someone having fallen for key points of Russian propaganda but not fully yet to the complete package. Especially regarding Maidan. This was a sustained mass movement, against the risk of being hurt or even killed. We ard talking about actual supporters in the millions. Large movements like this will attract a multitude of groups, also extreme ones just ad well as false flag contribters by the regime struggling for survival. Calling the entire movement far right is so far detached from reality it is ludicrous. Did the US support it? Likely. Did they manufacture that revolution? Ridiculous and beyond anything the CIA could accomplish at this scale.
Just compare it to the Russian “uprisings” in the Donbas etc. Russia had to send its own men dressing up as Ukrainians and never managed anything resembling even remotely an actual public movement. That’s how manufactured uprisings look like. They only got supportive “protests” in larger sizes after taking over complete power and turning the region into a stalinist style puppet state, with torture, persecution etc.
when you’re in the cult - you are in the cult
ain’t no other way
oddly enough this person had loads of good will with the creation of lemmy to gently push socialism and commieness through the fediverse
the radicalisation is too addictive i guess
I’m not sure if it’s just a Dessalines thing or a Marxist-Leninist thing but communists (tankies specifically) tend have auth-leaning tendencies (which they will defend to the death). A lot of their views seem reactionary to just be anti-west in general. Let’s support Russia because it’s “against the west”!.
Though they are for state power anyway so this should be a natural consequence.
The truth is a lot more nuanced than this, though. Elements of what he says have a decent amount of supporting evidence, namely:
- that US officials and diplomats actively supported the uprising in 2014
- NATO expansion continued despite warnings that Russia would perceive it as a direct threat
- The US and NATO have arguably perpetuated the war in Ukraine because it creates profits for the military-industrial complex, rather than actively trying to bring about peace.
However, all this is not to say that Russia was therefore justified in its illegal invasion of Ukraine, of course. And the extent which you can claim that the 2014 uprising was a CIA coup, or that ethnic Russians in the Donbass were being persecuted by far-rigth Ukrainian ultranationalists is definitely debatable.
The problem is that the Russia-Ukraine tends to polarize people into one of two camps, both of which paint their preferred side as the forces of good fighting against the forces of evil.
Sources:
https://jacobin.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia-nato-crimea
https://www.salon.com/2023/07/08/they-lied-about-afghanistan-they-lied-about-iraq-now-theyre-lying-about-ukraine/
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/cia-ukraine-russia/Yeah I’m going to call the fascist invading a country bad and the people killing the invaders good. It is polarizing because one side is being killed for no reason other than Putin’s lust for more territory.
If you had read any of the sources I provided, you might see that there’s more to this conflict than just a simple land-grab.
Oh yes. It’s also a child kidnapping and civilian butchering genocide. Look at Bucha.
Only a fool would see it as anything other than a waning power trying to assert itself on a former colonial possession.
The Ukrainian people have the right to self determination.
Simple or not, it is a landgrab, it’s bright as day, there’s zero justification for it.
If you had read any of the sources I provided, you might see that there’s more to this conflict than just a simple land-grab.
🥾👅
that US officials and diplomats actively supported the uprising in 2014
Are we really getting into Euromaidan conspiracies now?
NATO expansion continued despite warnings that Russia would perceive it as a direct threat
Funny how Russia perceives a defensive alliance as a direct threat. It couldn’t be because they’ve openly made insane statements like questioning the sovereignty of the Baltic states, which they regard as rightfully Russia’s, or… you know… invading multiple fucking neighbors and annexing their territory.
The US and NATO have arguably perpetuated the war in Ukraine because it creates profits for the military-industrial complex, rather than actively trying to bring about peace.
“Ukraine would have welcomed genocide if only the US and NATO weren’t egging them on!” is such a fucking bizarre position.
A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
The war will only be solved through negotiations that allow ethnic Russians in Ukraine to have autonomy and Moscow’s protection, as well as Ukrainian neutrality, which means the country cannot join NATO.
The Kyiv-CIA partnership deepened under the Trump administration, yet again putting the lie to the baseless idea that former President Trump was somehow amenable to Russia’s interests while in office.
Jesus fucking Christ. Any other Russian talking points you’d like to mindlessly circulate?
If you see NATO as a defensive alliance I have a bridge to sell to you.
That’s literally its fucking purpose. NATO as a treaty organization has no other functions than defense and standardization. Everything else is a question of the choices of individual countries. Fuck man, even at the height of the Cold War NATO countries were out supporting opposite sides of conflicts.
I don’t really know what kind of boogeyman org you think NATO is, but I might suggest listening less to campists.
It certainly is towards Russia directly. Are you seriously suggesting NATO would start an aggression against Russia?
And are you suggesting any of the countries that have joined NATO did so hecause they were coerced by the US and not because they were really desperate of being in an alliance to protect against Russian aggression? On the other side the Warsaw Pact nations were desperate in being in there because they were longing for Russian protection, right. I guess thats what those tanks in Prague and Budapest were for too.
Anyhow even if you follow Russian propaganda, the aggression against Ukraine directly caused another NATO enlargement. That would not have happened without that aggression. So either Russia es lying about its motivation or actively working against its own security goals.
So instead of engaging with these ideas intellectually or producing counter claims, you automatically dismiss them as “Russian talking points”.
Thanks for so beautifully illustrating my point.
So instead of engaging with these ideas intellectually or producing counter claims, you automatically dismiss them as “Russian talking points”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
Sorry that you want fucking bizarre ideas like “Euromaidan was a far-right coup”, “Russia was just really concerned about minorities!” and “Trump was never favorable to Russian interests!” taken seriously, bootlicker.
And funny how you ignore the actual points I brought up in refutation, but I guess the innate desire of all of Russia’s enemies to submit to imperialism and genocide is an axiom of your worldview.
Funny how you call me a “bootlicker” and make loud pronouncements about my assumed worldview, when I expressly did not claim to support Russia nor the invasion of Ukraine.
Like I said, dare to question the orthodox, black-and-white view of this conflict and it quickly devolves into shouting and name-calling.
Funny how you call me a “bootlicker” and make loud pronouncements about my assumed worldview, when I expressly did not claim to support Russia, or it’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I just spread blatantly untrue Russian talking points in support of their war aims, I’m not actually in support of them! 😭”
Boot leather taste good, buddy?
Still no response to the actual points I raised either, despite your whingeing about me bringing up that your sources were all common and blatant propaganda canards.
Like I said, with this conflict it’s either black or white apparently.
…
God forbid I hear your opinions on the very reasonable war aims of that Hitler fellow back in 1939. Wouldn’t want to see things as just ‘black or white’ after all.
Maybe imperialism and fucking genocide is bad?
No, of course not. It’s the Ukrainians who are wrong. And the West was clearly puppeteering them into defending themselves.
Like I said, dare to question the orthodox, black-and-white view of this conflict and it quickly devolves into shouting and name-calling.
Sorry that you want to spread pro-genocide talking points and be treated with asspats instead of disdain. Maybe go find a circle of like-minded pro-genocide types, like a Zionist forum, for example.
Maybe imperialism and fucking genocide is bad?
Well we agree on this, at least.
To your points, as far as I could make them out:
-
“US interference in Euromaidan is a conspiracy theory” - Public actions and statements by U.S. officials during Maidan (Victoria Nuland meeting protesters, leaked Nuland–Pyatt call discussing preferred Ukrainian political figures) are evidence of U.S. diplomatic involvement and attempts to influence the post‑Maidan government. Also, the new goverment formed close ties with Western intelligence agencies, including creating CIA bases in Ukraine to coordinate activities against Russia and various training programs for Ukrainian commandos and other elite units.
-
“NATO is merely a “defensive alliance” and not a credible threat to Russia” - NATO forces have been used to further western imperialism (which you claim to be against, no?) in places like Libya and Afghanistan. Structurally, it ensures that European members stay subservient to Washington and broadly fall in line with US foreign policy. The addition of multiple countries like Poland, Finland, Hungary and the Baltic States were obviously seen by Russia as signs of encroachment beyond NATO’s original mandate.
-
They are russian talking points and have been since this shitshow started.
Their state-owned TV has been parroting these for years at this point, in between unsubtle threats about nuking shit and straight-up lies about more or less anything conceivable.
If you can’t admit that or are ignorant enough to not realise it, you’re not really bringing anything worthwhile to this discussion.
Let’s be real – Both sides deploy propaganda to suit their own ends. Dismissing any evidence I’m putting forth as “Russian talking points” is just as fruitless as Tankies dismissing you guys as “NATO shills”.
It’s odd to me that left-leaning people readily acknowledge that the US/CIA has meddled extensively in many parts of the world, and has either overthrown (or helped to overthrow) sovereign nations across pretty much every continent, but when it comes to Ukraine suddenly the idea becomes unconscionable.
It’s a bit different when you live an hour from the Russian border and have friends and/or family directly involved in the war.
Unless that’s your reality, too, and you actually understand Russian and their general attitude towards anything west of them, you maybe, just maybe, are missing a few things here.
As for the CIA or US fuckery in general I think we all know they’re just about everywhere. Ironically, it’s probably a bit different now since the US are losing their soft power quite quickly, either by design or sheer idiocy.
I freely admit I’m no expert on the region, and I’m not claiming to have the full picture of the situation on the ground there.
I’m just advocating that we do our best to avoid binary type thinking when it comes to geopolitics, particularly when it involves Russia and the US/EU bloc.
Who says it’s just a land grab? Putin’s vision of the world is the KGB vision of viewing America as an all encroaching entity pulling the strings and Russia being the true successor of the USSR, seen as a competing superpower balancing out that influence with its own. His ambitions are also thoroughly imperialist and revolve around the idea of rebuilding the Soviet Union. Beyond that, it’s also the most trivial dictator politics: manufacture enemies to distract the population from its real problems. Waging wars is a logical extension of cracking down on minority groups domestically as a way to stay in power.
Riddle me this. Why did Russia move it’s troops from Finland (NATO) border to Ukraine. If NATO is such a threat?
Prioritizing immediate military goals over long-term posturing, I would imagine. Putin has to focus everything on winning the war.
Setting up a long-term deterrent against a newly expanded NATO in the north is a secondary goal that can wait.
So, “NATO expansion” ain’t really an issue. Copy.
Dessalines is a fascist, you say things they don’t like and they will just ban you and delete your comments instead of engaging with your comments.
I have made it a point to block any community they moderate.
I was stupid enough to engage with them on a similar topic and after like 20-30 comments where they ignored evidence, lied about things that have never actually happened, blatantly misconstrued evidence from completely unrelated events and moved their goal posts so far that they might as well be in another stadium they simply removed all my comments so nobody would be able to see the evidence showing how wrong they were.
Pretty stupid of me and since lemmy.ml has gone down the drain content wise I love the idea of simply blocking the instance, as stupid as it sounds, did never think about it so far.
I’ve seen it! It got deleted? Not even surprised. You did a good job anyway. Thx.
I can’t even keep em on topic for 2 comments in a row. On a post making fun of “two things can be bad” as falling for propaganda, someone pointed out the outright nazi shit putin says. Someone comes back with literal “whatabout Ukraine.”
Does that mean one sides nazism justified another? Or that they actually do think both sides can have negative qualities at once? Hell if I know, when I asked they said that’s a strawman and didn’t even explain what the whataboutism meant.
deleted by creator
The goal of the “slavic” bullshit is to claim there are no Ukrainians. Or any other Slavic people besides russians. According to them, we’re all secretly russians that were led astray by the evil West™.
Let’s be honest, when they say you’re banned for being impolite, it really means you say things they don’t like they cannot argue against.
They do not trust their weak-minded followers won’t be pulled away from them. Which is not to say there all weak-minded, there are a lot of great people in these Subs.
A significant portion of the blame for this conflict can be put on the USA, but you’d have to be delusional to make excuses for Russia. Genuinely who in their right mind thinks Putin is a good guy? Or Russian oligarchs? They’re just as bad as American presidents and oligarchs, except Russian [wanna-be] Empire is fairly weak, so it’s not as big a threat as the US Empire.
Please elaborate how exactly the “significant portion of the blame” for the US comes to be. Also please explain how attributing “significant portion of the blame” to the US does at least not partially “excuse” Russia.
And while you are at it, please explain how the Russian regime that openly states that its ambition is the destruction of the Ukranian nation (which amounts to genocide) and is also engaging towards this goal in the areas it occupies, is merely equally as bad or as much of a threat (or even less so) in the Ukranian context as the US regime.
Post cold war understanding was that there was going to be a buffer zone between Russia and Nato. Ukraine being brought into Nato or the EU was a known line in the sand that the US crossed. Does that absolve Russia of their aggression? No it does not. But it is like with Pearl Harbor, the US blockade of Japan provoked them to attack. Does not absolve Japan, but the idea they attacked purely out of their own aggression is false.
What gives the country Russia the right or privilege to force a “buffer zone” on entire other nations again, or rather, them into Russian vassalage?
Never mind that Ukraine was neither in the process of joining NATO or the EU. Both were very unrealistic prospects in 2014 during the first invasion as well as in 2022 at the 2nd invasion. Who joins the EU is outside of US control, quite plainly and the joining NATO could be prevented by sympathetic governments within NATO if it were a thing to begin with (Even Sweden’s bid was delayed substantially by Hungary/Turkey and that was a far less controversial case).
Indeed if keeping Ukraine out of NATO and EU had been the aim, that would have been far more effective and billions of Euros cheaper too, never mind about a few hundred thousand able and young Russians still being alive and productive instead of in a grave. On top of it all, if NATO enlargement was the aim, what good did an invasion do again that directly caused NATO enlargement multiplying the direct NATO-Russian border? Its all very irrational indeed. The arguments don’t fit together, if we assume Russia is a rational actor.
The way I see it, Russia did not attack because of what the US did, it attacked because of what Ukrainians did but I know, that does not fit into the narrative that Russians like to believe in themselves. It also does not fit into the imperialist world view in which only the imperial capital can have agency or legitimacy. Maidan was a mass movement. The US might have been supportive but it was not really within their control either to secure the survival of the old Russian controlled regime. This has never been about the fear towards the US or NATO. It has always been about the ambition to rebuilt the Russian empire that was lost to the collapse of the Soviet Union which also lost because it collapsed under its own weight, not because of foreign intervention.
And because of that I find it hard to see the blame on the US, as that aim of reestablishing Empire and regain control of lost realms was independent from anything the US has done. It is an ambition that is deeply rooted not only in Putin but wide parts of the Russian elite as well.
I am saying that when treaties and assurances are ignored you risk war. That is the case here.
Edit: here the receipts: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
US secretary of state gave verbal assurances in 1990 that were abandoned later.
There is no source for any treaty violated in there. So why do you talk about “treaties and assurances” then? That is highly misleading. There were assurances made verbally during negotiations that were never substantiated, ie never agreed on in a treaty or even a summit statement. Those were assurances of intent in that moment that were also correct at the time but never promises that the position will never chance even under dramatically different circumstanced a decade later.
NATO expansion happened in 1999 and 2004, based on the strong sovereign decision of the joining nations. Unlike with the Warsaw pact no country was coerced into it and Russia did not make a big deal out of it either, at the time. To consider that an assault against Russia requires a solidly imperialist world view where sovereign nations have no right of self determination and self defense.
Interestingly Russia’s actions that were obviously no reaction to something happening 10 years earlier but what had happened the same year, internally because of the will of the people in Ukraine, not anything in the US, vindicated all those countries that joined in their decision. Russia was never afraid of NATO as threat but rather as a force that could make recolonisation of its former colonies impossible.
Because the assurance was the basis for the treaty negotiations that followed. You can say that doesn’t not justify aggression, and I would agree. But to say assurances have no bearing in the matter is materially false
No I am challenging your basic premise. If you want to get some epically huge guarantees that all former Warsaw Pact countries will be denied the sovereign decision to join NATO for eternity. You’d demand at the very least to have that recorded in summit press notes but rather in some treaty, the way you made it look like innitially, it was done but it wasn’t - not at all.
The assurances further never were guarantees for the distant future. They were assurances during negotiations for and in the context of sudden German unification. Context matters and wording does too. Unless you are of course claiming that Russian leaders and diplomats are stupid and clueless.
If Russia considered those odd verbal assurances made in completely different circumstances that was missing from each and every agreement Russia has made with anyone, one would have expected that they had made some major fuss about the NATO expansion when it actually happened. They didn’t.
It just feels very forced of an argument something that was not only never repeated, also not in treaties after 1990, where that could have been done. But the second the Russian regime loses control over Ukraine, not because of what NATO has done but because it lost power in Ukraine to the people of Ukraine.
The simple question if those mentioned verbal assurances during a few negotiations in 1990, were of any significance in 2014 when Russia decided to break a number of binding treaties and invade a neighbour country it was contractually obliged to protect, is the following. Would Russia have acted in any way differently in 2014 if those verbal assurances in 1990 had never occured? I dare to say no, not at all. Russia would have done the very same thing under Putin because it was never about NATO or assurances, it was about losing control of Ukraine to the Ukrainian people and Putin could not accept that. If it makes no difference it is also of no significance.
You mean like the assurance that russia isn’t going to invade Ukraine? The one that was made multiple times in different agreements and broken every time? That one?
Edit: since you prefer this form of discussion, sure. Why should anyone keep any promises or assurances made to russia when they clearly never intended to keep any of their own?
Which treaty or assurance was violated? The one about protecting Ukraine and guaranteeing its territorial integrity?
And unless you disagree with my position above, Russia intended to maintain control over Ukraine, no matter what. In that case the war was a consequence of Ukrainians demanding control over their own government, not anything the US has done. If that is so, how can you attribute significant blame on something that played no role in the decision over the aggression?
You get it.
I am fairly new to Lemmy and was slightly bewildered by the relentless Tankie propaganda going on. I am not talking about left criticism of capitalism but full blown glorification of Russian and Chinese imperialism, justification of wars of aggression and denial or justification of war crimes etc.
Then I figured out to block the .ml instance and things have gone mostly back to normal. I am still a bit uneasy about having to block the instance of the main developer but so what …
I’d also recommend blocking the other 2 instances of the Tankie triad, Hexbear and lemmygrad. They’re like .ml, but much worse, .ml tries to do their shenanigans with subtlety. The rest of the triad…not so much lol
Yeah blocking .ml makes browsing lemmy soooo much better
I just picked up a permanent ban there too for rule 2.
Did you receive your CIA paycheck tho? Mine has been held up again. I’m thinking of establishing a CIA shill union.
At least you got paid, they’ll do it for free!
They’re better than Soros was.
The Grand Tour explains what the Russians are doing to quietly steal land from Georgia. Literally moving the border markers at night.
I had some interaction with them on an .ml post today, which i can’t respond to due to the ban hammer (imagine that).
There’s reality, there’s perspective, and there’s spin.
But then there’s blatant lies and propaganda.
That’s how they roll at the .ml
Tankies gonna tank
I was about to downvote this post
SaltFreeBae just keeps proving that he’s got absolutely no understanding of geopolitics, and that he lives in a fantasy world where half of reality is whatever he makes it up to be on the spot.
