Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
- Start date
We all know the queen has £12m to spend on her son's sexual assault settlement because she doesn't buy Avocado toast or have a Netflix subscription.
That's all it takes to be rich right...
..right?
Who is pinkwashing anything? Is acknowledging state collaboration in far-right violence against queer people in Russia pinkwashing now?
Comparing this situation to Israel is telling, because what you seem to be implying more broadly is that because a group that is affiliated with the democratically elected government of Ukraine is bad, that government is illegitimate. That argument has some definite parallels with Israel, but perhaps not in the way you were thinking.
Collective punishment is not a reasonable basis for international relations no matter who is doing it, and annexing territory from neighbouring countries in defiance of the democratically expressed will of the population based on nebulous historical claims or ethnonationalism is Imperialism.
There is no such thing as benevolent Imperialism. Not in the US, not in Russia, not in Israel, not anywhere. The Russian government in particular has absolutely no right to claim any moral high ground when it comes to cooperating with Nazis, and Ukraine or even the US doing the same shouldn't be serving as any kind of justification for blatant Russian Imperialism.
Last edited:
It is when it's both irrelevant and transparently being used as a cudgel. Is NBC News showing us propaganda films from the perspective of Russian nationalists with kindly babushkas training with light machine guns to prepare for supposedly imminent attack? No, it's showing Azov Battalion propaganda films. With the Wolfsangel insignia visible but going unremarked.
?
This insistence that debunking the narrative that Russia is (or now was) about to invade Ukraine amounts to an endorsement of a Russian invasion of Ukraine makes little sense.
You made it relevant when you made a claim to the effect that Putin is "not worse" than any recent US president without answering the very obvious follow up question "not worse for whom?"
A lot of us don't have the luxury of living in some world of absolute moral equivalence.
I don't actually care how confident you are that Russia isn't going to invade the Ukraine. What is happening here is still Imperialism, and it's alarming you don't see that.
When a country starts talking about foreign territory as its own by right of historical claim, when it starts making up war crimes as a justification for military intervention, when it treats its dominant ethnic group as an organic part of the national body regardless of citizenship, those should be red flags. Not the good kind of red flags either. Maybe it translates into military action, maybe it's just sabre rattling. Imperialism has always involved a lot of sabre rattling.
Russia's crimes pale in comparison to those of the United States, the wish to focus on a particular set of crimes to the exclusion of all others notwithstanding. Obviously crimes are not evenly distributed across the world.
The ongoing expansion of NATO and alarmism over a rival having the audacity to have a military is definitely imperialism, yes, as is the push to fortify friendly "revolutions" on the other side of the world because they contain a lot of the right kind of fascist and are five minutes by cruise missile away from Moscow.
TBH, that's how the current Australian Govt would do it... and that their 'black friends' were totally cool with it.
In what sense?
Are we talking severity or are we talking scale?
If we're supposed to ignore blatantly fascist government action and policies in Russia because the US conducts more crimes all over the world aggregately, then why should we care about a group of neo-Nazis in the Ukraine who (whatever their influence) have far less power, and consequentially far less ability to commit crimes, than the Russian government?
What is your antifascism supposed to be worth to anyone if you will go to the wall defending right wing, reactionary authoritarian governments?
You actually said the quiet part out loud there when you described Russia as a "rival" to the US. A rival in what? What game are these countries playing with each other that makes them rivals, Seanchaidh? What are they competing over?
?
Where are you getting this shit?
It is rather you that has given the game away. I am not interested in "anti-imperialism" which forswears any amount of competition with imperial powers, especially the largest imperial power. They have some amount of influence over their own destiny? Imperial! They're not utterly subservient to the United States? Imperial! A place takes any measures whatsoever that will allow them to resist the will of the United States as it pursues ever more thorough global domination? Obviously that's irredeemably imperialistic. No principled anti-imperialist could approve! The anarchism of fools.
It's a bit rich to ask this, and then to immediately follow it with a chain of some of the most ludicrous and transparent strawmen I've ever seen:
Competition over what?
Just answer the question. I want to hear you say it.
Why is the battle for control over the destiny of Russia being fought in the Ukraine, which (despite statements to the contrary on the part of the Russian state) is not part of Russia?
Again, just say it.
I think you need to get out the United States.
There are not many states on this planet who are "utterly subservient" to the United States. That is not how US global hegemony works, or has ever worked really outside of maybe the Western hemisphere and the pacific. You're crossing a line into conspiratorial thinking that is spectacularly unhelpful when it comes to contesting that hegemony, and laughably naïve if you have actually lived in a place that has experienced colonialism.
Worse, you're kind of repeating wholesale lines and ideas expressed by Russian fascists, because conspiratorial thinking tends to lead to familiar targets. You talk about Russian queerphobic policies as being irrelevant, but what do you think the logic is behind those policies? Why do you think they are aimed so specifically at criminalizing queer expressions of dissent or solidarity?
The irony though is that I think only an American could conceive of a world so Americentric as the one you seem to believe in.
We're not talking about a place. Fuck a "place". We're talking about a state. We're talking about a state that is extremely right wing, extremely authoritarian and which openly carries out acts of violence against innocent people to advance its own ends. Which has a proven history of using military force to suppress the independence of other nations, including carrying out war crimes against the civilian population. Did those people sign up to be acceptable casualties in the glorious anti-Imperialist struggle?
If Russia is your model of anti-fascism or anti-Imperialism in action, I don't think I'm the fool here.
Last edited:
Afterwards they gave the white kid a hug, kissed his boo-boos, and treated him to Burger King. Happy Black History Month.
It's not. The fact that you need to relentlessly assume I mean what I've not said suggests that you don't really have a relevant argument.
They compete on a global stage with the United States; you objected to that specifically. You would object to that specifically no matter who was doing it-- presumably, otherwise it's not a principled objection at all. So Russia's various other shortcomings that absolutely disqualify them from my admiration are not relevant to this particular discussion.
I've already given you a few answers to that question. "Influence over their own destiny" is perhaps the most succinct.
I think you may be mistaking the degree of subservience for the outward form a relationship of dominance and subjection takes-- which is not strange. The dominant ideology has every reason to encourage this particular conflation. But it has the consequence of making actions motivated by e.g. debt seem voluntary because the chains are not visible.
Anyway, there are plenty that are utterly subservient to Western capital in the ways that Western capital actually cares about. And those that aren't tend to end up needing to take actions you would almost certainly describe as imperialistic or authoritarian themselves or ally with someone else that takes such actions in order to avoid becoming subservient to the ruling class of the United States (which is also the ruling class of various other places). This is just the nature of espionage and military pressure. There is no escaping it while the imperial core remains stable and capitalist and an imperial core.
What's the track record of uncritically parroting the US State Department's propaganda? Apart from its effects on individual career advancement, I mean.
Do you mean to say that the United States of America has no experience with colonialism? I think I get what you mean, but... come on now.
That is where the United States has most recently decided to direct its efforts at creating an anti-Russian regime on Russia's doorstep.
Ukraine: shuts down opposition television stations, bans anything that resembles a communist party, incorporates neo-Nazis into its armed forces, and when its politicians aren't Nazis they're just nakedly corrupt instead
Westerners: We need to keep safe Ukrainian democracy!
Guess I can't complain too much about that reasoning given the state of US 'democracy'. The things we've normalized...
Not at all a strawman. If Terminal Blue thinks that catching me calling someone a rival to the United States is some kind of gotcha, there is little other interpretation to be had than the one I made. It's not an inconsistent idea. But I don't find it at all useful. It's like Tolstoy's pacifism: OK, that's great, but absolutely not helpful at all in creating a better world unless and until literally everyone is doing it-- and some people doing it doesn't create conditions that could bring about everyone doing it.
That's exactly the tactic used at protests BLM or Charlottesville. They've been taped saying this as their goal. Far Right wing guy yells at others, might even throw a punch. But as soon as the Left Wing guy, the police throw them on the ground
Spoiler: The white kid gets put on a couch and the black kid gets handcuffed, because the white kid is obviously just a troubled teen and the black kid is obviously a hoodlum in the making. And there's no racism in America! (Except when things make white people feel bad.)
Putting him on the couch will still make them feel bad somehow
