The NDP and the Nazis in Ukraine: Don't Say I Didn't Tell You So

Svoboda’s Oleh Tyahnybok doing their party salute when re-elected their leader. Photo GlobalResearch.ca

Many people relish the chance to say "I told you so" but sometimes the reality of what was predicted proves nasty enough to negate the usual pleasures of feeling smug. The New Democratic Party's response to recent events in Ukraine could scarcely have been scripted to more fully confirm my thesis that the party's leadership has jettisoned all principle in its quest for power; but in this matter there can be scant satisfaction in being proven correct.

At the beginning of February anonymous sources posted to the Web a recording of a private phone conversation between Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for the United States, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine. To judge by the coverage of this incident in the international press the most notable feature of the recording was Nuland's imprecation: "Fuck the EU." The real significance of the recording was quite other, but was mentioned barely or not at all. Reporting the substance of the conversation would not have provided the same frisson afforded by a patrician female's vulgar put-down of ostensible allies but, more importantly, it would have exposed the complete falsity of the authorized version of what was happening in Ukraine.

The mainstream media, taking its cue as always from the spin doctors in the White House, has for months been peddling an almost ludicrously slanted account of the so-called Maidan opposition to the Russophile administration of Viktor Yanukovych, the recently deposed president of Ukraine. According to the big news corporations the Maidan was a peaceful pro-democracy movement that arose organically in response to the corrupt and authoritarian nature of Yanukovych's administration. The movement was said to be homegrown and grassroots. As reported by the international press, the only foreign interference in Ukraine was coming from Vladimir Putin, Yanukovych's sponsor in Moscow.

The Nuland/Pyatt conversation laid bare the truth of the matter. Their discussion made it clear that the US had been actively plotting to overthrow Yanukovych for some time. Indeed, in some ways this need hardly have been news: the same Nuland had earlier noted in public that the United States had, over a period of a decade or more, spent above $5 billion to create and develop opposition to Yanukovych within Ukraine. Still, what was novel was the frankness with which Nuland and Pyatt discussed not only the commitment of the US to overthrowing the head of state of a sovereign nation but the presumed right of the White House to determine the composition of the successor administration.

As to what the composition of this successor administration would be, here we come to the most damning aspect of the discussion. Again, in a perfectly matter of fact way, Nuland and Pyatt talked about the important role that would be reserved for the Svoboda Party.

The Svoboda Party is not merely right wing, not even simply fascist, but straightforwardly neo-Nazi. Prior to a recent public relations makeover, the group openly displayed the swastika as its insignia. The party has been condemned for its anti-Semitism by resolution of the European Parliament and -- ironically enough -- its leaders have been banned from entering the US on the same grounds. Apparently, what's fit for Ukraine is not fit for its patrons abroad.

Prior to the Nuland/Pyatt call, leaders of the Svoboda Party were already on record as calling for the extermination of "kikes, communists and other filth." Since Yanukovych's overthrow the party has set up an online registry where "Russian speakers and other Ukrainophobes [sic]" can be denounced so that they can be targeted for "physical elimination."

Naturally, matters have proceeded according to the US game plan: members of Svoboda have been awarded about one fifth of the ministerial posts in the new government. As for the rest of the regime, this movement that was supposedly for human rights and against corruption has made itself busy instituting censorship and other restrictions on civil liberties while installing oligarchs in provincial governorships, particularly in the areas of the south and east that did not support the Maidan.

As is well known, Russia has reacted forcefully to Yanukovych's overthrow. Russia's (nuclear-armed) southern fleet is based in Ukraine, Russia's main source of revenue flows through the petroleum pipelines that cross Ukraine, and Russian speakers in Ukraine are, as noted above, being subjected to death threats by members of the new governing regime in Kiev. A rough analogy might be a rabidly anti-American coalition, replete with a large Ku Klux Klan contingent, seizing control of Canada. Does anyone have the slightest doubt about how Washington would react in such a situation?

Indeed, even this comparison does not give a proper sense of the relations involved. Canada was never a part of the United States while, conversely, Ukraine was only ever a dependency of Russia (and in the very distant past, of Poland) until it became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. It might be nearer the mark then to ask how Washington would respond if Texas and other areas annexed from Mexico in the 1840s were to secede and, under Moscow's influence, come under the control of forces nostalgic for the old Confederacy.  

Yet of course the international press is filled with hysterical denunciations of Putin for intervening in the affairs of a foreign country. It is conveniently forgotten that the US has acted thus hundreds of times (and continues to do so at this moment). Likewise it goes unmentioned that the Monroe Doctrine, which has been official US policy for almost two centuries now, asserts the right of the United States to intervene militarily against any foreign (i.e., non-US) influence anywhere in the Americas. Nor, of course, is any notice taken that, as the Nuland/Pyatt conversation laid bare, the present crisis in Ukraine was brought about through the covert machinations of the United States.

With Russian forces having apparently seized control of the Crimea, and Ukraine calling up its reserves, a major war is obviously in the offing. Yet far from trying to reduce the tensions in the region the United States and its lackeys in Ottawa and elsewhere are responding with minatory rhetoric that threatens to bring about open conflict between the US, the world's leading military power, and Russia, which has the planet's second largest stock of nuclear weapons.

How, finally, has the New Democratic Party reacted to these developments? By complaining that Stephen Harper did not bring along emissaries from the NDP to congratulate the new Nazi-affiliated regime in Kiev and by clamouring for the Canadian government to press for an even more confrontational stance vis-a-vis Russia. In other words, the New Democrats are actively flirting with the possibility of provoking World War Three in the cause of safeguarding a regime made up of xenophobic, fascist and outright Nazi putschists, all the while moaning about Harper's meanness in denying them the chance of photo opportunities in Kiev. These moral vacua worry more about being denied the limelight than they do about the very real prospect of nuclear war -- and there are still leftists who can conceive of supporting them?

Oh, silly me, I forgot: the New Democrats are the lesser evil.

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