12/09/14 – Nebojsa Malic – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
It's my show, The Scott Wharton Show.
I got Novoselic back on the line, writer for antiwar.com and greyfalcon.blogspot.com.
And we're going to be talking about America's Ukrainian Nazis.
But as long as we're talking about America and Nazis and torture today, I want to remind you guys, brag a little bit and boast, I guess, is all.
And give a little bit of credit to my wife, Larissa Alexandrovna.
I never can say her name right.
But anyway, she's the one who broke the story that the CIA was torturing prisoners at a former Nazi, then Soviet, then CIA base in Poland.
First, it belonged to Adolf Hitler.
Then it belonged to Joseph Stalin and the people that came after him.
And then there's a little interregnum there.
And then the very same base was used by the CIA to torture people in Poland.
And it was Larissa who broke that story.
It was Dana Priest in The Washington Post, of course, who always gets the credit for it.
But she was the one who refused to publish the names of even the countries where the CIA torture was taking place.
It was Human Rights Watch that revealed Morocco.
And I forget who revealed Thailand, maybe Jane May or something like that.
But it was Larissa that showed that it was a former Nazi, then communist, then American base where they tortured people in Poland.
That's kind of important.
So, anyway, introducing Nebojsa Malik.
He writes for Antiwar.com, Moments of Transition.
Nebojsa, that again, is the name of his column there.
And, again, greyfalcon.blogspot.com is the name of his great blog.
And so the subject this morning is the Ukrainian Nazis.
And it just sounds silly to an American because there are American Nazis, but nobody cares about them because they have one hundredth, one thousandth of the American population with them.
They have no political power, and they can march up and down the street all they want.
Nobody cares.
But in Ukraine, they are a force to be reckoned with, a very real force.
And I interviewed Nebojsa for my KPFK show on Sunday in Los Angeles, and we talked about this a little bit, but I thought it would be worth expanding on the topic of just who are these Ukrainian Nazis, how much power do they really have, and just how closely they're in bed with the United States of America.
Welcome back to the show, Nebojsa.
Thanks, Scott.
Good to be back.
I really appreciate it, and sorry for the extra-long introduction there, but please, if you could, who are these guys?
How much power do they really have?
Because I heard that they hardly have any power at all.
And what's their relationship with the U.S. at this point?
Well, the official line is that there are no Nazis in Kiev.
This is a peaceful, wonderful democracy, and all they want is democracy and freedom and all this other jazz that you can observe from verifiable facts on the ground that this is absolutely not the case.
But just about every party that's in the current parliament in Kiev has some ties to the organization of Ukrainian nationalists led in the 1930s and 1940s by Stepan Bandera, who was an eager collaborator with Hitler.
Bandera was assassinated by the Soviets in 1959, but his successor, Stetsko, actually made it over to the U.S. as part of a massive program of evacuating Nazis and Nazi collaborators from Europe in the initial stages of the Cold War.
And Ukrainian Nazis, as well as Nazis from other European countries, formed these captive nations committees and kept up the Cold War propaganda in the U.S.
I guess, you know, they figured they could use the U.S. for their own ends.
The U.S. thought they could use them, and who's using whom exactly doesn't really matter.
In the end, it's all the taxpayer money that gets spent in American lives that get lost, as well as the lives and futures of countless people abroad.
You've basically had several of these organizations on the deserving margins of society in Ukraine prior to the February coup.
A lot of these people came back to Ukraine in the 1990s after the declaration of independence, after the demise of the Soviet Union, and tried to impose their brand of Ukrainian nationalism and Ukrainian national identity, which is violently anti-Semitic, anti-Polish, anti-Lithuanian, anti-Russian, anti-everything.
And they really haven't had much luck until 2004 when the first Orange Revolution hit, and all of a sudden their team, so to speak, was in charge.
You had all these captive nations, people from the U.S. who were part of the Yushchenko administration, and they tried pushing this Russophobic, intolerant brand of Ukrainian nationalism in which they would change the spellings of words.
You have video clips out there of political activists abusing school children because they, quote-unquote, say their name wrong, and so on and so forth.
At the same time, they would also have these commemoration societies.
You've got your Civil War reenactors in this country that dress up in the blues and the grays and try to reenact Civil War battles, and that's all mostly good, clean fun.
Even when it isn't, it really doesn't have any political overtones.
In Ukraine, you have people dressing up in Waffen-SS uniforms, not to role-play Nazis, but to basically pay homage to their ancestors.
There's videos out there shown on Ukrainian state television of these activists staging Nazi funerals for the people that were found in Armageddons from 1944 when the Red Army was chasing these people out.
This is not role-playing.
This is not make-believe.
These people really do value their heritage.
Boy, that's the heritage of mass murder and genocide.
And so these people belong to the party called Svoboda, or translated as freedom.
You also have another party called Fatherland.
Not to say that fatherland isn't a legitimate word, but fatherland and freedom, let's face it here, these are all very ominous-sounding names when you translate them properly.
And there's also the right sector, which started out as a band of soccer hooligans, but it's actually pretty much the enforcement arm of the current government composed of various thugs.
One of them has actually been filmed, and he filmed it and he posted it, of barging into offices of television and radio stations and slapping around editors for showing the wrong things or showing Russian programs.
He would throw politicians into garbage bins.
Mind you, politicians in garbage bins, some politicians in this country deserve it, but it's still assault and it's still illegal.
And this is the routine sort of thing that was going on there.
You also had the right sector people behind the horrible massacre in Odessa in May, when essentially protesters who were demonstrating against the coup government and against this illegal overthrow of legal authorities were hounded into a trade union building and set on fire.
And then the media said, oh, well, it was armed Russian activists who attacked the peaceful Ukrainians, so we just had to return fire with machine guns and burn the bastards down.
Unrepentant, completely unrepentant.
You have these quote-unquote volunteer battalions, some of which are private militias of oligarchs that we've discussed on the show before, and some of which are just outright Nazis.
For example, the Azov battalion has as its emblem one of the logos of the SS that was used in Ukraine in the 1940s.
They have swastika tattoos, they've got photos of themselves, pictures of Hitler, swastika flags.
I've seen something that might vaguely resemble swastika in a wrapping paper.
These are the people who are openly, overtly, out-and-out Nazis and proud of it.
And then you have Western reporters who go in there and say, okay, so we're here with the Nazis that are defending Ukrainian freedom, and they spin it as, well, they might be Nazis, but they're still on our side, and therefore they're the good guys.
Yeah, it took the New York Times months to even mention it at all, and then when they did, it was kind of apropos of nothing, sort of tacked on toward the end of an article.
Which, by the way, these guys do parade around with Nazi symbols and talk about how much they love Hitler.
But anyway, yeah, back to the narrative.
But hey, at least they mention it from time to time, the New York Times.
All right, we're talking with Naboj Samalich about America's Ukrainian Nazis.
More on the other side of this break.
Call Robertson Robertson 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
I'm talking with Naboj Samalich about America's Ukrainian Nazis.
Part of the fact of life, for a lot of people in the world, they're from some crappy little country surrounded by great powers.
They can't have a revolution without serving the interests of a foreign power.
They can't have a political position on anything without serving the interests of a foreign power.
Ask the Syrians.
They'll explain it to you.
And so in Ukraine, there are plenty of people, there are Jews who couldn't possibly be Nazis, who they never liked the kind of pro-Russian Party of Regions guys.
They didn't like the previous leader, Yanukovych.
They were happy to see him go, but that still makes them the useful idiots of the American Empire and the social nationalist party because those are the breaks.
That's what happens when you live in a little country that's exploited by foreign powers.
And so, you know, the defense that I always hear is, oh, but the Nazis didn't do very well in the election.
Well, it depends which election, but also they sure do seem to be getting sworn into the parliament.
So I don't know exactly how your proportional representation system works over there, but there's a Nazi police chief in Kiev.
There are Nazi battalions fighting in the east.
You've got the co-founder of the Svoboda Party.
It has just been sworn in as the deputy chief of something or other, right, Nebojsa?
Well, yeah, you've got to always keep in mind, though, that when we're talking about people holding public office, it doesn't necessarily follow that in countries like Ukraine, which has officially been turned into a colony at this point, people in office are the people in power.
I mean, we just had a couple of foreign citizens who were abruptly given Ukrainian citizenships to be made acceptable, appointed to some key posts there.
It's essentially one of those, okay, you know, we're going to put up our people and, you know, if anybody asks if it's legal, we'll say we'll make it legal.
Very Imperial Star Wars here, but that's what we're dealing with.
Keep in mind also that the current prime minister, who, despite the fact that there's been a couple of elections since February, he's the guy that Victoria Nuland wanted to see in the office and, lo and behold, he's in office.
You know, the current president was the one that was favored by the Americans and the EU to be appointed because he was an oligarch who worked for them and he could be trusted.
And so, lo and behold, he's in office and he's winning majorities.
And it doesn't really matter who votes, but who counts the votes.
And again, even if people could dare to vote in the presence of all these Nazi thugs patrolling the polling stations and torturing and torching people to death who disagree with them, all the opposition parties have been banned.
And so they have nobody to vote for.
So your choices are Nazis or oligarchs or oligarch Nazis.
There's really no other choice beyond that.
So, you know, no wonder most Ukrainians actually stayed home and didn't bother to lend the stamp of approval to this regime.
But it doesn't matter.
It's one of those if, you know, Washington declares elections to be democratic, that's it.
You've just been given government.
You're saying, though, that if Dmitry Yurash and, what's his name, Peruby and Tanibach and these other Nazis are given positions in the government that kind of don't worry about it because it's really the more American loyal technocrat types who are really the ones calling the shots and these Nazis are just being patted on the head?
No, no, that's not what I said.
That's the perception that the media are nurturing.
The mainstream media in the West are saying exactly that.
Oh, well, you know.
I was going to say they made Yurash the head of the National Guard.
That doesn't sound like a nothing position to me.
No, that's precisely the point.
Those are not nothing positions.
They're being spun in the media as nothing positions.
Oh, don't you worry about the Nazis.
We'll get them into the system.
And then you give them positions involving security, public safety, you know, intelligence services, surveillance, policing.
Yeah, that's not how you make a country safe, by appointing Nazis into the police.
Yeah, that's not how it works.
So, no, obviously these are not marginal.
They should be marginal people in a normal society, but they're very much part of the junta government.
They're very much part of it.
And yet, you know, we're supposed to look at Yatsenyuk.
We're supposed to look at Poroshenko.
We're supposed to look at all these other people as the public face of Ukraine and continue this fairy tale about the Democratic Democrats democratizing democracy.
And it's BS.
It's nonsense.
You know, people are dying in the East every day because despite the official ceasefire, the Ukrainian army and these volunteer Nazi battalions are keeping up artillery fire.
They're keeping up indiscriminate artillery bombardment, which, you know, in cases of other countries has been deemed to be a war crime.
Hey, you know, Ukrainians are defending themselves.
That's the official line in Washington.
State Department says so, so we're supposed to believe it.
And so these people are committing war crimes on a daily basis.
Hey, do you have any idea of the number of...
And people wonder why the Russians might be upset about it.
Do you know how many refugees have fled into Russia from eastern Ukraine?
At the very least 300,000.
Those are official U.N. figures, although the real number is probably three times that much.
Is that why you think they're just doing the kind of random artillery is just to try to scare all the civilians away to ethnically cleanse them as they call it?
Nazis and their supporters are basically under record.
Even Poroshenko said in addressing Ukrainians, believing naively perhaps that, you know, in this day and age, nobody else will hear his remarks, that the goal is to basically eliminate these people, get them out of the territory.
And what they want is they want the territory but not the people in it.
Because that territory has all sorts of mineral wealth and, you know, shale gas and oil and coal and steel and so on and so forth.
So they want the land.
And obviously they're obsessed with territory.
But they don't want the people.
The people inhabiting this territory they consider Moscow's and, you know, subhumans and so on.
I mean there's a variety of terms that they've used.
Including subhumans.
Yeah, I think subhumans.
That was Yatsenuk.
That was the nice guy, the poster boy that called them subhumans.
Exactly.
The prime minister.
Exactly.
And so, again, you have to realize based on these remarks and based on their behavior that there are no really nice guys on that particular side.
It's all just different flavors of abysmal.
Yeah, if only they could get the gas princess back in there, then everything would be all right, right?
Oh, but wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
You surely remember Tymoshenko's interceptive phone call when she said she would use nuclear weapons against these, you know, detested Russians and kill them all.
Well, I mean, it was meant as a figure of speech to just, you know, blast them all kind of thing.
Well, okay, perhaps in the heat of the moment and everything, but come on.
I mean, her point being that they were – she wanted them outside of her protection.
This is the lady who was trying to inherit the state at that moment.
I don't know to what degree that was a success again this time around.
But she was saying basically, damn them.
They are foreigners.
They are enemies.
They are not part of the Ukrainian people.
They're not rebels to be brought back into the union like Lincoln would have called them, right?
They are – they're gone.
They're an enemy state to be eliminated.
I can see that particular point being made.
Okay, these people have been written off.
They've been declared separatists.
You turn your guns on them.
Yeah, she's renouncing her own right to rule them is what she's doing.
Pretty much.
But again, Tymoshenko is a political nobody right now from being the darling of the EU just a year and a half ago when it was all about securing her release from prison for financial abuses.
And embezzlement.
She was a darling of the European establishment.
Not so much of Washington.
And look at her now.
She's nowhere to be seen because Washington's found new stooges.
And she's out.
She's been used.
She's been discarded.
Well, yeah, she can't shoot.
They need Nazis to do the killing for them.
But they also need people like her to get the common people to get on board with the program of let's nuke these vicious enemies.
I mean the Ukrainians of all people ought to know what nuclear fallout can do with Chernobyl and everything.
They were ground zero for a horrible nuclear disaster.
So for them to joke about nuking people is just poor taste if anything.
Well, I would encourage people to look if they're new at this.
Definitely just put in Google images Ukraine and Nazis and just look.
Wow.
That's right, sector.
That's the Azov battalion.
These guys are basically kind of the special forces units of the kind of do nothing Ukrainian military who are actually doing the fighting in the east for America's interests in Ukraine.
These guys with the Heil Hitler in the air?
You've got to be kidding.
But no, it's real.
Just go look.
You'll see 100,000 results for who these kooks are.
It gets worse.
I mean these were the people who were holding torchlight parades.
I kid you not.
Actual bonafide torchlight parades in Kiev.
All right, y'all.
That's Nebojsa Malic.
Read him at antiwar.com.
He's in the right margin right there, moments of transition.
And read him at greyfalcon.blogspot.com.
Thanks again for coming back on the show, Nebojsa.
Thanks for inviting me.
Appreciate it.
We'll be right back, y'all, with the other Scott Horton in just a second.
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