Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?
I am describing behavior I quite frequently directly observed in .ml threads, but go off about how it’s not real. I personally got banned for calling Russia out for the war in Ukraine and the lack of any proper justification for it, and it was relevant to the discussion at hand, not just some random post to stir the pot.
Of course, there’s also the popular theory that .ml is heavily astroturfed by Russia and China, so maybe you’re right that they’re not actually communists, just a bunch of malicious propagandists the communists can never seem to weed out.
Or maybe a bunch of western propaganda to make communists look like violent assholes. Which, again, never seems to get weeded out.
Or some combo of the two.
But in all cases, it’s a common observance on .ml, and the one thing they’re not doing over there is distancing themselves from it literally at all. Far more likely to find .ml users like you in other communities trying to stick their head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening.
I’m on Lemmy.ml, I have never seen anyone that fits your description. Further, Lemmy.ml isn’t astroturfed by Russia or China. Regarding Ukraine, you were banned for misinformation, such as the idea that Russia is trying to “force everyone to become Russian,” with a temp ban at that.
If you could give an example of people “standing up for the most brutal of regimes,” for example, that would help. The simple fact is that socialist states have not been “the most brutal regimes,” western countries have been.
All I can really say to that is that you should maybe look closer. They show up pretty frequently when Russia and China come up in discussion, regardless of reason, but especially if someone bad mouths either.
Let’s be real, every online community of any significant size with open registration is being astroturfed to some extent. The only real question is which countries are most heavily involved in astroturfing any specific community. Here on Lemmy, spreading misinformation that supports Russia and/or China comes from lemmy.ml accounts much more frequently than from other accounts. That’s not to say that all lemmy.ml accounts are like that, but if I see someone spreading very obviously bullshit in favor of Russia or China anywhere on Lemmy, it’s almost a given that it’s a lemmy.ml account. You’re also likely to see lemmy.ml accounts pop up out of nowhere any time Russia or China are mentioned in any sort of negative capacity, sort of like how [email protected] picked up on a tangential mention of China in one of my earlier posts in this thread and launched into a bunch of whataboutism and Chain apologia. Frankly, it’s kind of surprising to see it from an account that’s NOT @lemmy.ml.
Nope, not even the Lemmy.ml mods would claim that when they banned me, temporary or not. They classified it as a violation of rule 1, which seems to cover the banning of various forms of bigotry. They aren’t any more specific than that, but I imagine they would classify it as xenophobia or, if they cared to get more specific, Russophobia.
But let’s talk about the idea that that statement was misinformation. Let’s remind ourselves of the context. Four years ago, Russia began their invasion of Ukraine, which still continues to this day. Ukraine had not attacked them. Russia makes no claim that Ukraine attacked them first. Russia did this in spite of being party to the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in 1994, about 30 years ago, in which Ukraine voluntarily gave up Soviet era nuclear weapons in exchange for a promise from the USA and Russia that Ukrainian sovereignty would be respected. Russia then violated the agreement in 2014 when they annexed Crimea and violated it again with their ongoing invasion. Russia is annexing Ukrainian land. If you live in Crimea or any of the more recently conquered land, I’m terribly sorry, you now live in Russia. So, in light of all that, could you maybe explain to me how the fuck it’s misinformation to describe it as forcing people to become Russian? Do you just expect Russia to expel the Ukrainians if they succeed? I suppose that would make my statement technically incorrect, but I don’t really expect that option.
No, I’m not wasting more of my day to track down evidence for the most obvious shit that almost everyone on Lemmy outside of Lemmy.ml already knows. I’m not going to go and find proof just so we can sit here and split hairs on the exact nature of what was said, which I know will inevitably happen because I’ve made that mistake before. If you want evidence, just pay more attention next time you’re digging around in Lemmy.ml threads. It’s not that hard to find, which is why Lemmy.ml is somewhat commonly defederated from other instances.
Yes, thank you, I’m sure that will massively recontextualize things for me the next time I’m witnessing someone defend the start of a pointless war that’s probably lead to around a million casualties and growing, just to stroke some corrupt old fuck’s ego. And before you try to bUt IsRaEl AnD iRaN me, which happens every god damn time I point out something bad that Russia or China did, yeah, I fucking know, and I don’t like that, either. In a thread about those topics, I’d be agreeing with you, but here, it’s just whataboutism and deflection.
Just a formatting tip, you need a double newline in between quotes and comments you mean to have in your own voice, not just a single newline.
Either way, your comment is a continued lack of evidence, and doubling down on misinformation. For example, the Budapest Memorandum was nullified by the US first, Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation after the 2014 Banderite coup, and Donetsk and Luhansk have been at war with Kiev since they seceded in 2014 and requested aid from the Russian Federation in 2022. Russia isn’t trying to turn everyone Russian, this is clear misinformation on what is far more complex than “Russia is evil definitionally.”
Funny, my stack of evidence is just as big as yours, so I guess I could say the same about you.
I can’t find anything that agrees with this at all. The best I can find is that the US didn’t defend Ukrainian sovereignty when someone else violated it, which, to my understanding, is not required by the agreement. Ironic, given you were just complaining about my lack of evidence, so I’m gonna need you to cite something here.
But even if you’re right, that doesn’t excuse Russia. They were still party to the agreement along with the UK. They still violated the agreement by violating Ukrainian sovereignty.
Oh you mean the vote that occurred on March 16, 2014, the one that happened over 2 weeks after Russia invaded on February 27, 2014? The one that had an extremely suspicious 95.5% support for annexation? Thankfully we can all trust that because Russia is totally known to ensure elections run fairly and smoothly and in no way are biased towards the wants of the Russian ruling class, right? Right? Very fortunate that Russia managed to find exactly the justification for invasion that they needed two weeks after they had already invaded. I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that they just so happened to be the one administrating the election that gave them exactly the result they needed right after they violently seized the territory.
“Our revolutionaries are glorious freedom fighters. Their revolutionaries are a filthy coup by the west.” Turns out when Russia develops a history of abusing its neighbors, its neighbors get really fucking pissy when their leadership starts cozying up to Russia.
Just like Crimea voted to secede, right? Always, they start really supporting Russia and independence from Ukraine after Russia seizes the territory and starts enforcing its will. It’d be a lot more impressive if any of that happened before Russia invaded those regions.
No, you’re right, Russia isn’t trying to turn everyone Russian right now. Just the Ukrainians, which is the context in which the quote I assume you’re referencing comes from. If they succeed, though, Russia might turn their eyes to someone else next.
The US specifically stated the Memorandum had assurances, not guarantees, broke the Memorandum by intervening in Belarus via sanctions in 2013.
Steven Pifer, US ambassador to Ukraine:
The fact that Crimeans overwhelmingly voted to secede from the Banderites in Kiev is not suspicious unless you don’t think it’s rational to be fearful of fascists. You don’t actually have evidence undermining it, so you just say you’re skeptical to the point of believing it.
What is interesting is that you’re now denying the Russian ethnicity of much of the Donbass region, implying that they are all Ukrainian. The ethnic Russians in the Donbass region are why Russia intervened at the request of the LPR and DPR, as Russia is governed by nationalists. The Banderites had been killing the seperatists in the Donbass region for nearly a decade before Russia stepped in.
This is the map pointing to the modern division in Ukraine, between the seperatists in the Donbass that side with Russia and the Banderites that side with Kiev, which faction has influence where.
So basically, the idea is that the US is never allowed to sanction Belarus for anything at all, ever again because doing so for ANY reason at all, regardless of how justified it may be, is always going to be considered “economic coercion designed to subordinate [them] to their own interest”. When we’re making a comparison to Russia militarily invading and actually directly violating the sovereignty of Ukraine, that’s pretty weak. I can’t say I terribly care on this one. I’d be willing to review other sources, but it’s hard to find much on a search that’s about that instead of more recent events.
Oh, there’s another option. Russia clearly does not have much respect for the democratic process beyond its capacity to justify things to the populace. I am extremely distrustful of Russia running an election in any capacity, especially one that just so happens to justify the invasion they already started.
I’ve seen some stuff about this, and let me preface this by saying fuck Nazis with something sharp and rusty, but the one thing that never seems to come up is how prevalent it is. Pretty much every predominantly white western nation has some shithead portion of the population that supports Nazism, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a sizable portion of the population. Any time I’ve asked for more info on the matter, I’ve never been provided with anything that can prove these sorts of pictures are anything more than very heavily cherry picked photos.
That said, it’s alarming that any military group would be comfortable posing for those photos, regardless of how big the group is. I’d be willing to look at anything you might be able to share that would show this is systemic, but like I said, nobody ever seems to have anything like that handy when they want to bring up the pictures.
No, I’m speaking in terms of nationality, and you’re speaking here in terms of ethnicity. Ukraine has been independent from Russia for almost 35 years. I understand that some people in the area are ethnically Russian, especially in eastern Ukraine, and they may identify more as Russian than Ukrainian at this point, even after 35 years. If the vote had been held under more trustworthy circumstances, I’d be more inclined to trust it, but you’re telling me that Russia ran an election after they seized the area by force, and I should just believe Russia when they say people voted for what Russia wanted at a rate of 19 to 1? Yeah, no. Had they held the vote FIRST and the Ukrainian government told them “tough shit, you’re staying”, I might be inclined to side with secession as it would be clearly the desire of the local population, but Russia muddied the waters waaaaaaaay too much for anyone who pays attention to just take their word for it now.
The requests that we already established came after Russia seized the region, yes. The requests whose validity can very reasonably be questioned given this is a captured government making a request in line with the desires of the captor. Can you provide any evidence that this was widely supported in the region before Russia invaded? Because “man with metaphorical Russian gun to head says thing Russia wants said” is not a massive point in your favor.
This is difficult to research given the time distance unless you know the right keywords to use in the search, so I’m open to good resources on this, but it’s not one I’m having an easy time looking into myself.
Cool, do you have anything that’s not twenty years old? Or at least something that’s not ten years older than the invasion? Ten years of the wrong policy could have pissed off a lot of those blue regions, so I’m not sure this is an appropriate data point. It shows some important history, sure, but it may not accurately reflect things at the appropriate time or today.
The point regarding the Budapest Memorandum is that the US made it clear that it was not legally binding, and already violated it in 2013 in Belarus. In 2014, the west intervened directly in Ukraine, aiding the Banderite faction in overthrowing the democratically elected moderate, Yanukovych.
Regarding Russia and the referendum for the DPR and LPR to join the Russian Federation, the war started in 2014, with the Banderite coup. Russia did not start the Ukrainain Civil War, it entered the Civil War 8 years after it started. Kiev has been shelling the Donbass region and killing thousands of civilians there for over a decade at this point, which is why they voted to join.
As for Nazis in Ukraine, the key point distinguishing them is that they are extremely common, open, and close to the levers of power:
This has been true since 2014, when the Banderites took charge. As for the DPR and LPR requesting assistance, they requested on the 23rd, with letters dated the 22nd. We also know that Russia was heavily involved with talks between the Donbass and Kiev prior to 2022, and that the seperatists voted to join in September 2022. They would have been at war for 8 full years with Kiev.
The Kiev regime killing civilians in the Donbass region is well-documented even by western orgs. Further, Kiev has been found guilty of war crimes.
As for the map, it’s the electoral map for support of Yanukovych, so no, I can’t provide an electoral map since then as the civil war has been going on since 2014.
Oh, cool, well in that case, totally cool for Russia to invade and violate the agreement, too. I mean, why should Russia get left out of all the imperialist fun?
The idea Russia waited 8 years is just bullshit, and you know it because it’s already come up repeatedly. We’ve already established that Russia didn’t wait 8 years. We’ve already extensively talked about how Russia invaded before the vote to secede.
Russia invaded, THEN DPR and LPR requested aid from Russia once they were already effectively under Russian control.Hell, we can say they directly intervened militarily. The “little green men” were admitted to be Russian Spetsnaz, and Russia admitted to blocking Ukrainian armed forces. Russia directly interfered from the start.
If there’s truth to this, I’d be open to sources. I unfortunately cannot be aware of everything that happens in every conflict, so I admit it’s possible I’m uninformed here, but I’d need a source. Reminder that you are the one who gave me grief for not providing evidence.
Look, I’m not going to try to pretend that that patch in such proximity to the leader of the country is anything other than alarming. But I’m also not going to try to pretend that photos of… looks like less than a hundred people in all the photos you’ve shown, is enough to prove a systemic issue. Once again, even though I’ve explicitly professed an interest in seeing a quality source, even though I’m talking to someone who tried to give me grief for not providing evidence, you’re still not providing any real evidence that this is a truly widespread and systemic issue. Hell, I can’t even recognize the patch circled behind Zelenskyy with all of 20 pixels allocated to it, and the infographic doesn’t even seem to be relevant to the pictures you include with it, although it does appear exactly once in the set of pictures you shared earlier.
Hmmmm looks like you might be correct here. Difficult to find hard information on it. I’ll strikeout my above statement as the fact it had been discussed previously is still relevant to the point I was making.
That said, Russia once again weakens the argument for you. Russia themselves handed out medals specifying the start of the campaign as being February 20th. There are also some reports that the “little green men” may have began appearing as early as mid February, although I’m having trouble finding anything to definitively prove that. Sources have reported that special forces were put on alert as early as the 18th. Russia was very clearly preparing before then, and there’s plenty to suggest they’d begun actively taking steps in the region, including suspicion that some of the protests at the time weren’t as “home grown” as Russia wants it to be believed. Combined with them shipping in special forces and lying about their involvement, it seems quite reasonable to assume that Russia had already taken steps to create the impressions of favorable protests and to secure the allegiance of government officials.
Keep in mind, you say those governments requested Russian support when the link I’m about to share in the next paragraph shows that support in Crimea for Russian annexation was as low as 23%, so just because the local government made the request does not mean it accurately reflects the will of the people. Given what we know of Russian planning and involvement in the region, I think it’s reasonable to suspect that Russia made an attempt to influence local leadership to act in their favor, regardless of what the local people wanted.
Well I stumbled across some polling that suggests support for joining Russia in 2013 was as low as 23% and had been actively decreasing, which makes it EXTREMELY suspicious that Russia claims the vote to secede won with NINETY FIVE POINT FIVE PERCENT OF THE VOTE. That’s just absurd to trust at face value. There is zero good reason to blindly trust results of 95.5% in favor of what Russia wants in an election run by Russia in a region that clearly espoused just one quarter of that level of support only a year beforehand. There’s just no fucking way that was an honest vote with that in mind.