Everytime i see a doomer opinion it's like another rehash of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism on hedonism nihilism.
And because it is Mark Fisher, there is no solution
The problem with the Western left is that they refuse to read and apply theory
oh the western left reads a lot of theory, they just don't apply it
''oh the western left reads a lot of theory, they just don't apply it''
Well they do apply it: to be a good opinion haver during family gathering because it's all Ego at this point.
Well this is just activism vs lifestylism
if you fall for the latter, you'll just end up getting a cushy job in a cubicle and you'll be slowly getting soft at voting for the libs when you reach a certain tax bracket
The western left does not read theory, it reads reddit or wikiquotes
Theoretically the majority of the western left is still firmly grounded in some kind of ad hoc military keynesianism with some Milton Freeman inexplicablebly sprinkled in
The western left does not read theory, it reads reddit or wikiquotes
Hey
Let's get this straight, we also listen to podcasts and watch Elden Ring lore videos
I live in DC, the most lib brained and poisoned city on earth and even the people with the “in this house” signs don’t have the Ukraine flags out anymore.
And if Ukraine is melting people's brains, I suppose no one who was over 22 in 2003 will ever move left either
The ones I've heard mention it seem to be against escalating, but also think Ukraine is BTFOing Russia.
All of them that I've met have been pro-ukraine conservatives. It's definitely an issue that's impossible to guage on the internet
They threw up a fuckin painting of Zelenksiyyyy at my workplace and I've spent hours trying to refute NATO propaganda lines to friends and family
They threw up a fuckin painting of Zelenksiyyyy at my workplace
In Communist Country, workplaces must hang Dear Leader's portrait up or face accusations of insufficient fealty.
My coworker is a Hindu nationalist and he decries Ukraine and Zelensky all the time. He does uh does have reactionary opinions regarding Muslims however…
According to my Indian-American buddy his Hindutva cousins love Putin and hate the “d3generate” Ukrainians. Very odd massive movement but yeah the invasion has a lot of Hindu nationalist support
Lucky. I live in an area heavily populated by ukrainian diaspora. There's ukrainian flags everywhere including those little car window ones, tons of ukraine trident decals, and I've seen more than a few "SLAVA UKRAINI" stickers/decals. Hell, the Russian cultural group was recently barred from participating in a cultural festival due to people calling in threats against them
I assume you live far enough from the war. It's rare to meet a refugee who doesn't talk about home.
Anecdotal, but in my offline time I never met anyone who gave a shit about Ukraine. It seems to be terminally online turbo-libs. I did meet an anarchist in rehab who while more a libertarian than anything else, at least told me that Ukraine was bad and full of neo-nazis. Most people seem to be republicans obsessed with Trump.
There’s still a couple of ukraine flags around where I live and a bunch of yellow and blue twistie things all over the place. The most fervent supporters are definitely libs who left the republican party over trump.
Also, I think we can see now that libs were against the Iraq War because W. was doing it. Had it been Gore, they would have been totally into it.
I've always seen the whole ukraine flag waving thing was just for libs to display their american nationalism in a way that was more sanitized and less tacky than the republicans.
The libs are also flying American flags now just as much as the conservatives do (while some conservatives have taken down their flags because they hate biden lol).
Really? I live in a Kamala town (during the last primaries) and I don't see any USA flags. Still see some Ukrainian though. Would you say that libs are getting more nationalist in most places? It does make sense with a historical analysis.
All I know is that they're getting more nationalistic here. It's like third reich shit in some places. It's not enough that every third house has a fucking flag flying out front—a couple of towns (in the rural northeast) will have their streets lined with flags. If Biden loses the presidency the flags could disappear though. I don't know. But the era of liberal internationalism does seem to be ending.
this sounds like an extremely online outlook. Even if it's true it doesn't stop you from keep doing IRL activism and local network building.
At least people living in countries with constant bombings, choleras and famines popping, never stop doing what they believe is the right thing to do
This is completely unnecessarily doomer. There are plenty of people who realize it's bullshit. Also, the propaganda push won't last forever. At some point it will die down, and some people will come to their senses.
I agree that this is overly doomerish, but it’s been super disheartening watching how effective the Ukraine and china propaganda is.
It's very rarely against the initial propaganda push that the socialists win anything, not in WW1, not in Vietnam, not in Iraq. The idea that "We were supposed to have learned our lesson post-9/11, but everyone fucking forgot it" strikes me as a bit naive for pretty much that reason. Stupid wars are not new, there have been many before and none of those suddenly made the entire population permanently realise what's going on. Foreign policy issues have never been the main draw of socialism in the imperial core anyway, because why would they be? The main harm done by imperialism isn't done within the imperial core. People didn't become socialists in the UK because they opposed the British Empire nor did they in France because they opposed the French Empire or in Russia because they opposed Tsarist imperialism.
If by coming to their senses you mean pretend they never supported the war and then move on to frothing at the mouth about the next state department-designated enemy bad country, then yeah I guess so.
This is needlessly doomer and not really oriented in any empirical reality
Meh, the real real issue is climate change and yeah you have my permission to be a doomer about that since I too lost all my hope a long time ago.
Nothing, absolutely nothing will be done until its too late. Then they'll write fetish articles about "amazing real state opportunities in [insert cold climate region here]" and how entitled you are for taking food and energy for granted, maybe some dipshit NYT columnist will do a "top 10 cheap foods for the coming food shortage crisis".
In any case I am a long supporter of the US balkanization theory, climate change is really our only hope and paradoxically/unfortunately it will fuck with everyone else too. You are right that revolution in the US is impossible as it is but I think outside of an academic debate on the root causes it really doesn't matter now.
Remember there being a Swedish pundit that recently got raked for arguing that Swedish kids couldn't be described starving as they could be fed inexpensively on oatmeal.
for better and worse, foreign affairs do not have much of a direct effect on american politics. I'd guess that like a quarter of the country thinks the war is over because they haven't seen as many headlines about it.
A stranger told me, after a few soldiers died while withdrawing from the occupation, "We ought to bomb them for it".
And I said, "We've been bombing them for the last twenty years." They seemed rather confused by that.
Yeah I think it’s a small, albeit vocal, minority of PMC libs who’ve made the Ukraine-Russia war their entire politics and personality; most people are focused on the bread and butter economics. It’s only those that rolled their TDS brainworms into punishing Russia for, in their minds, creating Trump that are considering the be all issue.
I'm sorry but the dialectic doesn't lie, the material conditions of the number 22 make it so
Dia means double and since 22 is two twos it is the twoiest number.
Those are the facts.
Anyone in this demo is dying with a Harry Potter book in hand
No they're not. Plenty of people went through this shit after 9/11. What was originally seen as this unprompted assault on a peaceful nation gets revealed, year after year, as a particularly notable salvo between the Old Empire and its colonies. The propaganda was successful in the moment, but time will reveal the contradictions and erode trust in the institutions that spawned it. By the end, the entire framework of the conflict has crumbled and people talking about "The War on Terror" with open disgust.
People get older, their material conditions change, and they put the HP books aside.
It just doesn't shape US domestic policy, because we don't live in any kind of democracy. The fact that large numbers (even a majority) of the public oppose something doesn't do anything to change it. Ukraine propaganda merely smooths over the edges of dissent until it is harmless to the body politic. It doesn't matter whether we support or oppose Ukraine, because we're all just passive observers to the horror.
They won't have to reckon with shit, they'll just completely ignore any of your points and imply in a homophobic manner that you love Putin.
After 9/11 the left within the US was barely visible, or where it was visible it looked very very small. Yet not even a generation later, and often with people who lived during that time, there is much more political, radical and both socialist as well as anarchist potential there. Which includes climate change action that is systemic.
The war in Ukraine is much less in terms of propaganda than 9/11 was. This, too, will pass.
People probably said the same after 9/11 and the subsequent terrorist/war hysteria
There was some pretty scary shit going on in terms of surveillance of anti-war groups leading up to the Iraq war, and the anti-war protests were met with SWAT teams. Whereas the scariest thing the lib hawks will do is, accuse you of being misinformed on Twitter or Threads. The fact that so much of the right is borderline mocking them over their obsession with Russia just shows how impotent they are.
Only if you give a shit what those libs think. The whole lib method of controlling the discourse is built around getting people to buy into the idea that they’re the great moderators of what’s acceptable in the discourse. That’s why conservatives are immune to it because they straight up don’t give a rat’s ass what libs think and have no qualms about making that known.
Isn’t that what you’re arguing for anyway? I’m not sure what caring what libs think but also seeing them as immovable is going to accomplish.
there was SOME public pushback against Iraq
A bunch of street protests that did nothing. A Presidential campaign that was "for the war before I was against it" and still lost, because of the opposition's focus on vilifying gay marriage. Am upswell in anti-war organizing that never managed to coalesce into a full blown party system. A plunge in military recruitment that has never recovered.
One could argue that the whole reason we're just air-mailing Ukrainians our military surplus rather than putting troops on the border is because we destroyed the appetite for foreign wars with the last two conflicts. One could argue that we were already dragging our feet into Iraq, from a popular standpoint, thanks to Korea and Vietnam.
I mean fuck the Dixie Chicks did it.
They did it then.
Roger Waters did it now.
shrug
Now you basically HAVE to be a fucking Leninist to have even one iota of nuance about the conflict.
No you don't. Plenty of libertarian conservatives are as disgusted with the Ukraine conflict as they were with Iraq, and for all the same reasons. Plenty of liberals have more nuanced opinions, but get straight shouted down if they try to draw any kind of parallel to the last war. Plenty of moderates tap the "Debt Clock" while frowning dourly, because Deficit Spending Bad.
The support for the war is confined almost entirely to the NPR liberals and their need to wear their own Yellow Ribbons.
It just doesn't matter. The policy is being written in the State Department, wholly removed from any kind of popular input.
It's so fucking cool that in Germany and other European states we have literal fucking fascists being the only ones who are allowed to voice any criticism of NATO and the Ukraine war right now because anyone else gets buried under mountains of concern trolling by libs and the vast majority of leftists.
I sure fucking wonder why the far right is massively gaining ground if no one else can even address the thing that has the most immediate impact on people's lives right now. People who stupidly thought they were well off enough to not be impacted by the world going to hell are starting to feel their confidence in that crumble and they either double down on their delusions and lash out at anyone who reminds them of that or go full on Hitler mode
It's so fucking cool that in Germany and other European states we have literal fucking fascists being the only ones who are allowed to voice any criticism of NATO and the Ukraine war right now because anyone else gets buried under mountains of concern trolling by libs and the vast majority of leftists.
It's the same problem the left has faced in 1990 (First Iraq War), 1998 (NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and intervention in Kosovo in favor of the Albanian population), 2001 (Invasion of Afghanistan), 2003 (Invasion of Iraq), 2011 (Bombing of Libya) and 2014 (Euromaidan):
Do you support the libs in the imperialist adventure to expand the sphere of influence and economic system that's destroying the world or do you support the questionable government that's right-wing nationalist, socially reactionary, possibly religious fundamentalist and kinda militaristic... but does actually have a legitimate grievance in the fact that it needs to defend itself?
In that case, you have a faction that goes "NATO is bad but it's spreading human rights around the world, Slava Ukraini!" (which turns into "Ukraine is based actually" through the process of self-justification of the decision made) vs the faction that goes "Russia is leading the fight for multipolarity, Z!" (and the resulting "Putin is based actually" for the same reason), plus a third faction that goes "Both of these are cringe, the workers need to overthrow both governments", which is usually the biggest group but doesn't really have any immediate solutions for a very partisan conflict, so it ends up doing little.
And boom, you have people lured into returning to being libs, people becoming nazbols or worse and demoralized people taking the grillpill. With less people active, you also have structures disappear, manpower fall as the elderly comrades die and less youths replace them, etc.
The fash don't have that problem. Among the small militant groups you sometimes do get such factionalism as you get debates about Asian hordes vs fighters against Globohomo or whatever, but the big fash parties are almost all pro-Russian or at least opportunistically open to diplomacy because United Russia's government is actually pretty close to what they want. Powerful, Nationalistic, Reactionary, willing to show force against people threatening its interests, especially if they're confident their country could do the same (vs for example Eastern European chuds worried their countries would be put under the exploitative conditions the United States put them under in the 80s -and only liberated themselves from only by virtue of kneeling to them, for which they were sometimes rewarded- and fear might repeat itself with Russia, to which they attribute every ill of imperialist pressure from the cold war. And in some ways, they're not entirely wrong. The USSR was always the underdog and having gathered attention from the US as pawns, they had only to gain... unless they were Romania or Bulgaria, which were less important strategically so are now in a way rougher shape from the economic transition than say the Baltics and thus the US/EU didn't pump as much free money into them.)
(My point in my side-tangent: The politics of trying to outcompete capitalism in its own game, with their own development goals, were a mistake.)
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
So... it's not like people are gullible and being arbitrarily manipulated by master psychologists and computer engineers. It's more like propaganda is a device to reaffirm preexisting, established, values of the ruling class that expresses itself through variation and overwhelming repetition, and it takes hold on people who already believe in those values established by the society and its ruling class.
In other words, the propaganda echoes and articulates the thought in the American mind - those who still believe in America - of patriotic value: America means well, America is the best because America is good, to the more "realistic" America may not be perfect but it's better than the rest. Propaganda is a pep talk! It doesn't work if you don't believe in it to begin with, but if repeated enough you eventually will believe aspects of it as no one is immune to the effects of propaganda.
Propaganda only finally begins to wear off when faced with declining economic and social conditions that every reversal for the worse is permanent, and that each of these reversals are not isolated to arbitrary individuals or communities but large segments of the country. Which is why activists keep agitating for unions and welfare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_situation
You should listen to
as they really do break down the propaganda quite well.Propaganda is effective but it isn't infallible.
as their material conditions decline, their politics will improve
or get far worse
time will tell
