Gregory's ServerI can’t comprehend how the Russian invasion of Ukraine messed up people’s brains. I’m not talking about the war’s participants themselves, mind—it’s pretty expectable for a war to ruin everything, not only physically, for the people involved. The target of this angry rant of mine are people that had emigrated from the post-soviet countries decades ago. These are the people that I often see spewing some of the most moronic or ghoulish takes on the war.
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The most peculiar thing is that it’s easier to witness ideological shades of grey in the takes of this war’s actual stakeholders—the people of Ukraine and Russia, whose future had been tainted by warmongering kleptocrats. But post-soviet emigrants, long-time citizens of other countries—they are en masse a different matter. They tend to consider this war as a monumental struggle between the ultimate good and the ultimate evil—no matter what you’ve done before, if you’re with the good guys, you’re a hero. |
Now, everyone with the slightest understanding of the political situation in Russia knows that Putin’s initial casus belli of purifying Ukraine from nazis is bullcrap. But one must be completely disconnected from reality to argue that there are no nazis involved in this war. As a matter of fact, there are plenty of nazis in the post-soviet space—shitloads of them, although they’ve become somewhat silent, specifically in Russia, after the wave of internal cleansing performed a decade or so ago. This cleansing, involving mass arrests and disassembling of prominent nazi movements, wasn’t performed with righteous reasons, of course. Skinheads served a practical role in the 90s and early 00s in the Russian elites’ power struggles—these thugs were enforcers and cannon fodder in the street wars. When they’ve become more dangerous to the elites themselves, they’ve been disposed of.
Now, everyone with the slightest understanding of the political situation in Russia knows that Putin’s initial casus belli of purifying Ukraine from nazis is bullcrap. But one must be completely disconnected from reality to argue that there are no nazis involved in this war. As a matter of fact, there are plenty of nazis in the post-soviet space—shitloads of them, although they’ve become somewhat silent, specifically in Russia, after the wave of internal cleansing performed a decade or so ago. This...