You realize what you’re saying just confirms my point? Supporting colonialism because it serves your national interest is still supporting colonialism. Realpolitik is simply the justification.

The EU and NATO are led by imperialist powers and their allies. The social, economic, and military stability of the West is built directly on neocolonial extraction from the periphery. Of course they support it. The system reproduces itself.

And lol at “naive.” I don’t expect those who benefit directly from imperialism to take meaningful steps to stop it.

My issue is with you pretending colonial powers are something they’re not. I’m just pointing out the reality.

Plenty of rapists justify their crimes to themselves. Doesn’t make them not rapists.

You said

Criteria for being considered a colonizer have to be a little bit more strict then “I have wasted toons of money trying to control a country between 1936 and 1941 for prestige”.

Congo, Angola, Mozambique aren’t past tense. Over half the EU built colonial systems and still benefit from their evolved forms.

Also France backed the LNA in Libya, undermined the UN-recognized GNA, and faced zero material consequences. Not an accident. Their allies sustain and support their colonialism and neocolonialism.

France remains a core member of NATO, EU, G7, UNSC. Also France maintains the CFA franc. Military bases across West and Central Africa. Corporate access secured through policy shaped in Brussels and Paris. Whether Meloni yells on TV, the structure which is supported through integration into the EU and NATO doesn’t change. No sanctions. No budget cuts. No accountability.

Words don’t dismantle systems. Material support sustains them. And that support never stops for the major powers. Lives on the periphery absorb the cost.

The Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Mozambique, Suriname etc. would probably disagree with you.

Not to mind the fact that much of the US and France colonialism and neocolonialism is fully backed by allies.

Canada is literally a settler colony that is still actively repressing indigenous populations?

?

The USSR is hiding out in Red Shambhala consolidating power to fight the fascists in the hollow earth.

A big Freikorps fan? Imperialist pillaging of the periphery isn’t a major issue in your mind so long as you get “your” cut of the spoils?

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You’re wrong. You’re running purely on vibes. “Oh it’s not a stretch… Id believe it… etc.” and you do double genocide theory (a form of Holocaust denial). I think this conversation has reached it’s natural conclusion.

So you support the shelling of the Donbas and repression of minorities? Certainly a take. The people of the Donbas don’t want the Donbas to be part of Ukraine since the banderite government began their repression campaign around 2014. They asked Russia for help as the majority of the Donbas is ethnic Russians.

They can move if they want, but the ground belongs to the majority

You’re also pro ethnic cleansing wow.

Edit:

All of this is irrelevant to my original point anyway. Which is that no matter how you personally feel about Russia, the war, etc. etc. etc. the people of the Donbas likely see the war as liberatory for them.

Russia is only asking for the Donbas you know that right? They aren’t trying to take all of Ukraine. The people of the Donbas clearly would prefer to be part of Russia or independent given they fought for a decade about it. Why should banderites in Kyiv and the West of Ukraine get to decide for the Donbas?

The people of the Donbas who have been getting shelled by the banderites since 2014 would probably disagree with you.

I’m not the one rewriting history here you are. It was one famine affecting an entire region caused mainly by environmental factors and worsened by policy failure (among other factors). It was not man made, it wasn’t targeted, it was still a tragedy.

Again because you keep doing this I don’t support the Checnyan wars, the deportations etc. like I’ve said every time you can say these things are bad without padding your list with twisted bullshit.

Chen Xiaopiro

陈傻逼肉

Yes, people discuss government policy in public and offline all the time. It’s a very normal topic of conversation. In practice, serious political discussion tends to happen face-to-face because that’s simply a better format for nuanced debate, but there is also plenty of discussion online. What generally gets censored online are calls for overthrowing the state, organizing mass unrest, or similar things. Many countries draw similar lines around incitement or destabilization.

Protests and strikes do occur, but they are usually local and issue-specific rather than ideological movements aimed at regime change. Labor disputes, land disputes, corruption complaints, etc. happen all the time and are often resolved through administrative or legal channels. The political culture tends to focus more on petitioning, negotiation, and internal pressure than on permanent protest movements.

On “independent” media: Independent from whom? In Western countries most major media outlets are owned by a very small number of large corporations or billionaires. Those owners influence what gets covered, what narratives dominate, and what perspectives are marginalized. Calling that system “independent” while ignoring ownership power is a very selective definition of independence.

The firewall was originally created to foster and protect China’s fledgling digital infrastructure and data sovereignty. That was a legitimate policy choice. Many countries regulate foreign platforms and data flows. China built its own ecosystem instead of depending on foreign companies. We have seen what happens when foreign platforms operate without local oversight: Facebook facilitating genocide in Myanmar, coordinated anti-vax disinformation campaigns in Southeast Asia, algorithm-driven radicalization. The firewall makes those kinds of external influence operations harder to run at scale.

I like many others here support the firewall even though it can be inconvenient (so long as vpns remain accessible and legal). I have seen the alternatives. The trade off makes sense to us.

I think you don’t have a solid grasp of what the abuses really were and what actually happened in Xinjiang.

forced assimilation

Uyghur is used in schools, all signage is in both Uyghur and and Mandarin, Uyghur is still widely spoken and cultural practices continue.

reeducation camps

If it happened in a white country you’d call it reformative justice. When you get sent to prison being taught vocational skills so that you can reintegrate into society once you finish your sentence is how it’s supposed to work.

forced labor

Do you have a source for this. Xinjiang cotton farming for instance is some of the most automated on earth.

forced sterilization

This comes from Adrian Zenz (German evangelical on a self proclaimed mission from god to punish China (some of my favourite quotes from him

Through notions of gender equality…the enemy is undermining God’s unique but different role assignments for men and women”

… anti-discrimination laws put in place throughout the European Union … forbid employers to discriminate based on gender or sexual orientation. That way, it becomes illegal for churches or Christian organizations to refuse to hire homosexuals into important positions

) (whole other rabbit hole)) misinterpreting a table that said Xinjiang made up 8.7% of new IUD insertions as 80%. As well as the fact that the population growth rate fell by 84% but that’s normal as developing areas develop throughout history. Also why bother exclude Uyghurs like the rest of us minorities from the one child policy if they were going to do this? It just doesn’t make sense.

What happened in Xinjiang is categorically not a genocide. Both the UN and OIC agree on that. The actual abuses were much closer to what the US does to its people of colour, racial profiling, dragnet policing etc. still terrible and inexcusable but calling it genocide simply diluted the word and throws mud on the real grievances.

Being accurate on reality shouldn’t get you labelled a tankie if it actually fits the meaning you prescribed it. Like I’ve been saying tankie is a pejorative used to apply a moral label to those who don’t tow the anti-communist line properly.

The major contributor to the famine was environmental, as it was every other time that region experienced famine. My criticism is that the Holodomor presentation is disingenuous. It wasn’t a man-made famine from scratch and it clearly wasn’t targeted. Kulaks destroyed food that was being collectivized for redistribution. That absolutely would have helped feed people. They burned it because they couldn’t profit from it in the crisis. If they couldn’t have it, no one should. That’s not noble resistance, that’s sabotage that hurt the very people they claimed to represent. This is an ahistorical framing.

On the Nazi invasion: Stalin being “speechless” is revisionist folklore. Hitler’s intent to invade Russia was literal doctrine in Mein Kampf. Everyone knew it was coming. When France, Britain, and Poland refused every pact the Soviets put forward to stop the Nazis, to defend Czechoslovakia, to form a collective security front, it was extremely obvious what was next. The USSR wasn’t naive. They were preparing for a war they knew was inevitable because the West wouldn’t ally with them to prevent it.

You say the USSR didn’t expect to face Germany alone. That ignores the diplomatic record. Stalin proposed collective security repeatedly. He was rebuffed. Poland refused Soviet passage to confront Hitler. The buffer zone gained in 1939 did delay the Nazi advance. Whether that was the primary intent or a side effect, it happened. That’s strategic reality, not apologism.

On the famine again: if Moscow deliberately seized quotas to genocide Ukrainians or Kazakhs, why did the same policies apply to Russian peasants in the Volga, Kuban, and North Caucasus? Why did party officials in those same regions starve? Procurement quotas were brutal and badly implemented, yes. But they weren’t ethnically calibrated. The suffering was cross-ethnic because the crisis was structural and environmental, not a targeted hit job.

I’m not debating the deportations. They were bad. Full stop. But you’re twisting history to pad the list. Conflating distinct events, ignoring environmental factors, and erasing the agency of kulak sabotage doesn’t strengthen your critique. It makes it easier to dismiss. Call out the crimes, but don’t reshape the record to do it. Accuracy matters.

the majority of people who use the word know that it’s a pejorative for exclusively authoritarian communists

Yes in theory, but unless you are a diviner or mind reader identifying who is and isn’t especially is short online debate is far from a science.

For example if you point out there is no Uyghur genocide even if you perform the 1000 prostrations, and explain the reality of the abuses how it was still terrible and inexcusable it doesn’t matter what your wider beliefs are you will be called a tankie.

Which is exactly my point it is at its core a pejorative specifically to put down those who do not tow the anti-communist line just right by equating them with the straw man of some hyper evil pro genocide caricature.

Ok so everything else I said stands just put pejorative in place for slur.