I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

Link 1:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video

Link 2:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video

You might want a non-NATOpedia source if you want to understand

It was wikipedia but yes great point, wiki is just surface level overviews and shouldn’t be the primary source for info.

Always encourage people to read deeper.

I just don’t know what news sites people trust here, I can post CNN i guess since you posted that, but I personally don’t care for them

I’m also not into youtubers as a source for info but ill check out any legitimate stuff you wanna send

a CNN report from 2016 showing what the fascist government installed by the US was doing in Donetsk, 6 years before the start of the Russian invasion.

I think you mixed up your timeline. This was during the invasion. Fighting been going on since spring 2014.

From CNN in 2015

The conflict broke out last spring after Russia annexed Ukraine’s southeastern Crimea region and as pro-Russia separatists claimed control of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. A ceasefire agreed to in Minsk, Belarus, in September crumbled long ago.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/30/europe/ukraine-crisis

You are swallowing a narrative

With respect, I am not. My stances on the imperialist project in basically every other sphere (especially the Middle East and Sputh America) are incredibly skeptical and critical.

But what appears to be confusing everyone is I choose to apply those same standards and lenses to everyone

Yes, you actually should understand the context of this war, even if that means that Russian atrocities are also going to be put in context and complicate your feelings about it.

Exactly, thank you. I think the “if the USA is involved its always the invading force” bothers me so much because it wipes away that cognitive dissonance with delusional dogma.

If your position is to sit by the sidelines and condemn any state actor because states are oppressive/expansionist/monstrous then you’ve maintained a moral high ground that you’ve eliminated any chance to turn into a project for actually advancing a political goal.

I assume this is a hypothetical “if your position is” and not an accusation, because I totally agree.

I do not sit on the sidelines, Ukraine has a full and complete right to defend itself. (As does Palestine, as does (did) Hong Kong, as does any sovereign nation who is not the aggressors and who’s boldest demand is a return to previously agreed upon boundaries from before the invasion.

The Western imperialist bloc must be stopped. That requires the cooperation of everyone in the world that understands the true nature of imperialism to contribute in the struggle against imperialism.

We remarkably agree on the premises here. It’s surprising to me we go so opposite to each other.

When I look at the Russian Ologarchs and all the people falling out of windows and that they all have bank accounts in the same offshore places that Western bourgeois were showing up.

If you are open heartedly telling me that Putins Russia is an ally on eliminating inequality and distributing capital back to the producers then I don’t get where that is coming from.

When Mao fought against the Japanese imperialists alongside Chiang Kai Shek, he had to make a moral compromise that was necessary to actually achieve the goal, to liberate China. Modern day anti-imperialists are no different.

China and Russia are highly different beasts.

Is it your genuinely held belief that Putin is making the right compromises in the right places to liberate Russia?

Setting aside Russia’s moral right to the invasion, let’s look at their economy since. It’s tanked! Are you really suggesting that the Ukraine war was a strategically sound idea?

yeah the nazis had a right to self-determination, just like the Chinese nationalists of the ROC

So imperialism is just a synonym for invasion?

No, the first thing I said was that I was dumbing it all the way down

Was the Soviet Union imperialist when they marched into Berlin?

I’m not sure i understand your thought process here. They were the ones who got invaded.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa

I personally choose to distinguish between the country invading another and the country getting invaded itself but then going on to not lose the war.

Does this distinction seem reasonable?

England takes Hong Kong, that’s imperialism.

China takes it back, also imperialism i guess.

After the world wars, i.e. the most important inter-imperialist conflict in the stage of history we’re in, America successfully became the leader of the capitalist world. There no longer was a meaningful division per se, because the US was in power over all of it. That’s what the end of Bretton Woods in 1971 was, the US confidently saying the world belongs to them.

Man, that’s just what Americans like to think…but it isn’t actually true. That effectively removes any concept of agency from the rest of the world. That kind of thinking lacks any semblance of nuanced reality. We live in an interconnected world, so no one is truly a fully independent nation anymore. We all interact with each other in some way, for better or worse. But that doesn’t mean that we are all having our strings pulled by one nation, just because it has an outsized degree of influence in the world.

Russia is no different. Claiming that they aren’t imperialistic, just because they aren’t as successful as other imperialists, is also laughable non-logic. If it quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck…it’s just another kind of duck. Putin’s obvious intent on bringing the previous Soviet states back under his control, is overtly imperialistic in nature. And make no mistake…it is dually motivated by nostalgia for Russia’s imperialist past, as well as its current financial benefit.

All you have to do, to confirm this, is listen to the man talk about Russian history. He isn’t idealizing Socialism. He’s idealizing the Russian Empire. He is as far from being a socialist as any oligarch can be. All he wants, is singular control over all the power, influence and capital that he can get his hands on…and by any means necessary.

THAT is what actual imperialism looks like. Not some naive, fictional representation from over a century ago.

What else would you call a mutual defense treaty? The fact that Russia is the only country in Eastern Europe that poses a consistent threat to its neighbors, isn’t because NATO keeps expanding. NATO keeps expanding because Russia continues to invade its neighbors. Eastern European countries wouldn’t be seeking NATO’s protection, if they didn’t think there was a genuine threat to their sovereignty so close to their borders.