If your starting point is having your own ethno-state, every political project outside of that will be seen as colonialism.

[2026-08-18] @sopjap@twitter.com: USSR was not a ‘colonial power,’ no matter how much you grift and pretend, no matter how many degrees you drop for legitimacy or your extensive ‘travel history.’ If you did travel and actually talk to regular people, you wouldn’t be writing such nonsense.

[2026-08-17] @MonicaLMarks@twitter.com: Travelling to the Caucasus, “-stan” & other former USSR countries taught me what 3 BAs, a Masters & PhD studying politics hadn’t: Russia was a colonial power. Yes, even under the USSR.

When anti-colonialism ignores that, it becomes anti-Westernism. Those are 2 different things.

[2026-08-17] @KramarenkoMari3@twitter.com: When Western lefties laugh at the idea of Ukraine being a post-colonial nation, it just proves their entire worldview is broken.

::: spoiler Expand yapping

To them, imperialism only counts if a Western power sails across an ocean to conquer someone. Because russia is an overland empire and Ukraine sits right next door, centuries of russian colonization get brushed off as "shared history" or "brotherly unity."

If your anti-imperialism stops at the coastline, your anti-imperialism is a fraud.

Overland empires use the exact same colonial toolkit as maritime ones:

Resource Extraction - stripping Ukraine to feed the metropole in Moscow.

Cultural Erasure - outlawing the language and executing an entire generation of poets and intellectuals (the Executed Renaissance).

Demographic Engineering - starving millions in the Holodomor and replacing them with ethnic russians.

Ukraine knows the real cost of totalitarian empire better than anyone. It suffered the absolute worst of both Soviet Communist terror and Nazi invasion. That’s why modern Ukraine legally banned both Communist and Nazi regimes and their symbols.

While Western lefties romanticize hammer-and-sickles from their unbombed apartments, Ukraine actually lived through the mass graves and starvation those symbols represent. Laughing off Ukraine's post-colonial reality while Ukrainians are fighting for their lives against their former metropole right now is beyond absurd. It completely strips the mask off their fake anti-imperialism.

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[2026-08-18] @sopjap@twitter.com: If your starting point is having your own ethno-state, every political project outside of that will be seen as colonialism.