• WhatWouldKarlDo@lemmygrad.ml
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    7 days ago

    Lemmy ate my reply. But the short version is that I actually do mostly agree with you. I try not do this myself, but it is linguistically difficult to speak more narrowly about the Nazis in Ukraine. I just think it’s a wee bit of a stretch to assume that the comment you referenced actually refers to all Ukrainians.

    • Red_Scare [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
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      7 days ago

      It’s not difficult to call Nazis Nazis.

      Zhukov was right when he said “We have liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it.” The West immediately went on to put Nazi generals in charge of NATO, Canada nurtured Banderites who would never see a day of freedom in Ukraine, all this simply because Nazism is an organic outgrowth of European settler-colonial project (same as Zionism), it’s the ugly side of Western liberalism.

      Turning this around against Ukraine made my blood boil because Ukraine was one of the primary victims of Nazism along with Belarus, over two million Ukrainians enslaved and sent to German industries for forced labour, over five million slaughtered, entire villages razed to the ground, mass rapes organised by Nazi officers, mass shootings by SS death squads and Banderites, things Western education mostly glosses over. Even the 30s famine has nothing on the destruction Nazis wreaked on Ukraine.

      I doubt you can imagine the generational trauma people raised in the USSR have. Watch “Come and See” and understand we were raised by people who lived through this (https://youtu.be/zjIiApN6cfg). Liberation from Nazis is not a laughing matter for us, which is why the Ukrainian grandma with the red flag resonated so deeply with so many post-Soviet people (https://youtu.be/DfeflkpcOi4).

      Ukraine was a founding member of the USSR, Ukrainians were the largest ethnic group in the Red Army after Russians, with over 5 million serving (https://i.imgur.com/62j4OYo.jpeg). It’s Ukrainians who did the liberation, and it’s the West who never forgave them for it and is now destroying them in a proxy war against Russia, after putting Banderites in power.

      I’m sorry but the comment I referenced comes out of a deep ignorance and arrogance typical to Westerners. No they didn’t say “every single Ukrainian” but they generalised Ukrainians in an extremely ahistorical and offensive manner.