Hey thanks for cross posting! i will leave my comment here from other thread
This was in my city Shahjahanpur (pronounced : Shah Jahan pur) The incident that took place in Roza left the goat owner injured, requiring four stitches. FIR against Gangaram under IPC sections 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 504 (intentional insult) and 506 (criminal intimidation)." Just last year, again in Uttar Pradesh, a man had cut off the genitals of his male friend in Bareilly after the latter recorded a video of him in a compromising situation and set about extorting money from the individual. Police said “The victim will recover over time and can live a normal life. We’ll take strict action against Gangaram”
Okay but how do you bite someone’s genitals hard enough to need stitches if they’re wearing clothes? How do you push someone down, get their junk out, and bite through the skin without getting your eyes gouged out?
I don’t know the context, so I have to take the titles literally and in that case I don’t see the problem. Not everyone who fought against USSR was a Nazi, which is a fact. Did this just fly over my head? It feels like I’m either missing something, or the connection between the headlines just isn’t there.
OP linked the Politico article (it should be under the title/image on most clients) but having read it, this is one of those rare headlines that’s actually worse in context. As OP mentioned it’s about a recent controversy that was stirred up when Canada’s parliament honored Yaroslav Hunka for fighting against Russia in Ukraine, despite his history as a volunteer for the Waffen-SS (an armed paramilitary group that played a major role in the Nazis seizing power and combat throughout WWII).
The article defends Hunka with the absurd claim that joining the muscle of the Nazi party doesn’t make you a Nazi, maybe you just really didn’t like the USSR! Even if you buy that excuse, the article provides no evidence whatsoever that it actually applies to Hunka, they don’t even attempt to make that case. It then tries to draw an incredibly bad-faith equivalency between the USSR and Nazi Germany (and while I’m not going to say that Stalin was anything resembling a platonic ideal of leadership, there’s a pretty big gulf between the USSR and Nazi fucking Germany). After that we get some nitpicking of the claims against Hunka (bringing up the fact that his unit was never convicted of war crimes, which completely glosses over the fact that his unit was, again, part of the Nazi’s armed paramilitary). It then dismisses any criticism of Hunka or the Canadian Parliament’s ovation for him as people being fooled by Russian propaganda through a series of absurd logical leaps. I think things are best summed up by this little nugget towards the end of the article:
However, any further discussion of the error has to be carefully phrased, as any suggestion that Canada is showing contrition for “honoring a Nazi” would acquiesce to the rewriting of history by Russia and its backers, and concede to allegations of Hunka’s guilt that have no basis in evidence.
Again, they are talking about a volunteer for the Waffen-fucking-SS. The muscle for the Nazi party.
I can’t blame a Ukrainian who literally just endured a genocide against their people welcoming the people who kicked out their oppressors. I can’t blame them if they took a gun from them to get revenge, either.
But yeah… the SS? That’s beyond the rank and file, it’s the ideological zealots. The Venn diagram of people fighting under a German flag an ideological Nazis might not be a perfect overlap… but the SS is.
It’s potentially more complex than you make it sound. Ever see that picture of German soldiers being shown photos of the death camps? Most Germans didn’t know about the atrocities being committed by the Nazis, most soldiers didn’t know.
We have the benefit of hindsight and knowing all of the details that were only revealed after the war ended. So we know that the SS were pure evil, but did the Ukrainians that just survived the Soviet genocide against them know that?
It’s all a messed up pile of shit, but we need to be careful about expecting everyone in the past to have the expanded knowledge we possess in the future.
In the case of the SS, ideological alignment was kinda a prereq. The SS was specifically about the “racial policy” of Nazi Germany. It would be impossible to be permitted into the SS without being aware of those policies, and agreeing to enforce them. We’re all memers of the SS specifically aware of the death camps? Maybe not, but they were certainly in the camp of “there exist unpure races which pose a danger merely by being permitted to exist”.
Again, I draw a stark contrast to the regular military. Maybe they were bought into the idea, maybe they were not, it wasn’t really part of their duties to enforce racial policy.
So, would he have known? Maybe not when he applied, but certainly he would have been aware before he was admitted. Enforcing racial policy was literally the explicit job of the specifically the SS.
Anyways, I agree that it’s appropriate to give historical actors the benefits of attempting to morally evaluate their decisions within the context that they were made in.
At the same time, I think it’s important to do the legwork to attempt to understand what that context was.
I can’t speak to the specific reasons a specific man chose to join the SS, but I can speak to the fact that the SS was specifically associated with the duty of enforcing racial policy, and the regular German army was not. I’d need to hear an explanation of why he chose the SS as opposed to the regular German army if his rationale was simply that he wanted to fight Russia.
War is awful and complicated. Much like in Finland things were complicated in the eastern european nations during WW2. Much like it is hard to blame Indian tribes that allied themselves with the Confederates during the American Civil War. Although, IIRC those tribes were also slavers.
I agree that the Maple MPs should have done due dilligence before honoring a member of the Waffen SS. The CBC is reporting that his family was hoping for him to just meet Zelensky not be put into the spotlight.
It’s messed up that a 98-year-old has been pulled into this mess.
there’s a pretty big gulf between the USSR and Nazi fucking Germany
You’re right.
Stalin alone has a higher body count than all of Nazi Germany, and the USSR went trucking along murdering people for almost six times as long as Nazi Germany existed.
Europe had been moving towards the slaughterhouse for years, and by 1914 a conflict was all but inevitable—that, at least, is the argument often made in hindsight. Yet at the time, as Niall Ferguson, a historian, noted in a paper published in 2008, it did not feel that way to investors. For them, the first world war came as a shock. Until the week before it erupted, prices in the bond, currency and money markets barely budged. Then all hell broke loose. “The City has seen in a flash the meaning of war,” wrote this newspaper on August 1st 1914.
Apart from this, nothing in the article is worth reading.
Investors have their heads buried in there arses or rather in the charts and balance sheets. I think they delude themselves into believing that by buying selling what essentially amounts to promises, they think they are doing important work.
The only reason all that industry exists is because the government keeps devaluing and taxing our savings. The day we create an asset with easy transactions and that doesn’t devalue, with ease of exchange, they’ll be out on the street.
Could financial markets once again be underpricing the risk of a global conflict? In the nightmare scenario, the descent into a third world war began two years ago, as Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border.
These idiots forgot Russia annexed Crimea a decade ago.
And at the time they moved fast enough and the Ukrainian government was inept and the military untrained and underequipped to do anything about it. That’s why the status quo was accepted like that.
In the first days of the Ukraine war a lot of western leaders were rather sceptical of Ukraines chance to defend itself and more than happy to write them off and accept a new order, if it doesn’t interfere with the Russia business.
Something similiar can also be seen from the US in WW2, were before Pearl Harbor it seemed the US was mostly accepting and seeing how to deal with a new world order, with Europe under Nazi control.
To them the danger never arises from any status quo or a quick change of status. Only a continued long lasting changing process is what they fear and get troubled by.
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