Ukraine can fight this with whatever they can get from around the world.
You ignored the entirety of my point, which is that Ukraine has signaled that they want the conflict to end, but their masters in Washington and the EU are pressing them forward regardless. Donbas has been functionally independent from Ukraine for almost ten years now, and only two of those with Russian troops supporting it. It’s not Ukrainian territory anymore in any way that matters.
I never said mistakes weren’t made. Class war is war and war has collateral damage. The problem here is the total idealistic rejection of “authoritarianism”, where every single thing that has ever worked is classed as such and therefore made off-limits.
It’s Ukraines fight
The US and its allies have sabotaged peace talks between Ukraine and Russia on multiple occasions. European politicians have been talking about putting EU troops on Ukrainian soil in support roles so that more Ukrainian men can charge directly into Russian artillery fire for the past few months. In the months leading up to the invasion, the western media apparatus was braying for Russian blood with a fervor that I hadn’t seen since the runup to the Iraq War - and for ten years now the US has been directly backing anti-Russian elements inside Ukraine, regardless of the fact that many of those elements were literally fascists, leading directly to the Maidan coup and the ethnic schism in Ukrainian society that resulted in the civil war.
It’s a proxy war, always has been.
All over the world
Showing your bias here, because really this is only happening in Europe and the Anglosphere.
I mean, for the majority of the country’s history, huge portions of its population had literally no democracy due to no right to vote. But I guess we’ll ignore that.
Don’t forget the millions of felons who still don’t. In Florida they passed a direct referendum to give them their franchise back, but the state government employed legal fuckery to prevent it from working as intended.
This is a law
The US also has laws against providing arms to military units that have been credibly accused of war crimes, but in Israel (also Ukraine) they simply don’t investigate allegations in order to keep the arms flowing. If Biden wants a legal casus belli to deny Israel arms, he has many to choose from, but he is actively choosing not to employ them.
one is a guy trying to stop the genocide that’s been negotiating behind the scenes for months
I don’t believe you. Or more accurately, I don’t believe the alleged “leaks” from the White House about how mad Joe Biden is but it’s behind closed doors just trust me bro. This guy has been hard in the pocket for Israel his entire career, why wouldn’t he be now?
Batman put Harley Quinn in charge of the bat cave.
If by “not falling in line” you mean “actively sabotaging the working class for selfish reasons” then I suppose you have a point, but I would argue that in class war those organizations which do not support the working class are fair targets.
the will of the proletariat during the 1917 and 1918 elections
By the time the Bolsheviks were disregarding the results of elections, the People’s Soviets were the state power in the former Russian Empire, and they were a hundred times more democratic than the Duma ever was.
amassing personal power and wealth
I’m sorry comrade but the Soviets simply never did this. The benefits enjoyed by even top Party officials paled in comparison to the lavish lifestyles of the former Russian Empire’s aristocracy or those of the ruling class of any of their contemporary capitalist rivals - even fucking Stalin lived in a shared apartment!
Objectively speaking the Soviet Union was one of the most democratic and equal societies on this Earth during the time of its existence, and you can very clearly see in the data how their system equalized wealth (not “perfectly”, just “better than everyone else has ever done it”), and how the destruction of their system undid all of their progress.
Palestinians
Claudia De la Cruz it is.
I won’t deny that people can do multiple things at once, I just don’t agree with the premise that voting matters in the current paradigm.
If you had enough people to do the thing, then you would be able to protect members of the group at a local level while national orgs realign and/or get replaced.
But nobody has a large enough group of people to do the thing. In the absence of a large enough group of people to do the thing, voting is a purely personal decision that will not effect the outcome.
As I’ve said elsewhere, to fix it from within the system itself you would need a bloc of people willing to punish one of the parties for moving right by withholding their votes and their donations. To fix it from without the system is also possible, but would require some “authoritarianism” in the form of people with guns. Anything else is just people flailing around ineffectually and getting mad at others who aren’t flailing in the ineffectual way that they prefer.
Either way you’ve got the same problem: getting a large enough group of people together who are willing to do the thing. Socialists of all stripes have been trying to crack that egg for over a hundred years and the only ones who had any success were the ones that managed to get the peasants on their side because peasants have a certain amount of class consciousness that proles don’t.
If choosing red or blue doesn’t work, and choosing another option also doesn’t work, then what good does feeling self righteous about your decision to pick one over the other do? Unless you’re suggesting that the shitty reality of our situation is that we’re fucked and nothing will work at all no matter what - which is a level of defeatism that I don’t think is very helpful either.
Perhaps if both sides were not so awful, people wouldn’t feel compelled to meme about them.
Lemmitors: You don’t understand! I’m not voting for Slightly More Rotting Corpse, I’m voting for the Slightly More Rotting Corpse administration. Yes it’s true that both of them support nuclear warfare along the Mexican border, but Rotting Corpse would be dropping more nukes with higher frequency on the climate refugees so we have to vote for the lesser evil.
To push the Dems left you can either a) reward them for moving left or b) punish them for moving right. Continuing to vote for them year after year as they continually move to the right accomplishes neither of these things.
If every single incentive structure rewards the Democrats for shifting to the right, please tell me how on earth they are under any pressure at all to shift back to the left. The answer is that they’re not, and the people who believe that they’re engaging in the system and pushing it in the right direction are simply fooling themselves as they take part in the system’s unstoppable rightward movement.
We have class war waged against us by the bourgeoisie, and thousands of people are casualties of that war every single day. Expecting to turn the tide against them without getting our hands dirty in turn is useless idealism.
Meanwhile Brazil went back to their last progressive president after Bolsonaro’s failure, and Bolivia has foiled two attempted coups by reactionary forces. Venezuela and Cuba also remain strong, with the latter being possibly the most democratic country on this planet.
In Africa, the most notable “democracies” that have been overthrown in recent memory were all client states of western countries whose previous governments cannot in good faith be said to have been representative of the people.
The Middle East is pretty bad, what with Israel going full fash in the past year. It’s not like they haven’t been edging for decades, though.
But in Asia, the only country that might be more democratic than Cuba is China, and they’re as strong as they’ve ever been. Since that’s 1/5th of the population of this planet living under one of its premier democratic governments, I’d say the prognosis for global democracy is fine.