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Whitewashing The SS: The Attempt to Re-Write the History of Hitler’s Collaborators
(espritdecorps.ca)
Relevant due to the Canadian monument that was recently defaced. Image via [email protected].
This is a plea not to whitewash Ukraine's nazi past or minimize the fascist presence in its forces, but to defend its people from fascism and imperialism. Anarchists and Communists are fighting for the Ukrainian people against Russia, and are calling for solidarity.
This post mirrors similar posts made in /c/[email protected] and /c/[email protected] where the user making the post was trying to assert that Canada welcomes Nazi soldiers. You can skim my profile for comments I've made on those posts within the last 24hs if you want a bit of context.
Both of the original posts were deleted from their respective communities so trying to follow the comments leads to an error page informing you that the post could not be found.
Here are some screenshots I have of the users' partially censored usernames and the associated post titles which are very similar to the wording in the title used here (I'm using censored names because I'm unsure if naming users is against the rules).
lemmygrad user posting to /c/[email protected]
lemmynsfw user posting to /c/[email protected]
I'm guessing that this is getting pushed due to a recent incident involving a Canadian House of Commons speaker, and trolls have been trying to push Ukrainians as Nazis since then.
If anyone came straight to the comments, I strongly encourage you to read the article right now. You can make your own judgement about what the above commenter is trying to do after reading it.
I probably inferred too much from the post's title, especially after I had seen previous posts with very similar titles framing Canada as being supportive of Nazis.
While I don't agree with OP's stance of associating people today with people from +70 years ago, people have differing perspectives on things and my opinion is going to be based off of how much I perceive the two things to be relevant. To me, their stance would be like holding a person accountable because their grandparents destroying a building long before they were even born.
What if instead of destroying a building the grandparents instead did the holocaust, and the grandchildren put up statues of their grandparents and held parades for them, and invited them into the Canadian Parliament? That sounds worse than your analogy doesn't it?
The grandparents are still being held accountable for what they did, I don't believe in descendants inheriting crimes, this is where I disagree with OP. Celebrating the grandparents in this example would be the same as celebrating the Holocaust and the people responsible for it.
I consider society to be "dynamic"; it will change over time, and it makes more sense to make judgements of a general population based off of currently living people and how the newer generations are trending. Basing observations on a generation that is dead/will be dead within the next 15 years does not feel like it can be used to represent the current population. The changes are gradual but when you're already generalizing large groups of people, it's easier to break it up by what generation has done/are doing and if they are still around. There is going to be some bleed over between generations, but looking at how the newer generations are changing seems like a better way to see how a population will be changing in the long term.
My stance is clear from the post body text and my post history.
Representing concern about fascism in Ukraine as a narritive only shared by pro-Putin trolls is tacit support for nazism. Your kind of propaganda is harming support for Ukraine in the west. Please stop.
That's the point especially people in Ukraine don't seem to get.
Nobody gives a fuck about right-wing radicals or neo-nazis existing in Ukraine because they (like every group of idiots) exist everywhere to some degree. Giving their extreme situation, we can also somewhat live with them being used for a cause back when they were a vital part of fighting Russians at a time when the official army wasn't up to the task yet.
But only IF we feel that they acknowledge the issue and are able to handle them when they become a problem. And categorically denying everything and denouncing every question as Russian propaganda is doing the exact opposite. And it's actually fuelling the narratives they try to work against.
Or to paraphrase a particularly extreme example of Ukrainian¹: "Neither do neo-nazis (or any other right-wing radicals) exist in Ukraine nor have they ever existed there in history. All evidence saying otherwise is fabricate by or for Russia." That comment alone has probably done more good for Russian propaganda than a hundred of Russian bullshit stories. As we know history and he was either lying to our faces or insane.
¹Ukraine's ambassador to Germany in 2015
The issue is with conflating people from an event which occurred in the 1950s and associating it with groups of people alive currently, to me these two things are distinctly different from each other, and I wouldn't link these two things together.
Events related WWII feel irrelevant anything going on today, it's been ~75 years since then and the majority of people from that time period are already dead or >90 years old. Their actions were not influenced by people born decades after the fact, and it feels incorrect to link the two groups together. Multiple generations of people have been born in that time span further distancing people from older ideologies.
With the title of the article/post, and the summary shown on desktop, it looked like this was just another post associating Canada with accepting Nazis/implying that people with Ukranian nationality are Nazis due to the phrasing of the title being similar to the titles used by the lemmygrad/lemmynsfw users.
It's my fault for skimming the rest of the post body, it looked that was a generic image caption crediting a photographer, followed by a short paragraph copied from the article.
There's a Shona proverb, "The axe forgets what the tree remembers" - There are still holocaust survivors alive today, and they and their descendants continue to remember the actions of Ukrainian fascists. To many of them the Nazi history and Azov symbols and rhetoric are inexorably linked. Maybe consider whether it should be a bigger deal to you, now that murderers are coming for people you care about. Will you stay silent if Canada erects a monument to Wagner veterans in 50 years?
Might've picked the wrong link on the second one - it leads to a post about Ukraine's denial of a missile attack rather than anything about far-right whitewashing.
No, the link is intentional. It's a illustration of Ukraine using an authoritarian-style blanket denial of something that everyone knows to be true, and a discussion of how it is concerning to Ukraine's allies.
There's definitely information about far-right whitewashing if you're looking for it.