cfgaussian

Not zero, that would be absurd, but much less than Ukraine. There is a very simple rule of thumb for estimating casualty ratios in such conflicts, and that is they are directly proportional to the artillery overmatch since most casualties in conventional modern conflicts are inflicted by artillery fire. Ukraine has been stockpiling their best equipment and munitions which they received from the West for this offensive, and as a result they are managing to shoot a fair number of shells and missiles in order to try and soften up the Russian lines, but Russia still has an overwhelming advantage. In addition Russia also has almost uncontested air dominance at the moment which further skews the ratio in their favor.

I agree that electoral tactics are futile, and i personally have some major issues with Cornel West and some of the things he has said about communists and communism, but the fact remains that the Democratic party is the biggest obstacle to revolutionary organizing and revolutionary consciousness in the US. I can see an argument for supporting a spoiler candidate that draws away votes from them, especially when that candidate comes with a platform that has at least some semblance of anti-war messaging because that is something woefully absent from public discourse in the US and any voice on this issue with a platform such as that provided by participation in electoral politics is invaluable for shifting the public consciousness no matter what other faults those who popularize anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiments may have.

As Lenin said, the point of participating in bourgeois electoralism is not the delusional belief that you will be able to actually change anything substantial through the mechanisms of liberal democracy but the platform that this gives you to agitate and to spread your messaging.

From my point of view as an outsider looking at the situation in US politics my primary hope is that someone, regardless from which political direction, will make US interventionism unpopular enough for the US to stop meddling around the world. Ideally NATO would be allowed to collapse, funding for programs like the NED to be cut and US military bases and military aid to allied government across the world to be deemed unaffordable and be rolled back.

Of course I am realistic and I know that this is a long shot, US interventionism and empire is very much in the interests of its capitalist elite, so this will only happen if there is sufficient decline and turmoil in the US itself that its ruling class is forced to focus its attention inward.

Not all Ukrainians may subscribe to the most hardcore version of Nazi ideology but this is not a either-or thing. There are various degrees of Nazi indoctrination and many Ukrainians today are somewhere on this spectrum. They may not openly profess Nazi beliefs but they certainly use dehumanizing language to refer to Russians. They celebrate Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators as national heroes. They hold parades for these new national "heroes"in the streets unopposed. Like their counterparts in the Baltic states they celebrate and adopt the symbols of various SS units.

Their media and their government representatives regularly call for and glorify war crimes and make no secret of their aims to ethnically cleanse Russians from the territories they intend to seize back. They destroy Russian books, ban Russian media, attempt to forbid the use of Russian language, and they heavily suppress even other minority languages such as Hungarian. Moreover the entire conception of Ukrainian national identity as it exists today is built solely on hatred of Russia, Russians and everything Russian.

To all of this we see no opposition to speak of among the Ukrainian society. Of course we understand that many people in Ukraine are intimidated and terrorized into silence by the brutal police apparatus of the fascist state. The FSB regularly arrests, imprisons, tortures and murders political opponents, suspected "collaborators" (including anyone who gave or accepted any kind of help from the Russians), people who say the wrong thing either in public or on social media, etc. But this could not occur without a significant degree of support from at least a portion of the population.

There are plenty of Ukrainians who are true believers and who are more than willing to rat out their neighbors to the fascist police state, who themselves undertake vigilante violence against suspected "enemies of Ukraine" or just against ethnic minorities. This was no different in Nazi Germany where despite the protestations of Germans after the war that they too were just victims of the Nazi regime, the regime could not have done what it did without the help and support of a sufficient segment of the population.

And ultimately if you care about the fate of those Ukrainians who have been cowed into silence and who do not support all of this, there is unfortunately at the moment no other realistic way to help them than to militarily liberate them from the fascist regime, because it will not fall on its own especially as long as it is supported by the West.

Of course this is very sad. It is always regrettable when a fascists manage to take an entire population hostage and effectively use them as human shields. But the fact is that as things currently stand the population of Ukraine is either not able or not willing to liberate itself.

The Russian economy has proven to be far more robust and resilient than the West assumed, who thought that the all out sanctions assault would be enough to collapse it. It has withstood this assault better than almost anyone expected, including many Russians and the Russian government itself. This points to the Russian economy having been severely misunderstood and underestimated. It is clear that the simplistic caricature of the Russian economy being a hollow one based primarily on raw material export has proven to be false.

Russia has a significant and growing industrial base and this is what has enabled them to prosecute the current conflict on both the economic and military fronts so effectively. Russia's real industrial economy by some estimates actually surpasses that of any European country and rivals that of the US despite a nominally far lower GDP. This is because most of the West has lost its manufacturing base and turned into hyper financialized economies.

There is good indication that in conjunction with its BRICS partners the Russian economy is only going to accelerate its growth in coming years now that it has freed itself (thanks to the ill advised sanctions imposed by West) from the albatross around its neck which was its dependence on the West preventing Russia from developing its own domestic alternatives. The growth of multipolarity which this conflict has accelerated has enabled the entire global south to be able to start doing the same.

As for demographic issues, this is not unique to Russia, the West's demographics are no different, and in fact this is a phenomenon observed in all sufficiently advanced economies. We hear the same fearmongering about demographic doom when it comes to China as well. For sure this is something that needs to be taken into account but it is not as catastrophic as it is often made out to be.

Of course China and Russia are different in that one is a socialist state and the other is not, so we can expect that China will be better able to respond to the challenges that this presents, but i don't see any predictions of demographic collapse of Europe (except from fascists who fearmonger about white replacement) so why should we apply a double standard when it comes to Russia?

One more addendum to my earlier comment:

The claim that Putin's Russia has a history of invading countries around it is simply false. The example typically given to support this assertion is the brief Russo-Georgian war of 2008, however this is a bare faced lie. Even a EU commission investigation into that conflict found that it was in fact Georgia which started it (much like Ukraine did with this one) by attacking the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia which were under Russian protection. Of course they did this at the behest and with the encouragement of the US which led them to believe that the Russians would not fight back, and if they did that the US would have Georgia's back.

The parallels of that conflict to the one with Ukraine are actually quite impressive. In both cases the conflict was preceded by the US carrying out a color revolution to install a fanatically anti-Russian proxy puppet regime into power in those countries. Then the carrot of EU and NATO membership was dangled in front of these states under the condition that they allow themselves to be used as a battering ram against Russia. The plan was to provoke Russia into a conflict by threatening its vital interests right on its border, portraying Russia's reaction as aggression and use this to justify imposing sanctions that were supposed to devastate Russia.

Other examples that are sometimes used to portray Russia as an inherently aggressive state are callbacks to certain actions of the Soviet Union, all of which are grotesquely misrepresented and the real history of which is systematically twisted and falsified. And in any case the Russia is not the USSR, so none of that has any bearing on discussions of the behavior if Russia as it exists today unless you subscribe to the racist belief that there is just something in Russian genes that is somehow inherently aggressive.

Please don't use those silly liberal nicknames for Putin. Comparing him to Hitler is tantamount to Nazi apologia. You can find ways of expressing your dislike of Putin without the use of language steeped in anti-Russian propaganda tropes. The same people who use that language to refer to Putin also call Russians "orcs" and other dehumanizing epithets.

Russia is not in decline, at the moment it is on a trajectory toward regaining its former status as a superpower. The economic war launched by the West against it has backfired and has only made Russia stronger, as a result of sanctions Russia has reoriented its economy and strengthened its domestic capacities.

The kinetic war which was launched by NATO against Russia through the use of the Ukraine proxy has led to a reboot of much of Russia's dormant military industrial capacities, an expansion of the Russian military, and is giving Russia invaluable experience in what it means to fight a war with modern technology.

This is a fight against the unchecked global hegemony of the US empire. It is no coincidence that the global south has overwhelmingly aligned with Russia. Russia and China are the leaders of a global anti-hegemonic coalition that is growing by the day. Neither of the two for the time being shows any intentions of replacing the US. Both are heavily pushing multipolarity.

And if any one fact more than anything else should tell you that you should support Russia in this conflict it is that the DPRK does so. Throughout its entire history the DPRK's track record on global conflicts has been spotless. Do you really thing you know better than the world's most successful communist parties, the CPC and the WPK, not to mention Russia's own KPRF?

Literally every one of your premises is false. It is not a "war of aggression" and while we obviously do not support Putin, for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that he is an anti-communist, a liberal and he encourages reactionary social tendencies, he is also none of the things you described him as.

It is hard to believe that this is not a troll post when in the span of a few sentences you managed to regurgitate such a high number of western imperialist propaganda talking points and repeated a half dozen of the silly names they call Putin to demonize him: "oligarch", "richest man in the world", "warlord", "megalomanial" [sic], "autocrat fascist" and "tyrant". But i'll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain.

Let's start from the top: firstly, there are oligarchs in Russia with close ties to the government but Putin himself is not an oligarch. You may want to look up the definition of the term if you are confused. In Russia the oligarchs are primarily those opportunistic capitalists who after the fall of the USSR managed to amass great wealth and economic-political power by gaining ownership over a significant portion of the old state industries. Putin was not among them. Putin was a bureaucrat first and then a career politician.

Secondly, there is not a single shred of evidence for the liberal media concocted myth that he is "the richest man in the world". These allegations have never been substantiated by anything factual. They are based solely on the argument that "well, the Russian state owns X property and Putin controls the state, therefore Putin owns all of X". It is nonsense.

Further, calling him a "warlord" is just silly, i shouldn't even have to explain why. He does not lead a military government, he is an elected president and head of state of a civilian government. Whether or not his election was or was not legitimately democratic (by whichever measure we want to judge that) is beside the point. Like all elections in bourgeois democracies Russian elections underrepresent the working class and favor the interests of the bourgeoisie. But he is no less legitimate than any western elected official,

In fact it could be argued he has more legitimacy than most of his western counterparts as even western conducted polls that are biased against him show that his popularity is genuinely quite high. As communists we understand that this does not change the class character of his bourgeois government but it shows that many people in Russia at least in part associate the recovery that Russia has experienced since the disastrous 1990s with Putin's governance.

As for "autocrat" that depends on whether you consider the executive powers of a president inherently autocratic. That would make the US or French presidents also autocrats. However this is a meaningless accusation anyway and unbecoming of a socialist because if Putin is an autocrat then so was and is every leader of any socialist state. Liberals accuse any leader they dislike of being an "autocrat".

So let's simplify the discussion and look at the literal definition of "autocrat" as meaning a sole ruler with absolute power. Doing even cursory investigation of how the Russian government works we find it simply does not apply. Putin does not have unchecked autocratic power, he is checked by the Russian parliament and a number of various other governing bodies of the Russian Federation. The decision making is very much collaborative and involves a whole strata of political elites. The problem is that as in all bourgeois democracies these governing bodies and elites represent and advance the interests of the bourgeoisie first and foremost.

As for whether or not he is a fascist this opens up a whole discussion about what fascism actually is. Is social democracy just social fascism? Many leftists would also argue that the US is and has been fascist since its inception, if not towards everyone to begin with then at least toward black and indigenous people. Where even is the difference between fascism and the regular dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that we have in every capitalist country?

However if we assume for the sake of this discussion that the western liberal bourgeois democracies are not what we mean when we say fascist then neither is Russia. Russia is not in any qualitative or quantitative way more authoritarian or reactionary than the US, and in many ways it is less so. And no, fascism is not simply when people have reactionary tendencies. Otherwise most of the world would be full of fascists.

Of course we can never know what someone truly believes but at least overtly Putin himself does not seem to be ideologically fascist. He can be best described as a moderate nationalist liberal. There are people and groups in Russia with legitimately fascist ideology and the centrist Putin government sometimes flirts with them but on the whole it seems to want to keep them marginalized. Russia is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, if a real fascist, ultra-nationalist political movement was to gain traction Russia would almost certainly devolve into internal chaos. It is not in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie to allow that.

And as of late fascist ideology has become even more unpopular in Russia as they are at war with an actually fascist state. A state that openly worships Nazi collaborators as its national heroes, which has adopted fascist slogans and a racist, genocidal, fascist ideology, and whose soldiers are covered in Nazi insignia. A large number of Russian neonazis have gone over to the side of Ukraine and are now fighting against Russia.

Finally, calling Putin a "tyrant" is just a repeat of the accusation of being an autocrat which is simply not factual. All of these cliche expressions you have used that are lifted straight out of western media's anti-Russian propaganda are essentially rehashings of the old racist "oriental despotism" trope. As communists must understand our class enemies and to understand what they are and what they are not. And Putin is many things we dislike and oppose but he is not the caricature that the West paints him as.

Enough about Putin, on to the war itself. The claim that it was started solely by Putin for "megalomanial" reasons is simply infantile. Not only is it embarrassing and unserious to engage in this sort of individualizing, psycho-pathologizing of complex geopolitical conflicts, it is evidence of either intent of deception or catastrophic ignorance. Conflicts between nations do not start because one person felt like starting a war. They are the result of complex processes and contradictions, often having built up for a long time.

This conflict did not start in 2022, it started at least as far back as 2014. I won't repeat the history, you can read about it elsewhere, but suffice to say there was already a conflict happening way before Russia intervened. And Russia intervened because it was left no other choice. Not only was the expansion of NATO into the now fascist state of Ukraine becoming an existential threat, but the ethnically Russian Donbass region of Ukraine, which in 2014 rebelled against the US orchestrated fascist coup d'etat, had come under serious threat of being attacked and overrun by the spring of 2022. No Russian government could have stood by and allowed this.

Putin himself in fact was among the most reticent in Russia about taking direct military action to resolve the problem. For many years forces in Russia that sympathized with the Donbass had been pushing the Russian government to do more, to intervene directly. Multiple different diplomatic approaches were tried, none of which led anywhere, not least of all because the West, as has now been admitted, never had any intentions of negotiating in good faith and did everything it could to push Russia toward war in hopes that this would result in the fall of the Putin government and the renewed subjugation of Russia to western imperialism.

For all intents and purposes this is an act of self-defense by Russia, on behalf of itself and on behalf of the Russians in the Donbass. By the precedent that NATO itself set during the Yugoslav wars Russia recognized the secession of the Donbass republics and invoked the UN article on collective self-defense, making their intervention legal by international law and defensive.

We support Russia's anti-fascist intervention not only on moral and legal grounds but more importantly because it is a major blow against US imperialism itself, and we recognize it as a fact that US imperialist hegmony is the biggest obstacle to socialism and socialist states everywhere. A defeat for NATO in this proxy war is a victory for the global proletariat. Anti-imperialist, anti-fascist struggle IS class war. Like the first cold war, this new cold war of the US against Russia and China represents a global dimension of the class war.

These people have no sense and they have only one response to failure which is to double down and escalate.

This is the power of advertising, of creating a brand image and a loyal base of dedicated consumer-fans. If a critical mass is reached it even takes on a life of its own and consumers themselves become more effective advertisers than the sellers of the products. A culture of group think and peer pressure is created where identity and consumption are intimately linked.

I know there have been comments before here defending the practice of advertising, even arguing that it is necessary and indispensable, but personally if it was up to me i would have our future socialist states ban all advertising as it is a dangerous and socially unhealthy form psychological manipulation. There are instances in which it creates literal cult-like behavior.

To me that all sounds a bit too much like wishful thinking. I fear you are underestimating the strength of the settler nation and their determination to violently defend their gains. Then again, as someone who has never even been to the US i won't pretend that i know the local conditions better than those who actually live there. Maybe my analysis as an outside observer is wrong and maybe your strategy is the correct one. All i can say is good luck and i hope you succeed, that would be of great help to our struggles here on the other side of the world where the primary obstacle to our own revolutionary liberation is still the stranglehold of US imperialism.

Phrases like "legitimate claim" sound like idealism to me. Where does a "legitimate claim" come from? Is it just God given? Or is it not more realistic to acknowledge that the claim belongs to those with the power to enforce it? If the power of the settler state wanes and the internal colonies amass enough power to overthrow it and take its land then that is what will be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the international community. I would be very glad for you to be correct about the brittleness and weakness of the settler state. But that is an optimism that i find hard to share.

I incline more toward the pessimistic view that it will be a hard struggle and one that can only be won through making hard compromises and forming strategies that do not rely on the assumption of receiving significant outside support. I would also not rely on climate catastrophes and economic crises to do your work for you. People have a surprising ability to adapt to almost anything. They are creative and will find solutions and ways of keeping the system going even in a very deteriorated state.

That is why the revolutionary strategy must be proactive instead of reactive. We cannot just wait for outside factors to make the bourgeois state collapse. We need to be actively organizing and increasing our preparation and militancy, create political structures that can be turned into military ones capable of seizing and holding power when the revolutionary situation presents itself.