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Furious Obama Says Calls to Putin Going Straight to Voice Mail |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Tuesday, 02 September 2014 14:55 |
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Borowitz writes: "In what he called 'a provocative and defiant act,' President Obama charged on Tuesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has started letting his calls go directly to voice mail."
President Obama in the Oval Office. (photo: Ron Sachs/Getty)
Furious Obama Says Calls to Putin Going Straight to Voice Mail
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
02 September 14
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
 n what he called “a provocative and defiant act,” President Obama charged on Tuesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has started letting his calls go directly to voice mail.
Speaking at the White House before this week’s NATO summit, a visibly furious Obama said that Putin’s new practice of letting his calls go straight to voice mail “hampers our ability to discuss the future of Ukraine and other important issues going forward.”
Having left dozens of voice mails for the Russian President, Obama said that he tried to reach him via e-mail on Monday night but received an out-of-office auto reply.
“Given what he has been up to in Ukraine over the past few weeks, I find it impossible believe he has been out of the office,” Obama said.
The President hinted that Putin’s failure to respond to his voice mails could result in additional sanctions and signaled that he did not intend to call the Russian President again. “I have left my last voice mail for him,” he said, adding that the last time he called Putin his mailbox was full.
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How America Made ISIS |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6396"><span class="small">Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Tuesday, 02 September 2014 14:44 |
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Engelhardt writes: "Whatever your politics, you're not likely to feel great about America right now. After all, there's Ferguson (the whole world was watching!), an increasingly unpopular president, a Congress whose approval ratings make the president look like a rock star, rising poverty, weakening wages, and a growing inequality gap just to start what could be a long list."
Shakir Wahiyib with other ISIS fighters. (photo: Reuters)
How America Made ISIS
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
02 September 13
 hatever your politics, you’re not likely to feel great about America right now. After all, there’s Ferguson (the whole world was watching!), an increasingly unpopular president, a Congress whose approval ratings make the president look like a rock star, rising poverty, weakening wages, and a growing inequality gap just to start what could be a long list. Abroad, from Libya and Ukraine to Iraq and the South China Sea, nothing has been coming up roses for the U.S. Polls reflect a general American gloom, with 71% of the public claiming the country is “on the wrong track.” We have the look of a superpower down on our luck.
What Americans have needed is a little pick-me-up to make us feel better, to make us, in fact, feel distinctly good. Certainly, what official Washington has needed in tough times is a bona fide enemy so darn evil, so brutal, so barbaric, so inhuman that, by contrast, we might know just how exceptional, how truly necessary to this planet we really are.
In the nick of time, riding to the rescue comes something new under the sun: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), recently renamed Islamic State (IS). It’s a group so extreme that even al-Qaeda rejected it, so brutal that it’s brought back crucifixion, beheading, waterboarding, and amputation, so fanatical that it’s ready to persecute any religious group within range of its weapons, so grimly beyond morality that it’s made the beheading of an innocent American a global propaganda phenomenon. If you’ve got a label that’s really, really bad like genocide or ethnic cleansing, you can probably apply it to ISIS's actions.
It has also proven so effective that its relatively modest band of warrior jihadis has routed the Syrian and Iraqi armies, as well as the Kurdish pesh merga militia, taking control of a territory larger than Great Britain in the heart of the Middle East. Today, it rules over at least four million people, controls its own functioning oil fields and refineries (and so their revenues as well as infusions of money from looted banks, kidnapping ransoms, and Gulf state patrons). Despite opposition, it still seems to be expanding and claims it has established a caliphate.
A Force So Evil You’ve Got to Do Something
Facing such pure evil, you may feel a chill of fear, even if you’re a top military or national security official, but in a way you’ve gotta feel good, too. It’s not everyday that you have an enemy your president can term a “cancer”; that your secretary of state can call the “face” of “ugly, savage, inexplicable, nihilistic, and valueless evil” which “must be destroyed”; that your secretary of defense can denounce as “barbaric” and lacking a “standard of decency, of responsible human behavior... an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it's in Iraq or anywhere else”; that your chairman of the joint chiefs of staff can describe as “an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated”; and that a retired general and former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan can brand a “scourge... beyond the pale of humanity [that]... must be eradicated.”
Talk about a feel-good feel-bad situation for the leadership of a superpower that’s seen better days! Such threatening evil calls for only one thing, of course: for the United States to step in. It calls for the Obama administration to dispatch the bombers and drones in a slowly expanding air war in Iraq and, sooner or later, possibly Syria. It falls on Washington’s shoulders to organize a new “coalition of the willing” from among various backers and opponents of the Assad regime in Syria, from among those who have armed and funded the extremist rebels in that country, from the ethnic/religious factions in the former Iraq, and from various NATO countries. It calls for Washington to transform Iraq’s leadership (a process no longer termed “regime change”) and elevate a new man capable of reuniting the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds, now at each other’s throats, into one nation capable of turning back the extremist tide. If not American “boots on the ground,” it calls for proxy ones of various sorts that the U.S. military will naturally have a hand in training, arming, funding, and advising. Facing such evil, what other options could there be?
If all of this sounds strangely familiar, it should. Minus a couple of invasions, the steps being considered or already in effect to deal with “the threat of ISIS” are a reasonable summary of the last 13 years of what was once called the Global War on Terror and now has no name at all. New as ISIS may be, a little history is in order, since that group is, at least in part, America’s legacy in the Middle East.
Give Osama bin Laden some credit. After all, he helped set us on the path to ISIS. He and his ragged band had no way of creating the caliphate they dreamed of or much of anything else. But he did grasp that goading Washington into something that looked like a crusader’s war with the Muslim world might be an effective way of heading in that direction.
In other words, before Washington brings its military power fully to bear on the new "caliphate," a modest review of the post-9/11 years might be appropriate. Let’s start at the moment when those towers in New York had just come down, thanks to a small group of mostly Saudi hijackers, and almost 3,000 people were dead in the rubble. At that time, it wasn’t hard to convince Americans that there could be nothing worse, in terms of pure evil, than Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Establishing an American Caliphate
Facing such unmatchable evil, the United States officially went to war as it might have against an enemy military power. Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, the Bush administration launched the unmatchable power of the U.S. military and its paramilitarized intelligence agencies against... well, what? Despite those dramatic videos of al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, that organization had no military force worth the name, and despite what you’ve seen on “Homeland,” no sleeper cells in the U.S. either; nor did it have the ability to mount follow-up operations any time soon.
In other words, while the Bush administration talked about “draining the swamp” of terror groups in up to 60 countries, the U.S. military was dispatched against what were essentially will-o’-the-wisps, largely representing Washington’s own conjured fears and fantasies. It was, that is, initially sent against bands of largely inconsequential Islamic extremists, scattered in tiny numbers in the tribal backlands of Afghanistan or Pakistan and, of course, the rudimentary armies of the Taliban.
It was, to use a word that George W. Bush let slip only once, something like a "crusade," something close to a religious war, if not against Islam itself -- American officials piously and repeatedly made that clear -- then against the idea of a Muslim enemy, as well as against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and later Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. In each case, Washington mustered a coalition of the willing, ranging from Arab and South or Central Asian states to European ones, sent in air power followed twice by full-scale invasions and occupations, mustered local politicians of our choice in major “nation-building” operations amid much self-promotional talk about democracy, and built up vast new military and security apparatuses, supplying them with billions of dollars in training and arms.
Looking back, it’s hard not to think of all of this as a kind of American jihadism, as well as an attempt to establish what might have been considered an American caliphate in the region (though Washington had far kinder descriptive terms for it). In the process, the U.S. effectively dismantled and destroyed state power in each of the three main countries in which it intervened, while ensuring the destabilization of neighboring countries and finally the region itself.
In that largely Muslim part of the world, the U.S. left a grim record that we in this country generally tend to discount or forget when we decry the barbarism of others. We are now focused in horror on ISIS’s video of the murder of journalist James Foley, a propaganda document clearly designed to drive Washington over the edge and into more active opposition to that group.
We, however, ignore the virtual library of videos and other imagery the U.S. generated, images widely viewed (or heard about and discussed) with no less horror in the Muslim world than ISIS’s imagery is in ours. As a start, there were the infamous “screen saver” images straight out of the Marquis de Sade from Abu Ghraib prison. There, Americans tortured and abused Iraqi prisoners, while creating their own iconic version of crucifixion imagery. Then there were the videos that no one (other than insiders) saw, but that everyone heard about. These, the CIA took of the repeated torture and abuse of al-Qaeda suspects in its “black sites.” In 2005, they were destroyed by an official of that agency, lest they be screened in an American court someday. There was also the Apache helicopter video released by WikiLeaks in which American pilots gunned down Iraqi civilians on the streets of Baghdad (including two Reuters correspondents), while on the sound track the crew are heard wisecracking. There was the video of U.S. troops urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. There were the trophy photos of body parts brought home by U.S. soldiers. There were the snuff films of the victims of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns in the tribal backlands of the planet (or “bug splat,” as the drone pilots came to call the dead from those attacks) and similar footage from helicopter gunships. There was the bin Laden snuff film video from the raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, of which President Obama reportedly watched a live feed. And that’s only to begin to account for some of the imagery produced by the U.S. since September 2001 from its various adventures in the Greater Middle East.
All in all, the invasions, the occupations, the drone campaigns in several lands, the deaths that ran into the hundreds of thousands, the uprooting of millions of people sent into external or internal exile, the expending of trillions of dollars added up to a bin Laden dreamscape. They would prove jihadist recruitment tools par excellence.
When the U.S. was done, when it had set off the process that led to insurgencies, civil wars, the growth of extremist militias, and the collapse of state structures, it had also guaranteed the rise of something new on Planet Earth: ISIS -- as well as of other extremist outfits ranging from the Pakistani Taliban, now challenging the state in certain areas of that country, to Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen.
Though the militants of ISIS would undoubtedly be horrified to think so, they are the spawn of Washington. Thirteen years of regional war, occupation, and intervention played a major role in clearing the ground for them. They may be our worst nightmare (thus far), but they are also our legacy -- and not just because so many of their leaders came from the Iraqi army we disbanded, had their beliefs and skills honed in the prisons we set up (Camp Bucca seems to have been the West Point of Iraqi extremism), and gained experience facing U.S. counterterror operations in the “surge” years of the occupation. In fact, just about everything done in the war on terror has facilitated their rise. After all, we dismantled the Iraqi army and rebuilt one that would flee at the first signs of ISIS’s fighters, abandoning vast stores of Washington's weaponry to them. We essentially destroyed the Iraqi state, while fostering a Shia leader who would oppress enough Sunnis in enough ways to create a situation in which ISIS would be welcomed or tolerated throughout significant areas of the country.
The Escalation Follies
When you think about it, from the moment the first bombs began falling on Afghanistan in October 2001 to the present, not a single U.S. military intervention has had anything like its intended effect. Each one has, in time, proven a disaster in its own special way, providing breeding grounds for extremism and producing yet another set of recruitment posters for yet another set of jihadist movements. Looked at in a clear-eyed way, this is what any American military intervention seems to offer such extremist outfits -- and ISIS knows it.
Don’t consider its taunting video of James Foley's execution the irrational act of madmen blindly calling down the destructive force of the planet’s last superpower on themselves. Quite the opposite. Behind it lay rational calculation. ISIS’s leaders surely understood that American air power would hurt them, but they knew as well that, as in an Asian martial art in which the force of an assailant is used against him, Washington’s full-scale involvement would also infuse their movement with greater power. (This was Osama bin Laden’s most original insight.)
It would give ISIS the ultimate enemy, which means the ultimate street cred in its world. It would bring with it the memories of all those past interventions, all those snuff videos and horrifying images. It would help inflame and so attract more members and fighters. It would give the ultimate raison d'être to a minority religious movement that might otherwise prove less than cohesive and, in the long run, quite vulnerable. It would give that movement global bragging rights into the distant future.
ISIS’s urge was undoubtedly to bait the Obama administration into a significant intervention. And in that, it may prove successful. We are now, after all, watching a familiar version of the escalation follies at work in Washington. Obama and his top officials are clearly on the up escalator. In the Oval Office is a visibly reluctant president, who undoubtedly desires neither to intervene in a major way in Iraq (from which he proudly withdrew American troops in 2011 with their “heads held high”), nor in Syria (a place where he avoided sending in the bombers and missiles back in 2013).
Unlike the previous president and his top officials, who were all confidence and overarching plans for creating a Pax Americana across the Greater Middle East, this one and his foreign policy team came into office intent on managing an inherited global situation. President Obama’s only plan, such as it was, was to get out of the Iraq War (along lines already established by the Bush administration). It was perhaps a telltale sign then that, in order to do so, he felt he had to “surge” American troops into Afghanistan. Five and a half years later, he and his key officials still seem essentially plan-less, a set of now-desperate managers engaged in a seat-of-the-pants struggle over a destabilizing Greater Middle East (and increasingly Africa and the borderlands of Europe as well).
Five and a half years later, the president is once again under pressure and being criticized by assorted neocons, McCainites, and this time, it seems, the military high command evidently eager to be set loose yet one more time to take out barbarism globally -- that is, to up the ante on a losing hand. As in 2009, so today, he’s slowly but surely giving ground. By now, the process of “mission creep” -- a term strongly rejected by the Obama administration -- is well underway.
It started slowly with the collapse of the U.S.-trained and U.S.-supplied Iraqi army in Mosul and other northern Iraqi cities in the face of attacks by ISIS. In mid-June, the aircraft carrier USS H.W. Bush with more than 100 planes was dispatched to the Persian Gulf and the president sent in hundreds of troops, including Special Forces advisers (though officially no “boots" were to be "on the ground”). He also agreed to drone and other air surveillance of the regions ISIS had taken, clearly preparation for future bombing campaigns. All of this was happening before the fate of the Yazidis -- a small religious sect whose communities in northern Iraq were brutally destroyed by ISIS fighters -- officially triggered the commencement of a limited bombing campaign suitable to a “humanitarian crisis.”
When ISIS, bolstered by U.S. heavy weaponry captured from the Iraqi military, began to crush the Kurdish pesh merga militia, threatening the capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq and taking the enormous Mosul Dam, the bombing widened. More troops and advisers were sent in, and weaponry began to flow to the Kurds, with promises of all of the above further south once a new unity government was formed in Baghdad. The president explained this bombing expansion by citing the threat of ISIS blowing up the Mosul Dam and flooding downriver communities, thus supposedly endangering the U.S. Embassy in distant Baghdad. (This was a lame cover story because ISIS would have had to flood parts of its own “caliphate” in the process.)
The beheading video then provided the pretext for the possible bombing of Syria to be put on the agenda. And once again a reluctant president, slowly giving way, has authorized drone surveillance flights over parts of Syria in preparation for possible bombing strikes that may not be long in coming.
The Incrementalism of the Reluctant
Consider this the incrementalism of the reluctant under the usual pressures of a militarized Washington eager to let loose the dogs of war. One place all of this is heading is into a morass of bizarre contradictions involving Syrian politics. Any bombing of that country will necessarily involve implicit, if not explicit, support for the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad, as well as for the barely existing “moderate” rebels who oppose his regime and to whom Washington may now ship more arms. This, in turn, could mean indirectly delivering yet more weaponry to ISIS. Add everything up and at the moment Washington seems to be on the path that ISIS has laid out for it.
Americans prefer to believe that all problems have solutions. There may, however, be no obvious or at least immediate solution when it comes to ISIS, an organization based on exclusivity and divisiveness in a region that couldn’t be more divided. On the other hand, as a minority movement that has already alienated so many in the region, left to itself it might with time simply burn out or implode. We don’t know. We can’t know. But we do have reasonable evidence from the past 13 years of what an escalating American military intervention is likely to do: not whatever it is that Washington wants it to do.
And keep one thing in mind: if the U.S. were truly capable of destroying or crushing ISIS, as our secretary of state and others are urging, that might prove to be anything but a boon. After all, it was easy enough to think, as Americans did after 9/11, that al-Qaeda was the worst the world of Islamic extremism had to offer. Osama bin Laden's killing was presented to us as an ultimate triumph over Islamic terror. But ISIS lives and breathes and grows, and across the Greater Middle East Islamic extremist organizations are gaining membership and traction in ways that should illuminate just what the war on terror has really delivered. The fact that we can’t now imagine what might be worse than ISIS means nothing, given that no one in our world could imagine ISIS before it sprang into being.
The American record in these last 13 years is a shameful one. Do it again should not be an option.
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Why Is Homeland Security So Busy Arming Cops to Fight Americans? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29990"><span class="small">Trevor Timm, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Tuesday, 02 September 2014 14:42 |
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Timm writes: "For three weeks and counting, America has raged against the appalling behavior of the local police in Ferguson, Missouri, and for good reason: automatic rifles pointed at protesters, tank-like armored trucks blocking marches, the teargassing and arresting of reporters, tactics unfit even for war zones - it was all enough to make you wonder whether this was America at all."
A police tactical team moves in to disperse a group of protesters on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. (photo: Jeff Roberson/AP)
ALSO SEE: How Does a Police Department Lose a Humvee?
Why Is Homeland Security So Busy Arming Cops to Fight Americans?
By Trevor Timm, Guardian UK
02 September 13
From Ferguson’s military police to loaning drones and tracking your every move, the agency’s expensive, violent sinkhole of bureaucracy needs reform – now
 or three weeks and counting, America has raged against the appalling behavior of the local police in Ferguson, Missouri, and for good reason: automatic rifles pointed at protesters, tank-like armored trucks blocking marches, the teargassing and arresting of reporters, tactics unfit even for war zones – it was all enough to make you wonder whether this was America at all. But as Congress returns to Washington this week, the ire of a nation should also be focused on the federal government agency that has enabled the rise of military police, and so much more: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The 240,000-employee, Bush-invented bureaucratic behemoth that didn’t even exist 15 years ago has been the primary arms dealer for out-of-control local cops in Ferguson and beyond, handing out tens of billions of dollars in grants for military equipment in the last decade with little to no oversight and even less training on how use it. “From an oversight perspective, DHS grant programs are pretty much a mess,” a congressional aide told the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman the other day:
They don’t know what’s been bought with the money, how that equipment has been used, or whether it’s made anyone measurably any safer.
Buttressed by government policies that make it sometimes impossible for citizens to hold police accountable for civil rights violations, police can act like paramilitary forces to combat the most mundane crimes without much worry of the consequences. As Matt Apuzzo of the New York Times reported in June:
Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of ‘barbering without a license.’
There is now so much attention on the paramilitary pipeline that the White House has reportedly ordered a comprehensive review of the sprawling grant programs of both DHS and the Pentagon. But the problem with DHS is much larger than just combat gear: Homeland Security is also transferring tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in high-tech spying technology to local police through a sprawling backroom operation surveilling your neighborhood, much of which may be unconstitutional.
DHS has its own fleet of Predator drones roaming the US border and far beyond, which it has loaned out to police over 500 times for myriad unknown reasons. They don’t have missiles like America’s killer drones in Pakistan and Yemen, but they come decked out with all the surveillance equipment you can imagine – and more may be on the way as President Obama tasks DHS chief Jeh Johnson, who once helped justify the military drone program, as his pointman on the border. Homeland Security is also handing out millions of dollars to local police to “accelerate and facilitate the adoption” of smaller drones that police can fly themselves. Cops claim they want these “middleman” drones for “emergencies,” but in places like California’s Alameda county, documents show they’ll end up using them for “crowd control” and “intelligence gathering”.
Local police have also received millions of dollars in grants for Stingray surveillance devices, the invasive and controversial spying tool that police have been using to secretly suck up cellphone data from entire neighborhoods – then covering it up. As USA Today’s John Kelly reported, “Applications justify the purchases as an anti-terror tool, but records obtained from many police departments show the devices are being used to pursue more routine local crime.” That pattern – intended for “terrorism” but used for everything – repeats itself with virtually everything local police agencies receive from the Department of Homeland Security. Even local politicians who approve the continuation of funding rarely know what it’s being used for.
Recently, DHS planned to build a nationwide database for license plate tracking, only to scrap it under rare public scrutiny. But the database – filled with billions of private records – already exists in other forms. Feeding it are local police and private corporations, which received millions more in agency funding for sophisticated license plate readers that can track your movements around town whether or not you’ve been accused of a crime. They are so controversial that some cities, like Boston, have suspended them altogether.
A Congressional report in 2012 found that so-called DHS “fusion centers” – the surveillance money pit that funnels all sorts of mundane personal information into databases that can be used and abused by countless local, state and federal agencies – produce “predominantly useless information”, while “running afoul of departmental guidelines meant to guard against civil liberties” and are “possibly in violation of the Privacy Act”. They’ve failed to uncover a single terrorist attack.
The civil liberties controversies swarming around the Department of Homeland Security are almost too numerous to mention in anything other than a book. A small taste: One of its sub-agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has been seizing internet domain names – essentially censoring websites in violation of the First Amendment – with no judicial oversight whatsoever, for years. DHS is also the home to the TSA, which detains people without probable cause at airports and seizes laptops and other electronics when they’d never be able to get away with the same behavior if they tried it anywhere else. The agencies secretive rules for the No Fly List were recently called “Kafkaesque” by one federal judge and ruled unconstitutional by another.
As with every agency conducting surveillance on Americans, DHS attempts to use excessive secrecy and overclassification as its immunity trump card. The agency has been caught playing politics with Freedom of Information Act requests and has recently taken to refusing to release information that’s already public.
Early in this Congressional session, the Senate committee that oversees the Department of Homeland Security will hold a public hearing on how, whether and why the local police look like they’re doing battle in the Iraq war. But will the politicians who have long been the biggest proponents of this perpetual money funnel have the guts to reign in the agency they’re supposed to be overseeing? Or will they continue to prop up a sinkhole of bureaucracy masquerading as counterterrorism? We’ve learned a lot from Ferguson; the least we can take away from it is that we don’t need more “good guys” with billions of dollars in guns.
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FOCUS | Neo-Nazis Suck, But in Changing Ways |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 02 September 2014 13:01 |
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Weissman writes: "From Moscow and Kiev to Western Europe, neo-Nazis and near-Fascists are flexing their muscles, but doing it in different and changing ways. Three questions shape the story."
Neo-Nazi pictured at a rally in 2009. (photo: Reuters)
Neo-Nazis Suck, But in Changing Ways
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
02 September 13
rom Moscow and Kiev to Western Europe, neo-Nazis and near-Fascists are flexing their muscles, but doing it in different and changing ways. Three questions shape the story.
- Why do neo-Nazis play such a prominent role in the supposedly moderate Ukrainian government of billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko?
- Why did Marine Le Pen, her Front National in France, and her fellow-travelers in Western Europe stop supporting their former neo-Nazi allies in Ukraine?
- And why do the Front National and many of its allies give such fervent support to Vladimir Putin, who presents himself as the Great Anti-Fascist?
Together the answers provide a far more nuanced view of the world than most Americans will get from the mainstream press, the Putin propaganda mill, or the followers of Lyndon Larouche and other conspiracy-mongers who uncritically cheerlead for Putin.
Long Before Bandera
Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, with their SS-like symbols and murderous brutality, are in many ways the most straightforward. They grow out of a long history of Ukrainian nationalism and its yearning for an ethnically homogenous homeland. Their blood and soil nationalism led them to target the country’s long-standing Jewish population, mostly in Galicia, which is now in Western Ukraine but was formerly part of Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Over the years, the nationalists have held their Jewish neighbors guilty as a group for everything from crucifying Christ to working for rich Polish land-owners to supporting Soviet Communism.
Most dramatically, nationalist-led Ukrainian pogroms against Jews reached epic proportions in the annals of ethnic cleansing. As far back as the Chmielnicki Massacres of the mid-1600s, Cossacks and their allies killed more than 100,000 Jews and destroyed 300 Jewish communities. In 1920, Ukrainian nationalists killed some 60,000 Jews. During World War II, they helped the Nazis slaughter hundreds of thousands of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Armenians, Gypsies, anti-Fascist Ukrainians, and Jews, including the killing of thousands at a ravine near Kiev called Babi Yar.
“Jews in the USSR constitute the most faithful support of the ruling Bolshevik regimes and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in the Ukraine,” proclaimed the followers of nationalist leader Stepan Bandera in April 1941.
“I … fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine,” declared Bandera’s closest deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko. “I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine.”
Wanting Galicia for themselves, the Nazis jailed Bandera and Stetsko. But Ukrainian nationalists under Bandera’s wartime chief Mykola Lebed continued to slaughter Jews, Poles, and others in the most barbaric ways. As one eyewitness told the story, “Bandera men … are not discriminating about who they kill; they are gunning down the populations of entire villages.… Since there are hardly any Jews left to kill, the Bandera gangs have turned on the Poles. They are literally hacking Poles to pieces. Every day … you can see the bodies of Poles, with wires around their necks, floating down the river Bug.”
Read the horrific history for yourself. It’s available free online in an authoritative study from the U.S. National Archives: “Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War.” Note how quickly the allies made their peace with Ukraine’s fascists, which helps explains why Washington and the Europeans feel so comfortable about using them again today.
Updating the story in Part II of “Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev,” I laid out at length the overlapping histories of the key players, especially Andriy Parubiy, who commanded the often armed militants during the coup. He now runs the government’s National Security and Defense Council, which oversees Kiev’s “anti-terrorist” campaign in Eastern Ukraine. His credentials are vintage neo-Nazi. He helped create both the militant Praviy Sektor, or Right Sector, and the pointedly named Social National Party, which became the ultra-nationalist Svoboda (“Freedom”) Party, under Dr. Oleg Tyanhnybok.
You can find the details and sources in “Meet the Americans.” Here I want to draw attention to an often overlooked part of the story. When the U.S. and its European allies engineered the first “Orange Revolution” in 2004, they brought to power Viktor Yushchenko and his Ukrainian-American wife Katherine Chumachenko, a former Reagan aide who was extremely well-connected in Washington. These supposed “democrats” authorized a new official history of Bandera and the others, presenting them as national heroes and white-washing their horrendous crimes.
Why does this matter? Because many of the same ideas that motivate the overt neo-Nazis and right-wing ultra-nationalists inspire the supposedly moderate Fatherland Party of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, for whom the scary Andriy Parubiy now works.
Follow the food chain. The U.S., EU, and IMF back Ukraine’s billionaire oligarchs. Yatsenyuk works for the oligarchs. Parubiy works for Yatsenyuk. And the neo-Nazi militias work for Parubiy as little more than hired storm troopers. The balance of power could change to a degree, especially in the highly unlikely event that Tyanhnybok’s Svoboda Party were to win the parliamentary elections, now scheduled for October 26. But, the bigger danger comes from the spread into the highest levels of the Poroshenko government of an ideology so eager to kill in pursuit of an ethnically pure Ukraine, which remains an impossible dream.
Back in March, as the coup was defining itself, I wrote a column called “Will the Nazis and Jews Make Nice?” Though I obviously had tongue in cheek, the question has become even more pressing. Ukraine’s overt neo-Nazis see the most unexpected people as “”some type of Jew or secret Jew,” to cite The Daily Stormer. The hate list includes Poroshenko, whom one militant publicly called “Jew Trash”; the heavyweight champion Vitali Klitshko, now Mayor of Kiev, whose maternal grandmother was supposedly Jewish; Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, whom a political opponent called “the impudent little Jew”; and Yulia Tymoshenko, “the billionaire Jew” with a peroxide bottle.
Who cares who’s Jewish? The neo-Nazis do. But as long as an impoverished Ukraine needs so much Western support, most of the mini-Führers have decided to make nice, joining with their new allies to spew racist venom against the “ethnically impure” Russians.
Paradoxically, those who simply parrot Putin’s propaganda about Ukraine’s neo-Nazis vastly underestimate the danger here, as Putin himself seems to be doing. This is especially true now that Kiev has once again asked for NATO’s nuclear guarantee. To give Ukraine, with its historic yearning for ethnic homogeneity, the key to blow up the world would be one of the dumbest things Washington and its allies could do. But they are proving themselves just dumb enough to do it, especially with Putin making his own dumb nuclear threats rather than trying harder to find a diplomatic way to make nice.
Her Daddy’s Darling
When Jean-Marie le Pen ran France’s Front National, no one could doubt how much he despised Jews, or how much he admired Adolph Hitler and his National Socialists. So, few paid attention when the old paratrooper came to Ukraine as an honored guest at the Social National Party’s convention in May 2000 or when he returned in 2004 to see the group soften its name to the Svoboda (“Freedom”) Party and began to look more like the Front National. The elder le Pen also hosted a visit by Tyanhybok to France in 2009 and worked closely with him in the Alliance of European National Movements.
File all this way as yesterday’s news. Once Le Pen’s daughter Marine took over the Front National, she began rewriting the book on how to bring the far right to power. She still uses the old Nazi template, holding fast to her father’s blood-and-soil nationalism and targeting an ethnic scapegoat on whom to blame the world’s problems. Only she now directs her fire primarily at Muslims, especially Sunni Muslims and their rich backers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Little noticed at the time, in her effort to de-demonize the Front National, she completely abandoned Ukraine’s Svoboda Party with its lingering stench as Jew-bashers.
Why the turnabout? In part, but only in part, Marine seems to have discovered a simple truth. Even with Israel’s outrageous persecution of Palestinians, which decent people loudly condemn, she has found it a tough sell in today’s world to extol Hitler, deny his Holocaust, and forever persecute Jews. Tough, and not at all necessary for building a mass right-wing movement in Western Europe. As the caustically racist American Free Press summed it up, “National Front finds being ‘anti-Muslim’ better for business than being anti-Semitic.”
Like most of Western Europe’s leading far-right nationalist groups, Marine is proving bashing Muslims to be more productive, especially with the shameful encouragement of right-wing Israelis and anti-Muslim activists, Christian as well as Jewish, in Europe and the United States. Will this mark a major sea-change for Western Europe’s ultra-right? I have cautiously come to think it will, though how that will affect European government policies depends on how well the new strategy works in elections.
France still has the Jew-bashing comic Dieudonné Mbala Mbala winning young people of all races with his Nazi-like salute, the quennele, and his sickening “Holocaust humor.” Crowds still march in the streets of Paris shouting “Jews. Out of France!” and “Faurisson was right. Gas Chambers are a fraud.” Righteously angry but sadly short-sighted pro-Palestinian demonstrators still shout “Death to the Jews” in both French and Arabic, and militants have carried out the threat in several highly-publicized attacks over recent years. But, if Marine Le Pen and her allies do as well as current polls suggest, these outliers will become little more than a legitimating fringe for a massive anti-Muslim movement, which will also target other immigrants and the Roma.
This is cold-blooded political marketing, to be sure. But the shift also reflects a strong strategic and even spiritual thrust. Marine Le Pen and her far right-wing allies in Western Europe have become Vladimir Putin’s greatest fans. “He is attached to the sovereignty of his people,” she explained in an interview in April with the Austrian daily Kurier. “He is aware that we defend common values. These are the values of European civilization” and of our “Christian heritage.”
Even more dramatic, her Hitlerite father is singing the same song, going to extravagant lengths to defend Russian actions in Ukraine, including the taking of Crimea. Putin acted “faultlessly,” Jean-Marie declared. “The Americans [and] the European Union have been wrong in every field, politically, historically, [morally]. Putin’s position is in my opinion unassailable.”
“Crimea has always belonged to the Russian Empire,” he explained. “It was the decision of a communist dictator, Khrushchev, to give … a part of Russia to Ukraine, perhaps to compensate for the millions of deaths the communist regime had created with the famine in Ukraine.”
Jean-Marie was obviously relishing some of his old-time anticommunist zeal. But he and his daughter support Putin as part of a larger idea long popular in the Front National. They want to oppose American hegemony by joining with Russia to create “a powerful, independent, [and] respected Europe encompassing the nations of the northern (boreal) continent from Brest to Vladivostok.” The words were Jean-Marie’s in 2009. Two years later, in laying out policy for the Front National, Marine spoke of withdrawing from the integrated command of NATO, as De Gaulle had done in 1966. In its place, she would propose to Russia a strategic alliance based on a military partnership. Suggesting that she was not merely indulging in a passing fad, she spoke of the new partnership as being “profoundly energizing.”
Vlad the Conqueror
“Sad as it might seem,” said Vladimir Putin, the fight in Eastern Ukraine “reminds me of the events of World War II, when the German Nazi occupants surrounded our cities, like Leningrad, and directly shelled those cities and their inhabitants.” He was talking about the proxy war between Kiev’s forces and pro-Russians whom he claims not to be supplying or reinforcing with Russian troops.
Given his caginess about the “green men” earlier in Crimea, I see no reason now to believe his implausible denials. Nor can I find any reason to believe most of the claims from Washington and its European allies. Once bit, twice shy.
“Both towns and cities are surrounded by the Ukrainian army, which is directly shelling residential areas with the purpose of destroying infrastructure, and suppressing the will of those in the resistance,” he went on.
Characteristically, Putin wanted the world to see current Russian policy in Ukraine as a heroic replay of the Soviet Union’s fight to defeat the Nazis in World War II. Like everyone else, he cherry-picks his history, completely ignoring the August 23, 1939, deal between Hitler and Stalin to carve up between them much of Eastern Europe. Happily for Putin’s narrative, Hitler betrayed the deal on June 22, 1941, and launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, a massive invasion to which the Soviets did respond heroically.
The present is more nuanced. If Putin is truly the Great Anti-Fascist in Ukraine, why does he get so much support from the Le Pens and their fellow-travelers in Western Europe? Why do these modern revisionists of the Nazi tradition find him such a soul-mate? The answer seems obvious. Because they see him as one of their own. Not as the reborn fascist or “National Bolshevik” that writers like Yale historian Timothy Snyder tried to paint him in the New York Review of Books. And certainly not as the “neo-commie” that so many progressives would like Putin to be.
Like the Le Pens, he remains an ultra-right nationalist who believes that blood and soil justify his meddling from Georgia to Moldova, the Baltic countries, Crimea, and the rest of Eastern Ukraine. Ultra-nationalists in Western Europe identify with all that, even as they oppose meddling and expansion by Washington and the EU.
Sharing his unhappiness with American hegemony, the Le Pens sympathize with his nationalistic response to the expansion of NATO and his desire to guarantee Russian control over its warm water fleet in Crimea. If as Kiev, Washington, and NATO warn, Putin is providing overt and covert support to the insurgency in Southeastern Ukraine to give Russia a land bridge to Crimea, the Le Pens will be the first to say “more power to you.”
They similarly feel comfortable with his embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose teachings he uses to justify his authoritarianism and persecution of gays and “blasphemers” like Pussy Riot. In much the same way, the Front National uses the traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church to promote an extremely rigid view of “the natural order.”
What then do Marine and Jean-Marie think of Putin’s kleptocratic government enriching his favored oligarchs and former buddies from the security and intelligence services? They could not care less, at least from what I’ve been able to find so far. Addressing the Russian Duma in April, Marine declared that Putin was “a pure democrat, but with an authoritarian style.”
Putin clearly appreciates all the support he receives from the Le Pens and many of their Euro-Right allies, and you will find their views widely reported in the Russian media. They provide a fascinating insight into the new Russia and what the Le Pens want their new anti-Muslim Europe to become.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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hree years ago, I waited tables at a diner in Jackson, Mississippi. The minimum-wage job was one of four part-time jobs I held at the time, all of which were necessary to pay my rent, keep my lights on, have heat in the dead of winter, and keep my car in decent shape. Tips at the restaurant were placed in a bucket by the cash register, and the bucket was divvied up among all the servers and cooks at the end of the day. But before the tips were distributed, the co-owners of the restaurant would retreat to their back office for “bookkeeping,” and the bucket of tips would suddenly be much lighter. After a full day of waiting tables, I would only go home with a little over $30 in tips. If one of the owners caught a server pocketing a tip from a customer who wanted to tip a server directly, we would be forced to put it in the bucket, which we knew would be skimmed. But my experience is just one example of the situation for millions of restaurant workers in America today.
