The fediverse was developed such that you don’t have to agree with the devs to use it. Unlike corporate social media, you’re free to set up an instance that’s rabidly at odds with the dev’s viewpoints.

Given that, if the devs criticizing the US is so “controversial” that you won’t touch any instance on the fediverse, if you demand that the devs speak in a bland, focus-group tested way, even though you’re not subject to their authority by their own design, then you should probably just stay on corporate social media. Facebook, for example, has a single authority with a marketing team that carefully curates their messaging to appeal as much as possible to a wide audience. We are not Facebook.

The devs built Lemmy as a passion project, and are not just looking to grow it to sell to some venture capitalist firm.

Thanks

Anything you do to act against or weaken a given state tends to benefit that state’s rivals. Unless you have some switch you can flip to overthrow every government at once, then either you refrain from meaningfully opposing your government or you make peace with the possibility that another government may benefit from your actions.

There are cases where leftists should refrain from opposing their government, for example, during WWII, it wasn’t the best time to strike or revolt if you lived in the US. On the other hand, in WWI every side was relatively the same, so there was no need to put class war on hold, it doesn’t matter if German capitalists or French capitalists came out on top, so both German and French workers would have been justified to strike and disrupt and revolt, even though French workers doing so would benefit German capitalists and vise versa.

Therefore, this “oppose all states” line is reductive. If someone paints the PRC as being so bad that they’re a threat on par with the Nazis, so we should put class war in the US on hold in order to stop them, then we need to evaluate whether or not that’s actually true. Which means first making the assessment, and then, if we assess that it’s not that serious of a threat, that means “defending” it (at least to an extent), it means saying things that will get you labelled as a tankie. If, on the other hand, you don’t do that, if you concede even the most extreme and far-fetched claims about them, then either you must also concede that we should drop everything to fight them, or you must adopt the unreasonable stance of weakening a state that stands between you and something equivalent to the Nazis.

Any actual opposition to a government (as opposed to opposition merely in principle) means at least being ok with that government’s geopolitical rivals benefitting from the internal conflict. Actual opposition will almost always mean getting accused of supporting enemy states (whether you do or not), or at least of not taking their threat seriously enough. It’s necessary to have an answer for why you’re not rallying around the flag to fight off that supposedly greater evil.

Yes, motherfucker. It’s generally how I refer to people who say ridiculous bullshit.

Motherfucker, did you hear how many people were talking about attacking Middle Eastern civilians across the US during that period? How many Americans talked about nuking the Middle East, turning the sand to glass, exterminating the entire region? Do you think that sounded peaceful to them? Do you think, then, that Al Qaida was justified in attacking civilian targets if said civilian had said something like that? If that’s what it takes, the majority of the US population would have been valid military targets. What a load of nonsense.

But no, it only goes one way. The US can set the rules that everyone else in the world has to obey. The US doesn’t have to obey anybody else’s rules. Why? Because the US has power and authority. Authority that you believe in asserting over the entire rest of the world. Because you are an imperialist.

That’s not even mentioning the fact that you completely ignored my entire argument. Even if it was justified to kill him in this case, it still involved giving the executive unilateral power to execute any person anywhere in the world, with zero oversight or accountability. Either you believe the executive should have that power, or you don’t. You don’t get to support it having that power only in the cases where you agree with the decisions the executive made. If you think you should have some say over such decisions, then you should support those decisions being democratically accountable.

I would simply not get stormed by 10 Al Qaida freedom fighters by not going to their country in the first place.

Also, can we just take a moment to appreciate how wildly you’re distorting this? He was not killed “storming” someone with 9 other people. There was no physical danger. He was killed by an unmanned drone, by someone probably sitting in an air conditioned room on the other side of the world. And this was in Yemen, a country we weren’t even at war with. So when you say, “that’s what you do in war,” apparently, it’s also what you think we should do in peace.

What would you say if Yemen launched a drone strike in the US, claiming that the US was harboring a terrorist? That cool with you? Is that just “what you do in not-war?”

Completely ridiculous. What you’re saying right now is exactly what actual authoritarianism looks like.

Al-Awlaki is cited because he was the first US citizen to be targeted under the policy. The criticism isn’t about whether he was guilty or innocent, it’s about the flagrant disregard for due process.

It’s important to talk about cases like that precisely in order to confront the brainworms of, “He was probably a terrorist so who cares?” That mentality is precisely what got us here and it’s impossible to fix the problem without firmly rejecting that way of thinking.

You don’t get to give the government permission to ignore due process in some cases and not in others. That’s not how laws or systems work. Either they have to follow the process even when you personally think the person is guilty, or they can ignore the process even when you think the person is innocent. Once you’ve given the executive the power to make the decision unilaterally, you don’t get to challenge that decision. Because that what having the power to make a decision unilaterally means.

The slavery doesn’t count, that’s prepolitical because they had to have them

What in the ideology?

Explain themselves? Impeachment? Prison? Is that a joke?

The reason you don’t understand the backlash is because you don’t understand how this works.

Those were things that were at least theoretically possible in the pre-9/11 system. What Bush changed and Obama continued, was making it into a system with zero accountability. All the executive has to do is claim that they think someone’s a terrorist, there is no court, no evidence required, no higher authority they answer to or that could hold them accountable. One, single person has total and complete authority to kill anyone in the world. And what al-Awlaki showed is that this applies even to US citizens.

Theoretically, if Trump wanted to, he could launch a drone strike on Ilhan Omar’s house and the only obstacle would be the political backlash. Y’all simply do not appreciate the degree to which the executive acquired dictatorial power in the “post-9/11 world.” Bush was just Trump but with literally 90% of the country supporting him. Trump has only gone further because of the groundwork Bush laid. The “emergency” powers from post 9/11 are still in place, they were never going away.

The president can ride his bike with no handlebars.

It seems the lesson they learned wasn’t “don’t do genocide” so much as “get someone else to do your dirty work to avoid being held accountable for genocide.”

And those little spats are supposed to be enough for the US to vote against condemning Nazism out of spite? That’s nonsense. Unless the US was already relatively predisposed to vote against it.

Feel free to address any of the other aspects in that comment though, I’m not sure why you’ve dropped them.

What other parts would you like me to address?

I always find it interesting that using drone strikes on an objectively evil group (in this case Al Qaeda) gets so many panties get knotted…

I’m so glad that we’ll always be able to trust the president to unilaterally decide which groups are evil and to use his power in the interests of the people.

I mean, can you imagine what would’ve happened if some bad actor got in and used those sorts of things for precedent? Like, what if a Republican president had got in and decided to, I don’t know, accuse random Venezuelan fishing boats of being “narco-terrorists,” and used the exact same power to kill them for sport? Just spitballing here.

But I mean, what are the odds of that, right? Surely we can trust the United States president with the power to be judge, jury, and executioner for the entire globe. This is a very sane and reasonable position, and I just can’t understand why anyone would get their panties in a knot over it.

You’re absolutely right, the US had always been very level headed towards the Russian Republic and it’s precursor states, right up until 2022. Prior to that there has never been any major ideological disagreement between the two power blocs, and certainly never any attempts to do something absurd like “portray Russia as the ‘specter of communism’” in popular US media. No indeed, the US has a long and robust history of rational behavior towards the russophone world.

In 2005?? Who was saying any of that? That’s complete nonsense.

1. You say that it was a political move by Russia to make the US and Ukraine look like Nazis. Even if this is true, then it makes no sense for the US and Ukraine to vote against it, because that plays directly into that narrative.

2. Even if there was some kind of bizarre political calculus of voting not to condemn Nazis to prove you’re not Nazis, because the US has voted the same way since 2005, it can’t be the case that the US vote is a response to the war in Ukraine. The US had no particular reason to be contrary to every resolution Russia put forward at that time.

3. Even if the US could see into the future and knew that Russia was going to invade, and even if they followed this insane political calculus just because Russia put the motion forward, why wouldn’t the US make it’s own resolution?

Nothing you said seems to answer any part of the many, many broken links in your explanation.

Well, it was certainly weaponized after they made the insane decision to vote against it. I’m not sure how on earth it would’ve been weaponized if they’d just voted for it.

Y’all will believe anything.

First, a version of this resolution was first introduced in 2005 (A/RES/60/143 ) when the US was one of only four countries to vote against it, which it has done consistently every time it’s been reintroduced. Acting like it’s opportunistic regarding the war in Ukraine, or that that’s the reason the US voted against it, is completely false.

Second, the best way to avoid it being used to advance the narrative that the US and Ukraine are pro-Nazi would be to just vote for the resolution! Voting for it, and they have nothing, vote against it, and they have this perfect map they can point to where the US and Ukraine are completely alone in refusing to condemn Nazism. This logic is completely and utterly backwards.

Third, if the US was willing to condemn Nazism, and only objects to it being a Russian initiative (or the supposedly “authoritarian language”), then, why have never put out their own resolution condemning Nazism?

One time this Taiwanese guy showed up to a board game group and when he found out I was sympathetic to China he told me:

If you want to know more about the cultural and historical reason causing the seemingly crazy Chinese expanding ambitions. I highly recommend you read this book. It explains why Xi is being so aggressive these years and why it’s almost inevitable. It’s not the same logic most people in the world understand. Even most Chinese people aren’t aware it.

And he linked me to “The China Order” by Fei-Ling Wang. I skimmed it, and it was complete drivel.

The central thesis is that Europe developed a peaceful Westphalian model that led it to respect the sovereignty of states, throughout it’s history and into the present day (somehow ignoring the entire history of colonialism, the Cold War, etc), while China’s historical model was based around “tianxia” which basically means that it ruled the known world, which is why it will always be a big evil meanie out to conquer the world.

Apparently this is a whole genre. Taking random snippets from China’s thousands of years of extremely varied history and picking out anything that supports the thesis that China is just inherently evil. There’s tons of works with similar theses written by white people, but I really can’t be assed to skim more than one, Fei-Ling immigrated from China to the US and has a doctorate, and he still writes this crap, in a university press, I can’t even imagine how bad the shit written by “China watchers” and pundits gets.

What’s funny to me about this is that I once watched a film made during WWII produced by the US government, “Why We Fight: The Battle for China” which made the rather dubious claim that China had, “never once waged an aggressive war in it’s 4000 years of history.” Change your posture towards the US, and your entire history going back thousands of years gets rewritten.

It’s just so lazy and childish to paint all of Chinese history with such a ridiculously large brush like that, it’s unbelievable.

By “progressive” I believe he means historically progressive, as in, the next stage of development, not necessarily a positive thing. My understanding is yes that his solution is nationalization, seeing the trend towards monopolization as a natural development. However, whether attempts to break up monopolies should be opposed, I don’t actually know his stance on that. My assumption would be that he’d call such an approach insufficient, but it might be something to critically support. I haven’t read Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which probably has more context for that.

Vegetables don’t exist.

3. Should socialists support bourgeois-led national liberation movements?

A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism flows fairly naturally from the previous point.

In the previous text, Lenin argues that those who refuse to call for revolutionary actions against their own governments in WWI, but rather called for “neither victory nor defeat” were essentially taking the same stance as “the defense of the fatherland,” and accepting the framing that fighting the war was necessary to protect the nation, to guard against defeat. After this critique, Kievsky argued that the same logic should apply to bourgeois-led national liberation movements, that to support them is to support “the defense of the fatherland.”

Lenin repudiates this misunderstanding. The problem with “the defense of the fatherland” slogan is not that it is always wrong to “defend the fatherland,” but rather that WWI was not actually about defending the fatherland, rather, it was about the control of various colonies. Therefore, while it is unjustifiable to adopt a position of “the defense of the fatherland” in WWI, this does not mean that we must always reject any course of action that happens to defend somebody’s fatherland.

With this misunderstanding cleared up, Lenin presents the method by which we should understand conflicts: by viewing them as a continuation of policy, and by looking, on a case-by-case basis, at what dispute prior to the conflict led to the war. This does not mean looking at “who started it,” as he says in Socialism and War (cited in this text):

For example, if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be “just,” “defensive” wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slaveowning, predatory “great” powers.

Instead of looking at conflicts in terms of who’s the aggressor and who’s the defender, we should look at things in terms of class, and in terms of oppressor and oppressed. Imperialist powers do not have the right to defend their sovereignty; after all, if they did, then revolution would be unjustified.

From chapter 5 of the same work:

Here, Lenin makes a remarkable point. He argues that real international solidarity requires unity of action, but not necessarily unity of rhetoric. Specifically, in the case of Norway seeking independence from Sweden, he argues that Swedish socialists, those of the oppressor nation, were correct in giving unconditional support to Norway’s right to secede, that, if they had been critical of the movement and imposed conditions, then they would have been chauvinists. On the other hand, Norwegian socialists were correct to be critical and skeptical of the movement, on the basis that it was a bourgeois-led movement.

One way to think of this is two people bumping into each other on the street. If they both apologize, then there’s no conflict, even though they’re taking different stances on who’s at fault. On the other hand, if they try to arrive at a unified line on whose fault it really was, then there may be more conflict.

Lenin notes, here and in many other works, that there should be no inherent preference for large or small nations, for breaking apart or coming together, but that such questions should be considered in terms of how to best unite the proletariat and advance socialist goals. Secession movements can be used by the bourgeoisie to “drive a wedge” between people, however, this wedge only becomes stronger when such movements are opposed by the dominant group. You might say, “if you love someone, let them free,” the hope being that they will choose voluntarily to remain united.

Later, from the same chapter:

Here, Lenin provides one more condition for supporting a national liberation movement: it must not be a struggle “of the reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism.” This phrasing can generate confusion, as imperialism and capitalism are often thought of as being reactionary. But he provides the context that “capitalism is progressive compared with feudalism,” meaning, the “reactionary classes” he’s discussing are classes which aim to return to a feudal system, such as the aristocracy, as distinct from the bourgeoisie.

To sum up, when looking at secession or an imperfect national liberation movement, or whether a nation should be defended, we should consider the following questions:

A. Is the conflict actually about national liberation, or it really about something else?

B. Will it start WWIII?

C. Is the movement not merely flawed, but reactionary, even relative to capitalism?

D. Am I in a position to critique the movement, without engaging in chauvinism?