Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
www.thenation.com
Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant.

Here’s how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.

Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.

These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.

Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe

If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn’t make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.

If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.

We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs

        • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          What has that got to do with this argument?

          You said that it’s not possible for a country to have Nazi elements if it had a Jewish president. I pointed out that this is an illogical statement, as the USA still had plenty of anti black racism, even at the institutional level, while having a black president. So it’s definitely possible for a country to have Nazi elements and a Jewish president, just as it is possible for a country to have a black president and anti black racist elements in it’s social fabric.

          There is likely lots of racism in modern day Russia, but I don’t see what that has to do with your argument.

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      The funny thing about Zelensky is not only is he Jewish, but he is a Russian speaking Jewish man. The parts of Ukraine that overwhelmingly voted for him were not the nazi hotbeds in Lviv but the Russian separatist regions of Donbass and Luhansk. Turns out support for Zelensky was strongest in the regions that wanted to leave in the first place? Why is this? Because Zelensky ran on a peace platform, and presented himself as in favor of Minsk II, against escalation with Russia, and not as much of a rabid reactionary as the (US-backed, nazi-glorifying) Petro Poroshenko, who was put in power through a transparent US-backed right-wing coup during Euromaidan in 2014.

      The people in the Donbass and Luhansk regions mostly speak Russian. They were part of Russia historically, but Lenin, Stalin, and Khruschev all granted more land to the Ukrainian SSR in an attempt to keep them happy and better integrate the agriculture with the industry.

      This is why there was strong Russian identity in those regions, and strong separatist tendencies. The west half of Ukraine meanwhile, especially near Lviv, is the home of the most far right parts of Ukrainian society, who want to be part of NATO, who glorify nazi collaborators like Bandera, who join fascist street gangs like C14 and ethnically cleanse Roma people living in tents.

      Zelensky presented himself as wanting to prevent the Ukrainian civil war (going on since 2014) from escalating into a full scale war with Russia, but after he got in office, he made few efforts to actually do this, and rather turned out to be a quite willing collaborator with the United States, and was willing to turn a blind eye to the reactionaries despite himself being a Russian-speaking Jewish man. He made a big show at the beginning of the presidency of filming himself “confronting” Azov battalion and telling them to put down their weapons. But guess what? He had no mechanism of enforcement. They didn’t take him seriously, and made clear their intention to violate any and all attempts to de-escalate. Zelensky, being a man who is Jewish and speaks Russia, is actually the perfect mascot this shit, because his surface appearance covers up the underlying reality. of the Banderite situation in Ukraine.

    • Bnova [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      You wouldn’t know a Nazis if they were goose stepping right in front of you. Nazis obviously do not care for Jewish people but their real enemy is and has always been the left. Otto Skorzeni litterally worked on behalf of the Israeli government. Walther Rauff, the inventor of “gas vans” also worked for Israel. About a dozen Nazis war criminals worked for Israel, and both the Nazis and the Israeli government knew this. Contemporary Nazis fucking love Israel because they’ve created a white ethnostate and admire their ability to have done so.

      So to answer your question can Ukraine have a Nazi problem with a Jewish head of state? Absolutely, Nazis have no problem working with Jewish people when it serves their interests and it has served their interest to work with Zelensky because people such as yourself who are incapable of seeing through this thin veil guzzle the propaganda willingly and supported giving them a fuck ton of weapons to carry out pogroms on Roma and Russians.