To me it looks like Russia it's turning into a big North Korea.

If they disconnect from the internet they will have almost complete informational control. If they carpet bombed Kyiv few russians would know.

Not any authoritarian or totalitarian dictatorhip is fascist. Russia is getting there if they get the right energy going.

Robert Paxton (author of Anatomy of Fascism) points out that one feature of fascism is it's flexibility with doctirine and truth. It provides raw emotion and sensual experience.

>Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader's mystical union with historic destiny of his people. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one's petty concerns for the group's good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled cultural critic Walter Benjamin was first to point, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.

>Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Fascism radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification.

Paxtons short definition is pretty good:

a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Yes, this was a feature of the war in Ukraine for Putin, not a bug.

He is using China as a template and I wholly expect Russia to be remade in China's image, using the war in Ukraine and resulting Western sanctions and aid as justification for doing so.

That's what people don't seem to want to get -- Putin wins this either way. Even if he gains no territory in Ukraine after all of this, he will have still dramatically shifted the internal state of Russia toward totalitarianism, will have cemented himself as dictator for life, will have complete domination over the population in terms of information and economics and will use all of this to militarize all aspects of Russian life.

And most Russians will support all of this.

How easy would it be to associate that z logo with a "naZi" message.

Maybe people will stop supporting it so blindly

It feels like this Twitterer is trying hard to spread propaganda that a lot of Russians support Putin. Maybe I'm biased, but I'll also take his tweets with a grain of salt. I could imagine a campaign of "soft" harassment where it'd be safer to put the "Z" on your car, because to not do so means you're with the enemy.

(Remember the Dixie Chicks getting booed when they voiced opposition to the Iraq War? Oh, to the young people out there, yeah that happened: https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/10/24... )