Ukraine: Denazification and the war of words
Swinging the term around on multiple occasions, Russian President Vladimir Putin has abused of the term ‘denazification’ in order to confuse the brainwashed Russian citizen in supporting his invasion of Ukraine.
W“The process of denazification in the post-WW2 era included the Nuremberg trials, where Nazis were convicted for their war crimes, replacing the Nazi ideology from all major institutions and replacing the Nazi ideology in government with a democratic one.”
ith thousands of civilian casualties in the first 47 days of the war and millions more fleeing the country as refugees, Putin’s admnistration has done nothing but displace families and murder innocent lives in Ukraine.
The use of the term ‘denazify’ by Putin is interesting because he uses the 80-year-old term against the Jewish leader of a democratic country which lost millions 1.5 million Jews during the holocaust.
The history of the term ‘ denazify’ obviously finds its roots in the post WW2 cleanup of Germany. In order to go through the process of denazification, one has to be considered as a Nazi by forming part of a right wing National Socialist Party.
The process of denazification in the post-WW2 era included the Nuremberg trials, where Nazis were convicted for their war crimes, replacing the Nazi ideology from all major institutions and replacing the Nazi ideology in government with a democratic one.
This process took years in Germany and the allies of WW2 had spent years after the fall of the *
Nazi government spying on the democratically elected officials in order to make sure that no relapse to the Nazi ideology was made.
One thing is for certain, someone cannot denazify a country if there are no Nazis. Sure, Ukraine has fringe parties which are considered as NeoNazis, but current President Zelenzky is not only Jewish but won the democratic elections with 73% of the votes.
At the end of the day, which country does not have fringe political parties who are NeoNazi?
Malta sure does, and so do countries like Italy and England, but they are considered fringe political parties for a reason.
The current Ukrainian government not only does not have any links to these Neo-Nazi parties, it is not a fascist dictatorship and as mentioned before, the president was elected democratically in 2019.
It is important to mention once again that Zelensky is also Jewish who lost relatives in the Holocaust and also while fighting the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in WW2.
What Putin tries to rely on are these fringe Neo-Nazi political parties in Ukraine. He does not realise that these types of political parties will always be present - he would know if only Russia was not a dictatorship.
At the end of the day, more than 20 million people died at the hands of Nazi Germany and since the Soviet Union was one of the allies fighting against Nazism, sentiment in Russia still runs high against the political movement, and rightly so, but this does not justify the twisted goals of Putin’s government.
By calling the invasion of Ukraine a denazification exercise, Putin is in turn calling the Jewish Ukrainian President a Nazi. This is being done by Putin in order to change around the roles of the victim and the perpetrator, reaching his goal of confusing his country. Putin wants the Russian people to think of Russia as the victim once again against Nazism, and only by achieving this can he justify the invasion of Ukraine.
At the end of the day, Putin is abusing the fact that there are strong sentiments in Russia against the Nazi political movement and using that sentiment to try and reignite the dream of the Soviet Union.