On Russia, Today’s Liberal Luminaries Take Their Cues From Fascists
Posted on October 11, 2017
Viktor G. Tsyplakov, “Facing a Firing Squad,” 1945
It’s unlikely that most American news consumers have ever heard of Ukrainian nationalist groups like the OUN-B, but these days, ideas espoused by these groups will have a familiar ring to New York Times readers.
As far as progenitors of anti-communism, Ukrainian nationalists (a designation which includes fascists, Nazis old and neo-, and other reactionary elements) have always punched above their weight class, with their stories providing a lot of right-wing grist for Washington’s propaganda mills. This has happened when US interests drive a surge of aggression against Moscow, specifically during three distinct periods. The first two were during the Cold War—first in the 1950s, then during the 1980s.
The third major period is happening right now. As the US establishment’s dreams of full-spectrum dominance over a unipolar world grind and howl against the Russian border, ideas popularized by Ukrainian fascists and their friends in Washington are en vogue to an unprecedented degree, particularly through highly publicized figures like author Timothy Snyder.
However, unlike during the first two Cold War-era periods, the current offensive is being driven primarily by the Empire’s “liberal” wing, a.k.a. the ruling class elements that coalesce around the Democratic Party. All this adds up to a bizarre scene in America circa 2017, and strangely enough, it was summarized most accurately by the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov in his 1935 text “The Fascist Offensive” (which could serve as an alternate title to this piece):
Let us take, for example, so important a country in the capitalist world as the United States of America. There millions of people have been set into motion by the crisis. The program for the recovery of capitalism has collapsed. Vast masses are beginning to abandon the bourgeois parties and are at present at the crossroads.
Embryo American fascism is trying to direct the disillusionment and discontent of these masses into reactionary fascist channels. It is a peculiarity of the development of American fascism that at the present stage it comes forward principally in the guise of an opposition to fascism, which it accuses of being an “un-American” trend imported from abroad… American fascism tries to portray itself as the custodian of the Constitution and “American democracy.”
This is an attempt to explain what’s going on with an “American fascism that at the present stage it comes forward principally in the guise of an opposition to fascism.” Or, as it’s become known since the 2016 election, the #Resistance. This spectacle, largely centering around a series of conspiracy allegations about Russia, draws upon decades of reactionary misinformation and is inspired less by traditional liberal heroes like Franklin D. Roosevelt than Ukrainian fascists like Stepan Bandera. This is the story for how and why America’s ruling elite chose to make Ukrainian fascism mainstream.
Chapter 1: Fascism and Anti-Communism: a Match Made in Hell – on Soviet anti-racism and the shared class interest between liberals and fascists.
Chapter 2: Goebbels, Hearst, Bandera, and McCarthy – Nazi propaganda makes its way to North America; the activities of Ukrainian nationalists during WWII; Ukrainian fascists come to America at the dawn of the Red Scare.
Chapter 3: Ronald Reagan and his Conquest – the Reagan administration’s plans for a gargantuan military buildup and propaganda offensive; Western intelligence agencies’ favorite “scholar” Robert Conquest; Ukrainian nationalists take up Reagan’s campaign.
Chapter 4: Washington Über Alles – Washington plunders a unipolar world; fascist advocacy groups and liberals promote Nazi lies; the birth of Cold War II.
Chapter 5: Timothy Snyder, Euromaidan, and the Fascist Offensive – Timothy Snyder brings fringe revisionist history into the mainstream; the specter of Stepan Bandera haunts Euromaidan; Democrats make friends with modern-day Banderites.
Chapter 6: #Resisting the Oriental-Bolshevik Menace – Democrats take up Ukrainian fascist propaganda; liberal luminaries manufacture an Orientalist hysteria; NATO threatens to unleash another Operation Barbarossa.
Fascism and Anti-Communism: a Match Made in Hell
It’s worth noting that contrary to the mainstream narrative, Western anti-communism wasn’t a response to Soviet aggression. It didn’t originate during the McCarthy period, or even the First Red Scare, but in the late 19th century. According to Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality, as early as 1880, Ulysses S. Grant was lionized as an eternal foe of “communism, lawlessness, and disorder.” A decade and a half later, “The great Pullman strike outside Chicago in 1894 was greeted with shrieking headlines like ‘MOBS IN CONTROL OF CHICAGO’ and ‘CHICAGO FACES FAMINE’ and was dubbed the ‘Debs Rebellion.’ At about that time, to whip up public alarm about radical disorder, the New York Tribune ‘discovered’ and alerted the readers to ‘ANARCHIST PLOT TO BLOW UP THE CAPITAL.’”¹
It’s important to note something else, in addition to the fact that official anti-communism predates the first socialist state by several decades. Equally important is that the tropes we hear today existed in the 19th century, and reality has little-to-no bearing on how, why, or when these narratives are deployed. Propaganda doesn’t have a relationship to facts, its relationship is to its intended recipient.
After all, whatever came of the Chicago Famine of 1894 inflicted by America’s socialists?
In 1917, the October Revolution established a socialist state in the middle of the Eurasian continent, and wealthy exploiters, royalty, and racial chauvinists worldwide saw their worst nightmare realized. Fearing that they would meet the same fate as the slaveholders of St. Domingue and the Romanovs, the armies of 14 nations invaded Soviet Russia. The allied expeditionary forces fought alongside the “White Russian” armies, commanded by those elements of Tsarist society whom the newborn socialist republic had divested of their privileges. In an evocative illustration of the class forces arrayed against one another, British planes allied to White Russian forces airdropped anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets over Russian cities to agitate against the “Judeo-Bolshevik” menace.
In America, official anti-communism exploded during this period, as recounted in Robert Murray’s Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920:
Anti-Bolshevik testimony was played up in the columns of the nation’s newspapers and once again the reading public was fed on highly colored tales of free love, nationalization of women, bloody massacres, and brutal atrocities. Stories were circulated that the victims of the Bolshevik madmen customarily had been roasted to death in furnaces, scalded with live steam, torn to pieces on racks, or hacked to bits with axes. Newspaper editors never tired of referring to the Russian Reds as “assassins and madmen,” “human scum,” “crime-mad,” and “beasts.” Russia was a place, some said, where maniacs stalked raving through the streets, and the populace fought with dogs for carrion.²
Reactionary émigrés fleeing Soviet Russia, and later the Soviet Union, were usually the primary sources for this and later propaganda campaigns against the USSR. The first major wave of émigrés was the White Russians; one of the major sources of anti-Communist material in this early period was a virulently anti-Semitic, 12,000-word pamphlet titled “Crimes of the Bolsheviks,” published in Munich in 1926. One of the fables concocted by the pseudonymous author “Dr. Gregor,” in the section titled “Fiendish tortures devised by the Jewish Cheka,” alleged that Soviet torturers forced rats to eat through the bodies of helpless Christians. This story about rats was later borrowed for the grim conclusion of George Orwell’s 1984. From then until now, the primary sources for anti-Communist agit-prop are fascists, whose stories are filtered out to various target audiences through different salespeople.
Anti-communism is, if not an expression of fascism itself, proximate to fascism. Orwell provides a perfect example. This might sound shocking to someone who only knows Eric Blair as the patron saint of the permissible left, but as could be expected of a lifelong anti-communist, he was a man of retrograde attitudes. In his infamous “Orwell’s list,” in which he snitched on suspected communists, socialist, and various progressives, he noted everyone he suspected of being Jewish (Charlie Chaplin earned a “Jew?” in the margins of Orwell’s list). Next to Paul Robeson, the black communist who fought for social justice alongside progressives of all races his entire life, Orwell wrote “very antiwhite.” Orwell believed the contemporary neo-Nazis slogan that “anti-racist” is code for “anti-white.”
This could be expected because contrary to anti-communist nonsense about “totalitarianism,” it is the liberal capitalist ideology that resembles fascism. As early as the 1950s, the Martinican political philosopher Aimé Césaire observed that fascism was colonialism imported to Europe from the periphery. The Nazis admired European colonialism, American Jim Crow, and Western eugenics, and sought to constitute white supremacist rule in Germany and create settler-colonies in Eastern Europe. The same categories of racial exclusion that are expressed most nakedly in fascism are immanent to the liberal worldview: John Stuart Mill claimed that “Civilization is the direct converse of rudeness or barbarism. Whatever be the characteristics of what we call savage life, the contrary of these constitute civilization.” Edward Said similarly observed that “Underlying these categories is the rigidly binomial opposition of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs,’” with “their” savage world legitimizing “our” enlightened civilization.
Fascism and liberalism share a foundational class interest in maintaining capitalist enterprise, and from this springs the shared ideological view of a world divided between the enlightened and barbarians. In contrast, communism rejects all the ideological aspects of fascism, to the extent that it is an entirely opposed worldview. Here are how three observers characterized the differences between fascism and communism:
When speaking to several American journalists after the rise of the Nazi party, Germany’s Count Hugo von Lerchenfeld beamed that the Führer was a “prophet,” and characterized his agenda thusly:
Who is this man Adolf Hitler? The first and most important dogma in Hitler’s creed from the very beginning has been anti-Semitism… Like Mussolini he has unfolded the banner of nationalism. The spirit of the trenches, the spirit of unswerving fidelity to the Fatherland, must be revived in order to strengthen and unite the German people. Hitler looks upon Socialism and Internationalism as purely Jewish inventions.³
Fascism is based on extreme racial chauvinism—particularly against Jews (which it sees as the masterminds of Communism)—and the most vicious dictatorship of capital justified by a highly idealistic blood-and-soil mythos. In contrast, here is how journalist Edgar Snow discussed the Soviet perspective during World War Two:
It is true enough that Marxist ideology must reject the notion that the “German mind” exists as apart from class forces which shape it, or that the “German race” is biologically and congenitally incapable of human decency. It is also true that basic propaganda in Russia usually stressed the “anti-fascist” and “anti-Hitlerite” nature of the war, rather than the anti-German.
I remember seeing a big cartoon chart in a Soviet military school which showed the figures of a Red Army man and a Nazi soldier, side by side. There was little physical difference in the two figures. But above the Soviet fighter were slogans such as “racial equality,” “support of all freedom-loving nations,” “people’s ownership of production,” “international peace,” “highest development of the individual,” “international brotherhood,” to indicate the moral equipment which made him a good soldier. The top of the Nazi trooper’s skull was cut away, and inside it the contents were displayed: “false racial theories,” “ignorance,” “plunder of peace-loving peoples,” “Germany over all,” “reactionary Prusso-German militarist tyranny,” “moral filth,” and so on. You got from that cartoon the distinct impression that whoever drew it believed that if you emptied out the contents of that German skull and refilled it with the correct ideas, the man beneath it would not differ so much from the Soviet hero beside him.4
Describing the 1936 Constitution of the USSR, journalist Anna Louise Strong summarized the opposing worldviews of Hitler and Stalin: “its adoption was intended as a direct challenge to the theories and practice of Nazi fascism, which had risen to power in Berlin… While Hitler preached the view of ‘inferior and superior races,’ the Soviet Constitution made even the preaching of race privilege or inferiority a crime. Stalin directly challenged Hitler in what is perhaps the most sweeping statement ever made of equality: ‘Neither language nor color of skin nor cultural backwardness can justify national and racial inequality’.”5
“Paul Robeson at Peekskill,” by V. Poliakov, H. Shatz & T. Radoman, 1954. In 1949, Paul Robeson and other musicians put on a concert in Peekskill, NY, which was attacked by a crowd of fascist thugs shouting “We’re Hitler’s boys” and “Go back to Russia, nigger.” The police allowed the mob to attack the progressives and send 140 to the hospital—Robeson claimed “perhaps no single event in the postwar anti-fascist struggle has had the same impact and importance as the incident of Peekskill.” Robeson had visited the USSR and claimed that he felt like “a human being for the first time” in his life.
This was as much a rejection of liberal capitalist governance as it was Hitlerism: in 1936, black Americans were de facto disenfranchised by a series of measures including de jure Jim Crow (the United States had only relinquished direct military rule over the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti in the last few years). Three-quarters of people governed by Paris lived under colonial rule; it was nearly 85% for British subjects. Indigenous people in the dominions of Canada and Australia were similarly barred from voting.
Anti-communists dismiss comments like Stalin’s 1934 reply to the US Jewish Agency as cant, but the Soviet commitment to anti-racism is confirmed by sources with no stake in defending the USSR, including explicitly anti-communist ones (it should be obvious that the following is not a claim that the USSR was “perfect,” nor that it was a “paradise,” nor that retrograde bigotries had been entirely eliminated).
A report published by the RAND Corporation in 1958 titled Smolensk Under Soviet Rule, and authored by Merle Fainsod (with the help of a young researcher named Zbigniew Brzezinski), claims that “Indifference toward the expression of anti-Semitic sentiments by worker Communists was singled out for special censure” by Soviet authorities. Smolensk also claims that between 1929-30, dozens of university students were expelled and one professor removed from his post for anti-social crimes including anti-Semitism. During one of the purges, a party functionary was reprimanded for failing to report that his wife had made bigoted comments against Jews.6
A survey conducted by Harvard University in 1950-1 among displaced Soviet WWII refugees asked subjects to describe differences between the country’s nationalities. The respondents claimed that there were no differences, except for the preferential treatment afforded to historically marginalized groups. According to the respondents:
There is no chauvinism. You can get ten years for it.
In the army, a soldier got seven years for calling a Jew ‘Zhid.’
All are alike. You cannot tell somebody that he is a Ukrainian and brag that you are a Russian or you would be arrested.
If you cussed out a member of a minority group, there was serious trouble.
Since Nazi-fascism was the most virulent form of white supremacy, which was invented and pioneered by West European colonists in North America, the USSR and Nazi Germany embodied two opposing systems. The capitalist West, which the Reich sought to replicate, shared Hitler’s goal of extinguishing the socialist system—a struggle that would both create the conditions for World War II and succeed that horrible conflict.
Goebbels, Hearst, Bandera, and McCarthy
Between the First and Second World Wars, business interests in both Europe and North America were resolutely opposed to the demands of communists, socialists, anarchists, labor activists and syndicalists around the world. During the fascist insurrection against the Spanish Republic beginning in 1936, the UK and US organized a non-intervention campaign in order to allow Nazi Germany and fascist Italy to crush the progressive government. According to Carl Geisler, an American who fought for the Republic with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade:
Some American businessmen deliberately helped the fascists. When the rebellion occurred, Texaco had five oil tankers at sea fulfilling a contractual agreement with the Republic’s oil company, CAMPSA. Captain Thorkild Rieber, Texaco’s director, ordered all tankers to go to ports controlled by the fascists. Texaco, helped by Standard Oil, supplied three and one half million tons of aviation and truck equipment to the fascists and one half million tons of aviation and truck gasoline to the fascists that Germany and Italy could not supply, much of it on credit. While Hitler and Mussolini were able to supply 3,000 military trucks, General Motors, Ford, and Studebaker provided 12,000. These transactions were violations of the Neutrality Act and though known to Secretary of State Cordell Hull were kept secret.7
In late 1936, when it was clear that Germany and Italy would not observe the neutrality act, the Soviet Union and Mexico became the only two countries to aid the Republic. In contrast to the blind eye afforded to the fascists, France blocked materiel sent overland at the border. On March 20 1938, the US Ambassador to Spain Claude Bowers telegrammed Secretary of State Hull informing him that “Germany and Italy are acting openly on a very large scale,” that the legitimate Spanish Government “cannot compete,” and “this is all due absolutely to the non-Intervention scheme of the British which has tied the hands of France and the other Democracies while making no pretense to enforcing the agreement upon the Fascist Powers.”8 It stands to reason that Britain would take an active role against the Republic, since General Francisco Franco was an asset of Britain’s secret service, the MI6 (MI6 even chartered a plane to ferry Franco to Morocco in order to begin the rebellion).
Major newspapers, owned as they are by millionaires, were generally willing to oblige. Following the Luftwaffe’s infamous bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, The New York Times published a proto-hot take titled “The Ruins of Guernica. A Rival View,”which posited that Guernica’s destruction was largely the result of fires started by fleeing civilians. One Times correspondent in particular, William Carney, was an indefatigable supporter of Franco’s insurrection. A May 18th 1937 telegram from Ambassador Bowers to Secretary of State Hull said that an Italian propaganda station in Salamanca “solicits war correspondents to make propaganda speeches for them for from one to ten thousand lire… One American, Mr. Carney of the New York Times responded.” Carney concluded his broadcasts with the fascist motto Arriba España.9
A discussion of the links between the Nazi regime and its capitalist supporters worldwide is outside the scope of this piece (check out this great Michael Parenti lecture for that), but one prominent example is industrialist Henry Ford publishing the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and subsequently receiving the Order of the German Eagle from the Nazi government. Along with the progressive activists in their own respective countries, reactionaries targeted the USSR. According to author Douglas Tottle, “German Nazis, defeated right-wing Ukrainian Nationalist exiles, European conservatives, neo-fascist millionaires like [William Randolph] Hearst—all wanted to isolate and bring pressure on the Soviet Union, to discredit and reverse socialist developments”10
As far as wealth, influence, and reach, fascists agitators like the Times‘ Carney and Father William Coughlin were manic street preachers compared to publishing impresario William Randolph Hearst. In the 1930, Hearst was known as “America’s number one fascist.” According to Tottle, Hearst employed Benito Mussolini; “for a long time his chief source of income was $1500.00 per week from the Hearst press.” The Hearst press frequently derided President Franklin Roosevelt as a “communist,” so one can imagine how he felt about actual communists.
When Hearst visited Nazi Germany in 1934, he met with Hitler personally, and Hearst, Hitler, and Joseph Goebbels struck a deal worth $400,000 for Hearst’s presses to cover the Third Reich. One of the Nazi party’s chief ideologists, Alfred Rosenberg, began publishing articles in the Hearst presses worldwide under his own name. A 1936 biography of Hearst claimed that he “derived a new political vision from his Nazi contacts,” which included both fulsome praise of Nazi Germany and “denouncing the Soviet Union in particular and Communism in general.”¹¹
The Nazi regime provided him with an idea that would be in the mutual interest of both European fascists and North American tycoons. From 1931-33, there was a serious famine in several parts of the USSR, including the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Western Siberia. According to Professor Mark Tauger, “[m]y research has shown that the famine resulted from drought, plant disease and pest infestations that caused two years of crop failures.” Tauger observes that extensive contemporary historical evidence attests to the fact that the Soviet government cancelled exports from and sent aid to the afflicted regions, even to the point of ceasing to pay foreign debt during the crisis. “Most of these points are also documented in easily available sources,” Tauger adds. “Soviet leaders made bad decisions that worsened the famine, but the regime also provided relief and helped peasants produce a larger harvest that ended the famine” in 1933. Tauger concludes: “The famine that took place was not limited to Ukraine or even to rural areas of the USSR, it was not fundamentally or exclusively man-made, and it was far from the intention of Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership to create such as disaster.”
Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, two prominent historians who dispute aspects of Tauger’s work, nonetheless conclude that “The authorities overestimated harvests and tried to impose high procurement quotas, but they also reduced those quotas when difficulties developed, and returned procured grain to villages for food and seed; they decided in the face of crisis to feed the cities as well as possible, but they also made significant efforts to support agricultural recovery, though this failed for millions of people.” In contrast to the genocide narrative pushed out by powerful reactionaries, Wheatcroft and Davies’ study of primary sources claims:
Soviet leaders, even if their actions contributed to the famine crisis, found it unexpected and extremely undesirable […] archival and published sources on high-level policy discussion and decisions in this crisis, including the formerly secret records of the Politburo and the now published correspondence of Stalin with some of his top lieutenants like Kaganovich and Molotov…decisively refute intentionalist explanations of the 1931-1933 famine. None of these sources contain any evidence indicating that Stalin or his officials intended or wanted to create a genocidal famine to suppress Ukrainian nationalism or any other such objective.
However, the Nazi regime and the Hearst press colluded to turn this serious crisis into a story about a Stalin-instigated “famine-genocide.” For the Nazis, this served two chief purposes. First, it laid the groundwork for the Nazis to claim they were acting in the interests of beleaguered minority groups—they conquered several nations while claiming to be defending German speakers, and during the war the Reich founded a “Committee of Subjugated Nations” to co-ordinate stay-behind terrorist armies. Second, portraying Moscow as genocidal augmented the Nazi propaganda ploy to claim self-defense (for this reason, the Nazis were frequent users of false-flag attacks, from the Reichstag fire to the Gleiwitz incident). The Reich’s propaganda initiative against the Soviet Union coincided with Hearst’s own red-baiting campaign: Hearst papers called for legislation requiring teachers to swear loyalty oaths, and “Hearst assigned ‘hundreds’ of reporters to ‘expose’ radical professors…and while taking a soft line on Nazi activities in Germany, Hearst launched his press attack portraying alleged ‘famine, misery, and brutality’ against the Soviet Union.”¹²
This section, discussing the origins of the “famine-genocide” myth, will draw heavily from Tottle’s Fraud, Famine and Fascism, which debunked the genocide narrative three decades ago. Those interested in learning how the smear campaign was carried out from the 1930s-‘80s should read the book in full [here]; in addition to being exhaustive, Tottle is very witty (especially given the subject matter), so the book is a quick read.
To summarize, the sources for the famine-genocide myth are the presses of Hitler-admirer William Randolph Hearst and propaganda from Nazi Germany. The initial Hearst campaign began with a man calling himself Thomas Walker, who claimed to have visited Ukraine and documented a famine (and providing photos). A few months later, the Hearst press began broadcasting stories about a famine which had killed 6 million people in Soviet Ukraine. Noting numerous discrepancies in Walker’s story, a reporter for The Nation named Louis Fischer investigated, and found that “Walker” was an escaped convict and career criminal named Robert Green, who entered the USSR in 1934, spent a week in Moscow, traveled to Manchuria, and then left, while never coming within hundreds of miles of the Ukraine. Tottle points out that the Walker photos used in publications pushing the genocide myth can be traced to Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary during the First World War, and the famine that resulted from the White Terror during the Russian Civil War. Many are obviously doctored or of dubious provenance. “Walker’s fake photographs are the most prominently displayed pictorial ‘evidence’ associated with post-war famine-genocide campaigns, despite the fact that this material was exposed as fraudulent immediately following its release in 1935.” However, “Despite the Thomas Walker fiasco, Hearst did not give up his famine-genocide campaign—it was part and parcel of his overall propagation of anti-Soviet, pro-fascist views.”¹³
“Simultaneously with Hearst’s 1935 famine-genocide campaign,” continues Tottle, “the Nazi press in Germany and similar papers elsewhere in Europe issued materials on the same theme. The Nazis had been flogging the issue as early as 1933, complete with fraudulently mis-dated photos.” The official Nazi party publication Völkischer Beobachter repeated and spread the stories of the Hearst presses. A 1935 book published in Germany was translated to English as Human Life in Russia the next year, and Tottle observes that Human Life in Russia set the tone for many publications pushing the genocide myth: “Documentation is minimal: footnotes are remarkably scarce and no bibliography is included.” The author, Ewald Ammende, attested to the authenticity of the photographs within, declaring that they are the work of “an Austrian photographer.” Like “Thomas Walker’s” photographs, those pictures that could not be identified as fabrications were of dubious origin. Tottle points out that many were first published in the German Nazi party’s organ Völkischer Beobachter.14
In other words, the famine-genocide narrative was debunked shortly after Joseph Goebbels and his fascist North American confederates like Hearst invented it. However, it would be a powerful propaganda myth for those whose interests it served, which included Ukrainian nationalists.
In the interwar period, the territory that today comprises Ukraine was partitioned into what were then 4 different countries; in 1922, eastern Ukraine became a union republic of the USSR. There were multiple competing schools of thought among Ukrainians and Ukrainian émigrés (which ranged from Communism to monarchism), but those who espoused fascist views are the ones germane to this discussion. One of the most prominent groups, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), formed an alliance with Nazi Germany. OUN leaders like Stepan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk were recruited by Germany’s military intelligence, the Abwehr, for espionage, terrorism, and irregular warfare. The OUN’s motto was Slava Ukraini, slava heroyam! (“Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes”).
After WWII, many OUN activists and sympathetic chroniclers would present this as a marriage-of-convenience or an act of grudging realpolitik, but there was deep ideological affinity. Before the war, the OUN was preparing a plan for what it would do if it managed to rule Ukraine, and one historian explained its platform like this: “During the 1930s, the anti-Jewish, anti-Polish, and anti-Russian stance of the Ukrainian nationalist leadership hardened. The fascist tendencies of the movement flourished…the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) declared, ‘The Jews are guilty, horribly guilty, because they were the ones who helped secure Russian rule in Ukraine. […] Only when Russia falls in Ukraine will we be able to secure the Jewish question in our country in a way that lies in the interest of the Ukrainian people.’”15 Before the Second World War, the OUN had a vision for Ukraine that was almost identical to that envisioned by the Hitler regime.
In the United States, a constellation of reactionary émigré groups maintained a structure for advancing Ukrainian nationalist interests (in competition with pro-Soviet socialist émigrés). One group called the United Ukrainian Organizations of America (UUOA) organized demonstrations in late 1933 “save Ukraine from death by starvation.” In 1934, when the Nazi/Hearst campaign began, the UUOA adopted the famine-genocide theory and lobbied Congress to do so as well.
During this period, a monarchist organization called the Hetman Sich engaged in paramilitary activities. A pastor of the Ukrainian Catholic church in America praised the group for combating the “infection of socialism,” and the Chicago Sich enjoyed the sanction of the US government—as did many right-wing paramilitaries of the era. According to one historian, the Chicago chapter “bubbled with excitement,” proclaiming “By joining the American militia, we shall realize the main aim. i.e., to be the base and the beginning of the new Ukrainian army.” An informant reported the paramilitary activities of a different nationalist group to the FBI, including running “Nazi drills,” but the FBI cleared the group. In order to organize a “National Front against the Bolsheviks,” the Organization for the Rebirth of Ukraine (ODWU) staged an event in 1938 which brought OUN leaders (visiting from Nazi Germany) and 5,000 participants to New York. At the end of the rally, participants sieg-heiled and shouted Slava Ukraini, slava heroyam!16
On June 22nd, 1941, Nazi Germany commenced Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. [content warning: descriptions of Holocaust violence]
As Barbarossa began, it was Banderites who sounded the tocsin of what was to come.
Illustration from Pavel Ya. Kirpichev’s series “Malaya Zemlya – Novorossiyskiy Desant.”
On June 22nd 1941, via a German radio broadcast, “A young man in Trembowla [Ukraine] heard an important member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) demand ‘Death to Jews, death to Communists, death to Commissars, exactly in that sequence.’”17
Members of the OUN were incorporated into the Nazi command as the Nachtigall and Roland Battalions. Author Saul Friedländer explains what happened when these units began the Holocaust on the Eastern Front:
Bandera’s men led the OUN-B auxiliary units that marched into [the Ukrainian region of] eastern Galicia in June 1941 with the Wehrmacht. In Zloczow the killers belonged first and foremost to the OUN and to the Waffen-SS “Viking” Division, while Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C kept to the relatively passive role of encouraging the Ukrainians (the Waffen SS did not need any prodding).
Aryeh Klonicki, a Jew from Kovel, described the events of June 1941 in Tarnopol: “On the third day of the German invasion a massacre lasting three consecutive days was carried out in the following manner. The Germans, joined by the Ukrainians, would go from house to house in order to look for Jews. The Ukrainians would take the Jews out of the houses where the waiting Germans would kill them…This is how some five thousand people found their death, mostly men.18
In his diary, Otto Korfes, a Nazi general in Ukraine, described a pogrom that took place on July 3rd 1941:
We saw trenches 5 meters deep and 20 meters wide. They were filled with men, women, and children, mostly Jews. Every trench contained some 60-80 persons. We could hear their moans and shrieks as grenades exploded above them. On both sides of the trenches stood some 12 men dressed in civilian clothes. They were hurling grenades down the trenches… Later, officers of the Gestapo told us that those men were Banderists.19
This was the beginning of Nazi barbarism on the Eastern Front. In May 1943, the SS declared the region of eastern Galicia Judenrein (“free of Jews”). At the first tribunal for Nazi war criminals, held in 1943 in Kharkov, Ukraine shortly after its liberation by the Red Army, presiding judge Major General A. N. Myasnikov summarized the horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich as “crimes and atrocities whose magnitude and baseness far exceed anything inscribed in the blackest pages of human history.”20
Aleksei M. Gritai, “A Traitor,” 1945
However, after the war, the capitalist West maintained the class interest that it had shared with Nazi Germany. Winston Churchill advocated re-arming Nazi armies and attacking the USSR before the war had even ended; in Greece, Britain implemented a small-scale version of this plan by massacring anti-fascist partisans to bolster the collaborationist regime. While pursuing a superficial policy of denazification, the Reich’s successor state in western Germany retained much of the Nazi state apparatus. This included hundreds of former Nazis in the Bundestag, putting Nazi general Reinhardt Gehlen and his clique at the head of the post-war intelligence service, an interior ministry that was “77% former Nazis” in 1957, and a clandestine Gladio-style stay-behind army comprised of 40,000 Wehrmacht veterans. Theodor Oberländer, who served the Nazi regime as both an adviser to the OUN-B’s Nachtigall battalion and an ideologue for the Holocaust, was made the FRG’s Minister for Refugees and Expellees for much of the 1950s (as well as an OSS/CIA advisor), where he found new careers for OUN-B members.
Illustration from Pavel Ya. Kirpichev’s series “Malaya Zemlya – Novorossiyskiy Desant.”
Through the OSS and then the CIA, the United States opened countless “rat lines” to funnel fascist war criminals towards new jobs under Washington’s supervision. Through a network of programs including Operation Paperclip, Operation Sunrise and Project Bloodstone, the US imported thousands of former Axis personnel to work for the US government and stateside businesses. Through the Lodge Act of 1950, 200 Eastern European former Waffen-SS killers became the nucleus of the US Special Forces, and one of their advisors was Nuremberg war criminal Franz Six. As Harry Rositzke, a former head of CIA secret operations put it, “It was a visceral business of using any bastard as long as he was anti-Communist.”21
The Congressional debate in 1948 over the Displaced Persons Bill noted that “No doubt every one of them [Eastern European Nazi collaborators] now bears a new name, passes [himself] off as a martyr of Soviet oppression, and answers to all the specifications of a political refugee.”22 If this description suits anybody, it fits the Ukrainian nationalists who joined the ranks of Washington’s allies.
In order to transmute their wartime experience from Holocaust perpetrators into genocide victims, Ukrainian nationalist émigrés fashioned the “double genocide” narrative. In North America, the fleeing fascists claimed to have been caught between Hitler and Stalin—though they presented the Soviets as the greater evil. In order to continue Hitler’s anti-communist crusade, Washington took up their stories about Bolshevik barbarism, a narrative that necessarily whitewashed Eastern European fascism and minimized the Holocaust.
But what of the OUN-B’s fabled anti-Nazi campaign? After all, this is an indispensable part of their post-war claim to heroism: they say that both the Nazis and Soviet committed genocide, and that the OUN consequently fought both equally. Much like the claim of Soviet genocide, the OUN’s fight against the Reich is largely a fraud. It is true enough that on June 30th, the OUN-B declared an independent state with Yaroslav Stetsko as its Prime Minister (the text concluded with an oath of fealty to Stepan Bandera and “slava Ukraini”). The OUN-B’s declaration stated that independent Banderite Ukraine would “work closely” with Nazi Germany “under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.” The OUN-B celebrated their newfound independence by initiating a pogrom that murdered thousands of Jews in Lviv over the course of a few days—a propaganda pamphlet written by the Banderite government told the region’s Jews “we will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet.”
However, while the OUN-B anticipated an independent fascist Ukraine under Hitler’s aegis, the Nazis wanted a subordinate puppet state. As a result, the OUN-B’s dream was short-lived. Though many OUN members ran afoul of the Reich, and some OUN-B leaders were imprisoned for several years, the latter received preferential treatment (including the ability to send and receive correspondence). One author explains that “Although Stetsko was under an ‘honorary arrest’ by the Germans because the creation of the Stetsko regime hadn’t been cleared by the Germans, he was still active in OUN-B affairs and even allowed to travel.”23 In 1943 and ‘44, Stepan Bandera and his OUN-B lieutenants Stetsko and Roman Shukhevich were formally recruited by SS commander (and future Mossad agent) Otto Skorzeny to fight the Soviets. At this point, they relocated to Berlin and rejoined the Nazi ranks. After the war, Bandera and Stetsko both lived comfortably in Munich, West Germany. This is a far cry from the fate which befell genuine enemies of the Third Reich like Ernst Thällman, to say nothing of the OUN-B’s Jewish, Polish, and Soviet victims.
As the Cold War began, Winston Churchill adopted Joseph Goebbels’ line about an “iron curtain,” and the Second Red Scare began. For the American ruling establishment, Ukrainian fascists were ideal collaborators—not only were they battle-tested killers, but they had come to America’s shore with ready-made anti-communist fables. In 1953-4, Ukrainian fascists living in North America assembled a compendium of Nazi lies into a two-volume work called The Black Deeds of the Kremlin. In 1959, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) invited the authors of Black Deeds of the Kremlin to contribute testimony about the “crimes” of Stalin and Khrushchev.
A panel from the 1961 American anti-communist propaganda booklet “This Godless Communism” [source]
The first speaker was Lev Dobriansky, an OSS officer who had managed rat lines to smuggle Ukrainian fascists away from justice (CIA programs BELLADONNA, LYNX/TRIDENT, and many others). According to a CIA report, the Banderite network Dobriansky helped maintain was “primarily a terrorist organization” [original emphasis].
Dobriansky would play an outsized role in Western anti-communism for the rest of the century. Like the Nazis, he established fascist advocacy groups operating under a veneer of human rights, creating the National Captive Nations Committee and the Victims of Communism Memorial Fund (The Captive Nations Committee was a Washington-backed update of the Nazis’ Committee of Subjugated Nations). Dobriansky, Yaroslav Stetsko, and other Banderites also founded the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), to co-ordinate Nazi-aligned émigré groups and advance various fascist agendas; in the 1980s, the ABN “attack[ed] the Office of Special Investigations of the Justice Department, the branch engaged in prosecuting alleged Nazi war criminals residing in the United States,” according to authors Scott and Jon Lee Anderson. Dobriansky and his associates were a “central element,” in the words of anti-fascist researcher Dave Emory, of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), a big-tent congress of seemingly every Nazi, fascist war criminal, anti-Semitic genocidaire, death squad leader, and right-wing terrorist that Washington could find from around the globe.
Petro Pavlovich, HUAC’s second speaker, repeated a series of claims that he had made in Black Deeds for the HUAC board. However, the Congressional record omitted that Pavlovich’s testimony in Black Deeds were a continuation of his earlier propaganda work for the Nazis. Working under the pen name Apollon Trembovetskyj, Pavlovich was the editor of a fascist publication and authored a text called Zlochyn U Vinnytsa (“Crimes in Vynnitsa”), which was printed and disseminated by the Nazi regime.
In Zlochyn U Vinnytsa, Pavlovich wrote: “Let [the massacre] strongly unite our people with the mighty strength of Germany, the liberator of Ukraine, let it unite [us] in the cruel and merciless struggle with the terrible enemy of mankind—Bolshevism.” Douglas Tottle continues: “By 1943 the Nazis had caused the death or transport for slave labor of millions of Ukrainians; still the Nationalist’s appeals continued. Proclaiming Hitler ‘the great humanitarian and savior,’ Trembovetskyj urges: ‘Only by hard work and our lives will we be able to repay our debt to Hitler, and defeat Judeo-communism.’ Zlochyn U Vinnytsa is riddled with anti-semitic slurs. Trembovetskyj calls upon Ukrainians to be steeled ‘in the greater and cruel struggle against Jew-communism.’” 15 years later, a man whose wartime propaganda missives often included the phrase “Stalin the Jew” was passed off by the US Congress as an objective and dispassionate witness.24
Another speaker, Mykola Lebed, was one of the OUN’s founders and was responsible for organizing the genocide of 100,000 Poles in the regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during the war. Lebed claimed that Soviet authorities subjected victims to gruesome bacteriological experiments and even crucifixion. Tellingly, with the former claim, Lebed was trying to pass off a barbarity practiced by the Nazis on concentration camp inmates as something done by the NKVD to Ukrainian nationalists—in other words, to supplant Jews as the primary victims of the Holocaust. The accusation that the Soviets crucified victims might sound like it originated in a lurid pulp novel, but it had a different provenance: one SS General claimed that, in order to motivate them, the Ukrainian invaders were told that the Soviets killed children and prisoners by “nail[ing] them to the wall.”25
With the testimony of these Ukrainian fascists at HUAC, Nazi lies invented to justify Barbarossa and the Holocaust became part of America’s mainstream historical record. Had he not gotten what was coming to him years before, Joseph Goebbels would’ve been proud.
https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2017/10 ... -liberals/ (Part 1)