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“Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
— George Orwell, 1946
FTR#1231 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: This program continues analysis of the war in Ukraine.
As mentioned by Mr. Emory in the last program, the war and its attendant coverage has had the effect of the mythological “Philosophers’ Stone” of the alchemists, creating an alchemical transformation of this country, its political culture and citizenry, the EU and UK, their political cultures and citizenry and much of the world into the Orwellian historical perversion being enacted by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
In numerous broadcasts, we have noted the Orwellian rewrite of Ukrainian history to deny the perpetrators of the Holocaust in that country and whitewash the Nazi-allied OUN/B and UPA.
An article in Foreign Policy (published by “The Washington Post” and consequently VERY mainstream), further develops the activities of Volodymyr Viatrovych, appointed as head of the Institute of National memory by Viktor Yuschenko and then re-appointed by Petro Petroshenko.
After the Yushcneko government left power and prior to the Maidan coup, Viatrovych was in the U.S., working as a fellow at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute. This is in line with the fundamental role of the OUN/B‑based American emigre community in the generation of the Orange Revolution and the Maidan coup.
” . . . . During this period Viatrovych spent time in North America on a series of lecture tours, as well as a short sojourn as a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). He also continued his academic activism, writing books and articles promoting the heroic narrative of the OUN-UPA. In 2013 he tried to crash and disrupt a workshop on Ukrainian and Russian nationalism taking place at the Harriman Institute at Columbia. When the Maidan Revolution swept Yanukovych out of power in February 2014, Viatrovych returned to prominence. . . .”
Recall that Yuschenko married the former Ykaterina Chumachenko–Reagan’s Deputy Director of Public Liaison and a key operative of the OUN/B’s American front organiztion the U.C.C.A.–and had Roman Zvarych (Jaroslav Stetsko’s personal secretary in the early 1980’s) as his Minister of Justice.
Note, also, that Serhiy Kvit, the Ukrainian Minister of Education is a bird of the same feather as Viatrovych. ” .
. . . . Last June, Kvit’s Ministry of Education issued a directive to teachers regarding the “necessity to accentuate the patriotism and morality of the activists of the liberation movement,” including depicting the UPA as a ‘symbol of patriotism and sacrificial spirit in the struggle for an independent Ukraine” and Bandera as an ‘outstanding representative’ of the Ukrainian people. . . .’ ”
The measure of the revisionism underway in Ukraine can be gauged by this: “. . . . UPA supreme commander Dmytro Kliachkivs’kyi explicitly stated: ‘We should carry out a large-scale liquidation action against Polish elements. During the evacuation of the German Army, we should find an appropriate moment to liquidate the entire male population between 16 and 60 years old.’ Given that over 70 percent of the leading UPA cadres possessed a background as Nazi collaborators, none of this is surprising. . . .”
It is depressing and remarkable to see such elements being portrayed as “heroic!”
Additional perspective on the physical, political and historical reality underlying Viatrovych’s revisionism is the massacre of the 600 residents of the Polish town of Janowa Dolina by the UPA. ” . . . . On the night of April 22–23 (Good Friday), 1943, the Ukrainians from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, together with local peasants, attacked Janowa Dolina. Some 600 people, including children and the elderly, were brutally murdered (see Massacres of Poles in Volhynia). Most homes were burned to the ground and the settlement deserted. The perpetrators, commanded by Ivan Lytwynchuk (aka Dubowy) exercised rare cruelty. Poles, unprepared and caught by surprise, were hacked to death with axes, burned alive, and impaled (including children). The murderers did not spare anyone, regardless of age and sex. German garrison, numbering around 100 soldiers, did not act and remained in its barracks. After the first wave of murders, the Ukrainian nationalists started searching the hospital. They carried its Ukrainian patients away from the building, while Polish patients were burned alive.[2] Dr Aleksander Bakinowski, together with his assistant Jan Borysowicz, were hacked to death on the square in front of the hospital. In several cases, Ukrainians were murdered for trying to hide their Polish neighbours. Petro Mirchuk, Ukrainian historian, counted several hundred massacred Poles, with only eight UPA members killed. . . .”
The overall them of this series is encapsulated in a letter from Glenn Pinchback–an Operations Officer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma to Jim Garrison in connection with the latter’s investigation of the assassination of JFK.
. . . . Garrison also obtained a transcript of a letter written by Ferrie to Baragona. Next to Baragona’s name, Garrison wrote: “Note Baragona is important.” The letter had been sent to Garrison by Glenn Pinchback, and a carbon copy was sent to Mendel Rivers, a congressman from Georgia. (Pinchback worked in the Operations Command at Fort Sill, where he intercepted mail.) In the letter, Ferrie shared his dream of the re-unification of Germany and living in a world where all the currency was in Deutschmarks. Pinchback’s summation of the letter described a “Neo-Nazi plot to enslave America in the name of anti-Communism,” and “a neo-Nazi plot gargantuan in scope.”
In conclusion, the feelings I have are best expressed through a poem I have read in a number of programs:
“Be Angry at the Sun” by Robinson Jeffers
That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors.
This republic, Europe, Asia.
Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.
You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.
Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.
1a. In numerous broadcasts, we have noted the Orwellian rewrite of Ukrainian history to deny the perpetrators of the Holocaust in that country and whitewash the Nazi-allied OUN/B and UPA.
An article in Foreign Policy(published by “The Washington Post” and consequently VERY mainstream), further develops the activities of Volodymyr Viatrovych, appointed as head of the Institute of National memory by Viktor Yuschenko and then re-appointed by Petro Petroshenko.
After the Yushcneko government left power and prior to the Maidan coup, Viatrovych was in the U.S., working as a fellow at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute. This is in line with the fundamental role of the OUN/B‑based American emigre community in the generation of the Orange Revolution and the Maidan coup.
” . . . . During this period Viatrovych spent time in North America on a series of lecture tours, as well as a short sojourn as a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). He also continued his academic activism, writing books and articles promoting the heroic narrative of the OUN-UPA. In 2013 he tried to crash and disrupt a workshop on Ukrainian and Russian nationalism taking place at the Harriman Institute at Columbia. When the Maidan Revolution swept Yanukovych out of power in February 2014, Viatrovych returned to prominence. . . .”
Recall that Yuschenko married the former Ykaterina Chumachenko–Reagan’s Deputy Director of Public Liaison and a key operative of the OUN/B’s American front organiztion the U.C.C.A.–and had Roman Zvarych (Jaroslav Stetsko’s personal secretary in the early 1980’s) as his Minister of Justice.
Note, also, that Serhiy Kvit, the Ukrainian Minister of Education is a bird of the same feather as Viatrovych. ” .
. . . . Last June, Kvit’s Ministry of Education issued a directive to teachers regarding the “necessity to accentuate the patriotism and morality of the activists of the liberation movement,” including depicting the UPA as a ‘symbol of patriotism and sacrificial spirit in the struggle for an independent Ukraine” and Bandera as an ‘outstanding representative’ of the Ukrainian people. . . .’ ”
The measure of the revisionism underway in Ukraine can be gauged by this: “. . . . UPA supreme commander Dmytro Kliachkivs’kyi explicitly stated: ‘We should carry out a large-scale liquidation action against Polish elements. During the evacuation of the German Army, we should find an appropriate moment to liquidate the entire male population between 16 and 60 years old.’ Given that over 70 percent of the leading UPA cadres possessed a background as Nazi collaborators, none of this is surprising. . . .”
“The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past” by Josh Cohen; Foreign Policy; 5/02/2016.
. . . . Advocating a nationalist, revisionist history that glorifies the country’s move to independence — and purges bloody and opportunistic chapters — [Volodymyr] Viatrovych has attempted to redraft the country’s modern history to whitewash Ukrainian nationalist groups’ involvement in the Holocaust and mass ethnic cleansing of Poles during World War II. And right now, he’s winning. . . .
. . . . In May 2015, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a law that mandated the transfer of the country’s complete set of archives, from the “Soviet organs of repression,” such as the KGB and its decedent, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), to a government organization called the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. . . .
. . . . The controversy centers on a telling of World War II history that amplifies Soviet crimes and glorifies Ukrainian nationalist fighters while dismissing the vital part they played in ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews from 1941 to 1945 after the Nazi invasion of the former Soviet Union. . . .
. . . . And more pointedly, scholars now fear that they risk reprisal for not toeing the official line — or calling Viatrovych on his historical distortions. Under Viatrovych’s reign, the country could be headed for a new, and frightening, era of censorship. . . .
. . . . The revisionism focuses on two Ukrainian nationalist groups: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought to establish an independent Ukraine. During the war, these groups killed tens of thousands of Jews and carried out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed as many as 100,000 Poles. Created in 1929 to free Ukraine from Soviet control, the OUN embraced the notion of an ethnically pure Ukrainian nation. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the OUN and its charismatic leader, Stepan Bandera, welcomed the invasion as a step toward Ukrainian independence. [This is modified limited hangout. The OUN/B was part of the Third Reich’s political and military order of battle.–D.E.] Its members carried out a pogrom in Lviv that killed 5,000 Jews, and OUN militias played a major role in violence against the Jewish population in western Ukraine that claimed the lives of up to 35,000 Jews. . . . [A street in the Lviv district has been renamed in honor of the Einsatzgruppe Nachtigall or Nachtigall Battalion, commanded by Roman Shukhevych (named a “Hero of Ukraine” and the father of Yuri Shukhevych, a top architect of the current Ukrainian political landscape.)–D.E.]
. . . . The new law, which promises that people who “publicly exhibit a disrespectful attitude” toward these groups or “deny the legitimacy” of Ukraine’s 20th century struggle for independence will be prosecuted (though no punishment is specified) also means that independent Ukraine is being partially built on a falsified narrative of the Holocaust.
By transferring control of the nation’s archives to Viatrovych, Ukraine’s nationalists assured themselves that management of the nation’s historical memory is now in the “correct” hands. . . .
. . . . In 2008, in addition to his role at TsDVR, Viktor Yushchenko, then president, appointed Viatrovych head of the Security Service of Ukraine’s (SBU) archives. Yuschenko made the promotion of OUN-UPA mythology a fundamental part of his legacy, rewriting school textbooks, renaming streets, and honoring OUN-UPA leaders as “heroes of Ukraine.” As Yuschenko’s leading memory manager — both at TsDVR and the SBU — Viatrovych was his right-hand man in this crusade. He continued to push the state-sponsored heroic representation of the OUN-UPA and their leaders Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and Roman Shukhevych. . . .
. . . . After Viktor Yanukovych was elected president in 2010, Viatrovych faded from view. . . . During this period Viatrovych spent time in North America on a series of lecture tours, as well as a short sojourn as a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). He also continued his academic activism, writing books and articles promoting the heroic narrative of the OUN-UPA. In 2013 he tried to crash and disrupt a workshop on Ukrainian and Russian nationalism taking place at the Harriman Institute at Columbia. When the Maidan Revolution swept Yanukovych out of power in February 2014, Viatrovych returned to prominence. . . .
. . . . The new president, Poroshenko, appointed Viatrovych to head the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory — a prestigious appointment for a relatively young scholar. . . .
. . . . To that effect, Viatrovych has dismissed historical events not comporting with this narrative as “Soviet propaganda.” [This is true of information presented by anyone that tells the truth about the OUN/B heirs now in power in Ukraine–they are dismissed as “Russian dupes” or “tools of the Kremlin” etc.–D.E.] In his 2006 book, The OUN’s Position Towards the Jews: Formulation of a position against the backdrop of a catastrophe, he attempted to exonerate the OUN from its collaboration in the Holocaust by ignoring the overwhelming mass of historical literature. The book was widely panned by Western historians. University of Alberta professor John-Paul Himka, one of the leading scholars of Ukrainian history for three decades, described it as “employing a series of dubious procedures: rejecting sources that compromise the OUN, accepting uncritically censored sources emanating from émigré OUN circles, failing to recognize anti-Semitism in OUN texts.” . . . . Even more worrisome for the future integrity of Ukraine’s archives under Viatrovych is his notoriety among Western historians for his willingness to allegedly ignore or even falsify historical documents. “Scholars on his staff publish document collections that are falsified,” said Jeffrey Burds, a professor of Russian and Soviet history at Northeastern University.“ I know this because I have seen the originals, made copies, and have compared their transcriptions to the originals.” . . .
. . . . Seventy historians signed an open letter to Poroshenko asking him to veto the draft law that bans criticism of the OUN-UPA. . . .
. . . . After the open letter was published, the legislation’s sponsor, Yuri Shukhevych, reacted furiously. Shukhevych, the son of UPA leader Roman Shukhevych and a longtime far-right political activist himself, fired off a letter to Minister of Education Serhiy Kvit claiming, “Russian special services” produced the letter and demanded that “patriotic” historians rebuff it. Kvit, also a longtime far-right activist and author of an admiring biography one of the key theoreticians of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism, in turn ominously highlighted the signatories of Ukrainian historians on his copy of the letter. . . .
. . . . UPA supreme commander Dmytro Kliachkivs’kyi explicitly stated: “We should carry out a large-scale liquidation action against Polish elements. During the evacuation of the German Army, we should find an appropriate moment to liquidate the entire male population between 16 and 60 years old.” Given that over 70 percent of the leading UPA cadres possessed a background as Nazi collaborators, none of this is surprising. . . .
. . . . Last June, Kvit’s Ministry of Education issued a directive to teachers regarding the “necessity to accentuate the patriotism and morality of the activists of the liberation movement,” including depicting the UPA as a “symbol of patriotism and sacrificial spirit in the struggle for an independent Ukraine” and Bandera as an “outstanding representative” of the Ukrainian people.” More recently, Viatrovych’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory proposed that the city of Kiev rename two streets after Bandera and the former supreme commander of both the UPA and the Nazi-supervised Schutzmannschaft Roman Shukhevych. . . .
1b. Additional perspective on the physical, political and historical reality underlying Viatrovych’s revisionism is the massacre of the 600 residents of the Polish town of Janowa Dolina by the UPA. ” . . . . On the night of April 22–23 (Good Friday), 1943, the Ukrainians from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, together with local peasants, attacked Janowa Dolina. Some 600 people, including children and the elderly, were brutally murdered (see Massacres of Poles in Volhynia). Most homes were burned to the ground and the settlement deserted. The perpetrators, commanded by Ivan Lytwynchuk (aka Dubowy) exercised rare cruelty. Poles, unprepared and caught by surprise, were hacked to death with axes, burned alive, and impaled (including children). The murderers did not spare anyone, regardless of age and sex. German garrison, numbering around 100 soldiers, did not act and remained in its barracks. After the first wave of murders, the Ukrainian nationalists started searching the hospital. They carried its Ukrainian patients away from the building, while Polish patients were burned alive.[2] Dr Aleksander Bakinowski, together with his assistant Jan Borysowicz, were hacked to death on the square in front of the hospital. In several cases, Ukrainians were murdered for trying to hide their Polish neighbours. Petro Mirchuk, Ukrainian historian, counted several hundred massacred Poles, with only eight UPA members killed. . . .”
2. June 30th was been established as a commemorative celebration in Lvov [Lviv]. It was on June 30, 1941, when the OUN‑B announced an independent Ukrainian state in the city of Lviv. That same day marked the start of the Lviv Pograms that led to the death of thousands of Jews.
June 30th is also the birthday of Roman Shukhevych, commander of the Nachtigall Battalion that carried out the mass killings. The city of Lviv is starting “Shukhevychfest” to be held in Lviv on June 30th, commemorating the pogrom and Shukhevych’s birthday. Shukhevych was named a “Hero of the Ukraine” by Viktor Yuschenko.
In past posts and programs, we have discussed Volodomir Vyatrovich, head of the Orwellian Institute of National Remembrance. He defended Shukhevych and the public displaying of the symbol of the Galician Division (14th Waffen SS Division.)
In other, previous discussions of the return of Ukrainian fascism, we noted that the Svoboda Party’s militia is called Combat 14, named after the “14 words” minted by David Lane, the American neo-Nazi who participated in the killing of Denver talk show host Allan Berg.
He passed away on June 30th, triggering numerous demonstrations, including several in Ukraine.
June 30th appears to be a particularly significant day for the OUN/B successors and Nazis who are in power in Ukraine.
We also note, in passing, the silence of the Israeli government in this regard. Individual Jews and Israelis have taken note of the resurgence of the OUN/B and the UPA, with all of their lethal historical prejudices. The Netanyahu government, in particular, maintained an eloquent and revealing silence.
The Ukrainian city of Lviv will hold a festival celebrating a Nazi collaborator on the anniversary of a major pogrom against the city’s Jews.
Shukhevychfest, an event named for Roman Shukhevych featuring music and theater shows, will be held Friday.
Eduard Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, in a statement called the event “disgraceful.”
On June 30, 1941, Ukrainian troops, including militiamen loyal to Shukhevych’s, began a series of pogroms against Jews, which they perpetrated under the auspices of the German army, according to Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder and other scholars. They murdered approximately 6,000 Jews in those pogroms.
The day of the festival is the 110th birthday of Shukhevych, a leader of the OUN‑B nationalist group and later of the UPA insurgency militia, which collaborated with the Nazis against the Soviet Union before it turned against the Nazis.
Shukhevychfest is part of a series of gestures honoring nationalists in Ukraine following the 2014 revolution, in which nationalists played a leading role. They brought down the government of President Viktor Yanukovuch, whose critics said was a corrupt Russian stooge.
On June 13, a Kiev administrative court partially upheld a motion by parties opposed to the veneration of Shukhevych in the city and suspended the renaming of a street after Shukhevych. The city council approved the renaming earlier this month.
In a related debate, the director of Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance, Vladimir Vyatrovich, who recently described Shukhevych as an “eminent personality,” last month defended the displaying in public of the symbol of the Galician SS division. Responsible for countless murders of Jews, Nazi Germany’s most elite unit was comprised of Ukrainian volunteers.
Displaying Nazi symbols is illegal in Ukraine but the Galician SS division’s symbol is “in accordance with the current legislation of Ukraine,” Vyatrovich said. . . .
3. The overall them of the programs to be presented in this long series is captured in an observation made by Glenn Pinchback.
. . . . Garrison did not provide an explanation for all of the [David Ferrie] note’s subject matter. However, he did know the meaning of “flying Baragona in the Beech.” “Beech” refers to the model of Ferrie’s airplane, a Beechcraft. Baragona was a Nazi from Fort Sill. . . .
. . . . Garrison also obtained a transcript of a letter written by Ferrie to Baragona. Next to Baragona’s name, Garrison wrote: “Note Baragona is important.” The letter had been sent to Garrison by Glenn Pinchback, and a carbon copy was sent to Mendel Rivers, a congressman from Georgia. (Pinchback worked in the Operations Command at Fort Sill, where he intercepted mail.) In the letter, Ferrie shared his dream of the re-unification of Germany and living in a world where all the currency was in Deutschmarks. Pinchback’s summation of the letter described a “Neo-Nazi plot to enslave America in the name of anti-Communism,” and “a neo-Nazi plot gargantuan in scope.” The Ferrie letter spoke of the need to kill all the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . Pinchback also reportedly obtained a letter from David Ferrie to Baragona confessing his role in the assassination of Robert Gehrig, who was a Nazi and Fort Sill soldier. . . .”
This one largely speaks for itself. The Intercept first broke this (sigh), but it appears that Business Insider has talked to Meta spokespeople and they confirmed that Meta is now allowing posts praising the Azov Battalion. The rest of the media is not covering this. Let’s not forget that recent coverup I mentioned of the Meta director who was caught sexting young boys and fired from his job! Is Meta getting some kind of quid pro quo? If they play ball with the US on Ukraine “disinformation”, do they get a special perk with US-controlled search engines on the Jerren Miles story? I mean, DuckDuckGo (my reference point as it is the one I use and the LEAST compromised of the major search engines) is playing along. I’m sure google, bing, and the rest are as well.
The LGBT advocacy group where he was a board member not only removed him from current websites, but even went back to 2019 to remove a mention of him on the host committee for an event held at that time. But the web never forgets… if you archive properly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210514074440/https://www.eqca.org/equality-awards/san-francisco-2019–2/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/facebook-is-reversing-its-ban-on-posts-praising-ukraines-far-right-azov-battalion-report-says/ar-AAUiIo7
Facebook is backtracking on a ban it placed on users praising the Azov Battalion, a far-right paramilitary force within the Ukrainian National Guard.
The Intercept first reported the news.
Praise for the group, which is the armed wing of the country’s white nationalist Azov movement, was banned in 2019 under Facebook’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy. The platform had classified the group alongside others such as the Ku Klux Klan and Islamic State.
A 2016 report by the OHCHR found that Azov soldiers had raped and tortured civilians during the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The memos seen by The Intercept, however, also acknowledge the group’s ideology, and listed the following post as an example of unacceptable content, according to the outlet: “Well done Azov for protecting Ukraine and it’s white nationalist heritage.”
The battalion itself will still be banned from using Facebook to publish posts or recruit members, while images of its uniform and banners will still be banned as hate symbols.
“For the time being, we are making a narrow exception for praise of the Azov Regiment strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard,” a spokesperson from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, told Insider.
NOTE: Perhaps the most shocking thing to me has been the all out anti-RUSSIAN assault in media, not to be confused with anti-PUTIN or anti-“current government” sentiment. No, it’s a war on all things Russian! Soon we’ll see a bunch of ANTIFA goons dancing around a fire of Russian nesting dolls and bottles of Russian dressing. The only “credible” sources on this in the English language that I could find are Newsweek and Reason Magazine. While I loathe them both, they usually don’t make stuff like this up. Wish I had a better source… but, hey, nobody’s covering it!
https://www.newsweek.com/college-backtracks-banning-teaching-dostoevsky-russian-1684080
A university in Italy has backtracked on a decision to postpone a course about the work of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky following a backlash.
Italian writer Paolo Nori posted a video on Instagram on Tuesday saying he had received an email from officials at the University of Milano-Bicocca, in Milan, informing him of the decision to postpone his course following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Dear Professor, the Vice Rector for Didactics has informed me of a decision taken with the rector to postpone the course on Dostoevsky,” the email said, according to Nori’s video.
“This is to avoid any controversy, especially internally, during a time of strong tensions.”
…Nori went on: “I realize what is happening in Ukraine is horrible, and I feel like crying just thinking about it. But what is happening in Italy is ridiculous.”
“Not only is being a living Russian wrong in Italy today, but also being a dead Russian, who was sentenced to death in 1849 because he read a forbidden thing. That an Italian university would ban a course on an author like Dostoevsky is unbelievable,” he said.
NOTE: Snopes used to be a really good “fact-checker” website that was fairly unbiased and non-partisan. The details are murky, but there was a serious battle within for control and ownership that went on for most of the 2010s. Now they follow a “CIA Liberal” line and continually distort the “facts”. They are now owned by a company named “Sovrn”, of all fucking things, that also owns Salon. Salon was founded by David Talbot, but he has not been involved with the site for many years. While they actually have some decent info in this article, the purpose is to minimize the role Azov and Nazis play within the larger Ukrainian situation and it is all about these two paragraphs.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/03/02/what-is-ukraines-azov-battalion/
The Azov Battalion is a real extremist group that became (and still is) a faction in Ukraine’s national guard, but to equate them with the “Kyiv regime” is to vastly overstate their size and influence.
To say that the Azov group is representative of Ukraine’s overall defense or government is false, because it makes up a small percentage of Ukraine’s total military defense, and Ukraine’s national government system is a democracy.
NOTE: The Ukrainians are trying to get crypto exchanges to cut off the Russians entirely. Note that this Ukrainian minister is pushing not only to target crypto of the Russian elite, but to “sabotage ordinary users”. So far, most of the exchanges appear to be telling them to pound sand.
https://www.zdnet.com/finance/blockchain/ukraine-asks-cryptocurrency-firms-to-block-russian-users/
Ukraine has requested major cryptocurrency exchanges restrict the activities of Russian account holders. Mykhailo Fedorov, the Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, tweeted the appeal on February 27, asking that “all major crypto exchanges block addresses of Russian users.”
It’s crucial to freeze not only the addresses linked to Russian and Belarusian politicians but also to sabotage ordinary users,” Fedorov said.
NOTE: When Obama turned over control of ICANN (used to assign IP addresses to names), I thought it was an incredibly foolish thing to do. However, in this case, it may be a good thing as I don’t trust the Biden Admin to NOT use ICANN as a weapon if we were still fully in control of it. Note also that the CIA control of Anonymous has taken full flight and they claimed to have taken down rt.com (it’s now back up). Easiest group in the world to infiltrate: all you need is a Chinese-made Guy Fawkes mask, a webcam and a voice scrambler. Bingo! You’re Anonymous! I had noticed this development a few years back when you would see the main Anonymous twitter account following CIA party line, while offshoot Anonymous groups like Anonymous Scandinavia were highly skeptical of the US maneuvers in Eastern Europe, Syria, etc.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/icann-rejects-ukraines-request-to-block-russia-from-the-internet/
Following Russia’s invasion, Ukraine had asked the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to revoke Russia’s top-level domains (TLD), such as .ru, .рф, and .su be revoked along with the nation’s associated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. The request came from Andrii Nabok, ICANN’s Ukrainian representative, and Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation.
Now, ICANN has replied: No.
The letter from Göran Marby, ICANN’s CEO and president, tried to soften the blow, “ICANN stands ready to continue to support Ukrainian and global Internet security, stability, and resiliency.” But, a no is a no.
Fedorov had also asked that RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia, withdraw Russia and its Local Internet Registries (LIR) rights to use their assigned IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and to block their DNS root servers.
RIPE had turned down this request earlier. The RIPE NCC Executive Board stated that “the means to communicate should not be affected by domestic political disputes, international conflicts or war. This includes the provision of correctly registered Internet numbering resources.”
These moves come as no surprise. Earlier, people with both internet organizations and related groups had made it clear they didn’t want to grant Ukraine’s request
Andrew Sullivan, president and CEO of the Internet Society, warned that if ICANN has granted Ukraine’s request it might cause “ ‘Splinternet’ – the splintering of the Internet along geographical, political, commercial, and/or technological boundaries.” This fragmenting would have massive negative effects, while also setting dangerous precedents. Sullivan said: “The calls to cut Russia off from the Internet are a slippery slope, as the ‘Splinternet’ is the antithesis of how the Internet was designed and meant to function. We must resist these calls, no matter how tempting they may be.”
Marby agreed: “Within our mission, we maintain neutrality and act in support of the global Internet. Our mission does not extend to taking punitive actions, issuing sanctions, or restricting access against segments of the Internet – regardless of the provocations.”
While the internet’s official governors are staying out of the war, unofficial groups such as Anonymous have taken up their cyber arms against Russia. Anonymous has claimed to have taken down various websites, including Russian oil power Gazprom; Russian state news agency RT; and Russian and Belarusian government agencies, including the Kremlin.
Numerous companies have also joined the right against Russia. For example, Microsoft President Brad Smith announced that the Windows giant would help Ukraine against Russian cyber attacks. Smith wrote that while “We are a company and not a government or a country,” Microsoft would protect Ukraine from cyberattacks.
NOTE: Back to the War on Russian Culture… The Munich Philharmonic tried to make its chief conductor take the equivalent of a Ukrainian loyalty oath to keep his job. He didn’t, so they canned him. He was also dropped by the Paris Philharmonic and a Vienna Philharmonic show at Carnegie Hall, plus dropped by his German agent. I wish the Germans every single Ukrainian refugee that hopefully can make their way to their country and that they build a tent city in the heart of Berlin.
https://www.thelocal.de/20220301/munich-orchestra-drops-russian-conductor-gergiev-over-ukraine/
Acclaimed Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, known to have close ties to the Kremlin, was fired Tuesday from his job as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic after failing to denounce Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
“With immediate effect, there will be no further concerts by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra under his direction,” Munich mayor Dieter Reiter said in a statement.
The dismissal is the latest blow for the 68-year-old classical music titan who has come under pressure from arts institutions around Europe since Russia attacked Ukraine last week, and has been dropped from a slew of prestigious concerts.
As well as being the principal conductor in Munich since 2015, Gergiev is also the chief and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg.
He has not yet spoken publicly regarding Moscow’s offensive, but he has proven fiercely loyal to Russian president Vladimir Putin in the past, allying with him on the 2014 annexation of Crimea and a law aimed at stifling LGBT rights activists in Russia.
The Munich orchestra had given Gergiev until Monday to take a stance against Moscow’s aggression, but the deadline passed without a response from the conductor.
…Gergiev had in recent days already been dropped from upcoming concerts at the renowned Philharmonie concert hall in Paris and by the Vienna Philharmonic at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
The Edinburgh International Festival has also cut ties with him, as has his agent in Germany, Marcus Felsner.
NOTE: Of particular concern is the war on academics. I suspect this below statement results from a mix of arm-twisting and outright fear on the part of its signatories. They do not wish to lose their cushy University jobs. Keep in mind, these are some of the key historians of topics like Bandera and Ukrainian fascism! They aren’t naive idiots who work for CNN or get all their news from Reddit. They know the truth, but they MUST live the lie. This is insane. Below the statement I have included commentary from David North of the WSWS. I would prefer to have cited something more mainstream, but there is very little coverage of this issue, and certainly no critique of the statement. I disagree with the WSWS on many things, but their coverage of the US/NATO buildup in Eastern Europe and their understanding of the War for Earth Island are consistently strong.
https://jewishjournal.com/news/worldwide/345515/statement-on-the-war-in-ukraine-by-scholars-of-genocide-nazism-and-world-war-ii/
As we write this, the horror of war is unfolding in Ukraine. The last time Kyiv was under heavy artillery fire and saw tanks in its streets was during World War II. If anyone should know it, it’s Vladimir Putin, who is obsessed with the history of that war.
Russian propaganda has painted the Ukrainian state as Nazi and fascist ever since Russian special forces first entered Ukraine in 2014, annexing the Crimea and fomenting the conflict in the Donbas, which has smoldered for eight long years.
It was propaganda in 2014. It remains propaganda today.
This is why we came together: to protest the use of this false and destructive narrative. Among those who have signed the statement below are some of the most accomplished and celebrated scholars of World War II, Nazism, genocide and the Holocaust. If you are a scholar of this history, please consider adding your name to the list. If you are a journalist, you now have a list of experts you can turn to in order to help your readers better understand Russia’s war against Ukraine.
And if you are a consumer of the news, please share the message of this letter widely. There is no Nazi government for Moscow to root out in Kyiv. There has been no genocide of the Russian people in Ukraine. And Russian troops are not on a liberation mission. After the bloody 20th century, we should all have built enough discernment to know that war is not peace, slavery is not freedom, and ignorance offers strength only to autocratic megalomaniacs who seek to exploit it for their personal agendas.
The statement can be found below. If you are a scholar and would like to add your signature to the list, please tweet @eugene_finkel or @izatabaro or send an email to efinkel4@jhu.edu.
To see the latest additions to the list of signatories, please see here.
***
Statement by Scholars of Genocide, Nazism and World War II
Since February 24, 2022, the armed forces of the Russian Federation have been engaged in an unprovoked military aggression against Ukraine. The attack is a continuation of Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and its heavy involvement in the armed conflict in the Donbas region.
The Russian attack came in the wake of accusations by the Russian president Vladimir Putin of crimes against humanity and genocide, allegedly committed by the Ukrainian government in the Donbas. Russian propaganda regularly presents the elected leaders of Ukraine as Nazis and fascists oppressing the local ethnic Russian population, which it claims needs to be liberated. President Putin stated that one of the goals of his “special military operation” against Ukraine is the “denazification” of the country.
We are scholars of genocide, the Holocaust, and World War II. We spend our careers studying fascism and Nazism, and commemorating their victims. Many of us are actively engaged in combating contemporary heirs to these evil regimes and those who attempt to deny or cast a veil over their crimes.
We strongly reject the Russian government’s cynical abuse of the term genocide, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, and the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression. This rhetoric is factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it, including Russian and Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army.
We do not idealize the Ukrainian state and society. Like any other country, it has right-wing extremists and violent xenophobic groups. Ukraine also ought to better confront the darker chapters of its painful and complicated history. Yet none of this justifies the Russian aggression and the gross mischaracterization of Ukraine. At this fateful moment we stand united with free, independent and democratic Ukraine and strongly reject the Russian government’s misuse of the history of World War II to justify its own violence.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/04/acad-m04.html
Historians capitulate to war propaganda over Ukraine
David North
4 March 2022
The war is having a devastating impact on historians. There are entirely principled and leftwing grounds upon which the Russian invasion of Ukraine should be opposed, and which do not require adapting to the US-NATO coverup of fascism in Ukraine’s past and present.
But, unfortunately, even historians who have written major works on the fascist Stepan Bandera, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN‑B) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) are renouncing their own scholarship to suit the needs of the US-NATO propaganda campaign.
The “Statement on Ukraine by scholars of genocide, Nazism and WWII” is a disgraceful example of the intellectual and moral capitulation of significant segments of the academic community to the demands for historical falsification.
The statement begins with a reference to World War II, bizarrely attacking Putin for being “obsessed with the history of that war,” as if it is abnormal for a Russian president to be “obsessed” with a catastrophe that cost the lives of approximately 30 million Soviet citizens.
One must assume that the statement’s signatories, who have devoted their professional lives to the study of genocide, are also “obsessed with the history of that war,” whose central event was the Holocaust in which Bandera and OUN‑B played a critical role.
The statement’s signatories declare: “We do not idealize the Ukrainian state and society. Like any other country, it has right-wing extremists and violent xenophobic groups. Ukraine also ought to better confront the darker chapters of its painful and complicated history.”
In the context of its history, this statement is indeed an idealization of the Ukrainian state and society. Ukraine is not “like any other country” which has “right-wing extremists and violent xenophobic groups.”
Supporters of far-right parties carry torches and banner with a portrait of Stepan Bandera reads ‘Nothing was stopped the idea when its time comes’ during a rally in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
As the historians know, despite the horrific genocidal crimes committed by the OUN, under the leadership of their “Providnyk” (fuehrer) Stepan Bandera, the legacy of the fascist nationalists continues to exert an immense political and cultural influence in Ukraine.
Among the statement’s signatories is the historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, who is the author of an important 652 page scholarly work, titled Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist—Fascism, Genocide, and Cult.
Rossoliński-Liebe’s book, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist — Fascism, Genocide, and Cult
This book not only documents the crimes committed by Bandera’s movement. Rossoliński-Liebe also examined his cult-like status among broad segments of contemporary Ukrainian society.
In the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR, he writes: “Many monuments devoted to the victims of the Ukrainian nationalists or to heroes of the Soviet Union were replaced with monuments devoted to Bandera and the OUN and UPA ‘heroes.’
“Bandera and Ukrainian revolutionary nationalists again became important elements of western Ukrainian identity.
“Not only far-right activists but also the mainstream of western Ukrainian society, including high-school teachers and university professors, considered Bandera to be a national hero... whose memory should be honored for his struggle against the Soviet Union.”
Rossoliński-Liebe made the following significant and troubling observation: “The post-Soviet memory politics in Ukraine completely ignored democratic values and did not develop any kind of non-apologetic approach to history.”
How is this damning commentary on the post-Soviet intellectual life of Ukraine reconciled with the statement’s cynical and historically apologetic reference to “independent and democratic Ukraine”?
Rossoliński-Liebe also called attention to the significant international connections forged by Bandera’s followers with the United States and other imperialist powers during the Cold War.
Iaroslav Stets’ko, who “had written letters to the Fuhrer, the Duce, the Poglavnik [the top Croatian Nazi], and the Caudillo [Franco], asking them to accept the newly proclaimed Ukrainian state, was in 1966 designated an honorary citizen of the Canadian city of Winnipeg.”
The historian continues: “In 1983 he was invited to the Capitol and the White House, where George Bush and Ronald Reagan received the ‘last premier of a free Ukrainian state,’” i.e., which had existed under the control of the Third Reich.
“On 11 July 1982,” recalls Rossoliński-Liebe, “during Captive Nations’ Week, the red-and-black flag of the OUN‑B, introduced at the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists in 1941, flew over the United States Capitol.
“It symbolized freedom and democracy, and not ethnic purity and genocidal fascism. Nobody understood that it was the same flag that had flown from the Lviv city hall and other buildings, under which Jewish civilians were mistreated and killed in July 1941...”
Given the history of Ukrainian fascism and its truly sordid contemporary significance, the apologetics in which the historians are engaged is as contemptible as it is cowardly.
The Russian government is engaged in its own propaganda-style falsification of history, which must be exposed. Putin—a bitter opponent of the internationalism of the October Revolution—counterpoises Russian nationalism to Ukrainian nationalism.
The competing nationalist narratives must be exposed—in the interests of uniting Russian and Ukrainian workers in a common struggle against the US-NATO imperialists, their fascist allies within Ukraine, and corrupt regime of capitalist restoration in Russia.
What happened to Konotop? It’s a question that’s been growing for days following a flurry a reports from the region in Northeastern Ukraine. First we got reports of an ultimatum issued to Konotop by Russian forces. Russian troops holding hand grenades met with the mayor of Konotop and issued a surrender ultimatum under the threat of Russian artillery. The mayor then relayed the ultimatum to a crowd, asking the people if they wanted to give in to the Russian demands or fight on. The crowd chanted to fight on, with the mayor expressing solidarity with that sentiment.
We haven’t received any updates on the state of Konotop for five days. But we have received updates from the region with reports of a humanitarian corridor being opened in the city of Sumy. Konotop is located Northwest of Sumy in the Sumy Oblast. Will this humanitarian corridor pass through Konotop? What is the world going find there? A pile of rubble?
These are some of the key questions looming over the fate of the people of Konotop. But part of what makes the fate of Konotop such an ominous question has to do with the identify of that mayor. Because it turns out the mayor of Konotop, Artem Semenikhin, is a member of Svoboda and an unambiguous open neo-Nazi. As we’ll see, shortly after he was elected in 2015, residents of Konotop were shocked to find their mayor driving around in a car bearing the “14/88” neo-Nazi numerology. He also replaced a picture of then-President Petro Poroshenko in his office with a portrait of Stepan Bandera. True to form, he even refused to fly the city’s official flag at the opening meeting of the city council because he objected to the star of David emblazoned on it (the flag also has a Muslim crescent and a cross). Artem Semenikhin’s behavior may have shocked some residents in 2015, but he’s still mayor in 2022, leading the city during this siege.
Our last reports out of Konotop last week was about how the open neo-Nazi mayor was leading the city in refusing to submit to Russian demands. What happened there? We’ve had no updates since, but the fact that this town has an open Nazi as the mayor does not bode well given the stated goal of “de-Nazification”. With a humanitarian corridor potentially leading through the area we might get an update. A potentially very ominous update that could give us a preview of how direct conflict between Russian forces and Ukrainian towns led by open Nazis could play out as this conflict continues to boil over.
Ok, first, here’s a NY Times article from last week about the siege of Konotop and the ultimatum issued to the city by Russian soldiers holding grenades. An ultimatum relayed to the community by Mayor Semenikhin, who is not once referred to in the article as a far right extremist but instead depicted as just a patriotic mayor standing up to Russian aggression:
“Another video showed Mr. Semenikhin standing on a concrete planter outside the City Council building and addressing the crowd. He said the Russian soldiers had told him they would “raze the city to the ground with their artillery” if the residents did not surrender. He then asked the crowd whether they wanted to surrender or fight. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of fighting.”
That was more or less the last update we got from Konotop. Faced with a ultimatum from Russian artillery, the mayor was leading the town in resistance.
What happened in the following days? It would be a big question for any town facing a siege. But as the following 2015 article makes clear, Artem Semenikhin is no ordinary mayor. He’s a neo-Nazi who barely tries to hide his sympathies. In others, he’s the perfect person to ensure the conflict in Konotop is as intense as possible:
“According to reports, Semenikhin drives around in a car bearing the number 14/88, a numerological reference to the phrases “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” and “Heil Hitler”; replaced the picture of President Petro Poroshenko in his office with a portrait of Ukrainian national leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera; and refused to fly the city’s official flag at the opening meeting of the city council because he objected to the star of David emblazoned on it. The flag also features a Muslim crescent and a cross.”
He’s not hiding it. Driving around with a 14/88 car isn’t subtle. At the same time, it sounds like Semenikhin has been holding back his extremism somewhat. At least he was in 2015:
Is Semenikhin still bothering to hide his extremism in 2022? Well, we got a hint from an interview that was conducted last week on the PBS NewsHour, where he told the interviewer that ““We are ready to fight till the end — till the victorious end — to defeat these Russian cockroaches”. You can see a portrait of Stepan Bandera in the background:
That’s the guy who is going to be leading the city of Konotop in its resistance. A resistance that’s presumably going on right now. So what happens when an open neo-Nazi leads a city’s resistance to this Russian invasion fought under the pretense of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine? That’s the horrible question we’re presumably going to get answers on soon.
@Pterrafractyl–
My ongoing theme/metaphor of the war and its attendant coverage as a kind of Philospher’s Stone alchemically transforming the U.S., Western and much of Eastern Europe into the equivalent of Viatrovych’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory with this video, posted on twitter and featured in a “Consortium News” article by Patrick Lawrence.
The Mayor of Konotop was interviewed on PBS Newshour and presented as a hero, while the picture of Stephan Bandera behind him was deliberately blurred out.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1499771677143707658
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/08/patrick-lawrence-the-casualties-of-empire/
What fun!
Best,
Dave
Following up on the mystery of the fate of the Ukrainian town of Konotop, it turns out there has been some reporting on what happened following the standoff between Russian soldiers. First, recall how the city was facing a Russian ultimatum to surrender, culminating in a meeting on March 2 between the Russian forces and the Konotop authorities, including the mayor of the Konotop Artem Semenikhin, an open neo-Nazi who drove around town in “14/88” car after being elected in 2015. Semenikhin then relayed the demands to the public, asking if they wanted to submit to the demands or fight on. The crowd appeared to choose to fight on, and that was more or less the end of the story. Or at least that was the gist of the bulk of the English-language reporting we got out of Konotop.
But as we’ll see, there was a rather significant update to that tense standoff from March 2. An update that was reported but basically ignored in the wave of English-language reports in the days that followed celebrating Semenikhin’s defiance in the face of the Russian threats. It turns out the Russian forces and Konotop arrived at a truce on March 2: there would be no mutual provocation. “We will not shoot at them. They will remain in their positions. Unobstructed passage of public transport and services, ambulances, food, humanitarian goods will be provided,” according to the head of the Sumy Regional State Administration Dmytro Zhyvytsky.
So how is it that this truce was barely reported in the English language press at the same time Semenikhin’s defiance was being celebrated? There was plenty of reporting on the fighting that led up to the truce. The open defiance of Artem Semenikhin was widely celebrated. But the truce itself somehow got lost in the reporting (along with any mention of Semenikhin’s open embrace of Nazi symbolism).
It’s the kind of story, or lack of a story, that hints at what could end up being one of Putin’s biggest strategic blunders in starting this conflict: if the idea was the invade Ukraine and then sue for peace on his desired terms, that’s the kind of plan that could only work if there wasn’t already a counter-plan to drawn Russia into a long drawn out costly occupation. Yes, the town of Konotop appears to have desired peace and got that peace following the negotiations. Yet no one is celebrating it. Quite the opposite. This story of a successful peace negotiation got memory-holed. It’s more than a little ominous.
Ok, first, here’s a CNN piece from March 2 with one of the few English-language reports acknowledging that the standoff of Konotop was apparently resolved later that day:
““The conversation between my representative from the military administration and Russians in Konotop lasted about 12 minutes,” Zhyvytsky said.”
It’s the 12-minute meeting that never was. At least that how it seemed based on the reporting of these events. And at the end of that 12-minute meeting, the two sides reached the kind of agreement that one would expect to be widely touted as a kind of breakthrough given the situation: the Russian forces agreed to no change in the government. The Ukrainian flag would still fly:
This was the reporting on the morning of March 2. Flash forward to the evening of March 3, and we see the following PBS NewsHour piece that includes an interview of Semenihkin, and yet no mention at all about the truce that was reached. Or the fact that Semenihkin is an open neo-Nazi. These fact apparently didn’t fit the narrative:
“Yes, of course, we are concerned. And this concern is not groundless. There’s a big unit near our town. And using the weapons they have, they could destroy our town. But we are not afraid. We are ready to fight until the end, until the victorious end, to defeat these Russian cockroaches.”
That was the response Semenikhin gave to the question of whether or not he feared the Russian soldiers would return. And sure, he had plenty of reason for genuine concern. But you would think an interview the day after the truce was negotiated would actually mention the truce, and maybe the terms the Russians were demanding. Achieving peace is supposed to be the primary goal here, right? And yet there was no mention of the truce at all. Just a celebration of Semenikhin’s defiance. What does that tell us about the prospects of actually arriving at a truce across the country?
And that brings us to the following piece from a couple of days ago describing the Kremlin’s calls for an end to the hostilities ‘in a moment’ if Ukraine agrees to the terms. Terms that have been distilled down to recognizing the independence of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, and changing Ukraine’s constitution to guarantee neutrality and no membership in NATO.
Notably, the Kremlin calls aren’t just for Ukraine to amend its constitution to reject the possibility of joining NATO. It’s to reject any aims to enter “any bloc”, which presumably includes potential future closer alignment with Russia too. Recall how the tussle over whether or not Ukraine would join an EU trade associated that led up to the 2014 Maidan protests included the prospects of Ukraine joining the Russian-led Eurasian Union instead. It’s a potentially significant detail in terms of signaling what the Kremlin’s long-term vision is for its relationship with Ukraine.
The statements by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also clarify what the official stated reason is for the “special military operation”: the Kremlin claims it knew it was just a matter of time before Donetsk and Luhansk were attacked. So it’s going to be interesting to see what, if any, evidence is eventually put forward to defend those assertions.
Overall, the Kremlin’s terms for peace at least give us a better sense of what the ‘off ramp’ could be: formally recognize the separatist republics and promise no future NATO prospects for Ukraine. If these really are the Kremlin’s goals — goals that don’t include the ‘de-Nazification’ of Ukraine — it points towards a potential quick end to a conflict that otherwise appears poised to drag on for years. Assuming the other side is even remotely interested in those terms, which remains a very open question:
“It was the most explicit Russian statement so far of the terms it wants to impose on Ukraine to halt what it calls its “special military operation”, now in its 12th day.”
12 days into the invasion we got terms for peace. It’s progress. Maybe. Assuming peace is possible. But in terms of significant changes to the status quo, it’s really the demand that Ukraine abandon all futures hopes of joining NATO that’s the biggest change. Crimea and the separatist republics were already effectively gone. Will Ukraine be willing to amend its constitution as the price for peace?
And note what is now the most explicit articulation of the justifications of the invasion: protecting the 3 million people living in the separatist republics from a perceived inevitable attack, coupled with a sense of the inevitability of Ukraine’s long-term prospects for joining NATO:
Keep in mind that Ukraine legally can’t join NATO while it has separatist republics on its soil. So Ukraine would either need to formally recognize their independence or recapture that territory before joining NATO. That was presumably part of the Kremlin’s logic here in terms of viewing a large conflict as inevitable.
Is Ukraine open to those terms? We’ll see. It doesn’t look likely. But it’s also an example of why the lack of coverage of the peace talks of Konotop are so unhelpful. It’s a lot easier to arrive at a long-term peace agreement when there’s coverage of the short-term truces.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that there’s another party implicitly involved in these negotiations over whether or not Ukraine has a future in NATO: NATO. There’s nothing stopping NATO from telling Ukraine to give up any hope of joining NATO in the future. It raises the question as to what NATO is going to do if Ukraine ends up refusing to Russia’s peace terms under the primary demand that it wants to join NATO in the future. Will NATO encourage this? Even worse, is Ukraine quietly being given a promise of NATO membership following the ‘liberation’ of those separatist republics after a brutal war? It’s a major question looming over all of this. The kind of question that’s likely to be answered in the form of quietly ignored stories about calls for peace, whether they’re a failure or success.
@Dave: It’s worth noting that it’s likely that it wasn’t the PBS Newshour blurring out the portrait of Stepan Bandera in that intereview but Artem Semenikhin himself who actively did it. Blurring out the background is a standard video filter that you can select with video conferencing tools like Zoom or Skype. He could have done it with a couple of clicks and based on the blurring of the door and chair it looks like the whole background was blurred. Not that PBS Newshours wasn’t completely playing dumb about Semenihkin during the interview.
If indeed it was Semenihkin who did the blurring, it suggests an awareness about the potential bad press that comes with the open embrace of a figure like Stepan Bandera. It would be interesting to find interviews of Semenikhin from his same office to Ukrainian media to see if he activates the filter for those interviews too.
@Pterrafractyl–
Thanks for the clarification.
Actually, I noted McLeod’s observation on the Zoom blur effecgt.
Still–as you noted–this is the erasure of history.
The program should drop the “P” from its title and become the “BS Newshour.”
Best,
Dave
@Dave: Here’s an article about another example of the Western white-washing of Ukraine’s Nazi problem in Canada last week:
While marching during a pro-Ukraine rally in Toronto, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland was photographed holding up a red-and-black scarf with the slogan “Slava Ukraini” (Glory to Ukraine). Her office even posted a photo on twitter. This predictably led to a number of people pointing out the far right Nazi collaborationist history associated with that flag and slogan. Getting photographed with the clear symbolism of the UPA army would be a public image problem for any politician, but it’s a particularly tricky topic for Freeland, who was already caught denying that her grandfather was the editor of a pro-Nazi publication in Ukraine during WWII before the unambiguous evidence was release.
So how did Freeland’s office deal with the tweet? By deleting it and then tweeting out a different photo from the March that didn’t feature the red-and-black flag. When that tactic failed to silence her critics, a new tactic was deployed: assert that everyone making a big deal out of this was playing into Russian disinformation:
“Soon after its posting, the original photo was deleted and replaced with an image of Freeland without the scarf.”
Whoops. Marching holding up a “Glory to Ukraine” scarf was not a great idea, in retrospect. Especially for Freeland, who is no stranger to these kinds of controversies:
And note how we got rather contradictory messaging in defense of the scarf incident. On the one hand, Freeland’s office was asserting it had no idea where the scarf came from, running away from the ugly history of the red-and-black symbolism. But on the other hand, we hear from the director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta about how the red and black flag is a traditional Ukrainian symbol that predates WWII. The red stands for blood and the black for soil. But we are assured this traditional ‘blood and soil’ meaning isn’t like the extremist far right ‘blood and soil’ symbolism. It’s an example of how dicey these defenses can get:
It’s also worth noting that the Macdonald-Laurier Institute that runs the “DisinfoWatch” website is right-wing libertarian ‘think-tank’ affiliated with the broader Koch network of right-wing libertarian organizations, which is reminder that powerful oil and gas interests in the West have a powerful lobbying network that’s going to be actively shaping perceptions of this conflict:
Finally, it’s hard to avoid amazement, albeit jaded amazement, at how at the end of this article where it’s repeatedly asserted that all of these claims are just Russian disinformation we then get lamentations about how the Nazi Azov Battalion is aiding these Russian disinformation efforts:
Damn those Ukrainian Nazis! They’re only fueling the vicious Russian lies about Ukrainian Nazis, complicating Canada’s efforts to train these Nazis! This is where we are.
At least this is where we are right now. Where we’re heading is another story. It’s hard to see how the Ukrainian nationalism doesn’t get ‘turned up to eleven’ for at least the next generation following the brutality of Russia’s invasion. Nationalism that’s going to surging throughout the Ukrainian diaspora across the world. It’s part of what made the dismissal of the outcry of that flag as ‘Russian disinformation’ so disturbing. Global outrage over the invasion, conducted under the auspices of ‘de-Nazifying’ Ukraine’, is going to be used around the world as the ultimate excuse for ignore even the most blatant open displays of Nazism as Russian disinformation. The war is wrong, and therefore there are no Nazis in Ukraine and anyone suggesting otherwise is only fueling this unjust war. That’s the logic that’s getting turbo-charged everywhere. You know, like those members of Azov Battalion sporting swastikas who unfortunately fuel all those Russian lies about Nazis in Ukraine.
Here’s an example of the kind of ugly story that could get a lot uglier by the time this conflict comes to an end: Meta (aka Facebook) just announced some special revisions to its hate speech policies pertaining to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The company is now going to all some posts calling for the death of Russians, along with calls for the death of Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko. Meta is characterizing it as a limited loosening of its policies, saying they still won’t allow “credible calls for violence against Russian civilians”. But speech such as “death to the Russian invaders”, which would have been previously banned, is now temporarily allowable in certain countries.
There’s also a technical rule for the calls for the death of Putin and Lukashenko: they’ll be allowed as long as there aren’t at least two technical indicators, like the timing and method. So, for example, you can call for the poisoning of Putin, or the assassination of him at a particular world event. But you can’t call for his poisoning at that event.
Here’s where it gets extra ugly: the select countries where posts on death to the Russian soldiers aren’t limited to Ukraine. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, are all subject to this loosening too. In other words, every country with a substantial ethnic Russian minority. Yes, the Facebook pages of every country with a large ethnic Russian minority can now be inundated with calls for the death of Russians. Yes, technically it’s just Russian soldiers, but that’s where the nuance of language comes into play. There’s a lot of different somewhat ambiguous ways one can call for the death of Russian soldiers.
Oh, and there’s one more change to the hate speech policy: Praise of the Azov Battalion will now be allowed as long as its in the context of defending Ukraine or its work in Ukraine’s National Guard. Interestingly, it doesn’t sound like this exception applies to any of the other Nazi militia units operating in Ukraine. Just Azov. It’s a sign of the symbolic significance the group has acquired.
Death to Russians and praise for Azov. That’s Facebook’s approach to conflict resolution. Which we probably should have expected:
“The temporary policy changes on calls for violence to Russian soldiers apply to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine, according to one email.”
Literally every country with a large ethnic Russian population. You have to wonder what exactly the internal rational was for selecting only these countries.
And then we get the other big change: Azov, and only Azov, can now be praised. But only praised in the context of its National Guard work:
And as hinted at in the following piece in the Intercept, which first reported the change in Facebook’s Azov policies, one of the conundrums raised when Facebook first modified its Azov policies after the invasion began is the fact that the policy still didn’t really allow for the praise of Azov because the rules still prohibited praise of any violence Azov was engaged in. So the lifting of the ban on calls for the death of Russian soldiers was effectively required for the meaningful lifting of the ban on praising of Azov because violence is the only thing Azov really does:
“The exemption will no doubt create confusion for Facebook’s moderators, tasked with interpreting the company’s muddled and at time contradictory censorship rules under exhausting conditions. While Facebook users may now praise any future battlefield action by Azov soldiers against Russia, the new policy notes that “any praise of violence” committed by the group is still forbidden; it’s unclear what sort of nonviolent warfare the company anticipates.”
Azov’s “battlefield actions” against Russian soldiers could now be praised, as long as they were non-violent actions. It was quite the muddle. At least before Facebook lifted its ban on calls for violence against Russian soldiers.
Still, the muddle remains of how content moderators are going to walk that line of deciding which posts include too much overt white supremacy:
Azov killing Russian soldiers = Good. Azov killing Russian soldiers to protect Ukraine’s white nationalist heritage = Bad. And somewhere in between is the gray area that Facebook’s moderators get to navigate.
Also keep in mind that this is the perfect environment for the development of new white nationalist lexicons and the ‘Alt Right’ art of barely veiled racist trolling. In other words, it’s only a matter of time before we hear about how Facebook’s ‘Pepe policy’ is due for another belated update.