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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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Liberals can't tolerate anyone to their left, so they try to stir interlemmy drama to encourage their censorship.
Even anarchists get called tankies when they don't support western imperialism.
Stop calling everything that doesn’t fit into neat political boxes liberal or neoliberal
Identity politics over meaningful progress is the whole reason westerners become tankies. They just want a group identity, not a revolution. It doesn't matter if you work together on similar principles; they want you to wave the flag like a moron.
They haven't learned that a liberal doing the right thing will always be better than a Marxist doing the wrong thing. No identity can make you a good person; you have to do good
Liberals doing the right thing eventually realize their biggest obstacle is capitalism and either end up in an anarchist or communist org based on who is organizing around them, ideology is secondary to actually getting shit done.
Half the time I see someone critical of "Identity politics", they're talking about the way it's cynically wielded by liberals (black CEOs, cops, and judges who are no less oppressive than the whites who selected them), the other half they doing some class reductionist horseshit and advocating ignoring all axis of oppression except class.
Which are you doing?
I'm saying that tankies aren't bad for being Marxists; they're bad at being Marxists. The identity blinds them to the praxis, convincing them to defend things that aren't worth defending. They never own up to the problems in ML movements, instead letting power centralize and corruption fester.
The whole issue with liberal capitalism is how it encourages the unchecked accumulation and exploitation of power. ML movements encourage it too, centralizing power through the tactics necessary to win control. It might start off with a leader dedicated to the cause, but in their rise to power, they create an environment that compromises the whole goal of the cause. Liberation turns into imperialism, as selfishness is the path of least resistance.
Libs might claim that MLs and fascists are two sides of the same coin, but they really have themselves and MLs as demonstrations of the same truth. It really is an evolutionary ecosystem of nonhuman macroentities. That ecosystem is blind and cruel, with right and wrong not really factoring into what happens. Might does not make right, only what typically happens.
I guess that puts me into the anarchy camp more than anything, but only in a vague sense. I don't think it matters what you call me. In a fascinating way, I'm very pessimistic, but not because I think people are bad. Governments aren't run by the king or the members of parliament, but by the kingdom and the parliament as an entity. Capitalism isn't run by rich people, but by the the rich as a class. The systems don't serve anybody; we serve the systems. That's the real problem.
I really love your last paragraph. I’m somewhere in the anarchist camp as well and when pressed by the ML types my general take is that power corrupts.
Most of the time it’s liberals
Auth left and lib left may be left, but they are not close to each other.
Nobody who understands both communism and anarchism would say that in the context of opposition to liberalism.
On .ml, communists get called lib. Ask me how I know.
I'm referring to the political compass, not center right liberals. Yall just refer to anyone that doesn't love authoritarian regimes as "liberals."
The political compass is useless for describing actual ideologies. Partly because that's not how ideologies work, partly because you can't divorce political philosophies from their contexts in society.
Here's an academic work going over what liberalism meant to every major liberal philosopher.
Like anarchists, we only call people who support capitalism liberals, because liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism.
What's the societal context for defending genocides and excusing imperialism (specifically, Russia)?
Opposition to American imperialism isn't support for Russian imperialism.
The simple truth is that this prolonged war is worse than a quick defeat for the people living in Ukraine; millions are displaced, hundreds of thousands are dead, the rightwing is stronger than ever in both countries, and Ukraine will never be safe again within either of our lifetimes.
3 parties can unilaterally end the war right now, Russia, Ukraine, and America. As an American, the only way I can meaningfully oppose the war is to oppose America's involvement. That would be reversed if I was a Russian.
Rewarding imperialism because war is bad. Fantastic. I'm going to move next door and annex your backyard because you rolling over and letting me have it is better than a prolonged legal fight.
In this analogy you've created, that user would get me or another to take pot shots at your children while you kill their children for years and years until finally you or they give up, both worse than just accepting that the separatist governments were legitimate and the insanely corrupt zelensky government was probably in the wrong.
And definitely in no way funded or supported by Russia, right?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/26/russia-admits-soldiers-in-ukraine
https://youtu.be/xV0FUx5i9eA
https://www.vice.com/en/article/selfie-soldiers-russia-checks-in-to-ukraine/
Russia indisputibly fired the first shots, and the so-called genocide in donbas was about 3k civilian deaths over 8 years of conflict. Not ideal, but still miles better than the 12k civilians killed (often deliberately) in the almost 3 years since the full scale invasion by Russia. Not to mention the cities literally shelled to rubble.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Like when the CIA supported the Maidan coup or any other color revolution, the GRU taking advantage of very real grievances of the Russian-speaking population of Donbass to advance its own geopolitical interests at the expense of those same people doesn't mean those grievances didn't exist or that those people were happy being part of a Ukrainian state that made them second-class citizens.
Yes exactly the same. I remember the Abrams and us soldiers rolling through the streets in support of the coup of the totally not russian puppet.
But hey, if you think the CIA can literally psyop 70+% of a country into supporting EU membership, then you might be more of an American exceptionalist than the liberals you hate.
If you think the US doesn't fund and arm right-wing factions and media in adversarial (and sometimes "friendly") countries, IDK what to tell you.
Obviously they fund groups to further their interests. You still can't compare it to active Russian soldiers on the ground pretending to be separatists.