Think about it.
First of all, it had to resort to supporting Nazis to overthrow the Ukrainian government in 2014. While Western collaboration with Nazis is nothing new, it still goes to show how far they’re willing to go to terrorize the world. When the Russian majority in Crimea overwhelmingly voted to join Russia, instead of praising the outcome of a democratically held election on the basis of self determination, it condemned Russia and yelled “fake referendum”. So much for their ideals of “freedom and democracy”.
Now compare that to the situation regarding the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Armenia invaded Azerbaijan in the 1990s to support its ethnic minority in Karabakh. Unlike Crimea, that was not done via referendum and was extremely bloody, with the Azeri population around Karabakh displaced from their homes. Now Azerbaijan is taking it back. If the West applied its own logic to this conflict, they’d be praising Azerbaijan similar to how they’re praising Ukraine. Instead Westerners think this a conflict between Christians and Muslims and default to at least verbally supporting Armenia, even though it has nothing to do with religion whatsoever.
The geopolitics are different with Armenia being part of CSTO so we didn’t see the West sending arms to Armenia but the point is you either support the rights of ethnic minorities or you support the “territorial integrity” of a country. You can’t have it both ways.
Then there’s Syria. The West has been accusing Assad of using chemical weapons, even though the UN has confirmed that Syria destroyed its stockpile in 2013 after the first round of accusations came. The West however was apparently too lazy to come up with another lie and kept insisting that Assad uses chemical weapons. Meanwhile the US has actually used chemical weapons against entire cities in Syria in their so called fight against ISIS (not to mention other conflicts like Vietnam) which was actually just a pretense to occupy Syria’s oilfields and stop Iranian support by blocking Syria’s main border crossing with Iraq.
Iraq of course. WMDs!!! 9/11!!! Saddam supports al-Qaeda!!! All just lies and they’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people over them.
The list goes on. There will never be peace on this planet with these insects being able to do whatever they want.
Now Ukraine’s army has lost all its offensive capabilities and Zelensky is asking for more and more weapons. Meanwhile Ukraine’s manpower is getting more and more depleted to the point where they feel the need to kidnap random civilians and force recruit them into their pathetic army.
Imagine the shitstorm that will happen after Ukraine is forced to surrender. It’ll be the second major defeat for the US after it lost in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile China and third world countries are becoming more and more powerful, with many countries in Africa abandoning Western neocolonialism. BRICS is expanding and the world is becoming more multipolar.
Remember, the wealth of the first world is a direct result of the exploitation of the third world. In a multipolar world, this won’t be possible anymore. These conflicts are just the last hurray and last ditch effort for the West to remain relevant.
Don’t forget that Ukraine supplies a quarter of the world’s grain and with it gone, we will see food shortages in Western countries. Which will only worsen the cost of living crisis. That mixed with the upcoming recession won’t end well for the Western world.
The US also has for decades, if not centuries created a system that ensures that its population keeps fighting each other rather than its overlords. See Democrats vs Republicans. This has now gone to such lengths that the latter has been arming for civil war and gone to fanatical lengths defending their favorite candidates that are turning more fascist by the day. It’s the perfect example of why fascism is capitalism in decay. That civil war may actually come and if it does, the collapse of the US is a very real possibility. The defeat in Ukraine will only accelerate this.
With the US gone, Europe will become more independent. I’d imagine some countries would be willing to accept this new multipolar world, while others won’t. The US meanwhile will collapse similar to how the USSR collapsed, except it probably won’t happen peacefully. After that, imagine 90s Russia under Yeltsin and CIS countries but applied to North America. We communists will finally have the last laugh. Too bad that it’ll suck for those of us living in these places.
I think this post is a little too , every time in the past the west showed weakness like this communists thought they were about to collapse then too, but the capitalists are extremely competent at somehow squeezing blood from a stone and managing to maintain their dominance. Only thing that gives me hope today is that I’m not sure we’ve ever seen the ruling class be so delusional in that they really seem to have swallowed their own propaganda meant to trick the proletariat, and that they truly believe that neo liberalism is like magic and they don’t actually need to change their strategies this time, a Hexbear user wrote a great comment a few weeks ago about how if competent leaders come to power in the west they can still turn it around, I’ll try and go find it.
Edit: found it https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/1909868
“Never celebrate a victory until you’re standing over the podium,” was something my mother would say.
Saying “the West is done”, just like the “dead horse” that is Communism (that, while “being done,” still terrifies the imperialists to beat this supposed dead horse) is not prudent. They’ve gotten out of tough spots before, so we must first watch and wait.
Agree, but I think there’s a demonstrable difference between now and, say, the 1960s. For the first time, the socialist bloc is on an equal economic footing with the west, and the west depends on the socialist bloc to stay afloat. Once upon a time, the IMF was giving loans to Yugoslavia; now China is buying American debt. The same people who used to mock Soviet cars and “backward” Soviet computer technology are now freaking out over Huawei and Chinese electric cars. Even western military dominance is no longer what it once was. America and Europe are both utterly unable to match Russian production (a fact which makes the whole lend-lease argument that libs like to deploy sound increasingly like the whining of a bitter ex), and north Korea, a country that has been sanctioned to hell and back, is still able to field more advanced missiles than the US military. The US is having unprecedented economic problems. People compare it to the Depression, but there’s an important difference: during the 1930s, the US still had the most advanced industrial base in the world. Now, it has almost nothing, and American wealth is based solely on financial speculation.
Not to peddle hopium here, but I think we do need to recognize that we are living in an objectively different world than that which existed at any time during the Cold War and the Clinton-Bush II years.
“The US has to resort to lying so they must be doomed”
The imperialists have always lied, that is not indicative of a current weakness. You mentioned the government’s diversion of discontent into electoral politics, but that just shows they can adapt. My hope comes more from the increasing radicalization of the youth, and the decaying living conditions that are part of a revolutionary situation.
This is a dangerous assertion to make, in part because it is still too early and uncertain to say very much about BRICS, in part because apparent collapse is indistinguishable from the natural development of sufficiently advanced capitalism
Yes, that’s a very good point about collapse and the natural course of capitalism being indistinguishable. Or perhaps the collapse started exactly 15 years ago (plus a week or two) and we’re still in the middle of it now? I wouldn’t be surprised if future historians picked September 2008 as the beginning of the end.
I’m sure many were just as hopeful in the 50s and to some extent into the 60s. A proper socialist bloc forming, the USSR making friends and allies all around, imperialists resorting to lying, distortions and hypocricy to retain their power. The US is on the brink of societal collapse due to the contradictions of its racial policies, colonies breaking their shackles and so on.
I’m not saying the things you’ve lissted aren’t supposed to give you hope, but they’re not supposed to give false hope. In 2020 the US went through an extreme economic instability and through a pittance to the common folk and a media campaign they survived without a hitch. They aren’t collapsing any more than they were in the decade prior, they’re merely deteriorating at pace. Same story in europe.
BRICS and multipolarity are similar in that respect. These are saplings that were planted decades ago and will bear fruit in the coming decades, not a unified socialist bloc that can act together rhe next day, or even the next year. Best case scenario in the short term is that we’ll see them rejection western advances and demands while reducing conflicts between each other in small steps year by year.
I’ll admit, one thing that gives me genuine, short-term hope is the developments in Niger and Gabon, on top of Mali and Burkina Faso of course. I wish to see a domino effect in other neo-colonies. I’m doubtful, yet living in hope.
I think China’s analysis that the bloc system doesn’t work is on point. The new formation is porous on purpose and it seems to be working.
Just to start pulling on the thread. Xi has at least 2 speeches saying that the bloc formation must be rejected. I can’t find much good shit on Google and I am on my phone. Maybe another comrade can pull some sources from RedSails, Marxists.org, or something similar.
While true, I think the difference here really is China. The USSR was the first. It’s failure was baked in from it’s origins and manifested with the failure to transition power to non-deviated communists after Stalin died.
China, however, adopted some rectification processes that allowed it to survive and adapt from failed starting points. It learned from the USSR in this way. It was dicey up until the 80s. But what we’ve seen since then is that they have truly out maneuvered the West.
At this point, the only things that can stop China are an insidious and hidden internal deviation that’s been building invisibly for the last few decades or nuclear devastation at the hands of the West. Barring those two things, China is on track to put the USA into an ultimately untenable position as the contradictions become unresolvable with the space the US has to maneuver. Every country that joins BRICS and the BRI reduces the maneuvarability of the Western system. It’s as though China took grand chessboard theory and found a meta
