> Lol, very few people are minimizing Azov or other far-right groups in Ukraine. Everyone knows they're a huge problem
Your response to the USA spearheading propaganda efforts to support far right neo-nazi's is- 1) they failed and 2) russian nazi's are worse.
My problem is with the fact that the US did it at all, whether we agree or disagree on the success of that operation isn't part of my point.
As for media being driven by conspiring forces, I agree that they are lazy and scared to dissent, but this doesn't account for everything. I'm not going to take the time to prove that right now. If you truly believe the media organizations are benign, just lazy and conformists, then I doubt I can change your mind anyways.
> albeit they are a problem that is caused by Russia's invasion in 2014
Unrelated, they were an organization that existed long before Russia's invasion, and they arguably played a crucial role in ensuring that the peaceful Euromaiden protests turned bloody. This goes back to CIA Operation ANYFACE, and subsequent Western intervention during the Cold War and after the fall of the USSR to combat Russian influence.
> Your response to the USA spearheading propaganda efforts to support far right neo-nazi's is- 1) they failed and 2) russian nazi's are worse.
No, my response is that (1) it's an insane unsupported conspiracy theory, (2) which misdirects from the actual fascist dictatorship that uses gaslighting and DARVO to trick conspiracy minded fools into thinking that actually the democratically elected centrists over in Ukraine are the real fascists.
Consider this. STOPFAKE, an alleged arm of US pro-fascist propaganda, whitewashes C14 by calling it a "community organization", yet the U.S. State Department classifies C14 as a "nationalist hate group". Why would the U.S. State Department do that if the goal of the US led conspiracy (which presumably involves the U.S. State Department) is to paint these groups as heroes? The claims are internally inconsistent and self-refuting.
> USA spearheading propaganda efforts
More DARVO. The US has been trying to respond to Russian propaganda efforts. What Putin is doing is out of Hilter's propaganda playbook for Sudetenland and Poland. If you knew anything about Putin's election interference in 2016, and about how Xi and Putin are weaponizing social media against the US population, and about the Kremlin's propaganda campaign to portray Ukraine as a fascist threat so as to have a justification for the invasion, you would perhaps not automatically assume such a cynical position. That doesn't mean that such efforts haven't sometimes failed, of course, in fact I'd be surprised if they had a perfect track record. But failures and mistakes don't mean that anti-propaganda efforts are themselves concerted propaganda.
> 1) they failed
This is a variation of the No True Scotsman fallacy. No evidence to the contrary is deemed sufficient because the conspiracy theory is this amorphous thing that has to be true regardless of how well it is falsified by counterexamples.
> Unrelated, they were an organization that existed long before Russia's invasion
More DARVO. They were nascent at best and had no institutional acknowledgement (and let's not forget that pre-Maidan was a pro-Russian government, so to the extent that Azov was a thing pre-2014, the blame for that goes on their shoulders). Then Russia invaded, and that forced a change in the status quo out of necessity and made eliminating far-right paramilitary groups pragmatically infeasible. Ukraine doesn't have the luxury of picking and choosing who can fight to defend their small population.
> I'm not going to take the time to prove that right now.
If someone alleges a conspiracy theory and doesn't present compelling evidence, it can be safely dismissed.
Your response to the USA spearheading propaganda efforts to support far right neo-nazi's is- 1) they failed and 2) russian nazi's are worse.
My problem is with the fact that the US did it at all, whether we agree or disagree on the success of that operation isn't part of my point.
As for media being driven by conspiring forces, I agree that they are lazy and scared to dissent, but this doesn't account for everything. I'm not going to take the time to prove that right now. If you truly believe the media organizations are benign, just lazy and conformists, then I doubt I can change your mind anyways.
> albeit they are a problem that is caused by Russia's invasion in 2014
Unrelated, they were an organization that existed long before Russia's invasion, and they arguably played a crucial role in ensuring that the peaceful Euromaiden protests turned bloody. This goes back to CIA Operation ANYFACE, and subsequent Western intervention during the Cold War and after the fall of the USSR to combat Russian influence.
https://www.voltairenet.org/article216406.html https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/operation-anyface-how...