this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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This is just a landing page that is displayed by the server host when a site can't be accessed. It's probably just down, wayback has archives as recently this month.
This is an american's childlike view of politics, in particular it is one that has no understanding of political vanguardism and how absolutely tiny quantities of people can have incredibly outsized influences politically. The UK was pushed into leaving the EU by a political party with 0.2% of the seats that year on year received just 3% of the vote.
What you need to do is not view fascists as one political party, they're several spread out over multiple channels performing vanguardism through multiple methods because it has a far stronger effect. The goal is not to win elections. The goal is to create political forces in motion that move fascists through positions of power in all ways. Liberals think of institutions in the form of "win election and then you get to do your manifesto" but power doesn't just come from elections. Power comes from all elements of a state. The police. The administrative positions. The civil service. The judiciary. The businesses. Small local electoral positions. The media. The military. Etc etc etc. All of these elements can be hijacked without winning any major elections in any way whatsoever. They allow you to turn a country into whatever you want to turn it into because you are the voice of the country regardless of what you consider to be the intended "power" positions.
In essence, if you control the zeitgeist it doesn't matter who wins elections, all politicians are stuck following the zeitgeist, they are subservient to it. If they do not serve the zeitgeist then they simply get tossed out... or killed.
Instead of leaning on these metrics I suggest an alternate method for getting a picture of the influence that fascists currently have in Ukraine and that is looking at the opinions of the total population now vs historic on various topics. One in particular I think you'll find quite alarming is the shift in public opinion of Bandera, who I reckon you're quite familiar with. See this article from a major Ukrainian polling agency. It finds that in 2012 support for Stepan Bandera was only 22%, this is a very good measure for us for what kind of influence the fascists had in Ukraine pre-2014 when the Maidan revolution occurred. Today, after the changes and promotion of his fascist beliefs, the lionisation of him and the remaking of Ukraine that has been underway since Maidan, that support is now 74%. Quote:
For any bystanders interested in why this metric is valuable. Stepan Bandera was leader of the OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists), this organisation collaborated with the nazis in ww2 and killed tens of thousands of jews during the holocaust, it was regarded by the Nazi SS as extreme and particularly brutal even by their standards and I should not need to explain to anyone how evil the SS were.
This is what vanguardism can achieve. You do not need elections to become the dominant ideology of a country. You take over various non-electoral parts of the structure and become the zeitgeist itself and this is all while ignoring the fact that fascists exist within the main parties as well, you see this with your own eyes in America where people at all levels of the structure are having a major influence in the fascist direction, in both electoral and non-electoral positions.
You need to reassess in your head what power actually means. There are many ways to wield it. Liberals often have a misguided perspective that politics = elections when the reality is quite different, elections are a steam valve for society to let off what would be revolutionary energy every few years through a process of giving people "choice". They're not what power is though when the choice is created through far greater forces of influence developed across society on multiple fronts. For a more marxist interpretation of them as a whole this is a strong video.
I additionally strongly recommend the (now suppressed and hard to find) documentary Ukraine on Fire (not to be confused with the propaganda film created to drown it out, Winter On Fire) which released before the war so it's largely free of the fog of war propaganda. It's not marxist but gives a fairly good overview of Maidan and influences within it.
There's another documentary I want to re-find too but am struggling with, might edit if I do find it. There's also another video I wanted to include in this of the far right occupying the rada, locking the doors and refusing to leave until the vote they want is performed. I can't find this but if I mention it here someone might remember what it's in, it's a good example of what power you can have without electoralism.
Domain registrant is Domains by proxy, nothing to get there. The logo though is favbet which is a Ukrainian gambling company. Seems like they took over the domain to direct traffic their way, it's exactly the kind of slimy but legal thing you'd expect gambling companies to do.
Last magazine landing page on wayback is June 2022, first gambling landing page June 2023. Domain must've lapsed somewhere in between, which tracks with National Corps getting out of politics.
Dude calling me a yank was uncalled for. I'm German, have a look at the AfD when you want to know what having issues with Nazis looks like. (Or, for that matter, the Republican party). And Ukraine, much unlike the UK (or USA) doesn't have a FPTP system, it's proportional so poll numbers actually mean something. Also that vanguard that pushed for Brexit was Etonians not wanting to declare their taxes, the EU had new rules on tax havens coming up.
Also as a body politic the Brits are muppets. They fucking had a referendum on introducing proportional representation and voted against it, can you believe that. Egged on by Russian assets when it comes to Brexit I wouldn't deny it but they're perfectly capable of being bellends all on their own.
And, do they? Svoboda, Right Sector, all are deeply unpopular in Ukraine. The people's consensus is some liberal democratic EU-aligned thing, and safety from Russia, not a far-right resurgence. Poroshenko types, that is, electable kind of ring wing, is limited to "gays are icky church good" type of conservatism, but without wanting to murder them. And the SBU currently has its hands full sniffing out Russian collaborators so they're probably not very interested in what a splattering of Nazis with close to zero public backing do at the printing press.
Bandera is a complicated topic, and not distinguishing between Bandera the Nazi (collaborator) and antisemite and Bandera the national hero is disingenuous. Ukraine also has the lowest rate of antisemitism among eastern European states and a Jew is President, witch actually higher approval ratings than Bandera. But yes I'd very much prefer Makhno... alas he wasn't terribly successful and whose fault was that, I give you a hint: That of a vanguard.
I kind of view Bandera in the same way as Churchill who, by all means, was a monster of a politician. And not in the positive way ask e.g. Bengals. Or take the founding fathers as worshipped by Americans, (nearly? not sure about the details) all of them slave owners in one way or the other yet we don't commonly call people with a Washington boner advocates of slavery. Stauffenberg was a monarchist yet he's getting honoured by the Bundeswehr, trying to assassinate Hitler washes over his iffy politics.
You're talking to an Anarchist. And recommend Marxist analysis. I think I'll pass on being educated by a Marxist on, of all things, power.
None of this really matters. You're overly focused on "they stopped". The fascists haven't disappeared nor have they stopped promoting their views within society. Moving to different tactics isn't a win for anyone, it's like a person playing peekaboo by hiding behind their hands but somehow liberals actually think they've disappeared.
Yes. I was there. The liberals caused it by calling for it immediately after Nick Clegg betrayed their voters on his one and only promise of not fucking over student fees, with students making up the majority of the base. The response to the proportional representation vote was largely coloured by the response to Clegg.
Nah not really. Libs love this shit but both we marxists and conservative eurosceptics had been promoting euroscepticism for 30+ years. The greatest foreign influence was american capitalists seeking to strip the country, which they're still doing.
No. Again you are making a mistake. Votes are not popularity. 35% of people here in the UK support socialism (not social democracy, socialism) but that doesn't translate to a socialist party getting those votes. Not because of a lack of popular but because there is considerable complexity in who gets those votes. If you're German you know this, you know the voters leaving SPD for AfD aren't doing so because AfD they agree with all of its politics but because they don't see any other viable options to use and they want to punish the major parties to send a message.
No it's not. You are literally falling for the fascist propaganda now. This is one of many methods the fascists in ukraine have successfully laundered his image. You should be very concerned that if it is possible for the Ukrainian nationalists to do this with Bandera it is also possible for the German nationalists to do this with Hitler.
Again irrelevant. Ukrainian fascism isn't nazism. Much like Italian fascism was not, nor was Spanish nor Chilean, nor Indian etc etc. Fascism conforms to the national conditions and presents itself differently each time. The use of the word "nazis" here is just to communicate the level of threat really. Their main concern at the current point in time is eliminating the Russian ethnicity alongside the Roma, whose camps they have consistently destroyed and murdered throughout this war. Moving onto other targets like the high proportion of greeks in Donbass would follow, there have been a number of Greeks in donbass who have spoken out about the Ukrainians attacking them, particularly in mariupol they did not like them (you don't need to watch all of this it's just the only place I know of for this particular clip from Greek tv I wanted to share, the first 5 mins or so is worth your time though).
Churchill is a monster who should have been regarded as one, but was not because war. There's a considerable difference between laundering someone without a reason and this.
If anything if you want a hero of Ukrainian nationalism then the real hero of Ukrainian nationalism is Lenin who created the country entirely.
You're being naive again. This is an excuse to honour him, because the people pushing the honouring know what kind of laundering effect it has on the figure and the ideology that figure represents.
I grew up in squats and spent 30 years of my life as an anarchist. We probably don't differ politically as much as you think. I am an ML because we have a timelimit from the climate crisis that is going to see millions of refugees pour into europe very soon. The destabilisation this will cause will be on the scale of nothing we've ever seen before and only ML theory has the track record of revolution needed to save at least a some people in the coming chaos when the opportunities to seize states begin. You saw what just tens of thousands of Syrian refugees did to stability in Europe with your own eyes, in particular you must have seen this in Germany. You should know as well as I do exactly what tens of millions will cause. As an anarchist I could not sit by knowing my ideological toolkit was not equipped to try and deal with the death that is coming, and I could not sit around and think myself a moral person knowing exactly what the future holds yet not doing everything in my power to help people. The correct toolkit for the time limits we have is marxism leninism. Will I go back to the black afterwards? Possibly. I'll cross that bridge when it comes as we have no idea what things will look like in the aftermath of it all.
I know full well why you're an anarchist. But I really do ask you to wrestle with the question of what is equipped to save the most lives in all of this. States suck, we all dislike them, we're all in the left because we want them abolished, marxists and anarchists both. But lives are what matter here.
It's pretty obvious you're talking to a Nazi, not an anarchist.
Yeah it is at this point.
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Yeah and we don't consider protests votes to be Nazis. 2/3rd of the current AfD poll numbers are protest votes btw, 47% want the party outlawed (and among the 47% who don't are plenty saying "they should be dealt with otherwise"), and 10% of people polled to vote for the AfD want the AfD outlawed.
Back to Ukraine: Svoboda has exactly one seat. They can't really be hateful Nazis people don't like that, and they can't go undercover as patriots either because being a patriot really isn't a distinguishing factor while the whole democratic spectrum from left to right is fighting at the front.
I'll be concerned if those 70% percent actually come even close to expressing fascist ideas. Again, back to the founding fathers: How many percent in the US see them positively, how many advocate for slavery?
You're falling in a type of "big man" trap. Just because there was a (or more) big men in the past, and they did stuff, and now their memory is recalled, doesn't mean that all of their memory is recalled. This is not Bandera controlling people, it's people looking for some figure to represent national identity and, well, Bandera very much was a nationalist. Currently alive people project things into the past, not the other way around.
Back to Hitler and Germany: No. The conservatives have Bismarck and also Stauffenberg and such, leftists, if patriotic at all, are regionalists.
No. The choice of words is due to Russian narratives saying "Anyone who opposes us is a Nazi". I've seen too much Russian talking points being uncritically parroted by hexbears to believe otherwise. You know the type, "Kiev is ruled by Nazis" stuff.
Svoboda in particular was deeply anti-semitic before they toned it down because nobody liked it. Non-Antisemitic fascists also don't tend to don Germanic symbolism, but that's circumstantial.
From all I know that could be a Golden Dawn guy hating Ukrainians. The plural of anecdote is not data and that's not even a plural. Generally speaking the idea of Ukraine as a multiethnic, and naturally multiethnic state, is very solidly anchored in Ukraine.
...even among the right. Which is why Svoboda and their more ethnophobic lines don't fly well at all, attracting if at all protest votes. The consensus enemy is the Kremlin, and with the Kremlin actually attacking the previous split between ethnic Russians ("we need to try harder to be friends with them") and the rest vanished. The Kremlin, unsurprisingly, interprets that as everyone being Nazi because if you're marching on Moscow (figuratively speaking) you're a Nazi because that's what Nazis do.
If Ukraine is oh so Russophobic why do they have a Russian president, and why are very large portions of the army speaking Russian? Including Azov, btw.
Nah it's choosing an actual patriot over a madman, and giving cultural legitimisation, within the Bundeswehr, to, if need be, assassinate a mad man at the top of the chain of command as an extreme but justified way of fulfilling their oath, to valiantly defend justice and the freedom of the German people. There's no suitable democrat who, in a position like Stauffenberg's, tried a similar thing otherwise that guy would be honoured. Bundeswehr tradition is anything but random.
Syria had little to nothing to do with it things have been brewing in the east for quite a while now. Remember Lichtenhagen? Among other reasons naive eastern Die Linke politicians saying "fascism can't reach the east because we're all good socialists". Prime Marxist analysis, right there, we've been telling them from the start that they're full of shit and got called Besserwessis for it. The issue with the east is that they don't have decades-long civil society experience combatting fascists because back in the days all politics was party matter, and the party said there were no fascists. The percentage of people with closed right-extreme world view is actually higher in the west than in the east, yet in the east they're making political inroads (and yes Bernd Höcke is a Wessi. Westphale).
It doesn't matter what purpose a protest vote has if it's advancing nazi agendas and change in society. People don't need to be nazis to be influenced by nazis.
Once again ignoring all the fascists in the major parties just because their party line isn't "we're fascists". It's like you fucking liberals can't understand that taking off a nazi uniform doesn't actually mean you stopped being a nazi.
It's a war. You're not getting data until 20 years after its finished. Multiethnic? You are out of your fucking mind. Pogroms and mass exterminations have been common since the start of the war. You're not an anarchist, you are a nazi and it is blatantly fucking obvious that you're here playing games and being a silly fuck. It is a considerable waste of time talking to you, eat my ass and kindly follow your leader.
They're not Nazis. Or, differently put, dismissing them as Nazis plays right into the hand of Nazis: Protest voters have a reason they're protesting, there's things that other parties aren't addressing, haven't been addressing for ages, and those voters are pissed.
And you'd understand that if you actually, once in your life, went to a bar and talked to actual blue collar folks, instead of having your head up your own ideologically pure ass. You know, workers. The guys you're supposedly fighting for.
The current failure of the government isn't necessarily even policy -- it's primarily communication, and not signalling an actual turning point. The new heating law does not bankrupt poor homeowners, but they had the genius ideas of having drafts that didn't even include mentions of financial aid. Sure heat pumps are cheaper in the long term but first you have to be able to afford the investment, and many poor home owners don't.
That kind of stuff is what really worries people -- that they'll lose the little economical stability they do have, lose the little property they do own., as the saying goes, Erst das Fressen, dann die Moral. The FDP doesn't care in the first place, the Greens have to be reminded by the SPD (Greens aren't a left party as such) but would not block, either, and the SPD has its head far enough up its own image of itself as worker's party that it's not talking to actual workers before setting policy. Vanguard blindness in a sense.
Inflation? Well, it's not too bad. Some relief would be good, if you can't get that past the FDP just do what the French do and bully supermarkets. Not much to bully when it comes to the discounters but it's also the sentiment that counts.
Asylum? Actually, that's not the issue the issue is housing. An issue they're working on and as the previous government really fucked it up it's slow to start (actual lack of building capacity) but again, communication is shit. Berlin's SPD trying to sabotage the expropriation of landlords doesn't help, that is the exact shit that pisses off the east. At the same time they're co-responsible for the situation as is as they failed to put pressure on the CDU in the Merkel years.
In short: The issue isn't the people being Nazis. The issue is the people being to the left of the government but Die Linke not being an option, either, the east already tried that and I don't mean the GDR times. Three decades of unification and the federal republic is less social then before that's straight up their fault. People have the impression that the party cares more about random sexual minorities than workers, and yes it's true, of course you can, should, and must do both and people wouldn't mind, issue is they didn't do anything for workers.
Remember how fascism is a failed revolution? That right there.
[citation needed]. Well you don't need to find those for Russian atrocities those have been well-documented. Show me a Bucha committed by Ukrainians, I'll wait. Show Russian soldiers who were castrated as POWs.
How convenient of an opinion for you.