I was banned without notice for calling out that supporting Putin is not something we should be doing, check my post history, you won’t easily find people more radicalized than me.
This was my final post:
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To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate.
Like we’re doing with Putin?
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“Like we’re doing with Putin?” in reply to a Mao quote, genzdong’s front page at the time was full of threads and posts defending Putin.
Not defending Ukraine is understandable, attacking the USA is understandable but trying to defend and justify Putin is a direct offense against Mao’s teachings.
Putin has clearly gone wrong, we mustn’t refrain from principled argument because he’s an old acquaintance (is he?).
Another good outcome would be if Putin died or Russian just stopped the invasion…
Whatever ends the combat.
The only peace solution that makes sense is one where NATO is not involved. But it’s not their people dying by the hundreds, so they don’t care. They’ll keep telling Zelensky to tell “his” people that they need to keep dying for whatever reason, cause prior to the war Ukraine was pretty clear from their actions that they didn’t consider the Donbass part of their country so I’m not really sure what they’re fighting for here, and I don’t think they know either.
Putin retreating is literally not going to happen, because it can’t. People think he’s the only one who takes decisions, because he’s an autocratic leader, and you display some of that thinking when you say that the war would stop if he died. If Putin surrounded himself with loyal followers like the media wants us to believe, then why does it follow that they would follow him if he decided to stop the war? Wouldn’t it make more sense that they actually support this war and want it to continue? If they’re just loyal yes men and rely on Putin’s power for their own, then wouldn’t they want Putin to stay in power? I don’t know, it’s sort of a Schrodinger’s Russia where Putin is a malevolent all-powerful autocratic absolute figure who skillfully managed to fill the entire government, armed forces, cabinet, parliament, even the people of Russia who keep voting for him and Medvedev with loyal yes men, but also his grasp on power is so weak that he’s at risk of getting couped or assassinated at any point lol.
Russia has committed too much in this anyway, with all the sanctions. Saying “soz everyone we’re actually wrong and we’re gonna go back home now peace” would be the nail in the coffin for Putin. Well, I don’t know the situation on the ground in Russia – we have some comrades from Russia here who can shed light on that – but people generally seem to support the war. Getting the news that all of this was for nothing and your dad died in Ukraine for nothing because Putin had a change of heart would probably do more to galvanize a coup than the US could ever hope to achieve lol.
Plus what would happen after they go back home? Their disengagement does not guarantee peace in Russia, which was the primary reason for the war. NATO is not going to say “eh tell you what, you were a good sport about Ukraine so we’re not going to invade you now”.
Anyway the only realistic peace plan is one where NATO is not involved. The whole war could have been avoided if Ukraine had gone to the negotiations from the get go, but NATO wants this meat grinder. They don’t care how many Ukrainians die; Ukraine was never going to get into NATO anyway (they admitted this not long ago). And every missile fired is one more bought from the military-industrial complex. This conflict needs actual solutions, because with the way things are going, with the insistence on NATO’s part to not have any sort of negotiations take place, the only way out is to the last Ukrainian.