Yasha, I continue to admire your extraordinary distaste for reductive judgement. May I suggest that flag-semantic vagaries, "the prime myths .....the language, the culture, the heroes, the symbols..." and the ongoing sausage factory not only rewriting, but enforcing the suppression and erasure of, history, all remain prime movers of the American brand of nationalism as well. The long history of institutional and political sheltering, and Faustian bargains made, as you've noted here and elsewhere, by the US imperium with these very fascists and other authoritarian malefactors merely underscores the observation.
"And look, it’s true that symbols change meaning. They get edited along the way to fit changing cultural and political conditions. People pull what’s useful from a myth or from a text and discard the rest. Meanings get inverted. That’s not surprising or even that interesting."
What's interesting and meaningful to me is the question of who did it? Who permitted (or didn't permit certain kinds of) editing, pulling, and discarding? Why did these people have the ability to give permission for this to happen?
"That’s how a surviving member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS could be rebranded"
No, too much non-agency in your analysis. While it's entirely possible natural ignorance, haste, and/or laziness can explain part of this, somebody had consciously to come up with this scum's name and hand it to somebody else for approval.
(BTW, mainstream ie Zionist Jewish groups in Canada were up-in-arms about this [unlike their southern versions, whom, I suspect, have been told to shut up by various official and unofficial gate-keepers]. Mind, this could easily be because, like many on Canada's Right, they hate Trudeau and want to pile onto him anything, even the nonsensical, in the hopes it will get him out and the Cons in.)
"This isn’t Bandera’s Ukraine."
Sure, but what do you want to bet it can become it again during the next Big Crisis? Not to mention that, while there are Jews who seem copacetic with this, will any news focus on the LGTBQ folks or Roma who get beaten and burned to death?
Pro-Banderite Jews might want to look at these people:
"I don’t think this makes Ukraine into some kind of freak or aberration."
True, but it's a much speeded-up version of what's been happening for the past thirty-some-odd years world wide, kind of like William Gibson's description of future shock: "a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button." Ukraine's had to be caught up.
"It all seems rather natural, doesn’t it?"
Yup, it's _supposed to seem natural_ because it isn't.
To put it another way: there are Nazis in every country on Earth. Including Israel: google Patrol 36! A country having Nazis is not in and of itself a good reason to invade said country.
And anyway as we’ve seen from America’s Special Military Operation to Denazify Afghanistan and America’s Special Military Operation to Denazify Iraq, invading a country because it has a death cult does not make the death cult go away.
Why did Al Qaeda do 9/11? Al Qaeda did 9/11 because their apocalyptic worldview required us to be at war with them, so they wanted us to _notice me senpai_! Likewise, what justifies Russophobia in the mind of a Banderite better than a Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Nazis are narcissistic divas who crave attention. Divas are very difficult to deal with.
To be somewhat more succinct, if we define “a Nazi” as “a registered member of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (1920-1945)”, then Bandera wouldn’t qualify, so one needs be more abstract, don’t you think?
Also seriously google Hitler and Wagnerian opera if you want to discuss Nazis and literal, *literal* divas.
I’m obviously paraphrasing here, but the thing that made Adolf Eichmann go from merely hating Jews to being wildly efficient at killing Jews was that he wanted senpai to notice him.
(Yes, I read all of _Eichmann in Jerusalem_, albeit like four years ago. But aside from the fact that it’s been a while, so my recollection is increasingly fuzzy, I’m only interested in critically discussing the book with you if you’ve actually read it yourself.)
Thanks Yasha, great article. Out of interest, Canada had the largest community of Ukrainian descent outside of Ukraine and Russia. Many are descendants of immigrants from late 19th and early 20th centuries who settled on the rich farmlands of central Canada. However, many are descendants of collaborators who fled after the end of WW2 and settled here. For instance a senior member of the current Government - Chrystia Freeland - who has a grandfather who collaborated with the nazis and published an anti-Semitic newspaper. Not her fault who she is descended from, but she has never denounced or expressed regret about the actions of her grandfather. Unfortunately the extreme nationalists who are the ideological descendants of Bandera have control over the main Ukrainian/Canadian organizations and lobby groups. Alas this all seems a repeat of what happened with the Croatian community here during the 1990s with breakup of Yugoslavia and the revival of the reputations of such obnoxious and murderous Ustase leaders as Ante Pavelic. Also it’s maddening when some nationalists and sympathetic journalists try to excuse the actions of leaders like Bandera as a reaction to the brutalities of the Stalinist state. What’s missing is the story of how despite Stalin, millions of brave Ukrainians fought in the Red Army and partisan groups to help defeat the scourge of nazism.
I mean one thing that annoys me with the focus on the Banderites is that early in the war there was also a group in Russia that collaborated with the Nazis and committed widespread atrocities. You don’t hear much about them from the people who talk about the OUN-B, but you might have heard of them nonetheless: the group was called the РККА/RККА, or the Krasnaya Armiya, for short.
(Obviously I’m being facetious, but the contortions people go into to defend the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact are just ridiculous.)
Let’s first stipulate that the original Azov Battalion, founded in May 2014, was Bad Actually. Okay?
When Petro Poroshenko became President of Ukraine in June 2014, the Ukrainian government was weak and desperate. Attempting to repress a substantial fascist militia while also facing an insurgency sounds like a great way to find oneself facing… two insurgencies. So in November 2014 the Poroshenko government nationalized the militia, in an attempt to keep it under the control of the dysfunctional but still basically democratic central government. Since that time casualties have been high enough that basically zero original Azov militiamen remain. While there are still Nazis in the Ukrainian armed forces, they are difficult to quantify, and there isn’t a lot of evidence that the commend structure of the current Azov Brigade, specifically, is particularly Nazi.
Now, for comparison, let’s first stipulate that Nazi Germany, as in the German state between 1933 and 1945, was Bad Actually. Okay?
The Soviet Union in 1939 was weak and desperate. Still less than twenty years out from a catastrophic civil war that killed 2 million people, half a decade out from a catastrophic famine that killed another 5-9 million people, and just a year out from the paranoid autoimmune flareup of the Yezhovshchina, which killed another 700k to 1.2 million people (disproportionately from the party elite), the Soviet Union also, in its two decades of existence, had as of yet still failed to sign any major treaties with foreign powers to guarantee its peace.
The Soviet Union’s not-quite-adjacent neighbor, Nazi Germany, was a clear threat to Soviet security, and, incidentally, Nazi German was also internationally isolated and desperate (though somewhat less weakened due to civil war and famine). Starting a war with Nazi Germany would have been suicidal, so the Soviet Union instead signed a non-aggression pact with them, in the hopes of forestalling at least Nazi Germany as a future threat.
Anyway in September 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly invaded Poland and the Baltic states, but we won’t dwell on that.
The important thing is that in June 1941 Nazi Germany betrayed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union. And while the United States, despite its historical ties with France and Britain, had been trying to stay out of the war, in December 1941 Germany’s ally Japan got itchy and preemptively attacked the US territory of Hawaii, leading to the US declaring war on Japan, Japan declaring war on the US, and Japan’s ally Germany declaring war on the US. As the Soviet Union had joined the Allies in July of 1941, once the United States formally joined the Allies in December 1941, the United States was formally allied with the Soviet Union, and during the course of the war the United States provided military aid to the Soviet Union, mostly by way of Iran.
Back to the present day.
In February 2022, after having used proxy forces (“little green men”) up to that point, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, uniformed troops and all. The US and its allies, which up to that point had maintained a certain distance from the basket case of Ukrainian politics (while still, of course, trying to exploit Ukraine for domestic gain—both Hunter Biden and Donald Trump doing this), began aggressively dumping more and more advanced weaponry into Ukraine.
Now, obviously, Russia is not Nazi Germany. (Though, also, obviously, Russia is not the Soviet Union.) The parallel I am drawing, specifically, is this:
On the one hand, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, then proceeded to commit atrocities, and nonetheless the US and UK came to its aid when Nazi Germans betrayed and invaded the Soviet Union.
On the other hand, Ukraine incorporated the Azov Battalion into the Ukrainian National Guard after the Azov Battalion had committed atrocities, and nonetheless the US and the UK came to its aid when Russia invaded Ukraine.
The target of my criticism, here, are the people who say that Ukraine is “a Nazi state” (or anything along those lines) for nationalizing Azov, despite Ukraine having had two election cycles and a democratic change in government since having done so, yet nonetheless bend over backwards into contortions to defend the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Being a Marxist requires ideological consistency. Sure, yes, Marxism-Leninism wiggles out of it a bit by handwaving and invoking “dialectical materialism”, that is, the fact that material circumstances make things more complicated, but if one invokes dialectical materialism to defend the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or, even more astonishingly, the Soviet invasion of the Baltic states, how can one not invoke dialectical materialism to defend the actions of the democratically elected government of Ukraine trying to keep its domestic neo-Nazis under control?
Is it just that, maybe, perhaps, when people invoke “dialectical materialism”, what they’re really doing is talking about how they want to fuck Josef Stalin?
I’m a communist. My comment is exclusively about the Soviet invasion of Poland and the Baltic states, which is really hard to justify. Hence the disclaimer!
Anyway I’m Team Makhnovshchina. How do you create the power vacuum necessary for a fascist movement? Kill all the communists who are the “wrong” sort of communists. Socialism in one country my ass…
So… are you saying that an ice pick to the skull is your preferred way of dealing with ideological disagreements on the left? Because I’m pretty sure that would violate Substack’s ToS lol 🤓
Lots of comments in the local on-line paper (a right-of-center rag but still better than the even more right-wing one), and, sure as shit stinks, the Usual Suspects either screaming for Trudeau's head or blaming those evil Rooskies.
Yasha, I continue to admire your extraordinary distaste for reductive judgement. May I suggest that flag-semantic vagaries, "the prime myths .....the language, the culture, the heroes, the symbols..." and the ongoing sausage factory not only rewriting, but enforcing the suppression and erasure of, history, all remain prime movers of the American brand of nationalism as well. The long history of institutional and political sheltering, and Faustian bargains made, as you've noted here and elsewhere, by the US imperium with these very fascists and other authoritarian malefactors merely underscores the observation.
This stuff just makes my head want to explode, its the Stockholm Syndrome gone nuclear.
"And look, it’s true that symbols change meaning. They get edited along the way to fit changing cultural and political conditions. People pull what’s useful from a myth or from a text and discard the rest. Meanings get inverted. That’s not surprising or even that interesting."
What's interesting and meaningful to me is the question of who did it? Who permitted (or didn't permit certain kinds of) editing, pulling, and discarding? Why did these people have the ability to give permission for this to happen?
"That’s how a surviving member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS could be rebranded"
No, too much non-agency in your analysis. While it's entirely possible natural ignorance, haste, and/or laziness can explain part of this, somebody had consciously to come up with this scum's name and hand it to somebody else for approval.
(BTW, mainstream ie Zionist Jewish groups in Canada were up-in-arms about this [unlike their southern versions, whom, I suspect, have been told to shut up by various official and unofficial gate-keepers]. Mind, this could easily be because, like many on Canada's Right, they hate Trudeau and want to pile onto him anything, even the nonsensical, in the hopes it will get him out and the Cons in.)
"This isn’t Bandera’s Ukraine."
Sure, but what do you want to bet it can become it again during the next Big Crisis? Not to mention that, while there are Jews who seem copacetic with this, will any news focus on the LGTBQ folks or Roma who get beaten and burned to death?
Pro-Banderite Jews might want to look at these people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews
"I don’t think this makes Ukraine into some kind of freak or aberration."
True, but it's a much speeded-up version of what's been happening for the past thirty-some-odd years world wide, kind of like William Gibson's description of future shock: "a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button." Ukraine's had to be caught up.
"It all seems rather natural, doesn’t it?"
Yup, it's _supposed to seem natural_ because it isn't.
To put it another way: there are Nazis in every country on Earth. Including Israel: google Patrol 36! A country having Nazis is not in and of itself a good reason to invade said country.
And anyway as we’ve seen from America’s Special Military Operation to Denazify Afghanistan and America’s Special Military Operation to Denazify Iraq, invading a country because it has a death cult does not make the death cult go away.
Why did Al Qaeda do 9/11? Al Qaeda did 9/11 because their apocalyptic worldview required us to be at war with them, so they wanted us to _notice me senpai_! Likewise, what justifies Russophobia in the mind of a Banderite better than a Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Nazis are narcissistic divas who crave attention. Divas are very difficult to deal with.
Do you even know what a Nazi is, aside from a pejorative?
"Divas are very difficult to deal with."
Oh, yeah; I'm getting that . . . .
Keep it civil on here.
To be somewhat more succinct, if we define “a Nazi” as “a registered member of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (1920-1945)”, then Bandera wouldn’t qualify, so one needs be more abstract, don’t you think?
Also seriously google Hitler and Wagnerian opera if you want to discuss Nazis and literal, *literal* divas.
I’m obviously paraphrasing here, but the thing that made Adolf Eichmann go from merely hating Jews to being wildly efficient at killing Jews was that he wanted senpai to notice him.
(Yes, I read all of _Eichmann in Jerusalem_, albeit like four years ago. But aside from the fact that it’s been a while, so my recollection is increasingly fuzzy, I’m only interested in critically discussing the book with you if you’ve actually read it yourself.)
Something being normalized does not make it good, obviously!
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/notes-from-a-normal-country
Thanks Yasha, great article. Out of interest, Canada had the largest community of Ukrainian descent outside of Ukraine and Russia. Many are descendants of immigrants from late 19th and early 20th centuries who settled on the rich farmlands of central Canada. However, many are descendants of collaborators who fled after the end of WW2 and settled here. For instance a senior member of the current Government - Chrystia Freeland - who has a grandfather who collaborated with the nazis and published an anti-Semitic newspaper. Not her fault who she is descended from, but she has never denounced or expressed regret about the actions of her grandfather. Unfortunately the extreme nationalists who are the ideological descendants of Bandera have control over the main Ukrainian/Canadian organizations and lobby groups. Alas this all seems a repeat of what happened with the Croatian community here during the 1990s with breakup of Yugoslavia and the revival of the reputations of such obnoxious and murderous Ustase leaders as Ante Pavelic. Also it’s maddening when some nationalists and sympathetic journalists try to excuse the actions of leaders like Bandera as a reaction to the brutalities of the Stalinist state. What’s missing is the story of how despite Stalin, millions of brave Ukrainians fought in the Red Army and partisan groups to help defeat the scourge of nazism.
The Bottlemen podcast (RIP) called this “Operation Mapleclip”, for obvious reasons:
https://thebottlemen.podbean.com/e/preview-victims-of-victims-of-communism-part-3-operation-mapleclip/
I mean one thing that annoys me with the focus on the Banderites is that early in the war there was also a group in Russia that collaborated with the Nazis and committed widespread atrocities. You don’t hear much about them from the people who talk about the OUN-B, but you might have heard of them nonetheless: the group was called the РККА/RККА, or the Krasnaya Armiya, for short.
(Obviously I’m being facetious, but the contortions people go into to defend the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact are just ridiculous.)
Oh, puh-leese! Horseshoe Theory, here? Fuck you!
To make my comparison more explicit:
Let’s first stipulate that the original Azov Battalion, founded in May 2014, was Bad Actually. Okay?
When Petro Poroshenko became President of Ukraine in June 2014, the Ukrainian government was weak and desperate. Attempting to repress a substantial fascist militia while also facing an insurgency sounds like a great way to find oneself facing… two insurgencies. So in November 2014 the Poroshenko government nationalized the militia, in an attempt to keep it under the control of the dysfunctional but still basically democratic central government. Since that time casualties have been high enough that basically zero original Azov militiamen remain. While there are still Nazis in the Ukrainian armed forces, they are difficult to quantify, and there isn’t a lot of evidence that the commend structure of the current Azov Brigade, specifically, is particularly Nazi.
Now, for comparison, let’s first stipulate that Nazi Germany, as in the German state between 1933 and 1945, was Bad Actually. Okay?
The Soviet Union in 1939 was weak and desperate. Still less than twenty years out from a catastrophic civil war that killed 2 million people, half a decade out from a catastrophic famine that killed another 5-9 million people, and just a year out from the paranoid autoimmune flareup of the Yezhovshchina, which killed another 700k to 1.2 million people (disproportionately from the party elite), the Soviet Union also, in its two decades of existence, had as of yet still failed to sign any major treaties with foreign powers to guarantee its peace.
The Soviet Union’s not-quite-adjacent neighbor, Nazi Germany, was a clear threat to Soviet security, and, incidentally, Nazi German was also internationally isolated and desperate (though somewhat less weakened due to civil war and famine). Starting a war with Nazi Germany would have been suicidal, so the Soviet Union instead signed a non-aggression pact with them, in the hopes of forestalling at least Nazi Germany as a future threat.
Anyway in September 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly invaded Poland and the Baltic states, but we won’t dwell on that.
The important thing is that in June 1941 Nazi Germany betrayed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union. And while the United States, despite its historical ties with France and Britain, had been trying to stay out of the war, in December 1941 Germany’s ally Japan got itchy and preemptively attacked the US territory of Hawaii, leading to the US declaring war on Japan, Japan declaring war on the US, and Japan’s ally Germany declaring war on the US. As the Soviet Union had joined the Allies in July of 1941, once the United States formally joined the Allies in December 1941, the United States was formally allied with the Soviet Union, and during the course of the war the United States provided military aid to the Soviet Union, mostly by way of Iran.
Back to the present day.
In February 2022, after having used proxy forces (“little green men”) up to that point, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, uniformed troops and all. The US and its allies, which up to that point had maintained a certain distance from the basket case of Ukrainian politics (while still, of course, trying to exploit Ukraine for domestic gain—both Hunter Biden and Donald Trump doing this), began aggressively dumping more and more advanced weaponry into Ukraine.
Now, obviously, Russia is not Nazi Germany. (Though, also, obviously, Russia is not the Soviet Union.) The parallel I am drawing, specifically, is this:
On the one hand, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, then proceeded to commit atrocities, and nonetheless the US and UK came to its aid when Nazi Germans betrayed and invaded the Soviet Union.
On the other hand, Ukraine incorporated the Azov Battalion into the Ukrainian National Guard after the Azov Battalion had committed atrocities, and nonetheless the US and the UK came to its aid when Russia invaded Ukraine.
The target of my criticism, here, are the people who say that Ukraine is “a Nazi state” (or anything along those lines) for nationalizing Azov, despite Ukraine having had two election cycles and a democratic change in government since having done so, yet nonetheless bend over backwards into contortions to defend the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Being a Marxist requires ideological consistency. Sure, yes, Marxism-Leninism wiggles out of it a bit by handwaving and invoking “dialectical materialism”, that is, the fact that material circumstances make things more complicated, but if one invokes dialectical materialism to defend the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or, even more astonishingly, the Soviet invasion of the Baltic states, how can one not invoke dialectical materialism to defend the actions of the democratically elected government of Ukraine trying to keep its domestic neo-Nazis under control?
Is it just that, maybe, perhaps, when people invoke “dialectical materialism”, what they’re really doing is talking about how they want to fuck Josef Stalin?
https://imgur.com/M4JI09q
(Yass, bae! Send me to your gulag, bae! You know how I like it! Just like that!)
I’m a communist. My comment is exclusively about the Soviet invasion of Poland and the Baltic states, which is really hard to justify. Hence the disclaimer!
Anyway I’m Team Makhnovshchina. How do you create the power vacuum necessary for a fascist movement? Kill all the communists who are the “wrong” sort of communists. Socialism in one country my ass…
"I’m a communist"
Uh-huh . . . .
So… are you saying that an ice pick to the skull is your preferred way of dealing with ideological disagreements on the left? Because I’m pretty sure that would violate Substack’s ToS lol 🤓
Lots of comments in the local on-line paper (a right-of-center rag but still better than the even more right-wing one), and, sure as shit stinks, the Usual Suspects either screaming for Trudeau's head or blaming those evil Rooskies.
May also be of interest https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/02/the-historian-whitewashing-ukraines-past-volodymyr-viatrovych/?fbclid=IwAR24n9xLgjuXKl6Ooq-5J-0dfniQfyoSMJqoYjndxcTXgTwL-zz8MmpCYwM
Archived version to avoid paywall https://archive.ph/HChCs#selection-1531.0-1781.262
The long to belong runs deep within the human spirit. The "longbonging" if you will.
May be of interest https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/02/03/how-a-network-of-nazi-propagandists-helped-lay-the-groundwork-for-the-war-in-ukraine/