I’m not on Twitter, so I get my news elsewhere, but most of the actual pictures I see are from here. So is there some kind of bias where only the fascist imagery gets posted here in the the dunk tank? Or do the libs scrolling through Ukrainian posts on Twitter literally see and ignore fascist imagery on every single post? Like, if they see 1000 Ukrainian soldiers, will they see 1000 fascist symbols?
The CIA spent the postwar years doing all kinds of gross things, one of which was trying to move as many nazis to Ukraine as possible, with the specific aim of creating a fascist uprising in the USSR and possibly a Ukrainian fascist break-away state. They accelerated this program after the USSR coup, and the result is a modern Ukrainian state with outright neo-nazis in positions of power over the police, cities, and entire government. This is also why Ukraine doesn’t bother to do the hilariously simple trick of just telling their troops to stop wearing white nationalist, nazi patches, or perhaps suggesting to volunteers using assumed names to stop picking “Adolf” or “Dirlewanger” or whatever - they are all part of an explicitly fascist national project.
Wow, that’s… incredible. The CIA has done some fucked up shit, but that’s something else entirely. Do you have a quality source on this? I’d like to follow up on this claim.
Edit: holy shit
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I don’t trust NATO sources, do you have a youtuber?
It makes me so fucking mad how much of this shit you can learn just from their own declassified documents. They’re not even trying to hide it
yet liberals will still scream “CONSPIRACY THEORY!!!” at you for pointing at things they publicly admit on the record lol
“Oh so now you believe the CIA?”
“We know the CIA did a lot of shady shit that’s similar to what you’re describing in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and aughts, no one involved was arrested, and there was no reform of the CIA, but they aren’t still doing any bad stuff. They just stopped. You’re a conspiracy theorist nut job if you think otherwise.”
what in the goddamn fuck
I hope I’m alive to see how history will contextualize america’s decades-long nazi support around the world in the context of wwi - russian revolution - wwii - cold war - whatever is coming.
When we consider the history of all societies to be the history of class struggles, it’s maddening to think that chain of events as capitalists trying everything in their power to keep profits going and growing and combating workers that try to do take the next step. I also think wwii nazism is still not the worst that capitalists can possibly do to stop communism. The worst is still to happen and america will be the actor.
I’ve spent some time to find an account that’s properly federated to Hexbear just to comment, because wow, if I never doubted that the U.S. were meddling in Ukrainian affairs (what with the leaked phone calls and all that jazz), I can see that the beast is way bigger than expected; it made me understand this server’s perspective better. And to think they don’t even hide it…
Honestly, even if you all didn’t change your tone but just added this kind of links to your comments, you’d have an easier time convincing people.
I’ve been on hexbear for years and I didn’t know this tidbit, although I was aware that GLADIO stuff like this has happened. Learn new things every time I visit here lol.
GLADIO
Oof, yet another thing where I saw the tentacle but not the kraken behind…
If you wish to understand the leftist perspective on the US beyond the “tankies just think everything the US does is automatically bad”, I strongly recommend that you read Killing Hope and The Jakarta Method. Arming and supporting fascists to slaughter and subjugate everything that looked even vaguely socialist or just wanted to be unaligned during the Cold War has been business as usual for many decades and Ukraine is just a bullet point in a very long and bloody list. Fair warning: the stuff in those books can make you extremely angry. I legit had to put Killing Hope down and go do something else after going through the Guatemala chapter to shake off the utter disgust.
Thanks for the recommendations, and the links! If you’ll allow me the redditism, username checks out. The missing pieces are falling into place, notably about NATO, which I didn’t understand that well the hatred for; going down the rabbit hole of Operation Gladio mentioned by iie, and seeing how they’ve, for instance, supported extremist groups and commissioned terror attacks in my country with the U.S. pulling on the leash was a ride…
You’re welcome. As always, I am asking liberals to read the Progress of Truth.
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We should just get a bot to pin this to every new ukraine-related post
Edit: holy shit
This exact thought has created hundreds of thousands of marxist-leninists over the years. Stick around, you’ll have a lot of these moments.
If you also accept people that feel closer to the anarchist ideals (not the “I’m free to do what I want, no rulez!!” type), I’ll do.
I love my anarchist comrades.
I’m still in the infancy though, so, don’t mind too much if there’s some bad takes here and there; they’ll eventually stop after more reading.
That tends to be how it goes. Bad takes in good faith are usually met with direct explanation. Hopefully that is your experience as well.
Yeah, you don’t have to agree with everything to still be family.
Google “Project AERODYNAMIC CIA”, the documents are all on the CIA’s own website
Ever hear of The Jakarta Method?
I had not. I looked it up and have since bought the book, and just… I have no words that can really do it justice.
It’s a lot, but it’s a really good (and important) read. I found that, for me, it really hammered home how much of the conflict out there is class war where the nazi’s and their adjacents ( neo-nazis, kkk, christo-fascists, mujahideen, etc) are ultimately just the foot-soldiers of capital against the workers of the world.
Unfortunately, The Jakarta Method just kinda scratches the surface of the horrors of the last century. I definitely recommend Vijay Prishad’s Washington Bullets for a more broad overview of what Jakarta Method covers at an individual level. Also, The Blowback podcast is great, especially Season 2 if you’re looking for CIA shenanigans. I’ve not read a book on it yet, but Operation Gladio is also pretty important when it comes to the CIA and supporting nazis and other fash.
Project Aerodynamic was one part of the CIA network of Ukrainian Banderite Nazis creating propaganda literature.
https://www.foiaresearch.net/project/aerodynamic
This nazi was the main guy involved in running the operation. Prolog Research was his publishing firm funded by the CIA to generate anti-soviet pro-Ukrainian nationalist books.
From 1949, Lebed lived in the United States. During 1952–1974, he headed the Prolog Research Center in New York; in 1982–85, he was Deputy Chairman and since 1974 he was a Member of the Board of Directors of the institution. In 1956-91 he was a member of the board of the Ukrainian Society of Foreign Studies in Munich and Toronto, publishing committee "Chronicle of the UPA (1975). Author memories “UPA” (1946, 1987). Thanks to his collaboration with the CIA and their active shielding of him, Lebed was never tried for the war crimes he and his men had committed against Poles and Jews during WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykola_Lebed
The works published through Prolog later became incorporated into history curriculum to cement the false narratives they had established.
More about that here: https://www.villagevoice.com/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/
IMO they publish all these pictures on purpose as part of a wider campaign to normalize nazism.
There’s a video out there from pretty early in the war with an azov officer bragging and laughing about how easy it was for them to dupe the entire western media apparatus into apologizing for their obvious fascism, so yeah.
I haven’t seen it since it was first making the rounds though, and I have no idea how to even start trying to find it again.
TBH I think that guy got it backwards. He didn’t “dupe” the media, it’s just his masters running interference for him. The CIA has him wrapped around their collective little finger, not the other way around. Kind of like a dog thinking they tricked their owner into feeding them.
Oh definitely, but it does demonstrate how it’s an intentional effort. Unlike his masters this fascist dog just comes right out and admits it.
I’d love to get a source for this if you have one.
Same, but like I said I have no idea where to even start looking
I don’t internet very well
I think there are pieces of it in this clip compilation video
I just posted it in a comment yesterday. Funny how often it becomes relevant and how few liberals know about this, even over a year and a half later.
tagging @GhostofLeninsGhost@hexbear.net in case this helps.
Thank you!
Ukrainian fascists are the commandos of the war and have people sympathetic to them all up the chain. They are provided with a lot of power on the ground and this includes the production of propaganda.
You see a lot of Nazi imagery because (1) there are indeed a lot of Ukrainian fascists in the military and (2) the Ukrainian fascists are the ones creating the photo ops.
Liberals are first and foremost ignorant and most don’t even notice or recognize sonnenrads or whatever most of the time. And when it’s pointed out, they become defensive, as this has been their rah-rah nationalist moment, the first war in a long time they feel they can outwardly support. Acknowledging that they’re supporting Nazis creates cognitive dissonance that leads them to lash out like children.
Acknowledging that they’re supporting Nazis creates cognitive dissonance that leads them to lash out like children.
Or just straight up deciding that Nazis aren’t that bad after all. “If I’m supporting Nazis, and I know that I’m cool and good, then Nazis must not actually be that bad either.”
I haven’t seen that specifically, more just these ones don’t count and then ranting about the USSR.
I haven’t seen an outright defense of nazis, just a defense of looking the other way. Which materially makes no difference, but as far as the thought process goes it’s a bit different than fully saying nazis are good
I can see what you mean, but on the other hand the sentiment of “Well, Hitler did have some good points” is common enough, for example. I would say it leans more towards the “not so bad” thought process than the “not actually Nazi” thought process. I think that the “not so bad” thing is probably more of a cryptofascist tactic than it is a liberal excuse, but in my experience there’s a hell of a lot of crossover between those two. Otherwise, the concept of the “scratched liberal” wouldn’t be so constantly applicable.
I have never seen a lib irl say hitler has good points, but I have seen them argue that Stalin was worse. Like before, effectively the same statement materially, but I think the thought process is a little sneakier.
I think the scratched liberal goes fascist without even knowing it. They’re not going to just suddenly get on board the “hitler good” train, but they’ll get on the “well they’re on our side this time” train, you know what I mean?
It’s a semantic difference, but idk I think it’s somewhat, if not important, worthwhile to note that they are a different creature being used by the fascist, less so than a fascist outright.
I have never seen a lib irl say hitler has good points
Consider yourself fortunate, then. I have, more than once.
I think the scratched liberal goes fascist without even knowing it. They’re not going to just suddenly get on board the “hitler good” train,
I agree. There’s a reason we call it a pipeline.
if not important, worthwhile to note that they are a different creature being used by the fascist, less so than a fascist outright.
It’s absolutely worthwhile (and important) to differentiate between out-and-out fascist and ignorant liberal. I just think for a lot of them, certainly the ones we’d call scratched libs, it’s more a matter of degree than of kind. It’s a spectrum, and unfortunately they usually end up sliding in one direction along that spectrum.
I do think you’re right that it’s far more often that a lib will deal with their cognitive dissonance by going the “that’s not Nazi” route as opposed to the “Nazis aren’t all bad” route, but I still contend that the latter does happen, and I have actually seen it happen.
A lot don’t because they’re just ordinary people in a shit war, and I don’t blame them for fighting any more that some french or german dumbass volunteering in ww1. Even if you know the theory and are socialist, Revolutionary Defeatism is a hard road to follow in a real war, especially at first.
But pretty much every elite or regular army unit does. And as militia get hardened by these cadre more and more take on their fash ideology, much as German proto fascists infiltrated the units that would become the freicorps.
It’s fucked and Ukraine is gonna be a hotbed of not just Fascism but full Nazism if it survives, win or lose. Of course this war continues to strengthen the Fash opposition to Putin (who sucks, but isn’t a fascist) in Russia as well. Only silver lining is that the communist rank and file is increasingly agitated as well.
I struggle to see a clean argument that Putin isn’t fascist. Russia’s economic system looks fascist; the targeting of internal minorities, particularly homosexuals, seems congruent; the regime’s media mouthpieces say things about nearby countries that sound fascist.
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Isn’t Russia’s economic system basically normal as hell neoliberalism? I won’t argue about it being fascist, but since the west is also neoliberalized, there may be some questions you need to grapple with.
Tbf, what we think of as neoliberalism (in this case, referring to post-Reagan/Thatcher US/UK) is closer in practice to fascism than anarchocapitalism. Anarchocapitalism at least doesn’t have the government picking winners, working with tech companies to spy on its citizens, and corporate welfare. Not to say that anarchocapitalism is viable, but Neoliberalism (which is supposed to be like diet anarchocapitalism), is definitely not what we have in the US and Russia. There’s far, far, far too much intermingling of power between government and big corporations for that. So, yeah, in pure economic terms, both Russia and the US are fascist economies, and that should be a pretty uncontroversial statement.
When did capitalist states practice anarcho-capitalism?
That’s only because anarcho-capitalism is only possible in fantasy
Or even bring up “anarcho”-capitalism at all lol
I’m not saying they did, but the neoliberals fashion themselves as sort of diet anarchocapitalists. At least, that’s how they present their policies. In practice, I wouldn’t be amazed if Ronald “less government” Reagan put more people in jail than Stalin.
I think you’re pretty much right and the only reason the upvote ratio doesn’t reflect that is that you seem not to understand that capitalism necessitates “the government picking winners, working with tech companies to spy on its citizens, and corporate welfare.” You will never have capitalism without those things, and that’s why people are pointing out that anarchocapitalism is a nonsense fantasy, because it is. So using that as a point to counter something (and I’m not sure what) in the comment you responded to above makes no sense.
Neoliberalism does like to paint itself as a more “pure” capitalism, so I don’t think calling it “diet anarchocapitalism” is wrong, but that’s just their branding. There never was or ever will be a non-diet version of capitalism in that sense, where the bourgeoisie and government don’t collaborate and reinforce each other. If anything, fascism is the non-diet version. That is to say, you’re also correct that neoliberalism does incorporate some fascist elements. Maoo’s response to ChrisLicht in this very thread explains that better than I could hope to, so refer to that.
There is a ton of centralized control of the economy (gazprom, 99% of the media, etc) though which is more fasc than neolib
I’m sorry, centralized economic control of industry is fascist? What?
Liberals saying everything that’s not liberalism is fascism again.
Illiberalism ≠ fascist.
This is why you see liberals that are as afraid of antifa as they are of Nazis.
Everything unlike them is the same to them the same way they can’t tell the faces of non-white people apart lol.
I don’t even know why I respond to federated liberals to be honest, they never get the picture and I usually just give up
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TIL social democracy is fascist
It is indeed the left wing of fascism
lol they literally invented privatization but we can just ignore that because all the things i don’t like are the same
It’s not a command economy like you’re interpreting here. It’s a grift economy. Basically, it’s a freak hybrid of public/private company structure that functionally allows Putin to reward his favorite cronies with high-rolling executive positions while also providing shitty, expensive service to the Russian people. It’s really not all that far removed from a lot of what we’ve got going on in the US.
What is the differentiation between grift and profit maximization for the individual participants of the free market economy?
no you don’t get it I externalized that aspect of capitalism by calling it a derogatory name
Yeah they are just doing another version of the US has billionaires and Russia has oligarchs thing. Its basically the same system
Basically, it’s a freak hybrid of public/private company structure that functionally allows Democrats and Republicans to reward their cronies with high-rolling executive positions while also providing shitty, expensive service to the American people
Or, put another way,
neoliberalism
To be fair, they did close with “It’s really not all that far removed from a lot of what we’ve got going on in the US.” I think this person is pretty much on the right track, they just haven’t been exposed yet to enough actual theory to rid them of the more pernicious liberal brainworms.
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Nope, fascism involves privatization. Nationalization is a communist/socialist/social democratic move.
The word privatization was invented to describe the actions of the Nazi government. The biggest lie you have ever been sold by Liberals is that Fascism is “when big scary state” exists. Fascism is the domination of the petty capitalists, the complete freedom of them to act with impunity. “Free Market” and “Small Government” are synonymous with fascism, not antithetical to it.
The intermixing of the capitalists and the state happened in Nazi Germany not because private capital was being nationalized, but because national capital was being privatized and sold off. Private industrial barons became warlords. Notice how all the big German war production companies were private companies making massive profits (Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porshe, etc.) while all the USSR war production companies were 100% soviet controlled?
lmao
Russia’s economic system looks like typical industrial-ish capitalism.
Targeting internal minorities has been America’s playbook since the response to Bacon’s Rebellion and is a key tenet of every European country’s history. You’ll still find huge numbers of Europeans justifying the modern and historical persecution of Roma.
Targeting gay people has been the policy of The West for centuries. The colonizers wrote all about their disgust at “savage” people that embedded spectra of sexualities into their societies. The US only adopted a rainbow capitalist “acceptance” in the last decade.
Fascism is rooted in a particular approach to anti-left reaction. A series of methods by which to co-opt and oppose groundswells of anti-capitalist sentiment. The primary goal is to disseminate a false consciousness that redirects frustrations away from capitalism itself and instead to reactionary scapegoats, and a key part of doing so is the destruction of communists and others on the left.
Like all Western-installed capitalist regimes, whether it’s France or Russia or Japan, there are fascistic elements to the existing systems of control. Fascism was never fully defeated. The West incorporated it into their own societies. Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascisms were the prototypes. The red scare, genocidal anticommunist campaigns, the cold war, the anti-civil rights campaigns, mass incarceration, the police state are all the modern incorporations, and every single one of them justified through nationalist, nativist, white supremacist rationales.
So yes you’ll find some fascistic elements in the Russian state.
But you won’t find that it’s run by the ham-fisted Hitlerite fascism that’s taken over large swaths of Ukrainian power structures. As a head capitalist of an existing order that has no fear of an organized left, Putin has no need to stoke outright ham-fisted fascism in his own country, as the whole point of it is to deputize a violent anti-left paramilitary. He doesn’t want one of those, he already has the army and is doing the opposite by consolidating Wagner. In addition, fascist false consciousness tends to target some of the bourgeoisie. Putin is the symbol of the system that fascists claim to oppose.
This does not make Putin a good guy. He’s as fascist as any US president. But he’s not like Sonnenrad-tatted white supremacists looking to create a neo-Bandyerite society on top of the mass graves of Russian-speakers.
Fascism isn’t when homophobia
For comparison, Ukraine also has many anti-homosexual and anti-trans laws, while also having a history of attacking ethnic minorities and having doctrinally Nazi military brigades, along with a persistent campaign of whitewashing and lionizing Holocaust collaborators like Bandera, and has a ton of ethnonationalist policy (with its President openly declaring wanting to emulate Israel, an exterminationist ethnostate).
That second group (the non-LGBT stuff) are things that Russia notably does not have. It is literally “just” a modern liberal state with homophobic policy, revanchist rhetoric, and, depending on how you define it, expansionism (here I am thinking of Georgia rather than Ukraine). It is by no means a good country or a moral country, but it is not fascist in the sense that liberal darlings like Navalny are fascist
Russia having the same anti-LGBT policies as 1970s West Virginia is fascist (they are oriental and primitive)
(Please do not mention 1960s liberal America not allowing black people to vote)
The same anti-LGBT policies as …checks notes… 2023 Florida. (Is Florida worse than RF right now? IDK)
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That’s a good question, it genuinely might be, though most of us agree Meatball is an aspiring fascist . . .
A few months ago Russian government banned transition for trans people, i.e. it’s impossible to change gender in passport, can’t get HRT officially (exceptions are people who was getting HRT before the law was passed) and etc. And there was literally NO ONE who voted against the law in the government. It’s awful.
It’s interesting that Putin’s fascist mistakes are normal to you, but Navalny’s are not.
Navalny’s explicitly a great Russian chauvinist though, right? He is anti-immigration and suspicious of the national minorities within the Russian Federation. I don’t know if Navalny has said he’s pro LGBTQ but his racism makes me suspect he’s categorically different than Putin. Putin may hold these less bigoted views for pragmatic or even cynical reasons, but that is a qualitative difference between the two.
And what conclusions does that interest draw you towards?
Do you think that contextualizing something to show how Navalny is exceptional equates to an endorsement of what Navalny is being compared to?
The only reason this comparison is being made is because of how often Navalny is promoted as an alternative to and preferable opposition candidate to Putin in liberal spaces.
Navalny? The cockroach guy?
I didn’t get a notification. Uh, he would probably let pogroms against Muslims, Jews, etc. run wild if you look at the groups behind him. Putin mostly fights gay rights organizations, which is bad but not on remotely the same level. Putin doesn’t say we should deny poor people welfare for being gay, Navalny marches in front of “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” banners.
Putin is a liberal, he is your guy not ours,
He was appointed by your Yeltsin clique that previous liberals openly appointed to liquidate socialism.
Instead of accepting him as one of your own you did a little orientalism and pushed Putin towards China.
Maybe you should support an alternative that is left-wing.
Nalvany is even more right-wing than Putin, calls immigrants cockroaches to be exterminated.
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oppositional defiance disorder that pervades here
fuck off, typical ableist liberal.
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Revolutionary defeatism = whatever weakens your own government makes your role as a revolutionary socialist easier
You are a socialist, your primary concern is the weakening of your own government so that a proletarian state can take its place
You can’t affect what’s happening in Russia, the only thing you can affect is sending less Ukrainians into certain death by forcing your government to the negotiating table and force your proxy to actually sign a ceasefire.
Let’s be clear here, we’re only talking about Putin in this thread because you wanted to know if he was fascist. No one here has been defending Putin, they’ve been explaining why your understanding of terms like fascism are not well formed and that it is far more accurate to label Putin as a liberal. Not in spite of all of the horrible things Putin stands for, but precisely because those horrible things are consistent with liberalism.
But the original post was about Ukraine. Putin is only relevant if you believe the conflict in Ukraine is between Putin and Ukraine. It is not.
The conflict in Ukraine is a civil war that has been ongoing for years before any Russian involvement. The sides in that conflict are the increasingly nationalistic government that came into power following a coup, and the people of the Donbas region who have been facing increasing levels of ethnic discrimination, political disenfranchisement, and legal barriers to social and economic participation in society under that new increasingly nationalistic government. This elevated into the Donbas war, with the national government and private militias shelling civilian centers throughout the Donbas, resulting in a refugee crisis of people fleeing into Russia to seek asylum. This fighting had been ongoing for years, with Russia stepping in to negotiate a ceasefire in the form of the Minsk agreements long before any military intervention was considered. Ukraine ended up being the one to break the terms of the Minsk agreement and started hostilities back up, at which point the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic saw full separation from Ukraine as the only viable end to the war. They began petitioning for outside military assistance, and that was when Russian military intervention started in the Donbas war.
The Ukrainian national government is 100% the aggressor in this conflict, with their claim to acting in a defensive capacity based on nothing more than political borders and “blood and soil” rhetoric. That doesn’t mean that Putin is “the good guy,” he almost certainly has self serving goals that he is able to pursue that motivated his decision to provide the military support that the LPR and DPR asked for. But a critique of Putin doesn’t change the fact that the LPR and DPR are justified in fighting for their autonomy, and that justification doesn’t go away just because military assistance from Russia was the best option available to them out of a set of bad options. They shouldn’t have to roll over and submit to being second class citizens in a country that has been stripping their rights away and murdering them just because you don’t like the guy that responded to their request for assistance.
And as for Putin having self serving goals with regards to his involvement in this conflict, the same could be said of US/NATO involvement in this conflict. The government that came into power following the Euromaiden coup was propped up in part through US support, and US/NATO weapons were slowly being stockpiled in Kiev with missile silos being placed within striking distance of Moscow close enough that they could strike critical infrastructure and high value targets without having enough time to deploy defensive countermeasures once their early warning equipment has detected a missile has been launched. When taken in the context of the US and NATO’s consistent aggressive posturing towards Russia, Russia seems as if it has a legitimate national security motivating it’s involvement in Ukraine. Unless you think that “na na na na na I’m not touching you” is a legitimate geopolitical argument for why installing first strike capabilities on the doorstep of someone you have declared to be your adversary is actually completely neutral/defensive act and not a naked act of aggression.
the targeting of internal minorities, particularly homosexuals, seems congruent; the regime’s media mouthpieces say things about nearby countries that sound fascist.
Liberal nationalism does a fine job doing all that on its own, can’t just apologize for all the things that all variants of liberalism do by saying “all the bad stuff was actually fascist, not liberal”
Manifest Destiny and the extermination of native Americans was a liberal project, at minimum as bad as lebensraum? Yes.
Fascism is the immunological response of capital that manifests at the dawn of a socialist revolution, the death throes of capitalism where capitalists employ an unending wave of terror to destroy and murder socialist networks, and so thoroughly traumatize the population that it can never have the social cohesion again necessary for socialist organizing or construction.
This was first done in the murder of the Communist Party of Germany by the Freikorps as ordered by the liberal wing of Weimar, and the rise of the Nazi party in its place.
Kissinger outlined and formalized this policy, widely recognized by social democratic and social democratic leaning liberals as “shock therapy”. Repeated and iterated upon as standard U.S policy from Korea, to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, etc.
Putin came out of the Russian national bourgeoisie’s resistance to shock therapy. Naturally, right-wing, anti-communist, and extremely reactionary, but from a project based around protectionism of Russian bourgeoise interests rather than breaking open the Russian market for Western capital (which would loot the oligarchs).
This was first done in the murder of the Communist Party of Germany by the Freikorps
To add to your argument, this wasn’t even the first time. Marx himself described a form of pre-fascism in 18th Brumaire, decades earlier, with french cops freely executing anyone they thought could be associated to the workers movement, following a failed revolution
You can’t argue that he isn’t a fascist, you have to argue he is something, whether you think that thing is fascist or not.
Fascism is a European ideology as much as liberalism and socialism, and therefore has intellectual roots you can trace back. In finding out whether or not Putin’s a fascist, an analysis of his speeches and any written work would be needed to pin down his ideology. It’s not something that can be concluded from ticking all the boxes in a checklist
It’s not something that can be concluded from ticking all the boxes in a checklist
Just wait 'till you see the liberal “is it fascist” checklist - it’s short:
[ ] Is it a designated enemy of the hegemony?
Putin is a conservative Liberal, akin to Merkel, Assad or Singapore’s leadership. The difference between him and Merkel though is that he has been forced onto the anti-imperialist side of the world and shoved out of the core and pushed into the periphery, which has forced him to ally himself with AES nations and anti-imperialists.
It seems obvious when you’ve typed it out there, but it had never clicked in my brain that that was the mechanism happening here.
Nixon: I am a massive racist but am willing to work with the Chinese to undermine the Soviets
2023 liberals: I want to cleanse the world of the entire race of the Slavic Orient with nuclear fire
i mean , isnt it obvious…
Sorry babushka, this is the people’s washing machine now
It’s fairly easy by comparing the central factions of United Russia, which doesn’t even reach Salazar levels of Fascist organisation, to the actual “Black Hundreds were good actually” fascists to Putins right.
Putin started as a compromise candidate holding the collapsed remnants of the state together with duct tape, and his system while certainly nationalist is more like Peron or something similar. He just isn’t powerful enough even with the GRU on side to force class collaboration.
It doesn’t rise to corporatism since he can’t adequately control the oligarchs and force the workers into a cohesive whole. I’m not sure he even wants to.
This is not an endorsement of Putin who I dearly hope gets the wall when the Communist Party or one of it’s less cringe splinters undergoes backbone replacement surgery
Because there’s been a concentrated propaganda effort since the 2014 coup to make fascist ideology acceptable. Look at what happened to the polled approval rating of Bandera between 2014 and 2022. It pretty much doubled. That is not an organic thing, it happened because the fascists wanted it to, and pushed hard for the normalisation of fascism since their 2014 coup.
I’ll be as fair as I can about it, really seems like it’s around 1 in 10.
Which is a fucking lot.
If one Nazi sits down in an armored vehicle with 9 others, you now have 10 mechanically mobilized Nazis
Unlike going to a restaurant or rally, being drafted into the military is by definition not voluntary association.
Will they do anything while their Nazi comrade is massacring russian “collaborators” or doing whatever other war crimes and torture they get up to? They could gang up on the nazi and confront them, have them remove their patches and have them removed from their unit. Instead, they back them up or are cowed into conformity. To an onlooking ethnic russian civilian or donbas citizen, all they see from their perspective is 10 mechanized soldiers with a nazi among them who are too scared to stop the nazi. That’s effectively 10 nazi soldiers to the ones on the receiving end.
Skill issue. I would simply defect. Really don’t have to many consequences to worry about when the alternative is dying to protect your landlord’s house
for real, they’re using you for cannon fodder, even amerikkkans figured out how to frag their commanding officer
Ukrainian nazis are an insignificant minority with no real political power, but also it would be way too much to ask them to stop wearing nazi symbols or to not show them off front and center in all their propaganda.
And really, doesn’t every military have its nazis? That’s why we also constantly see pictures of American and Russian soldiers wearing nazi patches, right?
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tbh we do see that for both of those armies, albeit not nearly as often
to the
army’s Planck-length credit, there were some scout-snipers or whatever that actually got in trouble for nazi shit in like 2006If these are the guys you’re thinking of they didn’t get in actual trouble.
HEY!
The finger was waved at them. And they promised to be on their best behavior from now on.
/s
Ukrainian nazis are an insignificant minority with no real political power, but also it would be way too much to ask them to stop wearing nazi symbols or to not show them off front and center in all their propaganda.
This is patently false. The head of the Ukrainian armed forces posed with a painting of Bandera on Banderas birthday and it was posted on the official twitter of the Ukrainian parliament. The head of the armed forces is not a position with no political power.
For the 8 years between maidan and Russia’s entry into the civil war there were dozens of stories in western media and reports by foreign governments regarding the rise of nazism in Ukraine.
You have to be intentionally ignorant to say that Nazism isn’t a major thing in ukraine.
It’s hard to infer tone over the internet sometimes, so no harm done. Just letting you know that Babs was making a joke highlighting the absurdity of deluding one’s self into thinking that Ukrainian Nazism doesn’t run deep.
Oh thank god.
I was getting a bit weirded out thinking “how is this a hexbear?”
Our poster’s are just to good folks. Many people are saying this
I get got on here every so often too
There is obviously a bias because the pictures with fascist imagery are worth posting for that very fact, but also a lot of major news outlets keep struggling to post even a small gallery without needing to scrub it.
It would be so fucking easy NOT to have death heads and sun-wheels on everything. It just seems that there is 0 problem to flaunt fash imaginery in the Ukranian forces. Which isnt suprising since neo-nazism seems to be pretty commonplace in Ukraine (even by european standards).
I think I disagree. At this point it feels like in Ukraine you get shot for not sporting enough nazi flair.
The exact bias that lead to Canada plucking a Nazi out of the thousands of possible veterans they could have chose and honored, yes
Turns out when virulently reactionary nationalism goes unchecked it proliferates among the populace. The entire reason those same nazis were allowed in to begin.
i mean there’s a draft, so it seems highly unlikely, but I think the nazis are the most in favor of the war, and therefore are the most willing to show up in propaganda begging for more guns.
exactly. I think that the large majority of the Ukrainian military that could be really called “soldiers” - as opposed to men who are drafted, shown which end of the gun the bullets come out of, and then are sent to die in minefields (because NATO doesn’t consider the average Ukrainian to be a human being and are instead treated as subhuman cannon fodder, hence all the “we’re weakening Russia for basically no cost!” shit from liberals) which makes up the vast majority of the Ukrainian military at this point - do have fascist imagery somewhere on their person.
i assume the ones most on social media are the most ideologically commited, some unenthusiastic draftee probably isn’t bragging and masturbating online about it.
The draftees are getting beaten and shot by the Nazi recruiters and “rear guard”
stalin shouldn’t have stopped at berlin
Libs loving Nazis - NATO!
Nazi Arming and Training Organization.
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a few bad apples
Finish the turn of phrase
Finish the fucking turn of phrase, I beg of you, this is not the defense you think it is
seriously wtf how do they not get that
How do people still use that phrase unironically?
If you don’t already have the capstone on your bad apples dunk:
A few bad apples don’t ruin the whole bunch, they ruin the barrel.
Apples release a gas as they ripen and eventually spoil that makes all the other apples ripen and spoil faster. So obviously a bad apple will make all the apples you put in a barrel with it spoil too.
But the barrel is made of porous wood, so the apple spoiling gas gets in the barrel and even after you empty the old spoiled apples, hose it out and fill it back up it’s gonna spoil the good apples you put in there.
A few bad apple don’t just spoil the ones they’re packed in with, they spoil the whole barrel.
A few bad apples don’t just ruin the police department, they ruin the institution!
A few Nazis don’t ruin the soldiers they’re stationed with, they ruin the army!
“Don’t let a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch” means get the fuck rid of those bad apples asap.
E: the apple spoiling gas is called ethylene.
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Find me a nationalist movement that doesn’t have wannabe nazis.
I don’t see people loosing their shit over the taliban running Afghanistan like they do about possible nazis somewhere.
The vietnamese did not embrace nazis when they fought off the american invaders. The hatians did not become nazis when they cast off the yoke of slavery. Cuba did not become nazis by overthrowing the dictator batista. You are a dip shit.
Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine off the top of my head.
Vietnam
lmao buddy come on now
If everyone in the West was sending weapons to the Taliban then that might have been an interesting comparison. But no one does that (anymore).
On top of other ones: the PRC and DPRK
I have seen the iron eagle carrying the trident of Ukraine
Ya see, to me, that doesn’t exactly vouch for the liberal nature of Ukrainian Nationalism so much as the opposite.
media promotes controversial material
the media has been deepthroating Western and particularly Ukrainian boots ever since the war began. you would need the strongest solvent on the planet to remove the superglue that binds the average journalist’s tongue to the leather of a Ukrainian jackboot. if even they can’t convincingly depict Ukrainian soldiers as not being coated head-to-toe in imagery that celebrates the fucking Holocaust, then there’s a really big problem in Ukraine.
“we are killing each other as fast as possible and your worried about a patch?”
yes, actually, I am worried that many, many Ukrainian soldiers knowingly use fascist imagery in a war that began in 2014 partially over the rights of the Donbass people. that is, in fact, a rather pertinent issue here
Bruv they can’t keep fash symbols out of pictures of Zelensky with soldiers.
Yeah, we’re worried about a patch, because when this conflict ends one way or another Ukraine is going to be full of angry nazis with military experience and vast amounts of weaponry and that’s going to be very bad for everyone.
Please produce one of those pictures.
How do you think it will be bad? They are having a hard time fighting the Russians who are using barely trained conscripts and equipment pulled from museums.
The most advanced things on that battle field are consumer drones and weapon systems that are parts and consumables reliant from western countries.
these are easy as fuck to find. You have to be trying to avoid them if you’re this deep and still incredulous.
Did you also miss the time that NATO tweeted out a photo of a ukrainian soldier wearing a black sun for international women’s day?
the Russians who are using barely trained conscripts and equipment pulled from museums.
Source?
The most advanced things on that battle field are consumer drones and weapon systems that are parts and consumables reliant from western countries.
Please point me to your dealer. I’ll buy their entire stock.
Please produce one of those pictures.
https://leftypol.org/edu/src/1662026001627.webm
Not all of these included Zelensky (some do!) but there’s also a bonus Zelensky video clip in here too you should probably see. Either way, a person has got to be fucking willfully blind not to see that Nazism is endemic to Ukrainian military and leadership (and culture now too, because of the former two).
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I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m saying it’s probably over reported on.
No, it’s criminally underreported in the West because it’s harmful to the narrative that they have to maintain to justify how they insist on perpetuating the war at all costs.
It doesn’t help that one of Russias main premises for invading is de nazification.
It only “doesn’t help” if your default assumption is that Russia is always lying about everything. If you recognize that Ukraine has a deep and systemic problem with literal Nazis (which it does), then it becomes obvious that Russia is simply using this fact, justifiably so, as a reason for its role in the conflict.
every report and image that can’t be traced back to it original source and tied to the Ukrainian military should be viewed skeptically as possible propaganda.
Go ahead and do that then, and maybe you’ll end up at the correct conclusion that the Ukrainian military is fundamentally a Nazi military. Also try this, look up even western news articles from before 2022 and note how they aren’t shy about pointing this fact out. Look at the image @KittyBobo@hexbear.net posted here if you don’t want to take the time to confirm this yourself.
The amount of brigading and vitriol seen in this community is probably pro Russian agents.
There is no “brigading,” it’s just that this is one of the few spaces where voices that are contrary to the dominant western narrative aren’t silenced or immediately overwhelmed. And no, lol, it’s not bots or “agents,” you just aren’t used to seeing those contrary opinions I just mentioned, and it’s easier to blame it on bots/agents than it is to actually engage with well-reasoned arguments you aren’t usually exposed to that challenges your own stance. It’s not easy having to recognize you’ve been lied to and your stance is based on faulty premises, but it is very easy to say “Bots! Agents! Disinformazia!”
edit: fixed a link
No, it’s criminally underreported in the West because it’s harmful to the narrative that they have to maintain to justify how they insist on perpetuating the war at all costs.
This is the one thing that gives me a small sliver of hope for those of us in the west. Popular opinion is still such that “nazi = villain” even in NATO member states, as the recent Canadian parliamentary debacle showed. We’re not so far gone that the modern fascists and their enablers are able to openly talk about their admiration for the nazis in the mainstream media.
you are literally commenting on a hexbear post, brigadier twokie
The amount of brigading and vitriol seen in this community is probably pro Russian agents.
beep boop I am a communist robot beep boop I am here to subvert americas precious bodily fluids boop beep death to capitalism
Brigading is when you post on an active discussion in your home instance and the more posting you do the more brigading it is.
Take your ball and go home. You have no power here.
BOT
does a little group called the Mujahideen sound familiar to you
Yeah typically the media would go out of their way to not portray the nation we’re pumping full of weapons as absolutely covered in nazis, but apparently they’re so common we get to see the black sun on MSNBC while cheering on the freedom boys
The media absolutely covers that shit up too. It’s just so prevalent that it still slips out frequently.
some of those patches are close but not actually nazi
Uh-huh. How are you determining that a patch that looks very similar to a Nazi one actually isn’t? Is it just ”well ackshually, eagles were used by Germany before WWII and the swastika is an ancient Buddhist symbol”?
we are killing each other as fast as possible and your worried about a patch
If there are Nazis involved, I personally would like to see them die as fast as possible.
Read my reply many of those patches share an eagle as symbolism but last I checked the Ukrainian trident wasn’t nazi.
If eagles are nazi symbols then I must have gotten some of those bad textbooks in school.
who do you think you’re fooling? we all know where this symbol comes from. we all know what it means
It’s hilarious how they just swap the swastika for a trident and liberals say “this isn’t Nazi!”
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Please be mindful of downplaying the prevalence of Nazis, especially coming from a German instance.
Imagine deliberately playing naïve to run defence for Nazis because it suits US geopolitical interests. Next you’ll tell us about how these soldiers are just wearing a Buddhist peace symbol.
it isn’t “just an eagle”, it’s literally a reichsadler
but last I checked the Ukrainian trident wasn’t nazi
The symbol was famously used by the guys who were literally out just massacring Jews and Poles.
So, yes, the Ukrainian nationalist trident is a fascist symbol.
Different symbol look at the coat of arms for the Ukrainian trident.
OK what do these definitely non Nazi but totally exactly Nazi symbols symbolize?
oppa gangnam style
Someone cares about the patch enough to manufacture them, distribute them, and wear them
Sure thing, twokie
