Yet the agency and agendas of all players ought not be forgotten. Looking at the events from the agenda and objectives of one player, the West or more plainly the US and it's administrations, doesn't give you a correct view. — ssu

It is absolutely legitimate to heap focus on the most destructive and powerful imperial agent on the face of the Earth, especially as a bulwark against those who continue to swallow Western propaganda wholesale while spouting off racist narratives as a matter of casual conversation.

I don't think it needs to be explained in terms of brain function. But I do think it needs to be explained in some terms other than tautology.

Usually countries change course dramatically only when everybody can see what a disaster the previous course was. — ssu

This I can agree with. Unfortuntely, without any recognition of the role that the West has played in bringing this disaster about - and subsequently affecting change there too - such sentiments are just more White Man's Burden bullshit.

'Giving up' does not constitute a position but a lack of one. Hence it being a matter of laziness and psychology through and through.

If India was colonized by Great Britain and Kazakh Khanate by Russia, what is racist? It's a fact. The only difference is that other imperialist Great Power continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union. People don't just see the colonialism in Russia. — ssu

[Group of people X] have always been violent. Therefore, this explains why [group of people X] will continue to be violent. "These are just facts. It's just history bro". Maybe try to be less racist.

I suspect the OP was asking for theoretical motivations, not psychological ones. — bert1

I don't see them as distinguishable, in the case of panpsychcism.

Basically Russian history tells us how we got here. While other countries gathered colonies, Russia conquered more territory to be Russia, not colonies of Russia. — ssu

Yeah, no, this is just straight racism. No thanks.

I think that there's actually many countries that want to keep a distance to the US. Like China and also India. Remember the BRIC countries? — ssu

Ah yes, China, the great friend of the US and totally not subject to bouts and bouts of extreme sinophobia all the time, every day. And India, who, because they haven't stood with the US on Ukraine, suddenly find themselves subject to investigations into 'human rights abuses' all of a sudden from the US.

The basic problem is that Putin's Russia sees itself as what either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union was and it is this that makes it so dangerous — ssu

The 'basic problem' is that Russia is attempting not to be nothing but another vassal-state to a US governed world economic order, and this is a big no-no and cannot be tolerated. That Russia's response has been a murderous war of aggression is of course squarely on it's shoulders, but to think that Russian nationalism is a problem that popped out of nowhere rather than a response to global conditions set almost entirely by the West is a farce.

Has anyone said laziness yet? Because the answer is almost certainly laziness. Why bother explaining anything about consciousness when you can just impute it everywhere and save yourself the trouble? It's the same laziness that motivates people who dabble in multiverse theories or simulation theories of the universe. Lowest of the low hanging fruits of philosophy.

MSNBC exists to make liberals feel better about being just as awful except they get to be smug about it because the other guys aren't so sotto voce about their awfulness.

Yes it's very passe and not so a la mode, just a bit out of fashion, to recognize that NATO has blood on their hands. All the cool kids are over it.

"Woman" is one half of a social division of labor which is now in crisis in high-income states given that woman can now be exploited in equal measure to men. The irony is that the crisis over how to define 'woman' comes exactly at the point when women can no longer be straight-forwardedly subordinated to men, but instead get to participate in the domination of capital, just like everyone else. This in turn has shifted more power from workers to capital, the latter of which has a vaster reserve of labor to exploit, which of course fosters resentment in men, who see their once dominant position in society wither up, as they get to be exploited even harder. The right-wing reaction, instead of directing itself towards capitalism, which makes things worse for everyone, instead reckons the problem is women in general, and appeals to reinforced standards of femininity while scapegoating transwomen and so on. The panic over women is a panic over capitalism in another form.

https://alyesque.medium.com/on-women-as-a-class-materialist-feminism-and-mass-struggle-42a228bde888

US: Enables and supports the genocide carried out on Yemnis by Saudi Arabia while provking war in Ukraine.

Also US: How could Russia do this???

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations accused Russia on Thursday of making the precarious food situation in Yemen and elsewhere even worse by invading Ukraine, calling it “just another grim example of the ripple effect Russia’s unprovoked, unjust, unconscionable war is having on the world’s most vulnerable.”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield told a U.N. Security Council meeting on war-torn Yemen that the World Food Program identified the Arab world’s poorest nation as one of the countries most affected by wheat price increases and lack of imports from Ukraine.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-europe-united-nations-yemen-52ed5d071e4022078c93a5a1975ae38d?

What a fucking joke.

*Make nuclear annihilation taboo again*

We should probably treat people who think a tiny bit of nuclear armageddon is OK the same way we treat pedophiles but also alot worse.

It makes no less sense than the US letting its society fester and waste away to oligarchy and fascism while spending billions of dollars on wars on the literal other side of the planet to shore up its dying empire. At least Russia is playing the imperialist with its own god damn borders.

Although I agree this isn't realpolitick. This is a plutocratic capitalism that sees it's extractive mechanisms threatened by a Western-oriented neoliberalism that would decimate its parochialist economic independence and control. And that does make sense, although much to be said about the murderous execution.

Oh look everything Radhika Desai says is 100% correct:

The conflict that the West calls Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and which Moscow calls its special military operations for Ukraine’s demilitarization and denazification, is not a conflict between Ukraine and Russia; it is a phase in the hybrid war that the West has been waging for decades against any country that chooses an economic path other than subordination to the United States.In its current phase, this war takes the form of a US-led NATO war over Ukraine. In this war, Ukraine is the terrain, and a pawn – one that can be sacrificed.

This fact is hidden by wall-to-wall Western propaganda portraying Russian President Vladimir Putin as either mad or a devil hell-bent on recreating the Soviet Union. This pre-empts any questions about why Putin might be doing this, about the rationale for Russian actions.The United States, having sought without success to dominate the world, wages this war to stall its historic decline, the loss of what remains of its power.

This decline has accelerated in recent decades as neoliberalism turned its capitalist economic system unproductive, financialised, predatory, speculative, and ecologically destructive, massively diminishing Washington’s already dubious attractions to its allies around the world.Meanwhile, socialist China’s productive economy performed spectacularly and became a new pole of attraction in the world economy. This conflict, therefore, has long roots in the decaying capitalism headquartered in the US.

Understanding this war as 100% a symptom of the declining - and thus ever more dangerous - power of the US is the basis from which any understanding of what is going on needs to proceed. Anything else is fluff.

https://multipolarista.substack.com/p/the-us-war-over-ukraine-is-a-phase?s=r

The propaganda peddled and eaten up wholesale by the West and people in the West against China is utterly insane. And I say this as someone with a deep hatred for alot of what China has and continues to do. But everytime an Amercian shits their pants over something China does - this is a good thing. And China's willingness to crackdown on its ultra-wealthy is a model to be emulated with passion.

Anyone who whines about Chinese influence but has nothing to say about the 100+ US military bases around the planet can STFU and be shot into the sun.

I was going to laugh at the fact that the US gave $800 million dollars in weapons away to Ukraine despite being a third world country that "can't afford" healthcare for its citizens, then I remembered that it gave one billion dollars in arms to Israel so it can continue murdering Palestinians and then I remembered that the US is a bunch of arms manufacturers in a trench coat who fund genocide when and where it takes place.

Imperialism in the 21st Cent, if only because Value Chains builds off it.

Macron not warmongering hard enough for the warmongers.

Do notice the universality of this, which obviously can be seen from Putin's rhetoric. Of course when it comes to Putin, he is willing to aid neo-nazis and right-wing extremists if it furthers his agenda of creating more instability in the West. — ssu

Do notice the universality of this, which obviously can be seen from the West's rhetoric. Of course when it comes to the West, they are willing to aid neo-nazis and right-wing extremists if it furthers their agenda of creating more instability in the Rest.

Domenico Losurdo - War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century
Domenico Losurdo - Liberalism: A Counter-History — StreetlightX

I cheated and haven't yet read these two because I got distracted by a bunch of others in the meantime:

Davide Tarizzo - Life: A Modern Invention
Eugene Thacker - After Life (reread)
Giorgio Agamben - Means Without End: Notes on Politics
Michael Parenti - Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
Lisa Adkins et. al. - The Asset Economy: Property Ownership and the New Logic of Inequality

On to Losurdo soon enough.

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Thanks! Really cool that you're going through all the feminist classics. Much respect.

If the Nazis didn't exist the West would have to invent them in order to exculpate themselves for all the horror they have ever committed. There's nothing someone in the West loves more than a Nazi - they serve the perfect internal excuse against which the West can maintain its pristine innocence, once expelled as some kind of abberant otherness.

Perhaps, but the power of misunderstood aspiration (temporarily embarrassed millionares and all that), and what is effectively a hostage economy in housing, together with misattributed blame - immigrants, the Chinese, city elites - still leave the door open to an engineered tragedy of the commons type situation (they're all engineered). Basically, I can't count on the power of real tragedy, visceral as it may be.

I'm still too burned I won't believe he will lose until I see it.

Funny that you call history imagination. Though I suppose you have to given that Ukraine's history began exactly two months ago for you and no further back.

Lol, no, I had in mind the part where the West enthusiastically supports a rapacious post-communist dictator in order to expand capitalist market-economies right up until the point where he gets too big for his britches, threatens that market-expansion, and has to be bombed and fought into submission at the expense of a massacre of local population while then denying any and all involvement, complicity, and support after the fact. And then supported in turn by a bunch of bootlickers who who think that politics is Harry Potter. Good to know that you didn't read the extract though.

Rough list of 10, tried to stick with slightly more accessible ones:

Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition
Linda Zerilli - Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
Ellen Meiskins Wood - The Origin of Capitalism
Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu - How the West Came to Rule
Andre Leroi-Gourhan - Gesture and Speech
Miguel de Beistegui - Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology
Alicia Juarrero - Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behaviour as a Complex System
Alva Noe - Action in Perception
Fredrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil + On the Genealogy of Morals
Alphonso Lingis - The Imperative

God, history really does rhyme with itself doesn't it. Just... ridiculous uncanniness:

The way NATO was waging its war was clearly not aimed at helping the Kosovars [in Yugoslavia] ,but using their plight as a pretext; similarly, Milosevic’s accelerated war against the Kosovars, while using NATO’s attack as a pretext, obviously had nothing to do with defending Serbia from NATO. Nevertheless, a prominent section of the left supported NATO’s war [against Yugoslavia]. As the war became more and more destructive and obviously counterproductive, it was difficult to withdraw support: if you had concluded that NATO was finally acting on behalf of the oppressed, even if unwittingly, you could only insist it finish the job.

Leftists like Ken Livingstone hence found themselves on the same platform as the likes of Margaret Thatcher. Of course, that may happen in peculiar instances. Yet to be allied to a warmongering section of Western imperialism on the issue of war must surely be a worry. NATO was not being dragged in and reluctantly carrying out actions that helped the oppressed. On the contrary, once it decided on war, it launched it with all the destructiveness and callous disregard for civilian life that it usually displays, while assiduously not helping the oppressed Kosovars.

... Regimes which are the greatest violators of human rights have always been useful for enforcing the ruthless exploitation of labour. There was no fundamental Western interest in intervening in Yugoslavia just because of aggression and human rights violations. There were plenty of examples of non-intervention when it was simply a humanitarian concern (Rwanda 1994). This was even the case with Iraq when it was gassing Kurds, rather than occupying the Western protectorate of Kuwait. From this one can understand that if the West does use “human rights” to justify a war against a tyrannical regime, it must really have some other interests in mind.

The support for NATO by a section of the left in 1999 had its mirror image in a very prominent section of the left which decided instead that, since an imperialist bloc like NATO was attacking Milosevic’s Serbia, the latter must be doing something right. The aim of this section of the left was to play down the crimes of Milosevic. In the most extreme cases, this meant pretending, that ethnic cleansing was not taking place and that the Kosovar refugees were “fleeing NATO bombs”.

....A number of left-oriented writers [demonstrated] the large-scale Western economic intervention into Yugoslavia, particularly through the free market radicalism imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the dramatic effects of which played a role in driving people to nationalism ... The dictates of the IMF and World Bank played the decisive role in shaping the Western policy of insisting on Yugoslav centralism, undermining traditional republican privileges. Some impressive works— Susan Woodward’s Balkan Tragedy and Branka Magas’ The Destruction of Yugoslavia — have documented this extensive relationship, correctly situating the rise of Milosevic in this context.

It's like this stuff follows a script.

Via Mike Karadjis, Bosnia, Kosova, & the West.

ThErE iS No ProPaGanDa In ThE WeSt - Every clown ever

The evening news programs of the three dominant U.S. television networks devoted more coverage to the war in Ukraine last month than in any other month during all wars, including those in which the U.S. military was directly engaged, since the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, according to the authoritative Tyndall Report. The only exception was the last war in which U.S. forces participated in Europe, the 1999 Kosovo campaign.

Combined, the three networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — devoted 562 minutes to the first full month of the war in Ukraine. That was more time than in the first month of the U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989 (240 mins), its intervention in Somalia in 1992 (423 mins), and even the first month of its invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 (306 minutes), according to a commentary published Thursday by Andrew Tyndall, who has monitored and coded the three networks’ nightly news each weekday since 1988.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/04/08/networks-covered-the-war-in-ukraine-more-than-the-us-invasion-of-iraq/

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/ukraine-russia-putin-azov-neo-nazis-western-media/

A nice accounting of how Western media and analysis went from "we need to be really careful about Nazis in Ukraine" to "what Nazis nothing to see here haha Putin propaganda", right after the advent of war:

Before this war, Western media coverage presented a Ukrainian far right that was uniquely well-organized, well-connected to both the Ukrainian state and private benefactors, increasingly emboldened, violent, and threatening to democracy, and on the march in terms of its influence. Suddenly, this same media is now telling us all of this is simply lies and Russian propaganda, in line with the favored talking point of the neo-Nazis themselves. Calling this “Orwellian” doesn’t do it justice.

...Before the war, the German government–funded Counter Extremism Project had warned that Ukraine’s paramilitary training infrastructure “presents the risk that violence-oriented right-wing extremist and terrorist individuals from abroad obtain weapons and explosives training in Ukraine,” potentially “increas[ing] the effectiveness of the violence that these individuals may perpetrate in their home countries.” Yet despite years of media fixation on the threat of far-right terrorism — a threat that’s still relatively small at this stage but has the potential to get much worse — this concern, when it’s not dismissed as a Kremlin talking point, goes almost entirely undiscussed in the Western press, even as thousands of foreign fighters, some of them homegrown extremists, stream into the country.

There are serious risks for Ukraine, too. A Western public uninformed about the dangers of the far right is watching its governments, with no debate, send an avalanche of weaponry into the country, where it will fall (and some has already fallen) into the hands of extremists — the same extremists who have serially attacked vulnerable groups, want to institute a dictatorship, have repeatedly threatened and carried out violence against the government, and have already helped overthrow one president. With Zelensky now envisioning a postwar Ukrainian society with more armed people in the streets, and members of the military and National Guard — both institutions where extremists have made a home — patrolling everyday locations, this risk is all the bigger.

Putin’s war on Ukraine has, ironically, been a boon to its far right, which has been further legitimized, better equipped, and supplied with volunteers as a result of his attack. Tragically, the Western press is now also assisting this process, unwittingly advancing extremists’ preferred talking points. We don’t have to pretend there’s no far right problem in Ukraine to give the country our support and solidarity. But by rewriting history and doing PR for literal Nazis, we may be sleepwalking into more disaster.

Maybe in the quest for righteous rooting out of Russian propaganda people here should not find themselves running cover for Nazis.

OK Imma put that one down to miscommunication because I am lovely and charitable.

At the end of a gun. — Olivier5

Funny, we were talking pre-invasion. Very naughty of you, invoking agency as and when it suits you.

Ha, where is the fabled 'agency' of the Ukrainians now?

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Among the saddest things about this war is that those who champion the independence of Ukraine - without addressing the conditions of that independence in the slightest - are simply championing for the right of Ukraine to self-determine the conditions of its own exploitation. Which is - true - marginally better than having those exploitative conditions dictated from Moscow:

Q: We have learned that the Ukrainian government, in the name of a state of emergency and using martial law, has enacted a series of laws that severely restrict employees' rights. Employers can increase the working week from 40 to 60 hours, shorten vacations or cancel extra vacation days. Are you afraid that all this will serve as a basis for a more radical transformation of labour law and trade unions in the name of war?

A: Prior to the war, Ukraine already had a high unemployment rate floating around 10%, with a labour force participation rate of 65% in 2021. The issues of a highly uncertain future raised by the heavy student presence at Euromaidan have only been exacerbated due to further gutting of the universities, among many other public sector austerity programs. High informal employment rates for all age groups and non-existent pensions meant there was no way out of poverty for most of the population. In a stagnating and hopeless country, you knew your plans wouldn’t materialise, but they collapsed slowly and allowed you to pretend there were options and guarantees. War, however, completely disorients you, making you feel utterly powerless as you are thrown into a sea of new incalculable probabilities, with everything lost and everyone confused. A month in, I am still not sure whether I’ll ever be able to speak of the “after” of this war. It is future-destroying, not only by burning up precious stock market options and millions of careers but on a cosmological scale too. As comrades are swept into the ranks of another patriotic army, not only overwhelmed by the tradition of dead generations but celebrating its repetition, the possibility of liberation seems foreclosed.

That's why I am afraid the “temporary” labour laws have merely formalised already-existing practices. Nobody cares much about proper legal conduct as millions have left their homes and employers have suspended pay. The system was slightly disrupted, but quickly adjusted itself and asserted its reign once again: refugees are trying to find any work whatsoever, and exploitation limits can be dispensed with in such demanding times. It’s difficult to speak to the possibility of these restrictions continuing after the war. Still, it wouldn’t be surprising, considering the need to make the trickle of foreign investment find profitable industries. The unions are unlikely to oppose these laws, as there is almost no independent trade union movement in Ukraine, and official post-Soviet organisations are nothing but hollowed-out conservative structures. There haven’t been any strikes, even during the 2014 uprising, and largely patriotic unions are unlikely to undermine the nation’s war efforts.

This is the wonderful democracy that Zelensky presided over and for which Westerners swoon for - retroactively. At best the Russians have made a hopeless future even more so.

https://endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/andrew-letters-from-ukraine-part-3

https://archive.ph/onoLL

Use this site for most paywalls.

Agreed. Which makes him continuous with every other American president in history.

What, it's funny. They made such a big deal of suspending Russia.

Lmao I was just reminded that the US unilaterally pulled out of the UNHR council back in 2018 only to have rejoined it again in Janurary of this year.

From February, before the war:

Scandals and tolerance for corruption have chipped away at Mr. Zelensky’s popularity. Sixty-two percent of Ukrainians don’t want him to run for re-election, and if an election were held today, he’d garner about 25 percent of the vote — down from the 30 percent he easily won in the first round of the 2019 election. He’d still be likely to win, but the historic 73 percent he scored in the second round feels like a distant memory.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/opinion/ukraine-russia-zelensky-putin.html

This is common knowledge to anyone who did not suddenly get propagandized by the largest propaganda machine on Earth to love someone they had never heard of before in their life, overnight.

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And of course, Americans, who are incapable of approaching politics in any way that does not involve celebritydom, are head-over-heels for the man. And considering the American electorate voted for a fucking cockroach in a coat to be their president, their electoral opinions on anything whatsoever are about as much worth as a shit smear on the bathroom wall, except to the extent that everyone else has to deal with the noxious, deadly fallout.