Solumbran comments on Ukrainian drone causes blaze on passenger bus in Russia’s Zaporozhye Region

[–] Solumbran@lemmy.world -5 points 4 months ago (9 children)

So Russia loves its "own people" so much, fine.

What about LGBT people that it hunts down?

What about political opponents that it murders?

What about the soldiers that it keeps on sending to their deaths, that are much more numerous than whatever "genocide" Ukraine could have been doing from their border?

What about the people sent to forced labor in jail for doing nothing else than voice a slight critic of Putin, and that then get sent to the frontlines?

You can bullshit whatever you want about Russia, saying that it cares about its own people is bullshit. And even if they did, being fine invading countries to "protect your own people" is a very typically fascist thing, and the nazis were fond of this idea for example.

Russia is supporting Iran against Israel? Then why not support Palestine, who needs support even more, and from long before? Seems like they don't care so much about nazis, just about what geopolitical conflict they can profit from.

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 months ago (8 children)

Russia isn't some bastion of goodness or something. They have many internal contradictions that need to be resolved before they get my uncritical support. I merely see them as the lesser evil in this conflict, because they are opposed to the US empire.

Don't you believe in supporting the lesser evil?

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[–] Solumbran@lemmy.world -5 points 4 months ago (7 children)

They follow the same morals as the "US empire" though.

Also, it's circular reasoning. You believe that Russia is right according to Russian sources that don't seem very coherent, because you believe that Russia is right. I have yet to find any convincing evidence of Ukraine being a nazi country, and as the one that started the attack, the charge of the proof falls onto Russia. I have seen the "proof" they were using at the beginning of the invasion, and it was absolutely not convincing, it was some cherrypicking of obsolete links that didn't mean much anymore. And after that, most of the justifications used were sounding like Trump's justifications to attack random countries. Ironically enough, the US and Russia are very similar.

For me I believe in only supporting moral stuff, and I'm not going to defend an oppressive fascist dictatorship, even if they are attacking other fascists. And in this case, the second part is yet to prove.

Supporting the lesser evil is also what led to all current democracies falling into fascism and discrimination. If you take a look at France, Macron has been seen as the lesser evil, and has been consistently and successfully popularizing and supporting the far right. The lesser evil is still evil.

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 months ago* (6 children)

I believe Russia is right not just according to Russian sources, but from my understanding of empire. The US is usually on the wrong side of every conflict with only a couple notable exceptions that happened before my parents were even born, I see no reason to assume this is any different. It's that momentum of history plus non-Western sources that convinced me.

And I'm certainly not going to convince you, we've both made up our minds, but we weren't talking about that.

We were assuming what I'm saying is true i.e. that Russia is intervening to stop the Banderite NATO puppet regime from enacting a genocide of ethnic Russians. If we assume that is true, then Russia must be supported in this specific conflict even if they're still reactionary on many fronts and still a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Do you disagree?

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[–] Solumbran@lemmy.world -5 points 4 months ago (5 children)

The US being wrong does not make its enemies right. I don't think that right now, in the current way the world is, there is much of a "good side" because most countries are doing horrible shit. If you start going for the lesser evil, you accept that as the new norm and it continues worsening.

Yes, I do disagree. Because even if it were to be true, Russia is still doing things in the worst possible way. Ukraine is having nazis? Then influence their elections (which Russia loves to do) to make them shift away from it. Find economic or political leverage to pressure them. Setup rescue operations or diplomatic passage for the potential victims. But steamrolling the whole country, killing basically everyone you can on your way? I'm sorry, that's not how it works.

If Ukraine is made of nazis, then the nazis must be taken care of, yes. But what Russia is then doing (assuming that what you've been saying were to be true), is the equivalent of the US dropping a bunch of nuclear bombs on a Japan at the brink of surrender, or of the winners of WWI dismantling Germany to "punish" it for its leadership, or of Israel trying to conquer and destroy all the countries around it that it doesn't like. Or even, of all those western countries that use the excuse of counter-terrorism to consider every individual a potential threat that deserves death. It's an oppressor move, and these cannot be supported.

A powerful country like Russia has many ways to solve any conflict or problem, and if they pick the violent, oppressive, indiscriminate way, then they are wrong.

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

The US being on the wrong side of every conflict is a pretty good reason to think it's on the wrong side of this one, too. The US needs to be defeated. Besides, we can't fight the whole world at once.

And it was already far too late to rely on influencing elections (and it's not like Russia is uncontested - do you think the US doesn't influence elections? ) because Ukraine was already at war with separatists in the Donbas. Russia intervened because the war was already ongoing, their options were either to invade or open the borders to refugees (and that would have caused a lot of other problems that Russia couldn't handle). Ukraine didn't just have neonazis. They were in the government, passing nazi policies, doing nazi things.

The equivalent would be if Mexico attacked the US for ICE putting people in concentration camps and gunning them down in the streets.

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[–] Solumbran@lemmy.world -4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

But how many countries have been on the "right side"? You can look at most western countries history and most events will be on the wrong side. Even the ones fighting the nazis during ww2 were doing it for shitty reasons half of the time. Yes, the US is shit, and generally siding with the US is a problem; that doesn't mean that you should side with Russia. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a bullshit saying that just means that you can be opportunistic to take advantage of the situation, it's not a good moral stance.

I find it easy to say that opening the borders would be too much to handle. Rescuing people is too much to handle, but launching yourself in an endless war that causes gigantic amounts of casualties, this is doable? I call bullshit.

And once again, the problem is the proof. What you describe in Ukraine is a symptom of the decline of modern democracies, it's a disease, not an intention. France right now is passing a law giving a right to kill to cops, after years of anti-immigration policies and nazis in various levels of the government. It's not because the country is nazi, it's because nazis are trying to take control of it. If you attack France right now, guess who will take advantage of the crisis and seize control of the country to "save" it? The nazis that have been hoping for an opportunity. And if anything, that's happened in Ukraine too, with former nazis being integrated in the army because they weren't visibly doing nazi things anymore, and Ukraine desperately needed soldiers. Crises just help fascists, and Russia is going to do nothing other than strengthen the nazis both in Ukraine and in other western countries. If anything, Russia is the one pushing countries like Ukraine to become actual nazi countries, and it's a common pattern in history - that's how Napoleon destroyed the basis of democracy in France, he took advantage of a crisis and everyone let him be a crazy murderous dictator.

Tl,dr: if you want to attack nazis, you need to make sure that you're actually attacking nazis, and not just destroying everything and everyone that you see. That's the difference between the resistance in ww2, and Israel now fighting the "terrorists" by flattening out the whole country and murdering civilians. Right now, Russia is much more similar to Israel because they are just attacking indiscriminately, and that definitely pushes me to believe that the "nazi" thing is bullshit, and an excuse for oppression.

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

You can look at most western countries history and most events will be on the wrong side.

👀 👀 👀

Rescuing people is too much to handle, but launching yourself in an endless war that causes gigantic amounts of casualties, this is doable? I call bullshit.

The problem isn't only the neonazis, it's also NATO. NATO is not purely defensive, just ask Libya.

If we assume what Russia is saying is right, that Ukraine is a Banderite puppet regime installed by NATO and was on the verge of ethnic cleansing, then if they just evacuated the Donbas they'd still have a Banderite NATO regime directly on their border and eager to take back Crimea (which democratically chose to join Russia). While that solves the immediate problem of ethnic Russians being in danger in Ukraine, it creates a new problem of a hostile nation having a launching platform to attack Russia.

The choice was either launching a war in 2022 on their terms or undergoing a national crisis to absorb millions of refugees while preparing for when war came to Russia anyway.

Crises just help fascists, and Russia is going to do nothing other than strengthen the nazis both in Ukraine and in other western countries.

I don't disagree, actually. I just think Russia was between a rock and a hard place.

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[–] Solumbran@lemmy.world -1 points 4 months ago (1 child)

Just a followup. Western countries being on the wrong side of history comes with being the "dominant" power for quite a while. That comes when you mix power and people that don't care much about morals (which is most people who own this power). Russia has also been on the wrong side of history a bunch of times. My point was, history has a meaning but is not all that matters, and you can't necessarily interpret the present through the scope of history.

Well now we're adding more assumptions. It's not just that Ukraine would be nazis, but that they are having NATO involved in the whole thing. And that's a bigger assumption considering that no one gave a flying fuck about Ukraine (or had a negative view of it, for not such bad reasons) until Zelensky did his little stunt to shame Europe into helping them. And even then, it has been a drop by drop help, because everyone is scared of Russia.

And I don't see how opening borders and basically playing "nice" could specifically lead to hostility. If Ukraine is a crazy violent country that wants to exterminate Russians, then they would attack eventually either way; evacuating people to Russia before the military conflict would just protect civilians instead of letting them be in the middle of the warzone.

As for Crimea "democratically joining Russia", that's a big pill to swallow. I understand your scope of "western propaganda bias", but once again, no one is really believing Russia to be a democracy or to even like the idea of it, so I don't really see how a foreign area would democratically decide to join a dictatorship. It makes it feel like this "democratic" process would then be of the same kind that leads Putin to win all elections forever with 99% of votes and dead political opponents, while removing the democratic safeguards preventing too many reelections.

And I'll also add that in terms of purely cold reasoning, extracting people from Ukraine before going at war also means more people to support the war, so it doesn't really make sense to rush into it. Especially considering that it was obvious that the US would lose power over time, with Trump and whatever, as well as a lot of other western countries.

That's the whole problem with the narrative of Russia playing the victim: in the end, starting the war didn't make sense both on a material and a diplomatic scope. It does make sense, however, if you consider Russia to be the one that wanted to attack (and there are a bunch of reasons, very simply speaking Ukraine was an unpopular country with a lot of land and big food production, it probably seemed like an easy and valuable target).

Don't get me wrong, I have no love for western countries. That's why from the very first time I started hearing about the conflict between Israel and Palestine being ambiguous, and people supporting Israel heavily in western countries, I just read about it and concluded that yeah, Israel was obviously wrong in that case, and they kept on proving it afterwards. I have no problem considering that western news can be full of shit, and admitting that there definitely is propaganda going on (just like everywhere, but people still believe that western democracies are actual democracies, and that they are immune to propaganda, for some reason), and making my own conclusions based on what seems to make sense. But with Russia, the idea that Russia did what they did out of morals and out of trying to help against oppression, doesn't really fit the facts. I can obviously be wrong, but with the way things have been unfolding, I don't see enough evidence to consider that this narrative is the real one. And sure, maybe some part of it is slightly true and exaggerated, it's totally possible that there was systemic discrimination against a Russian "ethnicity" in Ukraine, their country was basically a political shithole. But that's not enough to make the Russian narrative believable.

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I'm not just looking to history to predict the future, I'm using very recent history to analyze the present. This is basically a question of who I should believe: the source of every problem in the world for the entire time I've been alive (the US and its allies) or one of its victims. Maybe that makes me biased, but I'm just never going to believe anything the US says.

And the assumption I was operating under was "Russia's claims for why they started the war are largely truthful" and "the US's claims for why Russia started the war are largely false" which means addressing both the neonazi problem and NATO. It's not just that there's neonazis in the streets and in the army, it's that they're in the government installed by NATO and doing NATO's bidding. In that context, it's completely believable Crimea would want to escape the new Banderite regime that wants to exterminate their language and culture.

Ultimately, none of our arguing matters. We can go around and around in circles, but neither of us know what's really going on. We can only guess, based on our own prior assumptions about how the world works. All we can really do is wait for history to resolve itself, maybe in a few decades we'll know what really happened.

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