I think it’s worth noting that, prior to the war, the default position was “There are definitely Nazis in Ukraine and we should be concerned about that.” The position changed to “There are no Nazis in Ukraine” on the day the invasion started and people have been flailing around since trying to figure out how to reconcile that against years of generally accepted reporting on the rise of the Ukrainian far-right.
Even trying to just FIND articles about this sort of thing, I have to configure search to only look for items prior to invasion
Otherwise I just get items about how it’s Russian propaganda (or nothing)
Yeah I have a bookmarked search setting for pre-February 2022 searches because of how rapidly the entire media landscape changed overnight. Have to use a lot of archives and waybackmachines as well, since a lot of it was deleted or edited later. All the “pro-Russian” media also got censored and banned and is just gone now, which includes a lot of leftist smaller independent media. FAIR and Grayzone and Mint Press are all suppressed in google search algos compared to pre-Russiagate hysteria
I remember thinking when I was younger and more naive, that we might not have had the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq right after, if internet access was more prevalent at the time (or at the least it would have been much more loudly opposed)
This all has made me realize how very foolish that line of thought was
ed. Your comment about things being deleted reminded me of how I was trying to find a specific Reuters article about how Ukraine press-ganged prisoners with military experience into the war very early on; I couldn’t find it later, and I doubt I could if I looked now. Just something to add to the pot
Would you be willing to share some archived links here? I didn’t learn about the Ukraine Nazi problem before the war and it’s been a bear trying to find information now
It’s super visible in the YouTube comments on Vice’s video about the rise of neo-Nazis in Ukraine prior to the war. Any pre-war comments are basically “wow this is concerning, hope Ukraine finds a way to stop this”, post-war comments are “wow vice is Putler propaganda now”
“Wow, all of these major publications that are currently supporting the war in Ukraine sure were posting a lot of Russian propaganda before the war. Are we sure we can trust them now?”
This is a dumb gotcha I made up in my head that won’t work on liberals because they’re perfectly okay contradicting themselves constantly.
Remember in 2016 when libs pretended they wanted to punch and de-platform nazis? Lmao, turns out that was 100% complete and total opportunist bullshit
Pretty soon they’re going to be flying Nazi flags to symbolize their support for Ukraine, and they’re going to fall back on the 'ol “the Swastika is acktchually a symbol of PEACE from an ancient religion!! Decolonize the swastika!!!”
Idea to make liberals realize that Churchill was bad: call him a tankie because he collaborated with Stalin, the enemy of democracy worldwide and the murderer of innocent Germans
edit: I’m actually wondering how far you could take this line of thought, I wonder if you like couched it in enough anti-Russian rhetoric you could make liberals just straight up pro-Nazi Germany.
“The Russian disinformation propaganda campaign against this admirable elderly man is disgusting honestly. Totally against civility and all this arguing about it only serves to strengthen Putin’s position in his genocidal terror war against Ukraine. Frankly, I think that murdering Nazis merely for having views that could be considered unpleasant, like some tankies online have been suggesting we do to this gallant old man, is totally uncivil and against all morality and decorum; really, our actions in World War 2 went overboard when we could have tried to rehabilitate and reason with the Germans, with civilly and with respect, rather than resorting to violence. Beginning to really have second thoughts about the role of FDR and Churchill in the war. The true enemy was, of course, the tankie genocidal dictator Stalin, and we would have done better to have allied with Germany against the USSR, regardless of the questionable human rights record of the Germans at that time.”
never mind, just realized that I’ve seen liberals with this take unironically (usually the exact same people who also think that the Soviets having a non-aggression pact with the Nazis proves that they are both fascist regimes)
I’ve been noticing that a lot of them have been doing speedruns of this lately
There are decades where libs are unscratched and nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades of scratches happen.
This is the flowering of years of reactionary seed-sowing. The population has been primed for decades on Holodomor soft-holocaust denial, anti-soviet cold war propaganda and more recently: Ukraine Nazis being the Good Nazis TM.
What else would we expect? Of course this is the natural result of a bunch of people believing these things. It’s the active re-writing of history and the slow boiling nazifaction of hundreds of millions of people
