Lester Golden
3 min readAug 21, 2022

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Instead of answering my questions you changed the topic. Since I saw fascism up close as a history student in the 1970s and 80s, I define it by the same 14 points Umberto Eco did in his classic 1995 NY Review of Books article. Since he grew up in Mussolini's Italy we can both safely defer to his definition of fascism.

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news-you-are-a-fascist-if-you-do-these-14-things-16658/

Trump scores yes on 13/14 points. Orban, Salvini, Kaczysinski, Germany's AfD, Spain's Vox and LePen score similarly. Try scoring Putin, Medvedev and the rest of the Russian versions of the American MAGA verse. I'd score Putin at 12 or 13/14 based on their speeches, writing or the Dugin and Ilyin writings they love and their wars launched in 2008, 2014 and now. If you don't agree, tell me why on all 14 points, point by point.

The Ukrainians I've met, Yermolenko and Zelenskiy all yield an Eco-score far lower than all of them if you examine what they've said. They explicitly reject ethnonationalism, xenophobia, homophobia, the antimodernist cult of tradition, as the 1 minute Yermolenko video below shows.

Now you can answer the unanswered questions:

Are all the 1000 Ukrainian troops/month your adopted country is training Nazis?

Is Volodomyr Yermolenko a Nazi? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reRQ_-7YyGw

At 0:35 of the video he denies Ukraine is an ethno state, but multi-ethnic and multilingual. The core of Nazi ideology is racist ethnonationalism. Yermolenko says clearly that Ukrainian national identity is civic, not ethnic or linguistic. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia, Armenia, Bhutan and Nepal are all ethno states. Are they therefore all Nazi?

Is "Ukraine's Other Army" of civil society volunteeers such as Anna Bondarenko, as described by Anne Applebaum's article, a Nazi army? Read the article if you care about reality-based on the ground journalism.

This stage of the war began with a Russian paratrooper attack on Hostomel airport on my birthday February 24. How is this not an invasion?

Sergeytsev wrote in Ria Novosti that Russia will decide Ukrainians' national identity within Russkiy Mir and that any who oppose the Russia state are Nazis to be purged. Yermolenko views national identity as a complex bottom up civil society question. Who's right? If 40m Ukrainians prefer an identity separate from the Russkiy Mir and to join the EU, who are you, Putin and Sergeytsev to say no? Imposing Russkiy Mir by force will yield only this: http://languagesoftheworld.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/divided_russia.jpg

The Buryatis, Tuvans, Kalmyks, Chechens, Tatars, and Dagestanis dying in disproportionate numbers in Ukraine have begun to figure this out: https://www.rferl.org/a/kalmyk-nonrussian-brand-xenophobia/31820307.html

These Russian-speaking people in Kherson in April certainly prefer their Ukrainian identity and weren't asking to be liberated by war (Indian network WION):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSlA47kkUMs

Tim Snyder, the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, describes Ukraine as a post-colonial country. How or why is he wrong? If you don't trust a Yale University historian who's fluent in Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and German and spent decades in archives, then you have the same anti-intellectual contempt for reality-based expertise as Brexiteer, Michael Gove.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d21K_csDds

Do you believe that Russian speakers in Narva, Daugavpils, Jurmala, Kazakhstan, Abkhazia, Tbilisi, Sumgait and Lithuania also need to be "liberated"?

You know my real name. What's yours? Based on your immigration to the UK article, it certainly isn't Alex Stone.

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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