Robert Parry: Ignoring Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers

[Igel]

3. The Right Sector folk are hardly ignored.

Nor is the occasional apprehension of a separatist "on vacation" in Kharkiv or Kyiv unnoticed.

What is unnoticed in the Western press is that Ilovaisk--one of the bergs of Donets'k--was reported widely in the Russian and separatist media being defended by Serbs of the Chetnik movement. They were praised for repelling a Ukrainian attack. Hundreds of them.

They were openly allies of Hitler in WWII. They etnically cleansed and massacred Muslims. They were banned, but allowed back because they were avidly for a "Greater Serbia." Strelkov-Girkin, the guy who was heading the armed insurgency in Donets'k until yesterday, fought with such in Bosnia in '92 to help defend Serbs. This he proudly admits. They like to have marches commemorating their victories over Muslims. Whereas the world mourned the massacre in Srebrenica in the '90s, they celebrate the massacre of Muslim in Srebrenica in the '40s.

Girkin was the same way in Chechnya. Bomb civilians--women and children? Better that 1000 civilian Chechens die than a single Russian soldier. He and Borodai--who was the civilian "leader" of the DPR and his friend, wrote that in '99. Of course, now that it's Russians being bombed he'd still rather 1000 of the "other side" die than a single Russian be killed.

Then there's the new textbook to teach the "real" Donbas history. Where Kievan Rus' was a East Slav phenomenon, but skull-shape data show that the Ukrainians in the West aren't "true" East Slavs. They're interlopers, fake East Slavs, and Donbas and the Ukraine belongs to the Donbas Russians. The "real" race in charge of the glories of Kievan Rus'.

Let's not forget the Natsbol'/limonovtsy support for the rebels. National bol'sheviks. They're Nazis, they're Bol'sheviks--it's like Reese's, two in one. Limonov didn't get much support for his views until this conflict. He's up in the polls. Zhirinovsky--the Communist Party "opposition leader", also supports the rebels. And told the Poles they should be learning Russian, and if the Baltics are destroyed in a war it's their own fault for siding with NATO. (This, in the last couple of days.) And the Russian Orthodox Army in the east of Ukraine. Beating up and killing Protestant ministers and shutting churches because they're "non-Russian" and "non-Orthodox" influences that corrupt society. You don't want to know what they did to the one Catholic church that was in Luhans'k.

Or the nice swastika that was formed during the recent fundraiser for the rebels held in Crimea. A biker gang--one that Putin's ridden with and sort of supported--was featured. A swastika formed by marching bikers with their torches lit and held high, in front of the Donetsk People's Republic's flag. It makes the heart melt with the sheer patriotism.

In some ways, we're like Nazis. It's all about us. Everybody lives to support to deny us, the American- or the Jewish-controlled West and its power structures. Nobody else has any views--we're not just talking about "proper views"--no, they simply have no views without us. If we all vanished, the heart and core of the universe would be empty, because we are the center of all cognition. It's not just us that reach enlightenment by examining our navels 24/7. No, all others on Earth reach enlightment by examining our navels.

Ukraine will have to deal with the Right Sector, which only formally got into the "organized battalion game" in July. Scraping the Maidan clean of the remnants of the protests and protesters was a good start. Then again, in the last election they and their fellow hard-right groups got less than 2% of the votes. And that was *without* Crimea and the more strongly pro-Russian Donbas. Fortunately, at this point the Right Sector folk have trouble holding their heads up in Ukrainian society. They're "marginals". Svoboda's in slightly better standing, but you have to go back 10-15 years for bad quotes from them. They had a spate of electoral success, and the influx of single-issue voters in one election forced to moderate to not lose them the next election. It was a bit of a scandal in Ukraine, as the die-hard rightists fought it out with moderates in the party. In the press. The result is still clearly right of center, but if you compare what critics say about it versus what it and its members actually say, there's only partial overlap these days. What's clear is that Svoboda is harshly, unambiguously anti-Communist. And that is part of the definition of "fascist" in that part of the world. Being nationalist means it's "anti-Russian" when it comes to Ukraine, and that's another part of the semantics of "fascism."

The Wolfsangel is quite possibly used because it was an old Nazi symbol. (Like the swastika, it predates the Nazis.) But it was also taken over by Ukrainian nationalists who were bad guys for a nationalist, pro-independence cause in WWII. This alliance helped make the Chetnik Movement what it was, and the Banderites what they were. It's also a clever flip of the tryzub, the Ukrainian national symbol that first showed up in Kievan Rus' by 980 AD, with the left-most "zub" or "tooth" of the trident flipped down. The current interpretation is that it stands for "National Idea"--another "Nazi" idea that predates the Nazis but as far as I know was never read into the Wolfsangel. (Which apparently was used as a symbol in a novel when National Socialism was in its youth and wasn't yet Nazism.)

Then again, the Right Sector folk do consistently say that they don't hate or want to hurt any minority, just independence from Russia and for Ukraine to be free to be Ukraine. (They're nationalists and would like Ukrainian language and culture to be used and if necessary protected. This is very French, indeed, and I've heard the same thing said about Native American languages, Spanish in Mexico and even in the US, various indigenous languages in Africa. And even Irish and Welsh. This is largely where National socialism started--state nationalism. That kind of nationalism wasn't all that uncommon--it was part of the liberation movements in Central Europe and to German unification, and continued in the anti-imperialist movements of the '40s, '50s, and '60s. But 'national socialism' also started with socialism, which had a slightly non-canonical form: the belief that large corporations shouldn't exist and that all production should be in small, individual/family/collective production units. That would distribute income and production, remove the "alienation of workers from what they produce," and dispose of large economic power centers in society. There's a reason that "national socialism" was morphed into Nazi when the first became exaggerated and the second part vanished. But 'national socialism' was directly at odds with Soviet 'socialism', which was clearly monopolistic state socialism.

There's a tendency for humans to judge based on likes and dislikes; and to judge based on partial data, so if a person gives to a good cause they're considered just overall more moral, smarter, better dressed, and more attractive, even if there's no good correlation between these things. It works in the opposite direction, too. While I'm iffy on the idea of having to protect languages and cultures, even if endangered or threatened--protection and revitalization of a downtrodden culture, language, ethnicity is the core of nationalistic thought--I'm against imposed adoption of languages and culture in anything more than the same way we have imposed "drive on the right" and "stop at red" rules. These are a pain to learn and get used to, and violations are punished; but having a professional language and a different language used in all other spheres of life is fairly standard in much of the world.