I guffawed

Utopian indeed

What are you talking about?!

Agent Orange, White Phosphorous, crowd control conpounds (like tear gas, “pepper” munitions, etc). Napalm was used in Iraq and Kuwait.

What you’re talking about is the US not using a very specific list of very specific weapons that are effective due to their chemical properties and the way those chemicals interact with human bodies. It is by no means a comprehensive list of munitions with similar chemical properties.

And it is a classic imperialist move to make a list of some chemical weapons, call the list The List Of Chemical Weapons and they develop new chemical weapons that aren’t on the list and say “These aren’t chemical weapons because they aren’t on the list”.

The point being made is that the present contains the past and there has been no attempt to break with the past. The CIA hacked into the state-owned computers of Congressional staffers who were writing up the report on torture findings and destroyed most of their report permanently. The CIA was ordered not destroy video evidence. The woman who then destroyed the evidence against court order was unpunished and she was appointed to oversee the case against the CIA hackers, who she absolved of any wrong doing.

It’s literally not the past. The US is constantly and continuously doing these things.

Uhhh, Agent Orange, White Phosphorous, Depleted Uranium. Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq… The US absolutely engages in driving civilian casualties in a way that can only be described as strategic. The number of civilians they kill even with conventional weapons is so high. Agent Orange poisoned generations of people, reducing birth rates and increasing mortality for an entire country. And then after they figured that out, they still decided to develop and deploy DU rounds that leave radioactive waste pulverized over vast stretches of land that can effectively never be cleaned up. Almost like it’s a deliberate strategy…

Meanwhile, we never see terrorists use anything even close to what the US has done and continues to do.

I don’t think anyone fails to understand this. The points being made are that 1) Russia is also using old stock so assessing Russian capabilities based on what they are fielding is copium; 2) the US literally doesn’t have the physical manufacturing assets required to increase production to anything resembling reasonable; 3) while the US is ramping up production, Russia and China are already significantly further ahead in manufacturing and also are ramping up production meaning the US is racing to see who can produce more while starting from way behind and not having anywhere near the infrastructure necessary to ramp faster than either Russia or China.

Even before WW2 most of their conflicts were on the wrong side of history. And if you analyze the actual system flows of WW2, there’s an argument to be made that the US was only accidentally on the right side of history in WW2 and that the overarching strategic goals of the US in the conflict (anti-communism and dominance over Europe) were and are on the wrong side of history.

Good move. Thanks, Macron!

I don’t think you have any grasp of the political situation if you think your strawman represents a position anyone of reasonable political understanding holds.

The fact that you think the predominant position of “tankies” is that communism just needs to be done “right” is also evidence that your self-assessment of being “fairly socialist” is completely detached from reality. You’re still fighting through Western propaganda.

The reality of the situation is war is going to happen, whether the US starts it or someone else starts it. Who starts it doesn’t actually matter, what matters is the entire structure of politics around the war. I don’t like war, it’s terrible, but certain conditions make it necessary, and the US is far and away the architect of these conditions. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is no exception. This was a structure put in place by the US. That Russia crossed the imaginary border and made the declaration of escalation in Feb 2022 does not mean Russia holds special moral standing in this conflict. Russia assessed the same system flows that the US assessed and decided now was the time to escalate the conflict, but the conflict has been hot since 2014 and the US has been there stoking that fire since well before the bullets started flying.

If you think crossing the border and declaring the escalation holds moral standing but the entire 30 year program of the US to create these conditions does not, you might just be a standard run of the mill liberal without a hint of being “fairly socialist”.

LOL, using “tankie” and then accusing me of grade school understanding is fucking hilarious

The US is to blame for so so so much in this conflict, but obviously not for Russia making the choice it made. National security is a relationship, not a state of being. A nation’s national security is dependent on the national security of every other nation. It’s a system. Russia attempted to work with NATO, even attempting to join it, because everyone knows that national security is an interrelational framework. The US refused to admin Russia. The US refused to do anything to advance Russian national security for decades. The US explicitly stated that Russian national security is not relevant. The US explicitly acted against Russian national security interest and explicitly refused to negotiate anything that had to do with Russian national security.

The US worked for decades to get Ukraine to join NATO, up to and including supporting a violent right wing coup, sending its war heroes and its statespersons to support every anti-Russian movement in Ukraine. It worked hand-in-hand with Ukrainian military forces to establish anti-Russian capabilities and pave the way for nuclear capabilities owned and operated by the US to be deployed against Russia on Ukrainian soil.

And the US knew this would trigger an attack for 30 years. Literally as far back as Clinton the US was in talks with Russia about how Ukraine must remain neutral for Russia to be nationally secure, and documents from that time show Clinton and his administration leaving those talks and immediately talking about how to get Ukraine to join the North Atlantic bloc and turn against Russia.

Ukraine is the physical territory through which Russia was brutally invaded twice, most recently by the Third Reich. It is not appropriate to look at Russia’s decision to invade and limit your analysis to that one moment. The US has spent 30 years creating this conflict, deliberately, and it has cost the Ukranians their lives and their country. And then the US did exactly the one thing that would cause more Ukranian deaths once the conflict started - it fed them arms. Ukraine’s is tiny compared to Russia. It has no chance to defeat Russia. Feeding arms into the conflict means the proxy continues to fight and continues to draw more fire and continues to die at larger and larger numbers. Literally every conflict the US has pumped arms into shows this result. Had the US simply stopped it’s program as soon as Russia invaded, the Russian SMO would have succeeded much more quickly with far less damage. Instead, the US has shown us exactly what it’s doing - it’s building it’s own military capabilities to fight China while attempting to weaken the Russian position by sacrificing Ukraine for it’s strategic goals.

The US had 30 years to stop this. Russia made many attempts over the years to demonstrate that the US program needed to stop because national security is non-negotiable for every single nation on the planet. But the US chose death for the Ukrainians and continued it’s program knowing full well that Russia would eventually be forced to react or be subjugated. That Russia reacted when it did was a matter of Russian strategy and military intelligence. That Russia reacted at all was the known outcome of US foreign policy in Ukraine for 30 years and every diplomat, politician, and military analyst knew it.

I think the bloodletting is horrendous, and I think the US bears the overwhelming majority of the blame for it. In 2022 the US provided more lethal aid than Russia’s entire annual military budget. In literally every conflict where the US sends weapons, the death toll skyrockets. Without lethal aid from the North Atlantic, this SMO would have been over very quickly and the bloodshed would have been far less.

Literally nothing in the last 500 years is worse than the North Atlantic campaign of global genocide, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, environmental devastation, psychological warfare, mass murder, sexual violence, and utter subjugation of 80% of the planet. The US is the pinnacle of that subjugation and violence. Russia cannot hold a candle to the US’s global violence. No, it is impossible for Russian propaganda to be worse in any way.

What are you waffling about?

You don’t know what waffling means.

Did the US force Russia to invade Ukraine?

Strawman

the Russians invaded, Ukraine asked for aid to defend themselves and Europe/the US are providing the aid because it’s the right thing to do.

Completely naive understanding of the world.

Unless you’ve brought into the US libertarians nonsense

Ad hominem

we should be encouraging peace

I am

this way is only going to end with the Russians leaving or the Ukrainians surrendering land which they won’t do

Ukrainians will surrender land as soon as the North Atlantic stops feeding them weapons. And the sooner that happens, the fewer Ukrainians will die and the less additional damage the country will incur.

You are crying for Ukraine which is dying because the US is using it as a proxy in a war against Russia. This is the violence done to all proxies in all proxy wars. The proxies are trapped between the bigger powers. It is very sad what is happening to Ukraine. Russia and US are at war but the battlefield is Ukraine and 99% of US personnel are Ukrainian and 100% of US collateral damage are Ukrainian. Just like every conflict the US adds weapons to, it only gets more bloody and more hopeless. The US created this conflict, it created the battlefield, it created the training and the munitions, it refuses to allow negotiations, it has a strategic goal of harming Russia. It literally says it almost every month through its various mouth pieces.

We all cry for Ukraine, but some of us know where the real blame lies.

USA has never stopped doing some bad, ever. It is founded entirely on doing bad. It continues to do bad to this day. It is literally engaged in mass murder daily and lying about it. It’s non fucking stop mass murder at the hands of USA globally and their propaganda system has poisoned nearly every single communication company you can name. Russian propaganda could never hold a candle to what the USA is doing every single day.

You say that Russia has a fascist state, yet ignore that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, literally said his vision was to replicate the US system in Europe and target the Slavs the way the USA actively oppressed the indigenous peoples in the Americas. What could literally be more fascist than the USA? It is literally the thing from which European fascism emerged and when European fascism was defeated, it was the USA (and the Vatican) that distributed Nazis into normal society, appointed them as generals of NATO, and brought them into positions of influence and power.

It was the US that developed and deployed nuclear and chemical weapons and committed the first generational mass murders in the world, literally dooming millions of future children to violent deaths from the poisons they deployed.

When NATO bombed Yugoslavia citing “humanitarian aid”, they dropped thousands of tons of depleted uranium on urban populations, and the region has the highest rates of fatal cancers, childhood cancers, and violent birth defects. The US literally murders and tortures children before they are born.

The idea that a proxy war between USA and Russia isn’t about USA is ridiculous. If you want to live in an illusion, enjoy, but be mindful and respectful of the people in South America who have been tortured, mass murdered, completely displaced and who have been under cultural genocide and complete environmental devastation from the US via direct and indirect military action, training and arming death squads, funding and supporting fascist coups, and dumping millions of tons of toxic waste, and dooming millions to deaths of poverty and neglect through deliberate political action - all of it covered entirely by USA propaganda.

Forgive me if I think it’s disgusting when Eurocentric news outlets cry about Russian propaganda. They all deserve to be completely dismantled, and they will be eventually.

The US has been using propaganda to justify it’s atrocities, genocides, mass murders, environmental devastations, scores of violent coups, invasions, use of chemical and nuclear weapons against civilians, torture, enslavement, human trafficking, war profiteering, and massive body count for over a century. Far worse, for far longer, and far more deadly than anything Russia or the USSR has ever done.

You’re right that propaganda is inherently neutral. When Euro-centric news outlets complain about Russian propaganda, it’s completely and utterly without standing, as most of them are part of the US propaganda machine in big or small ways. These complaints are worthy of nothing but ridicule.

Someone has to counter the greatest propaganda machine in the world built and operated by the US to manage its global empire and many decades of bloodletting, massacres, tortures, slavery, environmental devastation, genocides, and its astronomical body count.

And yes, that same propaganda machine is the one that taught you everything you know about Zelensky and Ukraine, as they’ve been propagandizing the entire world about Ukraine since it was a part of the USSR. You are literally sitting in a century-long stream of American disinformation on the region. Which is why you think American newspapers crowing about “Russian disinformation” is worthy of anything other than ridicule and derision.

Finally! Someone has to fight against US propaganda there.

Given the way the USG has been lying about events in maritime conflicts since at least Tonkin, anything other than extreme skepticism to this news is just boot licking