Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
www.thenation.com
Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant.

Here's how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.

Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.

These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.

Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe

If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn't make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.

If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.

We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Ukraine couldn't possibly be allowed to join both - just look at the customs nightmare going on with Northern Ireland as the UK actively tries to be in two economic customs regimes at the same time.

      There are many countries caught between two powers that manage ok (see Taiwan and South Korea as examples) -- Northern Ireland is different because it's not its own country and was brought along with the rest of the UK out of the EU with zero preparation despite one of its main trading partners being Ireland, which still is in the EU.

      Russia didn't want its biggest trading partner integrating with the EU, which it opposes because it's capitalists are "removed atheists" or whatever.

      Russia says reactionary things about western Europe, but you are just kind of asserting that it refused to let Ukraine be involved with trade relations.

      It's not like Russia is China, Cuba, or Vietnam in being controlled by Communist Parties and having some level of socialist policy. Western Capitalists expected to subordinate all the baby Russian capitalists of the 90s by now.

      This is true, but it seems to me that the west pushed too hard on this from a strategic standpoint by refusing to let Russia join NATO back when it tried. I'm glad that they made this mistake -- it's better for multipolarity -- but for them it was surely a mistake.

      China is playing the game quite well, so I don't believe it was because they weren't allowed to win.

      China's situation can hardly be compared, or else must be compared from a much earlier state. While there are criticisms to be made of Deng's policies, he did not allow for the wholesale gutting of domestic industries the way that most of Eastern Europe did. He allowed foreign capitalists to take ownership but kept the manufacturing power where it was, allowing it to be used for development of the country rather than selling it off. It should be unsurprising that traitors like Yeltsin had no interest in preserving long-term national sovereignty in this way.

      Perhaps China, too, will one day be hijacked by compradores and turned back into a backwater like the former USSR states and Yugoslavia were, but that's not how things are now.