It’s hard to believe one’s eyes while witnessing the latest performance put on by the comedian tyrant of Ukraine.
By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
Within the space of a week or so, the regime of president-for-eternity-no-elections-needed Vladimir Zelensky has repatriated and reburied with pomp and ceremony the remains of Andrey Melnik, a twentieth-century Ukrainian fascist leader and Nazi collaborator, and named a contemporary military elite unit “Heroes of the UPA” (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of World War Two).
The UPA was, in effect, the military arm of the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN had two political wings that mattered, one under Andrey Melnik, the other under Stepan Bandera. They were rivals, but both were fascists.
During the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both OUN wings tried to collaborate with the Nazis. The Nazis, in their arrogance, did not always let them, but the whole OUN was very eager to please. The OUN and the UPA also participated in murderous German violence against Jews, serving as pro-active mass murder auxiliaries. In addition, they conducted a genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign of their own against Poles.
Predictably, the in-your-face obscenity of Kiev’s latest fascism worship has provoked Israel as well as Poland. Polish president Nawrocki would like to deprive Zelensky of the high state honors that Warsaw has foolishly bestowed on him and has threatened to curtail Poland’s support for Kiev’s EU ambitions. In Israel, both its official Holocaust remembrance and exploitation agency Yad Vashem and the foreign ministry have taken exception.
Official Kiev is in the middle of devastating corruption scandals and shaken by mortifying revelations about Zelensky personally from a well-informed insider speaking to one of America’s most influential journalists.
Yet its ruling clique finds time to really rub it in, again. How much it cannot stop hugging Nazis, dead and alive? Costs in foreign-policy terms? Apparently, no big deal: When the Nazi-loving urge itches really bad, to hell with caution and, very unusually for Kiev, even dissembling.
Some observers speculate that the fascism fetish is being escalated in public again because of the scandals and continually plunging popularity of the regime. Zelensky and the rest of his governing circle, such commentators believe, are merely using the Nazi play “out of a position of weakness” to distract from the state of Ukrainian politics.
This is a mistake. It is time that even the slowest in the West accept a simple truth about Zelensky, one he is not even hiding. He genuinely likes fascists. And, with his extremely cynical manipulation techniques, his vicious persecution of political opposition and any dissent, his abuse of the mass media for propaganda, and his deep contempt for democracy, he has much heartfelt affinity with them, to say the least.
Silly, and actually racist, pseudo-arguments advanced by Western proxy war boosters that Zelensky can’t possibly ally with a violent far-right because he is Jewish deserve no serious answer.
The current Israeli regime and its policies of war, genocide, supremacy, and ethnic cleansing are fascist. Case closed.
In fact, the Zelensky regime has a longstanding, consistent habit of pandering to, working with, employing at high levels and on a large scale, and honoring the very far right. Some may love to quibble about terminology, but in reality, those labeled Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, fascists, ultra-nationalists and similar movements form a large whole having much more in common than not.
Re-labelling has also served to spread what the author describes as long-standing historical distortions.
In Ukraine, there is a tradition of repackaging Ukrainian World War II fascists associated with terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing. According to Amar, re-labelling these figures as “integral nationalists” does not alter the historical record.
And so it is in the present, too. Play with words as much as you like, a fact remains a fact, that Zelensky’s Ukraine is a state with a big fascism problem.
According to the author, the roots of that problem extend back to the period between World Wars I and II, expanding significantly during World War II itself. After the Soviet victory in 1945, many of these ideological movements survived among émigré communities in the United States, Canada and Europe.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, these networks returned to independent Ukraine and, according to Amar, reintroduced their ideological traditions into Ukrainian public life and historical memory.
In that long-term sense, Zelensky and his regime’s sympathy for the fascist devil is part of a deeper story.
Yet Zelensky’s personal contribution is not merely substantial but crucial. First because he has gone farther than any post-independence leader of Ukraine in making fascism part of a new political normality. And second, because in a world dominated by identity politics, he has, in effect, exploited his Jewishness to promote the normalization of fascism.
It is hard to imagine a greater intellectual and moral perversion. But then again, it’s Zelensky.
Source: RT
Author: Tarik Cyril Amar