“Russian Propaganda” Means Disputing US Propaganda

WWII comparisons are apt, because this war is largely a resumption of grievances from that war, but not in the way you’ve implied. Here’s a hint as to which side is the Axis analog: It’s the one that glorifies Nazi collaborators and made it illegal to commemorate the Allies’ victory.

Me when I change my VPN exit node

What’s with the spacing around the punctuation?

It happens because it makes rich people richer

No, it’s not inherently liberal. It’s just that I hear it most often from liberals when discussing how Democrats and Republicans both stand for capitalist imperialism. To be fair, that’s probably primarily due to the types of discussions that anti-imperialists find themselves in.

I wrote a tongue-in-cheek characterization of the propaganda of the nations we’re discussing here, but I’ll elaborate further.

There are qualitative and quantitative reasons the equivalence is false.

Qualitative: As the undisputed global hegemon, the modus operandi of the US empire is to maintain full-spectrum dominance over the globe. It does this by exploiting weaker countries and looting their resources for use by American corporations. When a country refuses to submit, US propaganda has to invert reality and depict its victim country as the bad actor in order to justify its actions. Therefore, it inherently relies on distortions. On the other hand, the propaganda of the oppressed nation simply needs to reveal the true intentions of the US empire in order to make its case.

The best example of this is the DPRK. US propaganda frequently invents, out of whole cloth, Looney Tunes-style stories, such as Kim Jong-un executing a government official with an anti-aircraft cannon—an official who later turned up alive, by the way. In contrast, DPRK propaganda is usually centered around telling stories from the brutal war of extermination that the US carried out against it in the 1950s, like its popular museum memorializing the Sinchon Massacre.

Quantitative: US propaganda is voluminous and far reaching due to the empire’s cultural hegemony that’s concurrent with its military hegemony. Just as the US has military bases around the world that number more than those of any other nation by orders of magnitude, so is its propaganda more numerous than that of its enemies. In fact, US propaganda is even more powerful and effective than its military is. Hollywood movies are popular worldwide. In contrast, the propaganda of its enemies is weak and typically limited in reach to within its own borders, and the language barriers limit the scope of the little bit that manages to extend further than that.

Americans eat, breathe, and bathe in US propaganda. They rarely, if ever, are allowed to see propaganda from enemy nations. YouTube regularly bans channels that speak for China, Russia, or the DPRK. One of the greatest accomplishments of US propaganda is the creation of the perception that this dominance is inverted. They’ve convinced Americans that they do not consume any propaganda at all, and that the enemy’s propaganda is all around them. They’ve trained them to dutifully ignore or attack any narrative which portrays their enemies in a positive light because it must be originating from its conniving enemies.

Yeah, same. A lot of lives would have been saved if he had not given them almost a decade to entrench. I think Putin was trying hard to buck the strong man characterization of him, but US propaganda does not bend to material reality.

The hesitancy is something the US never would have done, but the situation was also not a position the US would ever find itself in, because its enemies aren’t as belligerent.

One major difference between the two conflicts is that if the US had been in Russia’s position it would have invaded in 2014 and never attempted eight years of diplomatic solutions

As liberals are fond of saying, “false equivalence”.

They keep the comment sections clear of State Department talking points

Did they reply?

Marx stared at the turntable in wide-eyed amazement.

“Seventy-two revolutions per minute!?”

Yeah, someone informed me here.

I didn’t know much about it, but the story I remember reading was something like “the Nazis are invading” and Stalin’s attitude was “shut up that’s impossible; it’s too soon”.

I’m honestly not too surprised that it’s false because it didn’t make much sense. Everyone knew it was inevitable.

You’re flailing out of control, name calling, pointing and yelling “Russian propaganda!” at every inconvenient fact, and completely missing the crux of my arguments in general. Just stop.

Stephen F. Cohen who is on the record as saying that Putin is not an autocrat, Russia’s invasion of a sovereign country was justified, and disputed evidence on MH17.

Look, I already thought he was based. You don’t have to try to convince me further! No, Putin does not hold absolute power over his country. That’s a childish characterization. His intervention in the Ukraine civil war in 2022 was done partially because he was receiving criticism from the Duma for being soft on NATO. None of his problematic qualities change the fact that he has been popularly elected just like Western presidents have (but with a much higher approval rating which makes it even harder to deny). Ukraine effectively ceased to be a sovereign country in 2014 when it was couped by the CIA—it no longer even holds elections. The only investigation done on MH17 concluded the damage was more consistent with a NATO munition. That’s a fact.^[1]

Aaron Maté who regularly appears at events hosted and paid for by the Russian government.

Are you one of those liberals who claims Jill Stein is a Russian agent because she had dinner in Russia once lol? Who cares?

Bad faith argument. I didn’t say that [RT claimed Putin was a communists].

I was making a good faith assessment of your argument by recognizing that you weren’t directly answering my request for examples of RT propaganda (which is okay), but rather making the case that Russia is right wing in order to argue that they’re not attempting to denazify Ukraine. After recognizing that crux of your argument, I proceeded to make a detailed case for why that’s irrelevant in this case.

Ukraine didn’t pose a serious security threat to Russia prior to Russia’s invasion.

“We should take up arms and shoot those god damned Russians along with their leader. I will rally the entire world as best as I can to turn all of Russia into a field of scorched Earth. We should light them up with nuclear weapons!” —People’s Deputy of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko^[2] (years before Russia’s military intervention)

Playing “let’s see which country has more photos of Nazis” is not the way to properly assess the cause of this war, but it is also a game Ukraine cannot win. There is a reason why Western news agencies have been instructed to censor far-right symbology from photos taken of the AFU—a problem that does not exist in the Russian army. Listing all of Ukraine’s examples would fill several web pages.

What you call “making excuses” is just the acknowledgement of material reality and causation. Making excuses would be something like denying that Russian nationalists exist, or saying that it’s okay that they exist because of X. I did no such thing. I embraced the complexities and nuance. I lament the capitalist restoration which caused reactionary elements to surge in both Russia and Ukraine.

Ukraine didn’t start the war.

Tens of thousands of civilians dead before 2022. Just watch the first fifteen minutes of this, I beg you comrade. The West has completely ignored these events. The only party that was seriously interested in ending the civil war through diplomacy was Russia, but their attempts were scuttled at every turn.^[3] Diplomatic cables from 2008 released by Wikileaks prove that the US knew that Russia did not want war in Ukraine and would only intervene if NATO kept pushing at their border.^[4] The fracturing and weaponization of Ukraine was a plan thirty years in the making that was done largely out in the open.

The war started by Russia is decimating Ukraine’s population, correct.

Russia’s military intervention came to a natural end after just six weeks, when both sides were close to an agreement at Istanbul, but Ukraine’s puppet masters sabotaged the peace deal because they wanted to weaken Russia at the expense of Ukrainian lives.^[5] Today, a majority of Ukrainians are willing to conceded territory to end the war, but the corrupt and authoritarian Zelensky regime has ignored the will of the people and suspended elections, opting instead to kidnap people to use as cannon fodder.^[6]

Threats of nuclear war. Russian propaganda.

The Doomsday Clock is the closest to midnight it has ever been in its 78-year history.^[7] That’s a fact. And the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a liberal Western organization.

wut

China’s opposition (or lack of it) to Israel is controversial among MLs. I’m not familiar with the specifics of Russia’s opposition to Israel or what RT has claimed about it, but I’ll grant you that it’s probably similar to China’s dynamic with Israel.

I strongly disagree with the characterization of everything else as false propaganda, however.

I’m inclined to side with people like Jeremy Corbyn, Aaron Maté, and academics like Stephen F. Cohen and David S. G. Goodman who all expressed skepticism over the Skripal poisoning. IIRC, he was supposedly exposed to poison on the doorknob to his home at a time when he wasn’t even in the city.

If the idea that Ukraine has a Nazi problem is Russian propaganda, then most Western media outlets prior to 2022 qualify as Kremlin propagandists. The Neo-Nazi problem is highly regional. Ukraine is a divided country, which is why it entered a civil war in 2014. You referenced the far-right party Svoboda’s mere 2% of the national parliament, however, in the Neo-Nazi stronghold of the western Lviv Oblast, where statues of Stepan Bandera are erected, that share rises to 34%^[1]. Furthermore, their influence is outsized, because they’re highly organized. NATO armed and supported the Banderite Azov Battalion beginning in 2005.^[2] Today, that group has been upgraded to encompass multiple brigades.^[3] Ukraine is the only country in the world with a Neo-Nazi group formally integrated into its federal armed forces. Starting in 2014 under Poroshenko’s coup regime, after massacring leftists in an inferno in Odessa, these fascists began traveling to the east to ethnically cleanse Russian Ukrainians in pogroms.^[4] Zelensky ran on a platform of peace with Russia, which is still the dominant position, but was powerless to rein in the NATO-backed far right in his country.

I don’t believe RT has ever claimed that Putin is a communist. Presumably you’ve enumerated his ties to Russian nationalists to suggest that he and the Russian Federation could not possibly be genuinely opposed to Nazis. But even Russian nationalists share the Federation’s immense pride in the victory of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War, for which the country still holds huge annual parades. A guiding tenant of past and present Nazi ideology is a boiling hatred of Russians, which is why they exterminated 18 million Russian civilians in that world war. Nationalism is characterized by pride in ethnicity and nation, and so nationalists tend to dislike people who consider them subhuman and want to kill them. Thus, opposition to Nazis and concern for the security threat they pose make sense from the perspective of both the left and right within Russia.

Apologists for Ukraine and its endless proxy war on behalf of NATO which is decimating Ukraine’s population and propelling the entire world towards WWIII and thermonuclear brinkmanship are IMO the embarrassing, useful idiots for the far-right and their genocidal ambitions in the Donbass.

I support your quest for nuance.

Mao was critical of his own policies which exacerbated the famine during the Great Leap Forward.

My understanding is that the executions were a form of justice doled out by the peasants (not Mao himself) against their former landlords and oppressors. As Mao said, “a revolution is not a dinner party”; it’s a class war. Violence is part of it. Given the scale, it’s plausible to me that some of the killings could have been unjust, but I would need to learn of the specifics in such cases before arriving at that condemnation.

it’s plainly obvious that tankies fail specifically by not engaging in criticism

Here are frequent criticisms of AES states from MLs off the top of my head:

I keep hearing that MLs are “campists” who don’t engage in nuance, but the side I typically see lacking nuance is the “anti-authoritarians” who refuse to acknowledge any successes of AES and label anything short of universal condemnation as “apologetics”. That’s actual campism.

You’ve probably heard of the expression “when someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. There is a similar dynamic going on here: When someone is accustomed to black and white thinking, shades of gray look like whitewashing.

States should not exist.

That’s the goal of all communists, including MLs. The disagreement lies in the path to get there.