A Ukrainian group named after the hometown of Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera won the Eurovision competition last night. Given the politics in Europe, this is hardly a surprise.
Meanwhile a photo of the alleged Buffalo mass shooter apparently a white-supremacist symbol used by the Azov battalion in Ukraine. The manifesto connected to the alleged shooter is full of white-supremacists and antisemitic ideology.
The apparent connection between white-supremacist terrorists and Azov and allied groups in Ukraine should hardly be surprising. Back in 2018, Time magazine documented how Ukrainian groups recruit and support members throughout the US and western Europe.
Curiously the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Antidefamation League have quietly expunged its earlier warnings about the Azov battalion and similar white-supremacist groups in Ukraine. They were an issue when Trump was president, but now any concerns have disappeared. Everything is better now that Biden is president!
In the 1920s and 30s, US media covered the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany in positive and sometimes glowing terms. Fascists were the cool kids on the block back then.
They fashion themselves after the UPA fascists who fought against Stalin at the end of World War II. New monuments to the UPA have been built in Ukraine since 2014.
While the UPA fought against Communist tyranny, they also collaborated with the Germans and were responsible for brutal attacks against Polish civilians. Should they be honored as heroes?
The methods used by UPA to carry out the massacres were particularly brutal and were committed indiscriminately without any restraint. Historian Norman Davies describes the killings: “Villages were torched. Roman Catholic priests were axed or crucified. Churches were burned with all their parishioners. Isolated farms were attacked by gangs carrying pitchforks and kitchen knives. Throats were cut. Pregnant women were bayoneted. Children were cut in two. Men were ambushed in the field and led away.”[75] In total, the estimated numbers of Polish civilians killed by UPA in Volhynia and Galicia is about 100,000.[76][77][78] On 22 July 2016, the Sejm of the Republic of Poland passed a resolution declaring the massacres committed by UPA a genocide. Ukrainian Insurgent Army - Wikipedia
The Eurovision group included a plea for foreign intervention at Azovstal. A large portion of the remaining Azov Battalion is trapped in underground bunkers under the Soviet-era steel plant surrounded by Russian and allied forces.
Members of Ukraine’s Azov battalion trapped inside Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant have said they fear they will be killed if captured by Russian forces, as they pleaded with Ukrainian authorities to help arrange their extraction.
Speaking to the media from inside the besieged steelworks, an Azov commander and lieutenant, looking gaunt and pale, said they had defended the city for the people of Ukraine and the rest of the world and needed a third party to negotiate their exit whether by land or sea.
Videos of Ukrainians torturing and killing Russian POWs are not helping either. Nor are reports of Azov fighters using civilians as human shields.
The fact that Ukraine is erecting monuments to groups who did similar things 75 years ago certainly makes the reports plausible. Fascists act like fascists.
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