I think everyone who has been paying attention saw this coming. Now so-called "socialist" Hasan Piker is putting out CNN level liberal propaganda. Even western polling had to admit that Putin enjoyed an approval rating above 80% just prior to the election, but of course when you have demonized Russia to this degree you have to resort to reality denial to explain what you see.
We need to start using the term "red liberal" to describe these "leftist" political streamers and YouTubers who mimick the aesthetics and language of leftism while feeding into imperialist dogma and liberal assumptions about the world. Hasan also continues to deny the Donbass genocide that had been taking place since 2014 before Russia finally intervened, refuses to accept that Russia had legitimate reason to take action to stop NATO eastward expansion, and downplays the Nazi nature of the Kiev regime.
Now after he made fun of all the dumbass chuds who insisted in 2020 that the US election was stolen and made up all kinds of conspiracy theories to try and justify it, Hasan himself engages in the same kind of behavior when it comes to Russian elections. This is the kind of "socialist" who will act like they are not Democrat shills by superficially criticizing Genocide Joe yet continue to advocate that you vote for Democrats as the "lesser evil".
It is good though that since 2022 all of these sheepdogs for liberal imperialism have been exposing themselves. Now we know where the lines are drawn. Once again Lenin's words ring true:
"We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don't clutch at us and don't besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are "free" to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!"
Putin is clearly an autocrat and the Russia of today, I am sorry to say, is not the USSR and won't become it either. Just because he is aligned against the west doesn't mean we have to like him.
If this whole site has one big stupid obvious blind spot it's the pathological need by many of you to go USA bad -> Russia no like USA -> Russia good.
Our posture is to critically support Russia while their interests align with multipolarity and anti-imperialism, we've never claimed that Russia is still the USSR or on the path to restore it that's childish liberal propaganda.
It just happens that, due to the complex circunstamces, in this moment they ended up in the progressive side of history, like it or not.
I'm not pro-russia, I'm just anti-america/NATO. To use the WW1 comparison again I'm not pro-kaiser just because I think king George sucks ass. As always our real enemies are the ones annihilating entire generations to line their pockets.
None of us is saying Russia is good. You won't find a single Putin supporter over here. Critical support is critical for a reason.
How is he any more of an autocrat than any US president?
Both things can be true.
Both of these nations are “liberal” “””democracies”””. Just because one is acting as a foil to the American imperial ambitions doesn’t mean that it still doesn’t have the same glaring faults.
I agree that both can be true, but i don't see what the usefulness is of stretching the traditional definition of autocrat so far that it includes nominally elected leaders in a liberal bourgeois democracy with separation of powers and a parliament. We already have another term to describe that state of affairs and it's dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. That is a more accurate description than autocracy for what Russia and that US are.
Russia has many but not all of the glaring faults that the US does. We should not fall back on false equivalencies just because two countries share similar traits in some aspects. It would be too much to get into here but in certain respects the way that Russia's state and economy operate is quite different from how things are done in the West, and so is the role that they play in the geopolitical arena. They are not mirror images of each other.
Russia's system may have been put into place and shaped by the Americans but it has since undergone changes and development that have diverged it from that path.
If the US system is a lie, is the Russian system less of a lie? Bourgeoisie “democracies” are hardly known for their fair and honest elections. They’re all shams and window dressing at best, or just fake outright. Do you think Russian capitalists wouldn’t play the same dirty games that’s western ones do?
The word autocrat doesn’t fit here still, but let’s not delude ourselves that this is some wonderful showing of a true proletarian democracy, and not a sham election for the front running capitalist candidate as always, same with Biden.
I think i made it pretty clear that i don't disagree with any of this, all of what you said here is true. All i said was that we should not play into liberal propaganda by using the word "autocrat" unless we are prepared to use it for every bourgeois leader. But that muddles things imo more than clarifies them because these systems are not dictatorships of one person, they are dictatorships of a class.
The difference that i am pointing out between Russia and the US is not in which class rules them - that is the same - but in the degree to which the state intervenes in and controls the economy. This may seem like a small distinction but it results in some pretty big differences in how their respective states behave, and in particular their relationship to their financial systems.
They also have undeniably different approaches in how they behave toward the rest of the world and we should not downplay this.
Who is killing the nazis / NATO imperialists in europe? Certainly not the majority of western leftists.
Whatever we think of Russia, they are helping to do undo the primary contradiction in the world today, imperialism, ie the inequality between rich and poor nations, by harming / draining the military and financial resources of those keeping that system of inequality in place.
Could both these positions not be true at once? Neither these statements seem to be at odds with each other.
The comment above seemed to be a simplistic "russia bad tho"... I think we can and should do much better than that. This isn't a situation of 1800s / ww1-era inter-imperialist conflict.
This point does not get emphasized enough. Is there any other country or force right now that is killing as many Nazis and NATO "mercenaries" as Russia? Is anyone else depleting NATO arsenals and so successfully exposing them as a paper tiger? Has anyone else done so much reputational damage to the US as this unbeatable force that everyone was supposed to be terrified of and to the image of NATO equipment as some kind of superweapons? Is it a coincidence that we have seen the Palestinian resistance take the fight back to the occupier, the Yemenis openly challenge the entire collective West's ability to protect its shipping lanes and win, or entire African nations evict their western neo-colonial garrisons just after Russia struck a massive blow against NATO and its Nazi proxies in Ukraine? We all love and appreciate China and what it has done for the Chinese people and the world, for showing that socialism can and does bring a better life even in this modern era, but it's not China that has dared to take direct military action against the western imperialist hegemony, it's Russia.
Spot on. This reminds me of an Eldritch Cleaver quote that goes something like: "every white cop that gets killed is one less imperialist soldier that goes to kill innocent people in vietnam and elsewhere."