Below I have cut and pasted an article By Robert Parry, an independent journalist with a long and distinguished history in U.S. invesitgative journalism on the events in Ukraine today,
Parry's work from the 1980s on has been in the tradition of I.F. Stone and Seymour Hersh, very different from the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times Reporter, Nicholas Kristof, refered to in the article who sees the world in terms of sweeping generalization based on refurbished stereottype that so many readers feel comfortable.
I doubt Parry will win any Pulitzer Prizes but he did win a Polk Award for his Iran-Contra investigative journalism in the 1980s, and George Polk was the U.S. journalist murdered by the Greek right in the post WWII Greek Civil War(the beginnings of U.S. CIA counterinsurgency) although the official story then was to blame Polk's killing on the revolutionary left.
In the documents that Parry cites from the 1980s, it is especially interesting to note that Richard Pipes, Reagan's favorite Kremlinologist and a champion of the most extreme anti-Soviet policies, was privately critical of the anti-semitic messages that the neo Nazis broadcasting from the CIA Radio Liberty were sending into the Ukraine--not necessarily on any moral or ethical grounds but in the belief that it was counter-productive to general anti-Soviet policy
I plan to write about these issues in greater detail subsequently but let me make a few preliminary observations. Karl Marx said famously in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte "Hegel wrote somewhere that all great world historic personages appear so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Marx was writing about the leaders of the French revolution and the eventual triumph of Napoleon and comparing them to the leaders of the revolution of 1848 and Napoleon's nephew Louis Napoleon, who declared himself Napoleon III.
Hitler had no nephews who sought revive his "legacy" but he had Waffen SS divisions from all of occupied and collaborator Europe, divisions filled with local fascists, opportunists, those who were active participants in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Some of these fascists were with the help of U.S. cold warriors able to "re-invent themselves as anti-Communist "freedom fighters" working with and for many U.S. NAT0 bloc propaganda and intelligence services, becoming "advisors" on Soviet and Warsaw Treaty state policies, even academics in some instances, often removing the murderous anti-Semitic and other racist materials from their previous writings while maintaining comparable anti-Soviet and anti-Communist assertions
Others became part of various emigre communities in Germany, Canada, the U.S. and other countries, maintaining their old nationalism, sometimes celebrating their war criminals.
Just when the U.S. government at the end of the 1970s began to seriously investigate and seek punishment for war criminals who had entered the U.S. under these auspices, the Reagan administration began to use them in a far more extensive and agressive manner with its cold war revival policies.
Mikhail Gorbachev's "Glasnost" policy also, by undermining the Soviet economy with all of its faults by siphoning off resources to a parallel economy, encouraging various dissident groups, including ethnic nationalists in various parts of the Soviet Union, strengthened these forces everywhere, just as the Reagan administration's support of rightwing Muslim "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan led directly to Al Queda. whose founder, Osama bin Laden, worked directly with the CIA in the 1980s and hid in plain sight in Pakistan for many yeaars after the September 11 attacks while the Bush administration poured billions into the Pakistani military-theocratic state to "fight terrorism."
In Ukraine today, the Obama administration and dominant media are up in arms in defense of "the little Hitlers" of the region against Russia, new croney capitalist Russia not "Soviet Russia." They indignantly accuse this Russia of agression against territory all of which was formerly the Soviet Ukraine and, in regard to Crimea, never a part of Ukraine until Nikita Khrushchev made it so in hte 1950s
Now, instead of Napoleon III as "a caricature of the old Napoleon," as Marx wrote, the U.S. has conjured up a caricature of the "old Stalin" in Putin of all people, an aggressive strong man with an appetite for conquest who must be resisted "contained" in the name of "peace" and "democracy." That is the farce of today.
Napoleon Marx understood, was a revolutionary despot, whose expansion of French power was connected to a bourgeois revolution of far reaching importance, which the French peasant masses associated with the own advances, just as the Soviet masses associated the development of industry, agriculture, education, and the victory against fascism with policies of the Stalin leadership.
I am not writing here to defend those policies, only to say that unlike Napoleon III, who pretended that he would continue them, the croney/oligarch/state capitalist government of Putin makes no such pretense. And of course it is objectively weaker even with its still great military power(on paper at least) than any Soviet government, with the NAT0 alliance expanded to include former allies in Eastern Europe and former Soviet Republics in under the sway of both the transnational syndicates of capital and the U.S. NAT0 bloc.
So who really has any reason to be afraid of the Putin government? Twenty three years after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, Hitler's ideological grand children are coming out of the closet in Ukraine and Croatia, Bosnia, Hungary, Luthuania, and other countries and the propaganda "media" in the U.S. and other countries continues to support them while refusing to seriously evaluate them Why?
Russia still has hugely valuable raw materials, oil, natural gas, precious metals which, whatever else may be said of it, the Putin government has not yet turned over to the syndicates of transnational capital operating in other parts of the former Soviet Union. And Russia still has vast quantities of nuclear weapons and military power that the U.S. NAT0 bloc would love to add to its arsenals against future Chinese, possibly Indian, and other rivals in the world economy, to to mention all anti-capitalist peoples movements.
Fortunately, there are writers like Robert Parry who take investigative journalism seriously as against the "don't ask, don't tell" policy of the New York Times and other establishment media outlets towards neo Nazis in the Ukraine and other parts of Europe today Below is his fine article
Norman Markowitz
Ukraine's 'Dr. Strangelove' Reality
06 May 14
s much as the coup regime in Ukraine and its supporters want to project an image of Western moderation, there is a “Dr. Strangelove” element that can’t stop the Nazism from popping up from time to time, like when the Peter Sellers character in the classic movie can’t keep his right arm from making a “Heil Hitler” salute.
This brutal Nazism surfaced again on Friday when right-wing toughs in Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters driving them into a trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the building was engulfed in flames, some people who tried to flee were chased and beaten, while those trapped inside heard the Ukrainian nationalists liken them to black-and-red-striped potato beetles called Colorados, because those colors are used in pro-Russian ribbons.
“Burn, Colorado, burn” went the chant.
As the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing of the Ukrainian national anthem. The building also was spray-painted with Swastika-like symbols and graffiti reading “Galician SS,” a reference to the Ukrainian nationalist army that fought alongside the German Nazi SS in World War II, killing Russians on the eastern front.
The death by fire of dozens of people in Odessa recalled a World War II incident in 1944 when elements of a Galician SS police regiment took part in the massacre of the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka, which had been a refuge for Jews and was protected by Russian and Polish partisans. Attacked by a mixed force of Ukrainian police and German soldiers on Feb. 28, hundreds of townspeople were massacred, including many locked in barns that were set ablaze.
The legacy of World War II – especially the bitter fight between Ukrainian nationalists from the west and ethnic Russians from the east seven decades ago – is never far from the surface in Ukrainian politics. One of the heroes celebrated during the Maidan protests in Kiev was Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose name was honored in many banners including one on a podium where Sen. John McCain voiced support for the uprising to oust elected President Viktor Yanukovych, whose political base was in eastern Ukraine.
During World War II, Bandera headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-B, a radical paramilitary movement that sought to transform Ukraine into a racially pure state. OUN-B took part in the expulsion and extermination of thousands of Jews and Poles.
Though most of the Maidan protesters in 2013-14 appeared motivated by anger over political corruption and by a desire to join the European Union, neo-Nazis made up a significant number. These storm troopers from the Right Sektor and Svoboda party decked out some of the occupied government buildings with Nazi insignias and even a Confederate battle flag, the universal symbol of white supremacy.
Then, as the protests turned violent from Feb. 20-22, the neo-Nazis surged to the forefront. Their well-trained militias, organized in 100-man brigades called “the hundreds,” led the final assaults against police and forced Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives.
In the days after the coup, as the neo-Nazi militias effectively controlled the government, European and U.S. diplomats scrambled to help the shaken parliament put together the semblance of a respectable regime, although four ministries, including national security, were awarded to the right-wing extremists in recognition of their crucial role in ousting Yanukovych.
Seeing No Nazis
Since February, virtually the entire U.S. news media has cooperated in the effort to play down the neo-Nazi role, dismissing any mention of this inconvenient truth as “Russian propaganda.” Stories in the U.S. media delicately step around the neo-Nazi reality by keeping out relevant context, such as the background of national security chief Andriy Parubiy, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Parubiy was commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”
When the neo-Nazi factor is mentioned in the mainstream U.S. press, it is usually to dismiss it as nonsense, such as an April 20 column by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who visited his ancestral home, the western Ukrainian town of Karapchiv, and portrayed its residents as the true voice of the Ukrainian people.
“To understand why Ukrainians are risking war with Russia to try to pluck themselves from Moscow’s grip, I came to this village where my father grew up,” he wrote. “Even here in the village, Ukrainians watch Russian television and loathe the propaganda portraying them as neo-Nazi thugs rampaging against Russian speakers.
“‘If you listen to them, we all carry assault rifles; we’re all beating people,’ Ilya Moskal, a history teacher, said contemptuously.”
In an April 17 column from Kiev, Kristof wrote that what the Ukrainians want is weapons from the West so they can to go “bear-hunting,” i.e. killing Russians. “People seem to feel a bit disappointed that the United States and Europe haven’t been more supportive, and they are humiliated that their own acting government hasn’t done more to confront Russian-backed militants. So, especially after a few drinks, people are ready to take down the Russian Army themselves.”
Kristof also repeated the U.S. “conventional wisdom” that the resistance to the coup regime among eastern Ukrainians was entirely the work of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, Kristof wrote, “warns that Ukraine is on the brink of civil war. But the chaos in eastern cities is his own creation, in part by sending provocateurs across the border.”
However, when the New York Times finally sent two reporters to spend time with rebels from the east, they encountered an indigenous movement motivated by hostility to the Kiev regime and showing no signs of direction from Moscow. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Another NYT ‘Sort of’ Retraction on Ukraine.”]
Beyond the journalistic risk of jumping to conclusions, Kristof, who fancies himself a great humanitarian, also should recognize that the clever depiction of human beings as animals, whether as “bears” or “Colorado beetles,” can have horrendous human consequences as is now apparent in Odessa.
Reagan’s Nazis
But the problem with some western Ukrainians expressing their inconvenient love for Nazis has not been limited to the current crisis. It bedeviled Ronald Reagan’s administration when it began heating up the Cold War in the 1980s.
As part of that strategy, Reagan’s United States Information Agency, under his close friend Charles Wick, hired a cast of right-wing Ukrainian exiles who began showing up on U.S.-funded Radio Liberty praising the Galician SS.
These commentaries included positive depictions of Ukrainian nationalists who had sided with the Nazis in World War II as the SS waged its “final solution” against European Jews. The propaganda broadcasts provoked outrage from Jewish organizations, such as B’nai B’rith, and individuals including conservative academic Richard Pipes.
According to an internal memo dated May 4, 1984, and written by James Critchlow, a research officer at the Board of International Broadcasting, which managed Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, one RL broadcast in particular was viewed as “defending Ukrainians who fought in the ranks of the SS.”
Critchlow wrote, “An RL Ukrainian broadcast of Feb. 12, 1984 contains references to the Nazi-oriented Ukrainian-manned SS ‘Galicia’ Division of World War II which may have damaged RL’s reputation with Soviet listeners. The memoirs of a German diplomat are quoted in a way that seems to constitute endorsement by RL of praise for Ukrainian volunteers in the SS division, which during its existence fought side by side with the Germans against the Red Army.”
Harvard Professor Pipes, who was an informal adviser to the Reagan administration, also inveighed against the Radio Liberty broadcasts, writing – on Dec. 3, 1984 – “the Russian and Ukrainian services of RL have been transmitting this year blatantly anti-Semitic material to the Soviet Union which may cause the whole enterprise irreparable harm.”
Though the Reagan administration publicly defended Radio Liberty against some of the public criticism, privately some senior officials agreed with the critics, according to documents in the archives of the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. For instance, in a Jan. 4, 1985, memo, Walter Raymond Jr., a top official on the National Security Council, told his boss, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, that “I would believe much of what Dick [Pipes] says is right.”
What the Reagan administration apparently didn’t understand three decades ago – and what the U.S. State Department still has not seemed to learn today – is that there is a danger in stirring up the old animosities that divide Ukraine, east and west.
Though clearly a minority, Ukraine’s neo-Nazis remain a potent force that is well-organized, well-motivated and prone to extreme violence, whether throwing firebombs at police in the Maidan or at ethnic Russians trapped in a building in Odessa.
As vengeance now seeks vengeance across Ukraine, this Nazi imperative will be difficult to hold down, much as Dr. Strangelove struggled to stop his arm from making a “Heil Hitler” salute.
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