I agree! They haven’t banned me yet, though, and I regularly post about how Russia sucks, and is the aggressor in Ukraine.

You’re an anarchist, yeah? Me too. I support a mainly modern syndicalist approach, because collective community effort is far more effective than individual effort, but it’s going to be a hard time demonstrating the effectiveness of our preferred model while the capitalists keep crushing it anywhere it threatens to become practical.

It’s more complicated than “Russia bad, Ukraine good” though. I think that’s the nuance that gets distorted by some ml people who have been arguing with centre-left Democrat voter types for ages and gotten tired.

Russia has a fucked up, Mafia government, it is bad for its people, it encourages corruption as long as the money flows to the top, etc.

Don’t ignore why that is, though: Russia was fucked over by the vultures of US capital in the 90s after Gorbachev and Yeltsin bent over and allowed former soviet state industrial assets to be bought for far less than their value. This is how the oligarchs were established. The economy was absolutely crushed, it reduced the living conditions of millions of people, increased crime, destroyed the social welfare state, etc.

This created the opportunity for Putin to get popular by killing a bunch of the oligarchs and taking their stolen wealth for himself, as well as promising to restore the glory of Russia’s military, stopping the breakaway of the few remaining former Soviet countries that had not yet left Russian control, like Georgia and Chechnya, promising to fight the terrorists (the terrorist attacks were done by him, btw), etc.

Basic Make Russia Great Again stuff, done more competently than Trump because he has at least half a brain.

This much is clear from history.

Ukraine does have a lot of Nazis in its power structure. And it has been very corrupt indeed ever since it broke away from Soviet control. Zelenzky has had to work with both of these power blocs as leader. He did gain power by promising to change things, but it’s impossible to run the place without working with the moderate parts of those factions, at least, even without a war. With the war, he has had to allow all sorts of very dodgy bastards indeed to coexist as long as they fight the Russians too.

Now, Putin was absolutely right when he said that NATO was invading his sphere of influence by bringing the Ukraine into the Western economic sphere. The US knew this, and knew that Russia may invade the Ukraine in return, and they were happy to provoke that. It was a completely ruthless move in the Great Game of geopolitics.

However, invading Ukraine is still an evil thing to do. It’s an imperialist action by Russia. It is one empire defending against an incursion by another empire.

The people of Ukraine, flawed as its government and society is, are right to defend themselves. Russia is not the good guy here, even if they are effectively part of China’s sphere now. They use slave armies. So does Ukraine, but far less brutally. It’s… not an ideal situation.

China practices ruthless geopolitics too, to defend its own system against the efforts of imperial capitalism, but that does not mean its client states are the good guys. China’s system is worth defending, imo, because capitalism is destroying the world with climate change and China is the biggest single factor in decarbonisation, not to mention a serious contender for a better economic system which we could learn a lot from.

When we survive climate change, it will likely be due to the sheer industrial capacity of the Chinese economy, which is rapidly transitioning to renewable energy and exporting solar panels and batteries to the entire world.

However, the Chinese defence of its “socialism with Chinese characteristics” system is ugly and throws a lot of people under the bus.

Palestinians, the Russian people sent to die on the front lines, people who get arrested by Chinese security services, people who have to move out of the way of large industrial projects, non-Han minorities, LGBT minorities, etc. (Not Falun Hong, btw, fuck those cultist assholes).

The mistake a lot of people make is to think that all systems of coercion are equally bad.

Representative democracy with capitalism looks good in theory, until you factor in all the people who don’t get a vote, who still get affected by the actions of the govt. And of course all the decisions made by people who aren’t elected at all.

And of course you as an anarchist know that nobody recognises economic violence when comparing systems by how much violence they do to their citizens, and nobody compares violence done by client states to protect capital’s ability to do that violence.

So America and Europe look less violent than the Soviets and China, even though they are all drenched in blood. Imo, the US most of all.

However, instead of having that sort of discussion, it’s way easier to say “go back to the DNC!” or “read a book, corpo!” or “boo, stop licking Xi’s asshole!”.

It takes way less time.