afaik the nazis are a small part of the ukrainian defense campaign, but god damn do they keep showing up *constantly* in variously supposedly-supportive propaganda and outreach efforts
that's fucked up, it's deeply fucked up, and i've hardly ever seen anyone grapple with it well
a lot of leftist criticism of this shit just falls down, too, like you've got people casually reposting shit from sputnik and relentlessly humping the term "proxy war" as a thought-terminating cliche
meanwhile an imperial power with state-mandated fox-news brain is churning out news reports about how their soldiers raided an lgbt charity and found a colored-pencil drawing of a trans woman on a poster, and that justifies their genocidal military campaign
a quirk of fascist nationalism is that it can grow through opposition as well as support —
the guys slapping sonnenrads and wolfsangels on everything are ideological allies of a sort even as they slaughter each other on the battlefield, because their battles serve to build up their respective nationalist death-squad movements as legitimate arms of the state, that they will then happily turn on their other designated enemies, both internal and external, when the current struggle has ended
imo the new ultranationalist internationalism is based on this premise:
• dictatorship-against-the-left will always be required to save capitalism in crisis
• capitalism can benefit from its own crises
• the world is going to hell — the crises will escalate
• *choosing* to send the world to hell is rational "homo economicus" / "realpolitik" behavior
• a network of para-fascist states can effectively preserve capitalism and hierarchy all over, and the ride to hell will only strengthen them
and please don't confuse this for me saying these people are all incredibly clever, visionaries, master manipulators, &c.
the ruling class have their illusions and delusions just like everyone else. it's just that they can choose how to inflict them on all of us.
to bring this back to the invasion of ukraine — every single azov guy is a victory for "putinism" in a very real sense, because he wholeheartedly buys into the right-wing hell-world idea and will spend his whole life building that hell-world.
and afaik the national boundaries between these ultranationalist death-squad groups get rather porous when it comes to shit like going off to be a mercenary in africa.
in some sense, ultranationalist internationalism is in conflict with american hegemony — it's trying to build a new thing out of american decline, the end of "the end of history" and all that.
but it's built by repurposing our imperial tools. it's built on our inaction (on climate change, e.g.). a lot of it is built by explicitly by americans and other westerners, because all of the ruling elites largely want the same big things.
and — since i'm talking to a mostly left-wing audience here, i presume — i want to emphasize this: the thing the international right-wing is building isn't a "multi-polar world" as you conceive of it.
it's not an end to hegemony, but a kind of new para-hegemony, a more redundant and resilient version of our modern system, a way to keep the oppressive power of the nation-state rolling along even as vulture-capitalists strip their own nation states for profit.
@saddestrobots this is the first time ive been able to accurately respond to something with:
This is what 1984 is about
@mungus great way to put it
a guy who worked in one of the soft-power industries (world bank or usaid type stuff) told me they were basically cooked and we're all getting reactionary mafia states instead like 10 years ago ☠️
@saddestrobots the whole issue of nazism in contemporary ukraine has never really gotten the in-depth treatment it deserves - even something as seemingly simple as the Bandera cult ("it's bad") gets complicated when you see that there's very popular novels talking about how the Ukrainian Insurgent Army protected Jews from the Real Antisemites in the USSR, which is obviously not anything resembling historical reality, but also this seems to be a popular narrative in at least one sector of the population, and what do you do with that, how did that narrative get to the point of prominence it reached, through what mechanisms
And Azov too it's like, ok, on the one hand it was only ever one unit and one that seemed to get owned pretty badly at Mariupol, but on the other hand, solidarity networks with Ukraine seem to be heavily dominated by their sympathizers (which perhaps makes sense, since the most ideological people would be the most active). The book that came out on them last year did a good job showing how they survived because they were useful to a lot of people's interests, but it was written prewar so a lot of stuff is obviously out of date
Alex P. 👹
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Mungus
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