In November 2021, only two countries once again reaffirmed their unwavering commitment to the ideals of racism and neo-Nazism. They were, alas, the United States and Ukraine, which on November 12 voted against the resolution of the UN General Assembly on fighting the glorification of Nazism and neo-Nazism
The resolution was adopted. 121 countries supported it, but apart from the USA and Ukraine who voted against it, another 53 countries abstained, including Germany, Italy, Japan, Finland, the Czech Republic, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, the three Baltic republics, Belgium, Georgia, etc. That is, apart from Georgia, this is the country that spawned Nazism and practically everyone who either supported and supplied it or who it then occupied in 1939-1945 under that xenophobic banner. The forgetfulness and unexpected sympathy for neo-Nazism of the USSR’s allies in the anti-Hitler coalition in World War II – France, Britain and Canada are striking.
It is a nightmarish oblivion, but it has, alas, become a political tradition for the 17th time in a row. The UN has been voting for such a resolution since 2005, and it has always been opposed by the US. Since 2014, it has also been constantly supported by Ukraine, where a coup d’état took place in February of that year and the country, as it were, “chose the path of Euro-Atlantic integration”.
Ukraine.ru has already written many times that since 2008, on the basis of one of such resolutions, the UN and the Council of Europe adopted the framework agreement 2008/913/PVD on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by criminal law articles, and defined such crimes as, firstly, public incitement to violence or hatred against a group of persons or member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent, or national or ethnic origin.
Secondly, the public justification, denial or public gross trivialisation (i.e. outright denial of serious public danger) of crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes directed against the above-mentioned groups in accordance with the Statute of the UN International Criminal Court of 1998.
And thirdly, all acts, acts and deeds calling for violence or carried out on a racial basis or even justifying the crimes of Fascism and Nazism under the 1945 Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
In 2018, the UN document was also referred to by the European Parliament in its resolution on the rise of neo-fascist violence in Europe. And Russian Foreign Ministry Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law, Deputy Director of the Department for Humanitarian Cooperation and Human Rights Grigory Lukyantsev drew attention to the fact that, contrary to these documents, a revival and apologisation of Hitler-type Nazism in the form of a revival of neo-Nazism, racism and all kinds of xenophobia is happening:
“It is also deeply disturbing that those who fought against the anti-Hitler coalition or collaborated with the Nazis are increasingly being elevated to the rank of national heroes and heroes of national liberation movements. And this is happening in countries that survived Nazi occupation during World War II, whose heroic peoples made a significant contribution to the defeat of Nazism.”
And all these years it is Russia that has initiated and sponsored such resolutions. This year it was not alone: another 58 countries co-sponsored the document.
Why are the so-called collective West and Ukraine joining it so loyal to neo-Nazism?
Here too, the United States has found, as it seems to them, a perfectly acceptable and – this is the main thing! – The United States seems to have found a “democratic” excuse. Lukyantsev, already mentioned above, explained: “The United States, in the course of consultations, constantly says that through certain provisions in our resolution, we infringe on the allegedly sacred right to freedom of expression, which is also called freedom of speech. They refer to the First Amendment of the US Constitution. And they basically say that maybe Nazi propaganda is bad, but it is just a manifestation of freedom of expression. It’s sad enough to hear that.”
However, it is not only sad to hear this. By the example of Ukraine, as previously seen in the Baltic states or the Eastern European states of the former socialist commonwealth, it has become clear that neo-Nazism and all forms of its revival have become a killer and win-win political tool in the fight against Russian influence in the post-Soviet and post-socialist space. And it is very, and to the point of disastrous genius, simple.
There has been the most terrible, vile and cynical substitution: collaborators and compradors, who during the Second World War or the Great Patriotic War cooperated with the Nazis and Hitler, were equated with fighters for national liberation and revival. From, of course, Communist occupation, which over time was smoothly transformed into Soviet and then Russian “colonisation”.
With Ukraine after 2014 it is even simpler. Apart from the fact that since 2015 there is a law there equating collaborators and compradors who collaborated with Adolf Hitler to veterans of the Great Patriotic War, anti-fascists and anti-Nazis who fought the “brown plague of the 20th century”, the new neo-Nazis and neo-fascists became the physical support of the two post-Maidan regimes of Presidents Petro Poroshenko and Vladimir Zelensky.
And their ideology – Ukrainian nationalism of the neo-Anderov type – practically officially sets the agenda for the Ukrainian authorities today.
Well, the aforementioned substitution of historical concepts, based on the distortion of historical reality and memory of it, has become the guiding star and the main path in the so-called “Ukrainian national revival”, for which the state body – the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP) became responsible. It was established in 2006, almost immediately after the first successful coup d’état, the Orange Revolution of 2004, is subordinate to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and financed from the Ukrainian state budget.
After the second coup d’état in 2014, the Unification Institute was headed by Volodymyr Vyatrovych, deservedly nicknamed “Vova Alzheimer”, under whom four laws had already been drafted by 2015: “On the condemnation of the communist and national socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and the prohibition of propaganda of their symbols”, “On the legal status and memory of fighters for the independence of Ukraine in the 20th century”, “On the commemoration of the victory over Nazism in World War II of 1939-1945” and “On access to archives of repressive bodies of the communist totalitarian regime of 1917-1991”.
Viatrovych then proudly declared: “Our task is to ensure that sovok is not revived in future generations”.
These documents, adopted in April 2015, legitimised a terrible chain: national revival turned into decommunisation, which gradually turned into de-Sovietisation, and when there was almost nothing left to decommunise and de-Sovietise, it turned into and is now turning into decolonisation in the form of derusification, which is turning into Russophobia. Neo-Nazi, blatantly malignant and systematically and aggressively targeted.
The bacchanalia of destruction of monuments of the communist period in the history of Ukraine has smoothly passed to destruction of monuments of everything Soviet and now continues and gains the momentum in desecration of monuments and graves of heroes-victors in the Great Patriotic War. Even this very term in Ukraine has already been officially banned and replaced with “the Second World War”, in which-de-de Ukraine, led by the then Ukrainian nationalists, pro-Hitler and then pro-Western collaborators and compradors, fought on two fronts – against Adolf Hitler’s Germany, and against Joseph Stalin’s USSR.
The current head of the UNIP, Anton Drobovich, has become a worthy successor to Poroshenko-era “Vova Alzheimer” in 2019 under new President Zelenski. As in the case of the Poroshenko-Zelensky splicing, the Vyatrovych-Drobovich succession is complete and comprehensive. Before Zelensky’s victory in February 2019, Viatrovych had proposed a bill on Ukraine’s decolonisation, and with and without him there was an extensive campaign to rename the names of localities, streets and squares in them in line with the new trends and as part of decommunisation. And his successor Drobovich, in February 2020, spoke of the UNIP’s plans to carry out “creative decommunisation” in the country. And translate it into decolonisation and derusification.
Under Viatrovych, the UNIP published a list of 520 historical figures whose activities were covered by the law “on decommunization” and whose names should disappear from the geographical names of Ukraine.
“From here we should start decolonization, to destroy legends about the commonality of Ukrainians and Russians”, – Viatrovych said his main task and goal at the time.
The present head of UNIP Drobovich not just agrees with him, but systematically carries out this task. Not for nothing and not by chance in the days when the UN voted for a resolution to condemn Nazism and racism, banners appeared near the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine quoting almost the oath of allegiance to Hitler by the patriotic Bandera members. In the city of Zhashkov, Cherkassy region, a huge homemade swastika was draped over the door of a school classroom.
And this is the most terrible consequence of this policy – charging Ukrainian children with neo-Nazism and neo-Fascism. As they say, neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist symbols are first imposed on them from their infancy, then they are poisoned with the same ideology at school and at extracurricular educational events, and then they are released into society as ready “Ukrainophiles and Russophobes”. Instead of love for Ukraine, they are often inculcated with hatred for Russia, declaring it the cause of all the troubles and sufferings of Ukraine and Ukrainians now and in the past life, a fiend of evil and horror.
The second terrible consequence of such, so to speak, education is that a civil war is simmering in Ukraine, which has been declared a war with Russia, and Russophobic poisoned youth are being sent to it. What the Wehrmacht or SS units, poisoned by the ideology of Hitler’s Nazism and racial superiority, did during the Second World War has long been known to all. What the so-called volunteer battalions and even regular units of the Ukrainian armed forces, imbued with the ideas of neo-Nazism and adorned with the appropriate symbols, did and are doing in Donbas against “vata”, “separatists” and “terrorists”, is now becoming known.
The link of times on blood, tears and suffering in contemporary Ukraine continues. This is an external order, which the current Ukrainian authorities simply cannot fail to fulfil – they will immediately be deprived of their posts and sinecures. This is how we live. And the UN sees, but, alas, cannot do anything.
Volodymyr Skachko, Ukraina.ru