No it cannot, because the Ukrainian army and regime is filled with nazis that want to ethnic-cleanse the Russian speaking population.

Here is a video of a Ukrainian nazi conference on the 5th of February 2022 (!) discussing the end goal of a dismembered Russia, which these nazis expected to gain a large share of the spoils from.

The Chinese Nationalists thought that military power should decide that they were in charge of China, right up until the People’s Liberation Army fucking bodied them and they fled to their little island with their tails between their legs (and then conducted massacres against the native population and anyone remotely leftist).

This “”“independence dispute”“” would have been resolved seventy years ago had the US Navy not stuck their fucking imperial beak in and stopped the communists chasing down these fascist war criminals and finishing the job.

Yeah, clearly they just post any kind of Russian propaganda over at the… checks notes Kyiv Independent

Why are you defending the rump state of a fascist dictatorship?

I hope the “Republic of China” can someday be peacefully dissolved and the province of Taipei reunited under the mainland government.

I question the US’s claims over a certain region (the whole of it)

They joined a civil war in progress on the morally correct side

Firstly, Budapest?? That’s a wild first example, either way here’s a book about it.

Secondly, I hope you understand the different between the USSR and the Russian Federation, but regardless

It doesn’t “make me feel better”, it’s the objective historical truth.

There is a true sequence of events that actually happened in real life. That sequence can only be determined by the evidence left behind, the collecting and interpreting of which is a painstaking and fallible process - but through rigorous investigation the true history of the world CAN be reconstructed.

However, if you’re not the one investigating, then you have to assess the reconstructions presented by those who do. What biases do they have? Who is funding their research? In what context have they chosen to present it? Who disagrees with them, what are their alternative conclusions, what is the difference in quality of evidence and analysis?

And so I have to ask you, how did you come to your understanding of history? How many books have you read? By who? What have you heard and where? Who was telling you? What evidence did they present?

WHY ARE YOU SO SURE YOU’RE RIGHT?

What evidence have you personally been presented that gives you absolute confidence in your worldview? I can show you why I believe what I believe about history, can you show me why you do? For western anticommunist leftists, the answer is usually “No”, because your understanding of the history of existing socialism has been carried over whole-cloth from your lifelong capitalist indoctrination.

If any of this jogs you into a realization that your historical understanding is not based on any kind of solid evidence or research, I’d be happy to recommend some sources. More than happy in fact, I’d be thrilled! Read! You have to read history! If you don’t, your attempts to change the world will fail! Would you try to build a house without reading about the properties of wood, steel and concrete? How can you try to build a movement to improve the world without investigating those who went before you? Do you think you can just ‘freestyle’ it?!

Anyway, I’ll leave one book here in case it piques your interest - Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti - which was crucial to developing my personal understanding of the actual place of the USSR in world history, as well as understanding the material basis of fascism in capitalist society and why it is the direst mortal enemy of communism. You can take my suggestion to read it or you can ignore it, but either way at least be honest and don’t lie to yourself about the sources of your beliefs.

Okay, regardless of what political tendency you end up at, you really have to understand that none of those things are true. This is just a matter of history.

The USSR was not fascist, it was as far from fascism as any political system can possibly be. It was fundamentally anti-imperialist and was by far the most important actor in the defeat of European fascism in the 20th century, as well as in supporting national liberation movements across the world afterwards. Its collapse was devastating to workers’ and indigenous peoples’ rights globally.

Similarly, the USSR not only did not commit any genocides, not only was not antisemitic, but was essentially the only thing standing in the way of the total extermination of every single person from west Poland to Siberia by the German Nazis’ genocidal colonial expedition. Red Army prisoners of war were the first to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and Red Army soldiers liberated it and stopped the Holocaust. The idea that the USSR committed genocide, whether by ‘intentionally causing famine’ or by any other means you may have heard, is a lie that provably originated with Joseph Goebbels himself, and was amplified by the media empire of US fascist William Randolph Hearst.

If you want any books or articles to read about any of this then I’ll happily provide them, but understanding the real history of the first socialist nation is absolutely crucial to both understanding the world as it is now and imagining how it can be changed for the better in the future.

Okay, so where’s your proof of this? Reports? Graphs? Photos?

Of course you don’t have any because you’re just asserting an absolutely, totally ridiculous narrative. The growth rate was frighteningly low?? It was the fastest rate of economic growth in human history! The people became poorer??? China is basically the only place in the world that lifted anyone out of poverty in the last thirty years! Without China, global poverty reduction is a net negative. 800 million people joined the middle class! These are not achievements you can have “in name only”. Like, you can’t fake the fact that China produced ONE BILLION TONS of steel last year, or that it installed four times as much green energy as the entire G7 combined. These facts require an enormous, highly advanced industrial base, which requires an enormous, highly skilled body of workers.

So what, exactly, is your personal experience of China that contradicts these provable facts then?

Would you say Ukraine was “preparing for a possibly (sic)” when its Nazi special forces were creating Hitlerjugend-style child soldier training camps?

Damn, if the Ukrainians had your tactical insight they might’ve won by now!

Yes. China is controlled by the Communist Party of China, who maintain an unbreakable grip on the commanding heights of the economy - energy, utilities, infrastructure, steel, finance etc. State-owned enterprises are some of the largest companies in the country, and hence also some of the largest in the world.

Foreign capitalists were invited to invest in China starting in the 80s, in order to bring in the technology and capital (tools, machines and money) that China was sorely lacking. This unfortunately led to several of the problems typical to capitalist economies - uneven development between the cities and countryside, increases in wealth inequality, the strengthening of the national capitalist class and the spread of liberal (pro-capitalist) ideas - but through the whole process, and unlike in the USSR, the CPC maintained total political control and didn’t allow the capitalists to dictate policy.

It’s true that China appeared to go quite far in a liberal direction, including by joining the WTO; around the turn of the millennium, the US and the rest of the capitalist world assumed that China would soon liberalize completely, both economically and politically, and they’d be able to break it open and feast on the insides like they did with the USSR. Instead, since then, and especially since the appointment of Xi Jinping as President, China has been moving, more or less rapidly but seemingly inexorably, towards more outright socialist policies. The result of the swing to the right and now back to the left is that China has had one of the longest and fastest sustained periods of economic development in human history.

In short, no capitalist economy run by and for the capitalist class could ever have made these achievements. Only an ideologically committed and politically dominant communist party would be able to manage an economy this way, wielding the capitalists as tools to improve the productive forces and raise their people out of poverty while setting the stage for the transition to socialism.

Edit: here is a long essay, China Has Billionaires, on the same subject, which is well worth the read

Mr. Boatarelli!

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The “”“problem of overshoot”“” is that the human species is still in the death grip of capitalism. The task of preserving a habitable world is not being ignored because humanity is just too stupid to understand how to do it, but because it’s incredibly profitable for a tiny handful of extremely rich and powerful people to enforce the current course by any means necessary, including extreme violence - or indeed, funding academics to point the blame at anything but themselves. “It’s just human nature!”

I would respond to the problem of ‘over’ shoot by ‘exactly’ shooting the capitalists in their rotten hearts, with the help of an army of communist soldiers.

Ukraine is defending the western values of Hitlerite racism

Russia joined a civil war already in progress on the morally correct side

Sadly the PLAAF has already made their statement on that…

Labour could axe all hereditary peers…

…from the House of Lords