{"id":48716,"date":"2014-10-20T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2014-10-20T11:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=48716"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:38","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:38","slug":"ukraines-neo-nazis-demand-respect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/10\/ukraines-neo-nazis-demand-respect\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine\u2019s Neo-Nazis Demand Respect"},"content":{"rendered":"

15 Oct 2014 – Thousands of Ukraine\u2019s neo-Nazis surrounded the parliament\u00a0in Kiev demanding that the government honor Ukrainian paramilitary forces who fought for Adolf Hitler in World War II, another embarrassing reminder of the extremism unleashed by last February\u2019s U.S.-backed coup.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol on a banner in Ukraine.<\/p><\/div>\n

For months, the New York Times and other major U.S. news outlets have insisted that it\u2019s just Russian propaganda to say that a significant neo-Nazi presence exists inside Ukraine, but thousands of these \u201cnon-existent\u201d neo-Nazis battled police on Tuesday outside the parliament building in Kiev demanding recognition of their Hitler-collaborating forebears.<\/p>\n

The parliament, aware of\u00a0the obvious public relations fiasco that would follow if it bowed to far-right demands to honor members of the Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UIA), defeated the proposal. That touched off\u00a0riots by an estimated 8,000 protesters<\/a> led by Ukraine\u2019s right-wing Svoboda party and the Right Sektor.<\/p>\n

Historians blame the UIA and other Ukrainian fascist forces for the extermination of thousands of Poles and Jews during World War II as these right-wing Ukrainian paramilitaries sided with the German Nazis in their fight against the Soviet Union\u2019s Red Army. Svoboda and the Right Sektor have elevated UIA leader Stepan Bandera to the level of a Ukrainian national hero.<\/p>\n

But Svoboda and\u00a0Right Sektor activists are not just neo-Nazi street protesters. They were key figures in last February\u2019s violent uprising that overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych and established a coup regime that the U.S. State Department quickly recognized as \u201clegitimate.\u201d Many\u00a0far-right militants have since been incorporated into the Ukrainian military in its fight to crush resistance to the coup regime from ethnic Russians in Ukraine\u2019s east.<\/p>\n

Though played down by the Western press, the neo-Nazi affiliations of these militants have occasionally popped up in news stories, including references to displays of Nazi insignias, but usually these citations are mentioned only in passing or are confined to the last few paragraphs of lengthy stories or are dismissed as\u00a0\u201cRussian propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this neo-Nazi reality continues to be\u00a0an inconvenient truth\u00a0about the U.S.-backed coup regime that seized power in Kiev with the overthrow of Yanukovych on Feb. 22. Several government ministries, including national security, were given to these far-right elements in recognition of their key role in the putsch that forced members of Yanukovych\u2019s government to flee for their lives.<\/p>\n

The larger historical context\u00a0is that Nazism has been deeply rooted in western Ukraine since World War II, especially in cities like Lviv, where a cemetery to the veterans of the Galician SS, a Ukrainian affiliate of the Nazi SS, is maintained. These old passions were brought to the surface\u00a0again in the battle to oust Yanukovych and sever historic ties to Russia.<\/p>\n

The muscle behind the U.S.-backed\u00a0Maidan protests against Yanukovych came from neo-Nazi militias trained in western Ukraine, organized into 100-man brigades and dispatched to Kiev. After the coup, neo-Nazi leader Andriy Parubiy, who was commander of the Maidan \u201cself-defense forces,\u201d was elevated to national security chief and soon announced that the Maidan militia forces would be incorporated into the National Guard and sent to eastern Ukraine to fight\u00a0ethnic Russians resisting the coup regime.<\/p>\n

At War in the East<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the U.S. government and media cheered this \u201canti-terrorist operation,\u201d the neo-Nazis and other right-wing\u00a0battalions engaged in\u00a0brutal street fighting against Russian ethnic rebels. Only occasionally did this nasty reality slip into the major U.S. news media. For instance, an\u00a0Aug. 10\u00a0article<\/a> in the New York Times mentioned the neo-Nazi paramilitaries at the end of a lengthy story on another topic.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d the Times reported.<\/p>\n

\u201cOfficials 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.\u201d [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cNYT Discovers Ukraine\u2019s Neo-Nazis at War.<\/a>\u201d]<\/p>\n

The conservative London Telegraph offered more details about the Azov battalion in an article<\/a> by\u00a0correspondent Tom Parfitt, who wrote: \u201cKiev\u2019s use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk \u2018people\u2019s republics\u2019\u2026 should send a shiver down Europe\u2019s spine.<\/p>\n

\u201cRecently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming. The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf\u2019s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites.\u201d<\/p>\n

Based on interviews with militia members, the Telegraph reported that some of the fighters doubted the reality of the Holocaust, expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and acknowledged that they are indeed Nazis.<\/p>\n

Andriy Biletsky, the Azov commander, \u201cis also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly,\u201d according to the Telegraph article which quoted a\u00a0commentary by Biletsky as declaring: \u201cThe historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, for the first time since World War II, a government had dispatched Nazi storm troopers to attack a European population \u2013 and officials in Kiev knew what they were doing. The Telegraph questioned\u00a0Ukrainian authorities in Kiev who acknowledged that they were aware\u00a0of the extremist ideologies of some\u00a0militias but insisted that\u00a0the higher priority was having troops who were strongly motivated to fight. [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cIgnoring Ukraine\u2019s Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.<\/a>\u201d]<\/p>\n

But a rebel counteroffensive by ethnic Russians in August reversed many of Kiev\u2019s gains and drove the Azov and other government forces back to the port city of Mariupol, where Foreign Policy\u2019s reporter Alec Luhn also encountered these neo-Nazis. He wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cBlue and yellow Ukrainian flags fly over Mariupol\u2019s burned-out city administration building and at military checkpoints around the city, but at a sport school near a huge metallurgical plant, another symbol is just as prominent: the\u00a0wolfsangel<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(\u2018wolf trap\u2019) symbol that was widely used in the Third Reich and has been adopted by neo-Nazi groups. \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cPro-Russian forces have said they are fighting against Ukrainian nationalists and \u2018fascists\u2019 in the conflict, and in the case of Azov and other battalions, these claims are essentially true.\u201d [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cSeeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n

Nazi Insignia on Helmets<\/strong><\/p>\n

More evidence continued to emerge about the presence of Nazis in the ranks of Ukrainian government fighters. Germans were shocked to see video of Azov militia soldiers decorating their gear with the Swastika and the \u201cSS rune.\u201d NBC News reported<\/a>: \u201cGermans were confronted with images of their country\u2019s dark past \u2026 when German public broadcaster ZDF showed video of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols on their helmets in its evening newscast.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe video was shot \u2026 in Ukraine by a camera team from Norwegian broadcaster TV2. \u2018We were filming a report about Ukraine\u2019s AZOV battalion in the eastern city of Urzuf, when we came across these soldiers,\u2019 Oysten Bogen, a correspondent for the private television station, told NBC News. \u201cMinutes before the images were taped, Bogen said he had asked a spokesperson whether the battalion had fascist tendencies. \u2018The reply was: absolutely not, we are just Ukrainian nationalists,\u2019 Bogen said.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the newsworthiness of a U.S.-backed government dispatching neo-Nazi storm troopers to attack\u00a0Ukrainian cities, the major U.S. news outlets went to extraordinary lengths to excuse this behavior, with the Washington Post\u00a0publishing a rationalization\u00a0that the use of the\u00a0Swastika\u00a0was merely \u201cromantic.\u201d<\/p>\n

This curious description of the symbol most associated with the human devastation of the Holocaust and World War II can be found in the last three paragraphs of a Post lead story<\/a> published in September. Post correspondent Anthony Faiola portrayed\u00a0the Azov fighters as \u201cbattle-scarred patriots\u201d nobly resisting \u201cRussian aggression\u201d and willing to resort to \u201cguerrilla war\u201d if necessary.<\/p>\n

The article found nothing objectionable about\u00a0Azov\u2019s\u00a0plans for \u201csabotage, targeted assassinations and other insurgent tactics\u201d against Russians, although such actions in other contexts are regarded as terrorism. The extremists even extended their threats to the government of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko if he agrees to a peace deal\u00a0with the ethnic Russian east that is not to the militia\u2019s liking.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Kiev reaches a deal with rebels that they don\u2019t support, paramilitary fighters say they could potentially strike pro-Russian targets on their own \u2014 or even turn on the government itself,\u201d the article states. (The riot outside the parliament building on Tuesday is an early indication that such a threat is real.)<\/p>\n

The Post article \u2013 like almost all of its coverage of Ukraine \u2013 was laudatory about the Kiev forces fighting ethnic Russians in the east, but the newspaper did have to do some quick thinking to explain a photograph of a Swastika gracing an Azov brigade barracks.<\/p>\n

So, in the last three paragraphs of the story, Faiola reported: \u201cOne platoon leader, who called himself Kirt, conceded that the group\u2019s far right views had attracted about two dozen foreign fighters from around Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn one room, a recruit had emblazoned a swastika above his bed. But Kirt \u2026 dismissed questions of ideology, saying that the volunteers \u2014 many of them still teenagers \u2014 embrace symbols and espouse extremist notions as part of some kind of \u2018romantic\u2019 idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, this\u00a0inconvenient truth \u2014 this\u00a0neo-Nazi extremism in Ukraine \u2014 has reemerged\u00a0in violent clashes outside the parliament building in Kiev.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for <\/em>The Associated Press and <\/em>Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, <\/em>America\u2019s Stolen Narrative,<\/em> either in\u00a0print here<\/a>\u00a0or as an e-book (from Amazon<\/a> and barnesandnoble.com<\/a>). <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

15 Oct 2014 – Thousands of Ukraine\u2019s neo-Nazis surrounded the parliament in Kiev demanding that the government honor Ukrainian paramilitary forces who fought for Adolf Hitler in World War II, another embarrassing reminder of the extremism unleashed by last February\u2019s U.S.-backed coup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-balkans-eastern-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}