I am genuinely confused by hexbear's opinion on the Ukraine war
I am genuinely confused by hexbear's opinion on the Ukraine war
What I have learned:
- Russia has already won the Ukraine war
- Which NATO started
- A lot of people in the West think that Ukraine should surrender
- Also Ukraine was the world's main provider of CSAM
- Also Ukraine is exploited by the West but if they can unite with Russia then their economy and everything else will finally be alright
It's literally like a bizarro world and everyone is over there agreeing with it. I'm genuinely confused by, who even are these people (what is the mixture of Russian bots / Russian-aligned ordinary people / confused Westerners / some other explanation.)
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There are some Americans, who upon learning that the US is not the mythological good guy it's propaganda portrayed it as, are dealt such severe psychic damage that the only way their fractured mind is able to cope is to just assume the opposite worldview must be true.
The key takeaway is that they're not capable of thinking for themselves. They require others to tell them what to think, and that's either going to be US or Russian propaganda.
I would LOVE to find a non deranged communist forum but like I said on another comment, I have yet to encounter one which does not make me vomit all over the screen after I see them celebrating bloodshed in Ukraine and masturbating to the idea of an independent sovereign nation being crushed by brutal, authoritarian, and savage state.
It’s heartbreaking that people seeking an ideology with genuinely noble intentions turn into such violent loons. On hexbear (and co) I think they are genuinely mostly from the west but try so hard to stick it to US imperialism that they literally end up supporting a significantly more horrifying empire. I sometimes think that they deserve to have been born into Soviet Union or present Russia but I genuinely cannot bring myself to wish such horror on a human being. Their thoroughly typed and carefully cherry picked facts vs what the victims of these regimes went through have the same vibe as Tucker’s recent montage/comments about trip to Russia.
Most propaganda is grain sized, very subtle and so well masked that most people swallow without noticing it. It is structured so vaguely and discreetly that others who smell it are not able to produce hard enough evidence.
And with enough time we get the stereotypical tankie communities - gullible teenagers, bitter adults that are so blinded by search of an alternative that by endless reading they somehow achieve ignorance and betray fundamental human values, and some Russians having the time of their life having their disgusting views and evil atrocities welcomed, accepted, and spread for free.
They do not allow discussions, but the Russian propaganda that gets spread on other servers or social media cost them nothing emotionally while all of us who have to argue back need to resurface feelings that we suffer under Russia’s terrorism, after inheriting the generational trauma from parents born into Soviet Union.
I assume hexbear is just the russian troll factory.
I can read Russian and I sometimes read Russian media and it uses almost exactly the same topics for their people. There is a new one that they started to repeat recently and it's that Zelensky is an illegitimate president, because his term has ened.
Useful idiots and shills, they are.
This thread makes me laugh.
They're getting their knickers in a twist thinking that Biden is escalating and would be the cause for a nuclear war, conveniently forgetting that:
- Russia invaded Ukraine
- Russia has been constantly making threats to use nuclear weapons against western nations since the invasion started
- Russia attacks Ukraine from within their own borders
It seems that tankies support Putin.
thank you for succinctly articulating an echo of my experience recently on lemmy.ml
They are very ...passionate... about their ideals I guess.
That is the power of an echo chamber. My favorite post by a hex was when he tried to convince me that the Tiananmen Square massare was fake. He had a comprehensive list of over 20 links prepared, with bangers like "Actually, the massacre wasn't happening on Tiananmen Square, but next to it. Checkmate globalists". I'd love to link it here, but shame on @goat for deleting that post and sending them to the Tankie corner, because now I can't find it anymore, not even in the mod log.
Reality is a team sport, to some people.
Oh, you forgot the "Ukraine is 90% nazis" part
Whoa, I should not have hit that link.
Those guys are loons, and now I feel like I'm on a list for seeing that conversation, haha.
Trying to make tankies make sense is a losing vocation mate. bizarro world is right.
Stupidity is easy to see and trying to understand it is pointless.
Unfortunately propaganda works. And the Russians have been working at it for a long time. To be fair, so has the West. There are absolutely Russians out there who believe in conspiracy theories we've spread.
The problem of course is that propaganda like this is self serving and generally impedes the progress of civil society. We can't recommend a change in our government without getting called a dirty commie and lumped in with these guys. Russians can't do it either, not without being called a Western traitor and arrested. And yes I realize those are two different outcomes, the point is the problem is just as hard to get around.
The amount of cognitive dissonance is massive. they proudly present their pronouns, completely ignoring that doing so would get them on the russian shitlist superfast. Also, just like with the OG nazis, the enemy is simultaneously strong and weak, stupid and cunning.
It's kinda sad. after the wall fell and russia started cooperating economically with the rest of europe i was a bit of a fan, but what Putin and his cronies have done to the country and their neighbours is inexcusable.
It's weird that those forums are in English, reading the insane takes and rhetoric. I also noticed many of the accounts are just prolific posters, making the community seem small to me. Also saw an account with a trans flag, which is surprising they would accommodate such a person or such a person would have those weird views on lemmygrad.
Tankie 'thought' is very simple: US bad.
that's it. that's all you need to do.
I really want to ukraine to win and retake all of its territory back but some of its points do make sense in a way, russia is turning to wartime economy, backed by china starting to plug flaws that we laugh at them year ago.
they news that russia able to strike ukraine infrastructure that ukraine has thwarted a while back means theyre facing critical shortage of anti missile and uav arms.
ukraine also facing manpower problems, zelensky lowered the drafting age requirement but i doubt its still enough, the likelihood of concession in ukraine favor is unlikely in current time but i hope with lifting of target bans from newly supplied arms from the west could tip that in the future
OP, the link is to lemmygrad.ml but you keep citing lemmy.ml in this thread; are you mixing up the 2 without realizing it or do you intend to mean both?
I haven't seen much of anything on lemmy.ml that reaches grad.ml's level of what you describe. Then again, I stick mostly to somewhat-niche interest subreddits that receive a decent amount of participation from other federated servers.
In my experience even hexbear users are surprisingly (for the internet) good and decent to others, as long as you can avoid provoking their "the capitalist US empire is the current hegemony that's killing the planet and ourselves, and we don't punch down, therefore our vitriol is a uni-directional torrent" mode of operation that others in this thread have mentioned.
Obviously, the classical "cult" approach resembles that as well (love-bomb anyone not explicitly an enemy, close ranks against any potential discrediting of the movement). In my books most of them are ordinary people, from whom (legitimate) despair of the current state of the world has leeched all desire for compromise.
I don't have a less patronizing way of saying it, but they remind me of someone who, after years of abuse by their partner, finally snaps and gravely injures said partner. In some sense, it's on the rest of us to not have intervened beforehand, and at the same time their lashing out really doesn't help things.
Oh, and this probably reads as hippy anar-kiddy logic to them, which is part of why I personally stay away from most of their politics-related communities.
If this is a honest question I will try to give some honest context, I do not represent a Hexbear, so these are just some views that I have that make me sceptical of the narrative that currently exists.
After the cold war there were calls to establish a common security structure including Russia to try to ensure peace in Europe. Instead the US (with pressure from past satellite states of Moscow, Poland, Czechia, etc) chose to maintain NATO and on top of that invite everybody except Russia, many foreign policy experts already warned that this was a recipe for war, but wether it was malice or incompetence they were ignored.
Fast forward to 2008 the US suggests inviting Ukraine (and Georgia) to NATO, and Russia makes extremely clear that this would not happen, that this was a red line for them. Now you can disagree with Russias right to say anything about the military alliances of its neighbours, but the fact that Russia is a military regional power with nukes is something you need to deal with. Again wether it was incompetence or malice is hard to say but the next 14 years are basically a chain of escalatory actions by the US combined with a series of stronger and stronger warnings from Russia that this would lead to war.
During the events themselves it is hard to judge as a civilian what exactly is happening in geopolitics, the US has a very clear trackrecord of treat inflation or simply lying about its true intentions or the truth on the ground. It could of course be that this is one of those rare cases where the US are truly the Good Guys™️ or it could be that this is a ploy to weaken a rival with the only price being the destruction of a country they don't care about and the death of hundreds of thousands of military age males they don't care about.