cfgaussian @ cfgaussian @lemmygrad.ml

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3 yr. ago

I can't believe we are having to have this struggle session again on Lemmygrad. I thought this had been settled a long time ago.

It's a proxy war between two capitalist oligarchies over geopolitical power and control over resources

No, it's not. It's a proxy war between the global imperialist hegemon and a capitalist country defending itself against imperialist encroachment.

In that sense yes, it is about geopolitical power. About the power of one state to remain sovereign and defend its people in the face of imperialist encroachment.

The argument that it's primarily about resources falls apart when you look at the terms that Russia was willing to agree to with Minsk. That would have returned control to Kiev over the entire Donbass, except in an autonomous form and with protections for the Russian speaking population enshrined into law.

It also falls apart when you consider the terms that Russia was willing to agree to at the Istanbul peace talks. Again if it was all about resources, Russia would not have been willing to return all occupied territories to Ukraine (except for the now irreversibly separated DPR and LPR) in exchange for permanent neutrality.

(To clarify: I'm not saying resources don't play a role, but it doesn't appear to me like they are the primary motivation. If Russia was after resources they would have had a much easier time invading resource rich and sparsely populated Kazakhstan. And why would they invade Ukraine in 2022 after it had already built up a massive military instead of 2014 when its military was in total shambles? This explanation just doesn't add up.)

it doesn't matter that one is the underdog and the other the hegemon. As such this war is inherently reactionary.

It does because Russia is not just "the underdog" it is acting defensively and not as an imperialist power. Today's Russia is not the Russian empire. The geopolitical situation is completely different. There is only one imperialist pole and Russia has been forced into alignment with most of the anti-imperialist forces in the world today, from China and the DPRK to Iran, the AES (Alliance des États du Sahel) states, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.

And that's on top of the fact that for the people on the ground in Eastern Ukraine who identify as Russian this very much is a war of national liberation. For the Russian people and the Russian soldier this is an anti-fascist struggle. That makes it a progressive struggle.

A revolution stemming from this war is possible, perhaps more possible now than it was when Lenin wrote this.

Completely delusional. Maybe in Ukraine (still highly unlikely due to the high levels of brainwashing and the complete destruction of any worker organization and communist movements) but not in Russia. I wish that was the case but it just isn't. Unless you consider a color revolution to be a revolution. That is the only kind of "revolution" you would potentially get out of Russia's defeat. That or an up-swelling of extreme nationalism leading to a strengthening of reactionary forces in Russia and potentially a repeat of the Chechen wars on a much bigger scale.

International cooperation and mutual aid are not only possible but much easier in modern times than they were when Lenin wrote this.

What are you even talking about? International co-operation from who? The imperial core? An absurd proposition considering how chauvinist the Western proletariat is. We have seen vastly more "international co-operation" from fascists and mercenaries going to fight for the Ukrainian Nazi regime.

It's true that there were a few Westerners who went to defend the DPR and LPR when they were alone in fighting the fascists until Russia started the SMO but that was very much the exception. Most Westerners simply bought into the narrative their mainstream media bombarded them with. The same would be the case if a civil war broke out in Russia.

Who then? Non-interventionist China? Cuba, Iran, the DPRK, all of which are under severe siege themselves by the imperialists and which if they lost Russia would be in a much more exposed and vulnerable position than they already are? The world can't even muster up enough solidarity to stop the Palestinian genocide, do you seriously think they would go to bat to defend Russia from imperialist aggression, neo-colonial plundering and local warlords taking over as imperialist comprador puppets if the Russian state were to fall? You are living in a fantasy world.

Edit: Looking back at how i formulated this response i think i am guilty of somewhat losing my patience. My tone was overly hostile and i apologize. I should not have taken this tone with a comrade on a discussion thread. We are here to discuss and learn.

The people living in the DPR and LPR disagree with you. For many of them this is about self-determination. It is about protection from a fascist regime that was seeking to exterminate them, their language, their culture and their religion. This is not a border dispute, that is completely ignorant of the reality of the situation and of how this started.

Go try and ask a person living in Donetsk what they think about the prospect of being left unprotected at the mercy of the Ukrainian Nazi regime that has been shelling them for a decade. All this started because the people there rose up against an illegal coup that brought to power a regime that declared everything Russian as anathema. The entire reason why there was a civil war for eight years in Ukraine is because of people fighting for self-determination. For autonomy or independence from a state that they felt no longer represented them and had become outright hostile to them. For them this is a war of national liberation.

This is not about a few people of another nationality living in a border area, these are entire regions, most of Eastern and Southern Ukraine in fact, that are and have been for centuries historically Russian, linguistically and culturally. It is quite apparent that you don't understand Ukraine, its national-ethnic composition or its history. (Edit: I should not have said that, i made unjustified assumptions about where you were coming from on this issue)

The Banderite Ukrainian nationalist project, even if you wanted to ignore its deeply fascist character and roots, is a colonial one, in the sense that it seeks to establish a mono-linguistic ethnostate and erase the linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity of Ukraine by forcibly imposing the language, culture and historical national conception of a minority in the far west of Ukraine.

There is a continuum of culture and language in Ukraine going from East to West. The distinction between Ukrainian and Russian national identity is not at all as clear as you make it out to be. No, the DPR and LPR are not nations, they never claimed that, they (now) consider themselves part of the Russian nation, as did much of Ukraine to some degree before the Ukrainian nationalist re-education project began post 1991 and accelerating after 2014 to aggressively promote the idea that the entire territory of Ukraine should view itself as "Ukrainian" according to a strictly Western Ukrainian conception of that term that is explicitly and aggressively anti-Russian.

Over a million people dead, over 10 millions displaced, Ukraine is destroyed, the debt will surpass the GDP this year, state assets sold off to foreign capital for chicken feed

You are right about the devastating impact of this proxy war on Ukraine. Sadly this is what happens when the West manages to turn you into a proxy. They will use you and destroy you. But to blame this devastation on Russia is to completely ignore reality, the fact that the war was started not by Russia but by the US and the Europeans when they orchestrated the Maidan coup. Russia tried for eight years to resolve this diplomatically. Even when the SMO had started, Russia still offered a way out with the Istanbul negotiations. All of the destruction that came afterwards is solely on the US and its European puppets who went and told the Ukrainian side to renege on the peace agreement they were about to sign and promised them a blank check for military and financial support. Moreover the selling off of Ukraine and the destruction of its public sector had already begun long before the SMO. That was always going to happen after the West successfully engineered a color revolution.

But the opposite is happening, US has achieved its goals in this war. This war has accelerated the European descent into fascism, it made Europe dependent on the US energy, it triggered European countries to join NATO and to raise their defense budgets by billions.

You are wrong in saying that the US has achieved all its goals in this war. It has achieved some goals as you correctly stated with the impact this has had on Europe. But if you think that they didn't go into this originally hoping, intending and to a large extent even believing that they would defeat Russia, militarily or via sanctions and overthrow the Russian government, you have not paid attention to just how much they invested in this. And they certainly didn't and don't plan on losing Ukraine, which they very well may if the entire post-Maidan Kiev regime ends up collapsing as a result of the Russian victory. Blackrock and other Western corporations have not invested so much into owning Ukraine only to lose it to the Russians.

If Ukraine is lost to them then everything that happens in Europe is nothing more than a consolation prize. They have achieved a short term victory in subjugating Europe but in doing so they have severely destabilized it and further undermined their own global hegemony. Russia's victory is a victory for anti-imperialism. It is doubtful whether the increase of the European defense budgets is sustainable or even feasible at the levels proposed. Especially with the deindustrialization that is occurring. And it comes at the cost of the gutting of European welfare states which does not in the long run stabilize the imperialist position but rather has the opposite effect. Is is also not clear how long NATO as an entity will still survive after this defeat and the splits that are emerging in the imperialist camp.

The question is whether this text by Lenin suggests that Russian communists should desire the defeat of Russia in this war so that they can turn it into a civil war, a revolution. The answer is yes, unambiguously.

The defeat of Russia would not turn into a revolutionary civil war. If you think that then you have no understanding of the real conditions and political situation in Russia. Russian communists have no ability presently to do what you are fantasizing about here. And i'm sorry to be so blunt but that's what this is, a fantasy completely detached from the reality on the ground. If a civil war does take place it will be more akin to what happened to Yugoslavia with ethno-religious hatred and separatism breaking out, reactionary nationalist forces taking over and Russia being balkanized into Western neo-colonies and NATO fiefdoms just as the Balkans have been. Is the socialist revolution any closer in any of the countries that NATO has destroyed and plunged into internal conflicts? Is it any closer in Iraq? Libya? Syria?

I need to repeat this because this cannot be stressed enough: the geopolitical conditions of today are not the same as those in Lenin's time. You cannot blindly take a text which was written in a specific context and under specific historical conditions and apply it over a century later in totally different context without a proper analysis of the real conditions. This is un-scientific and anti-Marxist. There is no inter-imperialist rivalry today (at most there may be emerging splits in the imperialist camp). The working class is disorganized and the communist movement is not in the position it was at the time that the First World War broke out. The US's unipolar hegemony which suppresses not only socialist revolutionary movements but any kind of sovereignty and de-colonization across the world would only be strengthened by the defeat of Russia.

Gaining access to Russia's resources would greatly alleviate the problems that Western capitalism is now facing as a result of the mounting contradictions of neoliberalism and of the emerging multi-polar world in which it is much harder to extract neo-colonial plunder from the global south when they are developing and have alternative centers of power to look to. It would be akin to the infusion of life that the global capitalist system, which by the 1970s had begun to run into serious issues, received after the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the USSR. Such a renewed age of rampant plunder would delay the potential for socialist revolutions not just in the West but the world over by many decades, maybe longer. It would place even the Chinese revolution under an existential threat.

And ultimately neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians would benefit from it. In fact at the moment the best hope the Ukrainians have is a total Russian victory that would liberate them from not only their own fascist regime but from the total enslavement by the IMF, Blackrock & co. that they are looking at today.

You are completely misunderstanding the context and the reality of the Ukraine conflict. As you yourself have pointed out in another comment here, Palestine's struggle is just because it is anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. The same applies to Russia in the context of the Ukraine conflict.

It's undeniable Russia escalated the conflict 3 years ago and it wasn’t necessary. Russia absolutely had enough power in Ukraine to meddle and pull strings, hell do some assassinations, sanctions, etc.

This is simply not true. Russia had no such power in Ukraine to fundamentally change the trajectory. You are massively overestimating the ability of Russia to exert that kind of influence. Assassinations would have achieved nothing, in fact they would likely have strengthened the imperialist grip on Ukraine. Moreover, the escalation did not come from Russia, it came from NATO via its Ukrainian proxy army.

By 2022 the Donbass Republics and the ethnic Russian people living there were facing an existential threat. Ukraine had been building up an enormous army with the help of NATO since 2015. Starting in late 2021 they had been amassing forces and preparing to launch an all out assault on the Donbass which would have been a bloodbath for the civilians there. Anyone perceived as having collaborated with the rebels would either have had to flee or would be tortured and brutally murdered in retribution for the years of rebellion. It is clear that this attack was coming as preparatory shelling from the Ukrainian side had already begun just a few weeks prior to Russia launching the SMO. I have explained this in a prior comment on another post where i also provided sources confirming that this occurred in the lead up to the SMO: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7112898/6016809

The Donbass militia was not going to be able to withstand an all out attack by a Ukrainian army that had been reconstituted, massively expanded and armed to the teeth by NATO. It is enough to look at how the Ukrainians treated the civilians in the Kursk region, where now countless massacres and atrocities are being uncovered to see what would have happened had Russia not intervened. It was imperative that Russia not allow that attack to begin in earnest, as once the Ukrainian forces had lodged themselves into the urban areas of Donetsk and Lugansk - which they would have done quickly had they broken the militia lines as the frontline was extremely close to the city and the Ukrainians were trained in NATO's blitzkrieg style of war - they would have been impossible to dislodge without the widespread destruction of the cities, as we have seen throughout this conflict.

We saw in Mariupol what happens when Ukrainian units take over a majority Russian city in Ukraine, how they treat civilians, use them as human shields, and how they entrench themselves into every civilian building. Except it would have been worse even than Mariupol, which was surrounded and cut off from supply and reinforcements and thus could be partly preserved intact despite the best efforts of the Azov and other Ukrainian units to ensure maximum destruction of the city. If Russia had reacted only after the invasion by the Ukrainian forces began they could not have surrounded and cut off the incursion into Donetsk as the Donbass was too heavily fortified by Ukraine. We have seen how long it took Russia to break through those defenses.

Liberating Donetsk would have been a grinding affair more akin to Bakhmut in which the entire city would have been ruined and with Donetsk being an order of magnitude larger almost a million civilians would have been killed or displaced. And Russia would still have been portrayed as the aggressor and be blamed for starting a war and for all the destruction.

The goal of the Banderite Nazis was and is ethnic cleansing. They have explicitly said this. See the sources on this that i gave here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7263447/6081888 The Ukrainian nationalist project is fundamentally a colonialist one in Eastern Ukraine and the struggle against it is anti-colonialist. And on a broader scale Russia's SMO is an anti-imperialist and anti-fascist operation, pushing back the expansion of the imperialist NATO by defeating its Ukrainian proxy army and the fascist Kiev regime. Russia's defeat in this conflict would not accelerate the socialist revolution in Russia any more than the victory of NATO's jihadi proxies in Syria has done for Syria. Syria and the entire region is now further away from socialism than it has ever been, and imperialism and colonialism have been greatly strengthened there.

I think none of us here disagree with Lenin's stated position in this text. But you are committing a dogmatic, ultra-left error by reading it as if its application is universal regardless of objective material context. The geopolitical context surrounding the Ukraine conflict and the Western imperialist assault on today's Russia more broadly is simply not the same as the context in which this text was written. The current context is closer to the one you yourself quoted in your comment about the Palestinian struggle. It is closer to the struggle of the Emir of Afghanistan which Stalin spoke about. A reactionary and capitalist regime but one which in the present context is serving an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist function.

Impossible to say. Too many factors could still go a number of different ways. If i had to take a guess i would say it's probably going to go on for at least another six months. And i wouldn't be surprised if it goes on well into next year. But there are things that could happen which would shorten it considerably, such as an unexpected collapse on one of the fronts, a coup in Kiev, or the US cutting off all aid. Barring an event of that sort i don't think Russia is in any hurry to end it, especially now that Ukraine has been evicted from Kursk. One thing i can tell you is that the Europeans are going to be wholly irrelevant to this process. They have no material capability to follow through on any of their rhetoric.

They are usually a niche demographic, but present in any country.

The difference is that in the Baltics and Ukraine this is not a niche demographic anymore. Pro-Nazi views are either the norm or they appear to be because the state has been legitimizing and endorsing pro-Nazi views while suppressing the opposite viewpoint.

You see, most other countries do not officially celebrate SS regiments with parades, they don't name their streets after or erect monuments to Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust and brutally butchered hundreds of thousands of people, and they don't teach children in schools to hate people of a certain ethnicity while teaching that Nazi collaborators were actually national heroes and freedom fighters, all while monuments and graves of the real liberators and anti-fascist fighters are destroyed.

If you feel nazis are your main baddie, it might be better to understand what makes them tick.

Are you implying that Nazis are not "baddies"?

What makes Nazis tick is hate and sadism. There is nothing deeper to understand there. And as long as that hate continues to be taught and endorsed by a country's institutions, from the state to the educational system to media and NGOs, as is happening in Ukraine and the Baltics, the problem will only get worse.

Sounds great until you remember that the current governments of Romania, Germany, France, Britain, etc. are all arming and funding Nazis in Ukraine and enabling ethnic cleansing by a genocidal apartheid occupation regime in Palestine.

it can not be allowed for groups that espouse extreme ideologies to even gather the smallest of support

but it can be allowed to give billions of Euros and tons upon tons of weaponry to swastika-tatooed Hitler worshippers bent on ethnic cleansing. It can be allowed to prop up a corrupt, kleptocratic, dictatorial regime that has cancelled elections, placed all media under state control, declared WW2 Nazi collaborators to be their national heroes, imprisons, tortures and brutally murders journalists, political opposition, people who make online posts against the government or the war, and people who just don't want themselves or their relatives be forcibly drafted into a war against their own brothers. That can be allowed, right?

Personally i just find it extremely hypocritical to constantly talk about how much Europe loves democracy and at the same time steal an election from the candidate who was about to win it and then go on to ban that candidate, who is clearly polling far ahead of all others, from standing in the repeat elections.

The reality is that these right wingers are not being banned from elections for their extremist views (which they undoubtedly hold, i'm not saying they don't), they are banned because they are anti-EU and want peace with Russia instead of war. That is the "extremism" that is intolerable to the Brussels bureaucrats and their comprador lackeys in the Romanian state. A leftist candidate with the same popularity and the same views toward the tyrannical EU and the self-destructive European drive to war against Russia would be treated exactly the same, if not worse.

Democracy as been shown, countless times, it is a very fragile system, vulnerable to players willing to manipulate and distort it in order to achieve personal gains, at the detriment of a large majority.

This has always been happening for as long as "liberal democracy" has existed. The worst offenders of manipulation and distortion of democracy are the mainstream media, who constantly manipulate public opinion in favor of the so-called "moderate" and "centrist" parties that have been getting elected for decades in Europe. This is also to the detriment of a large majority.

Or do you seriously believe that the policies of either the Tories or the Labor party in the UK have benefited the large majority in Britain? How about Macron in France, has he not been a detriment to the large majority of his citizens? So much so that the French voters overwhelmingly rejected his party (yet he somehow is still in charge...)? How about the SPD, CDU and Greens in Germany? How is it not to my detriment as a German citizen for them to cut social spending in favor of massive rearmament? How is it not a detriment to the large majority of Europeans for these parties to push us into a war with Russia? Why is that still allowed?

Why is it that it is not allowed to democratically vote for candidates who oppose the EU (which is a fundamentally neoliberal and highly undemocratic institution that makes it impossible for countries to have left wing economic policies and is now led by unhinged warmongering lunatics who want to pump hundreds of billons of Euros to their friends in the arms industry) and who want peace instead of war?

Giorgia Meloni in Italy is just as much a fascist sympathizer as these right wingers in Romania, but the reason why she was not treated this way is because she was willing to bend the knee to Brussels.

The lab was in China but it the experiments were run by the US. The NIH admitted they funded illegal gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Have you considered that this was perhaps a US bioweapon "accidentally" deployed against China? The US has a history of this: it used biological weapons in Korea in the 50s and lied about it for decades.

And if that is the case (not saying it is; i'm still not 100% convinced of the lab leak theory) then it backfired spectacularly as China took the most serious measures of any country on earth to keep its people safe. No other country managed to maintain Zero Covid for as long as China did.

Over 1.2 million people died in the US. One third of their entire population was infected, potentially suffering long term health damage. In China it was just over 5,200 deaths, not even one hundredth of the US numbers with a population more than four times that of the US.

Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

If that to you says "lax safety precautions" then we are not speaking the same language.

The fact that you ridicule the lack of evidence and imply that this indicates China is covering something up is telling. If there was evidence you would say they are guilty. If there is no evidence then they are also guilty. That is called an unfalsifiable orthodoxy. There is nothing that can convince you otherwise because you have already decided what you want to believe and you don't care what the evidence or lack thereof indicates.

By that same logic i could claim that the lack of evidence just "proves" that the US are very good at covering their tracks and erasing evidence of a bioweapon attack. Do you see how that logic is bad because it can be used to justify virtually any conclusion?

Why is it always the Chinese government that supposedly hides things? How about it's actually the US government that has been hiding the truth all along?

Be that as it may let's put the speculation aside and stick to the facts:

The fact is that China responded to the best of their abilities to a novel and highly contagious disease, which may or may not have been released from a US funded lab. It is objectively demonstrable (the stats prove it) that China had the world's most successful Covid response. It is not China's fault that the rest of the world is so incompetent or indifferent to the wellbeing of their citizens.

Were a few mistakes made in the initial confusion when nobody yet knew exactly what they were dealing with? Probably. It's almost unavoidable to make mistakes when first encountering a situation you have never faced before. That doesn't imply any kind of deliberate conspiracy. The real test is how did each country deal with it once it was understood how serious the situation was.

Great recommendation! It is already relevant to those of us who live in Europe and the US. Our governments are already involved in an imperialist proxy war which we should do everything we can to make sure they lose.

This definitely has the Nazi scum spooked now:

They are afraid this will be all of their fate (as it should be) if the regime and its Nazi thugs don't increase the repressions and brutality even more.

To which there can be only one answer: Смерть фашизму, свобода народу!

Germany is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Neonazis and genocidal fascists.

Thanks! I know it was probably not super relevant to your post but i'm just a big nerd for geography and i love sharing cool stuff about lesser known parts of the world.

No, i'm not on Hexbear, although i follow it occasionally. I'm only on Lemmygrad and unfortunately right now Hexbear isn't federated with us anymore.

Jokes aside, i am fascinated with this region and with what China has been accomplishing there. Just the fact that they managed to build whole highways through an enormous shifting sand desert that is basically the size of Germany is a feat in and of itself. The most recent one actually finished just over a year ago:

http://english.ts.cn/system/2024/11/20/036937530.shtml

And on top of that they've also built what they call their "first zero-carbon desert highway":

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202406/1313925.shtml

As your post hints at, all around the desert they've now built a "green wall":

https://www.charmission.cn/explorechina/201.html

And since i love maps, here are a couple showing the quite extensive desert highway network:

In fact by now there is actually a fourth north-south connection:

All of these cut travel times by a lot since now you no longer have to drive around the entire desert. The way they build these is also super fascinating because they obviously have to stop the sand from engulfing the road, so they make these huge grass grids to keep the sand back.

And right at the crossroads of two of those highways, in the middle of the desert more than a hundred kilometers from any other major settlement, is a town called Tazhong. This Chinese travel vlogger went there and it's fascinating to see how people live in such a remote location.

Here's some more cool maps:

The old silk road:

Tarim river tributary system (some of these rivers only flow seasonally, if at all... it's a very dry place):

Vegetation & altitude map:

Much of that green didn't use to be there, a lot of these oases have been purposely expanded by China to create more vegetation and area for cultivation. Though climate change is also a factor as it accelerates melting of snow and ice in the surrounding mountains, increasing runoff water.

The EU is the far right. They support Nazis, war, rearmament, and genocide.

Iran doesn't have a nuclear arsenal, and Ukraine never did.

https://www.youtube.com/@militarysummary

This is a similar channel. Neutral-ish with a slight pro-Russia inclination. Reliable when it comes the facts of what is currently happening, but very mediocre track record on predictions and deeper analysis. Both of these channels are good for following the up to date maps and footage, but you should draw your own conclusions or rely on more intelligent analysts when it comes to the big picture.

The news megathread on Hexbear always has a section in the header titled Russia-Ukraine conflict where they list out a number of sources. It's somewhat out of date and some of those sources are now either defunct or lower quality than they used to be, but it's still a good place to start.

Else you can also use Yandex search and look for Russian language (just run them through a translator) news sources which tend to be the most up to date.

It was always just theatre. Nothing has changed. They're just doing a PR stunt now pretending like Trump was so tough on Zelensky it pushed him to agree to a ceasefire proposal. It's an exercise in narrative control because Russia has already said it would not accept a ceasefire (which would only benefit Ukraine at this point since it is losing ground all along the line and needs time to regroup, dig in and rearm) unless its demands are met.

Pay attention to what's happening on the battlefield, not in the media circus.

China really, really doesn't play fair on the global stage.

What does it mean to "play fair"? Who made the rules and what is so unfair about what China is doing? If it works why don't we do it too?

It's very likely that many parts of those vehicles are sold to these companies by CCP owned or partly-owned businesses, from the steel to the leather to the plastics, these cars are cheap for a reason.

So state owned industry is more efficient than privatized industry, is that what you're complaining about? Then why don't we in the West adopt the same model as China? Why don't we nationalize our industries as well so we can provide our car manufacturers with cheap parts? Why is it "unfair" to have a better economic model? And what's wrong with subsidies? Our states give out a ton of subsidies too, including to agriculture, fossil fuel, and yes the auto industry.

that's why those tariffs exist, because if they do flood the market with cheap vehicles

This is fundamentally an anti-free trade position. I thought that's what capitalism was about: whoever makes their product cheaper than their competitors wins in the free market competition, no? And if there's a problem with the quality then the market will adjust for that. People who are short on cash will buy the cheaper but less qualitative products, while those with more money will be able to afford higher quality. Isn't that how the free market is supposed to work?

Only...China's EV's aren't even low quality, are they? They're cheaper and they're just as good or better. So what you're saying is they're simply outcompeting us. And because we can't compete we need to shut them out.

Ok...well, i have no issue with that logic. Only please let's apply it to the rest of the world as well. When developing countries can't compete with Western industrial products, they should be allowed to tariff them as much as necessary or even shut them out entirely to support their own domestic production. You agree then that the WTO and IMF shouldn't go to them and force them to open up their markets or sign free trade agreements?

it's important that we're not wholly enriching a foreign nation [...] at the expense of our own.

When you agree to buy something you don't just give the other party money for nothing. In return you get a product, presumably of equal value to what you paid. So isn't your country being also enriched equally when it buys EVs? This is the liberal free trade theory right? If you freely agreed to a trade it must be fair. There is no such thing as an unequal trade in liberal theory. You're not some kind of godless Marxist, are you?

In fact, if these vehicles are somehow "artificially cheap" (putting aside the little inconsistency that liberal economics doesn't recognize the labor theory of value and instead maintains that value comes purely from exchange, meaning that a product is technically always worth exactly what you are willing to pay for it), then aren't you getting an awesome deal? You get EVs that, according to you, are supposed to be worth more than what you paid for them since China is "cheating" and making them cheaper than they should be. Which means your country actually is getting richer in this exchange!

So what's the problem? Isn't having abundant, cheap EVs good for the people and good for the environment? Why do you want poor people to not be able to afford EVs?

especially one that has shown it is happy to clandestinely meddle in Canadian affairs

Ah yes, the old Yellow Peril McCarthyist tactic. Great choice. Always a sign of healthy politics and good social stability when your politicians and media start to foster an atmosphere of paranoia and accuse people of a different ethnicity of being spies, saboteurs and traitors to the nation. How dare the evil other interfere in our country when we have never, ever meddled in their internal affairs!

Canada would never support false allegations to discredit China's government, or back separatists and violent mobs in order to destabilize China! Canada would never associate with opposition politicians in other countries whose government they don't like. Never!