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After spending months burying ourselves in news articles, social media posts, obscure websites and research papers, we discovered that when it comes to the Far-Right, Neo-Nazis and Neo-Fascists in the Ukraine conflict, we’re facing a tangled web: Political groups, military and paramilitary formations, activists and government bodies all disturbingly interlinked, and we documented as much of this as we could.
In order to keep track of the various groups, individuals and their affiliations, we needed something that would help us catalogue this information in a non linear fashion and that would act as a visual aid when exploring, adding to and revisiting this web; There was only one program out there that we thought was perfect for this application, and which would allow us to share our findings in various ways, that program is Obsidian.md, the same program we used to create this article!
Obsidian is one of many note taking applications, however it stands out from the crowd for it’s main graphical feature which isn’t just for show - a neural web which represents “an artificial brain”, with every note being represented as a “neuron” or point in the graph, and with these neurons being interconnectable in any way one could imagine. With more connections, a neuron increases in size and related notes cluster around, giving us an easily accessible overview over a mess of organisations and names we stumbled across.
Key:
- Red = Russian/Pro-Russian
- Blue = Ukrainian/Pro-Ukrainian
- Yellow = Foreign (Non-Russian/Non-Ukrainian/Non-Aligned)
- Grey = Navigation Pages and Documents
Each one of these dots is a piece of the puzzle, a page documenting an individual, a political party or a military unit connected to the far-right, Neo-Nazis or Neo-Fascists in the Ukraine conflict, and the state institutions these groups have connected themselves to.
The repository is a resource we’ve made publicly available1, so feel free to read through it for yourself if you’d like to know more about our work, but we’ll talk you through some of it here to show you what we think the situation is with this issue, and what we think needs to be done about it.
First, let’s talk about terms, when we’re talking about a “far-right” problem we need to be clear about what we think the “far-right” actually is:
We’re not talking about your average right winger, we’re not talking about people who have conservative values, people who consider themselves “patriots”, people who follow pseudo universities or complain about “cancel culture” and “social justice warriors”.
No, when we talk about the far-right, we’re talking about genuine, literal Neo-Nazis and Neo-Fascists, and their offspring groups, organisations defined by a cocktail of toxic ideals ranging from ethno-nationalism to social darwinism to totalitarianism, these are the descendents of Italian Fascism and German Nazism, the products of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
These people believe in throwing democracy into the trash, commemorating war criminals and bringing their legacy back into the modern world, and many of them would enjoy throwing more liberal minded people and those of “undesirable” races into concentration camps, just like the old times of the 1930s.
For a more detailed dissection, our Obsidian vault includes a dedicated Definitions page getting into all the nitty gritty of these fringe worldviews.
Next Subchapter → 4.2 Introducing Azov
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Footnotes
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Start viewing the Far-Right repo via this link! 000. INDEX ↩