This Holocaust revisionism is motivated by the need to whitewash the present-day, far-right Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis who are supported by the United States. The reason the US, NATO and the European Union say they are sending weapons and mercenaries to Ukraine is to help a fellow democracy defend its independence and sovereignty against an illegal invasion by an expansionist, megalomaniacal madman.
It is therefore very awkward from a Western perspective that the Ukrainian regime is underpinned by hard-right fascists and neo-Nazis.
Acknowledging this fact, Western war propagandists undoubtedly fear, would legitimize President Vladimir Putin's claim that the Russian invasion - which has been overwhelmingly condemned by the UN General Assembly - is justified by a need to "de-Nazify" and demilitarize Ukraine.
The dilemma is summed up in an NBC News headline from earlier this month: "Ukraine's Nazi problem is real, even if Putin's 'denazification' claim isn't." But most Western media will no longer even go as far as NBC News in acknowledging this reality.
The current war can be traced directly to the 2014 coup in Ukraine, during which the US and its allies supported far-right and neo-Nazi elements. The goal was to install a US-friendly regime that would bring Ukraine into NATO, the anti-Russia military alliance. Moscow has long seen NATO expansion as an existential threat.
Key actors in the US-supported coup were neo-Nazi groups like Right Sector, the Azov Battalion and C14. They are part of a broader Ukrainian nationalist movement that venerates Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which collaborated with Hitler during World War II.
During the war, members of the OUN loyal to Bandera formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, commonly known by its Ukrainian initials, UPA.
"Tactical" alliance with Hitler
On 4 March, the Anti-Defamation League published an article by Andrew Srulevitch, its director of European affairs, to minimize the Nazi problem in Ukraine.
The article was also promoted in a 15 March email newsletter from ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on how "anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and other misinformation are spreading in the wake of the invasion."
In order to downplay the present-day cult of Bandera and support for Nazism in Ukraine, the ADL finds it necessary to rewrite some history - in effect Holocaust revisionism.
Srulevitch's article takes the form of a Q&A with David Fishman, a professor of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Fishman is also a member of the academic committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Srulevitch asks: "We've seen torchlit marches in the middle of [Kiev] with the red and black flags of UPA ... and pictures of Stepan Bandera, who allied with the Nazis during WWII. Isn't that evidence of Nazism in Ukraine?"
Fishman responds: "For Ukrainian nationalists, UPA and Bandera are symbols of the Ukrainian fight for Ukrainian independence. The UPA allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union for tactical - not ideological - reasons. For Jews, however, not only is allying with the Nazis unforgivable under any circumstance, but historians have documented that Ukrainian nationalists participated together with Germans in the murder of many thousands of Jews in Ukraine."
Fishman's excuse that Bandera and other Nazi collaborators are "symbols" of the "fight for Ukrainian independence" mirrors the claims from American white supremacists that their display of the Confederate battle flag is merely to honor their "heritage" and not to celebrate a regime that went to war to protect its "right" to enslave people from Africa.
Fishman asserts: "There are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just as there are in the US, and in Russia for that matter. But they are a very marginal group with no political influence and who don't attack Jews or Jewish institutions in Ukraine."
In other words, there's nothing to see here, the ADL wants us to believe.
But Israel lobby groups were concerned over the rise of the Ukrainian far-right before the Russian invasion. Efraim Zuroff, a regional director with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, another pro-Israel lobby group, correctly stated in 2015:
"Holocaust perpetrators are the last people on Earth who deserve to be glorified, regardless of their nationalist credentials. This phenomenon, currently so common in post-Communist Eastern Europe, and especially in Ukraine and the Baltics, clearly shows that these countries don't fully comprehend the obligations of true democracy."This condemnation came after Ukrainian nationalists held a New Year's Eve torchlight procession in Kiev to honor Bandera.
But today, just like the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is, for political expediency, denying the support for Nazism in Ukraine. And also like the ADL, it is citing the fact that Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish as evidence that neo-Nazism is not a concern.
However, this is no more convincing than arguing that the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president means that racism and white supremacy have been eliminated from the United States. Indeed, according to the ADL, the dissemination of "white supremacist propaganda" in the US surged in 2020 - four years after America's first Black president left office.
Falsifying history
This rationalization, minimization and "both-sidesing" of Nazism and Holocaust crimes ought to be shocking in itself. But the ADL's claim that the Banderite alliance with Hitler was merely "tactical" - as if that would in any way mitigate their crimes - is also false.
Journalist and author Daniel Lazare writes in a 2015 Jacobin review of historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe's book Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist:
"Although Bandera and his followers would later try to paint the alliance with the Third Reich as no more than 'tactical,' an attempt to pit one totalitarian state against another, it was in fact deep-rooted and ideological. Bandera envisioned the Ukraine as a classic one-party state with himself in the role of führer, or providnyk, and expected that a new Ukraine would take its place under the Nazi umbrella."Bandera was however detained by the Nazis because he was pushing for Ukrainian independence - something Hitler was not ready to grant. But the alliance between the OUN and the Germans persisted. Lazare writes:
"Rather than disbanding the OUN, the Nazis had meanwhile revamped it as a German-run police force. The OUN had played a leading role in the anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out in Lviv and dozens of other Ukrainian cities on the heels of the German invasion, and now they served the Nazis by patrolling the ghettoes and assisting in deportations, raids and shootings."In 1943, Banderite members of the OUN formed their own militia, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA. The UPA began the ethnic cleansing and extermination of Poles from territories they saw as belonging to Ukraine. Citing historians, Lazare writes that:
"the UPA killed close to 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945 and that Orthodox priests blessed the axes, pitchforks, scythes, sickles, knives and sticks that the peasants it mobilized used to finish them off."At the same time, the UPA's attacks on Jews, as cited by Rossoliński-Liebe:
"continued at such a ferocious level that Jews actually sought the protection of the Germans. The Banderite bands and the local nationalists raided every night, decimating the Jews. Jews sheltered in the camps where Germans were stationed, fearing an attack by Banderites. Some German soldiers were brought to protect the camps and thereby also the Jews."Bandera resurrected
This horrifying history has a direct bearing on events today.
After World War II and with the start of the Cold War, the US and its allies embraced the Banderites, many of whom went into exile in the West, especially in Canada.
Since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became independent, and even more so in the last few years, the cult of Bandera has re-emerged with a vengeance. Far from being marginal, it is fully supported by Ukrainian state institutions.
In what NBC News calls an "ominous development," Ukraine "has in recent years erected a glut of statues honoring Ukrainian nationalists whose legacies are tainted by their indisputable record as Nazi proxies." Such monuments can be found all over western Ukraine from Lviv to Ternopil to Ivano-Frankivsk and many small towns in between.
In 2016, the city council in Kiev voted overwhelmingly to rename the Ukrainian capital's Moscow Avenue in honor of Bandera.
Eduard Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, has for years documented how Bandera is regularly celebrated with statues, banners and ceremonies:
The Ukrainian ambassador in Germany, Andrij Melnyk, even bragged in 2015 that he "laid down flowers on the tomb of our hero Stepan Bandera" during a visit to Munich.
Potential for horrifying blowback
With the US and Europe arming and supporting the government in Kiev, all this must be buried along with the ample evidence of support for Nazism and fascism in present-day Ukraine. Acknowledging this reality is not the same as claiming that 40 million Ukrainians are Nazis or that the country deserves to be attacked.
Nonetheless it is crucial for people in the US, EU and NATO countries to know that their governments are colluding with, as well as reportedly arming and training far-right and Nazi elements that are definitely not "marginal."
On top of the moral revulsion that allying with Nazis - any Nazis - should provoke, it is a strategy that is bound to produce horrifying blowback, even if an escalating conflict in Ukraine does not lead to nuclear war.
In 2019 - before it became politically necessary to whitewash them - the ADL itself warned that an "extremist group called the Azov Battalion has ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists" and issued a report on how the Ukrainian militia was trying to "connect with like-minded extremists from the US."
Today, the Azov Battalion, fully integrated into Ukraine's National Guard, is reportedly already receiving weapons supplied by Western countries.
American and European far-right extremists are flocking to Ukraine to join their neo-Nazi brothers in arms. When these battle-hardened race warriors return home, it will be Muslims, Jews and anyone else they consider not to be truly "European" or "American" who will likely pay the price.
It may seem surprising that an Israel lobby group claiming to fight bigotry against Jews and others would help to whitewash Nazis. But the alliance between Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism goes back a century.
The ADL may also be taking a leaf from Benjamin Netanyahu's shameless historical distortions and fabrications. In 2015, when he was still Israel's prime minister, Netanyahu attempted to exonerate Hitler and blame the Holocaust instead on Palestinians. Nor is it surprising that the ADL, which spied for apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, would tacitly join forces with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Nonetheless it is still hard to fathom the cynicism it takes even for an Israel lobby group to brand almost any support for Palestinian rights as "anti-Semitic" while it helps rehabilitate Hitler's Holocaust accomplices.
Reader Comments
Thank you for that.
All the violence and bs,
Both micro and macro
Tears me apart.
And internalizing anger, not standing up for oneself over the years.
There comes a point, rightly or wrongly, where I say to a bully--I mean business.
Just saying speaking the truth to the context of evil has a purging effect,though painful.
Even what you said there, the doubt, the knowing in my soul the truth, is an example specific to my internal process.
This is why EVERYONE bar a remnant will need to be killed.
All because people IGNORE the commandments to punish crime and create the enviroment for justice to flourish. Only Jesus/Yeshua has the power to avenge. Evil is the predominant way of the world.
People have made their choice.
Nazism was virtually invented for a charismatic leader to win peoples trust unanimously because it returned the country back to a level of prosperity quickly, which could enable the money men to continue on their planned future world government.
They will all be lumped together because Nazism was the prescribed political movement that was allowed to take Germany out of complete financial chaos (because Jewish banking has no concept of debt release) and could give a historical example to the world that would enshrine persecution post 1800. Where Jews were kicked out of countries for ruining that countries financial stability (amongst other things) Nazism could be used as a beta form of the great reset. Communism is the destructive side of the same coin, Nazism is simply constructive in its philosophy. The two are twins. Both need each other.
Qui bono.
Man has to now work inside inflation with no hope of financial remedy which ferments the greivience needed to offer the enviroment for a sales pitch that helps keep the status quo, thins out the herd (puts Jews out of harms way, killing the very people who believe in financial remedies that prevent the inflation in the first place: Jubilee (biblical mandate).
So EVERYONE will soon be a Nazi....
Everyone and his grandmother and next doors dog.
"Heads I win (Nazism) tales you lose (Communism).
The Western economic system is Nazi.
Not that I should get into semantics of Social Democracy or Oligarchy or what not; because it's a ruling by psychopaths for Psychopaths.
Neo-liberalisms is today's face of this in America.
With the prescribed biblical mandate of the 7th year Sabbath (personal debt release) and the 7th 7 year Sabbath (49th year as the national debt release) hyper inflation and national debt would be prevented (if honoured).
Nazism helped the German economy (took less than 2 years to reverse the hyper inflation and create massive economic upturns in employment and national security) bounce right back, it also served as the perfect vehicle to create a refreshed plunder of German wealth, keeping it's self determination firmly on a leash, reduced the Saxon gene pool, helped create Zionism and a middle eastern launch pad for world Judaism (Noachide Chabad Orthodoxy) to benefit from, while creating the strongest propaganda in the form of unverifyable persecution (both from historic and archeological points of view) it also helped secure Rothchild hedgemony of international banking post Napoleonic war.
People have been watching to much Hollywood "inglorious bastards/schindlers list" type movies.
People of Ukraine, some good and well meaning, turn a blind eye to basically genocide.
Worse in America.
Hypnotic hypocrisy is a tragic, strange, and shameful thing.
criminal psychopaths that coined the term "Sub-Human" for those who were not white Europeans, or of European descend. Slavs, Africans, Asians, Roma, Gypsies all matched that description to the criminal psychopaths. With "homosexual" it was more hypocritical - since the wealth of a person would determine whether his/her homosexuality would be tolerated.
"Nazism" is therefor an -ism that actually should be renamed into "Criminalpsychopathism", which is obvioysly impractical, but closer to the truth. Also totally unhinged sadism is attributed to Nazism.
When I use the term "Nazi", or "Nazi-lover", I do it with the knowledge that as a "Nazi" was especially known a person who was already unhinged, psychopathic or sadistic and member of the NSDAP. Many initial members of the NSDAP (which from a certain point on You had to be) left the party after they realized what it stood for. What You described had nothing to do with the policies by the NSDAP to regain military strength and heave The German Reich out of its slumber. These were policies that would have worked under any other party as well. This goes however to show the other part that You brought up: there was a reason as to why it was the NSDAP who was given reign over the German Reich. Other parties had the majority under a coalition. Similarily to the latest actiond of the wannabe Nazi Zelynchsky, opposition parties were banned after the Nazis in the NSDAP realized that they would not have the majority backing of the German people.
I think it is important to have these nuances on the mind when discussing the term "Nazi". "Fascist" would be the appropriate roof term for all of those who deem themselves worthier than anybody else. Especially worthier than those with a darker shade of skin color.
Nazism could be extended to mean Racism if it actually covered race, however, my only concern with the racial element is it simply doesn't extend further than a historical theory that has been accredited to Nazism, mainly from the point of view that Nazism cost the "White" non dark genome (race) a huge loss of life (which is the historical fact using hindsight) while the premise still clings onto this percieved "master race" (blonde haired blue eyed 6ft plus tall etc etc) which for me only really lives in the historic archives via short videos that was never really seen or manifested or evidenced by the physical attributes of Nazis (many of who were mixed race) then and especially now if it can be funded by a peoples who celebrate their master race in the present and admit to mixed race heritage in their own post WW2 literature and publishing monopoly.
So you are saying they are psychopathic wannabes.
The neo-Nazis.
They proxies, just like Isis.
The real Nazis understood that-how does it go--"the goal of power is power"--something like that.
I guess once one is clear about their direction, one way or the other, they stop being rebellious and develop discipline.
If that gets certain Sorus funded protesters in America twisted oh well.
The parasite has sucked as much nutrients as it could from its former host, that host is now about to die or slowly recover. Now dislodged the parasite makes its way out, signalled by the decline in nutrients, it shows an urgency, an urgency for requiring a new host, displaying a different morphology it adapts to a intermediary stage in its life cycle, allowing itself to become consumed once again, where it will hope to firmly lodge itself inside its new host and enjoy the nutrient rich enviroment of its host which grows.
Only the parasite is blind. It has no expectation beyond that of following the only instructions it has, it's DNA, giving it traits it cannot deviate from as they are suited to it's ability and environment, the parasite cannot know adaptation beyond that environment that will offer it perfect habitation or security.
The parasite that lives inside a poisoned host cannot reach the next stage in it's life cycle, the healthy host however can.
Historically there is more than one type of "nazi" in Ukraine.