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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> Zelensky is a nazi,

He's not a Nazi, of course, him being of Jewish ancestry, but it did raise some questions for me when a Russian bomb (that killed about 20 civilians) did its thing in Kyiv very close to a boulevard named after Bandera. Bandera is of course a war criminal and a Nazi collaborator. That thing with a Kyiv boulevard being named after a war criminal and a Nazi collaborator you don't see in the MSM. The bombing took place here [1], you can see the Bandera-named avenue just close by.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/50%C2%B029'19.1%22N+30%C2%...

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Here in the US we have street names and even monuments dedicated to slave owners and people who advocated so strongly for slavery they went to war with their own people.

Does that mean the US, today, generally supports the institution of chattel slavery? No, that's absurd.

Lots of people want those monuments removed and streets renamed, but that's apparently cancel culture. The only country I know of that has actually faced it's rotten past is Germany

But @paganel apparently thinks it’s totally okay to bomb that street while civilians are walking on it. Talk about priorities.

> But @paganel apparently thinks it’s totally okay to bomb

I didn't say that, way to go. Come on, this is HN, not some sub-reddit shithole.

You did say exactly that.

> it did raise some questions for me when a Russian bomb (that killed about 20 civilians) did its thing in Kyiv very close to a boulevard named after Bandera. Bandera is of course a war criminal and a Nazi collaborator.

A bomb killed 20 civilians. Who the fuck cares if a street it fell onto was named after a war criminal? Makes it a legit target?

So, let's carpet bomb all those Strada Ion Antonescu it took me all 15 seconds to find across Romania. After all, you are saying it's illegal to name a street like that, so let's de-nazify them. Right?

Where in the world are you getting it from that the name of the street made it ok to bomb? He's saying that he learned of the street because the Russians bombing it was newsworthy given that it killed 20 people. Then what followed from him learning that the street exists with the name Bandera, was him thinking that maybe there could be some support for Nazis still remaining in Ukraine. Similar to how seeing a street named after a Confederate fighter would make someone think that maybe there's still some love for the Confederacy in the US (which is actually accurate!)

I'm going to spare a long explanation for you, but calling Ukrainians who refer to one another as "banderivets" and naming streets after Bandera "support for Nazis" is almost, if not entirely, equal to calling American Blacks who refer to one another as "nigga" "support for racism and slavery".

Americans don't like the name chattel slavery anymore, but the demand for labourers that don't have rights as people is just a prevalent.

The treatment of "illegal immigrants" is currently better than the chattel slaves of old, but policies like getting rid of birthright citizenship points in a direction of America wanting to being back chattel slaves

Maybe you don’t know but here in Romania we have our fair share of streets named after anti-semites and-or iron guard collaborators.

But you’d probably protest if someone called you an anti-semite for this alone.

I'm Romanian and we don't have streets named after Antonescu, which is what Bandera was for the Ukranians in WW2. It is illegal to have streets named after Antonescu, because he killed hundreds of thousands of Jewish people in WW2, apparently in Ukraine is still legal to have a street named after Bandera, who collaborated in the killings of Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

> I'm Romanian and we don't have streets named after Antonescu

In your town?

> It is illegal to have streets named after Antonescu

Hm, really? Then again -- and sorry if this comes as a shock to you -- Romania isn't all that well-known (at least in the northern half of the EU) for living up to the law.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30700460 :

> So, let's carpet bomb all those Strada Ion Antonescu it took me all 15 seconds to find across Romania. After all, you are saying it's illegal to name a street like that, so let's de-nazify them. Right?

My own search for "Strada Ion Antonescu" on Google Maps popped up seven results across Romania, but that was zoomed out from Lviv to Thessaloniki to see the whole country. Don't know if there'd be more if I zoomed in.

Stepan Bandera Avenue was called Moscow Avenue up until 2016, where it was renamed after anti-communist (and, granted, nazi sympathiser) Stepan Bandera. He was arrested by the Gestapo and put in a concentration camp after refusing to revoke an attempt to make Ukraine an independent state.

You're doing some interesting mental gymnastics here. Do you think "a Russian bomb doing its thing very close to a boulevard" is in any way evidence of the "mainstream media" hiding the Truth or whatever? Who do you work for? Do you actually believe the Russians are attacking Ukraine because of nazis? Do you believe their invasion and the murder of civilians is warranted?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera

What questions did it raise for you?

How come in Romania (from where I'm from) it is illegal to have a street named after Antonescu (our Bandera counter-part from WW2) while in neighbouring Ukraine it is not? Why aren't they 100% for eliminating their Nazi past from, well, the present?

And yet you do have streets named after Antonescu in Romania:

1) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/WsVVsW13Eb9BjnRm9 2) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/Fe4Ggh3EPZyF7Z6r8 3) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/ANV22wPVDnaoFRVw5 4) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/hhN2jDvsiD9eXnVB6 5) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/a4gjwkDAzD5VrXj77

That law does indeed exist, but nonetheless you still have numerous streets in Romania named after Antonescu. They can be trivially found on Google Maps. For example, Strada Mareșal Ion Antonescu in Constanța [0] — and it was given that name in 2000!

Of course, nobody should judge all Romanians, nor even the political leaders who were not directly involved in the naming decision, for that. Countries are not a homogenous unit.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Strada+Mareșal+Ion+Antones...

It's a small street that no-one has heard about, this is a boulevard in the capital city. We had the same thing in Bucharest, when there was a church (built by Antonescu and his wife) that had a bust sculpture [1] of him in the church-yard sometime in the early 2000s. There was of course a huge scandal, with the foreign ambassadors chiming in, the law against naming things after bad people from our history got passed soon after so that we could entry into the EU, so of course that the bust sculpture had to go.

> Countries are not a homogenous unit.

I expect things that stand in your face (like a boulevard in a capital city, a bust sculpture of a genocide perpetrator in a downtown place in another capital city) to not be left to the local authorities. Even Bandera's wiki page mentions the EU and Israeli administrations not being at all happy with Ukraine naming things after Bandera back in ~2011, apparently that has all been forgotten now that Putin has attacked and everyone acts surprised how come Putin calls the Ukrainians as being nazis. And I didn't mention anything about the infamous "Freikorps" now battling the Russians close to Sumy, most definitely their name was not taken from a Heine poem or anything like that.

[1] https://foto.agerpres.ro/foto/detaliu/158701 (if you're Romanian you might recognise one of the characters in that photo)

> everyone acts surprised how come Putin calls the Ukrainians as being nazis

I mean, they should. Calling an entire country of 44 million people Nazis is ridiculous regardless of whether a boulevard in a capital city is named after Bandera.

Oh, you know, "where there's smoke there's fire" and "many people are saying" and "look into it, is all I'm saying" and "whether it's true or not, it just raises questions."

That's the way these things usually work. A slow erosion of public opinion through insinuation. People like Tucker Carlson aren't going to instantly go back to brown-nosing Putin, but they'll slip in occasional questions about Zelensky here and there, until certain insinuations are taken as ground truth.

> but it did raise some questions for me

What questions of any importance or relevance to this war would it possibly raise? Are you suggesting that if Ukraine really was wall-to-wall Nazis that maybe Russia is somehow justified here? Maybe WW2 wasn't quite finished after all? Good grief. Stop stirring the turd for no good reason other than to rile people up.

So of course those civilians deserved to die, because they happened to be on a street named after someone or other?

> He's not a Nazi, of course, him being of Jewish ancestry,

That is strong evidence that he isn't, but short of proof. A counterexample from California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Unz

We have no proof you are not a Nazi either. Let's assume you are, just to be safe. And maybe we can write a few blogs about it and drum up a following?

I do not believe Zelensky is a Nazi. The evidence against it is much stronger than the evidence for it. Your ire against me is misdirected.

> Your ire against me is misdirected.

Insofar as it was ire against your implication that "there is no proof against it" would somehow validate the insinuation, it wasn't.

And, sorry, even if you claim that that wasn't what you meant to do, the mere mention of it does imply that. We don't (AFAIK) have absolute proof that the Moon isn't (mainly) made of green cheese, either (those moon rocks the astronauts brought back could just be part of a thin rock crust over the cheese[1]), but what does it imply if I throw out the claim "We don't have proof that the Moon isn't made of green cheese!" in a general discussion about cosmology?

___

[1]: Aha, so "Moon Pie" should be a cheese pie!

Does it actually matter though? If he was a nazi, and if he engaged in practices from WW2 nazis like putting people into concentration camps, then there would be a case.

But it doesn't warrant an unprovoked single-party invasion. We're better than that these days.

The invasion is unwarranted, I would never suggest otherwise.

>> He's not a Nazi, of course, him being of Jewish ancestry,

> That is strong evidence that he isn't, but short of proof.

It's about the strongest evidence possible. Also, I'd think a person who's such a raw contradiction of "Jewish Nazi" would show signs of obvious psychological illness (either as a cause or a symptom, e.g. suicide to help the final solution along).

Add to that the fact that the claim he's a Nazi have all the hallmarks of a lie concocted to fabricate a moral reason for the invasion, by people with a history and strategy for creating such lies, and it's proved false practical sense. It's proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Zelensky is not Nazi, in fact it's even proven beyond most unreasonable doubts.

> A counterexample from California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Unz

I don't think so. Ctrl-F "nazi" -- zero hits.

> It's about the strongest evidence possible.

It's not as strong as the synthesis of all the other evidence, particularly: his actions and statements throughout life, none of which point towards him being a Nazi. That is stronger evidence than his ethnic identity.

With respect to Ron Unz, you might want to read that wikipedia page more carefully than a quick C-f; that guy is a big fan of Hitler and hating jews. The same synthesis of actions and statements that vindicate Zelensky will plainly damn Unz.

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