Putin Vindicated: Ukraine Fascists & Potential Ukraine-Jewish Aliyah

JPOST - ARTICLE Putin says Ukraine being overrun by fascists - and he may be right 05/16/2015     Candidly speaking: Putin, Ukraine and the Jews     The crisis in Ukraine and ‘the new Jewish question Kiev has now handed the Kremlin "evidence" for Putin’s claim that Russia is facing off against fascists. Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators during the Second World War Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators during the Second World War. (photo credit:Courtesy) As Ukraine continues its battle against separatists, corruption and a collapsing economy, it has taken a dangerous step that could further tear the country apart: Ukraine’s parliament, the Supreme Rada, passed a draft law last month honoring organizations involved in mass ethnic cleansing during World War Two. The draft law - which is now on President Petro Poroshenko’s desk awaiting his signature - recognizes a series of Ukrainian political and military organizations as “fighters for Ukrainian independence in the 20th century” and bans the criticism of these groups and their members. (The bill doesn’t state the penalty for doing so.) Two of the groups honored - the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) - helped the Nazis carry out the Holocaust while also killing close to 100,000 Polish civilians during World War Two. The law is part of a recent trend of contemporary Ukrainian nationalism promoted by those on the extreme right to break with the country’s Communist past and emphasize Ukraine’s suffering under the Soviet regime. In addition to the moral problem of forbidding the criticism of Holocaust perpetrators, the law hinders Ukraine’s European ambitions - and validates Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims that the country is overrun by neo-Nazis. The OUN was founded in 1929 as a revolutionary organization designed to liberate Ukraine from Soviet rule and create an independent Ukrainian state. Many OUN leaders were trained in Nazi Germany, and the group’s philosophy was influenced by Nazi racial theorists such as Alfred Rosenberg. OUN literature, for example, declared the need to “combat Jews as supporters of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime… Death to the Muscovite-Jewish commune! Beat the commune, save Ukraine!” The OUN fought both the Nazis and the Soviets, and many Ukrainian nationalists have argued that the OUN was primarily a national liberation movement. But while the OUN’s core goal may have been the creation of an independent Ukrainian state, along the way its members were responsible for terrible atrocities. Starting with a pogrom in Lviv shortly after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, OUN militias - with the support of the Nazis - embarked on a killing spree in Western Ukraine that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Jews. After the Nazis dissolved these militias, many of their members joined the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in German service, where they received weapons-training and became one of the most important instruments of the Holocaust in Belarus and Western Ukraine. By 1943 the OUN had seized control of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary group, and declared itself opposed to both the retreating Germans and the oncoming Soviets. Although no longer in Nazi service, the UPA nevertheless continued to target and kill Jews, herding them into labor camps for execution. The UPA also engaged in the mass ethnic cleansing of Poles during this time, killing nearly 100,000 people. Even after the Red Army pushed the Germans from Ukraine in the summer of 1944, the UPA continued to fight a partisan war against Soviet forces well into the 1950s, before it was finally crushed by the massive power of the Red Army. It is this legacy of sacrifice that explains the Rada’s decision to pass a law honoring the OUN and the UPA. This law echoes a recent trend of glorifying right-wing Ukrainian nationalist organizations with controversial pasts. Under former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, a number of leading Ukrainian nationalists were honored with a memorial at Babi Yar - site of the single-worst massacre of Jews during the Holocaust. Yushchenko also bestowed the highest government honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon the controversial former OUN leader Stepan Bandera - a step roundly condemned by the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland and the European Union. More recently, radical nationalists played a key role as “shock troops” on the Maidan, and the anti-government camp was full of OUN-UPA flags and cries of “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!” - chants that originated with the OUN. Currently, a number of OUN-UPA apologists occupy important government positions, including the minister of education, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine and the director of the Ukrainian government’s Institute of National Memory. Even Poroshenko has gotten into the act, laying a wreath in honor of the OUN at Babi Yar last year. The draft law has a number of downsides beyond the moral problem of giving the OUN and UPA a free pass for atrocious crimes. Most obviously, making criticism of Holocaust perpetrators illegal is not compatible with Ukraine’s European ambitions. It is natural that many Ukrainians would wish to define themselves in opposition to the former Soviet Union, but as a budding democracy, banning criticism of any organizations - particularly those with such dark pasts - is the wrong way to build national identity. Kiev also must remember that its conflict with Putin’s Russia is taking place in cyberspace as well as the Donbass. Kiev has now handed the Kremlin “evidence” for Putin’s claim that Russia is facing off against fascists. Not surprisingly, Russian state-owned media outlets have had a field day condemning the law. Perhaps the worst effect of this law is the way it would split the country. Eastern and western Ukrainians already possess widely diverging views on recent political events such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Maidan revolution. The law would only exacerbate these regional differences. Historically, support for the “OUN-cult” originated primarily in the western Ukrainian regions of Galacia and Volhynia, where they are seen as heroic freedom fighters against Soviet oppression. Eastern Ukrainians, by contrast, grew up viewing these groups as Nazi collaborators to be feared and condemned rather than celebrated. The Rada’s passage of this law has already greatly harmed Ukraine. It is now up to Poroshenko to mitigate the damage by vetoing it. Josh Cohen is a former USAID project officer involved in managing economic reform projects in the former Soviet Union. He contributes to a number of foreign policy-focused media outlets and tweets at @jkc_in_dc .  http://www.jpost.com/International/Putin-says-Ukraine-being-overrun-by-fascists-and-he-may-be-right-403205 RT NEWS - ARTICLE EXTRACT Poroshenko signs laws praising Ukraine nationalists as ‘freedom fighters’ Published time: May 16, 2015 01:46 The ‘de-communization’ package of laws signed by Poroshenko on Friday also included a legislation banning communist-era symbolic and propaganda, condemning Soviet government on par with German Nazi regime. He also signed laws that will see the release of Soviet-era KGB archives to public, and scrap the term Great Patriotic War from official use replacing it with World War II. FULL ARTICLE - here. COMMENT So there you have it.  Ukraine's glorifying Nazi collaborators & those that have committed other WWII atrocities,  according to Jerusalem Post.  And the anti-Russian West can hardly brush off JPost as a 'Kremlin troll' or a Russian cyberwar psyop. It looks as though this love of homegrown Nazis is entrenched, as it was former Ukrainian (pro-West) President Viktor Yushchenko that first instigated the formal recognition.  So the love of Nazi collaborators would have been known to USA, UK, Germany, and the rest of the EU-NATO parade of clowns that supported the CIA coup in Ukraine. Yushchenko was in office 2005-2010 and is supposed to be the Orange Revolution president who was given a dose of Agent Orange (which sounds pretty fitting): Another murky chapter in recent Ukrainian history involves the 2004 poisoning of pro-Western politician Viktor Yushchenko. His successful run for the presidency that year against a Moscow-backed candidate triggered Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. During the campaign, Mr. Yushchenko ingested dioxin, a powerful toxin that left him in severe pain, his face discolored and bloated. Shortly before becoming ill, he had attended a small private dinner with Ihor Smeshko, then SBU chief. Ukrainian investigators zeroed in on the dinner as a possible site of the poisoning. Mr. Smeshko, whom Mr. Yushchenko had fired upon becoming president, was interrogated by prosecutors. Mr. Smeshko denies he had anything to do with the poisoning, which remains unsolved. [Wall Street Journal - here] Anyway, I thought that was rather a quirky detail.  Although it's superficially interesting, I'm not interested enough to dig through the ins and outs of 2004 Ukraine to get a feel for what may have really been going on.  While I don't believe what mainstream media has to say, I've provided a link to WSJ regardless, for anyone that does want to read what likely amounts to US propaganda about 'Russian sabotage'. Not sure why there's a discrepancy between the JPost article and the RT News article:  the former reporting that the pro-Nazi Ukraine law has been prepared for signature, while the latter's reporting that the law's been signed into effect (along with a ban on communist-era symbolism and "propaganda" and so forth). Do that note that the JPost writer is a former USAID project officer, who managed projects in the former Soviet Union. As I've a poor memory and can only remember a vague USAID and CIA connection, checked to see how USAID is connected to the CIA.   Looks like I'm not the only one checking on USAID as a CIA front: The following are a couple of USAID articles that discuss the CIA connection.  I'll never remember the ins and outs of the CIA connection, so knowing that there is a connection is going to have to be enough for me in the short-term (unless I force myself to read an endless series of these articles, over and over again, until I finally get it.  No chance.  Too lazy.  Also, CIA is too abstract for me:  it's this thing that nobody ever sees; it seems almost like a myth, although I know it's not.  Anyway, hoping that drip-type tiny bits of exposure, here and there, will eventually get the related information to sink in.  LOL). CIA Front, USAID, “Spreading Democracy”, Gearing Up in Ukraine – Suharto II? By Scott Creighton Global Research, May 08, 2014 USAID has a history of working with the CIA as a front operation to help them spread that special kind of “democracy” (read as IMF inspired brutal repression) in nations where we have installed brutal dictators in support of our neoliberal economic agenda. http://www.globalresearch.ca/cia-front-usaid-spreading-democracy-gearing-up-in-ukraine-suharto-ii/5381174 The murderous history of USAID, the US Government agency behind Cuba’s fake Twitter clone By Mark Ames On April 8, 2014 “In a number of countries, including Venezuela and Bolivia, USAID is acting more as an agency involved in covert action, like the CIA, than as an aid or development agency.” —Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research Last week, we learned from the Associated Press that USAID (United States Agency for International Development) — the government agency which manages billions in overseas “humanitarian” aid programs — plotted to overthrow Cuba’s communist regime via a covertly-funded fake Twitter platform. http://pando.com/2014/04/08/the-murderous-history-of-usaid-the-us-government-agency-behind-cubas-fake-twitter-clone/ I've kind of gone off track here with the USAID diversion, so back to fascists of the Ukraine kind. Seeing that there's definitely a fascist / neo-Nazi revival in Ukraine, it's interesting that US pro-Israel lobby groups (Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre) have blocked US legislation that would have left Ukraine without US Department of Defence support (ie arms, equipment and training). This was described as a decision based on 'geopolitics,' but I don't fully understand why organisations that promote what I assume is a Zionist cause are involving themselves in geopolitics. However, if Ukraine continues to attack the ethnic Russian, pro-independence, population of the east - or if war eventually breaks out between Ukraine and Russia - Israel stands to gain a sizeable additional Jewish population departing from Ukraine, and Jewish population growth is something Israel welcomes and encourages: Ukraine’s 70,000-strong Jewish community, the world’s 11th-largest, is undergoing what members describe as its biggest upheaval since the Second World War. While most of the country’s Jews live in Kiev, up to a fifth reside (at least until recently) in the conflict-hit east. Convinced they would return home after the fighting ended, many now face the brutal reality of all-out war on Europe’s fringes. Some are resettling elsewhere in Ukraine, while others are immigrating to Israel (an act known as aliyah). The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) estimates that more Ukrainian Jews will make aliyah this year than in the last three years combined. Through September 1 of 2014, 3,252 Jews had relocated to Israel from Ukraine, compared with 1,982 in 2013, according to the IFCJ, which helps foot the bill for the move. In 2012, that number was 2,030. The IFCJ expects to spend some $2 million this year on securing plane tickets to Israel and predicts the number of immigrants could hit 7,000, Yechiel Eckstein, the organization’s founder, told me by telephone from Jerusalem. Under Israel’s Law of Return, any Jew in the world is entitled to Israeli citizenship. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/ukraine-jewish-community-israel/380515/ I'm wondering if increasing Israel's population may be one of the motivators behind the pro-Israel organisations' move to block legislation that would have prevented the US military from providing assistance to the Ukraine fascists. * PS    Both Israel and US probably stand to gain from war in Ukraine.  Israel would gain a Jewish population boost and the US gets to sell arms, cause Russia grief and divert Russia from other things.  That being so, it would not be unreasonable to expect Mossad to be part of the Ukraine action - maybe stoking things.  So maybe that ambush of Alexei Mozgovoi was a Mossad job?   OK, I'm probably getting a bit carried away here guessing wildly about Mozgovoi's end. But the premise that Mossad would have an involvement overall seems a sound one, given they operate closely with CIA and given the expected population gains for Israel if conflict continues or war is ignited with Russia. The other pay-off of war between Ukraine and Russia might be that Russia would perhaps be less focused on events in Syria and the Middle East.  I don't know that for a fact, but it seems reasonable that you'd be more worried about your own backyard than goings on in the Middle East if you had a war on your doorstep to deal with.  If so, that would mean the US-Israeli and Saudi sides could maybe finally get the upper hand in Syria and get on with the mission of destabilising Iran. * PPS  I don't know what I'm talking about.  LOL I'm just guessing what could happen, but I don't really know enough for anyone to take this seriously.  For all I know, Russia is capable of 'multi-tasking' and any potential war with Ukraine is primarily about weakening Russia economically and politically, in terms of maybe domestic support for the government (which would be a bonus for the West, as the West is bent on getting rid of Putin and installing some puppet that will let them suck Russia dry). Tempted to delete the rambling thoughts above, because it really is crap, where I'm not referring to news sources, and I'm just taking wild guesses at what's going on. Will let it stand, although it's rather embarrassing to get this carried away guessing at players and motivations in Ukraine.