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
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/AERODYNAMIC VOL. 1_0113.pdf <- legit from their own website
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
I don’t trust NATO sources, do you have a youtuber?
Google “Project AERODYNAMIC CIA”, the documents are all on the CIA’s own website
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.
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.
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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?
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.
It’s only a small minority of 1 to 3 soldiers in every single goddamn photo
Red Army enters chat
There probably actually are plenty of US military Nazis though
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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”
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.
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.
Yes it is indeed a capitalist country
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.
There is a ton of centralized control of the economy (gazprom, 99% of the media, etc) though which is more fasc than neolib
That’s such a fucking historically illiterate statement.
You know that the USA and UK saw far more state ownership and direction of the economy than Nazi germany?
Fucking brain dead PragerU nonsense.
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
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
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
lmao
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?
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
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)
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?
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.
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.
stalin shouldn’t have stopped at berlin
There are a few things going on.
- media promotes controversial material.
- there are a few bad apples like everywhere.
- some of those patches are close but not actually nazi I have seen the iron eagle carrying the trident of Ukraine a lot.
I have asked a few people I know who are there about some of the questionable patches and the general response can be summed up as “we are killing each other as fast as possible and your worried about a patch?”
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.
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.
who do you think you’re fooling? we all know where this symbol comes from. we all know what it means
it isn’t “just an eagle”, it’s literally a reichsadler
To be fair, the only other group I know who uses an eagle as a symbol is the US. Wait, never mind, they’re Nazis too, sorry…
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.
Someone cares enough about the patch enough to manufacture them, distribute them, and wear them
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
How do all these waffen SS nazis keep getting in my ukrainian nationalist movement?
70%+ of Ukrainians have a positive image of stepan bandera, literal nazi collaborator
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.
Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine off the top of my head.
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.
Vietnam
lmao buddy come on now
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?
We managed to infect them with ebil tankie propaganda but they didn’t get the message
