First published Strategic Culture Foundation
In the Western media universe there are good nazis and there are bad nazis. Good nazis look like nazis but aren’t really nazis and bad nazis don’t look like them but actually are nazis. For example, there are no nazis in Ukraine or Belarus and, if there were, they would be good nazis. The Kremlin, on the other hand, is packed full of bad nazis, even if they don’t look like nazis. Take Alexander Motyl, for example: Ukraine’s Democracy Is (Almost) All Grown Up and Is Vladimir Putin a Fascist? “Putin and his Russia fit the bill perfectly.”
Trump doesn’t have a moustache, but if he did, it would be a Hitler moustache (although, as we see here, it would probably be orange). Likewise, the unmoustached Putin would have Hitler moustache and here is the photo to prove it. Or, perhaps, he and Trump would have symbolic Hitler moustaches. Nazis often have worship rooms or relic rooms where they have banners and books and other paraphernalia: here, for example, is Trump’s. Putin’s has not yet been found. Putin/Hitler comparisons are common. Is Putin the new Hitler?; Uncomfortable Parallels: Hitler and Putin; Is Vladimir Putin Another Adolf Hitler?; Hillary Clinton’s Putin-Hitler analogy. One might observe that, as most of these talk about the “Munich precedent”, Putin/Hitler is very much behind schedule. And then there’s Trump/Hitler: Trump’s Big Lie and Hitler’s; Thirteen Similarities Between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; Just How Similar Is Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler? and 100-year-old Holocaust survivor compares Trump to Hitler. But Trump/Hitler is out of office; he didn’t “subvert democracy to remain in power” after all. You’d think that the fact that Putin hasn’t invaded Poland or that Trump has left the White House would have calmed things down but none other than Rachel Maddow informs us that “Putin joins pro-Trump chorus in making excuses for January 6th rioters” and someone else saw the “latest evidence of the active coup efforts orchestrated by Russia’s Putin against the U.S.” just this month so the danger is clearly still there.
Or consider torchlight parades. In Kiev they are a minor event; but in Charlottesville an enormous event which gave rise to one of the anti-Trump lies Biden campaigned on. The Atlantic points to the significance of torchlight parades in nazi Germany and KKK USA but says nothing about contemporary Lviv. Some nazi-style torchlight parades really are nazi and some are not. What about marches of people wearing nazi uniforms that they themselves or their forebears wore? The Latvian SS commemoration march has not had official support for some years but the same cannot be said of the Galician SS division commemorations; frequently held in Lviv, this year for the first time there was a small march in Kiev. How about memorials to actual nazi collaborators – such as this one attended by the Canadian Ambassador to Ukraine? These events receive little coverage in the West because the subject is rather embarrassing. For example, there is a monument to the Galicia Division in Canada; its recent defacement was first called a “hate crime” and then embarrassingly walked back to “vandalism”. Canada does not especially want to remember that it admitted many of these people after the war. But these were presumably good nazis.
Take for example the fearless journalist/blogger who was hijacked out of the air recently over Belarus. Here is a photo of him and fellow journalist/bloggers working with the tools of the journalist trade. To say that these are actually the tools of soldiers would be confessing to be a tool of the Kremlin: Roman Protasevich is a journalist blogger – his assistant in the centre photo is presumably carrying his laptop; on the right he’s wearing a Greek helmet and the Greeks, after all, invented democracy. And as for this picture, he’s holding what Al Capone would have called a Chicago typewriter.
And, to readers of the Western media, that’s the story: “act of piracy… political hostage“; dissident journalist”; “26 year-old journalist and activist“; “26-year-old journalist”; “main editor”; “cameraman, journalist and blogger“; “Belarusian dissident”. The fact that none of the standard Western story actually fits the facts doesn’t matter: it fits the propaganda requirements.
But it quickly became apparent, thanks to lots of pictures on his cell phone, that Protasevich had a strong connection to the Azov Battalion whose ubiquitous symbol is the wolfsangel. A old German symbol, it was adopted by the nazis and widely used in nazi heraldry, it was banned in post-war Germany. However, with a straight face, RFE/RL writes “The group claims it is an amalgam of the letters N and I for national idea.” But, in Ukrainian that would be written Національний Ідея which would be HI, not NI. Another certainly-not-a-nazi-symbol used by Azov is the Black Sun of Himmlers’ castle. To remark upon or to draw conclusions from the blogger-journalist posing with guns, uniforms, nazi symbols and Azov members would be quite wrong. We can trust these judgements because Western reporters are so acute in their perception of what is and is not a nazi symbol that they find this to be a story: 7 Days to Nomination Lock: Donald Trump Says He’ll Reconsider Raised-Arm Loyalty Pledge That’s Been Compared to Nazi Salute.
The Western media cannot always pretend not to notice that the good nazis certainly resemble real, bad, nazis: here’s a DW documentary that sees reality. Israeli publications and Jewish organisations are not quite so blind, as one might expect. Haaretz shows much of the nazi symbology that conventional media reports pretend not to see in this piece. David Pugliese in Canada appears to be permitted to write one piece a year on Ukrainian nazi collaborators: here he says, correctly, “But in this case the Russian tweets aren’t ‘fake news’ or ‘disinformation’. They are accurate“. And Poland remembers the Volyn massacre.
But these nods to historical reality are drowned out by a now-formulaic recitation; the standard two arguments that nazis in Ukraine, if indeed they exist at all, are insignificant are here given by Alexander Motyl:
- The nazis get few votes: “Left- and right-wing extremists who reject the democratic rules of the game garner only a few percentage points of the popular vote—far fewer than their counterparts in Germany and France.”
- The president of Ukraine is Jewish “And contrary to the Kremlin’s depictions of Ukraine as anti-Semitic and ethnically intolerant, the Jewish, Russophone Zelensky won 73 percent of the vote…”
It’s not just the admittedly one-sided organ Euromaidan Press that insists that nazis in Ukraine are an insignificant figment of Putin’s imagination – How Russia’s worst propaganda myths about Ukraine seep into media language, No, Belarusian dissident Protasevich is not a neo-Nazi. But the Kremlin sure wants you to think so – even the staid and semi-official Foreign Policy solemnly warns Russian Disinformation Distorted Reality in Ukraine. Americans Should Take Note. In it we find an exquisite ballet of balance:
On the one hand, it’s true:
The government-funded Institute of National Memory, run by the historian Volodymyr Viatrovych, produced a steady output of revisionism, obscuring the racism and anti-Semitism of Ukraine’s wartime ultranationalists and falsely recasting them as democratic partisans who rescued Jews.
On the other hand, it’s not true:
Russia initiated provocations intended to create the impression that Ukraine’s post-revolutionary leadership was continuing in the violent and racist footsteps of the Bandera movement at the very first stages of the conflict.
It’s now a meme: Behind Russia’s ‘Neo-Nazi’ Propaganda Campaign in Ukraine and Russia’s Nazi Propaganda against Ukraine’s’ Army. And we hear, over and over, Motyl’s arguments that Zelensky is Jewish and the nazis don’t do well in the polls. Well, Zelensky has had little effect (as Motyl himself admits here) and the nazis have a lot of guns. Here’s the Azov battalion’s guns today, here are its tanks, here its artillery, here its masses; not bad for
Who needs votes when you have all those guns and summer camps for kids too?
The whole “X is a nazi and Y is not” routine as practised in the Western media and academia is nothing but propaganda. In fact it’s propaganda for idiots: the most ignorant clunk knows that nazi=bad and thus Hitler’s moustache can be stuck on any face and the cheap point will be got by even the dullest: Assad, Xi Jinpeng, Merkel, Bush, Obama, Qaddafi, Kim Jong Un, It’s a quick and easy way to pretend to say something – here’s the template.
Nonetheless, it is amusing (in a contemptuous way) to watch reporters in service to the Borg twist themselves into contortions finding nazis where they aren’t (Trump’s silly pledge skit) and no nazis where they are (Hs become Ns).
Russia Observer 
