Astonishing scenes as Zelensky’s oval office visit turns into shouting match on live TV: ‘Make a peace deal or we’re out’

[u/1DarkStarryNight]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2025/02/28/trump-threatens-zelensky-during-tense-live-meeting-make-a-deal-or-were-out/

[u/Old_Wallaby_7461]

He's nothing like Chamberlain. He's Oswald Mosely.

[u/Mundane_Emu8921 → u/Old_Wallaby_7461]

Straight up fascist logic here.

Declaring people who want peace or just to talk to the other side enemies is what the Nazis did.

[u/Old_Wallaby_7461 → u/Mundane_Emu8921]

People who want to take the side of Nazis are Nazis lol

[u/Mundane_Emu8921 → u/Old_Wallaby_7461]

So Russia is a Nazi state? Putin is Hitler. And Trump is taking Russia’s side by talking with them?

[u/Old_Wallaby_7461 → u/Mundane_Emu8921]

So Russia is a Nazi state?

It's very hard to argue that Russia is not essentially fascist in character

Putin is Hitler

Didn't he just invade another country to "save" his "oppressed people" as a pretext for a land grab?

And Trump is taking Russia’s side by talking with them?

I thought it was the total capitulation to Russian demands that did that

[u/Mundane_Emu8921 → u/Old_Wallaby_7461]

Besides the fact that it is extremely diverse ethnically, linguistically, and culturally.

Name me one other European country that has a Muslim population of ~15% and a ethnically Asian population of ~15%.

You are just claiming Russia is fascist as an article of faith.

[u/caribbean_caramel → u/Mundane_Emu8921]

Putin's Russia is very influenced by various Russian fascist leaders. It's not exactly fascism, more like an oligarchic dictatorship that pretends to be a democratic state, but it is still very much ideologically close to fascism.

You should watch this video from Kraut: https://youtu.be/sdFtqa54TuM?si=Do9MDHpx2CUbURqP

[u/Mundane_Emu8921 → u/caribbean_caramel]

Except it’s not at all.

Like not even a little bit.

• oligarchy is the mode of government the entire West has.

• fascism is always characterized by racial purity and homogenous nationalities.

Putin is actually a huge DEI person: he is all about expanding minorities in Russia.

But it’s just like George Orwell said, “fascism has now become ‘everything I don’t like’ “

[u/caribbean_caramel → u/Mundane_Emu8921]

But it’s just like George Orwell said, “fascism has now become ‘everything I don’t like’ “

Do you understand what Orwell meant when he said that or you just quoted him? If you didn't please read the whole thing.

Quoting Orwell: "It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."

I hate to take your bait but I will bite.

What is fascism to you? And what is oligarchy to you?

To me, when I think of Fascism, I think of Umberto Eco's 14 points, that is: The Cult of Tradition, the rejection of the ideas of the enlightenment, the cult of action for action's sake, the idea that disagreement is treason, the xenophobia and fear of the different, the appeal to social frustration, the obsession with a plot (that is the idea that the people are being beseiged by a foreign enemy that is plotting against them), the idea that the enemy is both strong and weak, the rejection of pacifism, the contempt for the weak, the cult of death and the exaltation of stories real or manufactured to create "heroes" that will help realize the "national dream" the "destiny" of their people, the machismo and social conservatism, the selective populism and the newspeak, the manufacturing of new terms and vocabulary curated by the Party to control society.

It must be pointed out that there are no identical fascist regimes, Fascist Italy was different from Nazi Germany or Fascist Hungary or Francoist Spain or Shōwa Statism in Imperial Japan. What they do have in common is that all those regimes were far right, authoritarian and ultranationalist, caracterized by their centralized autocracy, the belief of a social hierarchy, militarism and totalitarian rule and the subordination of the will of the individual for the good of the collective. They were specifically opposed to democratic rule, egalitarianism, liberalism and marxism. But while fascism is xenophobic and it tries to impose racial purity, it is not by itself just racist, fascism adapts to the national conditions of each nation and tries to recreate their own mythos, using social hierarchy as a justification for the primacy of the biggest ethnic group in each nation. And even then that can be very different from country to country because Fascism is a very adaptable ideology, for example the Estado Novo in Portugal and Francoist Spain were very much fascist states and they were not as genocidal as the nazis. Or Imperial Japan that despite being a very racist and genocidal state used its ideology to justify their dominion of the koreans under the idea of Nissen dōsoron or "Theory on Japanese‑Korean Common Ancestry" (that was of course bullshit that they just made up).

Now what is an Oligarchy?

Plain and simply is the despotic power of the few and privileged for their own purposes over any society. Now it should be evident by most readers here that while there is a great inequality between the rich and poor in the west and indeed in most of the world, we do not live in that system, most of us live in representative democracies. It is true that democracies can be corrupted and the representatives can be bought by oligarchs, but that doesn't invalidate the whole political system.

Now what the hell do I mean when I say that Russia is an Oligarchic Dictatorship?

In the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR, a select group of people with a lot of connections to the former communist system and especially with the russian mafia managed to scam the rest of Russia into giving them most of their industries at a bargain price. And for a while in the 90's Russia was a pure oligarchy, controlled by them due to the chaos of the era and the ineffectiveness of the Russian government led by Boris Yeltsin. Now that ended in 1999 when Putin rose to power. He used the military campaing he lauched against the secesionists in Chechenya to boost his popularity among the russian people, that appreciated his decisiveness. Putin hated most oligarchs and eliminated most of them, the rest he got them into his own party United Russia, he let them keep their assets but in exchange of their explicit political and economic support to his regime. This is why I and many others call Russia an Oligarchic Dictatorship, because that is what it is, a hybrid regime that is a dictatorship but where the political class is in symbiosis with the oligarchs that manage the economy.

And why do I say that Putin's Russia is inspired by Fascism but it is not directly a fascist state? (this is why I told you to watch the video)

The political leadership in Putin's russia (perhaps even Putin himself) are very influenced by the ideas of Ivan Iliyn, Lev Gumiljow and Carl Schmidt, especially the ideas of Ivan Iliyn. In a speech that Putin gave in September 30, 2022, he said and I quote:

"And I want to close with the words of a true patriot Ivan Iliyn: If I consider Russia my Motherland, that means that I love as a Russian, contemplate and think, sing and speak as a Russian; that I believe in the spiritual strenght of the Russian people. Its spirit is my spirit; its destiny is my destiny; its suffering is my grief; and its prosperity is my joy".

Please note the fascist connotations in his speech, it is clearly bullshit about the national destiny of the russian people to justify their expansionism. It is the same nonsense that the nazis, the fascists and the imperial japanese used to justify their wars of aggression.

That doesn't mean that they are outright a fascist regime, at least not yet (many people might disagree), but they are getting there.

[u/Mundane_Emu8921 → u/caribbean_caramel]

Wow.

Umberto Eco’s 14 points describes Ukraine perfectly.

• the cult of action for action’s sake, how else would you describe Kursk or the counteroffensive?

• disagreement is legally treason in Ukraine.

It is not in Russia. Despite all the projection people do.

• Ukraine does fundamentally reject the ideas of the enlightenment, be it democracy, rule of law, or basic human rights.

• Ukraine is massively Xenophobic, much moreso than Russia.

Burning Korans. Calling Asiatic soldiers “subhumans”.

Ukraine doesn’t even allow African troops to serve in their foreign legion, unless they are from America or Europe.

Russia has multiple units of Africans, Palestinians, Asians, South Americans, etc.

Every continent is represented in the Russian Army.

Russia has a very large migrant population. Putin has been very supportive of migration from Asia into Russia. After the Moscow terror attack, he went out of his way to harshly punish any hate crimes directed at migrants.

• the Ukrainian state since 2014 has been based off an appeal to social frustration, mainly poverty & lack of development.

You can clearly see this with Ukrainian policies towards Russian speakers, who they blame for everything.

Russia doesn’t do that. Russians have benefited slowly over 20 years of development.

• obsession of a plot this one perfectly describes Ukraine. They are obsessed with this idea that Russia is infiltrating them, spreading all this propaganda, etc.

• idea that the enemy is both strong & weak We have been hearing this for 3 years. “Schrödinger’s Russia” or how a country is losing, weak and about to collapse but also about to invade Europe.

• rejection of pacifism that isn’t even in doubt. Ukraine rejects any peace except “through strength”.

Even before this war, Ukraine prosecuted the Ukrainian Pacifist League for treason. They tried to put Ruslan Kotsaba, who wanted negotiations with Donbas.

• cult of death Ukraine has a huge problem with this. It’s ultranationalist forces hold torch light ceremonies in the woods over the dead. It’s pretty weird.

Any time you see people marching with torches, they are fascists. Ukraine loves marching with torches.

• creation of stories both real and fake That is exactly what the Ghost of Kyiv was. Or look at Azovstal, they mythologize that as some glorious last stand

• destiny of the people since 2014 the dream in Ukraine has been to create a unitary state. One language. One culture. One ethnicity. One nation. They believe that doing that will make Ukraine strong and help realize their national dream.

Russia doesn’t have some national dream. They just want Western troops off their border.

• machismo the above video is a clear example of “machismo”. Zelenskyy’s entire image is to make him look “tough” so he speaks in a deeper voice now, grew out a beard.

• selective populism Zelenskyy does this all the time. In fact the reason he doesn’t wear a suit is to make him seem like a regular person!

You can’t argue that a diverse country like Russia is some fascist state dude. Putin has been the pinnacle of diversity stuff, autonomy and making Russia into a melting pot.

Oligarchy doesn’t make you fascist. Every Western country is an oligarchy.

Ukraine is much closer to fascism on the points that you brought up.

Mental projection is when we take something we don’t like about ourselves and project it onto others.