Screenshot from the alleged shooter's first court hearing
In Ukraine, the American media have played down the facts of the Neo-Nazi and white supremacist «volunteer brigades» that have launched a terror war on the ethnic Russian population since April 2014. As American journalist Robert Parry has extensively pointed out, the US media, led by the so-called newspaper of record, the New York Times, have willfully ignored the reality of the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi paramilitaries. Even though these brigades are an integral part of the Kiev regime's fighting force in east Ukraine and even though these paramilitary foot soldiers and their commanders openly espouse Neo-Nazi slogans, white supremacist views, and Third Reich regalia and insignia - the American, and Western media generally, have declined to report on the grim reality of these Ukrainian regime forces and their criminality against ethnic Russian civilians.
Since the Western-backed Kiev regime launched its so-called «anti-terror operation» on the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, more than 6,000 people have been killed. Most the victims have been innocent civilians, women, and children. Over a million people have been displaced from their homes because of the violence, a violence which has reignited in recent weeks and threatens to sweep away the shaky ceasefire that was brokered in February 2015 by Russia, Germany and France.
The Kiev regime's so-called volunteer battalions never recognised the putative ceasefire anyway, and they are accused of fomenting the ongoing low-intensity warfare. These battalions, with names such as Azov, Donbass, Dneipr, Tornado, operate with the full knowledge of the Kiev regime's ministry of interior, headed by Arsen Avakov. They are accused of a litany of crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, kidnapping and arson.
The military commander of the Azov battalion is Andriy Biletsky, who is also a member of the coup-installed parliament in Kiev. Like his cadres, Biletsky is a self-declared Neo-Nazi who adulates the Ukrainian storm troopers that collaborated with the Waffen SS during the Second World War in the mass extermination of millions of fellow Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Russians.
Biletsky is also a proud white supremacist who rails against «negroes» and «immigrant hordes» who are infecting the biological purity of Europeans. He sees it has his duty to »lead the white races of the world» out of this contamination from «Jews, Muslims, blacks» and other «untermenschen» (subhumans). Not unlike the mission that the Charleston killer Dylann Roof also professed.
On rare occasions, the Western media have lifted the lid on the vile reality of the Kiev regime. With the regime's paramilitaries waving Nazi-era flags and wearing SS insignia on their uniforms, it would be hard to not admit, at least occasionally, this glaring contingency. In an earlier rare report, Britain's Daily Telegraph commented that Kiev's battalions were «openly white supremacist».
Most of the Western media coverage, however, has served to conceal the disturbing development of Western governments supporting a regime whose military power relies on Nazi-adulating brigades. Incongruously, the Western media have sought to expedite their cover-up by claiming that the Neo-Nazi labels are «only Kremlin propaganda».
As Robert Parry notes, the US House of Representatives earlier this month acknowledged the true nature of the Kiev regime's military units by passing an amendment that purports to withhold supplying American weapons to these paramilitaries, precisely because of their Neo-Nazi and racist ideology. That belated admission by US lawmakers has not been adequately explored in American public discourse.
For it alludes to the bigger and more self-incriminating fact that the Washington government, as well as its European allies, have unleashed these Neo-Nazi storm troopers in the heart of Europe to terrorise and murder civilians based on atavistic notions of «racial purity».
It is a sign of astounding denial or self-censorship that US politicians, media and pundits cannot openly engage with the flagrant facts.
Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter, is not simply a deranged «lone wolf» with sickening, warped personal views. In his home state of South Carolina, there is in that state alone reckoned to be at least 16 white supremacist, Nazi, fascist organisations, according to an oblique mention in a New York Times report last week. That means that all across the US there are probably hundreds of such groups and thousands of gun-toting would-be foot soldiers.
Following the massacre at the black church in Charleston, President Obama said: «At some point it's going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively... this kind of mass violence doesn't happen in other advanced countries». Obama went on to say that people need «to ask not just who did the killing but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers».
Obama's words may sound as if they are searching. But they still don't address the «system» that «produces the murderers».
Even less searching are Republican presidential contenders who equivocated shamefully about the Charleston massacre. None of them openly acknowledged the attack was «racial hatred». Rick Perry, Rick Santorium, Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul talked about the incident being «a drug-fuelled accident» motivated by «evil cowardice»that could have been prevented if the murdered churchgoers had themselves been armed with guns instead of just holding bibles.
The real sickness in American society is not simply that a 21-year-old Neo-Nazi white supremacist can go into a place of worship and gun down people who are praying. The real sickness is that American society, or at least its official public discourse, cannot face up to the reality that the kind of ideology and violence that its government sponsors in Ukraine is rampant in the midst of its own population.
If American leaders and media cannot deal with the glaring reality in their own midst, then it is little wonder that they continue to deny the same reality in Ukraine, where Neo-Nazi paramilitaries operate with American weaponry - in no less a way than Dylann Roof did on his murderous, hate-filled rampage in a Charleston church.
As the former black leader Malcolm X once said of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 - «the chickens are coming home to roost». The violence that US government begets around the world is a continuum of the violence that resides in the heart of American society at home.
Comment: It should be no surprise that we see individuals in the U.S. emulating the very same actions that the U.S. government engages in. Willful murdering of innocent civilians is what the U.S. is supporting in Ukraine and many other countries around the world, so why shouldn't people like Dylann Roof think it's normal to do the same at home?