Thanks for sharing your perspective. I wrote a comment a while ago with my own thoughts on this phenomenon.

In a sense, most of it is intentional and every leftist from formerly socialist Europe can attest to the reactionary overcompensation of regional cognition, where the only way to become “white” and “European” and “Western” is to prove one’s anti-communist bona fides with the zeal of a new convert. These are societies where an entire past half century has been completely repudiated and hollowed out in collective memory, leaving a vacuum that people searching for national pride and identity generally fill by looking back to the reactionary, often monarchical or fascist, regimes before socialism. These sentiments are of course encouraged by the political and educational regimes, where communism has been made an illegal thought-crime across most of formerly socialist Europe and it is openly seen as much more preferable for the population to swing towards fascism than socialism.

I think to further refine @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml’s comment, one important skill as a leftist is to build on one’s ability to think dialectically. One way to overcome liberal propaganda is to engage with it, process its arguments and still come out saying “No.” The failure to do this is why you have all those “Why I left the Left” grifters where their origin story is that they were once the “model Marxist Leninist” but then were enlightened because some redditor one day spammed them with the NATOpedia article on Tiananmen.

If everyone could do that, there would be no need for AES to protect themselves from the modern West’s propaganda system, the most comprehensive discourse hegemony in history.

This is why, if you read Marx and Lenin, they sound at times like they would be the most terminally online debate bros today because a bulk of their writings are just constantly dunking on Bakunin, Kautsky, The Economist or various other political talking heads. Yet in spite of their obsession in exposing themselves to slop, they maintained the integrity of their beliefs.

On the other hand, the alternate side of dialectics entails that this does not mean you need to spend your day reading just NYT or FT articles. Some “leftists” do this, where they have clearly never heard of Parenti/Losurdo/Amin or even the 20th century heavyweights like Fanon, Rodney, and Sakai. We need to support leftist information and content, especially because in the West, they are suppressed and leftist authors/platforms are suffocated of support like African Stream was. That’s why it’s also just as disappointing to see leftists who get all their information from liberal media and academic materials.

The renowned Mexican historian Miguel León-Portilla’s 1962 book “Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico” compiles Aztec primary source documents where the trauma of what Spain inflicted really reaches across the centuries to agonizing parallels with modern day Palestinian accounts of suffering.

I remember, I will establish a little temple where we will place the new god that the men from Castile have given us. Truly this new god wants us to worship him. What will we do, my sons? Let us receive the water on our heads [be baptized], let us give ourselves to the men of Castile, perhaps in this way they will not kill us.

Let us remain here. Do not trespass [by] going on another’s land, perhaps in this way they will not kill us. Let us follow them; thus, perhaps we will awaken their compassion. It will be good if we surrender entirely to them. Oh, that the true god who resides in heaven will help us [coexist] close to the men of Castile.

And in order that they will not kill us, we will not claim all our lands. We will reduce in length the extension of our lands, and that which remains, our fathers will defend.

Now I declare that, in order for them not to kill us, . . . we accept to have water poured on our heads, that we worship the new god, as I declare he is the same as the one we had.

Now I reduce in length our lands. Thus it will be. Their limits will begin in the direction from which the sun rises and continue . . . [he mentions each of the limits].

I presume that for this small piece of land they will not kill us. It does not matter that it was much larger. This is my decision because I do not want my sons to be killed.

Therefore, we will work only this little piece of land, and thus our sons will do so. Let us hope in this manner they will not kill us.

Edit: Here’s an old comment of mine sharing more excerpts from this book, with accounts of the Fiesta of Toxatl Massacre committed by the Spanish and the suffering endured during the Spanish siege of the city.

There’s no such thing as “Bosnian sovereignty” given that, under the Dayton Accords, the country is a colony ruled by a viceroy dubbed the “High Representative.” The current viceroy is an ex-CSU Merkel-era cabinet minister from Germany, Christian Schmidt. As is the case with all these washed up political low-rungers across the history of colonialism getting newfound authority under a colonial role, they turn into power-tripping freaks that would make subreddit moderators swoon.

In 2023, Schmidt used the “Bonn powers” proscribed under Dayton to amend the Bosnian criminal code to literally criminalize, in the actual legal header of the new article, the “Failure to Implement Decisions of the High Representative,” which sets out a criminal charge for any “responsible person” that fails to:

implement, enforce or otherwise comply with a decision of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or who prevents or otherwise obstructs its application, implementation or enforcement, shall be punished by imprisonment for a term between six months and five years.

The present Republika Srpska issue arises because, in 2023, the autonomous region’s president, Milorad Dodik, (the “Bosnian Serb leader”) issued legislation blocking entry of the colonial viceroy’s decrees into the autonomous region’s gazette recording published acts and passed laws on defamation that had been previously annulled by Schmidt.

The colonial regime’s legal appendage then acted to use the newly amended Criminal Code against Dodik. In February of this year, he was stripped of his presidential office and sentenced to a year in prison and banned from political office for six years. The sentence was appealed to the “Constitutional Court,” a court of final appeal where three of the nine judges are foreigners appointed by the President of the “European Court of Human Rights,” which upheld the sentence for “non-compliance with the decisions of Christian Schmidt” early this month.

Bosnia is a good case example of the Western liberal “rules-based order’s” depravity, its utter moral bankruptcy and its innate talent for projection. On the one hand, you have them screaming bloody murder every time they see Chinese takeout food as “Chinese foreign interference” or “Beijing’s growing influence,” on the other hand, framing any resistance to literal modern day colonial projects as “Dodik’s defiance, echoed by Serbia, Hungary, and Russia, reveals an illiberal axis wielding sovereignty rhetoric to undercut EU authority”. Incidentally, on the exact same day as this judgment, the European Council for Foreign Relations published an article about “Reading China’s Playbook in the Western Balkans” where they congratulate themselves for rescuing “Montenegro from falling into debt bondage with China” and “raising fears that new member states could act as promoters of Chinese interests” in the region, which reads as satire when juxtaposed with what they’ve been doing with their actual colonial fiefdom in Bosnia.

If you remove the context, the legal argument Dodik used in his appeal, which was that “Schmidt had no authority to intervene in the criminal code, saying only the national parliament was empowered to do so,” could easily be mistaken for one of those Western international law journal editorials railing against the “erosion of democracy” by strongmen in designated adversary countries like Venezuela. In case anyone feels an excess of individual sympathy for Dodik, he’s one of those generic right-wing Eastern European Orban clones, down to his Israeli sycophancy, visiting the site of the October 7 “Nova Music Festival Massacre” to try to drum up support, so this is moreso one of those “worst person you know just made a great point” situations.

The case of Bosnia today really drives home that there’s no meaningful difference between the openly imperialist depravity of the West a century ago and the West today. The only real change since then is that, externally as a limiting factor, a few other nations nowadays have the military capabilities to deter Western expressions of our sociopathy from being directed them, because it really is just like Fanon said: “colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Nothing really exceptional in these leaked transcripts in terms of tone. This is just how diplomats typically talk, it’s a sort of “casual formality,” equally candid and duplicitous, when they aren’t performing for their domestic audiences. It’s only the Reddit and Twitter NATO shitlibs who would be surprised by the tenor of these kind of conversations because they think diplomats talk to each other like they do screaming against designated tankies in r/worldnews threads.

If people here want to see some really interesting historical diplomatic transcripts, I’d recommend reading through the declassified portions of the top secret Kissinger transcripts with adversary diplomatic interlocutors like Zhou Enlai and Brezhnev along with Gerald Ford’s meetings with Mao himself. Him talking to Zhou Enlai about the CIA’s “innocence” in culpability for the Chilean 9/11 reactionary coup and Allende’s murder gives quite the Christian Bale talking to Willem Dafoe’s detective character from American Psycho vibes with the asymmetry of information at play in retrospect.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/publications/DOC_readers/kissinger/docs/index.html

The full comprehensive answer you’re looking for is Hao Shiyuan’s books “How the Communist Party of China Manages the Issue of Nationality” and “China’s Solution to its Ethno-National Issues.”

In short, the original structural intent of the CPC for China was precisely that of a federal state based on the models of the USSR and the United States which had also influenced Sun Yat-sen’s “Republic of the Five Nationalites.” The contradiction was that China was a country that had always invited fantasies of partition. Churchill in 1901 during the Boxer Rebellion infamously said his “Aryan triumph” quote in the context of his own imagining of China’s partition: “I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe in the ultimate partition of China. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” That view for a federal system therefore evolved in the process of the historical and material conditions of the CPC’s experience within the disunited China of the Warlord, WW2 and Civil War eras, which saw the British attempts to legitimate the feudal Lamaist theocracy’s secession in Tibet, the Japanese attempts to carve away the Northeast as Manchukuo, the breakaway of Outer Mongolia, the incitement of the two Turkestan secessionist attempts propped by the Soviets in Xinjiang and the various warlord clique territories.

As such, one of the defining qualities of the Chinese polity as recognized by the CPC was its historical tradition of unity. This had largely preserved the territorial integrity, which is the sine qua non for all states, of the various Chinese governments throughout the torturous first half of the 20th century. In the materialist view that socialist governance must reflect the history and national conditions of the given state, this historical context was therefore instrumental in influencing the CPC’s decision against a federal system, as Hao explains in this excerpt and cites Zhou Enlai’s views on the matter in 1949:

Both the Chinese Soviet Republic founded by the Communist Party of China in 1931 and the Red Army’s political declaration of establishing a federal republic in China en route to the Long March can be identified as the Chinese Communists’ early attempts to inaugurate a federal republic in China. However, these symbolic advocacies and practices were unable to be realized due to their incompatibility with the national conditions of China.

Historical facts have testified that neither the American-style “one out of many” federalism nor the Soviet-style “union of constituent socialist republics” applies to China due to its unique ancient historical process and modern historical experience. Therefore, maintaining state unity and respect for diversity have been upheld as a national commitment by the people of all ethnic groups due to China’s time-honored history as a unified multi-ethnic state. Toward the modern era of China, which was heralded by the First Opium War in 1840, the state unity, political unification, ethnic solidarity, and territorial integrity of the country were seriously threatened and undermined by the foreign powers’ aggression. Neither the social conditions for Bourgeois Revolution nor the backbone forces for launching Proletarian Revolution were existent in Mongolia, Tibet or Xinjiang at that time. If these regions were factitiously facilitated for “national self-determination” and founding independent states, they would inevitably be reduced as imperialist powers’ colonies or spheres of influence. In addition, the Versailles Peace Conference in the wake of the First World War permitted no space for China’s national self-determination. Therefore, federalism is only a fantasy for China; it would only lead to national and state disintegration.

The federalism form of government tallies with the reality of the Russian Revolution at that time; however, it does not mean that the Soviet-style union of constituent republics is the only form of government for all the socialist states. Some federated states of Eastern Europe founded after the Second World War, for example, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, successively collapsed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was, fundamentally speaking, the inevitable result of divorcing from their corresponding national conditions.

In addressing the first session of the CPPCC, Premier Zhou Enlai stated: “China is a multi-ethnic country in which the ethnic minorities make up less than 10% of the total population. Of course, all the ethnic groups, regardless of their population sizes and levels of economic development are on an equal footing. The Han people should respect the religious beliefs, languages, folkways, and customs of ethnic minorities. We advocate regional ethnic autonomy under the pre-condition of maintaining the territorial integrity of the country. Any ethnic group is undoubtedly entitled to the endowed right of self-determination. But today, the imperialists intend to divide China by fomenting the independence of Tibet, Taiwan or even Xinjiang. Against this backdrop, we hope people of all ethnic groups will not be incited by the provocations of the ill-conceived imperialist forces. For this very reason, the name of our new administration is called the People’s Republic of China, rather than the federal republic. We shall implement regional autonomy in the concentrated communities of ethnic minorities to ensure their right of autonomy”. Zhou Enlai added: “the policy of regional ethnic autonomy, by means of ethnic cooperation and assistance, aims to achieve a common development and prosperity of all ethnic groups. It will, in turn, contribute to a prosperous, culturally advanced and unified China”.

By comparing the historical conditions and developmental path of China with those of the Soviet Union, Zhou Enlai expounded the reasons why the Chinese government established the system of regional ethnic autonomy as a basic political system: “Historical conditions and the revolutionary movement development have provided a sound basis for ethnic cooperation in China; therefore, regional ethnic autonomy conforms to the national conditions of China”. Zhou Enlai added: “in addition to their obvious different appellations, the regional autonomy of China and the federalism of the Soviet Union are basically different; the former is an administrative division under unified state leadership, while the latter is a loosely-connected union of constituent republics, which are essentially ethnically-based proto-states.”

While it’s interesting that the Russian leadership would make an explicit statement like this when they have the opportunity to leverage a degree of strategic ambiguity to prey upon the hopes of the Trump admin’s Kissinger-wannabes trying to explicitly manifest such a thing - in my cynical interpretation, this signals a certain anxiety within the Sino-Russian relationship that such a thing might actually be possible, which Lavrov is thereby compelled to go out and publicly reassure - the issue is Russia’s historical track record.

Under Gorbachev, it threw all of socialist Europe under the bus. I’ve been reading Honecker’s prison memoirs lately and he personally attested how the DDR government was not even given a place at the table in the negotiations for German “reunification.” Gorbachev went over a Soviet ally of half a century because he was so desperate for the likes of Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl to shake his hand and chose to negotiate with them directly in the same way, ironically, that the Trump admin is sidelining the Ukrainian regime in recent weeks. A statement like this could very well have the same lack of worth as Brezhnev’s saying that the “USSR would never betray its Warsaw Pact allies.” It’s a frankly trite truism, but also one that already rang true for Russia in the past, which is that no one can predict the personality of future leadership.

The real impediment in the attempts to foment a Sino-Russian split 2.0 is the American desire to have its cake and eat it too by refusing to give the Russians any long-term geopolitical concessions. What the current Russian government led by Putin has always wanted is a “G2” with the US over Europe. This naturally goes against the American objectives in Europe, dating back to the Cold War NATO founding principles of “keeping the Russians out.” A “G2” relationship requires concessions and strategic sacrifices that the US is fundamentally and psychologically unwilling to make. This is what scuppered the Obama era “G2” proposals with China, which basically ordered China to remain in place as a permanent toy and clothing factory while denying the Chinese even the concession of reclaiming Taiwan.

The pathway to “split” the Sino-Russian relationship is actually there, in my view, so long as the following conditions are achieved:

1. Allowing Putin the room to attempt to reclaim a sphere of influence over Eastern Europe in the same way Churchill in his memoirs alleged he brokered with Stalin the post-war European orientation on napkin paper.

2. Forcibly ordering the economic binding of NATO Europe to Russia and solidifying this dependency to wean Russia off the material conditions of its partnership with China, which is primarily the immensely expanded economic ties.

3. Forcing through bi-partisan domestic American allegiance to this “G2” alignment by enshrining it as treaty or legislation, so that it can’t be repudiated by a later presidency, as this would be the only way to ensure Russian trust to any such arrangement.

I’d say this latter point is actually easier done than might be believed: the anti-China agenda is the leading bipartisan consensus in Washington and a coordinated narrative campaign framing such a move as “owning China” and blasting any political opposition as “surrendering to China” would overcome even the Democrats’ Russophobia through their even more fanatical Sinophobia.

The outcome, however, would not be a Russo-American grand Christian white alliance against “the East,” that Nicholas II dream of the Republicans, but a geopolitical paradigm where Russia is incentivized to openly hedge against China and the US as a much more “neutral” party.

The issue for the US is that it is fundamentally unwilling to pay the high price for such an arrangement. Going from having defeated the USSR, shattering it into partitioned pieces and successfully making those pieces fight against each other for US interests to being forced to share Europe with the territorially diminished Russian successor state is too much dramatic a psychological transition for Washington’s foreign policy blob to contemplate. This Western chauvinism of being unable to accept a relationship of true equality with a non-Western state, with all the implications and sacrifices that entails, is the colossal impediment to the “Reverse Kissinger” aspiration of “getting Russia to betray China.”