Slandering Americans Overseas

The 'very good people on both sides' slander aimed at Trump is bad enough, but -- as David Reaboi points out -- it is amazingly awful to slander American citizens as Nazis while in Europe supporting a government that actually has an openly neo-Nazi wing, the Azov Regiment.

Ukraine may still be worthy of support because they are being invaded, and we are supposedly devoted to opposing wars of aggression. Or they may be worthy of supporting because it is in our national interest to tie the Russian military down and degrade it, so that it is less of a competitor. 

However, if you support Ukraine it's not because you're opposed to Nazis in some sort of principled way. You're siding with a government that has formally integrated Nazis into its military; and while the government has suspended political parties that have any sort of pro-Russian agenda, the Nazi political party associated with Azov is still licensed to operate.

4 comments:

J Melcher said...

The *Actual* extreme far right, (as opposed to those so called by the mainstream media) sometimes argues the case that the Nazis successfully protected Western Europe from Soviet/Communist takeover.

Grim said...

Not very successfully, since Berlin ended up in the hands of the Red Army. If they succeeded at all it was only because they provided a reason for George S. Patton et al to be there as well.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Not to mention the Ukrainian mafia. It's not that these are laudable folks, it is the two first reasons you note: they don't deserved to be invaded and they provide us with some advantage. But those are balance points to be weighed practically more than moral choices.

David Foster said...

Vitaliy Katsenelson, who grew up in Russia and now lives in Colorado (where he works as an investment manager) has written a long 4-part essay on Russia/Ukraine. Includes comments on what he is hearing from old friends back in Russia. Highly recommended.

You'll need to register with email address, but he only sends an email every 2 weeks or so, and usually interesting...writes about investing, but also about art and music.

https://contrarianedge.com