159
Zelensky admits Ukraine does not have military strength to reclaim lost territories from Russia
(www.independent.co.uk)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
159 points (88.8% liked)
World News
32531 readers
383 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Have you considered that doing an imperialism under a non-western flag is still doing an imperialism?
Russia, if given its druthers, would be imperialist, but since it presently doesn’t, it presently isn’t. Putin tried to join NATO once, to join the imperialist club, but that was rejected, because the US wanted Russia Balkanized & plundered instead. Russia has figured out it’s better off allying with Global South countries than attempting imperialist adventures upon them. And this war has accelerated that allyship.
It’s only imperialism if it comes from the West, otherwise it’s just sparkling being an asshole to your neighbors isn’t a winning argument.
It seems pretty clear you just don't know what imperialism is full stop.
In the present stage of history, yes. No country other than Japan or the western ones have managed to rise to the status of being imperialist powers. The reason is simple. The powers which became imperialist first delayed the development of the rest of the world by literal centuries, preventing any other people from becoming imperialist. Japan happened to escape this fate by geographical luck and developed early, allowing it to join the ranks of the imperialists.
There is a reason why the most dominant/advanced capitalist countries today are still the same ones that were advanced over a 100 years ago.
This has literally nothing to do with imperialism, which is the system by which a handful of the most advanced capitalist countries have consumed unparalleled sums of human labor from the whole of humanity for centuries on end.
It’s not exclusive to the West. Japan did it for sixty years, until it was made a vassal of the US, which it still is today[1][2].
I’m not sure what the point of this considering that I am specifically calling you out for refusing to admit Russia is doing an imperialism and your deflection is to say that Japan did an imperialism. Is that supposed to make Russia all clear to do an imperialism?
It seems you didn’t read what I linked to, so I’ll copypasta:
Still hinging literally everything on Donbas not being externally caused I see. As long as you cover up interference in other countries, it’s fine to use that as pretext to invade and do whatever you want.
So Donbas was externally caused because... we should trust you that it was?
But Ukraine's 2014 coup wasn't externally caused because... it was different from all the other times the US deposed a government, since this time they put congresspeople like John McCain on the ground? Even US, anti-Russian sources recognize it as fact.
At this point you have to be deliberately dodging the evidence to not recognize what's going on.
The very fact that you treat imperialism like an action and not a system shows that you don't have even the minimum possible of understanding of what it is.
It's imperialism if it has the characteristics of imperialism, wishing it really hard because that's a word that would be an amazing gotcha isn't enough. Imperialism is, to really overly simplify it: the extraction of surplus value, often in the form of labor through financial instruments from one country to another. Russia's position in the world is not that of imperialist extraction (except in the participation prior to the sanctions in the western financial sector) since capital was still consolidating its power over the working class in Russia, given that its capitalist system (another western imposition) wasn't developed enough to do so, and it was still mostly an export economy.
Now, I eagerly await for the flat-earth level analysis of "but I see it and I think it is imperialist".
I mean, we agree, Russia intends to exploit Ukraine’s natural gas reserves in the regions they are occupying, which definitely meets the definition you set out so…
Unless you’re insisting that Russia is going to just give that territory up after all this, despite them claiming they have a hereditary right to it all, because they just really wouldn’t want to accidentally profit off taking over their neighbors territory in which case, it sounds like the “flat earth level analysis” is coming from inside the house.