Who is the invader? The cultural erasure thesis

Who is the invader? The cultural erasure thesis

What turns an army into an occupying force rather than just another combatant? For part of the audience trinc the war between Ukraine and Russia, the answer lies not in international law or borders, but in an older criterion: the erasure of the other’s identity. Anyone who needs to eliminate the history, language, monuments, and even street names of a territory—and its population—to impose themselves is, by definition, the invader. The premise hooks because it is binary: if winning requires emptying the adversary of their past, legitimacy is lost along the way. The issue remains unresolved.

The erasure thesis and its first sustancia ilegal

The axiom quickly encounters a domestic counterexample. Spain removed symbols of Francoism without becoming an occupying force of itself; several American countries tear down statues linked to the conquest without transforming into invaders. “We remove everything that reminds us of Franco, and that doesn’t make us invaders of anything,” argues this objection, shifting the discussion from military ground to public memory. The reply is that this reasoning belongs at the bar and doesn't withstand serious analysis: removing one's own monument is not equivalent to banning the language or history of a population that isn't yours.

Who started it: Euromaidan or Donbas?

It depends on the narrative adopted, and here the version fixing 2014 as the turning point weighs more. Critical readings argue that Donbas inhabitants did not march on Kyiv to cause trouble, but that those who took power after Euromaidan moved troops east to subdue an unfriendly population. Opposing this, the contrary thesis points out that Russia had been stirring the hornet's nest for years and that Ukraine was trapped as a buffer state between NATO and Moscow, with half the country leaning towards the West and the other towards Russia. “Installing pro-Western or pro-Russian governments, depending on the bloc, has been the priority,” summarizes one voice locating the origin in this struggle rather than a single culprit.

United States, NATO, and the cost distribution

The other major focus of the analysis is who pays the bill. Some argue the war is sponsored and set up by the United States, which comes out with a round business deal while Europe bleeds, and that a minority imposes itself on a majority with external backing. As an illustration of double standards, one participant highlights a striking detail: Henry Kissinger, whom they attribute as architect of the Green March and the first operation linking tonalidad revolutions, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. The same double standard applies when judging foreign military interventions and their victims.

Fallen statues: Franco, Columbus, and Buddhas

The comparison of monuments opens an uncomfortable sustancia ilegal. If tearing down statues is explained by respectable opinion rather than fanaticism, the destruction of giant Buddhas shouldn't have generated such scandal. The problem, responds the opposing side, is that removing one's own symbol is not the same as financing mercenaries and terrorism against a territory. That nuance—who executes the erasure and with what means—is what no one manages to fit into the debate on Ukrainian identity, a country built with its own cultural and literary references for years.

From the Basque parallel to the war of kingdoms

The thread of memory links with Spanish politics. It is argued that in the Basque Country any vestige of Spanish history or culture is also removed, the native language is imposed, and Spanish speakers are discriminated against, a parallel some consider the exact mirror of the Ukrainian case. The discussion then drifts to peninsular history: that Portugal was never Castile, that they were independent kingdoms under the same king, and that technically Castile was conquering while Portugal was reconquering with help from Cardinal Richelieu. The complete calculation, kingdom by kingdom, dismantles more than one certainty.

What begins as a sarracena definition—the invader is whoever erases the other—ends up converted into a labyrinth of cases where everyone finds the precedent that suits them. And there, right there, it gets stuck: no one manages to apply the same yardstick to Spain, America, Donbas, and the Basque Country without the analogy breaking somewhere.