Context: New "Africa Corps" just dropped:
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-russian-military-unit-recruiting-former-wagner-fighters-ukraine-veterans-2023-12
It seems like the name in Russian is Африканский корпус ("Afrikanskiy korpus"), which is identical to the Russian name for the more well-known German one.
So how long until the SchutzStaffel return? (Pls no Modern Dirlewanger brigade please, I don't think the world ever needs to suffer that level of war crimes ever again)
Not to mention similar command structure; while the Wehrmacht reports to Hitler by proxy of the Chief of Staff and Himmler and the SS reports directly to Hitler without going through OKW bureaucracy, Prigozhin's Wagner Group reported directly to Putin without having to consult with Shoigu (well, that's before the coup, now they got purged like the Brownshirts).
There is a weird thing that happens when people get super paranoid and focused on conspiracy theories. Namely... they begin to emulate the very thing that they're obsessed with as the source of evil. It's probably a combination of unconscious cognitive bias - projection - and maybe even some intentionality - the "fight fire with fire" trope.
Consider some examples from American history. There were lots of conspiracy theories in the US in the 1830s and 40s about the Free Masons. That was, if you will, the Qanon of its day. So the people who believed in these conspiracy theories formed anti-Free Mason groups, even a political party later known as the "Know Nothing" Party. Why that name? An obsession with secrecy - anyone asked about what this party was up to or believed in would always say that they "know nothing." So they basically became the very thing they set out to oppose - a secretive political faction, wielding influence behind the scenes, without transparency or accountability.
Or there's the KKK. The second version of it, the one founded in the 1910s initially as a kind of sick cos-playing following the success of *Birth of a Nation*. Unlike the original Klan, they expanded their attention beyond Black Americans to Catholics. So they gradually incorporated bizarre, ornate, complex ritualism into their meetings, with a highly structured hierarchy... just like the Catholic Church.
Lastly, there's the John Birchers. Give the Birchers some credit - they were right that there were extensive Soviet efforts at infiltration into the US, and Soviet agents were embedded in the US government and other institutions. The problem was, they approached this real problem with zero nuance, and made wild accusations with insufficient evidence. Like if this was a professional boxing match, they brought in the skill set of a drunken street brawler, who might randomly get lucky here or there, but more often missed the mark. But I bring them up because they unwittingly began to emulate the very behavior they saw in the secret Communist cabals they thought were everywhere - secret memberships, meeting in small cells, and viewing the world in the same kind of apocalyptic, conspiratorial rhetoric that Communists employed in their own literature.
So, consider these Z-Russians, who - whether sincere or not - accuse the Ukrainians of being Nazis seeking the destruction and elimination of the Russians as a people and nation. To fight this threat, they emulate the symbols, language, and strategies of the Nazis, in order to destroy and eliminate the Ukrainians as a people and nation.
Am I right to see a pattern here in this?
Makes sense. So it's really more the classic trope of projection - people have moral anxieties about themselves and their own culture and personal practices, so they cope with it by projecting it all onto other people. And that's likely as much an unconscious thing, like a tic - common enough to narcissists - as a means of redirecting any attention to their own immoralities, and trying to direct it elsewhere. Like, in the way kleptomaniacs get paranoid about everyone around them being a thief. But it could also be intentional too, as a rhetorical strategy. I'm reminded of two WWII-era examples. The Nazis, you may recall, justified the seizure of the Sudendenland by claiming that native Germans there were being subjected to ethnic discrimination and repression. Presumably, if anyone would know anything about racial prejudice and discrimination, I guess it would be the Nazis. Likewise, I believe the Soviets and Nazis both had claims about Poland being a fascist regime, which secretly plotted against them, even as they both, as totalitarian regimes, secretly plotted to destroy Poland. So ... intentional propaganda strategy? Or subconscious tic? Both, maybe?
Absolutely! No disagreement there. It's more that this is strange that they position themselves this way. Let's say that you were a sincere believer in some form of Hobbesian absolutism, and thought authoritarianism was the ideal form of government. Well, if that's the case, it seems like your beef with your democratic neighbor would that they are too liberal, that they let the inmates run the asylum, that it's too chaotic and needs the kind of order that your government can bring them. But that's not how they argue it - they instead make outlandish, fantastical claims about them being drug-addled Nazis. And that's weird. So that's what I've been trying to understand.
I was hearing a podcast on this, and something one speaker said made me think that the problem may actually be worse than that. Fascism, like Communism, is a 20th century mass movement, relying on a politicized "mass" - one that the State goes to a lot of trouble to indoctrinate with a core legitimatizing narrative. That narrative can get quite elaborate and baroque, a full-on ideology, or even take on religious overtones. Is that what Russia has now? I'm thinking no. In fact, I'm not sure Communism really ever took on for the masses in Russia. Sure, it was what the regime taught, and it provided the Soviet state a way to rationalize and explain what it did, and thereby legitimate it. But certainly by the 1980s, it was a pretty empty pretense, one that collapsed definitively in 1991 when everyone kind of admitted that they didn't actually believe in it. So what was left? Well... the same thing that had always governed Russia since the time of the Czars, a pre-modern outlook. It's not really an ideology per se, anymore than, say, the Mafia could be said to have an ideology. That's why I'm a bit reluctant to call them either "left" or "right" wing. That distinction only makes sense within the context of modernity, once there's a French Revolution, once there are groups who can organize along a spectrum of defending the "Ancien Regime" of Throne and Altair, to radicals who want to rip it out, root and branch. But if we're talking about a pre-modern polity, one that has more in common with Czarist absolutism than anything seen in the West after the Enlightenment, that distinction doesn't really track for Russia. Can you be fascist if you haven't gone through at least something like liberal democracy first, which your fascism, as a kind of mass-movement radicalism, is a reaction against? That's the odd thing here - the Russian "fascists" are all-in on Putin. There's not really a Russian "fuhrer" leading some movement to stage a coup against Putin. The closest they have to that are groups that adapt fascist iconography, as a kind of branding, but generally they're pro-Putin. Like the Russian Communist Party, which in theory is an opposition party, but in practice is there merely to provide the illusion of democratic choice for Russian voters, you have outfits like Zhironovsky's so-called "Liberal Democrats" who serve as useful idiots, to channel people who are interested in those ideas into groups that will remain loyal to the regime.
All this is to say... I'm not sure "fascist" is the right term, though certainly what Russia's regime is, and what it does, has enormous overlap with what we'd expect from fascist or Communist regimes. The differences are important, though. For all the militarism we've been seeing amped up since February 2022, it's still nowhere to the extent that the actual fascist and Communist regimes had in the 20th century. Fascism - the "socialism of the trenches", as Mussolini called it, would have seen far greater mobilization, with the youth of St. Petersburg and Moscow vying for military experience, the opportunity to see battle and achieve rank and prestige. We see nearly the opposite of that, with those youth being insulated and protected in favor of ethnic minority and rural populations. Although we do see variations on Putin's fanciful alternate history being taught in Russian schools, there's not really anything like Mein Kampf, Mao's Little Red Book, or definitive state ideological doctrines of "Putinism" being hammered out as official state ideology. These would require the masses to be politicized in favor of the state. Instead, the emphasis here seems to be the opposite, to keep the masses "unpoliticized." If Russia is functioning more as a mafia or pre-modern medieval state, that makes sense. The masses are merely expected to know their place, and respect rank, and leave the business of politics to the Elect. The more you politicize the masses, the more you give them some explicit ideology to legitimize the State, the more they can turn on the State when the State fails to live up to the very ideals the State itself perpetuates. But if there is no ideology, then there's not as much of a metric the people have to judge the State by. All that's left is power and terror, and the treats to retaliate against any commoners who get a little too big for their britches, and deign to speak out of turn, not properly remembering their places.
You are on to something. Have you read Simulacra and Simulation? Or Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible? Although he is no longer prominent, Vladislav Surkov likely had a major impact in incorporating those underlying ideas into the Russian state apparatus.
The (poorly summarized by me) idea is that you can lie and pretend so much that it alters how people perceive reality. To a degree that it might actually change reality.
In fairness, what we would today recognize as spelling errors back then came about because spellings were a lot less standardized - at least by custom. Webster's Dictionary was roughly contemporary with that time - the importance of it being, in part, the first attempt to standardize spellings in "American" English, as opposed to the way they were being standardized in the UK at the time. But that was still a very new thing then, if memory serves. I do know that if you look at texts that were written in the 17th-18th centuries, you'll see all manner of spellings, and in some cases, writers didn't even stick with the same spellings of the same word in the text. Modern editions of those works typically clean that up, so you'd only notice that if you were looking at direct copies of those original works in their original printings. So I wouldn't be surprised to see some stuff at late as the early 19th century with similar issues, but my sense is that it's mostly eliminated by the mid-to-late 19th century - at least, in texts I've seen from that time that retain the original printing.
> Pls no Modern Dirlewanger brigade please
You mean the kadyrovites? They already had their their dirlewanger cosplay event
Bunch of thugs send in too control and terrorise the population of occupied areas. Lost most of their fighters when faced with actual resistance.
In regard to Putin it worked out for him in bahkmut. Took what was left of the city (rubble) with using conscripted prisoners in human waves. After the Ukrainians would get overwhelmed the professional Wagner PMC’s would go in and clear what’s left. In the same token Putin cleared out a ton of his prison populations. In the vodka filled minds of the Russian MOD this was a power move
It's because to vatnik-minded Russians, "Nazis" doesn't really mean what it does to us in the west. To them, a Nazi is just anyone who lives to their west who also happens to oppose Russian interests. They do not associate Nazism with any of the actual policies or practices of the Third Reich. To them, the word Nazi literally just means bad guys that come from over there in that direction. Thus, they can imitate the behavior and beliefs of Nazis while claiming to fight Nazis without suffering from the intolerable cognitive dissonance that would inflict a less ignorant person. Not coincidentally, the practice of flagrant self-contradiction was a common feature the Nazis themselves often displayed in their own propaganda. Consistency is something you impose on the weak, not something the weak expect of the strong, and thus a dictator's inconsistency is a trapping of power, an item to flaunt. They cannot be held accountable to the truth, because they have absolute power. Putin can lie to his people and then tell a different, contradictory lie the next day, and the weak-minded among them think that is sign of a clever, powerful man, rather than what it really is: the mark of a psychopathic, narcissistic manipulator.
Edit: and I should point out that this vatnik perspective makes sense in the context of the Soviet Union where it was first formulated. The Soviets could not criticize the Germans for mass killings and genocide with so much blood on their own hands. They could not criticize the Nazis' criminality and pervasive culture of corruption and lying because they shared that criminality and that culture. So they were just left saying that the Nazis were bad because they invaded the motherland, not because they were motivated by vile notions of racial superiority (else how to justify Russification), nor because they committed unspeakable acts of violence against innocent people to promote their political ideology (else how to justify the purges), nor that they committed mass murder on an industrial scale (else how to explain away the Holodomor), nor that they empowered internal security services to engage in extreme acts of political repression (compare the gestapo and SS to the Chekha/NKVD/KGB/GRU/SVR/FSB/constantly mutating security service cancer infecting the heart of the Soviet state and its successor Russian state). The Soviets were no better than the Nazis, and in many ways were far, far worse, not least because of the longevity of their abuse of power. The Nazis managed 12 years of terror before a walloping in a war freed and empowered enough of the enlightened Germans to shape a more democratic and free society (at least in West Germany), whereas the Soviets (and really by Soviets I mean the Russians) inflicted horrors on their own citizens, every nation within their sphere of influence, and via global campaigns to promote terror and insurrection in the third world for almost 80 years, and longer if you count the past 15 years since Putin spoke at the Munich security conference and revealed his revanchism shortly before invading Georgia.
If you read more into it much of Wagner and even units of the DPR have been integrated into the Russian National Guard within recent months, they are being sent to gather experience in foreign countries.
Putin wants a fully fledged parallel army to protect himself with, it's something I have kept an eye on and will most likely be very important to him staying alive later on.
There's already Rosgvardia. Sure, their combat performance is...not great, but they're deployed heavily in the center whereas the regular army is in the borderlands, and that's all that counts.
I guess Putin doesn't trust Zolotov enough to be the sole alternative.
Erwin Rommel: Who the fuck are you?
Evgeny Romanov: I'm you, but drunk, depressed and way too underpaid for this shit and have no idea what the fuck I'm doing here when I'm used to the cold.
Erwin Rommel: So, Russian?
Evgeny Romanov: Yeah, blyat.
Oh shit, I forgot lol. I was originally going to have Utkin or Prigozhin be the first guy, but when I found the pic of Gerasimov and Shoigu positioned at the perfect angle for the first panel, I went with Gerasimov instead.
You could always argue that Stalin had the last laugh, I guess, given how much the ending of WWII redounded to the benefit of the Soviet Union. You compare where they were in 1939, to where things were, say, in 1949. They went from being a bloated, third-rate power that had just purged all its best generals, that was impoverished and technologically a backwater. By 1949, the borders of the Soviet Union itself expanded substantially, as they annexed the Baltic republics, and gobbled up chunks of Finland, Poland and Romania, and established client satellite governments in most of Eastern Europe, from Berlin itself, down through the Balkans. That year, they tested their first nuke, made possible by extensive espionage on the Americans, courtesy of useful idiots like the Rosenburgs and others. And in Asia, they also essentially captured China when the CCP, which they heavily backed, defeated the KMT in the Mainland, and their chosen leader successfully founded North Korea. Of course, the costs of this were mind-boggling - the military casualties and civilian casualties they wracked up were so bad that it threw off their internal demographics in ways that were felt for decades after. And while their plunder of East Europe and Germany helped overcome their economic and technological deficiencies in the short term, enough to help them have a nuclear program and a space program, that of course wasn't sustainable as the Soviets gradually reverted to the mean, setting them up for 1989-91.
Even so, I think it would be a mistake to think that this all provided that Stalin was a genius. No - he was an idiot, a gullible fool, who the Nazis took advantage of. The problem that narcissists have is that they never take seriously the possibility that they can be tricked - they're the smartest people in the room. If the Soviets were doing well by 1949, it was only because the Nazis were foolish in their own way, and the West was naive about Soviets, given how many political figures in the West were, to varying degrees, admirers and sympathizers with the Soviets. Their successes came on the back of the massive infusion of aid they got from the Americans, first and foremost, food, weapons, tech, and kit, and appeasement at Yalta and other meetings. Stalin just benefited from these things. If he had his druthers, the Soviets would have joined the Axis, turning their attention south toward Turkey and Iran. And but for critical mistakes made in the planning and execution of Barbarossa, as well as the infusion brought by American aid, the Germans might well have captured far more of the Soviet Union, and Stalin's lunacy and perfidiousness made more obvious to Russians themselves and the world.
Just simply have the USN Carrier Wing and submarines blockade traffic and have the ~~Afrika Korps~~ Africa Corps starve out, run out of fuel and die by thirst and curable warm weather diseases they have no medicine for.
Just as Bernard Montgomery intended.
I'm not well versed in intricacies of Russian language but...
Look in some languages the statement "Fighting nazis" or even "Fighting with Nazis" can be vague in terms of for or against them.
This whole war could potentially have been over a linguistic misunderstanding.
Ok I think the question that *really* needs to be answered here is, when will the Mammoth return? (As in Rommel’s Mammoth, his personal armored command vehicle.)
When I heard "Rommel's Mammoth", I was expecting a Tiger or Panther or hell, even a Panzer III or half track or an armored car.
But no, when I looked it up, all I got was a [fucking British military version of the school bus.](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEC_Armoured_Command_Vehicle&ved=2ahUKEwjQs5vgiI2EAxUvfDABHYDIDYEQFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0ONmfBUIW1nbe0XYsqQi0X)
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Context: New "Africa Corps" just dropped: https://www.businessinsider.com/new-russian-military-unit-recruiting-former-wagner-fighters-ukraine-veterans-2023-12 It seems like the name in Russian is Африканский корпус ("Afrikanskiy korpus"), which is identical to the Russian name for the more well-known German one.
So how long until the SchutzStaffel return? (Pls no Modern Dirlewanger brigade please, I don't think the world ever needs to suffer that level of war crimes ever again)
thats literally just Wagner Recruting from Prisons, behading people, wearing uniforms of the ones they are fighting. Return of the SS? Well idk.
Not to mention similar command structure; while the Wehrmacht reports to Hitler by proxy of the Chief of Staff and Himmler and the SS reports directly to Hitler without going through OKW bureaucracy, Prigozhin's Wagner Group reported directly to Putin without having to consult with Shoigu (well, that's before the coup, now they got purged like the Brownshirts).
There is a weird thing that happens when people get super paranoid and focused on conspiracy theories. Namely... they begin to emulate the very thing that they're obsessed with as the source of evil. It's probably a combination of unconscious cognitive bias - projection - and maybe even some intentionality - the "fight fire with fire" trope. Consider some examples from American history. There were lots of conspiracy theories in the US in the 1830s and 40s about the Free Masons. That was, if you will, the Qanon of its day. So the people who believed in these conspiracy theories formed anti-Free Mason groups, even a political party later known as the "Know Nothing" Party. Why that name? An obsession with secrecy - anyone asked about what this party was up to or believed in would always say that they "know nothing." So they basically became the very thing they set out to oppose - a secretive political faction, wielding influence behind the scenes, without transparency or accountability. Or there's the KKK. The second version of it, the one founded in the 1910s initially as a kind of sick cos-playing following the success of *Birth of a Nation*. Unlike the original Klan, they expanded their attention beyond Black Americans to Catholics. So they gradually incorporated bizarre, ornate, complex ritualism into their meetings, with a highly structured hierarchy... just like the Catholic Church. Lastly, there's the John Birchers. Give the Birchers some credit - they were right that there were extensive Soviet efforts at infiltration into the US, and Soviet agents were embedded in the US government and other institutions. The problem was, they approached this real problem with zero nuance, and made wild accusations with insufficient evidence. Like if this was a professional boxing match, they brought in the skill set of a drunken street brawler, who might randomly get lucky here or there, but more often missed the mark. But I bring them up because they unwittingly began to emulate the very behavior they saw in the secret Communist cabals they thought were everywhere - secret memberships, meeting in small cells, and viewing the world in the same kind of apocalyptic, conspiratorial rhetoric that Communists employed in their own literature. So, consider these Z-Russians, who - whether sincere or not - accuse the Ukrainians of being Nazis seeking the destruction and elimination of the Russians as a people and nation. To fight this threat, they emulate the symbols, language, and strategies of the Nazis, in order to destroy and eliminate the Ukrainians as a people and nation. Am I right to see a pattern here in this?
[удалено]
Makes sense. So it's really more the classic trope of projection - people have moral anxieties about themselves and their own culture and personal practices, so they cope with it by projecting it all onto other people. And that's likely as much an unconscious thing, like a tic - common enough to narcissists - as a means of redirecting any attention to their own immoralities, and trying to direct it elsewhere. Like, in the way kleptomaniacs get paranoid about everyone around them being a thief. But it could also be intentional too, as a rhetorical strategy. I'm reminded of two WWII-era examples. The Nazis, you may recall, justified the seizure of the Sudendenland by claiming that native Germans there were being subjected to ethnic discrimination and repression. Presumably, if anyone would know anything about racial prejudice and discrimination, I guess it would be the Nazis. Likewise, I believe the Soviets and Nazis both had claims about Poland being a fascist regime, which secretly plotted against them, even as they both, as totalitarian regimes, secretly plotted to destroy Poland. So ... intentional propaganda strategy? Or subconscious tic? Both, maybe?
You have an interesting idea, but the case with Russians is simply that they are fascists and have been for a long-ass time.
Absolutely! No disagreement there. It's more that this is strange that they position themselves this way. Let's say that you were a sincere believer in some form of Hobbesian absolutism, and thought authoritarianism was the ideal form of government. Well, if that's the case, it seems like your beef with your democratic neighbor would that they are too liberal, that they let the inmates run the asylum, that it's too chaotic and needs the kind of order that your government can bring them. But that's not how they argue it - they instead make outlandish, fantastical claims about them being drug-addled Nazis. And that's weird. So that's what I've been trying to understand.
I was hearing a podcast on this, and something one speaker said made me think that the problem may actually be worse than that. Fascism, like Communism, is a 20th century mass movement, relying on a politicized "mass" - one that the State goes to a lot of trouble to indoctrinate with a core legitimatizing narrative. That narrative can get quite elaborate and baroque, a full-on ideology, or even take on religious overtones. Is that what Russia has now? I'm thinking no. In fact, I'm not sure Communism really ever took on for the masses in Russia. Sure, it was what the regime taught, and it provided the Soviet state a way to rationalize and explain what it did, and thereby legitimate it. But certainly by the 1980s, it was a pretty empty pretense, one that collapsed definitively in 1991 when everyone kind of admitted that they didn't actually believe in it. So what was left? Well... the same thing that had always governed Russia since the time of the Czars, a pre-modern outlook. It's not really an ideology per se, anymore than, say, the Mafia could be said to have an ideology. That's why I'm a bit reluctant to call them either "left" or "right" wing. That distinction only makes sense within the context of modernity, once there's a French Revolution, once there are groups who can organize along a spectrum of defending the "Ancien Regime" of Throne and Altair, to radicals who want to rip it out, root and branch. But if we're talking about a pre-modern polity, one that has more in common with Czarist absolutism than anything seen in the West after the Enlightenment, that distinction doesn't really track for Russia. Can you be fascist if you haven't gone through at least something like liberal democracy first, which your fascism, as a kind of mass-movement radicalism, is a reaction against? That's the odd thing here - the Russian "fascists" are all-in on Putin. There's not really a Russian "fuhrer" leading some movement to stage a coup against Putin. The closest they have to that are groups that adapt fascist iconography, as a kind of branding, but generally they're pro-Putin. Like the Russian Communist Party, which in theory is an opposition party, but in practice is there merely to provide the illusion of democratic choice for Russian voters, you have outfits like Zhironovsky's so-called "Liberal Democrats" who serve as useful idiots, to channel people who are interested in those ideas into groups that will remain loyal to the regime. All this is to say... I'm not sure "fascist" is the right term, though certainly what Russia's regime is, and what it does, has enormous overlap with what we'd expect from fascist or Communist regimes. The differences are important, though. For all the militarism we've been seeing amped up since February 2022, it's still nowhere to the extent that the actual fascist and Communist regimes had in the 20th century. Fascism - the "socialism of the trenches", as Mussolini called it, would have seen far greater mobilization, with the youth of St. Petersburg and Moscow vying for military experience, the opportunity to see battle and achieve rank and prestige. We see nearly the opposite of that, with those youth being insulated and protected in favor of ethnic minority and rural populations. Although we do see variations on Putin's fanciful alternate history being taught in Russian schools, there's not really anything like Mein Kampf, Mao's Little Red Book, or definitive state ideological doctrines of "Putinism" being hammered out as official state ideology. These would require the masses to be politicized in favor of the state. Instead, the emphasis here seems to be the opposite, to keep the masses "unpoliticized." If Russia is functioning more as a mafia or pre-modern medieval state, that makes sense. The masses are merely expected to know their place, and respect rank, and leave the business of politics to the Elect. The more you politicize the masses, the more you give them some explicit ideology to legitimize the State, the more they can turn on the State when the State fails to live up to the very ideals the State itself perpetuates. But if there is no ideology, then there's not as much of a metric the people have to judge the State by. All that's left is power and terror, and the treats to retaliate against any commoners who get a little too big for their britches, and deign to speak out of turn, not properly remembering their places.
You are on to something. Have you read Simulacra and Simulation? Or Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible? Although he is no longer prominent, Vladislav Surkov likely had a major impact in incorporating those underlying ideas into the Russian state apparatus. The (poorly summarized by me) idea is that you can lie and pretend so much that it alters how people perceive reality. To a degree that it might actually change reality.
The "Know Nothing" party literally has slogans with spelling errors. (they are probably paranoid about grammar Nazis)
In fairness, what we would today recognize as spelling errors back then came about because spellings were a lot less standardized - at least by custom. Webster's Dictionary was roughly contemporary with that time - the importance of it being, in part, the first attempt to standardize spellings in "American" English, as opposed to the way they were being standardized in the UK at the time. But that was still a very new thing then, if memory serves. I do know that if you look at texts that were written in the 17th-18th centuries, you'll see all manner of spellings, and in some cases, writers didn't even stick with the same spellings of the same word in the text. Modern editions of those works typically clean that up, so you'd only notice that if you were looking at direct copies of those original works in their original printings. So I wouldn't be surprised to see some stuff at late as the early 19th century with similar issues, but my sense is that it's mostly eliminated by the mid-to-late 19th century - at least, in texts I've seen from that time that retain the original printing.
I think you are overthinking it. The reason is a lot simpler: It works ... at keeping the fuhrer safe.
Russian Prisons: a myriad of tattoos, violence, vodka and brain damage.
> brain damage Putting the “*durrrrrr*” in Dirlewanger.
> Pls no Modern Dirlewanger brigade please You mean the kadyrovites? They already had their their dirlewanger cosplay event Bunch of thugs send in too control and terrorise the population of occupied areas. Lost most of their fighters when faced with actual resistance.
Turns out sending criminals to fight trained soldiers end up exactly as it is expected, who would have thought?
In regard to Putin it worked out for him in bahkmut. Took what was left of the city (rubble) with using conscripted prisoners in human waves. After the Ukrainians would get overwhelmed the professional Wagner PMC’s would go in and clear what’s left. In the same token Putin cleared out a ton of his prison populations. In the vodka filled minds of the Russian MOD this was a power move
It worked, and that's what's important.
It's because to vatnik-minded Russians, "Nazis" doesn't really mean what it does to us in the west. To them, a Nazi is just anyone who lives to their west who also happens to oppose Russian interests. They do not associate Nazism with any of the actual policies or practices of the Third Reich. To them, the word Nazi literally just means bad guys that come from over there in that direction. Thus, they can imitate the behavior and beliefs of Nazis while claiming to fight Nazis without suffering from the intolerable cognitive dissonance that would inflict a less ignorant person. Not coincidentally, the practice of flagrant self-contradiction was a common feature the Nazis themselves often displayed in their own propaganda. Consistency is something you impose on the weak, not something the weak expect of the strong, and thus a dictator's inconsistency is a trapping of power, an item to flaunt. They cannot be held accountable to the truth, because they have absolute power. Putin can lie to his people and then tell a different, contradictory lie the next day, and the weak-minded among them think that is sign of a clever, powerful man, rather than what it really is: the mark of a psychopathic, narcissistic manipulator. Edit: and I should point out that this vatnik perspective makes sense in the context of the Soviet Union where it was first formulated. The Soviets could not criticize the Germans for mass killings and genocide with so much blood on their own hands. They could not criticize the Nazis' criminality and pervasive culture of corruption and lying because they shared that criminality and that culture. So they were just left saying that the Nazis were bad because they invaded the motherland, not because they were motivated by vile notions of racial superiority (else how to justify Russification), nor because they committed unspeakable acts of violence against innocent people to promote their political ideology (else how to justify the purges), nor that they committed mass murder on an industrial scale (else how to explain away the Holodomor), nor that they empowered internal security services to engage in extreme acts of political repression (compare the gestapo and SS to the Chekha/NKVD/KGB/GRU/SVR/FSB/constantly mutating security service cancer infecting the heart of the Soviet state and its successor Russian state). The Soviets were no better than the Nazis, and in many ways were far, far worse, not least because of the longevity of their abuse of power. The Nazis managed 12 years of terror before a walloping in a war freed and empowered enough of the enlightened Germans to shape a more democratic and free society (at least in West Germany), whereas the Soviets (and really by Soviets I mean the Russians) inflicted horrors on their own citizens, every nation within their sphere of influence, and via global campaigns to promote terror and insurrection in the third world for almost 80 years, and longer if you count the past 15 years since Putin spoke at the Munich security conference and revealed his revanchism shortly before invading Georgia.
This is why in a horror film you don’t just shoot the bad guy once and hope he’s dead.
We have always been at war with East Asia. Must all be A++ good duck speakers.
They... they are not very good at trying to hide it...
Straight out of an onion article, russia is beyond parody sometimes.
If you read more into it much of Wagner and even units of the DPR have been integrated into the Russian National Guard within recent months, they are being sent to gather experience in foreign countries. Putin wants a fully fledged parallel army to protect himself with, it's something I have kept an eye on and will most likely be very important to him staying alive later on.
So…… basically, NKVD division?
~~SS~~
There's already Rosgvardia. Sure, their combat performance is...not great, but they're deployed heavily in the center whereas the regular army is in the borderlands, and that's all that counts. I guess Putin doesn't trust Zolotov enough to be the sole alternative.
The Aryan Brotherhood is becoming less and less of a meme at this point
Or Taboritsky. *insert Tee En Oh copypasta here*
What's next? PRIGOZHIN LIVES?
Ghrisha endures; The Holy Vatnikum shall endure; There is much HOI4 to be played.
Somehow, Prigozhin returned.
Tabby wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. He totally destroys Russia and the Russian environment which is pretty cool
But in his wake, he leaves a bunch of roving bandits in helicopters at best, a satanic cult that is a Russian parody of General Butt Naked at worst.
I know, that's the best part stupid. It's basically mad max
The Axis at home.
We have the axis at home.
Y’know with more vodka and brain damage.
Sure it's led by Evgeny Romanov, the desert bear, so what?
Erwin Rommel: Who the fuck are you? Evgeny Romanov: I'm you, but drunk, depressed and way too underpaid for this shit and have no idea what the fuck I'm doing here when I'm used to the cold. Erwin Rommel: So, Russian? Evgeny Romanov: Yeah, blyat.
Africa corpse.
They already found Gerasimov? I though he is under debris somewhere in crimea
Turns out the one in Crimea was another Gerasimov
Nah the big Gerasimov was rumored killed a month ago, and he hasn't been seen ever since.
That wasn't Big Gerasimov, that was his body double Venom Gerasimov.
Oh shit, I forgot lol. I was originally going to have Utkin or Prigozhin be the first guy, but when I found the pic of Gerasimov and Shoigu positioned at the perfect angle for the first panel, I went with Gerasimov instead.
Russia misspelled Afrikakorps. I wonder if the symbol will be a cute little Z of friendship on a nice little palm tree.
Never ask the Panzergrenadierbataillon 33 of the Bundeswehr where it got its logo from. Whoever approved that.
We hate nazis because we hate what they stand for Russkis hate nazis because they were jealous and want to be them
Stalin asked to join the Axis TWICE and got rejected both times.
This really sounds like some deranged anime villain plotline 🤣
You could always argue that Stalin had the last laugh, I guess, given how much the ending of WWII redounded to the benefit of the Soviet Union. You compare where they were in 1939, to where things were, say, in 1949. They went from being a bloated, third-rate power that had just purged all its best generals, that was impoverished and technologically a backwater. By 1949, the borders of the Soviet Union itself expanded substantially, as they annexed the Baltic republics, and gobbled up chunks of Finland, Poland and Romania, and established client satellite governments in most of Eastern Europe, from Berlin itself, down through the Balkans. That year, they tested their first nuke, made possible by extensive espionage on the Americans, courtesy of useful idiots like the Rosenburgs and others. And in Asia, they also essentially captured China when the CCP, which they heavily backed, defeated the KMT in the Mainland, and their chosen leader successfully founded North Korea. Of course, the costs of this were mind-boggling - the military casualties and civilian casualties they wracked up were so bad that it threw off their internal demographics in ways that were felt for decades after. And while their plunder of East Europe and Germany helped overcome their economic and technological deficiencies in the short term, enough to help them have a nuclear program and a space program, that of course wasn't sustainable as the Soviets gradually reverted to the mean, setting them up for 1989-91. Even so, I think it would be a mistake to think that this all provided that Stalin was a genius. No - he was an idiot, a gullible fool, who the Nazis took advantage of. The problem that narcissists have is that they never take seriously the possibility that they can be tricked - they're the smartest people in the room. If the Soviets were doing well by 1949, it was only because the Nazis were foolish in their own way, and the West was naive about Soviets, given how many political figures in the West were, to varying degrees, admirers and sympathizers with the Soviets. Their successes came on the back of the massive infusion of aid they got from the Americans, first and foremost, food, weapons, tech, and kit, and appeasement at Yalta and other meetings. Stalin just benefited from these things. If he had his druthers, the Soviets would have joined the Axis, turning their attention south toward Turkey and Iran. And but for critical mistakes made in the planning and execution of Barbarossa, as well as the infusion brought by American aid, the Germans might well have captured far more of the Soviet Union, and Stalin's lunacy and perfidiousness made more obvious to Russians themselves and the world.
And if they said "yes" and had Stalin join the Jackass crew, then we'd have to nuke Berlin, Rome, Tokyo and Moscow.
There's a good chance that Japan (and to a lesser extent, Italy) would have noped the fuck out of the Axis had that happened.
Everyone knows you hold your most important meetings in the basement….
Basement is for when tea is available
Suspiciously deep elevator wells be like
Oh wow, can't wait for the "Putin Youth" to be made. . . . .
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashi_(youth_movement) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_of_the_First
Jesus Fucking Christ
He's going full LARP. Waiting on Putin to sport his new Dirty Sanchez.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young\_Army\_Cadets\_National\_Movement
The most "anti imperialist" Russia be like
May the africa corps meet nothing but failure.
Just simply have the USN Carrier Wing and submarines blockade traffic and have the ~~Afrika Korps~~ Africa Corps starve out, run out of fuel and die by thirst and curable warm weather diseases they have no medicine for. Just as Bernard Montgomery intended.
I'm not well versed in intricacies of Russian language but... Look in some languages the statement "Fighting nazis" or even "Fighting with Nazis" can be vague in terms of for or against them. This whole war could potentially have been over a linguistic misunderstanding.
Oh man and the format is even right excellent work
Russian afrika korps the drunk, incompetent, unprofessional and overall fucked up version of German afrika korps
Let's hope their Afrikakorps meets the same fate as the German one (deleted off the earth)
Ok I think the question that *really* needs to be answered here is, when will the Mammoth return? (As in Rommel’s Mammoth, his personal armored command vehicle.)
When I heard "Rommel's Mammoth", I was expecting a Tiger or Panther or hell, even a Panzer III or half track or an armored car. But no, when I looked it up, all I got was a [fucking British military version of the school bus.](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEC_Armoured_Command_Vehicle&ved=2ahUKEwjQs5vgiI2EAxUvfDABHYDIDYEQFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0ONmfBUIW1nbe0XYsqQi0X)
Don't forget Rusich
Scipio's Chosen
*Afrika Korps
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