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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsUkrainian Neo-Nazis Mark Anniversary Of Galicia SS Division With Torchlit March
Torch flames and ultra-nationalist insignia and slogans were visible on the streets of the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankovsk as neo-Nazis marched to commemorate the 73th anniversary of the creation of the Ukrainian SS division.
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Chanting nationalistic slogans, around 100 members of the civil wing of the far-right Azov Battalion held the torchlit procession to honor those who fought for the Nazis against the Soviet Union in World War II.
Activists marching under a large banner kept on shouting glory to those who served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, recognized as patriots by the current Ukrainian regime.
Following the procession, clergymen from the Uniate church, which acknowledges papal supremacy but retains its own orthodox liturgy, held a memorial service where they prayed for the souls of those guilty of butchering their own population.
The SS division also known as the 1st Galician was a military unit comprising over 80,000 volunteers from the Ukrainian region of Galicia. Created in 1943, as the Soviet Union was gaining the upper hand in a war against the Third Reich, it was largely destroyed in the battle of Brody, a major Red Army operation to force the Nazi forces from Ukraine and Eastern Poland.
Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer and the head of SS, once said in a speech to soldiers from the division, your homeland has become so much more beautiful since you have lost on our initiative, I must say those residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicias good name, namely the Jews...I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles...I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.
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https://www.rt.com/news/341312-ukraine-ss-anniversary-torch-march/
NewImproved Deal
(534 posts)Who do you suppose the Neo-Cons are supporting for President?
Wilms
(26,795 posts)Why "go off the reservation"? Hillary's State Dept. has been so accommodating.
newthinking
(3,982 posts)and a Chairman of the "Institute for the study of war"; a NeoCon think tank run by Kimberly Kagen. She is linked on all sides with them and their goals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html?&_r=0
Jack Keane is one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq surge; he is also perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues. A bear of a man with a jowly, careworn face and Brylcreem-slicked hair, Keane exudes the supreme self-confidence you would expect of a retired four-star general. He speaks with a trace of a New York accent that gives his pronouncements a rat-a-tat urgency. He is also a well-compensated member of the military-industrial complex, sitting on the board of General Dynamics and serving as a strategic adviser to Academi, the private-security contractor once known as Blackwater. And he is the chairman of an aptly named think tank, the Institute for the Study of War. Though he is one of a parade of cable-TV generals, Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He doesnt shrink from putting boots on the ground and has little use for civilian leaders, like Obama, who do.
Keane first got to know Clinton in the fall of 2001, when she was a freshman senator and he was the Armys second in command, with a distinguished combat and command record in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. He had expected her to be intelligent, hard-working and politically astute, but he was not prepared for the respect she showed for the Army as an institution, or her sympathy for the sacrifices made by soldiers and their families. Keane was confident he could smell a phony politician a mile away, and he didnt get that whiff from her.
I read people; thats one of my strengths, he told me. Its not that I cant be fooled, but Im not fooled often.
Clinton took an instant liking to Keane, too. She loves that Irish gruff thing, says one of her Senate aides, Kris Balderston, who was in the room that day. When Keane got up after 45 minutes to leave for a meeting back at the Pentagon with a Polish general, she protested that she wasnt finished yet and asked for another appointment. I said, O.K., but it took me three months to get this one,? Keane told her dryly.
Clinton exploded into a raucous laugh. Ill take care of that problem, she promised.
Wilms
(26,795 posts)Robert Kagan and Nuland, yes. Now, Kimberly.
But look at the rest of the clan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberly_Kagan
newthinking
(3,982 posts)http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/us/politics/historians-critique-of-obama-foreign-policy-is-brought-alive-by-events-in-iraq.html?_r=0
But Exhibit A for what Robert Kagan describes as his mainstream view of American force is his relationship with former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes. Mr. Kagan pointed out that he had recently attended a dinner of foreign-policy experts at which Mrs. Clinton was the guest of honor, and that he had served on her bipartisan group of foreign-policy heavy hitters at the State Department, where his wife worked as her spokeswoman.
I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy, Mr. Kagan said, adding that the next step after Mr. Obamas more realist approach could theoretically be whatever Hillary brings to the table if elected president. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, he added, its something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.
newthinking
(3,982 posts)1939
(1,683 posts)The Soviets purposely created created a genocidal famine in the Ukraine.
Like Finland, Slovakia, and Croatia, the Ukrainians were trying to choose what they perceived as the lesser of two great evils.
Wilms
(26,795 posts)What's up with that?
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)She with the help of the US State Dept mad a real f'ing mess while doing a regime change exercise.
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)MattSh
(3,714 posts)if you can...
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)NuclearDem
(16,184 posts)There used to be another_one as well, but he got banned.
Purveyor
(29,876 posts)Boo!!!
Igel
(35,383 posts)Unfortunately for the narrative, they fought the Red Army before the Nazis invaded, many of their members fought the Nazis when the Red Army wasn't on Ukrainian soil, and they all fought the Red Army when it returned. It's one of the reasons that Ukraine had the largest casualty rate, in both civilian population and number of soldiers per 1000 population, of any of the constituent republics in the USSR. (Of course, at this point the entire Red Army was pure Russian. Another reason for low casualty rates for non-Slavic soldiers is that Stalin didn't trust them any more than he trusted the Tatars that he ethnically cleansed.)
Those Nazis did have one thing in their charter: They would not fight Allied troops. And when the Nazis were pushed out, they kept that part of the bargain. They found Allied units to surrender to.
They were nationalists, and often had engaged in anti-Polish and anti-Jewish campaigns. Much like the Russians cleansed the territory they got from Poland of Poles. Of course, the Ukrainian forces in the SS division have never successfully been shown to be guilty of anything organized. Individual units and members did, but their focus was on disposing of German occupation or Russian occupation. (Some of the non-SS nationalist forces were much nastier, but they don't have the "SS" emblem of fear attached to them, and never did. They were so nationalist that they refused to work with the Germans at all.)
What with all the nationalist ethnic cleansing of Poles and Tatars, you'd almost think Stalin was a Nazi.
Point is, the language breaks down, or at least the words acquire a different meaning so that the quick and easy translation is often a quick and wrong translation. What's really bad is that the wrongness of the translation isn't obvious, and we like the outrage the wrong translation produces so we're not likely to even think to question it.
In many ways, the way the Ukrainians dealt with various occupying ethnicities was similar to the way the Filipinos dealt with the Americans and the Spanish in the early 1900s. They'd been fighting the Spanish, and when the Americans showed up they fought the Americans and enlisted the Spanish as allies. Had the Spanish beaten the Americans, the Filipinos would have resumed fighting the Spanish. *This* we get, because it's clearly anti-European imperialism, esp. anti-US imperialism. We don't like thinking of other imperialisms, whether Arab or Russian, because it dilutes the purity of our ideological biases.
newthinking
(3,982 posts)Of course our western press generally does not bother to report on facts that are inconvenient to the narratives that they prosper by.
Ukrainians march in honour of controversial nationalist hero Stepan Bandera
?
http://www.euronews.com/2016/01/02/ukrainians-march-in-honour-of-controversial-nationalist-hero-stepan-bandera/