I want you to think about a massacre. Look, I know I’m asking a lot. For normal people, it’s not fun to think about massacres. It’s not fun to contemplate what the victims endured. It’s not fun to look at our fellow humans and think, “How would my friend, my neighbor, my spouse, behave in such a hellscape? As the victim? As the perpetrator? As the bystander?” It’s not fun to think those thoughts while looking in the mirror.
It’s not fun to compare the social, political, and military features that engender massacres, and then to look at one’s own society. We post-World-War-II Americans are some of the luckiest people on earth. Other than in localized and temporary terror attacks like 9-11, we have not known war on our soil. That could change. Our society, too, has its fault lines. If social norms decayed just a bit more, if divide-and-conquer invaders trespass on our soil, how long before massacres follow? And which group, racial, ethnic, religious, economic, would do the killing, and which group would be killed? Would anyone record the carnage? Would anyone care?
No, it’s not fun to think these things.
But, listen. I just want you to give this massacre ten or fifteen minutes of thought. Why? I’m not sure why I want this so much. It’s a visceral reaction. When I read about this massacre, one of the most intense reactions I have is, “Who cares about these victims? Who says their names? Who cries for them? Who prays for them? Where is their monument? Where is their justice? When will the perpetrators, and their ideology, be named, blamed, and shamed? When will anyone learn the horrible lessons this massacre teaches, in boldface type ten feet high?”
I know my reaction is irrational. Nothing we do can “fix” this horror. Nothing we do can resurrect and redeem the dead. Nothing can ever erase the agony they and their loved ones endured. And yet I want this. I want you, the person reading this, to think about these victims, perhaps to shed a tear for them, to read at least one name, to feel anger at their killers, and to look at the world anew. To say, yes, the earth is covered with wounds, history is complicated, and tribal moralities exacerbate problems rather than offer any solution, and the only solution is a universalist morality that insists, against all the pressure not to say this, that all lives matter.
The massacre I want you to think about is little-known and understudied. You may never have heard of it. The upper estimate of the number of victims is 100,000. There are graphic images of massacre victims and even film footage of loved ones sobbing over the disinterred remains of their beloved. All this documentation is easily found in an internet search.
In spite of the high numbers and graphic documentation, the Wikipedia page for this massacre is a mere seven pages. In contrast, the Wikipedia page for the 1940 Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers by Soviets is thirty-two pages. The Wikipedia page for the death of George Floyd is forty-one pages. A six-year-old YouTube video in which a serious scholar discusses his unique work on this massacre has fewer than six hundred views. His book has exactly one review on Amazon. Big-name historians who have published best-selling books about events surrounding this massacre in space and time have spared it few to no words.
There are concrete reasons why you may not have heard of this massacre. One is that it was part of a larger cataclysm. Of course, that’s not the entire answer. The Katyn Massacre, the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, were all part of World War II, and they are all better known. There are other reasons, and those other reasons are discussed, below.
I’m talking about the NKVD Prison Massacre of 1941. Here’s the backstory. On August 23, 1939, in Moscow, the Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This was a non-aggression pact, and also a pact dividing up territories Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would soon conquer as their newly annexed territory.
Hitler was, of course, an insatiable liar, and on June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded his former ally, the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was dubbed “Operation Barbarossa.”
Most educated people know that Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. What many forget is that Soviet Russia invaded Poland on September 17, 1939. In his 1988 Princeton University Press book, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, Jan Tomasz Gross wrote, “Very conservative estimates show that [between 1939 and 1941] the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that under German jurisdiction.” To state things baldly, the Soviet Union, initially, helped Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union committed atrocities that were initially comparable to those initially committed by Nazi Germany.
Soviet and Nazi invaders had the same immediate goals: decapitate society and divide and conquer the masses. Decapitation of society was carried out by arrests of anyone who might be a social leader. Nazis and Soviets both targeted education persons, teachers, clergy, and journalists. Stamp collectors and speakers of Esperanto were also on the Soviet lists of those subject to deportation.
When I think about the doomed Polish stamp collectors, I think about a passage from First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers.
“The Khmer Rouge are executing people perceived to be a threat … City people are killed [as well as ] former civil servants, monks, doctors, nurses, artists, teachers, students – even people who wear glasses, as the soldiers view this as a sign of intelligence. Anyone the Khmer Rouge believes has the power to lead a rebellion will be killed.”
Same totalitarian song, but a different totalitarian band covering the same totalitarian lyrics.
Historian Norman Davies described the conditions under which Poles and other political prisoners were deported en masse from the Soviet Union’s newly conquered territory to the Gulag. The deportations’
“horrors were known and published…but were largely ignored by a western public…Poles were among the foremost victims … Passengers…were packed in a standing position in sealed, windowless, and unheated cattle wagons, for a winter journey of three, four, five, or even six thousand miles … instances of derangement, frostbite, starvation, infanticide, even cannibalism occurred.”
Anyone who has spent any time in the recent past interacting with numbers of Polish people will inevitably have met Poles who themselves were on these transports, or whose loved ones were. Through social media, I met Lucja Siemienowski Adams, an almost one-hundred-year-old survivor of one such transport. Lucja’s husband was sent to Kolyma. Lucja, her mother-in-law, and her two young children were sent to a hard labor camp in Siberia. You can see her photo here.
Edward Herzbaum was a Polish Jew captured by the Soviets and sent to the Gulag. His daughter, Krystyna Mew, shared his captivity memoir with me. I review that book here. Facebook friend Krysia Jopek, daughter of another Gulag survivor, told of Polish exiles’ attempts to remain decent in indecent conditions. “We didn’t stare at the bodies they dumped” into anonymous graves was one such effort to maintain decorum.
In 1941, in what had been eastern Poland but what would become West Ukraine, as the Nazis advanced, the Soviet NKVD, or secret police, made a decision. They decided to torture and kill all of their political prisoners. This decision boggles the mind. They knew the Nazis were ruthless and genocidal killers. The Nazis would be after all Slavs in their way, but certainly would focus on the NKVD. And yet the NKVD decided to, in the midst of this frantic retreat, devote time to torturing and murdering Ukrainian, Polish, German, Jewish, and other political prisoners. Again, merely being a stamp collector could turn you into a political prisoner.
This torture, it goes without saying, had no practical purpose. The NKVD agents were not attempting to extract needed information, or to enforce compliance, or to terrorize a population. They knew they would immediately murder their victims, and then depart. Their choice to torture first, then kill, and then escape, the sheer, empty viciousness of this choice, is overwhelming.
The NKVD gauged out eyes. The NKVD mutilated genitals. They buried and boiled victims alive. They cut off breasts. They broke bones, they bayonetted prisoners, guaranteeing them a slow and painful death. The tossed grenades into cells. They burned down entire prisons with prisoners locked inside. They put prisoners into train cars, moved the cars onto a bridge, and then blew up the bridge. The cars fell into the water, below, drowning any trapped prisoners who survived the explosion. They smashed heads with hammers. They drove nails into nostrils and then into brains. They did some torturing; as Nazis approached, they ran; they received word that Nazis hadn’t yet arrived; they returned, and did some more torturing. Smaller towns, off the major routes of Nazi advance, saw leisurely torture.
Again, Nazis were advancing. Victims were buried in shallow graves. It was summer. As memoirs of the time report, the shallow, mass graves began to stink. Loved ones of those executed lived nearby. They could smell their relatives’ corpses. This detail added to the overall horror.
Researchers Ksenya Kiebuzinski and Alexander Motyl estimate that victims were 70 % Ukrainian, 20 % Polish, and 10 % other, including Jews and Germans. I wanted you to read at least a couple of names of massacre victims. I have just two. Father Ivan Kiebuz and Bohdan Hevko were among the dead. I don’t know anything about either one, but Kiebuzinski and Motyl mention them in their work. They were their relatives, and they were part of the statistics.
Kiebuzinski and Motyl report, “Joseph Stalin and his accomplices systematically destroyed the political and cultural life of Ukraine in four stages. First came the genocide of 1930-1933, during which tens of thousands of political, cultural, and religious elites were killed and about 4 million peasants were intentionally starved in the Holodomor. Then came the Great Terror of 1937-1938, during which, according to Werth, 270,000 Ukrainians were repressed and 125,000 – 130,000 were executed. Next came the Prison Massacre of 1941. The final stage came in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when hundreds of thousands of Western Ukrainians were killed or deported during the Soviet assault on the nationalist resistance movement.”
You know, it’s funny. Putin and his supporters insist that Ukrainians don’t exist as a people. And yet for decades Russians have been able to identify who is Ukrainian and who is not in order to suppress them, imprison them, and kill them.
After recounting the basic history, the methodology of atrocity, and the numbers, one asks, why haven’t we heard more about this? Especially now, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been making headlines for months? Why does it receive so little attention? This is where things get complicated.
Most Soviet communists were not Jews, and most Jews were not communists. During the 1930s, though, Jews were disproportionately represented in the NKVD. One of the top men of the NKVD, Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, was Jewish. Stalin ordered Yagoda purged. He was arrested, tried, and shot in 1938. The numbers of Jews in the NKVD dropped after the 1930s.
These are all historically significant facts. There’s a problem in stating these simple facts. There are anti-Semites who use these facts to foment hatred against Jews, and to spread the lie that Judaism and communism are virtually the same. This propaganda is false, and it complicates discussion of important historical realities.
Consider, for example, Felix Dzerzhinsky. The predecessor of the NKVD, the Cheka, was founded by Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky wrote, “We stand for organized terror. This should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly.” Dzerzhinsky also wrote “The Cheka is the defense of the revolution as the Red Army is; as in the civil war the Red Army cannot stop to ask whether it may harm particular individuals, but must take into account only one thing, the victory of the revolution over the bourgeoisie, so the Cheka must defend the revolution and conquer the enemy even if its sword falls occasionally on the heads of the innocent.”
Under Dzerzhinsky, morality was tribal. Guilt or innocence were of little important. Tribal identity is what mattered. If you were of the enemy tribe, your life was forfeit. One of Dzerzhinsky’s operatives explained. “We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. First you must ask him to what class he belongs, what his social origin is, his education and profession. These are the questions that must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.” Since communists were to create a Utopia, Lenin explained, “To us, everything is permitted.” Lenin perhaps unconsciously evoked Dostoyevsky’s famous quote that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. Permitted acts included the murder of innocents.
Dzerzhinsky, responsible for the deaths of uncountable innocents, waxed poetic about “Communist Morality.” That morality allowed for mass slaughter to achieve its ends. Dzerzhinsky was a member of the Polish nobility and he was raised Catholic. Dzerzhinsky, Lenin, Stalin, Beria, etc, were not Jewish, nor were most communists. So, no, Judaism and communism, contrary to anti-Semitic hatemongers, are not identical. But, yes, the disproportionate number of Jews in the NKVD in the 1930s had historical consequences.
When the Nazis invaded Western Ukraine, the NKVD tortures and murders were mere playthings to them. Nazis photographed and filmed Ukrainians, Poles, and Germans sobbing over the desecrated bodies of their loved ones. Nazis prostituted their documentation of human grief in anti-Semitic propaganda. Nazis encouraged Ukrainians and Poles to conflate communism with Jews. Reinhard Heydrich ordered this himself. Motyl and Kiebuzinski write, “Edmund Kessler, a Jewish eyewitness highly critical of Ukrainians, goes so far as to say that ‘the Germans were the conductors of all this. They decided when to begin a pogrom, when to end it, and how long the victims should be tormented.'”
Nazis fomented pogroms. Ukrainian and Polish pogromists committed crimes against Jews. Those crimes included Jews being forced to wash the bodies of the corpses of those killed by the NKVD. In the pogroms that broke out in the immediate aftermath of the prison massacre and the Nazi invasion, estimates are that Ukrainians and Poles, in pogroms, killed thousands of Jews, with one estimate at 5,000.
As you can see, it’s complicated.
As mentioned, it’s difficult to talk about the disproportionate number of Jews in the NKVD. It’s also difficult to talk about non-Jews, in this case Ukrainians and Poles, and others throughout Eastern Europe, being goaded by Nazis into hideous atrocities. We allow all of these complications to taint the innocent dead. Again, “political prisoners” in the Soviet system were often best people in any given locale. The priests, the teachers, the persons of conscience, the stamp collectors. All the ugliness surrounding the murders of these innocent victims of NKVD terror makes us, and canonical historians, turn away. Perhaps the NKVD Prison Massacre of 1941 receives little attention because paying attention to all this is just too difficult.
But there’s another reason we don’t hear much about the NKVD Prison Massacre.
When I was still teaching, every semester, I tried to walk my students through what the words “left” and “right” mean politically. My students were constantly required to address the difference between the political left and the political right, and they were required to do this even though they had no idea what either term meant. In fact their educations, controlled by leftists, gave them the impression that the political right was the evil enemy of humanity. They also associated any position on the left with benignity.
I told my students that communism was the extreme left position. I had to explain to them what communism means. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” was a handy catchphrase. I would then demand that every student in the class surrender whatever cash he had on hand and I told them that I would divide it up equally and redistribute it according to need. They declined to do this. I insisted. They said that they would resist any attempt on my part to requisition their money. I asked them to apply that scenario to all of society. Their eyes would grow wide and they would get that wonderful “Aha” look on their faces. I would then ask,
“How many people do you think died in the imposition of communism?”
They would shrug, shake their heads. Some would guess “Hundreds.” Others, “Thousands.” None came close to guessing any number close to historical estimates. When I told them that one estimate is that communism killed one hundred million people, they would be gobsmacked.
“Why have we not heard anything about this? Why has no one told us this?”
One answer is that education and media in the US today are largely left-of-center, but I don’t know if that explains it all. It’s a question Polish friends and I ponder endlessly. Again, Poland was attacked by both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia in September, 1939. We ask, why are t-shirts with red stars or Mao or Stalin images considered benign, while t-shirts with swastikas or Hitler images are monstrous? I’ve never seen a fully satisfying answer and I suspect we’ll be asking that same question for some time.
There’s more going on here than the social acceptability of t-shirts with red stars. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were both murderous regimes. Timothy Snyder takes on the hard task of putting Hitler and Stalin, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, on a scale and deciding that Nazi Germany murdered more people.
But this brings me to a second reason for wanting you to think about the NKVD Prison Massacre of 1941. Yes, I want you to shed a tear for, say a prayer for, and honor the dead. But in the same way that I want everyone to learn something from the Holocaust, I want everyone to learn something from the killings that the communists carried out.
Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia played similar games in occupied territories. They decapitated societies, going after clergy, teachers, any potential community leaders. They practiced divide-and-conquer. All societies have fault lines. The fault lines are comparable around the world. Fault lines between men and women, between rich and poor, between rural and urban populations, between people of faith and atheists, between the educated and those lacking formal education, between young and old, between people of various faiths. Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia exacerbated these fault lines. German Nazis set Poles living in the highlands against Poles living in the lowlands. Soviet Russia worked in Poland to scapegoat Jews, students, workers, even windmill operators.
Both Nazis and Soviets were shameless and skilled liars, but when it comes to the fissures in society, they didn’t have to invent anything. They just had to apply a new morality. In interwar Poland, most Poles were poor agriculturalists, and Jews did occupy a disproportionate percentage of urban, white collar professions like professor, doctor, and lawyer. Jews were disproportionately urban. In one city, Bialystok, “By 1898, Jews owned 80 percent of the city’s large mills … Jews comprised 88 percent of the city’s shopkeepers. By 1921, Jews ran 93 percent of the city’s businesses and owned 89 percent of its factories.” Poland’s invaders expertly exploited the fissures between rural and urban, between factory owner and rural peasant.
Nazis insisted that the differential between one social group and another demanded hatred and violent abuse. It’s also true that in West Ukraine, Poles and Jews were disproportionately represented among landlords and estate managers, and Ukrainians were disproportionately represented in the peasantry. Both Nazis and Soviets exacerbated social tensions around these fault lines and set one group against the other. In German-occupied Ukraine, Ukrainians committed massacres of Poles, killing up to 100,000 Polish people.
Both German Nazis and Soviet Russians pushed tribal moralities. If a person is not of my tribe, his life is worthless, and I am entitled, no, required to harm and even kill that person. Nazis propagated tribal morality in Ukraine after the NKVD Prison Massacre. Most communists were not Jews, and most Jews were not communists, but Nazis conflated Jews with communism and instigated pogroms. Pogromists, acting on tribal morality, committed atrocities against Jews, and no doubt felt righteous in doing so.
These processes are not foreign to the United States today. In 2020, we saw violence that justified itself using divide-and-conquer, tribal morality. Citizens were robbed, beaten, and publicly tortured because of their skin color. Celebrities like Chrissy Teigen justified this behavior.
I want you to know about the NKVD Prison Massacre because I want the utterly ugly face of Soviet communism to be public knowledge. Communism’s metaphorical hands drip with human gore. I want you to know about the NKVD Prison Massacre because I want the dead to be mourned and honored. I want you to know about the NKVD Prison Massacre because I want you to learn the lessons from the victims’ agony, to recognize how evil is tribal morality. I want the victims to be honored. We honor them by rejecting tribal morality and insisting that all lives matter. Anyone encouraging us to conflate criminality with an ethnic identity – for example to conflate white skin with a slew of historical evils – is himself selling evil.
The God I believe in insists that all lives matter. One of the most moving depictions of this principle is found in the Talmud. The Israelites are escaping captivity in Egypt. They are pursued by Egyptian soldiers. God drowns the Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea. In the Talmud, angels wish to sing to celebrate this victory. “The Lord, God, said to them: ‘My creations are drowning and you are singing before me?'”
Let us live the morality that insists that all lives matter.
The full text of the 2017 Amsterdam University Press book The Great Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941: A Sourcebook by Ksenya Kiebuzinski and Alexander Motyl is available online here.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
Excellent article…!!!
It is indeed a wonderful article, sadly the comments below simply serve to obfuscate the message that national socialism and communism are both evil.
The fact that the leftist elites are happily socialist and that they hate Nazis hides the fact that there’s very little difference between the two. Both demand big government controlling the lives of us peasants.
There’s very little, FUNDAMENTAL, difference between the Christian Dark Ages and the Nazi and Soviet, short-lived, Dark Ages. The Christian Dark Ages did last approximately one-thousand years, the thousand year reich Hitler so looked forward to.
There was very little difference between the tyranny and brutality of the Roman Catholic Theocracy and the tyranny and brutality of the competing Christian theocracies once the Reformation broke the stranglehold of the R.C. theocracy. Martin Luther was NOT fighting for freedom of religion, even less for freedom of conscience, or freedom of thought, he was fighting to PERFECT a corrupted Christian theocracy. Luther DEMANDED that the peasant revolt he inspired be CRUSHED by the STATE.
“In like manner we must endure the authority of the prince. If he misuse or abuse his authority, we are not to entertain a grudge, seek revenge or punishment. Obedience is to be rendered for God’s sake, for the ruler is God’s representative. However they may tax or exact we must obey and endure patiently.” – Martin Luther
I heard a Dennis Prager podcast this week about universities having a sex week for their students and he asked why there wasn’t a bible or religious week. The answer was that anyone who proposed it would be considered a bible thumper (bible basher in the U.K.)
Secularism has no equivalent, which books do you thump?
I don’t say this to attack you but only to let you know that this is how you are perceived here.
Why don’t you stay on point? My comment was not promoting any book or philosophy, it was highlighting the uncanny similarity between the tyranny and brutality of Christianity and the tyranny and brutality of socialism. They are both collectivist belief-systems based on the unreal and unreason. They both enslave, sacrifice, and crush the individual for a so-called higher purpose. Socialism sacrifices the individual to Almighty Society, Christianity and Islam sacrifice the individual to an alleged supernatural, Almighty Creator.
“Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice.” – Leonard Peikoff
“That’s why Marx who began as a Christian became a communist. That’s all communism, socialism, progressivism IS. It’s the secularization of Biblical ethics, of Biblical morality. It’s Christ achieving his goal right here on earth. We don’t have to wait for the Kingdom of Heaven which the Left derided… as pie in the sky, we can get pie right here by simply having the government take pie from those who baked it and give it to those who lack it.” – Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger, “The Left’s Bible Thumping”
“On August 23, 1939, in Moscow, the Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.”
This is FALSE. Molotov’s signature does not appear on the document.
Rather, the signature that appears there is Stalin’s.
The last things you should expect from an FPM article are honesty, integrity and rigor.
No, that’s the last thing I’d expect from one of your comments. I’m actually amazed you were correct in classifying Bandera as a Fascist, though I’ll chalk that up to you uncritically aping Kremlin propaganda (such as your bogus claims that Ukraine’s government after Euromaidan was full of Fascists).
Even when you accidentally stumble on the truth – that Bandera was a murderous Fascist- you do so by dependence on propaganda and lies.
“No, that’s the last thing I’d expect from one of your comments. I’m actually amazed you were correct in classifying Bandera as a Fascist, though I’ll chalk that up to you uncritically aping Kremlin propaganda (such as your bogus claims that Ukraine’s government after Euromaidan was full of Fascists).”
This is where you dismiss Bandera’s overt fascism as Soviet propaganda.
“This is where you dismiss Bandera’s overt fascism as Soviet propaganda.”
Quote me where I ever dismissed Bandera’s Fascism as “Soviet Propaganda.”
Far from it. I’ve always admitted he was a Fascist, a terrorist, and a brutal tyrant..
To take just a few quotes from my own comments on here.
“Who is the Duce or Fuhrer of Ukrainian Fascism? Or perhaps the competing ones (such as the classic Melnyk v. Bandera conflict)?”
*Snip*
“”” Bandera was a fascist and you can’t honestly defend that. (Quote by You) ”
(Quote by me) Which is why I haven’t. I’ve never denied that he was a fascist, that he was a mass murdering terrorist, or that he was a garbage human being, or that the main reason he “stopped” collaborating with the National Socialists was because they betrayed him unprovoked. I merely argued that he was the worst of the faction leaders in WWII Ukraine…. except for all the others (sans the Polish Home Army, who were only involved in the far West of Ukraine)..”
“You’d think you would want to prove that by identifying such Fascists. You certainly are happy to hammer on Bandera (and for good reason, since I fully admit he was a murderous Fascist terrorist). Why the change in tactics?”
Three comments should suffice.
You’re a psychopathic liar and a pretty bad one at that.
“Nazis encouraged Ukrainians and Poles to conflate communism with Jews.”
And nowadays… the world/media encourages everyone to conflate communism with Jews!
Meanwhile… most everyone believes communism is the threat to this world… wrongly feeding the belief the Jews are out to take over the world…
There’s work to be done…
This is going to take a while to dissect, but at its heart this is pure, dishonest whataboutism. And what’s worse, it is reliant upon taking things out of context.
Part 1
“One detail is not given: after WW II,according to experts SCOTT RITTER”
Scott Ritter isn’t an expert. Scott Ritter is an evil, pedophillic, totalitarian and terrorist simp….. as well as one who really isn’t even that good at lying.
Our own Daniel Greenfield had his number pegged years ago, as can be outlined here.
https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2007/04/pathetic-disgusting-saga-of-scott.html
And a particularly telling admission from Ritter’s own words is this:
“The prison in question was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children – toddlers up to pre-adolescents – whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.”
Thanks Tortoise, I always enjoy your comments 🙂
Thank you kindly..
I’m not even that fond of people like Bandera (by all accounts if you weren’t one of those traumatized or radicalized by the hell Ukraine went through in early and mid 20th century there is very little to be fond of), but the dishonesty and lack of context galls me.
The fact Ritter may not be a reliable source doesn’t disprove that those “nationalist” Ukrainians were the remnants of fascists who collaborated with the Nazis.
Part 1
Ah, if it isn’t Dan Goebbels going to talk about Fascism.
“The fact Ritter may not be a reliable source-”
That’s a mother of understatements. He is monumentally an unreliable source, beyond being a mouthpiece for totalitarian shills.
” doesn’t disprove that those “nationalist” Ukrainians were the remnants of fascists who collaborated with the Nazis.”
There were a lot of “Nationalist” Ukrainians, many of whom were either Fascist or proto-Fascist but others were not. And today the ideological heirs of the Fascists are quite marginal and out of power.
Indeed, it’s worth telling that many of Bandera’s earliest targets were other Ukrainian nationalists, both other Fascists (during his fratricidal and murderous civil war with Melnyk over the control of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the much broader, non-Fascist communities of Ukrainian Nationalists.
Fascist fight each other. What is your point? Instead of blathering about Ritter why don’t disprove the allegations that Ukraine has a fascist movement that holds power and has expanded that power base since 2014.
Part 2
What a lot of people “conveniently” ignore about Ukrainian Nationalism after WWI is that by mid WWII its leadership had seen a “Survival of the Worst.” The reasonably sane and democratic republics (and even the authoritarian-but-not-insane juntas that precededed the former) in Ukraine proper and Galicia got crushed out of existence and ultimately partitioned between the Soviets and Poles, both of whom discriminated against Ukrainian culture and the former of whom waged genocide.
While Polish oppression was mild enough that it saw splits between those seeking more rights legally and those… Not. Only for the former to get crushed when the Soviets moved in in 1939. Which meant that the people who survived were not the civic leaders or philosophers that had spent years agitating for their people or writing in their own vernacular, but hard people who were used to operating outside the law and underground.
People like Bandera and Melnyk.
Ah the “devil made me do it” excuse. Bandera was a fascist and you can’t honestly defend that. It didn’t stop you of course but you’re a liar so that’s old hat for you.
In 2018 Ukraine made Bandera’s birthday a national holiday:
https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/ukraine-designates-national-holiday-for-nazi-collaborator/
Fascists filled the post coup 2014 Ukrainian government. They still do now.
Part 3
And notably even they realized their hard core nutjobs weren’t enough to make a movement, which is why (especially after Hitler backstabbed them) they had to widen their recruiting basis, hence why Bandera and co worked to call off the whole “mass murder of Jews” under the grounds that (and I paraphrase) there were so few they weren’t a threat, but could be useful.
In any case, the last Neo-Fascist members of the Ukrainian Cabinet resigned in late 2014 and the Neo-Fascist parties in the Rada got kicked so badly they only have a single member. Their representation on the regional scale is somewhat larger but still marginal.
Oh, and it’s incredibly ironic that you the Baathist and PLA fanboy are trying to complain about “remnants of Fascists who collaborated with the Nazis” considering how both still glorify outright collaborators with the Holocaust who -unlike Bandera- Hitler never even betrayed. But please do try and explain to me how “settler colonialism” or something justifies Amin al-Husseini having his militias impale children on sickles.
Ah, so your defense of Bandera was he eventually stopped murdering Jewish people when it was politically beneficial to do so.
Wow, I’ve been living rent free in what puss sack you call a brain this whole time. That’s very telling. Remind me again (you’re to unimportant for me to remember) were you the clown who kept a text file on me? The same text file that only contained one side of the argument so you made an ass of yourself. Or was it another FPMer? Like I said you’re not important enough to remember.
Part 1 “Fascist fight each other.”
You would know, Fascist scumbag.
“What is your point?”
My point is that it’s rather inaccurate to call most Ukrainian Neo-Fascists “Nazis” for the same reason it’s inaccurate to call the AustroFascists of the 1930s “Nazis.” They evolved separately from the Nazis and ultimately came to blows with them.
This isn’t about morality or making one side or the other “better.” It’s about diagnosing the different ideologies and – more importantly on a strategic level – how they get along (or rather Don’t).
Which is why most Ukrainian Fascists and Neo-Fascists operate somewhat at odds with most Neo-Nazis in a way that-say- American or Italian or Russian Neo-Fascists aren’t. It’s personal.
(And before you ask, no I don’t know why they are).
Part 2
” Instead of blathering about Ritter why don’t disprove the allegations that Ukraine has a fascist movement that holds power and has expanded that power base since 2014.”
Ah yes, the classic kafkatrap BS of shifting the goal posts.
Firstly shitstain: it’s your job to prove allegations like that.
Secondly: It’s fairly easy to disprove. Name the supposed “fascist movement that holds power.” Totalitarian movements tend to rally around a set name and icon, even if the name changes (for instance the rebranding of the PNF to the PNR after Mussolini was overthrown by the Grand Council and the Monarchy, only to be sprung).
Who is the Duce or Fuhrer of Ukrainian Fascism? Or perhaps the competing ones (such as the classic Melnyk v. Bandera conflict)?
What government position do he/she/they hold, if any?
Answer those questions and it is pretty simple. No coherent Neo-Fascist movement in Ukraine holds power throughout the country. Indeed, Svoboda is the only Neo-Fascist party to have a representative in the Ukrainian national government and they got stomped to having a single member in the Rada out of 450.
One too many to be sure, but hardly “holding power” as you imply.
“” Instead of blathering about Ritter why don’t disprove the allegations that Ukraine has a fascist movement that holds power and has expanded that power base since 2014.”
Ah yes, the classic kafkatrap BS of shifting the goal posts.”
Whines about me shifting goalposts when you’re being called out for shifting the goalposts. Yeah, that’s peak FPM right there.
” it’s your job to prove allegations like that.”
LOL sorry baby boy. You’re the one that dodged. You have to put in some work. I know it’s scary.
Part 1 “Ah the “devil made me do it” excuse.”
You of all people REALLY do not want to be nitpicking with that, given your fullthroated defense of actual, to-the-end Nazi collaborators like the Husseinis and their modern heirs in the PLO. Especially when you realize that nothing that has happened in Israel (which is PLENTY bad) holds a candle to the Holodomor.
” Bandera was a fascist and you can’t honestly defend that. ”
Which is why I haven’t. I’ve never denied that he was a fascist, that he was a mass murdering terrorist, or that he was a garbage human being, or that the main reason he “stopped” collaborating with the National Socialists was because they betrayed him unprovoked. I merely argued that he was the worst of the faction leaders in WWII Ukraine…. except for all the others (sans the Polish Home Army, who were only involved in the far West of Ukraine).
Which is the faintest possible praise imaginable when you’re being directly compared to Hitler and Stalin, but also not a trivial consideration for people in the middle of a brutal mosh pit between the Second and Third most prolific mass murderers in history.
“It didn’t stop you of course but you’re a liar so that’s old hat for you.”
Once again, Dan Goebbels the unempathetic fascist psychopath employs projection. Becaus
“You of all people REALLY do not want to be nitpicking with that, given your fullthroated defense of actual, to-the-end Nazi collaborators like the Husseinis and their modern heirs in the PLO. ”
You’re a liar. That was a slander you belched out against me. You shit it out when you outed yourself as a fascist.
Part 2
“In 2018 Ukraine made Bandera’s birthday a national holiday:
https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/ukraine-designates-national-holiday-for-nazi-collaborator/”
And I opposed that.
But let’s employ a little fucking critical thought. WHY DO YOU THINK a nation might choose to make a holiday based off of the most active political and military leader who fought to prevent Ukrainian identity from getting utterly annihilated between the twin genocides of the Holodomor and the Wider Holocaust in Ukraine? Even in light of the fact that he was a terrorist, a fascist, a mass murderer, and had helped let the Nazis into Ukraine?
Think. Think. Think…. Especially since Amin al-Husseini is revered and subject to official holidays in the “Balestinian Territories” for far less.
In a better world, Bandera would’ve been a footnote in history, a deranged totalitarian loon in an independent Ukraine or the Polish partition in Galicia who would soon enough get locked up or disposed of while saner, more moral heads prevailed. But even someone as dishonest as you should know that Eastern Europe did not live in such a better world, and certainly not in that era.
“But let’s employ a little fucking critical thought. WHY DO YOU THINK a nation might choose to make a holiday based off of the most active political and military leader who fought to prevent Ukrainian identity from getting utterly annihilated between the twin genocides of the Holodomor and the Wider Holocaust in Ukraine? Even in light of the fact that he was a terrorist, a fascist, a mass murderer, and had helped let the Nazis into Ukraine?”
The “devil made me do it” excuse again? You really have rocks in your head. You already got caught trying that one. At best you offered only the most perfunctory criticism against Bandera while blaming everyone else for what happened.
@Dan Foster
Part 1
“The “devil made me do it” excuse again?”
It’s not an excuse, though it is an explanation. Ultimately Bandera had every possibility of not “doing it” and even his rival Fascist Melnyk was less brutal and depraved. Which is again why I do not defend either many except in the barest possible terms.
But it’s ironic how you happily embrace “the devil made me do it” far more than I have when it comes to Hamas, the PLO, Saddam’s Iraq, or Putin’s Russia.
” You really have rocks in your head.”
There’s a couple X-Rays that prove otherwise.
“You already got caught trying that one.”
No, I didn’t. You got caught lying and claiming I did.
” At best you offered only the most perfunctory criticism against Bandera”
My “perfunctory criticism” against Bandera is far more eloquent and in-depth than your criticism against Him, let alone Stalin, Arafat, or even Hitler. And it could be even less prefunctory. I can talk about the totalitarian nature of his declaration of independence, of Poles and Jews massacred by OUN agents, and even Ukrainian farmers who had their scalps cut off for the “crime” of joining Soviet collective farms under duress, along with academic citations of all of the above.
Part 2
But its ultimately a side story. You got caught lying and claiming Ukraine was in control of Neo-Nazis, but were unable to prove it. You got caught whitewashing the role the Soviets had in creating it.
” while blaming everyone else for what happened.”
Well YEAH, when “everyone else” includes FUCKING STALIN AND HITLER who played a far larger role in the tragedy in Ukraine than all of the OUN/UPA’s terrorists put together. That doesn’t mean Bandera and Melnyk have no blame. Far From it. They got dealt a terrible hand but it was how they played it that made them monsters. But it takes some gall to point to Bandera while “conveniently” ignoring Lenin and Stalin, as you have.
The irony is that this is classic whataboutism. You want to claim I haven’t condemned Bandera in eloquent or vitriolic enough terms (in spite of doing so far more than you have), but don’t want to talk about the Soviets starving and shooting millions of people during a time of peace helping to poison Ukrainian culture, allowing people like Bandera to come to the forefront.
Part 2
I oppose celebrating Bandera in the way that Holiday did, but I’m also not enough of a racist psychopath to ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands of people (including a VERY FEW Jews) lived through the peak killing years of Hitler and Stalin due to his organization, and for better or worse he’s been an icon of Ukrainian survival in the face of literal genocide. That doesn’t make him Good by any stretch of the imagination, but it does mean the main reason you’re condemning him is because he’s the wrong flavor of totalitarian socialist terrorist.
“Fascists filled the post coup 2014 Ukrainian government.”
Firstly: there was no “coup” in 2014. There was Yanukovych being legally deposed by the democratically-elected Rada.
And by “filled the government” you mean “got 3 of the 23 cabinet positions, only to lose them by a coordinated resignation.” Oh yeah, and “Had their Rada representation decline from 38 Rada members under Yanukovych to 6 in the first post-Yanukovych elections.” After which they’ve since declined to having a single Svoboda member of the Rada.
Yeah, really “filled” there. That’s TOTALLY the trajectory Fascist movements that have power have. After all, everybody knows that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and the Italian Fascist Party had less representation in the legislature than ever two General Elections after they took power!
Oh wait.
“I oppose celebrating Bandera in the way that Holiday did, but I’m also not enough of a racist psychopath to ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands of people (including a VERY FEW Jews) lived through the peak killing years of Hitler and Stalin due to his organization, and for better or worse he’s been an icon of Ukrainian survival in the face of literal genocide. That doesn’t make him Good by any stretch of the imagination, but it does mean the main reason you’re condemning him is because he’s the wrong flavor of totalitarian socialist terrorist.”
You’re making excuses for a fascist again. Man, you are stupider than Jeff Bargholz. That’s really saying something.
“You’re making excuses for a fascist again.”
Sane people recognize that a genocidal totalitarian dictatorship mass murdering your people is one hell of an excuse. The true test is recognizing – AS I DO – that such an “excuse” does not actually excuse impaling children or scalping their parents because of “collaboration” with the regime.
This is akin to emphasizing condemnation of the Military Lizard Union of Poland as racist Fascists (which they were) to the point you completely ignore the literal Holocaust in Poland by the Germans and mass murder by the Soviets.
Though this is somewhat unfair to the MLU because while they were evil scum they didn’t have the raw body count or intolerance Bandera’s OUN had for most of their existence.
But it points to your moral bankrupcy.
” Man, you are stupider than Jeff Bargholz. That’s really saying something.”
Pot Kettle Black. The fact that you routinely lose arguments to JB underlines that.
Part 4
Ironically, modern Neo-Fascists are far more significant in the government of Russia than they are in Ukraine, with such luminaries as Dmitry Medvedev and his long history as a Neo-Nazi. Perhaps you have heard of him?
This is the problem with you. You’re pathologically dishonest, and you suck at research. Which is why you pointedly ignore evidence that does not conveniently fit with your narrative.
“Ironically, modern Neo-Fascists are far more significant in the government of Russia than they are in Ukraine, with such luminaries as Dmitry Medvedev and his long history as a Neo-Nazi. Perhaps you have heard of him?”
You’re resorting to whataboutism. How weak minded and childish of you.
“This is the problem with you. You’re pathologically dishonest, and you suck at research. Which is why you pointedly ignore evidence that does not conveniently fit with your narrative.”
Not, even a little bit. We’re talking about Ukraine. You’re so weak and cowardly you just can’t face reality.
@Dan Foster
“Oh, well I guess it doesn’t matter because his body count is lower. You’re a psychopath.”
No, you are.
I never denied that Bandera was evil. The very limit of what I was prepared to say in his defense was that he was probably the lessest evil in a very evil world, and came to power at a time when both the Soviets and his former Nazi “friends” outright sought to destroy Ukrainians as a nation and people.
Does that justify his crimes? Not at all. But it sure as hell explains why he is such a touchstone in Ukrainian history, much like Stalin is in Russia.
The difference is, as rose-tinted as memories of Bandera and his ideology are in Ukraine, they don’t dominate the current Ukrainian government with the force of law. You can condemn and criticize Bandera without being arrested like you will if you accurately talk about the Nazi-Soviet alliance and its invasion of Poland.
“You’re justifying all the murdering and terrorism he did.”
No, I’m not.
Though it’s interesting what this says about your own shilling for the PLO, the Golden Square, and so on. That your defenses of them are not merely in the idea that they are the least of evils but are actually good and their terrorism and atrocities are justified.
I have never done so with Bandera. I even note how his atrocities were ultimately self-defeating. He never fully realized that.
“Like I said you’re a psychopath.”
Like I said, psychopaths are glib, remorseless, and obsess with deflection. They also have prickly egos. You fit like a glove. They also tend to be endemic liars, mostly incompetent ones.
And you’re amazed why people like me call you out for your actions. Especially since you will happily justify hundreds of thousands of murdered civilians in order to grind your anti-Western axe. As far as you care, they don’t exist.
In contrast I’ve been brutally upfront about Bandera, what he was like, his many crimes, and those of others like the former Hilfies that went into the Forest Brothers.
Part 1
“Ah, so your defense of Bandera was he eventually stopped murdering Jewish people when it was politically beneficial to do so.”
And that he was less murderous overall than the Nazis or the Soviets.
Also note: I never claimed he was a good boy who dindu nothing wrong and was totally justified because he was fighting German or Russian settler colonialism. I never claimed he ordered a stop to the murders of Jews and later Poles because of an ethical revelation, or anything other than politics and the need to recruit people.
I have been nothing but scathingly honest about his conduct, his ideology, and his actions.
Which you want to pretend amount to a full throated endorsement of him because I don’t pretend we should ignore the Nazis and Soviets involved or how they thoroughly devastated Ukraine, killed off the sane cultural and political leadership that’d have put Bandera in a cell or in the grave where he belonged, and generally made the fascist terrorist the Least Worst option for hundreds of thousands of people.
Ironic, considering how if I pointed out similar mass murders and intentional extermination and slavery by the Nazis against Eastern Slavs to point out that Stalin was the lesser evil for Russians and Belarusians (among others), you’d probably agree with me. But god forbid I use that similar logic and trying to understand the hell people actually lived through to point to why there’s half-deserved nostalgia for Bandera.
“And that he was less murderous overall than the Nazis or the Soviets.”
Oh, well I guess it doesn’t matter because his body count is lower. You’re a psychopath.
“Also note: I never claimed he was a good boy who dindu nothing [you just can’t stop being racist. That’s really sad] wrong and was totally justified because he was fighting German or Russian settler colonialism. I never claimed he ordered a stop to the murders of Jews and later Poles because of an ethical revelation, or anything other than politics and the need to recruit people.”
You’re justifying all the murdering and terrorism he did. Like I said you’re a psychopath.
Part 2
“Wow, I’ve been living rent free in what puss sack you call a brain this whole time. ”
What can I say? I have a long memory and I find it worth while to understand my enemies. Even if they’re barely coherent trolling shills for genocidal, totalitarian terrorists online.
The difference is, you have a file in my skull . I apparently have a palatial estate in yours. Probably because there was so much unused space in yours.
“That’s very telling.”
Yes, it’s telling I don’t forget fools.
” Remind me again (you’re to unimportant for me to remember) ”
Your lies are as lazy as they are self-defeating. You’re the person who got paranoid and accused me of “stalking” you through the articles.
Nobody sane or reasonable is going to think that I’m unimportant to you, judging by your actions.
Hell, you’re neither sane nor reasonable and you know I’m important to you. Even if you don’t intend to admit it.
“What can I say? I have a long memory and I find it worth while to understand my enemies. ”
Here you just admitted you’re obsessed with me.
“Your lies are as lazy as they are self-defeating. You’re the person who got paranoid and accused me of “stalking” you through the articles.”
Yeah, I mean you’ve just admitted how obsessed you are with me.
“Hell, you’re neither sane nor reasonable and you know I’m important to you. Even if you don’t intend to admit it.”
I hold you in the same regard as what sticks to the bottom of my boots when I walk across a parking lot in the summer. You’re just projecting at this point.
@Dan Goebbels
“Here you just admitted you’re obsessed with me.””
There’s a difference between being obsessed, Dan Goebbels, and not being ignorant. I was perfectly happy not reading your drivel for months, but that does not mean I forgot how you act. Or forgot how you lied.
I suppose by this “logic” I am also obsessed with people like Gerhard Schroeder or Franco for similar.
“Yeah, I mean you’ve just admitted how obsessed you are with me.”
And you’ve just admitted you consider any recognition or memory of me at all to be “obsession.” Good at indicating megalomania and excessive sense of grandeur, both clinical symptoms of psychopathy.
As if the pervasive lying, dishonesty, and lack of empathy from you wasn’t good enough.
“I hold you in the same regard as what sticks to the bottom of my boots when I walk across a parking lot in the summer. “”
Of course you do. Because you’re a psychopath who doesn’t like being called out, especially when you wind up being humiliated. But I’m pretty sure even a low-functioning mental case like yourself will regard mud and shit stuck to the bottom of your boots with frustration and trouble.
“You’re just projecting at this point.”
Says the honorary IMAX Projector.
@Dan Goebbels.
“Interesting how when you think about me your mind goes right to anal sex. You’ve got more in common with Jerff “I’ll send Dan my sex pics like a straight guy” Bargholz.”
Curious how you interpret a reference to “crushing your asshole” as Anal Sex. Most people who are not nymphomaniacs would (correctly) recognize it as more likely to refer to a spanking or beat down on one’s butt. After all, anal sex is comparatively rare.
But it fits quite well with the oversexed, poorly ordered erotic mindset of a clinical psychopath.
Are you really so desperate for company you have to interpret my references to beating you in debate with colorful language as a sexual vision?
“You still wanna claim you aren’t cyber stalking? I”
Absolutely. And in particular, I’ll note I was on this article first. You came later. If you have commented elsewhere on this website in recent weeks, I neither know nor care.
The evidence paints you more as the cyberstalker.
” mean you’ve admitted to stalker behavior. ”
Remembering a smear merchant and their tactics is hardly “stalker behavior.”
“I challenged you to provide both sides and you couldn’t. Why? because you were the nonce that didn’t save it.”
No, I provided screenshots at the time. And you whined about me taking you out of context and then lied about how I was lying.
In the meantime you were utterly incapable of naming the “Fascists” the post-Euromaidan governments were full of.
“were you the clown who kept a text file on me?”
Yes, and I put it to good use by crushing your asshole by catching you in lies and contradictions.
I admit I’m not sure I still have the text file, since I’ve had to change around the hard drives due to – ya know – actual work, but it seems like you are desperately grabbing for attention.
” The same text file that only contained one side of the argument so you made an ass of yourself.”
Manifestly untrue. I copy paste everything, precisely so I can present all sides of the argument.
That is, if there is more than one side. Which you rarely can muster, especially given your outright delusions and attempts to claim that the PLO have every right to behead Jewish children because of the alleged crimes of their ancestors and that nerve gas laced artillery heads are not “WMD.”
” Or was it another FPMer? Like I said you’re not important enough to remember.”
Like I said, you suck at lying. You suck at arguing. And you suck in general.
Which is probably why you can’t read simple pie charts or legislative graphs.
And why am I not surprised you’re trying to collude with Putin’s propaganda mouthpieces? I suppose this is one job you’re actually qualified for. The troll farms need more people and they’re not terribly concerned about competence. Just don’t reveal that you’re willing to do it for free.
“Yes, and I put it to good use by crushing your asshole by catching you in lies and contradictions.”
Interesting how when you think about me your mind goes right to anal sex. You’ve got more in common with Jerff “I’ll send Dan my sex pics like a straight guy” Bargholz.
“Manifestly untrue. I copy paste everything, precisely so I can present all sides of the argument.”
You still wanna claim you aren’t cyber stalking? I mean you’ve admitted to stalker behavior. I challenged you to provide both sides and you couldn’t. Why? because you were the nonce that didn’t save it.
“Whines about me shifting goalposts when you’re being called out for shifting the goalposts. Yeah, that’s peak FPM right there.”
No, that’s simply me pointing out that if you want to make an assertion or claim, the onus is on you to provide evidence for it.
You did not such thing, I notice.
You could not identify the Fascist movement’s name. You could not identify their Fuhrer/Duce/Leader. You could not identify what members they have in government.
This is you whinging and projecting your own feebleness and totalitarianism onto FPM. As usual.
“LOL sorry baby boy. You’re the one that dodged. ”
Nope. You’re the one who claimed that 2014 in Ukraine was a “coup” and claimed that the post-Euromaidan government was “Fascist” and “filled with Fascists.”
You’d think you would want to prove that by identifying such Fascists. You certainly are happy to hammer on Bandera (and for good reason, since I fully admit he was a murderous Fascist terrorist). Why the change in tactics?
I’m pretty sure we both know why.
Because you’re a fucking idiot and you know you can’t actually detail how the Ukrainian government of today is “Fascist” or “filled with Fascists.” Especially in terms of personnel.
So you whinge about me.
“You have to put in some work. I know it’s scary.”
I already put in the work. I challenged you to do the same. Sad to say you cannot.
“You’re a liar. ”
The liar accuses the person who beats them into tar of being a liar. Predictable.
Also, this brings up why I bothered with the text file and screenshots. So that I could prove you were lying about what you had said before.
“That was a slander you belched out against me.”
Firstly: Slander is spoken. In print, it’s libel.
I realize using accurate terminology is probably beyond an idiot like yourself, but it would make your claims SOMEWHAT less risible.
Secondly: it wasn’t libel or slander. It was truth, as I have proven with quotes of you.
” You shit it out when you outed yourself as a fascist.”
Says the person who is shilling for regimes that glorify Nazi collaborators like Amin al-Husseini and now Wagner Group, and who whined endlessly when I pointed out how Fascism is socialism and is ultimately your ideology, not mine.
“You’re making excuses for a fascist again. Man, you are stupider than Jeff Bargholz. That’s really saying something.”
This is rich coming from the idiot who openly glorifies genocidal Nazi collaborators like the Golden Square and Amin al-Husseini.
Also, as far as “excuses” go, having your entire country and culture brutalized with millions dying is a hell of an excuse.
The difference between you and I is that I point out this doesn’t actually EXCUSE Bandera himself (though it MIGHT excuse SOME OF the people who flocked to his banner to survive).
I’ve never claimed Bandera was noble, good, non-totalitarian, non-terrorist, or would bring Ukraine to a bright, noble future. He was none of those things. This is in sharp contrast to you glorifying every two bit genocidal anti-Western dictatorship and smearing the likes of Dubya Bush far more than you ever will Stalin, Putin, al-Husseini, or even Hitler.
Ironic how I’m supposedly the “Fascist” yet I spend far more time condemning Fascists like Hitler and Mussolini than you ever have.
You’re dumber and more evil than Sumsrent. And that’s saying something.
Well, looks like FPM is freezing me out from responding. Yet, lets you jabber. Oh, well I respond where I can:
““You’re making excuses for a fascist again. Man, you are stupider than Jeff Bargholz. That’s really saying something.”
This is rich coming from the idiot who openly glorifies genocidal Nazi collaborators like the Golden Square and Amin al-Husseini.”
Nope, you’re lying . You could provide evidence to support your comments but – oops – you don’t have the file anymore. How convenient for you.
“Also, as far as “excuses” go, having your entire country and culture brutalized with millions dying is a hell of an excuse.”
To fight? Yes, but that’s not what Bandera did. He willing joined with the NAZIS and committed acts of genocide. You keep on providing more proof you’re a psychopath.
“The difference between you and I is that I point out this doesn’t actually EXCUSE Bandera himself (though it MIGHT excuse SOME OF the people who flocked to his banner to survive).”
LOL! I’ve read your comments. Any honest reading would reveal that.
“This is in sharp contrast to you glorifying every two bit genocidal anti-Western dictatorship and smearing the likes of Dubya Bush far more than you ever will Stalin, Putin, al-Husseini, or even Hitler….”Ironic how I’m supposedly the “Fascist” yet I spend far more time condemning Fascists like Hitler and Mussolini than you ever have.”
Provide 10 examples of me doing that.
@Dan Foster
“Well, looks like FPM is freezing me out from responding. Yet, lets you jabber.”
I’m also struggling to respond since when a comment thread gets to a certain depth it doesn’t let you reply. So I’ve had to get creative at where I reply.
“Oh, well I respond where I can:”
Shame.
“Nope, you’re lying .”:
No, you’re lying by claiming I’m lying.
” You could provide evidence to support your comments ”
I already did several times over. I do not need to do so again.
And as even someone as idiotic and dishonest as you knows, FPM is in a bad habit of glassing the comments of old articles, making it even harder to do so. Which is one reason I used the text document and screenshots.
I don’t need to do so again, though I might later. But I don’t think anybody sane is going to doubt your bad faith.
“but – oops – you don’t have the file anymore. How convenient for you.”
No, it’s inconvenient. Had FPM retained its old article comments, links alone would be more than enough. But you know this.
@Dan Foster
“To fight? Yes, but that’s not what Bandera did. ”
That’s not All he did. Say what you will about the scumbag, but he fought.
The problem is he spent at least as much time and effort murdering innocent people.
“He willing joined with the NAZIS and committed acts of genocide. ”
Yes he did. Hell, no need to use the wishy washy “acts of.” He outright embraced genocide. I’ve never denied that, nor have I justified that. It’s also worth noting that his inhumanity extended to “his own” people, such as murdering farmers for being forced onto Soviet Collective Farms. A memory well worth keeping.
“You keep on providing more proof you’re a psychopath.”
Why? Because I point out what Bandera did, for both good and bad? I’ve never pretended he was good.
That’s in sharp contrast to you defending Hamas by conflating it with all Balestinians (ironically).
“LOL! I’ve read your comments. Any honest reading would reveal that.”
You wouldn’t know how to do an honest reading. As we’ve established.
@Dan Foster
“Provide 10 examples of me doing that.”
Firstly: Responding to someone claiming that if Hamas disarmed there would be peace while if Israel disarmed there would be genocide by accusing them of being racist against Arabs and conflating Hamas with all Palestinians.
Secondly: Peddling Kremlin bullshit about 2014 being a “coup” in Ukraine.
Thirdly: Lying and claiming there were no WMDs in Iraq (multiple times over).
Fourthly: Trying to smear me as a Fascist while uncritically justifying the literally Fascist, pro-Nazi genocides of al-Husseini and the PLO that idolizes his legacy.
Fifthly: Blaming Venezuela’s suffering on the US Embargo (in spite of basic chronology not working).
Sixthly: Blaming Cuba’s misery on the US Embargo.
Seventh: Smearing me as a “Fascist” endlessly while at the same time trying to ignore the essence of Fascism as a Third Positionist, Nationalist Socialism.
Eight: Knee jerk anti-American Ho Fangirlism.
Ninth: Acting as if “settler colonialism” – no matter how ethical or unethical – justifies genocidal violence against the descendants of said settler colonists.
Tenth: Shilling for the Iranian Mullahs and Houthis stealing food in Yemen.
“You’re resorting to whataboutism. How weak minded and childish of you.”
No, I’m calling out your bullshit bluff.
I challenged you to identify how Ukraine is in the grip of “Fascism.” I challenged you to name names – party names, personal names, names of government positions they held. You never did, instead mentioning the commemoration of Bandera’s birthday as a deflection to avoid providing concrete evidence in the form of names.
In contrast I can talk ALL DAY about Medvedev’s past and the actions of groups like the Zhirinovskyites and Wagner Group.
And the fact that you think deflecting like this will work shows how weak-minded and psychopathic you are. As well as stupid.
“Not, even a little bit. We’re talking about Ukraine. You’re so weak and cowardly you just can’t face reality.”
I have faced reality. Which is why I spend absolutely no time beating the crap out of you with it. I pointed out that only one Neo-Fascist party has a presence in the Ukrainian National Government, and that consists of a single member of the Rada. That all the Neo-Fascist cabinet members resigned their positions within months. That you have nothing to provide but accusations and Kremlin propaganda.
My reference to the Kremlin’s Fascists and Neo-Nazis underlines your double standards as well as the lack of research you have.
Let’s look at your ten examples:
1. No quotes just accusations that you made up.
2. Again no quotes. Funny thing is the coup was pushed by Obama so you should be all over it. Well, you are inconsistent.
3. The US admitted their were no WMD. You’re a deluded buffoon. Also, no quotes.
4. I can only go by your repeated statements. You are also just repeating lies about me with no evidence.
5. Again, no quotes. How about you explain how a massive embargo doesn’t harm the target country.
6. Ibid.
7. Repeating yourself? Are you to lazy or stupid to come up with 10 things? Still no quotes.
8. Word salad. Not a shred of proof.
9. Nope, just accusations. I never supported genocide. You’ve provided no evidence so, next.
10. Nothing? No quotes. No links. No evidence.
It’s clear to me you are not a health, well adjusted person. Now, I’m beginning to think you are full on psychotic.
@ Dan Foster
Part 1
“1. No quotes just accusations that you made up.”
Untrue, as I beat your head in with screencaps before. But being able to exploit FPM’s ill advised comment purging helps.
I also note by this “metric” all of your accusations against me are baseless.
“2. Again no quotes.”
Because unlike your other shit, you made this comment in this very article and it is still present for anybody to see by CNTR+Fing “coup.”
” Funny thing is the coup was pushed by Obama so you should be all over it. Well, you are inconsistent.”
Funny how totalitarian idiots ignore the fact that the so-called “coup” consisted of the democratically-elected Rada removing the President from power on grounds of inability to do his job and violations of the constitution. Some “coup.” If only our own legislature would do it to Biden.
Oh, and it was “pushed by Obama”? So? Obama is a despotic, progressive scumbag like yourself but that doesn’t mean he is wrong about literally everything. I’m not going to shill for IS in order to snub him, any more than I’m going to claim Stalin’s evil excuses the Nazis or Bandera.
@ Dan Goebbels
“3. The US admitted their were no WMD. ”
A shamelessly politicized, utterly dishonest, and counterfactual hatchet job has no factual evidence.
Moreover, the fact that even the New York Times had to admit that Iraq had WMD and that the US took casualties disabling it underlines the fact that this claim is nonsense.
The best liars like you can pull to try and justify this is that the weapons were somehow “abandoned.” Which is laughable if you understand Saddam’s personality, but would also be irrelevant even if so; abandoned WMD are still abandoned WMD that Iraq illegally possessed (because of a prior decision to hide them from weapons inspectors).
“You’re a deluded buffoon. Also, no quotes.”
Pot Kettle Black.
“4. I can only go by your repeated statements. ”
And yet you consistently fail to accurately quote me.
“You are also just repeating lies about me with no evidence.”
Says the liar who gets quoted about their lies repeatedly.
@Dan Goebbels 3
”
“5. Again, no quotes. How about you explain how a massive embargo doesn’t harm the target country.”
There’s a difference between harming the target country and driving it into starvation. This is best shown by when – like in Venezuela – the starvation takes place long before the first embargos.
You’re desperately clinging to the instability and lack of evidence caused by FPM purging comments.
“6. Ibid.”
See above.
“7. Repeating yourself? Are you to lazy or stupid to come up with 10 things? Still no quotes.”
I don’t take accusations of stupid and lazy from someone who still can’t identify the Fascist movement in control of the Ukrainian Government or who their leader is.
@ Dan Goebbels 4
“8. Word salad. Not a shred of proof.”
Pure projection on your part.
“9. Nope, just accusations. I never supported genocide. ”
Then why the hell do you continue to whitewash the al-Husseinis and the PLO with their goal of “From the River to the Sea”?
“You’ve provided no evidence”
So in other words, like you, only mine is a result of the limitations in FPM commenting (as well as the fact that I already nailed you to the wall about your lies with screencaps and text quotes before, so I don’t have the same urgency to do so again).
“10. Nothing? No quotes. No links. No evidence.”
Ironic projection from someone who provides no such things themselves, but then demands I do.
In spite of things like your falsely claiming 2014 was a “Coup” are present in your other comments on here and were quoted by me.
Pathetic.
“It’s clear to me you are not a health, well adjusted person.”
It’s clear to me you are projecting and would not give a damn about my health or adjusted status even if you were capable of diagnosing either. Because you’re a totalitarian psychopath with Fascist affinities.
“Now, I’m beginning to think you are full on psychotic.”
This is not very convincing when you’ve openly accused me of being psychopathic in dozens of comments before. But shameless liars like psychopaths rarely care about consistency.
Thank you, Tortoise Herder. Your comments always add depth to the conversation and I always learn new and valuable things when you contribute!
Thank you kindly. This sort of support really helps when dealing with this kind of nonsense.
Is this the same Scott Ritter who went around inspecting for WMDs during the 90’s?
The same Scott Ritter who suddenly decided they never existed when Bush was making his case to invade Saddam B. Hussein’s Iraq?
(Just curious.)
The very one. Also the one who admitted he covered up pedophilia among Baathist Iraqi leadership in the name of “peace”, got convicted of sexing undercover disguised as minors twice over, and married a likely FSB asset.
Garbage human being and garbage source.
Part 2
Let’s read that again.
“The prison in question was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children – toddlers up to pre-adolescents – whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.”
It doesn’t take a genius to realize what this means, especially if one understands the long and sordid history of pedophilia in the Middle East and its prevalence among Baathist Iraqi leaders like Uday Hussein. So Ritter is admitting to covering up the torture, sexual molestation, and murder of children for “peace” by his own words.
And that’s before I get into his two convictions for pedophilia in his own right.
Or his shameless shilling for Saddam’s Iraq, Putin’s Russia, and the Iranian Mullahs.
In addition to the many times he has blatantly and dumbly lied, such as claiming Zelenskyy banned all Ukrainian parties except “Nazis.”
Sorry for the fragmented replies.
“You are an ANTI-Globalist,Great Reset,as I am. So is Ritter,”
Fair, and that is also why I will not instinctively condemn principles just because of who does it.
“but we are also pro-MULTIPOLAR world.”
I am leery about a Multipolar World at best. I generally would be in favor of decentralization on the global scale and a retiring of most aspects of “Global Governance”, but in practice “Multipolar World” tends to mean clapping as dangerous, perfidious, and untrustworthy totalitarians, terrorist states, and other malcontents seeking their own version of a Unipolar World (and one that would be at least as bad as the Great Reset) husband their powers and expand.
Geopolitics is and always has been a dirty, nasty game and it was when the Founders created a new birth of liberty, but it is worth playing to survive and win.
Part 2
“That means ANTI-interventionist.”
In this case we respectfully disagree. I am no longer quite pro-interventionist, especially since I am now convinced that the US and the West under “current management” cannot do so very meaningfully. However, I do believe interventionism in support of and in defense of US interests is a valuable tool on the belt of a sovereign state that cannot be forgotten about. And I am consistent on this front in regards to other states.
“Which is just another way of saying,anti the following:
imperialism, economic sanctions and secondary economic sanctions.”
I honestly am more unashamedly for those things if used cleverly or productively (which I admit I have scant trust in the Biden Junta to do). Sanctions and imperialism are often misused, but does this mean we should drop them (as Biden and many other globalists do) and throw open the gates to say the Mullahs or Iran?
And Imperialism has plenty of problems, but it is also a natural political drive. It has also done a fair bit of good, as the obliteration of the maritime slave trade shows. My main qualm is on the value or benefit – or conversely the sins- of a given brand of imperialism, in a similar way to how I supported the Russians during the Chechen Wars.
Part 3
“The OTHER group of anti-Great Reset are PRO all that since they are PRO- US HEGEMONY ( world dominance).”
I am cautiously in this camp, though with caveats. I am an American Patriot and I believe that the US is the least worst option we could have among the great powers, even with the Brandon Regime and other Leftists. Especially given some of the counterpoints such as the jockeying Ummah claimants, the PRC, and yes Putin. Though the dangers that globalists in the US have shown as well as ar weariness show why I think the US should take a step back and downsize its power projection (without entirely abandoning it).
Part 4
“But to maintain it that means the US has to organize secret coups against foreign governments,”
Such has usually been the case, and frankly the US does it far less than it is usually accused of (as I’ll discuss re: Ukraine in 2014).
And honestly the world would be a far better place if the US had done some surgical coups. Venezuela for instance would not be a totalitarian Narco-terrorist nightmare supporting Islamist terrorism and allowing the US’s geostrategic enemies next door (while also starving its own people). Iran would probably be… Something other than the messianic, terrorist-sponsoring nightmare that glorified Persian Beria when we killed him and has tormented its own people.
Coups are a nasty and bloody tool and should be used sparingly given the power they hold and how few people can be trusted with it, but I do think when the situation calls they should be used.
“covert operations, support TERRORIST groups (Al-Qaida in SYRIA and LYBIA), economic “and secondary economic sanctions.”
My main objection to those in principle is supporting terrorist groups, and even then that is because I think such an evil can only be justified under the very direst of threat (such as my aforementioned discussions regarding the OUN/UPA under Bandera vs Stalin).
But regards, thank you for the reply.
Part 3
Having dealt with Ritter and his lunacy, let’s move on to the heart of the matter.
“the CIA gave financial and military assistance to the neo-Nazi military group of STEPAN BANDERA to”
And here we get to uncritically aped Kremlin propaganda, devoid of all context.
Firstly: Bandera was neither “Neo” or “Nazi.” He was a totalitarian Fascist and garbage human being by any standard except that of WWII Eastern Europe, but he was contemporary with the Nazis but developed separately from them. He also was not one of them, though this is not to his credit as he initially wanted to collaborate with the Nazis (as he made painfully clear in his “Declaration of Ukrainian Statehood”) but the Nazis had no interest in an independent Ukraine, even if it were an allied one. So they betrayed him and tried to “liquidate” “all functionaries of the Bandera Movement”, as evidence the Soviets allowed at Nuremburg showed.
But besides from this necessary caveat, the US did support him. But you know why? Because the US was supporting EVERY anti-Soviet guerilla group in the aftermath of WWII. As they were CORRECT to do so.
“I certainly agree there is a time when INTERVENTION is required,even pro-Multipolar world people agree to that.
Some of us are Conservatives,others Centrists,others Marxists( there are different kinds of Marxists)”
Understandable, and I can respect that, even though I am not really a pro-Multipolar person.
“In would be the DROIT D’INGERENCE ( by Jean-Francois REVEL,French philosopher). When in the case of like RWANDA, mass genocide.”
Agreed there.
“But it has to be a cooperative effort via the UN.”
Honestly I am leery at this at best. I have scant faith in the UN, in large part due to its negligence, misdeeds, and corruption. Rwanda is a classic case, as is its disowning of the UN Command in Korea. I am not opposed to trying to use it as an avenue for cooperation and even oppose leaving it (if only to maintain our veto and ability to gum up the works), but I am opposed to relying on it for matters of national importance. The UN is ultimately a entity that is globalist in essence, and while I do not think all globalism is evil (unlike most globalist leaders and think tanks now, who are), I do think it cannot be trusted with US sovereignty or that of most others.
This is one place where I do agree with Putin: that national prerogatives and powers should rest with the nations and the ones there.
P:art 4
“carry out a GUERILLA war against the Soviets. ”
Oh Dear. A guerilla war against the Soviets! And under Uncle Stalin no less! Why… Why would the US allow such a thing? It’s not like Stalin had mass murdered millions of people (including Ukrainians in the Holodomor), had persecuted and annihilated pro-Western democratic guerilla groups like the Polish Home Army, and was planning to launch a Third World War in order to fulfill his mentor Lenin’s ideal of world revolution!!
Oh wait…. He did and he was.
So a little context here. Stalin was actively seeking world conquest, had made his hostility to the West abundantly clear, and had long ago violated Yalta and the Percentages Agreement in order to impose Communist totalitarianism over Eastern and Central Europe in order to pave the way for war. He had also been funding anti-Western subversive activities such as the assorted Communist Parties in the West and even the ACTUAL, ORIGINAL NEO-NAZIS of Major Remer (aka “the guy who thwarted the Bunker Plot and Saved Hitler’s Government) and his Socialist Reich Party.
So Western Intelligence was supporting every anti-Soviet guerilla group in Eastern Europe. Some were Fascists or former Nazi collaborators, most were not. But it does not take a genius to see why they did it and that was correct.
Part 1
“You put it as a fight against a great evil. Against Communist IMPERIALISM.”
And it was.
“But Communism is a WESTERN ideology,by Marx. ”
Sure, though it isn’t a coincidence Marx drew from sources like Legalist philosophers in China when drawing up his work. And “Actually-existing-Communism” did mesh quite a lot with the ideologies of the cultures it dominated, like Pan-Slavism in Greater Russia or Han Nationalism in China, in much the same way as the very Eastern ideology of Pan-Asian nationalism by the Japanese drew much from Western Marxism and Fascism.
In any case, it represented an existential threat that could not be ignored, regardless of its sources.
“Plus we have regular Western imperialism.”
This is true, though I guess one question is where does “Western imperialism” meet “non-Western imperialism”? The borderlands of the region had been on the fracture points between West and East for centuries (with Kyiv being fought over between the Mongols and Lithuanians, and then the Lithuanians and Moscow).
In any case, there was no shortage of Eastern Imperialism around, and it isn’t a coincidence that statesmen in the Moscow Kremlin (whether Tsarist or Communist, ethnic Russian or Georgian or Ukrainian) worked to synthesize Western and Eastern imperialism and ideologies into new nightmares.
Part 2
”
“And NAZISM was a Western ideology.”
Agreed, though one that was at least partially based in a revolt against many Western hallmarks such as the Judeo-Christian tradition and openly romanticized parts of the Non-West, such as the Indo-Aryan Caste System (which the Proletarian Nazis identified as Race) and the Legalism of China.
“Plus the LATEST Western imperialist ideology: Great Reset-New World Order.”
Which Putin does not really object to so much as he objects to being on the receiving end of it and not top dog.
“The truth is, the NON-Western world (80% of the world ) views it all as not much different.”
The Non-Western world is hardly a monolith and they are quite capable of identifying things and telling them apart. It’s no coincidence that the longest ongoing Maoist rebellion is wedged in the heart of India.
Likewise why Xi mingles Marxism with Confucian Imperial rhetoric.
” But I agree Communism was worse,killing more( 100 million ) , than Nazism.”
Indeed, though I do think at least part of that was that Nazism was burnt out earlier.
Part 5
“In the 10 years after WW II the Banderistas,former allies of the Nazis, killed 40,000 Soviet soldiers and about 100,000 Russo-Ukrainian civilians.”
Thank you for proving my point in tat by ANY objective measure, the “Banderistas” were FAR Less evil than the Soviet Union. Not because the Banderistas were angels or even particularly GOOD.
But they killed hundreds of thousands of people and wanted to turn Ukraine into an “independent” Fascist dystopia. The Bolsheviks killed DOZENS OF MILLIONS (including millions in Ukraine alone) and wanted to turn THE WORLD into a Communist Dystopia.
Now if we truly prize America First, what should the US do? Especially since the Banderista resistance slowed Communist consolidation in Eastern Europe and drained valuable Soviet resources away during the early COld War.
This is not rocket science.
Oh, and PS: Even that tally of dead comes into dispute when you realize that the Soviets ACTIVELY USED FALSE FLAG TACTICS and KGB troops disguised as Bandera’s guerillas in order to commit atrocities.
https://www.istpravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2021/10/14/160307/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26925017
Reasonably accurate I agree, though they also closed the archives back up to one degree or another after a few records were kept. This is something Bukovsky mentions when talking about his own archives and the need to scan and smuggle them. His sources are, if nothing else, quite worth checking out.
https://bukovsky-archive.com/
In any case, I am no Bandera Simp, though I am a Devil’s Advocate. It was certainly not out of character for the Banderaistas to murder thousands upon thousands of civilians, even those that were supposedly “their own.” And indeed had they not done this so the NKGB false flag tactics would never have been so effective. But the exact magnitude of their guilt is hard to tell in large part because the Soviets intentionally muddied the water.s.
And unfortunately we may never know.
“that is terrorism, no longer national resistance,”
It was both, and it is why I do not make a point of praising Bandera or his Ukrainian Insurgent Army. I just point out that A: He was a far lesser evil than the Soviets who implemented the fucking Holodomor and violent ethnic cleansing after WWII, B: It is better that the Soviets burnt up resources and men fighting him than they did fighting Us or our proper allies, and C: The US has supported far worse people and groups for far worse reasons.
Oh, and D: The Soviets had absolutely no qualms about supporting actual Neo-Nazis like the Socialist Reich Party in order to try and destroy the West, in much the same way that Putin is happy to employ actual Neo-Nazis like Wagner Group and the Russian Imperial Movement.
“And today the Banderistas are doing the SAME, intentionally killing unarmed Russ0-Ukrainians since 2014, ”
Citation Fucking Needed.
Especially when you realize that a sizable chunk of the “Banderaistas” even among Ukrainian Neo-Fascists like Right Sector *ARE RUSSO-UKRAINIANS.* The infamous Azov Battalion had a plurality of Russian Speakers, many of whom were Russophones. And those are a lunatic fringe that haven’t had a presence in the Ukrainian Government for years after the Svoboda Cabinet Members resigned.
Part 1
“I will have to find out about the Russian Imperial Movement”
I admit my knowledge base is modest at best, but I have done a fair bit of research with friends who I trust are not globalists. And they are pretty unashamed as the odd intersection of Russian Nazi Monarchists.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200415145236/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/12/far-right-russian-group-claims-donald-trump-labelled-terrorists/
(I know it’s the Torygraph and so MSM, but it also talks about their demonization of Trump and us).
htt ps ://r u sskiymarsh .org/
(Their website, sans some gaps, so you can read for yourself).
https://www.counterextremism.com/extremists/stanislav-anatolyevich-vorobyev
” but regarding WAGNER,it is NOT neo-Nazi. It is a mercenary group, ”
The group as a whole may not be 100% Neo-Nazi, but its owner Dmitry Utkin certainly is, or at least WAS. The whole “SS and Nazi Tattoos” is a good sign.
https://www.respublica.lt/post/signs-of-neo-nazi-ideology-amongst-russian-mercenaries
And Neo-Nazis in Russia and the broader Neo-Fascist movements were popular recruiting pools for Wagner. They’ve since thinned out somewhat due to battle losses and recruitment from elsewhere (such as prisons) but it is worth tying back to their leadership’s political identity.
Part 2
”
but I have not found any reliable evidence, only affirmations,that they have a NAZI ideology. Belief in the Aryan race,admiration for Hitler. They are a regular paramilitary group.”
Understandable, and I will freely admit that reliable evidence is hard and often piecemeal. I’ve purposefully avoided making some links less due to my belief that the given evidence they present is false in this case than because I believe such sources to be so fatally politicized and untrustworthy as to be unworthy of citation (and even then a lot of crucial English language sources are borderline, like the “Countering Extremism Project”).
This is made worse by the major search browsers being intent on sending you not to new sources that are useful, but to their own toxic walled garden of hand-picked propaganda sources.
However, Russian and other language media are often much better sources, especially if you can read, and there is a significant amount of info there.
https://informnapalm.org/50087-znaki-neonacistskoj-ideologii-sredi-russkih-naemnikov/
Part 3,
In short, I think Wagner is best understood much like Azov Brigade. A paramilitary unit whose membership is fairly diverse and not all Neo-Fascist or Neo-Nazi, but whose founders and hard core leadership are avowed Neo-Fascists (and in the case of Mr. Utkin a Neo-Nazi).
“RUSSOPHONES In Ukraine about 50% of those who SELF-IDENTIFY as UKRAINIAN have as their, NATIVE language, Russian. They say their grandparents,and ancestors were ORIGINALLY Ukrainian SPEAKERS, but over the century, forgot it, left it, but that in their families, the Ukrainian identity was always kept alive.”
Indeed, and this is a common dodge used by many of the more murderous Fascists and nationalists among Ukrainians. In practice reality tended to be much more complicated, with Russians and Ukrainians sharing a common ancestry and many Ukrainians today being the children of Russian or other foreign immigrants (to say nothing of others like the Crimean Tatars once the absolute banes of all East Slavs but now loyal Ukrainians).
You’re going rabid on this, and it’s annoying.
Part 1
“The present POLISH government is giving MILITARY assistance to a Ukrainian government FULL of Banderistas ”
Firstly: This is manifestly BS. Indeed, of those in Ukraine that could honestly be called successors of Bandera and Neo-Fascists, there is a grand total of ONE MEMBER in the Ukrainian Rada, and NO Cabinet Ministers. There WERE, but Svoboda got tired with the Ukrainian Government and resigned in late 2014, thinking it might help catapult their party back to power. This backfired and instead virtually every Neo-Fascist party in Ukraine has been crushed at the polls and have no say in the government.
But let’s ignore all that.
Secondly: You wonder WHY the Poles would support “Banderistas” against Russian invasion? Well, consider doing the goddamn math. Poland lost dozens of thousands of lives to Banderista terrorism in WWII and hundreds of thousands to Ukrainian nationalists more broadly, going back to the 17th century.
In contrast, it has lost Millions Upon Millions of dead to Russian expansionism.
This is not a hard calculation to make. The Poles recognize that even the most monstrous Ukrainian nutjob is not an existential threat to them in the same way Russian expansionism is.
Part 1
“The FACT that there is a Stepan Bandera Day,since several years ago, shows the Banderistas have a lot of power and influence.”
Influence yes, power less so, especially given their weak hold there. It’s also worth noting that while Bandera was stripped of the Hero of Ukraine award (which I have mixed feelings about) the post-Maidan governments have refused to re-award it in spite of a few votes. Bandera’s modern political heirs have far less power and influence than is often made out to be, especially in the official halls of the Ukrainian government.
“A day in honor of an evil man,who was thoroughly anti-Semite.”
That he was. Though also an evil man who fought against attempts to subjugate his people. Russians still commemorate Ivan III as “the Great” for helping to break Mongol power over Russia, and Ukrainians have commemorated Khmelnitsky (who murdered far more Polish and Jewish civilians that both factions of the OUN put together) for his role in the uprising.
I don’t like it, but I also don’t have to like it. And no Ukrainian government is going to be able to escape grabbling with Bandera’s legacy and what it means for Ukrainians, both good and (mostly in my opinion) evil, given how he was a brutal, murderous, racist tyrant and terrorist but also a man who emerged from the horrors of the Holodomor by the Soviets, (relatively mild) Polish discrimination, and German mass murder.
Part 2
That doesn’t make him good and I never will claim he was. In a better world he’d have died in prison after a lengthy sentence, alone and all but unknown and unmourned. But Ukrainians do not live in a better world.
” Another evidence of the chauvinistic Bandera ideology is the 2021 law called
“The Law on the INDIGENOUS PEOPLES of Ukraine. What does it bring to national minorities” it is written JUSTIFIES linguistic and ethnic LEGAL discrimination against those who do NOT qualify,they are: RUSSIANS ( Russo-Ukrainians) and its 300,000 JEWS( very Banderista) also Poles, Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians and Moldovans( all few in number) and HUNGARIANS ( 150,000 native-speakers of it in a border region of Ukraine,Transcarpathia).
”
Untrue . The core essence of Banderaism and the wider Ukrainian Fascism it emerged from was “Long live the great, independent Ukraine without Jews, Poles, or Germans.”
Acknowledging the rights of those indigenous groups – even if curtailed in comparison to Yanukovych’s sweeping and dubiously legal laws – is far from “Banderaista.” Especially when you actually read the law and realize it was largely to curry favor of Crimean Tatars and Russophone moderates in Crimea.
Part 2
“They are in the Ukrainian army,in high positions in the civil government.”
Try citing who “they” are. Give examples, like I can point to out-and-proud Neo-Nazis like Dmitry Utkin and Stanislav Vorobyev fighting under Putin, outright Jihadi terrorists like Kadyrov, and people with a history of Neo-Nazi sentiments that they claim to have abandoned inside Russia’s government, namely Dima Medvedev.
“They agree 100% with the ethnic killing of the first wave of Banderistas that killed 80,000-100,000 POLES.”
Even if this were true- and it almost certainly isn’t for the reasons I mentioned above and how thoroughly self-avowedly Banderista parties got crushed between 2014 and 2019 – modern Ukraine’s borders already encompass all or almost all the territory claimed by the “Banderistas”, especially in the West. As such the Poles recognize that fact along with their political impotence makes them no threat to Poland.
“At the POLISH border, Ukrainian MEN 18-60 are NOT allowed to enter.Because Ukraine told the Polish government not to let them in as refugees.”
Nations in the grip of war and mobilization need able bodied fighting men. News at 11.
“However 450,000 Ukrainian men 18-60 have entered POLAND.How,they had to BRIBE the Polish guards, pay them $4,000 or $5,000. They are now living in Poland.”
Eastern Europe suffers from corruption, News at 11.
“I will have to check out about Dmitry Utkin and Stanislav Vorobyev”
Understandable. I’d suggest checking Cyrillic spellings of their names; a lot of English or other Western sources tie back to the MSM.
” but Kadyrov fought OTHER Muslims in the Chechen war,but in defense of his clan. They are divided into clans,like the Afghans.
”
As is unsurprising. ISIS fought its former father Al Qaeda after all about dogma and ambition. Kadyrov did similar.
“1. The 80,000-100,000 figure refers to the WW II Banderista massacre,not today.”
I knew that, but I was pointing out that even in light of that it doesn’t make “Banderistas” more of a threat to Poland than Russian expansionism.
“2. The best evidence of Banderista influence,beside Bandera Day, is the 2021 “The Law on the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine”. ZELENSKY, a JEW,had to sign it,though it discriminates against them.”
Did you actually read the law’s raw text? Guaranteeing the right of Jews to education in their own language is hardly “discrimination.” Indeed the most the Kremlin complained was that it did not include Russians as such an indigenous people.
“3. Another proof is the 2022 law that says that ANY Ukranian who accepts HUMANITARIAN aid(food,medicine,shelter) will get 15 YEARS in PRISON ( very Banderista)”
Something’s clearly missing, because the Ukrainian government is obviously not imprisoning people for accepting Red Cross humanitarian aid. Hell, even the Nazis didn’t do that.
Can you point to the law in question or the relevant text?
Part 1
“Another detail not given: AFTER WW II the CIA gave financial and military assistance to the FOREST BROTHERS.”
YOU SAY THAT LIKE IT’S A BAD THING.
But unlike even Bandera and his Ukrainian Insurgent Army (who originated as Fascists and self-avowed terrorists) ALMOST NO Forest Brothers units were engaged in Nazi Collaboration (and most of those that WERE were conscripted by the Germans). They answered not to some Fascist revolutionary movement but to their own pre-war Governments in Exile, recognized as legitimate by the US.
And again, they were fighting against FUCKING JOSEF STALIN, #2 in the stack up of Greatest Mass Murderers of all time and direct pupil to #1 (Mao) and inspiration to #3/4 (Hitler), who was trying to prepare for a “World Revolution” to destroy the West.
Only the most deluded and shameless Kremlin shill would be trying to shame the West for supporting guerillas fighting against literal Stalinist Genocide.
“It is a historical FACT that the Forest Brothers who fight the Soviets:
1.Had many former Nazi collaborators who approved of the killing of Jews by their leaders.”
Agreed, and I won’t deny it. Though I also note they had a significant number of Jews in their ranks.
“2. Did NOTHING to purge their movement of those killers.”
They did significantly more than Nothing, though nowhere near enough. While participating in the murders of Jews was rarely enough to get a target on your head specifically, the Forest Brothers did make a point of assassinating locals for collaboration with either the Nazis or the Soviets, with the order from Plechavičius to disband the Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force (to prevent conscription into the SS) and go into the woods, his loyalists went on a rampage shooting up the relatively few unit commanders that agreed, as well as local police that were deemed to have cooperated “too closely” with the Reich.
In any case it was an ugly, nasty conflict by mostly decentralized partisan bands in which things like justice took a very distant back seat to survival and resistance.
Part 2
I write this not to excuse those monsters among their ranks or downplay the moral sin of cooperating with them, but to underline that they were hardly the entire movement or some kind of rigid totalitarian party like the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists entered WWII as.
“How can you justify accepting as a fellow fighter those who were ok with the HOLOCAUST? 0 0”
I don’t know what I would do or do not, or how much I would mortgage my soul. But I imagine many of them would have something to do about the NKVD coming to their houses to arrest dozens of thousands of their kin and deporting them to Siberia or to death pits, and then asking us if we would instinctively know the past actions of the people in the next squad over, and if we did if we would really care, mid-firefight- what they did.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA508032.pdf
And to be honest, I can only blame them so much for that. There were no real good options in that war, only varying degrees of less-bad ones. But the Forest Brothers were too decentralized and broad tent nationalist to be tarred with the brush of genocidal collaboration as a whole, unlike even the OUN/UPA (who were happy to have their members cooperate opportunistically with the Nazis while undercover in units like the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police mass murdering their way through thousands of people)
Part 2
“They were Nazi collaborators during WW II”
No, they mostly weren’t. There were a few exceptions (such as the Arajs Commando who were prolific in the mass murder of Jews and had many of their members flee to the forest), but most Forest Brothers were either pre-war military personnel or Latvian civilians resisting collectivization and Sovietization.
Also, a little context: the Soviets smeared everybody who resisted them as a “Nazi Collaborator”, no matter how nakedly untrue this was. In particular they smeared the Polish Home Army – the group that had fought the Nazis longer than anyone in WWII – as “Nazi Collaborators” in their show trials of people like Leopold Okulicki and Witold Pilecki (the latter being the man who GOT HIMSELF THROWN IN AUSCHWITZ so he could compile a report about the Holocaust and inform the world).
All of which is conduct that the Putin Dictatorship justifies and whitewashes now.
So trying to get an honest assessment of the anti-Soviet resistance from Kremlin-aligned sources is worthless.
“The Forest Brothers first appeared in 1905. As a military group.”
But I think the question is: were they really a coherent group, or just assorted rebels and malcontents that fled to the woods to resist the Tsar during a year of revolutions? Even the much more urbanized and centralized political machines in places like occupied Poland fell into decentralization and factionalism at the time.
So actual continuity between the “Forest Brothers” of 1905 and those decades later is more dubious, in the same way that a reference to “Robin Hoods” in a medieval English manuscript hardly means affinity with a band of libertarian robbers fighting unjust royal taxation under The Robin Hood.
Part 2
” When the Baltic states were conquered by the Soviet Union there was already a military group,Forest Brothers, to resist them.”
There were usually assorted paramilitary militias, mostly born from the breakup of the great Absolutist Empires of Eastern Europe (Tsarist Russia, Kaiserreich Germany, etc) and the resistance to both Bolshevik and Soviet occupation. But these were similar but different groups, the Estonian Home Guard, the Latvian Defenders, and so on. But these were hardly united even among themselves, nor did they unite all paramilitaries (and Estonia in particular faced a conflict with schismatics of a more openly Fascist bent in the form of the Vaps Movement, who also had their own militias from veterans).
“Their chance came when the NAZIS conquered the area in 1941. So the whole group a) became the allies of the Nazis,
or b) did not, but at the same time, did NOT care to oppose,intellectually or militarily,the Nazis. Nor did that group OPPOSE the Forest Brothers who were pro-Nazi.”
Not really. Some did (and many of those that did so did in an attempt to gain resources and militia), but others stayed in the forests and shot at the Nazis. It’s also worth noting that the doctrine of the Governments in Exile was to minimize conflict with either occupation, in the hopes that the Western Allies would defeat Nazi Germany and help liberate the areas.
Part 3
It’s worth noting that this was a strategy favored by the unquestionably anti-Nazi Polish Home Army, and this had good precedent. It’s pretty much what happened in German-occupied Poland at the end of WWI (when nationalist militias from Posen to Kerch turned on their German officers).
Of course many Baltic militias took collaboration with the Nazis far further and into outright murder, and I make no apologies for people like Arajs. But the idea that people like Otto Tief were Nazis because they pursued a time-tested and wise policy of biding their time is a disservice.
“When the Germans left, they got new members but there were numerous former Nazi supporters, and even ,so I read, many GERMAN Nazi officers in the anti-Soviet fight.”
This much is very true.
Part 3
“AFTER WW II,the carried out the “Guerrilla War in the Baltics”. Tens of thousands of former Nazi allies,the Forest Brothers, fled to the forests of Lithuania and Latvia, They fought Soviet soldiers from 1945-1956, killing 14,000 Russian soldiers, And 22,000 Forest Brothers were killed.”
Again, you say this as if it were a BAD Thing, even on the libelously inaccurate face you gave it.
It wasn’t. Again, context: Stalin had already murdered dozens of millions of people and by this point had begun to crush the life out of Eastern Europe in order to prepare for a Third World War. Is it any surprise that people resisted?
“Since a few years ago,in UKRAINE ,they have an OFFICIAL holiday, Stepan Bander Day. And tens of thousands of admirers of the Nazi collaborator hold TORCH parades at nights. ”
This is true (though frankly calling Bandera a “Nazi Collaborator” is technically true but misleading, sort of like calling Shiro Ishii a “Bacteriologist.” Most of his infamous atrocities were committed after the Nazis had betrayed him). And one reason why I do not simp for the modern Ukrainian government or Bandera. The main good thing that can be said about him is that he was better than the Nazis and Soviets, which is faint praise indeed but also true.
“Bandera began his movement years before WW II.”
Indeed, which is what I was saying. His was a sort of convergent evolution with other Fascists, and was indeed a dissident outgrowth of the pre-existing Ukrainian Fascist underground (indeed, his single greatest enemy was probably Melnyk, the “Grand Old Officer” of Ukrainian Fascism).
1. The NAZIS were not above collaborating with SLAVS ( who they thought of as UNTERMENSCHEN,sub-humans).”
Agreed.
“2. They had THREE Slav allies: BULGARIA and CROATIA ( the Ustashi government) and
SLOVAKIA ( ruled by a priest).”
They had more Slavic allies than that (Such as Nedic’s Serbia), though part of this is because those were South Slavs, and thus under Nazi Racial nonsense largely Germanic in ancestry (to the point where Ustasha doctrine was that they were Goths with a Slavic Language), and more importantly they were not competitors with German colonists for “Living Space” in the East.
This is what made Hitler betray Bandera rather than any kind of anti-Nazi sentiment Bandera (didn’t) have. An independent Ukraine of any kind had no place on Hitler’s map, and so Bandera and co were in the way.
Part 3
“3. Bandera thought Hitler would create a Ukrainian state,but he was wrong.But he nonetheless collaborated with the Nazis. After he was arrested MANY Banderistas joined the SS and those SAME Banderistas”
Agreed. Though at least some of them did it as a means to get intelligence and equipment while working to betray the Nazis. Though the magnitude of their crimes makes it impossible to regard that as an excuse like it was for some of the Forest Brothers or for the Czech “Government Army.”
“were later paid by the CIA after WW II. They knew their leader was in prison,but they also knew that in Sachsenhausen camp he was relatively comfortable.”
Indeed, though they also knew the Nazis were seeking to subjugate or wipe them out, as the Soviets later acknowledged at Nuremburg. Which is why relations with the Nazis were testy at best and why Bandera’s supporters fought several major campaigns against the Nazis. (Indeed, the windfall from a failed Nazi anti-guerilla campaign the previous winter is what gave the Banderaistas the equipment and resources they used to commit wholesale genocide against Poles in Volhyna).
Part 4
”
“Now it is true that Bandera was for a few years held prisoner by the Nazis in a concentration camp, but the documents show he was WELL-TREATED, fed well,”
Most of his followers were not so lucky. Captured Nazi documents openly talked about how all “functionaries of the Bandera movement” were to be “liquidated”, with Bandera too to get that treatment at a moment of convenience that never came due to the Allied advances.
In any case, if you want to talk about Nazi Collaborators, why don’t we talk about the Socialist Reich Party headed by an actual, card-carrying Nazi, Major Otto Remer, the man who saved Hitler’s government during Operation Valkyrie? And a man who also went to work for Soviet intelligence in order to destabilize Western Germany with with first Neo-Nazi Party in history, all funded by the Soviets.
“I agree the Soviets were evil. But that in no way justifies overlooking that the US,via the CIA, used the services of FORMER NAZIS.”
Fair enough, and I agree it shouldn’t be overlooked. But I do think in many cases it was justified and can be defended, particularly in comparison to other actions by the US and CIA.
“The most famous case: OPERATION PAPERCLIP, a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959. They were all scientists who had HELPED the NAZI war effort via MILITARY research.”
Which is true and unsurprising. Prussia had been one of the most intensely militarized places in the world for centuries, and under the Nazis this intense militarization of society was expanded to totalitarian levels. All had to serve. Even the more-or-less apolitical or even outright anti-Nazis (like members of the White Rose) were roped in to the war effort of a regime they hated.
So I frankly have less of an issue with the US or other powers (even the USSR) using “former Nazis” so much as them using outright war criminals or unrepentant Nazis. Which was done plenty of times, I’ll be the first to admit. But people could hardly go around executing or imprisoning everyone who so much as joined the NSDAP with a party card (such as Oskar Schindler and Karl Plagge).
“So, no, Judaism and communism, contrary to anti-Semitic hatemongers, are not identical…. As you can see, it’s complicated…. I told my students that communism was the extreme left position….”
Ms.Goska, the extreme Left position is COLLECTIVISM. The extreme Right position is INDIVIDUALISM. That simple clarification isn’t complicated. How man arrives at that simple clarification, however, does involve a complex but not insurmountable journey through the hierarchical branches of philosophy (religion being an early form of philosophy, a precursor to rational philosophy).
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism are not identical in a myriad of superficial points, however, they all share the same fundamental philosophical unreason and faith as a means of knowledge leading to the same morality of altruism and self-sacrifice which produces the same political outcome of collectivist tyranny over the individual.
“Despite all its anti-religious posturings, Communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion: it agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff
“Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism are not identical in a myriad of superficial points, however, they all share the same fundamental philosophical unreason and faith as a means of knowledge leading to the same morality of altruism and self-sacrifice which produces the same political outcome of collectivist tyranny over the individual.”
One who can label Islam as altruistic and self sacrificial knows little about the doctrine and history of Islam. Historically Islam was spread through the sacrificial offering of the infidel (the non believer in the god of Islam) The doctrine and practice of koranic Islam is the opposite of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Your philosophy has little real discernment.
“Despite all its anti-religious posturings, Communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion: it agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff
If the above is true then Randianism is also a form of religion. It has the same system of belief at the bottom. It is atheistic and is given to attacking Christianity. The fact that it claims a new morality and promotes its form of capitalism is superficial to its philosophical base.
“Islam” means SUBMISSION. Submission to the authority of “OTHER”. That “other” is God, the god of Islam — Allah — and his earthly representative Mohammed, and their earthly representatives, the mullahs, the Muslim priesthood.
Submission means altruistic, self-sacrifice, to Allah. Another word for altruism is OTHERISM. The moral code of altruism defines morality as selflessness. To be moral one must submit, i.e., sacrifice one’s self, to other. Any other. It can be Allah, Yahweh, the neighbor, the stranger, the enemy — any and all OTHERS.
In the case of the Nazis the individual’s moral worth was his willingness to sacrifice himself to Hitler and the Aryan Race. In the case of the Soviets the individual’s moral worth was his willingness to sacrifice himself to Almighty Society. In the case of Christianity the individual’s moral worth is his willingness to sacrifice himself to, SUBMIT to, Jesus Christ.
Objectivism is NOT a religion, it is a rational philosophy which accepts only one natural reality; this reality we live in. A religion by definition is dualistic, it claims that there is this reality that we live in and can prove to exist AND that there exists another SUPERNATURAL reality beyond this one which is superior to and creates this inferior reality, who’s supernatural existence can not be rationally and logically proven but must be taken on faith.
Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is NOT altruism and self-sacrifice, that’s rational and prudent self-interest, i.e., selfishness properly and rationally defined. The formulation for altruism and self-sacrifice would be, “Don’t think of yourself at all, if you derive any personal benefit from your action, spiritual, emotional, physical, material, or financial, you are being SELF-INTERESTED, you are seeking a benefit of one kind or another, you are being SELFISH, and therefore un-virtuous.”
“If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.” – John Galt, “Atlas Shrugged”
“We ask, why are t-shirts with red stars or Mao or Stalin images considered benign, while t-shirts with swastikas or Hitler images are monstrous? I’ve never seen a fully satisfying answer and I suspect we’ll be asking that same question for some time…. There’s more going on here than the social acceptability of t-shirts with red stars… They just had to apply a new morality…. Both German Nazis and Soviet Russians pushed tribal moralities.”
Because the West’s philosophers, intellectuals, and mainstream media, were unable to cover up, or evade, the Nazi Socialist Holocaust as they were able to cover up the Soviet Socialist Holocaust. Moreover, many of the West’s intellectuals were Jews and they could not evade the reality of the EXPLICIT antisemitic nihilism of the Nazi Socialist Holocaust as easily as they could evade the anti-all of-mankind nihilism of the Soviet Socialist Holocaust.
They knew that as Jews they would have been massacred by the Nazis while they could still hold out hope that in the Soviet Socialist Holocaust they could have survived, maybe even flourished.
The Western intellectuals could not, would not, let go, would not abandon, their misplaced, perverse, corrupt, confidence and idealism in the moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice. Indeed, to this day, not only educated intellectuals but 99% of mankind can not bring themselves to even question the tribal-collectivist, evil, moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice.
“It is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon. Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes. The cause of altruism’s perpetuation into civilized eras is not physical, but psycho-epistemological: the men of self-arrested, perceptual mentality are unable to survive without tribal leadership and “protection” against reality. The doctrine of self-sacrifice does not offend them: they have no sense of self or of personal value-they do not know what it is that they are asked to sacrifice…” – Ayn Rand
This article has generated a lot of replies. The only thing criticism I would like to add is that the author should have mention the war crimes by the Allies, so it would present both sides, which are guilty of the committing atrocities.
Of all the history books I have regarding World War II, none of them ever wrote anything as to why England never declared war on Russia when they invaded Poland. I found that to be unusual for historians to not touch on that issue.
All lives do matter as the author says.
Regarding Ukrainian actions in Donbas, I don’t know anyone can deny it. 14,000 Russian-Ukrainian people were murdered over 14 years by Ukrainian forces, right on Russia’s border, between 2014 and the start of this war. Ukrainian actions were never reported in the Western press, not even in most alternative media. There was a media blackout, but these crimes have been well-documented. Ukrainian, American and European journalists have reported on it in great detail. Putin was provoked. This does not make him right in his aggression toward Ukraine. He is widely hated by Russian ex-pats living in the US. No one trusts him, but the Ukrainian government made a mistake.
Part 1 “Regarding Ukrainian actions in Donbas, I don’t know anyone can deny it.”
Because some of us were watching this conflict for the longest time and know better.
“14,000 Russian-Ukrainian people were murdered over 14 years by Ukrainian forces, right on Russia’s border,”
Citation Fucking Needed.
You’d be lucky to get those numbers if you compiled all the deaths on all sides, regardless of combatant status or allegiance (for instance counting Ukrainian Loyalist soldiers) and the “invisible” troops dispatched by the Russian Federation).
Moreover, the war originated not as a result of some kind of fantasy where the Post-Maidan government went Milosevic on “Russo-Ukrainians”, but as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine by stealth starting in March 2014 at the latest, as Putin’s government now acknowledges happened with Spetznaz in Crimea and which common sense and Girkin show happened around the same time in the Donbas.
Part 2
During a time in which I note the “Separatists” largely had the initiative and the upper hand, wiping out entire Ukrainian units that did not defect, repulsing or encircling others (like Luhansk), and massacring loyalists.
That obviously doesn’t mean that Ukrainian Loyalists were saints and none among their number ever did anything wrong; Aidar’s existence proves otherwise. But it wasn’t the kind of genocidal violence on the basis of race or language that Putin’s propagandists want to claim.
As shown by the fact that Azov Battalion – a heavily Neo-Fascist Ukrainian Loyalist paramilitary – had a PLURALITY OF ETHNIC RUSSIANS in its ranks.
” between 2014 and the start of this war. Ukrainian actions were never reported in the Western press, not even in most alternative media. There was a media blackout, ”
No, they were, especially among the Indie Press (though the MSM was useless as usual). It’s just that it was very hard for the Kremlin to spin reports and claim this when people like me pointed to the “urban renewal” in downtown Luhansk caused by Russian artillery during the siege of Luhansk Airport.
Part 3
Sort of like the supposed “Bioweapons Laboratories” (really more mundane though still unethical biological research) that Putin did not care about from 2010 to 2021 only to try and claim were a factor when he escalated the war in 2022.
It’s just that people like me pointed out that Oliver Stone and others uncritically parroting Kremlin narratives and estimates tended to be untrustworthy and often obviously wrong.
” but these crimes have been well-documented. Ukrainian, American and European journalists have reported on it in great detail.”
Ok, I’ll bite. What were these crimes and where and by whom were they well-documented? Because I have seen plenty of credible reports about Loyalist Ukrainian atrocities (many by the Ukrainian government itself regarding the likes of Aidar) but nothing like these numbers.
“Putin was provoked.”
No, he was the provoker. As even he tacitly admitted when he acknowledged the deployment of Spetznaz to Crimea in “Crimea: The Way Home” and by the investigations of the Crimean Prosecutor’s General into Russian servicepeople for the first blood of the war at Simferopol.
” This does not make him right in his aggression toward Ukraine. He is widely hated by Russian ex-pats living in the US. ”
Agreed.
“No one trusts him, but the Ukrainian government made a mistake.”
It’s made many mistakes and even crimes, but fighting against an obvious attempt by Putin to split the country using violent proxies alongside false-flagged Russian military units was not one of either.
All lives matter? For all the real horrors of antisemitism, the irony of this is how, like all of us, Jewish people conveniently forget, excuse and dismiss their own bloody history that pursued the destruction of their own Messiah they still deny and then his follower-martyrs. They can’t explain how God brought an end to the temple and its sacrificial system and religion in saving the world in sending His Son to die for many as the New Testament book of Romans so wonderfully explains. True Judaism requires sacrifices that ended in 70 AD, so without one seeing that Jesus fulfilled all that on the cross and brought it to an end, as the New Testament book of Hebrews so wonderfully shows (6:19-7:28 … (12 For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law. 13 For he of whom these things are spoken pertains to another tribe, of which no man gave attendance at the altar. 14 For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Judah; of which tribe Moses spoke nothing concerning priesthood. …), Jewish people can’t justify their present heretical system while ignoring the sacrifice God requires.
Acts 7:57-8:1
And the great and wonderful thing is how God can give repentance and forgiveness to turn murderer Saul into the apostle Paul: Act 9:3-6
Another one of Putin’s useful idiots
Part 1 “1. In 2014 there was a COUP D’ETAT of the legitimate Ukrainian government, by the US Deep State. Just like in 2011 the US Deep State”
Not really. The Ukrainian government is supposed to consist of multiple co-equal branches like our own, and Yanukovych and his executive cabinet weren’t the only democratically elected element of it. There was also the Rada, the Ukrainian Legislature, which was actually dominated by Yanukovych’s Party (the Party of Regions) and the wider coalition he led of more-or-less Pro-Russian “Blue” Parties.
Part 2
But in 2014 after months of tension, protests, rioting, and increasingly unhinged behavior from Yanukovych most of his own party joined hands with their long time opponents the Orangists to oust him after he refused to stand before the Rada and answer questions about his government’s conduct. It’s also worth noting that while a lot of these people were oligarchs involved and would very much count as “the swamp” a lot were not, being relatively recent entries into politics (many even replacing the people who had to step down since 2010). And while the US State Department obviously cheered this on and helped pull a few hooks to ease it, painting this as a Steal much like 2016 is, I think rather inaccurate. Especially given how ineffective Nuland and State Dept had been. Honestly I think it’s an example of VERY imperfect people in a VERY corrupt and imperfect system joining together to hold a lawless executive accountable, and I wish we had people willing to do the same Re: Brandon and his henchmen.
In any case, the supposed “coup” quickly began making steps for a new election.
Sorry for the misplaced replies Chcuo, the website keeps bugging and telling me my comments are too long.
Part 1 “1. In 2014 there was a COUP D’ETAT of the legitimate Ukrainian government, by the US Deep State. Just like in 2011 the US Deep State”
Not really. The Ukrainian government is supposed to consist of multiple co-equal branches like our own, and Yanukovych and his executive cabinet weren’t the only democratically elected element of it. There was also the Rada, the Ukrainian Legislature, which was actually dominated by Yanukovych’s Party (the Party of Regions) and the wider coalition he led of more-or-less Pro-Russian “Blue” Parties.
Part 2
But in 2014 after months of tension, protests, rioting, and increasingly unhinged behavior from Yanukovych most of his own party joined hands with their long time opponents the Orangists to oust him after he refused to stand before the Rada and answer questions about his government’s conduct. It’s also worth noting that while a lot of these people were oligarchs involved and would very much count as “the swamp” a lot were not, being relatively recent entries into politics (many even replacing the people who had to step down since 2010). And while the US State Department obviously cheered this on and helped pull a few hooks to ease it, painting this as a Steal much like 2016 is, I think rather inaccurate. Especially given how ineffective Nuland and State Dept had been. Honestly I think it’s an example of VERY imperfect people in a VERY corrupt and imperfect system joining together to hold a lawless executive accountable, and I wish we had people willing to do the same Re: Brandon and his henchmen.
In any case, the supposed “coup” quickly began making steps for a new election.
Part 3
Part 3
“overthrew Gaddafi,and killed him,using Al-Qaida terrorists.”
Which is one reason why I opposed intervening in Libya, even if I do relish Gaddafi’s death. But I also note that Al Qaeda largely took advantage of Gaddafi’s typically brutal reaction to dissent, and thus sparked a revolt. There were maybe 10,000 members or associates of Al Qaeda in Libya at the time the Civil War broke out. They didn’t start the ride to hell there, and they can ironically thank the Colonel for that.
Doesn’t mean Obama wasn’t acting illegally or that it was wise to intervene. It wasn’t.
“2.Since 2014 Ukraine has LOST its INDEPENDENCE, it has been a PUPPET”
I mean, compared to what?
If by the standards of Ukraine today it is a “puppet”, then it lost its independence years earlier, at the latest when Yanukovych was elected and promptly did a 180 to appease his Kremlin backers, if not years earlier during the fraud controversy around the Orange Election.
Ukraine is certainly a client of the US and other Western powers, but it is hardly a “puppet.” As shown by the many times Zelenskyy (more on him later) has gotten the cold shoulder or spoken in terms the senior globalists are unhappy of.
Great article, indeed.
I wonder if the trajectory of American ignorance of this massacre was begun with the FDR administration’s public regard for our then ally Stalin.
“I think logic tells us most are DESERTERS, got into civilian clothes, and fled EAST, to the Donbass, or into RUSSIA itself, entering as REFUGEES ( mixed among the 2 million Russo-Ukrainians who also fled to Russia since MARCH 2022, to add to the 1.5 million”
I don’t think that’s the case. I’m sure a lot of Ukrainians have deserted but I think most of those MIA were actually killed .The Ukrainian government has been obviously lying about their military deaths.
“The bombs were the PROPERTY of the Soviet and later the new Russian government. They were NOT the property of the new Ukrainian government.”
That’s not how it worked. The Russian government was a continuation and successor of the Soviet government, but it was NOT the only one. Indeed, Ukraine was and is recognized as a successor to the Soviet Union.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1686&context=djilp
Moreover, even those countries that are NOT de-jure successor states of the USSR often had a claim on its property, as we see in places like Estonia. While Marxism was the central lie of the Bolshevik ideology, the central lie of the USSR was that it was a voluntary union of “equals” including Ukraine, Russia, etc. Its dissolution was supposedly the end of that union, in which the successor nations would divvy up the property of the USSR.
And Ukraine’s right to claim part of that property is shown by things such as the partition of the Soviet Black Sea Navy *and its vessels and property.*
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Partition_Treaty_on_the_Status_and_Conditions_of_the_Black_Sea_Fleet
As such it was fairly clear that Ukraine MIGHT push forward a claim to ownership of some of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and that such a claim might be legitimate. Which for various reasons Russia, the US, and UK all agreed was undesirable.
Hence the compromise.
Part 2
“The Russian government (YELTSIN ) took the bombs out of Ukraine, and struck a deal with Ukrainian leaders that if he gave them independence, they would write into their new constitution that Ukraine would officially be NEUTRAL. In exchange, Yetsin guaranteed Ukraine would never be invaded by Russia.”
This is manifestly untrue, and all one has to do is look at the freaking Chronology.
Yeltsin recognized Ukrainian independence by December of 1991 at the very, very latest.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/03/world/ex-communist-wins-in-ukraine-yeltsin-recognizes-independence.html
The Budapest Memorandum whose terms we have talked about was not agreed to until three years later in 1994.
So Russia acknowledged Ukraine’s vote for independence and that Ukraine was independent two and a half years before the nuclear issue was settled by the Budapest negotiations.
Moreover, Ukraine’s decision to be neutral was voluntary, not a condition imposed as a result of the negotiations.
This is why it’s important to understand the primary sources.
Part 1
“There is another of those crazy situations associated with the Zelensky-Banderista-Globalist regime in Kiev.”
My love for Zelensky and the Globalists is dubious at best, but Zelenskyy is hardly a “Banderista.”
“1. There was a PETITION by Ukrainian MOTHERS of Ukrainian soldiers who have received NO contact from their sons. They want to know WHAT happened to their sons,are they dead,wounded, prisoners? The number: 320,000 mothers,thus 320,000 soldiers.
”
This is true but unfortunately pretty damn common in wartime. Comms security is big stuff and parents are routinely out of contact with their kids, even in wars far less chaotic than the modern one. Russia is having similar issues.
“2.The answer of Kiev: those 320,000 are MIAs ( missing in action).”
Which is probably at least TECHNICALLY true, even if even Kyiv would acknowledge a part of that is dead, they just can’t confirm the deaths yet.
Part 2
“3. The estimates of those killed varies,some say 80,000,others 120,000. We also know 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers are PRISONERS of Russia. However they are allowed CONTACT with their mothers.”
Indeed, as they should be. It’ll take a while before the dust clears and both sides stop lying about their losses and those of the enemy for us to get a better estimate.
It’s also why I don’t blame Putin’s Russia (in spite of my fierce bias against him) for this, unlike other things like lies about the nature of the callup. War’s hard and systems way less corrupt and politicized than the Ukrainian military have trouble keeping track of troops in combat.
“4. Officially,I think Ukraine still says about 8,000 or so Ukrainian soldiers have been killed,thus they are NOT in the MIA list of 320,000.”
As is appropriate, since MIAs are SUPPOSED TO be those whose fates are unknown and who are missing; KIAs are those people can confirm as KIAs. And even then the 8,000 KIA is a lowball that at BEST might apply to official soldiers. And even then probably not.
Part 3
“Also the Kiev regime recognizes lots of Ukrainian soldiers as WOUNDED. How many,people estimate about 200,000 wounded. Thus THEY are not in the 320,000 MIA list.”
Because a guy who had a finger blown off and is being treated in a major hospital isn’t Missing, their location is known. A guy who had his finger blown off and is being treated in a dinky first aid station behind the front that doesn’t keep good records on who they treat or how many might fit into the MIA tally, but not people convalescing in places like Lviv and Kyiv (beyond crazy bad record keeping, which granted is always a possibility).
“If we say 100,000 killed,it leaves us with 220,000 who are NOT prisoners,nor wounded,nor dead.”
Where the hell would we get those kinds of numbers? Even the Russians don’t officially claim to have killed that many Ukrainians total, or inflicted those kinds of losses.
“What happened to THEM?”
Probably they don’t exist, with real casualties being about a third of the figure with maybe 25,000+ combatant dead.
Part 4
“I think logic tells us most are DESERTERS, got into civilian clothes, and fled EAST, to the Donbass, or into RUSSIA itself, entering as REFUGEES ( mixed among the 2 million Russo-Ukrainians who also fled to Russia since MARCH 2022, to add to the 1.5 million”
No, that isn’t what the logic tells us.
Firstly because the fighting on the Donbas is dominated by STATIC WARFARE so you’d be unlikely to get through your own lines and even less likely to approach Separatist/Russian positions without being shot. Which is why in positional warfare like WWI or Korea deserters tended to flee to neutral countries bordering their positions or just disappear into their own countryside.
SecondlY: again, what are your sources for the numbers? I legitimately would like to know because I haven’t seen even the Russian Gov’t claim them.
“Russo-Ukrainians who fled to Russia from 2014-2021 as refugees from the Banderistas).”
That’s true, though those numbers are padded out by forced relocations by Russian and Separatist troops, such as forced adoptions. Most people fleeing the war in the Donbas from 2014 fled West towards Ukraine proper or even further (hence the number of Ukrainians in places like Poland).