“De-nazification”, it’s called. A military operation of a scale of the largest military invasion in Europe since the second world war. To weed out nazis.
The term “nazi” has been somewhat devalued these past decades. Depending on the discussion, it may seem like one is a nazi as soon as one doesn’t agree with the zeitgeist. Yet, once upon, the term actually had meaning, namely; being a political proponent of “national-socialism”. A strange illegitimate authoritarian love-child between left-wing socialism and right-wing nationalism with its cradle in 1920’s Germany. Take care of our own (whether ethnically or nationally defined), but fuck everyone else.
Now, as opposed to what twitter twinks think, harbouring questions about… oh, I don’t know, trans people’s sporting, or opposing the defund the police movement, does not, in fact, make you a Nazi. Being an outright fascist does not necessarily make you one either.
But what about Ukraine? Across the internet, the Russian trolls and those funded by the Federation’s channels start showing their true colours by legitimizing a full-scale invasion of a sovereign country based on the claim that Ukraine is riddled with more Nazis than a wild dog is tapeworms. Which supposedly turns any support for Ukrainian self-determination into a… defence of national-socialism, somehow, I don’t fucking know how the brains of these cretin work…
But it prompted me to want to take a closer look at the claims of Ukrainian nazism. Most of which has been centered on the infamous Azov Battalion. A paramilitary movement who, prior to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and dissection of the Donetsk and Luhansk territories, were naught but a football hooligan group out of Kharkiv, with ties to a Moscow FC hooligan squad. The hooligans were militarized during the spring of 2014 when Russia came knocking, and since then have grown into a full-blown military organization, quickly getting incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine.
Are they nazis though? Well, their leadership prior to the incorporation into the National Guard certainly was. And still are, having moved on to found numerous neo-nazi political parties, the most successful of which has been the National Corps, which has failed to win any national parliament seats. During the 2019 parliamentary election, an ultra-right wing coalition spearheaded by the National Corps, got just 2.15 % of the national votes.
And as for the remnants of Azov, folded into the National Guard, numerous contemporary reports hows that some of them still exhibit neo-nazi affiliations and loyalties. Swastikas, white-supremacist ideologies, nationalism galore, even though a modicum of effort has been made to tidy it up.
The bottom line is this: There are nazis in Ukraine. Nazis that are fighting alongside and among the blue-and-yellow armed forces against the Russian invasion. That much seems verifiably true. And Ukraine is not alone in that regard. In Sweden, the Swedish Democrats have 12.9 % of the national vote (as of the 2018 general election). The Swedish Democrats have had plenty of white-supremacist ties, past and present, and run a nationalist platform and promote socialist policies as long as those policies target ethnic or “cultural” swedes. The current Tory leadership in Britain have overwhelming ties to the Brexit movement, a political madness of protectionism, isolationism, and xenophobia which is difficult to argue is anything but preservation of national resources through the exclusionary lens of nationalism. Likewise, the Republican party of the libertine US, as mutated by the Orange Hydra Trump, bear the particularly sickly stench of protectionism, nationalism, with a strange breed of insincere socialism aimed distinctly at some mythological working-class hero kind of white person.
Le Pen in France, the Mussolinis of Italy, the Erdogans of Turkey, the Bennetts of Israel, the Orbans of Hungary, the Bolsonaros of Brazil, the Modis of India, the Jinpings of China… the world is absolutely lousy with nationalism and supremacism, sometimes painted with a flaking layer of something akin to socialism. Or why not look at the Putin of Russia, who has expressed the explicit doctrine to militarily “protect” Russian minorities world-wide, and in so doing expanding the lebensraum of the Russian population back to their Soviet glory days.
If “de-nazification” is a legitimate reason for war, then there should be plenty more nations queueing behind Ukraine to get a thorough wash. And seeing as the wake of “de-nazification” looks something like this, or this, or this, or this, I will reserve my doubts as to whether there isn’t something much worse than Nazis prowling Ukraine…
/Sebastian Lindberg 5/4-2022
WastedWords 