⚡️Medvedev’s Entartet “Nazi medal” for Himself.
Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, is gloating that Poland’s new president has stripped President Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle.
“Now there’s more room on his green sweatshirt,” he sneers, “for Hitler’s Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves.”
He calls the elected leader of a country his own inadequate forces unlawfully invaded a “Nazi-worshipping Kiev degenerate,” a “Banderite-in-chief.”
Start with the one word he cannot take back.
“Degenerate” is not an insult he reached for at random.
It is entartet, the exact word Hitler’s regime stamped on the art it burned and the people it destroyed.
So watch what has just happened: a man speaking literal Nazi vocabulary, in the very act of calling someone else a Nazi.
That is the whole trick, folded into a single word, and it has a name. Accusation in a Mirror: you charge your victim with precisely the crime you are committing. It is the oldest sound in the run-up to every genocide.
The Nazis made it against the Jews. Hutu Power Radio made it against the Tutsis. Russia makes it against Ukraine, while Russia is the one bombing the maternity wards and shipping the children east.
The “green sweatshirt Iron Cross” is a smear that died years ago. The cross on Zelenskyy’s shirt is the badge of Ukraine’s armed forces, worn since 2009. Full Fact checked it. AFP checked it. Timothy Snyder, who has spent his life inside exactly this history, said it plainly: it is not an Iron Cross of any kind. Medvedev knows.
He is not informing anyone.
He is feeding a Bogeyman.
And the Bogeyman dies the moment you look at the actual man. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish. He had relatives murdered in the Holocaust.
He is the elected president of the country Russia invaded. The fairy tale of “Nazi Ukraine” needs you never to picture that person, because the person does not fit the story. Specificity is the one thing these tales cannot survive.
There is a real wound underneath the news, and it deserves better than this tweet. Poland’s grief over the Volhynia massacres is genuine, and a serious thing. But Ukraine’s own foreign minister said the quiet part out loud: stripping the medal is a mistake “from which only Moscow benefits.”
That is what Medvedev’s post is for. Not Poland’s memory. Moscow’s wedge, driven between two friends.
The post-war world has a name for dehumanising a people to license what comes next. The tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia called it persecution, a crime against humanity. Šešelj. Nahimana.
The Genocide Convention calls the incitement itself a crime. Medvedev trained as a lawyer. He knows exactly where that line runs, and he is standing on the wrong side of it on purpose.
So do not argue with the medal. Do not repost the sneer. Just name what it is.
It’s a troll. And the man who typed “degenerate” is the only Nazi in the sentence.
Podcast | The Lie as Binding Agent, the Pickup Artist, Their God Is War, and the Vanished Koshchei
I am going to continue today the series on The Beast from the Abyss, this brilliant book by a renowned Ukrainian historian. Last week, you may remember, I got to her chapter on the deep folk — which is the moniker that the Russist former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, used. He used this term, deep folk, to describe, highly ironically, the Russians, and Larysa is basically parsing this troll into its parts and making a play on the words.