SO FEW AND FRINGE?

A popular debater, streamer, and social media personality was recently posting about the ongoing war in Ukraine. Specifically they were concerned with the discussion of Nazis making up some portion of the force the West is backing against Russia. The argument was that it was deeply silly and unethical even to purity test the armed forces of a nation who had been invaded and had its territory stolen by a vastly larger neighbouring nation. Though emotionally compelling, I only have problems with this argument, and the issues are many. 

But first a proviso:

Russia should get the hell out of Ukraine. And the US and her friends in NATO should, too. Sadly, I don't think either action solves the problem there.

I have no reason to suspect that far-right extremism and extremist rhetoric isn't actually worse in Russia (or Belarus or Italy or any number of other places) than in Ukraine; but the situation in Ukraine over the last two decades has been at best appalling. And the reason this situation in Ukraine is worth pointing out is because the West continues to provide unimaginable volumes of resources and moral support to many of the worst actors. That's not happening with Belarus or Russia. 

That would be bad enough but, since our full-throttle support for Ukraine began, there has also been an aggressive cover-up here in the West of these actors and their actions; or, if you wish to be less conspiratorial, a total failure to investigate and merely treat our "allies" as we would treat our own. Government and the press do not want you to know the extent to which you are funding, training, and sending all manner of weapons to violent and bigoted extremists who gladly spell out their fascist, white supremacist aims for all to see. These people are not even shy about their views when they have a BBC, PBS, or CBC camera in their face. That’s a real problem. You may not see it as such.

Based on mainstream press and institutional reports, published academic papers and books, I contend that, contrary to much of the popular discourse:

A) The number of terrible actors with terrible motivations, conducting terrible deeds as they seek a terrible future for Ukraine are not nearly so limited as others suggest, given that the iconography, rhetoric, and actions still manifest just as they did a decade ago

B) The worst bigotry is very obviously tolerated and even endorsed by leading figures, from celebrated historians and lawmakers to military recruiters and training teams, from war heroes to new recruits; and

C) A “tiny fraction” (10%, 1%, 0.01%) of the citizenry, the military or intelligence community, or political establishment is a very large number and too many. Similarly humungous is the "tiny fraction" of Western financial and material aid landing in these people's hands when the sums are in the hundreds of billions

Just these worst folks are receiving an unimaginable volume of resources. Yes, it is literally unimaginable that our military would knowingly train one dude (yes, one) with a SS tattoo on his face or elbow or that $1 (yes, just one dollar) from taxpayers would go to him or his friends who want to purge their country of anyone they assert are not Ukrainian or who like to pretend the Holocaust didn't happen or wish to try and start another. I suspect the funding he and his friends and the general he marches under have gotten is in the tens or hundreds of millions, maybe upwards of a billion dollars — and, of course, there is no sign of this sponsorship or the overabundance of unearned moral support slowing down. Somehow we couldn't do so little as condition the continued receipt of howitzers and surface-to-air missiles upon their key military trainers not sharing on our televisions their most visible examples of those symbols last sported by the armies of Adolf?

TO BEGIN WITH

A critical first point is needed regarding identity. Many of Ukraine’s militant ultranationalists — who are happy to fight with or kill those they don’t consider Ukrainian to get them out of positions of power or out of the country — choose not to associate with Nazism even while they gladly sport and spread the worst symbols and slogans. They tend to prefer to self-identify, just like Germany’s mid-century warfighters, as “nationalists” or “national-socialists.” Cute, right?

Still, let there be no doubt, they are perfectly happy to sit down with Western journalists and declare in front of the camera, for example, “We are Aryans and we will rise again.” It is that subtle. As you see, when they reject Nazism it is not the ideas or aims they oppose but the association with something they consider to be insufficiently organic or endemic to their own nation’s fertile steppes. So, you just aren’t going to find folks self-identifying as “Nazis”, even if they’re extremely proud of and participate in the annual celebrations of their grandfathers who fought under Hitler and within local Nazi divisions during WWII. So, the bulk of the problem was never folks sporting swastikas, though there are, indeed, seemingly endless numbers of folks in that category. And then framing any discussion of the problem this way, as about Nazis, is inappropriate.

Then we have the current international optics and need for outside resources. Since Putin’s invasion and his stated aim of the “denazification”, the farthest right in Ukraine have had a PR problem. It didn’t help that immediately prior to the current war and in early 2022 the most mainstream of the Western press hadn’t yet pivoted to the new reality (not yet denying basic historical facts or purging their previous reporting.) It took time to grok that for NATO to back Ukraine we would all have to agree to abandon all our principles and pretend homophobia, racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism wasn’t rampant in Ukraine and that we weren’t fully aware of the extent to which the culture remained poisoned by hate and her institutions and citizenry unaccustomed to tracking down or meaningfully punishing even the most terrible actors.

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So, even in 2022, our media were still publishing articles about how serious the problem of far-right extremism was in Ukraine, just as they have been for a decade or more. As such, Ukraine’s avowed ultranationalists and passionate White supremacists (those self-identifying as such and adorned in t-shirts and visible tattoos attesting to their beliefs and desires) started realizing that, if they wanted backing against Russia’s much larger and better equipped military, it might be in their best interest to be a little more discrete, at least in certain company. And that did happen. The loudest and proudest displays have dampened. And the press here in the West have got in line, too. But, of course, their iconography and slogans still managed to make their way onto our nightly news and continues doing so. This highlights, for me at least, just how bad the problem is.

From there we can talk about the recent conflict. As I wrote about at the outset of the 2022 invasion, just as many mainstream Western scholars and journalists have pointed out, I think there’s good reason to consider the current conflict as directly precipitated by and an escalation of the events of 2014. And, too, there are plenty of reasons to suspect the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s government, popularly known as the Euromaidan Revolution, was at minimum endorsed, but more likely engineered, by the US. Even at that time the renowned John Pilger published in The Guardian a piece titled “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia.” There he observed as explicitly as possible that “Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing of the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world.” Pilger went on to notice that “Nato's military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained ‘pariah’ role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.” For me, there’s no doubt that Russian leaders continually stated how NATO bases in or NATO membership for Ukraine, right there on Russia’s border, was the brightest of uncrossable red lines, tantamount to a declaration of war — likely a nuclear one. And, of course, even ignoring the overthrow of the Russia-friendly government in Ukraine, the ever-closer relationship with the West paired with discussions of these sorts of forbidden activities (little different to many from Soviet nukes in Cuba or Russian, Chinese, and Iranian operations in Venezuela) has only increased over the last decade and exploded in the last couple of years. So, it seems clear, maybe only to me, that the ubiquitous demand that the 2022 invasion was the start of something or unprovoked are totally indefensible and little more than smoke and mirrors.

But why does that matter to this discussion? It matters for all kinds of reasons but especially because, as the debater/commentator noted in their post, “at its height, it is estimated there were some 900, maybe, Nazis in the Azov Battalion.” Folks love limiting the problem to this one group and to events of a decade ago, but nothing was ever so distant or limited.

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