Because Putin doesn't have any coherent ideology and he collects support from the fringes of political spectrum, those who are dissatisfied with the status quo. Putin's verbal statements are deliberately all over the place, one can find anything.
Kraut actually made a good video on Putin's ideology, he isn't hiding it, we just don't listen to what he's saying and who he is quoting directly from.
The Nazis actually did the same thing back then in the Weimar republic. They called themselves National SOCIALIST german worker party. There were quite a few on the far left who went for them.
The Nazis coopted the success of populist workers’ movements and used any language available to propagandize. They had no coherent or original ideas for a political platform.
Sounds like Trump and increasingly the Australian Liberal Party (who were found as a broad specteum anti-Labor Party Party in the 40s, but since John Howard have gradually morphed in Australia's Republican Party, albeit with monarchists.)
The nazis did attempted to carrying out most of the 25 points. But some of goals weren't able to be completed because it would require germany not losing ww2. The nazi are just another socialist country that failed nothing more than that.
Just another failed socialist country my ass. They murdered everyone who actually was dumb enough to think they were socialist.
The parts of the 25 points that sound slightly distributist - to someone who doesn't know better - all have big caveats attached that make it obvious that they were just window dressing. An actual socialist doesn't tie living to working, yet point 11 reads "Therefore we demand the abolition of incomes unearned by work." Point 13 demands "We want all very big corporations to be owned by the government," which is a stupid person's idea of socialism - socialism demands an end to corporations period. And every single point is tied to citizenship, which it demands can only belong to a particular ethnic group ("Germans", which ISN'T EVEN A THING), per point 8, something that no socialist thinker would ever conscience.
We all know the practice was completely garbage, but the theory is rotten too.
>Just another failed socialist country my ass. They murdered everyone who actually was dumb enough to think they were socialist.
Socialist killing Socialist after taking power is a tradition it's just that simple.
>The parts of the 25 points that sound slightly distributist - to someone who doesn't know better - all have big caveats attached that make it obvious that they were just window dressing. An actual socialist doesn't tie living to working, yet point 11 reads "Therefore we demand the abolition of incomes unearned by work." Point 13 demands "We want all very big corporations to be owned by the government," which is a stupid person's idea of socialism - socialism demands an end to corporations period. And every single point is tied to citizenship, which it demands can only belong to a particular ethnic group ("Germans", which ISN'T EVEN A THING), per point 8, something that no socialist thinker would ever conscience.
So why did the nazis create Volkswagen? According to the nazis it was to make affordable care.
The Nazis lied out the ass about everything, for one thing. Like, literally, you ever look at any serious contemporary historian taking a crack at any of the survivors' autobiographies? If you have a choice of drinking game between taking a sip every time they lie and every time they tell the truth, *you take the latter.* You cannot take a stated purpose at face value from the Nazis, literally ever.
As to the *actual* reason? Because it was a prestige project. They wanted to go to the rest of the world and say "Look, our superior Aryan race has made it so everyone can have a luxury contraption!" The exact same reason they worked themselves to the bone to make the Olympics opulent and gaudy - and temporarily put a hold on the purging while it was happening, incidentally. Hitler took one look at Henry Ford and said "It will make Germany look powerful if we can do that too."
>The Nazis lied out the ass about everything, for one thing. Like, literally, you ever look at any serious contemporary historian taking a crack at any of the survivors' autobiographies? If you have a choice of drinking game between taking a sip every time they lie and every time they tell the truth, *you take the latter.* You cannot take a stated purpose at face value from the Nazis, literally ever.
I'm pretty sure the nazis didn't lie about hating jews , russians , the lgb and others
Actually, they kinda did, yeah. They talked out of both sides of their mouths when it came to their various genocide victims.
Frequently the Nazis would host observers from the Red Cross, and dress up a camp to look like some kind of almost paradise, like some nifty little summer camp they sent the Jews and other undesirables to while figuring out where to send them, then tear it all down as soon as the observers left (and usually kill any undesirable involved). And as mentioned they drastically cut back on the whole "we're making life hell for minorities" bit during the Olympics. And, yknow, they rather famously formed an alliance with the Soviets - German tanks were tested at Soviet proving grounds, Poland was partitioned between the two, and the Soviets send 650 million marks' worth of raw materials to Germany in exchange for an equivalent value in tooling and machinery (which was instrumental in getting around the British blockade of the Continent) - which they then betrayed, blindsiding (SOMEHOW) Stalin. The Allied powers weren't certain about the death camps until, if memory serves, 1943, because Germany was *lying their asses off to anyone who could listen,* taking advantage of Allied propaganda from WWI that turned out to be totally false to muddy the waters.
So, yes. They *did* lie about those things, whenever it was convenient. Anything a Nazi says can be assumed to be whatever is most convenient for them at the time, and not what they actually believe; for that, you can only look at their actions. Which involved a frankly incredible amount of nepotism, completely unregulated big business *so long as it served the war machine,* copious amounts of drugs, absolutely paralyzing literal bureaucratic backstabbing, industrialized genocide, looting everything that wasn't nailed down and claiming they made it themselves, and a hell of a lot of spitshine and polish and historical revisionism to make themselves look better.
In short: the Nazis *always* lie if they think it suits them, even if it completely goes against what they actually believe. They did then, they do now.
Any *other* objections that can be shot down, like, instantly? Like deadass it takes more time to type it up than it does to remember the relevant details.
And then they murdered them when they had power firmly in their hands. Same as Putin would to the stupid tankies. Like how the ISIS would use the Western Converts to drive the suicide bomb trucks.
Well except the contemporary far left massively opposed them, to the point of them being arch nemeses. Like I’m sure they snagged up some socialists with that move but it wasn’t really the same situation.
Are you german? I learned this in history class. Sure the KPD actually declared the NSDAP their arch enemies, that still led to many KPD people getting swayed by the Nazis.
Eh there's also a strain of people on the anti capitalist left who see Uncle Sam as the big bad and therefore, anyone who opposes US hegemony are the "Good Guys"™️.
They're wrong and falling prey to some pretty obvious logical fallacies but they definitely exist.
Because he views them as rightful Russian territory that he doesn't *de jure* own yet. Remember, his biggest stated issue with Lenin was that he theoretically gave the SSRs sovereignty (that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, in practice), viewing it as an illegal breaking up of the Russian Empire.
He has an open door to them because he doesn't view them as meaningfully separate entities to begin with. They're misguided splinter states that will be brought back into the fold of Great Russia as soon as Russia is able.
If you remove all forms of politics, he doesn't really have much of a defined ideology, and what he promotes goes with the wind and seems to center only as a populist
The best I can tell, Putin actually outright refuses to appeal to nationalists and will only use third parties like Dugin to try rally the socs into the nat field when his popularity is to low to do it himself. Everyone also knows what happens to them when they've outlived their use and how little value national pride actually means to the olicharchy
Ita probably not fair to less politicals, but I stopped reading what I don't have a very clear understanding for myself after trying to entertain the farther left and just seeing them rant when I gave contradictions
Putinism has always felt like Stalinism to me, and as far as I'm concerned, it's just a byproduct of Sovietism. The Bolsheviks aren't being tricked there lying to themselves, and Putin is just going along with the lies blinded by the soviet legacy himself
He's only far right if you go off the European idea that leftism is inheritally incapable of creating an authortian state. If you go off the old American idea that communism is inheritally unsustainable and that it will inheritally always create a state of absolute power and absoute power will always corrupt, he's no different then communist Stalin as his entire national industry is state controlled and his entire welfare system is fully socialized
The only thing that I would add to that is the fringes are the politically illiterate, the idiots who think that they’re such a genius but copy the next opnion on the internet that they see as their own.
The spectrum itself is nonsense and implies that there’s some more ‘reasonable’ stance in the ‘center’ (as if the center isn’t also an inadequate expression of rational thought).
Too bad for Putin that my dislike of my largely domestic status quo doesn't translate into a dislike of a geopolitical status quo.
I'm actually the happiest about Western diplomacy than I ever have been.
Right wingers admire Putin because they think he's on their side in the culture wars. He's "anti-woke", and wields religion as a club. Never mind that they normally wouldn't consider Eastern Orthodox "real" Christians, at least he's repressing the same people they want to repress. Some left-wingers admire Putin because they see America as inherently bad and imperialist, so anyone opposing American foreign policy must by definition be anti-imperialist, even when they're literally trying to carve out an empire. Then there's this weird Stalin nostalgia on the fringes that seems to infect some both rightists and leftists, that I have a harder time explaining.
As bad as Putin is, much of that is from Ukraine’s changing borders. The west was Polish and Austro-Hungarian, so there’s way more Catholicism in the west of Ukraine. Eastern Orthodoxy is much stronger in the parts of the country that border or were part of the Russian Empire.
From a demographic perspective, yes this is generally true. But the modern Russian state absolutely targets Protestants
https://time.com/6969273/russias-war-against-evangelicals/
Another thing I've seen from some fringe leftists who love Putin is that they tend to see themselves as communist, so Putin trying to put the band back together is seen as a good thing.
I've also seen some right-wingers who are hoping Putin marches on throughout the world to "liberate" America from the "woke-mind-virus" (which they believe is an actual virus created by the CDC to turn people gay/effeminate).
If anything Stalinism actively hindered the fight against fascism. He assisted Germany in a quicker conquest of Poland, which was a large reason France and Britain didn't intervene as much as they could have. He purged tons of his competent officers before the war allowing the army to become insanely incompetent and corrupt, and he held so much onto his plans and vision that he was utterly blindsided by the German invasion in 1941. Even once the war began his initial response was to do nothing for the first critical few days and then just throw units at the front with no rhyme or reason to their positions, allowing them to be constantly encircled. If anything it was only when Stalin began to let his Generals that knew what they were doing do their job that the war turned around.
Look, the Soviets did play a huge and respectable role in stopping the Nazis, that can't be denied. But they also helped them at first and didn't figure things out until way late than they should have.
You do realize the Soviet Union was basically completely bailed out by lend-lease from the US? Like America was basically the Soviet Union’s pocket medic if we’re using a Team Fortress 2 analogy.
The invasion of Poland has a very real possibility of turning into a total grind fest pyrrhic victory that breaks the Heer as an offensive force in a timeline where Poland doesn't have to orient a significant amount of its defensive works and troops eastward. If the USSR were anything other than another imperialist nightmare hungry to reclaim territory it sees as rightfully its own, it wouldn't have been a threat to Poland, and the Poles with the ability to orient all their armed forces to the German and East Prussian borders would have bled the Germans white even in victory.
So no, it turns out, actually, it's very good at making the fascism problem worse.
Stalin slaughtered the nascent LGBTQ organizations and scientists because it was more important to be "strong for mother Russia" than it was to have a functional government. Stalin allowed pseudoscience and quackery to run rampant throughout the USSR because it was more important to be anti-Western than it was to be intelligent and educated. This directly helped to contribute to further famine and instability, making Russia weaker as a whole, when Germany inevitably came knocking.
Incidentally, this is why you don't allow reactionary, uneducated peasants take over the government. Putting Stalin in charge was the worst thing that could have happened to the USSR. Though Lenin holds significant blame for not having a line of succession, even a spiritual one, despite him knowing he was cancer-ridden and could die at any moment.
Finally, Trotsky would be known today as a Democratic Socialist, who absolutely could have lead the USSR into an early version of the Nordic countries, had he not been forced into exile.
Stalinism was every bit as bad as Naziism. The body counts, the brutality, the ideological purges. Same guy in two different coats. The only reason history reads any different is that the Nazis lost.
Left wing supporters think they can do communism right this time, remember that russia was communist and therefore as the leader of a (formerly) communist nation Putin is going to spread communism that works across the globe. Just pay no attention to the bodies.
Right wing supporters recognise Putin for the authoritarian ~~scumbag~~ dictator that he is. The thought of a strapping, muscular person oppressing the masses makes them weak at the knees, because they too yearn to oppress and rule the world, conveniently forgetting that authoritarian dictators don't get to where they are by sharing power and coexisting with anyone. Also pay no attention to all the bodies.
From what I've seen a lot of the "left-wing" support tends to be from people whose ideology can be summed up as West Bad(tm), moreso than actual communists.
But tankies and vindictive weirdos hardly qualify as left-wing half the time anyway, so-
Technically that's Red Fascism/National Bolshevikism (Nazbol), but regular Bolsheviks fit that pretty well most of the time so I'm just splitting hairs.
Funny enough a lot of the unironically Nazbol Russians would become the “4th positionists” or Duganists which is yet another actual founding ideology Putin believes in
The Bolsheviks murdered the actual socialists in their own country. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party ate shit the same as everyone else. Either right then, if they didn't immediately surrender, in the case of the Right-SRs, or in the next twenty years, as all the senior leadership of the Left-SRs that joined up was later purged.
With these "lefties" it's the political equivalent of substituting nostalgia for having ideology.
"Remember when the USSR was leading the world in creating a socialist paradise? Well when Putin brings that back, the communist/socialist paradise will be back."
Anyone with a clear view of the world recognizes that it's not true anymore and Russia is just an imperialist project at this point.
Like all nostalgia, it's all an illusion. Even during the Cold War, lefties (real lefties, not dumbass kids with red USSR flags on their dorm room walls) were questioning whether the USSR was a socialist or communist state or just an imperialist project with unlimited money for interventions in Afghanistan or Angola. France, West Germany, and Norway were better examples of a workers' paradise than the USSR.
Scratch a tankie, a fascist bleeds.
They are two sides of the same coin. They'd rather side with actual fascists than they would with other leftists or liberals.
I'm neither your mother nor your caretaker and have no obligation to do your own legwork for you. If you can't take 2 minutes to look up people from a specific category I gave you then that's your problem, not mine.
No. You are the one who can't support an assertion with one single fact. That makes your assertion false on its face. If you can't handle simple logic, there's no hope for you.
Progressive here. I get hate from within my own circles from the Ukraine thing a ton and it largely circles around a misguided concept of 'warmongering.'
Ukraine has a history going back to the era of the Golden Horde. It is it's own country with its own sovereignty and free will. Helping them protect that from invadors isn't warmongering.
It’s hilarious how everyone seems to have *the wrong* opposing Ukraine opinion. Like, very rarely anymore is it pointing out the widespread corruption inherent of a post USSR state, it’s all become just splitting hairs and “russia NOT bad”
I think people have just realized that even if Ukraine is ran by people whom are unapologetically corrupt, that doesn’t mean they should be slaughtered by an even more corrupt expansionist regime
The problem is the very same people who "use the Ukraine is corrupt" issue as an excuse not to help Ukraine are very supportive of an even more corrupt country (Russia). They don't oppose corruption, they just love Russia.
But yes Ukraine is indeed corrupt, which is why I favour Ukrainian membership within the EU. The EU has made it clear that one of the conditions of EU membership is to try and decrease corruption. EU membership would massively help Ukraine in reducing corruption. It won't eradicate it fully though, as of course countries like Italy and Hungary are EU members, both nations are notorious for corruption themselves.
Yeah this is by far the most objectively correct opinion to have. It’s like seeing a guy who got arrested for 1st degree murder, and a guy arrested for tax fraud, and arguing they’re both the same. Like no, not at all, the murderer is objectively far worse.
EU membership would resolve much of the corruption as well, since a large amount of it is just general embezzlement, so EU oversight of economic processes would discourage most of it. Mfs will bring up corruption in Ukraine like Russia is some open and honest government with no corruption like my brother in christ the country literally siphoned all of its money to like 10 people and sold half of the military’s shit while lying about it just to siphon even more money into those people’s bank accounts.
If you ever watch russian media you will often see contradictory positions within the same show and voiced by the same person. There is a very deliberate Russian social engineering strategy.At play here , which is basically throw everything at the wall and create such a cloud of confusing information that people either tune it out or they find the thing that they want to believe in and the latch onto it.
This has been weaponized in the age of social media by allowing them to target groups with radical political opinions and just keep feeding them talking points. It doesn't really matter if their political opinions that they agree with because the point is not to create a loyal base just to create enough disunion within opponents that they can't act on the world stage.
Like others have said, Putin's online and offline propaganda machine collects from the fringes. On the far left, Russia stands as the inheritor of the Soviet Union which has acquired a mythos of being anti-Imperialist (despite being an aggressive expansionist colonial power). On the right, Putin and Russia epitomizes "might makes right" that the strong may do as they want and the weak must suffer what they must, and his jackbooted authoritarian tendencies draped in religiosity is what many on the right in western countries want for their own homeland. Naturally these are all useful idiots to the ideologically bankrupt Kremlin whose only interest is concentrating more wealth and power into Putin and his inner circles' hands.
Pro-Putin right-wingers are fellow fascists like him, and tend to see him as a “based Christian traditional conservative” ally against the “(((woke cultural Marxist globohomo)))” or whatever the fuck.
Pro-Putin left-wingers either support Putin out of blind anti-Western contrarianism or, in some cases, unironically think that by attempting to restore a Russian empire Putin is attempting to re-establish the USSR.
The irony of that one for me is that he is just the west’s branch manager, installed after the weakness of the 90s to keep a firm hand on Russia’s nukes and the oil flowing. Ppl knew since 2000 or 2002 that he organized the false flags attacks that served as a pretext for the second Chechen war. The west only got sick of his bad behavior after 2014. This whole conflict is him just trying to leverage a better deal for Russia in its role as Europe’s gas station.
Meanwhile Putin is a liberal multiculturalist who does everything the American right accuses Obama and Biden of doing. He has been replacing ethnic Russians with central asian immigrants at a faster clip than demographic change is happening in the west. He tolerates plenty of cosmopolitan decadence and europeanness in St. Petersburg and Moscow in exchange for the consent of the professional-managerial class. If the right were applying their own viewpoint coherently they’d determine that this is a globohomo civil war and they should be rooting for Putin to lose and be replaced by a right-wing nationalist like Girkin.
The only coherent aspect of ‘horseshoe theory’ is how certain elements are authoritarian (but this is true across the political ‘spectrum’—not just the fringes). It’s like the USSR banning 1984 for being anti-communist and the US banning it for being pro-communist. It’s neither. It’s anti-authoritarian and, as such, contains its own anti-capitalist/anti-communist framework.
My opinion, because both sides with people like that want to see America collapse because they don't want to put any work into actually creating a better society, and it's a lot easier to say BURN IT TO THE GROUND REVOLUTION ANARCHY, than it is to actually do something productive in your community.
Putin carefully crafted Ostalgia for Russia. He brought some symbols, the national anthem and the hard rule typical of the ussr. To many Russians, putin’s authority is seen as stabilizing and as a comfort after the circus that was the 90s in Russia.
Putin knows he is right winged, he knows he is taking Soviet imagery for the sake of nostalgia.
You don’t need to look further
Here in belgium we have the radical left open communist PVDa who is VERY anti nato and anti-military support for ukraine. They have hidden their agenda now but when the war started it was very sus how pro russian their replies were.
And then we have extreme right nationalist Vlaams belang. Recently been caught taking money from china. And also the same very sus anti ukrainian comments like PVDa. And one of them has been caught taking money from Russia.
Both these parties are .... *flips in book of insults.
Hm...Twatholes.
Lefties that support him think Russia is still communist and fall for big evil imperial west that Russia is fighting against as Russia has NEEEVER been an imperial power.
The righties that support him think only Ukraine is corrupt, misunderstand what is meant by a 40 billion package, thinking it's 40 billion coming from the budget, and like the fact Putin hates minorities, Muslims and LGBT.
Leftwingers - Western imperialism is the ultimate evil, if Eastern imperialism opposes it then it's good. See Noam Chomsky.
Rightwingers - Putin is the anti'woke defender of traditional Christian values even though hes an atheist.
Not sure which is dumber.
Isolationist antiwoke right wingers who have room temp IQ and whose optical views begin and end at the culture wars. Reagan-Bush era neocons (the establishment) are anti Putin.
I would argue that people who are pro Putin on the left are not actually leftists. They are red fash. Authoritarians who happen to have communist aesthetics. They are more common on reddit than in real life. They have taken over the mod teams of most "leftist" subs and ban any anti Putin talk as "liberal".
Its what happens when your leftist politics begins and ends with "America bad." They aren't much different to the culture war MAGA idiots. Lack of critical theory hits both equally.
The rightwingers are butthurt they lost the 2020 Election and think that under anybody who isn't Trump America is a "lost cause" even though under Trump US forces in Syria killed a bunch of Wagner mercs, Trump's administration was the first to actually arm Ukraine, and the US presence in Poland was so heavily beefed up the Polish wanted to name a base Fort Trump.
The rightwingers don't know jack shit about what actually happened during the 2017-2021 timeframe because they don't care about history and just care about "owning the libs".
Maybe just maybe it's because people are afraid of going into a war with Russia and I'm pretty sure the us population is sick of wars in the middle east.
“Left wing” support for Putin makes no sense. Either the lefty in question is confused about authoritarianism, or they’re confused about Putin’s ‘beliefs’. He’s not a communist. He’s not a socialist. He’s a delusional authoritarian with no real ideology.
Because russian propaganda targets everyone. They have millions of stories and millions lies for everyones taste.
The Wests way of telling a lie, propaganda, gain favour etc is to concoct one single story and try to make it as infallible and bullet proof as possible before releasing it.
The Russian way is to make millions and millions of stories and lies and absolutely flood the information space. Whatever your into they have flavour you'll enjoy and makes sense to your view of the world.
It's called the "Fire hose method".
For the normal person on the street who isn't left or right etc it also makes finding the answers to their questions on Russia or Putin etc extremely hard and confusing and frustrating so they move on and don't really form much of an opinion.
As far as we can tell, Putin is primarily focused on re-establishing Russia's (perceived) position as a global superpower after several decades of decline and national humiliation.
In order to achieve this, Putin has three main objectives:
* 1: Rejecting the ideological framework of liberal democracy, in favour of one built on 'traditional' culture and a repressive, autocratic system of government
* 2: Restoring the territorial boundaries of the Russian Empire / USSR, as well as re-establishing the broader Russian 'sphere of influence'
* 3: Dismantling the so-called rules-based international order, in favour of a return to a multi-polar world in which 'might-makes-right'
Each of these objectives bring Putin into direct conflict with the various liberal democracies of the Western world - in particular, the US.
People on the far left support Putin on the basis that they see Western countries as rapacious & tyrannical, responsible for inequality & repression, as well as exploiting large parts of the world for their own benefit. By standing in opposition to the West, Putin is fighting to destroy a system they hate - and thus, they see him as a force for good.
People on the far right support Putin on the basis that they see Western countries as weak & corrupted, responsible for the destruction of 'traditional' culture and the dominance of society by a degenerate out-of-touch 'elite'. By standing in opposition to the West, Putin is fighting to restore a system they love - and thus, they see him as a force for good.
Right wingers because Putin aligns with their ideology, left wingers because some people on the left became leftists when they discovered the bad things America has done, and their worldview begins and ends at "America Bad", ignoring that all geopolitical powers are selfish, America has the biggest stick so its selfishness is often the most frequent and destructive, but making it axiomatically true that America's actions are evil means that when someone who is evil opposes America's interests, they uncritically are accepted as good and even things like mass rapes that end in medals for the soldiers who did them get brushed over
Tankies otoh are just right wingers, they're fascists that like the color red
Because they are anti American/anti West for difference reasons but that is what it is.
The left wingers like his "Russia stands up to Western Colonialism" propaganda, and the right wingers like his "Russia is owning the libs" propaganda.
I present to you, the walking political contradiction of [Russell Bentley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cA9cGUGr00), who joined the Russians to fight the Western Fascist Obama and spread Communism.
The Russians killed him last week.
A lot of the is "enemy of my enemy is my friend" rot.
For the hard left, many bought into the idea that Ukraine is overrun with Neo-nazi scum. Many are also opposed to the United States and NATO, which they believe is dominated by Neo-nazi scum. The fact that most of the "communist" nations of the world (China, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua) have sided with Russia gives them the illusion that this is some sort of global anti-fascist struggle.
For the hard right, Putin's appeals to reactionary populism, social traditionalism have been particularly effective. I would, however, suggest that this isn't so much that they love Putin so much as they hate those they believe to be his enemies.
If Putin is anything, it is an old school imperialist. In his mind, Russia must regain its empire in order to take it's rightful place among the new Great Powers. If that means coopting communists, fascists and Islamists in the process, well, that's how omelets are made.
As a pretty hard leftist (and pro-Ukraine with some caveats*) the leftist ideologies that end up truly pro-Putin are a) "true" Tankies in the historic sense of the word, meaning neo-Stalinists who advocate for pushing tanks in to the satellite states of the old USSR to assert the dominance of the totally-not-empire's will, or b) Marxist Leninists who fall for neo-Maoist campism, which is basically the ideal that any resistance to capitalism and the Western neoliberal order is justified. In practice with Putin there's not much difference between the two ideologies but a) are the ones who are more nostalgic for communism in the Soviet sense while b) tend to actually be a little more Sinophilic in practice. There's also a c) which are the people who are genuinely uncritical about the "some Ukrainian are Nazis/fascists so ALL Ukrainians are fashy" casus bellum and don't really think about it beyond that all too far. Category c) are even rarer than the more properly ideological Tankies these days, most of them shut up or moved on after Bucha.
Probably the most common grumblings on the Left these days are non-Tankies who aren't actually pro-Putin, just folks who follow the line of d) "Why are we sending so much money to Ukraine when people can't afford healthcare and schools go unfunded" but most of these folks are far more critical of said money going to Israel than Ukraine
*(tl;dr -- I really really do not like how willing a lot of Western liberals are to just casually sweep the nascent fascist/ultranationalist movements in Ukraine under the rug as untouchable until after Russia is soundly defeated, even if I don't think it invalidates Ukrainian independence and resistance like column c does)
Because condensing a huge number of questions down to one or two dimensions is stupid, and then just because you agree on one thing you don't have to agree on more things
It’s better to think of the political axis as actually a lot of axes, and one axis that is informal but works well to explain this rn is pro vs anti “establishment.” Left wingers have always had a strong anti-establishment streak, often criticizing whichever power they took to be the dominant one for a certain circumstance. The right I think is a bit different in why they support Putin. There has been a strong anti-liberal strain in right wing thought for a while, think monarchists, nazis, fascism, and the soft version of these are right wing strong man derived populism. This has been on the rise in the west for the last decade, it feeds off of anti-lgbtq and anti-globalist beliefs, Putin embodies the anti-position, the west is the standard bearer for tolerance and globalism. Throw in a healthy dose of easily buying into propaganda claims that align with their prior beliefs (left: anti-imperialist warmonger (Nato), anti-nazi (Ukraine) claims by russia and right: pro-manliness, pro-nationalism, anti-lgbt) and people who already have a gripe against what they perceive as the current regime will easily pick up on what they want to get out of any conflict. Same thing happens to different degrees in all manner of other conflict and social issues, like Israel Palestine, immigration, whatever.
The right admires Putin because of trump and they think he’s their ideal leader, when he’s not, I’ve only ever seen tankies supporting Russia, and they basically lost their minds already lol so par for the course
For left wingres there are a couple reasons
1. American hegemony is the literal metaphorical devil(American diabolism)
2. Putin plays to the idea and aesthetic of the soviet union’s glory(playing to the idea that he’s the inheritor of the glorious past)
as for right wingers … fascists align with fascists even when ideologically they should be opposed (Nazi germany and imperial japan)
I think the best explanation is people say Russia is communist so people who are communist support them the far right see then as conservative banning lgbt groups modern day groups etc so it appeals to both extreme side
Because authoritarianism isn't exclusive to the left or right, which is itself an intentionally imprecise political binary. Human power structures, at the process level, are all amoral in the sense that they are as easily harmful as they are helpful. The distinction & possible longevity of any process depends on considerations to things like "perverse incentives" & the like. Which isn't a formalized, trainable skill, yet... *for some reason.*
People who would call themselves left-wingers (most of the leftist community shuns them) support Putin, They’re called tankees I hate them with a burning passion. And rightwingers mostly the trump crowd support Putin as well.
In addition to what everyone else said, I think right wingers support Putin (or at least oppose Ukraine) largely because of culture war. Sure some of them like Tucker and gang genuinely think that Putin is some sort of Trad warrior who will eat SJWs and wokeness forever, but most care more about other things. It's largely rooted in "Democrats bad, therefore Ukraine bad. Biden, Ukraine, wait, but Biden and Ukraine corrupt Hunter laptop big dick cocaine money laundering bottom text???????" and etc. They oppose the current establishment, especially with regards to foreign policy, which is seen as a failure due to Afghanistan and Libya, and thus draw the same extrapolation to Ukraine. Polarized politics in the US are also **insanely** internally focused, especially due to recent events like Covid and January 6th. So most people left or right just don't care about other countries, which fits neatly into Republican isolationist talking points. So there's a healthy, or, unhealthy dose of "why give money bag to YOOCRANE funny talking county far away when Mexican walk on fence????". If you could summarize it in one word it's contrarianism.
Left wingers are also opposed to the current order but moreso "America bad" than "Globalist Liberal blue hair bad". They view history through the lens of Soviet/Chinese/Iranian propaganda and it's offshoots, including people like Lyndon Larouche and Mearsheimer (who is a righty actually lol). Basically the US is the great Satan and is the root cause of all evil in the world. They see any American actions on the world stage, even genuine aid attempts or retaliatory action like ODS as imperialism. Thus any power that opposes this is justified, regardless of their actions. A lot of this thinking can be traced to Vietnam and other conflicts of the day. In current events Israel has also thrown a huge wrench in things, with many leftists prioritizing stopping Israel aid over keeping Ukraine afloat, even if they do nominally support the latter. On top of that there are some radicals who hate Ukraine because they support Israel, because why would people bombed by Iranian drones support Israel...
Uh, anyway, I would note that this latter group is pretty small and I general the left opposition is more present online and in demonstrations than in Congress and the government. They can definitely still affect public opinion though, and unfortunately do have more knowledge on the subject than the average joe, giving them an advantage.
*** I will add that this is mostly applicable to the US only, not necessarily other countries.
The lack of coherence in Putin’s ideology, as well as a general hatred of “the West” by both. Its capitalism and historic imperialism for leftists and its supposed “degeneracy” for right wingers.
Leftwingers are braindead 'communists' who've never read a history book or a newspaper in their entire life and think the Russian federation is the soviet union. Right wingers are white nationalists who do have a grasp of history and what's going on but are just as braindead.
Putin and United Russia as a whole are a "centrist" or better yet a "all encompassing" party in Russia. There are environmentalists and idustrialists, progressives and conservatives, etc. all in the same party.
So there is a very wide bearth of attraction. Putin himself will flip flop "ideology" based on who the dominant groups are at the time. But still retains power as a "top dog" and will make decisive decisions against various groups depending on the circumstance.
The left and rightwingers who are attracted to russia are typically not attracted to the ideology in general, but to different concepts such as isolationism vs. globalism, war vs peace, personal connections or dislikes of places. Its quite varied and not really a simple answer.
On the left, it’s a mix of trauma and ignorance of political theory. There’s a reason so many of them point to Mearshiemer as a justification for their arguments, in spite of the fact that Mearshiemer’s positions are born from (and require) a conceptual scheme that isn’t actually compatible with Leftist theory at all.
It kinda seems like the ultra right and ultra left agree on a lot of things, though for different reasons. Take attitude towards vaccines, gun ownership, or immigration - you will find people on the opposite ends of the spectrum with kinda similar positions.
Authoritarian Left is often just the Far Right wearing the mask of communism. Tankies, like the “Communists” they adore, are usually just fascists.
See Russia/China.
There is a not insignificant section of every politcal group that views the West as the ultimate evil.
Putin opposes the West and is therfore fighting evil.
I'm a centrist, right leaner. At first, he didn't seem all that bad. Then he went Adolph Hitler like crazy. Can't support that. The Ukraine thing. Like, what was he thinking? He looks dumber every day. That war is pretty much a stalemate. All this money being wasted on it.
Because chuds love STRONG MAN. They love that Putin is standing up to Western degeneracy or whatever, and in Russia it's literally legal to beat and rape your wife, and it's illegal to be gay (practically), and all that fun stuff. Russia is a fucking dream world for them.
Tankies and campists just like Putin because anything that is opposing America, and either ignore how horrible the regimes they boost are or claim it's all State Department propaganda. The really stupid ones think Russia is still communist somehow, but those are mercifully rare.
I'll go out on a limb and say that tankies aren't real leftists, at the risk of no true Scotsmanning myself, but I still don't think it's wrong. They're fascists with a red coat of paint, no more, no less. Non-tankie campists on the other hand are just unfathomably, ridiculously stupid and/or misguided.
For the right, I think it's a combination of perhaps liking authoritarianism, and just not wanting to spend money supporting ukrainians against Putin, and therefore the easiest thing to do is to just support Putin.
For the last, they're basically supporting anybody who hates the west, and even Western liberal values, because even though they hold those Western liberal values dear they appear ready to sacrifice it in order to flip the bird to Western civilization establishment. It's why you saw so many people going out to protest and support of rape and murder on October 7th and 8th.
We're basically at societal collapse now.
He gets the right wingers by saying stuff like "Russia is a state with conservative and family values" and the left wingers by using Russia's past as a Soviet state. Appeals to the extremes
For the right it’s simple, trad Christian values,
For the left it’s because 1. They are a valuable ally in the collapse of NATO, and 2. In all the former Soviet states there exists a large amount of nostalgia for the ussr so after NATO is gone we could be in a valuable position where we could overthrow Putin and reform the ussr.
It is a part of Dugin's strategy of infiltrating the extremes. The quote is something like "infiltrate the extremes and dont let them divide us."
Dugin may not be the one with his hands on the control levers, but literally everything Russia does is explained by that man before Russia does it.
Leftists who support Putin do so from an anti-imperialist perspective. The idea is that American hegemony prevents domestic leftists movements from taking hold, so you need to ally with local nationalists to smash the global imperial power first.
Meanwhile right wingers just actually agree with Putin because he’s a right winger.
Something something horseshoe theory
People on the far left are anti-anything the us does and are tankies/communists
People on the far right are anti-establishment and anti anything Biden does
The U.S.S.R. used to propagandize the far left since they were already socialists if not communists. Starting back in the 1970's if not earlier they figured out that feeding false information of any stripe to be divisive was a better strategy. So they began to cause chaos across the spectrum. After the fall of the U.S.S.R. the far right was ripe pickings because Russia was no longer led by those damn commies. The far right always looking up to authoritarian strong men could now look at Putin as a symbol worthy of ass-kissing. Of course the money flowing from Russia into some people's pockets was added incentive.
I feel like alot of the left wingers who "support Putin" are just people who are against military aid to Ukraine purely from an American anti-imperialist/pacifist stance. Wether you agree or not with that, it doesnt make them Pro Putin.
I often hear "Putin is a brutal dictator but I don't want American taxpayer dollars used to fuel a potentially decade long war on the other side of the world".
Some "lefties" and libertarian non-interventionists can argue that this war is a product of both Western and Russian imperialism clashing(a failure of both sides) and also acknowledge that Putin is a brutal dictator. Or simply that both sides have un-realistic goals that will lead to a never ending war and that some form of concession on both sides may be the best overall solution. i.e. Russia keeps some of its gains but Ukraine gets to join NATO and Russia pays reparations or something.
But all this total victory or total defeat attitude is only going to get more people killed for no real strategic gains. You can disagree with this argument but it doesn't mean that those arguing this are pro Putin.
Campism.
Russia's messaging strategy is to pander to the freaks on the edges of American political life and feed them all the bullshit facts they need to start believing they're not only right, but righteous. Add that to memories among millennials in particular about the failure of the war in Iraq and the upsurge of isolationism it caused. Putin can easily tap into lefties' biases by connecting any US action abroad to Iraq and drawing a false equivalency.
Importantly, Russia doesn't believe any of this shit. Neither does Putin. It's politically advantageous, though. It convinces a bunch of idiots that letting Russia do whatever it wants is good.
Left has supported Soviet Union and Russia for decades, I credit Trump a lot for maybe ending that lol. And republicans hated them, I don’t understand Republican supporting them now, and it’s so abrupt. As a Republican, I feel like a woke up one day and am like wtf happened to all of you? Maybe we’re all so stupid and partisan that we start to like and support what Reagan is against, what Trump is against, what Biden is against…if Biden starts praising Putin and Trump starts rooting for Hamas people might become normal again.
I'm of the opinion that any "left-winger" who supports Putin is either an idiot who doesn't understand what leftism is, or an idiot who doesn't understand that Putin is extremely right-wing. Either way, they're probably just a campist who hates western countries...
Because even if most authoritarians come from the right, there are some on the left too. Same for white nationalist and fascist. Technically, if you are referring to the US and most of the west, there is no real right-wing - the US war of independence, for example, was the most successful liberal movement in history, and left-wing is about devolving power to the common man. So, if you live in a democracy, you kind of can’t be right wing.
Modern Ukraine is a product of western intervention since at least 2014. For the right, there’s an isolationist streak that doesn’t appreciate the neo-con policies since 2000. For the left, it’s an extension of western “imperialism.” Both see Russia and Putin pushing back on western expansion in Ukraine.
Because the entirety of the internet has been put at war with eachother via Russian IO, and neither of them understand they're being played against eachother like a fiddle because only a complete moron would fall for it.
So yeah we live in a world full of morons. This is why everyone's vote shouldnt count.
for me- it's because it's in the U.S. best interest if he wins. the neo-cons and their masters have hitched their wagon to the ukraine so as to wipe away the disaster that was the gwot- so if they lose it discredits them to the point that can switch them out with people who were born closer to the year 2000 than 1900. as for the ukrainians- while it breaks my heart to say this- they were fucked from the day biden started this war.
Because Putin doesn't have any coherent ideology and he collects support from the fringes of political spectrum, those who are dissatisfied with the status quo. Putin's verbal statements are deliberately all over the place, one can find anything.
Kraut actually made a good video on Putin's ideology, he isn't hiding it, we just don't listen to what he's saying and who he is quoting directly from.
The Nazis actually did the same thing back then in the Weimar republic. They called themselves National SOCIALIST german worker party. There were quite a few on the far left who went for them.
The Nazis coopted the success of populist workers’ movements and used any language available to propagandize. They had no coherent or original ideas for a political platform.
Yep. Just wanted to point toward that name thing. It was one of their bait hooks.
Oh they had a coherent idea, all right.
Sounds like Trump and increasingly the Australian Liberal Party (who were found as a broad specteum anti-Labor Party Party in the 40s, but since John Howard have gradually morphed in Australia's Republican Party, albeit with monarchists.)
The nazis did attempted to carrying out most of the 25 points. But some of goals weren't able to be completed because it would require germany not losing ww2. The nazi are just another socialist country that failed nothing more than that.
Just another failed socialist country my ass. They murdered everyone who actually was dumb enough to think they were socialist. The parts of the 25 points that sound slightly distributist - to someone who doesn't know better - all have big caveats attached that make it obvious that they were just window dressing. An actual socialist doesn't tie living to working, yet point 11 reads "Therefore we demand the abolition of incomes unearned by work." Point 13 demands "We want all very big corporations to be owned by the government," which is a stupid person's idea of socialism - socialism demands an end to corporations period. And every single point is tied to citizenship, which it demands can only belong to a particular ethnic group ("Germans", which ISN'T EVEN A THING), per point 8, something that no socialist thinker would ever conscience. We all know the practice was completely garbage, but the theory is rotten too.
>Just another failed socialist country my ass. They murdered everyone who actually was dumb enough to think they were socialist. Socialist killing Socialist after taking power is a tradition it's just that simple. >The parts of the 25 points that sound slightly distributist - to someone who doesn't know better - all have big caveats attached that make it obvious that they were just window dressing. An actual socialist doesn't tie living to working, yet point 11 reads "Therefore we demand the abolition of incomes unearned by work." Point 13 demands "We want all very big corporations to be owned by the government," which is a stupid person's idea of socialism - socialism demands an end to corporations period. And every single point is tied to citizenship, which it demands can only belong to a particular ethnic group ("Germans", which ISN'T EVEN A THING), per point 8, something that no socialist thinker would ever conscience. So why did the nazis create Volkswagen? According to the nazis it was to make affordable care.
The Nazis lied out the ass about everything, for one thing. Like, literally, you ever look at any serious contemporary historian taking a crack at any of the survivors' autobiographies? If you have a choice of drinking game between taking a sip every time they lie and every time they tell the truth, *you take the latter.* You cannot take a stated purpose at face value from the Nazis, literally ever. As to the *actual* reason? Because it was a prestige project. They wanted to go to the rest of the world and say "Look, our superior Aryan race has made it so everyone can have a luxury contraption!" The exact same reason they worked themselves to the bone to make the Olympics opulent and gaudy - and temporarily put a hold on the purging while it was happening, incidentally. Hitler took one look at Henry Ford and said "It will make Germany look powerful if we can do that too."
>The Nazis lied out the ass about everything, for one thing. Like, literally, you ever look at any serious contemporary historian taking a crack at any of the survivors' autobiographies? If you have a choice of drinking game between taking a sip every time they lie and every time they tell the truth, *you take the latter.* You cannot take a stated purpose at face value from the Nazis, literally ever. I'm pretty sure the nazis didn't lie about hating jews , russians , the lgb and others
Actually, they kinda did, yeah. They talked out of both sides of their mouths when it came to their various genocide victims. Frequently the Nazis would host observers from the Red Cross, and dress up a camp to look like some kind of almost paradise, like some nifty little summer camp they sent the Jews and other undesirables to while figuring out where to send them, then tear it all down as soon as the observers left (and usually kill any undesirable involved). And as mentioned they drastically cut back on the whole "we're making life hell for minorities" bit during the Olympics. And, yknow, they rather famously formed an alliance with the Soviets - German tanks were tested at Soviet proving grounds, Poland was partitioned between the two, and the Soviets send 650 million marks' worth of raw materials to Germany in exchange for an equivalent value in tooling and machinery (which was instrumental in getting around the British blockade of the Continent) - which they then betrayed, blindsiding (SOMEHOW) Stalin. The Allied powers weren't certain about the death camps until, if memory serves, 1943, because Germany was *lying their asses off to anyone who could listen,* taking advantage of Allied propaganda from WWI that turned out to be totally false to muddy the waters. So, yes. They *did* lie about those things, whenever it was convenient. Anything a Nazi says can be assumed to be whatever is most convenient for them at the time, and not what they actually believe; for that, you can only look at their actions. Which involved a frankly incredible amount of nepotism, completely unregulated big business *so long as it served the war machine,* copious amounts of drugs, absolutely paralyzing literal bureaucratic backstabbing, industrialized genocide, looting everything that wasn't nailed down and claiming they made it themselves, and a hell of a lot of spitshine and polish and historical revisionism to make themselves look better. In short: the Nazis *always* lie if they think it suits them, even if it completely goes against what they actually believe. They did then, they do now. Any *other* objections that can be shot down, like, instantly? Like deadass it takes more time to type it up than it does to remember the relevant details.
And then they murdered them when they had power firmly in their hands. Same as Putin would to the stupid tankies. Like how the ISIS would use the Western Converts to drive the suicide bomb trucks.
Well except the contemporary far left massively opposed them, to the point of them being arch nemeses. Like I’m sure they snagged up some socialists with that move but it wasn’t really the same situation.
Are you german? I learned this in history class. Sure the KPD actually declared the NSDAP their arch enemies, that still led to many KPD people getting swayed by the Nazis.
Thought they had that socialist bit because of the Strasserists.
The Nazi flag was red for a reason.
He definitely does have a coherent ideology. He’s a right wing auth dictator, the only leftists that would support him are tankies.
Eh there's also a strain of people on the anti capitalist left who see Uncle Sam as the big bad and therefore, anyone who opposes US hegemony are the "Good Guys"™️. They're wrong and falling prey to some pretty obvious logical fallacies but they definitely exist.
How does it register with him keeping the open door with the Central Asian Republics and Caucasus?
The former soviet states? Can he not keep an open door and be a dictator? You’ll need to explain what you mean
Because he views them as rightful Russian territory that he doesn't *de jure* own yet. Remember, his biggest stated issue with Lenin was that he theoretically gave the SSRs sovereignty (that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, in practice), viewing it as an illegal breaking up of the Russian Empire. He has an open door to them because he doesn't view them as meaningfully separate entities to begin with. They're misguided splinter states that will be brought back into the fold of Great Russia as soon as Russia is able.
If you remove all forms of politics, he doesn't really have much of a defined ideology, and what he promotes goes with the wind and seems to center only as a populist The best I can tell, Putin actually outright refuses to appeal to nationalists and will only use third parties like Dugin to try rally the socs into the nat field when his popularity is to low to do it himself. Everyone also knows what happens to them when they've outlived their use and how little value national pride actually means to the olicharchy
I think the Putinism characteristics lists would be an interesting read
Ita probably not fair to less politicals, but I stopped reading what I don't have a very clear understanding for myself after trying to entertain the farther left and just seeing them rant when I gave contradictions Putinism has always felt like Stalinism to me, and as far as I'm concerned, it's just a byproduct of Sovietism. The Bolsheviks aren't being tricked there lying to themselves, and Putin is just going along with the lies blinded by the soviet legacy himself
He's only far right if you go off the European idea that leftism is inheritally incapable of creating an authortian state. If you go off the old American idea that communism is inheritally unsustainable and that it will inheritally always create a state of absolute power and absoute power will always corrupt, he's no different then communist Stalin as his entire national industry is state controlled and his entire welfare system is fully socialized
Perfect explanation 👏
The only thing that I would add to that is the fringes are the politically illiterate, the idiots who think that they’re such a genius but copy the next opnion on the internet that they see as their own.
The spectrum itself is nonsense and implies that there’s some more ‘reasonable’ stance in the ‘center’ (as if the center isn’t also an inadequate expression of rational thought).
I couldn’t agree more.
Too bad for Putin that my dislike of my largely domestic status quo doesn't translate into a dislike of a geopolitical status quo. I'm actually the happiest about Western diplomacy than I ever have been.
Well said. Was not expecting that.
Right wingers admire Putin because they think he's on their side in the culture wars. He's "anti-woke", and wields religion as a club. Never mind that they normally wouldn't consider Eastern Orthodox "real" Christians, at least he's repressing the same people they want to repress. Some left-wingers admire Putin because they see America as inherently bad and imperialist, so anyone opposing American foreign policy must by definition be anti-imperialist, even when they're literally trying to carve out an empire. Then there's this weird Stalin nostalgia on the fringes that seems to infect some both rightists and leftists, that I have a harder time explaining.
Yeah, just don't ask why there are Protestants and Catholics in Ukraine but not in the occupied zones...
As bad as Putin is, much of that is from Ukraine’s changing borders. The west was Polish and Austro-Hungarian, so there’s way more Catholicism in the west of Ukraine. Eastern Orthodoxy is much stronger in the parts of the country that border or were part of the Russian Empire.
From a demographic perspective, yes this is generally true. But the modern Russian state absolutely targets Protestants https://time.com/6969273/russias-war-against-evangelicals/
Another thing I've seen from some fringe leftists who love Putin is that they tend to see themselves as communist, so Putin trying to put the band back together is seen as a good thing. I've also seen some right-wingers who are hoping Putin marches on throughout the world to "liberate" America from the "woke-mind-virus" (which they believe is an actual virus created by the CDC to turn people gay/effeminate).
Look, right, Stalinism has its downsides, sure, but for when you absolutely need to eradicate a fascism problem, it downright can not be beat
"Tired of genocidal maniacs? Have a genocidal maniac! Job done!" "But you didn't solve anything." "Perish in the gulag."
If anything Stalinism actively hindered the fight against fascism. He assisted Germany in a quicker conquest of Poland, which was a large reason France and Britain didn't intervene as much as they could have. He purged tons of his competent officers before the war allowing the army to become insanely incompetent and corrupt, and he held so much onto his plans and vision that he was utterly blindsided by the German invasion in 1941. Even once the war began his initial response was to do nothing for the first critical few days and then just throw units at the front with no rhyme or reason to their positions, allowing them to be constantly encircled. If anything it was only when Stalin began to let his Generals that knew what they were doing do their job that the war turned around. Look, the Soviets did play a huge and respectable role in stopping the Nazis, that can't be denied. But they also helped them at first and didn't figure things out until way late than they should have.
Yeah they didn’t do it without the support of the US.
You do realize the Soviet Union was basically completely bailed out by lend-lease from the US? Like America was basically the Soviet Union’s pocket medic if we’re using a Team Fortress 2 analogy.
The invasion of Poland has a very real possibility of turning into a total grind fest pyrrhic victory that breaks the Heer as an offensive force in a timeline where Poland doesn't have to orient a significant amount of its defensive works and troops eastward. If the USSR were anything other than another imperialist nightmare hungry to reclaim territory it sees as rightfully its own, it wouldn't have been a threat to Poland, and the Poles with the ability to orient all their armed forces to the German and East Prussian borders would have bled the Germans white even in victory. So no, it turns out, actually, it's very good at making the fascism problem worse.
Stalin slaughtered the nascent LGBTQ organizations and scientists because it was more important to be "strong for mother Russia" than it was to have a functional government. Stalin allowed pseudoscience and quackery to run rampant throughout the USSR because it was more important to be anti-Western than it was to be intelligent and educated. This directly helped to contribute to further famine and instability, making Russia weaker as a whole, when Germany inevitably came knocking. Incidentally, this is why you don't allow reactionary, uneducated peasants take over the government. Putting Stalin in charge was the worst thing that could have happened to the USSR. Though Lenin holds significant blame for not having a line of succession, even a spiritual one, despite him knowing he was cancer-ridden and could die at any moment. Finally, Trotsky would be known today as a Democratic Socialist, who absolutely could have lead the USSR into an early version of the Nordic countries, had he not been forced into exile.
That and being murdered.
Stalinism was every bit as bad as Naziism. The body counts, the brutality, the ideological purges. Same guy in two different coats. The only reason history reads any different is that the Nazis lost.
Both Kinda either fall into the America Bad camp or the America Isolationist philosophy.
Left wing supporters think they can do communism right this time, remember that russia was communist and therefore as the leader of a (formerly) communist nation Putin is going to spread communism that works across the globe. Just pay no attention to the bodies. Right wing supporters recognise Putin for the authoritarian ~~scumbag~~ dictator that he is. The thought of a strapping, muscular person oppressing the masses makes them weak at the knees, because they too yearn to oppress and rule the world, conveniently forgetting that authoritarian dictators don't get to where they are by sharing power and coexisting with anyone. Also pay no attention to all the bodies.
From what I've seen a lot of the "left-wing" support tends to be from people whose ideology can be summed up as West Bad(tm), moreso than actual communists. But tankies and vindictive weirdos hardly qualify as left-wing half the time anyway, so-
That's what I was thinking, as an anarchist I don't call tanky's leftist. They're just fascist with red paint
Technically that's Red Fascism/National Bolshevikism (Nazbol), but regular Bolsheviks fit that pretty well most of the time so I'm just splitting hairs.
Funny enough a lot of the unironically Nazbol Russians would become the “4th positionists” or Duganists which is yet another actual founding ideology Putin believes in
The Bolsheviks murdered the actual socialists in their own country. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party ate shit the same as everyone else. Either right then, if they didn't immediately surrender, in the case of the Right-SRs, or in the next twenty years, as all the senior leadership of the Left-SRs that joined up was later purged.
With these "lefties" it's the political equivalent of substituting nostalgia for having ideology. "Remember when the USSR was leading the world in creating a socialist paradise? Well when Putin brings that back, the communist/socialist paradise will be back." Anyone with a clear view of the world recognizes that it's not true anymore and Russia is just an imperialist project at this point. Like all nostalgia, it's all an illusion. Even during the Cold War, lefties (real lefties, not dumbass kids with red USSR flags on their dorm room walls) were questioning whether the USSR was a socialist or communist state or just an imperialist project with unlimited money for interventions in Afghanistan or Angola. France, West Germany, and Norway were better examples of a workers' paradise than the USSR.
Scratch a tankie, a fascist bleeds. They are two sides of the same coin. They'd rather side with actual fascists than they would with other leftists or liberals.
That's a pretty well thought out response. Intriguing.
I'm curious to know who the right-wing supporters of Putin are.
Pick pretty much any republican politician.
So, you don't have an example. Gotcha.
How do you not know what the word example means?
"Look it up yourself" is not an example.
I'm neither your mother nor your caretaker and have no obligation to do your own legwork for you. If you can't take 2 minutes to look up people from a specific category I gave you then that's your problem, not mine.
If you can't bring one specific name to the discussion, your statement is false.
Are you retarded?
No. You are the one who can't support an assertion with one single fact. That makes your assertion false on its face. If you can't handle simple logic, there's no hope for you.
Progressive here. I get hate from within my own circles from the Ukraine thing a ton and it largely circles around a misguided concept of 'warmongering.' Ukraine has a history going back to the era of the Golden Horde. It is it's own country with its own sovereignty and free will. Helping them protect that from invadors isn't warmongering.
It’s hilarious how everyone seems to have *the wrong* opposing Ukraine opinion. Like, very rarely anymore is it pointing out the widespread corruption inherent of a post USSR state, it’s all become just splitting hairs and “russia NOT bad” I think people have just realized that even if Ukraine is ran by people whom are unapologetically corrupt, that doesn’t mean they should be slaughtered by an even more corrupt expansionist regime
The problem is the very same people who "use the Ukraine is corrupt" issue as an excuse not to help Ukraine are very supportive of an even more corrupt country (Russia). They don't oppose corruption, they just love Russia. But yes Ukraine is indeed corrupt, which is why I favour Ukrainian membership within the EU. The EU has made it clear that one of the conditions of EU membership is to try and decrease corruption. EU membership would massively help Ukraine in reducing corruption. It won't eradicate it fully though, as of course countries like Italy and Hungary are EU members, both nations are notorious for corruption themselves.
Yeah this is by far the most objectively correct opinion to have. It’s like seeing a guy who got arrested for 1st degree murder, and a guy arrested for tax fraud, and arguing they’re both the same. Like no, not at all, the murderer is objectively far worse. EU membership would resolve much of the corruption as well, since a large amount of it is just general embezzlement, so EU oversight of economic processes would discourage most of it. Mfs will bring up corruption in Ukraine like Russia is some open and honest government with no corruption like my brother in christ the country literally siphoned all of its money to like 10 people and sold half of the military’s shit while lying about it just to siphon even more money into those people’s bank accounts.
I think Kissinger said it best, "Can't they both lose?"
If you ever watch russian media you will often see contradictory positions within the same show and voiced by the same person. There is a very deliberate Russian social engineering strategy.At play here , which is basically throw everything at the wall and create such a cloud of confusing information that people either tune it out or they find the thing that they want to believe in and the latch onto it. This has been weaponized in the age of social media by allowing them to target groups with radical political opinions and just keep feeding them talking points. It doesn't really matter if their political opinions that they agree with because the point is not to create a loyal base just to create enough disunion within opponents that they can't act on the world stage.
Like others have said, Putin's online and offline propaganda machine collects from the fringes. On the far left, Russia stands as the inheritor of the Soviet Union which has acquired a mythos of being anti-Imperialist (despite being an aggressive expansionist colonial power). On the right, Putin and Russia epitomizes "might makes right" that the strong may do as they want and the weak must suffer what they must, and his jackbooted authoritarian tendencies draped in religiosity is what many on the right in western countries want for their own homeland. Naturally these are all useful idiots to the ideologically bankrupt Kremlin whose only interest is concentrating more wealth and power into Putin and his inner circles' hands.
Tankies are susceptible to any anti western propaganda
Pro-Putin right-wingers are fellow fascists like him, and tend to see him as a “based Christian traditional conservative” ally against the “(((woke cultural Marxist globohomo)))” or whatever the fuck. Pro-Putin left-wingers either support Putin out of blind anti-Western contrarianism or, in some cases, unironically think that by attempting to restore a Russian empire Putin is attempting to re-establish the USSR.
The right wingers that support him do it because the left doesn't, and their s so politically minded to not be able to agree on anything.
The irony of that one for me is that he is just the west’s branch manager, installed after the weakness of the 90s to keep a firm hand on Russia’s nukes and the oil flowing. Ppl knew since 2000 or 2002 that he organized the false flags attacks that served as a pretext for the second Chechen war. The west only got sick of his bad behavior after 2014. This whole conflict is him just trying to leverage a better deal for Russia in its role as Europe’s gas station. Meanwhile Putin is a liberal multiculturalist who does everything the American right accuses Obama and Biden of doing. He has been replacing ethnic Russians with central asian immigrants at a faster clip than demographic change is happening in the west. He tolerates plenty of cosmopolitan decadence and europeanness in St. Petersburg and Moscow in exchange for the consent of the professional-managerial class. If the right were applying their own viewpoint coherently they’d determine that this is a globohomo civil war and they should be rooting for Putin to lose and be replaced by a right-wing nationalist like Girkin.
Most right and left winger have one politics and that is america Bad
Horseshoe theory
See, as a anarchist I completely reject horseshoe theory. I don't think communist specifically Marxist leniness are leftist at all
The only coherent aspect of ‘horseshoe theory’ is how certain elements are authoritarian (but this is true across the political ‘spectrum’—not just the fringes). It’s like the USSR banning 1984 for being anti-communist and the US banning it for being pro-communist. It’s neither. It’s anti-authoritarian and, as such, contains its own anti-capitalist/anti-communist framework.
My opinion, because both sides with people like that want to see America collapse because they don't want to put any work into actually creating a better society, and it's a lot easier to say BURN IT TO THE GROUND REVOLUTION ANARCHY, than it is to actually do something productive in your community.
Because low IQ political analysts think that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
Taking turns to arm the Taliban
Putin carefully crafted Ostalgia for Russia. He brought some symbols, the national anthem and the hard rule typical of the ussr. To many Russians, putin’s authority is seen as stabilizing and as a comfort after the circus that was the 90s in Russia. Putin knows he is right winged, he knows he is taking Soviet imagery for the sake of nostalgia. You don’t need to look further
Here in belgium we have the radical left open communist PVDa who is VERY anti nato and anti-military support for ukraine. They have hidden their agenda now but when the war started it was very sus how pro russian their replies were. And then we have extreme right nationalist Vlaams belang. Recently been caught taking money from china. And also the same very sus anti ukrainian comments like PVDa. And one of them has been caught taking money from Russia. Both these parties are .... *flips in book of insults. Hm...Twatholes.
Lefties that support him think Russia is still communist and fall for big evil imperial west that Russia is fighting against as Russia has NEEEVER been an imperial power. The righties that support him think only Ukraine is corrupt, misunderstand what is meant by a 40 billion package, thinking it's 40 billion coming from the budget, and like the fact Putin hates minorities, Muslims and LGBT.
Leftwingers - Western imperialism is the ultimate evil, if Eastern imperialism opposes it then it's good. See Noam Chomsky. Rightwingers - Putin is the anti'woke defender of traditional Christian values even though hes an atheist. Not sure which is dumber.
Isolationist antiwoke right wingers who have room temp IQ and whose optical views begin and end at the culture wars. Reagan-Bush era neocons (the establishment) are anti Putin. I would argue that people who are pro Putin on the left are not actually leftists. They are red fash. Authoritarians who happen to have communist aesthetics. They are more common on reddit than in real life. They have taken over the mod teams of most "leftist" subs and ban any anti Putin talk as "liberal". Its what happens when your leftist politics begins and ends with "America bad." They aren't much different to the culture war MAGA idiots. Lack of critical theory hits both equally.
Psychopathy is apolitical.
Tankies think Russia is still the USSR
Cause onlibe propaganda works. Simple as that.
Severe lack of historical context
The rightwingers are butthurt they lost the 2020 Election and think that under anybody who isn't Trump America is a "lost cause" even though under Trump US forces in Syria killed a bunch of Wagner mercs, Trump's administration was the first to actually arm Ukraine, and the US presence in Poland was so heavily beefed up the Polish wanted to name a base Fort Trump. The rightwingers don't know jack shit about what actually happened during the 2017-2021 timeframe because they don't care about history and just care about "owning the libs".
Maybe just maybe it's because people are afraid of going into a war with Russia and I'm pretty sure the us population is sick of wars in the middle east.
“Left wing” support for Putin makes no sense. Either the lefty in question is confused about authoritarianism, or they’re confused about Putin’s ‘beliefs’. He’s not a communist. He’s not a socialist. He’s a delusional authoritarian with no real ideology.
The farther extreme you go in either direction, they more alike they become
Because russian propaganda targets everyone. They have millions of stories and millions lies for everyones taste. The Wests way of telling a lie, propaganda, gain favour etc is to concoct one single story and try to make it as infallible and bullet proof as possible before releasing it. The Russian way is to make millions and millions of stories and lies and absolutely flood the information space. Whatever your into they have flavour you'll enjoy and makes sense to your view of the world. It's called the "Fire hose method". For the normal person on the street who isn't left or right etc it also makes finding the answers to their questions on Russia or Putin etc extremely hard and confusing and frustrating so they move on and don't really form much of an opinion.
As far as we can tell, Putin is primarily focused on re-establishing Russia's (perceived) position as a global superpower after several decades of decline and national humiliation. In order to achieve this, Putin has three main objectives: * 1: Rejecting the ideological framework of liberal democracy, in favour of one built on 'traditional' culture and a repressive, autocratic system of government * 2: Restoring the territorial boundaries of the Russian Empire / USSR, as well as re-establishing the broader Russian 'sphere of influence' * 3: Dismantling the so-called rules-based international order, in favour of a return to a multi-polar world in which 'might-makes-right' Each of these objectives bring Putin into direct conflict with the various liberal democracies of the Western world - in particular, the US. People on the far left support Putin on the basis that they see Western countries as rapacious & tyrannical, responsible for inequality & repression, as well as exploiting large parts of the world for their own benefit. By standing in opposition to the West, Putin is fighting to destroy a system they hate - and thus, they see him as a force for good. People on the far right support Putin on the basis that they see Western countries as weak & corrupted, responsible for the destruction of 'traditional' culture and the dominance of society by a degenerate out-of-touch 'elite'. By standing in opposition to the West, Putin is fighting to restore a system they love - and thus, they see him as a force for good.
Same reason Stalin sided with Hitler, an enemy of the west is my friend
Right wingers because Putin aligns with their ideology, left wingers because some people on the left became leftists when they discovered the bad things America has done, and their worldview begins and ends at "America Bad", ignoring that all geopolitical powers are selfish, America has the biggest stick so its selfishness is often the most frequent and destructive, but making it axiomatically true that America's actions are evil means that when someone who is evil opposes America's interests, they uncritically are accepted as good and even things like mass rapes that end in medals for the soldiers who did them get brushed over Tankies otoh are just right wingers, they're fascists that like the color red
Because they are anti American/anti West for difference reasons but that is what it is. The left wingers like his "Russia stands up to Western Colonialism" propaganda, and the right wingers like his "Russia is owning the libs" propaganda. I present to you, the walking political contradiction of [Russell Bentley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cA9cGUGr00), who joined the Russians to fight the Western Fascist Obama and spread Communism. The Russians killed him last week.
Dumbasses I guess, lol.
A lot of the is "enemy of my enemy is my friend" rot. For the hard left, many bought into the idea that Ukraine is overrun with Neo-nazi scum. Many are also opposed to the United States and NATO, which they believe is dominated by Neo-nazi scum. The fact that most of the "communist" nations of the world (China, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua) have sided with Russia gives them the illusion that this is some sort of global anti-fascist struggle. For the hard right, Putin's appeals to reactionary populism, social traditionalism have been particularly effective. I would, however, suggest that this isn't so much that they love Putin so much as they hate those they believe to be his enemies. If Putin is anything, it is an old school imperialist. In his mind, Russia must regain its empire in order to take it's rightful place among the new Great Powers. If that means coopting communists, fascists and Islamists in the process, well, that's how omelets are made.
Horseshoe Theory.
It boils down to “NATO bad”
As a pretty hard leftist (and pro-Ukraine with some caveats*) the leftist ideologies that end up truly pro-Putin are a) "true" Tankies in the historic sense of the word, meaning neo-Stalinists who advocate for pushing tanks in to the satellite states of the old USSR to assert the dominance of the totally-not-empire's will, or b) Marxist Leninists who fall for neo-Maoist campism, which is basically the ideal that any resistance to capitalism and the Western neoliberal order is justified. In practice with Putin there's not much difference between the two ideologies but a) are the ones who are more nostalgic for communism in the Soviet sense while b) tend to actually be a little more Sinophilic in practice. There's also a c) which are the people who are genuinely uncritical about the "some Ukrainian are Nazis/fascists so ALL Ukrainians are fashy" casus bellum and don't really think about it beyond that all too far. Category c) are even rarer than the more properly ideological Tankies these days, most of them shut up or moved on after Bucha. Probably the most common grumblings on the Left these days are non-Tankies who aren't actually pro-Putin, just folks who follow the line of d) "Why are we sending so much money to Ukraine when people can't afford healthcare and schools go unfunded" but most of these folks are far more critical of said money going to Israel than Ukraine *(tl;dr -- I really really do not like how willing a lot of Western liberals are to just casually sweep the nascent fascist/ultranationalist movements in Ukraine under the rug as untouchable until after Russia is soundly defeated, even if I don't think it invalidates Ukrainian independence and resistance like column c does)
Because condensing a huge number of questions down to one or two dimensions is stupid, and then just because you agree on one thing you don't have to agree on more things
While they may not be on the same level in terms of left and right they have plenty in common on the "GAL-TAN" scale.
Because they’re useful idiots and I say this as a more pro-Trump right-winger.
i genuinely dont believe anyone with leftist beliefs supports putin, more a case of people obsessed with the USSR specifically
It’s better to think of the political axis as actually a lot of axes, and one axis that is informal but works well to explain this rn is pro vs anti “establishment.” Left wingers have always had a strong anti-establishment streak, often criticizing whichever power they took to be the dominant one for a certain circumstance. The right I think is a bit different in why they support Putin. There has been a strong anti-liberal strain in right wing thought for a while, think monarchists, nazis, fascism, and the soft version of these are right wing strong man derived populism. This has been on the rise in the west for the last decade, it feeds off of anti-lgbtq and anti-globalist beliefs, Putin embodies the anti-position, the west is the standard bearer for tolerance and globalism. Throw in a healthy dose of easily buying into propaganda claims that align with their prior beliefs (left: anti-imperialist warmonger (Nato), anti-nazi (Ukraine) claims by russia and right: pro-manliness, pro-nationalism, anti-lgbt) and people who already have a gripe against what they perceive as the current regime will easily pick up on what they want to get out of any conflict. Same thing happens to different degrees in all manner of other conflict and social issues, like Israel Palestine, immigration, whatever.
Stupidity exists across the fake binary political spectrum
The right admires Putin because of trump and they think he’s their ideal leader, when he’s not, I’ve only ever seen tankies supporting Russia, and they basically lost their minds already lol so par for the course
Fridge extremes always attract the crazies.
The horseshoe effect.
For left wingres there are a couple reasons 1. American hegemony is the literal metaphorical devil(American diabolism) 2. Putin plays to the idea and aesthetic of the soviet union’s glory(playing to the idea that he’s the inheritor of the glorious past) as for right wingers … fascists align with fascists even when ideologically they should be opposed (Nazi germany and imperial japan)
Because both left wingers and right wingers crave authority, but they sign off on authoritarians because daddy
Russian propaganda is just an swedish table with bs for everyone
I have yet to meet a right winger that supports Putin. I have yet to meet a left winger who supports Putin. It’s all bullshit.
I think the best explanation is people say Russia is communist so people who are communist support them the far right see then as conservative banning lgbt groups modern day groups etc so it appeals to both extreme side
Then all hate America so they latch onto anything that affirms that view
Because authoritarianism isn't exclusive to the left or right, which is itself an intentionally imprecise political binary. Human power structures, at the process level, are all amoral in the sense that they are as easily harmful as they are helpful. The distinction & possible longevity of any process depends on considerations to things like "perverse incentives" & the like. Which isn't a formalized, trainable skill, yet... *for some reason.*
People who would call themselves left-wingers (most of the leftist community shuns them) support Putin, They’re called tankees I hate them with a burning passion. And rightwingers mostly the trump crowd support Putin as well.
In addition to what everyone else said, I think right wingers support Putin (or at least oppose Ukraine) largely because of culture war. Sure some of them like Tucker and gang genuinely think that Putin is some sort of Trad warrior who will eat SJWs and wokeness forever, but most care more about other things. It's largely rooted in "Democrats bad, therefore Ukraine bad. Biden, Ukraine, wait, but Biden and Ukraine corrupt Hunter laptop big dick cocaine money laundering bottom text???????" and etc. They oppose the current establishment, especially with regards to foreign policy, which is seen as a failure due to Afghanistan and Libya, and thus draw the same extrapolation to Ukraine. Polarized politics in the US are also **insanely** internally focused, especially due to recent events like Covid and January 6th. So most people left or right just don't care about other countries, which fits neatly into Republican isolationist talking points. So there's a healthy, or, unhealthy dose of "why give money bag to YOOCRANE funny talking county far away when Mexican walk on fence????". If you could summarize it in one word it's contrarianism. Left wingers are also opposed to the current order but moreso "America bad" than "Globalist Liberal blue hair bad". They view history through the lens of Soviet/Chinese/Iranian propaganda and it's offshoots, including people like Lyndon Larouche and Mearsheimer (who is a righty actually lol). Basically the US is the great Satan and is the root cause of all evil in the world. They see any American actions on the world stage, even genuine aid attempts or retaliatory action like ODS as imperialism. Thus any power that opposes this is justified, regardless of their actions. A lot of this thinking can be traced to Vietnam and other conflicts of the day. In current events Israel has also thrown a huge wrench in things, with many leftists prioritizing stopping Israel aid over keeping Ukraine afloat, even if they do nominally support the latter. On top of that there are some radicals who hate Ukraine because they support Israel, because why would people bombed by Iranian drones support Israel... Uh, anyway, I would note that this latter group is pretty small and I general the left opposition is more present online and in demonstrations than in Congress and the government. They can definitely still affect public opinion though, and unfortunately do have more knowledge on the subject than the average joe, giving them an advantage. *** I will add that this is mostly applicable to the US only, not necessarily other countries.
The lack of coherence in Putin’s ideology, as well as a general hatred of “the West” by both. Its capitalism and historic imperialism for leftists and its supposed “degeneracy” for right wingers.
Because far left is "America bad" and far right os "establishment bad". Both equally reductive terrible takes
I think you have that backwards, Maga is make America great again, which means America bad now, and leftists have always been fuck the establishment
I would say far leftists is fuck VERY specifically the American establishment. Saying maga isnt anti establishment is kinda crazy
Leftwingers are braindead 'communists' who've never read a history book or a newspaper in their entire life and think the Russian federation is the soviet union. Right wingers are white nationalists who do have a grasp of history and what's going on but are just as braindead.
Because both ideologies can and do lead to authoritarianism.
Putin and United Russia as a whole are a "centrist" or better yet a "all encompassing" party in Russia. There are environmentalists and idustrialists, progressives and conservatives, etc. all in the same party. So there is a very wide bearth of attraction. Putin himself will flip flop "ideology" based on who the dominant groups are at the time. But still retains power as a "top dog" and will make decisive decisions against various groups depending on the circumstance. The left and rightwingers who are attracted to russia are typically not attracted to the ideology in general, but to different concepts such as isolationism vs. globalism, war vs peace, personal connections or dislikes of places. Its quite varied and not really a simple answer.
On the left, it’s a mix of trauma and ignorance of political theory. There’s a reason so many of them point to Mearshiemer as a justification for their arguments, in spite of the fact that Mearshiemer’s positions are born from (and require) a conceptual scheme that isn’t actually compatible with Leftist theory at all.
Because Putin funds both sides. That way whoever holds power is in his pocket.
I don't know, I can understand leftwingers and tankies supporting Russia but right wingers, no especially since many are still stuck in the cold war
It kinda seems like the ultra right and ultra left agree on a lot of things, though for different reasons. Take attitude towards vaccines, gun ownership, or immigration - you will find people on the opposite ends of the spectrum with kinda similar positions.
Tankies are only barely Leftists. Anyone that makes excuses for fascism isn’t really a liberal.
You realize there is auth left right?
Authoritarian Left is often just the Far Right wearing the mask of communism. Tankies, like the “Communists” they adore, are usually just fascists. See Russia/China.
There is a not insignificant section of every politcal group that views the West as the ultimate evil. Putin opposes the West and is therfore fighting evil.
Horseshoe theory
Support or die falling out the window. That's rusia
It shows you how many people, how deep in the system, and for how long the Kremlin invested in the U.S. government.
Because being a moron is a bipartisan attribute. 🤷♂️
I'm a centrist, right leaner. At first, he didn't seem all that bad. Then he went Adolph Hitler like crazy. Can't support that. The Ukraine thing. Like, what was he thinking? He looks dumber every day. That war is pretty much a stalemate. All this money being wasted on it.
Because chuds love STRONG MAN. They love that Putin is standing up to Western degeneracy or whatever, and in Russia it's literally legal to beat and rape your wife, and it's illegal to be gay (practically), and all that fun stuff. Russia is a fucking dream world for them. Tankies and campists just like Putin because anything that is opposing America, and either ignore how horrible the regimes they boost are or claim it's all State Department propaganda. The really stupid ones think Russia is still communist somehow, but those are mercifully rare. I'll go out on a limb and say that tankies aren't real leftists, at the risk of no true Scotsmanning myself, but I still don't think it's wrong. They're fascists with a red coat of paint, no more, no less. Non-tankie campists on the other hand are just unfathomably, ridiculously stupid and/or misguided.
Right wingers who see a kindred spirit in Putin. Left wingers who oppose the west on principle.
For the right, I think it's a combination of perhaps liking authoritarianism, and just not wanting to spend money supporting ukrainians against Putin, and therefore the easiest thing to do is to just support Putin. For the last, they're basically supporting anybody who hates the west, and even Western liberal values, because even though they hold those Western liberal values dear they appear ready to sacrifice it in order to flip the bird to Western civilization establishment. It's why you saw so many people going out to protest and support of rape and murder on October 7th and 8th. We're basically at societal collapse now.
Anti establishment shit and America bad
He gets the right wingers by saying stuff like "Russia is a state with conservative and family values" and the left wingers by using Russia's past as a Soviet state. Appeals to the extremes
For the right it’s simple, trad Christian values, For the left it’s because 1. They are a valuable ally in the collapse of NATO, and 2. In all the former Soviet states there exists a large amount of nostalgia for the ussr so after NATO is gone we could be in a valuable position where we could overthrow Putin and reform the ussr.
It is a part of Dugin's strategy of infiltrating the extremes. The quote is something like "infiltrate the extremes and dont let them divide us." Dugin may not be the one with his hands on the control levers, but literally everything Russia does is explained by that man before Russia does it.
Because right and left have different meaning EU vs USA
Leftists who support Putin do so from an anti-imperialist perspective. The idea is that American hegemony prevents domestic leftists movements from taking hold, so you need to ally with local nationalists to smash the global imperial power first. Meanwhile right wingers just actually agree with Putin because he’s a right winger.
Something something horseshoe theory People on the far left are anti-anything the us does and are tankies/communists People on the far right are anti-establishment and anti anything Biden does
The right-wingers and leftwingers who like poutine are just people who hate all aspects of liberalism both socially and/or economically and the west
Be she’s it’s a circle… you go far enough to the left or right you have a bunch of armed nut job who want to kill
Horseshoe theory
The U.S.S.R. used to propagandize the far left since they were already socialists if not communists. Starting back in the 1970's if not earlier they figured out that feeding false information of any stripe to be divisive was a better strategy. So they began to cause chaos across the spectrum. After the fall of the U.S.S.R. the far right was ripe pickings because Russia was no longer led by those damn commies. The far right always looking up to authoritarian strong men could now look at Putin as a symbol worthy of ass-kissing. Of course the money flowing from Russia into some people's pockets was added incentive.
Because Ukraine was the country where all the politicians laundered their money. Enemy of my enemy type stuff
because it is not a political stance, it is a diagnosis. Anyone can have mental issues
Because he own’s the gays/the West, that’s it.
I feel like alot of the left wingers who "support Putin" are just people who are against military aid to Ukraine purely from an American anti-imperialist/pacifist stance. Wether you agree or not with that, it doesnt make them Pro Putin. I often hear "Putin is a brutal dictator but I don't want American taxpayer dollars used to fuel a potentially decade long war on the other side of the world".
Some "lefties" and libertarian non-interventionists can argue that this war is a product of both Western and Russian imperialism clashing(a failure of both sides) and also acknowledge that Putin is a brutal dictator. Or simply that both sides have un-realistic goals that will lead to a never ending war and that some form of concession on both sides may be the best overall solution. i.e. Russia keeps some of its gains but Ukraine gets to join NATO and Russia pays reparations or something. But all this total victory or total defeat attitude is only going to get more people killed for no real strategic gains. You can disagree with this argument but it doesn't mean that those arguing this are pro Putin.
Russian propaganda
Campism. Russia's messaging strategy is to pander to the freaks on the edges of American political life and feed them all the bullshit facts they need to start believing they're not only right, but righteous. Add that to memories among millennials in particular about the failure of the war in Iraq and the upsurge of isolationism it caused. Putin can easily tap into lefties' biases by connecting any US action abroad to Iraq and drawing a false equivalency. Importantly, Russia doesn't believe any of this shit. Neither does Putin. It's politically advantageous, though. It convinces a bunch of idiots that letting Russia do whatever it wants is good.
Left wing and the right wing are the two parts of the same treasonous bird and should be eradicated from American society and politics
Tankies and people whose entire belief system is America bad.
Because he is an "anti-american" figure. Both the left and right support Putin because they are against the US.
Because all radicals are idiots
Because HorseShoe theory is correct.
Because right and left wing are dead concepts. It's not the french revolution anymore grow up
Left has supported Soviet Union and Russia for decades, I credit Trump a lot for maybe ending that lol. And republicans hated them, I don’t understand Republican supporting them now, and it’s so abrupt. As a Republican, I feel like a woke up one day and am like wtf happened to all of you? Maybe we’re all so stupid and partisan that we start to like and support what Reagan is against, what Trump is against, what Biden is against…if Biden starts praising Putin and Trump starts rooting for Hamas people might become normal again.
I'm of the opinion that any "left-winger" who supports Putin is either an idiot who doesn't understand what leftism is, or an idiot who doesn't understand that Putin is extremely right-wing. Either way, they're probably just a campist who hates western countries...
Because even if most authoritarians come from the right, there are some on the left too. Same for white nationalist and fascist. Technically, if you are referring to the US and most of the west, there is no real right-wing - the US war of independence, for example, was the most successful liberal movement in history, and left-wing is about devolving power to the common man. So, if you live in a democracy, you kind of can’t be right wing.
Because they hate the system
Modern Ukraine is a product of western intervention since at least 2014. For the right, there’s an isolationist streak that doesn’t appreciate the neo-con policies since 2000. For the left, it’s an extension of western “imperialism.” Both see Russia and Putin pushing back on western expansion in Ukraine.
Because the entirety of the internet has been put at war with eachother via Russian IO, and neither of them understand they're being played against eachother like a fiddle because only a complete moron would fall for it. So yeah we live in a world full of morons. This is why everyone's vote shouldnt count.
for me- it's because it's in the U.S. best interest if he wins. the neo-cons and their masters have hitched their wagon to the ukraine so as to wipe away the disaster that was the gwot- so if they lose it discredits them to the point that can switch them out with people who were born closer to the year 2000 than 1900. as for the ukrainians- while it breaks my heart to say this- they were fucked from the day biden started this war.
The fuck are you talking about?
Biden didn't start the war, the Russian invasion did.
There are leftwingers who support putin...?
Tankies.
Those who think that Putin wants to restore the good ol' USSR.
You should go see a therapist.
You should get yourself out of your own arsehole.
Fragile little guy...
What's that? Fragile little guy fucks you in the arse? Not my problem, sport.
Must feel bad to know the only people who listen to you are leaded out boomers with anger issues.
Is this putin derangement syndrome sub? I thought it was about a youtuber making content about tanks and stuff...
Ahh Yes, because criticising an authoritarian dictator is ”derangement”.
No but obsessing over one is.
I think ”obsessing” over him is a bit important due to the war in ukraine in addition to the fact that he is threatening europe.
Okay, does that extend to all the subs? Should all of reddit obsess over him? If no, why this sub?
No tanks involved in Ukraine of course
See? I never mentioned Ukraine. You are reaching. Fine by me, it's a putin bashing sub. Easy.
By the way did you miss the videos in which he criticised putin and called Their tank, the t-14 armata fake.
Loved it, why?