Who are you calling a nazi?

Europe’s neo-nazi problem has been growing. The horror of the Nazis’ atrocities in Europe is fading from living memory with the passing of the last survivors of the Holocaust, and farright politicians have used this historic distance to manipulate the past like never before. At the same time, fascism has exploited popular discontent with neoliberal capitalism, particularly the ‘status anxiety’ the latter creates. The diminishing influence of the Left, and the disappearance of leftwing intellectual traditions rooted in economic structures, has created a vacuum in which far-right narratives flourish, and where scapegoating often goes unchallenged.

Now the charge of neo-nazism has entered the realm of geopolitics, with Vladimir Putin’s bogus allegation that the Ukrainian government needs ‘denazification’ by his tanks and missiles. Putin’s rally cry for his ‘special military operation’ is redolent of the USSR’s Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany in the 1940s – a period that still looms large in the Russian military imagination.

It is true there are long histories of intolerance, racism and antisemitism in Ukraine – and indeed in Russia