The odious legacy of Stepan Bandera drives the suppression of those who dare challenge the narrative of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict promulgated by the Ukrainian government, its Western allies and a compliant mainstream media.
Stepan Bandera monument in Ternopil, Ukraine, 2017. (Mykola Vasylechko, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News
In May 1986 I received orders to attend a counterterrorism awareness course at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. For the next two weeks I learned about the various terrorist threats facing the United States military, and was taught various skills to overcome them, such as high-speed evasive driving, counter-surveillance methodology and reactive shooting techniques.
Upon my return to Twenty-Nine Palms, where I was stationed as a Marine Corps intelligence officer, I was given the task of putting my newly learned skills to work by carrying out a base-wide counterterrorism exercise. I borrowed a scout-sniper team from the infantry battalion on base, and set them up in an apartment off base, where I turned them into a terrorist cell tasked with collecting intelligence on the senior officers who lived and worked on the base. The only rule was that the terrorists could not engage with civilians — no families were to be impacted by the drill.
Over the course of the next 30 days, my terrorist team was able to “assassinate” every battalion commander, the regimental commander and the base commander, using improvised explosive devices and sniper fire — and had the photographs to prove it.
The takeaway from this exercise was that if someone wanted you dead, you were probably going to die.
Vigilance was your only real defense — to be alert for anything suspicious. In short, to live a life governed by paranoia. In the age of terrorism, if you feel like someone is seeking to do you harm, it is probably because someone is seeking to do you harm.
Using Those Skills
Throughout my professional life, I have had occasion to use the skills I learned at Fort Bragg on several occasions — I was targeted for assassination while working as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq and I was informed that I was the subject of a “hit” put out by the Russian mafia for my role in breaking up an illicit missile component smuggling ring.
I would conduct a 360-degree inspection of my vehicle before entering it, looking for signs of tampering. And I would conduct counter-surveillance drills while driving, accelerating at odd intervals to see if anyone kept pace, or rapidly exiting a highway to see if anyone followed.
Today, I’m a 61-year-old writer living in the suburbs of Albany, New York. It’s a quiet neighborhood, where everyone knows everyone. And yet, due to recent circumstances, I once again find myself inspecting my vehicle before getting inside, keeping a watchful eye out for strange vehicles driving down my street and conducting counter-surveillance maneuvers while driving.
Why the paranoia? Simply put, my name has been added to a Ukrainian “kill list.” Think I’m getting too wound up? Ask the family of Daria Dugina, the 29-year-old daughter of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. Both she and her father were on the same list. Both were targeted for death by an assassin dispatched by the Ukrainian security services. Only a last-second change of plans, which put Alexander Dugin behind the wheel of a different car, kept him from being killed in the blast that took the life of his daughter.
Daria Dugina. (1RNK, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
I’ve been writing for some time now about the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation and their publication in mid-July of a “blacklist” containing the names of 72 intellectuals, journalists, activists and politicians from several countries who were labeled “Russian propagandists” by the Ukrainian government for having the audacity to speak critically, yet factually, about the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
I took umbrage over this list for several reasons, first and foremost that the salaries of the Ukrainians who compiled this list appeared to be paid by the U.S. taxpayer using funds appropriated by Congress for that very purpose. The idea of Congress passing a law which empowered the Ukrainian government to do something — suppress the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and a free press — that Congress was Constitutionally prohibited from doing angered me.
[Related: SCOTT RITTER: Chuck Schumer’s War on Free Speech]
So, too, did the fact that the Center for Countering Disinformation announced the existence of this “blacklist” at a function organized by a U.S.-funded NGO and attended by State Department officials who sat mute while their Ukrainian colleagues labeled the persons on this list “information terrorists” who deserved to be arrested and prosecuted as “war criminals.”
At the time, I cautioned that the use of such inflammatory language meant that the “blacklist” could be turned into a “kill list” simply by having a fanatic decide to take justice into his or her own hands. Given that the U.S. government funded the creation of this list, organized the meeting where it was presented to the world and gave an implicit stamp of approval to the list and its accompanying labeling through the attendance of U.S. government officials, these fanatics don’t have to be foreign sourced. Plenty of people in the U.S. adhere to the same hate-filled ideology that exists in Ukraine today and which gave birth to the “blacklist.”
Some of them are my neighbors.
In June I drove down to Bethel, New York (the site of the original Woodstock music festival), to participate in a Spartan Obstacle Course Race. To get there, I had to drive past Ellenville, a sleepy little town that is home to a camp belonging to the Ukrainian American Youth Association which, every summer, coordinates with the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms of Ukraine to hold a “Heroes’ Holiday” honoring veteran of the Ukrainian People’s Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
I just realized the principal CYM-A camp is in Ellenville, NY, the same Ulster county I live in. CYM-A [aka SUMA]'s Ellenville camp ("Oselia") pictured below: the year it opened (1955), on the 25th anniversary of the UPA leader's death (1975), and its "Heroes Monument" today. pic.twitter.com/1AHa9sDKL1
— Bandera Lobby Blog (@mossrobeson__) May 17, 2019
The camp boasts a “Heroes’ Monument”, consists of a 42-foot-tall structure with a Ukrainian trident at the top flanked by the busts of Yevhen Konovalets, Symon Petliura, Roman Shukhevych and Stepan Bandera —four leading figures in the history of Ukrainian nationalism, all of whom were involved in the murders, collectively, of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians.
Bandera has been elevated to the status of a national hero in Ukraine, and his birthday is considered a national holiday.
That a monument to men responsible for genocidal mass murder and who, in the case of two of them (Shukhevych and Bandera) openly collaborated with Nazi Germany, could be erected in the United States is disturbing.
That every year Ukrainian-American adherents of the odious ideology of Stepan Bandera gather to celebrate his legacy at a “children’s camp” where the youth are arrayed in brown uniforms that make them look like what they, in fact, are — ideological storm troopers for a hateful neo-Nazi ideology that promotes the racial superiority of the Ukrainian people, is an national abomination.
Here is another, newer CYM-A camp ("Beskyd") which can be found in Baraboo, Wisconsin, featuring its fascist "Heroes Monument," including a bust of the wanna-be Hitler of Ukraine, Stepan Bandera. pic.twitter.com/RYTqcTQTaD
— Bandera Lobby Blog (@mossrobeson__) May 17, 2019
From Ellenville to Bethel, I saw evidence of this hateful reality in every blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag fluttering in the wind — and every red-and-black banner of the Bandera-worshipping Ukrainian neo-Nazi fanatics that fluttered next to them.
Stepan Bandera Legacy
The legacy of Stepan Bandera is at the very heart of what passes for Ukrainian nationalism today. It dominates the political arena inside Ukraine, where all competing political ideology and affiliations have been outlawed by President Volodymyr Zelensky.
It is behind the suppression of all dissenting voices — foreign and domestic — that dare challenge the narrative about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict being promulgated by the Ukrainian government, its Western allies, and a compliant mainstream media.
After Consortium News published my letter to my New York congressional delegation (Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Paul Tonko), in which I called them out for voting for Public Law 117-128 appropriating $40 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to underwrite the Ukrainian government and military, there was concerted action by others impacted by the Ukrainian “blacklist,” which the legislation had funded. This was led by Diane Sare, the LaRouche Party candidate challenging Schumer for his Senate seat.
The publicity about congressionally-funded suppression of free speech appeared to be too much for those who are complicit in a frontal assault on the U.S. Constitution. The Center for Countering Disinformation’s “blacklist” was removed from the internet.
Victory, however, was short lived. Within days of the Center for Countering Disinformation’s “blacklist” being taken down, a list published by the Ukrainian “Myrotvorets” (Peacemaker’s) Center incorporated names that had been on the Center for Countering Disinformation “blacklist.”
Coat of Myrotvorets staff member with field version of their emblem on sleeve. (Shao, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The Myrotvorets list has been in existence since 2014 and has been described as “effectively a death list for politicians, journalists, entrepreneurs and other public figures who have been ‘cleared for firing’” by the list’s creators.
Daria Dugina’s name was on that list.
And now so is mine, along with several other Westerners, such as Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett and British rock musician Roger Waters.
Scott Ritter on the death list. (Click to enlarge).
The Biden administration is silent about this abomination.
So is Congress.
According to 6 USCS § 101, the term terrorism is
“any activity that involves an act that is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources; and is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State or other subdivision of the United States; and appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.”
There is little doubt that the murder of Daria Dugina was an act of terrorism perpetrated on behalf of the Ukrainian government. (Her photo on the list now has the word “liquidated” written diagonally across it in red.)
While the Ukrainians deny any such allegations, Russian authorities have assembled a convincing factual case to the contrary.
The existence of the Myrotvorets “death list” is an instrument of terror and should be taken down at the insistence of the U.S. Government.
The failure of the Ukrainian government to shut down the Myrotvorets Center and condemn its activities would constitute material support of terrorism.
The U.S. should also recognize any organizations which embrace the ideology of Stepan Bandera as terrorist entities — including those responsible for raising a new generation of brown-shirted neo-Nazis in the heartland of America.
The “Hero’s Monument” in Ellenville must be closed, and the statues of Bandera and the other three Ukrainian nationalists removed from public view.
It is a national disgrace that U.S. citizens are subjected to death threats from an erstwhile ally of the United States for simply exercising their Constitutional right of free speech. The adherents to the ideology of Stepan Bandera, in Ukraine and in the United States, must be treated as terrorists, and prosecuted with the same level of intensity and purpose as were the followers of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Until this is done, I will have no choice but to take the appropriate precautions to make sure that neither my family nor I suffer the fate of Daria Dugina.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Is Schumer silent because he is afraid of being targeted?
What about a counter list of chickenshit armchair warmongeringing neoconartists that the world will be better off without? Stinken’ Blinken and Droolin’ Nuland will certainly be at the top
As many others here say, thank you Scott, your analysis and your life’s work speak about standing up for what is true. Certainly there is a fascist danger in this group explained here, and these blacklists, but it seems to be a useful element of what Scott has stood up against since the WMD’s a generation ago, it is a force driven by people who think they have good intentions, perhaps delusional, becoming psychopathic, something like the creation of Frankenstein by a brilliant scientist, who becomes infatuated with what he has created, and blinded, and then a monster that cannot be controlled, as Chris Hedges writes, “War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning”. My prayers for your protection, and continued commitment to wake up these blind leaders
Scott
I’m sorry it has come to this. Your work is very important and you are much appreciated. If you decide to run against one of these congresscritters your profile will be higher and you may even be a bit safer. Good luck!
From Wikipedia. Notice that the US is NOT one of the nations that has called for Ukraine to shut down this very suspicious site.
Myrotvorets or Mirotvorets (Ukrainian: ???????????, lit.?’Peacemaker’ /m?r?’tv?r?t?s?/), is a Ukrainian Kyiv-based[4] website and NGO that publishes a running list, and sometimes personal information, of people who are considered by authors of the organization to be “enemies of Ukraine”,[8] or, as the website itself states, “whose actions have signs of crimes against the national security of Ukraine, peace, human security, and the international law”.[9] The website was launched in December 2014 by Ukrainian politician and activist Georgy Tuka.[10][11] The site has remained open despite repeated requests from the UN, G7 ambassadors, the EU and human rights groups to close it down, and although it has no official status, it acts to supplement government databases at checkpoints.[12] In 2018, German Foreign Ministry asked the Ukrainian government to delete the website.
Such a description certainly supports Ritter’s veracity.
I wonder what those holding up the mediocre writer Salman Rushdie as a paragon of free speech has to say about this suppression and oppression? Does Free speech protection only applies to people who insult and oppress a “designated” group but does not apply to the powerful Fascists running around the west? The fake liberals like Bill Maher and fake intellectuals like Sam Harris and their ilks are pretty silent about this issue.
Not to mention that those supporting Rushdie (as do I) have been noticeable for their failure to defend Julian Assange. And they all continue to vote for the Democrats! The mind reels.
Why would you denigrate Rushdie as if his attempted assassination was somehow ok.
Bill Maher is a loud mouth, an would never call himself a liberal.
That said are you in support of assassination if public figures are fake or mediocre
Ritter was making several points. Black lists supported by our gov.
and it you are to be killed there is no real way to defend or live with calm confidence.
We don’t appear to have respect for truth, or revealing truth.
We demand consensus.
Thank you Mr. Ritter.
Mr. Ritter,
It is one thing for you to have put your life on the line for your country on the battlefield, but it is quite another for you to be placed in fear of your life by your own country for its support of a foreign terror campaign waged against those exercising their right to free speech. As a fellow citizen, I urge you and others on that “hit list” to take legal action against the U.S. government to stop the funding of this terror campaign. At the very least, taking legal action is a way to publicize what is happening to you and others and to establish a truthful record for all eyes to see. Perhaps the FIRE organization would be interested. As always, thank you for your courage in standing up for the truth.
The administration appears to be conniving in the murder of its own citizens.
Read The Lost Hegemon, by F. William Engdahl.
Whatever entity is truly ruling this country from Washington and its other fascist power centers would strike a deal with the Devil to maintain its world domination. It has done so with the Devil’s own spawn in Ukraine, namely Zelensky and his murderous band of Banderite Nazis. Washington is not simply ignorant or oblivious to this reality. It has been a willing and eager collaborator with the very same German Nazis who fought WWII against the US and the Soviet Union. We brought all the useful ones straight to the heart of America to work developing weapons for us in Project Paperclip (on the side they sent men to the Moon).
Like the German Nazis the pseudo-democrats in Washington immediately lined up as mortal enemies of Russia and any country even slightly on the left of the political spectrum, or any country that would even do business with any vaguely “socialist” country. We have since unrelentingly fought both cold wars and hot wars against dozens of countries, killing and maiming millions, whilst dispossessing equally many now permanently homeless. We have allied this country’s military with the most hard-core fascist dictatorships, destroying genuine democracies in the process, countries that slaughter without compunction for religious reasons (Saudi Arabia and Israel), along with their terrorist accomplices (ISIS, al Qaeda, etc, etc, etc). All this is so well known that it is pointless to give any more examples.
Washington and its media puppets have absolutely no use for the truth whatsoever. The entire “history” of all its wars around the entire globe for the last hundred years is entirely contrived, a confected “matrix” comprising nothing more than a litany of false narratives that is never challenged, or totally ignored by the insider elites, their “Deep State” and the surface “establishment” which they fob off as “reality” to the somnambulant masses. Supporting Ukraine, Zelensky and all their lies and atrocities without the slightest hint of public protest or objection represents the total utter pacification of the “freedom and democracy” in the United States that its tyrannical government falsely claims to support. Up is down, black is white, war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength throughout the Western World today, entirely thanks to the tireless but malign actions of the American government to crush all dissent, independence or sovereignty of all other societies on this planet.
I fear that Russia’s defeating the murderous Ukrainian fascists deliberately created and totally supported by Washington (it is even surreptitiously directly involved in the fighting) is the only hope for this world. Sad to say it is NOT “my country right or wrong.” My country is damned wrong and needs to be put right by somebody. If not by its own citizens, then let the job fall to Russia if they can do it. The bastards in Washington have cleverly cultivated massive antagonisms of numerous different identity groups (that it has colluded in creating) that are now constantly at each others throats, and that incipient civil war prevents most of our people from realising that their greatest threat comes from their own government, not Russia, not China, not Iran, not Venezuela, not the dozen other countries presently being bombed, sanctioned, blockaded or picked clean in acts of pure and simple piracy or grand theft.
The cabal in Washington, protected and projected to the world by its corporate media and rubber stamped in its numerous malefactions by a mercenary congress transgresses in practically every way possible or imaginable and needs to be stopped. Joe Biden is every bit the equivalent of a mafia don who just happens to be paid out of the federal treasury, a bloodthirsty one who orders countless numbers of hits (as did the presidents before him), most often against innocents, every damned day of the week. As nothing but a sock puppet, he is so old and demented that he can barely read his scripts off the teleprompter. He and his handlers are fooling no one at this point. Probably the only thing keeping these American fascists in power is fear by the public that all this American murder and violence being meted upon dozens of foreign countries will be directed upon them if they protest too stridently. If they can destroy a president both while in office and after retirement with their lies, slanders, intrigues, espionage, violence and manipulation of the justice system, they can destroy any one or any large group, even organisations or whole cities. What Washington has evolved into and come to stand for over an entire human lifetime must not prevail or the future will be bleak farther than the mind can imagine.
Your 1st paragraph shows an insightful understanding of little-known history, but you just barely missed the critical point cor our times. They have ALREADY MADE their deal with Lucifer. All major political movements world-wide have been corrupted by the soulless Corporation (they all own shares in each other, so in reality there’s only 1 mammoth corporation.). The basis of the word ‘corporation’ is from the Latin “corpus”, meaning body. As an artificial construct, this ‘body’ lacks a soul, just as machines also lack a soul. Having a semblance of ‘life’ with no soul makes it uniquely subject to demonic influence & control ( I am a devout Catholic who believes in the existence of the spirit world due to the evidence of its influence on human behavior, which cannot logically be explained in any other way.) It is not “the Government” or any of the other entities being blamed for our problems, but Lucifer & his minions, both demonic & human, working through the soulless corporation. How? Remember the Biblical proverb: “The LOVE of money is the root of all evil.”
You might want to ask Cloudflare (reverse proxy) why are they protecting the myrotvorets site?
Yes, I looked up its hosting information and have NEVER seen one with so much [REDACTED FOR PRIVACY] listed, absolutely absurd.
Here in Europe we hear from the EU as well as member governments that we must support Ukraine because of our “shared values”. Seems like they got that right…..
The far-right tradition has been historically very strong in the western Ukraine. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) was first established in 1929 and brought together, war veterans, student fraternities, far-right groups and various other disoriented socially and political flotsam and jetsam under its banner. The OUN took its ideological position from the writings of one, Dymtro Dontsov, who, like Mussolini had been a socialist, and who was instrumental in creating an indigenous Ukrainian fascism based upon the usual mish-mash of writings and theories including Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and Charles Maurras. Dontsov also translated the works of Hitler and Mussolini into Ukrainian.
The OUN was committed to ethnic purity, and relied on violence, assassination and terrorism, not least against other Ukrainians, to achieve its goal of a totalitarian and homogeneous nation-state. Assorted enemies and impediments to this goal were Communists, Russians, Poles, and of course – Jews. Strongly oriented toward the Axis powers OUN founder Evhen Konovalets (1891-1938) stated that his movement was ‘’waging war against mixed marriages’’, with Poles, Russians and Jews, the latter which he described as ‘’foes of our national rebirth’’. Indeed, rabid anti-Semitism has been a leitmotif in the history of Ukrainian fascism, which we will return to below.
Konovelts himself was assassinated by a KGB hit-man in 1938 after which the movement split into two wings: (OUN-M) under Andrii Melnyk and, more importantly for our purposes (OUN-B) under Stepan Bandera. Both wings committed to a new fascist Europe. Upon the German invasion in June 1941, the OUN-B ttempted to establish a Ukrainian satellite state loyal to Nazi Germany. Stepan Lenkavs’kyi the then chief propagandist of the OUN-b ‘government’ advocated the physical destruction of Ukrainian Jewry. OUN-b’s ‘Prime Minister’ Yaroslav Stets’ko, and deputy to Bandera supported, ‘’the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.’’
During the early days of the rapid German advance into the Soviet Union there were some 140 pogroms in the western Ukraine claiming the lives of between 13000-35000 people (Untermensch, in fascist terminology). In 1943-1944 OUN-B and its armed wing the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armia – UPA) one Roman Shukhevych carried out large scale ethnic cleansing resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands; this was a particularly gruesome affair in Volhynia where some 90000 Poles and thousands of Jews were murdered. The campaign of the UPA continued well into the 1950s until it was virtually wiped out by the Soviet forces.
It should be said that during this early period Bandera himself had been incarcerated by the German authorities up until his release in 1944, since unlike Bandera they were not enamoured of an independent Ukrainian state but wanted total control. Bandera was only released at this late date since the German high command was endeavouring to build up a pro-German Ukrainian quisling military force to hold up the remorseless advance of the Red Army. Also pursuant to this it is also worth noting that during this period the 14th Galizian Waffen SS Division, a military Ukrainian collaborationist formation established by Heinrich Himmler, was formed to fight the Soviet forces, and yet another being the Nachtingal brigade; (1) this unit was integrated into the 14th Galizian in due course. It is also interesting to note, that every year, and up to 2014 commemoration ceremony including veterans of this unit takes place with a march through Lviv in an evening torchlight parade – genuine Leni Riefensthal Nazi pastiche. The flag of this unit is not dissimilar to the Peugeot logo, the standing lion, and can be seen at ultra-nationalist rallies as well as football matches involving Lviv Karparti FC. There are also numerous statues of Bandera across Ukraine, and since the 2014 coup even street names bearing the same name. Significantly the UPA have now received political rehabilitation from the Kiev Junta, with Bandera declared a hero of the Ukraine and the UPA rebranded as ‘freedom fighters.’ One particularly splendid statue of Bandera stands proudly in Lviv and is usually lovingly adorned with flowers.
“this was a particularly gruesome affair in Volhynia where some 90000 Poles and thousands of Jews were murdered.”
Gruesome affair. I have a film entitled “Hatred – murder of the innocent” (banned in ukraine) which depicts this hideous massacre. It’s not an episode of WW2 which is commonly known it seems.
Thank you for posting the true history of Ukraine. Not enough people are aware of this history, which enables them to call the Ukrainians “fredom fighters”. It’s sickening. My father fought in WWII against the Nazis that Bandera and his myrmidons helped in the murder of Jews, Pole, and socialists. Dad participated in D-Day. If he were alive today, he’d be outraged that the U.S. government was supporting the very force that he risked his young life to destroy.
I see Langley, VA, USA clearly on the top right corner of the “Peacekeeper” screenshot. Is that code for endorsement by the blob?
Frightening. Thank you for fighting for the truth. Stay vigilant.
The US is a Fascist state with a thin veneer of Democracy to impress the children and the naive.
From a bird’s eye view, Julian Assange is on that same Death List.
Scott, I’m a big fan of yours and I greatly admire your courage to continue to speak out and expose those scandalous wrongs. I hope you will never be silenced by any means but you are not paranoid for nothing. You are in danger.
Exactly what I wanted to say.
Stay safe Scott, you are a shining light in the fog of lies we are being fed.
We should be honest with ourselves. The US has always leaned fascist. Look at the governments we have supported. They all lean fascist as well. Some of those governments in Latin America harbored Nazi criminals after WWll. I believe Castro said “In the future, fascism will be called democracy.” He knew the nature of the government trying to assassinate him for defying its rule over his country.
Russia knows the nature of the beast attempting to destroy it. They’ve been here before.
Hear, hear. Thank you.
Congress isn’t financing a suppression of free speech, they’re financing assassination. Nothing new I’d avow, though that doesn’t mean Americans should yawn at the fact of it. When you have American citizens and congressmen on another country’s hit list, that’s bad enough. But the idea that WE are paying for this?
Where are the massings of citizens on DC? Do Americans have less moxie than Canadian truckers and the Norwegian farmers?
Is there a man left standing?… (Besides Scott Ritter Ron & Rand Paul, Douglass MacGregor, Cynthia McKinney, Tulsi Gabbard..and the usual stalwart few? Are they on the ‘List’ too?)
It’s real quiet out my window today in upstate New York… Why does it feel eerily like the calm before the storm?
And Consortium News, Joe Lauria, Julian Assange, John Pilger, Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, the World Socialist Web Site, Caitlin Johnstone, Richard Medhurst, Steven Donziger, Chelsea Manning, and many others.
Mika Brzezinski is nothing if not the Darya Dugina of the United States, both being the daughters of Mackinderite imperialists who pursued careers journalistically carrying water for the insidious hegemonic worldviews and agendas of their fathers, but it is far better to let them expose themselves for who they are in their respective societies and abroad by running their mouths on television and in the press than it is to make them martyrs by targeting them for assassination (I mean, aside from the fact that casually murdering any human being is wrong, not least when the motive is your own emotional hang-ups about someone holding and expressing views contrary to your own).
I read your story about 5 hours ago and got lost in research on everything about Banders to the history of Ukraine to the Coup in Kiev. Thanks to your fascinating story I have not accomplished anything I was supposed to do today! The statues/monuments don’t surprise me as we still have confederate symbols all over the place!
What a great story this would be for 60 Minutes!
Ha! 60 Minutes wouldn’t touch a story like this. Think of their sponsors.
Bravo!
Thankyou for your courage to continue your antifascist writing and investigative research.
You’re a good man, Mr Ritter. And you’re not alone in speaking to freedom — full & true freedom.
I’m a Canadian and in a much lesser way I understand the frustration of living in a country that is thoroughly brainwashed by the MSM and government regarding the conflict in Ukraine. Our Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is of Ukrainian descent. She wrote a book in which she emphasized that her grandfather was a great influence on her growing up. Which is very revealing in a new way . Her grandfather was an editor of a newspaper within Nazi occupied Ukraine that was pro-fascist. A collaborative propaganda publication in fact. After the war he emigrated to western Canada as did many ex-Nazis both Ukrainian and German. Clearly Canada’s policy regarding this conflict is hyper supportive of this Zelensky regime. Not that our government before was neutral with regard to anything Russian.
The last time we ever had a government policy that wasn’t in lockstep with US foreign policy was under Pierre Trudeau decades ago. And Jean Chrétien during the Iraq invasion.
The CBC is government funded to the tune of 1.2 billion a year. The rest of our media is also heavily subsidized with government funding and therefore also toes the line regarding “ reporting “ on Ukraine. I do comment on the CBC website regularly. However I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve been “ content deactivated “ and banned for periods of time for expressing views regarding the Ukraine conflict that don’t conform to the prescribed narrative. Views that merely reflect and mirror those of Scott, The Duran, New Atlas, Greyzone,, Glenn Greenwald and others. In other words, articulation of the truth about Ukraine .
Stay safe Scott and keep fighting this evil ideology that has come to permeate our democracies. You in your country and me in mine.
“ that doesn’t conform “ darn spellcheck. I even proofread and missed it.Sorry.
Will you consider running against Schumer this November? You would be the ideal ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’.
Great though but bad idea, any campaign event would put Scott at risk.
“The camp boasts a “Heroes’ Monument”… Yevhen Konovalets, Symon Petliura, Roman Shukhevych and Stepan Bandera were involved in the murders of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians. That a monument to men responsible for genocidal mass murder and who openly collaborated with Nazi Germany, could be erected in the United States is disturbing.”
Two Qs:
1. Why the Jewish Lobby has not condemned the US government’s financial and military support for the Banderites? It is widely known that Banderites are self-proclaimed neo-Nazis.
2. How come that none of the 37 Jewish members of the US Congress rose his/her voice against the Nazification of Ukraine after the Nuland-Kagan’s coup in Kiev in 2014? The coup was a result of a collaborative effort between American Ziocons and Ukrainian Banderites (neo–Nazis).
As someone who is Jewish and who has been following this whole sickening thing since the Maiden coup, I can only say I am appalled. These congress people and organizations are no better than nazi collaborators. I want to thank Scott Ritter personally for all this information and will pray for his safety. I had no idea of those Bandera camps and monuments in Ellenville and I am from New York. If something should happen either to him or Eva Bartlett, the hands of the U.S. government and these Jewish organizations are filled with blood. However there is such apathy right now in the U.S., when I try to talk to people about this they don’t seem to care.
Cerena, Your questions, like arrows, go exactly to the heart of the matter. Well said by you…and somewhat sidestepped by Scott.
Cerena needs to be asking the Jews in Congress why they support Ukraine. I don’t think Scott “sidestepped” the issue. I think that the Congress members not only “sidestepped” it, they ignored it completely.
Well, I will just assume, that You are having fun – I sure was, when reading Your Questions.
The short answer is – why would they destroy with their left hand destroy that, which they erected with their left hand.
“At the time, I cautioned that the use of such inflammatory language meant that the “blacklist” could be turned into a “kill list” simply by having a fanatic decide to take justice into his or her own hands. Given that the U.S. government funded the creation of this list, organized the meeting where it was presented to the world and gave an implicit stamp of approval to the list and its accompanying labeling through the attendance of U.S. government officials, these fanatics don’t have to be foreign sourced. Plenty of people in the U.S. adhere to the same hate-filled ideology that exists in Ukraine today and which gave birth to the “blacklist.””
So, the US is financially farming out to foreign hit men and women its wishes to eliminate Americans like Scott, who speak the truth, to do what Americans cannot risk being caught doing themselves. What have we become?
“We” have not become anything. The U.S. government and the capitalists have become this monster. I am always irritated when people refer to the government as “we”. The government is not “we”. The government has NEVER BEEN “we”.
Free speech is a basic right in our constitution, N’est ce pas?
It is sad that we have come to this.
Mass hysteria is not helpful to anyone.
I appreciate your commitment to the opposite – clarity, integrity, respect for others.
Thank you!
See my comment about the use of the word “we” above.
A great article Scott thank you, you are a courageous person. What can anyone say about this time when all the lies, deceit, manipulation and corruption are being shouted from the rooftops. At least now we can see, thanks to people like you, what is really going on. What to do? Perhaps we can all try to do our part to be courageous in shining a light into the current darkness, each in our own ways, as you are.
Horrific. But these are exactly the kinds of groups that the CIA and the American foreign policy apparatus seek out to fund and train. Who is the main corrupter in the world today? Who scours the globe looking for “piles of flammable material” that can be set alight for the furtherance of American hegemony? This is the world that America’s elite envision. What a small crappy place. The “good thing” is that it should now be blindingly obvious to the rest of the world that Trump was not an anomaly. His was just the undisguised face of bipartisan American policy. There is in fact no sane “other party”. The Biden admin has put that idea to rest. They are both barking mad. Both are the worst possible choice. At this point, it seems almost impossible that positive reform can come from the inside out. Eventually, the rest of the world will have to unite against this insanity if it just wishes to survive.
Our taxes are paying for terrorist assassinations of prominent American’s. Orwellian at its best. Or I guess, worst.
It’s a CIA-backed Death Squad – this sounds very familiar indeed. Since the Ukr puppet govt. does nothing without approval from the imperial overlords, I would bet that the CIA was involved in the murder of Darya Dugina. Supporting right-wing, Death Squads is standard practice- El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Haiti etc.. So this comes as no surprise.
However, it’s not good PR to have domestic advocates of murder and violence against free speech and journalism. As Mr. Ritter points out, no one is safe if this is allowed to go on. This is yet another fact that makes a mockery of the Bill of Rights and the so-called rule of law. The fact that high-profile folks like Roger Waters and others appear on the ‘hit list’ should make public officials take action. One would think anyway…
Don’t forget Chile.
Once again, Ritter hits the nail on the head repeatedly and exposes fact after fact. I don’t know what else to say. Stay safe Scott Ritter. Please stay safe