The Denazification Manifesto

This is from one of Putin's media sources - definitely a must read on the subject.  When you read something like this - you understand why Russian soldiers may be targeting the whole population.  Ridding the world of nazis is #1 objective and when you read something like this - everyone is a nazi.  The interesting thing about this article is that the thumbs down rating is more than double the thumbs up rating.

https://ria.ru/20220403/ukraina-1781469605.html

It's probably one of the longest articles this Putin "news source" has posted.  I'm sure the translation skews some of the meanings, but chrome seems to do a decent job.

Here's a few excerpts:

Denazification is necessary when a significant part of the people - most likely the majority - has been mastered and drawn into the Nazi regime in its politics. That is, when the hypothesis "the people are good - the government is bad" does not work. Recognition of this fact is the basis of the policy of denazification, of all its measures, and the fact itself is its subject matter

Denazification is a set of measures in relation to the nazified mass of the population, which technically cannot be subjected to direct punishment as war criminals.

Any organizations that have associated themselves with the practice of Nazism have been liquidated and banned. However, in addition to the top, a significant part of the masses, which are passive Nazis, accomplices of Nazism, are also guilty. They supported and indulged Nazi power. The just punishment of this part of the population is possible only as bearing the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system, carried out with the utmost care and discretion in relation to civilians. Further denazification of this mass of the population consists in re-education, which is achieved by ideological repression (suppression) of Nazi attitudes and strict censorship: not only in the political sphere, but also necessarily in the sphere of culture and education.

The peculiarity of modern nazified Ukraine is in amorphousness and ambivalence, which allow Nazism to be disguised as a desire for "independence" and a "European" (Western, pro-American) path of "development" (in reality - to degradation), to assert that in Ukraine "there is no Nazism , only private individual excesses". After all, there is no main Nazi party, no Fuhrer, no full-fledged racial laws (only their truncated version in the form of repressions against the Russian language). As a result, there is no opposition and resistance to the regime.

The name "Ukraine" apparently cannot be retained as the title of any fully denazified state entity in a territory liberated from the Nazi regime. The people's republics newly created in the space free from Nazism should and will grow from the practice of economic self-government and social security, restoration and modernization of the life support systems of the population.

Denazification will inevitably also be a de-Ukrainization - a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic component of self-identification of the population of the territories of historical Little Russia and New Russia, begun by the Soviet authorities.

Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construction that does not have its own civilizational content, a subordinate element of an alien and alien civilization. Debanderization by itself will not be enough for denazification - the Bandera element is only a performer and a screen, a disguise for the European project of Nazi Ukraine, therefore the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.

The Bandera elite must be liquidated, its re-education is impossible.

—liquidation of armed Nazi formations (which means any armed formations of Ukraine, including the Armed Forces of Ukraine), as well as the military, informational, educational infrastructure that ensures their activity;

—the formation of public self-government bodies and militia (defense and law enforcement) of the liberated territories, protecting the population from the terror of underground Nazi groups;

—installation of the Russian information space;

—the withdrawal of educational materials and the prohibition of educational programs at all levels containing Nazi ideological guidelines;

—mass investigative actions to establish personal responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, the spread of Nazi ideology and support for the Nazi regime;

—lustration, publication of the names of accomplices of the Nazi regime, involving them in forced labor to restore the destroyed infrastructure as punishment for Nazi activities (from among those who will not be subject to the death penalty or imprisonment);

—the adoption at the local level, under the supervision of Russia, of primary normative acts of denazification "from below", a ban on all types and forms of the revival of Nazi ideology;

—the establishment of memorials, commemorative signs, monuments to the victims of Ukrainian Nazism, perpetuating the memory of the heroes of the struggle against it;

—the inclusion of a complex of anti-fascist and denazification norms in the constitutions of the new people's republics;

—creation of permanent denazification bodies for a period of 25 years.

Russia will have no allies in the denazification of Ukraine. Since this is a purely Russian business. And also because not just the Bandera version of Nazi Ukraine will be eradicated, but also, and above all, Western totalitarianism, the imposed programs of civilizational degradation and disintegration, the mechanisms of subjugation to the superpower of the West and the United States.

The denazification of Ukraine is at the same time its decolonization, which the people of Ukraine will have to understand as they begin to free themselves from the intoxication, temptation and dependence of the so-called European choice.

This seems as good a thread as any for this -- maybe this can be the "Problem of Far Right Extremists in War" thread.

Here's a MSM article talking about the infamous Azov battalion:

Right-wing Azov Battalion emerges as a controversial defender of Ukraine (WaPo)

In the context of Russian talking points, all this talk about Nazis and Neo-Nazis etc is clearly just cyncial propaganda. Russia did not invade Ukraine because it is bothered by Nazis specifically or far right nationalism in general (indeed, Putin himself would be in trouble if far-right nationalism was a serious Russian concern). Russia invaded because Putin cannot abide the presence of a state with close historical ties asserting sovereignty and independence from Russia. A Ukraine striving for a more open, democratic society is a threat to his model of governance.

But I do think that among the tragedies of war is that it elevates people who in ordinary circumstances would not deserve recognition or praise, who in fact in normal circumstances should be shunned and ostracized. WWII provides plenty of examples of resistance leaders who truly did fight heroically for national liberation, but who in the postwar years themselves became oppressors and murderous tyrants. Putin's hero Stalin is of course a prime example here -- the USSR deserves a lot of the credit for defeating the Nazis, but Stalin was also one of the 20th century's greatest monsters.

I think it's possible -- even highly likely -- that some of the people fighting for Ukrainian independence today will be a problem for a post-war Ukraine.

And this isn't something unique to Europe, of course. Our own national history elevates men who were slaveholders. They are both legitimately national heroes to whom we owe our independence, and moral monsters who participated in a system of torture, rape, family destruction, and forced labor -- and we're still working through how to handle that legacy (and likely will continue to struggle with this for many years, maybe forever).

Jamie, thanks for posting the above article.   Frankly, it scares the hell out of me that people can write this total BS stuff and make it sound logical.   This goes way beyond the book 1984 because it is real propaganda and people in Russia probably believe and support it. I expect that we have some Russian reading and speaking people on MOL who could expand on the article.   

I heard Nikita Kruschev's great-granddaughter interviewed on NPR radio.  She said that Putin is not a return to Stalin but a return to a farther past of the Russian empire and Putin wants to be "Putin the Great."   But many of the points listed in the above article seem like stuff Stalin and the Communists would do.   Remember that Stalin starved the Ukrainians into submission in the 1930s and after WW II.   And Nikita Kruschev, a Ukrainian, was in charge of this.  My thinking is that many Ukrainians hated Stalin and thus sided with Hitler.  They were not so much Naziis as much as Stalin haters.  And yes, I understand that many  Ukrainians took part in the Holocaust.   Countries like Ukraine and Poland have been conquered many times over by more powerful neighbors.   I strongly hope that Ukraine expels Russia and can continue to form its own future.