Stabbed in the Back: What's the Difference Between an "Unabashed Nationalist" and a "Fascist"?

“Fascist”, it appears, is the go-to epithet for characterizing nationalists and racists we don’t like.  “Nationalist” is apparently the go-to epithet for characterizing fascists we do like.

The Western media is coping with the conspicuous and undeniable presence of fascists in the Ukrainian paramilitaries by rebranding them.  A recent case in point was in a Reuters article celebrating the doughty defenders of Mariupol i.e. the Azov Battalion, which discommodes Kyiv-friendly observers by unapologetically  marching under the fascist “Wolfangel” banner:

Many in the Azov Battalion have unabashed Ukrainian nationalist sympathies, prompting rebels to label them neo-fascists.

From time to time, Azov fighters in Shyrokyne greeted one another with ironic Roman salutes and then grinned at their own humor. That kind of idle larking and the battalion's flirtation with neo-Nazi symbolism is seized upon as confirmation of their critics' worst fears.

The infamy appears only partly deserved, however.

Some embrace fervent Ukrainian nationalism as a repudiation of the heavily Russian-dominated Soviet legacy, all while serving with fighters from a wide array of political and ethnic backgrounds. Chit-chat switches casually from Ukrainian to Russian and back again.

Let me offer my back-of-the-envelope guide to discriminating between “unabashed nationalist sympathizers” and “neo-fascists”.  Nationalists let their fervor, their bigotry, and enthusiasm play out in the quotidian realm, along the spectrum from vociferous Internet commentator to soccer hooligan.

Neo-fascists do something about their nationalist convictions, by joining an armed fascist formation which considers implementing a national or racial political and social agenda, by violence if necessary, an existential national imperative beyond state sanction.  That’s been a powerful strain in Ukrainian political thought since the 1930s that flourishes today, and not just in the Azov Battalion.

Trying to submerge “fascism” in the mushy nomenclature of “nationalism” is an exercise in self-delusion that, in my opinion, balks understanding of trends throughout Europe and not just in Ukraine.

A classic German film by Fritz Lang, Die Nibelungen, provides an opportunity to reflect upon the difference between unabashed nationalism and meat and potatoes fascism.  The epic, split into two stand-alone films, Siegfried and The Revenge of Kriemhild, is available on Netflix, so readers interested in film and fascism are invited to have a look.  I’ll wait.

…

For those readers who did not just sit through four and a half hours of black and white silent film, I will mention that this is not Wagner’s Nibelungen.  Instead of the hallucinogenic word salad and musical bombast of the Wagnerian Ring cycle, Lang and his wife and scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, went back to the ur-text of the Nibelungen Saga, a medieval epic that was rediscovered in the 19^th century and was adopted as the German foundation myth, its Iliad, in order to give age, nobility, and gravitas to the Germanic historical tradition, its recently established Kaiser, and Bismarck’s newly-minted nation.

The original Nibelungen is a simple story of a boy, his dragon, his utterly bugnuts wife, and the interesting folk they encounter.

UFA spared no expense to bring Die Nibelungen to the screen. The artistic and technical resources of German cinema are on full display in the sets, costumes, makeup, and cinematography, as are the expressive power of silent-film acting.  The movie is quite compelling and, to the patient, rewarding.  Remarkably, much of the syntax of modern film—the closeups, cross cutting, establishing shots und so weiter—appears to be fully developed at this early date.

Die Nibelungen was made in 1924, as Germany was still trying to come to terms with the epic calamity of its defeat in World War I, the exile of Kaiser Wilhelm, loss of territories in the east and west, the rise of communism as a potential organizing principle opposed to German nationalism, and the appearance of the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time Weimar Republic.  The explicit purpose of the film was to buck up the German people and assure them that the national mojo had not been lost.

The first title-card in The Nibelungen dedicates the film “To the German People.”

There’s a lot of good writing about the Lang movies.  William Ahearn referenced several important works on his site  and included this quote from Lang:

In 1974, in an interview with Focus on Film, Lang said: “By making ‘Die Nibelungen’ I wanted to show that Germany was searching for an ideal in her past, even during the horrible time after World War I in which the film was made. At that time in Berlin I remember seeing a poster on the street, which pictured a woman dancing with a skeleton. The caption read: ‘Berlin, you are dancing with Death.’ To counteract this pessimistic spirit I wanted to film the epic legend of Siegfried so that Germany could draw inspiration from her past, and not, as Mr Kracauer [author of From Caligari to Hitler; he links the films to Nazi themes—CH] suggests, as a looking forward to the rise of a political figure like Hitler or some such stupid thing as that.”  

Unfortunately, it’s kind of hard not to think and look backward at “stupid things” such as Nazi racial ideology when looking at the depiction of Siegfried’s human and barely-human foils in the picture.

Siegfried benefits greatly from a charismatic turn in the title role by Paul Richter.  Richter is, there’s no other way of putting it, gorgeous.  He’s studly, buff, noble, merry, and with a disingenuous and spontaneous demeanor which is pretty much supposed to embody the positive “German” self-image--as I understand it.  I invite readers to test this generalization, as well as subsequent generalizations about the stereotypes of non-Germanic people (which I do not endorse and carefully identify as stereotypes by the use of “quotation marks”) Lang and von Harbau perhaps chose to depict, by watching the films and drawing their own conclusions.

We first meet the blonde Richter displaying his energy and effervescence while rusticating in the forest realm of Mime the Blacksmith.  Actually, he materializes like a shaft of golden light forging a sword amid a group of slovenly oafs who, I regret to say, may possibly be meant to represent a certain easterly contingent of the northern European woodland population.  Siegfried impulsively decides to seek the hand of Kriemhild, sister of King Gunther of Burgundy, in marriage and jumps on his snow white steed to venture off.  Consider the box for “German” initiative and vigor—in contrast to the lackadaisical deportment of certain neighbors—checked.

Next, Siegfried slays the dragon, in this case an enormous and to modern eyes somewhat unconvincing puppet that weighed one and a half tons and was operated by 32 men.  He bathes in the dragon’s blood, thereby acquiring imperviousness to all weapons—except on his shoulderblade, where a linden leaf alights and blocks the shield-sauce.  (Speaking of sauciness, Siegfried’s rear is on display in the bathing scene, but it is not Paul Richter’s.  Richter refused to do the scene nude and Rudolf Klein-Rogge--another member of the Lang troupe, Thea von Harbau’s first husband and, subsequently, star of Metropolis --stepped up to depict the heroic booty.)

Siegfried then encounters a suspiciously “Jewish”-looking individual, Alberich--depicted as “not a handsome Jew, naturally, but as a vile Jew.”, as one contemporary account put it -- a tricky dwarf from whom Siegfried acquires the treasure of the Nibelungen, in addition to a worrisome curse.  Then it’s Off to Burgundy! To woo Kriemhild with his glamor and treasure.

Burgundy is “Germanic” but also kind of “Frankish”, if you get my drift, with a pervasive and oppressive Christian establishment that contrasts with Siegfried’s apparently joyous, unselfconscious paganism.  Siegfried wins Kriemhild, but also gets embroiled in all sorts of intrigue and betrayal in the gloomy court, culminating in his murder—yes, he is STABBED IN THE BACK—by the king’s henchman, Hagen.

Siegfried ends with Kriemhild vowing revenge for her husband’s murder.

In the second film, The Revenge of Kriemhild, Siegfried’s widow marries Attila the Hun in her quest for revenge and the manpower to inflict it.  Attila is portrayed by the protean Karl Klein-Rogge, who transforms himself from Paul Richter’s butt-double in the first film to a depraved and cadaverous, phrenologically-challenged “Mongoloid” Oriental despot in the sequel.  It is interesting though unfortunately meaningless that the German form of Attila, “Etsel”, was the name Henry Ford gave to his son, Anglicized as “Edsel” (it was the given name of one of Ford’s closest friends).

The Huns are subhuman “Asiatic” hordes (“Slavs” or “Bolsheviks” in my reading) whom Kriemhild (“Spartacist”/”race traitor”, perhaps) is able to wrap around her little finger.  When her brother, the King of Burgundy, and Hagen and a small company arrive at Attila’s encampment in an ill-starred reconciliatory visit, she gins up a massacre that fails, thanks to the Euro-valor of the Burgundians and the fecklessness of the debased Huns.

However, the vastly outnumbered Burgundians are unable to escape and find themselves trapped inside Attila’s castle.  Kriemhild orders wave upon wave of attacks, all of which are beaten back by the doughty knights.  Finally, she orders the hall torched (the inspiration for Wagner’s Gotterdammerung), the roof falls in, everybody dies, THE END.  Well, the King and Hagen make it out, but they choose death instead of dishonor so THE END.  To be honest, Lang missed a trick when he omitted the fate of Kriemhild described in the original edda: an enraged Burgundian retainer cuts her in half as she stands amid the corpses of her brother and her countrymen and she doesn’t even notice until she bends over to pick something up and literally FALLS TO PIECES.  THE END.

 

The Burgundian band of brothers are explicitly identified as the Germans; when the king is offered a dirty deal of safe passage in return for giving up Hagen to Kriemhild’s wrath, the riposte is “You don’t understand us Germans.”  And before the final inferno in Attila’s hall, one soldier speaks longingly of his wish to see “the green waters of the Rhine” again.  At the time the film was released, German audiences were well aware that the Rhine was under Allied occupation and German troops forbidden to approach within 20 miles of the river per the terms of the Versailles Treaty.  They were also aware that the French had occupied the Ruhr, on the “right” or east bank of the Rhine, in retaliation for Germany’s non-payment of reparations.  Not only that, the French were currently engaged in an escapade to try to encourage the creation of a Rhenish Republic to permanently alienate the Rhine Valley from Germany.  The Rhine crisis was the mother of hot-button issues for Germans, all Germans I suspect and not just over-the-top German nationalists, during this period.

For those with an interest in historical parallels, it could be said that the Rhineland represented the “classy, European elite-status schloss und kultur” element of German national identity as Kyiv does today for Ukrainian nationalists; and loss of the Rhine represented loss of caste, and a disastrous descent toward parity with “those people” inhabiting the eastern reaches of northern Europe.

The Revenge of Kriemhild did not find much favor with audiences or critics.  Kriemhild does little more than glower, grumble, and occasionally point a minatory finger as the ape-like “Huns” caper about; the characters are universally unsympathetic and viewers are unable to develop a sporting interest in their fates which, it transpires, are universally dismal.  One critic described The Revenge of Kriemhild as a “vast, spectacular pageant of boredom.” 

On the other hand, everybody loved Siegfried.  Including Hitler, who cried at the ending. 

The character of Die Nebilungen as a national/nationalist rallying cry is indisputable, and its rather nasty nationalist/racialist approach to Germany’s relationship with its neighbors, though implicit is, I think, genuine.

Nationalism/racism themes inform both halves of Die Nibelungen, and both films fed into the unsavory theme of “dolchstosse”, the idea that Germany could only have been defeated in the Great War by the unpatriotic machinations of socialists and Jews in the homeland.

The general theme of the film is superior Teutonic stock gets cut down thanks to its inferior numbers, its hubris, and its quixotic devotion to noble ideals, especially when confronted with the duplicitous scheming of its enemies.  It’s not just the tragedy of Siegfried, the invincible German hero vulnerable only to treachery; The Revenge of Kriemhild recapitulates his death at the collective level.  

In fetishizing German martial valor, the film reflected broadly-held attitudes in Germany after World War I.

As Friedrich Altrichter, author of a widely-cited 1933 work on “the soul of the German Army” put it (h/t to the website Long Story Short Pier for the quote):

He had become painfully aware of the enemy’s overwhelming firepower, of his superiority in the air, of the countless tanks against which one could oppose nothing of equal force. Everyone recognized that Germany, economically exhausted and lacking important raw materials, helplessly faced the enormous harnessing of the world’s resources. But all this had nothing to do with the feeling of superiority as person, soldier, and fighter. The fact that this feeling of superiority was retained after the war’s conclusion is of utmost significance for the German future. It preserves a feeling in society that the battlefield was not left as loser, despite the lost war and the mighty collapse. 

But the movie doesn’t quite qualify as “fascist” for a variety of reasons.  First off, it was made too early—1924-- to be part of the Nazi bandwagon.  It was a Weimar product, approved by Weimar censors.

Second, Lang was not a fascist.  Lang elaborately overstated his anti-fascism after he left Germany and emigrated to the United States, but the fact is he did leave Germany after the Nazis took power.  Goebbels had actively recruited him to lead the Nazi cinema program on the strength of Die Nibelungen & Lang’s overall stature in the German film industry.  But Lang demurred and left the country, maybe not the next morning as he endlessly declared in his potted autobiography, but soon after. 

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse may not have been, as Lang pretended, his conscious riposte to the rise of Hitler (see David Kalat's book, The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse for an in-depth discussion of the gestation of the movie and its repurposing as part of Lang's self-cultivated anti-fascist mythos), but it was a brilliant and unsettling look at a monomaniacal genius declaring “I am the state” and mobilizing a secret army of thugs and fanatics to destroy Weimar Germany through street terror, intimidation, and sabotage of its political and economic institutions.  And it was banned by Goebbels (who secretly loved the film and frequently screened it in private) because its depiction of individuals and an entire society spiraling into madness worked against the will-exalting/subconscious and psychoanalysis-detesting Nazi program for social renewal.

Finally, Die Nibelungen doesn’t fit the fascist script.  The movie acknowledges, explores, exalts and panders to nationalism and racism.  But nationalism and racism ultimately are the instruments of annihilation, not rebirth and triumph.

At the end of the day, the dolchstossing of Siegfried is committed by another German, Hagen, enabled by the spinelessness of King Gunther and the gullibility of Kriemhild.  And the calamity that befalls the Burgundian party in the second film is entirely the work of Kriemhild, who basically has to take over from an initially conciliatory and remarkably disengaged Attila the Hun to organize the massacre.

Taken as a whole, in other words, Die Nibelungen was not a fascist infomercial effectively advocating exclusionary racial unity over democracy and socialism as the indispensable recipe for national survival, unless the definition of “national survival” includes “burning your nation to the ground” (which, interestingly enough, is exactly what Hitler did!).  

Eventually the Nazis had their chance to revisit Die Nibelungen.

In 1933, with Hitler in power, Siegfried was re-released in a truncated form, Siegfrieds Tod (Death of Siegfried), with passages of Wagner finally chunked in (the notoriously protective and contentious Wagner estate had denied music permissions to the film when it was first made).  Netflix viewers can rest assured that they have watched a careful reconstruction of the original 1924 version—released on BluRay by Murnau Stiftung in 2012—and not the Nazified release.

According to scholar Adeline Mueller (in Joe & Gilman, Wagner and Cinema, Indian University Press, 2010)  the 1933 version was re-edited without Lang’s input to shift focus away from the fecklessness of the Frankish king and the role of his cowardice in Siegfried’s death —after all, his royal seat stood on the shores of the hallowed Rhine at Worms!  Can’t irresponsibly disparage German leadership!—in order to put the onus on one Burgundian bad apple, Hagen, for the demise of the Teutonic paragon.

 And the entire second half of the opus—The Revenge of Kriemhild—the downer-bloodbath in which Germanic back-biting, vindictiveness, and stubborn malice effect the destruction of the entire Burgundian nobility—got ditched. 

Ironically or perhaps understandably the Nazis had no appetite for Lang’s vision of self-annihilation of a group of obtuse, violent, and vicious German nationalists.

It is also amusing, I suppose, that Hitler was recapitulating American artistic judgment.  For the 1924 release in New York, only Siegfried made the cut; The Revenge of Kriemhild stayed in the can and sank virtually without a trace on its US release three years later.  And to reduce the “embittered-loser” vibe that would have set Americans’ teeth on edge, the last few minutes of Siegfried—Kriemhild’s vengeful mutterings that set up the second movie—were reportedly excised.  Instead, Siegfried died heroically and pitifully…and then, in a tacked-on live-action epilogue, was transported to Valhalla by the Valkyries to the tune of the funeral march from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung! The pit orchestra was recruited from the Metropolitan Opera, and the arrangement apparently represented a flank attack on the Met’s ban on Wagner & indeed all sung German opera in place since World War I.

Mueller writes:

One practical explanation for this epilogue is that it provided a more conclusive ending to Siegfried, given the absence of Part 2.  Another motivation was that American preference for happy endings…the renunciation of revenge suggests that the New York version of Siegfried sought to rewrite…history itself…to “speed the healing of the wounds of war”.

In other words, Siegfried got to go to Valhalla early using the EZPass lane of youthful martyrdom, so no biggee, right?  Bygones be bygones?

Of course, Hitler didn’t feel that way, and decided to do something about it.  That “something” was transforming his nationalist and racist inclinations into a political and paramilitary movement, fascism.  

 

I expect a lot of members of the Azov Battalion feel the same way.

Ukraine is Chockablock with Fascist Formations; Better Deal With It

 The Guardian published an adulatory feature on “The Women Fighting on the Frontline in Ukraine”.

One of the women profiled was “Anaconda”, fighting in the Aidar Battalion bankrolled by Igor Kolomoisky:

Anaconda was given her nickname by a unit commander, in a joking reference to her stature and power. The baby-faced 19-year-old says that her mother is very worried about her and phones several times a day, sometimes even during combat. She says it is better to always answer, as her mother will not stop calling until she picks up.

 “In the very beginning my mother kept saying that the war is not for girls,” Anaconda says. “But now she has to put up with my choice. My dad would have come to the front himself, but his health does not allow him to move. He is proud of me now.”

…

 Anaconda was photographed in combat dress resolutely holding an assault rifle in front of a rather decrepit van.   

 

The caption read: 

“Anaconda says she is being treated well by the men in her battalion, but is hoping that the war will end soon.”

As reported by the gadfly site OffGuardian, several readers posted critical observations on the van’s insignia in the comments section of the piece.  One, “bananasandsocks”, wrote:

“We learn from Wikipedia that the image on the door is the “semi-official” insignia of the 36^th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS…” and also pointed out the neo-Nazi significance of the number “1488”.

“bananasandsocks” seemingly temperate comment was removed by the Guardian for violating its community standards, as were several others, apparently as examples of “persistent misrepresentation of the Guardian and our journalists”.

But then the Guardian thought better of it.  While not reinstating the critical comments, it quietly deleted the original caption to the photo of Anaconda and replaced it with: 

Anaconda alongside a van displaying the neo-Nazi symbol 1488. The volunteer brigade is known for its far-right links.

Problem solved?  Maybe not.  Maybe it’s more like “Problem dodged”.  Specifically, the problem of the pervasive participation of “ultra-right” paramilitary elements in Kyiv military operations, which even intrudes upon the Guardian's efforts to put a liberal-friendly feminist sheen on the debacle of the recent ATO in eastern Ukraine.

As to “1488”, I’ll reproduce the Wikipedia entry:

The Fourteen Words is a phrase used predominantly by white nationalists. It most commonly refers to a 14-word slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children."  It can also refer to another 14-word slogan: "Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.”

Both slogans were coined by David Lane, convicted terrorist and member of the white separatist organization The Order. The first slogan was inspired by a statement, 88 words in length, from Volume 1, Chapter 8 of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf:
…
Neo-Nazis often combine the number 14 with 88, as in "14/88" or "1488". The 8s stand for the eighth letter of the alphabet (H), with "HH" standing for "Heil Hitler".  

Lane died in prison in 2007 while serving a 190 year sentence for, among other things, the murder of Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg.  David Lane has considerable stature within global white nationalist/neo-Nazi/fascist circles as one of the American Aryan movement’s premier badasses (in addition involvement in to the Berg murder—in which he denied involvement—and a string of bank robberies to finance the movement—also denied, Lane achieved a certain martyr’s stature for enduring almost two decades in Federal detention, frequently in the notorious Communications Management Units).

And David Lane was a big deal for the “ultra-right” & fascists in Ukraine, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Lane's death touched off paeans from racists around the country and abroad. June 30 was designated a "Global Day of Remembrance," with demonstrations held in at least five U.S. cities as well as England, Germany, Russia and the Ukraine. 

Judging by this video, the march/memorial on the first anniversary of his death, in 2008, organized by the Ukrainian National Socialist Party in Kyiv, was well enough attended to merit a police presence of several dozen officers.  The sountrack to the clip, by the way, is an elegy to David Lane performed by Ukraine's premier white nationalist metal band at the time, Sokyra Peruna.

There is a photograph of a shield inscribed “1488” at Maidan. 

 

More significantly, perhaps, the name of the armed wing of the Svoboda Party, C14, apparently invokes Lane’s “14 words” .  

It should be said that Lane’s views, including those that inspired the 1488 tag, are esoteric even within the fascist/Neo-Nazi/white supremacist world he inhabited. 

In a letter from prison, Lane wrote:

You know that the three greatest movements of the last 2,000 years have been Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Judaism allowed Jews to conquer and rule the world. I believe only a religious fervor can save our kind now. The 14 Words must be a divine command of Nature's God whom we call Wotan Allfather.

…

As the 666 man, and the Joseph Smith of Wotanism my rewards will be zero. Death in prison, scorn from those with no vision, and hate from the stupid goyim and their kosher masters. But sometimes a man is condemned to a higher cause. And cheerfulness in adversity is still a virtue. Take care. 14 - 88

Lane composed his “88 Precepts” to instruct believers in the ways of white nationalism.  While apparently riffing off the 88 word Mein Kampf passage and “88=HH=Heil Hitler”, it also refers to Lane’s numerological/messianic preoccupations.

Ukrainian fascists’ admiration for Lane is a reflection of the pervasiveness of indigenous Ukrainian fascism, which looks for models and partners internationally while drawing plenty of strength and inspiration from its own profoundly deep historical and ideological local roots. 

 

As I wrote in a piece for CounterPunch, Ukrainian fascism seems almost inevitable:  

Ukrainian fascism is more durable and vital than most.  It was forged in the most adverse conditions imaginable, in the furnace of Stalinism, under the reign of Hitler, and amid Poland’s effort to destroy Ukrainian nationality.

Ukrainian nationalism was under ferocious attack between the two world wars.  The USSR occupied the eastern half of Ukraine, subjected it to collectivization under Stalin, and committed repression and enabled a famine that killed millions.  At first, the Soviets sought to co-opt Ukrainian nationalism by supporting Ukrainian cultural expression while repressing Ukrainian political aspirations; USSR nationalities policies were “nationalist in expression and socialist in essence”.  Then, in 1937 Stalin obliterated the native Ukrainian cultural and communist apparatus in a thoroughgoing purge and implemented Russified central control through his bespoke instrument, Nikita Khrushchev.

Meanwhile, the western part of the Ukraine was under the thumb of the Polish Republic, which was trying to entrench its rule before either the Germans or the Russians got around to destroying it again.  This translated into a concerted Polish political, security, cultural, and demographic push into Ukrainian Galicia.  The Polish government displaced Ukrainian intellectuals and farmers, attacked their culture and religion (including seizure of Orthodox churches and conversion into Roman Catholic edifices), marginalized the Ukrainians in their own homeland, and suppressed Ukrainian independence activists (like Bandera, who spent the years 1933 to 1939 in Poland’s Wronki Prison after trying to assassinate Poland’s Minister of the Interior).
Ukrainian nationalists, therefore, were unable to ride communism or bourgeois democracy into power.  Communism was a tool of Soviet expansionism, not class empowerment, and Polish democracy offered no protection for Ukrainian minority rights or political expression, let alone a Ukrainian state.

Ukrainian nationalists turned largely toward fascism, specifically toward a concept of “integral nationalism” that, in the absence of an acceptable national government, manifested itself in a national will residing in the spirit of its adherents, not expressed by the state or restrained by its laws, but embodied by a charismatic leader and exercised through his organization, whose legitimacy supersedes that of the state and whose commitment to violence makes it a law unto itself.

It’s not just a matter of historical sentiment or inclination.  Ukraine’s contemporary fascists share a direct bloodline with the fascists of the Soviet era, especially in the matter of Roman Shukhevych, the commander of Ukrainian nationalist forces fighting with the Nazis during World War II and also responsible for horrific atrocities while attempting to cleanse Galicia of Poles in the service of Ukrainian independence.   From my CounterPunch article:

In February 2014, the New York Times’ Andrew Higgins penned a rather embarrassing passage that valorized the occupation of Lviv—the Galician city at the heart of Ukrainian fascism, the old stomping grounds of Roman Shukhevych and the Nachtigall battlaion, and also Simon Wiesnthal’s home town—by anti-Yanyukovich forces in January 2014:

Some of the president’s longtime opponents here have taken an increasingly radical line.

Offering inspiration and advice has been Yuriy Shukhevych, a blind veteran nationalist who spent 31 years in Soviet prisons and labor camps and whose father, Roman, led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army against Polish and then Soviet rule.

Mr. Shukhevych, 80, who lost his sight during his time in the Soviet gulag, helped guide the formation of Right Sector, an unruly organization whose fighters now man barricades around Independence Square, the epicenter of the protest movement in Kiev.

Yuriy Shukhevych’s role in modern Ukrainian fascism is not simply that of an inspirational figurehead and reminder of his father’s anti-Soviet heroics for proud Ukrainian nationalists.  He is a core figure in the emergence of the key Ukrainian fascist formation, Pravy Sektor and its paramilitary.

And Pravy Sektor’s paramilitary, the UNA-UNSO, is not an “unruly” collection of weekend-warrior-wannabes, as Mr. Higgins might believe.

UNA-UNSO was formed during the turmoil of the early 1990s, largely by ethnic Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet Union’s bitter war in Afghanistan.  From the first, the UNA-UNSO has shown a taste for foreign adventures, sending detachments to Moscow in 1990 to oppose the Communist coup against Yeltsin, and to Lithuania in 1991.  With apparently very good reason, the Russians have also accused UNA-UNSO fighters of participating on the anti-Russian side in Georgia and Chechnya.

After formal Ukrainian independence, the militia elected Yuriy Shukhevych—the son of OUN-B commander Roman Shukhevych– as its leader and set up a political arm, which later became Pravy Sektor.

There’s plenty of indigenous fascism to go around. Interviews with Ukrainian ultra-rights reveal a welter of views befitting the country’s fraught and contested status in central Europe, ranging from “autonomous nationalists” (whose demeanour and tactics mirror on the right mirror those of European anarchists on the left); ultras who emerged from the football club wars; and determinedly theoretical scientific fascists.  The common thread of the diverse and syncretic Ukrainian fascist movement is the conviction that the survival of the Ukrainian people is under threat from a multitude of forces and mechanisms (Russians, Jews, the EU, democracy, capitalism, communism etc.), and can only be assured by autonomous armed force under charismatic leadership; and yes, apparently a shared belief that Adolf Hitler showed how it could and should be done.

Rooting fascism out of Ukraine’s cultural, social, and political matrix is going to take a lot of work.  Unfortunately, the opposite is going on right now.

The leading Ukrainian observer of Ukrainian ultrarights, Anton Shekhovstov, did not deny the presence of ultraright formations at Maidan, but tried to square the circle philosophically by characterizing the Ukrainian conflict as an anti-imperialist/anti-colonial struggle that might elicit and safely incorporate fascist activism.  Then, when the Russian threat had been dealt with, Ukrainian civil society could neutralize the fascist factor.  In January 2014, when Maidan was white-hot, Shekhovstov wrote:

Thus, a fight against fascism in Ukraine should always be synonymous with the fight against the attempts to colonise the country. Those who separate these two issues or crack down on the Ukrainian far right without recognising the urgent need for national independence will never be successful in their attempts to neutralise the far right. Moreover, they can make the situation worse.

However, Ukrainian fascists have not been disempowered and marginalized by the circus of defeat and dysfunction that is the current Kyiv government.  In fact, “ultra-right” is trending upward in Ukraine governance, as Shekhovtsov glumly observed in a recent post discussing the emergence of yet another powerful ultra-right formation:

[T]he electoral failure of Svoboda and the Right Sector [in the recent parliamentary as well as presidential elections] did not mark “the end of history” of the Ukrainian far right…

… The recent developments in Ukraine marked by the rise of the previously obscure neo-Nazi organisation “The Patriot of Ukraine” (PU) led by Andriy Bilets’ky…

… the PU formed a core of the Azov battalion, a volunteer detachment governed by the Ministry of Interior headed by Arsen Avakov. From the very beginning, the Azov battalion employed imagery such as Wolfsangel and Schwarze Sonne that in post-war Europe is associated with neo-Nazi movements…

The political perspective raises troubling questions: Why did Ukrainians elect a neo-Nazi into the parliament? Why did the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior promote the leaders of the neo-Nazi organisation?...

Shekhovtstov finds an explanation for Avakov’s footsie with the PU in the cronyism (and demand for extra-legal street muscle) that permeates Ukraine business and politics.  His conclusion is not a particularly happy one:

Conclusion

Avakov may consider the PU-led Azov battalion as his “private army”, but not everybody in the PU and Azov see the current cooperation with the Ministry of Interior as a goal in and of itself. The PU may benefit from this cooperation, but it still has its own political agenda that goes beyond this cooperation. The PU has also started advertising employment in the Security Service of Ukraine on their webpages. [emphasis added]

Further infiltration of the far right into the Ukrainian law enforcement and other institutions of the state will most likely lead to the following developments. First, the coalescence of the police and the far right who were engaged, inter alia, in the illegal activities will necessarily increase the corruption risks. Second, the growth of the far right within the law enforcement will lead to the gradual liberation of the PU from the personal patronage of Avakov that will likely result in the PU’s independent action.

While Svoboda and the Right Sector have failed in the 2014 parliamentary elections, the infiltration of some other far right organisations in the law enforcement is possibly a more advanced long-term strategy in their fight against not particularly well established liberal democracy in Ukraine.

One of the awkward facts of Ukrainian politics is that Ukraine’s fascists have the ambition if not yet the demonstrated capability of opportunistically using the current regime’s need—and factions’ desires--for effective armed formations to catapult the extreme-right into power.

And it seems that the West has zero strategy for dealing with this problem.  In fact, if disorder and discontent escalate in western Ukraine as a result of the US insistence on confronting Russia and the ethnic Russian opposition in the West, I expect the fascist problem will get worse before it gets better.

And it isn’t going to be solved by ignoring, downplaying, wishing away, or dismissing Ukrianian fascism as an irrelevant historical and political anachronism...or by discretely recaptioning some of its embarrassingly blatant manifestations.  

It’s not just amusing or disturbing that the Guardian appears determined to graft a misleading liberal, Europe-loving image onto the fascist friendly Ukraine adventure; it’s downright dangerous.

I'm trying to avoid the TL;DR trap so I abridged my original piece to supply the excerpt posted above.  But I try to err on the side of inclusiveness and context whenever I can--especially since sources vanish off the web and the Google algorithm sometimes gets dodgy--so I've included the complete original piece below the fold for readers who wish to go deeper.

Re Ukraine, Maybe There Are Useful Idiots Around...But They Aren’t Named Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone’s opinion that the US engineered some skullduggery in Kyiv in February 2014 has attracted some outraged howling.  As to the actual mechanics of what went down, there is room for disagreement.  I myself am something of a Maidan truther (see my piece from February 24, 2014 attached to this post which, if I may say so, looks pretty darn prescient) but teasing what really happened in the square out of the hopeless evidentiary and procedural muddle created by New Ukraine ™ may be impossible.

As to the broader question, Would the United States destabilize Ukraine? I have to admit I find it amazing that there are doubters on this issue.  In US foreign policy, anti-communism/anti-terrorism/national interest/universal human rights can always trump respect for national sovereignty and expression of the popular democratic will.

And since Ukraine, according to Brzezinskian grand mal strategic theorizing, is The Big Kahuna, the difference between an assertive Russian empire and a demoralized Europe-bereft Little Russia miserably snuggled between Italy and Spain in the GDP league tables, it would seem almost irresponsible for the United States not to intervene.

I recently had the pleasure of reading Timothy Weiner’s history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes.  It’s a pretty major piece of debunking which depicts the CIA as an over-funded, under-powered, and over-matched clown college that has been viewed with suspicion and disdain by most modern American presidents with the exception of George H.W. Bush.  President Obama, I believe, also falls into this camp, being much more enamored by the resources and capabilities of the military embodied in JSOC, which probably also explains his willingness to let the CIA endure a public reaming over its detention/interrogation program while the military’s bigger effort gets to skate.

Looking at the history of CIA shenanigans over the decades as described in Weiner’s book, some interesting conclusions present themselves.

First, it is generally recognized that, although Commie rollback was the agency’s raison d’etre, the CIA’s intelligence/covert operations operations against the Soviet Union and its satellites (and against the People’s Republic of China, which included a $180,000 per year stipend for the exiled Dalai Lama until Nixon, I think, pulled the plug) were largely ineffective.   Maybe a dozen effective high level humint sources developed during the history of the Soviet Union, thousands of agents and assets killed or burned by effective Soviet counterintelligence and penetration of the CIA, and US policy crippled by the Agency’s politically tainted and/or clueless guesswork about Soviet capabilities and intentions.  Not a pretty picture.

Second, the CIA was much more of a factor in open societies, thanks largely to money.  The CIA had a lot of money—in the 1950s it was allowed to skim unaccountable millions off various countries’ local currency contributions to the Marshall Plan according to Weiner, and I recall reading in Sterling Seagrave’s Gold Warriors that there was a similarly massive slush fund available to the US in Japan.

That money was used to recruit pro-US politicians/spooks/military officers and support or even create pro-US parties, most famously in Italy.  It also made the CIA the world’s largest worldwide purchaser of crap i.e. fake intel and incompetent and/or disloyal assets which, according to Weiner, the Agency massively leveraged through its own incompetence, helter-skelter planning, and managerial dysfunction.

The money also ensured that, when it was deemed necessary to go beyond the electoral process and engage in some extra-legal destabilization or regime change activity, there were always some locals ready to pitch in and help out.

I direct interested readers to Weiner’s book for an impressive list of US regime-change activity in the post-war era.  The usual suspects are there: Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, the assassination of Lumumba in the Congo, and the epic cock-up at Bay of Pigs.  There are also some less-renowned activities.  For instance, I was not aware that the CIA had engineered the fall of the government of Chad in 1982, so that the United States would have a comfortably pro-US regime in place on Libya’s border to assist in the anti-Qaddafi effort.

Another, much more massive effort that I didn’t know about was the attempt to mount a coup against Indonesia in 1958 at the order of President Eisenhower in response to Sukarno’s perceived transgression in organizing the Bandung non-aligned conference, and the emergence of the Indonesian Communist Party or PKI as a political force.  

 Legacy of Ashes describes the elaborate and expensive but ultimately futile preparations:

Wisner [head of the CIA's clandestine service] flew to the CIA station in Singapore, just across the Malacca Straits from northern Sumatra to set up a political-warfare operation.  Ulmer created military command posts at Clark Air Force Base and the Subic Bay naval station…Ulmer’s Far East operations chief assembled a small team of paramilitary officers in the Philippines…They made contact with a handful of the Indonesian army rebels on Sumatra and another contingent…seeking power on…Sulawesi…. Mason worked with the Pentagon to put together a package of machine guns, carbines, rifles, rocket launchers, mortars, hand grenades, and ammunition sufficient for eight thousand soldiers, and he made plans to supply the rebels on both Sumatra and Sulawesi by sea and by air.  The first arms shipment came ou of Subic Bay on the USS Thomaston…on January 8, 1958.  Mason followed the ship in a submarine…

On February 10, the Indonesian rebels broadcast a stirring challenge to Sukarno from a newly established CIA-financed radio station on Padang…Meanwhile the CIA readied new weapons shipments…and awaited the first signs of a nationwide popular uprising.

Which didn’t materialize.  Instead, the armed forces, loyal to Sukarno, vigorously attacked the rebels on Sumatra.  The US dispatched a Navy battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga to the north coast of Sumatra, and US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made a statement calling for revolt against “Communist despotism”.

By the end of April, the battle on Sumatra was lost to the Indonesian government, leaving the only US hope the rebels remaining on Sulawesi.  To help things along, the CIA initiated a covert bombing campaign.  Weiner again:

For…three weeks…CIA pilots hit military and civilian targets in the villages and harbors of northeastern Indonesia.  On May Day, Allen Dulles told Eisenhower that these air strikes had been “almost too effective, since they had resulted in the sinking of a British and of a Panamanian freighter.”  Hundreds of civilians died, the American embassy reported…

To maintain deniability, the US claimed the bombings were carried out by “dissident planes” but that story unraveled on May 18, when a plane was shot down and a CIA officer, Al Pope, was captured.  The US finally threw in the towel.

In an interesting harbinger of John Kerry’s “I was for it before I was against it” statement, the US government then declared that it was against overthrowing Sukarno after it was for it.

Seven years later, in 1965, things worked themselves out as enough of the Indonesian military finally had sufficient doubts about Sukarno to overthrow him and massacre several hundred thousands of the unnervingly strong PKI.  While claiming it had not fomented this particular coup, the U.S. backed Suharto and the rebel generals enthusiastically.  I was struck by a statement by Bob Martens, a political officer at the Jakarta embassy.

According to Weiner’s account, Martens received a visit from an emissary of the rebels.  In case the rebel spooks were even less plugged in than the CIA, Martens helpfully delivered a list of sixty-seven PKI members that he had compiled out of press clippings.  “It was certainly not a death list…”

Anyway…

The most telling epitaph for the CIA’s regime change agenda was perhaps provided by the CIA pilot shot down and captured in Indonesia in 1958.  As recounted by Weiner:

“They said [1958] Indonesia was a failure,” Al Pope reflected bitterly.  “But we knocked the shit out of them.  We killed thousands of Communists, even though half of them probably didn’t even know what Communism meant.”

A lot of US regime change activity, in other words, was not against Communist regimes or Communist clients or allies.  It was against executed against unreliably independent non-aligned types whose loyalty and responsiveness to US needs was not assured.

And more.

What do the names Trujillo, Diem, and Noriega have in common?

These were US allies and clients, our own guys, but we decided they had to be overthrown anyway because their activities were deemed too incompetent, corrupt, or inconvenient.

In other words, the United States had so much money, and got so addicted to throwing unaccountable money at its overseas problems, covert action became something of a default in dealing with our own allies, not just our enemies.

Have things changed? Is America learning?  Working smarter not harder?  Ditching the easy solution of throwing black budget money at our growing legion of intractable problems?

As to whether “regime change” in the service of American interests and not necessarily directed against US enemies is an artifact of the Cold War, and we’ve moved into a new, post-subversion nirvana of Hope, I’ve got to say Nope.

There’s Qaddafi in Libya.  It is, I suspect, little remembered in the United States that Qaddafi made a colossally expensive deal with the West to assure his survival—in fact Libya was a rare triumph of George W. Bush coercive diplomacy and Libya's denuclearization was supposed to serve as the model for bringing refractory dictatorships like North Korea back into the family of nations—before the US and NATO greased the skids for his overthrow and murder under President Obama.

The elements of the deal bear repeating:

Qaddafi revealed and decommissioned Libya’s nuclear and chemical weapons programs in 2003 in response to the Iraq War and, in the same year, privatized much of the Libyan oil industry so that foreign majors could invest $40 billion and slurp at trough of the sweet Libyan crude.  In order to close the books on the Lockerbie bombing, the Libyan government paid over $2 billion in compensation (without admitting guilt) as “the price for peace”.

Qaddafi met with Tony Blair in 2004 and the EU lifted sanctions in the next year.  Qaddafi cooperated in the Global War on Terror and the United States obliged by repatriating to Libyan custody several anti-Qaddafi Islamists detained in Pakistan (in the requisite ironic aside, according to Human Rights Watch several of them were savagely tortured at US facilities and actually received better treatment in Libyan custody).

But these dealings, of course, availed Qaddafi little when push final came to fatal shove.

If you want to understand why North Korea has little appetite for the US and its demands to denuclearize, look at Libya, not The Interview.

As to whether Libya was just a one-off and the Obama administration has moved beyond crude subversion, and is limiting itself to the legally colored subtleties of sanctions, diplomacy, information freedom, and encouraging independent NGOs to deal with its designated adversaries--mainly vulnerable countries that don't do a good job of toeing the US line--well, consider the hijinks US AID has been pulling on Cuba and the carnival of destabilization inflicted upon Venezuela and ask yourself: would Yanyukovich get better treatment than Castro? And Maduro?  And I haven’t gotten to the coup in Honduras yet.  And I believe we are once again f*cking with Haiti.

Moving to the ex-Soviet bloc—the focus of $1 trillion in US covert, intelligence acquisition, and analytic efforts over the last half century--there is a powerful and to me inordinate determination to emphasize the solely indigenous character of the color revolutions that swept the ex-Soviet republics, perhaps assisted by some well-heeled foreign freedom-loving NGOs.  But at least in remote Kyrgyzstan, the open assistance of the United States embassy to the Tulip Revolution is well-documented. 

In Ukraine, Victoria Nuland has thrown around some big numbers, declaring that the United States spent $5 billion to help Ukraine shed the incubus of its pro-Russian and or infuriatingly incompetent pro-Western regimes since 1991.  Here, by the way, is Nuland’s defense of the $5 billion statement (“Not a penny for Maidan!) , her cookie-deliverin’ ways (“I came in peace!”), and that whole awkward “F*ck the EU” (actually, the “The US will determine the composition of the post-Yanyukovich junta”) megilla. 

Given the intense US interest in Ukraine and its commitment to getting its way by any means necessary, I don’t see support for any a priori assumption on the grounds of US respect for sovereignty/democratic process or aversion to violence that the U.S. would not f*ck with the Yanyukovich government, violently or otherwise, in February 2014.  Oliver Stone, to my mind, is not a “useful idiot”.  He’s a guy who co-authored an important book on US foreign policy and whose opinions can carry legitimate weight.

As to CIA sending snipers, my main reservation would be that, judging by the Weiner book, there is no way the Obama administration would entrust so sensitive and dangerous a mission to the Agency.  Maybe the US gave a nod and a wink, maybe it stirred the pot in Maidan, but if so maybe it was something local/provocateury or MittelEurop/Baltic subcontracty.  Time, maybe, will tell. 

As to whether some overall ratf*cking actually went on, well, here’s an excerpt from my contemporaneous take, which either reveals the ability of pro-Russian disinfo to travel back in time to cloud the minds of "useful idiots", or shows that for people who read the papers and paid attention there were always ample grounds for suspecting US machinations in Ukraine:

 Monday, February 24, 2014

Looks Like US Played Hardball in the Ukraine...and Against the EU

When the EU mediated a deal between the opposition and the government, I thought Yanukovich had dodged the bullet.

Not quite.

In parsing the circumstances of Yanukovich’s downfall, it is interesting to look for the machinations of Victoria Nuland, the State Department neo-con (wife of Robert Kagan) who was apparently given a free hand in matters Ukrainian by President Obama.

Consider this:

The background of Nuland’s notorious Fuck the EU audio was her feeling that the EU was insufficiently confrontational with the Ukranian government, especially on the issue of sanctions.

As to what “sufficiently confrontational” might look like, consider this AFP report from back in January that showed up in the Yahoo! Sports feed, since its subject, R. Akhmetov, is the owner of Ukraine’s most successful football outfit :

Ukraine's richest man Rinat Akhmetov, the owner of the Shakhtar Donetsk football club, is having a possibly decisive influence on Ukraine's standoff between the security forces and protesters.

Akhmetov has long been seen as a leading ally of President Viktor Yanukovych. He has bankrolled the ruling Regions Party which he formerly represented in parliament as an MP, and harks from the eastern Donetsk region that is the president's stronghold. 

But in a possible turning point in a crisis that has raised fears of a prolonged civil conflict, Akhmetov on Saturday issued a strong statement warning that the use of force against protesters was unacceptable and the only way forward was negotiations. 

…aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand…

…his reasons for being so strongly against the use of a state of emergency to forcefully end the protests may not be entirely altruistic.

According to the influential news site Ukrainska Pravda, visiting US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland warned Akhmetov at a secret meeting when she visited Kiev in December that he and other wealthy backers of the Regions Party could face EU and US sanctions if the police used force against the protesters.

For a businessman with an international reputation and properties outside of Ukraine, including a luxury town house in London, this was clearly an unwelcome prospect. 

…aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand more please:

Akhmetov was able to control a group of at least 40 MPs from the ruling Regions Party in the Verkhovna Rada parliament.

So what happened after the EU brokered a transitional, power-sharing sort of deal with the EU?

The truce broke.

How did the truce break?

Fearing that a call for a truce was a ruse, protesters tossed firebombs and advanced upon police lines Thursday in Ukraine's embattled capital. Government snipers shot back and the almost-medieval melee that ensued left at least 70 people dead and hundreds injured, according to a protest doctor.

…

A truce announced late Wednesday appeared to have little credibility among hardcore protesters. One camp commander, Oleh Mykhnyuk, told the AP even after the alleged truce, protesters still threw firebombs at riot police on the square. As the sun rose, police pulled back, the protesters followed them and police then began shooting at them, he said.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand what happened in the parliament?

Ukrainian Parliament Deputy Speaker Ruslan Koshulynsky has announced that more parliamentarians have withdrawn from the Party of Regions faction.

In particular, Oleksandr Volkov, Yuriy Polyachenko, Vitaliy Hrushevsky, Volodymyr Dudka, Yaroslav Sukhy, Artem Scherban, and one more parliamentarian, whose name Koshulynsky pronounced unintelligibly, had left the Party of Regions faction.

Koshulynsky later announced the names of four other deputies who left the Party of Regions faction, i.e. Viktor Zherebniuk, Ivan Myrny, Hennadiy Vasylyev, and Nver Mkhitarian. He later added Larysa Melnychuk and Serhiy Katsuba to this list.

Hence, the Party of Regions has lost 41 deputies, including 28 on Friday and the other 14 on Saturday.

Don’t know if any of these were among Akhmetov’s 40 people.  Would be interesting to find out.  In any case, enough Party of Regions deputies bailed to give the pro-EU forces a majority and a free hand in parliament to undertake some sweeping initiatives, like unilaterally impeaching the president, repudiating a previous constitutional revision, and releasing Yulia Timoshenko from prison.

So, by a less-than-generous view, it might be suspected that the United States encouraged demonstrators to break the truce, with the expectation that violence would occur and Yanukovich’s equivocal fat cat backers, such as Akhmetov, would jump ship because the US had already informed them that their assets in the West would be at risk under US and EU sanctions.

If this is the case, the EU perhaps has additional reason to feel sore and resentful at the US.  By blowing up the truce and the transition deal, Nuland got Yanukovich out and “Yats”—the preferred US proxy, Arseniy Yatsenyuk—in, but at the cost of terminally alienating the Ukraine’s pro-Russian segment—a segment, it might be pointed out, was actually able to elect Yanukovich in a free and fair election a while back.

In any case, through some creative interpretation of the Ukrainian constitution, the now West-friendly parliament has constituted itself as the primary legitimate organ of government, selected a new prime minister, and scheduled elections for December.

Since this new government is flat-busted, needs somewhere north of $30 billion in fresh loans to make it through the year, one might think the West didn’t get much of a bargain.  However, it seems that everybody in the new government is gung-ho on accepting an IMF package through which, I suppose, the Ukraine will be comfortably chained in debt vassalage to the West for the foreseeable future and incapable of returning to the welcoming arms of Russia.

Whether the eastern and southern Ukraine—strongholds of pro-Russian feeling—will put up with the wrenching IMF restructuring that their western comrades appear so eager to implement is another question.

Don’t be surprised if this miraculous offspring of Obamian righteousness and neo-con callous bravado yields another nation-building triumph along the lines of Libya and South Sudan, but this time with the fiasco squarely in the lap of the Ukraine’s discombobulated EU neighbors.