[FOREIGN]
>> Yeah, there you have it.
Russian soldiers are now depicting their invasion in Ukraine in spiritual terms and
want to make sure their soldiers know they're fighting against gay parades.
That is what line they are trying to use to inspire their soldiers.
Don't know why that would inspire anybody, but they're using more and
more spiritual terms to phrase this, frame it as a holy war.
The officer continued
in his explanation
on why they are fighting
this battle and
why it's so important.
>> [FOREIGN].
>> Yeah, I don't know, I'm pretty sure I saw that guy at a gay bar once I was
hanging out with some friends, but I can't confirm that just think I might have.
The officers exhortation had nothing to do with territorial claims or
the supposed nazism of the ruling regime in Kiev,
both of which were the original pretext of course for
Vladimir Putin's unprovoked invasion of Russia's much smaller neighbor.
Instead, the reference to Holy War mirrored the increasingly sharp spiritual
rhetoric emanating from political and military leaders in the Kremlin
who are desperate to retain public support for the faltering war effort.
To a degree that effort has always involved some reference to
spiritual warfare, despite the fact that Russians and
Ukrainians shared deep roots in the Orthodox church.
Those ties have been downplayed as the Kremlin has rebranded
the war as an intrusion of Western values on the so called Russky mirror or
Russian world of which it sees itself as the custodian and sole legitimate
ruler to the exclusion of sovereign governments in Kiev or Minsk Belarus.
Yep, there, you have that, and there's more,
they're not fighting Christians in Ukraine, a scholar of Russian culture and
religion at Wesleyan University victorious, Malkin said,
explaining how the justification for the invasion has shifted.
Now they're fighting satanists, they're fighting the West.
Yep, that's the way they're now portraying it.
Like late last month when the Kremlin held a ceremony to mark the illegal annexation
of four Ukrainian territories, they gave them about three days notice for
the election and essentially forced them to vote for
the annexation with soldiers there to intimidate everyone.
The territories that they annexed against those territories will
the Donetsk people's Republic, the Lugansk people's Republic, the zap or
I the Zappa the, sorry, the Zappa Rosie region and the Kherson region.
And, let me read you this next slide from Vladimir Putin himself,
I want the Kiev authorities and their true handlers in the west to hear me now, and
I want everyone to remember this, the people living in Lugansk and
Donetsk in Kherson and Zappa Rosie have become our citizens forever.
>> Okay, so, Ben, I am deeply concerned.
So I'll tell you why, because they are okay, so there's one way to look at this.
Well, they tried the thing about, nationalism, and so it's okay,
the Russians really, and they're gonna, when we go in there,
just gonna surrender to us anyway,
they're gonna be happy that we exactly like the old dick Cheney line, right?
And that didn't work, and they got slaughtered and
apparently 80,000 casualties so far for the Russians.
And so now they're switching to religion anyway,
I think they're just changing strategy and it's even easier way to rile people up.
They're not just against Russia or there with Russia or whatever, this is,
like, they're against your God, let's go kill them, right?
Yeah, that's part of it.
But guys, there's another much more sinister part to this.
So when they call them satanists and they say they're not like our religion,
wait a minute, but they're your exact religion,
they're orthodox Russian, just like you guys are.
So what are you referring to?
Zelensky is Jewish, and that word satanist
is is another old school anti Semitic trope.
And so not a trope, but like a slur.
And so and that's the kind of language that the radical,
right in America is using to and so now there's this bridge and the and
the story that that we're quoting from here does a great job of pointing out
the incredible similarities, the frightening similarities between
the right wing in America and the right wing in Russia.
And but get a load of that irony in the beginning, they go,
we we gotta go do this because they're Nazis now, they're like, okay,
no, never mind, we gotta go do this because we're Nazis, yep.
>> And you would think somebody who's against Nazis wouldn't,
let's say, be influenced by Adolf Hitler.
But Putin later in this same ceremony described the move as a quote,
glorious spiritual choice, referring to the nationalist philosopher and
religious scholar Ivan Ilyin, who was also get this an early admirer of Adolf Hitler.
In that same speech, put quoted from the sermon on the Mount and inveighed against
non traditional families in a seeming attempt to incite homophobia and
provide a cultural justification for the war, quote.
And as Jinks said, look at the similarities to right wing talk,
the overthrow of faith and traditional values amount to quote pure satanism,
the Russian president warned, So it's no longer deny notification.
Now, they're inspired by people who've been inspired by the thinking of Hitler
and it's now getting Satan out of people.
Desatanization, you think desatanizaion of water is hard,
trying to get satan out of somebody.
It's very challenging, but they're gonna try.
>> Yeah, look, I don't want to get too much of a fundamentalist religion,
people get offended etcetera, right?
But there's no Satan and but if you get people to believe that there is a Satan
that, is attached to certain people, then you'll get him to believe anything,
right, and how do you know, who has Satan in them?
They're making it up.
So, so yeah, that guy has it, Never mind, never mind that, that guy has it.
How the hell would you know?
It's that's why you can't believe in this stuff.
This is not so stuff.
And then what do they always do it to end?
We found Satan, it's a Jewish guy.
Goddammit.
They do that every time.
>> [LAUGH] Yeah. >> Right.
>> Yeah.
>> And why?
Because it's convenient because you can't, it's hard to say it's an orthodox
Christians because their orthodox christian, so they're stuck, right?
Normally it's easy to rile people up based on religion.
So there are different religion, right? So they're gonna pick the different
religion because the Zelensky is Jewish.
It's this is a disaster guys, it's worldwide now, it really is.
>> And the Russian people aren't really buying,
you're saying they can't believe this stuff and they're not fully believing it.
Since the start of the war, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled to
the west and elsewhere, apparently uninterested in sharing the Kremlin's
vision of a sanctified Russia engaged in endless spiritual warfare.
Putin's recent mobilization order appears only to have accelerated the flight
abroad.
In a cruel irony, many of the soldiers now fighting for
Russia come from the nation's poor, Islamic regions and
shared little of the Kremlin spiritual or geopolitical aspirations.
This tension has surfaced in the form of anti draft protests in
provinces like Chechnya and Dagestan and in a mass shooting at
a Russian military base in Belgorod near the border with Ukraine.
Even the Pope got in recently and pleaded with Putin and
the Ukrainian president Zelensky to bring an end to the conflict Muslim and
Jewish leaders have echoed similar calls.
So why is the war in Ukraine all of a sudden becoming holy?
For exactly that reason.
It's all they've got.
That's all they've got left as a desperate ploy to try to convince their
people to fight a little extra hard to not flee the country from a purposeless war.
Let's go to the next slide.
Wars tend to get more holy as they go on and
leaders have to justify the high costs.
The cost have certainly been rising for Putin.
What was supposed to be a quick invasion has turned into a grinding war that has
seen the Ukrainian armed forces put up a ferocious defense of their homeland with
military support of course from Western allies.
As many as 80,000 Russian soldiers have been either killed or
injured like junk mentioned in this eight month long war.
So they're grasping at straws, but.
>> Yeah, so the Russians that are fleeing is both good news and bad news.
I'm gonna explain why in a second, but one of our members on Twitch Spartan Dragon 84
said so the gaze made Putin invade Ukraine.
Like how dumb do they think their soldiers are so?
Well you're writing you're wrong.
So why do I say that some of them of course aren't buying it,
Especially the Muslim soldiers.
And so there's a part of the story where they explain, Lieutenant,
from the the Russian army comes in and they're using a lot of folks from
Chechnya and other places, as has been explained to you.
And remember they had conquered them earlier when the soviet union broke apart,
the Chechens rebelled.
And that was so close to within Russia from their perspective, Putin and
Russia's perspective that they came in and crushed the Chechnyans, right?
And so now they have their puppets installed there and etcetera.
So they're using it since that's a poor area,
they're using more of their soldiers.
So this Lieutenant comes in and says, okay, there,
we are doing this, it's a holy war.
And then he went insulted Allah, that was a mistake.
The Muslim soldiers killed him and the 10 guys with them.
So you've got this kind of internal dissension going on within the Russian
troops too.
So that's the good news because in this case there the imperial power invading
a nearby country and killing all these civilians, etc, right?
But the bad news about the people fleeing is remember Russia is a lot
like America and that it's a split country and propaganda does work.
It doesn't work on everybody.
That's why that Lieutenant is dead.
[LAUGH] That's why, it sounds like hundreds of thousands of men are fleeing
Russia, but it does work on a lot of people.
And then when the good guys flee, then you have a higher percentage of the right wing
left and the people who believe the propaganda,
the people who want to fight the satanists, right?
So it makes Russia unfortunately, more and more right wing and so don't get excited.
Yeah, this is dumb, It's not gonna work.
No, it works every time.
Okay.
>> And that's why it also matters very much here, that we stand up, and
it's an enormous price tag.
And I know that's not necessarily even something we can afford.
But, you see the exact same language, the exact same thinking, and
it's a battle against the West.
Well, we are the West.
We are trying to make sure that we do not allow the same thing to happen here in
America, the ability to manipulate reality to straight up lie and use that
to oppress people to take away people's rights to invade people who are innocent.
And that's exactly the perfect analogy for what the right wing is trying to do here.
And so we have to be vigilant and stand up against this kind of manipulation and
lies wherever we find it in the world and support our allies.
>> Absolutely. And what I'm really worried about,
you said we are the ones that's true.
And when you say we it's mainly us guys, progressives, moderates, etcetera.
But the right wing is now saying, no, we're with them.
>> Right. >> And
you see it on across the nightly, you see it in so many other pieces of propaganda,
the right wing is putting out.and and there's a reason why.
And that's why I interviewed these so called right wing philosophers on
the conversation because they connected into what they call,
Steve Bannon calls One World Religion.
So it's kind of funny because they're not exactly the same religion, right?
Somewhere Evangelical in America, the others are Orthodox in Russia, and
there's a lot of different versions of Christianity, etcetera, but they're like,
no, no, no, we're all the same.
They're the people who want to go backwards, not forwards.
And by the way, I'm not saying that recently, they say it,
the main Russian philosopher Alexander Dugan, that both Bannon and
Putin believe in, he's one of Putin's closest advisers, right?
And in fact Putin's enemies blew up his car, but he wasn't in it,
his his daughter was.
So this is how close he is to Putin.
And that guy talks about going back literally to the medieval ages.
Now, of course, you can't literally go back, but he's saying as a philosophy,
we should get rid of all progress, we should destroy technology,
we should destroy anyone who isn't like us.
He very literally calls for massive violence against minorities and
make Russia Great.
>> Again, I mean, it's exactly the same philosophy take us back to the time,
were more pure and we didn't have all of these impurities affecting us and
if you don't think it affects the ideologies here in America.
Look how quickly these mega idiot trump supporters,
put on t shirts at rallies saying we'd rather be Russian than democrats.
>> Right. And
look at how folks are still defending Kanye.
And so and now the anti Semitism is raging here.
We're in dark, dark times.
And they literally think, yes, medieval times were back, right?
So it's super dangerous trend.
And everybody keeps thinking in in America in power.
Well, it can't happen here.
It can't happen again.
No, you're wrong, it can.
That's exactly what they thought on the titanic.
No, this ship can't sink.
Who cares if we run into an iceberg?
Well, the icebergs right there.
Talk of satanists in America and in Russia and about.
And what do the satanists do according to Q & A here in America,
they drink the blood of Children, blood libel.
This is all leading to the same conclusion and it's a disastrous one.
We have to rally, we have to beat these guys.
But in order to do that, we have to speak with moral clarity.
What you're hearing here on the Young Turks,
you'll never hear from Democratic leadership.
My God, even when they went after Maga, they were like Ultra Maga?
I mean, they're a tiny part of the Republican Party,
but they're kind of ultra No, you have to speak with moral clarity.
>> Extreme extremists were just trying to stop the extreme of the extreme
the cream of the crop of the extremists.
>> Yeah. And by the way, they're all fake tough
guys anyway that it's easy to say that behind your massive military machine.
That guy that we showed you the video of, he says all these things and
Ben was joking about it.
I think I saw him at a gay bar, right?
He's like I worked on religion and that, and
then he's like mama papa, I heard that part anyways.
But still this is a very bad trend and we've got to help Ukraine.
It doesn't mean you give bloated defense contractors more money.
You have to be very vigilant about how you use the money and
make sure that it actually goes to Ukraine.
And so unfortunately, that never happens in Washington.
So that's the world we live in.