Can the US Please Stop Supporting Genocidal Nazis?
The conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine reveal how the US ends up on the wrong side of history.
Many people are seeking to find common threads between the conflicts in Ukraine and in Israel-Palestine. People are comparing Ukraine to Palestine; others are comparing Ukraine to Israel. Discussions are proliferating about a people’s right to resist occupation, or a country’s right to defend itself.
I have been struck by a similarity that focuses more on the United States, and on which entities (sides) the US chooses to support — or perhaps as a result of history, finds itself supporting.
Unfortunately, all too often, the US ends up supporting fascist, ultranationalist and genocidal regimes.
Ukraine and Israel are two examples of this.
Why the US supports Israel and Ukraine
The US supports Israel and Ukraine for the same outdated Cold War reason: to oppose the Soviet Union, and now Russia.
The US and Ukraine
In the case of Ukraine, the US CIA has been cultivating anti-Russian elements since 1947. That anti-Soviet covert campaign never really went away. The US always saw Russia as a strategic challenge. During the Cold War, Russia represented a geopolitical foe, an intractable enemy that was opposing United States influence all over the globe.
Once the USSR collapsed, Russia then became a strategically important target, a massive commercial opportunity, full of riches and resources ripe for the plucking. When Vladimir Putin took control, however, the Western capitalists saw their prize stripped from their fingers. The US then fell back into its comfortable anti-Russian attitude, in which Ukraine played a pivotal rile.
In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had served as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, published a book entitled The Grand Chessboard. In it, Brzezinski presents Ukraine as the pivotal country for containing Russia, declaring that:
“Ukraine is the critical state, insofar as Russia’s future evolution is concerned. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
Thus the goal of US foreign policy for the past decades has been to “pry” Ukraine away from Russia, and that has meant massive funding, armaments, weapons systems, training other military investments in a puppet regime in Kiev.
In fact, Ukraine has become a “de facto” NATO ally of the United States, according to the Ukrainian Defence Minister.
The US and Israel
“If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it”. This aphorism was first uttered by Joe Biden in 1986, during the Cold War, and he has repeated it incessantly since then, and most recently in his remarks about the October 7 attacks.
This is because Biden, the inveterate cold warrior, saw Israel as that “stationary aircraft carrier” that could oppose the surrounding Arab states who were clients of the USSR. Indeed, Russia still maintains its only Mediterranean naval base in Syria, which is one reason why the US and Israel are so hell-bent on overthrowing Assad.
Ukraine and Israel: Two fascist US allies
In supporting both Ukraine and Israel, the United States finds itself arming, supplying, aiding and providing diplomatic cover for two regimes that are autocratic and Nazi-like.
Aside from their shared dependency on US arms and funding, both Israel and Ukraine share many other traits that make both these states similar to that of Nazi Germany.
Belief in their own superiority
Ukrainians and Israelis both believe that they are superior to the rest of humanity. Both societies believe that they have been endowed with a special status that elevates them above other people, accompanied by an innate right and a collective destiny to rule over others.
The Ukrainian “Master Race”
For the Ukrainians, this unshakeable belief is a direct inheritance from Nazi Germany, with which the Ukrainian nationalists (OUN/UPA) allied to fight against Russia in WWII.
The OUN and UPA, led by Stepan Bandera, murdered thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians on behalf of the Nazis, and they adopted the same “blood and soil” philosophy of the Nazis, even adopting the Nazi salute. The Ukrainian chant of “Slava Ukraina” was instituted as a localised version of “Sieg Heil”.
That Nazi philosophy lives on in the form of Nazi organisations that thrive in Western Ukraine. This Nazi philosophy was best encapsulated by Andriy Biletsky, the founder and leader of the Nazi Azov Battalion, who declared:
“The mission of Ukraine is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]”.
The Israelis are “God’s Chosen People”
Israel, of course, bases their own superiority narrative on the Bible. The Jews, as God’s Chosen People, are inherently superior to all those around, them, and thus Israel also has a right to all the lands that God promised to the ancient Hebrews.
Moreover, the Likud Party, which has been ruling Israel since 1977, is a direct descendant of the radical Zionist Irgun and Lehi organisations. In fact, when Likud Leader (and future Prime Minister) Menachim Begin visited the USA in 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other prominent Jewish Americans wrote a letter to The New York Times condemning Begin’s party as ”closely akin to the Nazi and Fascist parties”.
Wikipedia sheds light on Likud’s ideological forbears, the Lehi:
According to Yaacov Shavit, professor at the Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University, articles in Lehi publications contained references to a Jewish “master race”, contrasting the Jews with Arabs who were seen as a “nation of slaves”. Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes that “Lehi was also unabashedly racist towards Arabs. Their publications described Jews as a master race and Arabs as a slave race.” Lehi advocated mass expulsion of all Arabs from Palestine and Transjordan, or even their physical annihilation.
Today, the idea of “Jewish Supremacy” is now firmly in power in Israel. As noted in Haaretz:
In reaching its conclusion last year that Israel was practicing apartheid, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem alleged “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
The Haaretz article also cites an open letter by leading Jewish and Israel Studies scholars in response to the May 2021 war in Gaza. The letter noted “unjust, enduring, and unsustainable systems of Jewish supremacy, ethnonational segregation, discrimination, and violence against Palestinians.”
Ah yes, the Palestinians. Every superior race needs an inferior one to attack. This was true for Nazi Germany, and it is also true for Ukraine and Israel.
Belief in the “Untermenschen”
In a Nazi-fascist state, where their own people are deemed to be Uebermenschen [superhuman], the State must also designate an enemy, an inferior nemesis, a scourge of “subhumans” [Untermenschen] that must be wiped out. The Untermenschen help to reinforce the concept of superiority in the fascist population.
Palestinians as “animals”
Much has been made of the many quotes and pronouncements made by Israeli leaders describing Palestinians as less than human.
In the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, the Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant famously stated: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”.
The Deputy Defence Minister Ben Dahan (who is also a Rabbi), is on record saying of the Palestinians: “To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.”
In a Sky News interview, a former senior Israeli diplomat stated: “I’m very puzzled by the constant concern, which the world and also Britain is showing for the Palestinian people and is actually showing for these horrible inhuman animals who have done the worst atrocities that this century has seen.”
Indeed, it is common to hear Israeli politicians refer to Palestinians as “cockroaches”, “ants” and “insects”, and even the Israeli “man on the street” is prone to dehumanising language.
The Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem was all over social media saying: “They [Palestinians] are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated”.
The depictions of Palestinians as subhumans has been so widespread and overt that the Palestinian Representative to the United Nations felt forced to give a press conference at which he declared, “we are not subhumans”.
Russians as “Untermenschen”
In Ukraine, the Azov leader Andriy Biletsky said that Ukraine’s mission was to wipe out the “Semite-led” Untermenschen, or subhumans. By these he means Slavic peoples, and especially Russians.And of course, the Jews who lead them also need to go, according to the Banderite Nazi canon.
The concept of “subhuman” Russians permeates all of Ukrainian civil society and government. Following the Nazi-backed coup of 2014, the US hand-picked an “interim” government led by a Ukrainian Nazi named Arseniy Yatsenyuk. He organised the Azov and other Nazi gangs into official Ukrainian Army units and sent them off to the east to slaughter the ethnic Russians in the Donbas who were rebelling against the coup government in Kiev.
Yatsenyuk issued a decree to commemorate the Nazi militia members who had died fighting the ethnic Russians in the easter provinces, whom he called “subhumans”:
“…we will commemorate the heroes by wiping out those who killed them and then by cleaning our land from the evil”.
A Ukrainian hospital operator gave orders to all his doctors in March 2022 to “castrate all captured Russian soldiers”. This was necessary, he said, “because they are cockroaches, not people”.
Mainstream Western media has also broadcast numerous interviews and speeches by Ukrainian officials who call Russians “cockroaches”.
Brainwashing the young
The concept of superior and inferior races, the war between supermen and subhumans, is a world view that must be taught, over and over again, and reinforced at every turn. Such programs have been going on in both Israel and Ukraine for decades.
A Ukrainian “Hitler Youth”
Following the so-called “Orange Revolution” in 2005 and the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014, Ukraine has embarked on a massive program of fascistic, supremacist indoctrination and “re-education”.
After the western-backed Orange Revolution, President Viktor Yushchenko altered the Ukrainian school curriculum to glorify both OUN and UPA (who fought with the Nazis in WWII and massacred hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews and Russians) and granted the titles of Hero of Ukraine to OUN-UPA leaders Roman Shukhevych and Stepan Bandera in 2007 and 2010, respectively.
As I have previously reported:
The limitless funding given by the West to the far-right and the coup government in Kiev has been funneled to neo-Nazi organisations in order to revitalise, restore and reinforce the odious Banderite philosophy at all levels and in all ares of Ukrainian society, from popular culture and youth organisations to educational institutions and curricula, even to the “public square”.
The extremists in Kiev as well as the extreme militant neo-Nazi youth groups have been lavishly supported by the vast international Ukrainian diaspora, where the Nazi-Banderite movement has been allowed to flourish and prosper unimpeded, uncriticised and unquestioned by the Western societies in which they have settled.
The result is a new generation of Ukrainian youth, as hate-filled and violent as they are arrogant and supremacist.
In 2008, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UNIP) was tasked with writing new textbooks on Ukrainian history “in order to help bring up the younger generation in a spirit recognising their national identity, respect and love for their native land”.
This process became perverted, however, following the Maidan Coup. From 2014 to 2019, the UNIP was headed by Volodymyr Viatrovych, who was described by Foreign Policy magazine as “The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past”.
What Israelis learn
Many studies have concluded that what young Jewish students learn about Israel and Palestine in a Jewish education system is distorted. But what really drives home the Zionist precepts are the other lessons that kids learn.
In 2014, journalist Michael Kaplan wrote this for The Forward:
Little kids throw mock grenades and pretend to shoot big guns; a boy crawls militant-style as gun-wielding adults cheer him on; a girl wearing a pink dress carries a rocket launcher twice her size.
These are some of the disturbing photos that flooded out of the West Bank earlier this week on Israel’s Independence Day, or what Palestinians call the Nakba (Catastrophe).
Indeed, the settler communities of the West Bank are becoming increasingly violent and brainwashed. The West Bank is outside of Israeli territorial jurisdiction, so the curriculum taught to the children there is one of ultra-radical Jewish Supremacy. This odious, radical philosophy is prevalent in the West Bank and other Occupied Territories and forms the driving force behind such Israeli political parties as Religious Zionist, Jewish Power and Jewish Home.
These parties are now firmly in control of the Israeli government, and their racist supremacist philosophy is what children in those territories learn.
The inevitable result is Genocide
Part of the Nazi racist playbook is, in the end, the perpetration of genocide on the “inferior” population. The need to “cleanse” the sacred land of the “evil” of the “filthy animals” is a common theme in genocidal campaigns, and we have such language, such utterances, used similarly in both Israel and Ukraine.
Israeli Genocide
There is a common theme to all genocides, namely that the ones who are perpetrating the genocide claim to believe they are actually saving the world, and not just their own people.
Isaac Herzog, the Israeli Prime Minister, seemed to be echoing the Ukrainian PM Yatsenyuk when he told foreign media:
“We will uproot evil so that there will be good for the entire region and the world”.
Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu cast his own genocidal war in the most grandiose frame of a civilisational struggle, in a formal address to the Israeli Knesset, he described situation as:
“…a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle”.
One assumes the jungle is full of filthy subhuman animals.
The Ukrainian Genocide that did not happen
When PM Yatsenyuk promised “clean our land from the evil”, he meant that Russians are evil, Russian culture is evil, and all traces of Russia must be wiped from the earth.
In the wake of the 2014 coup in Kiev and the taking of power by the Nazi elite, laws were passed outlawing Russian language and schoolbooks were “updated” to remove all positive references to Russia and instead to portray Russia — and Russians — as the mortal enemy of Ukraine.
Bloodthirsty psychopathic Nazi militias, ultranationalists who hated all things Russian, were sent to the east to perpetrate all sorts of atrocities on the people who lived in the Donbas region.
When Zelensky took power in 2019, people had high hopes for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in the Donbas, the eastern region of Ukraine, where the local population was comprised of ethnic Russians who wanted to maintain their language, history and culture in the face of an onslaught by the anti-Russian Nazis in power in Kiev. They subsequently voted to secede from Ukraine and form their own independent nations.
Unfortunately, Zelensky reneged on his campaign promises of peace, and began a huge military buildup along the contact line with the Donbas forces. Shelling and bombing surged, and Kiev moved 120,000 troops into position, ready to invade those eastern regions and execute a “Final Solution” against the ethnic Russian Ukrainian population.
In short, Zelensky was going to make good on the pledge that Yatsenyuk had made five years earlier, namely by “cleaning our land from the evil” of the “subhuman” Russian people living there.
Given the rate of US military equipment and supplies, bombs and missiles that were flowing into Ukraine in January 2022, the Donbas region may have suffered the same fate as today’s Gaza Strip had not Russia intervened militarily.
Conclusion: The Mirror Effect
As an American, I have experienced a series of revelations about the sad and despicable history of my country, a country that has supported and enabled the most odiously fascistic regimes, such as Pinochet in Chile, the Shah in Iran, and literally dozens of brutal dictators in Central America and Asia.
There was a brief period, however, in which I thought that America’s meddling in foreign countries’ politics had waned, that the USA had desisted from its aggressive aid to authoritarian regimes.
Alas, I was wrong. I have come to realise that America has a never-ending love affair with racist, white supremacist governments that brutally oppress and murder people of colour.
This oppression of people of colour is deliberate, it is not a coincidence. I believe it is US policy to brutally and violently oppress people of colour, indigenous people, and other minorities both at home and abroad.
In this way, America stands as the ultimate champion not just of settler colonialism, but of authoritarianism. Joe Biden is fond of casting himself as the great defender of “democracy”, yet the US is demonstrably authoritarian, totalitarian and indeed fascist.
Likewise, the Western media says we need to support the government of Ukraine as a “bastion of democracy”, when in reality it is extremely authoritarian, and Zelensky is a brutal autocrat who has exterminated all democratic elements from Ukrainian society.
Like the US, Israel also claims to be a “democracy” but is, in reality, anything but democratic. The Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories have no rights under Israeli law, and non-Jewish citizens living in Israel proper are also relegated to second-class status. The 2018 passage of the so-called “Nation-State Law” declared that only Jews have full rights under the law in Israel.
In other words, America’s foreign policy, in supporting genocidal fascist regimes like Israel and Ukraine, reflects the USA’s own domestic policy of racist persecution and disenfranchisement of minority groups at home.
#End.
The more things change... It is a sound conclusion to make, that the US only supports those countries in which it sees itself. And when the US looks in the mirror, it sees the most fascist, most racist, most authoritarian nation state in the world.