I’ve genuinely yet to come across leftwingers who actually support Putin. Most of the hard left seems to be placing blame fairly jointly on Nato expansionism and dicking around in Ukraine and on Putin for starting a fucking war.
I’ve seen plenty of libs coming out with seriously fucked up and very racist stuff against Russians and by inference also against any non white country/refugees.
I have definitely seen r/genzdongers cheering the russian army as if it was cool and good. They behave like strawmen.
Not to mention GZDongers posting straight up Kadyrov PR vids or being friends with Russian nationalists. Like ok I enjoy seeing Azov getting slapped around too but the civvies don’t deserve this shit, and you certainly shouldn’t be siding with weirdo Putin loving Tsar supporters on this. Still posting there trying to make these zoomers understand what the “critical” part of critical support means lmao.
sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between opposing a fascist government and supporting the other bad government doing bad things to them. Especially when you’re young and likely to be contrarian and are constantly swamped in such violently racist ideology towards one side which doe snot deserve it. I’d argue a lot of younger online leftists are still kinda childish or not fully de-libified and their brain is operating the same sequence that leads to rooting for the empire in star wars. There’s also a certain amount of being told a russia suporter that makes you want to go “okay, maybe I am.”
This is exactly illustrated when you read the differences of positions illustrated by the international statements communist parties have put out on the topic with the parties representing the nation’s most oppressed by NATO’s economic and martial might either completely denouncing western imperialism as the cause of this conflict thereby supporting the actions of the Russian Federation by omission or outright and openly declare their support for the action as an anti-fascist and anti-imperialist war. And the parties that reside within NATO’s influence tend to adopt a stance that condemns both-sides and calls the conflict an inter-imperialist war while calling for all parties to adopt a position of anti-war and defeatism against their respective countries of residence.
Now on a broader scale, both communist perspectives condemn and fight against NATO - to what degree you would have to ask the actions each countries CPs are doing - but the ideological break between the international movement revolves around whether or not the current crisis calls for utilizing the lessons learned in ww1 or in ww2.
There’s consistently been a bit of tacit support for a Russian victory in the megathread here. While this is presented in terms of hoping it ends soon, it sometimes crosses into giving the Russian army the benefit of the doubt with regard to civilian deaths and other unsavory things as well as focusing only on Russia’s geopolitical justifications for the war.
I know it’s fucking exhausting to have to declare your disavowal of Putin before saying anything and that everywhere else is whole-hog into the NATO version of things, but it’s important to take a moment every now and then to remember that this is still an awful thing and not to get too caught up in contrarianism.
There is some pretty explicit putin war support right here on this very website lol.
Everything from actually thinking he is going to do a denazification to the weird ass “this is what happens when you poke the bear!!!” Idiocy. Whatever, nato bad, but supporting an extremely clear example of chauvinism is beyond me. Let these dumbasses kill each other and hope civs get the fuck out.
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