If the
on-going fascist coup attempt in Ukraine is successful, or if the insane
EU/Obama interests intervene, we will be in a thermonuclear war situation.
Without immediate action, the world could be at war within the coming
weeks.
Please reprint and circulate
this fact sheet as widely as possible.
Mike Billington
PRESS
RELEASE
EIR FACT
SHEET
Western Powers
Back
Neo-Nazi Coup in Ukraine
Feb. 2,
2014—Western nations, led by the European Union and the Obama Administration,
are backing an outright neo-Nazi regime-change coup in Ukraine. If the effort
succeeds, the consequences will extend far beyond the borders of Ukraine and
neighboring states. For Russia, such a coup would constitute a casus
belli, coming as it does in the context of NATO missile defense expansion
into Central Europe and the evolution of a U.S.-NATO doctrine of "Prompt Global
Strike," which presumes that the United States can launch a pre-emptive first
strike against Russia and China and survive the retaliation.
The events in
Ukraine constitute a potential trigger for a global war that could rapidly and
easily escalate to a thermonuclear war of extinction. At this weekend's Munich
Security Conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had a heated public
exchange with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in which the latter
accused Russia of "bellicose rhetoric" and Lavrov responded by citing the
European missile defense program as an attempt to secure a nuclear first-strike
capability against Russia.
In his formal
remarks at Munich and a week earlier at the World Economic Forum at Davos,
Switzerland, Lavrov also assailed Western governments for supporting neo-Nazi
terrorist organizations in their zeal to place Ukraine under European Union and
Troika control to tighten the NATO noose around Russia.
If anything,
Lavrov understated the case.
Nazi Hooligans Take
the Lead
Ever since
President Viktor Yanukovych announced that Ukraine was withdrawing its plans to
sign the European Union's Association Agreement on Nov. 21, 2013, Western-backed
organizations made up of remnants of the wartime and immediate postwar Nazi
collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and their
successors have launched a campaign of provocations aimed at not only at
bringing down the government of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, but at
overthrowing the democratically elected President Yanukovych.
The EU
Eastern Partnership was initiated in December 2008 by Carl Bildt and Radek
Sikorski, the foreign ministers of Sweden and Poland, in the wake of Georgia's
military showdown with Russia in South Ossetia. The Eastern Partnership targeted
six countries that were formerly republics within the Soviet Union: three in the
Caucasus region (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) and three in East Central Europe
(Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine). They were not to be invited to full EU membership,
but drawn into an EU vise through so-called Association Agreements, each one
centered on a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA). The prime
target of the effort was Ukraine. Under the Association Agreement negotiated
with Ukraine, but not signed, the industrial economy of Ukraine would have been
dismantled, trade with Russia would have been savaged (with Russia ending its
free-trade regime with Ukraine, to prevent its own markets from being flooded
via Ukraine), and the European markets' players would have grabbed for Ukraine's
agricultural and raw materials exports. The same deadly austerity regime as has
been imposed on the Mediterranean states of Europe under the Troika bailout
swindle would have been imposed on Ukraine.
Furthermore,
the Association Agreement mandated "convergence" on security issues, with
integration into European defense systems. Under such an upgraded arrangement,
the long-term treaty agreements on the Russian Navy's use of the crucial Crimean
Black Sea ports would have been terminated, ultimately giving NATO forward
basing on Russia's immediate border.
While Western
news accounts promoted the demonstrations in Kiev's Independence Square (Maidan
Nezalezhnesti, or Euromaidan as it is now called), as initially peaceful, the
fact is that, from the outset, the protests included hardcore avowed neo-Nazis,
right-wing "soccer hooligans" and "Afghansy" combat veterans of the wars in
Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Georgia. According to Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleh
Tsaryov, 350 Ukrainians returned to the country from Syria in January 2014,
after fighting with the Syrian rebels, including al-Qaeda-linked groups such as
the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Already, on
the weekend of Nov. 30-Dec. 1, 2013, rioters were throwing Molotov cocktails and
seized the Kiev Mayor's Office, declaring it a "revolutionary headquarters."
Protesters from the opposition Svoboda Party, formerly called
the Socialist-Nationalists, march under the red and black flag of Stepan
Bandera's Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the Nazi
collaborators who exterminated Jews and Poles as an adjunct of the Nazi war
machine, and in fulfillment of their own radical ideas on ethnic purity, during
World War II.
The slogan of
the Svoboda Party, "Ukraine for the Ukrainians," was Bandera's battle cry during
the OUN-B collaboration with Hitler following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet
Union. It was under that slogan that mass executions and ethnic cleansing were
carried out by Bandera's fascist fighters. Ukrainian sources have reported that
the Svoboda Party was conducting paramilitary training during the Summer of
2013—months before President Yanukovych made his decision to reject the EU
Association Agreement.
The neo-Nazi,
racist and anti-semitic character of Svoboda did not deter Western
diplomats—including U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian
Affairs Victoria Nuland—from publicly meeting with the party's leader
Oleh Tyahnybok, who had been kicked out of the Our Ukraine
movement in 2004 for his speeches railing against "Muscovites and Jews"—using
offensive, derogatory names for both.
The Bandera
fascist revival has been underway in plain sight since the "Orange Revolution"
of 2004, when Viktor Yushchenko was installed as President of
Ukraine through a foreign-backed street campaign heavily financed by George
Soros's International Renaissance Foundation and more than 2,000 other
non-governmental organizations from Europe and America, after he had been
officially declared the loser in a tight presidential contest with Viktor
Yanukovych. On Jan. 22, 2010, one of Yushchenko's last acts as President, after
losing his reelection bid to Yanukovych by a wide margin, was to name Stepan
Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, which is a high state honor. Yushchenko's second
wife, Kateryna Chumachenko, was herself a member of the youth
group of the Banderist OUN-B in Chicago, where she was born, according to news
accounts. In the 1980s, Chumachenko headed the Washington offices of the
Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (in which OUN-B influence was great at
that time, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) and the National
Captive Nations Committee, before moving over to the State Department Bureau for
Human Rights. In January 2011, President Yanukovych announced that Bandera's
Hero of Ukraine status had been officially revoked.
The OUN-B: A Bit of
History
The Bandera
OUN-B legacy is critical to understanding the nature of the armed insurrection
now unfolding in Ukraine. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was founded
in 1929, and within four years, Bandera was its head. In 1934, Bandera and other
OUN leaders were arrested for the assassination of Bronislaw Pieracki, the
Polish Minister of Internal Affairs. Bandera was freed from jail in 1938 and
immediately entered into negotiations with the German Occupation Headquarters,
receiving funds and arranging Abwehr training for 800 of his paramilitary
commandos. By the time of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941,
Bandera's forces consisted of at least 7,000 fighters, organized into "mobile
groups" that coordinated with German forces. Bandera received 2.5 million German
marks to conduct subversive operations inside the Soviet Union. After he
declared an independent Ukrainian state under his direction in 1941, Bandera was
arrested and sent to Berlin. But he maintained his Nazi ties and funding, and
his "mobile groups" were supplied and given air cover by the Germans throughout
the war.
In 1943,
Bandera's OUN-B carried out a mass extermination campaign of Poles and Jews,
killing an estimated 70,000 civilians during the summer of that year alone.
Although Bandera was still running the OUN-B operations out of Berlin, the
ethnic cleansing program was run by Mykola Lebed, the chief of
the Sluzhba Bespeki, OUN-B's secret police organization. In May 1941, at an OUN
plenary in Krakow, the organization issued a document, "Struggle and Action of
OUN During the War," which stated, in part, "Moskali, Poles, Jews are hostile to
us and must be exterminated in this struggle." ("Moskal" is derogatory Ukrainian
slang for "Muscovites," or Russians.)
With the
defeat of the Nazis and the end of the war on the European front, Bandera and
many leaders of the OUN-B wound up in displaced person camps in Germany and
Central Europe. According to Stephen Dorrill in his authoritative history of
MI6, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence
Service, Bandera was recruited to work for MI6 in April 1948. The link to
the British was arranged by Gerhard von Mende, a former top
Nazi who had headed the Caucasus Division of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied
Eastern Territories (Ostministerium). Von Mende recruited Muslims from the
Caucasus and Central Asia to fight with the Nazis during the invasion of the
Soviet Union. At the close of World War II, he worked for the British through a
front company, Research Service on Eastern Europe, which was a recruiting agency
for principally Muslim insurgents operating inside the Soviet Union. Von Mende
was instrumental in establishing a major hub of Muslim Brotherhood operations in
Munich and Geneva.
Through von
Mende, MI6 trained agents from the OUN-B and dropped them inside the Soviet
Union to carry out sabotage and assassination operations between 1949 and 1950.
A 1954 MI6 report praised Bandera as "a professional underground worker with a
terrorist background and ruthless notions about the rules of the
game."
In March
1956, Bandera went to work for the German equivalent of the CIA, the BND, then
headed by Gen. Reinhardt Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence on the
Eastern Front during World War II. Again, von Mende was one of his sponsors and
protectors. In 1959, Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in West
Germany.
Bandera's top
OUN-B killer, Mykola Lebed, the on-site commander of the
group's secret police, fared even better at the close of World War II. Lebed was
recruited by the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in December 1946,
and by 1948, was on the CIA payroll. Lebed recruited those OUN-B agents who did
not go with Bandera and MI6, and participated in a number of sabotage programs
behind the Iron Curtain, including "Operation Cartel" and "Operation
Aerodynamics." Lebed was brought to New York City, where he established a CIA
front company, Prolog Research Corporation, under the control of Frank Wisner,
who was the head of the CIA s Directorate of Plans during the 1950s. Prolog
operated well into the 1990s, getting a big boost when Zbigniew Brzezinski was
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor.
In 1985, the
U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into Lebed's role in the
wartime genocide in Poland and Western Ukraine, but the CIA blocked the probe
and it was eventually dropped. Nevertheless, in 2010, after the release of
thousands of pages of wartime records, the National Archives published a
documentary report, Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence,
and the Cold War, by Richard Breitman and Norman Goda, which included a
detailed account of Bandera's and Lebed's wartime Nazi collusion and involvement
in mass executions of Jews and Poles.
It is this
Bandera-Lebed legacy, and the networks spawned in the postwar period, which are
at the center of the current events in Ukraine.
Speaking
Out
On Jan. 25,
2014, twenty-nine Ukrainian leaders of political parties, civic and religious
organizations, including former presidential candidate and parliamentarian
Natalia Vitrenko, sent an open letter to the United Nations Secretary General
and leaders of the EU and the United States, decrying the Western support for
the neo-Nazi campaign to carry out a bloody coup against a legitimately elected
government.
The open
letter read, in part: "You should understand that, in supporting the actions of
the guerillas in Ukraine ... you yourselves are directly protecting, inciting,
and egging on Ukrainian neo-Nazis and neo-fascists.
"None of
these oppositionists (Yatsenyuk, Klitschko, and Tyahnybok) hide that they are
continuing the ideology and the practices of the OUN-UPA.... Wherever the
Euromaidan people go in Ukraine, they disseminate, besides the slogans mentioned
above, neo-Nazi, racist symbols.... Also confirming the neo-Nazi nature of the
Euromaidan is the constant use of portraits of the bloody executioners of our
people, Bandera and Shukhevych—agents of the Abwehr."
The open
letter posed the question to Western leaders: "Have the UN, the EU, and the
U.S.A. ceased to recognize the Charter and Verdict of the International War
Crimes Tribunal at Nuremburg, where the Hitlerite Nazis and their henchmen were
convicted? Have human rights ceased to be a value for the countries of the EU
and the world community? Is the Ukrainian nationalists' devotion to Hitler and
his mass murders of civilians now considered democracy?"
Only in the
recent days, with scenes of mass violence by armed protesters finally breaking
through the propaganda fog, has the Western media taken up the neo-Nazi
character of the ongoing destabilization. Time magazine, on Jan. 28,
headlined its coverage from Kiev "Right-Wing Thugs Are Hijacking Ukraine's
Liberal Uprising," profiling one group of neo-Nazi hooligans called Spilna
Sprava ("Common Cause," but the Ukrainian initials spell "SS"), as being near
the center of the protests.
The next day,
Jan. 29, the Guardian headlined "In Ukraine, Fascists, Oligarchs and
Western Expansion Are at the Heart of the Crisis," with the kicker: "The story
we're told about the protests gripping Kiev bears only the sketchiest
relationship with reality." Guardian reporter Seumas Milne candidly
wrote, "You'd never know from most of the reporting that far-right nationalists
and fascists have been at the heart of the protests and attacks on government
buildings. One of the three main opposition parties heading the campaign is the
hard-right anti-Semitic Svoboda, whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok claims that a
'Moscow-Jewish mafia' controls Ukraine. The party, now running the city of Lviv,
led a 15,000-strong torch-lit march earlier this month in memory of the
Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, whose forces fought with the Nazis in
the second world war and took part in massacres of Jews."
Counterpunch also
published a Jan. 29 article by Eric Draitser, "Ukraine and the Rebirth of
Fascism," which began with the warning: "The violence on the streets of Ukraine
is far more than an expression of popular anger against a government. Instead,
it is merely the latest example of the rise of the most insidious form of
fascism that Europe has seen since the fall of the Third Reich.... In an attempt
to pry Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence, the U.S.-EU-NATO alliance
has, not for the first time, allied itself with fascists."
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