Do literally ALL Ukrainian soldiers wear fascist imagery?

The CIA spent the postwar years doing all kinds of gross things, one of which was trying to move as many nazis to Ukraine as possible, with the specific aim of creating a fascist uprising in the USSR and possibly a Ukrainian fascist break-away state. They accelerated this program after the USSR coup, and the result is a modern Ukrainian state with outright neo-nazis in positions of power over the police, cities, and entire government. This is also why Ukraine doesn't bother to do the hilariously simple trick of just telling their troops to stop wearing white nationalist, nazi patches, or perhaps suggesting to volunteers using assumed names to stop picking "Adolf" or "Dirlewanger" or whatever - they are all part of an explicitly fascist national project.

Wow, that's... incredible. The CIA has done some fucked up shit, but that's something else entirely. Do you have a quality source on this? I'd like to follow up on this claim.
Edit: holy shit
- https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/AERODYNAMIC%20%20%20VOL.%201_0113.pdf <- legit from their own website
- CIA: Undermining and Nazifying Ukraine Since 1953
- Edit: holy shit
  This exact thought has created hundreds of thousands of marxist-leninists over the years. Stick around, you'll have a lot of these moments.
- Google "Project AERODYNAMIC CIA", the documents are all on the CIA's own website
- Ever hear of The Jakarta Method?
- When we say the CIA is the arm of satan, we aren't kidding.
- Project Aerodynamic was one part of the CIA network of Ukrainian Banderite Nazis creating propaganda literature.
  https://www.foiaresearch.net/project/aerodynamic
  This nazi was the main guy involved in running the operation. Prolog Research was his publishing firm funded by the CIA to generate anti-soviet pro-Ukrainian nationalist books.
  From 1949, Lebed lived in the United States. During 1952–1974, he headed the Prolog Research Center in New York; in 1982–85, he was Deputy Chairman and since 1974 he was a Member of the Board of Directors of the institution. In 1956-91 he was a member of the board of the Ukrainian Society of Foreign Studies in Munich and Toronto, publishing committee "Chronicle of the UPA (1975). Author memories "UPA" (1946, 1987). Thanks to his collaboration with the CIA and their active shielding of him, Lebed was never tried for the war crimes he and his men had committed against Poles and Jews during WWII.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykola_Lebed
  The works published through Prolog later became incorporated into history curriculum to cement the false narratives they had established.
  More about that here: https://www.villagevoice.com/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/

IMO they publish all these pictures on purpose as part of a wider campaign to normalize nazism.

There's a video out there from pretty early in the war with an azov officer bragging and laughing about how easy it was for them to dupe the entire western media apparatus into apologizing for their obvious fascism, so yeah.
I haven't seen it since it was first making the rounds though, and I have no idea how to even start trying to find it again.
- TBH I think that guy got it backwards. He didn’t “dupe” the media, it’s just his masters running interference for him. The CIA has him wrapped around their collective little finger, not the other way around. Kind of like a dog thinking they tricked their owner into feeding them.
- I'd love to get a source for this if you have one.
- I think there are pieces of it in this clip compilation video
  I just posted it in a comment yesterday. Funny how often it becomes relevant and how few liberals know about this, even over a year and a half later.
  tagging @GhostofLeninsGhost@hexbear.net in case this helps.

Ukrainian fascists are the commandos of the war and have people sympathetic to them all up the chain. They are provided with a lot of power on the ground and this includes the production of propaganda.

You see a lot of Nazi imagery because (1) there are indeed a lot of Ukrainian fascists in the military and (2) the Ukrainian fascists are the ones creating the photo ops.

Liberals are first and foremost ignorant and most don't even notice or recognize sonnenrads or whatever most of the time. And when it's pointed out, they become defensive, as this has been their rah-rah nationalist moment, the first war in a long time they feel they can outwardly support. Acknowledging that they're supporting Nazis creates cognitive dissonance that leads them to lash out like children.

Acknowledging that they're supporting Nazis creates cognitive dissonance that leads them to lash out like children.
Or just straight up deciding that Nazis aren't that bad after all. "If I'm supporting Nazis, and I know that I'm cool and good, then Nazis must not actually be that bad either."
- I haven't seen that specifically, more just these ones don't count and then ranting about the USSR.
  I haven't seen an outright defense of nazis, just a defense of looking the other way. Which materially makes no difference, but as far as the thought process goes it's a bit different than fully saying nazis are good

A lot don't because they're just ordinary people in a shit war, and I don't blame them for fighting any more that some french or german dumbass volunteering in ww1. Even if you know the theory and are socialist, Revolutionary Defeatism is a hard road to follow in a real war, especially at first.

But pretty much every elite or regular army unit does. And as militia get hardened by these cadre more and more take on their fash ideology, much as German proto fascists infiltrated the units that would become the freicorps.

It's fucked and Ukraine is gonna be a hotbed of not just Fascism but full Nazism if it survives, win or lose. Of course this war continues to strengthen the Fash opposition to Putin (who sucks, but isn't a fascist) in Russia as well. Only silver lining is that the communist rank and file is increasingly agitated as well.

I struggle to see a clean argument that Putin isn’t fascist. Russia’s economic system looks fascist; the targeting of internal minorities, particularly homosexuals, seems congruent; the regime’s media mouthpieces say things about nearby countries that sound fascist.
- Isn't Russia's economic system basically normal as hell neoliberalism? I won't argue about it being fascist, but since the west is also neoliberalized, there may be some questions you need to grapple with.
- Russia's economic system looks like typical industrial-ish capitalism.
  Targeting internal minorities has been America's playbook since the response to Bacon's Rebellion and is a key tenet of every European country's history. You'll still find huge numbers of Europeans justifying the modern and historical persecution of Roma.
  Targeting gay people has been the policy of The West for centuries. The colonizers wrote all about their disgust at "savage" people that embedded spectra of sexualities into their societies. The US only adopted a rainbow capitalist "acceptance" in the last decade.
  Fascism is rooted in a particular approach to anti-left reaction. A series of methods by which to co-opt and oppose groundswells of anti-capitalist sentiment. The primary goal is to disseminate a false consciousness that redirects frustrations away from capitalism itself and instead to reactionary scapegoats, and a key part of doing so is the destruction of communists and others on the left.
  Like all Western-installed capitalist regimes, whether it's France or Russia or Japan, there are fascistic elements to the existing systems of control. Fascism was never fully defeated. The West incorporated it into their own societies. Mussolini's and Hitler's fascisms were the prototypes. The red scare, genocidal anticommunist campaigns, the cold war, the anti-civil rights campaigns, mass incarceration, the police state are all the modern incorporations, and every single one of them justified through nationalist, nativist, white supremacist rationales.
  So yes you'll find some fascistic elements in the Russian state.
  But you won't find that it's run by the ham-fisted Hitlerite fascism that's taken over large swaths of Ukrainian power structures. As a head capitalist of an existing order that has no fear of an organized left, Putin has no need to stoke outright ham-fisted fascism in his own country, as the whole point of it is to deputize a violent anti-left paramilitary. He doesn't want one of those, he already has the army and is doing the opposite by consolidating Wagner. In addition, fascist false consciousness tends to target some of the bourgeoisie. Putin is the symbol of the system that fascists claim to oppose.
  This does not make Putin a good guy. He's as fascist as any US president. But he's not like Sonnenrad-tatted white supremacists looking to create a neo-Bandyerite society on top of the mass graves of Russian-speakers.
- Fascism isn’t when homophobia
- For comparison, Ukraine also has many anti-homosexual and anti-trans laws, while also having a history of attacking ethnic minorities and having doctrinally Nazi military brigades, along with a persistent campaign of whitewashing and lionizing Holocaust collaborators like Bandera, and has a ton of ethnonationalist policy (with its President openly declaring wanting to emulate Israel, an exterminationist ethnostate).
  That second group (the non-LGBT stuff) are things that Russia notably does not have. It is literally "just" a modern liberal state with homophobic policy, revanchist rhetoric, and, depending on how you define it, expansionism (here I am thinking of Georgia rather than Ukraine). It is by no means a good country or a moral country, but it is not fascist in the sense that liberal darlings like Navalny are fascist
- the targeting of internal minorities, particularly homosexuals, seems congruent; the regime’s media mouthpieces say things about nearby countries that sound fascist.
  Liberal nationalism does a fine job doing all that on its own, can't just apologize for all the things that all variants of liberalism do by saying "all the bad stuff was actually fascist, not liberal"
  Manifest Destiny and the extermination of native Americans was a liberal project, at minimum as bad as lebensraum? Yes.
  Fascism is the immunological response of capital that manifests at the dawn of a socialist revolution, the death throes of capitalism where capitalists employ an unending wave of terror to destroy and murder socialist networks, and so thoroughly traumatize the population that it can never have the social cohesion again necessary for socialist organizing or construction.
  This was first done in the murder of the Communist Party of Germany by the Freikorps as ordered by the liberal wing of Weimar, and the rise of the Nazi party in its place.
  Kissinger outlined and formalized this policy, widely recognized by social democratic and social democratic leaning liberals as "shock therapy". Repeated and iterated upon as standard U.S policy from Korea, to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, etc.
  Putin came out of the Russian national bourgeoisie's resistance to shock therapy. Naturally, right-wing, anti-communist, and extremely reactionary, but from a project based around protectionism of Russian bourgeoise interests rather than breaking open the Russian market for Western capital (which would loot the oligarchs).
- You can't argue that he isn't a fascist, you have to argue he is something, whether you think that thing is fascist or not.
  Fascism is a European ideology as much as liberalism and socialism, and therefore has intellectual roots you can trace back. In finding out whether or not Putin's a fascist, an analysis of his speeches and any written work would be needed to pin down his ideology. It's not something that can be concluded from ticking all the boxes in a checklist
- i mean , isnt it obvious..
- It's fairly easy by comparing the central factions of United Russia, which doesn't even reach Salazar levels of Fascist organisation, to the actual "Black Hundreds were good actually" fascists to Putins right.
  Putin started as a compromise candidate holding the collapsed remnants of the state together with duct tape, and his system while certainly nationalist is more like Peron or something similar. He just isn't powerful enough even with the GRU on side to force class collaboration.
  It doesn't rise to corporatism since he can't adequately control the oligarchs and force the workers into a cohesive whole. I'm not sure he even wants to.
  This is not an endorsement of Putin who I dearly hope gets the wall when the Communist Party or one of it's less cringe splinters undergoes backbone replacement surgery

Because there's been a concentrated propaganda effort since the 2014 coup to make fascist ideology acceptable. Look at what happened to the polled approval rating of Bandera between 2014 and 2022. It pretty much doubled. That is not an organic thing, it happened because the fascists wanted it to, and pushed hard for the normalisation of fascism since their 2014 coup.

I'll be as fair as I can about it, really seems like it's around 1 in 10.

Which is a fucking lot.

If one Nazi sits down in an armored vehicle with 9 others, you now have 10 mechanically mobilized Nazis
- Unlike going to a restaurant or rally, being drafted into the military is by definition not voluntary association.

Ukrainian nazis are an insignificant minority with no real political power, but also it would be way too much to ask them to stop wearing nazi symbols or to not show them off front and center in all their propaganda.

And really, doesn't every military have its nazis? That's why we also constantly see pictures of American and Russian soldiers wearing nazi patches, right?

tbh we do see that for both of those armies, albeit not nearly as often
- to the
  army's Planck-length credit, there were some scout-snipers or whatever that actually got in trouble for nazi shit in like 2006
Red Army enters chat
There probably actually are plenty of US military Nazis though
Ukrainian nazis are an insignificant minority with no real political power, but also it would be way too much to ask them to stop wearing nazi symbols or to not show them off front and center in all their propaganda.
This is patently false. The head of the Ukrainian armed forces posed with a painting of Bandera on Banderas birthday and it was posted on the official twitter of the Ukrainian parliament. The head of the armed forces is not a position with no political power.
For the 8 years between maidan and Russia's entry into the civil war there were dozens of stories in western media and reports by foreign governments regarding the rise of nazism in Ukraine.
You have to be intentionally ignorant to say that Nazism isn't a major thing in ukraine.
- It's hard to infer tone over the internet sometimes, so no harm done. Just letting you know that Babs was making a joke highlighting the absurdity of deluding one's self into thinking that Ukrainian Nazism doesn't run deep.

There is obviously a bias because the pictures with fascist imagery are worth posting for that very fact, but also a lot of major news outlets keep struggling to post even a small gallery without needing to scrub it.

I think I disagree. At this point it feels like in Ukraine you get shot for not sporting enough nazi flair.

The exact bias that lead to Canada plucking a Nazi out of the thousands of possible veterans they could have chose and honored, yes

Turns out when virulently reactionary nationalism goes unchecked it proliferates among the populace. The entire reason those same nazis were allowed in to begin.

i assume the ones most on social media are the most ideologically commited, some unenthusiastic draftee probably isn't bragging and masturbating online about it.

The draftees are getting beaten and shot by the Nazi recruiters and "rear guard"

i mean there's a draft, so it seems highly unlikely, but I think the nazis are the most in favor of the war, and therefore are the most willing to show up in propaganda begging for more guns.

exactly. I think that the large majority of the Ukrainian military that could be really called "soldiers" - as opposed to men who are drafted, shown which end of the gun the bullets come out of, and then are sent to die in minefields (because NATO doesn't consider the average Ukrainian to be a human being and are instead treated as subhuman cannon fodder, hence all the "we're weakening Russia for basically no cost!" shit from liberals) which makes up the vast majority of the Ukrainian military at this point - do have fascist imagery somewhere on their person.

stalin shouldn't have stopped at berlin

Libs loving Nazis - NATO!

Nazi Arming and Training Organization.

a few bad apples
Finish the turn of phrase
Finish the fucking turn of phrase, I beg of you, this is not the defense you think it is
- seriously wtf how do they not get that
- How do people still use that phrase unironically?
- If you don’t already have the capstone on your bad apples dunk:
  A few bad apples don’t ruin the whole bunch, they ruin the barrel.
  Apples release a gas as they ripen and eventually spoil that makes all the other apples ripen and spoil faster. So obviously a bad apple will make all the apples you put in a barrel with it spoil too.
  But the barrel is made of porous wood, so the apple spoiling gas gets in the barrel and even after you empty the old spoiled apples, hose it out and fill it back up it’s gonna spoil the good apples you put in there.
  A few bad apple don’t just spoil the ones they’re packed in with, they spoil the whole barrel.
  A few bad apples don’t just ruin the police department, they ruin the institution!
  A few Nazis don’t ruin the soldiers they’re stationed with, they ruin the army!
  “Don’t let a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch” means get the fuck rid of those bad apples asap.
  E: the apple spoiling gas is called ethylene.
- Find me a nationalist movement that doesn’t have wannabe nazis.
  I don’t see people loosing their shit over the taliban running Afghanistan like they do about possible nazis somewhere.
I have seen the iron eagle carrying the trident of Ukraine
Ya see, to me, that doesn't exactly vouch for the liberal nature of Ukrainian Nationalism so much as the opposite.
media promotes controversial material
the media has been deepthroating Western and particularly Ukrainian boots ever since the war began. you would need the strongest solvent on the planet to remove the superglue that binds the average journalist's tongue to the leather of a Ukrainian jackboot. if even they can't convincingly depict Ukrainian soldiers as not being coated head-to-toe in imagery that celebrates the fucking Holocaust, then there's a really big problem in Ukraine.
“we are killing each other as fast as possible and your worried about a patch?”
yes, actually, I am worried that many, many Ukrainian soldiers knowingly use fascist imagery in a war that began in 2014 partially over the rights of the Donbass people. that is, in fact, a rather pertinent issue here
Bruv they can't keep fash symbols out of pictures of Zelensky with soldiers.
Yeah, we're worried about a patch, because when this conflict ends one way or another Ukraine is going to be full of angry nazis with military experience and vast amounts of weaponry and that's going to be very bad for everyone.
- Please produce one of those pictures.
  How do you think it will be bad? They are having a hard time fighting the Russians who are using barely trained conscripts and equipment pulled from museums.
  The most advanced things on that battle field are consumer drones and weapon systems that are parts and consumables reliant from western countries.
Yeah typically the media would go out of their way to not portray the nation we're pumping full of weapons as absolutely covered in nazis, but apparently they're so common we get to see the black sun on MSNBC while cheering on the freedom boys
- The media absolutely covers that shit up too. It's just so prevalent that it still slips out frequently.
some of those patches are close but not actually nazi
Uh-huh. How are you determining that a patch that looks very similar to a Nazi one actually isn't? Is it just ”well ackshually, eagles were used by Germany before WWII and the swastika is an ancient Buddhist symbol”?
we are killing each other as fast as possible and your worried about a patch
If there are Nazis involved, I personally would like to see them die as fast as possible.
- Read my reply many of those patches share an eagle as symbolism but last I checked the Ukrainian trident wasn’t nazi.
  If eagles are nazi symbols then I must have gotten some of those bad textbooks in school.
oppa gangnam style
Someone cares about the patch enough to manufacture them, distribute them, and wear them
Sure thing, twokie

I have seen a lot of Ukrainian soldiers without fascist tatoos

I did a bit of digging through news articles and found @Awoo@hexbear.net metric of 1 in 10 having fascist symbols or tattoos to be pretty accurate
- I have the feeling if it wouldn't be prohibited in a lot of countries, there would be cities with 10% or more having facist tattoos haha looking at you Germany, France, Italy, Israel, ...

After almost a decade of reporting on this war, I'd like to chip in with a couple of thoughts on why you might see these symbols on the battlefield in Ukraine. Not to justify these soldiers' decisions — as any use of Nazi symbols should always be condemned — but to offer my explanation for this phenomenon.
So, why are these symbols present on the battlefield?
First of all, let's establish one fact. No, Ukraine does not have "a Nazi problem."
lmfao
Just like in many places around the world, people with far-right and neo-Nazi views, driven by their ideology, are prone to joining the military and participating in conflicts. One also has to take into account that in Ukraine, nationalism with deep historical roots is tied to a desire for independence from Russia. It has driven many to take up arms to fight in what they believe is an existential war against a neighbor that seeks to subjugate and destroy their country. Among them, people with far-right views.
"deep historical roots" going all the way back to Second World War, where a minority of Ukrainian soldiers willingly sided with a genocidal fascist regime that wanted the complete extermination and enslavement of the Slavic people. weirdly enough, the part of history where an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians sided with the Red Army to free Eastern Europe from those genocidal fascists isn't represented quite as much, but that's not important, obviously.
These groups were aggressive and highly motivated. It is, of course, true that, for instance, the Azov Battalion was originally founded by neo-Nazi and far-right groups (as well as many soccer ultra-fans), which brought along with it the typical aesthetics — not only neo-Nazi insignia but also things like Pagan rituals or names like "The Black Corps," the official newspaper of Nazi Germany's major paramilitary organization Schutzstaffel (SS). But as with any country, real neo-Nazis in Ukraine were and still are a tiny minority.
are you sure about that?
It hasn't helped that, since 2014, some Western journalists have made the supposed "rise of the far right" a staple of their coverage of Ukraine, as headlines of supposed neo-Nazis in the country are consistently attention-grabbing. And right before the full-scale invasion, certain American journalists wrote about how Ukrainian neo-Nazis were allegedly using the threat of Russia's full-scale invasion to seize power in the country.
But guess what — the Russian invasion did happen, and the neo-Nazi power grab never did. Not only was there no serious evidence ever presented to support claims of an attempted "coup," these fringe elements are nothing compared to Ukraine's state and military machine.
Ukraine's government is absolutely fucking littered with fascists, what the fuck?
did this author think that the fascists would be like "We have an announcement to make! We are taking over the Ukrainian government. We are Nazis. We are fascists. We want to do genocide and are very evil. Please carry on!"
absolute fucking morons. if fascism was already an institutionalized force in the government as it was after the US-backed coup of 2014, you don't need to do dramatic takeovers of power! you just continue doing what you're doing! fascism was already the de facto arrangement of the Ukrainian government!
this is like saying "The racist power grab in America never happened. There was never a point where racists and white supremacists took control of Congress and the House in a dramatic coup d'etat. We beat racism in the Civil War. There is no racism in America today. This was definitely true by the time Obama was elected president (the good ol' "buhhhh if zelensky jew then how fascism?!?!?!!" thing). You are a stooge of foreign governments if you argue that America still has racists in it when a black president was elected. There is no systemic racism in the United States today."
- Lmao. I wanted to do a comprehensive breakdown like this, but gave up and posted a simpler comment instead. Good work 70trillion!
- Igood write up! It's embarassing for some lemmyverse rando to just come in here with this nonesense after hexbears have spent well over a year dissecting the Ukraine war to a subatomic level. Like bruh we know as much about this conflict as anyone in the west can, and what you're saying does not pass the smell test.
So why is this happening? In the oversimplified memory of some around the world, particularly within various militaristic subcultures, symbols representing the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany's Armed Forces, and the SS are seen to reflect a super-effective war machine, not the perpetrators of one of the greatest crimes against humanity in human history.

This, this is why a Ukrainian SS member was applauded in the Canadian parliament. The history of Ukraine is fighting with Russia to defend communism. When you tear that down, there's no heroes left but Hitler.
- the Nazi German army was tremendously effective and efficient, which is obvious because the war didn't last 6 years with an overwhelming Nazi defeat.
  wait. shit.
  (it's constantly funny how westerners love armies and countries that just fucking ate shit. just completely got fucking owned. totally embarrassed in front of the world.)
- Say what you want about the Nazis, but at least their genocidal super-effective war machine ran on time.
- So super-effective that it lost the one war it fought it
- hmmm, i wonder what feature of "militaristic subcultures" might coincidentally have a large overlap with fascism.
First of all, let's establish one fact. No, Ukraine does not have "a Nazi problem."
- It's not that they don't see the problem, it's that they don't see it as a problem.
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