• ZephrC@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I support any country’s right to not be conquered by capitalist, imperialist oligarchs whether I like their internal politics or not. I hate it when the US does it, so it would be hypocritical to not hate it when Russia does the same thing.

    • Dr. Jenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube
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      1 year ago

      Yup, I was opposed to the U.S.'s imperialist war for oil in Iraq. Just like I oppose Russia’s imperialist war for oil in Ukraine.

        • ZephrC@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Eastern Ukraine has a lot of natural gas, actually. Plus Ukraine has a lot of pipelines for getting that natural gas into the rest of Europe. Technically not oil, but one of the main objectives of the war was absolutely about controlling Europe’s access to fossil fuels.

          • atlasraven31@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            The shorter term goal is for Russian oligarchs to sell Europe gas via pipeline so their kids can get education in Europe.

        • Dr. Jenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube
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          1 year ago

          Yup, my understanding is there is a lot of oil in Ukraine (I think donbas specifically but don’t quote me on that). And arguably more importantly, a major pipeline runs through Ukraine. My understanding is the EU is currently very reliant on Russian oil and they would very much like to not be. Hence, why Ukrainian membership to NATO is so attractive.

          I think a lot of people in the West dismiss Putin as a nutjob, but I think there is a rational reason for controlling Ukraine. Oil is Russia’s largest export after all.

          All of that isn’t meant to excuse Russia; it’s unethical to murder for oil. But it’s intellectually lazy to dismiss a rational actor (albeit an unethical actor) as crazy. But capitalism gonna capitalism. And until we put an end to capitalism, people are going to continue to murder for money.

    • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Really? I thought we progressives and light-socialists (demsoc or socdem) were really just alt-right and going up against the wall with the rest of them…

      (yeah, sarcasm, but those are things people have literally said to my face)

    • OceanSoap@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Yes, lots of us live in reality and don’t try and convince others a utopian society is in any way possible.

      • BaconIsAVeg@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        The Smurfs were communist… though to be fair there was only 100 of them, and they all had jobs, and enough resources to go around. That one female though…

      • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Siri what is capitalist realism? Also Marxism is literally a materialist ideology, non-marxist leftists generally follow more utopian ideology.

  • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    I am hoping by “communists” you mean people who are aligned with marxism ideal, but not people supporting authoritarian capitalist regimes.

  • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
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    1 year ago

    “USA Left” != “EU Left”

    there are of course leftists like what you are thinking in the US but are a smaller or quieter group here due huge pushes the other way

    • Dr. Jenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube
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      1 year ago

      That’s a false equivalency. Genocide is core to Nazi ideology. And communism didn’t cause the death of millions any more than capitalism caused the deaths of millions. It gets pretty messy when you try and attribute unintentional deaths to an economic system. And frankly, kind of gross when you conflate unintentional deaths with the very deliberate and systematic execution of people.

      • Altomes@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I don’t usually jump in here but I’d disagree that the USA hasn’t genocided the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere

        • PeachMan@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago
          1. They said communists didn’t commit a genocide, not that the US didn’t.

          2. What the US colonies did to natives could reasonably be described as a genocide, but it was very slow, and often fueled by apathy and self-centered, quiet bigotry. I think I read that 2/3rds of Native Americans were killed unintentionally by diseases that colonists brought over, right? Then the last third were killed off or moved slowly over hundreds of years, kind of like a death by a thousand cuts. Not even in the same league as the Holocaust. That was very intentional, organized, targeted, and fast.

          However, to your point, the fact that Americans deny that a genocide happened here is very problematic. Maybe not as problematic as Holocaust denial, but not every atrocity has to be a competition. It was an awful, horrible thing that our ancestors did and we should acknowledge it. Pointing at something worse that also happened doesn’t make it better.

          • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Not entirely inaccurate. There was always an undercurrent of us treating Native Americans as sub-human. We would ally with them to get what we need, then break our side of bargains because they were not entirely seen as deserving of them. We saw a few small parts of this behavior in 2016-2020, but we were doing it to countries and agreements who do just fine without us. When the deal is “we will guarantee you safety, but you can’t keep this land” and “we will guarantee you safety” falls away, then it is basically genocide.

            I think it was unforgivable, but it certainly means the US doesn’t have some special moral highground.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          The cambodian genocide was carried out by fascists who were supported by the US and shitty Chinese policy. They were crushed by socialist vietnamese soldiers.

          Pol pot claimed to be socialist. The nazis called themselves the national socialist party, and we all know based on their record that was a lie, as communists, socialists, and trade unionists were their biggest domestic enemies. Next you’ll blame the holocaust on socialists, despite the socialists being in the camps. Don’t be so credulous.

          Edit: also, the US killed many Cambodians with mass bombings during the same era, which is a fun fact that is relevant given the fascists there were allied with the US government as they carried out their mass killings.

          • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            So you’re saying the CCP was a fascist party? I’m not sure how someone could respond to you when your response to sources was just rejecting them. I can show you non-Wikipedia sources, but I can only imagine college history curriculum would cause you to respond with accusations of propaganda.

            I can find it reasonable for a person looking at the available evidence to conclude that some communist regimes have committed massive atrocities. You might disagree, but how is that not (similar to your take on the other guy) soft holocaust denial?

            Communism as policy platform generally involves a window of authoritarian rule that is sometimes a bit difficult to distinguish from fascism (yes, there’s some big ones if you know what to look for). And no Communism has ever reached such a late stage they were able to lighten up on the authoritarian side. So yeah, despite being further left than everyone around me, I still see red flags in communism.

            • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              So you’re saying the CCP was a fascist party?

              No, the CPC (the way to say the communist party of China without any racist baggage, which you probably didn’t know about but you know now) made a very bad policy decision without very much intelligence about Pol Pot and while trying to stay on the good side of the US because they were very vulnerable.

              I’m not sure how someone could respond to you when your response to sources was just rejecting them. I can show you non-Wikipedia sources, but I can only imagine college history curriculum would cause you to respond with accusations of propaganda.

              Pol pot was not a communist. You aren’t going to find any sources indicating that his policies followed communist ideas, youre just going to find sources repeating his claim that he was a communist. And people who haven’t studied what communists actually believe or what policies they implement do not have the knowledge to discern further. People know less about Pol Pot than they do about Hitler but this is the same genre of “The nazis were actually socialists” which can be disproven by knowing what socialists believe and knowing nazi policy and comparing the two.

              I can find it reasonable for a person looking at the available evidence to conclude that some communist regimes have committed massive atrocities.

              Yes, at a similar level to any ideology that has been in control of a state will. States always produce excesses.

              You might disagree, but how is that not (similar to your take on the other guy) soft holocaust denial?

              Equating much lesser atrocities to the holocaust minimizes how bad the holocaust was and has historically been used to rehabilitate nazi collaborators and their movements in Eastern Europe. If you’re unfamiliar now is the time to research Jewish scholars writing on the “dual genocide myth”. "The line goes, with some variation “sure he fought with the nazis but only to liberate his country from the soviets!”

              Communism as policy platform generally involves a window of authoritarian rule

              A revolution is the most authoritarian thing in the world. It is one class, the proletariat, enforcing their will on another, the bourgeoisie, through physical force. Please read “on authority” and “state and revolution”

              that is sometimes a bit difficult to distinguish from fascism (yes, there’s some big ones if you know what to look for).

              Please consider that it is only difficult if you dont know a lot about fascism and communism and the waters have been made intentionally murky. (See dual genocide theory) The difference is night and day once you’ve read some basic analysis of the two systems.

              And no Communism has ever reached such a late stage they were able to lighten up on the authoritarian side.

              States exercise authority, and you’ll always get excesses from them. The difference between proletarian democracy and bourgeois democracy is that in the former, the proletariat controls the democracy, and in the latter, the bourgeoisie controls the democracy. Socialist States aren’t perfect, but the authority they wield is more aligned with the interests of the proletariat than under a capitalist government. States are required to protect a socialist society while capitalist empires still exist. When they no longer have external threats, the state should wither away, and if it doesn’t, it will be easier to subvert by the will of the people given how the state functions and derives its authority.

            • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              My other comment:

              The holodomor was made into a genocide by hearst press, which was a nazi publication run by a nazi who literally met with Hitler to discuss pr strategy. When it first made its rounds in the US it became obvious that it was a fraudulent story. And now people are believing nazi propaganda that people in 1930s America (which was pretty supportive of nazism) saw through pretty quickly.

              The famine was terrible, and there was incompetence abound, but after the soviet archives were unsealed even people like anti-communist historian Robert Conquest reversed their position on whether it was a genocide.

              Comparing this to the murder of 11 million people that the nazis considered subhuman is disgusting.

                • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  You’re doing soft holocaust denial. Plenty of Jewish “collaborators” were killed during nazi occupation under the justification that they collaborated with the Soviets on a genocide the nazis made up.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          The holodomor was made into a genocide by hearst press, which was a nazi publication run by a nazi who literally met with Hitler to discuss pr strategy. When it first made its rounds in the US it became obvious that it was a fraudulent story. And now people are believing nazi propaganda that people in 1930s America (which was pretty supportive of nazism) saw through pretty quickly.

          The famine was terrible, and there was incompetence abound, but after the soviet archives were unsealed even people like anti-communist historian Robert Conquest reversed their position on whether it was a genocide.

          Comparing this to the murder of 11 million people that the nazis considered subhuman is disgusting.

            • ZephrC@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I’d like to see where you got that number of 32 million from, but for the sake of argument I’ll accept it. I don’t think it sounds completely unreasonable. That’s still centuries of killing being in the same order of magnitude as what the Nazi’s did in under a decade. The Nazi’s took everything the US does wrong and dialed it up to 11. That is worse. It is. The US has done more than it’s fair share of awful things. Yes, including genocide. It has never been as enthusiastic, brazen, or thorough about it as the Nazis were though. The Nazis were so evil even the United States looked at them and said that’s too much. Let’s not minimize what Nazis did just because they’re not currently in charge of any countries. We don’t want to go back to that.

                • ZephrC@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  What do you think I meant when I said “The Nazis took everything the US does wrong and dialed it up to 11.” I know all this. I’ve known all this for decades. You do not have to think the US is good to think there are things that are even worse. The world is not as simple as USA bad, therefore everything else not as bad.

          • ricecake@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            holodomor is a genocide.

            that’s not true. the holodomor occured in areas of ussr explicitly ukrainian and explicitly ukrainian only. yes kuban is ukrainian. only ukrainian people starved to death

            • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              You are free to continue to believe nazi myths used to justify killing Jewish “collaborators” during the nazi occupation of Ukraine even after professional anti-communist historians have changed their mind on the issue.

          • rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Ok, gotcha. So the line at which the ideology is considered bad enough to be banned is below Holocaust, but above Holodomor. Nice to see it quantified

            • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              No, a party residing over a famine is not the line at which we should dismiss an ideology.

              • ricecake@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                It is a result of the policies of the USSR that 3 - 10 million Ukrainian people starved to death, not a low crop yield famine.

                • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  You are free to continue to believe nazi myths used to justify killing Jewish “collaborators” during the nazi occupation of Ukraine even after professional anti-communist historians have changed their mind on the issue.

    • jackmarxist [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Nazism is not banned in Ukraine though.Their national hero is a nazi who participated in the Holocaust.

      It’s insane that Ukraine worships Bandera who was an actual Nazi while actually decent Ukrainian Revolutionaries like Makhno are forgotten.

  • jackpot@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    given the circumstances and how these commie parties are aligned with their invaders, it’s fair game

  • mashbooq@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    As they should be; communism is just another hateful ideology pretending to be left