I believe what he means is that we have two separate things that could have happened:Posted by Satori (here)
Bill, really? What about Project Paperclip, the Rat Lines, ...?Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Wow, what a great reply. I have to say, that really really rings true, and fits with a great deal that I feel I know and understand. But I'd never joined the dots that way before. And kudos: I've never seen that concept posted or suggested anywhere else at all.Posted by Mashika (here)
That's a hard one to answerPosted by Bill Ryan (here)
Do you think there's more to this than some kind of phobia of anti-fascism and some weird compulsion to erase history?
I've heard several very bright commentators asked this question recently, and all of them have been honest enough to confess they can't fully understand it. Some possible factors seem to be
- Language (it's easier for most Europeans to read French, Spanish, Italian or English, whatever their nationality)
- Few Americans/Europeans have Russian friends
- Travel (for most Europeans and Americans, it's not been all that easy to visit Russia)
- Hollywood (Russia has often been presented as the 'bad guy')
- Generational memories of the Cold War (Ronald Reagan and "The Evil Empire"), maybe passed on through families
- And of course, media propaganda (as in 1984, there always has to be an enemy, whether it's a real one or not)
- ..... more ??
At least without sounding all conspiracy crazy and paranoiac
But i do have something to say, and it may or may not be right, i just know some people do tend to think this is a very real thing. In some of the less known political parties, and even in United Russia party at some levels, there is a very well accepted theory that the fascists never left, they just simply adapted and moved on with the times, while keeping their core values alive, under a complete framework of 'reality' adapted to the western values
In other words, they reformatted their ideology to be compatible with the western one, and eventually merged both into whatever we see today
So for these people (the other political parties in Russia, and the several in United Russia working hard in the background) you can equal modern western political movements and culture to a modern version of fascism
This is always proven right in their eyes by just looking at how media works in the US or the UK, for example. And how the western masses are so brainwashed they can't think properly, there's no critical thinking anymore, they can't identify anything but a childish good vs bad situation in all they see (or us vs them, with me or with them conditional environment)
People are conditioned and 'cancelled' and they lose it all if they even dare to question, and most people are in full compliance by now, they don't even think properly anymore.
When Russian politicians see this, they assume it is true that the west has been engulfed by fascism over decades and decades, and it was all planned this way, so now, repression, violence, ignorance, compliance or else, etc etc, equals "freedom and democracy" and anyone who thinks otherwise is 'malign' and 'communist' and everything else that goes with it
Also i can see that in Ukraine and even on the US, there is a growing trend to say that Russians are Nazi, and that anything that is Russian friendly, by association is Nazi friendly
Everything is backwards but since people have become so ignorant they can't know the difference anymore, this is the view that runs in underground political currents in Russia
We are not fighting against Ukraine, we are fighting against the same fascist machine from WW2, but under a new name and face (westernized), that's the general feeling
What Mashika very rightly and cogently said about Russia applies equally to the USA and many other countries. The NAZIs did not lose and disappear after WWII. Sadly, and tragically, they adapted and are functioning here and everywhere today.
1. Over time, some of the people in the west got influenced by the NAZI ideology in several ways, incorporating those ideas into the new modern reality. Is not like Nazi people just turned around and dropped all their ideas and beliefs as soon as the war was over, right?
2. There was a group of people who retreated to the shadows, bought influence on the west and started working towards keeping the ideology alive. They silently moved into positions of power, designed plans to integrate casually into the culture, started pushing for changes and influencing slowly new generations until a new framework of reality was laid out, one in which new generations on the west were born. Under this framework, the people is confused and black is white, nazi is equaled with the enemy (Russia) and anti-nazi is equaled with the original concepts. Under this framework, banning of books is ok, for example, and cancel culture is a representation of removing the unlikable or the ill, like the Nazi did. Then we have the removal of statues and memorials and so on, those are just exactly the same as we can see right now, openly hating on the ideals or what the monuments represent
We are considering the second case as a full reality right now
In this second case, we don't have nazi influence by chance or because it is normal that cultures merge over time and influence each other, instead we have very well planned conspiracy to completely obliterate the previous western culture and replace it with one perfectly designed by nazi shadow governments and that allows the original ideology to grow back into power.
We can see it perfectly but most people out there probably can't, or even realize that by cancelling someone or a book or a painting, they are basically implementing nazi policies and customs
And there are 'black lists' of books, monuments and other materials in the west, for example, just like there were in Nazi Germany, and the people who implement or follow those lists in schools and other places think they are doing 'the right thing'
A very important thing to consider: Most western young people don't remember or know anything about their past, they kind of have a clean slate somehow (we believe it is part of the design) so they can't identify the issues or how close things like cancel culture or the pedo degenerate stuff is to nazism or fascism. The 'snitch on your neighbor' thing is another example of that
They simply can't figure out these things because it has been erased from their culture, they are brand new into the world, and all the past seem to have been rewriten in a way that they find perfect sense of it all in this 'new reality' framework in which they were born
They don't hate Russia or Russian culture because they look into it and find it disgusting, they hate it because they carry the hate from whoever is behind the scenes and they have been programmed to hate since they were born, the environment in which they were born is one that allows nazism to flourish perfectly well, and by association it leads into hating the 'enemy' or the culture that hurt and defeated fascism the last time.
This is what Russian politicians see, even if they pretend or act nicely around it in the world stage
Does that make sense?