You are defending capitalist Russia, not the Left. I've been an activist for about 50 years and spit on your insults.
Lagatta:
1. You should learn to use the "quote" function, so that people can figure out who and what you're talking about. Sometimes I have to scroll back 3 days to figure out what you've responded to.
2. Repeating every 5 seconds that Russia is capitalist and imperialist gets tiresome. It's patronizing to activists here who fought against U.S. and Soviet and Canadian and British and French and other imperialism for decades. It will never convince the 1 or 2 people who hold a different opinion. Most troubling to me, however, is the effort here by some to say "U.S., Russia, all the same".
In 1939, the Communist Party of Canada, along with many other Communist parties around the world, slavishly followed Moscow's policy of the day and refused to speak a nasty word against Hitler Germany's aggression and atrocities - until 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and all of a sudden they uncritically became the biggest war boosters (even though they had meanwhile been banned).
You see, for the longest time, the CP upheld the line: "Germany, Britain, France, Poland, all capitalist, all imperialist, nothing to see here!" This dogmatic (and erroneous) line rendered them foolish and useless in the eyes of many progressive people - frittering away the great support they had accrued through their activism in the labour movement, the peace movement, the anti-fascist struggle (e.g. Spanish war), and so on. Other than isolated instances and regions where individual activists continued the good fight, the party as a whole never recovered. And no one who follows dogma, rather than the needs and voice of people, ever will.
So please. Write a post sometime which doesn't remind us that Russia is capitalist and imperialist. It is. But those are words. Don't tell me that Russia = U.S. One day it might be. So might China. But to say so today is to repeat mistakes that history teaches us we should not repeat.
