if you were very recently defending Putin in Russia and dismissing a sea of reports of atrocities against Ukrainian civilians as propaganda, forgive me if I doubt that your commitment to protecting civilians is truly genuine
What’s happening in Gaza is utterly disgusting and evil - and I also do NOT trust the people who I vividly remember defending Russia’s actions in Ukraine and Assad’s in Syria who now claim to passionately care about the murder of civilians in Gaza.
I remember someone On Here claiming that Russia wasn't as bad as the US because only the US had 'turned whole cities and regions to rubble'--and I'm just like... Aleppo? Mariupol? Grozny?
The breadth of atrocity denial from some folks is truly astonishing.
Well, that's not imperialism because... something something, they're not that far away...? (I've literally seen people argue that Russia was never an empire because it wasn't an *overseas* empire).
They did a reasonable job considering their starting point! The republic’s naval history during the Punic wars is fascinating because they were awful at it… and yet they managed to win by inventing a way to make sea battles more like land battles.
*ahem* sorry, my classics majorness is leaking.
the thing that bugs me about the whole "imperialism is when boat" discourse is that it specifically obscures the degree to which imperialism has characterized much of human history
I have seen an actual cogent and coherent argument to be made that the Boers and Russians were not engaged in imperialism, but it was not even wrong, and this thread is hurting me by reminding me of it.
By the standards of today's tankies, the U.S. would have been "anti-imperialist" at the height of Manifest Destiny in the 19th century because it only expanded regionally, it was a net debtor, and it was challenging the hegemony of the world's greatest naval, commercial and financial power.
Weird how often you can come up with screwed-up answers regarding imperialism if you neglect to respect the humanity of the people on the wrong end of the guns
Yes! I've heard the "it's only imperialism if it comes from the imperialism region of DC and northern Virginia, anything else must be understood through regional power dynamics..." argument, and it made my brain hurt.
I think what always gets me is that when these campists start talking about their favourite regimes, they go from Che Guevara to Henry Kissinger, often in the same sentence.
