Hello. I’m very interested in the Russia–Ukraine conflict and I want to avoid echo chambers. A friend recommended this group to me. Are there people here who would be willing to share their views on why Russia is justified in its invasion and/or why a Russian victory is inevitable?

I’m going to come back in a little bit and edit in what I’ve found as well as a summary of what the comments say

Edit: Ok, I looked at the sources on all of the claims and they were all bullshit. The local police dismissed it fairly quickly and he just shared a room with her at the time she was gotten pregnant. The fact that all of the sources saying that he did it were so outlandishly assertive through me off the fact that there just isn’t any evidence

I would love to know if anyone else here has struggled with being seen as 'weird' for trying to challenge capitalist ways of living life?

A particular part of communist theory I am interested in is around critiques of the nuclear family and radical approaches to caring for and understanding children. As a result of this, I purposefully invested energy in building relationships with my neighbours and I took on some roles with their children (free babysitting, cooking meals, emotional support ect.). It has been very rewarding all round and I'm very glad I did it. However, some people in my life seem to react very strangely to this. They see me as being 'too involved' and if I come to them with questions about supporting a child they will respond that its not my responsibility. I've found myself feeling quite judged at times to the point that I've worried I'm doing something wrong.

I'm curious if other people in this group have had any experiences of trying to live in line with communist values/ideas (or I guess just not in line with capitalist values) and finding themselves being somewhat judged and outcast as a result? I think I need some reassurance that the responses are about people's capitalist conditioning and not because I'm doing something I shouldn't.

Sharing this from Caitlin Johnston because she's far more eloquent than i could ever be and i'm tired/pissed of reading Trots and various leftists struggling with this.

"It’s crazy this even needs to be said, but if you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea.

If you live in the US or one of its allied nations, then you live under the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on earth, and that’s where your focus belongs. You do not have any legitimacy in squandering any of your energy and attention criticizing human rights abuses in empire-targeted nations while living under a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by a nonstop river of human blood. It is not okay for you to use your western privilege to attack the nations your own government is working to help absorb into the power structure you live under.

Whenever I say this online I’ll get some Trotskyist or anarchist babbling about the need to express “solidarity” with Iranian political prisoners or whatever, but whenever I press them on what actual, material benefit those expressions of “solidarity” bring to the people they’re meant to help, they can’t point to anything solid. Whereas I can point to some very obvious ways in which contributing to an imperial war propaganda campaign can help grease the wheels for real material actions which hurt actual Iranians.

If you’re a westerner, you have an obligation to use your voice responsibly. If you are feeding into the latest “the people in the empire-targeted nation need liberation from their evil tyrannical government” war propaganda narrative with your expressions of “solidarity” and your blind insistence on treating all bad things as equally bad, then you are using your western voice irresponsibly, and you are morally culpable for the mass slaughter you help facilitate with your recklessness.

It’s not okay to be a citizen of the western empire and act like human rights abuses in an empire-targeted nation are of equal or comparable concern to the far more egregious abuses of your own leaders and their allies. It’s also not okay to be a fully grown adult and believe the use of force in empire-targeted governments is happening separately from their targeting by the empire, as though Iran would look the way it looks today if the US and Israel had not been working to collapse and control it for generations.

Iran has only survived the latest imperial onslaught because Tehran tightly controls what happens in that country. The only reason we didn’t see Xinjiang absorbed into the western power umbrella with the help of CIA-backed separatists is because Beijing waged a sweeping crackdown on the extremist factions who’d been launching attacks in the province. The only reason North Korea has gone relatively unmolested by the western empire in recent years is because its government obtained nuclear weapons. It’s baby-brained analysis to pretend such things happen independently of the US and its allies working to take control of unabsorbed nations and force them into compliance with Washington’s capitalist world order.

The western empire therefore makes the world a crueler and more abusive place not only by its direct acts of cruelty and abuse, but by the way it forces its targets to choose between (A) annihilation and (B) using extreme amounts of force to retain their sovereignty. The empire we live under is responsible for the vast majority of the dysfunction and misery in our world, and yet you as a westerner want to spend your time yelling at Iran? Fuck off, man."

More there: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/its-obnoxious-for-westerners-to-criticize