Oh man someone is about to learn a conflict doesn’t have to have “good guys” vs “bad guys” and that reality doesn’t fit such a narrow minded view of morality
I never said they were good guys and bad guys. The Russian military does some really fucked up things. I would never call them good. But they are fighting against the imperialist war machine, just like Iran is, and just like China is economically.
You’re saying that every single border dispute is imperialism. You do realize that this is a ridiculous position, right? Russia did not invade Ukraine to steal land. Russia has repeatedly submitted documentation and evidence for a humanitarian intervention in the Donbas on the same basis the UN has approved other such interventions - ethnic cleansing. Further, the border between Russia and Ukraine was only defined 30 years ago. It is definitely not true that the Donbas region is indigenously Ukrainian, as clearly the ethnic Russians there were under attack. Again, border conflicts are not imperialism.
As for fighting the imperialist war machine, Russia’s stated reason for an expansion and full scale invasion of the border region was NATO activity. You can read NATO’s own documents about its collaboration with Ukraine and development of integrated readiness exercises that simulated invasions of Kaliningrad and nuclear readiness. These started in the late fall of 2013, a couple months before the US was on the ground for EuroMaidan. Ukranian integration in NATO exercises expanded from that point forward.
And further, in essence the only countries that supported the Ukraine war effort were the Western imperial forces. In a proxy war, that’s pretty telling. Ukraine is a proxy for the West. Russia and the Western imperialist are in a conflict and the West is using Ukraine as their proxy. Ergo, the conflict is between Russia and the imperialists via Ukraine.
So you’re saying that the USSR and China are giving juvenile support to one side or the other?
There is one imperialist project. It is 600 years old. At its height it dominated 80% of the world’s population. It extracted massive amounts of wealth from the world’s people. It has the largest collection of wealth in the world because of this. It is composed of countries that all work together to enforce a set of rules and systems that mutually benefit them and harm everyone else.
The USSR and China have never been part of that project. China has been opposed to that project since the CPC came to power, and it was subject to that project for a century prior. The USSR was subject to that project and opposed to that project until rapprochement under Gorbachev, though most would say Brezhnev had imperial ambitions, and I wouldn’t disagree. But at that point the USSR was a few decades into its counter-revolutionary liberal phase and only a decade away from dissolving into a capitalist hellscape.
I’m sorry but this is just ridiculous. I’ll address the size later, because it requires history.
How do you measure authoritarianism? Number of people managed by the criminal justice system? The amount of population managed by US criminal justice is 300% bigger than anyone else. Russia and China don’t even come close to that. The US is also the only country charging its prisoners hundreds of dollars a day to be in prison and then dominating them to pay back that debt after they get out.
The US policing system is the 3rd or 4th largest military budget in the world. That doesn’t include the budget for the prison system.
The US has engaged in wars of choice and acts of aggression against 14 countries since 1992. Russia has engaged with 3, all of them border disputes stemming from the fall of the USSR. China hasn’t dropped a bomb or fired on a ship since 1989.
By most reasonable measures, the imperial core is far more authoritarian than either China or Russia. The difference in application of authority is primarily the difference between being in the imperial core where you aren’t ever going to be attacked and being outside the empire where the empire has you surrounded with 600 military bases, nuclear missiles, and 60+ years of covert operations hell bent on toppling your country.
As for size…
Russia is predominantly uninhabited land. 80% of Russia’s population lives in the European part of Russia. The rest of Russia is and always has been very very sparsely populated. By way of comparison, historians estimate that there were 10M people living North of Mexico before European genocide, whereas in Russia it was less than 1M people before the Eastern Slavs of Europe migrated and established agriculture in what is modern day Russia. Russian imperialism was predominantly applied to territory and people that today you know and understand to be literally fully recognized independent nation-states: Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan. The fact that these nation-states exist now instead of being part of Russia is exactly what it means for the empire to be dismantled and sovereignty returned to the people. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was anti-imperialist in this exact way. Nearly every single one of these countries were part of the Tsarist empire prior to the communists coming to power. With the communists in power, they established independent national republics for each of these, building them governments for self-administration and generally setting up everything they would need to become independent states when the USSR eventually dissolved. The Tsarists also engaged in heavy Russification, crushing ethnicities, while the Bolsheviks literally funded the creation of national alphabets and dictionaries for the formerly subjugated nations, required all schooling to be in local languages instead of Russian, etc.
In short, Russia’s size has nothing to do with imperialism.
As for China, the story is different but similar. There are 5 autonomous regions on China. If you remove them, China becomes significantly smaller than Europe. The difference here is philosophical driven by geography. Compare European geography to Chinese geography and you see that Europe is replete with physical division that fundamentally limits the scope of European warlords to smaller territories. Chinese geography is basically a big open plain surrounded by barriers, which meant that a single warload could build momentum and roll the entire joint. Both of these things happened in their respective locations multiple times. As such, ancient political philosophies diverged along these lines, with ancient European political philosophy favoring many small independent states mapped to ethnicities (and thus war is violation of sovereignty) and ancient Chinese political philosophy favoring pluralistic society with many ethnicities living in unity (and thus war is bad for the collective).
When we add back in the 5 autonomous regions, China’s size becomes very large. The regions are 45% of China’s total landmass. However, they only make up 10% of the population, because like the vastness of Russia, most of the autonomous regions are uninhabited or very very sparsely inhabited. And this is actually quite important for understanding why they are autonomous regions and not fully independent nation-states. Like Greenland, the autonomous regions are not populous enough to field military capable of defending against outside aggression, and that means, like Greenland, their stability relies on being a protectorate. Tibet became a protectorate under the Chinese dynastic umbrella of protection when the Mongols invaded in the 1700s. Prior to that, Tibet and China were independent and happy to be so. But the invasion by the Mongols was too much for Tibet and they requested the Qing Dynasty to protect them. The Qing came in, saved Tibet, and established a protectorate because Tibet clearly could not defend itself from invading forces as the gunpowder revolution and industrialization were underway. It was either let Tibet get taken over and over again or establish a standing protectorate and let Tibet be autonomous within that structure. That’s the current state.
Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang are much closer to imperial holdings, with Xinjiang being a highly pluralistic crossroads of warring states and Inner Mongolia being a clear borderland integration as the imperialist Mongols fell apart. The fact that they are autonomous regions is a testament to this. Inner Mongolia is essentially defined by the Gobi. While it was historically occupied and controlled by the Mongols broadly speaking, it’s geography is much more integrated with the inner bowl of China. That it was Mongol is more of political warring thing that an indigeneity thing. Xinjiang similarly does not have a national character, being far more pluralistic as a borderlands between many nations. Both of these are autonomous regions for the express region that they aren’t fundamentally occupied foreign nations but rather territory that historically had distinct pluralistic cultures with distinct governance models. Establishing them as autonomous regions is the exact opposite of imperialism.
The other 2 autonomous regions are further evidence against imperialism. Both of them are separate governing structures for different ethnic minorities, elevating their cultural histories and investing in cultural institutions and local economies. Basically anti-imperialist behavior.
Come on. USSR inherited Russian Tsardom. Why is Central Asia speaking Russian and writing in Cyrillic? And the whole thing broke apart at ethnic lines.
Why did the USSR break apart at ethnic lines? Because it organized itself around national self-determination ensuring that each ethnic nation got it’s own Republic. The entire structure of the USSR was built around ethnic lines to begin with because they believed it was critical that every ethnicity be self-determining. They even had a constitutional right for each state to secede legally because they felt that if you didn’t have the right to secede then you didn’t actually have the right to self-determination
They didn’t mean it but is a valid point that every one of those “superpowers” are the same imperialism network, now that we know through Epstein files that every nation is under global control
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s links to the Mongolian President via Jeffery Epstein was perhaps the strangest thing I learnt from the files.
Multiple imperialists competing with each other is the description of Europe. China hasn’t been imperialist for over a century and even when it was an empire it was not a global spanning project and it was ended by the European empire. The European empire won. They are the empire. The USSR wasn’t imperialist, they were anti-imperialist. The revolution literally rode in on the idea of the Russian empire being defeated in WW1 - it was the revolution’s explicit program that Russia should lose the war, they would depose the imperialists, and then they would establish independent republica for all of the occupied people’s and form a union of independent republica with the constitutional right to secede.
Yes, by the time Brezhnev came to power the USSR was not only deeply reactionary and actively building the conditions to end the Republic, they also started to position themselves to become a partner with the North Atlantic Empire, but the North Atlantic Empire was not interested in that, they wanted total subjugation. Gorbachev worked with the North Atlantic Empire to achieve that through dismantling the union and implementing liberal shock therapy which allowed for local oligarchs to concentrate wealth but also allowed the West to extract huge amounts from them as well. And it got Russia nowhere. They did not join the empire, they did not build a new empire, they simply became subjugated in a neoliberal relationship with the empire.
I know you want to pretend that people with large militaries are imperialists and that you can possibly hold the position that everyone who is fighting the empire is imperialists because they’re psychologically imperialists even if the only active conflicts they have are border disputes that are deeply tied to the force projection apparatus of the global spanning mass murdering empire, but it’s just pretend. It’s not reality.
Yes yes your imperialists are the good ones because they compete with the other imperialists!
Wait till you figure out what people who fight with imperialists are called !
Oh man someone is about to learn a conflict doesn’t have to have “good guys” vs “bad guys” and that reality doesn’t fit such a narrow minded view of morality
I never said they were good guys and bad guys. The Russian military does some really fucked up things. I would never call them good. But they are fighting against the imperialist war machine, just like Iran is, and just like China is economically.
Um… invading other countries to steal land isnt “against the imperialist war machine” its just a different hat.
No you must understand any nation Russia fights is imperialist because they are fighting Russia. It’s very simple
Russia is always good even if it’s not pretending to be socialist! Critical support to their death machines!!
You’re saying that every single border dispute is imperialism. You do realize that this is a ridiculous position, right? Russia did not invade Ukraine to steal land. Russia has repeatedly submitted documentation and evidence for a humanitarian intervention in the Donbas on the same basis the UN has approved other such interventions - ethnic cleansing. Further, the border between Russia and Ukraine was only defined 30 years ago. It is definitely not true that the Donbas region is indigenously Ukrainian, as clearly the ethnic Russians there were under attack. Again, border conflicts are not imperialism.
As for fighting the imperialist war machine, Russia’s stated reason for an expansion and full scale invasion of the border region was NATO activity. You can read NATO’s own documents about its collaboration with Ukraine and development of integrated readiness exercises that simulated invasions of Kaliningrad and nuclear readiness. These started in the late fall of 2013, a couple months before the US was on the ground for EuroMaidan. Ukranian integration in NATO exercises expanded from that point forward.
And further, in essence the only countries that supported the Ukraine war effort were the Western imperial forces. In a proxy war, that’s pretty telling. Ukraine is a proxy for the West. Russia and the Western imperialist are in a conflict and the West is using Ukraine as their proxy. Ergo, the conflict is between Russia and the imperialists via Ukraine.
Drinking that koolaid hard there bud
This is just the Russian version of Iraq has WMDs
They’re called other imperialists.
Anti-imperialists are those who are against imperialism in its entirety. It is not those who give juvenile support to one side over another.
So you’re saying that the USSR and China are giving juvenile support to one side or the other?
There is one imperialist project. It is 600 years old. At its height it dominated 80% of the world’s population. It extracted massive amounts of wealth from the world’s people. It has the largest collection of wealth in the world because of this. It is composed of countries that all work together to enforce a set of rules and systems that mutually benefit them and harm everyone else.
The USSR and China have never been part of that project. China has been opposed to that project since the CPC came to power, and it was subject to that project for a century prior. The USSR was subject to that project and opposed to that project until rapprochement under Gorbachev, though most would say Brezhnev had imperial ambitions, and I wouldn’t disagree. But at that point the USSR was a few decades into its counter-revolutionary liberal phase and only a decade away from dissolving into a capitalist hellscape.
Right, they have their own imperialists projects.
How tf do you think they got so huge and authoritarian?
I’m sorry but this is just ridiculous. I’ll address the size later, because it requires history.
How do you measure authoritarianism? Number of people managed by the criminal justice system? The amount of population managed by US criminal justice is 300% bigger than anyone else. Russia and China don’t even come close to that. The US is also the only country charging its prisoners hundreds of dollars a day to be in prison and then dominating them to pay back that debt after they get out.
The US policing system is the 3rd or 4th largest military budget in the world. That doesn’t include the budget for the prison system.
The US has engaged in wars of choice and acts of aggression against 14 countries since 1992. Russia has engaged with 3, all of them border disputes stemming from the fall of the USSR. China hasn’t dropped a bomb or fired on a ship since 1989.
By most reasonable measures, the imperial core is far more authoritarian than either China or Russia. The difference in application of authority is primarily the difference between being in the imperial core where you aren’t ever going to be attacked and being outside the empire where the empire has you surrounded with 600 military bases, nuclear missiles, and 60+ years of covert operations hell bent on toppling your country.
As for size…
Russia is predominantly uninhabited land. 80% of Russia’s population lives in the European part of Russia. The rest of Russia is and always has been very very sparsely populated. By way of comparison, historians estimate that there were 10M people living North of Mexico before European genocide, whereas in Russia it was less than 1M people before the Eastern Slavs of Europe migrated and established agriculture in what is modern day Russia. Russian imperialism was predominantly applied to territory and people that today you know and understand to be literally fully recognized independent nation-states: Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan. The fact that these nation-states exist now instead of being part of Russia is exactly what it means for the empire to be dismantled and sovereignty returned to the people. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was anti-imperialist in this exact way. Nearly every single one of these countries were part of the Tsarist empire prior to the communists coming to power. With the communists in power, they established independent national republics for each of these, building them governments for self-administration and generally setting up everything they would need to become independent states when the USSR eventually dissolved. The Tsarists also engaged in heavy Russification, crushing ethnicities, while the Bolsheviks literally funded the creation of national alphabets and dictionaries for the formerly subjugated nations, required all schooling to be in local languages instead of Russian, etc.
In short, Russia’s size has nothing to do with imperialism.
As for China, the story is different but similar. There are 5 autonomous regions on China. If you remove them, China becomes significantly smaller than Europe. The difference here is philosophical driven by geography. Compare European geography to Chinese geography and you see that Europe is replete with physical division that fundamentally limits the scope of European warlords to smaller territories. Chinese geography is basically a big open plain surrounded by barriers, which meant that a single warload could build momentum and roll the entire joint. Both of these things happened in their respective locations multiple times. As such, ancient political philosophies diverged along these lines, with ancient European political philosophy favoring many small independent states mapped to ethnicities (and thus war is violation of sovereignty) and ancient Chinese political philosophy favoring pluralistic society with many ethnicities living in unity (and thus war is bad for the collective).
When we add back in the 5 autonomous regions, China’s size becomes very large. The regions are 45% of China’s total landmass. However, they only make up 10% of the population, because like the vastness of Russia, most of the autonomous regions are uninhabited or very very sparsely inhabited. And this is actually quite important for understanding why they are autonomous regions and not fully independent nation-states. Like Greenland, the autonomous regions are not populous enough to field military capable of defending against outside aggression, and that means, like Greenland, their stability relies on being a protectorate. Tibet became a protectorate under the Chinese dynastic umbrella of protection when the Mongols invaded in the 1700s. Prior to that, Tibet and China were independent and happy to be so. But the invasion by the Mongols was too much for Tibet and they requested the Qing Dynasty to protect them. The Qing came in, saved Tibet, and established a protectorate because Tibet clearly could not defend itself from invading forces as the gunpowder revolution and industrialization were underway. It was either let Tibet get taken over and over again or establish a standing protectorate and let Tibet be autonomous within that structure. That’s the current state.
Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang are much closer to imperial holdings, with Xinjiang being a highly pluralistic crossroads of warring states and Inner Mongolia being a clear borderland integration as the imperialist Mongols fell apart. The fact that they are autonomous regions is a testament to this. Inner Mongolia is essentially defined by the Gobi. While it was historically occupied and controlled by the Mongols broadly speaking, it’s geography is much more integrated with the inner bowl of China. That it was Mongol is more of political warring thing that an indigeneity thing. Xinjiang similarly does not have a national character, being far more pluralistic as a borderlands between many nations. Both of these are autonomous regions for the express region that they aren’t fundamentally occupied foreign nations but rather territory that historically had distinct pluralistic cultures with distinct governance models. Establishing them as autonomous regions is the exact opposite of imperialism.
The other 2 autonomous regions are further evidence against imperialism. Both of them are separate governing structures for different ethnic minorities, elevating their cultural histories and investing in cultural institutions and local economies. Basically anti-imperialist behavior.
Come on. USSR inherited Russian Tsardom. Why is Central Asia speaking Russian and writing in Cyrillic? And the whole thing broke apart at ethnic lines.
Why did the USSR break apart at ethnic lines? Because it organized itself around national self-determination ensuring that each ethnic nation got it’s own Republic. The entire structure of the USSR was built around ethnic lines to begin with because they believed it was critical that every ethnicity be self-determining. They even had a constitutional right for each state to secede legally because they felt that if you didn’t have the right to secede then you didn’t actually have the right to self-determination
No, I’m saying tankies are the juvenile ones.
There are multiple imperialists and they have always competed with each other.
They didn’t mean it but is a valid point that every one of those “superpowers” are the same imperialism network, now that we know through Epstein files that every nation is under global control
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s links to the Mongolian President via Jeffery Epstein was perhaps the strangest thing I learnt from the files.
Multiple imperialists competing with each other is the description of Europe. China hasn’t been imperialist for over a century and even when it was an empire it was not a global spanning project and it was ended by the European empire. The European empire won. They are the empire. The USSR wasn’t imperialist, they were anti-imperialist. The revolution literally rode in on the idea of the Russian empire being defeated in WW1 - it was the revolution’s explicit program that Russia should lose the war, they would depose the imperialists, and then they would establish independent republica for all of the occupied people’s and form a union of independent republica with the constitutional right to secede.
Yes, by the time Brezhnev came to power the USSR was not only deeply reactionary and actively building the conditions to end the Republic, they also started to position themselves to become a partner with the North Atlantic Empire, but the North Atlantic Empire was not interested in that, they wanted total subjugation. Gorbachev worked with the North Atlantic Empire to achieve that through dismantling the union and implementing liberal shock therapy which allowed for local oligarchs to concentrate wealth but also allowed the West to extract huge amounts from them as well. And it got Russia nowhere. They did not join the empire, they did not build a new empire, they simply became subjugated in a neoliberal relationship with the empire.
I know you want to pretend that people with large militaries are imperialists and that you can possibly hold the position that everyone who is fighting the empire is imperialists because they’re psychologically imperialists even if the only active conflicts they have are border disputes that are deeply tied to the force projection apparatus of the global spanning mass murdering empire, but it’s just pretend. It’s not reality.
There was a very, very short moment when it was true. By the 60’s even Mao was calling USSR imperialist.