It’s not that easy to just make a “second China”. Because what made China China wasn’t just cheap labor costs, it was the entire foundation built during the Mao era. Even India with its similarly large population size as the other comment here suggests can’t just replace China overnight. If they could they would have done so already.

But India is pursuing a fundamentally different model of economic development and the US can’t magically transform it with just their “carrot and stick method” that you mention. They would need not just to invest massively in a kind of Marshall plan style without immediate prospects for a return on that investment, which US capital is not going to be easily persuaded to do, but also change the entrenched oligarchic and political structures in India that stand in the way of China style industrial development.

And India is where the US’s chances are highest. In South East Asia they stand even less of a chance, countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, they are much more highly integrated into China’s economic orbit. And yes, the Philippines is a US neocolony that can serve as a military launchpad, but they definitely can’t economically replace China. I think if the US imperialists really are thinking along the lines you laid out they are severely deluding themselves.

Ah, that’s too bad. No i haven’t archived it, but the main text of the post is basically the entire text of the thread in the linked tweet. I only added the italicized bit at the top, the rest is the original thread’s text copy pasted.

No, i should have made that clearer in the post.

You are misunderstanding. This post is a repost from the Revolution Report. They are the ones pointing out the presence of pro-NATO elements in this protest.

Lots of Ukraine and USA flags there.

Okay, that sounds like it was even worse than i initially assumed. I thought someone just snuck in the NATO part on the poster, but apparently this was way more of a lib fest than i thought.

I was looking up more about this event and saw a bunch of photos of people with signs calling Trump a “Putin puppet” and “Moscow agent”. That plus the Ukraine flags and the “we’re the real American patriots” flag-waving jingoism, makes apparent that the pro-NATO poster is not an accident at all but absolutely intentional.

And the absence of pro-Palestinian messaging that others are also pointing out is a massive red flag that there is some co-opted bullshit going on here rather than genuine grassroots protest.

Leaving aside which of the two genocidal fascist choices was worse, because i think that’s just splitting hairs at this point…I for one appreciate Caitlin Johnstone’s writing. I don’t see it as whining at all. Yes she keeps repeating herself but that’s because what she is saying about the brutality and inhumanity of US empire is something that needs to be repeated over and over ad nauseam until it sinks in with everyone who can be a potential ally in the fight against this genocidal empire, against this enemy of humanity.

A very warm welcome to you, comrade!

And the Germans and the EU are planning to follow on the exact same path…

I loathe that term too. It makes no sense grammatically. “Content” of what? This is not a word that is supposed to be used on its own, it’s a word to specify that something is contained within something else. As in, the contents of a box, a bag, a letter, etc. The use of the term “content” as a standalone word is an awful corporate-speak neologism. It’s also way too broad in its current use, it can literally mean anything posted on the internet. It’s stupid and i hate it.

Also remember that a lot of people, including Chinese, are boycotting this movie because of actress Gal Gadot’s pro-Zionist views.

This is a very important point to make. For me that was by far the bigger reason why i decided i have zero interest in ever watching this, rather than it simply being another faux-progressive corporate cashgrab remake. It’s one thing to be unoriginal and cynically appropriate social justice causes for corporate profits, that’s just par for the course by now. But it’s another level of disgusting entirely to have literal IOF baby killers in your movie.

Agreed.

😂

A very good and insightful text, if somewhat lengthy. I’ve been working through it since yesterday. A lot of common sense stuff but it’s good to have it laid out in such a logical and well structured way. I found this part in the last chapter to be especially good advice when it comes to how to behave properly in a party:

It is necessary for comrades in the course of inner-Party struggle to receive well founded criticism, for it is helpful to them, to the other comrades and to the whole Party. On the other hand, it is also unavoidable that at times some comrades will receive unfounded criticisms or be attacked on certain matters, or will even be wrongly judged and disciplined. Failing to allow for this, they become shocked and feel most miserable and dejected when it occurs.

In this connection, it is my opinion that every Party member should pay attention to uniting with his comrades, be sincere and open, refrain from hurting others by thoughtless or sarcastic remarks and, in particular, refrain from irresponsibly criticizing comrades behind their backs. The proper attitude to any comrade’s mistakes is sincerely to remonstrate with him and criticize him to his face., out of concern for the comrade and a desire to be of help. All of us, and especially those in more responsible positions, must bear this in mind.

On the other hand, it is my opinion that comrades should be mentally prepared for inner-Party struggle, should open-mindedly accept all well-grounded criticism and be able to endure misunderstandings or attacks, or even unfairness and injustice; in particular, they should not get upset or excited over irresponsible and unjustified criticism or rumours. As far as irresponsible misjudgement and criticism are concerned - that is, excluding properly conducted criticism among comrades or through the Party organization - one can try and clear the matter up or offer some explanation when necessary, but if that does not help, one might just as well let others say what they please, provided there is nothing wrong in one’s thinking and behaviour. Let us remember the Chinese sayings: “Who never gossips about others behind their backs or is never the subject of gossip?” and “Never mind the storm, just sit tight in the fishing boat.” No one in this world can entirely avoid being misunderstood, but misunderstandings can always be cleared up sooner or later. We should be able to endure misunderstandings and should never allow ourselves to be dragged into unprincipled struggle; at the same time, we should be always vigilant and keep watch over our own thoughts and actions.

That is to say, we should take care not to use words that wound other comrades and should be able to stand injurious language from others.

We are radically opposed to unprincipled disputes in the Party. Since they are unprincipled, they are useless and harmful to the Party, and there is generally little of right or wrong, or good or bad, about them. In such unprincipled struggles, therefore, there is no point in passing judgement as to who is right and who is wrong, or estimating who is better and who is worse, because that is impossible. All we can do is radically to oppose struggles of that kind and ask the comrades involved unconditionally to stop them and get back to principles. This is the policy we should adopt towards unprincipled disputes and struggles.

Finally found a movie theatre playing Nezha 2. It’s in the neighboring country but the drive isn’t too bad. So my wife and i have decided we are going to see it this week.

That’s just Great-Russian chauvinism. Sorry but you’re parroting the most reactionary Russian propaganda

Please read the rest of the paragraph. I explicitly say that this is not the view of the majority of Russians (and obviously it’s not my idea of what being Ukrainian should mean either). This is what the current Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian nationalist (Banderite) movement have been insisting on telling the Ukrainian people. It is they who have turned the notion of being Ukrainian into the antithesis of everything Russian, when this clearly didn’t need to be the case and wasn’t the case in the USSR. It is they who insist that you are not Ukrainian if you don’t embrace Bandera worship, that you are Russian and thereby an enemy of Ukraine if you have a positive view of Ukraine’s Soviet past, if you want to be a part of “the Russian world” instead of (or even in addition to) “Europe” and the West.

like this piece which openly states de-nazification of Ukraine is necessarily also de-Ukrainization

And i don’t agree with that. I think history shows that that is not the case. But there does need to take place a rethinking in certain segments of Ukrainian society of what it means to be Ukrainian, a kind of return back to how it was viewed in the USSR as something more broad and heterogenous that could include people of various languages and diverse cultures, away from the almost all-consuming obsession with linguistic homogenization and from this self-destructive Russophobia that has led Ukraine into catastrophe. A culture cannot define itself purely by what it hates and what it isn’t. That is neither healthy nor sustainable. It actually makes for a very poor foundation for building a national identity.

Ironically, it is precisely this kind of negative and exclusionary definition of national identity that, far from saving the Ukrainian nation as Ukrainian nationalists think it does, risks destroying it.

Great suggestions!

what is so specific to Galicia in the current Ukrainian national identity? How is it different from Ukrainian identity of the UkrSSR

For one thing the anti-Russian hate. Another is the insistence on linguistic homogeneity. The Ukrainian SSR never enforced the Ukrainian language on those who didn’t want to speak it.

Ukrainian Nazis did the same thing Nazis do everywhere - take a national identity and slap some hatred on top. In this case, Bandera cult and russophobia. Remove that and you’re back to just… Regular Ukrainians.

Exactly. That’s the point. The problem is that now the Ukrainian national identity that began to be built (with western backed NGOs, CIA funded activists and Ukrainian diaspora groups with roots in the OUN and other Nazi collaborators who fled the USSR driving this process) after 1991 relied heavily on anti-Russian historical narratives, on the “holodomor” myth and other narratives of victimization by Russia, and on exaggerating the differences and the historical animosity between Ukrainians and Russians.

The problem is that at this point, it has become very hard to separate the Bandera cult and the russophobia from Ukrainian identity. Not because this is what Russia or Russian people think (i think even now the vast majority of Russians today, with the exception of a very small minority of extreme nationalists, want to believe that Ukrainians are still the same brotherly people and can return to what they used to be, the “regular Ukrainians” as you said) but because this is what the current Ukrainian state and Ukrainian nationalists insist on and what they have been teaching Ukrainian children in schools for decades to believe, which has resulted in a population that to a significant degree now shares this view.

And those who didn’t buy into this “new” post-Soviet conception of Ukrainian identity, the people living in Eastern Ukraine, as a result began to view themselves less and less as Ukrainian if being Ukrainian meant having to hate everything Russian. The “Russian Spring” in the Donbass was a direct result of the Maidan coup, but its roots lay in this longer process of polarization of Ukrainian society. It is tragic but no surprise that this ended up in a civil war and then eventually a Russian intervention when all diplomatic attempts to end that civil war failed.

Continuing from my other reply to this comment, I would add a few more minor things:

The way I’ve been taught, Dnipro marks the border between Eastern Ukraine, which was always under Russian influence, and Western Ukraine, which had significant Polish influence and cultural ties.

I don’t entirely agree with this generalization. Odessa is clearly a very Russian city but it is West of the Dnieper, whereas some parts of northern Ukraine close to the Belarus border, around Chernigov and even Poltava, at least according to voting patterns and language maps, appear to align more toward the West.

The only region here that sticks out from the general “more Russian-speaking = more pro-Russian” trend is Kiev itself where the population is naturally more cosmopolitan and Western oriented.

They still don’t justify invading a brotherly nation. Again, having been raised in the USSR I can’t support Russia’s wars on its neighbours, even if the fault lies mostly with the West.

I understand where you are coming from. I don’t think anyone who supports Russia wanted this war either. But what choice exactly did Russia have? Would you have had them throw the people of the DPR and LPR to the wolves? What was the alternative once it became clear that the Minsk agreements were never going to be fulfilled by Ukraine, and that the situation was quickly reaching a point of no-return? What would the domestic consequences be for Russia to have millions of refugees from the Donbass pour over the border? How many in Russia would blame the government for having abandoned these fellow Russians?

And on the subject of NATO, membership or no Ukraine was quickly becoming a de-facto member. NATO was already beginning to move into Ukraine, train its troops, transfer equipment, preparing to establish bases… Should Russia have waited until NATO had fully and irreversibly sunk its claws into Ukraine? Should they wait until the security situation became so critical that it would mean they were forced to start a war with all of NATO?

The Kiev regime was not going to stop at just the Donbass. Since 2014 they never stopped declaring their intention to retake Crimea, which i think you will agree is clearly Russian and voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia. What if a NATO Ukraine started a war to retake Crimea and NATO spun it to make Russia look like the aggressor? How could a sovereign Russia even continue to exist if NATO nuclear missiles were placed in Ukraine, at any time minutes away from a decapitation strike on Moscow? Would the fanatical Ukrainian nationalists stop at Crimea even or would they continue to push further, into places like Rostov-on-Don or Kuban which the Banderites also claim as “historically Ukrainian”?

What do you think Russia could or should have done, after eight years of being fooled with the Minsk sham, after their offer for a diplomatic settlement of the security situation in 2021 was decisively rejected and as it became clear that the Kiev regime was becoming increasingly intent on and prepared for a purely military “final solution” to the Donbass problem?

Russia is not waging war on Ukraine, it is at war with NATO and its proxies, with the fascist Kiev regime. At what point does it become morally unacceptable to abandon a brotherly nation to imperialism and fascism?

who seems to think Ukrainians are “a minority in the far West of Ukraine”.

That’s not what i said. I said that this particular conception of Ukrainian national identity (as it began to be popularized after 1991 and has been forcefully imposed since 2014) is one which came from Western Ukraine. You may disagree but from my understanding of history this specific conception of what it means to be Ukrainian is clearly rooted in the Bandera-Shukhevych Ukrainian nationalist movement.

Ukrainian language was spoken all the way to the Don, the Cossack dialect has strong Ukrainian influence

And Russian language was spoken all the way to Lvov. This is not an argument. The question is what is the majority language and culture, and that is not so easy to answer because it depends on where you draw a line that is to a degree somewhat arbitrary. Is Surzhik a Russian or a Ukrainian dialect? What distinguishes Ukrainian from Russian culture? Some people even argue that Ukrainian is (or started out as) a dialect of Russian: https://en.topwar.ru/193115-ukrainskij-jazyk-narechie-russkogo-jazyka.html That’s probably going too far but again, where exactly do you draw the line? I prefer not to get into these sorts of linguistic debates, my point is merely that there is a lot of ambiguity here.

And why was it necessary for post-Maidan Ukraine to begin such a harsh repression of the use of Russian language, suppression of Russian books and other media, etc. if it was an insignificant minority? https://softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Nationalism/Ukranian_nationalism/supression_of_russian_language_in_ukraine.shtml

I can assure you people living there considered themselves Ukrainian, even Russian speakers like me.

I don’t doubt it. At that time the definition of Ukrainian was different, it was not yet the fanatically anti-Russian identity that is now promoted by Ukrainian nationalism. At that time it was still possible to identify as Ukrainian in the sense that you live on the territory of Ukraine, and still speak Russian, identify in part with Russian culture and history, belong to the traditional Ukrainian Orthodox Church (not the fake one invented by the nationalists) which is now banned etc.

Look at China, it manages to maintain sovereignty without killing large numbers of people in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and without waging wars on internal separatists like in Xinjiang.

The situation is not comparable. Hong Kong and Taiwan are officially part of China. Russia does not consider Ukraine part of its territory. And if Taiwan did attempt to officially declare independence China would almost certainly respond very forcefully.

The closest comparison would be if China didn’t consider Taiwan as part of China but had good relations with it until the US one day replaced Taiwan’s government in a coup, Taiwan started to heavily persecute its ethnic Chinese population (unrealistic because they are a vast majority but let’s say for the sake of argument they weren’t), suppressed the use of Mandarin Chinese, waged an open war on a part of its own population while building up an enormous army, and openly declared intentions to join a US led military alliance that refused to rule out the placing of nuclear capable missiles on the territory of Taiwan. In what world would China just sit by and do nothing?

amassment of troops can be a show of force and more often than not doesn’t lead to an invasion

Yes but in this case there was a clearly stated intent from the Ukrainian side. As early as 2019 Zelensky publicly said that he would go to war to resolve the Donbass situation. I believe this is in one of the links i provided in the comments on the posts i mentioned earlier.

This was something that the Kiev regime, its spokespeople and all the Ukrainian nationalists were constantly talking about. Since they started their so-called “Anti-Terrorist Operation” in 2014 their stated goal was always to militarily subdue the rebels. The term “subhuman” was and is frequently used by them to refer to the ethnic Russians in the Donbass.

The only other option of resolving the situation would have been the Minsk agreements, but by 2021 the Ukrainian side was declaring them dead and was effectively saying they would never abide by them. NATO didn’t spend 8 years training and building up a new army for Ukraine for nothing.

Either way it was not a risk that Russia was prepared to take, due to the reasons i laid out.

Do you have a link directly to OSCE report?

You can use Yandex to search for OSCE report Donbass shelling 2022. There have been a number of articles written about this in the alternative media space as well as of course the Russian media that reference this.

I’d like to know who he is and what the context was cause most likely he was calling to kill separatists, not just ethnic Russians.

This is not just something one guy was saying, this was and is a common talking point in the Ukrainan post-Maidan media and among Ukrainian nationalists. Zelensky himself was saying at one point that anyone who “feels Russian” should leave and go to Russia. This is also linked in one of the comments i made.

All this needs to be understood in the broader context of the anti-Russian laws that were being passed in post-Maidan Ukraine, as well as the atrocities that were being committed against anti-Maidan protestors and pro-Russian activists such as the Odessa Massacre.

I’m sorry i can’t look up the exact links right now, but they should be in one of my comments addressing this issue.

Edit: here is the OSCE report: https://www.osce.org/special-monitoring-mission-to-ukraine/512683

And here is a Reuters article saying that shelling was noticeably escalating in Feb 2022: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/osce-reports-surge-number-explosions-east-ukraine-2022-02-19/

(Reuters of course purposely omits and OSCE tries to obfuscate which side the majority of the shelling was coming from; but this can be seen when you look at maps of the registered impacts and how most of them were on the rebel controlled side)

More on who was responsible for the shelling here: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/02/ukraine-who-is-firing-at-whom-and-who-is-lying-about-it.html

Here an article that lays out the chronology and shows how the shelling was clearly increasing in the lead-up to the SMO: https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/04/09/the-united-states-and-ukraine-started-the-war-not-russia/

And here another article laying out the argument why it wasn’t Russia that started the war (the website it was originally published on is reactionary but the article itself is solid): https://archive.org/details/setting-the-record-straight-on-ukraine

Here is a statement by the Russian MOD claiming to have documents showing Kiev was preparing to invade the Donbass republics: https://www.sott.net/article/465263-The-Russian-Ministry-of-Defene-Original-documents-show-Kiev-planned-offensive-operation-against-Donbass-in-March-of-this-year

Here DPR authorities allege that Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered confirmed that the attack was planned and imminent: https://tass.com/defense/1413035

LPR authorities said the same thing: https://sputnikglobe.com/20220315/kiev-was-preparing-full-scale-offensive-against-donbass-in-march-2022--lpr-head-1093898027.html

This preparation was already evident and being talked about months in advance: https://anna-news.info/kiev-is-ready-to-attack-donbass/

Essentially Kiev was planning a “final solution” for the Donbass, using primarily hardcore Nazi punisher units; Russia’s SMO pre-empted them by four days: https://newcoldwar.org/kiev-was-planning-final-solution-operation-in-donbass-russian-ministry/

On the topic of the stated intent of ethnic cleansing: https://www.sott.net/article/292240-Ukraine-government-admits-to-targeting-civilians-in-Donbass-region

This is not just one random person, this is someone associated with the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian military units who clearly says that the task of the Interior Ministry for which they work is to “cleanse” the cities after the military takes them over

The Kiev regime straight up denies the existence of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, which itself can be taken as a statement of intent of ethnic cleansing: https://en.topwar.ru/229905-vice-premer-ukrainy-stefanishina-zajavila-ob-otsutstvii-v-strane-russkogo-nacmenshinstva.html

We are talking about seven million people just in the DPR and LPR who unambiguously identify as Russian and by now have Russian citizenship. What do you suppose would happen to them if Russian forces pulled out and allowed Ukrainian Nazi units to move in who have a history of treating ethnic Russians and “separatists” like this: https://21stcenturywire.com/2014/11/17/natos-nazis-ethnic-cleansing-their-opposition-in-east-ukraine/

This intent was already understood by Ukrainians in 2014, it’s not something Russia came up with after the fact to justify its actions: https://www.globalresearch.ca/ethnic-and-cultural-cleansing-in-ukraine/5387539