Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Imperative

Exclusive: The mainstream U.S. news media is flooding the American people with one-sided propaganda on Ukraine, rewriting the narrative to leave out the key role of neo-Nazis and insisting on a “group think” that exceeds even the misguided consensus on Iraq’s WMD, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

After the Feb. 22 coup in Ukraine spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias European and U.S. diplomats pushed for a quick formation of a new government out of fear that otherwise these far-right ultra-nationalists would be left in total control, one of those diplomats told me.

The comment again underscores the inconvenient truth of what happened in Ukraine: neo-Nazis were at the forefront of the Kiev coup that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych, a reality that the U.S. government and news media have been relentlessly trying to cover up.

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof.

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof.

Although real-time reports from the scene in February chronicled armed and organized militias associated with the neo-Nazi Svoboda party and the Right Sektor attacking police with firebombs and light weapons, that information soon became a threat to the Western propaganda theme that Yanukovych fled simply because peaceful protesters occupied the Maidan square.

So, the more troubling history soon disappeared into the memory hole, dismissed as “Russian propaganda.” The focus of the biased U.S. news media is now on the anti-Kiev militants in the Russian-ethnic areas of eastern Ukraine who have rejected the authority of the coup regime and are insisting on regional autonomy.

The new drumbeat in the U.S. press is that those militants must disarm in line with last week’s agreement in Geneva involving the United States, European Union, Russia and the “transitional” Ukrainian government. As for those inconvenient neo-Nazi militias, they have been incorporated into a paramilitary “National Guard” and deployed to the east to conduct an “anti-terrorist” campaign against the eastern Ukrainian protesters, ethnic Russians whom the neo-Nazis despise.

The new role for the neo-Nazi militias was announced last week by Andriy Parubiy, head of the Ukrainian National Security Council, who declared on Twitter, “Reserve unit of National Guard formed #Maidan Self-defense volunteers was sent to the front line this morning.”

Parubiy is himself a well-known neo-Nazi, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991. The party blended radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Parubiy also formed a paramilitary spinoff, the Patriots of Ukraine, and defended the awarding of the title, “Hero of Ukraine,” to World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose own paramilitary forces exterminated thousands of Jews and Poles in pursuit of a racially pure Ukraine.

In the hasty structuring of the post-coup government in February, part of the compromise with the ascendant neo-Nazis was to give them control of four ministries, including Parubiy in the key position heading national security. To give him loyal and motivated forces to strike at the pro-Russian east, he incorporated many of the storm troopers from his Maidan force into the National Guard.

Leaving Out the History

Yet, how is Parubiy described in the U.S. mainstream media? On Sunday, Washington Post correspondent Kathy Lally, who has been one of the most biased journalists covering the Ukraine crisis, wrote a front-page article about the state of Ukraine’s military in which she relied on Parubiy for a key part of her story.

Lally simply identified him as “secretary of the National Security and Defense Council,” without explaining Parubiy’s extreme-right politics or the illegitimate way that he got his position. Lally then let him assert that Russia is “intent on making the government fail and seeing it replaced by one deferring to Moscow.”

But Lally is far from alone in representing the deeply prejudiced “group think” of the U.S. press corps regarding Ukraine. Often the only way that American readers can get any sense of the key role played by the neo-Nazis is in the repeated denials of that reality.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof returned to his family’s ancestral home in Karapchiv in western Ukraine to interview some of its residents and present their views as the true voice of the people.

“To understand why Ukrainians are risking war with Russia to try to pluck themselves from Moscow’s grip, I came to this village where my father grew up,” he wrote. “Even here in the village, Ukrainians watch Russian television and loathe the propaganda portraying them as neo-Nazi thugs rampaging against Russian speakers.

“’If you listen to them, we all carry assault rifles; we’re all beating people,’ Ilya Moskal, a history teacher, said contemptuously.”

Of course, Moskal’s description is hyperbole. The Russian media is not making those claims, although it has noted, for instance, that the neo-Nazi militias now reformulated as “National Guard” units did kill three eastern Ukrainian protesters last week, deaths announced by the Kiev government.

But Kristof doesn’t stop there in his nostalgia for his father’s old home town, which he depicts as a noble place where everyone loves the music of Taylor Swift and dreams of their place in a prosperous Europe if only President Barack Obama would send them weapons to kill Russians (or go “bear-hunting” as Kristof cutely wrote in a previous column).

On Sunday, Kristof wrote: “For people with such fondness for American culture, there is disappointment that President Obama hasn’t embraced Ukraine more firmly.”

Source of Ukraine’s Ills

Kristof also blamed Ukraine’s economic woes on Russia when a more honest explanation would be that the free-market “shock therapy” that Western advisers imposed on Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 allowed a dozen or so well-connected “oligarchs” to plunder the country’s wealth and amass near total economic and political control. They are the principal reason for Ukraine’s pervasive corruption and poverty.

But Kristof appears to be readying his New York Times readers to support the violent crushing of the popular resistance in eastern Ukraine, which was President Yanukovych’s political base. Kristof is a renowned R2Per, urging a “responsibility to protect” civilians from government force, but his sense of responsibility appears to be highly selective, fitting with his favored geopolitical priorities.

More broadly, the U.S. news media’s hiding of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis has become a near obsession, indeed, done in greater uniformity across the mainstream press and even much of the blogosphere than the misguided consensus on Iraq’s WMD in 2002-03 that led to the disastrous Iraq War.

From a purely news point of view, you might think the inclusion of Nazis in a European government for the first time since World War II might make for a good story. But that would go against the preferred American narrative that the protesters in the Maidan were peaceful and idealistic and that they were set upon by the evil Yanukovych who simply fled because he could no longer withstand their moral pressure.

Left out of this narrative is that Yanukovych signed an agreement on Feb. 21 brokered by three European governments in which he agreed to reduce his powers, accept early elections to vote him out of office, and most fatefully pull back the police. It was then that the neo-Nazi militias, from western Ukraine and organized in 100-man brigades, attacked the few remaining police, seized government buildings and sent Yanukovych and many of his officials fleeing for their lives.

As I was told by one of the Western diplomats involved in the aftermath, there was an urgency to cobble together some interim government because otherwise the neo-Nazis would have been left in total control. He said the various parties in parliament moved expeditiously to impeach Yanukovych (though constitutional procedures weren’t followed) and replace him with an interim president and government.

To placate the neo-Nazis, they were given control of four ministries, including the appointment of Parubiy to handle national security and make the neo-Nazi militias part of the official government security apparatus as National Guard.

But that history has been whisked away from information that the mainstream U.S. news media makes available to the American people, all the better to lead them into a new Cold War. [For more on this U.S. propaganda, see “Ukraine. Through the US ‘Looking Glass.’”]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

14 comments for “Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Imperative

  1. Anton from Russia
    April 23, 2014 at 04:43

    I live in Russia but when I see similar as:
    Torch procession in Kiev 01.01.14 when thousands people go in the center of the capital and shout “Bander, Shukhevich – heroes of Ukraine” though these characters were trained and were at war on the party of fascists.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=2QsVVkA4Ywo

    Or others again procession 26.02.14, again in Kiev. Here already openly shout “Russians at knifes”.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch? feature=player_embedded&v=7lKa6AXGtIQ
    It is terribly to me to become that Russians living in Ukraine feel… it is difficult to me to present.
    And, these events occur before about the Crimea started talking.

  2. rick sterling
    April 22, 2014 at 20:35

    The myth about non-violent protesters has been used with similar or even greater success regarding Syria. In reality there was a third force shooting both street protesters AND police/soldiers to stir and help propel the conflict.

  3. frank anderson
    April 22, 2014 at 17:53

    Neo-fascism is not meant to be spoken about in this chapter of history, it rings too close to home. It will be spoken of 20 years from now when central Europe, far from the din of 1945, and the subsequent oath to pacifism, and tolerance for four solid decades afterwards, reforms around old masters, and shall rival and genuinely compete against the USA. History cannot repeat itself, but it rhymes curiously well over and over again.

  4. Greg Driscoll
    April 22, 2014 at 12:43

    [email protected] – Very appropriate email address for one who has nothing really to contribute to the discussion but sleazy epithets & rancor…

  5. Bruce
    April 21, 2014 at 14:03

    To Oilybomber: Quit the War COLD, Turkey!

  6. Alex
    April 21, 2014 at 08:54

    I wonder how many people in the U.S. to read it? Why American journalists are not coming in Eastern Ukraine? Why light on one side only?

  7. April 20, 2014 at 23:31

    The main stream media’s falling in line with the conventional wisdom (aka lies) in the case of Ukraine, Iraq, etc., etc. should not be a surprise to anyone. When one connects the dots while following the money, we see that the media, to protect the bulk of their income (they are the main recipients of the billions of dollars spent in the various phoney American “democratic” election cycles that result in the selection of our Tweedledum and Tweedledee Democrats and Republicans, whose bipartisanship is securely ensconced in the realms of foreign policy and economic “laissez-faire” thus enabling massive fraud and fiduciary irresponsibilty by banks and other corporations here and around the world, and our government’s daily violation of our own national laws and international treaties) – they get along by going along as do the politicians themselves. One doesn’t get one’s bread by biting the hand that feeds… Journalism in the mainstream media nowadays is purely theoretical and a praiseworthy memory of the past – it now consists only in literally “doing the right thing” – right-wing, that is. Almost all of these overpaid so-called “journalists” are products of the same upper-class milieu (private schools, ivy league universities, social clubs, etc.) as the so-called “creme de la creme” of our corporate and so-called political leadership. It’s not only cream that floats to the top…

  8. John
    April 20, 2014 at 20:35

    It is remarkable that the media completely dropped the embarrassing neo-Nazi connection to shore up the illusion of a popular demand for democracy. They also stopped mentioning that Yanukovich was elected, and the US proxies were not. Their denial that the same militias attacked rebels in the East, and their denial of the obviously-contrived leaflet incident, simply shows the gross hypocrisy of US foreign policy and the utter dishonesty of the government toward its own people. Obviously the dark agencies of the US planned those Easter operations in coordination with the Kiev claim that they would not attack that day.

    One must wonder whether there is any independence of the US mass media from its dark agencies, or whether they simply share funding by the oligarchy. It took them a few days to get with the rightwing party line, which they did without a shred of evidence or argument, so perhaps their strings had to be pulled after the operation began.

  9. Jay
    April 20, 2014 at 20:17

    Sad that Kristof is allowed to pretend to have vehemently opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Here he’s just the opposite in Aug 2002:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/27/opinion/wimps-on-iraq.html

    These April 2014 columns look just as stupid.

  10. lumpentroll
    April 20, 2014 at 19:04

    Great work as usual.

    The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onward is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.

    George Orwell — Arthur Koestler

    http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/koestler/english/e_ak

  11. Michael Skoruppa
    April 20, 2014 at 12:45

    Dear editor,
    what is most disturbing are the crimes of the neo-Nazis in Kiev right from the beginning: http://hinter-der-fichte.blogspot.de/2014/04/kiew-namenlose-graber-und-ein.html. It’s in German, unfortunately.
    Yours sincerely
    Michael Skoruppa

    • N Dalton
      April 20, 2014 at 19:41

      Most disturbing > such moronic stories
      ` It`s in German,unfortunately ` – BS.
      People must be aware of the many obvious signs and revelations to see the evil Zionist -handwriting here.

      Kerry, alongside Jewish bitch ” F*ck the EU ” – Victoria Nuland at the press conference, had to condemn the “grotesque flyers that have no place in our 21st century,” as in forcing Jews in eastern Ukraine to ‘register’. Translation: the State Department accepted what bears all the hallmarks of a CIA-style psy-op as a true story. A not-so-subtle push to imprint in misinformed layers of public opinion the toxic tie-up between Russophobia and anti-Semitism,which has been used repeatedly by the Zionist-controlled-MSM for years.

      Yet,no wonder ‘Russian anti-Semitism’ became a lead news story in Western corporate media all over again

  12. April 20, 2014 at 11:22

    As for rescuing Nigerian schoolgirls, don’t ask.

    • Jay
      April 20, 2014 at 20:23

      Kristof has been a big supporter of sweatshops as a way out of poverty in what’s called the Third World. (He shut up after the factory collapsed in Bangladesh an kill 1100 people.)

      But the connection he never made: In abusive factory jobs, young people, mostly girls, are regularly sexually abused and or outright enslaved. So effectively Kristof is real guilty of supporting situations that lead directly to human trafficking for sexual purposes.

      He’s either not very bright, or takes his readers for fools. Neither is a good position to be in.

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