Most people I know in real life have long since stopped giving a fuck about the invasion, if they ever did in the first place. It only seems that way online because the fed's bot farms are working overtime.
:100-com: Always assume any thread on US enemies and US involvement abroad is populated mostly by bots.
I was gonna say this. I guess I'm not really a "doomer" about this like in the original post because when I look out over the broadest definition of my "social circle" - idk maybe 100 people - a majority barely have any idea of what's going on. These are the people on a spectrum of "do not even really know a war is going on" to "vague notion that Russia and Ukraine are fighting". The sizeable minority are a little more aware but don't really care one way or another.
The idea that this is the "death of the left" in the US is a bridge too far IMO. Sure a lot of the radlibs (the ones who care) are all strongly pro-NATO but they were libs to begin with. They were never on our side anyway. I'd say most of the actual left knows what's up here or are at least waking up to it. Talking IRL, not online.
I avoid talking about it because it just gets weird when people find out I'm Russian (but not a citizen, just first of my family born in US) and want me to ??? a country I've literally only spent at total only some months in, or tell my politically normie and powerless cousins to ???.
And that's on top of all the normal weird things that happen. When someone finds out you're """exotic""".
Nah, trust me, the USAs propaganda game was waaaay stronger in the 80s and 90s
Also the first Red Scare was INSANE, people lost their minds.
We've been through worse.
There are more people getting interested in leftism than in a long time. Capitalism is crumbling. Covid, The housing crisis and the cost of living have made Millennials and younger people jaded of capitalism. Everyone is tired. People are depressed and tapping out. There's an employee shortage because 'nobody wants to work'. Landlords are hated by most people. Every person you talk to thinks the world is pretty much fucked. Nobody has a future anymore because capitalsm sold the environment for burgers and NFTs.
Something has to give, don't you feel it?
At the very least, stay hopeful out of spite. Our masters want us to feel hopeless. They want to crush any idea that what we want is any more than an ideal. Don't let them have that. Commies in the past have dealt with worse, we owe it to them to keep going.
Yes, they have all the power of the worlds resources at their fingertips.
Yet communism still exists. It will always exist. It keeps coming back again and again until it defeats capitalism or capitalism eats itself to death. Capitalism is powerful but inefficient and sloppy.
Because at the end of the day, capitalism is an irrational, unethical, destructive and inhuman system that by its very nature cannot survive forever. People like Elon Musk have more money and power than the Earth has ever seen before, yet he can't commission a shuttle that doesn't leak piss. Meanwhile, communists were the first people to get a man into space! With 1961 technology!
So yeah, capitalists are powerful but not infallible. Hell, if we're lucky they'll take themselves out with a self-driving car or something lmao.
Shit does look bleak tho and it's perfectly valid to feel the way you do. I just wanted to see if I could help by sharing what keeps me going. I really do hope things get better so we can be optimistic about the world again. Maybe someday :meow-hug:
It's one of my favorite quotes from Disco Elysium, on the pretty similar topic of "If no one can agree what real communism even means, and the rest of the world keeps killing us for our beliefs, what's the point?"
Steban, the Student Communist - "Oh! And, gendarme. One last thing. About that question you asked earlier. It reminded me of a certain poem that you might appreciate. It was written by a young communard who was killed on the barricades during the Coalition landings. The story goes that he wrote it on the last night of his life, keeping watch from the barricades in the middle of the night. I don't have the whole thing committed to memory, but there's a line in it I think about sometimes."
Harry - "What's the line?"
Steban, the Student Communist - "'In dark times, should the stars also go out?' Anyway, goodnight to you."
It's 2022 friend. Once the war ends people will have forgotten about it in a week the same as everything else. This isn't some generational formative experience, it's just another sticker for people to slap on their laptops.
This. Remember Radical Islamic Terrorism? That really fell off of a cliff after the 2010s.
Azov could start live streaming pogroms
Already a thing for years basically. Svoboda party's militant wing C14 was filming themselves beating Romani and destroying their camps as far back as during Euromaidan (2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2ti1tgxTes
CW:SA
then there's all those videos that Juan Sinmiedo (now banned) posted to twitter of public floggings and sexual assaults. Basically victims were accused of looting or being saboteurs or being Russian spies, tied to telephone poles, their pants pulled down, and then whipped on their buttocks/genitals with tree branches while livestreamed to Telegram and other platforms. They would do this to children and teenage girls too. No mercy. Very lynch mob mentality. Some of them had their faces taped up so they couldn't breathe and were left out to freeze. Some of them had their faces sprayed with green industrial dye. Ukrainian nationalists filmed themselves stalking Russian-speaking Ukrainians and trying to get them to pronounce a Ukrainian word that's difficult for Russians to say and beating them if they failed. I saw footage of a Ukrainian nazi literally beating a group of roma women with a sex toy in public and calling them misogynistic and racial slurs and spraying them with mace and chasing them up and down the street while LITERALLY NO ONE INTERVENED AND A FEW PEOPLE STARTED FILMING.
Keep in mind that the Ukrainian right is far more than just azov regiment. You have Kraken battalion, Aidar battalion. Misanthropic division. Various "Banderstadt" enthusiasts. You have parties like Svoboda, Right sektor. You have militant wings of political parties like C14. and while all these groups together make up a very small percentage of the ukrainian population, they have outsized political influence because they receive support, weapons, training from the USA. It's very much a gladio type operation the americans have going over there. Zelensky's Jewishness was first viewed as an obstacle but as Dmitro Korchynysky of right sector noted, it whitewashes what the Ukrainian military is doing.
then there’s all those videos that Juan Sinmiedo (now banned) posted to twitter of public floggings and sexual assaults.
Still available if you go back to the beginning of their Telegram which was created in response to the twitter ban.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/3
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/13
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/23
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/33
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/43
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/48
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/58
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/64
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/75
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/85
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/89
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/90
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/91
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/107
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/114
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/117
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/118
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/119
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/120
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/121
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/122
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/123
This is more or less all the content on the early terror campaign that quickly led to twitter bans. May as well put links to it all in one place. This campaign was carried out before people had fully submitted to the far right rule, anyone that spoke out, opposed or otherwise was some kind of problem became a humiliation example as a message to hush up opposition to the state. Speculation at the time was that it was all being carried out by the Special Tasks Patrol Police (the nazi volunteer gangs formally part of the state).
The reprisals if Ukraine takes back the conquered territory are going to be really, really dark. They've already got state sanctioned kill lists with children on them. Children whose crime was livecasting the course of the war as they experienced it.
Thank you for finding these. The fact that people were livestreaming themselves doing Abu-Ghraib level shit and the people reporting on it were outright deplatformed is infuriating. Every year the United States perfects its insane propaganda model. It's getting harder and harder to reach people . I've been excommunicated by a few liberals in my family for not towing the Democratic Party line on Ukraine.
All good I'm just terminally on Telegram, although I've seen some are now starting to move to VK due to censorship. I liked ASB too.
This thread is now deleted though so maybe I should put this comment somewhere else? Not sure where. If the site continues to hide old posts too this will go eventually as well.
Hoping one day something big and undeniable happens that proves us right
Historically it's unlikely. People don't really care about the progress of wars while they're happening. Admittedly the Iraq invasion was a long time ago and my memory is a little foggy, but I don't recall nearly as much daily reporting and propaganda on it compared to Ukraine. Maybe in the first few months. But after a couple of years Americans mostly lost interest and it was just something happening in the background, and a few years later no one except war nerds really know anything about what happened.
I doubt most westerners have any actual knowledge of what's happening in Ukraine. All the sources I see on :reddit-logo: are naked, totally unapologetic propaganda with no assessible truth value. Most people have just bought in to the narrative that, in 2022, for no reason except the love of Evil, Putin invaded the brave, innocent, and patriotic country of Ukraine. And NATO and Europe, out of the kindness of their hearts and their love of justice, are pumping tens of billions of dollars in to this poor, extremely corrupt country that no one cared about last year. And anyone who says that there were any historical events leading up to this war, or that NATO worked tirelessly for thirty years to provoke this war, has been brainwashed by Putin.
It's just kind of how life is. The big capitalists control the media, the government, and the military, so history is whatever is convenient for them. I don't know why some people break out of it and some people don't. For me it was Obama assassinating al-Awlaki and his kid. Just straight up, in the open, unjustified, unapologetic, fully mask off murder of a US citizen while openly and deliberately denying him any kind of due process or ability to protect himself. "Hope and Change" Obama shitting on everything I was taught to believe about the USA was a big enough wake up moment for me to start to realize that all of it, from top to bottom, was lies and brutality and bullshit. But if I hadn't been a politically engaged weirdo to begin with I'm not sure what would have shaken me out of it, if anything.
Here's a good example of how perceptions about WWII changed over the decades
They went from pretty realistic in 1945 - The Soviets did all the heavy lifting, the Allies mostly supplied war materiel and then showed up for a bit at the end - To total Hollywood bullshit by 2000 - America saved the world. Even the article is hemming and hawing about just admitting that the war in Europe happened in the East and everything else was largely incidental.
what are we to do?
I hate it, but unless China makes some pretty radical changes to it's foreign policy positions I think we just have to wait and try to keep the fires burning until circumstances change. We're in the middle of a huge fascist resurgence and about eight different civilization crushing crises with no real western leftist movement poised to do anything on a national or international level. This might just be one of those centuries were we try to keep the books in print and not get exterminated by the fash.
I mean even if you took all the Nazis out of the picture, the war in Ukraine is... stupid isn't the right word, but it follows the completely alien and inhuman logic of NATO and capitalism - We're going to spend decades provoking Russia to start a war so we can destabilize Russia, slaughter it's population, and steal everything. If we screw it up the world ends in nuclear fire, but we don't actually care that much because we're NATO psychopaths and ice chewing capitalists. Like even if there weren't any Nazis in Ukraine this war was 100% intentional and carefully, deliberately orchestrated by NATO and the US. For decades. They've been working on this for decades, and everyone knew it right up until this year when it became politically inconvenient to understand what NATO has been doing for a lot of our entire lives.
Perhaps the European winter will be a testing ground for a leftist resurgent, that is, if they don’t soyface over defending Ukraine and start addressing the inequalities people are facing right in their backyards.
I think the US may have made a major mistake in bombing that pipeline. As far as conspiracies go, this one is pretty sloppy, and it seems like only a matter of time before people wake up and realize the US did it, but who knows.
That the US did it was trending in German Twitter at least
a testing ground for a leftist resurgent
I just don't see where we have a base to build off. There are lots of useless succdems but actual socialists and communists are thin on the ground, and there just aren't enough anarchists. But the fascists have a ton of institutional support and plenty of scratched liberals to feed on. It looks really, really, really bad.
If we live to see the anglo-american empire finally die, then we can push for ourselves and struggle with the reactionaries for what's left. That's the best to hope for.
Before WWII, the United States solved all its problems with :free-real-estate: free real estate
Now it feels like we just gin up some war fever whenever people start noticing the problems...
Or is reality deterministic and I just happened to read some book or watch some movie or one day had cereal for breakfast instead of eggs and that set off some chain of events that reprogrammed my meat computer to make me susceptible to communism?
No. Determinism is silly. It is mistakenly identifies our models - our simplifications - of the physical world as the physical world.
they were literally posting pogroms from day one brother. the videos of entire families of "saboteurs" stripped, dyed, and fastened to posts came from Ukrainian telegrams. nobody ever denied them. nobody ever cared.
Every decade or two, the new boogeyman is made to rally people for ultra-nationalism (and keyly, loyal to the capitalist state). Al-Qaedah have been the evil for which supporting US military hegemony and the slaughter of millions of innocent civilians has been 'necessary' for 20 years, now that cow has been starved of all public interest, Russia is the new one. In ten or twenty years, regardless of whether Russia is diminished or not, people will get bored and it'll be a different target.
What's the effective counter-narrative is a very important question, and one that'll have to be solved soon. When people are told, truthfully or not, that the lives of their tribe are being threatened, it tickles a very deep-seated and integral instinct to do whatever is necessary to protect tribe (so long as they can remain wilfully ignorant to the massive war crimes and murder of innocents). I daresay the effective most counter narrative is in reality, some similar poke of a sensitive bit of our stupid monkey brains.
I'll agree that they won huge. It's kind of a lesson that this is what wartime propaganda does.
Still they can't trick people into being interested forever. How many treats will people forgo?
Yes, they won the propaganda but propaganda is still all talk.
Nobody I know even talks about Russia anymore.
