Ukraine: Gunmen seize Crimea government buildings

[pampango]

20. Svoboda does not run the government. Ukrainains need to keep them marginalized but the far-right is

weaker in Ukraine than in many liberal Western European countries.

The students were the first to protest against the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych on the Maidan, the central square in Kiev, last November. These were the Ukrainians with the most to lose, the young people who unreflectively thought of themselves as Europeans and who wished for themselves a life, and a Ukrainian homeland, that were European. Many of them were politically on the left, some of them radically so. After years of negotiation and months of promises, their government, under President Yanukovych, had at the last moment failed to sign a major trade agreement with the European Union.

After weeks of responding peacefully to arrests and beatings by the riot police, many Ukrainians had had enough. A fraction of the protesters, some but by no means all representatives of the political right and far right, decided to take the fight to the police. Among them were members of the far-right party Svoboda and a new conglomeration of nationalists who call themselves the Right Sector (Pravyi Sektor). Young men, some of them from right-wing groups and others not, tried to take by force the public spaces claimed by the riot police. Young Jewish men formed their own combat group, or sotnia, to take the fight to the authorities.

The Russian media continually make the claim that the Ukrainians who protest are Nazis. Naturally, it is important to be attentive to the far right in Ukrainian politics and history. It is still a serious presence today, although less important than the far right in France, Austria, or the Netherlands. Yet it is the Ukrainian regime rather than its opponents that resorts to anti-Semitism, instructing its riot police that the opposition is led by Jews. In other words, the Ukrainian government is telling itself that its opponents are Jews and us that its opponents are Nazis.

The future of this protest movement will be decided by Ukrainians. And yet it began with the hope that Ukraine could one day join the European Union, an aspiration that for many Ukrainians means something like the rule of law, the absence of fear, the end of corruption, the social welfare state, and free markets without intimidation from syndicates controlled by the president.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine/

So far of the 19 government ministers appointed yesterday 2 belong to the Svoboda Party, less than the far-right Freedom Party has in the Dutch government. Not many of us call the Dutch government 'fascist'.

Svododa's presidential candidate in 2010 got 1.5% of the popular vote. In the parliamentary election of 2012 the party got 10.8% of the vote. Both those numbers are much less than the French National Front received in the most recent presidential (17.9%) and parliamentary (13.6%) elections.

Ukrianians need to watch their far-right parties, just as the French, Dutch and many other Europeans do. That does not mean that far-right fascists control those countries or are destined to do so.