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Neo-Nazis

White Lives Matter More In Ukraine

The accuracy of this commentary’s title is borne out by statements made and actions taken by the Ukrainians themselves. In 2020 millions of people around the world protested against racism in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Ukrainians made it clear that they were not to be included amongst that mass of humanity and in fact expressed their support for white supremacy. In June 2020, a group of football fans at a match in Ukraine unfurled a banner reading, “Free Derek Chauvin .” Chauvin is the man who murdered George Floyd. Not to be outdone, members of the neo-Nazi group Nazionalny Sprotyv, National Resistance, marched on October 14, 2020 with a banner that made the point very clear.

Ukraine: Parliament, Army Leadership Celebrate Fascist Mass Murderer

On January 1, 2023, hours after the Ukrainian armed forces engaged in an airstrike on a Russian military base that led to the death of at least 89 Russian soldiers—most of them raw recruits—the Ukrainian parliament, army leadership and local officials celebrated the 114th anniversary of Stepan Bandera, the figurehead of Ukrainian fascism. Bandera advocated the establishment of an “ethnically pure” Ukrainian state in alliance first with German and then with US imperialism. He personally participated in multiple targeted political assassinations of Polish politicians in the 1930s. During World War II, the Bandera-led Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its paramilitary wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), participated in the Nazi-led genocide of hundreds of thousands of Jews in what is now Ukraine and Poland; in 1943-44, the OUN-B and UPA engaged in massacres of an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Poles.

On The Influence Of NeoNazism In Ukraine

The U.S. relationship with Ukrainian fascists began after the Second World War. During the war, units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) took part in the Holocaust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles.  Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives.  The government study said, “Bandera’s wing (OUN/B) was a militant fascist organization.” Bandera’s closest deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, said: ““I…fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine…. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine….”

New York Times Has Found New Neo-Nazi Troops To Lionize In Ukraine

The New York Times has found another neo-Nazi militia to fawn over in Ukraine. The Bratstvo battalion “gave access to the New York Times to report on two recent riverine operations,” which culminated in a piece (11/21/22) headlined “On the River at Night, Ambushing Russians.” Since the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014, establishment media have either minimized the far-right ideology that guides many Ukrainian nationalist detachments or ignored it  completely. Anti-war outlets, including FAIR (1/28/22, 3/22/22), have repeatedly highlighted this dynamic—particularly regarding corporate media’s lionization of the Azov battalion, once widely recognized by Western media as a fascist militia, now sold to the public as a reformed far-right group that gallantly defends the sovereignty of a democratic Ukraine.

Italian Police Bust Azov-Tied Nazi Cell Planning Terror Attacks

Italian police announced a series of raids against the neo-Nazi Order of Hagal organization. Accused of stockpiling weapons and planning terror attacks, the group has established operational ties to the Ukrainian Azov Battalion. Five members of an Italian neo-Nazi organization known as the “Order of Hagal” were arrested on November 15th while an additional member remains wanted by authorities. He happened to be in Ukraine, fighting Russian forces alongside the Azov Battalion, which has been formally integrated into the Ukrainian military. The “Hagal” members are accused of plotting terrorist attacks on civilian and police targets. A sixth member of the Hagal group, now considered a fugitive, is in Ukraine and embedded with the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group that has been incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.

Exposing Fascists: Best Practices

This document came out of numerous discussions with anti-fascists across the country. There has been repeated concern among ourselves and our comrades about a culture of anti-fascist activism that views exposing fascists online as the end-all be-all of anti-fascist organizing. Online exposés are one tool of many that anti-fascists use to materially disrupt fascist organizing in our communities. An exposé of a Nazi by itself is meaningless if it does not have a material impact on that fascist, their organizing, or the communities they threaten. Here we address some common stumbling blocks and best practices for outing Nazis in a way that sustains our movements, protects our communities, and most importantly, materially impacts fascist organizing.

‘Now, All Of You Are Azov’

This September, a delegation of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi-led Azov movement arrived in the United States, at a time when myth making about the far-right network’s “depoliticization” had reached a fever pitch. By this time, the New York Times had ceased referring to Azov as “openly neo-Nazi,” and was referring to the ultra-nationalist organization as “celebrated.” Since news broke of Azov’s US tour, more information has come to light about the ultra-nationalist organization’s outreach in the country, including efforts by Azov to reverse Congress’ ban on supplying it with arms and training. The Azov delegation included three veterans of the regiment formerly holed up in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. They were led by Giorgi Kuparashvili, the only fighter not taken prisoner by the Russians.

Neo-Nazis In Dominican Republic Work To Prevent Solidarity With Haiti

The deployment of dozens of Members of the National Police, in coordination with a smaller group of neo-Nazi militants, occupied the surroundings of the Independence Park of Santo Domingo on Thursday to block the realization of an act of solidarity with the mobilizations in Haiti against imperialist interference. The event had been convened by the National Popular Coordinator, which brings together dozens of Dominican social organizations. Under police protection, neo-Nazis chanted slogans calling for the murder of "the traitors," a term by which they commonly refer to human rights defenders and left-wing activists. Since the previous day, neo-Nazis of the Old Dominican Order, a group that publicly vindicates Mussolini and Trujillo, as well as other groups had threatened the organizers of the act of solidarity, claiming that they were Haitians, and calling on their supporters to attend armed with sticks and stones to the Independence Park.

A New Generation Of US-Trained Extremists Is Fighting Russia

From 1978 (not ’79 as many believe), the administration of Jimmy Carter decided to “draw the Russians into the Afghan trap,” in the words of the President’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. US intelligence called on its British counterparts to activate networks of Afghan fighters. New generations of extremists joined the fight. Aid, arms, and training poured into Afghanistan. Support increased following the Soviet invasion in December 1979. Throughout the 1980s, tens of thousands of jihadis from dozens of Muslim-majority countries were flown into the US, Britain, and Pakistan to receive training from the CIA, Green Berets, US Marines, and British SAS and MI6. The foreign extremists later rebranded themselves “al-Qaeda” and launched a series of spectacularly bloody attacks on strategically significant targets that provided justification for a global “war on terror” that continues to serve as ideological cover for contemporary US hegemony.

DHS ‘Concerned’ Over Nazis Returning To US After Fighting In Ukraine

As the United States undergoes a national mourning process over a spate of mass shootings, American white nationalists with documented histories of violence are attaining combat experience with advanced US-made weapons in a foreign proxy war. That’s according to the Department of Homeland Security, which has been gathering intelligence on Americans who have joined the ranks of the more than 20,000 foreign volunteers in Ukraine. The FBI has indicted several American white nationalists associated with the Rise Above Movement after they trained with the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and its civilian wing, the National Corps, in Kiev. But that was almost four years ago. Today, federal law enforcement has no idea how many US neo-Nazis are participating in the war in Ukraine, or what they are doing there.

‘Disinformation’ Label Serves To Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts

Disinformation has become a central tool in the United States and Russia’s expanding information war. US officials have openly admitted to “using information as a weapon even when the confidence and accuracy of the information wasn’t high,” with corporate media eager to assist Washington in its strategy to “pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign” (NBC, 4/6/22). In defense of the US narrative, corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to US information goals as “disinformation” spread by Russia or its proxies. The New York Times (1/25/22) reported that Russian disinformation doesn’t only take the form of patently false assertions, but also those which are “true but tangential to current events”—a convenient definition, in that it allows accurate facts to be dismissed as “disinformation.”

To Honor Odessa Anti-Fascists, Stop Weapons To Ukraine

Now more than ever, we must raise the reality of the nature of the Ukrainian government, to alert our class to the danger of U.S.-led NATO expansion, the greatest danger to humanity today. The massacre at the Odessa House of Trade Unions on May 2, 2014, was a war crime by proxy, with Nazi and other fascist gangsters following the script written for them by U.S. imperialism before 2014. But instead of being tried in the International Criminal Court – because they were doing the bidding of U.S. and European imperialists – they received the de facto immunity for war crimes enjoyed by all U.S. forces committing murder and genocide spread across the globe.

Will Ukraine Become A Hub For Accentuating Rising Neo-Nazism?

It is apparent from this that there is recognition at the level of the UN and US official sources that neo-Nazi trends are increasing worldwide and more specifically in the USA and Europe. Secondly, that these forces have also succeeded in some countries to increase their impact (and capacity for harm) by infiltrating police and intelligence/security agencies. Thirdly, these neo-Nazi trends are now also seen in mainstream political debates. In addition these forces are establishing wider linkages cutting across national boundaries. Lastly, there is clear need for international cooperation for countering this increasing danger and its increasing capacity to infiltrate national security as well as cut across national boundaries.

Ukraine: A New Consensus On Whiteness?

In 1999 US and NATO forces bombed Serbia for 78 days, ushering a new century further characterized by war and militarism. With no negative consequences of military overreach, especially after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the U.S. unleashed war in its various forms (from direct attacks to sanctions, drones, and subversion) with a wanton disregard for its human and political consequences. Yet, even when massive numbers of U.S. troops were deployed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and other ancient cities whose names are in the great religious texts of the world, and reduced them to rubble, the awful reality of war was carefully hidden from the U.S. public. U.S. propagandists had learned from the Vietnam experience that it was much safer to shield the public from the brutality that their troops were dishing out to poor villagers, students, ordinary workers, and anyone who dared to resist the military might of the U.S. military on a daily basis.

Siding With Ukraine’s Far-Right, US Sabotaged Zelensky’s Peace Mandate

The House was gearing up to impeach Donald Trump for freezing weapons shipments to Ukraine while pressuring its government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The Beltway media was consumed with frenzy of a presidency in peril. But Professor Cohen, one of the leading Russia scholars in the United States, was concerned with what the impeachment spectacle in Washington meant for the long-running war between the US-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas. The subsequent impeachment trial, and bipartisan US policy since, has made clear that Washington has had no interest in having Zelensky's back, and every interest in fueling the Donbas war that he had been elected to end. The overwhelming message from Congress, fervently amplified across the US media (including progressive outlets) with next to no dissent, was that when it comes to Ukraine's civil war, the US saw Ukraine's far-right as allies, and its civilians as cannon fodder.
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