Did they forget to say unprovoked?

Yes, we did have terrorist attacks done against us. That doesn’t mean that every person we locked up as a terrorist was one.

I’m sure some mistakes were made because no system will ever be perfect, but socialist states are fundamentally different from a capitalist, imperialist, globally hegemonic state. Without evidence, there’s no reason to assume that China’s handling of it was analogous to ours.

You don’t have any problem with Russia removing Ukraine’s right to self determination?

Russia didn’t take Ukraine’s right to self-determination because the US already took it. The US isn’t helping Ukrainians any more than it’s helping Palestinians. It’s using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. It. Does. Not. Give. A. Fuck. About. Them.

We haven’t given Ukraine anything: it’s all lend-lease. Whoever survives this war, and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, will be paying the US back for using them as a bait and as proxy warriors against Russia. For the last three years Ukraine has been auctioning off the commons to wealthy Americans & Europeans. They’re privatizing whatever was left that hadn’t already been privatized in the first round of Western neocolonial shock therapy.

Why does Russia’s defense rely on the oppression of other states?

If NATO—lead by the US—hadn’t worked for twenty years on backing Russia into a corner, it wouldn’t have felt it needed to. The cold war nuclear balance of power was still working after the USSR collapsed. It was still working under Reagan and G.H.W. Bush. It didn’t start to break down until the neocon agenda took over US foreign policy during the Clinton administration. NATO enlargement started in 1999. NATO should have been disbanded after the cold war ended.

Russia warned the West a thousand times, a thousand different ways between the mid-1990s and 2022. The US didn’t listen because this is the war it wanted.

Think of what the US would do if Russia or China couped Mexico, trained & equipped their regular military units and fascist paramilitary units, and made motions to have Mexico join their international “defensive force,” which would bring nuclear weapons to the Texan & Californian border. We actually have some idea of what from the Cuban missile crisis, which brought us to the brink of Armageddon^[1].

Do their lives mean so little to you?

Again, which lives? Did the lives of eastern & southern Ukrainians mean so little to you? Because until I made mention you probably weren’t aware of them or the nine years of fascist terror they endured before Feb. 2022. Do the lives of the men now being shanghaied off the streets and thrown to the meat grinder mean so little to you that you want Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian for the US? Because they’re not fighting for self-determination, they’re fighting for the Ukrainian oligarchs[2] who are compradors to US empire.

Zelensky was a comedian groomed by oligarchs. He played a president on TV and then ran for president on TV. This was planned out in advance. Zelensky has never been in control because he was an actor in way over his head, beholden to US comprador oligarchs, and his life is openly threatened by high-level Banderite fascists should he get out of line. And he’s quite wealthy now, an oligarch in his own right. He’s in no way a “servant of the people;” that’s an act played by an actor.

Your image of Ukraine and Ukrainians is exactly the image the US government and corporate media want you to have. That’s how they manufacture consent. They want you to imagine Ukraine as a happy, scrappy, proud, independent, brave, homogeneous, unified democracy of white Europeans, who were attacked for no reason while peacefully minding their own business. They want you to think that history began 3½ years ago.

If any of us is the fuckface whisperer, it’s @Cowbee@lemmy.ml.

Maybe call it your gaming console and don’t use it for anything else, so Microsoft can’t see anything that matters to you.

There are prisons, of course. Every country has them. And some terrorists did get prosecuted and imprisoned. They weren’t hypothetical terrorists. Locals were getting stabbed, shot, run over, and bombed by them. So of course any non-radicalized Uyghur—which were the vast majority—wanted the terrorism to stop as much as anyone else, just as there were scarcely any US Muslims cheering as the Twin Towers fell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China#Chronology_of_major_events

But the job training facilities weren’t/aren’t prisons. Those who didn’t live near the schools traveled in for the week, received room & board, and went back home on weekends.

Yes, we do remember. What we don’t do is misremember. Previously.

We also remember the Kent State University protest.

It’s not silly if it’s true. Both certainly could be shit at the same time, but currently only one is.

NATOpedia is not a source. Also, do you think we haven’t already thoroughly read that page, like this is our first rodeo?

You can’t bring us evidence because there isn’t any.

The US tried to foment division in China by funding and organizing Salafi terrorist into Xinjiang, and once its efforts failed, it made lemonade out of its lemon by concocting and promoting a genocide narrative.

The only countries pushing this narrative are the “always the same map” imperial core countries, which just so happen to be largely the same ones supporting Israel’s genocide.

Almost no predominantly-Muslim country buys the Uyghur genocide narrative, because they know it’s bullshit, because they talked to the Uyghurs themselves.
https://twitter.com/un_hrc/status/1578003299827171330

#HRC51 | Draft resolution A/HRC/51/L.6 on holding a debate on the situation of human rights in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of #China, was REJECTED.

• The Uyghur Human Rights Project is a product of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s main regime change NGO.
• A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
• The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
• Uyghur genocide allegations
• American Debunks All Major Western Propaganda on Uyghurs and Xinjiang
• US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Soldiers of Empire
• The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent

What are you, twelve, or are you a grown-assed adult asking this question?

immediately massacred opposition in Odessa

This didn’t happen though.

removed Russian language rights

This also didn’t happen.

Does your confidence exceed your ignorance, or are you just trolling now?

• People’s World, 2024: The Odessa trade union massacre, ten years later
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences

The licensing: Free and open source vs. paid, proprietary, and closed source. That really is the core difference, the licensing, and all the differences that come as consequences of that difference.

What separates the Linux kernel from the (Free)BSD kernels is copyleft/reciprocal licensing vs. permissive licensing.

The US is still doing that. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=School_of_the_Americas

We liberated them from Fascism, and they will never forgive us.

Lemmy federation still has a quirk regarding display names. Most instances still have my display name cached like that.

I think we agree that, in the abstract, Westphalian states have a right to self-defense. That’s been the consensus for almost 300 years, and it’s baked into the UN charter.

But two things can be true at the same time: that the Ukrainian state has a right to self-defense and that the US, NATO, and Ukraine poked the bear for decades to get this reaction. Western promises to Russia were broken and red lines were crossed, over & over for decades, until the inevitable breaking point due to perceived existential threats.

Did the post-coup eastern & southern separatist states not also have a right to self defense against the Ukrainian coup government and the fascist Banderites that Ukraine and the US armed, trained, and supported? Were those separatists wrong to request aid from Russia for almost a decade before the 2022 invasion? Russia was very patient given the circumstances.

I think NATO sucks, but I also think Russia does.

Russia does indeed suck, but less so than NATO at the moment. The primary difference is the Global North’s neocolonialism, which is modern-day imperialism.

Previously:

The US-backed Maidan coup and US & Ukraine-supported fascist paramilitary attacks on eastern & southern Ukraine:

• Reuters, 2014: Leaked audio reveals embarrassing U.S. exchange on Ukraine, EU
• Leaked recording between Nuland and Pyatt: audio | transcript
• Counterpunch, 2014: US Imperialism and the Ukraine Coup
• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
• Consortium News, 2023: The West’s Sabotage of Peace in Ukraine Former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett’s recent comments about getting his mediation efforts squashed in the early days of the war adds more to the growing pile of evidence that Western powers are intent on regime change in Russia.
• Internationalist 360°, 2022–2024: History of Fascism in Ukraine: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
• NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide

 
NATO expansion:

• George Washington Univ., 2017: NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
• Orinoco Tribune, 2022: Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War With Russia
• Al Mayadeen, 2023: Zelensky admits he never intended to implement Minsk agreements
• Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace
• Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: NATO Chief Admits NATO Expansion Was Key to Russian Invasion of Ukraine

 
NATO in general:

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
• Gabriel Rockhill, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It

Russia has completely failed it’s “special military operation” in Ukraine and is bogged down in a war of attrition with a nation that is not in NATO.

Yes, Russia’s gamble to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table using a minimal amount of troops and minimal force failed, because the US & UK blocked it. So now it’s a slow, grinding war of attrition.

Russia has been stopped in its tracks and has failed to complete the majority of it’s military objectives

All signs point to Russia winning this war, yet somehow you’re framing it as them losing 🤷 Do you know what their objectives are?

Clearly Russia would not stand a chance if NATO decided to invade them.

No one in history has succeeded in taking Russia with an invasion force, not even before Russia had nuclear weapons, and now it has more of them than anyone else. Not Napoleon, not Hitler. It’s two-thirds larger than the next-largest country.

The NATO countries have de-industrialized themselves. They’re in no condition to invade Iran right now, never mind Russia. They don’t even have the industrial capacity to properly arm Ukraine. Russia meanwhile hasn’t de-industrialized nearly as much and isn’t running out of materiel.

if you believe NATO wants to invade Russia

I believe nothing of the sort. What the US wants is for Russia to be regime changed, Balkanized, and re-neocolonized. And they want it without needing to put any of their own boots on the ground. Ukraine is a pawn on the US’s “grand chessboard.” The US wanted this proxy war. Previously.

especially when link bashing is being used as a rhetoric device to prevent your argument being challenged.

I’m “link bashing” because I’ve already covered this territory—with sources/evidence—several times on Lemmy, though not nearly as many times as the Ukraine war.

And again:

1. NATO did not attack Russia
2. Russia invaded Ukraine

Okay? No one is saying otherwise.

Do Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves from Russian imperialism?

Again no one is saying otherwise. As for Russian “imperialism,” I already covered it elsewhere in this very post, and dozens of times before.

Edit to add: Oh, that one was already in my previous comment. Sorry for repeating myself. Here’s a talk by Parenti to summarize.

Also the idea that NATO caused the Bosnian Genocide is laughable. The bombing is the only reason it stopped.

Tell me you didn’t engage with the material I provided without telling me you didn’t engage with the material I provided. Here’s another: Michael Parenti » To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia