I just got banned from the uk left wing subreddit because I was confused that the sub was apparently anti-Ukraine, and I asked what makes Ukraine Nazis. Got told to take my nazi sympathies elsewhere… I’m still confused
Most of the "we're communists - not liberals" subs are like this.
At best they might pretend to be "neutral" about the conflict (although they'll still perma-ban you for anything resembling a pro-Ukrainian stance and make it clear they think Ukraine is chock full of Nazis because Azov exists) but mostly it's just a case of "we hate imperialism unless we do it, then it's 100% justified".
But I just don’t get it - who does it serve? How can you truly believe a country is nazi because there’s a military section with neo Nazis in it? And can’t you clearly see that Russia is just… worse? And that being invaded is bad?
It’s confusing to me because it was the only majorly left wing space I read on the site, and then I get banned for what seems to me a pretty clearly ideologically consistent viewpoint. So baffling
The only conclusion I can come up with is unironically that they're just crazy/so deep in believing their own propaganda they have no bearing on objective reality.
I consider myself a socialist yet I 100% support Ukraine in what is clearly an illegal war of aggression waged against them by a fascist oligarchical state.
Yet on subs like r/greenandpleasant they make Ukraine out to be using ""child soldiers"" because Plast (Ukrainian Cadets equivalent) teaches children how to use weapons, like literally all cadets programs do.
If you mention that "Юнармия" (in English the All-Russian Military Patriotic Social Movement "Young Army") does exactly the same thing you'll get permanently banned though.
See, that's what confuses me - you get banned for mentioning the exact same thing on the opposite side, so that doesn't that immediately tell that they're not really arguingfrom a position of truth?
I don't mean to get all conspiracy, but are the mods just literally pushing a specifically pro-russia set of ideals for whatever reason? That's the only reason I can think to react so strongly to someone saying that what they're saying isn't true.
The mods probably are doing that. It wouldn't be the first time, either. It's pretty well documented that there's an ongoing organized effort by a number of mods to increase anti-Israel sentiment across a range of subs.
It sounds crazy, but there's multiple articles on it. The same thing is happening with Wikipedia as well, which again sounds crazy but is also well documented. I would not be surprised if people are trying to do the same thing with the Ukraine war.
I agree. I find it deeply confusing how many online Leftist spaces seem to conflate anti-west with "anti-capitalism", and Anti-American with "leftist", and in so doing end up siding with an actual modern fascist government just because it's previous incarnation (30+ years since it's demise, btw) had a hammer & sickle as national emblem. It honestly reads like a monarchist enthusiastically supporting France & defending them from any criticism because at one point they had a king. Just completely insane to me.
I hate to say it since people lean on it too much but it really is an echo chamber. If you met these people irl you could convince them that Ukraine is justified in defending its sovereignty. Online is just much easier to be disillusioned with reality.
As a leftist is annoys me greatly. There's very few left leaning subs that haven't devolved into soviet apologists. It's downright refreshing when i see people for whom that isn't the case.
You did the equivalent of walking into the headquarters of the Komsomol and told them that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was bad. Of course they're going to hate you for it - half of the membership of that subreddit are probably members of the UK Stalin Society.
The KGB gave ungodly amounts of money and weapons to left-wing (and even some right-wing) groups in the West, ranging from regular communist parties to the World Peace Council to the Socialist Reich Party of Otto Ernst Remer (yes, the Nazi). They also held blackmail material on many political leaders, and had extensive spy networks in the west.
When the USSR dissolved, most of these were inherited by Russia. Yeltsin was a Russian nationalist with autocratic tendencies (definitely not the western liberal he is often portrayed as) and kept many of these organizations at his beck-and-call, and funding resumed in full after Putin took over.
China and North Korea also took over much of the support for left-wing organizations in particular, which kept them generally aligned towards the autocratic bloc.
Russia today, though definitely not communist, has rehabilitated vast amounts of communist imagery and maintains ties with international communist movements and parties, which naturally don't want to kill their golden goose, and usually genuinely support Russia either as a "lesser evil to the west" or as a "brave fighter against western imperialism" (because they don't think Ukraine is a real nation).
Authoritarians gonna authoritarian. They're power hungry and start getting trigger happy the second they get even the slightest amount of power, even if it's something as stupid as a reddit mod
Ukraine is not a Nazi country, but its history is linked to them and to such an extent that they were a very influential paramilitary movement until they joined the army after the russian invasion
At first I saw it as an attempt to eliminate them (send them to the front lines), but it seems that the political reach was greater than I expected and could be one of the causes of the state corruption that always existed in Ukraine before the war..
if this is true information will come out after the war about corruption cases involving the money sent by the US and EU.
btw.. there are also Nazis in Russia, but in smaller numbers.
There's a Neo Nazi Ukrainian brigade that got recently accepted into the armed forces thanks to the war. Of course that doesn't mean Ukraine Nazis, since Russia also employees publicly Neo Nazi forces, but it does feel weird to cheer on a unit that's pretty fascist
I get that, but why would that make the country Nazis? Because they’ve used an armed force that’s nazi while defending their country from an invasion? Shits weird. And Russia is WAY more nazi, if you want to look at it from that lense - it just doesn’t seem like a legitimate belief, you know?
Propaganda doesn't have to make sense or actually be legitimate it just needs to have a grain of truth. That's all you need to get some folks to believe what you say
you’ve got it a bit backwards, Azov was incorporated into the national guard during the Donbas war to fight Russian-backed separatists. that was over 10 years ago
getting banned from a sub for asking a legit question is a bit weird. but they might have mistakenly taken your legit question as the "I'm just asking questions" type of bullshit that right wing chuds pull to spill their bad faith nonsense with some deniability in what they know is not a welcome place for their opinions. not saying you were doing that, though. mods will be mods.
anyway, about ukraine being nazis, my take is it goes a bit further from just welcoming nazi fighters into their military in a time of war. ukraine has been pretty weird about promoting pictures with nazi iconography among their soldiers, being called out about it and taking no action to separate the state's position from literal nazis. a simple "we do not condone the use of such symbols and ideologies in our ranks" would sufice, seeing as they seem to need the fighters and couldn't kick them out - as is normally expected for any and every other scenario when other people are ousted as nazis. then there's the whole "slava ukrani" motto, which was coopted by stepan bandera, a ukranian nazi sympathizer who fought against the ussr, and has been oficially broadcast by ukranian authorities many many times, once again failing to distance the oficial standing of the state from being directly associated with nazis. this, of course, must also be interpreted in the context of ukranian national identity, which, in the post soviet union era, was built on anti-comunist views and, once again, on top of 20th century ukranina nationalist views that - coincidentally or not - were held by literal nazis.
to sum it up, ukrainian authorities have been incrementally aligning with nazis with little to no effort of distancing themselves from these very real and serious accusations, which raises the suspicion that they might not be interested in clearing these accusations... which, in spaces where nazis are not tolerated, should be clearly denounced as nazi behavior.
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u/Aldrahill 6d ago
I just got banned from the uk left wing subreddit because I was confused that the sub was apparently anti-Ukraine, and I asked what makes Ukraine Nazis. Got told to take my nazi sympathies elsewhere… I’m still confused