TurkeysGhost
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2018
- Messages
- 35,043
This has been discussed before. I'm pretty sure that as you go further into Eastern Europe, "nazi" takes on a somewhat different meaning. Here in the west, we equate Nazism with the Holocaust and white supremacist ideology. But it seems that to the east of Germany, people think of Nazism more in terms of the horrors visited upon them by the Nazi regime. They're not making common cause with evil Jew-hating bastards to promote an aryan empire. They're identifying with evil Russian-hating bastards. And really, in Ukraine's case, can you blame them? Adopting the iconography of the army renowned for massacring Russians by the tens of thousands seems reasonable. Especially if you are not burdened by the Western taboo against it.
Of course, Ukrainians were also raped and pillaged by the Nazis, but sometimes you don't have a lot of choices. Even Finland allied first with the Third Reich, then with the Soviet Union, in a desperate attempt to keep itself intact with competing predators on either side.
Why should we be upset about Ukrainian appropriation of the iconography? Other than because of our extreme taboo against it? It's not like the west was there for them, when the Wehrmacht rolled through. It's not like the west was there for them, the last time they were raped and pillaged by the Russian Empire. Why should the west now dictate to them how they should feel about their own history, their own holocausts?
I do think that if you polled Ukrainians, you'd find a problematic amount of anti-semitism. And I think you'd find, perhaps, a distasteful amount of ultra-nationalist sentiment expressed. But I don't think you'd find a race-war-mongering neonazi Reichskult in the mold of, say, the brain-dead American fascist movements.
Whatever the actual extent of the problem (which I'm not convinced is even really a problem at all, except for Westerners who want to see it that way), I think at this point it's safe to let Ukraine deal with it after they win this war.
That's fair enough, and by no means should any ultra-nationalist willing to go to frontlines be denied, and I roughly agree with what you're saying...
I would even go so far as to say it's morally correct to downplay this issue, in favor of encouraging broad public support for Ukraine, rather than harp on it like it needs to be a concern right now.
...except for this. At least, the press should not be in the business of such overt manipulation of the facts, especially for what amounts to a foreign affair for the US. Nor do I think it has that much use. People aren't that stupid, and the internet era means that these traditional gatekeepers of journalism don't have the same exclusive grip on how the news is reported. You don't have to be that perceptive to smell a rat here when the press keeps showing pictures of soldiers with nazi iconography all over them but won't discuss it.