Does Ukraine really have a neo-Nazi problem?
JVL Introduction
Larry Cohler-Esses writes that:
“In its existential struggle against Russian invaders, Ukraine, a pro-Western democracy, has elevated some problematic heroes with fascist origins. And its allies — including Jewish leaders and liberal politicians usually on guard against such forces — have largely downplayed or denied this phenomenon.”
His article provides a thoughtful analysis of the significance of this Nazi and antisemitic influence in Ukraine and of views as to how Jewish commentators and organisations who focus on antisemitism variously ignore, condone or condemn it.
Cohler-Esses does not extend his analysis to compare how significant neo-Nazi and anti-Jewish sentiment in Ukraine is often tolerated while the comments of those supporting Palestinian rights are picked over syllable by syllable to discover, or generate, hints of possible antisemitism.
RK/MC
This article was originally published by Forward on Fri 28 Jul 2023. Read the original here.
Does Ukraine really have a neo-Nazi problem? US officials won’t say
Some Jewish leaders have pulled back their criticism of the Azov Brigade since Russia’s invasion
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They didn’t elevate the nazi ‘heroes’ in their ‘existential struggle against Russian invaders’. They were elevating them long before the invasion. This is not a new phenomenon, it’s been going on for years and since Maidan the nazi-worshippers are the ones running the place, or very close to it.
Great to hear that the Azov Brigade only has 2,500 members left.
Saying they are just nationalists is no different to saying that the Waffen SS were fighting against the unfair terms of the 1918 armistice.
Azov were one of the groups crucial to scuppering the peace that Zelensky won his election espousing. That most Ukrainians voted for.
So Azov and others are directly responsible for destroying Ukrainian democracy. God what a mess.Good riddance.
Worse than Bandera. I recently attended a lecture on Ukrainian history in Oxford’s Linacre college by a young Ukrainian. She admired Symon Petliura and did not mention the killing of between 100,000 and 200,000 Jews — mainly by people they knew– in 1919 before he was driven out by Bolsheviks. She was not aware that the “history” she purveyed was a lie.
Whilst I think it’s quite wrong to view Ukraine as a ‘fascist’ country and it’s highly hypocritical of the Russian government to talk about ‘de-Nazifying’ Ukraine with the likes of the Wagner outfit, stuffed full of murderous hard-rightists, having run amok in Ukraine, there are worrying aspects within Ukraine which don’t augur well for when this war finishes.
It’s true that the Ukrainian hard-right wins little in elections, but that’s no indication of their real strength. Before this war started, there was plenty of evidence presented in Western publications and websites about the strong presence of hard-rightists within the Ukrainian state forces. Of course, it’s impolite to raise this today, but they haven’t gone away.
Aspects of the hard-right’s ideology have been seeping for quite some time into Ukraine’s political mainstream. This is especially symbolised by the widespread memorialisation of Stepan Bandera and the organisations he led, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), or influenced, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Viktor Yushchenko, the president of Ukraine during 2005-10, was not a fascist, yet he had Bandera rehabilitated as a Hero of Ukraine. Bandera was unquestionably a fascist; his organisation entered Ukrainian territory in 1941 with the Nazi invasion, and the OUN attempted to create an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, with no place for Poles, Russians and (especially) Jews. Had his idea of a Ukrainian state come to fruition, it would have been every bit as murderous as Pavelich’s Ustashe state in wartime Croatia, possibly more so. The OUN and UPA were deeply involved in ethnic massacres of Jews, Poles and Russians.
The official memorialisation of a fascist war-criminal, with statues, plaques, street renamings, museums, etc, etc, all over the place, is deeply worrying. Why hail such a murderous thug? In Britain, we don’t have statues of our failed führers of the 1940s, Oswald Mosley and Arnold Leese, in market squares. (On the Russian side, Putin has rehabilitated the White General Denikin, whose forces were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews across Ukraine and southern Russia during the Civil War.) The current anti-Russian trend in Ukraine, the extirpation of everything Russian, however culturally progressive or even innocent, is straight out of Bandera’s cook-book, and is surely a sign of the rise of a narrow ethno-nationalism: never a good thing.
Whatever the outcome of this current war — I suspect that it will be a frozen conflict roughly along today’s front lines — I see the main political victor on both Russian and Ukrainian sides of the lines being the far-right. I don’t see meaningful democratic politics, let alone left-wing politics, making much progress in either Russia or Ukraine after the war has ended, in an atmosphere of narrow ethno-nationalism.
PS Enlightening article by the way!
Older people will recognise here the USA’s persistent policy of siding with fascists, brutal monarchies all with or without death squads and torture regimes, influencing its current ‘let’s all look the other way’ approach to Nazism in Ukraine.
Back in 2014 BBC Newsnight did an item “Neo-Nazi threat in new Ukraine” – see youtube link below. Here the Azov battalion boasted about how enthusiastic they were about killing Jews and Russians (coverage now rhetorically un-existed by BBC commentators). While globalists careerists seeking advancement under US imperialist hegemony might turn a blind eye to this, UK Jews and other minorities will be wondering how they could possible walk down the same street safely as the Azov battalion and those like them.
Once again our citizenship and democratic input is subordinate to ruling-class interests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SBo0akeDMY&ab_channel=BBCNewsnight
Yes, clearly Ukraine does have this problem, along with many other countries in Europe including Russia. It is true however that the lauded (whitewashed?) Azov brigade is a small part of Ukraine’s forces. Zelensky in addition to being Jewish came from a Russian-speaking family and spent the first part of his term as president trying to reassure and reach agreement with the Eastern breakaway regions. He also tried to be civil about the Bandera identitarians (more than we’d like, viewing from outside) because he recognised a faultline in the country and that Bandera had become a symbol of independence with appeal outside the far-right groups. My fear is that if this war goes on and on without genuine military support that the west has emptily promised, the neo-nazi groups will grow stronger and step in to take over if the country is partitioned as many on the left seem to be advocating. My experience in Bosnia and my conversations with friends from former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe influence me. At the start of that Balkan war too, histories of WW2 were manipulated to camouflage invasion and genocide. The eventual Dayton ‘accord’ enforced ethnic division, gave huge territorial gains to the aggressors and hasn’t laid the foundations for a lasting peace. I don’t know any Ukrainians for inside information but I value the reports in Open Democracy which foreground those people organising for civil society, trade union rights and free speech .
Interesting article, however with many that deal with Ukraine and Russia what seems to be always missing is the part the US and UK played in the regime change from a democratically elected government to a right wing imposed government from the West. The pictures of Hunter Biden and Hilary Clinton in Maiden square, with the latter giving out biscuits, I thought unnerving. I knew it wouldn’t end well for either country.