Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant.
Here's how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march.
A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe
If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn't make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.
If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.
We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs
The US funding and arming far right militias as a means of attacking a geopolitical rival has historically always been a good idea and resulted in very few consequences
If there are ever consequences the US will leverage the consequences into justification for their next imperial project. They literally cannot lose in this particular dynamic. Only multipolarity or the ceiling of profit they can extract via financialization will stall this empire. Luckily both are beginning to happen. Also I’m dumb, there’s probably other stuff too.
I’m a bit out of my depth here, I don’t know history enough and don’t retain knowledge well. I feel like monopolarity hasn’t been a great thing for anyone who isn’t part of the NATO aligned countries. The US has intentionally bombed and blockaded countries to the point of infrastructure collapse and kept them in this state sometimes for decades. We’ve supported and instigated coups that have been followed up with death squads murdering hundreds of thousands. On the other hand world wars have a huge death toll and a higher likelihood of life ending nuclear war. I feel like any perceived stability that comes with monopolarity is a mirage that only exists for a fraction of the population, and multipolarity while potentially deadly also represents a world where less powerful people and nations may find new options for support. Like many countries turning to the Chinese Yuan for global trade. Yet nuclear war and world war with their massive potential death toll seems real bad. Someone better at history and geopolitics help me determine what’s worse.
Afaik the hope isn't for stable mulipolarity, it's more that a multipolar world has a chance to free the planet from USian domination, and if the US hegemony further collapses it opens up the possibility of seriously addressing global warming, amidst other things.
So like you were saying, its more about opportunities for change, rather than an end unto itself. Believe me, I have really mixed feelings about this. I live in America, and am disabled, so a serious collapse or destruction of American power will probably be really bad for me personally, despite creating hope for the world. : p
Im not arguing for unipolarity and regardless of what anyone thinks or wants we’re heading in the one direction towards american decline and the rise of alternative power blocs. I just feel that people should have sober expectations about what that has historically meant