The U.S. loves nationalism
It's good for the empire.
Ever since the Canadian parliament did a reenactment of a scene out of Starship Troopers by giving a standing ovation to a member of the Ukrainian SS division, lots of articles been written and a lot of tweets have been posted.
Some have dug deeper into the scandal, revealing that this was no fluke: Members of this SS division have been long integrated into various Canadian cultural and political structures. They even run a Ukrainian a studies division and fund scholarship endowments at a top Canadian university.1 Others have tried to whitewash the whole thing: Justin Trudeau blamed it all on Russian propaganda and Politico’s EU division ran a true masterpiece of an essay, arguing that people, and specifically Jews, have been sadly and wrongly conditioned to hate on the Waffen SS…when, after all, not everyone who was in the SS was a bad guy and that history really is complex.2
Yes, a lot to ponder here. No doubt about that.
But as I sit here and survey the ongoing response to this SS cheering scandal, I do think that a larger story is being missed. This is bigger than just a few SS sociopaths living comfortable lives in the west…it’s about a long-running strategy by the United States (with Canada helping on the side) to rescue and rehabilitate nationalist and fascist movements — some of which had been allied with Nazi Germany and did genocide on their own turf — and then to weaponize them for imperial aims.
This approach — using nationalist movements abroad while supporting nationalist immigrant communities here at home — has been a major plank of U.S. foreign policy going back to the very end of World War II. It was first unleashed with the hopes of destabilizing and fomenting insurgencies and unrest within the Soviet Bloc. But this strategy has outlived the Soviet Union and has relevance today. It continues in all sorts of different forms, wherever the empire thinks it has something to gain by meddling in internal ethnic conflicts. Ukraine, Russia, China — these are just a few examples.3 If you dip into the history of this thing, you quickly realize that a giant soft power apparatus has been built up over the years based on this strategy. It’s become such an integrated part of America’s imperial management style that few even notice it’s there. It runs on autopilot. It’s not controversial.
This support for nationalist/separatist movements and the immigrant communities that produce them has always been selective. The brain bugs of this empire of ours aren’t universalists. They care about the plight of a people only when the interests of this people intersect with their own imperial aims. So you won’t see the State Department funding Palestinian nationalism or Shia nationalism inside Saudi Arabia or anything like that. And of course the brain bugs change their minds from time to time in line with shifting international conditions. Some nationalisms that had been deemed vital to the free world and worthy of U.S. backing can fall out favor and become the enemy — a good nationalism can suddenly turn bad.
Russian nationalism is one such, eh, victim. When the Soviet Union was still around, the U.S. tried weaponizing White Russian exiles and their imperialist-religious-nationalist ideology as a liberatory movement. This support was most visible in the sainthood of Alexander Solzhenitsyn — a monarchist and Russian imperialist who was hailed as a hero against Soviet evil. But now that this White Russian ideology has become part of the Russian state and Russian nationalism has turned against the U.S. and “the West” rather than the a foreign enemy, backing it no longer serves the empire’s interests. So now these brain bugs tell us Russian nationalism is the most dangerous ideology known to man and that Solzhenitsyn was a blood-thirsty imperialist whose ideas helped inform Putin and led directly to Russia’s attack on Ukraine.4 They hope no one remembers their previous support for this stuff — and of course no one does.
An inquisitive mind might look at this and think, “Hey, did supporting Russian nationalism and imperialism against the Soviet Union contribute to the rise of this ideology and possibly help produce a blowback effect that we’re seeing now?” And the answer this inquisitive mind might reach would be, “Yes, there’s something to it.” But then our empire loves a good blowback, thrives on it even. Meanwhile, a Ukrainian nationalism molded by fascists and Nazi collaborators is considered an ideology of liberation and freedom… The wheel keeps turning
I’ve written about this stuff before in bits and pieces.5 I have a personal interest because my life is intertwined with it. My family was swept up in this multifaceted U.S. strategy of nationalist weaponization. We got slotted into the Jewish nationalism program — it’s how we ended up here in the United States. My happy American immigration story is just a tiny part of a larger strategy of imperial power projection, a compartmentalized bureaucratic world in which an effort to save Soviet Jews existed comfortably side-by-side with projects that utilized Nazi collaborators — perpetrators of a genocide against these same Jews.
It’s a weird world. But it does make sense. All these threads form the backbone of a personal book I’ve been chipping away at for the last few years: The Soviet Jew. Which reminds me…I gotta get back to it.
—Yasha
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