Today, 2 May, marks the eighth anniversary of the diabolical Nazi atrocities at Odessa. For those unfamiliar with how this war began I updated a News Junkie Post article about its aetiology for The Indicter in 2015. At least 46 people were killed and many more unaccounted for when pro-Russian sympathisers were locked in the trade-union building by Right Sector fascists before it was set on fire.
The fascists were chanting “Slava Ukraini”, that is “Glory to Ukraine”, as people burnt to death. The perpetrators walked free. These are the same Nazis fighting for Kiev.
A compiled video of what happened on 2 May 2014
Earlier this year, at the start of the Russian special operation, and in praise of the eight-year NATO-backed slaughter, Boris Johnson added his own cry of Slava Ukraini on behalf of the British People when he told the Zelensky regime that the UK stands with Ukraine and its people. This is not Johnson’s first cry of Glory to Ukraine.
On 24 August 2019 he saluted Ukraine’s “independence” together with John Whittingdale, Chair of the All-Parliamentary group on Ukraine, Robert Brinkley, British Ambassador to Ukraine (2002-2006), Michael Fallon, Member of the House of Commons, Baroness Alison Suttie, Member of the House of Lords, John Grogan, Member of the House of Commons, Julian Edward George Asquith, the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Jonathan Djanogly, member of the House of Commons, Orysia Lutsevych, manager of the Ukrainian Forum, Chatham House, Andrew Foxall, Director of Research for the Henry Jackson Society and Pauline Latham, member of the House of Commons.
Together they repeated the words, line by line, of what is claimed to be the Ukrainian National Anthem since the coup-d’etat which removed the legitimately-elected president Viktor Yanukovich to install the West’s puppet regime.
Details are starting to emerge that NATO was actually planning to take control of the Donbas region against the will of the people. Even more disturbing is the speculation that NATO has a unit hidden deep in the bowels of the Azovstal factory. That would certainly mean that Johnson knew the intent from the start.
If they knew what was happening today my parents would blow up a dust storm. Their generation spent five-years fighting off the evils of Nazism. Now my government is gung ho in support of it. It is almost unbelievable.
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This article was originally published on All the Goss.
Featured image is from All the Goss
The original source of this article is Global Research
Now, Western mainstream media downplays the group’s fascist ideology and national prominence
Image Credit: banned.video
Before mainstream media began to obfuscate the role of the Azov Batallion in the country of Ukraine, The Guardian produced a short documentary on one of the group’s youth camps.
Instead of watering down the openly fascist group’s ideology and influence, the pre-Ukraine/Russia war footage exposes the true nature of the Azov Brigade.
At the beginning of the 2017 video, a teenage Ukrainian boy named Anton who is preparing to attend an Azov camp describes being worried about some of the swastika tattoos or other “fascist” and “pagan” symbols promoted by the group.
“I will be killed there,” he tells his mother.
The boy continues to note that Azov members are known to “beat people” at “gay pride” events before saying he still thinks the neo-Nazi soldiers “are normal people.”
At one point narrator for the Guardian production provides a brief background of how Azov fought in the 2014 Western-backed coup against a then-Russia-friendly government.
An Azov fighter working at the youth camp tells the camera the neo-Nazi group “has transformed into a Ukrainian movement,” adding, “Now it’s a political movement.”
Some of the Azov members are filmed watching a Russian news report comparing the camps to the Hitler Youth program of Nazi Germany.
Responding to the accusation, an Azov soldier admits, “There are some people who have these beliefs,” before noting, “I have tattoos of things that I like.”
Not all of the man’s tattoos are visible, but there is a sonnenrad on his elbow.
According to the ADL, “The sonnenrad is an ancient Indo-European symbol appropriated by Nazi Germany, which has led modern-day white supremacists to use it as a hate symbol.”
While the individual being interviewed claims those with “SS” and “swastika” tattoos don’t teach the children, plenty of neo-Nazi ink is seen in the footage.
Sonnenrad“SS”White Pride
In the years since the mini-documentary was released, the Azov camps have expanded to host thousands of teens across Ukraine.
In the years since the mini-documentary was released, the Azov camps have expanded to host thousands of teens across Ukraine.
Nazi everywhere, you just don’t know it. The Canadian political system and many of its leaders are Nazi supporters. Hiding under your noses pretending to care about your well-being as they manipulate you. https://t.co/XDfglbZTtL
By evoking “a gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” in power in Kiev, President Putin has shocked many. The Atlanticist press tried to present him as a mental patient. However, the facts are there: the power in Ukraine is verily occupied by a bunch of drug addicts who stole the gas revenues.
A racial law has been passed. Monuments to the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera have been erected. And two Nazi battalions have already been incorporated into the regular army.
President Zelenski elevates Nazi Dmytro Kotsyubaylo to the title of «Hero of the Nation» in the Rada (National Assembly). Kotsyubaylo succeeded Dmitro Yarosh as head of the Right Sector.
Russia’s military strategy is impossible to decipher today because we do not have an accurate record of operations on the ground. Only the Russian and NATO staffs have them. What is being broadcast is clearly false, in the case of Western newspapers and the Ukrainian government, and unverifiable, in the case of the Russian armies, of Donestz and Lugansk.
The only thing that is certain is that -for the moment- the fighting is limited to Ukrainian territory, while the conflict concerns Russia and the United States, and only incidentally Ukraine.
We expect that on March 5, 2022, Russia will raise its voice and take the conflict to a second theater of operation.
In the meantime, I will explain what President Vladimir Putin meant when he described the Ukrainian authorities as “a bunch of drug addicts and neo-Nazis,” an extremely shocking, but very substantiated phrase.
Perhaps President Putin is giving too much importance to these facts, or perhaps we in the West are downplaying them.
From left to right: David Archer and his wife, Joe Biden and his son Hunter playing golf.Source : Fox News
“A BUNCH OF DRUG ADDICTS”
The government of Viktor Yanukovych (2010-14) tried to keep Ukraine in a middle ground between its Russian neighbour and its American friend. However, in the words of President Bush Jr., “Those who are not with us are against us”. Therefore the West considered him to be “pro-Russian”.
He was overthrown by the United States, under the command of the Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, during the “Revolution of Dignity” in Maidan Square. The transitional regime was in the hands of professional rioters. The extent of the corruption of the Yanukovych team was discovered and the Straussians decided to make even more money.
On April 3, one of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s former advisors, con man David Archer, and his fellow stoner, Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, met with billionaire Stephen Schwartzman, head of the Blackstone investment fund (not to be confused with Blackrock) in Italy, on the shores of Lake Como, at the Ambrosetti Club.
David Archer was placed on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the main Ukrainian gas companies, whose owner was under investigation by the FBI and MI5 in the West. The U.S. and British police were convinced that the owner of Bursima, the oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who was the Minister of Natural Resources under Yanukovych’s regime, had illegally granted licenses for his oil and gas companies. Archer was paid 83,333 dollars a month for this straw man position. A photo of him at the White House with Vice President Biden was placed on the company’s website.
Then Vice President Joe Biden and his advisers Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken arrived in Kiev to pledge U.S. support for the new regime and to organize credible elections. However, the Donestzk and Lugansk oblasts rejected the provisional government, which included five Nazi ministers, and in a referendum proclaimed their independence. The next day, May 12, 2014, Vice President Biden’s son, junkie Hunter Biden, joined the board of directors of Burisma Holding. Subsequently, a third man, Secretary of State John Kerry’s son-in-law Christopher Heinz, joined David and Hunter on Burisma’s board.
During the second half of 2014, at the direction of David Archer and Hunter Biden, Burisma paid $7 million in kickbacks to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine under the new Poroshenko regime to draft forgeries and close the legal case against it and its oligarch owner. A wiretap heard President Petro Poroshenko confirm to Vice President Biden that the deal was “fixed.” The United States had recycled the former minister of “pro-Russian” Yanukovych. Subsequently, the Prosecutor General, who was decidedly greedy, was ousted by a vote in Parliament provoked by the United States, the European Union, the IMF and the World Bank, who also wanted to save the oligarch and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, but at a lower price.
All these events have been widely reported in the Ukrainian press. They are only the tip of the iceberg. For example, according to the Wall Street Journal, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to fire the directors of the state-owned gas company Naftogaz and replace them with others, including the Straussian Amos Hochstein.
In July 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate these cases of corruption (including that of his own Secretary of Energy), the latter refused. As Trump became more and more insistent, a U.S. intelligence official revealed the content of this conversation and accused President Trump of using Ukraine to harm his rival, the Democratic candidate Joe Biden. This led to the impeachment of President Trump in Congress, the Ukrainegate.
The least we can say is that a large number of corrupt acts are proven, that they were perpetrated for the benefit of Ukrainian and American personalities, and that in the end, tens of billions of dollars disappeared and the standard of living of the Ukrainian population collapsed. All this was done thanks to straw men who have no expertise in gas, but have in common to participate in Hunter Biden’s drug parties. This is what Russian President Vladimir Putin rightly referred to.
From a European point of view, everyone has noticed that the consumer price of gas has increased tenfold in the last year. It is true that the increase in demand is greater than the increase in supply, but this cannot in any way explain the extent of this price increase. In fact, long-term gas contracts are still priced slightly higher than in the past, while short-term contracts have soared. The difference can be explained exclusively by speculation. And precisely Blackstone and friends of President Joe Biden were the first to speculate. They obviously expected a crisis in one of the producing countries.
It is easy to understand why the Atlanticist press is downplaying the Hunter Biden affair, in which his father, now President of the United States, is up to his neck in trouble. In the end, the current military operation in Ukraine is causing a further increase in gas prices, again to the benefit of the friends of the US president and to the detriment of the Europeans.
These facts should be linked to what I wrote in the previous article in this series. Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland, who piloted these schemes, are Straussians. And as the first of them, Paul Wolfowitz, wrote in 1992: The first rival of the United States is the European Union, whose development must be prevented.
By the way, these facts are internal Ukrainian and Western European affairs. They do not justify external intervention.
Arrival of the Nazi Azov Batalion in Mariopol in August 2020.
“A BUNCH OF NEO-NAZIS”
President Vladimir Putin also referred to a band of neo-Nazis. This time, it is no longer a small group of a few dozen people, but a few thousand, between 10 and 20 000.
To understand, one must remember that at the end of the Second World War, the United States and the USSR each took many Nazi dignitaries prisoner. All tried to collect their information. But if, after eight months, the Soviets sent them back home, the United States kept some of them and recycled them. Everyone knows that, for example, the Nazi scientist who imagined the V2, Werner von Braun, became the director of NASA (operation “Paperclip”).
Or that Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s special advisor for the New Order in Europe, Walter Hallstein, became the first president of the European Commission. Or that the mountaineer Heinrich Harrer was commissioned by the CIA to raise the Dalai Lama. What is less known is that the CIA also recycled many SS and Gestapo policemen around the world. It placed, for example, the gestapist Klaus Barbie at the head of Bolivia where he succeeded in assassinating Che Guevara, or the SS Alois Brunner in Syria (then an ally of Washington).
Throughout the Cold War, the CIA used Nazis. However, President Jimmy Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner to bring order to the agency, to limit the role of these agents and to end the dictatorships. Most of the Nazis were dismissed, but those who could operate in the Warsaw Pact were retained. Thus, President Ronald Reagan celebrated the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe, creating a host of associations to destabilize the Warsaw Pact member states and even the USSR.
It is therefore quite logical that in 2007, the CIA organized in Ternopol (Ukraine) a congress to gather European neo-Nazis and Middle Eastern anti-Russian jihadists. It was chaired by the Ukrainian Nazi, Dmitro Yarosh and the Chechen emir, Doku Umarov. However, the latter, wanted by Interpol, could not go there. He sent a video message of support. Subsequently, neo-Nazis and jihadists fought together to impose the Islamic Emirate of Ichkeria in place of the Chechen Republic.
In 2013, Nato trained the men of the same Dmitro Yarosh in Poland in street fighting. In this way, they were operational during the regime change in Ukraine, led by Victoria Nuland: the “Revolution of Dignity”, also known as “Euromaidan”. Most of the journalists on the spot noticed the disturbing presence of these Nazis, but the Western personalities who came to participate in this “revolution”, like Bernard-Henri Lévy, were blind.
In the following months, the presence of five Nazi ministers in the transitional government provoked the independence referendums in the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts. President Petro Poroshenko, on the advice of Hunter Biden’s friends, organized them into military units and placed them on the border of the new Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.
The neo-Nazi groups were financed by the local mafia godfather Ihor Kolomoysky. The fact that Kolomoysky was president of the Ukrainian Jewish Community did not prevent him from choosing his henchmen in this way. However, when Kolomoysky tried to take control of the European Jewish organizations with his money and threats, he was ejected.
In order to overthrow President Poroshenko, Ihor Kolomoysky fabricated a new politician by producing a television series, Servant of the People, whose main actor was a certain Volodymyr Zelensky. When Zelensky was elected president and the Straussians returned to the White House, he accepted all their suggestions. He erected monuments to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Nazi collaborators during World War II.
In the end, he supported his ideology according to which the Ukrainian population has two origins, on the one hand Scandinavian and proto-Germanic, on the other hand Slavic, only the first are true Ukrainians, the second are only Russians, subhuman. He then promulgated a “Law on Indigenous Peoples” which deprived the Ukrainians of Slavic origin of the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms. This law has not yet been implemented.
For seven years, Nazi groups massacred inhabitants of Donbass at random. Germany and France, guarantors of the Minsk agreements, have done nothing. The United Nations itself turned a blind eye. For seven years, these groups have grown. They have grown from hundreds of soldiers to thousands.
At the request of Victoria Nuland, President Zelensky appointed Dmitro Yarosh as special advisor to the army chief. The latter, obviously embarrassed, refused to comment on this strange duo for reasons of “national security”. Yarosh reorganized the neo-Nazis into two battalions and urban groups. He launched a massive attack on the separatist oblasts on the weekend of the Munich Security Conference, triggering the Russian response.
On March 3, the Nazi Aidar Battalion was defeated by the Russian army. President Zelensky then appointed its commander as governor of Odessa with the task of preventing the Russian armies from linking Crimea and Transnistria.
All these facts are indisputable. Russia’s response may be seen as disproportionate and inappropriate, but not as unjustified.
We must bear in mind that the Second World War was experienced differently in the West and in the East. In Western Europe, Nazism was a dictatorship that preyed on minorities, the Gypsies and the Jews, whom it abducted and exterminated by the millions in camps. In Eastern Europe, the project was quite different. It was a matter of freeing up a living space by exterminating the Slavic population.
There was no need for camps. Everyone had to be killed. The levels of destruction are not comparable. The USSR alone counted 27 million dead. Modern Russia was built on the memory of this Great Patriotic War against Nazism. For the Russians, it is unacceptable to wear swastikas and to vote a racial law. One must act without waiting for it to be applied.
Baxter Dmitry is a writer at News Punch. He covers politics, business, and entertainment. Speaking truth to power since he learned to talk, Baxter has traveled in over 80 countries and won arguments in every single one. Live without fear. Email: baxter@newspunch.com
Canada’s government, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his deputy Christa Freeland, is run by modern-day fascists working in lockstep with Big Tech companies, corporate media, and the global banking industry to create a kind of Corporate Communism.
Mainstream media is working with these tyrants to cover their tracks. Here are the indisputable facts.
Let us start with Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Her own grandfather was a Nazi collaborator. She previously lied about this when she wrote it off as “Russian disinformation“. But the claim was then proven by Ottawa Citizen:
Michael Chomiak was a Nazi collaborator.
For starters, The Ukraine Archival Records held by the Province of Alberta. It has a whole file on Chomiak, including his own details about his days editing the newspaper Krakivski Visti. Chomiak noted he edited the paper first in Crakow (Cracow), Poland and then in Vienna. The reason he edited the paper in Vienna was because he had to flee with his Nazis colleagues as the Russians advanced into Poland. (The Russians tended to execute collaborators well as SS members).
Freeland has expressed pride in her grandparents on Black Ribbon Day, a time to RESPECT those who suffered under Nazi Germany and Communist Russia.
Freeland openly supports Nazi collaborators.
Let’s move on to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his history of Nazi-collaborator flag-waving.
Justin Trudeau’s Deputy Prime Minister was photographed Sunday helping to hold the banner of a Ukrainian nationalist army that collaborated with the Nazis and violently massacred tens of thousands of Poles as part of an ethnic cleansing program.
On Monday morning, Chrystia Freeland, the Ukrainian-descended Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Canada, tweeted a picture of herself at Sunday’s “Mega March for Ukraine” in Toronto helping to hold a banner reading “Glory to Ukraine” in the red and black battle flag colors of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)
Freeland is also a member of Klaus Schwab’s ‘Young Global Leaders’ program. Schwab is a German elitist who has bragged openly about “penetrating” half of Trudeau’s Cabinet. Per the National Post, Freeland has links to interesting people indeed:
The World Economic Forum (WEF), which has met at the Swiss ski resort of Davos every year since its creation in 1971 by German academic and entrepreneur Klaus Schwab, was forced to convert its annual schmoozefest into a virtual event this year due to COVID-19. Of note on the main agenda was a “stakeholder capitalism” panel, which included Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland. The former-journalist-turned-politician has been a fixture at the WEF for years. Rubbing shoulders at Davos with the world’s rich, famous and powerful was one of the inspirations for her 2012 book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.
…
Indeed, the one-time critic has enjoyed an apotheosis of sorts and since 2019 has sat on the board of trustees of the WEF itself. Other members include Canada’s own Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England; Al Gore, former U.S. vice-president; Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest individual; Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment fund; and a slew of other bankers, CEOs, tycoons and celebrities. Notably, Freeland is the only government minister presently on the board.
Klaus Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum, names Justin Trudeau as one of his Young Global Leaders group. He also brags openly, without qualm, of “penetrating” the Cabinet and earning “half” of the Liberals to his cause.
In case you lived under and rock and missed it, after the Great Reset, you will “own nothing and be happy“. This article was taken down from the WEF website due to public backlash, but Forbes still has the article up here. Moving on, it’s now official that Canadians donating to the Freedom Convoy 2022 were NOT terrorists:
Canada’s chief financial intelligence agency has once again shut down claims by the Trudeau government that donations given to the truckers’ Freedom Convoy constituted terrorist funding.
Blacklock’s Reporter reported Friday that Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) deputy director of intelligence Barry MacKillop had declared the money raised for the convoy protests came from people supporting a cause they believed in.
Barry MacKillop, deputy director of intelligence at the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre (FINTRAC), then reasserted this as the case under oath.
The Justice Centre is suing the Federal Government for its illegal use of the Emergencies Act. Brian Peckford, the last surviving signatory of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is suing the Federal Government for its abuses of the Charter for their unconstitutional actions during the pandemic.
Trudeau and Freeland refused to meet with the Freedom Convoy 2022 at all, and Trudeau frequently walked out of Parliament whenever he was asked to address it. He made it blatantly clear he would never sit down to talk with regular working Canadians under any circumstance.
We are all now fully aware that Trudeau and Freeland crushed a peaceful, legal, and constitutionally protected protest with a military-style force. This came after slandering them as racists, sexists, transphobes, homophobes, etc.
Then Trudeau illegally invoked the Emergencies Act, which was used to shut down bank accounts of anyone donating money to a legal and popular cause for whatever reason they may have chosen to do so. And now that the Emergencies Act has been “revoked“, many of these accounts are still frozen… ILLEGALLY.
But it gets even worse.
This video from the Canadian Bankers Association details how they have teamed up with the World Economic Forum to implement a nationwide digital ID system.
Paper licences and plastic cards are old technology and should be replaced with a brand new biometric digital ID system according to Neil Parmenter, president and CEO of the Canadian Bankers Association (CBA).
Western developed nations are wholeheartedly embracing the new digital frontier. Their government agencies and commercial sectors have embarked on an energetic exploration of the promises of a robust and comprehensive digital identity system.
And yes, bankers are not the government but if you don’t think they have a huge influence, you aren’t thinking. They all link to the World Economic Forum as political players.
Trudeau and Freeland are still trying to push through legislation to crush free speech and free web browsing for Canadians online.
‘Bill C-11, like its predecessor C-10, shows that the government doesn’t trust Canadians with free speech & to make their own internet choices,’ Dr. Leslyn Lewis tweeted.
Canadian Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis voiced concern over a new internet censorship bill from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, saying that passing the legislation would open “the door” to internet suppression and canceling of opposing political views.
“Neither the Liberals nor any government, regardless of your political stripe, can be trusted to be neutral referees of what is preferred speech and preferred content,” Lewis said during a Bill C-11 debate in the House of Commons on Wednesday.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan has confirmed Canadian soldiers are no longer training members of the Chinese military, amid scrutiny following a report that senior civil servants opposed a decision last year to stop training activities with the regime.
A report by The Globe and Mail on Thursday cited documents mistakenly released under access to information laws which said Global Affairs Canada pushed back at the decision by Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance last year to cancel the training.
The training was set to see Canadian soldiers train Chinese soldiers in winter activities at CFB Petawawa.
As I covered in a previous article, Trudeau’s own half-brother Kyle Kemper has talked publicly about Trudeau’s corruption, his representation for the World Economic Forum over his own country, and the possibility that Trudeau may even feel trapped inside the clutches of an international power scheme.
Anyone who speaks out against the shameless corruption and blatant treason of the government is smeared or harassed or censored by Trudeau’s political police.
What is the first thing a Fascist or Communist dictator does when asserting absolute power? They get control over the corporate media. All of our major news outlets have been funded or bailed out by Trudeau. This is why even National Post, a supposedly ‘conservative’ news source, holds back from telling Canadians the full truth of many issues. They flat out LIE to the public in lockstep with Trudeau and his World Economic Forum peers.
This is tyranny, plain and simple. We can call it Fascism or Communism, but it’s really a new kind of corporate communism/corporatism/techno-communism. The Big Tech companies, corporate media and governments alike are all on board, with a few holdouts here and there.
Can it be taken back? I believe it can be. I believe the Freedom movement is a major sign of this. The Federal Government and banking system have lost an immense amount of confidence. I believe their global banking power network is imploding during the Russia-Ukraine war. I believe they were on a winning trajectory of enforcing global tyranny right under the radar–before certain personalities like Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates started pushing too far, too quickly.
They wanted to taste the power of leading a fully implemented global framework in their lifetime. But their impatience — thankfully for us — betrayed their cause. It has been exposed, it is being rejected, and it is collapsing due to betrayal and infighting from within.
This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author
Like all left-wing big tech platforms and their Democrat cheerleaders, Facebook is run by monumental hypocrites who pick and choose sides in issues based not on any moral compass but rather on political expediency.
For example, the platform has regularly banned and censored Nazi personification and worship, which, of course, most people agree is a good thing. But after Russia invaded Ukraine last week, Facebook has reversed course and is making a “narrow exemption” — again, for political purposes.
As reported by The National Pulse, the platform “is reversing a ban on users praising Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, previously included in the platform’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, amidst Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
According to internal memos from the platform, which regularly censors mainstream conservative content, Facebook will “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.”
Internally published examples of speech that Facebook is now going to accept include “Azov movement volunteers are real heroes, they are a much needed support to our national guard”; “We are under attack. Azov has been courageously defending our town for the last 6 hours”; and “I think Azov is playing a patriotic role during this crisis,” noted The Intercept, which was the outlet that obtained the company memos.
“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 explained.
“But we are continuing to ban all hate speech, hate symbolism, praise of violence, generic praise, support, or representation of the Azov Regiment, and any other content that violates our community standards,” the spokesperson added, in a statement to Business Insider, according to The National Pulse.
The shift in policy comes after years of heavy censorship of stories exposing, or that were critical of, the Democrat Party and its major players. Twitter, for instance, literally blocked stories ahead of the 2020 election exposing Joe and Hunter Biden as being corrupt patrons of Ukraine and China, and locked the newspaper reporting it — the New York Post — out of its account.
Meanwhile, the social media platforms also bar criticism of Big Pharma companies, the Chinese Communist Party, and any ‘unacceptable’ views and legitimate science regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines — but suddenly, Facebook will permit praise of a Ukrainian military unit that is know for it’s “hardcore right-wing ultranationalism and the neo-Nazi ideology pervasive among its members,” The Intercept noted.
The National Pulse adds:
The first commander of the Azov Batallion, which has marched and trained for combat wearing symbols from the Third Reich, was former Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Biletsky, who asserted that Ukraine’s national objective was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhuman].”
A recent video posted by the National Guard of Ukraine also showed an Azov soldier dipping bullets in pig fat while issuing the following warning: “Dear Muslim brothers, in our country, you will not go to heaven. You will not be allowed into heaven. Go home, please. Here, you will encounter trouble. Thank you for your attention, goodbye.”
Facebook’s decision comes as Vladimir Putin’s government refuses to show ordinary Russians what’s really happening in Ukraine.
“Russia’s all-out assault on the truth intensified this week, with the country’s leading independent radio station, Echo of Moscow, silenced, and the website of an independent streaming television channel, TV Rain, blocked, as both broadcasters refused to echo the government line that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not a war,” according to The Intercept in a separate report.
If you are like most people in the western world, you are strongly rooting for one side or the other to win the war in Ukraine. But how did you decide which side to root for? Could it be possible that your opinions have been greatly shaped by mainstream news coverage of the conflict? I am going to share some things with you in this article that are deeply disturbing, and they are likely to alter how you view the war. But before I get into the details, I want to be very open about the fact that I do not consider either the Russians or the Ukrainians to be “the good guys” in this saga. The Russians repeatedly lied to us about their intentions, I am very upset that Vladimir Putin ordered this invasion, and I am entirely convinced that when push comes to shove the Russians will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against the United States. Needless to say, I am not going to refer to anyone that is likely to nuke my country someday as “the good guys”.
Right now, the mainstream media is working tirelessly to frame the Ukrainians as “the good guys”, but that isn’t true either.
For years, Ukraine has been crawling with gangs, militias and political organizations that are recognized internationally as being either Nazis or neo-Nazis. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Azov Special Operations Detachment. The following comes from Wikipedia…
Azov Special Operations Detachment (Ukrainian: Окремий загін спеціального призначення «Азов», romanized: Okremyi zahin spetsialnoho pryznachennia “Azov”), often known as Azov Detachment, Azov Regiment (Ukrainian: Полк Азов, romanized: Polk Azov), or Azov Battalion (until September 2014), is a right-wing extremist[1] and neo-Nazi[2][3][4] unit of the National Guard of Ukraine,[5][6][7] based in Mariupol, in the Azov Sea coastal region.[8] It has been fighting Russian separatist forces in the Donbas War. Azov initially formed as a volunteer militia in May 2014.[9] It saw its first combat experience recapturing Mariupol from pro-Russian separatists in June 2014.[5] On 12 November 2014, Azov was incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine, and since then all members are contract soldiers serving in the National Guard.[10]
Even though the Ukrainian government knew that Azov was full of Nazis, it had absolutely no problem incorporating the unit into the main armed forces of the country in 2014.
In 2015, a reporter for USA Today interviewed a drill sergeant for the group that admitted that about half of the soldiers in Azov are Nazis…
A drill sergeant who would identify himself only as Alex wore a patch depicting Thor’s Hammer, an ancient Norse symbol appropriated by neo-Nazis, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
In an interview with USA TODAY, he admitted he is a Nazi and said with a laugh that no more than half his comrades are fellow Nazis. He said he supports strong leadership for Ukraine, like Germany during World War II, but opposes the Nazis’ genocide against Jews.
In recent years, Azov has recruited large numbers of neo-Nazis and white supremacists from the United States, Germany, the UK, Brazil, Sweden and elsewhere.
And now that Russia has invaded, neo-Nazis and white supremacists from all over the globe have been seeking to travel to Ukraine to join Azov and other paramilitary units. The following comes from the New York Times…
Rita Katz, the director of SITE, said that numerous far-right white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups throughout Europe and North America had expressed an outpouring of support for Ukraine, including by seeking to join paramilitary units in battling Russia.
The motivation to travel to Ukraine, she said, was to gain combat training. It was also ideologically-driven, she added, since these far right groups viewed the fight against Russia as a fight against communism, clinging to World War II historical narratives, and associating modern-day Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, with the former Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, Nazis and neo-Nazis are not just on the fringes of Ukrainian society. One of the founders of Azov, Andriy Biletsky, went on to serve in Ukraine’s parliament…
Post-Maidan Ukraine is the world’s only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces. The Azov Battalion was initially formed out of the neo-Nazi gang Patriot of Ukraine. Andriy Biletsky, the gang’s leader who became Azov’s commander, once wrote that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade…against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” Biletsky is now a deputy in Ukraine’s parliament.
Speaker of Parliament Andriy Parubiy cofounded and led two neo-Nazi organizations: the Social-National Party of Ukraine (later renamed Svoboda), and Patriot of Ukraine, whose members would eventually form the core of Azov.
And another veteran of Azov, Vadim Troyan, became one of the most important law enforcement officials in the entire nation…
The deputy minister of the Interior—which controls the National Police—is Vadim Troyan, a veteran of Azov and Patriot of Ukraine. In 2014, when Troyan was being considered for police chief of Kiev, Ukrainian Jewish leaders were appalled by his neo-Nazi background. Today, he’s deputy of the department running US-trained law enforcement in the entire nation.
The reason why men like this could rise through the ranks is because countless other key Ukrainian figures see things the same way that they do.
Anti-semitism is absolutely rampant in Ukraine, and in recent years there has been an enormous surge of Nazi-inspired violence all over the country…
The past three years saw an explosion of swastikas and SS runes on city streets, death threats, and vandalism of Holocaust memorials, Jewish centers, cemeteries, tombs, and places of worship, all of which led Israel to take the unusual step of publicly urging Kiev to address the epidemic.
Public officials make anti-Semitic threats with no repercussions. These include: a security services general promising to eliminate the zhidi (a slur equivalent to ‘kikes’); a parliament deputy going off on an anti-Semitic rant on television; a far-right politician lamenting Hitler didn’t finish off the Jews; and an ultranationalist leader vowing to cleanse Odessa of zhidi.
When the Russians say that the “denazification” of Ukraine is one of their goals, they make a legitimate point.
But the mainstream media is telling you that you must root for the Nazis and the neo-Nazis, and so I suppose that you don’t have much of a choice.
Of course the mainstream media will never show you the Nazi symbols, the Nazi salutes or the rampant abuse of minority groups.
And now that the war has started, Facebook has apparently decided that it is now perfectly okay for their users to publicly praise Azov…
FACEBOOK WILL TEMPORARILY allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.
Once again, none of this means that I approve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, because I do not.
In fact, I have always been a very strong advocate for a diplomatic solution in the region.
But if you are going to root for the Ukrainians, you need to understand who you are rooting for.
What I have shared in this article is just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, most people in the western world will never hear about any of this because the mainstream media is keeping it very, very quiet.
Earlier this month, Canada hosted the third Ukraine Reform Conference, a gathering of diplomats and officials from over 100 countries aimed at bringing Kiev even more directly under the geopolitical and economic domination of the western imperialist powers.
After meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the conference sidelines, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed “to stand with Ukraine against Russian interference and aggression,” and to support it in the struggle to end Russia’s “illegal annexation” of Crimea.
Trudeau’s portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine and Eastern Europe turns reality on its head. It conceals the fact that Canada played a major supporting role in the US-orchestrated, fascist-spearheaded February 2014 coup that chased Ukraine’s elected president from power and brought a far-right, pro-western regime to power in Kiev; and that the 2014 coup was the continuation of a longstanding US-led, Canadian-backed drive to expand NATO to Russia’s borders and harness Ukraine to the West.
Moreover, Canadian imperialism has been playing a leading role in the subsequent US-NATO war drive against Russia. This includes supporting Washington’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia; taking command and providing the bulk of the troops for one of NATO’s four new “forward deployed” battalions in Poland and the three Baltic states; and deploying 200 Canadian Armed Forces personnel to Ukraine since 2015 to help prepare its army and National Guard to, in Trudeau’s words, “liberate” Ukrainian territory.
But Canada’s intimate alliance with far-right Ukrainian nationalists did not begin in 2014, or even Dec. 1991, when Canada became the first western country to recognize Ukraine as a sovereign state. In the decades following World War II, Canada became a haven for far-right Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom had collaborated with the Nazis both in their drive to find “lebensraum” (living space) through the conquest of the Soviet Union and their genocidal “final solution to the Jewish problem.”
Under conditions of the postwar US-led military-strategic offensive against the Soviet Union—what euphemistically came to be known as the Cold War—these ultra-reactionary political forces came to be seen as useful allies due to their virulent anticommunism and hostility to anything and anyone associated with the Soviet Union.
In the immediate postwar period, Canada’s then Liberal government, working in close cahoots with US and British intelligence, opened Canada’s doors to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. These included members of the infamous 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, also known as the Galicia Division.
Among the beneficiaries of this policy was Mikhail Chomiak, the grandfather of current Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland. Chomiak served as editor of a pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist newspaper during the war, Krakivs’ki Visti, which used publishing equipment commandeered by the Nazis from a Jewish newspaper they had shut down. Chomiak emigrated to northern Alberta after fleeing to Vienna in late 1944 in the face of the advancing Red Army (see: Canadian media denounces exposure of foreign minister’s grandfather as Nazi collaborator).
The scale of the influx of Nazi collaborators only became public knowledge in the 1980s. A comprehensive study carried out by Alti Rodal on behalf of the federal government-appointed Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada uncovered records proving that US intelligence agents in Europe had funneled Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe through the Canadian immigration system using false papers. Rodal revealed that large numbers of identically typed applications were received by Canada’s immigration department from one address in West Germany. On closer inspection, this address turned out to be a US military base.
The Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney established the Deschênes Commission in 1985, in response to a mounting public outcry over exposures of Nazis and Nazi accomplices who had found a safe haven in Canada and tasked the inquiry with identifying Nazi war criminals residing in Canada.
Around the same time, the Simon Wiesenthal Center estimated that upwards of 2,000 Nazis and Nazi collaborators emigrated to Canada in the years after the war. A quarter-century later, in 2011, it would give Canada an “F minus” in its annual report ranking countries on their efforts to prosecute war criminals. This placed Canada on a par with Ukraine and the former Baltic republics, i.e. countries where the right-wing, nationalist regimes that have emerged since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union openly venerate the ultranationalists who aligned with the Nazis when they invaded the USSR.
War criminals in Canada
A significant number of those who made their way to Canada were members of the Nazi SS’s Galicia Division, which was made up of Ukrainian nationalist volunteers who fought on the side of the Wehrmacht against the Red Army during the Nazis’ war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. This preplanned onslaught—launched in June 1941 when a 3 million-strong force comprised of German troops, their Axis allies and fascist volunteers invaded the Soviet Union—led to the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens and the Holocaust.
In waging war, suppressing the population, and pursuing the annihilation of the Jews, across Eastern Europe and above all in the USSR, Hitler’s Wehrmacht and SS shock troops relied on the loyal collaboration of ultraright-wing, anti-Semitic forces. Among the Ukrainian nationalists, in both occupied Poland and the USSR, the Nazis found eager collaborators. The Galicia Division was formed in 1943 out of a faction of the Stepan Bandera-led Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists Bandera (OUN-B) and fought with the Nazis against the Red Army throughout 1944.
Massacres perpetrated by the division against Polish and Jewish civilians have been well documented, including at Huta Pieniacka, Podkamien, and Palikrowy. At Podkamien, 100 Polish civilians were massacred in a hilltop monastery, and at least a further 500 in surrounding villages as the Red Army approached the German-occupied area in March 1944.
Members of the Galicia Division were initially prohibited from entering Canada due to their membership in the SS. But in 1950, Britain made an appeal to the Commonwealth for volunteers to accept a total of 9,000 division members who were at that time residing in the UK after being disarmed by British troops at the war’s end.
When Canada’s External Affairs Department, prompted by complaints from the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), raised concerns about the division’s ties to the Nazis and role in Nazi atrocities, the British government insisted that it had carried out background checks. “While in Italy these men were screened by Soviet and British missions and neither then nor subsequently has any evidence been brought to light which would suggest that any of them fought against the Western Allies or engaged in crimes against humanity,” claimed the British Foreign Office. “Their behaviour since they came to this country,” added London, “has been good and they have never indicated in any way that they are infected with any trace of Nazi ideology.”
With this letter serving as political cover, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his cabinet declared that Galicia Division members would be permitted to immigrate to Canada unless it could be proved that they had personally committed atrocities against civilian populations based on “race, religion or national origins.” Simply having been a Galicia Division member would not be considered a valid reason to prevent entry, even though after the war all Waffen-SS members had been deemed complicit in war crimes.
The immigration of Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals continued for more than a decade after the war and was a significant factor in Canada’s emergence during the Cold War as a political-ideological centre of far-right Ukrainian nationalism.
Speaking to a CBS “60 Minutes” programme in 1997, Canadian historian Irving Abella, who is currently Professor for Canadian Jewish history at York University, bluntly summed up the political climate of the time. “One way of getting into postwar Canada,” he said “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.”
Ottawa carried out this policy in close collaboration with US authorities, who similarly permitted ex-Nazis to settle in the US and recruited hundreds to act as spies against the Soviet Union and the Soviet-allied regimes in Eastern Europe. According to investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, up to 1,000 former Nazis were made use of by the CIA in Europe, within the US itself, the Middle East, and in Latin America.
The open-door policy towards Nazi collaborators stood in stark contrast to the cold shoulder given by Canada to Jews desperately fleeing persecution. Abella coauthored a well-known book, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, which was published in 1983 just prior to the establishment of the Deschênes Commission. Abella and Harold Troper detailed how Canada accepted a mere 5,000 Jewish refugees between 1936 and 1945. Most infamously, Canada was among the countries to refuse to provide asylum to the 900 Jewish refugees on the ship the MS St Louis, which sailed from Hamburg for the Americas in April 1939. Canada’s refusal to accept any of the refugees forced the St. Louis to return to Europe, where over 200 of its passengers later died in the Holocaust.
Exoneration of the Galicia Division
Due to the continued high-level protection members of the Galicia Division enjoyed from the government and other establishment circles, the Deschênes commission granted the Brotherhood of Veterans of the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army (Galicia Division) special intervener status in its hearings. This meant it was able to cross-examine testimony from witnesses, as well as make use of the standard right to submit legal documents and provide its own testimony.
The Nazi War Criminals commission also refused Soviet offers to gather testimony in the USSR, on the purported grounds that Moscow had refused to allow Canadian officials to interrogate witnesses in accordance with Canadian rules of evidence.
Outrageously, the Deschênes commission exonerated the Galicia Division of any wrongdoing in its December 1986 final report. Its most important findings in this connection read: “The Galicia Division (14 Waffengrenadierdivision der SS [gal. Nr. 1]) should not be indicted as a group,” and “Charges of war crimes against members of the Galicia Division have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this Commission.”
The commission also summarily dismissed the charge that hundreds, if not thousands, of Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals had immigrated to Canada, declaring these figures to be “grossly exaggerated.”
Another Ukrainian nationalist outfit given special representation rights before the Deschênes commission was the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), which has since renamed itself the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. In 1950, the UCC had successfully campaigned for the lifting of the ban on Galicia Division veterans entering the country.
The UCC continues to uphold the legacy of the Galicia Division. On Remembrance Day in 2010, the organisation saluted Ukrainian veterans of the Waffen SS as fighters for “freedom of their ancestral Ukrainian homeland.” The press release came from Paul Grod, the current head of the UCC. Grod has accompanied both Trudeau and his predecessor, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, on their trips to the Ukraine.
The case of Vladimir Katriuk
Nobody should believe that the Canadian ruling elite’s defence of pro-Nazi war criminals is a thing of the past.
In 2015, Vladimir Katriuk, a Ukrainian and member of the SS during World War II, died in Quebec at the age of 93. His personal fate exemplifies how the Canadian state actively connived to ensure Nazi war criminals escaped justice.
Katriuk, who came to Canada under a false name in 1951, was accused of war crimes, the most documented of which was his participation in a the Khatyn massacre, carried out in what is now Belarus, in early 1943. In the last years of Katriuk’s life, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre placed his name near the top of its list of the ten most-wanted war criminals.
Katriuk’s case first came to prominence in 1999, when a federal court ruled that he had gained Canadian citizenship on false pretenses, because he had neglected to inform Canadian immigration officials about his Nazi past. After a lengthy period of deliberation, the Conservative government decided in 2007 that it would not revoke Katriuk’s citizenship and claimed there was insufficient evidence for him to be charged with war crimes.
Katriuk, who later joined the SS, was identified by multiple sources as being a machine gunner at the Khatyn massacre, which occurred on 22 March 1943. A total of 149 villagers were either burnt alive or shot by members of Battalion 118, a volunteer auxiliary police battalion of which Katriuk was a member, with the support of a Waffen SS unit. Evidence of his participation in other lesser known crimes has also been documented, as mentioned in a 2012 article by Swedish academic Per Anders Rudling.
Even in the last weeks of his life, when a Russian extradition request was submitted for the Ukrainian-born Katriuk, a spokeswoman for the Conservative government justified Canada’s refusal to allow Katriuk’s extradition to face trial on the basis of the political situation in Russia and its alleged “aggression” against Ukraine. “While I cannot comment on any specific extradition request, to be clear, we will never accept or recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea or the illegal occupation of any sovereign Ukrainian territory,” a spokeswoman for then Justice Minister Peter McKay declared.
Nothing has changed under Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Anxious to cover up the ultraright-wing character of the forces Ottawa and Washington have allied with in their drive to harness Ukraine to western imperialism and these forces’ ties to the Ukrainian nationalist collaborators with the Nazis, Foreign Minister Freeland has denounced the revelations of her grandfather’s ties to the Nazis as Russian-orchestrated “disinformation.”
When Trudeau visited Ukraine in 2016, he was accompanied by a strong UCC delegation and members of the Army SOS group, set up to procure military equipment for the pro-Kiev volunteer militias, which are drawn overwhelmingly from far-right, fascistic groups.
Vasily Prozorov’s testimony will likely be dismissed by Western governments that support Ukraine, but there is plenty of evidence to back his claims about MH-17.
Former Ukrainian intelligence officer Vasily Prozorov’s testimony will likely be dismissed by Western governments that support Kiev, but there is plenty of evidence to back his claims.
KIEV, UKRAINE — A former top official in Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), who recently fled the country, has given explosive testimony regarding the involvement of the Ukrainian government in the 2014 downing of the MH-17 passenger plane. The incident, which killed all 283 passengers and 15 flight crew members on board, had been blamed on Russia by Ukraine’s government, the United States and much of Western media.
In addition, the former official, Vasily Prozorov, told a group of international reporters that Ukraine’s controversial Azov Battalion, known for its Neo-Nazi ideology and symbolism, ran and maintained secret prisons in contested areas of Eastern Ukraine where there is fighting between pro-government forces and pro-Russian separatists. Prozorov, who has sought asylum in Russia, also accused the United States and the United Kingdom of training an SBU division that returned to Ukraine to conduct terrorist attacks in the Donbass region, which has been the site of a civil war since the overthrow of Ukraine’s government in 2014 in a U.S.-backed coup.
Prozorov’s identity was kept secret until the press conference began, in breaking with standard protocol. Prozorov then introduced himself, stating that he had been employed by the SBU from 1999 to 2018, but — after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 — had contacted Russian intelligence and began working undercover in the central office of the SBU. He does not describe himself as a defector, as he stated that his allegiance remains with the Ukrainian people while the allegiance of those who came to power with U.S. assistance in 2014 has long been suspect.
Prozorov then noted that, soon after the coup and before the civil war between Western and Eastern Ukraine had begun, the SBU — at Kiev’s behest — had begun to plan combat operations in the East and that the government had requested that plans be made that would result in mass civilian deaths among ethnic Russian populations, who were to be labeled as “accomplices to terrorists.”
The former SBU officer also detailed how the post-coup SBU had established secret prisons where prominent dissidents of the U.S.-backed government were interrogated, tortured and even killed. One of those prisons, located at an airstrip in Mariupol, was nicknamed “the Library” and Prozorov compared it to a “concentration camp” and showed images of severely beaten detainees he claimed had been imprisoned at the site. The former SBU officer also stated that SBU’s decisions, in regards to the black-site prisons and other areas, were often “led” by foreign advisers from the United States and the United Kingdom. The SBU’s use of torture in Ukraine’s civil war has been well-documented even though the SBU blocked UN efforts to probe its extent.
In addition, Prozorov asserted that the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, a militia that was incorporated into Ukraine’s Interior Ministry as a component of the country’s National Guard, also operates its own prisons in the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) zones in Eastern Ukraine. The Azov Battalion receives funding from the government of Ukraine as well as from the U.S. government and has also received weapons from the Israeli government.
Insights into the MH-17 downing
Prozorov’s most shocking statements were related to the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, or MH-17, which was promptly blamed on Russia by the post-coup Ukrainian government, the United States and much of the Western world. Prozorov stated, noting first that it was his personal opinion based on his experiences, that the Ukrainian government had been an “accomplice to the Malaysian MH-17 flight disaster.”
He continued, stating:
The amazingly prompt reaction of the Ukrainian leadership was the first thing that made me feel suspicious. My unequivocal opinion was President Pyotr Poroshenko and his press-service had prior knowledge of the affair. Secondly, hostilities had been underway for several months by then, but the airspace over the area was not closed.”
He also noted that his efforts to learn more about the circumstances of the disaster within the SBU from a senior officer were met with the following reply: “Don’t poke your nose into this business, if you don’t wish to have problems.” However, Prozorov noted that “some information has leaked out in the end, though.”
He then concluded:
On the basis of my own analysis I can speculate who was an accomplice in the crime and who was involved in concealing evidence. In my opinion, there were two men involved – the current deputy chief of the Ukrainian presidential staff Valery Kondratyuk and chief of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence directorate, Vasyl Burba.”
Valery Kondratyuk, left and Vasily Burba, right
Prozorov’s full conference can be watched here (in Russian). A summary with English subtitles can be watched here.
Claims well-supported by independent reporting
Though some may be quick to dismiss Prozorov’s testimony as “Russian propaganda,” many of his claims fit with independent reporting on the Ukrainian conflict. For instance, in regard to Prozorov’s claim of “black site” prisons, the SBU denied the UN access in 2016 to many detention centers in Mariupol — where Prozorov says “the Library” prison is located — and Kramatorsk. The SBU claimed that it blocked the UN inspectors access in order to protect “government secrets.” The UN had first tried to access the areas after several human-rights groups had found credible evidence of torture taking place at facilities in the area.
Prozorov’s claims that the post-coup SBU had made plans to murder ethnic Russians in the Donbass are also supported by publicly available evidence. For instance, when the civil war began, the Kiev-based government stated its intention to specifically target civilians in order “to clean the cities.” In 2016, then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who has been called “Washington’s man in Ukraine,” called pro-Russian civilians in the region “subhumans.” In an interview aired by the U.S.-funded, pro-government Ukrainian news channel Hromadske TV, a Ukrainian journalist aligned with the government asserted that the contested region was home to 1.5 million people “who are superfluous” and “must be exterminated.” With such sentiments having been openly stated by prominent politicians and journalists aligned with the current government in Kiev, Prozorov’s assertions seem hardly unreasonable.
US Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Robert Ashley, right, meets with Vasyl Burba, Chief of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine. Photo | Defence Intelligence of Ukraine
In regard to Ukraine’s alleged role in the downing of MH-17, it is worth noting that past reports by late American investigative journalist Robert Parry described in detail how the “independent” MH-17 investigation was almost completely dependent on information from Ukraine’s SBU in piecing together the event. According to Parry:
[This control by the SBU, combined with its past obstruction of the UN torture probe],suggests that the SBU also would steer the JIT away from any evidence that might implicate a unit of the Ukrainian military in the shoot-down, a situation that would be regarded as a state secret which could severely undermine international support for the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev. Among the SBU’s official duties is the protection of Ukrainian government secrets.”
In addition, one of Parry’s sources maintained that the CIA had, like Prozorov, found evidence that Ukraine’s government had indeed been “an accomplice” to the MH-17 incident:
A source who was briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that the CIA’s conclusion pointed toward a rogue Ukrainian operation involving a hard-line oligarch with the possible motive of shooting down Russian President Vladimir Putin’s official plane returning from South America that day, with similar markings as MH-17. The source said a Ukrainian warplane ascertained that the plane was not Putin’s but the attack went ahead anyway, with the assumption that the tragedy would be blamed on the pro-Russian rebels or on Russia directly.”
Another reason Prozorov’s testimony should not be outright dismissed as propaganda is the fact that he pushed back on previous Russian media reports involving U.S. infiltration of the SBU. When asked by a reporter if he could confirm reports that foreign military officials, including Americans, occupied their own floor at SBU headquarters, Prozorov adamantly denied those claims, stating that after 2005 there were CIA officials present in SBU headquarters but that the practice had been discontinued. He stated that U.S. intelligence officials regularly visited SBU headquarters after the 2014 coup but were not based in the building.
Thus, while Prozorov’s testimony will likely be dismissed by mainstream Western media outlets and Western governments that support Kiev, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that many of his claims — including his most shocking — deserve careful consideration, not outright dismissal. Indeed, were Prozorov a defector from a country currently at odds with the U.S. — be it Russia, Venezuela or Iran — it is highly likely that mainstream media would repeat and his promote his claims regardless of their veracity. However, because he has sought asylum in Russia, his recent statements are unlikely to gain international traction merely because of where he is now located, in spite of the evidence supporting many of those statements.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism
298 Passengers and crew were murdered by Ukraine in order to create a propaganda attack on Russia.The filth that comprise the Western media and governments hid the truth for the sake of Washington’s anti-Russian propaganda.
The security official says that his suspicions were aroused by “the amazingly prompt reaction of the Ukrainian leadership,” which “indicated prior knowledge of the affair.”Perhaps readers will remember that at the time I pointed out that the event was clearly staged as the same propagandistic accusation against Russia appeared everywhere instantly long before any investigation.Indeed, the investigation was stillborn as it could not be concocted to indicate Russia’s guilt.
Don’t be surprised. Western governments and media only lie.Never do they tell the truth.Remember:Russiagate.Weapons of mass destruction.Iranian nukes.Assad’s use of chemical weapons.Gulf of Tonkin.9/11. Russian invasion of Ukraine.JFK assassination. MLK assassination.Bobby Kennedy assassination.Skripal poisoning. Maduro starving his own people.An endless list of lies.The entirety of the West is nothing but a lie factory.
MOSCOW – Top ranking SBU (Ukrainian Security Service) agent in charge of the ATO operation through 2014 when the operation commenced, Vasily Prozorov, has just made some stunning statements to international media, and has recently escaped to Russia. Moreover, without exaggeration, this is a major blow to the foreign policy positions of Kiev. It is also a very weighty argument for those forces in Europe who want to quickly move the peace process in Ukraine from its present stalemate.
In speaking to journalists, Prozorov’s presentation can be summarized with these points:
– Kiev from the very beginning did not plan to resolve the conflict in the south-east of Ukraine by peaceful means
– Kiev initially planned a large number of victims among the population of Donbass, then they wanted to declare them accomplices of terrorists
– In the area of the ATO there are Ukrainian secret prisons (as he called them concentration camps)
– The neo nazi Azov unit also had its secret prisons. This is not Russian propaganda, people were actually killed there.
– Specialists from the USA and the UK prepared a division of the SBU (Department No. 5) who went to train in the US and abroad to organize terrorist attacks and sabotage in Donbass
– The Ukrainian side was involved in the Boeing crash of the MH17 flight
The Ukrainian side was involved in the MH17 flight disaster over Donbass, a former officer of the Ukrainian security service SBU, Vasily Prozorov, told a news conference on Monday.
“It is my personal opinion and it relies on certain information. The Ukrainian side is an accomplice to the Malaysian MH17 flight disaster,” he said.
Given that people who espouse neo-Nazi ideology are attracted to the military, it is disappointing to learn what a poor job the generals do to uncover and expel them. Or perhaps the inaction reflects a deeper problem.
A recent stream of stories about right-wing extremists in the Canadian military prompted the leadership to scramble to get ahead of the story. But, the Chief of the Defence Staff’s effort to simply blame low-ranking individual members was neither convincing, nor satisfying.
Ricochet reported that three soldiers in Alberta operated an online white supremacist military surplus store that glorifies white ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
VICE concluded that Nova Scotia reservist Brandon Cameron was a prominent member of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division.
The three founders of Québec anti-Islam/immigrant “alt right” group La Meute are ex-military. Radio-Canada found that 75 members of La Meute’s private Facebook group were Canadian Forces members.
On Canada Day 2017 five CF members disrupted an indigenous rally in front of a statue of violent colonialist Edward Cornwallis in Halifax. The soldiers were members of the Proud Boys, which described itself as “a fraternal organization of Western Chauvinists who will no longer apologize for creating the modern world.”
The CF’s response to these embarrassing stories is to claim these soldiers don’t reflect the institution. In a Toronto Star article titled “Right-wing extremism not welcome in Canadian Armed Forces — but ‘clearly, it’s in here,’ says top soldier”, John Vance claimed racist individuals slip through “unknown to the chain of command.”But, is that answer convincing or does the CF hierarchy share blame for far rightists in the force?
Over the past four years over 1,000 Canadians troops (a rotation of 200 every six months) has deployed to the Ukraineto train a force that includes the best-organized neo-Nazis in the world. Far right militia members are part of the force fighting Russian-aligned groups in eastern Ukraine. Five months ago Canada’s military attaché in Kiev, Colonel Brian Irwin, met privately with officersfrom the Azov battalion, who use the Nazi “Wolfsangel” symbol and praise officials who helped slaughter Jews during World War II.According to Azov, the Canadian military officials concluded the June briefing by expressing “their hopes for further fruitful cooperation.”
Sympathy for the far right in Ukraine has been displayed by the CF on other occasions. In February 2016, for instance, “nearly 200 officer cadets and professors of Canada’s Royal Military College” attended a screening of Ukrainians/Les Ukrainiens: God’s Volunteer Battalion, which praised far right militias fighting in that country.
More generally, Canadians have fundraised for and joined rightist militias fighting in the Ukraine.For their part, top politicians have spoken alongside and marched with members of Ukraine’s Right Sector, which said it was “defending the values of white, Christian Europe against the loss of the nation and deregionalisation.”
(In a story titled “US-Funded Neo-Nazis in Ukraine Mentor US White Supremacists” Max Blumenthal recently described how Washington’s support for the far right in the Ukraine has blown back. He reported, “an unsealed FBI indictment of four American white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) declared that the defendants had trained with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia officially incorporated into the country’s national guard.”)
In addition to supporting fascistic elements in Eastern Europe, the CF’s authoritarian, patriarchal and racist structure lends itself to rightist politics.
Ranging from Private Basic/Ordinary Seaman to General/Admiral,there are nineteen ranks in the CF. In deference to authority, lower must salute and obey orders from higher ranks. In addition to the hierarchy, the CF has been highly patriarchal. Until 1989 women were excluded from combat roles and the submarine service was only opened to women in 2000. As has been discussed elsewhere, extreme patriarchy represents a sort of gateway ideology to the far right.
The CF has also been a hot bed of white supremacy.For decades institutional racism was explicit with “coloured applicants”excluded from enlisting in several positions until the 1950s. Despite making up 20 percent of the Canadian population, visible minorities represent 8.2percent of the CF (it may be slightly higher since some choose not to self-identify). In 2016 three former CF members sued over systemic racism. Their suit claimed that“derogatory slurs, racial harassment and violent threats are tolerated or ignored …. Victims of racism within the Canadian Forces are forced into isolation, subjected to further trauma and, in many cases, catapulted toward early release.”
Chief of the Defence Staff John Vance’s effort to blame right-wing extremism on a few bad apples won’t do. The CF needs to look at how its decisions and culture stimulates right-wing extremism.
It has been five years to the day since Ukraine’s ‘Euromaidan’ protest movement began, with anti-government protesters demanding an end to corruption and a closer relationship with the European Union. But what became of the dream?
It has been five years to the day since Ukraine’s ‘Euromaidan’ protest movement began, with anti-government protesters demanding an end to corruption and a closer relationship with the European Union. But what became of the dream?
On the evening of November 21, 2013, pro-West protesters began flocking to Kiev’s Maidan Square, carrying banners and waving EU flags. Hours earlier, then-president Viktor Yanukovych had suspended preparations to sign a European Association Agreement, which would have been a potential step on the road to joining the EU – and a move which Russia had warned would be “trade suicide” for the post-Soviet state. The West, on the other hand, was determined to wrangle Ukraine out of Russia’s “orbit” and lure it into its own.
Ukraine was facing an economic crossroads. The country was being pulled in two directions, asked to choose between closer alignment with the EU or Russia. When Yanukovych chose Russia by refusing to sign the Association Agreement, it sparked outrage within the EU and a protest movement which would quickly be hijacked and used to engineer a Western-backed coup – a shortcut to bringing a pro-West government to power.
Such interference, manipulation and exploitation of Ukraine’s internal political and societal divisions was not without consequences. More than 10,000 died during an insurgency in the eastern regions which began when the ethnic Russian population began to fear it would be swallowed into an anti-Russia nationalist state backed by Western powers. But the West ignored dangerous signs of growing nationalism – and outright Nazi-style fascism – in Ukraine, bargaining that anything was better than Russia ‘winning’ in a game of geopolitical chess.
Five years on, what has become of the protesters’ dreams to rid Ukraine of corruption and build an equal, transparent and functional democracy? The sad answer is that Ukraine’s revolution was a disaster which left the country teetering on the edge of becoming a failed state.
An anti-corruption revolution?
Corruption is still rampant in Ukraine. A recent assessment by the International Monetary Fund suggested that corruption wipes about two percent off the country’s GDP growth per year.
The IMF and World Bank also scolded the Ukrainian government for the “limited results” that have been seen in fighting corruption, with no high-level officials convicted – something which is said to be keeping investors out of the country.
World Bank Country Director for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine Satu Kahkonen said that “governance issues” were forcing investors to steer clear. “It’s basically a high level of corruption and the rule of man instead of the rule of law” that have prevailed in Ukraine, she said. “We’re getting a lot of inquiries from various investors, they come to talk to us, and we see the opportunities in Ukraine, but time after time we hear the concerns about the governance.”
Higher living standards?
Ukraine is also emerging as Europe’s poorest country, with a GDP per capita of just €2,960 – well below Estonia’s €22,420 and Slovenia’s €26,590 GDP per capita.
In fact, according to a recent Credit Suisse report, Ukrainians rank among the world’s poorest people, coming a dismal 123rd out of 140 countries, with the net wealth of the country’s citizens lagging behind Bangladesh and Cameroon. Another recent study by the United Nations Development Program found that, despite continuing economic growth, 60 percent of Ukrainians live below the poverty line.
Less income inequality?
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s richest 100 citizens have seen their wealth increase significantly in the years after the Euromaidan protests. A recent report from the Novoe Vremya magazine showed that the wealth of the country’s richest people is growing 12 times faster than Ukraine’s total GDP. Pro-West President Petro Poroshenko is the country’s sixth richest man, increasing his wealth by 10 percent to about $1.1 billion, all while average Ukrainians see little or no improvement in their own living standards or net wealth.
Political reforms?
While some recent reforms in education, pensions and healthcare were welcomed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in its latest country report, there has still been a lack of “meaningful progress” in the reform of governance and an “inefficient court system continues to obstruct the administration of justice.”
European values?
Scant attention has also been paid by the Ukrainian government – and Western powers and media – to the increasingly worrying growth of neo-Nazi sentiment in Ukraine. When, in October 2017, Ukraine witnessed its biggest neo-Nazi march in years, Western media all but ignored it. In fact, in deeds and words, Ukraine’s government has almost encouraged this kind of sentiment, by praising as an “inspiration” the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fighters who the Nazi marchers were commemorating. In recent months, mainstream media have done more to acknowledge this creeping fascism in Ukraine, but the admission comes far too late.
On the world stage, too, Ukraine’s pro-West President Petro Poroshenko has faded into near irrelevance, barely acknowledged by US President Donald Trump at recent Armistice Day commemorations in Paris, as geopolitics returned to business-as-usual with Kiev fading from the headlines.
“The US and its minions among European allies have destroyed any foundations of international order from their unabated wars and campaigns of mass murder. Their corporate-capitalist plunder has eviscerated the planet.”
Former US President Barack Obama was in South Africa last week for the centennial anniversary marking the birth of the late Nelson Mandela. Obama delivered a speech warning about encroaching authoritarianism among nations and the “rise of strongman politics”.
Coming on the heels of the summit in Helsinki between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, media reports assumed that Obama was taking a swipe at these two leaders for supposed growing authoritarianism.
Obama’s casting of the “strongman” as a foreboding enemy to democracy is a variant of the supposed threat of “populism” that Western political establishments also seem concerned about.
Trump, Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, Italy’s Salvini, Victor Orban in Hungary and Sebastian Kurz in Austria, among many others, are all lumped together as “strongman politics”, “populists” or “authoritarians”.
Here we are not trying to defend the above-mentioned political leaders or to make out that they are all virtuous democrats.
The point rather is to debunk the false narrative that there is some kind of dichotomy in modern politics between those who, on one hand, are supposedly virtuous, liberal, democratic, multilateralists, and on the other hand, the supposedly sinister “strongman”, “authoritarian”, or “populist”.
In Obama’s pompous depiction of world political trends, people like him are supposedly the epitome of a civilized, democratic legacy that is now under threat from Neo-fascists who are darkly rising to destroy an otherwise happy world order. That world order, it is presumed, was up to now guided by the magnificence of American political leadership. In short, the “Pax Americana” that prevailed for nearly seven decades following the Second World War.
Following the Helsinki summit, the Western media went full-tilt in hysterics and hyperbole. Trump was assailed for “embracing a dictator” while repudiating Western democratic allies.
In a Washington Post article, the headline screamed: “Is Trump at war with the West?” It was accompanied by a photograph of Trump and Putin, bearing the caption: “The New Front”.
Meanwhile, a New York Times piece editorialized: “His [Trump’s] embrace of Putin is a victory dance on the Euro-American tomb.”
Another NY Times op-ed writer declared: “Trump and Putin vs. America”.
The Western establishment political and media commentary promulgates the notion that the US-led Western order is breaking down because of “populist”, “strongman” Trump. In this alleged assault on the pillars of democracy and rule of law, Trump is being aided and abetted by supposedly nasty, like-minded authoritarians like Russian leader Vladimir Putin, or other nationalistic European politicians.
The premise of this establishment narrative is that all was seemingly salubrious and convivial in the US-led order until the arrival of various renegade-type politicians, like Trump and Putin.
That premise is an absolute conceit and deception. If we look at Obama’s presidency alone, one can see how the supposed guardians of democracy and international order were the very ones who have actually done the most to decimate that order.
Obama, you will recall, was the US president who notched up seven simultaneous overseas wars conducted by American military, arguably without a shred of international legal mandate. Under international law, Obama and other senior officials in his administration should face prosecution for war crimes. He also greatly expanded the executive use of assassination with aerial drones, reckoned to have killed thousands of innocent civilians in several countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia, merely on the suspicion of being terrorists.
It was Obama who ramped up the covert war policy of his predecessor GW Bush in Syria, arming and directing terrorist proxies in a failed bid to overthrow the elected government of President Assad. That US-backed covert war in Syria, along with Obama’s overt regime-change war in Libya, largely contributed to the refugee crisis that has destabilized the politics of the European Union.
So here we have the supremely bitter irony. Obama now lectures audiences with his pseudo-gravitas about the specter of strongman politics and xenophobic populism, when in fact it was politicians like Obama who created much of the refugee problems that have given rise to anti-immigrant politics in Europe.
It really is a conceited delusion among US and European establishment politicians, pundits and media that somehow a once virtuous, law-abiding US-led Western order is being eroded by rabble rousers like Trump, Salvini, Orban and so on, all being orchestrated by a “strongman dictator” in the Kremlin.
For the record, Putin, the supposed “strongman” in the Kremlin, warned more than a decade ago in a seminal Munich speech that the international order was being eroded by rampant American unilateralism and disregard for law in its pursuit of illegal wars for US hegemony. That was at the height of US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which killed more than one million civilians and forced millions more into infernal destitution.
In truth, the Pax Americana that is presumed to have prevailed over the past 70 years was never about order, peace or justice in the world. The notion that the US guided the world with its “moral authority” and maintained stability throughout is one of the most fatuous delusions of modern history.
From the atomic holocaust in Japan and during subsequent decades, the US has waged wars non-stop in almost every year, whether from covert operations in Latin America and Africa, to full-on genocidal wars in Indochina. The past quarter-century has seen an acceleration and expansion of these US wars, sometimes with the assistance of its military axis in NATO, largely because Washington viewed that its license to kill for mass murder was unchecked after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This is the real dynamic underlying why the Western order is now seen to be collapsing. The US and its minions among European allies have destroyed any foundations of international order from their unabated wars and campaigns of mass murder. Their corporate-capitalist plunder has eviscerated the planet.
The chaos from these wars, including economic impacts of gargantuan costs to Western populations, has created social conditions which engender politics of protest, anti-establishment, anti-austerity, anti-war, anti-immigration, and so on.
If the supposed order is shaking for the establishment political class and its flunkies like Barack Obama it is because of their own criminal depredations – depredations which have been going on for decades under the guise of Pax Americana.
The writers at Monthly Review had it so presciently right years ago, when they analyzed the actual Western order as “Pox Americana” – a diseased affliction.
This is the historical context which accounts for why US and European establishments are decrying “strongmen” and “populists”. They are essentially scapegoating others for the historic failure of institutionalized Western criminality led primarily by “democratic” regimes in Washington.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stands out as the one international leader who put a brake on the US-led criminal assault on global peace. Putin’s stand first emerged with his landmark speech in Munich in 2007, and then came into clear expression when he helped put an end to the US-led covert criminal war on Syria.
That is why Putin is so vilified and demonized by the Western establishment. The poachers have been stopped from raiding the globe, and in their exasperation, they have whipped up all sorts of disparaging epithets like “strongman” and “authoritarian”.
No one has practiced more fascist-style criminality and brutality towards law and peace than the polite-sounding pseudo-democrats who have been in office for the past 70 years in the US and Europe.
The Western political establishment and its elite-driven capitalism is rotten to the core. Always has been. Its own erosion and oozing corruption is the source of the putrid smell that it now wishes to waft away by scapegoating others.
(MEMO) — The arming of neo-Nazi groups by Israel has come under the spotlight once again. This time it’s weapons that are ending up in the hands of a right-wing Ukrainian militia that openly espouses neo-Nazi ideology.
Concerns were raised by a group of more than 40 human rights activists who filed a petition with Israel’s High Court of Justice demanding the cessation of the arms deal. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the petitioners have argued that these weapons serve forces that openly espouse a neo-Nazi ideology and cite evidence that the right-wing Azov militia, whose members are part of Ukraine’s armed forces, and are supported by the country’s ministry of internal affairs, is using these weapons.
While details of the export licenses for armaments are not disclosed to the public, the appearance of Israeli weapons in the hands of avowed neo-Nazis, the activists say, should be a consideration used in opposing the granting of such a license.
The Haaretz pointed out that this was not the first time in which the defence establishment has armed forces that embrace a national socialist ideology, citing its arming of anti-Semitic neo-Nazi groups on a number of occasions.
Previously Israel had armed anti-Semitic regimes, such as the generals’ regime in Argentina, which murdered thousands of Jews in camps while its soldiers stood in watchtowers guarding the abducted prisoners with their Uzi submachine guns, the Haaretz said. Israel has also armed Nazis, such as the war criminal Klaus Barbie in Bolivia.
In addition to arming neo-Nazi groups, Israel is reported to have sold arms to regimes accused of committing genocide. Last year a similar petition addressed to the Israeli High Court called for the suspension of arms trade with Myanmar. Eitay Mack, the petitioners’ lawyer noted that the EU and the USA had imposed an embargo on Myanmar and said that Israel was the only Western state supplying weapons to the military junta. The treatment of Rohingya Muslims was denounced by the UN as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
A similar petition to the High Court of Justice called for the cessation of arms sale to South Sudanwhere Israeli weapons were being used in a conflict where nearly 300,000 lives were said to have been lost and two million people displaced.
Israeli arms also ended up in the hands of groups that carried out the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Over a million were killed in the genocidal mass slaughter of Tutsi.
It’s not clear if the petition will be successful. On previous occasions campaigners hit a brick wall after the Israeli government issued a gag order against the country’s High Court.
Last June, the Trump administration rescinded funds previously earmarked to counter right-wing extremism and white supremacist violence. Just two months later, 19 people were injured and protester Heather Heyer was killed by a neo-Nazi demonstrator in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. Though Charlottesville has become the most cited example of contemporary right-wing terror, it hardly offers a full picture of the threat posed by those Trump described as “very fine people.”
A new study from the Southern Poverty Law Center finds there have been more than “100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called ‘alt-right’—a movement that continues to access the mainstream and reach young recruits.” The SPLC report tracks the rise in alt-right related violence beginning in 2014, when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured 14 others in Isla Vista, California. Like many alt-right adherents, Rodger’s radicalization began in men’s rights forums, which helped stoke his racism, misogyny and self-loathing. The study identifies 13 killers who have collectively killed 43 people and injured 67 others. “While some certainly displayed signs of mental illness,” the media tendency to depict these violent right-wing extremists as troubled loners is conveniently misguided. The SPLC notes that the most conspicuous unifying background trait among these individuals is a “history of consuming and/or participating in the type of far-right ecosystem that defines the alt-right.”
A healthy number of those identified in the report are outspoken fans of Donald Trump, the report notes. Nicholas Giampa, who in December murdered his ex-girlfriend’s parents before killing himself, was an “enthusiastic supporter of then-candidate Donald Trump [who] often used racist slurs to attack Trump’s critics.” Charlottesville killer James Alex Fields’ social media pages were reportedly filled with Trump and Pepe memes. A Daily Beast report found Sean Urbanski, the alleged killer of U.S. Army Lieutenant Richard Collins III, “apparently liked memes about Donald Trump, white supremacy, and the alt-right.” Alexandre Bissonnette, the Quebec mosque murderer and the lone Canadian in the group, was reportedly an avid supporter of both Trump and Marine Le Pen. In July 2017, former Breitbart intern Lane Davis stabbed his father to death; a little over a year before, he wrote a rap ode to Trump he posted on YouTube. (Choice lyrics: “Finger on the trigger/Trump might use a nuke, boy/But he’d rather use a tariff/And that’s superb.”)
The alt-right’s visibility has grown alongside Trump’s political career, and the two appear inextricably linked. Nine of the attacks catalogued by the SPLC occurred in the shadow of the Trump presidency, leading the organization to cite 2017 as the most violent year of the alt-right’s existence thus far. Overall, the mean age of far-right killers is 26, with the youngest just 17. Members of the alt-right have been open about their efforts to appeal to young, impressionable minds. An Anti-Defamation League report released late last month noted that there has been a drastic increase in the amount of “white supremacist propaganda—flyers, stickers, banners, and posters—appearing on college and university campuses.” Racism and misogyny have also been allowed to grow unchecked online in spaces such as 4chan and Reddit, and more recently, “alt-tech” sites such as Gab and WASP.love (a racist dating site).
Back in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security published a report on right-wing extremism that warned of increasing violence from militias, hate groups and other right-wing terrorists. Following pushback from GOP lawmakers who leaked the report, as well as their conservative reporters, the document was officially retracted by DHS and “the Extremism and Radicalization Branch was quietly dismantled,” according to the New York Times. Yet multiple recent studies have shown that white nationalists now pose a far greater terrorist threat to the U.S. than ISIL. The Trump administration’s sympathy for the alt-right and other white supremacists and its refusal to counter their terror, means these fanatics will likely only grow more dangerous. Daryl Johnson, the counterintelligence analyst pushed out of the DHS for his prescient report, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post just after the Charlottesville tragedy, again attempting to offer a warning.
“Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, militia extremists, and other radical right-wing zealots march side-by-side at pro-Trump rallies across the country,” Johnson wrote. “Trump’s endorsement of the border wall, the travel ban, mass deportations of illegal immigrants—these ideas were touted on white supremacist message boards merely 10 years ago. Now they’re being put forth as official U.S. policy…Extremists no longer hide anymore. They number in the hundreds of thousands and are extremely well-armed. The political apparatus and the news media appears confused in their reporting of the scope of the domestic terrorist threat — some ignoring it completely. When 9/11 happened, the government made an effort to connect the dots beforehand, but failed because of a lack of communication among agencies. In this case, the government isn’t even trying—and worse, it appears to be enabling the threat to flourish.”
Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
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