Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]

When you say freedom, what do you mean? Freedom to do what? You’re talking about a place that under capitalist restoration became the poorest country in Europe and (as is tradition) uses ethnic violence to divide its working class that might otherwise kill its rulers. I’m thinking a lot of the population might not feel they actually have the freedom to actually do a whole lot. Some of them seem to want the freedom to continue living, or the freedom to not fight in a NATO proxy war, but you don’t seem to care about those freedoms. So, again, what are you talking about?

It’s not just the optics that are bad.

Azov battalion

What “communist dictator” are you talking about?

How is that different than any functioning state?

What does totalitarian mean?

That states had to react to threats from the US never crosses their mind. The whole dissolution of the USSR and subsequent pillaging played out on the nightly news for years and I’ve never met a liberal that remembers it. They do vaguely remember that the USSR had an aggressive security state but can’t ever understand why.

Oh, it would be way worse, because communism is always way worse.

There’s still a lot of people that came of age in the USSR. They’re very interesting to talk to. Often, their experience doesn’t match the American anticommunist rhetoric.

I don’t care about antisemitic noblemen. His book is fake, and he’s lucky he wasn’t killed.

The bourgeoisie cannibalised Russia. Liberals from the west insisted that Russia and the rest of the Soviet republics would be ruled by the bourgeoisie. This was the whole point of the Cold War. At huge expense to its own citizenry the west conducted a series of proxy wars and led an arms race to make it as difficult as possible for workers to control their own destiny.

As expected, false scarcity and extreme inequality followed, and to justify or explain this inequality, the bourgeoisie used from the usual ethnic and sexual minority scapegoats. With your weird understanding of history, you’re obviously American, so none of this should be hard to understand. You have people dying on the streets, the government won’t even raise the minimum wage, but the news about the evils of Mexicans, blacks, trans people, etc. never stops.

Liberals don’t know the difference between negative and positive rights.

There’s lots of above ground opposition to Putin in Russia. Stop being a clown. There’s plenty of real things to criticize. We don’t need to make things up.

I engage with some Russian language media, and people actually do express criticisms and critiques of Putin and the war without being arrested or killed.

They probably don’t, but unlike the bourgeois government of Ukraine, the bourgeois government of Russia wasn’t waging a several years long campaign of ethnic violence to redirect working class anger. If Russia is going to prevent a genocide, that’s obviously better.

I have a question for you. Why are liberals so much more interested in protecting the rich than the ethnic minorities they use as scapegoats? You guys do the same thing when you whine about communists in Ukraine fighting antisemitic Ukrainian landlords. How much were my ancestors supposed to endure in order to protect the privilege of the parasites?