The claim that last month’s democratic revolution in Ukraine
was actually driven by ultra-right extremists, fascists, or even
“neo-Nazis” has been a staple of Kremlin propaganda. It is also echoed
by Western pundits who think that Vladimir Putin is getting a bum rap and the United States is backing the bad guys in this conflict. It is true that far-right nationalists are a troubling, though by no means dominant, presence on Ukraine’s
political scene and a potential problem for the new leadership’s quest
for European integration. But the cries of “fascism” from Moscow and its
apologists are breathtakingly hypocritical, considering the Putin
regime’s entanglement with far-right, ultranationalist and, yes, fascist
elements at home and abroad.
It’s hard to gauge the actual extent of extremist involvement in the
Maidan protests, which began in late November in response to
Yanukovych’s rejection of a European Union trade deal. At the start of
February, Dmitry Likhachev, a Russian Jewish journalist and board member of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, estimated
that “radical nationalists” made up about one percent of the
protesters. On one occasion in the early days of the “Euromaidan,” a
notorious hatemonger, poet Diana Kamlyuk, took advantage of an open
microphone night to make overtly racist and anti-Semitic remarks; but
Likhachev stressed that this was an isolated, widely condemned incident,
and that the rallies featured prominent Jewish speakers as well as
Jewish religious and cultural events.
As tensions between protesters and riot police escalated, the
radicals took on a larger role—particularly Right Sector, a paramilitary
group some view as bordering on neo-Nazism because of its admiration
for World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist, onetime Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. (While Bandera’s record on anti-Semitism is a matter of some dispute,
his followers unquestionably committed atrocities toward Poles,
Russians, Jews, and others; by any objective reckoning, he was certainly
more terrorist than freedom fighter.) Right Sector has made some effort
to improve its image: its leader, Dmitro Yarosh, has met with the Israeli ambassador in Kiev to assure him that the group strongly opposes anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Yarosh and other militants have also praised Jewish fighters on the Maidan. Still, concerns about their influence justifiably remain.
Another alarming factor is the nationalist party Svoboda (“Freedom”), whose head, 45-year-old Oleg Tyahnibok, has a history of anti-Semitic and racist comments—though he has tried to reinvent
himself as a moderate. Svoboda has about 8 percent of the seats in
Ukraine’s parliament; thanks to the deal brokered by Germany and France before Yanukovych’s resignation, it also holds four of the twenty posts in the interim government,
including that of Minister of Defense. The party’s attempts to shed its
thuggish reputation have not been entirely successful; on March 18,
three Svoboda parliament members threatened and assaulted
the chief of Ukraine’s TV Channel 1, angered by what they regarded as
the station’s pro-Russian slant, and forced him to write a statement of
resignation. The incident, which caused near-universal outrage, is now
being investigated.
The good news, as historian Timothy Snyder points out
in The New Republic, is that current polls show Svoboda getting 2 or 3
percent of the vote in May’s presidential election. And some reports on
the right-wing menace in Ukraine clearly overstate the party’s impact.
Thus, a March 13 column in the Los Angeles Times and a March 18 Foreign Policy article
pointed to Svoboda’s successful push for a law making Ukrainian the
country’s sole official language—without mentioning that Interim
President Oleksandr Turchynov later vetoed the bill.
Meanwhile, in Russia, nationalists in the upper echelons of power
include such prominent figures as former NATO envoy and current Deputy
Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who first entered the political scene as a
leader of the nationalist bloc Rodina (Motherland). In 2005, Rodina was
banned from Moscow City Council elections for running a blatantly
racist campaign ad:
the clip showed three Azerbaijani migrants littering and insulting a
Russian woman and Rogozin stepping in to tell them off, and ended with a
slogan promising to “clean up the trash.” While Rogozin is no fan of
America, he has some peculiar American fans: in 2011, a glowing tribute
that concluded with, “Let’s hope that Rogozin rises to power in
Russia—and for the rise of a ‘Rogozin’ in America and elsewhere
throughout the West,” appeared on the “white identity” website,
Occidental Observer.
Rodina co-founder and Rogozin’s erstwhile rival for its leadership,
Sergei Glazyev, most recently served as Putin’s man in charge of
developing the Customs Union—the alliance with Kazakhstan and Belarus
that was also to include Ukraine. Like Rogozin, Glazyev has attracted
the sympathetic attention of far-right kooks in the Unites States—in
this case, Lyndon LaRouche: in 1999, LaRouche Books published an English
translation of Glazyev’s book, “Genocide: Russia and the New World Order,” with a foreword by LaRouche himself.
But Rogozin and Glazyev are mere peons compared to self-style
“traditionalist” intellectual Alexander Dugin, a writer and professor at
Moscow State University. In his New Republic article, Snyder identifies
Dugin—“an actual fascist”—as “the founder of the Eurasian movement,”
the ideology that provides the foundation for Russia’s expansion into
Ukraine.
In fact, Dugin—who, in his writings in the 1990s, was quite explicit
about the fascist and even Nazi roots of his views, asserting that true
fascism had never been tried and would be born in Russia—is more than
just the father of an idea. As documented in a 2009 article by Ukrainian scholar Andreas Umland (who has also chronicled
the rise of extremism in Ukraine), Dugin has extensive, close ties to
Russia’s political elites and the pro-Kremlin media. A number of
high-level officials and journalists have served on the leadership
council of his organization, the International Eurasian Movement.
Dugin’s admirers include Ivan Demidov, a TV producer who at one point,
in 2008, headed the ideology section of the ruling party, United Russia.
Dugin’s frightening rhetoric has been on display in recent days.
After a massive antiwar demonstration in Moscow on March 15, he wrote on
his Facebook page,
“This is no longer simply filth, ideological opponents, or dissenters,
but a parade of traitors. Today, they have risen against the Russian
people, against our State, against our history. They are defending
murderers, occupiers, Nazis, and NATO. All the participants in this
march of the fifth column have been condemned—by history, by the people,
by us.” Then, he quoted a line from a famous wartime poem: “As many
times as you see them, kill them.” (The poem, of course, referred to
German invaders.)
If those are the ideologues, it’s hardly surprising that some of
Russia’s foot soldiers in the conflict with Ukraine are of the
brownshirt type. Most notable among these is Pavel Gubarev, the
pro-Russian activist in Donetsk who briefly proclaimed
himself the city’s “People’s Governor” and raised a Russian flag over
the local government building. A few days after Gubarev gained
notoriety, it was revealed that he had once been an activist in the
militant group Russian National Unity, whose emblem bears an
unmistakable resemblance to the swastika. (Photos
of Gubarev in uniform made the rounds of the Internet):
And, shortly
before the March 16 referendum, the Kremlin’s man in Crimea, Sergei
Aksyonov, used a blatant anti-Semitic code in a televised speech,
referring to Ukraine’s new leadership as “an unnatural union of
cosmopolite oligarchs who have grown rich plundering the Soviet era’s
heritage, and neo-Nazis.” Of course, “cosmopolite” was once an infamous
Soviet euphemism for “Jew”—and it is no accident that the best-known
business oligarch allied with the new government is a Jewish man, Ihor
Kolomoysky.
Then there’s the matter of the “international observers” Moscow invited to the referendum in Crimea—a veritable freak central
of neo-Stalinists and far rightists including Belgian neo-Nazi Luc
Michel, Hungarian right-wing extremist Bela Kovacs, and Serbian-born
American paleocon and war crime apologist
Srđa (Serge) Trifković. Another observer, Polish parliament member
Mateusz Piskorski, who praised the referendum in a Russia Today
interview, is a former neo-Nazi in a very literal sense. In the late
1990s and early 2000s, Piskorski published a magazine called Odala,
which openly praised Nazi Germany, interviewed Holocaust deniers, and
proclaimed that “considering the decay and multi-racialism of the West,”
a united Slavic empire was “the only hope for the White Race.”
Piskorski now belongs to Dugin’s Eurasian Movement.
Umland’s 2009 article on Dugin and creeping Russian fascism ended with the eerie prediction: “Should Dugin and his followers succeed in further extending their reach into Russian high politics and society at large, a new Cold War will be the least that the West should expect from Russia, during the coming years.” Perhaps fascism has indeed won—and not in Ukraine.
1 comment:
Mo, you use to open your every posts with a song, a video a master piece of humor and comedy...What happened?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tMKO_9SD1Y
Did this mortal world got the best of you?? You can feel again... Happy Sabbath and Daniels' Spring, dear soul... welcome back...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tMKO_9SD1Y
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