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A post on Ask Lemmygrad by user Cyber Ghost titled "What are the reasons why Russia attacked Ukraine?"
Below is the comment by user @cfgaussian reading: "The Nazi Kiev regime attacked the ethnically Russian Donbass for eight years intending to commit genocide in their quest for an ethnically pure Ukraine and Russia finally came to their aid after it became clear that the Minsk agreements were never going to be honored. Also, NATO was turning Ukraine into a hyper militarized threat to the integrity and security of Russia itself. Refusal of the US and Europe to negotiate on a new inclusive security framework, refusal to stop NATO expansion eastward, and the relentless and violent anti-Russian psychosis that has gripped Ukraine since the Maiden coup that triggered a civil war in a country in which half or more of the population are essentially Russian became intolerable."
User Summertime Soviet has replied to the comment saying "It's a shame we can't pin comments on posts, because this one would get a pin from me.
so instead, have this Farmer_Heck seal of approval"
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Had a, uh, discussion with lemmygrad where apparently wanting high speed rail without secret police and genocide is a controversial take. It was a post kind of half celebrating the atrocities of communist regimes. Only for lemmygrad users to turn around and tell me that those things never happened, but they were totally justified and ought to happen again, but communists don't do that kind of thing and it's all made up propaganda, unless you're a capitalist or a liberal or [someone else who deserves it]. There were a few interesting and intelligent lines of thought in that whipping circle I found myself a part of, and I was glad for those, but generally the ideological spin was going so fast, you just about had to slap a tail rotor on it.
State socialists have some reasonable explanations for the authoritarian aspects of the USSR and sometimes China but they're so easily provoked (online) it's hard to find them in the flood of reactionary dumbassery going on around it. Don't take this as a defense of state socialism. It's not. But their logic has some merit if you believe a state is a necessary institution in a socialist/communist society
You'd think it would give a person pause when in the course of defending their political beliefs, they manage to post a single comment that contains four or five lines, almost verbatim, from the Narcissist's Prayer.
I know amount of explaining that NATO is a defence alliance seems to to work.
NATO exists because of Russian aggression. If they stopped trying to attack every country touching there borders it would be fine and NATO wouldn't need to exist.
I mean there's a case to be made that NATO expansionism is bad and does have a destabilizing effect and that trying to isolate the region for what may be mostly historical reasons isn't really helping in the grand scheme of things.
Then Russia goes and threatens to invade Finland or something and it's like "oh yeah, that's why".
I just loved all the people who were going "Russia respects borders and doesn't invade other countries" when they had tried literally the exact same thunder run strategy with Georgia not that long before Ukraine.