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'Minions: The Rise of Gru' and 'Stranger Things season four

Despicable Me was a new IP aimed at todays kids, while Stranger Things works for young audiences who couldn't care less about its pop-culture inspirations.

I dont think that the various Tik-Tok kids who showed up to theatrical showings of Minions: The Rise of Gru wearing suits made the difference between an $85 million Fri-Mon opening (on par with Despicable Me 3) and a $125 million Fri-Mon opening (akin to Minions). This online meme/call-to-action was successful because it was directed at a film that the young participants wanted to see. The tongue may have been as much in cheek with #GentleMinions as it was with #MorbiusSweep. Still, participants either already wanted to see the Minions sequel in theaters or had a casual interest in a movie they expected to enjoy, which was pushed into ticket sold status by participating in this specific online game. Simply put, audiences showed up this weekend in droves because Minions: The Rise of Gru looked like a lot of fun. Of course, thats a vast simplification, or is it?

LONDON, ENGLAND - JUNE 20: Steve Carell andMinions characters attend the "Minions: The Rise Of Gru" photocall in front of the newly unveiled Big Ben at Parliament Square on June 20, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage)

Despicable Me was a new franchise aimed at kids and not their parents.

Why did Minions: The Rise of Gru break a record for an Independence Day holiday opening weekend? Its partially for the same reason that Stranger Things has become the first English-language Netflix release to top 1.1 billion global hours viewed in the first 28 days. The middle school and high school-aged teens who showed up in theaters this weekend would have been young children when Despicable Me opened theatrically in 2010, and the kids who stumbled onto Stranger Things are now six years older. At the time, Illuminations Despicable Me was an original animated feature from an upstart studio (Illumination) aimed at kids of that moment in time. It wasnt a reboot, revamp or relaunch of a formerly successful IP from generations past. It was a new kid-targeted IP aimed at todays kids, which created new marquee characters (Gru, the Minions, etc.) and pop culture icons.

The Universal-released Despicable Me opened a week before Chris Nolans Inception, on the tail-end of when the mere idea of a big-budget animated fantasy, be it from DreamWorks, Pixar or Blue Sky, was an almost automatic theatrical event. Despicable Me grossed $251 million domestic from a $56 million debut and $543 million worldwide on a $69 million budget. It was also a leggy and crowd-pleasing performer in theaters and at home. Despicable Me 2 was not the result of franchise plans or cinematic universe aspirations but because moviegoers saw and liked the first film. Despicable Me 2 earned $368 million domestic in July 2013 from a $143 million holiday debut and $975 million global on a $76 million budget, more than any prior animated release ever at the time. Minions grossed $1.1 billion in July 2015, while Despicable Me 3 earned $1 billion in July 2017.

Minions: The Rise of Gru was supposed to open in July 2020, five years after Minions and three years after Despicable Me 3. It has now been five years since the respective last installment. Absence did make the heart grow fonder. Those young kids who grew up on the series aged to tweens, teens and young adults who never stopped at least somewhat enjoying the anarchic and comparatively non-sentimental antics of the mad scientist and his bizarre, yellow-skinned henchmen. It was, alongside DreamWorks Animations How to Train Your Dragon (2010, 2014 and 2019), the definitive animated franchise of the 2010s. It was aimed at kids instead of nostalgic adults. In 2022, Minions is still cool in that semi-ironic Shrek fashion. It also serves as a grim piece of pre-Covid nostalgia for kids who have spent much of their lives suffering through a Trump presidency and a global pandemic.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK - MAY 14: Noah Schnapp, David Harbour, and Gaten Matarazzo attend Netflix's "Stranger Things" Season 4 New York Premiere at Netflix Brooklyn on May 14, 2022 in Brooklyn, New York. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Netflix)

Merely ripping off Point Break or Flash Gordon gets you The Fast and the Furious or Star Wars.

Meanwhile, Netflixs Stranger Things was a comparative underdog when it debuted in the summer of 2016. It wore its references and inspirations on its sleeve. Still, the Duffer brothers.-created 80s-set supernatural thriller was an original story with new characters who, by the shows relative quality and appeal to kids entirely unaware of the references, became themselves marquee characters. Audiences who watched the fourth season didnt care as much about the pop culture homages or needle drops. They wanted to see what happened next to Eleven, Steve, Nancy, Max, Mike, June (Winona Ryder in a shrewd casting) and Hopper. Kids who loved Star Wars didnt know or care about John Ford westerns, Flash Gordon serials or Akira Kurosawa actioners. Stranger Things has become a massive hit with kids who dont have Pavlovian responses to 80s pop culture callbacks. Its a defining rip-off, dont remake triumph.

It stinks that the decade since The Amazing Spider-Man has seen a total normalization of reboots. A 2007 movie like Disturbia, which ripped off Rear Window (quite well, natch), is now downright aspirational. Hollywood would now remake Rear Window (possibly as a six-hour eight-part Peacock miniseries). This is partially because corporate consolidation has led to big companies getting the rights to make the genuine article. Amazon doesnt need to make their own Robocop (which was itself a resurrection fable by way of The Wraith) when they can just reboot the existing MGM-owned IP. To be fair, Sony and Universal showed with Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Jurassic World that you can make something old feel new again. However, when you merely rip off Point Break, you get The Fast and the Furious and pop culture icons (Dom, Letty, Brian, Han, Hobbs, etc.) from that $6.6 billion-grossing franchise.

When you mix James Bond with Alan Quarterman, you get Indiana Jones. When you rip off Poltergeist with a modern sensibility, you get Insidious, which is currently developing its fifth installment. Does anyone remember the 2015 remakes of Poltergeist or Point Break? The Child's Play remake did its own thing alongside Don Mancinis previous Chucky flicks and the ongoing Syfy television series. But its a one-and-done, like most remakes. Meanwhile, Annabelle was a blockbuster spin-off trilogy of evil doll chillers that helped push the Conjuring Universe past $2 billion global. Stranger Things remains Netflixs crowning achievement regarding worldwide viewership and IP viability. Its become so successful that actual 80s-set properties and revamps like It and Ghostbusters: Afterlife have essentially tried to crib its style. It didnt invent 80s pop culture nostalgia (see also: The Wedding Singer and Super 8), but it arguably perfected it.

'Minions: The Rise of Gru'

Minions: The Rise of Gru and Stranger Things season four were generational coronations.

Weve been dissecting the terrible performance of Pixars Lightyear for the last three weeks, and Id be inclined to say, Whoops, Solo: A Star Wars Story again! and leave it at that save for the consequences of its failure. The entire theatrical future of Disneys animated films is now at stake. We now must deal with alt-right political actors proclaiming Lightyears failure as tied to online controversy over A) a same-sex kiss between two married grandmothers and B) Chris Evans replacing Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear. Meanwhile, those same demos declare the triumph of Minions 2 as an anti-woke victory even as Minions are asexual and occasionally dress in drag. The same folks crowing about Top Gun: Maverick being a victory for conservative entertainment would be the same ones pointing out its multiple minority characters (including... gasp, a lady pilot) had it tanked.

Top Gun: Maverick and Transformers are a testament to the potential for adult-skewing nostalgia. Concurrently, Minions and Stranger Things are examples of new franchises aimed at todays kids being successful enough to become iconic and pop culture-shaping regardless of the homages, references or past-tense inspirations. Following years of Covid-caused delay, these new installments acted as generational coronations for both respective franchises. Their reception celebrated the triumph of the (comparatively) new amid a near-constant flow of refurbished, recycled and relaunched hand-me-downs with huge box office and viewership partially driven by the demographics which helped make them successful in the first place. The #GentleMinions meme and the record-crushing Stranger Things ratings are prime examples of what can still happen when you create new kid-friendly entertainment for todays kids. After all, you make more money from the first Harry Potter than trying to discover the next Harry Potter.

Read more here:
'Minions 2' And 'Stranger Things' Show The Power Of Original Franchises - Forbes

Guest post by Alt-Right Exposed

Right on cue, the Deep State Alt Right movement has been activated in order to conflate President Trump and Republicans with racism, and hatred of women, ahead of the mid term elections.

Andrew Weev Auernheimer, webmaster of the Deep State Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, publicly praised the cowardly mass shooting and terrorist attack, by one of his followers, against innocent Black Americans in Buffalo, New York on March 14th.

On the Poast social media platform, WeevstatedViolence works. Terrorism works., and They have launched open war against us, and occasionally there are a few heroes that are willing to respond in kind. I support anyone that kills Democrats.

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In numerous articles on the Daily Stormer, and on their Gamer Uprising forum, posters have been celebrating the attack, and calling for more violence.

Andrew Weev Auernheimer is a convicted computer hacker, who was sent to prison after being caught stealing and doxxing over 100,000 iPad users.

Mysteriously, Weev was suddenly released by Obamas Justice Department, after serving only 13 months of a 41 month sentence. As soon as he left federal prison, Auernheimer immediately started to praise convicted Oklahoma City terrorist Timothy McVeigh, and he publicly called for statues to be erected of terrorists who attacked the United States government.

Weevthen fled to Ukraine, where he suddenly had someone tattoo a swastika on his chest, and started Sieg Heiling, while attempting to align himself with Donald Trump, during Trumps 2016 presidential election campaign.

This is all eerily reminiscent of Alt-Right leaderRichard Spencersuddenly doing Sieg Heils and praising President Trump right around the same time.

It has long been considered common knowledge on right wing message boards that Andrew Weev Auernheimer cut some sort of a deal with the feds, to get out of jail early in order to infiltrate, disrupt and neutralize the right wing.

Weev, who is of of Jewish descent, according to his ownmother, ingratiated himself to Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, editor of a site called Total Fascism, which was later became the Daily Stormer. Anglin allowed Weev to become the webmaster of the site, despite his ethnicity and his early release from federal prison.

Weev and Andrew Anglin registered the Daily Stormer in Russia, in order to conflate Trump and conservatism with Russia, during the 2016 election. If these two were not taking orders directly from Adam Schiff, it is hard to tell how they would act any differently.

The alleged Buffalo shooter, 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron, was an avid reader, and a huge fan of the Daily Stormer. Gendron promoted and praised the site by name in his manifesto, while describing himself as a Neo-Nazi, a white supremacist, and an incel. All of these buzzwords are constantly being bandied about on the Daily Stormer and on their forum.

Gendron also shared a lot of Daily Stormer memes on a Discord channel which has long been considered an FBI honeypot on 4chan.

Weev and Anglin recently switched the sites domain to a registrar in Communist China, but the CCP dumped them after the Buffalo shooting. It seems that promoting terrorism is a bit much for even the Chinese Communist Party to stomach, at least publicly.

The site is now only accessible on the Tor network, which is park of the Deep Web, or Dark Net, where drugs and child pornography are routinely trafficked.

The official Daily Stormer forum, Gamer Uprising, is still up and running on the regular Internet. A whois search of Gamer Uprising indicates that the forum is registered in Tonga, and is hosted in the state of Washington, on the notorious vanwa.tech.

It turns out that vanwa.tech is being kept online by a shady Russian company calledDDoS-Guard, which is the host of the official website of the terrorist groupHamas. Vanwa also hosts the8chanforum, where the Buffalo shooter just happened to post and hang out on. Just a coincidence, we are sure.

For most of the existence of the site, Anglin advocated Neo-Nazism, and called for the extermination of Jews, and the ethnic cleansing of all non-whites. As soon as Weev became involved, the site took an even darker turn, if that is possible, in which they started calling for the kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder of women and teenage girls, in addition to committing terrorism against all minorities.

Timeandagain, have documented how the Daily Stormer started promoting the Incel movement in the past.

The incel, or involuntary celibate movement is composed of losers who hate and demean women, because they lack proper hygiene and basic social skills. Most of them are addicted to pornography, so they do not have the courage to approach women without coming across as creepy.

Due to being constantly rejected by normal women, the incels become bitter and lash out at women, often threatening to rape them. Some, like Elliot Rodger, who is often praised on the Daily Stormer,murderedtwo people, all because of his inability to approach women.

In one recentarticle, Andrew Anglin celebrated the stabbing death of a 13 year old Florida cheerleader, Trystin Bailey, in 2021. While the rest of the world reeled back in horror at this gruesome, cowardly murder, Weev and Andrew Anglin celebrated it.

If all of this activity were confined to the Dark Web, that would be one thing. However, the incel movement that Weev and Andrew Anglin started, is beginning to become popular, even among young influencers on the right, who should know better.

The Daily Stormer is promoting and endorsing Donald Trump again, in order to, once again, conflate support for Trump with racism, terrorism, and hatred and violence against women. The exact same people did the exact same thing during the first year of President Trumps term, when they encouraged the attack on Charlottesville.

These incels and Neo-Nazis are not conservatives.

They are not traditional.

They hate Christianity and everything that the West stands for.

They are not part of our culture.

They are not American, and most importantly, they will not replace us.

Read more here:
Alt-Right Incels at Deep State Daily Stormer Site Celebrate Buffalo ...

Liberals and progressives have long expressed mixed feelings about libertarians, applauding their views on marijuana, abortion and gay rights while disagreeing vehemently with their hardcore fiscal conservatism. Libertarians have a long history of describing themselves as fiscal conservatives who are social liberals and arguing that the War on Drugs and the evangelical Christian Right have been terrible for the Republican Party and terrible for the conservative movement.

The far-right MAGA movement championed by former President Donald Trump and his army of authoritarians and Christian nationalists is antithetical to many of the positions libertarians have taken over the years, such as abortion on demand and full legalization of marijuana and prostitution. But journalist Jeet Heer describes an unlikely trend in an article published by The Nation on June 6: a growing MAGA influence within the Libertarian Party.

Third parties have a political impact far greater than their electoral successes, Heer explains. They are the research and development wing of the political system. The Libertarian Party can rightly claim to be heir to this tradition of being a seedbed for policy innovations taken over by both Democrats and Republicans. If the dominant ideology of American politics since the 1970s is neoliberalism, then the Libertarian Party has truly punched above its weight. The Libertarian Party championed gay rights and drug decriminalization long before the Democrats.

But Heer goes on to lament that Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute, has become influential in parts of the Libertarian Party pushing MAGA-like blood and soil rhetoric. And Heer describes a struggle between the Libertarian Partys Mises Caucus and its Gary Johnson wing. Johnson, a former New Mexico governor and ex-Republican, was the Libertarian presidential nominee in 2012 and 2016.

In 2017, Arvin Vohra, vice chair of the Libertarian Party, warned that the Mises Caucus had been turned into a sales funnel for the White nationalist branch of the alt-right. And others in the Johnson wing of the Libertarian Party, Heer notes, have been equally critical of the Mises Caucus and its MAGA-influenced views.

Taking the Libertarian Party out as a competitive force will help consolidate the right-wing vote around the Republican Party, Heer warns. Once the Libertarian Party becomes a husk of its former self, the alt-right faction will continue to assist a Trumpized GOP in a way that parallels groups like the Proud Boys. MAGA Libertarians will be a potent vector for spreading bigotry on social media. The Mises Caucus are the nominal winners in the internecine libertarian wars, but the ultimate beneficiary could be Donald Trump.

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How 'alt-right' MAGA extremism has infiltrated the Libertarian Party ...

Picture a split screen on your TV. On one side a parade of prominent Republican officials in the Trump administration, in the Trump family, in the Trump Justice Department, in the Trump 2020 reelection campaign are spilling the beans about Jan. 6. Finally, Americans are hearing the truth about Trumps Big Lie from his own people. And they pull no punches.

The defeated president knowingly deceived millions in the country about an election he lost. He pursued what he knew was an illegal plot to stay in office. He understood the criminality of his malfeasance but plowed ahead anyway. Thats what Trumps senior advisors, White House counsel, campaign manager, attorney general, daughter and others testified under oath.

On the other side of your split TV screen are 2022 Republican midterm candidates. Almost to a man, they dismiss the explosive truths dropping on the Jan. 6 half of the screen. These pols intentionally reinforce what they know is false about a stolen election that wasnt, and the need to restore integrity to elections based on massive fraud that wasnt.

They know there is no evidence supporting either claim but repeat them anyway. Again, key Republicans in the Trump orbit reaffirmed there was no there, there about Trumps declaration that he won but for the cheating. But there is a mountain of evidence that the former president deliberately violated the law and, as a federal judge deemed probable, corruptly attempted to obstruct Congress. New, damning revelations about the nefarious lengths Trump went to stay in power are jaw-dropping.

Yet campaigning Republicans continue to parrot Trumps Big Lie without regard for the electoral damage inflicted. So, heres a question for general election voters in Ohio Republicans, independents, Democrats: How can candidates who are asking for your vote in November be trusted if theyre willing to lie to win favor from a likely criminal still conning the country about an election his own cybersecurity chief called the most secure in American history?

Every Republican running for federal office in Ohio has pledged allegiance to a man with no allegiance to the rule of law, as witnessed by his team of Republican enablers who drew the line at insurrection. In every congressional race, in every GOP gerrymandered district, proud defenders of an indefensible crook who watched the violent attack at the U.S. Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power and did nothing for hours have the gall to pitch themselves as principled politicians.

Please.

Noble these Trumpian toadies are not. Consider five Republican incumbent congressmen seeking reelection who voted, baselessly, to overturn the 2020 presidential election results after the Capitol was rampaged by a bloodthirsty Trump mob chanting Hang Mike Pence! One of those lawmakers, ranking Trump sycophant Jim Jordan from Ohios 4th U.S. Congressional District, is directly implicated in the presidents lawless scheme to seize a second term.

A participant in the Jan. 6 rally and a QAnon proponent whose devotion to the would-be dictator was splayed across his lawn with a giant painted Trump sign campaigns for Congress in the 9th District as someone who can unify our communities. You cant make this stuff up. But J.R Majewski, who also suggested that every red state should secede from the union, is in a toss-up district in a predicted red wave election year with a Trump endorsement.

That could be all it takes to unseat Democrat Marcy Kaptur, a 20-term incumbent with nearly four decades of public service.

The Ohio GOP candidate for an open U.S. Senate seat, is an elite coastal venture capitalist and carpetbagger. J.D. Vance moved back to Ohio to buy political prestige with Big Tech billions and strategically morphed from a Never-Trumper to an Ultra-Trumper. But Vances craven adulation of a man he once described as noxious and reprehensible was enough to snag a last-minute nod from the incorrigible fraud and win the Republican nomination.

Now the nominee shamelessly champions Trumps deceit as gospel. The 2020 election was stolen. Large-scale fraud. Joe Biden is a fake president. Vanity Fair wrote about an interview Vance did on a far-right podcast where he practically drew a blueprint for a successful coup in 2024. After winning (or losing?) Trump would declare himself absolute ruler, dare the courts to enforce constitutional order and unilaterally wipe out the institutions of the left in a kind of de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.

Before you panic about brownshirts clicking down Pennsylvania Avenue, be empowered to act. Be inspired by the real patriots investigating the Jan. 6 carnage and warning of the clear and present danger an unaccountable Trump presents. Be categorically unwilling, as an American, to surrender your democratic birthright to alt-right demagogues who a spin a violent insurrection to overthrow a free and fair election as legitimate political discourse.

And be repelled by those campaigning to represent you who defiantly stand with the only president in our history who trashed the peaceful transfer of power, cracked a fundamental pillar of our government and threatens to do it again. On your split TV screen one side is fighting for the rule of law and accountability. One is openly marching lockstep with a narcissistic fascist who knowingly tried to steal another term.

Nov. 8 will decide whether truth wins.

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Continued here:
Trump and his mob tried to overthrow American democracy and threaten to try again - Ohio Capital Journal

For me, John Lennons mega-hit Imagine was always a song popular for the wrong reasons. Imagine that the world will live as one is the best way to end in hell.

Those who cling to pacifism in the face of the Russian attack on Ukraine remain caught in their own version of imagine. Imagine a world in which tensions are no longer resolved through armed conflicts Europe persisted in this world of imagine, ignoring the brutal reality outside its borders. Now its the time to awaken.

The dream of a quick Ukrainian victory, the repetition of the initial dream of a quick Russian victory, is over. In what looks more and more as a protracted stalemate, Russia is slowly progressing, and its ultimate goal is clearly stated. There is no longer any need to read between the lines when Putin compares himself with Peter the Great: On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it He was not taking away anything, he was returning He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well.

More than focus on particular issues (is Russia really just returning, and to what?) we should read carefully Putins general justification of his claim: In order to claim some kind of leadership I am not even talking about global leadership, I mean leadership in any area any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty. Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.

The implication of these lines, as one commentator put it, is clear: there are two categories of state: The sovereign and the conquered. In Putins imperial view, Ukraine should fall into the latter category.

And, as it is no less clear from Russian official statements in the last months, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Finland, the Baltic states and ultimately Europe itself fall into the latter category.

We now know what the call to allow Putin to save his face means. It means accepting not a minor territorial compromise in Donbas but Putins imperial ambition. The reason this ambition should be unconditionally rejected is that in todays global world in which we are all haunted by the same catastrophes we are all in-between, in an intermediate state, neither a sovereign country nor a conquered one: to insist on full sovereignty in the face of global warming is sheer madness since our very survival hinges on tight global cooperation.

But Russia doesnt simply ignore global warming why was it so mad at the Scandinavian countries when they expressed their intention to join Nato? With global warming, what is at stake is the control of the Arctic passage. (Thats why Trump wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark.) Due to the explosive development of China, Japan and South Korea, the main transport route will run north of Russia and Scandinavia. Russias strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the worlds main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine. In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world. This is the ultimate economic reality beneath Putins imperial dream.

Those who advocate less support for Ukraine and more pressure on it to negotiate, inclusive of accepting painful territorial renunciations, like to repeat that Ukraine simply cannot win the war against Russia. True, but I see exactly in this the greatness of Ukrainian resistance: they risked the impossible, defying pragmatic calculations, and the least we owe them is full support, and to do this, we need a stronger Nato but not as a prolongation of the US politics.

The US strategy to counteract through Europe is far from self-evident: not just Ukraine, Europe itself is becoming the place of the proxy war between US and Russia, which may well end up by a compromise between the two at Europes expense. There are only two ways for Europe to step out of this place: to play the game of neutrality a short-cut to catastrophe or to become an autonomous agent. (Just think how the situation may change if Trump wins the next US elections.)

While some leftists claim that the ongoing war is in the interest of the Nato industrial-military complex, which uses the need for new arms to avoid crisis and gain new profits, their true message to Ukraine is: OK, you are victims of a brutal aggression, but do not rely on our arms because in this way you play in the hands of the industrial-military complex

The disorientation caused by the Ukrainian war is producing strange bedfellows like Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky who come from opposing ends of the political spectrum Kissinger serving as secretary of state under Republican presidents and Chomsky one of the leading leftwing intellectuals in the United States and have frequently clashed. But when it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both recently advocated for Ukraine to consider a settlement that could see it dropping claim to some land to achieve a quicker peace deal.

In short, the two stand for the same version of pacifism which only works if we neglect the key fact that the war is not about Ukraine but a moment of the brutal attempt to change our entire geopolitical situation. The true target of the war is the dismantlement of the European unity advocated not only by the US conservatives and Russia but also by the European extreme right and left at this point, in France, Melenchon meets Le Pen.

The craziest notion floating around these days is that, to counter the new polarity between the US and China (which stand for the excesses of western liberalism and oriental authoritarianism), Europe and Russia should rejoin forces and form a third Eurasian block based on the Christian legacy purified of its liberal excess. The very idea of an Eurasian third way is a form of todays fascism.

So what will happen when voters in Europe and America, faced with soaring energy costs and broader inflation driven by sanctions against Russia, might lose their appetite for a war that seems to have no end, with needs that are only expanding as both sides head for a protracted stalemate? The answer is clear: at that point, the European legacy will be lost, and Europe will be de facto divided between an American and a Russian sphere of influence. In short, Europe itself will become the place of a war that seems to have no end

What is absolutely unacceptable for a true leftist today is not only to support Russia but also to make a more modest neutral claim that the left is divided between pacifists and supporters of Ukraine, and that one should treat this division as a minor fact which shouldnt affect the lefts global struggle against global capitalism.

When a country is occupied, it is the ruling class which is usually bribed to collaborate with the occupiers to maintain its privileged position, so that the struggle against the occupiers becomes a priority. The same can go for the struggle against racism; in a state of racial tension and exploitation, the only way to effectively struggle for the working class is to focus on fighting racism (this is why any appeal to the white working class, as in todays alt-right populism, betrays class struggle).

Today, one cannot be a leftist if one does not unequivocally stand behind Ukraine. To be a leftist who shows understanding for Russia is like to be one of those leftists who, before Germany attacked the Soviet Union, took seriously German anti-imperialist rhetoric directed at the UK and advocated neutrality in the war of Germany against France and the UK.

If the left will fail here, the game is over for it. But does this mean that the Left should simply take the side of the west, inclusive of the rightist fundamentalists who also support Ukraine?

In a speech in Dallas on 18 May 2022, while criticizing Russias political system, the ex-president Bush said: The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. He quickly corrected himself: I mean, of Ukraine, then said Iraq, anyway to laughter from the crowd, and added 75, referring to his age.

As many commentators noted, two things cannot but strike the eye in this rather obvious Freudian slip: the fact that the public received Bushs implicit confession that the US attack on Iraq (ordered by him) was a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion with laughter, instead of treating it as an admission of a crime comparable to the Russian invasion of Ukraine; plus Bushs enigmatic continuation of his self-correction Iraq, anyway what did he mean by it? That the difference between Ukraine and Iraq doesnt really matter? The final reference to his advanced age doesnt affect in any way this enigma.

But the enigma is dispelled the moment we take Bushs statement seriously and literally: yes, with all differences taken into account (Zelenskiy is not a dictator like Saddam), Bush did the same thing as Putin is now doing to Ukraine, so they should be both judged by the same standard.

On the day I am writing this, we learned from the media that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assanges extradition to the US has been approved by the UK home secretary, Priti Patel. His crime? Nothing other than to render public the crimes confessed by Bushs slip of tongue: the documents revealed by WikiLeaks revealed how, under Bushs presidency, the US military had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents during the war in Afghanistan, while leaked Iraq war files showed 66,000 civilians had been killed, and prisoners tortured. Crimes fully comparable with what Putin is doing in Ukraine. From todays hindsight, we can say that WikiLeaks disclosed dozens of American Buchas and Mariupols.

So while putting Bush on trial is no less illusory than bringing Putin to the Hague tribunal, the minimum to be done by those who oppose Russian invasion of Ukraine is to demand Assanges immediate release. Ukraine claims it fights for Europe, and Russia claims it fights for the rest of the world against western unipolar hegemony. Both claims should be rejected, and here the difference between right and left enters the stage.

From the rightist standpoint, Ukraine fights for European values against the non-European authoritarians; from the leftist standpoint, Ukraine fights for global freedom, inclusive of the freedom of Russians themselves. Thats why the heart of every true Russian patriot beats for Ukraine.

Slavoj iek is a philosopher. He is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London

More here:
Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine - The Guardian