Hey, comrades. I am new to lemmygrad and find it odd that there are so many marxist-leninist defending a war of agression started by an oligarch, possibly the richest man in the world. I get that you want to say that NATO is a source of evil on the global stage, but in this particular case you are defending Putin, a warlord, who has invaded many of his neighbouring countries and has stated plans to continue his campaign for megalomanial reasons.
No war but class war. Enabling an autocrat fascist oligarch does not do anything to counter the bad stuff done by NATO and the community should take a firm stand against the use of war for the sake of satisfying the dreams of a tyrant.
This is not a troll post or anything to that extent. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, but I think it needed to be said.
Nazis should be opposed all day, every day, everywhere. I am saying that there is a human cost to doing so through war, making it not the best (though sometimes necessary) way. Also, I think it is as much nazi apologist to buy into the Ukrainians are nazis propaganda as calling Putin for Putler, as stated above. Generally, nazism is a fringe ideology that has potential to gather a lot of common support if certain conditions are present. In a healthy environment nazis can be ridiculed, outed and opposed with ease due to their intolerant and inconsistent ideology being easy to take apart with words or fists if necessary. I think it is just as racist to call common Ukranians for nazists as it is to talk about “oriental despotism” as I was accused of above, both of which I for the record vehemently oppose.
Not all Ukrainians may subscribe to the most hardcore version of Nazi ideology but this is not a either-or thing. There are various degrees of Nazi indoctrination and many Ukrainians today are somewhere on this spectrum. They may not openly profess Nazi beliefs but they certainly use dehumanizing language to refer to Russians. They celebrate Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators as national heroes. They hold parades for these new national "heroes"in the streets unopposed. Like their counterparts in the Baltic states they celebrate and adopt the symbols of various SS units.
Their media and their government representatives regularly call for and glorify war crimes and make no secret of their aims to ethnically cleanse Russians from the territories they intend to seize back. They destroy Russian books, ban Russian media, attempt to forbid the use of Russian language, and they heavily suppress even other minority languages such as Hungarian. Moreover the entire conception of Ukrainian national identity as it exists today is built solely on hatred of Russia, Russians and everything Russian.
To all of this we see no opposition to speak of among the Ukrainian society. Of course we understand that many people in Ukraine are intimidated and terrorized into silence by the brutal police apparatus of the fascist state. The FSB regularly arrests, imprisons, tortures and murders political opponents, suspected “collaborators” (including anyone who gave or accepted any kind of help from the Russians), people who say the wrong thing either in public or on social media, etc. But this could not occur without a significant degree of support from at least a portion of the population.
There are plenty of Ukrainians who are true believers and who are more than willing to rat out their neighbors to the fascist police state, who themselves undertake vigilante violence against suspected “enemies of Ukraine” or just against ethnic minorities. This was no different in Nazi Germany where despite the protestations of Germans after the war that they too were just victims of the Nazi regime, the regime could not have done what it did without the help and support of a sufficient segment of the population.
And ultimately if you care about the fate of those Ukrainians who have been cowed into silence and who do not support all of this, there is unfortunately at the moment no other realistic way to help them than to militarily liberate them from the fascist regime, because it will not fall on its own especially as long as it is supported by the West.
Of course this is very sad. It is always regrettable when a fascists manage to take an entire population hostage and effectively use them as human shields. But the fact is that as things currently stand the population of Ukraine is either not able or not willing to liberate itself.