Libs and reactionaries will constantly bring up the Wagner group in response to having the existence of the Azovites pointed out to them. This counterargument strikes me as lazy and equivocating, but I’ve always had trouble responding to it.
What would people here recommend I say to this point? Assuming I say anything at all.
When someone starts to bring up Wagner Russonazis I know that I won’t get anywhere with them in terms of the big picture of anti-imperialism. There’s no real point in further discussion. Russiagate brainworms have been incredibly effective in this regard. Even if they admit that mercenaries are and always have been a part of war, they’ll just change their tune to “Putin’s personal Nazi PMC” if they haven’t already.
You could also just respond with something about Blackwater, or the German military’s Nazi infestation. Then they’ll call whataboutism and the conversation will be over, but there wasn’t any constructive dialog anyway and maybe some spectators (if it’s not a private conversation) may turn on their brains a bit and look deeper.
Wagner group has a statue in Central African Republic partially dedicated to them. Try to ask libs to explain how the Wagner group is nazi if Africans consider them partners and equals.
The organization that published that article is essentially NATO itself, which makes simply running that story quite an admission. Even so, I’m a little torn on really using this. I feel like libs could twist it into a statues-of-Confederate-generals type story pretty quick.
I don’t see Africans erecting statues to Europeans or Americans.
Yeah, at some point it’s not even about convincing the person you’re arguing with. Good points.
As far as I can tell, the Wagner PMC = Nazis thing is based on two bits of “evidence:”
a VK picture of a guy who looks like Dmitri Utkin wearing some kind of Wehrmacht/SS uniform. Problem is, there aren’t many pictures of Utkin around, and his connection to Wagner is kind of hazy anyway. Even Wikipedia calls him the “alleged” founder of the Wagner Group.
the fact that Richard Wagner, for whom Wagner Group is presumably named, held antisemitic views, and, because he was Hitler’s favorite composer, tends to be liked by neonazis. Of course this doesn’t in itself prove anything either, because Wagner is one of those composers with a pretty massive fanbase; Stephen Fry, who’s Jewish, made a documentary about his love for Wagner’s music. My sense is a lot of soldiers who are into classical music are into Wagner, not neccesarily because they’re Nazis, but because the mythic ethos and the evocation of an heroic death speaks them on a sort of “professional” level.