SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

it’s more fun to have your own, very specialized definition and conception of communism and socialism and repeat them for a few decades than to read boring books for a few weeks and have your misconceptions cleared up.

“my ignorance is as good as your knowledge”, but not in a bad stupid American way, but in a good virteous down-to-earth proletarian who doesn’t need the work of fancy shmancy professors way

To the point that there is a lot of footage of the people of Iran cheering in the streets.

we’re really doing this propaganda again? can we please get more interesting stuff than the “my people yearn for freedom from this tyrant”?

The vestiges of the imperialist system will probably continue for decades to come but it seems plausible that with mounting crises and contradictions, we’re looking at a meaningful collapse of hegemony within the next 15-20 years. I think it can be very easy to understate what’s been going on for the last couple years if you’re a liberal “It’s just a war in Ukraine, a trade war against China, and a fragmenting Israel versus half a dozen heavily armed militant groups - nothing that threatens the United States!” but one can also overstate what’s going on without an understanding of how deeply rooted most countries are in terms of debt and monetary flows to and from the United States, and just how many military bases there are, etc. These aren’t intractable problems but the easiest problems are being solved first (dedollarizing between two countries that are already being sanctioned) and the harder problems, like actually creating the alternative institutions that most of the world’s countries would be happy with ceding a portion of their sovereignty to, are indeed very hard.

It’s very encouraging that US military might already seems so undermined and ineffectual, though, as being militarily challenged is a really big first step towards the end of empires. The usual people will keep spending billions on American weapons, obviously, but the mere concept that there are indeed problems that America cannot simply bomb or overthrow out of existence (e.g. Ansarallah blocking the Red Sea) is a massive shift from the high-point of the 1990s, especially as America has no other tools in its toolbox except for sanctions, which are becoming less effective by the day. And the fact that America has to send Israel billions in weaponry every few months is encouraging in the sense that such massive volumes are clearly required for Israel to merely stay afloat, as they don’t seem to be, say, going to war against Hezbollah with them or anything. The monetary values are meaningless, the US would have no qualms with printing a quadrillion dollars for Israel if that was what was needed, it’s the resources being taken out that are the real prize here. You can’t bomb people with dollar bills, nor could Israels eat them under siege.

in totalitarian communist North Korea, the regime disseminates propaganda assuring their brainwashed citizens that being hungry is actually beneficial due to their failed communist agrarian policies

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a “failed annexation”

It does honestly feel like people - on both sides of the war, I will freely admit - put way too much focus on individual events and are unable to see the bigger picture of logistics and equipment produced and so on.

So you end up with, just as a recent example, the Ukrainians going on and on about that Bradley vs tank incident and how “owned” Russia was or whatever (that is managed to keep going for like 5 minutes in constant Bradley fire? sounds like a pretty awesome example of how great Russian tanks are tbh), or that Russian plane full of Ukrainian POWs being shot down by a Patriot, or now this boat being sunk. But none of this actually matters. What’s really going on here is that the pro-Ukraine crowd is seeing these events and drawing absolutely massive conclusions from it. “Aha, see, we can now destroy all Russian tanks with just our infantry carriers! Aha, see, we can now shoot down every Russian plane with our air defense! Aha, see, we can now sink every boat in the Russian fleet!” Russia has thousands of tanks, its planes are routinely not shot down by Ukrainian air defense because of how depleted it is and the Russian countermeasures (flying low, etc), and honestly, sinking the Russian Black Sea fleet would be an L but it would be very far from war-ending, given that Ukraine has no navy for it to fight anyway and Russia obviously has inland missile launchers. But the pro-Russian side like Rybar tends to take these narratives and feels the need to address them because they’re just as caught up in these narratives as everybody else, when they could just ignore them and watch as they’re forgotten in a week.

Wars are determined by systemic issues and, most importantly, the capacity for the warring nations to overcome those issues. Neither side is permanently locked into its state of affairs (in most cases; e.g. WW2 Germany had problems the whole war with getting enough fuel due to simple geography). Not being able to see how a military could make up for its deficiencies is what lead to the Kharkov surprise for the pro-Russian side who didn’t understand that Russia went into the war with too few troops to man parts of the front and that Ukraine had been creating brigades in the rear while their frontline army was getting mauled over the spring and summer, and then the surprise of the failure of the counteroffensive for Ukraine, who didn’t understand that Russia had found a way to counter the Ukrainian offensive strategy and thought that the same trick was guaranteed to work twice.

In short, if you’re going to make an assumption that a military is unable to counter a new problem, you need a LOT of evidence for it - not just vibes about how you think the conflict is going to go. Never assume that a military is stagnant unless you have extremely good reasons to believe so. I personally don’t believe that the Ukrainian military is stagnant and totally doomed and they can still probably keep defending for at least the better part of a year and finding new strategies to counter Russia, but the ongoing lack of Western military reindustrialization is my ‘extremely good reason’ to believe that Ukraine will be unable to win unless there is a very sudden change in the economic strategy of the West away from neoliberalism and just-in-time manufacturing.

Key Events in the timeline of X Bad Communist Country:

• Previous government which had some issues but could have been worked out through dialogue, debate, and reforms, is brutally overthrown by violent ideological communist terrorists
• Those terrorists evilly steal and pillage the institutions of that previous government and brutally loot the businesses of hard-working citizens, giving them to the lazy, inferior, unwashed masses
• As a consequence of this, the country falls into abject poverty, with breadlines and freedom of speech brutally repressed for decades.
• We put sanctions on them AFTER this. ABSOLUTELY 100% AFTER. I cannot stress enough that the sanctions did NOT cause the former thing to happen, it was only AFTERWARDS. But it’s also fine if they did cause suffering because those people are bad and inferior anyway.
• Protests from people yearning for freedom in this brutal communist regime occur and are brutally crushed, brutally. Thousan-- tens of tho-- HUNDREDS of thousands of people are murdered by state forces and their bodies washed into sewers so there’s no evidence of this happening, but it did definitely occur. Five million people are killed in this genocide, which claimed twenty million lives over a 20 year period; this truly awful crime of humanity killed fifty million people, and-- ah, this just in, that genocide actually killed seventy million, more than previous estimates from seven seconds ago, and-- did I hear eighty million from the gentleman in the back? 85 mil-- 90 million! Going, going-- a HUNDRED MILLION, to the fine person in row 5, going, going, and… SOLD!
• Eventually, the communist regime collapses due to corruption, mismanagement, and a lack of respect for basic human nature. We help them institute democracy in the aftermath and restore those hard-working businessowners to their rightful position above the masses who destroyed their country out of lack of work ethic / This communist country is a mere 5 days from complete collapse because none of the people in charge have any knowledge of even Economics 101, and are too stupid to figure out how to save their economies via privatization.

Winter offensive is very likely because the Grande Armée is getting French winter gear and Russians are getting… whatever they get, so they’ll probably freeze.

Part of that equation, for my point of view, includes the ability for people to think and speak freely without fear of reprisal by the government

This is like the people who say “We’re freer than the Chinese because I can call Trump a peepee poopoo pants on Twitter without being arrested!” when that doesn’t actually do anything at all

but if you try and protest and change conditions materially and meaningfully, you can absolutely bet your ass you will be disappeared like the horror stories you find on reddit about “totalitarian regimes”. The only reason why Americans don’t think it doesn’t happen in the West is either because it’s so completely internalized that it becomes memeified (“Haha, I hope the FBI agent watching me through my camera is having a nice day!”) or none of the media that they engage with reports on it.

IMO, this entire point is just a liberal ideological bludgeon, a condition that can be applied at-will to any government they want to criticize because no government will be good enough all of the time. it’s one thing if you’re an anarchist and oppose every government equally for not fulfilling that condition, that I can understand and respect, it’s quite another when you’re like “Oh, no, I hate authoritarianism! That’s why we need to constantly criticize a country on the literal other side of the planet 99.7% of the time, and then only criticize our own country when somebody calls us out on it by saying ‘Oh, yeah, America also does bad things too!’” Especially when America’s role in the world for the last century at least, and more accurately really since its conception, has been a source of capitalist reaction across its whole hemisphere and later the whole planet, with hundreds upon hundreds of military bases and tens of millions directly and indirectly killed in wars. Criticizing, say, Cuba or DPRK for these sorts of things is effectively zooming in on a single corpse in righteous indignation while ignoring the seas of blood spilled by America behind you.

the only people trivializing fascism are those who see fascism symbology like the swastika, Black Sun, various nordic runes, etc on the soldiers they’re egging on and go “doesn’t look like anything to me!” while advocating for the double genocide theory

this can be true, but a lot of the time, because the author has the ability to write anything and not be constrained by reality, what they write often isn’t a critique of a real situation so much as it is a reflection of their own internal biases and internalized propaganda about that real situation.

the example that most immediately jumps to mind is Rowling’s house elves being slaves and also liking being slaves and actually you’re a bad person if you don’t want them to be slaves anymore. I mean, sure, it could just be an entirely made-up fantasy race that likes being enslaved, but it could also be internalized propaganda about other races, especially considering that she was born in the decaying/fallen British Empire.

So I would argue that the books in the thread image are, obviously unintentionally, actually more about how propaganda about “authoritarian” states during the Cold War influenced the authors of that time, rather than those books saying anything about the Soviet Union.

I think it’s generally best to not rely on fiction when trying to make a point to others who don’t already agree. It can be a nice bonding moment between two people that already agree - we could talk about how Don’t Look Up if we both agreed about humanity’s role in climate change and how many people don’t give a shit because they think they’re invincible or already got theirs, but bringing up the film to a climate change denier just isn’t going to go well unless approached very carefully.

Which referendums are you referring to and does any country besides Russia or North Korea accept the results?

literally the consent “isn’t there somebody you forgot to ask?” meme but with America

but this is also a very funny way of imagining how self-determination and independence movements work a lot of the time. Imagine a world where a newfound country breaks free from an existing one and then that newfound country sees that 90% of the UN, including the country they just broke free from, doesn’t recognize them for doing that and they’re just like “Well, shucks. I guess we’re going back and re-joining the country again, because these people aren’t ready to accept us yet!”

the problem isn’t necessarily pointing out the problems with any particular country, that can be done as a legitimate discussion, what gets really fucking annoying is when people only talk about the problems with a certain country and then when questioned, are like “Oh, no! We also hate it when America does this thing! We’re just talking about X country right now!” when that’s clearly false. like, you say “Fuck China for having mass surveillance” on reddit and you get 100k upvotes, 20 platinum awards and some dude’s firstborn son, whereas if you say “Fuck America for having mass surveillance” you’ll get “Hm, well, you see, this is a complicated topic, because on the one hand…” or even just “Yeah, but it’s nothing compared to China though!”

the problem is also when what you’re talking about is necessarily a comparison because no action exists in a vacuum free of context. if I say “The US is an awful, imperialist country that has invaded all these nations, and NATO has also invaded and destroyed nations, and we should not support them even if Russia is doing a bad thing because Russia’s death toll is so much lower than the West’s” then all I would get on most lib platforms is “That history doesn’t matter! What matters is the here and now, when Russia is doing a bad thing and NATO currently, at this precise moment in time, is not! Bad things are bad things! You can’t wave them away through context!”

but the question isn’t “Is Russia doing a bad thing”, I don’t think anybody would deny except the most fervent Russian nationalist that Russia has done at least some bad things in Ukraine, the question is “Who should we support in this war” and so the fact that NATO and the US has killed tens of millions of people within the lifetime of the current president and doomed hundreds of millions more to backbreaking labor in mines and plantations and sweatshops, and Russia, well, hasn’t, is a perfectly pertinent point to make when asking who to support. This is also why liberals are so utterly gobsmacked when third-world countries don’t come out against Russia, because they have been on the receiving end of this campaign of carnage that the US has wrought around the world and so, logically, think Russia is the lesser of two evils. can’t they see that Russia is evil! can’t they see that Putler is the devil doing a genocide!? they must be brainwashed by Russian disinformation propaganda! we must up our efforts to spread Correct Information!

people get arrested during strikes and protests all the time in America. of course, you would justify it as “actually they were breaking Clause 8 of Section 9A so it was against the law and they shouldn’t have done it!” without questioning if that law might possibly have been drawn up specifically to punish those people because the government couldn’t do it legally before. no, all laws in America come straight out of the Founding Father’s dick as a glorious bukkake for us all to share freely, while in tyrannical states like Russia and China, all laws are to be questioned and/or drawn up by the supreme ruler himself because he was really extra totalitarian that day

never try idealism kids, it turns you into this

Again, purposely digging up confidential information and then exposing it is illegal.

Going up to Snowden and saying “Erm, sir, you might have told us that the American government is spying on us every moment of our lives, but, erm, actshually, doing that was illegal, so unfortunately, sir, you are not epic and you don’t deserve freedom of speech protections”

what an absolute fucking dweeb, holy shit

I will go tell Putin to make it “confidential information” that he’s a bad person, then maybe you’ll shut the fuck up for a single moment of your life because a bootlicker like you will be forced to obey it if you ever go there

that’s impossible, the entire Russian army has been destroyed a hundred times now by Ukraine, over 15 million Russian troops have been killed last time I checked, there are no snipers left

the Zaporozhye front is just the Ukrainians doing a giant war re-enactment of what would have happened if there were any Russians left alive, but due to the 1:984219 casualty ratio, there aren’t any Russians left

I’d love to see how you people will react when Mexico joins BRICS and the US invades it.

I cannot fucking wait for China and Russia to do freedom of navigation exercises between Cuba and Florida like how the US does with Taiwan and China and for Americans to just fucking LOSE it. Holy shit, it’ll be so funny. “No, this isn’t the same because China is evil and we’re the good guys!”

The imperialism of marching your border closer and closer to NATO’s troops from 1990 to 2022 is truly the worst kind. Russia must be punished for putting Moscow that close to Ukraine.

couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass who were getting slaughtered for years before 2022. those people don’t matter, only pro-Ukraine people matter. couldn’t possibly have anything to do with security interests. only NATO’s security interests matter, not Russia (or China’s). couldn’t possibly have anything to do with having armed NATO-trained troops in a country that recently experienced a US-backed coup. of course, if Russia puts Wagner forces in African countries (so not even inside NATO’s “sphere of influence”) that recently experienced a coup, that’s an entirely different thing because uhh Russia is bad and NATO is good. that’s Russian imperialism. us putting our troops in coup’d countries is freedom and bringing democracy. and also that wasn’t a coup, it was actually the citizens doing it all by themselves.

Holy shit, NATOpedia made an article saying “Hey, there might be actual historical context to this situation and Putin didn’t wake up on February 24th and decide to murder a bunch of people because he’s a very evil bad bad man and King Zelensky shall slay the dragon and then we all live happily ever after.” is actually Russian disinformation? Oh my fucking god. These people are unbearable.

Ukraine has a responsibility to make sure US and foreign support isn’t wasted and they’re doing just that.

idk dude, maybe you should stop sending wave after wave after wave of leopards and bradleys into minefields if you want to not waste Western resources

I hope Ukraine kill all these invading Russian motherfuckers and that Putin dies too.

the saddest thing is that at the end of this war, there will be hundreds of thousands if not millions of dead Ukrainians, all who died because of Western hatred. but you won’t actually care, will you? the lives of the average Ukrainian mean nothing to you. you could send a hundred Ukrainians to die horrifically in the no man’s land and if a Russian stubs his toe because of it, you would call it a worthy sacrifice, because causing the Russians inconvenience and suffering is worth much more than saving the lives of innocent people who have been conscripted at gunpoint.

if it wasn’t a worthy sacrifice, and you thought this wholesale slaughter should stop, you would support ending the war, like the left does.