Firstly, thank you for accepting me into the community. Within the last few weeks I came to the realisation that there is no such thing as a healthy, stable, capitalist society. I want to learn more about communism because it could be a real alternative to the frankly poor conditions of working class life in the UK (and any other capitalist country).
There is one thing that stands out to me here that I’d like to understand because it’s a little jarring. In a few places (e.g. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9012898/6943775) on the topic of Russia, specifically the war, people seem to believe the invasion was justified and that the Ukraine government is Nazi? Why? From my point of view, which I do admit is going to have inherent Western/NATO bias because I live in the UK, is that this is an example of Russian imperialism. If the US invaded Canada, or the UK invaded France, it would rightly be considered a travesty. Why is Russia not given the same treatment? After all, it is not communist any more and it is working class people being sent to die in this war.
Shouldn’t the modern Russian government receive the same scrutiny as any other capitalist government?
Prior to 2022 some western media still reported on Azov and the widespread Nazi problem in Ukraine:
Afterwards, they memoryholed all of that and acted as if there were never any Nazis there, or they somehow all became moderates overnight. They then proceeded to lie to the Western public and tell us that the Russians invented the whole Nazi story to justify the invasion. The western media began a co-ordinated campaign to whitewash the most heinous and violent Nazi groups in Ukraine, groups which by 2022 were already notorious in Ukraine for war crimes and atrocities against civilians and which have only gotten more brutal since, so that they could send weapons and money to these groups to fight the Russians.
Now the Kiev regime not only tolerates these Nazis but elevates them to the status of national heroes. They have adopted the slogans and symbols of these Nazis, as well as their worship and celebration as national heroes of WW2 Nazi collaborators, war criminals and mass murderers who participated in the Holocaust. We are talking about groups which massacred hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews and Ukrainians alike, and yet the current Kiev regime chooses to name streets and Ukrainian army units after them (they also name units after actual German Nazi Wehrmacht and SS units).
The cult of Bandera is the foundation of modern Ukrainian nationalism. This is one of the reasons why large parts of predominantly ethnic Russian eastern Ukraine rebelled against this regime in 2014.
You can find extensive research on the history and present day outsize influence of this cult on Ukrainian politics here: https://banderalobby.substack.com/
If you want something more concise and conversational on the topic of this cult you can read this polemic: Denazification - Bandera Cult (content warning for some ableist language).