Exclusive: Throughout the Ukraine crisis, the U.S. State Department and mainstream media have downplayed the role of neo-Nazis in the U.S.-backed Kiev regime, an inconvenient truth that is surfacing again as right-wing storm troopers fly neo-Nazi banners as they attack in the east, Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
The New York Times reported almost in passing on Sunday that the Ukrainian government’s offensive against ethnic Russian rebels in the east has unleashed far-right paramilitary militias that have even raised a neo-Nazi banner over the conquered town of Marinka, just west of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk.
That might seem like a big story a U.S.-backed military operation, which has inflicted thousands of mostly civilian casualties, is being spearheaded by neo-Nazis. But the consistent pattern of the mainstream U.S. news media has been since the start of the Ukraine crisis to white-out the role of Ukraine’s brown-shirts.
Far-right militia members demonstrating outside Ukrainian parliament in Kiev. (Screen shot from RT video via YouTube video)
Only occasionally is the word “neo-Nazi” mentioned and usually in the context of dismissing this inconvenient truth as “Russian propaganda.” Yet the reality has been that neo-Nazis played a key role in the violent overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February as well as in the subsequent coup regime holding power in Kiev and now in the eastern offensive.
On Sunday, a Times article by Andrew E. Kramer mentioned the emerging neo-Nazi paramilitary role in the final three paragraphs:
“The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat.
“Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.
“In pressing their advance, the fighters took their orders from a local army commander, rather than from Kiev. In the video of the attack, no restraint was evident. Gesturing toward a suspected pro-Russian position, one soldier screamed, ‘The bastards are right there!’ Then he opened fire.”
In other words, the neo-Nazi militias that surged to the front of anti-Yanukovych protests last February have now been organized as shock troops dispatched to kill ethnic Russians in the east and they are operating so openly that they hoist a Swastika-like neo-Nazi flag over one conquered village with a population of about 10,000.
Burying this information at the end of a long article is also typical of how the Times and other U.S. mainstream news outlets have dealt with the neo-Nazi problem in the past. When the reality gets mentioned, it usually requires a reader knowing much about Ukraine’s history and reading between the lines of a U.S. news account.
For instance, last April 6, the New York Times published a human-interest profile of a Ukrainian nationalist named Yuri Marchuk who was wounded in the uprising against Yanukovych in February. If you read deep into the story, you learn that Marchuk was a leader of the right-wing Svoboda from Lviv, which if you did your own research you would discover is a neo-Nazi stronghold where Ukrainian nationalists hold torch-light parades in honor of World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.
Without providing that context, the Times does mention that Lviv militants plundered a government arsenal and dispatched 600 militants a day to Kiev’s Maidan square to do battle with the police. Marchuk also described how these well-organized militants, consisting of paramilitary brigades of 100 fighters each, launched the fateful attack against the police on Feb. 20, the battle where Marchuk was wounded and where the death toll suddenly spiked into scores of protesters and about a dozen police.
Marchuk later said he visited his comrades at the occupied City Hall. What the Times doesn’t mention is that City Hall was festooned with Nazi banners and even a Confederate battle flag as a tribute to white supremacy.
The Times touched on the inconvenient neo-Nazi truth again on April 12 in an article about the mysterious death of neo-Nazi leader Oleksandr Muzychko, who was killed during a shootout with police on March 24. The article quoted a local Right Sektor leader, Roman Koval, explaining the crucial role of his organization in carrying out the anti-Yanukovych coup.
“Ukraine’s February revolution, said Mr. Koval, would never have happened without Right Sector and other militant groups,” the Times wrote.
Burning Insects
The brutality of these neo-Nazis surfaced again on May 2 when right-wing toughs in Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters driving them into a trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the building was engulfed in flames, some people who tried to flee were chased and beaten, while those trapped inside heard the Ukrainian nationalists liken them to black-and-red-striped potato beetles called Colorados, because those colors are used in pro-Russian ribbons.
“Burn, Colorado, burn” went the chant.
As the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing of the Ukrainian national anthem. The building also was spray-painted with Swastika-like symbols and graffiti reading “Galician SS,” a reference to the Ukrainian nationalist army that fought alongside the German Nazi SS in World War II, killing Russians on the eastern front.
The death by fire of dozens of people in Odessa recalled a World War II incident in 1944 when elements of a Galician SS police regiment took part in the massacre of the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka, which had been a refuge for Jews and was protected by Russian and Polish partisans. Attacked by a mixed force of Ukrainian police and German soldiers on Feb. 28, 1944, hundreds of townspeople were massacred, including many locked in barns that were set ablaze.
The legacy of World War II especially the bitter fight between Ukrainian nationalists from the west and ethnic Russians from the east seven decades ago is never far from the surface in Ukrainian politics. One of the heroes celebrated during the Maidan protests in Kiev was Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose name was honored in many banners including one on a podium where Sen. John McCain voiced support for the uprising to oust Yanukovych, whose political base was among ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
During World War II, Bandera headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-B, a radical paramilitary movement that sought to transform Ukraine into a racially pure state. OUN-B took part in the expulsion and extermination of thousands of Jews and Poles.
Though most of the Maidan protesters in 2013-14 appeared motivated by anger over political corruption and by a desire to join the European Union, neo-Nazis made up a significant number and surged to the front during the seizure of government buildings and the climatic clashes with police.
In the days after the Feb. 22 coup, as the neo-Nazi militias effectively controlled the government, European and U.S. diplomats scrambled to help the shaken parliament put together the semblance of a respectable regime, although at least four ministries, including national security, were awarded to the right-wing extremists in recognition of their crucial role in ousting Yanukovych.
As extraordinary as it was for a modern European state to hand ministries over to neo-Nazis, virtually the entire U.S. news media cooperated in playing down the neo-Nazi role. Stories in the U.S. media delicately step around this neo-Nazi reality by keeping out relevant context, such as the background of coup regime’s national security chief Andriy Parubiy, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Parubiy was commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”
Last April, as the Kiev regime launched its “anti-terrorist operation” against the ethnic Russians in the east, Parubiy announced that his right-wing paramilitary forces, incorporated as National Guard units, would lead the way. On April 15, Parubiy went on Twitter to declare, “Reserve unit of National Guard formed #Maidan Self-defense volunteers was sent to the front line this morning.” (Parubiy resigned from his post this past week for unexplained reasons.)
Now, however, as the Ukrainian military tightens its noose around the remaining rebel strongholds, battering them with artillery fire and aerial bombardments, thousands of neo-Nazi militia members are again pressing to the front as fiercely motivated fighters determined to kill as many ethnic Russians as they can. It is a remarkable story but one that the mainstream U.S. news media would prefer not to notice.
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.
This is no surprise to me.
Every attempt by myself to post comment on the obvious Neo-Nazi and budding hate group uprising and grab on power to major ‘news’ outlets has resulted in disabled comments over the last 10 years.
It begs the question…
Just how horrifyingly infiltrated by hate have our supposed inclusive institutions become?
Government, education, religion, engineering, science.
One clue I believe was and still is the push to tolerance.
Tolerance – hates contemptuous lie to further divide a population by means of class.
We all fell for it or ignored the consequence and so now once again quite possibly the innocent will have to forfeit their young to a push back.
Hate wins it seems yet again because as a society we teach fear.
You go and show that crap to poor brainwashed Ukrainians… This is NOT and anti-Russian blog but a place for a highly intelligent people who know how to search for and find the truth.
Robert, you are not right about Bandera. At first, read this about Stepan Bandera:
http://stepanbandera.org/index_eng.htm
Bandera was not nazi coolaborator. he fights for Ukranian independence all his life -against Poland. against Soviets. against Nazis.
He set independent Ukraine state in Lvov at August, 1941. After that nazists set him to Zaksehousen prison since to the end of 1944. When Chourkin tells about Bandera as a collaborationist, he lies, the same as he lies about crashed B-747 at 1983. Here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfF5Foh7ZvE and here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSEXS0E0NU you can see russian neo-nazis with swastika in today,s Russia -at Moskow streets. Police keep silence.
Bandera collaborated with the Nazis at the start of WW2 and also at the end. They imprisoned him in 1941 after he declared Ukrainian independence in the foolish belief that the Nazis would be sympathetic towards his OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) movement because of the extreme nationalism that they shared. They released him in 1944 and gave support to him and his followers to help fight against the advancing Soviet Army.
The US/NATO Drang nach Osten aims at geostrategic dominance of Eurasia. As Webster Tarpley pointed out back in 2008, Obama is “an abject puppet of Zbigniew Brzezinski”.
The rabidly anti-Russian Brzezinski hissed on a panel at the Wilson Center on June 16 titled “Mutual Security on Hold? Russia, the West, and European Security Architectureâ€. Brzezinski cannot abide Putin’s “chauvinism”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMNcSKAMJMI
СпаÑибо Вам вÑем! Мы в РоÑÑии очень надеемÑÑ, что правду наконец узнает мир! Пора вÑем вмеÑте выÑтупить против СШÐ! РуÑÑкие не хотÑÑ‚ войны, но к ней готовы!
The Salvador Option Redux:
Iraq (2006) – US backed regime deploys Interior Ministry armed and financed death squads in counter insurgency operations
Ukraine (2014) – US backed regime deploys Interior Ministry armed and financed death squads in counter insurgency operations
From El Salvador to Iraq, James Steele (US Colonel) – fueled the sectarian war in Iraq:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/mar/06/james-steele-america-iraq-video
“A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.â€
– Andriy Biletsky, commander of Ukraine’s Azov battalion
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11025137/Ukraine-crisis-the-neo-Nazi-brigade-fighting-pro-Russian-separatists.html
Exactly LIKE the Third REICH (via Bushist putsch)!
• LINK: Products banned for one year: what will disappear from Russian shelves?
16-appetizing delicacy photos. Economics and Business: the Government of the Russian Federation introduced a complete ban on the supply of beef, pork, poultry, fish, cheese, milk, fruits and vegetables from countries like – Australia, Canada, USA, Norway and some of the EU for a period as long as that one year. In this photo gallery we presented food that Russians will lose the next year. As a joke, we can say that, for example, the Lithuanian milk “dumped” – naturally toppled the Russian market …
Who supports these Nazis? Kiev is broke? History repeats itself…Ford Motor enthusiastically supported the Reich, but resisted calls from Roosevelt and Churchill to increase war production for the Allies. A third of trucks used in the motorized Nazi blitzkrieg were Ford:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ford_Motor_Company#World_War_II
http://richgibson.com/fordnazis.html
GM collected $33 million in “war reparations” because the Allies had bombed its German facilities. Senior executives for GM, Ford and Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_General_Motors#Nazi_collaboration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Cross_of_the_German_Eagle#Recipients
http://richgibson.com/fordnazis.html
“Could the NYT be a prelude to us witnessing the end of these thugs. Let’s hope so.†Joe Tedesky on August 10, 2014 at 12:11 pm .
Wishful thinking Joe as the NYT has been a constant neocon promoter .
.
BTW as for the phone evidence one should be highly suspicious because of the “Trojan†which is a special communication device that could be planted by commandos deep inside enemy territory. The device would act as a relay station for misleading transmissions made by the disinformation unit in the Mossad, called LAP, and intended to be received by American and British listening stations.
Remember Lybia ?
Originating from a distant IDF control center , the prerecorded digital transmissions could be picked up only by the Trojan. The device would then rebroadcast the transmission on another frequency, one used for official business in the “enemy countryâ€, at which point the transmission would finally be picked up by American ears in Britain.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/deception.html
Thank you for you inquisitive mind & good comments.
Hillary, that was an interesting link. I will need to go online and buy that book.
Yeah, maybe my take on the NYT article is wishful thinking. Although, there does seem to be many moving parts whirling around within the Ukraine junta. Revolutions always tend to create a certain kind of who’s in, and who’s out kind of atmosphere. Add to that, how things are not what they always seem to be.
Always good to read your comments, and I find your reference links some of the best to read…take care J.T.
Posted for Roger Annis
The self-censorship that Robert Parry observes in the U.S. media is in play big time in Canada. The role of fascist and far-right militias and political movements in Kyiv’s war in southeast Ukraine is absent from mainstream media, as is the horror of the bombings and shellings of civilian populations by the army and its allied militias.
Yesterday, Canada’s Globe and Mail national daily editorialized in favour of the aggressive, NATO posture that wants Russia to forget about domestic public opinion and let the slaughter in eastern Ukraine continue unabated. In remarkably frank language, the Globe editors say that Russia should be given some space to back away in order that “we” may win want “we” want–a pliant, “independent” Ukraine. The Canadian government is backing its words with action–last week, it shipped $5 million in “non-lethal” military equipment to Ukraine and it is pledging more. It is running to catch up with the $31 million in assistance being provided by Washington, plus the $19 million now pledged to train Ukraine’s National Guard.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/putin-has-trapped-himself-in-a-quagmire-of-his-own-making/article19969244/#dashboard/follows/
The progressive Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom made a rare foray for a Canadian columnist into the subject of the Ukraine war in his column yesterday. Unfortunately, he repeats a lot of the misinformation and outright falsehoods about events over the past months, so his welcome, cautionary note about the folly of Canada backing Kyiv’s war gets lost.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/08/08/canadian_military_aid_adds_more_fuel_to_ukraine_crisis_walkom.html
A Guardian writer, meanwhile, mused on Aug 5 about what will happen when the fascist and rightist militias being armed to the teeth by Kyiv and NATO return home from the battlefront. He wrote:
The proliferation of these battalions also poses important questions for the postwar settlement, and Poroshenko will need to find a way to integrate the groups either into the army or back into civilian life when the conflict in the east is over.
“A new Maidan could pose a danger to the very nature of Ukrainian statehood, and of course there will be a major issue about what happens to all of these volunteer battalions when they return from the east. They are heavily armed, and many have links to oligarchs or political forces,” says Fesenko. On Monday, there was an early warning of what could be to come, when the Kiev-1 battalion, back from the front, raided a cafe in central Kiev in order to evict other activists who had allegedly taken it over. (End quote.)
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/05/ukraine-revolution-dream-stalling-war-east
First of all I’d like to complement everyone on the high quality of the comments made above. I’ve learned a tremendous amount simply by reading the artice and your comments. Secondly, I’d like to ask anyone if they know any more about the ‘filtration camps’ that were raised some time ago and have since dropped out of sight. My concern is that with the right Sector or extreme-nationalist volunteers manning the front line in front of regular Ukrainian Army artillery, there will be outright massacres and mss deportations once the advancing front line has overrun Donestk and Lugansk. Those Russian speakers who were unable to get away may end up in the ‘concentration camps’ operated by the factions in Kiev. My other concern is that if such ‘pogroms’ start Putin may be driven to send in forces to rescue them, thereby giving the Americans a pretext for rampling up a general war between NATO and Russia. Again, great, intelligent postings.Let’s have more.
PS I have just finished “Alliance For Murder†edited by B.F.Sabrin, which is subtitled “The Nazi-Ukrainian Nationalist Partnership in Genocideâ€. Uneven, but excellent in parts.
The CIA Allen Dulles post war anti-Soviet “captive nations” apparatus was based upon protection of these fascists in Ukraine and many other countries. Now NATO is openly arming them. If you know this history that is not surprising. Chapter 5 of “Hitler’s Shadow” deals with this CIA collaboration in Ukraine, but the whole book is well worth reading on the unknown history swept under NATO’s rug. http://www.archives.gov/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf
Confederate flag symbol of white supremacy? Nice hitpiece… Lets just ignore what Russia has done with their communist regime in the ukraine. Doesnt justify atrocities but explains allot of the anger. Very biased article. Or how about the Americans and EU installing a dictator after violently deposing a democratic elected leader. Nato expansion/american agression and russian imperialism is to blame here. These poor europeans are caught in the middle.
But hey, you get cheap oil and gas right? sickening…
Russia did nothing to Ukraine, it was Soviet regime led by Stalin (Georgian). After Stalin, there was Khruschev (Ukrainian) so you cannot blame anything on Russia. Majority of ex-communist multinational countries were federations with “incorrectly” set borders between federal units. Those were always defined in their constitutions as just administrative and in Yugoslavia, as temporary. Later, western leaders declared them as borders of states and “unchangeable” and, again later, in case of Serbia they forced the change of borders. Nobody can deny the right of ethnic Russian population to have their wide autonomy or an independence from the country whose leaders are so obviously against them (as a nation). Why should ethnic Russians be denied such right?
The Kiev government says that it is false Russian propaganda. They self believe in this?
In my search for independent, objective information, I’ve been reading the daily press releases from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) special monitoring mission to Ukraine (SSM). MSM have quoted them selectively – or in some glaring cases misquoted them – primarily in articles about the inspection of the MH 17 crash site. However, the OSCE briefings contain a lot more info. One might think they’d be biased toward EU interests, but they actually seem to be pretty objective, and they are there on the ground, doing what reporters should be doing.
Here are a couple of excerpts that support Bob’s reporting above:
From August 5 briefing:
http://www.osce.org/ukraine/122446
The mayor of Velykomykhailivka (165km southeast of Dnepropetrovsk city) told the SMM that Right Sector activists, based in a training camp at a village close to the boundary with the Donetsk region, had been harassing local people. He alleged that some of the activists, sometimes drunk, had specifically fired shots in the air, stolen vehicles at checkpoints manned by them, and had entered houses, and intimidated women. The police, he said, were powerless to act, and the authorities, at a higher level, were doing nothing to stop this behaviour. Similar allegations were made by local inhabitants in mid-July.
From August 8 briefing:
http://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/122495
Two senior officials from Luhansk City Administration and from SBU corroborated an account given to the SMM that the mayor of Luhansk had been detained in Shchastya (23km north of Luhansk) by members of the voluntary Aidar Battalion, fighting with the Ukrainian army against the ‘LPR’.
The shelling of Donetsk continued. The SMM visited two high-rise residential buildings and a local hospital in the city centre, showing damage consistent with the use of artillery projectiles; and saw traumatised and crying civilians and medical staff (see SMM Report evening of 7 August). The scene was photographed by SMM.
If I’m not mistaken, a “terrorist” is someone who terrorizes. It sure sounds like the people of eastern Ukraine are being terrorized by these drunken neo-Nazi “activists,” self-styled militia on the side of the coup-led government, and the Ukrainian military itself.
Kolomoisky’s battalion is “dniepro”. The head of the azov battlion is Andriy Belitsky w
ho also leads the Social-National Assembly of Ukr., whose ideology is, guess what: National Socialism. Their flag is a wulfsangel w/lions. In addition, he is the head of
Patriots of Ukr, the paramilitary branch of the SNA, flag: wulfsangel. Besides being neo-nazi nationalists committed to violence, they are white supremacists. They have supposedly recruited prominent Swedish nazi, white supremacists to help w/ the slaughter. The video that links to the NYT story is mischaracterized by Kramer. Oddly, at 7:23 a male voice is heard saying, “Run!, Run!, Run!” in American accented English. ?
I forgot to say, Kravchuk is Marchuk’s real name. This article is a mere crack in the monolith of disinformation. If they ever openly acknowledge the role played by nazis it will probably mean that the whole project is becoming too expensive to continue.
Check this:
http://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/PA-Rudling-on-Return-of-Ukrainian-Far-Right-2013.pdf
One thing leads to the next.
American corporate MSM hammers the propaganda to make the coup that overthrew an elected President seem like no big deal, White Hats triumphing over Black Hats.
Then, when a faction of this neo-Nazi infested Government shoots down a commercial airliner, and commits war crimes against civilians in the East, and constantly lies about “Russian provocations” to try to get more military assistance from the US and her client states, American citizens barely hear about it, don’t believe it, think “neo-Nazi” is just a slogan that must come from Moscow “propaganda”.
The “news” is a constant battlefield of American propaganda – what they win one week from “hearts and minds” is used the next week, and the next, and the next to construct the next story, or the next chapter of an ongoing story, or the next round of sanctions, or the next war.
Unfortunately the prominent role of the neo-Nazis in Ukraine is also ignored in the European media. The only reference to Nazis that most people will see is a comparison between Putin and Hitler. The media is just reflecting the consensus that is shared by politicians, even those who are considered to be left of centre and opposed to intolerance.
There have been a few times however when the Nazi-worshipping ideology gets some coverage. A TV program (sorry only in German https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW4xvuYTi7w) showed an interview with the Ukrainian education minister Serhiy Kvit praising Bandera and also a group of school children being taught that Bandera was a role model (of course they play down his Nazi collaboration). Serhiy Kvit is a member of the Bandera’s Trident organisation which is closely linked to the Right Sector.
@ Loren Bliss re: Ayn Rand – Years ago, I came across an out-of-print book in a used bookstore. It’s been misplaced, but I’d recognize the author if I saw his name. As I recall, he was a French political exile. In addition to all Hitler’s speeches between 1933 and 1941, he included significant press excerpts released by major Western news services following each speech. Virtually every one glad-handed and soft-soaped Hitler as a rational actor serving reasonable German national interests. They referred to him frequently as, “the German statesman”. Behaving as a completely spineless and self serving tool of corporate interests is not a new phenomenon for them. There have only ever been a handful of real correspondents. George Seldes, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Richard Hottelet, William Shirer, Martha Gellhorn, Peter Arnett, and of course, Robert Parry would all qualify. Anderson Cooper and Christiane Amanpour are not journalists; they’r political hacks. But, I digress. The other interesting thing I learned was the source from which Ayn Rand PLAGIARIZED or PARAPHRASED all her work. ALL of it. Every self-serving rhetorical greed infested line of prose or twisted reasoning has a mirror image somewhere in passages from those speeches. She superimposed them on low-minded soap opera plots and sold it as original work. It should come as no surprise that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilley think it’s terrific stuff. Ayn was so bitter that the Bolsheviks appropriated her family’s wealth that she was willing to take up the Nazi mantle, but her admirers are not likely to ever admit that.
Actually what Ayn Rand did, particularly in Atlas Shrugged, is write a highly fictionalized version of Mein Kampf — “My Struggle.”
Right on the money.
I don’t think the Nazi symbols are ‘neo’ or just similar. In Azov’s case they’re pretty much direct:
http://sputnikipogrom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/IMG_1094.jpg
As to illustrate a common Ukrainian sense of mentality, there’s a cafe in Kiev with a macabre (or ‘creative’) menu, serving – I quote – ‘Colorado Bugs Fried a la Odessa’ (!)
http://drunkcow.net/uploads/posts/2014-07/thumbs/1404734747_0_1370b8_8122b9e7_orig.jpeg
You can dismiss the ‘Praviy Sektor’ (many often misleadingly do), but it’s not about Muzichko or Yarosh or The Right Sector, or even ‘Svoboda’ – as not being very popular – but it’s also about Azov, it’s about the far-right parliament member Oleg Lyashko, recently ‘black listed’ by Amnesty International, who has collected 8.3% of the presidential votes and his ‘Radical Party’ (yes, that’s the official name) who, at the moment, are the political frontrunners according to some polls, more popular than Timoshenko’s and Yatsenyuk’s ‘Batkivshchina’.
Mr. Parry: Is there any evidence the Obama Administration’s open support of the Ukrainian neo-Nazis and its implicit support-by-tolerance of U.S. hard-right militias are each manifestations of some new federal policy of brazen, across-the-board alignment with violently reactionary forces everywhere? If so, could this be a prelude to a public declaration of overtly fascist governance — no doubt euphemized as “patriotic Christianity” or something similar — here at home?
(Obviously the U.S. government has, in its role as capitalism’s goon squad, always favored fascism abroad, if only because fascism and/or Nazism are the ultimate forms of capitalism — the logical end results of capitalism’s Ayn Rand ideology. But in the past, the U.S. downplayed these realities abroad and, domestically, generally appeared to regard members of the armed right as public enemies, hence the events at, for example, Ruby Ridge and Waco. Now however under Obama, the message of the Bundy Ranch incident seems to be that even the domestic pretense of opposition to storm-trooper elements is being dropped. Which raises questions hitherto unthinkable: is the government, now openly allied with neo-Nazis abroad, also clandestinely seeking the U.S. hard-right militias as allies? Could this indeed be preparation for some final putsch to eliminate the few remaining vestiges of constitutional governance? )
The observation that Obama and his maladministration continue to support in every way the violence, illegality and lies of the Netanyahu régime make it clear that he is determined to exceed the misdeeds of his predecessor in a spectacular way. Ukraine, Colombia, Honduras, “good” Syrian rebels, Libyan chaos-any interference will do.
Somebody mentioned Ernst Roehm, so I’ll take that topic as fair game. This is a difficult needle to thread, but if you sift through the haystack long enough, it’s impossible to ignore. Roehm, the Strasser brothers (Otto and Gregor), Kurt Luedecke, Ernst Hanfstaengl and even to an extent Hess represented what might be called the “left wing” or “socialist” leg of the National Socialist movement. The Strassers were sympathetic to Bolshevism, and they along with Roehm believed the “revolution needed to continue” in order to advance socialist principles and improve the lot of common people. Don’t get me wrong – they were just as looney as the rest of the gang – but they didn’t come close to the distilled evil represented by the cloistered masterminds. They were the foot-soldiers, and most of what was known about the mass psychosis of the inner circle is owed to the fact that Otto, Ernst and Kurt escaped. Self preservation more than honesty no doubt prevailed, but they painted a gruesome enough picture. As it turned out, the picture they painted wasn’t near gruesome enough. Today in Ukraine, typical of such movements, Parry is revealing the distasteful truth about the foot-soldiers. Eventually, we’ll have to confront horrors which dwarf what we know now. Functioning after the war as a kind of “stay-behind” Gladio operation, the OUN and international support groups such as UCCA masterminded as many as 30,000 political assassinations inside USSR. As a closed society, that reality was carefully guarded. As I’ve mentioned, sooner or later the masterminds will begin exporting some of their less desirable commodities. MH-17 was “previews of coming attractions”. Pillar mentions the “difficulty of mustering international support for enforcement of a standard if one appears to be flouting it elsewhere”. That’s kind of like bombing Tripoli because Gaddafi was threatening civilians in Benghazi. Russia would wisely introduce R2P, but Susan Rice will staunchly object. She’s OK with the happy couple. Just wait till she “meets the in-laws”.
America has aligned itself with any number of despots who asked “how high” when asked to jump by their American masters.
Why should anything be any different now?
Great article and I totally respect Robert Parrish’s professionalism, but even more historical context would not, I think, tarnish that professionalism. I’m thinking of the research that has been done on the ties that have existed between our intelligence agencies, the Gehlen Group that we signed on after they left Hitler’s employ for Great Britain’s, and the continuing ties between Ukrainian nationalists and our government’s anti-communist crusade. A stopover on the subject of Operation Gladio would be a worthwhile detour also. I was impressed by “America’s Nazi Secrets” by former DOJ Nazi prosecutor John Loftus. An excellent backgrounder recently appeared in OpEdNews by George Eliason (http://www.opednews.com/articles/Ukraine–Why-Bandera-Have-by-George-Eliason-Communism_Extreme_Hitler_Ideology-140801-8.html). America badly needs an appointment with a psychiatrist.
Bob- Thanks for another great article and for hammering the Times on a very important point that the West and its mainstream media have consistently ignored, downplayed, and have even accused Russia of trying to manufacture or conflate.
Kramer also fails to add that the Azov militia is Oleg Kolomoyski’s private army, or that, while the Ukrainian army may ‘feel emboldened’- reports are that they are getting desperately needed US and NATO technical help and supplies (e.g.- a recent shipment by the Canadian government to Kharkov), and that NATO troops are present in increasing numbers to help Ukrainian Army that already greatly outnumbers the resistance in manpower and equipment- it is also reported from the Donbass side that the freedom fighters are defeating the junta forces when they engage, resulting in large numbers of junta casualties, and the capture of large caches of equipment, and also that they have been otherwise squeezing the junta forces in encirclements (cauldrons) and that already hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers have surrendered with many seeking to resettle in Russia. This is in contrast to U.S. claims that the Russians are supplying junta forces, which is more consistent with the West’s positive spin that Kiev is winning and the resistance is only surviving through the efforts of Russia). Even in the Ukrainian media there are reports of widespread losses and discontent among the soldiers about the their lack of adequate preparation, supplies and ordinance, and the incompetence of the military leadership. So, the Times, to its disgrace is peddling yet another skewed and misleading narrative.
Ernst Julius Günther Röhm, and his Sturmabteilung had a shelve life that expired in 1934. I think someone wrote in the comment section here a while back how the Ukraine bully’s would probably meet the same fate as Rohm. Could the NYT be a prelude to us witnessing the end of these thugs. Let’s hope so.
What followed Rohm was much worse. Let’s hope that you’re wrong.
Let’s put it this way, if I were any of those guys I would not book a room at any hotel for a party meeting!
Ernst Roehm was the leader of the socialist faction within the Nazi party. Thus, initially, the presence of party socialists, who appealed to Germany’s middle class, is where the name National Socialist came from. The SA, of which Roehm was the leader, had about 3 million men and thus he was perceived to be a potential threat to Hitler’s leadership of the Nazi party. Hitler’s capitalist big business supporters (e.g. Kirdorf, Krupp, Voegler, Thyssen) disliked Roehm’s socialistic views on the economy and his claims, typical of socialists, that the real revolution was still to come; thus, they wanted Hitler to get rid of him. So, after Roehm was eliminated, the only socialism in the Nazi party was socialism for big business – in the form of corporatism.
Why did Roehm’s ‘socialism’ appeal to the middle class? Don’t you mean the working class (the proletariat)? The middle class is generally very anti-socialist.
Very good analysis and good investigative journalism..