https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/putin-first.html?scp=9&sq=Frontline:%2520Breaking%2520the%2520Bank&st=Search

Here he is talking about his parents and grandparents in the Great Patriotic War. His family was at Leningrad for part of it.

https://www.jpost.com/international/comparing-soviet-union-to-nazi-germany-now-illegal-in-russia-672821

He made it illegal to compare the USSR to Nazi Germany, clearly showing he is at least to the left of the average western Liberal who claims they are identical and believe in horseshoe theory

There’s more but it’s hard to find because searches are flooded with deboonking articles about Putin de-nazifying the ukraine.

Problem is, a lot of this was coopted into “vote blue no matter who” horseshit.

Thus empowering someone who, if anything, has introduced far more structural fascism over his political career than Trump did. Wee hoo! 😒

I keep telling the libs: “Look, draw your line; voice your criteria. Either Trump and Biden are both fascists, or neither are. You really can’t produce honest criteria that allows you to have it both ways.” Makes lots of them very, very mad, obviously.

Calling him an actual fascist rings hollow when the two loudest groups shouting that he was a Nazi were establishment Democrats and “leftists” who vote blue for “harm reduction”.

The former got into power and did fuck all to combat Trump or reverse his policies or even mitigate them. The latter then covered up for Blue MAGA and started making excuses for them, and never pushed them to hard to reverse the “fascism” of Trump’s policies.

Hard to take either group seriously after that. In retrospect it was hyped up cynically to get democrat votes in the midterm. And I’m not faulting the hysterical doomsayers from a moralist perspective, but from a practical one - they did not have a coherent analysis of what Fascism is or what to do about it, and in the long run their alarmist cynical or naive nonsense will only make real fascism harder to call out

Putin purged the far right elements within Russia a couple years ago, a ton of rightwing orgs had to go underground and unofficial because of political persecution. This doesn’t seem like the actions of a Nazi. If he panders, he panders to Soviet boomers with Stalin nostalgia