Your description of the conditions is correct but your conclusion is a non-sequitur. It does not follow logically that the only or best option to stop those atrocities was to mass murder civilians. Despite what the propaganda about the bombings that has since been inculcated into the western public claims, they were not in fact necessary for compelling Japan's surrender. There were already internal disputes about this in the Japanese leadership for some time, but after their decisive defeat in Manchuria at the hands of the Red Army the decision to surrender as soon as possible became pretty much unanimous. Every day that went by was another day that the Soviets took more territory and came closer and closer - through the Kurils - to the Japanese home islands. The Japanese imperialists knew just as well as the Nazis that they stood a much better chance of avoiding punishment for their crimes (and some of them even being allowed to retain some power in the post war state) if they surrendered to the US rather than the USSR. Moreover we now know that the US leaders knew this. Their primary motivations were to have a live weapons test and to intimidate the Soviet Union.

It's one thing for Europeans to think that way, i expect it of them, the racism and the cultural superiority complex, but what makes me really mad is when non-Europeans internalize that shit, looking down on and denigrating their own cultures while idolizing and worshiping the culture of the colonizers. And it's not just the arts, i mean worshiping in the literal sense too. So many colonized peoples have literally adopted even the religion of the colonizers, and now hold on to it as an integral part of their own identity even though it was forced on their ancestors by the sword, with mass genocide, torture and brainwashing camps (the so called "mission schools"). I mean just think about how twisted it is that in the US the overwhelming majority of the descendants of slaves abducted from Africa now worship the god of the slavers...

Lol at the one lurker lib yet again obsessively downvoting every single comment here.

This reminds me of when top Kiev officials announced that Crimea has already been liberated "in our hearts".

I guess the job is basically done then eh? Time to declare victory. Mission accomplished boys!

Good on you. I left Reddit when they locked Genzedong and i never looked back. It is such a breath of fresh air to be free of that toxic cesspit. It's not just the regular users who are awful, the mods are even worse, and the entire site is heavily controlled by three letter agency employes.

As to their "argument" against the SMO, it is totally moronic. Denazification is the best conceivable reason for starting a military operation. No sane country should tolerate a militarized Nazi regime on their border.

Also there's the little detail that the "WMDs" were a lie while the Nazification of Ukraine was so obvious even the western media were writing about it, and they are still forced to address it because every time they take a photo of Kiev regime soldiers - surprise, suprise! - there is some swastika, iron cross or SS badge that the western media need to twist themselves into knots to handwave away or justify.

And it's not just the Nazi problem and the NATO issue, far too many people omit what is probably THE main reason for why Russia HAD to intervene when they did, namely the eight year long war waged by the Kiev Nazis on the people of the Donbass.

However this, just like arguments about Nazis and NATO expansion, is pointless to bring up when talking to Redditors and will just fall on deaf ears because they do not view Russians and pro-Russian East Ukrainians as human, nor will they ever acknowledge that Russia has a right to have national security concerns and vital interests, let alone a right to act to address these when the West refuses to take them seriously.

Complete nonsense.

They comply with UN sanctions. Unfortunately these are very hard to reverse and it would be impossible for China to continue to credibly championing the UN and international law as opposed to the West's "rules based order" without abiding by UN resolutions. Much of the global south is still being regularly blackmailed and pressured by the US into voting the way the US wants them to in the UN. Over time this will slowly change as the US grows weaker and the global south stronger and more independent, and then these unjust and absurd sanctions will be lifted because most of the world has no issues with the DPRK.

Wrong in what sense? Morally? I don't know how an emotion can be morally wrong. Practically? Probably yes, it just seems like a waste of your emotional energies. I don't think anarchists are important enough to warrant thinking about so much and having such intense emotions about. I don't see how it is productive. Righteous anger can be a very useful motivator, sure, but i think it is better directed against institutions and people with real power, not larpy kids.

I mean at the end of the day what is the point of hating anarchists? Besides, there are some of them who do fairly good work in organizing and anti-fascist action. Why hate someone that you may want or need to work together with on occasion? Of course they are going to have their cringe moments sometimes, and when they do and they turn out to be incorrigibly annoying you just shake your head at them in disappointment like the children they are and move on.

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.

I had to consider whether to even bother to respond to this because it contains so many thoroughly debunked anti-China propaganda talking points, including pro-terrorist apologia, that there is a high chance this is just another troll who is trying to throw out as much bullshit as possible and see what sticks. However in the interest of educating newer comrades who have not encountered these vile distortions of reality before and are confused i will say a few things:

1. China is NOT an ethnostate. It is not a state of and for the Han ethnicity. China is a multi-ethnic, pluralistic nation with many national minorities and religions. China strives for harmony between all ethnic and religious groups within its borders. Tibet is and has been for hundreds of years a historic and integral part of China. The Tibetan people are no less part of the Chinese nation than any other ethnic group in China. The same goes for all of the other regions that were mentioned. The people of these regions see themselves as Chinese. The so-called "independence movements" for these regions exist almost exclusively outside of China and are highly astroturfed and propped up by the West, financed by CIA cutouts like the NED and composed largely of a mix of religious extremists, criminals who were marginalized from Chinese society, and disgruntled anti-communist diaspora (such as former landlords and other such types of people that Cubans would call "gusanos") that have not lived in China for generations.

2. There is NO such thing "East Turkestan", that is a made up name that separatists and terrorists who are seeking the breakup of China use to refer to China's Xinjiang province. The use of this term is strong indication that one is dealing with a fanatical anti-China ideologue who sympathizes with ETIM terrorists, a group trained by Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria under programs designed by western intelligence agencies to wage a campaign of terror and violent separatism in China. The exact same kind of campaign was waged by the CIA in the 1950s to try and incite violent separatism in Tibet and it too failed.

3. China does NOT "force minorities to abandon their language and culture", in fact this lie is so perverse it is a complete inversion of reality. China does the exact opposite, it celebrates and protects BY LAW minority cultures and languages. It has extensive affirmative action programs for national minorities from economic benefits and tax breaks to cheaper or free education and preferential priority in a vast number of economic and social programs (including, when that the policy was still in effect, being exempt from the One Child Policy). Minority provinces in China use at least two official languages, oftentimes even more, and the minority languages are represented even on China's currency. There is education in minority languages as well as the national language, the latter being highly beneficial for minorities to efficiently integrate into the national economy and have the same opportunities as everyone else.

4. A country cannot invade itself. China's Taiwan is an integral part of China. This is internationally recognized by not only the UN but all major nations (including the US), as well as both the government of the PRC and the government of Taiwan province. The existence of an autonomous government in Taiwan is nothing more than an artifact of the civil war, and it has only existed for as long as it has due to malicious US interference. The complete reunification of China, besides being the inevitable trajectory of history, is solely an internal Chinese matter which outside forces have no business interfering in.

5. There is no such thing as the "CCP", the official designation of China's ruling party is the CPC, the Communist Party of China. The erroneous abbreviation is commonly used by racist sinophobes as an insult to the Chinese nation. Conflating China with "the CCP" and attributing the actions of China's government to the supposed intentions of "the CCP" is part and parcel of the strategy of delegitimizing in the collective consciousness of the victims of the West's anti-China propaganda the legitimate government of the People's Republic of China.

6. The claim that China wants complete control of the South China sea is a baseless lie. China has made no such claims. Whatever minor disputes exist between the nations which border the South China Sea (and these exist also between the other nations there, just as they occasionally appear almost anywhere around the world where different nations border the same body of water) are for these countries to resolve between themselves and are no business of any nations foreign to the region. One thing that must be clear however is that China will not allow the US to militarize the South China Sea and thereby threaten their national security.

7. Communists support proletarian democracy. We do not believe that we can achieve our goals through bourgeois elections because this is a system designed by and for the bourgeoisie that is intrinsically hostile to the interests of the working class. "Electoralism" is a strategy that has proven to be inadequate and insufficient for advancing and protecting the interests of the working class. However we are not opposed to the concept of elections. Both the PRC and the USSR have/had elections. They are/were proletarian democracies. The problem is that there is a huge amount of ignorance about how these systems actually work/worked.

8. Communists support national liberation and self-determination. We do not support bourgeois nationalism and astroturfed "independence" movements that are designed to weaken, break up and balkanize the adversaries of imperialism for easier subjugation and plunder. There is strength in the unity of peoples. The imperialists have a vested interest in undermining that unity because divided people are easier to control. By no objective measure can it be claimed that the working class of the former Soviet Socialist Republics or of Yugoslavia, both now divided, are better off today. The only ones who benefited were the national bourgeoisie and the western imperialists who plundered and subjugated the disunited peoples of those former socialist states. The working class of these states instead got fratricidal wars, brutal neoliberal austerity, and comprador puppet regimes.

9. "Authoritarianism" is a spook. It is a meaningless accusation. All exercise of collective or state power is "authoritarian". The imposition of the democratic will of the majority over a minority is "authoritarian". So-called "liberal democracies" are no less and in many cases far more "authoritarian" than socialist states. In this case the authority is that of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie imposed by the violence of the bourgeois state upon the working class. Communists seek to invert this relationship and impose upon the bourgeoisie the authority of the working class - that is the vast majority of the population and the class which actually produces value through its labor as opposed to parasitically stealing it from others - through the instrument of the proletarian state.

10. We do not oppose the "right to protest", we oppose the notion that the enemies of the proletariat should have the right to undertake subversive and hostile activities with the purpose of sabotaging or overthrowing socialist societies for the benefit of parasitic capitalists and foreign imperialists seeking to restore the working class to its former subjugation. But tell me, where is the right of the working class to protest its subjugation under capitalism? Only insofar as no real threat is posed is this ever allowed, but when the power and wealth of capital is threatened the working class is immediately faced with brutal repression by police, the guard dogs of capital. And where is the right to protest the warmongering imperialist policies of the West today? Doing so in the West today gets you branded a Russian/Chinese collaborator, and in many European states you can even get sent to prison for merely speaking out against their vile war propaganda. Exposing the lies and crimes of the US war machine oftentimes gets you imprisoned and tortured if not outright killed.

11. We do not "revere" either the PRC or the USSR, we simply see them as examples of how things can be done better than they are under capitalism and "liberal democracy". There are always things to improve on and as communists we will always try to engage critically and analyze what can be improved or done better. The CPC is the prime example of this. They have spent a great deal of time learning from the mistakes of the CPSU and have achieved great success as a result. Their historic and undeniable achievements are precisely why the imperialists fear and hate them so much, why they invest so much effort into disseminating and convincing you of these talking points that you parrot here. Because by being a positive role model for others around the world of what a country can build for its people using a model radically different than neo-colonialism and neoliberal parasitism, China, like the USSR before it, poses an existential threat to parasitic capital and the West's global empire of misery, death and destruction.

12. Simply repeating the magic words "authoritarian" and "authoritarianism" adds nothing of substance to your argument. There is nothing more inherently "authoritarian" about what socialist states do and have done than what any "liberal democracy" does on a regular basis. Go read Friedrich Engels' short essay "On Authority". Socialism is the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, nothing more, nothing less.

And no, we don't support "the rights of Palestinians" because that is too vague and too liberal a formulation. We support the total and complete liberation of all of Palestine - from the river to the sea! - from the genocidal, racist and illegal settler colonial occupation.

Let us know when you update to 1.20, i think some of us will be wanting to join when that happens.

Whitelist for sure. The easiest way to vet people is to require PMs from applicants and look at how long they have been on Lemmygrad for. Trolls are likely to be new accounts with very little to no history of posts/comments. If you want to let in people from outside the Lemmygrad community they should be vouched for by an older member.

Updating to 1.20 should be ok. There were no major changes to world gen and the update seems stable.

"Tankie" is a meaningless term. The PRC has a system that is right for China. Attempts to copy-paste a system that was designed for different historical and material conditions than your own will produce suboptimal results. Every country needs to arrive at a solution to the problem of building socialism that is built on a solid dialectical materialist analysis and adapted to their particular circumstances.

Doesn't prove anything except that if the CIA (or more likely the MI6 and the SBU) did have a hand in it they were outplayed. If the Kremlin and Russian society in general had reacted differently the West could easily have gotten its wish for bloodshed fulfilled. A more insecure government may have reflexively resorted to immediate use of force.

It is an interesting thought experiment for instance to think about how the US government would have reacted if ten thousand Blackwater mercenaries armed with heavy military equipment took over Boston and were rolling down the highway towards Washington demanding the resignation of the Secretary of Defense and top Pentagon generals.

As for the West's hostility toward Belarus, that is something that can switch on a dime if the color revolution that they have already tried to pull off once and will certainly try again in the future works out. They are even preparing for the possibility of a military overthrow using armed Belarussian dissidents out of Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania if they perceive that the Belarussian state is sufficiently weak. A Belarus under a puppet regime that is totally subservient to the West would not be considered hostile anymore, it would immediately start to do what Ukraine's regime did after 2014 which is cut ties with whoever the West tells them to cut ties with - i.e. Russia and China - and will go on to implement brutal neoliberal reforms on the economy, dismantle its industries and sell the country off to Western corporate and financial interests.

The possibility that this succeeds is very low for the time being, so long as Russia remains stable and strong they will never allow that to happen, just like they didn't in Kazakhstan. But Belarus needs to stay vigilant because the West may get desperate enough to try to roll the dice on some foolish gambit.

Hopefully someone who is equally or more dependable when it comes to staying vigilant about imperialist regime change attempts, keeping western NGOs and other neoliberal influence tentacles at bay, and resisting the pressure to liberalize the economy. At the same time hopefully being less of a cringe reactionary grandpa than Lukashenko when it comes to LGBT stuff. A lot can be learned from China, Cuba and Vietnam in this regard, all of whom are managing to make quiet but steady progress in this regard without giving in to rainbow imperialism or emulating the West's liberal identity politics that just create a culture war which polarizes the society.

However i am afraid that might just be a bit of idealistic wishful thinking on my part, i am not even sure there will be another leader of an independent Belarus after Luka. The Union State with Russia is probably going to evolve more and more toward a real merger of the two. Belarus is likely going to be going in the same direction as Russia, both socially and economically, so the real question is: which direction is Russia going to go in after Putin? As long as he is in charge it will be status quo, which is both good and bad, but just like Xi his age probably means that he will be retiring sometime this decade.

Interesting things are happening in the world today already and in the future things will get even more interesting. We're at a real crossroads moment in history.

Clearly it was a poor decision to have that command be useable by anyone. It should be exclusive to the server's mods so that images can be vetted.

If that is not possible or not within your skill set to do then it may be wise to just switch the plugin off altogether until a safe solution can be found.

You really need to prevent people without OP rights from being able to give commands to the server. Can't allow just anyone to be able to upload images. Need much stronger anti-griefing protections. Was considering joining for a while but i'm sorry to say this looks amateurishly managed at the moment. Luckily the troll was an amateur too, you got away easy this time. Could have been much worse, could even have gotten the server admin into legal trouble if they uploaded illegal materials. Communists need to take OpSec seriously.

In fact one of the most interesting things you will find if you actually analyze the positions of the KPRF today and what their ideas are about how to build a modern socialist economy and society you will find that they resemble to a surprising degree the ideas of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. This is of course a point of contention for some ultra-orthodox MLs, the Hoxhaist types who call the CPC capitalist and/or revisionist, but it is a sign that the Russian communists have done a lot of work figuring out what went wrong in the USSR and trying to understand what can be done better the next time around.

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.