Sunday, May 7, 2023

Repression and Fascism in Ukraine, Some Pertinent World Socialist Web Site Articles

1).  “Ideological opponents of the Ukrainian government are waiting for prison or death: Report by a Ukrainian socialist”, May 5, 2023, Maxim Goldarb, World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/05/mena-m05.html >

2).  “Ukrainian government spends millions on monuments and streets to honor Nazi collaborators and neofascists”, March 8, 2023, Maxim Goldarb, WSWS,                                         at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/08/wdtz-m08.html >

3).  “The 1619 Project and the New York Times’ promotion of the racialist ideology of Ukrainian nationalism”, May 5, 2023, Tom Carter, WSWS, at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/05/vmpa-m05.html >

4).  “Washington responsible for fascist massacre in Odessa”, May 3. 2014, Mike Head, WSWS,      at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/03/ukra-m03.html >

~~ recommended by dmorista ~~

Introduction by dmorista:  The propaganda and disinformation outlets of the U.S. / NATO ruling classes have worked very hard to try to portray the Ukrainian Political rulers as reasonable Jeffersonian Democrats; and the Russians as raving authoritarians whipping their male population into participating in the Proxy War with the U.S. that has been waged in Ukraine over the last 9 years, intensifying with the 2022 Russian incursion into Ukraine but certainly not starting at that time.  This is so obviously false as to provoke laughing fits among anybody who attempts to keep themselves “well-informed” and who is aware of information sources outside the Corporate Controlled Media and its allies in the Alternative Media.   


Items 1)., “Ideological opponents of the Ukrainian government …. ”,  & 2)., “Ukrainian government spends millions on monuments and streets ….”, both written by Maxim Goldarb provide the point of view of an actual Ukrainian Leftist leader {he is in fact the head of the Union of Left Forces (For a New Socialism) party, which has been banned by the Zelensky government.}  As Goldarb points out the current regime, installed by U.S. and E.U. conniving and covert actions in the 2014 EuroMaidan Coup, has taken many measures to consolidate power and impose their policies on the population of Ukraine.  This was done most harshly, of course, on the Russian-Ethnic and Russian-Speaking populations of the South and East of the Country and in Crimea;   Areas that are largely now outside of effective control by the Fascist Coup Regime.  The death toll from the assault on the border regions of the DonBas, mounted within days of the 2014 EuroMaidan Coup, reaching 16,000 several years ago.  The Coup Regime in Kiev has used both punitive actions against the Left, combined with positive affirmations of the Fascist cause and it major figureheads.  This has involved a massive renaming of public institutions including streets and buildings and associated changes in all the institutions of Ukraine.  Goldarb reports that: “Last year alone, 237 streets, squares, avenues and boulevards were renamed just in Kiev, …. (furthermore) for nine years since 2014, (the Klitschko regime) could not build in Kiev, a city of 3 million people with constant traffic jams on the roads, a single new metro station, a single new multilevel transport interchange, a single new medical center, a single new campus, a single waste processing complex, and so on.” 


The cost of doing this has had very high monetary costs Goldarb notes that in article 2) that.: “…. the massive wave of street renaming and the demolition of monuments throughout the country has already cost more than 1 billion euros!


“And this is in the most impoverished country in Europe, and during a war at that! This is in a country which is now in critical need of financial assistance and 60 percent of whose state budget revenues this year are provided by funding from abroad, ….”


In Item 3)., “The 1619 Project and the New York Times’ ….”, the author, Tom Carter, notes the extensive Coup Regime’s ethnic repression program including:  “.... the efforts of far-right forces in control of Ukraine’s government to codify anti-Russian xenophobia into law. This includes a massive ongoing effort to erase Russian words and names from cities, streets and schools—an effort on such a scale that, if it had been undertaken by a US adversary like China, the Times would not have hesitated to label it as ‘genocide.’ ” (Emphasis added).  Some of article 3). is devoted to a critique of the New York Times stance on U.S. socioeconomic and political issues, but there is considerable amount of criticism of the relationship of the U.S. Corporate Controlled Media’s reportage, over past year and currently, of events in Ukraine.


Finally in Article 4)., “Washington responsible for fascist massacre in Odessa”, posted at WSWS some nine years ago the author, Mike Head, discusses the far-right forces, acting on behalf of the Coup Regime, that killed 38 Ethnic Russians at the Trade Union Headquarters in Odessa.  The final death toll was, in fact, 48 and included two women;  evidently raped and then left to die in the flames by the Right Sector affiliated thugs who perpetrated this attack.  Much has been made, in the Corporate Controlled Media, of reports of rapes by Russian forces.  A couple of years ago I posted versions of these two photos, showing the corpses of two female victims from the burnt out Trade Union building in Odessa, here they are again.  The main point is that the horrific atrocities visited on Ethnic-Russians and Russian-Speakers continued, with not a peep from the propaganda and disinformation services of Western Capital, for 8 years before the much ballyhooed atrocities by Russian forces.  Even the four articles from Goldarb, Carter, and Head do not point out depth of the truly barbaric violence and repression the Coup Regime has been responsible for nearly a decade now in its ethnic cleansing and repression project.





These two images were taken from Odessa 2014: Alternative News and

Atrocity Narratives on Russian TV, n.d., Eva Binder & Magdalena Kaltseis,                       at < file:///C:/Users/Admin/Downloads/9783839446508-011.pdf >



1).  “Ideological opponents of the Ukrainian government are waiting for prison or death: Report by a Ukrainian socialist”, May 5, 2023, Maxim Goldarb, World Socialist Web Site (WSWS),       at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/05/mena-m05.html >


This article was submitted to the WSWS by Maxim Goldarb, the head of the Union of Left Forces (For a New Socialism) party, which has been banned by the Zelensky government. The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally opposes and denounces the persecution of left-wing and oppositional tendencies in Ukraine by the NATO-backed Zelensky regime. We call on our readers to distribute the information about the state-backed repression of anti-war opposition in Ukraine as widely as possible.

Ukraine has long been proclaimed the freest country in the post-Soviet space. In the pro-NATO media, the country is even portrayed as a bulwark of democracy. But this is a lie. The right-wing oligarchic regime that came to power in the Western-backed coup in February 2014 has severely persecuted its opponents, using terrorist methods.

The most tragic example of not just persecution, but murder by the ruling regime in Kiev of its ideological opponents took place in Odessa on May 2, 2014, when far-right nationalists, with the full connivance of and open assistance from the authorities, blocked anti-fascist activists in the building of the House of Trade Unions and set fire to the building. To escape the burning building, many jumped out of windows to their death. Even on the ground, some of those who had survived were then murdered by neo-Nazis. In total, more than 40 people died, among whom were Vadim Papura, a member of the Komsomol (Communist youth union), as well as Andrei Brazhevsky, a member of the left-wing Borotba organization.

(Caption:  The Trade Union house in Odessa after the fire and massacre in 2014. [Photo by Lsimon / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0] )


For this crime, no one was ever punished, even though those responsible were recorded in many photos and videos. One of the organizers of this massacre subsequently became the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, another one became a member of parliament on the lists of the party of former President Petro Poroshenko.

In the same way, the killers of a number of well-known opposition politicians and journalists who have died since 2014 have not been punished. This includes the ex-deputy of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, Valentina Semenyuk-Samsonenko (her murder on August 27, 2014 was disguised as suicide); the ex-deputy and organizer of opposition actions Oleg Kalashnikov (he was killed on April 15, 2015); the popular writer and anti-fascist publicist Oles Buzina (killed on April 16, 2015), and many others.

The Communist Party of Ukraine, one of the largest parties in the country, was banned in 2015.

In addition, opposition-minded politicians, journalists and activists, many of whom are left-leaning, have been beaten, arrested and imprisoned in recent years on trumped-up charges of “high treason” and other overtly political charges. This happened, in particular, with journalists Vasily Muravitsky, Dmitry Vasilets and Pavel Volkov, as well as human rights activist Ruslan Kotsaba and others. It is telling that even in the courts, which are under heavy pressure from the authorities, the accusations of “high treason” as a rule fell apart and turned out to be completely untenable.

The situation has become more and more aggravated with each passing year, especially after Volodymyr Zelensky became the president of Ukraine. The formal reason for the complete elimination of the remnants of civil liberties and the start of open political repression was the military conflict in Ukraine that began in February 2022.

All opposition parties in Ukraine, most of which are left-wing parties, including the Union of Left Forces (For New Socialism) party, which I lead, were banned on fabricated, carbon-copy accusations of being “pro-Russian.”

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has also detained a number of opinion leaders and journalists who spoke to the media before the war, criticizing the government. All of them were accused of promoting a pro-Russian position, high treason, espionage, propaganda, etc.

  • In February-March 2022, a number of well-known bloggers and journalists were detained on charges of high treason and placed in pre-trial detention centers (SIZOs). Among them were Dmitry Dzhangirov (a supporter of leftist views, who worked with our party), Yan Taksyur (a supporter of leftist views), Dmitry Marunich, Mikhail Pogrebinsky, Yuri Tkachev, and others. The reason for their detention was not ephemeral treason at all, but the authorities’ fear of their public political position, which did not coincide with the official line of the government.

  • In March 2022, the historian Alexander Karevin, known for his political activities, disappeared without a trace after SBU officers visited his house. Karevin has repeatedly sharply criticized the actions of the Ukrainian authorities in the field of the humanities, language policy and the politics of historical memory.

  • In March 2022 in Kiev, Olena Berezhnaya, a lawyer and human rights activist, well known for her anti-fascist positions, was detained and placed in a pre-trial detention center under suspicion under Article 111 of the Criminal Code, i.e., for treason. Just a few months prior, in December 2021, she had spoken at the UN Security Council about the lawlessness in Ukraine.

  • On March 3, 2022, the SBU detained the left-wing activists and anti-fascist brothers Alexander and Mikhail Kononovich in Kiev on charges of violating Article 109 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (“actions aimed at forcibly changing the constitutional order or seizing state power”). They were placed in a pre-trial detention center until the end of 2022, where they were beaten and tortured, and denied timely medical assistance.

  • In May 2022, in Dnipro, the SBU detained the brother of the former presidential candidate Oleg Tsarev, citizen of Ukraine Mikhail Tsarev, on charges of “destabilizing the socio-political situation in the region.” As a result, in December 2022, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison on charges of terrorism.

  • On March 7, 2022, six activists of the opposition organization Patriots for Life disappeared without a trace in Severodonetsk. In May 2022, one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, Maxim Zhorin, posted a photo of their dead bodies on the Internet, claiming that they “were executed,” and that their murder was connected to their political views and carried out by paramilitary structures.

  • On January 12, 2023, Sergei Titov, a resident of Belaya Tserkov, a half-blind and disabled person with a mental illness, was detained and placed in a pre-trial detention center. He was declared a 'saboteur.' On March 2, 2023, it was reported that he had died in the pre-trial detention center.

  • In February 2023, Dmitry Skvortsov, an Orthodox publicist and blogger, was detained in a monastery near Kiev and placed in a pre-trial detention center.

  • Since November 2022, Dmitry Shymko from Khmelnytsky has been in the dungeons for his political beliefs.

  • Hundreds of ordinary people have already been prosecuted in today’s Ukraine for distributing political content on the Internet that the authorities considered prohibited.

(Caption:  Brothers Mikhail and Alexander Kononovich)


The authorities have taken under tight control the information space of Ukraine, including the Internet. Any personal publication of citizens about mistakes at the front, about corruption among the authorities and the military, and about the lies of officials are declared to be crimes. Such individuals, as well as bloggers and administrators of TG channels, are subject to harassment by the police and the Security Service.

By the spring of this year, according to the SBU, 26 Telegram channels were blocked—channels on which people had informed each other about the locations where military summons were being handed out. Searches were carried out at six public administrator offices and suspicions were handed over to them. Thus, public pages were blocked in the Ivano-Frankivsk, Cherkasy, Vinnitsa, Chernivtsi, Kiev, Lviv and Odessa regions. These pages had more than 400,000 subscribers. The public administrators of these channels face 10 years in prison.

In March 2022, Article 436-2 (“Justification, recognition as lawful, denial of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, glorification of its participants”) was introduced into the Criminal Code of Ukraine. In reality, it is directed against any citizens of Ukraine who have views that differ from the official government line.

This new law is formulated in such a way that, in essence, it provides for punishment for “thought crimes”—words or phrases spoken not only publicly, but also in a private conversation, written in a private messenger or SMS message, or said over the phone. In fact, we are talking about an invasion of the privacy of citizens and of their thoughts. This, in fact, has been confirmed by the practice of law enforcement—conviction for likes, private phone calls, and so on. For simple conversations on the street and likes on the Internet under posts, as of March 2023 there have been 380 sentences, based on court records, including those sentenced to prison.

Thus, in June 2022, in Dnipro, a resident of Mariupol was sentenced to five years in prison, with a trial period of two years. In March 2022, the individual had claimed that shelling of the civilian population and civilian infrastructure in Mariupol was carried out by servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Another sentence, based on a telephone conversation in March 2023, was handed down against a resident of Odessa. That person was sentenced to two years on probation for “unpatriotic and anti-state” conversations on a mobile phone.

A resident of the village of Maly Bobrik in the Sumy region was convicted under Part 1 of Art. 436-2 of the Criminal Code in June 2022 and sentenced to a term of six months in prison because she had, in April 2022, near her yard and in the presence of three persons, expressed approval of the actions of the Russian authorities in relation to Ukraine, and later refused to admit her guilt.

At least 25 Ukrainians have been convicted of “anti-Ukrainian activities” on social media. Nineteen people were found by law enforcement officers in Odnoklassniki and held in the country. According to the investigation, these residents of Ukraine distributed “Z” symbols and Russian flags on their pages and called the invasion “liberation.”

Sentences were also handed down against those who did not distribute such publications, but only “liked” them (i.e., expressed a form of approval on social media). The texts of at least two sentences say that the so-called “likes” had the goal of “bringing the idea to a wide range of people of changing the borders of the territory of Ukraine,” and “justifying the armed aggression of the Russian Federation.” The investigators justified the prosecutions on the grounds that personal pages have open access, and liked publications can be seen by many people.

For instance, in May 2022, in Uman, a pensioner was sentenced to two years in prison with a probationary period of a year for “rejection of the current Ukrainian authorities... on the Odnoklassniki Internet network,” having put down “likes... to a number of publications that justify the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.”

{Caption:  A woman looks as Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) agents enter a building during an operation to arrest suspected Russian "collaborators" in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Thursday, April 14, 2022. [AP Photo/Felipe Dana] }


In Kremenchug in May 2022, a citizen of Ukraine was convicted under article 436-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. Using a pseudonym, this individual had spoken on the social media platform Odnoklassniki about the Nazis in Ukraine and the development of biological weapons funded by the Pentagon.

The repressive actions carried out by the current government to fight against those who disagree with it have turned Ukraine into the most repressive state in Europe, a state where any person who dares to oppose the authorities, the oligarchy, nationalism and neo-Nazism risks freedom and often even their life.

We ask you to disseminate this information as widely as possible, since in the current situation only wide international publicity about the facts presented in this article can help save thousands of people whose freedom and life are now under serious threat in Ukraine.

2).  “Ukrainian government spends millions on monuments and streets to honor Nazi collaborators and neofascists”, March 8, 2023, Maxim Goldarb, WSWS,                                           at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/08/wdtz-m08.html >


This essay was submitted to the WSWS by Maxim Goldarb, the head of the “Union of Left Forces of Ukraine - For New Socialism” party in Ukraine which opposes the NATO war against Russia and has been banned and persecuted by the Zelensky government. Last month, the WSWS published a statement opposing the state repression of his and other left-wing parties in Ukraine.

80 years ago, in 1943, Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was liberated from Nazi occupation by troops of the Red Army, led by General Nikolai Vatutin.

Shortly after the liberation of Kiev, General Vatutin died as a result of a wound inflicted on him in an ambush by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators from the OUN—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In 1944, he was buried in one of the central parks of Kiev that he had liberated, and a monument was erected on his grave with the inscription: “To General Vatutin from the Ukrainian people.”

The general was deservedly considered a hero; flowers from the people of Kiev always lay at his monument.

And now, in our days, in the year of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Kiev, the monument to Vatutin was demolished. With this demolition, the Kiev authorities also desecrated his grave. 

(Caption:  The demolition of the monument to Red Army general Nikolai Vatutin. [Photo: WSWS] )


The destruction of monuments to the soldiers of the Red Army, which liberated Ukraine and Europe from fascism, is going on throughout Ukraine. In some cities, such as Chernivtsi, Rivne and many others, they are demolished, and in some places they are completely blown up, as happened, for example, in Nikolaev.

In addition, many other monuments are being demolished: monuments to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, to the writers Nikolai Ostrovsky and Maxim Gorky, the test pilot Valery Chkalov and many others.

(Caption:  The monument to the Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky that has now been demolished in a photograph from 2021. [Photo: WSWS] )


Moreover, in recent years, cities, villages, streets and squares have been massively renamed in Ukraine.

Since February 2014, after the coup d'état during the Euromaidan, more than a thousand settlements and more than 50,000 streets have been renamed in Ukraine.

Last year alone, 237 streets, squares, avenues and boulevards were renamed just in Kiev,  as the city’s authorities, headed by mayor Vitaliy Klitschko, proudly report. The same government, which for nine years since 2014, when Klitschko first became mayor, could not build in Kiev, a city of 3 million people with constant traffic jams on the roads, a single new metro station, a single new multilevel transport interchange, a single new medical center, a single new campus, a single waste processing complex, and so on.

Where did such an insistent desire to rename everything and everyone come from? Is it because a large number of local residents wanted this? Because they were suddenly no longer satisfied with the names of the cities and streets, where they themselves, their parents, and sometimes grandparents were born and raised? Nothing of the sort. There were no referendums, no votes of local residents on these issues, no one asked their opinion.

On the contrary, in the few cases that polls were conducted, they almost always showed their overwhelming disagreement with the renaming. For example, in the case of the renaming of the regional center Kirovograd a few years ago, which had been named so almost 90 years ago in honor of the famous Soviet statesman Sergei Kirov, the absolute majority of the city's population—82 percent—did not support the decision to rename the city to “Kropyvnytsky”. Only 14 percent supported it. 

But neither in this case, nor in any other of the many cases when monuments were demolished and streets renamed did the authorities care at all about the opinion of the citizens.

Why then is all of this happening? The answer to this question becomes clearer if you look closely at the new names and monuments that are now being erected. 

The avenue of General Vatutin, who helped liberate Kiev from Nazism, which was discussed at the very beginning of the article, was renamed to the avenue of Roman Shukhevych, a Ukrainian fascist. A the time of the attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Shukhevych served as a member of the Nachtigall battalion, a subdivision of the Abwehr (the military intelligence of the Wehrmacht), which consisted of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.

What was formerly “Moscow Avenue” in Kiev was renamed to the Avenue of Stepan Bandera—another Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, and leader of the OUN (b), the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which during the Second World War “became famous” for its collaboration with the German Nazis, and its genocidal massacres of the Polish and Jewish population.

There are now many monuments erected and streets named in honor of Bandera in cities throughout Ukraine.

(Caption:  Stepan Bandera Monument in Lviv [AP Photo/Bernat Armangue]  )


The Druzhby Narodov Boulevard in Kiev was renamed into the Mykola Mikhnovsky Boulevard. Mikhnovsky was one of the main ideologists of Ukrainian nationalism, the author of the chauvinistic slogan: “Ukraine is for Ukrainians!”

And the street named after the Soviet military leader, Ukrainian Marshal Malinovsky, one of the leaders of the Red Army during the war against Nazism, was named the Street of the Heroes of the Azov Battalion. The Azov Battalion is a neofascist paramilitary formation that is now an official part of the Ukrainian army. Its emblem is the “wolfsangel,” a notorious Nazi emblem that has been used by units of the Nazi SS, in particular. For those who did not know or forgot, let me remind you that Azov was recognized as a neo-Nazi and terrorist group even by the US Congress.

(Caption:  Azov Battalion soldiers with Nazi flag. [Photo by Heltsumani / CC BY-SA 4.0] )


At about the same time when the monument to General Vatutin was being demolished in Kiev, the Tenth Separate Mountain Assault Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was officially renamed Edelweiss. During the Second World War, “Edelweiss” was the name of the First Mountain Infantry Division of the Nazis’ Wehrmacht. This Division played a major role in the deportation of Jews, the execution of prisoners of war, as well as in punitive operations against the partisans of Yugoslavia, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Greece. Today, skull patches, which practically do not differ from the emblems of the SS division “Death’s Head” and other Nazi units, are openly worn not only by many military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but also by the Supreme Commander.

The current government in Ukraine is completely destroying everything that is somehow connected with Russia, which most of Ukraine was part of for hundreds of years—even monuments and streets that were named in honor of world-famous writers—like Leo Tolstoy. It is also destroying everything that is related to the 70-year-old Soviet period in the history of Ukraine, and with socialism and leftist ideology in general. For example, streets named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have been renamed, monuments to them have been demolished, socialist and communist symbols—from the red flag to the performance of the “Internationale'—are prohibited. Likewise, all left-wing parties are banned in Ukraine, including the Union of Left Forces - For New Socialism, which I head.

Socialism and communism are banned, left-wing activists are persecuted and imprisoned, and neo-Nazism is becoming an element of state policy and increasingly the dominant ideology.

This all-out war by the Ukrainian authorities against all public symbols, monuments and names that are associated with Russia, the October Revolution and Soviet history, or leftist ideology, requires a lot of money.

The cost of just one plate with a new street name for one house, according to the Kiev authorities, is at least 1,000 hryvnia (about 25 euros). This must be multiplied by the dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of houses on the same street. And then this must be multiplied by the tens of thousands of streets that are being renamed. Let me also remind you of more than 1,000 renamed cities and villages.

But the cost of the new address plates is only a small part of the enormous costs of this right-wing campaign. There are many more components. All institutions and enterprises have to change documents, order new seals and stamps, update signs at the entrance, and so on. We need new signs on the roads, entrances to the settlement, as well as for streets and roads throughout Ukraine. Many institutions—not only in the renamed cities but throughout the country—need to be provided with new maps and atlases.

For instance, the renaming only of the city “Zhdanov” to “Mariupol” cost about 24 million euros. According to the most conservative estimates, the massive wave of street renaming and the demolition of monuments throughout the country has already cost more than 1 billion euros!

And this is in the most impoverished country in Europe, and during a war at that! This is in a country which is now in critical need of financial assistance and 60 percent of whose state budget revenues this year are provided by funding from abroad, mainly from the EU and the United States.

This means that the money of European and American taxpayers is now being spent, among other things, on the mass renaming of streets in Ukraine in honor of Nazi collaborators and neo-Nazis.

I don't think most citizens of the “donor” countries would agree with this. But it seems that they, like most citizens of Ukraine, are not going to be asked for their opinion.

3).  “The 1619 Project and the New York Times’ promotion of the racialist ideology of Ukrainian nationalism”, May 5, 2023, Tom Carter, WSWS,                                           at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/05/vmpa-m05.html >


The 1619 Project, launched in 2019 by the New York Times, sought to rewrite American history in the service of contemporary domestic identity politics. While it was promoted as a supposedly “anti-racist” endeavor and part of a “national reckoning” with race, it was subjected to rigorous criticism on the World Socialist Web Site in collaboration with leading historians of American history, both in terms of the project’s factual inaccuracies as well as its racialist method. As the controversy attracted national attention, project author Nikole Hannah-Jones responded on social media by implying that these criticisms were motivated by “anti-black” racism.

It is worth revisiting this controversy in light of the New York Times’ subsequent coverage of the war in Ukraine. This coverage has been marked by repeated efforts to legitimize the racialist ideology of the US-backed Ukrainian nationalists, who are playing a central role in the escalating proxy war that is now well into its second year.

Last month, the Times reached a new low with the publication of an article that can only be described as the opposite of “anti-racist.” The April 18 article by London-based reporter Emma Bubola, “When Freezing Sperm Makes a Patriotic Statement,” celebrates Ukrainian men who are “preserving Ukrainian bloodlines” by freezing their sperm, which the Times hails as “patriotic” and an act of “defiance” against Russia.

“For many Ukrainians,” Bubola writes, “the idea of saving soldiers’ sperm is at once personal and patriotic … It leaves open the possibility, at least, of preserving Ukrainian bloodlines even as the Kremlin insists that Ukrainian statehood—and by extension Ukrainians as a separate people—is a fiction.”

The phrase “preserving Ukrainian bloodlines” appears in the article without irony, qualification or quotation marks. Indeed, the whole thrust of the passage in context is that Ukrainians, in fact, are “a separate people,” contrary to the claims of “the Kremlin.” 

Behind this talk of “Ukrainian bloodlines” and Ukrainians as “a separate people” is an utterly toxic racialist ideology that was developed by the Ukrainian fascists parallel to German and other European fascist movements in the period leading up to the Second World War. The idea, which the Times does not dare to say out loud, is that “pure” Ukrainian blood will be corrupted if it is “mixed” with the blood of “impure” or “subhuman” people, including Russians, Jews or Roma people who are not part of the Ukrainian “national identity” being extolled by the Times.

The editors of the Times know very well that the government-backed “bloodline-preserving” endeavor they are celebrating is tainted by precisely that brand of poison. In the service of war propaganda, the Times not only conceals the hateful subtext but actively glorifies these conceptions, which have their American counterpart in the racist “great replacement” theory promoted by figures such as former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. The Times passes this filth on to American readers with an approving quote from a Ukrainian politician who claims that it represents “a continuation of our gene pool.” 

The Times’ glorification of efforts at “preserving Ukrainian bloodlines” is not an isolated incident. Throughout its propaganda campaign in support of the escalating US intervention in the war, the Times has relentlessly promoted the efforts of far-right forces in control of Ukraine’s government to codify anti-Russian xenophobia into law. This includes a massive ongoing effort to erase Russian words and names from cities, streets and schools—an effort on such a scale that, if it had been undertaken by a US adversary like China, the Times would not have hesitated to label it as “genocide.” 

On April 22, for example, the Times reported with approval the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had “signed two laws” that “strictly reinforce his country’s national identity, banning Russian place names and making knowledge of Ukrainian language and history a requirement for citizenship.”

In the course of the article, the Times reported the renaming of Leo Tolstoy street in Kiev. The Ukrainian authorities renamed the street in March to Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi Street, after a reactionary tsarist general who seized power in Ukraine in 1918 with the assistance of German imperialism.

Born in the Russian Empire (of which Ukraine was then a part) in 1828, Tolstoy was a pacifist, humanist and sharp critic of tsarist society who was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. He is known as the author of one of the masterpieces of Russian and world literature, the novel War and Peace

Skoropadskyi, an anti-Bolshevik aristocrat, was a pathological anti-Semite. He publicly denounced the “parasitical tendencies of Jewry,” and his regime, backed by German imperialism, encouraged the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He later fled to Germany, where he lived comfortably throughout the Nazi era before being killed in an Allied air strike in 1945.

Reporting that Tolstoy street had been renamed to Skoropadskyi street, the Times deliberately concealed from its readers the fact that Tolstoy’s replacement was a vicious racist. Instead, the newspaper dishonestly attempted to sidestep this history by presenting Skoropadskyi parenthetically as “a Ukrainian leader from the early 20th century.”

Imagine if the US government passed a law requiring all streets, cities and institutions in America with “Spanish” names to be renamed, beginning with the cities of El Paso and Los Angeles—and they were renamed instead after racist Confederate generals. In Ukraine, no less reactionary policies have the full-throated support of the New York Times

This conscious effort to normalize the Ukrainian far-right has characterized all of the Times coverage of the conflict. The Times has repeatedly hailed Ukraine’s Azov Battalion as heroes at the forefront of Ukraine’s war effort, frequently featuring Azov soldiers in photos on its front pages. The Times conceals the battalion’s fascist origins from readers. (The founder of the battalion, Andriy Biletsky, for example, claimed in 2010 that the Ukrainian nation’s mission is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].”)

In the same vein, the Times has repeatedly quoted without criticism or qualification the use of the slur “orcs” by Ukrainian military figures. This slur is an overt invocation of the Nazi trope of Russians as “subhuman,” but the Times attempts to normalize it, embracing it in August of last year as “a derogatory term many Ukrainians reserve for Russian soldiers.”

The linguistic style employed by the Times is fundamentally dishonest, designed to convey a false sense of lofty journalistic neutrality. If El Paso was renamed after Jefferson Davis, would the Times describe the president of the Confederate States of America in parentheses as “an American leader from the 19th century?” Would the Times describe a racial slur used by a government official in the US as merely “a derogatory term many Americans reserve for minorities?”

It should be recalled that the 1619 Project provided the ideological justification for a wave of lynch-mob style attacks on monuments to progressive American historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. In the wake of the publication of the 1619 Project, statues were vandalized and in many cases removed by local authorities.

American revolutionaries and abolitionists had to be “canceled” as the Times fanned the flames of historical ignorance and racial resentment, seeking to create favorable conditions for the Democratic Party to make an appeal based on identity politics. One memorable column in July 2020 by the Times’ Charles Blow shouted that statues to George Washington should “abso-fricking-lutely” come down.

But on the subject of canceling historical figures, the Times raised no objection to renaming Tolstoy street to Skoropadskyi street, and has likewise raised no objection to the construction of public statues in Ukraine to Stepan Bandera, a Nazi collaborator, war criminal and Holocaust perpetrator. 

(Caption:  Members of various nationalist parties carry torches and a portrait of Stepan Bandera during a rally in Kiev, Ukraine, Saturday, Jan. 1, 2022. [AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky] )


A large statue to Bandera currently stands in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, for example, where one of the prominent streets has also been renamed in his honor. The Times is evidently in no hurry for that statue to come down, or for Ukraine to have any kind of “national reckoning” with that history.

If one puts the Times’ “1619 Project” of 2019 side-by-side with its “Ukraine Project” of 2022-2023, one is confronted with: “Down with statues of Jefferson and Lincoln—and up with statues of Skoropadskyi and Bandera! Down with monuments to revolutionaries and abolitionists! Up with monuments to Nazi collaborators and anti-Semites!”

So much for the “anti-racism” of the New York Times! After all of the fanfare and self-congratulation around the 1619 Project, the Times’ “anti-racism” turns out to be upside-down, superficial and arbitrary—to be turned on or off like a faucet, and to be invoked or ignored when it is politically expedient. 

Lincoln was portrayed by the 1619 Project as a hopeless bigot, regardless of the fact that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed four million people from slavery and transformed the Civil War into a social revolution. Jefferson, too, was “canceled,” notwithstanding his famous universal declaration of human equality—that “all men are created equal.” But when the Times turns its attention to Ukraine, fascists and racists like Skoropadskyi and Bandera are given a free pass. 

(Caption:  Stepan Bandera Monument in Lviv [AP Photo/Bernat Armangue] )


Despite all of the contradictions on the surface, at a more profound level there is more to these positions than mere hypocrisy. The ease with which the Times has aligned itself with the Ukrainian far-right is a reflection of deeper issues involved in the controversy over the 1619 Project—and confirms the assessment of the project made by the World Socialist Web Site.

Notwithstanding the “left” pretensions of many who endorsed the 1619 Project within and around the Democratic Party, the World Socialist Web Site insisted throughout the controversy that the politics of racial division are inevitably right-wing, inherently anti-democratic and inescapably serve reactionary ends. 

The very first essay published by the World Socialist Web Site regarding the 1619 Project by David North, Niles Niemuth and Tom Mackaman took up the claim by Hannah-Jones in the series’ introduction that all of American history is rooted in uncontrollable race hatred of “black people” by “white people.” Specifically, according to Hannah-Jones, “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” 

“This is a false and dangerous conception,” the essay explained. Not only is the analogy to biology inappropriate in this context, it amounts to an idealist and irrationalist approach to history, deriving a historical narrative “from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse,” namely intrinsic racial hatred.

The essay continued, “This irrational and scientifically absurd claim serves to legitimize the reactionary view—entirely compatible with the political perspective of fascism—that blacks and whites are hostile and incompatible species” (emphasis added).

In his lecture to the 2021 Socialist Equality Party Summer School regarding the 1619 Project controversy, Tom Mackaman insisted that “the position that human beings are pitted in never-ending struggle based on the mythological category of race has, in the past century, provided the ideological justification for the murder of tens of millions all over the world.”

Indeed, when Hannah-Jones turned her attention to historical events that took place outside the US, the results of the application of her racialist method were highly offensive and downright horrific. 

At a lecture at New York University following the publication of the 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones claimed that because substantially all of the Jews in Germany perished in the Holocaust, it eliminated the source of the underlying racial conflict. As a result, she asserted, anti-Semitism has allegedly disappeared in Germany. Hannah-Jones contrasted Germany with the United States, where, she implied, racial resentment still exists because white people and black people still have to interact with each other. 

It goes without saying that these are sentiments with which the foulest Ukrainian neo-Nazi would enthusiastically agree. In this sense, it is no accident that the newspaper that attempted to place race “at the very center of our national narrative” in 2019 would go on in the next breath to align itself with Ukrainian nationalists who valorize the Nazi SS.

Last year, the Times published findings that Tucker Carlson had invoked the racist “great replacement theory” in more than 400 episodes of his Fox News show. The Times would do well to count the number of times that attempts to normalize the Ukrainian far-right have appeared in its own pages.

The alignment between the New York Times and the Ukrainian far-right is a confirmation of everything the World Socialist Web Site has published on the subject of the 1619 Project. These criticisms involved more than just pointing out factual errors in the project—although there were certainly many. On a more fundamental level, the racialist historical revisionism of the Times and the racialist ideology of the Ukrainian neo-Nazis share a common premise: the mythological reimagining of history as a struggle of “the nation” and “the race.” It was this essentially reactionary historical and political content of the 1619 Project to which the World Socialist Web Site correctly objected in 2019.

A categorical break from that reactionary premise is necessary for any genuine struggle to confront and eliminate racism—as well as for the defense of historical truth, and for building a united global movement to reverse the descent towards another world war.                 

4).  “Washington responsible for fascist massacre in Odessa”, May 3. 2014, Mike Head, WSWS, at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/03/ukra-m03.html >


               

In what can only be described as a massacre, 38 anti-government activists were killed Friday after fascist-led forces set fire to Odessa’s Trade Unions House, which had been sheltering opponents of the US- and European-backed regime in Ukraine.

According to eye-witnesses, those who jumped from the burning building and survived were surrounded and beaten by thugs from the neo-Nazi Right Sector. Video footage shows bloodied and wounded survivors being attacked.

The atrocity underscores both the brutal character of the right-wing government installed in Kiev by the Western powers and the encouragement by the US and its allies of a bloody crackdown by the regime to suppress popular opposition, centred in the mainly Russian-speaking south and east of Ukraine.

As the Odessa outrage occurred, US President Barack Obama, at a joint White House press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, explicitly endorsed the military offensive being carried out by the unelected Kiev government against protesters occupying official buildings in eastern Ukraine.

Despite Western media attempts to cover up what happened in Odessa—with multiple reports stating that “the exact sequence of events is still unclear”—there is no doubt that the killings in the southern port city were instigated by thugs wearing the insignia of the Right Sector, which holds positions in the Kiev regime, along with the like-minded Svoboda party.

The Trade Unions House was set on fire by pro-Kiev elements after they surrounded and set fire to a tent camp of anti-government activists that had stood for several weeks in front of the building on Odessa’s Kulikovo Field Square. The building itself was torched after some of the anti-government protesters barricaded themselves inside it.

As the building was engulfed in flames, photos posted on Twitter showed people hanging out of windows and sitting on windowsills of several floors, possibly preparing to jump. Other images showed pro-regime elements celebrating the inferno. Some jeered on Twitter that “Colorado beetles are being roasted up in Odessa,” using a derogatory term for pro-Russian activists wearing St. George’s ribbons.

Thirty of the victims were found on the floors of the building, having apparently suffocated from smoke inhalation. Eight more died after jumping out of windows to escape the blaze, according to local police. Ukraine authorities said a total of 43 people died in Odessa Friday and 174 others sustained injuries, with 25 still in a critical condition.

The violence started as around 1,500 supporters of the Kiev authorities, who recently arrived in the city, gathered at Sobornaya Square in central Odessa. Armed with chains and bats and carrying shields, they marched through the city, chanting “Glory to Ukraine,” “Death to enemies” and “Knife the Moskals [derogatory for Russians].”

Odessa has been among the southeast Ukrainian cities swept by protests since the February coup. At the end of March, thousands rallied in the city, challenging the legitimacy of the coup-imposed government and demanding an autonomy referendum.

The Odessa massacre is the largest death toll so far since the Ukrainian regime, at the urging of the Obama administration, renewed its full-scale military assault on anti-government protests and occupations.

Earlier Friday, interim Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov said many separatists had been killed in a government offensive in Slavyansk. Kiev officials said troops overran rebel checkpoints surrounding the city of 130,000 people in an operation launched before dawn, adding that the city was now “tightly encircled.”

Despite the use of helicopter gunships, the assault stalled, however, because of local resistance. By early afternoon, the Ukrainian troops were halted in the villages of Bylbasovka and Andreyevka, where residents flocked to their lines to argue with them and urge them not to fight.

In Andreyevka, about 200 people formed a human chain to stop armoured personnel carriers and trucks. In Bylbasovka, residents chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” In the nearby town of Kramatorsk, people blocked roads with trolley cars and buses in an attempt to prevent the army from entering.

At his press conference with Merkel, Obama seized on reports that two Ukrainian helicopters had been struck by ground fire. He cited unconfirmed allegations by the Ukrainian intelligence agency SBU that one was hit by a heat-seeking missile as proof that Russian forces were involved. By the evening, however, even the New York Times admitted that no evidence had been produced of heat-seeking missiles.

Along with Obama’s incendiary claim, his backing for Kiev’s military onslaught points to a drive by the US and its European partners to create civil war conditions and goad Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration into intervening, in order to provide the pretext for crippling economic sanctions and a NATO confrontation with Russia.

Washington pushed for the renewed offensive just days after the Kiev regime appeared to back away from an all-out military assault, saying it was “helpless” to stop the occupations of buildings, which have spread to at least 17 cities and towns.

Putin sought to forestall the US-led push by signing a so-called peace agreement with the US, the European Union and Ukraine two weeks ago, which provided for ending the building occupations and halting plans for a military crackdown. This pact has been swept aside by Kiev and its backers. Putin’s spokesman yesterday said the “punitive operation” mounted by Ukraine had destroyed the agreement.

Russia called another emergency UN Security Council meeting Friday to denounce Ukraine’s actions. Moscow’s ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, warned of “catastrophic consequences” if the military operation continued, only to be denounced by his US counterpart, Samantha Power, who called the attack “proportionate and reasonable.”

Power, who made a name for herself by championing US military interventions in Libya and elsewhere in the name of “human rights” and the “protection of civilians,” declared that Russia’s concern about escalating instability was “cynical and disingenuous.” In keeping with US government propaganda since the beginning of the crisis, she baldly asserted that Russia was the cause of the instability.

It was Washington and its allies, particularly the German government that orchestrated the ultra-nationalist February putsch in Kiev and then exploited the reaction of Moscow, and Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population, to accuse Russia of threatening Ukraine.

Having poured some $5 billion into the country to install the Kiev regime via violent paramilitary operations, it is now accusing Russia, without producing any serious evidence, of doing the very same thing.

Ukraine’s initial military assault last month began after CIA Director John Brennan surreptitiously visited Kiev. A second push followed a visit by US Vice President Joseph Biden.

There is evidence of ongoing US involvement. The Russian Foreign Ministry said English-speaking foreigners had been seen among the Ukrainian forces mounting the assault on Slavyansk on Friday, echoing its previous charges that Greystone, a US military contractor, is working alongside the Ukrainian military.

In part, the US operation seems directed at preventing an autonomy referendum planned by anti-Kiev opponents on May 11. In addition, a Ukrainian presidential election, scheduled for May 25, is seen by the Western powers as a means of lending legitimacy to the coup government in Kiev. The most widely-promoted presidential candidate, billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko, advocates NATO membership for Ukraine and the subordination of the country to the dictates of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

But with the Kiev regime failing to suppress the opposition, Washington appears intent on provoking a confrontation and then accusing Russia of preventing the presidential poll from proceeding. Meanwhile, on the pretext of training exercises, US troops are being deployed in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as Poland, bringing NATO forces right up to Russia’s borders.


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