I'm a Russian, grew up in USSR and like for many others in USSR members of my family fought, died, got decorated fighting German Nazi in WWII. So I wonder what kind of disrespect you mean.
>I know American use the term extremely casually like it meant nothing.
Do you think genocide and ethnic cleansing that the Russia Nazism conducts now in Ukraine is "nothing"?
It’s not disrespectful to Russia. It’s disrespectful to the actual victims of Nazism, the ideology of the NSDAP. Nazi is not a placeholder nor a meaningless adjective.
As i said i have members of the family who actually died in that fight, and i don't see anything disrespectful toward them in calling a nazist regime for what it is.
If you think Putin regime is nazist I regret having to inform you that said family members might have fought against nazism but did fail to explain to you what it was.
just out of curiosity, if we take a very simple, very narrow and in my view obvious case, and i'm just wondering what do you see there. This is a video of Rogozin, the Putin's favorite who is the CEO of the cornerstone of Russian nationalistic pride - Roskosmos - and who is one of the most prominent political voices in the today's Russia, and what i see in this video is him leading a Nazi salute and the end of his Nazi speech at the Russian Nazi march in Moscow (the specific phrase they all give Nazi salute to is "Glory to Russia!"). So what do you see here?
Once again and people can downvote as much as they want nazism is the ideology of the nazi party of Germany. Its main characteristic are belief in the existence of a hierarchy of races dividing humanity, the superiority of the Arian race, deep antisemetism, the legitimacy of eugenics as a mean of society improvement, the legitimacy of implementing fascism and subvert the state in order to implement these racist policies, pangermanism and profound anti-Christianity.
As repugnant as it is, Russian ultranationalism is not nazism and Rogozin is not making a nazi salute. As much as you wish it to be, nazi is not a generic world.
i think you're disingenuous here. You'd not make that salute in a public place, in a company meeting or, God forbid, in a synagogue because everybody knows that it is a nazi salute and anybody doing it would do it only as a nazi salute. There is no other meaning conveyed by that salute.
This is a war carried out against a neighboring country for territorial and security reasons. It's wrong for all the reasons aggressive wars are always wrong, but I don't see it as genocidal in the "now we kill all the Ukrainians" way. There certainly have been genocidal policies by Russians against Ukraine in the past, but I don't see it here.
The war declaration by Putin clearly contains call for genocide and ethnic cleansing and for destruction of Ukrainian ethnical and political identity. And that is what they've been doing there. And if i you watch Russian state TV you'll see that they call for and celebrate destruction of "Ukraininess", cancelation of Ukrainian language in schools and celebratory reporting that there will be only Russian, they celebrate and call for killing of "nationalists" (which de-facto, according to their words and actions, means Ukrainians who refuse to accept Russian identity).
> "now we kill all the Ukrainians"
The goal declared and constantly repeated on the TV is no more Ukraine, no more Ukrainians. As Putin said they are Russians, and the ones who resist are to be destroyed. To that goal they have already killed ~50000 in Mariupol (10% of its pre-war population or 30% of those un-evacuated), ~30000 of armed forces, hard to count the killed in all the smaller cities/towns though one can guess seeing the total destruction there similar to Mariupol, and 13M displaced by the bombings. And that just for the 4 months in the country of only 40M.
>for territorial
they do intentionally clean the territory off Ukrainians (all those displaced and killed with the rest having their "Ukraininess" suppressed by the terror regime enforced there by the Russian SS "Russian Guard") and establish there "Russian world" - classical genocide and ethnical cleansing.
>and security reasons
that is pretext. Pure propaganda BS. All those biological weapons (able at DNA level target Russians while staying safe for Ukrainians) carrying birds which Ukraine was making in the Pentagon laboratories, or Ukraine planning to attack Mother Russia on March 7.
To expand on this and compare to WW2 history, Germany invaded both Poland and France, but the rhetoric around both was very different.
For Poland, there is the Obersalzberg Speech[1], where he said in part:
Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
(The irony of the final sentence on this very discussion about the annihilation of the Armenians is not lost on me!)
Compare that to Hitler's speech about the conquest of France:
The German Army does not come as an enemy of the French people nor of its soldiers, nor does it intend to govern these territories. It has a single aim-to repel together with its allies any landing attempt by the Anglo-American forces.
Marshal Petain and his government are entirely free and are in the position to fulfill their duty as in the past. From now on nothing stands in the way of realization of their requests, made earlier, to come to Versailles to govern France from there.
The German forces have been ordered to see to it that the French people are inconvenienced as little as possible.[2]
The difference is very clear! And the French speech was made after the Poland one.
Which is more like Putain's denial of the right of Ukraine to be a country?
Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions. As recently as February 2020, he once again stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians “are one and the same people”, and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference. Similarly, Russia’s then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been “no state” in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis.[3]
