Before the fascists organised in Ukraine they were football hooligans and gangs. They went to games and got in fights, spread reactionary hate, etc etc. Nothing too major just vandals and thugs.
Then they started doing this kind of training, which functioned to organise them. They would engage in local terror like attacking russian businesses or anything they could get away with due to saying something provocative, (compare this with attacks on libraries and story hour). They then later became the basis of the forces that pulled off the 2014 coup. They were maybe 2-4% of the total protest but were 90% of its effectiveness, they functioned as an organised vanguard that the rest of protesters would follow. Combine that with millions and millions of dollars on tv channels to push people to the streets and then millions and millions of dollars poured into the protests to make them "fun" with music and food provided so that people would stay there long enough to participate repeatedly. Pulling off this kind of "revolution" is a matter of having enough of an organised vanguard to direct things when necessary and having the ability to get a very large number of people to congregate somewhere important and keep them there. That's what they did and it succeeded.
After the coup the Azov commanders that got into power in the Ministry of Internal Affairs like Arsen Avakov then built the Special Tasks Patrol Police out of these various organised and trained fascist groups up and down the country. Explicitly institutionalising all of these small freikorps groups as a police force in and of themselves, they had already been acting as police during their pre-2014 terror campaigns against businesses and the like, just not the kind of "police" a liberal would identify, a fascist police and terror force.
The same tactics are occurring. The same approaches to organising are occurring.
Yes that is exactly what I'm seeing.
Before the fascists organised in Ukraine they were football hooligans and gangs. They went to games and got in fights, spread reactionary hate, etc etc. Nothing too major just vandals and thugs.
Then they started doing this kind of training, which functioned to organise them. They would engage in local terror like attacking russian businesses or anything they could get away with due to saying something provocative, (compare this with attacks on libraries and story hour). They then later became the basis of the forces that pulled off the 2014 coup. They were maybe 2-4% of the total protest but were 90% of its effectiveness, they functioned as an organised vanguard that the rest of protesters would follow. Combine that with millions and millions of dollars on tv channels to push people to the streets and then millions and millions of dollars poured into the protests to make them "fun" with music and food provided so that people would stay there long enough to participate repeatedly. Pulling off this kind of "revolution" is a matter of having enough of an organised vanguard to direct things when necessary and having the ability to get a very large number of people to congregate somewhere important and keep them there. That's what they did and it succeeded.
After the coup the Azov commanders that got into power in the Ministry of Internal Affairs like Arsen Avakov then built the Special Tasks Patrol Police out of these various organised and trained fascist groups up and down the country. Explicitly institutionalising all of these small freikorps groups as a police force in and of themselves, they had already been acting as police during their pre-2014 terror campaigns against businesses and the like, just not the kind of "police" a liberal would identify, a fascist police and terror force.
The same tactics are occurring. The same approaches to organising are occurring.