The New York Times (7/2/22) attributed a spike in mentions of Nazism at the start of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to Putin describing Ukraine as “full of Nazis,” but did not discuss Western media comparing Putin to Hitler.
Earlier this month, a New York Times (7/2/22) report, “How the Russian Media Spread False Claims About Ukrainian Nazis,” argued that falsely branding people as Nazis is inherently propagandistic:
The lie that the government and culture of Ukraine are filled with dangerous “Nazis” has become a central theme of Kremlin propaganda about the war.
To say Ukraine is “filled” with Nazis is an obvious exaggeration, although even a relatively small number of Nazis has wielded disproportionate influence in the Ukrainian government (Kyiv Post, 3/26/19; Euronews, 8/4/21). Nevertheless, FAIR (3/7/14, 1/15/22, 1/28/22, 2/23/22) has covered the Western media’s denial of the far-right’s role in the Ukrainian 2014 coup, as well as their complicity in amplifying Ukrainian neo-Nazi publicity stunts during the war.
But if it’s true that falsely associating a government with Nazism is a manipulation worthy of condemnation, how then should one judge Western media efforts to tie Russian President Vladimir Putin to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler?
FAIR (3/30/22) has previously noted how evidence-free caricatures in Western media of Putin as irrational (and perhaps psychotic) make diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis seem pointless. Tracing a connection between Putin and Hitler is an even more insidious attempt to make the idea of a negotiated end to the war seem like a moral outrage.
‘Striking similarities’
In the early days of the Ukraine crisis, former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul implied to guest host Ali Velshi on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show (3/11/22) that Putin was worse than Hitler, because Putin was killing his own people, while Hitler “didn’t kill ethnic Germans.” McFaul’s comments were later shared without attribution or pushback by the Maddow blog on Twitter (3/12/22)—suggesting that Maddow’s show endorsed McFaul’s comparative ranking of Putin and Hitler—before being removed following social media backlash and a correction by the Auschwitz Memorial. (Many of the Jews killed by Hitler were, of course, ethnically German, as were countless other victims of Hitler, if that makes a moral difference.)
Historian Richard J. Evans (New Statesman, 4/9/22) listed several ways Putin could be compared to Hitler, including the argument that genocide was at “the heart of the Nazi project,” and Russia’s actions in Ukraine amount to genocide because Ukrainians “are being killed because they are Ukrainians, and for no other reason.” Furthermore:
Both men had imposed dictatorial rule over their respective countries, both men suppressed dissent and eliminated independent media, both men had no hesitation in murdering people they considered a threat to their rule. Both Hitler and Putin invaded a series of neighboring countries, both used lies and disinformation to justify their actions, both used a symbol–in Putin’s case “Z,” in Hitler’s the swastika–to advertise support for their aims. Both men had no hesitation in causing death and destruction on a massive scale to further their ends.
Many of these features would seem to apply to virtually any authoritarian ruler, from Augusto Pinochet to Ferdinand Marcos—though not every dictator has a distinctive logo, were they all Hitler as well?
Political scientist Alexander Motyl wrote an op-ed for The Hill (5/3/22), “Putin’s Russia Rose like Hitler’s Germany—and Could End the Same,” that argued that the “striking similarities between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Adolf Hitler’s Germany are not accidental,” because their “imperial mindsets, militaristic ambitions, personality cults and demonization of minorities (Jews and Ukrainians)” made it “almost inevitable that Hitler and Putin then embarked on major wars.”
“We err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust…But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin,” wrote Timothy Snyder for the New York Times (5/19/22).
Historian Timothy Snyder’s New York Times op-ed (5/19/22), “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist,” averred that we “err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust,” but claimed there are similarities between “Mr. Putin’s war” and “Hitler’s main war aim” of conquering Ukraine in 1941. In any case, Snyder suggested that, as with Hitler, there was no point in negotiating with Putin, because the only way to deal with such leaders is to hand them a military defeat: “The fascist leader has to be defeated, which means that those who oppose fascism have to do what is necessary to defeat him,” he asserted, warning that if “Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness.”
‘More dangerous’ than Hitler
In the London Telegraph (5/10/22), Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki argued that Putin is “more dangerous” than Hitler (or Stalin), because not only does Putin “have deadlier weapons at his disposal, but he also has the new media at his fingertips to spread his propaganda.” While it “seems impossible that Hitler or Stalin could return in our time,” Morawiecki wrote, they apparently did so when the “inconceivable became fact when rockets fell on Kyiv, Kharkiv and other cities of a sovereign, democratic state in the heart of Europe.” (Serbia was also, like Ukraine, a sovereign state with an at least nominally elected government—but NATO rockets falling on its cities during the Kosovo War did not seem to herald the second coming of World War II–era dictators.)
Morawiecki claimed that Putin’s “Russkiy Mir” ideology is “the equivalent of 20th-century Communism and Nazism,” and a “cancer” that poses a “deadly threat to the whole of Europe.” It is “not enough to support Ukraine in its military struggle with Russia,” he declared; nothing less than rooting out this “monstrous new ideology entirely” would be satisfactory to him.
Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is a violation of international law, condemned by 141 out of 193 countries in a UN General Assembly vote. But claims that Russia is committing genocide—a charge that carries automatic repercussions under international law—have to reckon with the comparison between the Ukraine invasion and the largest US military operation of the 21st century, the Iraq War. The UN’s count of civilian deaths in the first four months of Russia’s war was 4,677; the tally in the first four months of Iraq, according to Iraq Body Count, a project that monitored press accounts of civilian casualties, was 8,576.
Both numbers are horrific, and each surely underestimates the true civilian toll of these wars. But if Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, what was the US doing in Iraq?
“I know it’s hard…to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,” a US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told Newsweek (3/22/22). “But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians.”
If one genuinely wants to compare Putin’s brutality to Hitler’s, one has to look at the actual civilian toll of World War II. In the European theater alone, tens of millions of civilians were killed; some 14 million of these deaths were inflicted in the Soviet Union, which comprised both Russia and Ukraine. When you assert that the enemy of the day is as bad as Hitler, you’re also asserting that Hitler is no worse than the enemy of the day.
A parade of new Hitlers
Political scientist Michael Parenti pointed out in Against Empire that the corporate media often demonize the leaders of Official Enemy states as an evil personification of the entire population in order to justify US aggression against them, and there are few better ways to vilify foreign leaders in the West than by making exaggerated accusations that they are Adolf Hitler reincarnate. The glib trope demonstrates how frivolously historical comparisons are thrown around to advance US geopolitical goals.
British journalist Louis Allday (Ebb Magazine, 3/15/22) compiled a list of instances where Western journalists and officials have compared foreign leaders to Hitler—with Hitler sometimes coming off better in the comparison. Hitler-like leaders include Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milošević, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and even Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
If we take all of these allegations at face value, we should all be shocked by how many Hitlers have emerged after World War II. Or one could reasonably infer that Western journalists and officials will compare any foreign leader they dislike to Hitler, trivializing the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the suffering endured by their victims. Allday argues that these flippant Hitler comparisons are “effectively tantamount to a form of Holocaust denial and even an insidious rehabilitation of Nazism.”
Diplomacy = ‘appeasement’
One inevitable feature of these Hitler comparisons is frequent reference to “appeasement” when reporting on the US’s dealings with foreign leaders. This presents any attempt at diplomatic negotiations with foreign leaders opposed by the US as a misguided or unprincipled effort to placate an irrational or evil dictator bent on expansionist conquest.
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, as it amassed troops near its border, British Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace worried that “there was a whiff of Munich in the air.” This was a clear reference to what is commonly perceived to be a failed policy of diplomatic efforts to prevent World War II in the West, when European powers agreed to let Hitler annex part of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Agreement (BBC, 2/13/22).
Ian Bond (Guardian, 2/22/22), the director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform, wrote that although Putin is “not a charismatic madman,” there are still “echoes of 1938 in current developments,” as what “Putin has in common with Hitler” is a “mystical belief in a nation stretching beyond his country’s current borders.” Bond criticized Western officials for appearing to focus on “accommodating” Putin instead of deterring him, arguing that deterrence is “impossible” if “leaders keep telling Putin what they are not prepared to do” by ruling out in advance escalation into World War III.
New York Times columnist David Leonhardt (5/9/22) made it seem as if US leaders can only choose between their “old strategy” of “appeasement,” which supposedly caused Putin to “become more aggressive,” and their “new strategy” of “confrontation,” which would risk “a fight with a nuclear power that many Americans and Europeans do not want.”
This is a false dichotomy. Although establishment Western pundits and officials like to claim that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked,” FAIR (1/28/22, 3/4/22) has pointed out that this self-serving narrative omits a record of conscious provocations against Russia via NATO expansion towards Russian borders, in violation of promises made to Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. Leonhardt falsely described the US’s previous foreign policy toward Russia as a “strategy of non-confrontation ” rather than encirclement and antagonism.
(A poll of Ukrainians conducted by the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center—6/9-6/22—found 58% thought the US bore “some” or “a great deal of responsibility” for the current conflict, along with 55% for NATO, while 82% said the same of Russia. This majority opinion in Ukraine would be difficult to utter in an establishment US media outlet.)
According to a Wall Street Journal and National Opinion Research Center poll, 58% of Ukrainians believe the US bears “a great deal/some responsibility” for the war in Ukraine.
Accusations of “appeasing” Russia or Putin have been raised towards influential Western officials who have either engaged in diplomacy or advocated de-escalation through negotiations. Zelenskyy has made contradictory remarks throughout the conflict, arguing that diplomacy is the only way to end the war, while also advocating for escalation through more NATO military support and setting up a “no-fly-zone.” Western media outlets (e.g., Reuters, 5/26/22; Newsweek, 5/26/22) amplified Zelenskyy’s Munich references, with no pushback, when he criticized former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for advocating Ukrainian territorial concessions as a path to ending the war. Zelenskyy mocked Kissinger, stating that his “calendar is not 2022, but 1938,” and suggesting that Kissinger was speaking to an audience “in Munich back then.”
Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has also had to defend her record of diplomacy with Putin numerous times from charges of “appeasement,” as Zelenskyy blamed her and former French president Nicholas Sarkozy for not doing enough to prevent the situation. Other op-eds (Politico, 5/23/22; Bloomberg, 6/9/22) denounced her as the “Neville Chamberlain of our time”–evoking the British prime minister who met with Hitler at Munich–because of her insufficiently aggressive policy.
Russia’s ‘appeasement’ history
Comparisons that depict diplomacy with Russia as a reenactment of Munich gloss over Russia’s unique history with Nazi Germany. The popular narrative of “appeasement” in 1938 often omits that World War II might not have happened if Britain and France had accepted Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin’s offer to form a military alliance to preemptively attack Nazi Germany in August 15, 1939 (Telegraph, 10/18/08). Britain and France’s rejection of Stalin’s offer arguably led to the USSR signing a nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany (also known as the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact) on August 23, 1939; it was this agreement that set the stage for WWII, not Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in Munich.
World War II is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, because approximately 26 million Soviet citizens died in the conflict, while around three-quarters of all Nazi wartime losses came from fighting the Red Army (Washington Post, 5/8/15). But there are other historical memories that drive Russia’s perception of threats coming from the West. Another fact seldom recalled in US media is that Russia was invaded by the US and 14 other nations in 1918, who were intervening on behalf of the White Russian Army against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War (National Interest, 9/3/19; Consortium News, 7/18/18).
“The attempt to appease the aggressor ahead of the Great Patriotic War proved to be a mistake which came at a high cost for our people,” Putin said in his February 24 speech.
Indeed, Putin cited Russia’s history of being invaded by the West in the 20th century as a major reason behind the timing of his decision to preemptively invade Ukraine. In his speech announcing the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Putin invoked his own version of the “appeasement” trope in justification of military aggression:
The attempt to appease the aggressor ahead of the Great Patriotic War proved to be a mistake which came at a high cost for our people. In the first months after the hostilities broke out, we lost vast territories of strategic importance, as well as millions of lives. We will not make this mistake the second time.
Recreating empire?
An oft-repeated corollary to the Western media’s frequent Hitler comparisons is that there was little point before the invasion in addressing Russia’s security concerns surrounding NATO expansion and the US’s unilateral abandonment of arms control treaties, since Putin supposedly wanted to recreate the Soviet Union or Russian Empire despite his repeated explicit denials. Putin’s alleged belief that the modern state of Ukraine has no right to exist, the argument goes, is proof of his supposed Hitlerian expansionist ambitions.
“Talk of ‘de-Nazification,’ while absurd on a factual level, is nonetheless revealing. It tells us that Putin is acting on his long-held belief that the Ukrainian government has no right to be independent. It hints at his ultimate goal: to transform Ukraine into a vassal of a new Russian empire,” wrote Zack Beauchamp for Vox (2/24/22).
The two sources Western media most cite to make this claim are Putin’s speech (2/21/22) recognizing the independence of the separatist Donbas republics, and an essay he wrote last year (7/12/21) titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Vox’s Zack Beauchamp (2/24/22) wrote that Putin “believes that Ukraine is an illegitimate country that exists on land that’s historically and rightfully Russian.” Ha’aretz (3/17/22) published an op-ed comparing Putin’s July essay, with its “Hitlerian motifs,” to Hitler’s Mein Kampf—particularly “the notion of an artificial and tragic division of a people that must be rectified by reunification.”
Perhaps the most frequent purveyor of this narrative is Timothy Snyder (4/18/18), who claimed that the war in Ukraine is a “colonial war”:
In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, [Putin] argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.
However, when one actually reads both sources, rather than relying on secondhand sources to explain what Putin meant, it quickly becomes apparent that these are blatant misrepresentations of what Putin said. Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is long and convoluted, but although Putin talks about Russia and Ukraine’s shared historic, religious and linguistic heritage, and claims that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era,” he also stresses that Russia has acknowledged new geopolitical realities:
Things change: Countries and communities are no exception. Of course, some part of a people in the process of its development, influenced by a number of reasons and historical circumstances, can become aware of itself as a separate nation at a certain moment. How should we treat that? There is only one answer: with respect!… The Russian Federation recognized the new geopolitical realities: and not only recognized, but, indeed, did a lot for Ukraine to establish itself as an independent country.
This point was repeated in Putin’s later speech (2/21/22), where Putin blamed the existence of the modern Ukrainian state on Vladimir Lenin and the USSR. Putin’s claim was not that Moscow should continue to govern all of Ukraine, however, but that Russia’s recognition of Ukrainian independence was an act of political generosity, in contrast to what he presented as Kyiv’s ungenerous treatment of the residents of Donbas:
Despite all these injustices, lies and outright pillage of Russia, it was our people who accepted the new geopolitical reality that took shape after the dissolution of the USSR, and recognised the new independent states. Not only did Russia recognise these countries, but helped its CIS partners, even though it faced a very dire situation itself. This included our Ukrainian colleagues, who turned to us for financial support many times from the very moment they declared independence. Our country provided this assistance while respecting Ukraine’s dignity and sovereignty.
Putin’s efforts to justify Russia’s invasion are not based on events that happened centuries ago; his historical accounts in these two texts, however self-serving, are not linked to attempts to justify violence. Rather, the speech (2/24/22) that declared the “special military operation” did so on the grounds that the “eastward expansion of NATO” that began in 1999 is “a matter of life and death,” and a “red line” for Russia’s security that had been crossed despite several warnings.
He also maintained it was to “protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime” in the Donbas region. Such concerns are generally dismissed as pretextual in the West, but the UN’s count of civilian deaths in the Ukrainian civil war—3,321 as of January 2019 (UN OHCHR, 9/23/21)–is comparable to the UN civilian death toll from the Russian invasion, with a tiny fraction of the international outrage.
The cost of ‘appeasement’ charges
The hyperbolic comparisons between Russia and Vladimir Putin to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, as well as constant accusations that anyone who attempts to negotiate with Russia for a peaceful end to the war is engaged in “appeasement,” have cost the world opportunities to de-escalate. The Biden administration has not encouraged the Ukrainian government to engage in serious negotiations with Russia (Jacobin, 5/30/22), no doubt well aware that doing so would bring more Chamberlain analogies.
Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, cohosts of the Citations Needed podcast (10/9/19), point out that the emotionally manipulative and thought-terminating comparisons to Hitler and Munich are designed to suggest that
every so-called dictator is a new Hitler and every negotiation, every potential negotiation even, with those countries is a new Munich, is a new abdication of world responsibility that will inevitably lead to what else: a new Holocaust.
The extreme caricatures of Putin as equal to or worse than Hitler are setting up Ukraine and the world for a grim fate. A BBC report (6/20/22) last month featured NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg urging the West to “prepare to continue supporting Ukraine in a war lasting for years,” while the head of the British Army, Gen. Patrick Sanders, asserted that the “UK and allies needed to be capable of winning a ground war with Russia.” The frequent Nazi comparisons and Munich references made by Western media paint those who would prefer a negotiated settlement to years of bloodshed, the risk of World War III and nuclear war as “appeasers” of a Hitlerian dictator with genocidal ambitions.
Featured Image: Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Clive Rose, Alexander Nemenov and Kirill Kudryavtsev, via Getty Images
And your solution or direction is to negotiate with Putin for a peaceful end to the “special military operation” or de-escalating by giving up even m o r e Ukrainian sovereign land ?? WTF. We know that didn’t work out too well when Putin asserted sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014 and look where we are now. It seems to me you are just another Putin apologist who cherry picks their facts and arguments. Worse potentially, you could be a paid Russian bot.
You idiots are pathetic!!
LOL. You read any polls out of Crimea on whether they’re happy to be part of Russia, including ones conducted by Western agencies and news outlets? Let us know what you find when you do.
Yea, look at you two ‘Idiots’ … the first doesn’t respond to anything written. The second actually thinks Russian “Polls” have any validity or value. Dream on. The ancient Chinese curse about living in interesting times is striking again.
Riley Reading Comprehension,
Did you see where I specifically wrote WESTERN polls? These are NOT Russian “polls” you ninny. I’m not even AWARE of any “Russian “polls”” on the matter.
Since you’re apparently way too lazy to look this up, here you go:
1. From Putin mouthpiece Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-after-russia-annexed-crimea-locals-prefer-moscow-to-kiev/?sh=14a19450510d
2. From Putin propaganda outlet Gallup:
https://www.usagm.gov/wp-content/media/2014/06/Ukraine-slide-deck.pdf
3. From German Putin mouthpiece GFK:
https://www.gfk.com/ua/Documents/Presentations/GFK_report_FreeCrimea.pdf
“In February 2015, a poll by German polling firm GfK revealed that attitudes have not changed. When asked “Do you endorse Russia’s annexation of Crimea?”, a total of 82% of the respondents answered “yes, definitely,” and another 11% answered “yes, for the most part.” Only 2% said they didn’t know, and another 2% said no. Three percent did not specify their position.
With two studies out of the way, both Western-based, it seems without question that the vast majority of Crimeans do not feel they were duped into voting for annexation, and that life with Russia will be better for them and their families than life with Ukraine. A year ago this week, 83% of Crimeans went to the polling stations and almost 97% expressed support for reunification with their former Soviet parent. The majority of people living on the peninsula are ethnic Russians.”
But keep those thumbs in your ears babbling “Nah nah nah, nah nah nah…I kint heeeeear you!!! Ur a Putin apologist!!!”
LOL
Hmmm…now they’ve got me considering no longer donating to FAIR. While you’re allowed to call us “idiots” I cannot even post a reply with direct evidence supporting my position.
Dude, you’re a fool. Have you even bothered to read any of the WESTERN polls conducted in Crimea? Did you somehow miss that I specifically cited WESTERN polls in my comment?
From a summary at Forbes (clearly nothing more than a Putin apologist site, amirite?) which discussed polls conducted by Gallup, a German outlet and others and comes to the conclusion that:
“In February 2015, a poll by German polling firm GfK revealed that attitudes have not changed. When asked “Do you endorse Russia’s annexation of Crimea?”, a total of 82% of the respondents answered “yes, definitely,” and another 11% answered “yes, for the most part.” Only 2% said they didn’t know, and another 2% said no. Three percent did not specify their position.
With two studies out of the way, both Western-based, it seems without question that the vast majority of Crimeans do not feel they were duped into voting for annexation, and that life with Russia will be better for them and their families than life with Ukraine. A year ago this week, 83% of Crimeans went to the polling stations and almost 97% expressed support for reunification with their former Soviet parent. The majority of people living on the peninsula are ethnic Russians.”
Sounds like your problem isn’t with Putin, but with the Crimeans engaging in wrongthink as defined to you by the New York Times and Washington Post. Try harder next time.
Maybe just consider the fact that Crimea balked at ever being part of Ukraine in the first place, Ukraine ultimately conceding and allowing them to have their own parliament which then voted out in 2014 when the Ukrainian nationalist movement took over. Coupled with Ukraine having shut off the water and now talking about shelling them – I’m sure they’ve won the hearts and minds now…lol!
Exactly. The Ukrainian government (not just since Zelensky) knows full-well that the Crimeans overwhelmingly prefer to be a part of the RF, which is why they’ve resorted to the tactics you point to as well as the massive PR effort aided by Western outlets to cast aspersions on the referendum in which over 90% of voters chose to leave Ukraine after the coup.
If you are so concerned of sovereignty, have you been pushing for the US to stop meddling in the Caribbean, and South and Central America – supporting and training soldiers who murder and commit genocide against innocent people there – not to mention the millions who the US has killed around the world.
Russia build the Crimea and that area is their only access to a warm water port. They gave it up hastily with good intentions to a Ukraine that was at the time an ally. All things being equal and having read the history of this whole thing ( though certain not an expert by any means ) it seems that Russia has more of an excuse in terms of security to secure Crimea and even the Donbas. The US is still strangling Cuba after trying to invade it, trying to assassinate its leaders, and bombing and setting fire to its sugar cane fields and factories.
When you say “look where we are now”, that makes a certain implication that plays into the repeated propaganda that Putin is Hitler, or that Putin wanted to take over all of Ukraine, or that Putin wants to reconstitute the USSR. In the many lectures I’ve listened to in the last months the real experts have exposed those claims are lies and propaganda.
> It seems to me you are just another Putin apologist who cherry picks their facts and arguments. Worse potentially, you could be a paid Russian bot.
This is the “bot-like” rhetoric of someone who wants to do anything but actually discuss the real facts.
Here is how I see it: ( feel free to punch holes in it if you can )
1) The US has had “Nationalist/Nazi” contacts in Ukraine since WWII.
2) When the USSR collapsed the US took advantage of Russia.
3) The US causes economic havoc in Russia causing mass poverty and even a decline in life span at this time.
4) The US said it would not expand NATO one inch to the East, but is not pushing on Russia’s borders.
5) This trends of facts belies an aggressive and militant imperialist attitude against Russia, and the willingness to use Nazis to carry it out puts the motives of the West just as in doubt as Russia’s motives.
6) When the West knocked Yanukovich and Nationalists tried to murder him, they installed two puppet Presidents who caved in to Nationalists demands to honor Stepan Bandera and discriminate against Russians.
7) As Ukraine become more economically connected to the EU it’s heavy industry was shuttered throwing many out of work and causing unemployment and emigration.
8) Military actions were taken against the Donbas.
9) Billions of dollars were spent by the US shipping arms to Ukraine, advisors were sent in to train Ukraine’s military – without any American political resolution or vote.
10) Through all of this Russia had complained to deaf ears and tried to find a negotiated settlement with the West, with the US – but the US refused to negotiate.
11) Finally without any other recourse Russia began its Special Military Action – with very few troops – and indicator that Russia never meant to invade or take over Ukraine.
12) Ukraine’s response was so effective that Russia had to up its attack, and change its strategy and goals.
13) No one is quite sure what the Russian’s goals are at this point,but it is believed that they want to annex the Donbas and extend a land bridge possibly all the way to Odessa, or to the Russian enclave of Transnistria to weaken and leave Ukraine destroyed so the West has to clean it up and can no longer threaten Russia back..
Russia is in a better bargaining position now than it was four months ago. Instead of a few assurances (likely that the West wouldn’t have kept anyway), it now holds considerable territory which it has enough ethnic ties to hold politically. At some point you need to realize reality and that you can’t win every hand and fold before you get in too deep.
Oh yea baby … invoke a “special military operation” bomb them relentlessly, kill countless numbers of civilians, grab ‘considerable territory’ (as you say) and then play your hand. Brilliant, fu___ng brilliant. The level of dumbassery coming from these comments is truly staggering !!
You know nothing about Cuban missile Crisis ? WTF ?
Read and learn and stop being ” Usufull idiot”
Read the history of Russia – Ukraine.
You are ignorant man,if you are American,then you are intentionally left ignorant to say whatever your gov say.
Look,you people are electing arsholes,still supporting Trump,Biden trying to shake hands with people doesn’t exist,still nobody demonstrated about his ” Cognitive decline” you can not even afford to buy a Petrol and he blaime Putin price hike.
Keep being an ignoramus.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/canadian-officials-who-met-with-ukrainian-unit-linked-to-neo-nazis-feared-exposure-by-news-media-documents
So much pretzel logic here. Twisted and looping around — while leaving huge factual holes and omissions — eventually popping out a limp, centrist summation, like a tiny, anticlimactic burp; it wasn’t worth the effort.
Unsubscribing from your emails, I learned nothing.
You didn’t even read half the article. Besides, the takeaway is clear, even to a fifth grader. Haven’t you heard of Godwin’s Law? Comparing anyone to Hitler immediately renders any argument in their favor – or neutral – moot. You learned nothing because you’re brainwashed by Western media lies and distortions. Don’t let the door hit your….
Oh brother Tom Collin’s cocktail is off the rails again. Your criticism and style is similar to the circular argument of the twitter world. You assume everyone reading Fair.com agrees with your every twisted, woke thought. Of course, why wouldn’t they, as you thing as you pretend to right about everything?
You have no effing idea what you’re talking about and apparently your reading comprehension skills are nowhere to be found. That you felt the urge to include “woke” in your reply to me is plain ridiculous. Nothing to do with the subject at hand. More ad hominem and deflection, as usual.
DID YOU READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE? (I already know the answer is “nope”)
Oh yea cocktail Tom … we all read the WHOLE article you dumb MF er. Just gotta love these “special military operations” that aim to bomb people out of existence by killing countless numbers of civilians. Brilliant tactics – just, fu___ng brilliant. But you know it all, right ? Repeating – the level of dumbassery coming from you and other comments here is truly staggering.
And here we have Tom_Q_ The_Intellectual, who actually believes he knows it all. From his past posts he strikes me as one, who is the most virtuous and smartest kid on the block, this Web site and perhaps the planet. Don’t dare offer a position or thought that undermines his narrow minded view point and narrative. Its easy to be a bully and simply call people names.
Do you have anything other than childish ad hominem? Because otherwise your post was of zero value. And yet, FAIR, in their clear “bias for Putin”allowed it through moderation anyway!
And neither of you answered my question. Are you even aware of Godwin’s Law?
Those who sling the mud and arrows of outrageous fortune, without one scintilla of knowledge regarding Billy S… should never be taken seriously.
It appears that as the Pentagon budget continues to inhale taxpayer dollars that results in austerity for the American public, the dependency on bombastic, unsubstantiated assertions grow more and more frequent in our commercial media.
There’s a non-ironic reality inversion where UK and U.S. politicians and pundits throw around the term “fascist,” when the faceless billionaires who determine policy in both nations are beyond public scrutiny, and protect their anonymity with lethal zeal. We in the west may have the templates of democracy from our not-too-distant pasts, but nobody who isn’t drinking the kool-aid can believe we are still democratic. We have the tyranny of money which owns the political processes and players, and owns the media that masks all of their dirt.
From 2007, years before hostilities escalated, which is America’s proxy war against Russia, Putin has been consistently seeking a regional treaty to address the security concerns of Russia and its European neighbors. Since 2014, the U.S. has been arming an anti-Russian Ukrainian government, which was put into place by an American-purchased coup to replace an elected leader. All of this is history that cannot be unwritten, but the western narrative seeks to erase all of it. It is high time that Americans open their eyes.
According to Fox News on April 21 (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/austin-blinken-russia-weakened-ukraine-succeeding) the United States wants to see Russia “weakened to the degree that it cannot do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Monday.”
This is a remarkable admission and I am amazed it ever saw the light of day.
Am I wrong in thinking that this statement implies we would like the Ukrainians to keep on fighting at vast personal cost to weaken Russia, and that our wider motivation is for Putin to cease intervening in the Middle East with support for Assad and Iran and ignoring our sanctions?
I think large numbers of Ukrainians — probably a large majority — would have preferred an agreement with Russia to stay out of NATO and the EU and to negotiate and haggle over what happens to territory in the Donbas rather than see the massive destruction and forced migration of millions of refugees that has followed the Russian invasion. Putin won’t last forever and hopefully one day Russia will join the EU when Putin is gone, preferably sooner rather than later. It would have been less painful for Ukrainians to just wait until Russia becomes more liberal again than to engage in the current bloodbath. Look at Spain and Portugal and South Korea… all had pretty brutal dictatorships… and look at them now.
hello, one-eyed person,
do you remember zbigniew brzezinski?
who admitted: “we did not force the russians to intervene
[in afghanistan], but we knowingly increased the probability
that they would.” then, russia was supposed see “its vietnam”.
the supposedly “only indispensable nation” is obsessed
a) with violence [see genocide committed against the first nations,
war against communists, against democrats, bombs on vietnam,
war against drugs, against terror, against islamists, killer drones
on muslims and whoever else is CON_sidered an enemy],
b) with needing to ruin + bring russia to its knees, once and for all.
take brzezinski’s statement, replace “afghanistan” with “ukraine”.
russia must now see its second afghanistan.
should europe and eurasia ever become friends,
it would put an end to US hegemony, once and for all.
president selenski was ready to talk about “autonomy”
after president putin started his [ugly] invasion.
NATO offered millions of dollars’ worth of arms.
shortly later, selenski, again, seemed ready to talk.
[that he did not adhere to the minsk agreements BEFORE
putin invaded, is a sadly annoying, truly tragic fact.
“WHY did he not?” is yet another question.]
another fact is that NATO offered even more arms,
i.e. no talks, more fighting. ukraine is being sacrificed,
and europeans have no backbone or, worse, no will
to free themselves + us from the untied nations’ grip.
zillions invested in state-of-the-art-of-war arms.
“how dare you?!”, asked greta, “overheat the globe further?”
“who cares?!” she keeps hearing. “all that counts are shares!”
the military-industrial [inferiority] CON_plex win$ again.
Zelensky didn’t adhere to or attempt to enforce the Minsk Accords (I and II) because his political career (and more importantly his life) was threatened by the Bandera-loving but non-existent (to the Western media suddenly in January of ’22) neo-nazis and white nationalists.
https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/europe/how-ukraines-jewish-president-volodymyr-zelensky-made-peace-with-neo-nazi-paramilitaries-on-front-lines-of-war-with-russia/
Thanks for a very informative article. One thing I did not see was a reference to the problem Russia had with Ukraine when the Ukrainian government terminated (or attempted to terminate?) a 99 year lease on part of Crimea containing Russian naval facilities, that was far from its expiry date. I can’t remember the year when this happened. Another thing: I remember seeing Robert M. Gates, well respected Washington insider, secretary of defense for both Repubican and Democratic administrations, being interviewed on TV, and saying that there had been a tacit understanding that the Baltic states would be in the Western sphere of influence, and that Ukraine would be in the Russian, but that was then, and now is now. It seems to me of so little strategic importance to us in the West whether Ukraine is in or out of NATO, or aligned with us or Russia. The balance of power in Europe is heavily in our favor, so why push the Russians on this?
One question: Did we / Zelenskyy negotiate at all seriously to avoid the Russian invasion, or did we just say “No” to every Russian demand. and just threaten sanctions if they invaded?
That’s right Putin’s not Hitler.
He’s actually STALIN.
Putin’s actually Putin, and we would do well to actually look at the facts we can prove and really know about Putin that filling in that unknown with bad guys from the past. it’s not like Americans have very much understanding of history, and as someone once said “the victors write history”.
Another wise person once said that what we learn from history is that we don’t learn anything from history.
What a dumb thing to say. Putin has publicly refuted Stalin and state communism more times than I can remember. Have you ever actually *read* a transcript of any of his speeches? Stalin, LOL.
Let’s at least ‘try’ to be honest—the US has invaded most of the 7 countries targeted by the dumbest Pres. yet —-Bush jr. Under the global premise of ‘regime change’ that was like the lies told about invading Iraq —total bull–lies. No regime change anywhere–instead Afghanistan is a human mess along with Iraq and Syria and Libya and Mali …Do we ever hear about these lies and the human carnage done for the US defense corporations by the headcases in the Whitehouse—no.
Ask any Palestinian about human rights on having their country stolen—silence….just like their many slaughter …and those living are referred to as ‘rats’ by those responsible. Tutu said it plain—Israel is enacting apartheid against any long over due settlement that should see a vast reduction in occupied Palestinian land. The wing-nation for Israel is naturally the US….proxy are needed to spring and back upheaval.
The history of US insertion into and manipulating other sovereign nations is rank and perverse. Same with the USSR….China plays a different proxy game. Time for far more open and thought inclusive discussion and debate….maybe even some of the corporate media might offer more than false news that doesn’t aid in their ‘forever war goals’?
> To say Ukraine is “filled” with Nazis is an obvious exaggeration,
> although even a relatively small number of Nazis has wielded
> disproportionate influence in the Ukrainian government
Get your story straight FAIR. “Filled with” is a poor term, and can
you tell us what stories or people were claiming that Ukraine was
“filled with Nazis”? To ridicule and distort Russia’s claim is making
a dishonest argument of your own.
I know you guys seek to be “fair” and “accurate”, but to make the
false claim that people are claiming Ukraine is filled with Nazis is a
cheap shot with the implicit intention of ridiculing or dismissing
the Nazi angle and Putin’s claim that the Ukrainian government is
anti-human rights. I get that, it does seem off to portray Putin as
a protector of human rights given what we know about him, or
what we think we know about him – most of which are likely
propaganda claims by the US. We’ve heard these so many times
before, I’d think that FAIR would have a little more skepticism.
On the other hand, nothing is said about the claim that Ukraine is
democracy, and the US intention is to fight for democracy. A little
research into Ukraine seems to indicate that there is more meddling
in Ukraine by the CIA, US State Dept, NATO, and Russia, than honest
democracy going on, although my readings indicate most of the
meddling has been by the US and NATO.
Several ethnic groups are actually at war in Ukraine, laws have been
passed to forbid the use of Russian as a language, and opposition
media outlets have been closed down. Also there are documented
incidents where Ukrainian President Zelensky’s life and family have
been threatened if he does not give in to Nationalist’s/Nazi’s demands.
Does that sound like a democracy? Does that sound like the US is
nurturing a democracy or continuing the Cold War? Have you run
any stories about this false claim?
Or, how about a real story detailing exactly how much, qualitatively
and quantitatively – “a relatively small number of Nazis has wielded
disproportionate influence in the Ukrainian government”?
That’s my crazy idea about what would be FAIR, regarding this war.
Being an American I know America has a long history of vicious and
violent interference in the politics and economies of foreign countries,
and I’d guess so do your journalists and editors. Why are you using
weasel words and dishonesty to avoid reporting on the reality of this
war?
Joshua Cho states the obvious facts that corporate media propaganda has drowned in the brainless stampede of the U.S. masses to war. The demonization of Putin personally is nothing original. The American people overwhelmingly opposed U.S. entry into World War I, until Edward Bernays explained to Wilson’s ministry of propaganda that though the American people could not understand politics, economics, or geography, they could understand personal hatred, and therefore the propaganda of the U.S. warmongers should focus on the German Kaiser as a devil. Bernays’ scheme worked, and U.S. war propagandists have applied the same tactic of demonizing an individual to obtain the consent of the masses to destroy the nations of Saddam Hussein, Qadafi, Milosevic, Bin Laden, and Assad, (none of which had harmed or threatened the U.S.). The Russians have good reason to fear NATO imperialism. Apologists for the NATO war against Russia to the last Ukrainian standing reduce the conflict to the single personality of President Putin, and then ludicrously purport to read his mind as their excuse to refuse diplomacy and instead perpetuate the war that serves nobody (except the weapons industry).
On YouTube there is an interesting video from way back around WWII, part of the “Why We Fight” series that introduces the Russian people to the Americans. It is called “The Battle of Russia”. It is free of Cold War propaganda because the Cold War had not really begin, but it is a very interesting picture of Russia and description of wha they had to go through to survive in WWII, while in the US Hollywood we made movies like we were the only ones involved. I highly recommend it even though it is not immediately relevant to Ukraine of today.
We currently live in the golden age of suckers predicted in this post-WWII video:
More like the virtual golden age of suckers, can’t even talk to anyone without them coming up with a ‘contrary to popular belief’ factoid they’ve read from sone story within their “newsfeed” or worse from what they’ve “researched” on wikipedia.
Reminds me of a Paul Street article (Counterpunch) that started with this quote –
“What has been happening in Germany is a matter of the gravest portent for the whole civilized world…The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent people from whom they differ on minor points.” – Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity,” 1933
Then there’s an alleged Charles Bukowski quote that goes…
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
Poor thinkers who think of themselves as great thinkers abound online.
And they tend to engage in conversations while hiding behind a pseudonym.
The messenger’s name is irrelevant if the message they posit says something that is true.
Any “message” is irrelevant, if proven to be mere fascist propaganda.
The Nazi comparison is nonsense! Thank you for pointing that out.
What leader would not defend his country when a 30 member strong military alliance with plenty of blood on its hands, NATO, is at its door? The guilt for this war in on the leaders who would not adhere to the Minsk Accord, those who would not simply be neutral!
That logic seeks to justify mass killing of civilians & extrajudicial execution of soldiers.
Are you morally bankrupt, intentionally blind, or just another Russian ‘bot?
“polls conducted by Western agencies” you read that as Russian polls.
Go to Wikipedia. Crimea is populated by eighty percent ethnic Russians and the biggest employer in Crimea is the Russian naval base.
Why was the coup/revolution in 2014 legitimate and the popular vote by Crimea to secede from Ukraine not legitimate?
I appreciate this article. As an historian of the Nazis, and a professor who is also a teacher, I have been depressed by the inability of the press to discuss these issues correctly without the constant propaganda that is simply fanciful. I suppose in the US there exists an evangelical component that uses the concept of “Hitler as evil” and which is in turn projected to the public, rather than an actual historical analysis. This analogy then is applied to all of our “enemies”, so “good” vs “evil” is the narrative, and in the US that is a Christian world view, a not very useful one for understanding events. US = Good. Putin = Evil.
If you are truly “an historian of the Nazis”, then you know that the entire narrative about the NSDAP and WWII is a steaming pile of well rotted male bovine excrement. I’m not suggesting that it’s political philosophy was perfect, because no political philosophy is. Six weeks after Hitler was appointed Chancellor as head of a minority government, the world Jewish Congress declared war on Germany. The war on Fascism and National Socialism was waged because both opposed usury and the international banking cartel.
The author of this piece, like most others, have no sense of context. Large parts of what is now Ukraine were ripped from the Austrian and Hungarian Empires and handed to the Soviet Union under the Treaty of Versailles. While there have been extremist Ukrainian nationalists hating Russians, and later communists, since Catherine the Great, many saw themselves as Austrians or Hungarians. The Soviet Union, post Versailles, went on to starve to death millions of these same people. Why is anyone surprised that when the Germans invaded the USSR pre-emptively to stop the Soviet Union, which was in the final stages of launching the largest invading force in history to conquer Europe, that Ukrainian/Austrians/Hungarians would “collaborate” to rid themselves of their hated oppressors? The Treaty of Westphalia – the rules of war – required all combatants to be uniformed. Combatants not in uniform were spies as were those who aided and abetted them. Spies could be questioned and summarily executed. Unlike the “heroic underground”, i.e. non-uniformed combatants, used by the Allies, the Germans relied on the over 500,000 volunteers from across Europe and North Africa to fight on the Eastern Front. They formed the Waffen SS. Where numbers were sufficient, “national” battalions were formed, sometimes two. Each had their own insignia and often marches. Germany wasn’t conducting blood tests or having these people pass exams to determine whether they were “Nazis”. Most of the alleged atrocities committed by the Waffen SS groups were against non-uniformed combatants and those who aided and abetted them, entirely in line with the Treaty of Westphalia. The Ukrainians in the Waffen SS didn’t claim to be “Nazis” and the Nazis never claimed they were. The nonsense about neo-Nazi “symbols” would be sad, if it weren’t so funny. The Finnish Air Force used the swastika as its tail emblem from 1918, before the NSDAP was founded, until 1918, when (((international pressure))) caused them to replace it. The so-called Neo-Nazis in Ukraine today are in favour of the EU, the IMF, and the Bank of International Settlements – all globalist institutions which are the antithesis of “Nazis”. They supported a coup pushed for by Jews Yatsenyuk and Klitschko, a Russian speaking Jewish President, and the Jewish oligarchs past an present. Some Nazis. The “Nazi” narrative is needed, particularly by Russia, to continue the lie of “the Great Patriotic War” where the innocent and peace loving Soviet Union was attacked, for no reason by the eeevvviiilll Naht-zees. Ironically, there is a similarity between Hitler and Putin. Hitler invaded Poland to stop the ethnic cleansing of Germans in Poland, and Putin invaded to stop the ethnic cleansing of Russians in Ukraine. The UK and France urged Poland not to settle difference with Germany, and the UK and France (under US directive) did nothing when Ukraine refused to settle their differences with the PRs of Luhansk and Donetsk under the Minsk Accords.
Who wins? The two headed beast of the banking and war machines. Nothing has changed in 90 years.
When one believes “the two headed [sic] beast of the banking and war machine” controls U.S. domestic and foreign policy, it becomes much easier to support the slaughter of innocent civilians by some other violent and undemocratic regime, managed for the profit of those closely aligned with the leader of that purge.
Well one thing everyone can agree on – Hitler was bad. So bad that he continues to haunt the world today. As the scapegoat for every political argument and the excuse for every “necessary” war his legacy and evil lingers.
Godwin’s Law with the afterburners on.
Godwin’s law, short for Godwin’s law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches.
This quote from a Slate article references academic research that has disproven (refuted) Godwin’s Law:
“The study’s authors reviewed a sampling of nearly 200 million Reddit posts and found that references to “Hitler” and “Nazis” did not occur with a high degree of frequency. In fact, after a certain point, the probability of observing these words actually decreased.”
– From a Slate article titled “Has Godwin’s Law, the rule of Nazi comparisons, been disproven?”
One of the biggest problems for such claims like Godwin’s is that there is no way to falsify the claim, which makes it sort of specious in terms of evidence it can produce to back it up. If anything cannot be shown to not conform to the “law” then what kind of a law are we talking about?
Fact. When in 1941 the German army took Lviv (Lvov) the commander of that unit failed to immediately occupy the city’s radio station. When a nationalist Ukrainian group (I believe that it was Bandera’s OUN?) learned it, its leaders immediately went to the radio station to broadcast a statement that Ukraine was now a fully independent state which would be protected by the German army and Ukraine and Germany would now be allies.
Hitler was reported to have been furious because he never wanted Ukraine to be a sovereign state. In his plans Ukraine would have been a German colony.
Pretty much what both Biden and Putin want, no?
“This was a clear reference to what is commonly perceived to be a failed policy of diplomatic efforts to prevent World War II in the West, when European powers agreed to let Hitler annex part of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Agreement.”
Correct! It is commonly perceived due to mass post-war propaganda. The agreement prevented Hungary from invading Slovakia and the Czech region. The Germans were invited to protect them. Here is a short video:
Ukrainians seem to be doing much the same: mass killing surrendering Russian soldiers has been reported.
Also civilian rapes.
This is what happens in war UNLESS you have a disciplined, organized force, that knows they will be held accountable.
That doesn’t appear in the Russia-Ukraine conflict on either side.
Say whatever you want about Russia, at least abortion is still legal throughout the entire country, and for over 25 years the right to free healthcare has been enshrined in the Russian constitution.
And Russia has had a national Don’t Say Gay policy for more than a decade.
To “Bradley Grower”
Who said Russia is better than America? No one. The point up there was more nuanced and subtle – as bad as Russia is, it still has managed to do something better and more humane than America. This doesn’t mean that Russia is better in every way, only that the U.S. will always be inferior to Russia in at least one very important way – by the USA not having enshrined the right to free healthcare for all of its people.
The “don’t say gay” allegation against Russia is a straw man, since America is far from having equal protection under the law for all of its own LGBTQ people. In fact America with its undemocratic SCOTUS are in the process of rolling back many of the important gains the LGBTQ community has enjoyed.
No straw man created by mentioning a FACT. Thanks anyway, comrade.
I’m here for you bro! Here https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2022/05/hallucinated-implications-creep-hic.html#comment-form
Thanks for all of your comments and videos, Don’t Be A Sucker! was AWESOME!
Bernardo is a douche who traffics in hyperbole and deception.
To Bradley,
“Bernardo is a douche who traffics in hyperbole and deception.”
Lol.
Thanks so much Bernardo. I’ll keep you in mind… as the fascists destroy our planet with their marching orders from the investment bankers.
Snyder is a propagandist hack.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/30/baltic-nazi-soviet-snyder
Probably never occurred to your dense mind that the US provoked this conflict as well. https://news.yahoo.com/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-may-take-central-role-if-russia-invades-185258008.html
Ukraine is a sovereign country that was invaded and viciously attacked by Putin’s Russian forces. Russia has repeatedly bombed civilian targets, and has forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia. This essay implies that the U.S. has a responsibility to convince Ukrainian leaders to “negotiate”with Putin as Putin continues to slaughter Ukrainian civilians and destroy Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. Nowhere in this piece does the author acknowledge the agency of Ukrainians: What the Ukrainian people want, why they should negotiate with the despot responsible for the wanton killing and destruction. There was a time in my life when I held the utmost respect for FAIR. But now it seems that FAIR is guilty of the same brand of journalistic bias is purports to condemn. Really, this piece cites “Jacobin” – as ideologically rigid as journalism can be. I’m appalled by this piece’s derogatory dismissal of scholar Timothy Snyder, who no doubt knows more about the history & politics of Ukraine and Russia than anyone on FAIR’s staff. Very disappointing.
This has to be one of the absolute very best and most revealing articles I have ever read in my life. The author is very much in the right line of work!
Colour me shocked when I learned that this was (at least once at some point) an ostensible reputable, if left-slanted news organisation and not some mere far-left or -right e-rag (if it has always been anything comparable to Adbusters, I can rest assured that there is little difference to myself, however). Apparently the classic leftist urge to criticize the US and turn palpable atrocities committed by a despotic regime around be the West’s fault has reared its ugly head again. The genocide denier Noam Chomsky would be most proud of you, Mr. Cho, to play such a magnanimous role as devil’s advocate for a butchering tyrant.
Is it so egregious to compare the only leader in Europe since World War 2 to unprovokedly invade a neighbouring country to the last man to do so in the past 100 years? You are seemingly astounded that people focus on the absurdity of comparing a transitional democracy with an ultimately negligible far-right presence to the Third Reich, while they neglect to point out the upsurge of a comparison of a extreme-right autocratic regime which has used genocidal language to validate its aggressive military actions to another extreme-right autocratic regime which has used aggressive actions to carry out genocide. I believe this is the contrast between what is you journalists refer to as a ” Man Bites Dog” story versus a “Dog Bites Man” story. I would only expect someone with a partisan axe to grind would try to make a mountain out of molehill of not addressing what is otherwise considered a commonsensical comparison.
What is most disturbing is how manifestly you have become a mouthpiece for the Kremlin by uncritically repeating the exact same talking points of a pathological liar such as Putin to justify his war of aggression. You label the voluntary resignation of Yanukovich in response to his own parliament’s declaration of no confidence in his bloody suppression of protests to his rule as a “coup” (obviously one organized by the CIA. As we all know, no pro-Western grassroots revolutionary movement could possibly have agency independent of shadowy American 3-letter-initial boogey-men). You draw pointless red herring comparisons to the American War on Terror. And once again apparently the far-right, who were only represented by single party earning a single seat in the last Ukrainian Parliamentary election “wield disproportionate influence”. I am almost amazed you didn’t inflate that number of 3300 civilian deaths in Donbas (which occurred over a total of 8 years, a very questionable thing to compare to an invasion with the same death toll accumulated in mere months, a number which is obviously much higher now) to the mythical Russian propagandistic 14 000 which conflates both civilian and combatant deaths from both sides!
In your quest to obtain a fallacious both-sidesist alternative spin on current events, you have effectively become a Useful Idiot for our poor, unfairly dogged, misrepresented and mischaracterized reluctant war criminal, and have made as much of a mockery of journalistic impartiality as Tucker Carlson, if one with an on average higher syllable-count-per-word than the latter gentleman.
So by all means, Mr. Cho, divulge more of your feigned concern for the plight of the Ukrainian people from your lofty gentrified New York apartment, or whatever dwelling you are based in that hasn’t been turned to rubble by Russians. From there it is assuredly far more easy to advocate concessions to deliberate mass slaughter and attrition than in the very country it takes place. Thank you for so bravely speaking for the Ukrainian people from such a cozy, clear-headed perspective! You do them a great service!