Just got sent this, getting myself some popcorn for the inevitable cringe
Just got sent this, getting myself some popcorn for the inevitable cringe
Early on June 24, Vladimir Putin addressed Russia about the unfolding rebellion of the Wagner private military company, saying that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion is “pushing the country toward anar...
Weapons grade cringe. Hard to believe how these people can be so eager for civil war and the complete breakdown of order in their society while their country is in an existential conflict with a literal fascist state and the entire imperialist West behind it. But of course we know from history that anarchists have this tendency, as even while the Bolsheviks were busy defending the newly established Soviet state against the white reaction and the imperialist intervention forces, anarchists were doing their best to sabotage them every way.
Also, lol at the idea of defending against Wagner and/or state forces' tanks and artillery with "solidarity and mutual aid". Sure buddy... Are we sure these are adults and not children writing this? Or have they just been bought off by the CIA? Luckily these people are tiny and fringe groups that will never amount to anything.
It becomes immediately obvious why the Russian people don't take anarchists seriously. Compare this nonsense to the much more mature and sensible statement put out by the Communist Party under Zyuganov who are certainly no fans of Putin...it's clear who the serious people and who the clowns are, and why it is the communists who have widespread popular support and not the anarchists.
Isn’t the Communist Party in Russia basically controlled, nationalistic opposition, which wants a return to the Soviet Union because of tradition, not class struggle?
I might be wrong- I am not very well informed about this.
No, absolutely not. That is a completely false propaganda narrative that has been fabricated specifically in order to fool gullible western leftists (radlibs and ultras especially) into not supporting one of the biggest and still among the most active and politically vital communist parties in the world today. It's no different from the narrative which claims that the PRC has turned capitalist and is therefore not deserving of the anti-capitalist left's support.
We see this exact same trick being played on western leftists with virtually every politically relevant communist or socialist party in the global south. They all get painted as "fake communists", "revisionist", "nationalist" or any number of other excuses to get well meaning but ignorant and misinformed leftists in the imperial core to become totally nihilistic and demoralized and only support the most fringe and insignificant groups that have no real world impact. Unfortunately it seems to have worked.
Mind you, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is not perfect and there are definitely some positions they have taken which they deserve to be criticized for, but they are effectively the only real opposition to Putin that exists in Russia. All the rest, the so-called "liberal opposition" are overwhelmingly astroturfed with very little organic support in Russia and mostly propped up by western and western-affiliated NGOs and money from western intelligence cutouts like the NED.
Ah, such cute naiveity.
Quick read through, and this doesn’t seem all that cringe. Granted, I stopped at only the first paragraph of the first group, but their analysis of how both Putin and Wagner (representing the United States now) are both reactionary seems correct.
“Solidarity and mutual aid” can’t defeat military forces, but they can definitely relieve the suffering they cause. Mutual aid is done as a form of political agitation, so it makes sense to do it here.
I can’t help but feel there’s an inclination to make fun of anarchists without considering why they say the things they do, an inclination that is going to stunt our capability to really criticize them. There’s an almost ultra-left bent to how we criticize Anarchists, preferring instead to oppose their actions on ideological principle, rather than their actual flaws.
I have since finished reading the article and the only cringe was the call to attack Russian military infrastructure. That’s weird and would aid US imperialism. Everything else was reasonable. The calls for mutual aid and solidarity as “weapons” seemed to be about using them as weapons against the suffering of conflict, not actually about using them as weapons against Wagner or the Russian military.
Most statements about how good anarchy would be seem to come with the implication that what would arise from a conflict between Putin and Wagner wasn’t anarchy, but rather, violence, and that based on this, Putin’s statement wasn’t technically correct. There would not be anarchy, just suffering.
Granted, I stopped at only the first paragraph of the first group
You made it past the second paragraph and didn't cringe at this reactionary word salad?
This is a misuse of words. Fratricide has long been the rule under Putin. Torturing and assassinating dissidents was fratricide. Invading Ukraine was fratricide. Both the Wagner company and the Russian military have made fratricide their profession. Anarchy is the opposite of fratricide: it is the condition that prevails when people do not compete to rule each other. Totalitarianism always leads to bloody conflicts over power.
The biggest issue is the attempt to "both sides" the Ukraine conflict which requires that one completely ignores the fascist nature of the post-Maidan Ukrainian regime, its genocidal attacks on the Donbass, and NATO's aggressive expansion and crossing of Russian national security red lines. No Russian state could have done anything less than this one did and still survive. In fact a socialist government would likely have intervened much sooner.
This is a bunch of ideological platitudes and cliches that do not actually engage in any serious analysis of either the Wagner incident, the Putin government, or the Ukraine conflict, or how any of this fits in to the larger geopolitical picture of the confrontation between imperialism and the nascent anti-imperialist bloc of the global south led by China and Russia. In this context any internal instability in Russia is only playing into the hands of those who want to see it destroyed and/or reduced back to humiliating conditions like those in the 1990s, not to mention that it would leave much more vulnerable all of the countries which currently receive support from Russia in resisting western imperialism.
I also see why they had to quote a group from some far off eastern region of Russia which is distant from the Donbass because people who are actually from regions closer to Ukraine have much more intimate familiarity (including literal familial ties) with what has been happening there for the past nine years. Many Russians who have ties to family and friends in the Donbass know just how unacceptable it was for those conditions to continue... or worse, for the all out attack with the amassed arsenal, expanded military and training that the West had been providing and which the Kiev regime had planned in order to crush the Donbass republics and violently ethnically cleanse those regions to happen.
If Russia had not pre-empted that attack they would still have had to intervene (because if they didn't Russian society would have revolted, not to mention it would have emboldened the Kiev regime to go even further and try and seize Crimea by force as well, as that was always their plan and they still haven't given up on it) but instead they would have to try and dislodge the Nazi forces from the highly populated Donetsk city which would have resulted in its complete destruction as we saw with Artyomovsk that they cling to literally every building and street like parasitic ticks until everything is in ruins, meanwhile they abuse, rob and murder the local population whom they hate and see as Russians or Russian sympathizers. Imagine how much greater in scale and brutality the atrocities would have been if the Nazis had been allowed to enter Donetsk city - where they still keep shelling civilians even as they have a worsening shortage of shells because that is how much they hate those people for resisting them for eight years - before Russia intervened.