Category: Fascism

Say What You Will about the French, but They Do Not like Nazis

No Comments

So, unlike government representatives than almost any other country in the EU, they were unamused to stumble on a Nazi event at a celebration of Kiev’s birthday.

If they had been from any other EU nation, (and the Brits) they would have done their best impression of Sergeant Schultz, and pretended that they had seen nothing, but the French are slightly less accomodating of those who want to lionize Nazis. 

Given that the US has been actively cultivating Neo-Nazis in the FSU for years, we know how US government officials would have reacted to this.

The French, however, theyy take it kind of personally:

After a group of French senators visiting Kyiv to celebrate the city’s birthday stumbled across a far-right event involving children, Ukraine’s western allies no longer have any excuse not to demand action.

On the last weekend of May, the Ukrainian capital Kyiv celebrates its “birthday”, marking the day in 482 when the city was, according to legend, founded.

………

This year, however, there was another – very different – kind of event. On Andrievskiy Descent, a scenic, historic road in central Kyiv, members of the Ukrainian far-right party Right Sector and its youth wing, Right Youth, put on a militaristic show for children. They invited kids to shoot from air rifles at a paper target of the Kremlin and at pictures of Colorado beetles (a derogatory term for Russians).

This rather macabre scene coincided with a visit to the city of three French senators to Ukraine. Nathalie Goulet, Jean-Pierre Moga and Joel Guerriau were all in Kyiv for its birthday celebrations, and apparently witnessed Right Sector’s display.

They did not like what they saw.

On June 10, the delegation officially submitted a request to the French Foreign Ministry to “know what the position of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs [is] on this subject and what measures it intends to take to avoid the contagion of this deadly ideology.”

“The neo-Nazi parties are developing increasingly visible activities, including in the centre of Kyiv, with shooting ranges, practices of assembling and dismantling Kalashnikovs and recruitment offices for young people for militias that clearly claim Nazi ideology,” their joint letter read.

The senators also claimed that they had seen pro-Nazi memorabilia being sold by Right Sector cadres, including identity papers of members of SS-Sonderkommando units.

………

Bubbling under the surface for decades, the far-right came to mainstream attention following the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Far-right elements were present in the protests against then president Viktor Yanukovych, and had a higher degree of organisation, ideological zeal and propensity to violence than the bulk of the protesters.

The far right were supported by the US State Department, the CIA, and the Orwellian named National Endowment for Democracy.

The West needs to stop supporting Nazis in the former Soviet Union states.

The (Old) New Normal in Germany

No Comments

It appears that every few weeks, we have revelations of an element of the German state security apparatus with ties to Neo-Nazis or the far right.

In this case, it was a German commando (basically S.W.A.T) unit in Frankfurt, which has been disbanded over right-wing ties:

German authorities disbanded a Frankfurt police commando unit Thursday over the suspected far-right links of a group of active officers, the latest in a string of extremist-related scandals to blight the country’s police and military.

Peter Beuth, interior minister for Hesse state, where Frankfurt is located, said “unacceptable misconduct” prompted the decision to close the unit. He also said superiors had turned a “blind eye.”

Hesse’s prosecutor on Wednesday said the office was investigating 20 officers from the force, with the majority suspected of sending messages in far-right chat groups, including Nazi symbols and “inciting content.” Three supervising officers were accused of failing to stop or report the exchanges. All but one of the 20 officers was on active duty.

The chat groups were uncovered after examining the phone of an officer suspected of possessing and distributing child pornography.

Pedophile German Neo-Nazis? That’s like the worst law enforcement misconduct bingo card ever.

Germany’s Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has pushed back against assertions of structural racism or far-right sympathies in the country’s police forces. But he agreed to commission a study into the issue last year as pressure grew amid a slew of such cases.

The resurgence of Nazis in positions of authority in Germany is concerning, and there are definitely echoes from the past here.  

It’s even more concerning given the hegemony that Germany has over the EU.

Why Do We Keep Choosing Neo-Nazis?

3 Comments

I do not think that the interception of a Ryanair flight to detain Roman Protasevich in Belarus is a travesty.

I’m less concerned about this than the fact that once again, the US foreign policy apparatus, having confronted a broad based opposition to a despot, always seems to choose Neo-Nazi assholes.

I’m not a fan of our US regime change operations, but I wonder why these efforts always seem to pick Nazis.

It seems that the US State Security Apparatus has been very careless for a very long time:

There is more to say about the Ryanair incident in Belarus and the arrest of the ‘regime change’ operative Roman Protasevich.

We will start with the latter.

The sympathetic portraits of Protasevich in the New York Times and in the Guardian are only of interest for what they leave out.

FOIA Research and The Canadafiles have very well sourced and way more complete pieces on him. They link to a mountain of evidence in form of social media postings, photos and videos which support their findings.

From those we learn that Protasevich has long been a member of the fascist “Young Front” militia of Belarus. He has fought alongside the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine’s post-Maidan civil war.

………

Neither the NYT nor the Guardian mention Proasevich’s ideological position or his involvement with the neo-nazis of Azov. The London Times had originally reported that Protasevich was involved with Azov but later silently removed that passage from its report.

Another point missing from ‘western’ media is that Protasevich has long been on the payroll of various ‘western’ government financed propaganda media:

If this were an isolated case, I’d put it down to someone being lazy, and not doing a proper background check, but this happens over, and over, and over, and over again, so I have to conclude it’s deliberate policy.

This is worse than a crime, it’s a mistake, and it raises an obvious question:

He Won’t, Though

2 Comments

It appears that there has been an outbreak of extreme naivete at The Nation, where they expect Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to to confront The Ukraine over their embrace of Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, and revisionist history.

This will never happen.

Blinken, and Biden, are a part of a foreign policy establishment who never ended the Cold War, and simply changed the name from “USSR” to “Russia” on their to-do lists.

Fighting Nazis is simply too inconvenient for these folks:

From the moment he was nominated for secretary of state, the media has made much over the Holocaust’s impact on Antony Blinken. Blinken’s stepfather was a famous survivor; his upbringing made the Holocaust an indelible part of Blinken’s identity. Indeed, last month Blinken lambasted America’s callousness during the genocide, going so far as denouncing a World War II–era State Department official for refusing to aid Jews fleeing Europe.

The speech was hailed as a righteous reckoning—and it was. But condemning long-dead officials is one thing. Today, Blinken will have a chance to stand up for Holocaust victims in a far less comfortable environment. He will visit Kyiv, a city where, merely a week ago, hundreds marched in honor of a Nazi SS division. The march was denounced by Germany and Israel, but not the United States.

Blinken’s visit becomes a crucial test, considering that Ukraine is a key US ally: Addressing Kyiv’s blatant glorification of Nazi collaborators would be an opportunity to rise above the failures of his predecessors, placing the Holocaust above geopolitics.

Last Wednesday’s march was in honor of SS Galichina, a Ukrainian volunteer division in the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s military arm responsible for the Holocaust. In 1944, SS Galichina was personally inspected by Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s second in command and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. The division’s record of war crimes includes the Huta Pieniacka massacre, when an SS Galichina subunit exterminated around a thousand Polish villagers, chiefly by burning them alive.

………

The US embassy in Kyiv did not respond to a request for comment, while a State Department spokesperson replied, on background, “We welcome President Zelenskiy’s strong statement condemning the march,” and that the department “continues to monitor and systematically refute a longstanding Russian disinformation campaign that conflates support for Ukrainian sovereignty with support for neo-Nazi and fascist ideals.”

The comment did not explain what, if any, connection Kyiv’s SS march has with Russia or disinformation.

But the truly surprising thing is that Kyiv’s SS march made headlines at all. The reality is that glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn’t a glitch but a feature of today’s Ukraine.

One aided and abetted by the US state security apparatus, as evidenced by the strong support given by the US government during the Maidan protests.  (Victoria Nuland literally brought them cookies)

Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to ’14 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes and freedom fighters and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.

………

The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can’t be celebrating Nazi collaborators because it elected Zelenskiy, a Jewish president. Zelenskiy, however, has alternated between appeasing and ignoring the whitewashing: In 2018, he stated, “To some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator] Bandera is a hero, and that’s cool!”

Zelinskiy is a Kapo, and we should not be supporting what is going on in the Ukraine.  (Same goes to a lesser degree in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland)

If American foreign policy in the 21st century stands for anything beyond corporate profits, we need to be firmly anti-Nazi.

Glorification of Nazis leads to the creation of nativist political movements that eventually corrupt the politics, and lead to the implementation of Fascist policies.

Bad Stage Design, CPAC Edition (I Did Nazi See This Coming)

No Comments
Have you seen the stage desin for this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference>

It’s rather evocative, in an Adolph and Eva kind of way:


That shape looks familiar ……… Oh, right, it’s the Odal Rune, with wings, (Serifs) which was specifically created for:


Yes, it was worn on the lapels of some SS units in the 2nd World War, and is different from the historical Odal rune (ᛟ), which has no wings.


Here it is as the flag of the Flag of the Volksdeutsche 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, according to Wikipedia.


In recent years, actual NeoNazis have replaced the swastika with the winged Odal Rune in an attempt to mainstream their symboliam.

Also, I have some footage of the stage show at CPAC, and it’s a trip too:

My bad, that’s from the original 1968 version of the Mel Brooks film The Producers.

Still, this is whole affair is a complete mind f%$#.

 
On the bright side, it appears that at least the fascists are no longer denying who they are.