A court in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod has jailed a woman for wearing rainbow earrings, the human rights group Egida reported late Wednesday, marking the second case of its kind after Russia banned the so-called “LGBT movement” as an “extremist” organization in November. According ...
ngl russia is not making it easy to give critical support lol
Not directed at you OP, but just a general observation: I still don’t understand why so many Western leftists see things in such a black and white manner. This is especially true from my interactions with Americans in general, it’s almost always “the good guys” vs “the bad guys”, nothing in between.
You can absolute support Russia’s anti-imperialist goals while rejecting all their other reactionary views. The same can be said for support for the anti-imperialist causes of the Palestinians, Iranians, Lebanese, Algerians etc. You don’t have to like them, you just need to acknowledge that this is a historical process that is inevitable.
In my opinion, this is where the strengths of Marxism-Leninism lie, which provides a scientific and materialist lens to understand the world. The question to ask is not: should we support reactionary Global South countries against Western imperialism? The questions we should ask are: why have progressive movements that had proliferated throughout the 20th century across the Global South been largely obliterated? What was the historical and the objective process that had led to the demise of progressive politics and left-wing movements, and the rise of conservatism in the Global South, especially after 1990? What are the root causes underlying these symptoms and what is the process required to cultivate the very material conditions necessary to enable the growth of left-wing political movements in the Global South?
Like medical sciences, scientific socialism allows us to separate the root causes of the disease from a collection of symptoms, thus enabling us to find ways to cure the disease instead of merely treating the symptoms.
Maybe because if your lgbtq putting people in jail for wearing rainbow colors really isn't much more complicated than "bad guys"
It's the whole "The enemy of my enemy is my enemies enemy and nothing more"
Like if a nation would label you an extremist political organization and jail you for not being straight they're gonna have to do something other than happening to coincidently be opposed to NATO before you start singing their praises.
Doesn't mean you think nato should be running the country or expanding military bases but if you want to talk about being able to view it as more than "good guys" and "bad guys" being able to say "both these people are dogshit for different reasons" seems sufficiently nuanced
I come from and have lived many years of my life in the so-called Global South countries. Progressive movements have always existed throughout the Global South. Incidentally, they were all crushed - directly or directly - by Western imperialist powers. Perhaps not as brutal as those were in Afghanistan or Chile, or Indonesia even a decade earlier, but they were crushed nonetheless and the situation allowed reactionary forces to take power, which again conveniently benefited the foreign imperialists. All these countries are now conservative shitholes that you’d claim to be the “bad guys” in your book.
All the left-wing leaders that ever came into power had to face economic threats that forced them to more or less commit to austerity simply to survive. The end result? Left wing governments achieved nothing and only stoked further economic despair, allowing right wing forces to exploit and come into power.
Do you think Argentinians are simply so stupid that they elected the crazy libertarian as their leader? Or do you think there is a much longer history underlying the failures of left wing reforms in the Global South?
Tell us, what are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to just “be better”? Every time we have a left wing movement growing that wants to assert sovereignty (which almost certainly means threatening the interests of the Western imperialists), they get crushed one way or the other.
At the end of the day, trust me, if you had lived in Russia, unless you are part of the wealthy elites, you’d much rather live under the stability of Putin’s rule, conservative as it is, than the absolute madness and poverty of 1990s Yeltsin era, when simply walking down the street for being a minority can get you murdered by literal neo-Nazis, when child prostitution literally re-emerged after many decades of prosperity. Ah yes, so progressive of Russia to let the Western liberals in. There is a reason why Gorbachev and Yeltsin are the two most hated leaders in Russia.
This is why there is such a stark contrast in opinion between leftists in the imperial core and the peripheral, developing world when it comes to the Ukraine War. There is a reason why all the AES countries almost immediately came to an understanding with Russia’s plight when the Ukraine War started. The people who have been victims of abuse know that if one day, another victim kills the abuser out of rage, everyone immediately understands that the abuser had it coming. Nearly every country in the Global South stood with Russia and refused to impose sanctions, despite the demands of their Western imperialist masters. Leftists who live in the imperial core and still don’t understand why this is the case simply reveal their complete ignorance of what it means to be a leftist in the Global South.
Well if you think Russia is bad, wait till you hear of all the countries the US is giving money to. Russia destroying the us would lead to more LGBTQ people worldwide having better conditions than now.
Not because Russia is "good" or the us is "bad" but because the US is funding fascist regimes and reactionary movements across the world, which Russia does not have the resources to do
I think she just means "dualism" in the sense of the metaphysical view that the world is composed of opposite forces in all things: good and evil, light and dark, mental and physical, chad and soy, etc.
I think they might mean a the belief some people have of an independent morality from any earthly actions a person performs. As in, there's a mind you have with intentions and you're morally just so long as your intentions are good, regardless of what you're actually acting on the behalf of. American liberals sometimes do this to assuage their cognitive dissonance