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  • is not what Starmer is referencing. The context is;

    Sorry, posted another response before yours, but I dropped in a couple of Starmer quotes that seem to be insinuating opposition to war is support for Russia in one form or another.

    It's in the Corbyn thread because it's a slight derail from Corbyn speaking at the rally and because he's the deputy president of the Stop the War coalition.

    Anyone actually heard/seen/read what he said? I've not. Instead we've got a guilty by association situation (not a new criticism of Corbyn, tbf). But in this case, I don't think being affiliated with STW is anything anyone should be embarrassed about (at the moment - if they did come out supporting Russian aggression I'd reformulate my position).

  • Thanks for the links. I wrote a longer response to this (this ended up being quite long anyway), but I'm not sure it's worth it.

    The twitter account is uncomfortably proactive on numerous points, but I don't' have a Twitter account myself so am limited to what I can actually read. But, I'll put it this way: if I did have a Twitter account I wouldn't be following them. The second article is 8 years old and covers a very different event and situation. It's provocative and uncomfortable reading. But I've not seen any evidence for STW supporting Russian aggression in either. Instead, they're (somewhat unsurprising) left-wing criticisms of Western politics in international conflict. The second frames this in a lens of domestic Crimean politics and Nato expansion, while remaining critical of Putin to come to this conclusion: "Vladimir Putin may run a vicious regime but the people of Crimea have a right to be accepted as Russian if that’s what they want..." I'm guessing most people don't think we should go to war with with Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine, in spite of the local population, either? Even if what Russia did was fucking awful.

    On the whole we don't have to agree with them but:

    1) it's important they're out there (the points about Obama being a menace to world peace and a serial international law breaker are important)

    2) twisting the meaning to pretend that they're something that they're not (support for Russian aggression) is a bit dishonest. We should either engage them on their substance, or ignore them.

    If you want you can give me more specific examples of where STW does support Russian aggression. But a criticism of NATO/the US is not the same as actively supporting a Russian invasion of a foreign state - despite what Starmer says.

    This should probably be in a different thread.

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