First of all, I have no intention of taking or promoting any side here, because I’m not well informed enough about what has happened since 2022… however, before getting burned out of the internet somewhen by the end of the last decade, I used to follow a lot of anarchist collectives. I was on Riseup and Autistici mailing lists, and I remember reading a lot about everything that was happening in Ukraine directly from the anarchists there, the protests being led by openly fascist paramilitary groups like the C14, Svoboda, Tryzub, Pravy Sektor, the SNA that became the Azov Battalion, tons of pictures and videos documenting everything and everyone, even American Blackwater mercenaries operating in the country. These fascist groups clashing with socialists, setting fire to union buildings and shooting people trying to escape, and now it’s hard to even find references to these groups and their actions on the internet, like it was sanitized (not so long ago, I also had trouble finding some materials from antizionist rabbis I had read back in the mid-2000s, I actually just found accusations of them being antisemitic on main search engines, so I really believe there is a lot of fuckery going on to control information)… and I’m afraid if I start talking about Donetsk and Lugansk I might get accused of something, so never mind.
I’m mentioning it because it has been only a few months since I joined Lemmy, and I’ve seen some controversy about accusations of nazis in Ukrainian lines, like it’s tankie propaganda or that Dugin shit… but, uh, back when pro-EU factions took the government, the anarchists had documented the nazis very well… is there a generational gap of information here? How many people were following anarchist press (not the shit you’d find on Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever) back in 2014?
ps: I’m not here to discuss Russia.
edit: fixed some grammar mistakes I noticed, but I’m no native speaker.
Plenty volunteered for more dangerous missions, for example members of Right Sector fought in Mariupol and Bahkmut, but my conspiracy theory is that when a lot of these fascist groups joined the army, they were often sent on more dangerous missions, and that’s a large part of how they thinned out their ranks.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was sometimes deliberate, but if not certainly no one lost any sleep over it, even if they were given a hero’s funeral for propaganda purposes. Zelensky and plenty senior members of the government and army are Jewish, and far right paramilitaries were always a threat to the government, so yeah. Certainly the Volunteer Corps/67th was full of fascists. IRC this caused issues, because the fascists leadership would ensure the newer recruits saw combat first, sparing their Right Sector friends. This ultimately led to them losing ground. Then in 2024, presumably after they’d been thinned out further and because of their losing ground, the unit was disbanded and its soldiers were sent to new units.
The reason you see people get annoyed about accusations of nazis in Ukraine, is because Russia has exaggerated the Nazi problem in Ukraine for propaganda purposes. Present day, a lot of them are dead, and in the last election Right Sector got something like 2% of the vote. Traditionally, there’d be nazi thugs causing problems at the Kiev pride, but IRC something like 70% of Ukrainians are largely ok with gay people. Not great, but this is eastern europe, so much better than it was, and much better than the alternative. Certainly better than Russia. Senior officials in Donetsk have gone on record to say all homosexuals should be murdered and one even complimented Ukraine’s Right Sector for beating up the gays at pride. Obviously, the first casualty of war is the truth. So the knee jerk reaction is to say there are no nazis in Ukraine, which is nonsense. But not as bad as it once was, and better than in some neighbouring countries, almost certainly.
But ignoring this is a war, and the amount of propaganda out there, you also have to factor in the nature of the news media. Firstly, news = man bites dog. A dog biting a man isn’t news. A man biting a dog is. News media invariably report exceptions, not the rule. You’ll also often see media waves. Someone is murdered and suddenly the news media are reporting on all these murders. The initial story garners media attention, the public become concerned, the media react to that concern by publishing more stories, the public get even more concerned, the media publish even more stories, politicians get involved, even more stories, etc. etc.
For example, this is almost certainly why the public’s perception of crime is entirely out of whack with the data. Violent crime has dropped significantly in much of the western world but you wouldn’t know it from watching the media. Especially as scary stories are more likely to foster engagement and once again propaganda exacerbates this even further. Eg. London. Lowest murder rate in decades, if you go on social media or watch the news, you’ll come out thinking it’s a deeply unsafe city. The fact the mayor’s a muslim doesn’t help.
Anyway, something similar likely happened with neo-nazis in Ukraine. Media wave + man bites dog. Then it’s no longer news, and the media move on to the next story. That and propaganda.
Bit of a tangent and a gross simplification, but in the 60s Baudrillard warned us of the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced societies. Reality and the representation of that reality blend into one, with no way of knowing where one goes over into the other. Basically, in the present day and with current tech it’s become impossible to distinguish what is real, and we no longer interact with reality but the hyperreal. In many ways the hyperreal is more real than reality. If crimes drops in reality, it is less relevant than what happens to crime in the blending of simulation and reality.
This is a very long comment, and I don’t have time to proof read it, but I hope it contributes to the discussion. I’m also thinking out loud.
Obviously, if someone comes from a part of the fediverse where they make excuses for Russia or China, and start “just asking questions” about why we’re supporting Ukraine as they’re all nazis, the responses that will get will be different. I won’t waste too much time on Russia, you said you didn’t want to discuss it, but besides the Dugin thing, Putin regularly quotes Ivan Ilyin who openly admired Hitler and one the founders of Wagner was a full blown neo-nazi tattoos and all, and that’s not the end of it. So if someone with Russian sympathies starts banging on about Ukraine being over-run with Nazis, to me that’s like a MAGA supporter lecturing women on feminism. They are free to do it on their communities, where my views aren’t welcome either.
Thank you. I replied to another comment in this thread https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/61581354/23757784 but it might be a gross oversimplification and faulty recall. Yeah, I do think Russia claiming “denazification” is quite ironic, but until it was about protecting separatist regions instead of attacking others, I had a more clear opinion on the matter (as per that comment). After 2022 I prefer to not be so loud and absolute about it.
I taught language lessons to Ukrainians for a while, including those from the seperatist regions. It was a bit of a joke that I’d have to translate stuff into ‘east Ukrainian’ because their Ukrainian wasn’t great. My impression was that even if once many had been fond of Russia, that had now changed.
From what I’ve gathered, from a Russian viewpoint it’s less ironic. For them nazism is less about the ideology and its fundamentally anti-semitic nature. For them the Nazis were people who sought to wipe out the Russians. This is not entirely unreasonable. IRC up to 20 million Russian civilians died in the war.
After the war, the USSR had a falling out with Israel, so often the Jews weren’t even mentioned explicitly when discussing the holocaust, it was politically inconvenient. For example, they erected a monument at Babi Yar, the Nazi concentration camp near Kyiv, but the plaque didn’t mentioned the Jews that had died there. It simply honoured the ‘peaceful soviet people’. You’ll even see elements of the Russian far right suggest the Jews perpetrated the holocaust against the Russians.
But it’s not entirely weird that Russians think the holocaust was mainly perpetrated against the Russians. It’s also not weird that they think anti-Russia = Nazi, given how many people died. But this is partly why they see no hypocrisy in calling Jews like Zelensky Nazis. Nazi means something different in Russia.
Of course, given we have a different conception of the holocaust and Nazism in the west, Russian propaganda needs to exagerate Ukraine’s nazi problem as much as possible to foreign audiences, because the idea that Jewish Zelensky is a nazi is a harder sell abroad. When you see Putin apologists here in the fediverse, you can often tell they don’t fully grasp this difference when they’re parroting Russian narratives.
This is obviously controversial, but there’s also a debate to be had about the role of Soviet/Russian anti-Zionist propaganda on the left. I would argue it’s influence has often been counter-productive. A Russian audience might not blink if you call Jews Nazis, but outside Russia a Jewish fascist / zionist will have an easier time defending himself from accusations of Nazism(which in the western world is widely understood to be a fundamentally anti-semitic ideology), than he would defending himself against accusations of fascism. Hell, government ministers like Smotrich have openly admitted to being fascists. Accuse Smotrich of Nazism? “I’m Jewish. I can’t be a nazi. You’re lying about that, so you’re lying about everything else.”