Magpietothemax wrote:pietillidie wrote:
Magpietothemax wrote:Putin invaded because he hoped in this way to apply pressure on the US and thereby establish some kind of security guarantee for Russia that NATO would cease its neverending encroachment towards Russia's borders.
This is plainly absurd. No one anywhere wants a square metre of Russian tundra, or has ever hinted as much. It's propaganda of the most farcical kind th
I am sorry to say this PTID, but what is absurd is your claim that "no one wants a square metre of Russian tundra''
Russia is a massive storehouse of strategic raw materials, rare earth minerals of critical importance to modern capitalist industry. The US government is currently in the process of instituting through the ICIC the case for the criminal prosecution of war crimes against Putin (even though the US itself does not recognise this institution, because it fears that the numerous war criminals who occupied and currently occupy the White House would face prosecution if it did). This is because the US is opposed to any negotiated settlement to the Ukrainian war and aims for regime change in Russia, replacing the Putin government with a series of multiple pro US governments which will hand over the strategic resources of Russia for exploitation by US corporations.
If you want to read an analysis of this here is an article:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/0 ... e-m28.html
When I say no one wants a square meter of Russian tundra I mean no one has practical designs on it. Sure, there are plenty of scumbags who'd take anything they can get their hands on, but Russia is a massively militarised nuclear power. It's so obvious no one would even try. Desiring Russian resources is like Elon Musk desiring to rule the universe; he can desire it all he likes, but that has no bearing on reality.
And you call that 'analysis'? No offence, but that's Wikipedia-level common knowledge
It says nothing, absolutely nothing at all, about Ukrainian agency, what Ukraine wants, what Ukraine's neighbours want, and the effects of inflation and supply shortages right now. And the agency of Ukraine and its neighbours, and its collision with imperial power, is where the hard work lies. That article is fighting in the little league of life, quoting general knowledge as if its audience is some half-witted hick in the hills waving an American flag.
Even more bizarre, the very same article overlooks the actual leverage being used: Putin blackmailing the world into turning a blind eye to its murder and theft by manipulating the global market. Does the suffering caused by the oil, gas and wheat price spike, and their inflationary effects, mean nothing?
Plenty of us have been working to help rid the earth of those damned, tyrant-funding pollutants that Putin is wielding. The same pollutants that funded Afhanistan and Iraq disasters. It's astonishing that the 'analysis' hasn't connected OPEC profteering and global whitewashing efforts, feverishly underway, to the fact the writing is on the wall for ugly old energy. Nor that the scumbag waited until the world was on its knees at the hands of Covid to unleash more inflation hell.
Absolutely no one has a problem with Russia defending its agreed territory and resources. It's the wanton violence against its neighbours and economic blackmail people care about. How does this not rate or even register?
It's unbecoming to be so obsessed with The Idea that one cannot grant even the slightest weight to the agency to the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, or Georgia or Chechnya, who would rid themselves of living under the menace of Putin or in its shadow. Those people and their agency and wellbeing are dismissed as collateral damage; small beans in the war to prove that only one kind of bad matters: American imperialism.
So strained is this fundamentalism that it even implies that the real victim here is corrupt, outdated, delusional, isolated, oppressive imperialist
elite Russia. Not Russian citizens, not the victims of imperialist Russia, but
elite Russia and its billionaire thugs ike Putin.
But, but America!
Believe your eyes not your childhood indignation: Russia is the one invading its neighbours and stealing their resources. It is a nuclear and military power that can obviously, ridiculously obviously, defend itself. It doesn't need your help except to reform for the sake of its own citizens and neighbours, and those suffering downstream from its inflation and shortages.
The concrete thinking evident in the article above, and rife in socialist circles, is a classical psychiatric fundamentalism that can't cope with contradiction. Plenty of people who opposed Afghanistan and Iraq, and see them in the same vein as Indochina and Central America, already know that stuff. It's bleedingly obvious. There are no awards for recognising the obvious, nor forming a self-righteous sect around the obvious. Yes, the world has deep flaws and contradictions.
In the present context it just doesn't matter that the US is compromised and amoral. It doesn't even matter if Russia is compromised and amoral. That's what powerful self-justifying empires do. Those are the parameters we inherited and are working with.
What matters is wrangling the best outcomes for the most people; protecting the rights of the people whose land is being stolen and family members are being killed, and upholding their agency. And plain as day their preference is not to hand their lands, resources, lives and political choice to Russia, and to send America and NATO home.
Chomsky loves to quote polls to show that the will of the people differs from the will of the elite. Yet somehow, the will of Ukrainians can go to hell. This is not Iraq, which was widely opposed. It is backed by a major consensus, in complete contrast to Iraq. Ukrainian lives and agency, and the stability of a region and global economy that sustains hundreds of millions and billions of people in turn, matter infinitely more than proving that The Idea is right and everyone else is wrong.
Denying the agency of Ukrainians and the damage Russian violence and economic blackmail is doing to the planet just isn't an act of special moral or intellectual insight; rather, it's an act of solipsism. A stubborn narcissism that puts childish old arguments and egos above people and their agency. Revenge of the (Socialist) Nerds was a teen comedy, not a moral code for adults.
This is not the time or place to obsess over Anglo-American failings and contradictions to the ignorance of everything else. They will take centre stage once more soon enough. I am also sure there will come a time for imperfect resolution of some kind, but I'll let Ukraine and its neighbours lead on that because only they will know what that should entail. Thus far, they are very clear it doesn't mean kowtowing to the invaders and normalising their thuggery and blackmail.
