Hacker News Reader

Comment by jevgeni | Hacker News Reader

Cool! Let's validate. Let's find a useful content page in russian and see if it works say in Tartar.

So, a guide through all the relevant administrative documents you might need. Let's click the "TAT" button to switch to the Tartar language... Oh wait, what's this? It doesn't exist? Imagine that. Another Potemkin website. The most ironic thing is that the "Report of the Tatarstan Foundation for Citizen's Right Protection" (PDF) is russian only.

Regarding your pre-edit statement about seething in anti-russian hate: if russians don't like it, they can stop invading, stealing and killing. Maybe that'll help?

View on HN

So bigotry and hatred is okay against all Russians. Got it.

Glad my country never invaded or killed anyone recently...

Any German person I spoke to has a deep feeling of responsibility for WW2. Even today, even younger generations. Believe it or not it makes the society stronger. Russia is far away from that.

Being liked is a privilege you have to earn. Thinking you are owed nuanced, friendly treatment is a bit naive after what russia has done.

You avoided my question: Is bigotry against all Russians justified?

If so, you have more in common with Azov than traditional Western values.

Some measures (like the visa ban) are justified. Telling them what you think - sure. Unjustified violence obviously not.

My country (USA) has killed more people than Russia in invasions in the last 30 years.

As a US citizen by birth (zero control), should my visa/passport also be banned?

And how is visa ban justified? Just curious how you would manage to avoid the words 'collective guilt'.

1. Why would I need to avoid it?

2. Visas are not a right, but a privilege.

3. Skripal case.

"Why would I need to avoid it?"

Because it's a slippery slope to collective punishment.

"This is a telling slip; Lewy is talking about ‘the Armenians’ as if the defenceless women and children who comprised the deportation columns were vicariously responsible for Armenian rebels in other parts of the country. The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking. It fails to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, on which international humanitarian law has been insisting for over a hundred years now." [0]

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

Life is a slippery slope towards death.

Collective responsibility seems to have worked for post-WW2 Germany though. And made the society as a whole stronger.

Denying visas is not "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants". It is denying a privilege that the russian government has messed up for their own citizens. EU or USA don't owe you anything. The russian government does.

Personally, I have zero interest in letting someone into my country for them later to claim that learning my language is "nazism".

Please don't misinterpret my words.

You asked what's wrong with 'collective guilt' and I answered that using this justification is the slippery slope towards "collective punishment" that includes "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants". I never said that denying visas is "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants".

But I can give you an example: I've seen many times the calls to stop the export of medicaments to Russia thus killing or disabling most vulnerable civilians [0].

[0] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/970136

You literally set the subject:

> And how is visa ban justified?

You didn't quote my comment fully and left out "Just curious how you would manage to avoid the words 'collective guilt'."

That was dishonest.

Communicate better.

To reitterate:

> Denying visas is not "failing to recognize between combatants and non-combatants". It is denying a privilege that the russian government has messed up for their own citizens. EU or USA don't owe you anything. The russian government does.

Again a strawman.

I'm not interested in talking about collective guilt until you acknowledge how it impacted Germany. Everything else is just you whining about loosing your privilege.

It 'reeducated' Germans in profound way, but before that it led to a lot of war crimes towards civilian German population.

Now, where is collective Ukrainian guilt for the genocide of Poles and Jews during WW2 on part of Ukrainian Insurgent Army? Looks like it's absent, Ukrainian ambassador to Germany compared Bandera with Robin Hood to the disgust of Germans, Poles and Jews. [0]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-07/stepan...

Really? Which war crimes and which war?

Oh look, a (presumably) russian lecturing me about my country’s history with an OPINION piece, while simultaneously knowing dick-didly about it.

Receipts:

https://m.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/Documents/SpeechPdf/Por...

https://www.rferl.org/a/1068362.html

I gave you this link as a source for the statement of the Ukrainian envoy in Germany about Bandera being like Robin Hood.

Perhaps, you will like Israeli [0] and German [1] news more.

"The statement made by the Ukrainian ambassador is a distortion of the historical facts, belittles the Holocaust and is an insult to those who were murdered by Bandera and his people," the Israeli embassy said.

Polish deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz wrote on a local online platform that "such an opinion and such words are absolutely unacceptable."

And if you want historical information about Ukrainian Insurgent Army, I gave you wikipedia link in another comment here.

[0] https://www.israelnews.net/news/272606794/ukrainian-envoy-li...

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/ukraines-envoy-to-germany-irks-israeli...

Wait, so you're just going to ignore each point of mine every time I give you evidence and switch to something else? Because right now it looks to me like you're saying "Ignore what you know, pay attention only to the articles I cherry pick for you".

Kind of like calling Bandera's collaboration with the Abwehr "nazism", but pretending that it wasn't nazism or even nazi-collaboration, when Stalin signed a pact with Hitler to divide Europe and conducted joint military invasion of Poland in full knowledge of what will happen to the Jewish population there...

No visas until you guys work on your own self-awareness! :D

P.S. Just to make it a bit easier for you, because I suspect The Cult of the 9th Of May is interfering here, but Ukrainians understand that history is not a Marvel movie - heroes can be flawed to say the least. Just because OUN/UPAs actions were criminal against Poles and Jews doesn't negate the fact that their fight against the Nazis and russians were heroic. THAT'S HOW BAD YOU GUYS WERE.

"you're just going to ignore each point of mine every time I give you evidence and switch to something else"

Quite the opposite, I keep the conversation on track and ignore your sealioning [0]. You can't possibly be ignorant about the fate of German civilians when war moved to German territory. Especially about 'which war' was it.

"their fight against the Nazis ... were heroic"

OUN/UPA didn't really fight Germany. [1]

"Just because OUN/UPAs actions were criminal against Poles and Jews"

What were you saying about 'ethno-fascist roots'?

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_Ukrainian_Nati...

I'll ask again, my country (USA) has killed millions of innocent people since 1991. If we're keeping tally, that's a whole lot more than the modern Russian state in the same time period.

Should Americans (including me) collectively be punished for this (of those of us like me who were actively against it)?

Do you feel entitled to a comfy holiday in Kabul?

Taliban was at war with the US.

Is the EU at war with Russia? Maybe you should stop buying Russian oil and gas right now? Trading with the enemy, you know. Financing Putin's government.

Don't the russians claim they are at war with whole of NATO? And by the way, thank you for this push, now we'll finally ween Germany of its russian gas dependency.

You mean Putin and his propagandists? 146 millions of Russians can't claim anything with single voice.

You are doing exactly what the genocide scholar I quoted warned about.

Then sort it out. Telling you guys to sort your country out is not "genocide".

Again a strawman.

That's what I was talking about from the beginning. If you were talking about something else, that's on you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com