There are a bunch of sicko neoliberals and insufferable redditors there, yes, but there are also some normal libs and a few comrades, and it seems like a good way to encourage lemmy generally to re-embrace leftism.
I've been using an alt to talk on there and it's honestly not that bad. It's a little bad, but not that bad. I think if we just try to patiently explain ourselves, we have a reasonable chance of reaching people and shifting the general political alignment.
Those of us who aren't up to dealing with ghouls (I am frequently included in this group) can just stay at home here and that's just fine.
Anyway, just an idea. I would appreciate feedback.
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Russia is not ethnically cleansing Ukraine. It is engaging in a conventional war and being far less inhumane than NATO countries' engagements in war, particularly relative to civilians. At least, for now.
Ukraine was trying to de-Russify Donbas since 2014, however. Banning language, cultural references, etc.
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I'm going to be honest with you, you aren't going to find a lot of sympathy for Ukraine here. Civilians perhaps because civilians always suffer under war, but not for the country and especially not the government. If you are here expecting us to be sympathetic to Ukraine you will not last long. What is happening in Ukraine is unfortunate but it is a natural result of NATO brinkmanship and constant encroachment of Russian red lines since the fall of the USSR.
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i'm an american, so I place the blame on America for prolonging and instigating the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the first place. It was the USA that instigated and guided the 2014 coup in Ukraine, then encouraged Ukraine to ignore the Minsk agreements, and now continues to encourage rejections of ceasefires or de-escalation. The entire war didn't simply pop up out of nowhere. The Russian state didn't simply wake up one day desiring land and then pick a target at random.
Rather, the entire conflict is the culmination of decades of American and western meddling.
I've also known Russian-speaking people in the Donbas, but they were more associated with the separatists, so I haven't heard from them in a long time. They were probably shelled to death by Ukraine sometime between 2015 and 2022.
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These are not mutually exclusive. When the US does a color revolution, they amplify real social problems to get people into the streets. Then groups the US has financed (and armed), usually well before the actual tipping point, are used to steer the revolution in a way that's favorable to the US, with the US diplomatic support hinging on that faction's ascension to power. While the 2014 revolution started with euro-friendly liberals playing piano in the streets, it was quickly coopted by far-right groups.
Here's an NBC article from 2014 where a journalist tries to make sense of why the US required Svoboda, Right Sector, and Fatherland get a majority of the newly formed Ukrainian government's cabnet
There's similar articles from the time trying to make sense of why neonazi paramilitary groups were incorporated into the military instead of purged.
Timothy Snyder (respectable Nazi historical revisionist) and Wikipedia disagree with them? Excellent fact checking.
Here’s a good article on the issue.
Why do you think Russia invaded Ukraine?
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Czar literally means king in Russian. You may not think their electoral system is valid or representative of the people, but they objectively do not have a king.
Russia is the largest country on the planet and extremely rich in resources, they don't need or want to conquer Ukrainian land. Crimea is desirable to Russia insofar as it makes a NATO naval blockade of Russia's Black Sea access near impossible, which Russia recognized as a viable threat after the Maidan coup.
This comment looks ridiculous if you have an understanding of the region prior to 2022. Much of the region was originally Russian prior to the formation of the USSR. Getting included in the Ukrainian SSR wasn't a big deal because they were all apart of the same country, until its dissolution. Now, under the Ukrainian government, a culturally Russian peoples have had their language removed from all of public life and were on the receiving end of anti-Russian pogroms and terrorism. These people do not see Russia as a colonizing empire, hence the people of Donbas and Lugansk seeking independence from Ukraine.
Critical support. Russia's invasion is a reaction to US imperialism. No one here is cheering on the death and destruction going on in Ukraine. We want this war to be over, but the US doesn't. Our understanding is that the US tries to destabilize their adversaries by instigating war or regime change in regions along their borders, so reactions to that are less important to condemn than the US's hegemonic Imperialism.
Ukraine federally required the use of Ukrainian across several domains, including education, publication, hospitals, and political parties, excluding Russian. It additionally excluded those who could not speak Ukrainian sufficiently from public office despite not providing education programs to establish universal knowledge of Ukrainian. This was an action taken deliberately against ethnic Russians (and some others), as some other ethnic minority languages were regionally protected. In numerous public speeches, analyses, etc, it was commonly understood that this was an attempt to remove Russian from the public sphere. For the duration of this period, Ukrainian was itself regularly spoken only by a minority of citizens of Ukraine at home or at work.
Since 2022, the crackdowns have only gotten more severe, even banning things being named in Russian.
Would you have noticed this during your visit?
Yes, that's one of the ways of erasing culture. For example, the Irish language has been revived only through incredible effort due to its suppression by the British and many indigenous American languages are lost or nearly lost due to schooling systems that banned their use.
It is telling that bans occurred before actually educating the public in a so-called official national language.
What you have just said here is chauvinist and wrong-headed. Ukraine is a multilingual country with wide regional variation where some languages are dominant where others aren't. If you want a universal national language to facilitate national communication, you can implement education programs that still maintain regional ethnic culture and identities and education programs. Looking down on those that haven't opted to adapt to the plurality language of another region is not okay.
Public sphere bans have a massive impact on private sphere use. Given the form of the bans, it would be reasonable to expect yet more Russophobic escalations - and Kyiv has consistently done so.
A common experience for someone living in Donetsk city, shelled for nearly a decade by far UA sanctioned right forces. I am sorry your friends were killed just as I am sorry for those shelled in Donetsk. Civilians are the primary casualty of UA's war against Donbas and Russia's war against Ukraine.
If you would like to understand the true horrors that are visitable by such a military power, I would recommend reviewing the living conditions in Iraq from 1989 to 2007. Two invasions and an interceding sanctions regime. In the first invasion, Western forces destroyed the vast majority of essential civilian infrastructure. In the sanctions period, Iraq lacked for electricity, food, medicine, doctors, forced to buy expensive food aid with oil. Millions died, mostly children. In the second invasion, the pattern repeated, with what little had been rebuilt immediately targeted with "shock and awe" (terrorism) and then a long-term occupation with widespread extrajudicial killings.
Ukraine still has electricity and clean running water and healthcare. Think of what it would mean for the population for those to simply be gone. Think of what it would mean to see masses those around you dying of treatable diseases caused by malnutrition and contaminated water.
It is not coincidental that these are the conditions faced by Gazans, also under the thumb of a Western-backed occupation. An actual genocide. Most of the deaths are children.
Please do not use that term so casually unless you are ready to defend its use.
The most common sentiment among communists looks at this from a few different angles.
The first is that the common civilians are who suffer here, caught between a struggle between the Russian Federation and NATO powers led by the US. Most people in Ukraine just want to live their lives, they are not ideologically committed to a geopolitical project. Yet they are killed by bombs/shelling/missiles, alienated by ethnically discriminatory policies, forced into the military to be cannon fodder. Communists, generally, oppose this and want the war to end for the sake of the people.
There is also a larger geopolitical angle where we analyze the material interests and actions of states and how they relate to their economic realities. Communists, while of course seeing Russia as a capitalist state, also see Western powers as being those doing the most to escalate and make the situation unbearable for the RF until they saw this war as the most viable option. None of these NATO countries would ever accept these things happening on their borders. They have invaded countries for less several times. It is not like the RF does not bear responsibility for literally invading a country, but you won't understand the impetus nor the continuation of the war without seeing Kyiv as a proxy for Western interests and with those interests constantly escalating. Those interests are also why the war is ongoing. They don't want a peace deal, they have actively disrupted the chance for peace talks several times. The common theme is a desire to use Ukraine to hurt Russia and isolate it from EU countries (making them more US-dependent) no matter how many Ukrainians (or Russians, or Germans, etc) it harms.
Another geopolitical angle that communists take is to understand the US-led global capitalist hegemony as the primary enemy. Russia is responding to its exclusion from the imperialist side of this order (the US et al have pushed it towards immortalized status) and this conflict is emerging as maximum pressure from the West via Ukraine and Russia's invasion. Overall, this war is also a metric by which to evaluate and understand the imperialist bloc's power, particularly its financial weapons (e.g. kicking the RF off SWIFT), and hoping to see them fail or at least be far weaker than expected. Our larger projects for liberation are also targets of these weapons. In addition, any economic partner that is targeted by the US but can still facilitate a global south trading block is good for the wider project of undermining US imperialism.
Finally, Ukraine has a Nazi problem and liberal media outlets try to lie about it despite covering it nonstop up until 2022. The shock troops, the ideologically committed, for UA, are largely Nazis. This is why it is damned hard for the press to get pictures of soldiers without Nazi patches or tattoos. That and Azov/Azov-associated groups have an inordinate influence over what gets out, they basically run their own whole outfit on that front. Communists are, historically and now, the only group that actually opposes Nazis in the necessary terms and means.
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Yes, but the world in which that could exist outside of a very very small local council would look very different from what we have today. There is a large exploited underclass of Spanish speakers in the US, they should have political power and therefore representation. I would not say, "no you should not hold office because you cannot pass my poll tax".
Within a nation-state, the challenges of having multiple languages should be resolved by eduxating everyone in at least one common language, not suppressing the power and voice of large minorities.
Many absolutely are and feel this way, yes. But they don't tell the Gringos this most of the time, as those Gringos are very racist.
Though the situation is somewhat different. The US is a settler-colonized country and its Spanish speakers, due to racist immigration laws, are primarily fairly recent immigrants (last 50 years or so). Ukraine had much longer-established Russian-speaking regions, regions where it is the majority language. Or maybe I should say it did, because it won't be getting Donbas back. There are neighborhoods in the US where Spanish is the norm, but not cities or states. Oppression of Spanish speakers in the US is really oppression of Latinos and immigrants, themselves fleeing the consequences of US imperialism or the children/grandchildren of those immigrants. The oppression is there but its cultural embedding is somewhat different. Less stable. Less regionally coherent.
There are many schools that teach in Spanish, though they are all, to my knowledge, geared towards transitioning each student to learning in English.
Much smaller.
The US doesn't actually have an official language, technically speaking, though it is and has been plenty racist enough to use language (etc) as a weapon of oppression. Go back 200 years. What languages were predominant in what is now the United States?
The UA government was using policy to suppress Russian culture and language and has only accelerated this. Ukraine has had a large Russian population for a very long time - Ukrainian nationalism itself developed at the same time as there were ethnic Russians in Donbas (and Lenin himself promoted it!). Their actions are from the toolkit of cultural genocide. I'm not sure why they can be justified simply because they are the actions of a state.
Incorrect. Education is often compulsory and it is generally necessary to have a good life. The education we are talking about is predominately that of children, who have no autonomy. In addition, education is not something you can simply drop by a store and purchase easy-peasy. There are not a large array of affordable alternatives.
It is? Try not working for a few years, don't takr any debt, and tell me how great your life is.
What does this have to do with the systematic repression of ethnic Russians in Ukraine?
Yes, and per this discussion, that is the treatment Ukraine has not received by Russia *yet". To be honest, I originally thought Russia would use those same tactics. I was very surprised when they did not. I am relieved that they have not yet done so. I think that if NATO powers escalate, the RF will eventually do such things as a way to end the war more quickly given that diplomacy is taken off the table. It is imperative that we work against escalation, against extending the war, and demand peace negotiations from Ukraine and western powers.
UA hasn't been a sovereign state since Euromaidan. There was a coups and an EU-friendly, anti-Russia politician was placed there instead. If there is a recent "start" to all of this, it is Euromaidan. You can hear Victoria Nuland personally talking about which leader they would be picking for Ukraine, there is an audio recording.
In terms of negotiations, Russia wanted talks days into their invasion and they began shortly after. These were blown up by Boris Johnson, who of course is working with the US. If the US wanted UA to nefotiate with the RF they would have told Boris off and the talks would have resumed. The UK is not particularly powerful or important when it comes to these talks, they are just a representative of the NATO bloc.
The UA is now a complete dependency of the NATO bloc. In addition to all the Euromaidan fuckery, all of their material support comes from the NATO bloc. They don't have de facto independent diplomacy. They haven't had their scheduled elections and Donbas hasn't been part of them since 2014. They've banned many opposition parties. All signs point in the same direction.
Continued fighting just means more losses. More dead people, more destroyed infrastructure, more poisoned or mined soil, more territory lost. They're not getting Donbas back. No Wunderwaffe is going to make things better, a RF that retaliates gloves-off will make UA like Iraq in the 90s. The only reason any of it continues is because the imperialist bean counters believe they can still hurt Russia more and bring EU countries into greater US dependency.
in UA?
More specifically, UA has a neonazi problem. This actually extends very far up the ranks, with a federal attempt to rehabilitate Bandera, an anti-semite Nazi collaborator Ukrainian Nationalist that facilitated pogroms and the Holocaust against Jewish Ukrainians. Part of Ukrainian neo-Nazism is the merging of nationalist sentiment that they tie to Bandera with more openly German Nazi ideologies and symbols and texts. Ukrainian neo-Nazis, ethnically, would have been treated as lesser Undermenschen by German Nazis, but define themselves as a special kind of Ukrainian ethnicity superior to other slavs, especially Russians. The Russophobia in Ukraine is symbiotic with these neo-Nazis, they are often the enforcers on their eastern front.
But it is often very simple. Heil Hitler salutes, reading Mein Kampf for inspiration, antisemitic remarks, creating literal national socialist parties with Nazi insignia. Azov is an offshoot created by a member of a Nazi party, it uses a Nazi rendition of the Wolfsangel in its logo. Its older logo had a Sonnenrad that was designed by Himmler, it has no non-Nazi history ot meaning.
The neo-Nazis have important military positions, they are the most ideologically committed against Donbas separatists, most willing to shell civilians
This is why Nazi insignia are so ridiculously common in photos of Ukrainian soldiers. It I'd both distressingly popular and they enjoy an elevated position within the propaganda apparatus (and other efforts) directed against ethnic Russians and separatists.
Yes, in fact most of the southwest should be returned to Mexico or handed over to the indigenous nations who survived the genocide
Also your analogy is based on a faulty premise, bilingualism wasn't an issue in Ukraine until neo-nazis couped the democratically elected government in 2014 and activity waged war against Russian speakers who objected to that crime
You think the state that has rebuilt the Ukrainian military at least four times, while managing and coordinating the entire Ukrainian intelligence and communications services has no say is Ukrainian politics? I mean, obviously you know better, but it's still funny watching people like you claim to have no knowledge or understanding of concepts like "power" or "leverage" lmao
Did that nerd really try to use Spanish as a counter to your other post? lmao
You know you could've been more believable if you just said you visited Ukraine and saw plenty of people being openly Russian or some nonsense, but you had to say Donbas huh lmao
I can sort of understand being pro-Ukraine in this war given you probably don't know the context from before 2022 and have been thoroughly propagandized by western media portraying these fascists as freedom fighters.
But calling this war a genocide? I genuinely don't understand how anyone could come to that conclusion while we're watching an actual genocide unfold in Palestine. Russia could have immediately and relentlessly terror bombed Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure back into the stone age like the US and NATO typically do. But they didn't. Clearly they intend for Ukrainians to still exist at the end of this. In order to call this a genocide, you'd need to say essentially every war ever fought was also a genocide.
There is no racial prejudice or settler designs in Russia's motivation here. They've made themselves very clear since the fall of the Soviet Union that Ukraine joining NATO is their red line. But even after the US orchestrated the 2014 Maidan coup to install a fascist, rabidly anti-Russian government, even after Ukraine violated the Minsk agreements by continuing to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, Russia still attempted diplomacy until there were no other options left when NATO had Ukraine shut down all talk of peace.
You can't goad someone into a war for literal decades and then start crying when, on their own terms rather than yours, they join the existing civil war on the side of the people you are trying to erase.