Denial Larare - Corporate Media’s About-Face on Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis

U.S. corporate media spent years dismissing the role of neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s 2014 coup but it is suddenly going through a conversion, as Daniel Lazare reports.

Exceprts

Last month a freelance journalist named Joshua Cohen published an article in The Washington Post about the Ukraine’s growing neo-Nazi threat.  Despite a gratuitous swipe at Russia for allegedly exaggerating the problem (which it hasn’t), the piece was fairly accurate. 

Entitled “Ukraine’s ultra-right militias are challenging the government to a showdown,” it said that fascists have gone on a rampage while the ruling clique in Kiev closes its eyes for the most part and prays that the problem somehow goes away on its own

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Thus, a group calling itself C14 (for the fourteen-word ultra-right motto, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) not only beat up a socialist politician and celebrated Hitler’s birthday by stabbing an antiwar activist, but bragged about it on its website.  Other ultra-nationalists, Cohen says, have stormed the Lvov and Kiev city councils and “assaulted or disrupted” art exhibits, anti-fascist demos, peace and gay-rights events, and a Victory Day parade commemorating the victory over Hitler in 1945.

Yet nothing has happened to stop this.  President Petro Poroshenko could order a crackdown, but hasn’t for reasons that should be obvious.  The U.S.-backed “Euromaidan” uprising not only drove out former president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, who had won an OSCE-certified election, but tore the country in two, precisely because ultra-rightists like C14 were in the lead.  

Someday, historians will look back on Euromaidan Ukraine as one of the looniest periods in western journalism – except, of course, for all the ones that have followed. But if one had to choose the looniest story of all, one that best reflects the abject toadyism of the reporting classes, it would have to be “Why Jews and Ukrainians Have Become Unlikely Allies,” a 1,400-word article that ran on the Post-owned Foreign Policywebsite in May 2014.  Four years later, it stands as a model of how not to write about an all-important political crisis.

Consortium News

Denial Larare - Corporate Media’s About-Face on Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis

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I saw a documentary a little while back about the Ukrainian right wing extremist nationalists. They were mainly working class football hooligans who  were notorious  for their violence and obnoxious behavior. They looked menacing with their punk and skinhead hair cuts, their piercings, and their over tattooed bodies.

If for some reason you have slipped to the bottom and are not much good at anything then, sadly, some people feel they can at least raise your self esteem a little bit by being the worst, the most notorious, the baddest, and the most menacing.

These sort of can people fiercely patriotic because that raises their self esteem too - ' we're the best, we're the greatest, no one messes with us', etc, so the ruling elite find them easy to manipulate into fighting their wars for them. They lose their lives, while the elite make a ton of money.

To think these idiots could have caused the death of millions of people and maybe even WW3.  KV.