Nazi Roots of Ukraine's Conflict

By Jonathan Marshall, Consortium News

28 January 16

 

Few Americans understand the ugly history behind the Nazi-affiliated movements that have gained substantial power in today’s U.S.-backed Ukrainian regime. Western propaganda has made these right-wing extremists the “good guys” versus the Russian “bad guys,” as Jonathan Marshall explains.

he latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine, one of the leading journals in its field, offers a two-page photo essay on “what to see, do, and buy” in Lviv, a picturesque city in the Western Ukraine. “Amid the turmoil that has rocked Ukraine over the past two years,” the article gushes, “Lviv has stood firmly as a stronghold of national culture, language, and identity.”

That’s one way of putting it. Another, less charitable way would be to note that Lviv has for nearly a century been a breeding ground of extreme Ukrainian nationalism, spawning terrorist movements, rabid anti-Semitism, and outright pro-Nazi political organizations that continue to pollute the country’s politics.

On the lovely cobblestone streets admired today by tourists flowed the blood of some 4,000 Jews who were massacred by locals in 1941, during the German occupation. They were egged on by the radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), whose founder and wartime leader is today a national hero to many of his countrymen.

On April 28, 2011, the 68^th anniversary of the formation of a Ukrainian Waffen-SS division, hundreds of people marched through Lviv, with support from city council members, chanting slogans like “One race, one nation, one Fatherland!”

Two months later, residents celebrated the 70^th anniversary of the German invasion “as a popular festival, where parents with small children waived flags to re-enactors in SS uniforms,” according to the noted Swedish-American historian Per Anders Rudling.

Later that year, extreme right-wing deputies at a nearby town in the Lviv district “renamed a street from the Soviet-era name Peace Street to instead carry the name of the Nachtigall [Nightingale] Battalion, a Ukrainian nationalist formation involved in the mass murder of Jews in 1941, arguing that ‘Peace’ is a holdover from Soviet stereotypes.’”

Such inconvenient truths rarely get aired in Western media, but they are important for at least two reasons. They help explain the recent violent, anti-democratic upheavals that have made Ukraine the battleground of a dangerous new cold war between NATO and Russia. And they should inspire Americans to reflect on our own country’s contribution to recent political extremism in the Ukraine — going back to the early post-World War II era, when the CIA funded former Nazi collaborators to help destabilize the Soviet Union.

The revolutionary, ultra-nationalist OUN was founded in 1929 to throw off Polish rule and establish Ukraine as an independent state. It burned the property of Polish landowners, raided government properties for funds, and assassinated dozens of intellectuals and officials, including the Polish interior minister in 1934.

A particularly radical faction, known as OUN-B, split off in 1940 under the leadership of the young firebrand Stepan Bandera, who studied in Lviv. It enjoyed support during World War II from a Gestapo-supported secret police official, Mykola Lebed. Lebed was convicted with Bandera in Lviv for the 1934 murder of the Polish minister, and would become notorious for his involvement in the wartime torture and murder of Jews.

Bandera’s OUN-B collaborated closely with the German foreign intelligence service, the Abwehr, to form a German-led Ukrainian Legion. On June 30, 1941, just days after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, OUN-B declared an independent Ukrainian state with Lviv as its capital. Lebed served as police minister of the collaborationist government.

In the days that followed, OUN-B’s Nachtigall Battalion and its civilian sympathizers apparently slaughtered several thousand Jews and Polish intellectuals before moving on to join German forces on the Eastern Front. Another 3,000 Jews in Lviv were soon murdered by an SS death squad outside the city. OUN publications called these “exhilarating days.”

Although the OUN, in a letter to Adolf Hitler, officially welcomed the “consolidation of the new ethnic order in Eastern Europe” and the “destruction of the seditious Jewish-Bolshevik influence,” the Nazi leader rejected their nationalist ambitions and eventually banned the OUN.

The Germans imprisoned Bandera. His organization went underground, forming the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). There were no neat sides in the violent conflict that ensued. UPA units clashed with the Nazis on occasion, fought the Red Army much more often, and engaged in “ethnic cleansing” of thousands of Poles and Jews. (More rarely, OUN members saved local Jews as well.)

They also killed tens of thousands of fellow Ukrainians in a bid to dictate the region’s political future. Many OUN members also directly joined police and militia groups sponsored by the Waffen-SS. Bandera himself was released by the Germans in 1944 and provided with arms to resist the advancing Red Army.

After the war, the OUN continued its losing battle for independence. Soviet forces killed, arrested, or deported several hundred thousand members, relatives or supporters of the UPA and OUN. Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in Munich in 1959. But right-wing nationalism enjoyed a resurgence after Ukraine won its independence in 1990-91, stoked by emigrés in the West who were loyal to OUN-B and to Bandera’s memory.

The city of Lviv in particular led the revival of Bandera worship. In 2006 it transferred his tomb to a special area of the town’s cemetery dedicated to victims of Ukraine’s national liberation struggles. It erected a statue dedicated to him and established an award in his honor.

Finally, in 2010, Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yushchenko (who came to power in the U.S.-backed Orange Revolution), named Bandera a Hero of Ukraine for “defending national ideas and battling for an independent Ukrainian state.” The Simon Wiesenthal Center and other anti-fascist groups condemned the honor, which was annulled a year later by a Ukrainian court.

One of Bandera’s legacies was the creation of the ultra-nationalist Social National Party in Lviv in 1991.

“As party symbol, it chose a mirror image of the so-called Wolfsangel, or Wolf’s hook, which was used by several SS divisions and, after the war, by neo-Nazi organizations,” notes Rudling. “It organized a paramilitary guard and recruited skinheads and football hooligans into its ranks.”

In 2004 it rebranded itself as Svoboda and dispensed with its SS imagery. Nonetheless, Svoboda’s new leader lauded the OUN and UPA for having resisted “Jews and other scum, who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state.” He was decorated by veterans of a Ukrainian Waffen-SS division and championed the cause of Ukrainian death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk. His ideological adviser organized a think tank called the “Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center” in 2005.

Svoboda became the largest party in Lviv in 2010 and today enjoys strong influence at the national level. It has also extended its influence by allying itself with other far-right and fascist parties in Europe.

Most important for understanding today’s East-West crisis, Svoboda supplied many of the shock troops who turned the protests in Kiev’s Maidan Square into a violent confrontation with government forces and eventually precipitated the putsch against President Viktor Yanukovych in early 2014.  Svoboda leaders took important posts in the post-Yanukovych government, including the head of national security.

Svoboda militants from Lviv played an important role in the violent putsch. In a story for Consortiumnews.com, journalist Robert Parry cited a “human interest profile” in the New York Times of a Ukrainian protestor named Yuri Marchuk, a Svoboda leader from Lviv who was wounded at Maidan Square. Parry continued,

“Without providing . . . context, the Times does mention that Lviv militants plundered a government weapons depot and dispatched 600 militants a day to do battle in Kiev. Marchuk also described how these well-organized militants, consisting of paramilitary brigades of 100 fighters each, launched the fateful attack against the police on Feb. 20, the battle where Marchuk was wounded and where the death toll suddenly spiked into scores of protesters and about a dozen police.

“Marchuk later said he visited his comrades at the occupied City Hall. What the Times doesn’t mention is that City Hall was festooned with Nazi banners and even a Confederate battle flag as a tribute to white supremacy.”

Svoboda’s cause was championed during the Maidan protests by Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who egged on the crowds while standing under banners celebrating Stepan Bandera. McCain’s appearance was no accident. Since World War II, the Republican Party has been closely allied with pro-Nazi exile leaders from Eastern Europe. Many of them were recruited and paid by the CIA — and given secret legal exemptions to emigrate to the United States despite their history of war crimes.

For example, the OUN-B Gestapo collaborator and mass murderer Mykola Lebed made his way incognito to the United States after World War II. The CIA, which valued his help in organizing resistance movements against the USSR, exercised its veto power over anti-Nazi immigration laws to legalize his residence.

The CIA provided similar assistance to General Pavlo Shandruk, described by historian Christopher Simpson as “the chief of the Ukrainian quisling ‘government-in-exile’ created by the Nazi Rosenberg ministry in 1944.” Despite his pro-Nazi past, he received large CIA stipends to help organize intelligence networks against the Soviet Union after the war.

The CIA and Pentagon also earmarked millions of dollars’ worth of arms and other military aid to anti-Soviet Ukrainian guerrillas in the late 1940s, despite their record of atrocities against Jews and other civilians.

As Simpson concludes in his 1988 book Blowback, “In hindsight, it is clear that the Ukrainian guerrilla option became the prototype for hundreds of CIA operations worldwide that have attempted to exploit indigenous discontent in order to make political gains for the United States. …

“Instead of rallying to the new ‘democratic’ movement, there is every indication that many of the ordinary people of the Ukraine gave increased credence to the Soviet government’s message that the United States, too, was really Nazi at heart and capable of using any sort of deceit and violence to achieve its ends.”

Simpson also observes that CIA assistance to pro-Nazi Ukrainian and other East European ethnic leaders created powerful political lobbies in the United States that backed hard-line “liberationist” policies toward the Soviet Union and its “captive nations.” One such political group was the Ukrainian-dominated, neo-Nazi Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, which enjoyed support from Sen. Joseph McCarthy, among many other U.S. politicians.

“Before the decade of the 1950s was out,” Simpson writes, “the activities of extremist European emigre organizations combined with indigenous American anticommunism to produce seriously negative effects on U.S. foreign policy and domestic affairs under both Republican and Democratic administrations. …

“U.S. clandestine operations employing Nazis never did produce the results that were desired when they were initiated, but they did contribute to the influence of some of the most reactionary trends in American political life. … Working together with corporate-?nanced lobbies such as the pro-armament American Security Council, Captive Nations leaders have acted as in?uential spoilers capable of obstructing important East-West peace initiatives undertaken by both Republican and Democratic administrations. They continue, in fact, to play that role today.”

Simpson offered that powerful observation before the latest crisis in the Ukraine — precipitated in large measure by extreme rightists inspired by the OUN — plunged NATO and Russia into a series of military and economic confrontations that resemble the Cold War of old. But even today, the American political impulse to support anti-Russian agitation in the Ukraine reflects Cold War-era policies that forged an ugly alliance between the United States and Nazi mass murderers.

You won’t see that point made in the New York Times, or in a fluffy promotion for Lviv in Foreign Policy magazine. But it’s clearly written in history that Americans would do well to study.

Jonathan Marshall is an independent researcher living in San Anselmo, California. Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were “Risky Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons Want Regime Change in Iran”; “Saudi Cash Wins France’s Favor”; “The Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; and “Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War.”

Why Black People Are "Invisible" to Oscar Voters

By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, The Hollywood Reporter

28 January 16

 

The former NBA star invokes Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' in his take on the #OscarsSoWhite controversy: "Institutionalized racism is so insidious because those practicing it don't realize it."

ops, Hollywood did it again.

For the second year in a row the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has neglected to recognize a single black actor out of 20 acting nominations. The backlash was instantaneous. Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith announced they would not attend the Oscar ceremony. Don Cheadle tweeted that the Academy would have him parking cars at the Oscars. David Oyelowo, who was overlooked last year for his portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, said simply, “The Academy has a problem.” Even Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who is African-American, admitted that she was “both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion.” 

Defenders are trying to explain the winter whiteout, but it’s like trying to explain how The Martian received a Golden Globe as a comedy. Can’t be done convincingly.

And money is the main purpose of the Oscars. Parade superstars in designer finery and megawatt jewelry, add as much cowbell as possible, and publicize movies to the 37 million viewers in the U.S. and several hundred million worldwide so they can make more money on tickets, DVDs, streaming services and foreign sales. The movies get the publicity, and the viewers get the glamour. Everybody wins.

Well, not everybody. Because there's much more going on. First, an Oscar nomination can shift an actor's career into turbocharge, bringing them better roles and more money. Having more black actors nominated can translate into more prominent black roles in movies, which means a broader variety of black characters and voices heard around the world.

Second, an Oscar nomination elevates the role itself into our cultural collective memory. The movie will be watched more often, the character referred to more often. Both become important constellations in pop-culture heaven that will be gazed upon for generations to come. As such, they will carry the weight of a rich archeological find, revealing one more clue about what the people and time held precious. Julianne Moore's 2015 Oscar for Still Alice as the brilliant professor dealing with Alzheimer's reflects the current concern of our aging baby boomer majority. Matthew McConaughey's win for Dallas Buyers Club reveals our awareness of variations of gender identity as well as a grassroots disgust with government inefficiency, as expressed by certain GOP presidential candidates.

The heart of the controversy isn't the fact that no black actors have been nominated in two years; it's grappling with the reasons. Yes, it's possible that no black actor in two years has delivered an Oscar-worthy performance, but so many people have witnessed otherwise that it feels more like watching a fixed fight: The champion gets pummeled every round yet still wins by unanimous decision. Huh?

For African-American artists and moviegoers, the situation is reminiscent of what Ralph Ellison wrote about being black in America in Invisible Man: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.” The Academy members watched Creed, written by two black men (Ryan Coogler, Aaron Covington), directed by a black man (Coogler), starring a black man (Michael B. Jordan) and mostly black cast, yet the only person they saw was Sylvester Stallone. Everyone else was invisible.

The nominations express to African-Americans that their life stories and their art are mostly invisible, not out of deliberate racism, but out of the systemic, institutionalized racism that is so insidious because those practicing it don’t realize it. In fact, as individuals, Academy members are decidedly not racists and many have probably worked diligently in their art and perhaps even privately to fight racism. But there’s no getting around the fact that the members of the Academy are not reflective of society in general and therefore less likely to acknowledge the cultural spectrum. A Los Angeles Times study of the 5,765 Academy members concluded that 94 percent are Caucasian (77 percent male), 2 percent are black, and less than 2 percent are Latino. The average age is 62, with only 14 percent younger than 50.

Looking at this pasty gray demographic, one can’t help but wonder whether or not they saw the lovely little coming-of-age film Dope, or were at all interested in the powerful N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton, or cared about Spike Lee’s insightful Chi-Raq, or marveled at Samuel L. Jackson’s mesmerizing performance in The Hateful Eight. Why Will Smith (Concussion) was ignored is still a head-scratcher. Maybe they thought his previous two nominations were enough.

The problem is that Academy members seem to notice black performers mostly when they play socially familiar roles: athletes, performers, slaves, victims of racism, criminals. Eight of the last 10 male black actors nominated for best performance played real people, all of whom fall into one of the above categories. Opportunities for breakout roles are even worse for black women, who have received only nine best actress nominations, versus 18 for men.

So the Academy neglected to invite us to the Big House again. Boycotts and articles will raise awareness by prompting public discourse, but changing the Academy is like trying to steer a glacier. People of color, women and the LGBT community are better off looking to television to tell our stories because it is more responsive to cultural awareness. TV is packed with shows that are far superior to most movies and often viewed by a much larger audience.

Yes, there are still a lot of stereotypical black roles — sidekick cop (Mysteries of Laura, Elementary), by-the-book boss (Blindspot, Quantico, The Blacklist) — but during the course of a season, these characters are often developed more fully. Also, there are a variety of roles that step outside the usual well-trod path: Scandal, Empire, How to Get Away With Murder. On TV, black actors rarely play the lead, but they have been appearing more and more in juicy roles that expand the universe of how the world sees them. My favorite is Bokeem Woodbine, who plays mob enforcer Mike Milligan in this year's best show, Fargo. His performance is so nuanced, subtle and riveting that when he appears on the screen, the viewer might breathe a little softer as not to miss a word or gesture. Everyone in this series in spectacular, but Bokeem's performance as the philosophical hitman who straddles a narrow line between fatalistic and hopeful reveals a man aware of his racial burden but determined to rise above it. The odd cadence of his speech, the long pauses, the fixed smile combine to make him the most compelling character on television.

Perhaps in a few years, the Emmys will be the new Oscars and we will care less what the Academy does or doesn't do. But in the meantime, we must at least raise the questions that need to be asked — whether or not we like the answers. Even though, as Ellison says in Invisible Man, "I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied."