HeavenlyPossum on Nostr: Believing “Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine by the US” is a bit like ...

Believing “Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine by the US” is a bit like believing “Chiquita was provoked into hiring death squads to murder Colombian labor organizers by rival fruit companies.”

It makes a certain sort of sense, from a structural perspective, but it also assumes that any of these actors—capitalists or the states that work for those capitalists, these systems of competitive power politics/profit-seeking—should even exist in the first place. Chiquita was only in a position to be provoked by capitalist competitors because its owners chose to be capitalists. Russia was only in a position to be provoked by the US because its owners chose to be rulers of a great power.

We don’t have to naturalize the effects of terrible systems.