Here’s how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe
If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn’t make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.
If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.
We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs
Fuck all Nazis, regardless of country. That being said, “denazification” was a disgusting lie told by an imperialist who has plenty of Nazi’s living in his own country to deal with so he could commit cultural genocide.
look, zelensky is a jewish person who sees israeli apartheid as a model to be followed but i wouldn’t go so far that as to say he wanted to do cultural genocide. it’s just azov and the right sector who wanted to.
and as we all know azov and the far right militias are now in command of the ukrainian army / government. they don’t exist anymore. so it’s all good.
I was talking about Putin. Putin said “denazification”.
Exactly. And why would Putin talk about denazification? We read the same articles from CNN and MSNBC about Ukraine’s nazi training camps, about Zelensky’s inability to get the far right militias to stop killing eastern ukrainians, or the constant and widespread worship of nazi iconography combined with a redemption of banderism. None of this add up to a need for denazification.
One would have to be a cynic to exploit words like those of the security council of Ukraine, when they claimed that asians are subhuman and that russians are are asians.
The Russian government is truly mad if it believes it must do something just because tens of thousands of russians were killed by genocidal militias. Why, in international community tems those don’t even add up to a single american life.
I’m concerned you’re doing a satire, and I’m concerned that it means you’re being a tankie. Fuck Russia. You don’t get to whitewash the murder and torture and deportation of civilians as a justified war on Nazi’s in the region.
What are you a Trump bot? There’s nothing satirical about Reuter’s reporting. These are extremely serious journalistic outfits.
This is so disappointing. That people like you would deny ethnic cleansing of eastern ukrainians. You are definitely a Trump voter.
What does being a “tankie” (lol) have to do with supporting Russia as it exists today? It is no longer a communist country. Did you fall asleep in 1990 and just now wake up? That would explain a lot
You’re a child
Why do libs talk like this?
to understand that you must do a growth
You’re rooting for people who made the person who committed the holocaust in that region their hero.
You want to stand shoulder to shoulder with literal fucking nazis and call anyone who has a problem with you a ‘tankie’
Well you dumb motherfucker, the tankies were the ones who defeated the nazis in the first place.
Never forget that the tankies liberated Auschwitz
I’m something of a moron myself.
“I’m concerned you’re doing a satire, and I’m concerned that it means you’re being a tankie”
Who do I talk to about new site taglines?
https://hexbear.net/comment/3418806
It’s almost impossible to tell you liberals apart from the fascists these days with how much fascist rhetoric you use without knowing what you’re doing. I’m begging you to stop doing the work of fascists trying to diminish the holocaust. Stop using the word genocide so fucking cynically. Appending ‘cultural’ to it isn’t a fucking wildcard that makes it valid in any situation. When you continually use the word ‘genocide’ for things like there just being a war, you reduce what happened in the holocaust to those lesser things. YOU’RE MAKING IT OKAY TO BE A NAZI BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T THAT BAD.
I think this is because the liberal west is fascicizing, and has always had these tendencies somewhat but they are deffo intensifying imo. It’s true tho that when u compare modern Democrat imperialist bureacrats to those of the past it seems to be that they’re more nationalistically mask off now and more willing to openly support Neo-Nazis. Before it seemed a bit more surreptitious.
fuck all nazis. doing anything about them is super bad though, we should simply debate the nazis out of existence
Death to America
Russia was appealing to their former WWII allies about the Four Ds: demilitarization, denazification, decentralization, and democratization that came out of the Potsdam Conference.
Russia was saying hey, former allies, don’t forget what we have all promised about Nazism. Why are you promoting, arming and supporting Nazi activity in our doorsteps?
As you will note, the words denazification and demilitarization were specifically chosen to remind the Western powers of their promises.
Why wouldn’t Putin want to purge Ukrainian Nazis? As diehard nationalists who were spearheading attacks on Donbas to begin with, it makes sense to purge them.
Could you give me a source or any proof that to show that Nazis amongst the citizens are significantly more numerous than any other European country? Or that Nazis are in any significant numbers within the country or celebrated by the government like Ukraine does?
They constantly crack down on fascists all the time ever since Putin was in office. Russia probably has the strongest anti Nazi culture of any country
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/world/europe/24iht-russia.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-medvedev-nationalism-idUSTRE70G4DP20110117
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/9/23/behind-russias-ultra-nationalist-crackdown
Yeah Russia is a weird case because it is a very nationalist country and has swung massively to the right on social questions since the fall of the USSR, and there were may fascist groups that emerged there after that, similarly to the rest of Eastern Europe (National Bolsheviks are only the most well-known example), and it has had problem with racism and racist violence.
Nevertheless it’s interesting that the Russian state’s nationalism, due to its history, and due to the pragmatism of the state, is willing to crack down hard on these groups.
I’d add tho that fascists can dislike other fascists, especially of other nationalities, and that Nazism is just one type of fascism. There has legitimately been an issue with far-right individuals in groups like Wagner, which should surprise no-one if you’ve ever actually met or interacted with people who have experience as private security, many of whom are ex mercenaries, etc…
Nationalism is simply the inevitable outcome for any country that has been colonized by a foreign imperialist power.
It is a very potent weapon, that can be harnessed for chauvinist purpose (as in European imperialism where the concept was first originated) or for anti-colonial struggle (nearly all of the post-war decolonization and independence movements had strong component of nationalism - from the Chinese communists and nationalists fending off Japanese invaders in the early 20th century, all the way to today’s West Africa’s struggle against their French colonizers).
Without nationalism, your state will be quickly disintegrate into dozens of provincial authorities and constant civil war between various warlord factions. Like it or not, national consciousness is what holds the state together when it comes to resisting foreign colonial powers.
I agree with you pretty much completely, if by nationalism we simply mean an ideological position or sets of policies which emphasize most immediately the importance of securing the interests of the nation-state as a polity or of acquiring it in the first place. Nationalism as a short-to-medium term tactic is often politically necessary, but in the long-term is has to be overcome. We shouldn’t underestimate the dangers of the fact that, for most nationalists, nationalism has more substantial content and is more final as an objective than this very deflated, tactical definition I’ve just given.
Pragmatically I agree that there are fairly clear reasons why, historically, national-liberation movements, even when Marxist, have also been equally nationalist, or have had bases of their political movements which are more nationalist and less Marxist than their leadership. Namely, that the securing of the national interests is a first priority and is understood by the people of that region as such, and so if the most useful means of ensuring popular support. But this is a pragmatic consideration and depends on the content of the nationalism, which can go beyond the pretty deflationary characterization I gave above.
This is also, from what I understand, why there is continued immense respect in the PRC for Sun Yat-Sen and why there is even a remnant of some degree of respect for the Kuomindang and Jiang Jieshi, given the importance of the latter in the unification of China during the Warlord Period. But the Kuomintang is also the best example of the risk of nationalism, especially when it is not guided by communists. Indeed the Kuomintang became more and more fascist as time went on. One of the reasons why nationalism is so problematic is that if the movement ends up more nationalist than communist then it risk moving towards accommodation with capitalism and imperialism. You see this all over the Global South since the postcolonial period after WW2. Nationalist third world governments, dominated by their petit-bourgeois, have continuously proven willing to cowtow to Western imperialist interests by serving as local elites in neocolonial economic arrangements. Nationalism, unless it is pragmatically utilized by revolutionary Communists/Marxists, greatly risks devolving, especially if the base of the support of the nationalist movement is not largely proletarian and so, as Marx, Lenin and Stalin noted, risks identifying their interests with small property and land-ownership and kulak social ascension, as opposed to the socialization of the means of production.
An even more spectacular and important example is the Khmer Rouge, which was in no way substantively Marxist or Communist save in name, and closer to fascistic, but which shows the extreme dangers of nationalism even when there are communists in the movement.
We should also note that the Bolsheviks were not initially nationalistic at all, despite Russia’s underdevelopment, tho we can see the stalinist policy of ‘Socialism in One Country’ as a form of tactical nationalism as a response to the failure of permanent international revolution.
Apart from war crimes, I take this as one the most unforgivable things from an antifascist point of view. Putin, as the head of the russian state is completely dragging through the mud the glorious legacy of the big patriotic war.
80 years ago, russians lost millions to save the world. Now, it’s all being turned into a an excuse for imperialism an tyrany.
Russians lost millions of live to whom? And who was engaging in eight years of pogroms and direct attacks on civilians in the Donbass? It’s almost like exactly because of the history of Nazism as it relates to Russia, modern neo-Nazis doing ethnic cleansing on their borders might be of some concern to the Russians.
As if Russia didn’t have plenti of full-fledged fascists among his footmen. Can you explain me why Putin, an anti-comunist nationalist would have the slightest shit to give about ukrainians having the same ideology that serves him well domestically?
Footmen don’t call the shots, unlike in Ukraine.
My point isn’t that russia is fascist. My point is that if Putin wasn’t lying about his antifacist justifications, he wouldn’t be sending nazis to “de-nazify” Ukraine.
We’ve got every photo of Ukrainian troops as evidence they’re largely Nazis. We’ve even got public statements by Ukrainian senior leadership about exterminating Russians and sympathizers in any territory they recapture. What’s your proof the same is true about Russian troops or leadership? As far as I’m aware, this “Wagner are Nazis” theory comes from one single picture of the shit bag who used to be in charge of Wagner but isn’t any longer.
edit: while I’m thinking about it - what is your obsession with Putin? Do you understand that the war is popular in Russia? That Putin is more popular now than he was before the war? That a very common sentiment in Russian elected government and the citizenry is that the war hasn’t been prosecuted hard enough? If Putin were couped by Russians the war would almost certainly get kicked into high gear and the Russians would start honestly trying to capture all of Ukraine. This great man theory obsession with Putin himself is just off the mark.
You’re right that the Ukrainian military is filled with Nazis (this doesn’t mean all of them or a majority are consciously, but it does seem to be getting difficult to deny that now given the amount of evidence, at least when not of Ukrainian kids just pulled of the street).
However the idea that there is not a far-right presence in the Russian military is also not very believable, not least because we are still talking about a military state of a quite right-wing, nationalist, capitalist country. This in no way makes it equivalent to Ukraine however, because in Ukraine it appears to be far more integrated at every level of the military and state to be point where it appears like ultra-nationalism, bleeding into fascism, are the status-quo ideology.
Leaving aside the difference between “far right presence in the Russian military” and “explicit, patch-wearing, self-identifying neo nazis directly in leadership positions all over the Ukrainian state and military”, this is the point I am making. Whether there are right wingers in militaries isn’t even worth discussing - the answer is yes. Russia doesn’t have nazi units, they don’t have nazis in charge, they haven’t been doing pogroms for eight years, and to try to equate that with Ukraine is just outright wrong.
I don’t agree with your analysis, but to take your example for a moment I’d argue that sending nazis into a meat grinder of a war to fight other nazis is a pretty good way to kill two birds with one stone.
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And you take his official justification at face value?
You should check out parenti he has a quote about this:
You’re just going to assume anything Putin or Russia says is wrong and bad. There’s no logic or rationality in your worldview - you have decided Putin is a Bad Man and will for any new information into this preconceived notion.
Marx is in your username, where is the awareness of political economy in your brain?
I’m not using imperialism as meaning war, I’m using imperialism as: using of nationalism along with military might in order to assert regional domimance. If you dom’t call that imperialism, I would be curious to hear your definition
You’re bringing shame to Hexbear
You do actually have to do the reading I know we post a lot about anime and video games but there’s work involved too. It’s called the Belden Program
The bright side is eventually you gain this superpower where you tend to know more about everything than most regular people.
Read, comrade!
Ok not trying to be a lib here but doesn’t Russia have concentrated capital in the hands of its bourgeoisie, and is using the very real existence of Ukrainian Nazis to justify asserting control over its Ukrainian oil interests? To my eyes there’s really not a good guy in this situation, it’s imperial territorial pissing all the way down, comparable the first world war. In fact I would say the shock therapy Russia went through in the 90s locked them into an imperialist political economy, since it was essentially an exact reversal of what Lenin is advocating here
There are some missing pieces that would be necessary to recognize them as fully imperialist. Imperialism also involves export of capital to subject countries in order to turn them into export economies for the imperialist. It also involves the imperialist countries competing to divide the world into more or less mutually exclusive spheres of exploitation. To my knowledge, Russia’s economic mode does not principally involve export of capital or maintaining any neo-colonies.
Russia is locked into a bourgeois political economy and its principal mode is industrial capitalism. It has not (yet) made the qualitative transition into the imperialist mode, which isn’t to say that it could not do so or lacks the necessary preconditions. My understanding is very basic, I’m not claiming to be an expert on this topic, but hopefully that helps explain why people jumped on your rump about this.
Russia already had a majority control over Ukrainian oil interests because they have the bargaining power of being (and this is still true btw, during wartime) Ukriane’s main supplier of natural gas. They could have, and it probably would have been smarter economically, for them to, bargain with the Ukrainian government, trading the political rights of the Donbass for control over the oil. But that is not what this war is about. This war is primarily about NATO, geo-political control, and the fact that it would have been massively unpopular and incredibly disruptive for Russia to give up the Donbass, and what they were doing was not a long-term solution as long as Ukraine continues to arm themselves and politically bang the drum for a full-scale invasion. Whether or not that invasion was imminent in 2022 is unclear, as the Kiev government was completely taken by surprise by the Russian invasion, but also had been making huge rhetorical speeches about retaking the Donbass regions. It’s very unclear at the moment, and history may or may not provide clarification.
You aren’t incorrect that capital is concentrated in the hands of a national bourgeoisie, but that an imperialist economic model does not strictly make. As @panopticon@hexbear.net pointed out, being imperialist is about separating a ‘core’ from a ‘periphery’ and treating them as exclusive zones for exploitation. The development of Crimea for the last decade has shown that that isn’t what Russia does in areas they annex, they are simply incorporated into the ‘core’. Now we can argue about if their exploitation of the Chechens is imperialism, but even then, Russia is almost always trying to be an honest broker in their deals (with the continued natural gas trading to Ukriane is evidence for). They are capitalists and exploiters of their own people, but imperialists is abit of a stretch, from a Marxist-Leninist definition.
So war then