[Peace-discuss] Fascist Formations in Ukraine

[David Johnson]

Better Deal With It, this is what OUR tax money supports in Ukraine !

Fascist Formations in Ukraine

by PETER LEE

 <http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/fascist-formations-in-ukraine/>
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/fascist-formations-in-ukraine/

The Guardian published an adulatory feature on “
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/05/ukraine-women-fighting-frontli
ne> The Women Fighting on the Frontline in Ukraine”.
One of the women profiled was “Anaconda”, fighting in the Aidar Battalion
bankrolled by Igor Kolomoisky:

Anaconda was given her nickname by a unit commander, in a joking reference
to her stature and power. The baby-faced 19-year-old says that her mother is
very worried about her and phones several times a day, sometimes even during
combat. She says it is better to always answer, as her mother will not stop
calling until she picks up.
“In the very beginning my mother kept saying that the war is not for
girls,” Anaconda says. “But now she has to put up with my choice. My dad
would have come to the front himself, but his health does not allow him to
move. He is proud of me now.”

Anaconda was photographed in combat dress resolutely holding an assault
rifle in front of a rather decrepit van.
 <http://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/dropzone/2015/03/leeukraine1.png>
Description: leeukraine1  The caption read:

“Anaconda says she is being treated well by the men in her battalion, but
is hoping that the war will end soon.”

As
<http://offguardian.org/2015/03/05/the-guardians-latest-attempts-at-pr-for-t
he-ukraine-nazis/> reported by the gadfly site OffGuardian, several readers
posted critical observations on the van’s insignia in the comments section
of the piece.  One, “bananasandsocks”, wrote: “We learn from Wikipedia
that the image on the door is the “semi-official” insignia of the 36th
Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS…” and also pointed out the neo-Nazi
significance of the number “1488”.
“bananasandsocks” seemingly temperate comment was removed by the Guardian
for violating its community standards, as were several others, apparently as
examples of “persistent misrepresentation of the Guardian and our
journalists”.
But then the Guardian thought better of it.  While not reinstating the
critical comments, it quietly deleted the original caption to the photo of
Anaconda and replaced it with:

Anaconda alongside a van displaying the neo-Nazi symbol 1488. The volunteer
brigade is known for its far-right links.

Problem solved?  Maybe not.  Maybe it’s more like “Problem dodged”.
Specifically, the problem of the pervasive participation of “ultra-right”
paramilitary elements in Kyiv military operations, which even intrudes upon
the Guardian’s efforts to put a liberal-friendly feminist sheen on the
debacle of the recent ATO in eastern Ukraine.
As to “1488”, I’ll reproduce the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words> Wikipedia entry:

The Fourteen Words is a phrase used predominantly by white nationalists. It
most commonly refers to a 14-word slogan: “We must secure the existence of
our people and a future for White Children.”  It can also refer to another
14-word slogan: “Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not
perish from the earth.”
Both slogans were coined by David Lane, convicted terrorist and member of
the white separatist organization The Order. The first slogan was inspired
by a statement, 88 words in length, from Volume 1, Chapter 8 of Adolf
Hitler’s Mein Kampf:
…
Neo-Nazis often combine the number 14 with 88, as in “14/88″ or “1488”.
The 8s stand for the eighth letter of the alphabet (H), with “HH” standing
for “Heil Hitler”.

Lane died in prison in 2007 while serving a 190 year sentence for, among
other things, the murder of Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg.  David
Lane has considerable stature within global white
nationalist/neo-Nazi/fascist circles as one of the American Aryan movement’
s premier badasses (in addition involvement in to the Berg murder-in which
he denied involvement-and a string of bank robberies to finance the
movement-also denied, Lane achieved a certain martyr’s stature for enduring
almost two decades in Federal detention, frequently in the notorious
Communications Management Units).
And David Lane was a big deal for the “ultra-right” & fascists in Ukraine,
<http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues
/2007/fall/domestic-terrorists> according to the Southern Poverty Law
Center:

Lane’s death touched off paeans from racists around the country and abroad.
June 30 was designated a “Global Day of Remembrance,” with demonstrations
held in at least five U.S. cities as well as England, Germany, Russia and
the Ukraine.

Judging by this video, the march/memorial on the first anniversary of his
death, in 2008, organized by the Ukrainian National Socialist Party in Kyiv,
was well enough attended to merit a police presence of several dozen
officers.  The sountrack to the clip, by the way, is an elegy to David Lane
performed by Ukraine’s premier white nationalist metal band at the time,
Sokyra Peruna.
There is a photograph of a shield inscribed “1488” at Maidan.
 <http://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/dropzone/2015/03/leeukraine2.png>
Description: leeukraine2
More significantly, perhaps, the name of the armed wing of the Svoboda
Party, C14, apparently
<https://www.hate-speech.org/ukraines-far-right-forces/>  invokes Lane’s
“14 words” .
It should be said that Lane’s views, including those that inspired the 1488
tag, are esoteric even within the fascist/Neo-Nazi/white supremacist world
he inhabited.
In a letter from prison, Lane  <http://www.davidlane1488.com/14wordsdecoded.
html> wrote:

You know that the three greatest movements of the last 2,000 years have been
Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Judaism allowed Jews to conquer and rule
the world. I believe only a religious fervor can save our kind now. The 14
Words must be a divine command of Nature’s God whom we call Wotan
Allfather.
…



Lane composed his “88 Precepts” to instruct believers in the ways of white
nationalism.  While apparently riffing off the 88 word Mein Kampf passage
and “88=HH=Heil Hitler”, it also refers to Lane’s numerological/messianic
preoccupations.
Ukrainian fascists’ admiration for Lane is a reflection of the
pervasiveness of indigenous Ukrainian fascism, which looks for models and
partners internationally while drawing plenty of strength and inspiration
from its own profoundly deep historical and ideological local roots.
As I wrote in a
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/06/the-durability-of-ukrainian-fascism/
> piece for CounterPunch, Ukrainian fascism seems almost inevitable:

Ukrainian fascism is more durable and vital than most.  It was forged in the
most adverse conditions imaginable, in the furnace of Stalinism, under the
reign of Hitler, and amid Poland’s effort to destroy Ukrainian nationality.
Ukrainian nationalism was under ferocious attack between the two world wars.
The USSR occupied the eastern half of Ukraine, subjected it to
collectivization under Stalin, and committed repression and enabled a famine
that killed millions.  At first, the Soviets sought to co-opt Ukrainian
nationalism by supporting Ukrainian cultural expression while repressing
Ukrainian political aspirations; USSR nationalities policies were
“nationalist in expression and socialist in essence”.  Then, in 1937
Stalin obliterated the native Ukrainian cultural and communist apparatus in
a thoroughgoing purge and implemented Russified central control through his
bespoke instrument, Nikita Khrushchev.
Meanwhile, the western part of the Ukraine was under the thumb of the Polish
Republic, which was trying to entrench its rule before either the Germans or
the Russians got around to destroying it again.  This translated into a
concerted Polish political, security, cultural, and demographic push into
Ukrainian Galicia.  The Polish government displaced Ukrainian intellectuals
and farmers, attacked their culture and religion (including seizure of
Orthodox churches and conversion into Roman Catholic edifices), marginalized
the Ukrainians in their own homeland, and suppressed Ukrainian independence
activists (like Bandera, who spent the years 1933 to 1939 in Poland’s
Wronki Prison after trying to assassinate Poland’s Minister of the
Interior).
Ukrainian nationalists, therefore, were unable to ride communism or
bourgeois democracy into power.  Communism was a tool of Soviet
expansionism, not class empowerment, and Polish democracy offered no
protection for Ukrainian minority rights or political expression, let alone
a Ukrainian state.
Ukrainian nationalists turned largely toward fascism, specifically toward a
concept of “integral nationalism” that, in the absence of an acceptable
national government, manifested itself in a national will residing in the
spirit of its adherents, not expressed by the state or restrained by its
laws, but embodied by a charismatic leader and exercised through his
organization, whose legitimacy supersedes that of the state and whose
commitment to violence makes it a law unto itself.

It’s not just a matter of historical sentiment or inclination.  Ukraine’s
contemporary fascists share a direct bloodline with the fascists of the
Soviet era, especially in the matter of Roman Shukhevych, the commander of
Ukrainian nationalist forces fighting with the Nazis during World War II and
also responsible for horrific atrocities while attempting to cleanse Galicia
of Poles in the service of Ukrainian independence.   From my CounterPunch
article:

In February 2014, the New York Times’ Andrew Higgins
<https://johnib.wordpress.com/tag/yuriy-shukhevych/> penned a rather
embarrassing passage that valorized the occupation of Lviv-the Galician city
at the heart of Ukrainian fascism, the old stomping grounds of Roman
Shukhevych and the Nachtigall battlaion, and also Simon Wiesnthal’s home
town-by anti-Yanyukovich forces in January 2014:
Some of the president’s longtime opponents here have taken an increasingly
radical line.
Offering inspiration and advice has been Yuriy Shukhevych, a blind veteran
nationalist who spent 31 years in Soviet prisons and labor camps and whose
father, Roman, led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army against Polish and then
Soviet rule.
Mr. Shukhevych, 80, who lost his sight during his time in the Soviet gulag,
helped guide the formation of Right Sector, an unruly organization whose
fighters now man barricades around Independence Square, the epicenter of the
protest movement in Kiev.
Yuriy Shukhevych’s role in modern Ukrainian fascism is not simply that of
an inspirational figurehead and reminder of his father’s anti-Soviet
heroics for proud Ukrainian nationalists.  He is a core figure in the
emergence of the key Ukrainian fascist formation, Pravy Sektor and its
paramilitary.
And Pravy Sektor’s paramilitary, the UNA-UNSO, is not an “unruly”
collection of weekend-warrior-wannabes, as Mr. Higgins might believe.
UNA-UNSO was formed during the turmoil of the early 1990s, largely by ethnic
Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet Union’s bitter war in Afghanistan.  From
the first, the UNA-UNSO has shown a taste for foreign adventures, sending
detachments to Moscow in 1990 to oppose the Communist coup against Yeltsin,
and to Lithuania in 1991.  With apparently very good reason, the Russians
have also accused UNA-UNSO fighters of participating on the anti-Russian
side in Georgia and Chechnya.
After formal Ukrainian independence, the militia elected Yuriy
Shukhevych-the son of OUN-B commander Roman Shukhevych- as its leader and
set up a political arm, which later became Pravy Sektor.

There’s plenty of indigenous fascism to go around. Interviews with
Ukrainian ultra-rights reveal a welter of views befitting the country’s
fraught and contested status in central Europe, ranging from “autonomous
nationalists” (whose demeanour and tactics mirror on the right mirror those
of European anarchists on the left); ultras who emerged from the football
club wars; and determinedly theoretical scientific fascists.  The common
thread of the diverse and syncretic Ukrainian fascist movement is the
conviction that the survival of the Ukrainian people is under threat from a
multitude of forces and mechanisms (Russians, Jews, the EU, democracy,
capitalism, communism etc.), and can only be assured by autonomous armed
force under charismatic leadership; and yes, apparently a shared belief that
Adolf Hitler showed how it could and should be done.
Rooting fascism out of Ukraine’s cultural, social, and political matrix is
going to take a lot of work.  Unfortunately, the opposite is going on right
now.
The leading Ukrainian observer of Ukrainian ultrarights, Anton Shekhovstov,
did not deny the presence of ultraright formations at Maidan, but tried to
square the circle philosophically by characterizing the Ukrainian conflict
as an anti-imperialist/anti-colonial struggle that might elicit and safely
incorporate fascist activism.  Then, when the Russian threat had been dealt
with, Ukrainian civil society could neutralize the fascist factor.  In
January 2014, when Maidan was white-hot, Shekhovstov
<http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.com/2014/01/what-west-should-know-about-e
uromaidans.html> wrote:

Thus, a fight against fascism in Ukraine should always be synonymous with
the fight against the attempts to colonise the country. Those who separate
these two issues or crack down on the Ukrainian far right without
recognising the urgent need for national independence will never be
successful in their attempts to neutralise the far right. Moreover, they can
make the situation worse.

However, Ukrainian fascists have not been disempowered and marginalized by
the circus of defeat and dysfunction that is the current Kyiv government.
In fact, “ultra-right” is trending upward in Ukraine governance, as
Shekhovtsov glumly
<http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.com/2015/01/whither-ukrainian-far-right.h
tml> observed in a recent post discussing the emergence of yet another
powerful ultra-right formation:

[T]he electoral failure of Svoboda and the Right Sector [in the recent
parliamentary as well as presidential elections] did not mark “the end of
history” of the Ukrainian far right…
… The recent developments in Ukraine marked by the rise of the previously
obscure neo-Nazi organisation “The Patriot of Ukraine” (PU) led by Andriy
Bilets’ky…
… the PU formed a core of the Azov battalion, a volunteer detachment
governed by the Ministry of Interior headed by Arsen Avakov. From the very
beginning, the Azov battalion employed imagery such as Wolfsangel and
Schwarze Sonne that in post-war Europe is associated with neo-Nazi movements
…
The political perspective raises troubling questions: Why did Ukrainians
elect a neo-Nazi into the parliament? Why did the Ukrainian Ministry of
Interior promote the leaders of the neo-Nazi organisation?…

Shekhovtstov finds an explanation for Avakov’s footsie with the PU in the
cronyism (and demand for extra-legal street muscle) that permeates Ukraine
business and politics.  His conclusion is not a particularly happy one:

Conclusion
Avakov may consider the PU-led Azov battalion as his “private army”, but
not everybody in the PU and Azov see the current cooperation with the
Ministry of Interior as a goal in and of itself. The PU may benefit from
this cooperation, but it still has its own political agenda that goes beyond
this cooperation. The PU has also started advertising employment in the
Security Service of Ukraine on their webpages. [emphasis added]
Further infiltration of the far right into the Ukrainian law enforcement and
other institutions of the state will most likely lead to the following
developments. First, the coalescence of the police and the far right who
were engaged, inter alia, in the illegal activities will necessarily
increase the corruption risks. Second, the growth of the far right within
the law enforcement will lead to the gradual liberation of the PU from the
personal patronage of Avakov that will likely result in the PU’s
independent action.
While Svoboda and the Right Sector have failed in the 2014 parliamentary
elections, the infiltration of some other far right organisations in the law
enforcement is possibly a more advanced long-term strategy in their fight
against not particularly well established liberal democracy in Ukraine.

One of the awkward facts of Ukrainian politics is that Ukraine’s fascists
have the ambition if not yet the demonstrated capability of
opportunistically using the current regime’s need-and factions’
desires-for effective armed formations to catapult the extreme-right into
power.
And it seems that the West has zero strategy for dealing with this problem.
In fact, if disorder and discontent escalate in western Ukraine as a result
of the US insistence on confronting Russia and the ethnic Russian opposition
in the West, I expect the fascist problem will get worse before it gets
better.
And it isn’t going to be solved by ignoring, downplaying, wishing away, or
dismissing Ukrianian fascism as an irrelevant historical and political
anachronism…or by discretely recaptioning some of its embarrassingly
blatant manifestations.
It’s not just amusing or disturbing that the Guardian appears determined to
graft a misleading liberal, Europe-loving image onto the fascist friendly
Ukraine adventure; it’s downright dangerous.
Peter Lee edits China Matters and covers Asia for CounterPunch.



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