Parker Posey's Mouth

what with today being the date the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

Now, never-minding that the open warfare stage of the Ukraine-Russia Donbas kerfuffle has been going on for two years, so this isn't even the first June 22nd it's seen, I felt like this was a pretty foolish thing to say. Especially for my friend, who I think is generally wiser and more mindful about their politics than that. So I let them know I didn't see the connection they were trying to make at all (which is true, I had to ask them what was special about the date,) because they were making a lot of false equivalences.

Putin's Russia is hardly the Soviet Union, and I don't think any of NATO's fascists are so tuned into their own role as fascists that they're marking the dates that Hitler did things on their calendars, with reverence, as aspirational goals. They live in the NOW of fascism. As does Putin. The explicit neo-nazis within the Ukrainian military don't make the decisions about when and where they'll be doing what things. That's a moderate liberal American's job.

It's dangerous to conflate things so broadly. I mean half the reason people think this conflict matters to them, as Americans, is because they conflate Putin's Russia with the "Evil" Soviets, a condition NATO would like to enforce and exploit wherever possible. My tragically naïve Dad's go-to argument for cheering on this war is that Putin "is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union," for example. It just allows for easier manufacturing of consent to pretend this is an attempted rehash of the past, rather than another bumbling step in the cycle of politics that occurs when we're unwilling to examine the patterns of history as choices rather than inevitabilities of the only possible path. The parallels are largely incidental, because we're following the same basic patterns we've been following, not because the actors involved are consciously attempting a repeat performance of last century's big dramas.