I just watched the opening minutes of the film Winter On Fire, a movie made in response to Oliver Stone’s movie Ukraine On Fire. As opposed to Oliver Stone’s movie which explained how the U.S. supported a coup in Ukraine and was willing to work with the worst kind of fascists and neo-Nazis to do it, Winter On Fire took the official U.S. line on the events of 2013–4. In case you were wondering, it was WAY easier to find than Oliver Stone’s film. In fact I wasn’t even looking for it, I just stumbled upon it while looking for a good documentary to watch.
The movie opens with an interview of a pro-revolution protestor speaking about the leadup to the protests. The camera pans out to reveal he is wearing a scarf with the image of Stepan Bandera on it. Within a moment or two, the red and black flag of UNSO (the military arm of UNA) can be seen in the background. This flag is ubiquitous in the background (or foreground) of almost all the footage I watched (I only watched the first twenty minutes or so). The fact that the creators of the documentary found it either impossible or unnecessary to avoid overt Nazi imagery is telling.
There are those who will say that Bandera wasn’t really that bad a guy, and that even if he was, the people with pictures of him on their wall or with tattoos of him on their bodies are really just inspired by the fact that he fought for Ukrainian independence. Let’s do a quick dive into the history of Stepan Bandera, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Bandera was a key member of OUN, a group of Ukrainian nationalists who used terrorism and assassination against the Polish government. The OUN employed “bomb-throwing at Polish exhibitions and murders of policemen,” among other tactics. Bandera was arrested and sentenced to death for his involvement in terrorism, a sentence that was later commuted to life in prison. The OUN worked closely with NAZI intelligence to aid their invasion of Poland, and later helped to form the Waffen-SS Galizien division, perhaps the most vicious of all the SS groups.
Much revisionist history has taken place in the last decade to minimize the crimes of Bandera and the OUN, a necessity since their images, flags, and tattoos seem to be ever-present amongst the propaganda images and video of the west. Not just in this documentary but in many interviews of various Ukrainians on mainstream media. So let me cite a source that predated the events of the last two decades in order to get a more fairly balanced view of the symbology that is so prevalent in Ukraine.
The book Fascism: Past, Present and Future was written by Walter Laqueur and published in 1996. No wacko rightwing or leftwing nutjob, Laqueur was for 25 years the director of one of the world’s leading institutes for the study of fascism, London’s Wiener Holocaust Library. According to Laqueur, the red and black flags that are so prevalent among the protests belong to the UNSO, which is the paramilitary arm of the UNA, a successor group of OUN. To summarize, those red and black flags belong to a paramilitary group that considers itself the successor to the Ukrainian SS division, a group that even the German SS found especially reprehensible. The slogans of the UNSO are “War is our future” and “Provocation, revolt, revolution” (p. 213).
One might wonder why in 2014, with Ukraine being ostensibly a democracy, they felt revolution was necessary, until one recalls that the Weimar Republic was also a democracy.
Besides saying that Bandera and the UON we’re not that bad, western media is also fond of saying that the far-right elements involved in Ukrainian politics is a small minority. That is true, but the question is what percentage of ethnocentric nationalists, who take as their inspiration a truly genocidal movement, is acceptable. In United Sates politics according to liberal media, that would be zero percent. A single Confederate flag at a MAGA rally, or a Nazi flag — even if it is used to call the other side Nazis — instantly brands everyone there a racist and a fascist. I don’t necessarily think this is fair, whether we are discussing Ukrainian protests or Trump supporters, but if I were a supporter of either Trump or Ukraine, I would be careful whom I allowed in my protests.
Yevgeny Karas, the leader of the far-right group C14, was asked to comment on the fact that the extreme right only accounted for ten percent of the protestors involved in the Maidan Revolution. He replied that it was perhaps only eight percent of the crowd, but if it were not for them “the protests would have turned into a gay pride parade”. It doesn’t take a lot of violence-prone racists to change the course of a protest or a revolution.
To see the extent of the violence employed during the Maidan protests, it is recommended that you view Oliver Stone’s Ukraine On Fire (if you can find it). Compared to the documented violence that occurred in Kiev, January 6th looks as non-violent as a gay pride parade.
There is a moment in the movie Battleship Potemkin where the people gather together and decide the government must be brought down. In the midst of the excitement, one member of the crowd shouts: “Down with the Jews!” The crowd turns towards to where the voice came from, and the man who spoke the words realizes the crowd is not with him. The man pulls up his collar, pulls down his hat, and tries to slip away unseen. But the crowd is onto him. They surround him, and begin to pummel him.
This is what the protestors at Maidan should have done to the people overtly proclaiming their affinity for genocidal fascists. This happens in U.S. protests all the time. I’ve seen video of MAGA protestors chasing away provocateurs trying to incite violence. I’ve seen BLM protestors do the same. If you have a legitimate cause you are fighting for, it is essential that you do not allow such people to worm their way into your movement.
The fact that the peaceful protestors did shows either their ignorance of their own history or a fear of confronting the far right. If they were ignorant of their history, it is likely because of an undue influence of Western intelligence in their culture. Russia or the Soviet Union never would have permitted them to forget history when it came to Nazis. If it is because they feared groups such as C-14, The Svoboda party, and Right Sector, then clearly these groups had a greater influence on the protests than what western “experts” claim.
Among the protestors, non-violent and otherwise, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland handed out cookies. Despite being Jewish, Nuland to my knowledge never uttered a word of concern about far-right groups that espoused violent and antisemitic sentiments. This would be shocking, if anything the U.S. did in foreign politics had any shock value anymore. From Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden, MEK to ISIS, there is no one the U.S. will not supply weapons to or urge to violence.
Like the protestors in Ukraine, we are to blame for permitting such promotors of violence to exist among us. If we continue to tolerate them, they will soon employ violence, coercion and lies to co-opt our society and government. Oh, wait, that happened a long time ago.
