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Police discover 80 Russian torture chambers in Ukraine
(www.ukrinform.net)
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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I actually went and asked on Hexbear their opinions about this and tried to dig a bit to understand the logic. I don't agree with it and I think their logic is cold, brutal and lacking in empathy, but there is a logic.
Essentially, they support Russia critically. This means they agree with any normal person that Russia is a shithole, but it's a useful shithole that challenges NATO. They see this as a proxy war between NATO and Russia, and the more they can bleed each other the better, especially if it weakens NATO. The civilians who are caught in the middle are acceptable collateral damage according to them.
I've also talked to some of these folks, and my strong sense is that they are teenagers who have never been to any of these places, or really understand much about the complexity of global systems
I also get the strong sense that the vast majority are from North America, which greatly limits their perspectives. It's very easy to see this in simple calculus terms when the war isn't going on right over the border and has the potential to destroy a sibling country (Moldova, I'm Romanian).
I have a strong sense that a lot of them aren't people, they're CCP LLMs.
I honestly don't think that's the case. This seems to me to be people who have an ideology (fair enough, we all do) but then see the entire world and everything around them through this black and white filter where everything either supports the cause or doesn't, and anything and everything is justified in support of that.
Why don't you think it's the case? The CCP and Kremlin want to take down the current rules-based international system, and using LLMs on social media is an incredibly cheap way to do it.
If you think we're a big enough or influential enough of a target for moving the needle on public opinion here on lemmy, I have a bridge to sell you :))
I do get where you're coming from, but I do feel like you're running from bushes thinking they're bears.
Have you seen how many people use the fediverse? It would be easy to set up bots in this relatively unmoderated space and spread propaganda.
Rules-based international system? Did you copy and paste from a right-wing think tank or something? I always thought that phrase was a joke for rich Americans to say when they carpet bomb a wedding and the military gets away with it. You can sleep at night peacefully, I'm sure, since China and Russia would need at least a decade or two to finish the job.
But if your "rules based system" collapses because Chinese bots are posting memes in communities with a few thousand followers, then it deserves to happen.
There's definitely a lot of teens and young adults in those spaces, on both sides.
A lot of American communists supported Stalin. They refused to believe that the anti-Stalin news was anything but American propaganda. When Khrushchev exposed Stalin for what he did in an attempt to try rebuilding the country, many were disillusioned to the point that they left communism. Some remained pro-Soviet but rejected Stalin, some remained communist but rejected the USSR as state capitalism, and some remained pro-Stalin. I’m just pointing that out to make sure that we all remember that people can be all over the place and still justify their positions to themselves.
To me, supporting Putin because he opposes NATO is like supporting Donald Trump because he opposes Biden. There are some accelerationists who literally do that. I personally think it is idiotic, and anyone who does so is a fascist and not a communist. Putin’s homophobia, xenophobia, right wing religious fascism, and misogyny should be more than enough to dissuade any person with a conscience from supporting him. Honestly, I really think it does. I believe that the majority of the “tankies” supporting Putin are right wing accounts sockpuppeting as leftists. No one who supports LGBT rights could support Putin. I think the tankies are the same type of crowd that populated the_donald - people cosplaying a political position until it becomes internalized.
There is an absolutely massive literature in American and Western communism. Most of it predates Putin - at least, predates Putin bring anything other than a mafioso with a superpower to fund his personal wealth. You can read all about the soul searching about actually existing communism vs ideological communism and the moral dilemma that resulted.
But insofar as it’s about opposition to American imperialism or accelerationism, I think that the Trump years should have shown that to be tragically misguided. Putin’s opposition to NATO isn’t helping anyone in the West except for people like Trump and LePen. It’s not like supporting Ho Chi Minh or Mao, and it’s certainly not like supporting Allende, Castro, or Che. It’s like supporting Hitler on the basis of Hitler being anti-British.
You need to research some info on LaRouche and Dugin. They sound like complete jokes and everyone downplays their influence, but it's very real. That's where this comes from.
Also, Stalin was supported at that time in the US because of major wins in labor disputes and the fact that we were allied during WWII. The USSR was defeating Germany under Stalin, and we (the US) decided to finish off the losing team (luckily Germany). He was considered a hero, and a genuine revolutionary Communist for his work, and the fight against Nazism is how he went down in history. Ironically, wrt. your comment, it was the de-Stalinizing USSR under Khrushchev that were the "tankies", it had nothing to do with Stalin at all.
Like many other impoverished, war-torn, or underdeveloped countries, socialism failed to be fully achieved in the USSR and ended up getting stuck. We could recognize the good and move on to build something better.
Cutting the nose, those fine fellows…