this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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For me, I don't support what Russia is doing. I just don't want to further empower the US military industrial complex. Every couple of years there needs to be a new evil enemy for us to be scared of so that the money can keep flowing into weapons and so that we have excuses to extract value out of other countries in conflict. It's obvious we don't do this for humanitarian reasons or we wouldn't be allies with countries like Saudi Arabia (or see the entire history of US intervention since WWII). Whether Russia wins or loses the war, people in Ukraine aren't winning, they're just seeing which imperialists are going to be exploiting them for the near future.
In the abstract I don't oppose assisting countries against imperialist aggression with military force. But playing into US warmongering doesn't really do that and in the process is further making the world a worse place.
A good deed done for the wrong reasons is still a good deed. The reason why NATO is the lesser of two evils in this sense is that between two brutal authoritarian regimes, NATO is significantly more hands-off and more open to being manipulated by civilian interest than the more brutally right-wing Russian regime. One of these exploitative imperialists will probably let you get gay married, the other one will kill you for it. The US military industrial complex will pick a target regardless. It may as well be a target that ends up counteracting Russian imperialism; I'd rather have those bullets in Russian corpses than, say, whatever country Saudi Arabia has decided needs bullying this week.
Anyways, the core of the issue is that it takes a LOT of hand-wringing and "b-but both sides" to justify active warfare to sit back and let an imperial power shit hellfire down civilians' throats. Anyone who actively supports pulling out of Ukraine is, bluntly, just kind of an idiot.
Nato has killed magnitudes more people though, they go to war much more often and much more vigorously than Russia.
Do you think Ukraine deserved to have Russia invade?