except many people slobbering at the mouth for a crushing russian victory clearly don’t understand it either lmao. Not as if they’ve been crawling out of the woodwork much to say that, from the pov of the russian working class, they would hope that the Russian working class also overthrows the Russian government. I also want Nato to lose, for obvious reasons. But it often looks on here like people saying they hope the Germans get defeated by the Romanovs but dont want the Romanov dynasty to fall because it would inevitably lead to a foreign intervention and imperialist domination of Russia, when the clear thing to want is that is fundamentally destabilizes both governments. But again, that’s not what alot of people on here have been suggesting wrt russia (hey maybe because its mainly alienated people shitposting). Tbf, the best arguments I can think of in defence of that is the absence of sufficient leftist presence in Russia (due to that not being allowed by the gov). But it does raise the obvious question of when we should support anti-government movements in other countries. Like many people here seem to perceive every movement in countries opposed by Nato as astroturfed CIA-plants. The later obviously exist as a matter of public record at large, politically important scales (Ukraine’s fascist coup d’était being the obvious example), but the latter normally need to latch on to and redirect organic social movements. Honestly I think alot of people just want to make the real world politics of this seem alot simplier and easier than it is from the comfort of their computer screens, abstracting from the messy detail by doing some geopolitical analysis.

Again, just to change the reference a bit to Iran and Syria, its really, really evident from how they talk about these issues that a bunch of people here have not really interacted with many people from these places, let alone been to them. Like would people here be making their Assad jokes to comrades who’ve come out of a Syrian prison, or iranian feminist activists who’ve been raped in prison? It’s obviously correct to not want Nato to intervene imperialistically in these countries affairs, and people in the west have a political responsibility to organize to prevent that, but many people on here who make the pro-russian/syrian/iranian comments are not even doing that. They’re playing video games and watching anime. Its important to be conscious of the fact that you’re then talking about yet more governments that use mass repression, killings, torture and rape prisons against masses of communist, socialist, anarchist, feminist and indigeneous activists and militants, and use the political power they have to crush genuinely progressive movements as well. They’d murder you in a heartbeat if necessary or convenient. The other side of the revolutionary defeatist equation is normally not being consistently brought up here either, nor the related question on what conditions make revolutionary situations possible in these countries, and so when and how to support them if possible in any way.

The irony is that many people are would then point out that the Russian Communist Party has a decently sized base in Russia, not realising how reactionary the current org bearing that name it (to not get into the details of the other groups), and how they are fully integrated into the current ruling regime in Russia, seen as a asset by Putin’s faction to bolsher United Russia.