The Horrifying Lesson Republicans Have Taken From Vladimir Putin

Russians call their enemies "Nazis" in order to dehumanize them. Republicans have figured out an even more disgusting tactic.

Call you enemies pedophiles. Then you can kill them.

by Justin Rosario

I recently wrote about Vladimir Putin flipping the dictator switch by cracking down on his own people and why this was a preview of what Republicans planned for America. Now Putin has flipped the genocide switch, giving us yet another glimpse of our potential future should extremist elements in the GOP continue their takeover of the party.

Because of the Russian military’s historically poor performance, they have had to pull back from large swathes of occupied territory. In the wake of their retreat, our view of the atrocities the Russian military is leaving behind is becoming clearer; mass executions of civilians, bound and hooded. Mass rape of not just women, but children as well.

The world has been shocked and outraged but, honestly, why? This was entirely predictable. Russian soldiers were told they were hunting Nazis. When you are fighting the worst evil imaginable, you are the good guy. Everything you do is justified. Always.

It is critical to understand this dynamic and apply that understanding to current Republican hate speech. The end result will be the same if left unchecked. 

“We’re the new authorities here”

Once Putin announced that he was “denazifying” Ukraine and allegedly saving ethnic Russians from being murdered by the Ukrainian government, what came next was inevitable. The Washington Post reports:

Similar stories have been emerging in recent days from areas around Kyiv that were under Russian control until recently. In places like Irpin and Bucha, residents are also describing abuse, torture and killings at the hands of occupying Russian soldiers.

Villagers here in the Mykolaiv area said soldiers repeatedly threatened them at gunpoint. They broke into the stores and looted ice cream and produce, locals said. Some people said their cars were stolen. Others described the soldiers forcing them out of their homes so they could live there.

Everyone had a story about the Russians searching for people the Kremlin and Putin have claimed are fascists — part of Moscow’s false propaganda that was used to justify starting an unprovoked war against Ukraine. People in the villages said they told the soldiers there were no Nazis there.

Russian soldiers went door to door in some areas to round up all the men, some of whom were later found executed, hands tied behind their backs, hoods over their heads. Executing civilians is a war crime. Many of the men were beaten. Some for information about “Nazis” and others for simply being pro-Ukrainian. Torture is a war crime.

But it’s not really a war crime when you are hunting and killing Nazis and their sympathizers. It is very very easy to justify cruelty and evil when the target is a Nazi. Especially if you’re a Russian.

In America we tend not to think about Russia’s role in WWII all that much. We love to glorify our role, of course, and our heroic sacrifices on D-Day and the Battle of Normandy, etc., etc. Those were hard-won battles and hundreds of thousands of Americans died to defeat the Nazis. But that was the Western Front. After Hitler turned on his Russian allies, Russia fought Germany, mostly alone, on the Eastern Front.

That was not a glorious, heroic struggle. The Eastern Front was a brutal, horrific meat grinder. Germany lost over 5 million soldiers in its failed bid to conquer Russia. It cost Russia, at a minimum, over 8 million soldiers to drive the Nazis out. The number may be as high as 11 million. That’s not including the roughly 24 million dead civilians on top of that.

If you’re having trouble visualizing just how disproportionate Russian losses were, this video helps put the numbers in perspective.

Consider that the population of Russia was estimated to be 195 million at the time. That would mean almost 15-20% of the entire country died within a handful of years through violence, starvation, and disease because of the Nazis. It is unlikely there is a single Russian alive today that did not lose a child, a parent, a sibling, a grandparent, etc. to the Nazi invasion. Whatever your opinion of Russia and its people, they come by their hatred of Nazis honestly.

Which makes Putin’s abuse of that legacy for his personal fantasies of rebuilding the Soviet Union all the more vile. Weaponizing the darkest time in Russian history to satiate his ego is an insult to the sacrifices millions of Russians made to keep their country Nazi-free. And yet, according to The Guardian, a growing number of women and girls are being raped in the name of defeating imaginary Nazis and children are being kidnapped in order to erase Ukrainians as a people:

Now Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmyla Denisova, reports that in Bucha, 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were held in a basement by Russian soldiers who threatened to “rape them to the point where they wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children.” Nine of them are now pregnant. The brutal message is that even if Ukrainians won’t submit to being Russian, their unborn children will have no choice. Meanwhile, Kyiv claims Ukrainian children from occupied cities have been forcibly moved across the border, fast-tracked for adoption by Russian families.

This is what genocide looks like. Just to make it abundantly clear what is happening, just listen to how Russian media now speaks about Ukraine. The Washington Post reports:

“It’s no accident we call them Nazis,” said Margarita Simonyan, who also heads the Kremlin-backed media group that operates the Sputnik and RIA Novosti news agencies. “What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children on the basis of nationality.”

Russian media claims to have taken over 600,000 Ukrainians from their country and the deportations have not stopped. The children will be placed with families in much the same way the United States and Canada kidnapped and sent Native American children to live with families for forced assimilation. The adults will either be killed outright or put into concentration camps.There, they will either be “reeducated” into loyal Russian citizens or they will end up in an unmarked mass grave.   

You would think the people of Russia would never allow such atrocities to occur on their soil after the horrors of WWII. But you must understand that this is the entire point of smearing Ukrainians as Nazis. You cannot commit an atrocity against Nazis. Even mass murder and the rape of children is justifiable when the enemy is the worst evil imaginable. We grew up wondering how the people of Germany could allow such horrors to unfold in their name. We’re watching it happen, right now, in real time, right in front of us.

And it’s not just in Russia and Ukraine. The Republican Party is training their base to believe exactly the same thing here.

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“Pedophiles don’t get trials”

The correlation between the language of genocide that Russia has escalated to and the language Republicans are using right now are different only by small degrees. They call us fascists, tyrants, evil, vermin. For the last couple of years, they’ve been calling us pedophiles and taken it mainstream with the groomer hashtag.

We are a few weeks into the Republican “pedophile” attack on Disney and there are no signs of the Right relenting. Disney’s crime? Publicly opposing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill which targets the LGBTQ community. In fact, anyone who opposes the numerous bills targeting the LGBTQ is labeled a groomer, a predator eager to snatch up innocent children and do unspeakable things to them. Republicans brought this nonsense in the confirmation hearings of a Supreme Court Justice.

Why pedophiles and not Nazis? It’s hard to smear the left, with all of its Latinos, African-Americans, Asians, Jews, etc. as Nazis. Also, Nazis keep showing up at Republican rallies and Republicans keep attending Nazi-adjacent events so…

But pedophiles are the next best thing to a Nazi. Nobody likes pedophiles. You can punch a pedophile in the face and people will cheer you. A parent killing a pedophile who hurt their child is a hero. Fighting a cabal of blood-drinking pedophiles trying to destroy America? That’s the stuff of Red, White, and fucking Blue legend, man!

And wouldn’t you know it? They’re already talking about how badly they want to kill the pedophiles:

Ben Collins @oneunderscore__

There we go.

The entire purpose of QAnon was to resurrect the Blood Libel and apply it to the entire Democratic Party and the left. They have been laying the rhetorical groundwork for years and that labor is bearing fruit. Republicans just have to point to a political enemy and say “They’re a groomer” and their base will believe it with no evidence whatsoever. Rachel Maddow dedicated an entire segment about this on Monday, accurately calling it “eliminationist rhetoric.”

What does that mean for the future? Imagine the Republicans succeed in seizing power and ending democracy. How easy will it be for a 100% objective and not-at-all weaponized DoJ to “discover” evidence of a massive child porn operation that involves anyone Republicans need to remove? As Maddow pointed out, this is precisely how Vladimir Putin rose to power. He simply fabricated and planted evidence of pedophilia against his opponents and that was the story of them.

If this sounds impossible, I would like to once again direct your attention to Ukraine where, right now, in the 21st century, we are watching an attempted genocide against imaginary Nazis in Europe. Putin’s anger at the fall of the Soviet Union has been festering for a mere 30 years. The rage of the American Right has been metastasizing for over one and a half centuries.

Vote like your life depends on it because if every Ukrainian can be called a Nazi, every Democrat can be called a pedophile. And that could be the story of you.

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MEMBERS: Only Centrism And Guns Can Save Us

The political fringes are threatening to destroy the international order, and thus the human species.

by Ben Cohen

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”

- Winston Churchill speaking to the House of Commons, 11 November 1947

As a longtime critic of neoconservatism and Western imperialism, I have been opposed to much of the West’s meddling in the developing world. I have begrudgingly supported organizations like NATO, the UN, the EU and other internationalist organizations despite their inability to curtail modern Western imperialism and unfettered capitalism. In my mind, some form of internationalism is better than no internationalism, as the catastrophic 20th century global wars made abundantly clear.

Given the shocking humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine after Russia’s unprovoked attack, a transparent picture of two competing global forces has yet again emerged. As it did during World War II, humanity faces a choice….

To continue reading this article, go here.