Yep, stupid.

Nope. It was a Confederate battle flag with the stars and gold fringe.

Very similar. I got a picture of it somewhere on my phone.

Fuck I found it! It was in my ARFCOM file on photobucket

Meh, I get that most of the Nazi regalia is about trying to look like edglords and convey a honeybadger "We hate you so much we'll wear Swastika shit!"

And it goes deeper than that apparently, the CEO of Wagner has all those SS runes and rank diamonds tattooed on him. If more for the self-important "I'm just that much of a bad-ass!"-factor than the anti-Russian ones, I guess.

For Ukrainians, life under Stalin, the Holodomor and attempts to depopulate Ukraine and move ethnic Russians in was a big deal, and was bad enough that it made throwing in with the Nazis/Germans as operation Barbarosa rolled through seemed like a tenable option.

And it all plays into the existence of the Soviet Union, and then later on the Warsaw Pact, as being as much, if not more, about building an empire to surround Russia with vassal buffer states, as it was "Let's spread communism."

And then I'm sure that late-night door knocking by the NKVD then KGB, and folks vanishing for years after WWII, kept those feelings going.

And the whole thing in terms of using "Nazi" plays differently in the region. It's a different set of of shorthand, code-words, and dog-whisles used to convey ideas over there.

Putin's own use of "De-Nazification" as part of his pretext over Ukraine is itself loaded in ways for a Russian audience that aren't truly congruent to Western notions of what's meant when the Nazis are invoked. We think "Holocaust" and "Skinheads" etc. organized militant evil.

For Russians, to a degree, it's more like when militant Islam/Islamofascists/terrorists talk about "The Great Satan." And it ties together a whole bunch of ideas about Western Civilization vs. Islam, stuff the British Empire did over a century ago, the Crusades,  even crap going back to the Roman Empire, for which they merely view the US as the new point of the spear for.

"Nazis" is more of the default bogeyman, shorthand for "existential threat to Russia." in a sense.

Among other things, Putin's use of Nazis plays on established Soviet propaganda that the US, NATO, and the West were intent on goals or aims that started with the Nazis and was just a continuatoon of that struggle.

And there's a ton of earlier history and baggage that kind of circles around long-standing butthurt, that in a broad sense, stems from Russians being nominally Caucasians of a Judeo-Christian background, weren't "in the club" as compared to Western Europe, in terms of the broader strokes of history.

But optics are optics, and we live in a global information economy. And nobody does nuance or context worth a shit.

I'm in the "Guys... really?" camp over it. But it is what it is.

Honestly, the use of Nazi imagery and Hitler in SE Asia and Japan is both more interesting and disturbing. Partly because it's just ignorance and the place "Nazis" occupy in their worldview is different, it all being on the other side of the planet from them.

In recent history, Japan is the bogeyman.

And in the case of Japan, widespread ignorance of Imperial Japan's character and behavior in WWII and that it represents an "evil" for which they were just as culpable. If actually not more so. The Nazis were somewhat an insurgent political movement that navigated its way to power, whereas Japan's actions in WWII and their military expansion before its start, was just the inherent normal functioning of their culture and society.

"Kid glove treatment" to ensure a peaceful occupation meant they didn't have their noses rubbed in it like Germany did. And to this day, hard-line traditionalist factions can cause chaos at any time they wish. They're a minority in the Japanese Parliament, but big enough to scuttle any ruling majority coalition should substantial acknowledgement of WWII Japanese atrocities be discussed or taught in schools.

As such, the average Japanese person has at best,
only vague notions that WWII was some sort of "generic war" over geopolitical friction. And that they have something of a special status as the only victims of nuclear weapons dropped in anger.

It's not in their collective consciousness that Japan was a fanatical ethnocentric military expansionist nation. And that they might have done things, and conducted those things in such a manner that they "earned" Fat Man and Little Boy, isn't really a concept.