It is. Its important to remember that pro russian posters and other posters from authoritarian countries are already here to muddy the waters. Propaganda is the name of the game and these sorts of talking points are their main techniques to derail a conversation.

See, the problem isn't the authoritarian government, its racist westerners who just hate anyone. This way they expect you to be tolerant of their actions, while their actions are totally intolerant of others. Its their ide of a moral gotcha.

As far as I know that is correct. I personally don't like because it's dehumanizing them when we don't have to.

If we were in combat and actually needed to shoot at them and needed to dehhumanize them for our own psychological health that would be one thing. But we are all probably safe sitting on the toilet, so we probably shouldn't need to resort to it.

I think it also implies guilt of all Russian soldiers. They are deserving of all protections under international law, mainly getting shot at on the battlefield and a dignified confinement when they surrender or are incapacitated, until proven otherwise. And if they did something horrifying enough to be called an orc, they should probably be hanged, after trial, and not even dignified with discussion.

its important to note that the jews were a scapegoat and weren’t actively trying to invade Germany and eliminate their population.

Yeah, it's also important to note that "the Russian people" as a whole aren't trying to invade Ukraine and eliminate Ukrainians either..

It comes from the Lord of the Rings, that’s just someone using it.

Obfuscatory. The reason people rallied around that specific term can clearly be traced back to Azovites using it.

I don’t think it has anything specifically to do with Muslims.

With the Azovites, it certainly did. Obviously most Russians are not Muslim (nor are they Chechen), so Reddit's reinterpretation of the term is not identical.

It mostly spread as use for Russian soldiers that were just rampaging around

People tend not to qualify it as "just for soldiers" except when doing apologetics

comparing your enemies to characters in a fantasy novel isn’t exactly the worst slur in the world.

I've seen them called Death Eaters and, aside from "read another book" and some other ancillary issues, I think your statement applies well to giving the Russian military such a label.

That's because the Death Eaters are an organization, not a race. You opt-in to being a Death Eater, you can't opt-in or -out of being an orc. Flattening it to "comparing them to characters" is completely flattening the issue of racism.

Of course, the Azovites are viciously racist and Redditors are no stranger to basically every type of xenophobia imaginable, so I think the burden of proof here would be on you to demonstrate that this is an exception to the general trend of racism both Reddit and the Ukrainian military/paramilitary, who can only be dissuaded through great effort from dropping even a fragment of their Nazi iconography.

Edit: I should say that I'm speaking in terms of epistemology and counterargument. I'd much rather you just acknowledge the obvious truth and move on rather than try further to contort the evidence to make Redditors not racist. Some arguments are fun, but this one is tedious.

im not sure you can call krout racist