Can I get opinion on a back-and-forth convo w my Marxist friend on this?

9 comments

1. Your friend drank the cool-aid, I don’t think you have any hope here. They believe they are smarter so any other opinion is being dismissed. Rough one bro

2. Don’t waste your time. He probably hadn’t heard of USAID before this year but uses it as the source for the orange revolution? Bizarre and lacking any context in reality.

   Ukrainians wanted to move on with life and move towards the prosperous EU and that’s what lead to all subsequent events.

3. Russia is the global south! That’s hilarious. White Russians in St Petersburg and Moscow live comfortable lives because of the land/resources stolen from actual non-white peoples in the last extant land empire on the planet.

4. Your friend is hopeless and has issues with cognitive processes. Idealists like this person are the greatest danger on both the far right and far left. These individuals are essentially the same and very close on the spectrum, even though they believe they radically oppose the far right. Idealists like this will go to any lengths to support criminal regimes.

5. Calling Russia “anti-imperialist” while it bombs cities, annexes land, and crushes dissent is the kind of delusion that would make Orwell weep. Masking naked aggression as a noble struggle against the West is just bootlicking dressed up as analysis. Ukraine isn’t a “puppet”—it’s a nation refusing to kneel to a flailing, decaying empire run by a mafia in uniform.

6. NATO expansion by Finland and Baltic nations has nothing to do with the US and everything to do with self preservation. These countries do not want to be victimised by Russia expansionism. They know that their best hope for a self-determined future is with security guarantees from the West.

7. Your friends are completely wakadoo and devoid of reality of exactly who runs Russia and China. If they actually had any real knowledge of what was truly happening instead of just believing Russian and Chinese propaganda then they might have a clue. They sound a lot like dealing with MAGA true believers.

8. I have posted this before.

   This war is an act of neo-imperial aggression.
   Russia has mentioned a lot of different reasons for invading Ukraine: from pushing back NATO to ‘de-nazification’ of Ukraine. This is a war of an empire against its former rogue colony.
   Russia’s main goal in this war is to assert dominance over Ukraine: political, cultural and historical. This is why Russia soldiers rape, torture amd execute Ukrainian civilians while Russian compatriots cheer for this genocide. For them, this is an act of power over a dehumanised, inferior nation.
   Russians are a Slavic nation that lived roughly
   between the Baltic Sea and the Volga and Dnieper rivers until the late 15th century.
   After the establishment of Czardom, Russians have spent centuries conquering and assimilating numerous ethnicities in Eurasia. By the late 19th century, the Russian Empire spread from modern Poland to Alaska.
   Ukraine has its own colonial history with Russia. Since the 17th century, most of Ukraine has lived under the Russian Empire. From 1715 to 1775, Russia completely destroyed Ukraine’s political autonomy. In 1863 and 1876, Russia banned the Ukrainian language from public use.
   Imperialism is usually associated with conquering and exploiting distant nations located oceans away from the empire. But Russia’s conquests were different. Russia always expanded its territory by invading neighboring states. That way, they have gradually collected a lot: from Finland to the Caucasus, from Crimea to the islands bordering Japan. In all these lands lived non-Russian (and non-Slavic in many cases) nationalities with their own languages, religions, culture, and history. And they were subjected to similar extermination and assimilation strategies as the colonies of Britain, France, and Spain.
   USSR’s anti-imperialism was mostly directed against the West and its expansion. But when it came to Russian imperialism at home, it was never really recognized or challenged.
   After the fall of the Russian Empire, many former colonies declared independence and proclaimed sovereign socialist republics. This was never an option for Moscow. In 1917-1921, the Soviet army violently suppressed most of these states. Finland, Poland, and the Baltic states managed to keep their independence, but most colonies were conquered back. Ukraine fought for independence between 1917 and 1921 but fell eventually. Although officially Ukraine joined USSR as a separate republic, it happened only after a violent military campaign.

   Soviets eliminated Ukraine’s attempt to set up a sovereign state in 1921. But life under the Soviet regime was far from peaceful.
   In the 1920s, Ukraine enjoyed a revival of modern art and literature. But 90% of these cultural leaders were sent to the Gulag or executed in the 1930s, becoming known collectively as the Executed Renaissance.
   In 1932-1933, the state-managed Holodomor famine hit the Ukrainian rural population. Around 4 million people died from starvation just to fulfill the mad ambitions of Moscow. Soviets kept these events secret until the late 1980s.
   In 1944, after taking back Crimea from Nazi Germany, USSR deported all Crimean Tatar population (200,000 people) to Central Asia, killing thousands in the process.
   Remember, USSR was still a highly centralized, Russia-led state. Throughout most of the USSR’s history, Russian was the only language for work, education, and documentation.
   Any celebration of minorities’ national cultures was deemed “bourgeois nationalism” and violently repressed.
   The only path to a successful career for a member of a minority was through complete assimilation and rejection of their language and national identity.
   That way, Russian dominance remained deeply ingrained into the fabric of Soviet life. And these attitudes stayed that way among Russians after 1991.

   After the fall of the USSR, Russia broke down only partially.
   Some of the states became independent: Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, and more.
   Chechnya also tried to declare independence but was brutally reconquered between 1996 and 2009. Many other non-Russian ethnicities remain under Russian rule to this day.
   Since 1991, Russia has instigated numerous military assaults on its former colonies: Moldova in 1992, Georgia in 2008, and Ukraine in 2014.
   Russia always claimed to “defend the Russian-speaking people” when invading these states. Of course, many people across former USSR states are Russian-speaking precisely because of the history of Russian colonial policies.

   WHY RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM IS SO DANGEROUS
   Western imperialism is recognized, studied, and constantly challenged around the globe. Russia, on the contrary, never faced its imperialism internally or externally.
   As a result, Russians don’t just feel no shame about the history of Russian atrocities. They are proud of them, and they want more. That’s why Russia has gone completely fascist in the last 20 years. Putin’s rule is based on the idea of the rebirth of Russian imperial greatness, and Ukraine is at the center of it.
   That’s why Russians feel they have an inherent right to dominate Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries. And that’s why for them, the rejection of Russian dominance anywhere automatically means “Russophobia” worthy of invasion.
   WHAT DOES IT MEAN
   FOR THIS WAR?
   Ukraine is fighting for existence. It is defending against centuries-long oppression, and it needs all the help to survive.
   It’s not just Putin who wages this war. Russians are largely running on unchecked imperialistic thinking and want to completely reboot the empire.
   Russia will not agree to anything like the “neutrality of Ukraine” or independence of just Donbas. Only complete dominance over Ukraine will be enough for Russia.
   The ultimate way to achieve peace in Europe is to defeat Russia and let it disintegrate as an empire once and for all. Any compromise would mean the Russian neo-imperial machine will try to fight back later.

9. Whenever I hear someone in 2025 using the word “imperialism”, I am 100% confident they don’t know what it actually means.

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