{"id":200336,"date":"2021-05-07T18:17:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-07T23:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/05\/07\/he-wont-though\/"},"modified":"2021-05-07T18:17:00","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T23:17:00","slug":"he-wont-though","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/05\/07\/he-wont-though\/","title":{"rendered":"He Won’t, Though"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

This will never happen.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Fighting Nazis is simply too inconvenient for these folks:<\/p>\n

From the moment he was nominated for secretary of state, the media<\/a> has made much over the Holocaust\u2019s impact on Antony Blinken. Blinken\u2019s stepfather<\/a> was a famous survivor; his upbringing made the Holocaust an indelible part of Blinken\u2019s identity<\/a>. Indeed, last month Blinken lambasted<\/a> America\u2019s callousness during the genocide, going so far as denouncing a World War II\u2013era State Department official for refusing to aid Jews fleeing Europe. <\/p>\n

The speech was hailed as a righteous reckoning\u2014and 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<\/a>. The march was denounced by Germany and Israel, but not the United States. <\/p>\n

Blinken\u2019s visit becomes a crucial test, considering that Ukraine is a key US ally: Addressing Kyiv\u2019s blatant glorification of Nazi collaborators would be an opportunity to rise above the failures of his predecessors, placing the Holocaust above geopolitics. <\/p>\n

Last Wednesday\u2019s march was in honor of SS Galichina, a Ukrainian volunteer division in the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party\u2019s military arm responsible for the Holocaust. In 1944, SS Galichina was personally inspected by Heinrich Himmler<\/a>, Hitler\u2019s second in command and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. The division\u2019s record of war crimes includes the Huta Pieniacka massacre<\/a>, when an SS Galichina subunit exterminated around a thousand Polish villagers, chiefly by burning them alive. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

The US embassy in Kyiv did not respond to a request for comment, while a State Department spokesperson replied, on background, \u201cWe welcome President Zelenskiy\u2019s strong statement condemning the march,\u201d and that the department \u201ccontinues to monitor and systematically refute a longstanding Russian disinformation campaign that conflates support for Ukrainian sovereignty with support for neo-Nazi and fascist ideals.\u201d <\/p>\n

The comment did not explain what, if any, connection Kyiv\u2019s SS march has with Russia or disinformation. <\/p>\n

But the truly surprising thing is that Kyiv\u2019s SS march made headlines at all. The reality is that glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn\u2019t a glitch but a feature of today\u2019s Ukraine.
<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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)<\/p>\n

Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to \u201914 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide<\/a> level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation<\/a> declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries\u2014the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)\u2014heroes and freedom fighters and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN<\/a> was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000\u2013100,000 Poles on their own accord. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can\u2019t 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,<\/a> \u201cTo some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator<\/a>] Bandera is a hero, and that\u2019s cool!\u201d
<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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)<\/p>\n

If American foreign policy in the 21st<\/sup> century stands for anything beyond corporate profits, we need to be firmly anti-Nazi.<\/p>\n

Glorification of Nazis leads to the creation of nativist political movements that eventually corrupt the politics, and lead to the implementation of Fascist policies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[967,969,1282,964,1040,1011,1051],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigotry","category-evil","category-fascism","category-foreign-relations","category-former-soviet-union","category-history","category-hypocrisy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200336"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}