Are they stupid?
Yes
Who even knows with this war anymore? We’ve been looking at this exact map for almost a year now, moving pixel by pixel. Both sides crying about muh meatgrinder, how it’s super duper strategically important for the other side yadda yadda.
We can’t get a clear picture from the ground and I’ve long stopped putting too much stock in either side’s explanations. We’ll see in retrospect what happened.
Till then this dumb fucking battle will keep chewing through working class people from both sides for some random as backwater in Donbass. And then we’ll watch some more tens of thousands get slaughtered for Chasov Yar & Seversk and then Kramatorsk & Slavyansk and on and on.
this is the honest comment, what do we really know? workers are dying over bourgeois territorial control. does anyone here actually know someone from Donbass? like do they feel liberated yet as their homes lie in further ruins? wonder how they’ll get their lives back together after losing their economic/industrial center and their families through an entrenched DMZ border threatening nuclear standoff.
Thanks comrade. I feel like many people especially online, even from the ML spectrum, have fallen into this sports-team mentality, totally detaching from the horrific nature of this war.
That’s not to say both sides are the same, etc etc. We all know the causes of this war.
Still, we’ve seen the frontline move like 2km in a few selected places in the past 6 months and witnessed tens of thousands dying for it. How’s that cause for celebration from anyone? It’s fucking awful and senseless and certainly not proper for any principled communist to cheer this carnage on. An entire region of Ukraine is being rendered inhospitable for decades to come. Its people are displaced or fed into the meatgrinder. And for what exactly? To fight the “pedophile, gay satanists” in the West? To fight “Mongolic orcs” in the East? Dogshit.
And for what exactly? To fight the “pedophile, gay satanists” in the West? To fight “Mongolic orcs” in the East? Dogshit.
This is a reductionist framing. Communists everywhere are watching this conflict with bated breath because we want to believe the US war machine is on the outs. We want so badly to believe that the encirclement of China is a failure, that the US will not be able to continue to dominate the next century through military force nor through economic force. We interpret the conflict with much the same motivations that we interpret the dedollarization movement.
Communism is still fragile. Losing China to the West through war or through subversion would be a set back that would take decades, if not a century or more, to recover from. Emotionally, we are attached to the US losing this proxy war because of its implications for the future of global communism.
It has nothing to do with good vs evil, with dehumanization of the sides, nor with sports fanaticism. Sometimes it gets expressed in those ways, because of culture and psychology and because we’re on the socials, but these are aesthetic buffers to protect our psyches from the acknowledgement of the fear that if the US is triumphant here, then there will be darker times ahead of us and if the US fails here, and they don’t launch nukes, then there’s a chance they’re decline will be fast enough to avoid significant armed conflict with China and some of us may live to see a new stage of global human society.
