Ukraine

[Ally Bongo]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/vladimir-putin-ukraine-attack-antisemitism-denazify

The antisemitism animating Putin’s claim to ‘denazify’ Ukraine

Jason Stanley

 

When Russian president Vladimir Putin announced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at dawn on Thursday, he justified the “special military operation” as having the goal to “denazify” Ukraine. The justification is not tenable, but it would be a mistake simply to dismiss it.

Vladimir Putin is himself a fascist autocrat, one who imprisons democratic opposition leaders and critics. He is the acknowledged leader of the global far right, which looks increasingly like a global fascist movement.

 

Ukraine does have a far-right movement, and its armed defenders include the Azov battalion, a far-right nationalist militia group. But no democratic country is free of far-right nationalist groups, including the United States. In the 2019 election, the Ukrainian far right was humiliated, receiving only 2% of the vote. This is far less support than far-right parties receive across western Europe, including inarguably democratic countries such as France and Germany.

Ukraine is a democratic country, whose popular president was elected, in a free and fair election, with over 70% of the vote. That president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is Jewish, and comes from a family partially wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust.

 

Putin’s claim that Russia is invading Ukraine to denazify it is therefore absurd on its face. But understanding why Putin justifies the invasion of democratic Ukraine in this way sheds important light on what is happening not only in eastern Europe, but worldwide.

Fascism is a cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by ethnic or religious minorities, liberals, feminists, immigrants, and homosexuals. The fascist leader claims the nation has been humiliated and its masculinity threatened by these forces. It must regain its former glory (and often its former territory) with violence. He offers himself as the only one who can restore it.

Central to European fascism is the idea that it is the Jews who are the agents of moral decay. According to European fascism, it is the Jews who bring a country under the domination of (Jewish) global elite, by using the tools of liberal democracy, secular humanism, feminism and gay rights, which are used to introduce decadence, weakness and impurity. Fascist antisemitism is racial rather than religious in origin, targeting Jews as a corrupt stateless race who seek global domination.

Fascism justifies its violence by offering to protect a supposedly pure religious and national identity from the forces of liberalism. In the west, fascism presents itself as the defender of European Christianity against these forces, as well as mass Muslim migration. Fascism in the west is thus increasingly hard to distinguish from Christian nationalism.

 

Putin, the leader of Russian Christian nationalism, has come to view himself as the global leader of Christian nationalism, and is increasingly regarded as such by Christian nationalists around the world, including in the United States. Putin has emerged as a leader of this movement in part because of the global reach of recent Russian fascist thinkers such as Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov who laid its groundwork.

It is easy to recognize, in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the roadmap laid out in recent years by Dugin and Prokhanov, major figures in Putin’s Russia. Both Dugin and Prokhanov viewed an independent Ukraine as an existential threat to their goal, which Timothy Snyder, in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom, describes as “a desire for the return of Soviet power in fascist form”.

The form of Russian fascism Dugin and Prokhanov defended is like the central versions of European fascism – explicitly antisemitic. As Snyder writes, “… if Prokhanov had a core belief, it was the endless struggle of the empty and abstract sea-people against the hearty and righteous land-people. Like Adolf Hitler, Prokhanov blamed world Jewry for inventing the ideas that enslaved his homeland. He also blamed them for the Holocaust.”

 

The dominant version of antisemitism alive in parts of eastern Europe today is that Jews employ the Holocaust to seize the victimhood narrative from the “real” victims of the Nazis, who are Russian Christians (or other non-Jewish eastern Europeans). Those who embrace Russian Christian nationalist ideology will be especially susceptible to this strain of antisemitism.

If Prokhanov had a core belief, it was the endless struggle of the empty and abstract sea-people against the hearty and righteous land-people. Like Hitler, Prokhanov blamed world Jewry for inventing the ideas that enslaved his homeland. He also blamed them for the Holocaust

Timothy Snyder

With this background, we can understand why Putin chose the actions he did, as well as the words he used to justify them. Ukraine has always been the primary target of those who seek to restore “Soviet power in fascist form”. Echoing familiar fascist antisemitic tropes, in a 2021 article, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev denounced Zelenskiy as disgusting, corrupt and faithless. The free democratic election of a Jewish president confirms in the fascist mind that the fascist bogeyman of liberal democracy as a tool for global Jewish domination is real.

By claiming that the aim of the invasion is to “denazify” Ukraine, Putin appeals to the myths of contemporary eastern European antisemitism – that a global cabal of Jews were (and are) the real agents of violence against Russian Christians and the real victims of the Nazis were not the Jews, but rather this group. Russian Christians are targets of a conspiracy by a global elite, who, using the vocabulary of liberal democracy and human rights, attack the Christian faith and the Russian nation. Putin’s propaganda is not aimed at an obviously skeptical west, but rather appeals domestically to this strain of Christian nationalism.

There are broader morals here. The attack on liberal democracy in the west comes from a global fascist movement, whose center is Christian nationalism. It will be hard to disentangle this movement from antisemitism (albeit a version of antisemitism that allies with forces pushing for a Jewish nationalist state in Israel). Unsurprisingly, proponents of the view that a Christian nation needs protection and defense against liberalism, “globalism” and their supposed decadence, will be marshaled to their most violent actions when the faces of free, secular, tolerant liberal democracy prominently include Jewish ones.

 

[phart]

4 hours ago, Och Aye said:

To be honest I'm avoiding the coverage of this conflict, too depressing. Taking no sides here, however, I find it amazing after the west's actions in history people still believe our side of events and don't look into both sides of an argument.

That's pretty much where I am, my involvement makes zero difference to the outcome.

No one is the good guys in this. The pawns all die in the machinations of Putin and NATO

[Ally Bongo]

 

[Lamia]

31 minutes ago, phart said:

That's pretty much where I am, my involvement makes zero difference to the outcome.

No one is the good guys in this. The pawns all die in the machinations of Putin and NATO

👍

[SpecialisedOutsourcing]

59 minutes ago, Lamia said:

👍

Eh? What have NATO done wrong here? They have never invaded a country? Purely a defensive organisation and we’re lucky to have them. 

[Malcolm]

I can’t believe the amount of sympathy for a dictator invading a sovereign nation.  Russia are the aggressors and hopefully they get what’s coming to them.

[SpecialisedOutsourcing]

1 hour ago, Malcolm said:

I can’t believe the amount of sympathy for a dictator invading a sovereign nation.  Russia are the aggressors and hopefully they get what’s coming to them.

Yep - good news is the masks are off and we know the ones for the watching!  

[Malcolm]

I think this is going to be a horrible long term war….  Yes Russia may take Kiev, however, there will be continued fighting throughout Ukraine with a continuous stream of military hardware provided by the west.  Russia may pay a heavy price through sanctions… could end up ruinining russia.  Let’s see how putin reacts when his country ends up economically unviable.

[Ally Bongo]

From Sky News

BREAKING: Germany will supply Ukraine with 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger surface-to-air missiles so it can defend itself against Russia, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has confirmed.

Publically announcing this is an absolute gift to Putin

Forget about Neo Nazis volunteering to fight Russia on the front line - insane as it might sound - Russia has a reason to declare War on Germany

This is how it could escalate out of control very quickly

 

[SpecialisedOutsourcing]

What are you havering about? The US and UK have been flying weapons in for weeks .

[SpecialisedOutsourcing]

I honestly can’t believe how corrupted so many of you have become - the horseshoe effect does In fact exist where the views of the far left match  the far right exactly.  
 

[Ally Bongo]

4 minutes ago, SpecialisedOutsourcing said:

What are you havering about? The US and UK have been flying weapons in for weeks .

For fuck sake - Germany is Russia's boogeyman for obvious reasons

Why do you think Putin has been playing the "Nazi" card against Ukraine for the last while ?

If you need this explained then stop contributing to the thread as you are just making a (bigger) cock of yourself

[Malcolm]

58 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

From Sky News

BREAKING: Germany will supply Ukraine with 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger surface-to-air missiles so it can defend itself against Russia, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has confirmed.

Publically announcing this is an absolute gift to Putin

Forget about Neo Nazis volunteering to fight Russia on the front line - insane as it might sound - Russia has a reason to declare War on Germany

This is how it could escalate out of control very quickly

 

Surely you support providing Ukraine the means to defend themselves?

[Malcolm]

looks like Russia about to be thrown out of swift.  Economic ruin beckons.

[kumnio]

 

The UK Government are beyond fucking belief 

[Ally Bongo]

7 minutes ago, Malcolm said:

Surely you support providing Ukraine the means to defend themselves?

yes but if you also need explaining of why lauding this over the mainstream news is fucking madness then you should stop posting about it too

It's almost as if the West wants this to escalate out of control - as Thplinth said

[Malcolm]

45 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

yes but if you also need explaining of why lauding this over the mainstream news is fucking madness then you should stop posting about it too

It's almost as if the West wants this to escalate out of control - as Thplinth said

without being a military expert I would imagine we want putin to see this so he understands what he will be facing by continuing this action.

just because putin says that we mustn’t interfere doesn’t mean we should cower away.  You have to stand up to bullies.  
if this ends up as ww3 or nuclear war the blame is entirely with putin.

my concern is he is backing himself in to a corner from which there will be no easy way out.

 

[aaid]

13 hours ago, Lamia said:

Well yes. But the question was who should I believe.

Sources that you trust backed up by applying your own analysis based on what you already know and your own experience to make a decision on whether or not what they say is credible or not. 

[aaid]

1 hour ago, SpecialisedOutsourcing said:

I honestly can’t believe how corrupted so many of you have become - the horseshoe effect does In fact exist where the views of the far left match  the far right exactly.  
 

As you well know it’s the intersection of “the West is inherently evil” meeting “ my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, when in fact although there’s a whole raft of problems with Western liberal democracies, every other alternative has proven to be 100 times worse.  Allied with sometimes my enemy’s enemy is a complete and utter cunt and should really be my enemy as well.

[ThistleWhistle]

Putin isn't Darth Vader nor Biden Yoda.

Al Jazeera had an interesting approach to reporting the last Security Council meeting where they took the revolutionary approach of showing what both sides said.

A talking bonce in the studio said after if you stick the American flag on what Russia are doing and a Russian flag on what America are doing their respective media outlets flip without question.

However much an arsehole Putin is if you poke a rabid dog and it bites back blaming the dog is superfluous.  Regardless of how many sporting arenas we light up in blue and yellow it doesn't detract from the fact that a failure of Western diplomacy is complicit in untrained Ukrainians fighting on their streets no matter how tightly we shut our eyes and wish it wasn't so.

They're nailed on to win Eurovision though when Western Europe can vote for their upbeat euro techno entry eulogising peace for a quid plus standard network charges so every cloud... 

[SpecialisedOutsourcing]

1 hour ago, Ally Bongo said:

For fuck sake - Germany is Russia's boogeyman for obvious reasons

Why do you think Putin has been playing the "Nazi" card against Ukraine for the last while ?

If you need this explained then stop contributing to the thread as you are just making a (bigger) cock of yourself

You have no understanding of the young Russian population - they know Putin is full of shit and it’s been 75 - yes 75 ! Years since Germany was ruled by Nazis. 
and other idiots on here still saying that “Putin was poked” - my estimation of my fellow Scots is diminishing rapidly - we certainly don’t deserve independence if this board is anything to go by. 
although how many are paid Russian agents? Or sheep of the paid shepherd?

and if you are real TA please stay away from the Ukraine game.

[Ally Bongo]

32 minutes ago, SpecialisedOutsourcing said:

You have no understanding of the young Russian population - they know Putin is full of shit and it’s been 75 - yes 75 ! Years since Germany was ruled by Nazis. 

 

There are other people that are full of shit - particularly those that are ignorant of how the Russian people view The Great Patriotic War which trumps their feelings of Putin 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Day_(9_May)

 

[SpecialisedOutsourcing]

Do you know any Russians Bongo?

[bonzo]

Now he's back....wee bonny's back..... 

[Ally Bongo]

11 minutes ago, SpecialisedOutsourcing said:

Do you know any Russians Bongo?

Let me make it more clearer for you

Russian public opinion is important if you want this War to de-escalate and it was looking good going by the reported protests.

Putin's propaganda spends most of it's time telling the Russian people about how great they were in WW2 and that Ukraine is now full of Nazi's threatening them again

The russian people (Your words) know Putin is full of shit   (debatable)

Putin's propaganda shows them that Germany (not NATO) is supplying the "Ukranian Nazis" with weaponry to kill brave Russian soldiers

The russian people - maybe he is right

What effect does that have in anti war Russian public opinion now ?