Beyond racism and into fascism

A friend recently gave me a wonderful book by the Soviet musicologist Moshe Beregovski (1892-1961). He was a leading light during the 1930s in The Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. His book is entitled “Old Jewish Folk Music” and centres on the music of western Ukraine, eastern Poland and Bessarabia, which was the seat of “klezmer” music in the century before World War 2.

“Jewish proletarian culture” was well nigh wiped out in Ukraine in the period 1941-1944, thanks to the 3rd Reich, ably assisted by its allies in the anti-communist UPA, led by Stepan Bandera. It is estimated that Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army was responsible for the extermination of 145,000 Jews and Poles, aside from the millions more Ukrainians of many races massacred by the nazis.

After the war Bandera lived in West Germany – until 1959, at which point the KGB finally tracked him down and assassinated him.

The US backed coup of 2014 in Ukraine led to the resurrection of Bandera as a national hero and the symbols and colours of the Bandera fascists adorn the the uniforms of many Ukrainian soldiers, not just the Azov battalion. Statues of Bandera have been erected in many Ukrainian cities, just as those of Lenin have been torn down.

Bizarrely, much of the western left from Paul Mason to Zizek Slavoj see fit to ignore these unsavoury facts. Indeed Starmer punctuated his conference speech by crying “Slava Ukraini” (the Bandera era/UPA chant “Glory to Ukraine” to which the torchlit rallies of stormtroopers respond “Slava Heroyam”/”Glory to the Heroes”). This is a country where the Communist Party is banned and anti-trade union legislation is the most draconian in europe.

You don’t have to be a Putin shill to understand that turning a blind eye to this extraordinary revisionism is deeply unhealthy. Simultaneously many thousand US, Canadian, UK and other european fascists are gaining combat experience in the Ukraine war.

There are those who say “how can this be? Zelensky is a Jew.”

But then so is Netanyahu, so was Ariel Sharon.

I shall return to my book and leave these words of Bertold Brecht.

Firebugs dragging their gasoline bottles
Are approaching the Academy of Arts, with a grin.
And so, instead of embracing them, Let us demand the freedom of the elbow
To knock the bottles out of their filthy hands.
Even the most blockheaded bureaucrat,
Provided he loves peace,
Is a greater lover of the arts
Than any so-called art-lover
Who loves the arts of war.