darkcalling
News of a big restoration of Lenin’s tomb has come out in the past week or so. More generally reverence for figures like Lenin or Stalin in capitalist Russia divorced from what they stood for.
It's interesting in itself that they choose to announce it. It's a soft declaration of war of sorts really and perhaps another step along the line to preparing their populations for open war with China (and perhaps Russia too at this point). They claim they're "hitting back" despite clearly hitting first but perhaps that's part of the plan too.
Good to point out that they've also publicly announced recruitment of spies from Russia and China with slickly produced, very publicly disseminated videos on social media trying to recruit people from both nations as well as open statements by US intelligence leadership that they're stepping up recruitment and targeting and claiming they're not meeting goals (never trust a liar). So they're very much making this an official cold war at the very least if not paving the way for stepping up to a hot war in future from these open acts of aggression.
Part of it may be messaging, they want the public, they want Hollywood "thriller" writers and such to notice these things and make more anti-China, anti-Russia content and for there to be this undercurrent of a sense of we're at war with China and Russia.
Once again evidence that Ukraine is being used by the west as a global tool for maintaining its hegemony. Even after the current regime falls I expect the west to move their heavily trained CIA specialists (swastika tattoos and all) to Africa or Asia to continue CIA backed operations aimed at enemy states and disrupting multi-polarity. It's a real problem because right now they're contained within Ukraine. Russian forces are unable to kill them in large numbers as they're used as blocking units and the first to fall back from the front while reluctant conscripts are the ones dying as canon fodder so it's very likely even in a fall of Berlin type scenario that the west organizes their evacuation and these types are never killed by Russia but moved to be assets elsewhere. As it was with the most heavily trained and raving fascists in other comprador states last century like south Vietnam, so it is today. Only this time thanks to the poor tracking of weapons deliveries to Ukraine they've managed to smuggle and set aside quite a dangerous high tech weapons cache for future use.
Thanks comrade. Hopefully it's the ideas and not because of my weird writing style though I guess it could be that too. That or the spelling mistakes...
China is trying hard to give the US a slow decline. They've taken direct hits themselves because they want to avoid the confrontation. This would result in a hard decoupling of the US. What would really matter is if India stands with Russia as the US can't afford to attack both. Their supply chains for drugs and electronics would cease to function.
What I worry will happen instead is this passes, the president has authority on how to implement and can grant waivers, they use it very harshly on China, exempt broad swathes of India and use it as a cudgel to beat on Europe further and force them into their orbit and into reliance on their expensive energy imports as well as beating on other countries that want to align with BRICS and Russia and China specifically and thus hastening the formation of a bloc system with increasingly high barriers to trade and India probably allowed to play neutral if they continue to help the west with reshoring from China to India.
So that's my issue, there's almost always discretion and waivers so in practice it would likely be used as an attack on China. They might even given individual Chinese companies waivers to attempt to pressure them to ensure they don't use Russian products or energy and some Chinese firms would absolutely take that deal to keep the US market.
So while I don't think this would make the US implode overnight from sanctioning everyone I do think it passing would be a real win to the war hawk freaks like Graham (one of the closest human beings to being some sort of demon who gets off only on suffering and pain and war) who are also proponents of a hard decoupling and a dramatic near-term confrontation with China and thus a sign of things to come in terms of US policy and intent towards a hard decoupling with China, formation of bloc system, cold war 2.0, then pick off and attempt to destroy the smaller parties in the China/Russia bloc with coups, direct wars/proxy wars, sanctions, color revolutions, etc to isolate, encircle, turn up the heat and destroy them.
They may also think they can engineer a sino-soviet type split between Russia and China but they're absolute fools for that. This won't cause that. If anyone is going to split it will be Russia from China as frankly they have more to gain and as a capitalist nation pushing increasingly reactionary culture on their people means they'll see some difference between themselves and China.
It's because China is selling itself as impartial. They are selling themselves as an alternative to the US who is well known for using sanctions against countries who displease them, countries who do things they don't like, countries run by people they dislike.
China's idea for peeling the world away from US hegemony is offering a better deal. To do that they feel a need to be consistent so that the US has absolutely no examples it can point to of them violating their policy of being impartial and neutral, of not conditioning trade ties on obeying Chinese edicts on domestic policy, on basically trading with everyone fairly and letting countries set their own policies and leaving it to be their internal business.
This kind of selling point is very attractive to many global south countries, some of which may be run by people who are oppressive, the gulf monarchies for example are a group China would like to at least pull closer to their corner.
The second they break this rule for any reason, people start asking questions about why they won't break it for reason x or for country C doing bad things and it becomes a hammer to hit China with from two fronts: 1) That they like the US will try and use their might to influence your domestic policy, that you risk becoming a vassal to China like with the US if you side with them 2) they start getting hammered for doing it in this instance but not in another instance and the US does it in that instance and they start comparing themselves and China starts looking badly and can either buckle and risk significant real-politik consequences being lured into a trap of sanctioning whoever the US pleases or having to weather that storm.
This is a consistent position that places them beyond the morality of individual nations. They believe they need to build their strength first and for US hegemony to cease before they can even conceive of using power that way because any early use and they risk people fleeing from them. Let's remember most nations are capitalist and already have a built-in wariness of siding with or being with a communist power like China over a capitalist one like the US.
Partially accurate username.
Needless to say this is horribly wrong. Reading Parenti would disabuse you of this to say nothing of actually reading Marx and understanding DiaMat.
Exactly. Russia had only bad choices. They tried to navigate them as best they could. With the benefit of hindsight it's easy to see that the west was playing them all along with the Minsk agreements and such but even if they'd had known that making the move was incredibly dangerous and the more time spent preparing the better.
Russia's hand was quite literally forced. Either stand up now at the last moment or be trod on for the next decade or more. Either way NATO would have won and that's what people saying Putin made this worse don't understand: the chessboard was already fixed. What Russia has pulled off instead we must be aware of is nothing short of a humiliation of NATO and the west so dire that they've nearly escalated to all out war against Russia and only Russian nukes prevent that. They have without intending to given hope to the global south, to anti-imperialist forces, to everyone who resists US/EU/NATO hegemony and that is worth more than a few more racist, reactionary Euro-nazi-lover nations officially joining NATO instead of maintaining a tactical neutrality.
Putin's fault for not allowing a Nazi regime on Russia's borders which would have been built up military for several more years then used to attack Russia after getting it into NATO and used as a potential springboard for an under 5 minutes nuclear decapitating strike on Moscow or something else equally deranged?
Putin was between a rock and a hard place, the objectively correct thing would have been to invade and subdue Ukraine in 2014 after the coup, to roll in and murder all the Nazis and dismantle their military but Russia foolishly got played into diplomacy stalling. Besides that objectively if Russia had done that in that year the sanctions against Russia at that time would have done far more damage, possibly would have destroyed Russia because at that time they hadn't had years of time to take steps to prepare and insulate themselves from the shock and pain.
It's NATO's fault. It's the Euro loser vassals' fault, it is the fault of the US. Russia really didn't have any good moves to make and every year it waited meant more Russians who would die in the fight against an increasingly more well armed and more well trained by the month military.
I'm sure Putin's security detail is taking adequate precautions against the treacherous and backstabbing west.
NATO war-mongering monsters are gearing up for a war of aggression again.
Whether it's actually with Russia or just a faint and the plans are to use it all against China is the debate to be had I suppose. They're totally deranged and totally in the thrall of the US, any sense of independence that people felt they were edging towards has been rightly relegated to the trash-bin as they remain committed to white, western supremacy at the expense of all else.
Now is the time for European comrades to agitate against the austerity being imposed to support funding all of this. Anything that even slows this program delays what may be a nuclear war.