this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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ok https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6083127/5387445
It's not from a Lemmygrad user, but I don't agree with the phrasing of that comment and may have removed it if it had been reported. As it stands, I don't see the need to remove it because it would decontextualize your reply. Please use the report function if you see comments like these.
Will do, and thank you.
That's not even a lemmygrad user. Regardless, I think the point is that the people in power are Nazis. Not the general populace. Ukraine is tearing down victory monuments for Christ's sakes. When Georgia starts doing that, I'll definitely be sympathetic to calling their government Nazis.
The newly installed Tryzub on the shield of Mother Ukraine monument, will be likely to fall. The Soviet emblem was way more stable than a rushed replacement.
Yeah I don't think "Ukrainians will never forgive the Red Army for liberating them from Nazis" meant "Ukrainian government", sorry. More likely, this person thinks Ukraine was on the side of Nazis in WW2 which I'm seeing quite a lot too (not looking for examples though, sorry)
How is it any different from saying "Americans" do such and such when their representatives say awful things? We know that there are American comrades, and we know that there are likely a great number more comrades in Ukraine. I really don't think the post was meant to disparage all Ukrainians. Just the ones that support what their representatives are saying.
Americans and other imperial core nations directly benefit from imperialism, this is the real reason why no communist party can take off the ground there, not any ephemeral reppression. Ukrainians on the other hand are the victims of imperialism and it's their country that is right now ravaged by a war. You wouldn't go around blaming Bangladeshi people for politics that keep them in crumbling sweatshops, even though it's comprador Bangladeshi politicians who sign off those policies for the benefit of Western capitalists. The same way when comprador Nazi politicians of Ukraine sacrifice their people in a war for the benefit of Western capitalists, you shouldn't blame Ukrainian people for it.
Your question is no different from someone asking "if it's ok to say whites do such and such, why can't I say blacks do such and such"? The difference is between the oppressor and the oppressed, the perpetrator and the victim. White supremacy is not every single white persons fault and noone can singlehandedly end it, but whites are collectively benefitting from it and thus should take responsibility. Western people, working class included, have some responsibility for sustaining imperialism, because it does benefit them - all the sweat, blood and tears are outsourced to other nations so there's no reason for Western working class to rebel.
Those dynamics have to be understood if we're to achieve any change at all and it's actually sad I had to type this out.
Lemmy ate my reply. But the short version is that I actually do mostly agree with you. I try not do this myself, but it is linguistically difficult to speak more narrowly about the Nazis in Ukraine. I just think it's a wee bit of a stretch to assume that the comment you referenced actually refers to all Ukrainians.
It's not difficult to call Nazis Nazis.
Zhukov was right when he said "We have liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it." The West immediately went on to put Nazi generals in charge of NATO, Canada nurtured Banderites who would never see a day of freedom in Ukraine, all this simply because Nazism is an organic outgrowth of European settler-colonial project (same as Zionism), it's the ugly side of Western liberalism.
Turning this around against Ukraine made my blood boil because Ukraine was one of the primary victims of Nazism along with Belarus, over two million Ukrainians enslaved and sent to German industries for forced labour, over five million slaughtered, entire villages razed to the ground, mass rapes organised by Nazi officers, mass shootings by SS death squads and Banderites, things Western education mostly glosses over. Even the 30s famine has nothing on the destruction Nazis wreaked on Ukraine.
I doubt you can imagine the generational trauma people raised in the USSR have. Watch "Come and See" and understand we were raised by people who lived through this. Liberation from Nazis is not a laughing matter for us, which is why the grandma with red flag resonated so deeply with so many post-Soviet people (https://youtu.be/DfeflkpcOi4).
Ukraine was a founding member of the USSR, Ukrainians were the largest ethnic group in the Red Army after Russians, with over 5 million serving (https://i.imgur.com/62j4OYo.jpeg). It's Ukrainians who did the liberation, and it's the West who never forgave them for it and is now destroying them in a proxy war against Russia, after putting Banderites in power.
I'm sorry but the comment I referenced comes out of a deep ignorance and arrogance typical to Westerners. No they didn't say "every single Ukrainian" but they generalised Ukrainians in an extremely ahistorical and offensive manner.
You're reading that in the worst possible light and it's still not "all Ukranians are Nazis."
I've seen countless examples of this and won't waste time looking now, but if you want I can start tagging you and @[email protected] whenever I notice those?
No, don't start spamming me.
If there really are a bunch of blatant, actual examples, they'd be easy to find. If they aren't easy to find maybe there aren't that many, or maybe they aren't saying what you're reading into them (like the one you linked).
Found in my history the last time I had an argument over this and I see you commented there as well lol: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5287344/4812302
And when I brought up how it's the West that did this to us, you had a similar response as now:
This is your brain on liberalism, you have Western "leftists" running around asking "why can't those Slavs just be normal like us" but when a Slav mentions it's you people who keep spreading this poison around the world you will turn around and go "well he can't singlehandedly change the world can he?"
Do you really not notice the hypocrisy here? Can't understand how exasperating this is?
I'm old, I grew up in the Ukrainian SSR, I remember school trips to Babi Yar, I know that Nazis killed and enslaved millions upon millions of Ukrainians - nothing remotely similar happened in the West and you don't know this kind of generational trauma.
Then I saw my country crumble around me as a child, every hope and value burned and desecrated. My family had to escape to Poland where they shat all over my heritage for decades... Then I learned the street I grew up on got renamed Shukhevych and there were neonazi militias roaming the land raping and torturing people, and now it's all been fucking bombed to smithereens... And Western "leftists" go around asking "why can't they be normal" and "why did Ukraine go along with getting couped" and "why doesn't the puppet government we installed have guts to oppose us", and making jokes about how Ukrainians will never forgive the Red Army for liberating them from Nazis.
So you're definitely right I'm sensitive to this shit. I've only been to Georgia a few times, maybe 6 weeks total if that, but I love the country and the people (even if I can't find common language with the younger population), I'm angry and worried the same thing will happen there and yeah while nobody said this about Georgia yet surely you can see why I expect to start hearing this shit soon from the Western "leftists"?
I'll say what I said then: you're screaming at people who agree with you because you're putting words in their mouths.