by Thierry Meyssan

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 7 JUNE 2022

“The war in Ukraine is only taking place because of the ignorance of the Westerners of what was happening in Ukraine and because of a series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. The Westerners, focused on themselves, unable to think like their interlocutors, kept making mistakes. Finally, when the military operations end and the Russians have achieved their publicly stated objectives from day one, they can even persuade themselves that they have won. In the end, the only thing that matters to the West is not saving human lives, but having the conviction that they are on the right side of history.

THE BANDERISTS

The two sides, who fought side by side against Nazism, had completely different experiences during this period and therefore have different memories of it.

The Russian press does not distinguish between Banderists and Nazis. It is a question of awakening the memory of the “Great Patriotic War” (known in the West as “World War II”). When Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, the latter was not at all ready. The shock was disastrous. Stalin only managed to unite his people by allying himself with the Orthodox Church, which he had previously fought, and by freeing his political opponents who had been sentenced to the Gulag. To evoke this period today is to commit oneself to recognizing the place of each person as long as he defends the Nation.

The Russians perceive the contemporary Banderists /Nazis as existential dangers to their people. In doing so, they are right because Ukrainian nationalists consider that they are “born to eradicate Muscovites”.

Therefore, all Western attacks on the person of Vladimir Putin are out of place and ineffective. For Russian opponents, this is no longer the issue. Whether they like him or not, Putin is their leader, just as Stalin was from June 1941.

The Western press also equated the Banderists with the Nazis, but this was to put its importance more easily into perspective. In the memory of the people of Western Europe, Nazism threatened only minorities. First the mentally ill, the terminally ill and the old, then the Jews and the gypsies were separated from the pack and disappeared. On the contrary, the Slavs remember armies advancing, razing one by one all the villages they took. No one could survive. Not only is Nazism less frightening to Western Europeans, but the Anglo-Saxons are quietly suppressing symbols that might revive this memory. For example, British communications advisers changed the Azov regiment’s crest at the end of May. They replaced the wolf’s hook (Wolfsangel) associated with the SS Das Reich division with three trident swords evoking the Ukrainian National Republic (1917-20). In doing so, they removed a Nazi insignia and replaced it with an anti-Bolshevik insignia. In the Western European imagination, however, the Soviet Union is equated with Russia, ignoring the fact that the majority of Soviet leaders were not Russian.

British communication advisors assure that the Ukrainian Banderists/Nazis are comparable to the present-day Western Nazis: fringe groups of rabid people. They do not deny their existence, but suggest that they are not important. So they make disappear both the traces of their parliamentary and governmental activity since independence in 1991 and the images of the monuments to them that have since then been erected all over the country.

From 1991 to 2014, the world’s newspapers ignored the slow reformation of the Banderists in Ukraine. However, in February 2014, during the overthrow of elected president Viktor Yanukovych, all journalists covering the “Revolution of Dignity” were struck by the central role of far-right militias in the protests. The world’s media reported on these strange “nationalists” with swastikas. But the Western press abruptly stopped investigating a month later when Crimea, refusing to allow these extremists to take power, declared its independence. To continue to report on the drift of Ukraine would have been to give reason to the Russian Federation which had accepted its attachment. From then on and for 8 years, no Western media investigated, for example, the accusations of kidnapping and torture on a large scale that were spread throughout the country. Because they deliberately ignored the Banderists during this period, they are no longer able to assess their political and military role today.

This blindness continues with the evolution of Ukrainian power during the war. The Western press ignores everything about the dictatorship that was put in place: confiscation by the state of all media, arrest of opposition figures, confiscation of property of people who mention the historical crimes of the Banderists and the Nazis, etc. On the contrary, the Russian press does not miss anything of this sudden development and is mourning for having closed its eyes for years….”