• cawsby [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The US invaded Iraq because they were anti-socialist? I don't understand what you are saying.

      Are you for Putin-style Russian imperialism?

      • Glass [he/him,they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        are you for putin-style Russian imperialism

        "Do you support Saddamn Hussein?"

        • cawsby [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          What does that even mean?

          Saddam invaded Kuwait. What country did Ukraine invade?

            • cawsby [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              Anyone cheering on Putin's blunders is only supporting a more aggressive NATO.

              The solution is regional peacekeeping or international peacekeeping. Not an invasion and a proxy war.

              • Glass [he/him,they/them]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Ah yes let me just do some light peacekeeping with this here totally impartial worldspanning imperial military:so-true:

                • cawsby [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  What exactly do you think Russia's peacekeepers are going to do?

                  • Glass [he/him,they/them]
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    3 years ago

                    I literally don't care because the US created this entire clusterfuck when it was never our business in the first place, Russia's military wouldn't even have to be there if it wasn't for US and NATO aggression, and now you're arguing on behalf the nazi alliance funding the nazi militia instead of taking the obvious, non-brainwomed stance which is "US AND NATO OUT OF FUCKING EVERYWHERE." Amazing.

                    Peacekeeping with a capitalist war machine is a contradiction. It will never happen, but liberals keep falling for it.

              • DengXixian [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                The solution is regional peacekeeping or international peacekeeping. Not an invasion and a proxy war.

                The UN has extremely limited credibility in Eastern Europe after the 90s, so international peacekeeping effectively doesn't exist and is, to be blunt, a euphemism for imperialist genocide. What does regional peacekeeping look like to you, NATO? Germany? If Germany, why shouldn't Russia be involved with those efforts?

                • cawsby [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  Mutual defense pacts among Eastern Europe are possible outside the NATO framework.

                  • DengXixian [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    Sure, I can follow that. Do these defense pacts already exist then or are they hypothetical? If they do exist, why hasn't The Ukraine activated them?

                    • cawsby [he/him]
                      ·
                      3 years ago

                      There are a few but no one obviously wants to form a new one with Ukraine atm.

                      The question is whether those organizations themselves can send representatives. It has happened before in some African countries.

                      • DengXixian [he/him]
                        ·
                        3 years ago

                        There are a few but no one obviously wants to form a new one with Ukraine atm.

                        Okay, so then these defense pacts don't sound like a viable alternative to Russian intervention. I feel like I'm missing something here?

                        The question is whether those organizations themselves can send representatives. It has happened before in some African countries.

                        Which organizations? I'm confused, the eastern European defense pacts sent representatives to African countries? Were these diplomats or actual military?

                        • cawsby [he/him]
                          ·
                          3 years ago

                          The African Union uses peacekeepers from other countries in the AU when two countries are in conflict. In theory the EU could do the same but the Ukraine is not part of the EU.

                          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-UN_peacekeeping_missions

                          • DengXixian [he/him]
                            ·
                            3 years ago

                            So then what are you suggesting? I thought this was supposed to be an alternative to US or Russian intervention, but it doesn't sound like political reality.

                            • cawsby [he/him]
                              ·
                              3 years ago

                              How can any diplomatic solution be a political reality now? Russia has invaded.

                              All that is out of the window now.

              • comi [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                I think aggressive nato was a given, this move was an acceptance of ukraine joining nato in all but name :shrux: at least according to the reasoning I gleaned from our news

        • penguin_von_doom [she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Putin has a lot more similarities with the Tzarist regime and with the Nazis themselves than the USSR. Reducing everything to nostalgia for said USSR and someone painting qualities of it on top of modern Russia is peak brainworms. This is an internal war of capital and there is nothing anti-imperialist in supporting Russia. It's a shit situation with two equally bad sides. This is not centrism.

        • cawsby [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          WWII started when Germany argued for invading Poland to save German-speaking populations from Polish persecution and to prevent the "encirclement" of Germany by Western imperial powers.

          Not wanting a relatively cold civil war in Ukraine to turn into a hot civil war or regional conflict doesn't make me a centrist. If Russia continues this sort of border imperialism, where does it end? Will Russia take back the Kuril islands?

          Imperialist excursions of any kind should be condemned. All that Russia has guaranteed is not the safety of people in Ukraine but the inevitable ratcheting up of a proxy war. All for a warm water port - which we can both agree - NATO never should have jeopardized by backing Euromaidan .

          • BolsheWitch [she/her, they/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            WWII started when Germany argued for invading Poland to save German-speaking populations from Polish persecution and to prevent the “encirclement” of Germany by Western imperial powers.

            This is literally a nazi talking point, my dude.

            • cawsby [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              What the Germans claimed and what they acted upon are two different things.

              • BolsheWitch [she/her, they/them]
                ·
                3 years ago

                It’s frequently used to excuse or minimize nazi ideology and the very clear goals Hitler and other nazis stated from the beginning.

                • realPaavoVayrynen [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  I thought the above dude's point was acknowledging the "liberation" of german speaking poles as a flagrant lie by the nazis and likening it to russia's motives in donbass. maybe I'm just bad at parsing arguments and don't get what points people are making.

                  • BolsheWitch [she/her, they/them]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    Yeah, they were also making it sound like it was the main motivation and excuse for nazi aggression, which isn’t accurate. It was one of the lines they ran with, but based around “living space” more than any kind of humanitarian reasoning.

                    Trying to compare nazi Germany to Putin is frankly gross, not a coherent argument, and also extremely insulting to anyone with family who survived the Shoah.

                    There are plenty of things to criticize Putin on without trying to claim he’s a nazi, especially when the Ukrainian government is literally run by neo-nazis after their NATO-backed coup.

                    • realPaavoVayrynen [he/him]
                      ·
                      edit-2
                      3 years ago

                      yeah

                      I was just confused by the quip. I see what you meant now. I was following the exchange until I thought I was reading the other guy be like "so the nazis had this talking point" and you coming back with "but that's a nazi talking point" and at that point my brain short circuited and stopped functioning

        • Teekeeus [comrade/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Weren't the western libs way more concerned about screwing the USSR than nazi germany?

          • DengXixian [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            The USSR was trading with Nazi Germany as they annihilated western european nations, the Germans were receiving their much needed oil from the Soviets.

            for fuck's sake. learn history and stop repeating Western Cold War lies and propaganda. The British and French were trying to goad Germany and Russia into war.

            The Soviets were the last country in Europe to sign a pact with the Nazis and here’s a handy infographic of the countries that did sign.

            https://pics.onsizzle.com/what-countries-signed-contracts-with-hitler-and-when-1933-uk-1601874.png

            The Soviets spent over a year before then trying to sign an anti-Nazi alliance with the British and the French, but both of those countries were uninterested.

            Effort Post With Sources

            The British confirmed all of this in 2009 when the 70 year limit ran out and their archive was opened and the full scale of what Stalin offered the Brits and French was basically enough to ensure WW2 never happened.

            The British and French however sent delegates with no authority to sign an alliance. The polish hated the Soviets because Poland was fascist under Pilzudski and were hoping for an alliance with Hitler.

            Poland also realized that if they allowed the Soviets onto Polish territory the Soviets would unilaterally annexe the land the Polish had stolen from the Soviet Union in the 1918-1920 invasion of the USSR where Poland annexed land from Belarus, Lithuania (they stole Villinus the capital of Lithuania) and Ukraine.

            The Polish then enacted a forced “Polandisation” of the citizens living there. Suppressing native languages and treating Belarussians/Lits and Ukrainians as 2nd class peoples.

            Bear in mind this is one year after they signed the Munich agreement which gave Hitler Czechoslovakia.

            "Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.
            
            The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin’s generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.
            
            But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.
            
            The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, came on August 23 - just a week before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby sparking the outbreak of the war. But it would never have happened if Stalin’s offer of a western alliance had been accepted, according to retired Russian foreign intelligence service Major General Lev Sotskov, who sorted the 700 pages of declassified documents.
            
            "This was the final chance to slay the wolf, even after [British Conservative prime minister Neville] Chamberlain and the French had given up Czechoslovakia to German aggression the previous year in the Munich Agreement," said Gen Sotskov, 75.
            
            The Soviet offer - made by war minister Marshall Klementi Voroshilov and Red Army chief of general staff Boris Shaposhnikov - would have put up to 120 infantry divisions (each with some 19,000 troops), 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks and up to 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers on Germany’s borders in the event of war in the west, declassified minutes of the meeting show.
            
            But Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, who lead the British delegation, told his Soviet counterparts that he authorized only to talk, not to make deals.
            
            *“Had the British, French and their European ally Poland, taken this offer seriously then together we could have put some 300 or more divisions into the field on two fronts against Germany - double the number Hitler had at the time,” said Gen Sotskov, who joined the Soviet intelligence service in 1956. “This was a chance to save the world or at least stop the wolf in its tracks.” *"
            

            https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/3223834/Stalin-planned-to-send-a-million-troops-to-stop-Hitler-if-Britain-and-France-agreed-pact.html

            And yes, there were talks to join the axis! Germany at this point was in war with Britain and France and the Soviets needed another year and would still suffer horrendous losses (27 million dead)

            So what was the result of those axis talks? (Besides the end point which was Germany invading the Soviet Union but let’s continue down the fantasy path that the Soviets trusted fucking Hitler and they were going seriously joining any German axis) .

            “Hitler, however, saw the Soviet territorial ambitions in the Balkans as a challenge to German interests and saw its plan as effectively making Bulgaria into an adjunct of the Axis pact. On several occasions, Molotov asked German officials for their response to Moscow’s counter-proposals, but Germany never answered them. Germany’s refusal to respond to the counter-proposal worsened relations between the countries. Regarding the counter-proposal, Hitler remarked to his top military chiefs that Stalin “demands more and more”, “he’s a cold-blooded blackmailer” and that “a German victory has become unbearable for Russia” so that “she must be brought to her knees as soon as possible.””**
            

            -Ericson, Edward E. (1999), Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933–1941,

            Right so the axis talks ended with Hitler so pissed off at the Soviet Union Hitler assessed

            Stalin was a “cold blooded blackmailer” and that he “demands more and more”
            “A German victory is unbearable for Russia”
            that the Soviets were trying to have Germany “brought to her knees as soon as possible”
            

            And Hitler killing the talks.

            We’ve established so far that the Soviets prioritized a British-French and polish anti-nazi alliance. That the British, Poles and French were rat bastards that saw communism as a greater evil than fascism and were hoping for the Germans and Russians to kill each other.

            At this point though I’ve only quoted bourgeois sources so let’s see what the Soviets said about all this .

            "After the first imperialist war the victor states, primarily Britain, France and the United States, had set up a new regime in the relations between countries, the post-war regime of peace. The main props of this regime were the Nine-Power Pact in the Far East, and the Versailles Treaty and a number of other treaties in Europe. The League of Nations was set up to regulate relations between countries within the framework of this regime, on the basis of a united front of states, of collective defense of the security of states. However, three aggressive states, and the new imperialist war launched by them, have upset the entire system of this post-war peace regime. Japan tore up the Nine-Power Pact, and Germany and Italy the Versailles Treaty. In order to have their hands free, these three states withdrew from the League of Nations.**
            
            The new imperialist war became a fact.
            
            It is not so easy in our day to suddenly break loose and plunge straight into war without regard for treaties of any kind or for public opinion. Bourgeois politicians know this very well. So do the fascist rulers. That is why the fascist rulers decided, before plunging into war, to frame public opinion to suit their ends, that is, to mislead it, to deceive it.
            
            A military bloc of Germany and Italy against the interests of England and France in Europe? Bless us, do you call that a bloc? “We” have no military bloc. All “we” have is an innocuous “Berlin-Rome axis”; that is, just a geometrical equation for an axis. (Laughter.)
            
            A military bloc of Germany, Italy and Japan against the interests of the United States, Great Britain and France in the Far East? Nothing of the kind. “We” have no military bloc. All “we” have is an innocuous “Berlin-Rome-Tokyo triangle”; that is, a slight penchant for geometry. (General laughter.)
            
            A war against the interests of England, France, the United States? Nonsense! “We” are waging war on the Comintern, not on these states. If you don’t believe it, read the “anti-Comintern pact” concluded between Italy, Germany and Japan.
            
            But war is inexorable. It cannot be hidden under any guise. For no “axes,” “triangles” or “anti-Comintern pacts” can hide the fact that in this period Japan has seized a vast stretch of territory in China, that Italy has seized Abyssinia, that Germany has seized Austria and the Sudeten region, that Germany and Italy together have seized Spain – and all this in defiance of the interests of the non-aggressive states. The war remains a war; the military bloc of aggressors remains a military bloc; and the aggressors remain aggressors.
            
            **It is a distinguishing feature of the new imperialist war that it has not yet become universal, a world war. The war is being waged by aggressor states, who in every way infringe upon the interests of the non-aggressive states, primarily England, France and the U.S.A., while the latter draw back and retreat, making concession after concession to the aggressors.
            
            Thus we are witnessing an open re-division of the world and spheres of influence at the expense of the non-aggressive states, without the least attempt at resistance, and even with a certain amount of connivance, on the part of the latter.**
            
            To what are we to attribute this one-sided and strange character of the new imperialist war?
            
              • DengXixian [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                This is literally anti-communist propaganda.

                trading with the Nazis was kinda profitable for Stalin, he who seeked an alliance with the western powers just a few years ago

                Yes, Stalin tried to broker an anti-fascist coalition and France / Britain weren't interested. That meant Russia had to buy time while they built up the army and weapons needed to fight fascists solo.

                It should also be mentioned that the USSR was one of the last hold outs for trading with either of those countries.

                The Fascists, of course, cared as much as Stalin did for ideological diffierences

                This is completely ahistorical and frankly also fascist apologism.