Listen to a reading of this article:
❖
Ahh, that’s much better. Problem solved.
British empire smut rag The Times has a new article out titled “Azov Battalion drops neo-Nazi symbol exploited by Russian propagandists,” which has got to be the most hilarious headline of 2022 so far (and I’m including The Onion and other intentionally funny headlines in the running).
“The Azov Battalion has removed a neo-Nazi symbol from its insignia that has helped perpetuate Russian propaganda about Ukraine being in the grip of far-right nationalism,” The Times informs us. “At the unveiling of a new special forces unit in Kharkiv, patches handed to soldiers did not feature the wolfsangel, a medieval German symbol that was adopted by the Nazis and which has been used by the battalion since 2014. Instead, they featured a golden trident, the Ukrainian national symbol worn by other regiments.”
Yeah that’s how you solve Ukraine’s Nazi problem. A logo change.
https://twitter.com/taseenb/status/1531324958776995840
Claiming it’s “Russian propaganda” to say the Azov Battalion uses neo-Nazi insignia, and is ideologically neo-Nazi, is itself propaganda. A month ago Moon of Alabama published an incomplete list of the many mainstream western outlets who have described various Ukrainian paramilitaries as such, so if it’s only “Russian propagandists” who’ve been saying the Azov Battalion is neo-Nazi then Silicon Valley social media platforms should immediately ban outlets like NBC News, the BBC, The Guardian, and Reuters.
Before this war started this past February it wasn’t seriously controversial to say that Ukraine has a Nazi problem except in the very most virulent of empire spinmeister echo chambers. Even in the early days of the conflict it was still happening with mainstream publications who hadn’t yet gotten the memo that history had been rewritten, like this NBC News article from March titled “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t.”
An excerpt:
Just as disturbing, neo-Nazis are part of some of Ukraine’s growing ranks of volunteer battalions. They are battle-hardened after waging some of the toughest street fighting against Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine following Putin’s Crimean invasion in 2014. One is the Azov Battalion, founded by an avowed white supremacist who claimed Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. In 2018, the U.S. Congress stipulated that its aid to Ukraine couldn’t be used “to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” Even so, Azov is now an official member of the Ukraine National Guard.
So plainly it is not “Russian propaganda” to highlight the established fact that there are neo-Nazi paramilitaries in Ukraine who are receiving weapons from the US and its allies. The change in insignia isn’t being made to correct a misperception, it’s being made to obscure a correct perception.
The change in insignia is a rebranding to a more mainstream-friendly logo, very much like Aunt Jemima rebranding to Pearl Milling Company due to the Jim Crow racism the previous branding evoked. The primary difference is that the corporate executives of Pearl Milling probably aren’t still interested in turning America back into an apartheid state.
As journalist Alex Rubenstein noted on Twitter, al Qaeda in Syria went through a similar rebranding not long ago for the exact same reasons:
Azov is the new al-Qaeda in Syria: "We aren't al-Qaeda! We split from them. Sure, all of us are former members but our new group, Jaysh al-Zawahiri, isn't down with that sort of thing! We still fly the black flag but changed the words on it. Now please us send more weapons." https://t.co/coh8mZPNLQ
— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) May 30, 2022
Indeed it is very normal for the US and its allies to provide backing to fascistic extremists in order to advance imperial agendas, because those tend to be the armed factions in a given area who are willing to inflict the brutal acts of violence upon their countrymen necessary to facilitate those agendas.
From far right militias in Latin America to tyrannical jihadists in the Middle East, this pattern of backing murderous fascists and then having to manage public perception of their depravity has been going on a long time. After the US alliance began working with al Qaeda-aligned factions to push regime change Syria, it eventually became necessary for them to rebrand to appease public concerns about their image. When the US-backed Contras were committing human rights atrocities in Nicaragua to stomp out the leftist Sandinistas, the Reagan administration was launching a massive perception management campaign to manipulate the way people see the situation.
In Ukraine, neo-Nazi paramilitaries just happen to have been the armed thugs who were depraved enough to do what the empire needed done on the ground. As Ukrainian-American peace activist
The people in Donetsk and Luhansk were less lucky. The coup government dispatched the military to suppress their insurrections.
At first many Ukrainian soldiers refused to shoot at their own countrymen, in this civil war that their US-backed government started.
Seeing the hesitation of the Ukrainian military, far-right groups (and the oligarchs that were backing them) formed so-called “territorial defense battalions,” with names like Azov, Aidar, Dnipro, Tornado, etc.
Much like in Latin America, where US-backed death-squads kill left-wing politicians, socialists, and labor organizers, these Ukrainian fascist battalions were deployed to lead the offensive against the militias of Donetsk and Luhansk, killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
Unlocked: Siding with Ukraine's far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky's historic mandate for peace, by @aaronjmate https://t.co/3rYOdIcob2
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 15, 2022
The fact that factions like the Azov Battalion have been the ones willing to get their hands dirty in Ukraine has been a major factor in their ability to shore up influence over the nation’s affairs far in excess of their numbers, a dynamic described in detail by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Alex Rubenstein. As noted by journalist Aaron Maté, when Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine these extremists openly threatened to lynch him if he worked to make peace with Russia as he had pledged to do.
And on that note it’s work issuing another reminder at this time that the US could easily have prevented this entire war by simply giving Zelensky protection from those factions so that he could enact the peace mandate he’d been elected to enact. But of course the US would never do such a thing, because the US always wanted this war, and because the US does not actually believe in democratic mandates, and because the US does not actually oppose Nazism.
Which is why when concerns were raised about arming neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, the only offer on the table was a logo change.
____________________
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27 responses to “Empire Solves Ukraine’s Nazi Problem With A Logo Change”
I really, really hate it when blog comment posters copy and paste the same comments, especially when regular readers see it again and again. I consider it to be spamming, however………..as I am just now catching up with the excellent, evidence based articles Caitlin is publishing regarding Ukraine, I must begrudgingly copy and paste, for the last time today, a previous blog I posted. It is very relevant to all the articles exposing the hypocrisy of diplomacy in the Art of Politics, otherwise known as the Art of Advantage (I will gladly support my previous enemy if it gives my current enemy the disadvantage!) ,and so it seems practiced by journalists also! Indeed, there are major Nazi influences, not minor as we are continually told.
( 2% of 43,236,528 population is 864,730 no small number….interestingly about 86% the total number of people in active/reserve positions of Ukraine’s military & government leadership)
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ukraine-population/
So here goes……….sorry (copy & paste time)
Billy Eduard Albert Meier (BEAM) has also been contacted by officials within Ukraine’s inner circle of President Zelensky, asking for advice on how they can remove this sadistic, Nazi ideologist, warmonger (YES, THE COLLECTIVE WEST IS SUPPORTING A NAZI REGIME IN UKRAINE !!) from his current position, whereby he is allowed to carry on the insane application of Gewalt, against the citizens of his own country whom do not agree with his ideals. [Gewalt defined as ‹using all available coercing means, powers based in the psyche, mind and consciousness, capabilities and skills, in order to carry out and wield monstrous (immense/tremendous) actions and deeds -see full definition
here http://au.figu.org/glossary.html
There are now transcripts of conversations pertaining to the several, now official, communications of Ukraine government inner circle officials whom want True World Peace. It is explained that if it continues along the current trajectory, it will become an overt world war IV, not just a proxy as it currently is?! B…bu…but we are only up to WWIII…..aren’t we !?!
To clarify, World War 1 wasn’t in early 1900s, but mid 1700s
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War )
To understand and know, not just take my word for it, read the details here:
https://theyflyblog.com/2022/05/danger-to-peace-lovers-in-zelenskys-inner-circle/
https://theyflyblog.com/2022/05/a-plea-from-ukrainian-officials-to-stop-nazi-zelensky/
And if you are wondering what you can personally do, apart from participating in discourse with like minded individuals on excellent blogs like this, participate in this……perhaps?
https://theyflyblog.com/2022/06/the-salome-peace-meditation/
Ultimately the destiny of our planet, environment and state of collective mental/psyche health rests with each individual that has the free will to choose their own destiny!
WHAT DO YOU CHOOSE……………
Time to invest in laser tattoo removal in UKR
Keep going Caitlin.
Recently you’ve been taking flak which means you’re over the target,
Power to you, thanks.
Truer words have never been spoken. The shamelessness of the Empire of Lies when it comes to disguising the truth is absolutely mind blowing, as Dubya’s recent lapsus about the Iraq war revealed. It is reminiscent of surrealist painter René Magritte’s famous 1929 painting The Treachery of Images…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
… where he painted a pipe and wrote underneath it “This is not a pipe”. Yet Magritte later came clean explaining: “The famous pipe… How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I’d have been lying!”
Point!
How about the Azov Battalion’s Nazi symbol, is it only a representation?
Yes.
And what does it represent?
Nazism.
Of course you now have to move into hard logic, if you’re a journo at the Times, to prove the contrary.
For starters, you need an axiom: everything the Russians say is propaganda. The logical consequence is that when they say a Nazi symbol on the flag of the most ardent component of Ukrainian politics and military is a sign that the country is in the grip of far-right nationalism, this is propaganda.
And they know a lot of people will buy this because they’ve bombarded them for years with the opening axiom and its ubiquity, including trying to make the American public believe that the honourable son of the most respectable candidate to the presidential election was a depraved punk running an influence peddling scheme for his dad!
That’s how vicious them Russkies are! And now this Nazi garbage just because of an insignificant drawing that they have weaponized against Zorrolensky. I’m asking you… Couldn’t get more evil than that if you tried!
See also:
„The US Power Elite: they are doing it again!“: https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2022/04/09/the-us-power-elite-they-are-doing-it-again-die-us-machtelite-sie-tun-es-wieder/
Best regards
I think the US also going to try to get some European countries in debt (as in giving them loans to buy US-made weapons), so they can then command them to go into the World War 3.
The US has done that after the WW1, when they forced Britain and Germany to repay WW1 debt, that was then collected from Germany as reparations, in US dollars!
If you track the money, you will eventually find out who is pulling the strings to start WW3.
US power in the world became stronger after WW1 and even more so after WW2, so they are making an assumption that the US will dominate the world after WW3.
Pride ALWAYS goes before the fall.
Correction, forced Britain and France repay debt to the US…
The costume change won’t be complete until they paint their helmets white.
I didn’t see how Russia could de-nazify Ukraine but it looks like they knew what they were talking about.
It reminds me of Blackwater changing its name to “Xe”.
The real problem is that the Trident has forever been tainted because of all the Nazis that have worn it.
Ukraine has been exposed as a country full of Nazis and corruption. Of course they found support in Washington.
Pathetic.
Fortunately, all of them will be wiped out by “The Ugly, Evil Bear”… 😉
The Russians never did take out the bridges over the Dneiper. I can’t tell you how much that trips me out. The balls of their General staff, and the absolute confidence Vlad the Resolute (!) had in their judgement.
Knew the whole time the West could do NOTHING to effect the outcome of this campaign other than to open up with truly big stuff, the ultimate firepower, and end all life on the planet rather than a accept a crushing proxy defeat.
And the Russians said hey, that’s your fucking choice, there is nothing we can do to prevent you from suiciding this planet. Meanwhile, we are going to set up some cauldrons and whip your proxy armies and move on to Phase 3.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/05/ukraine-arty.html#more
Phase 3. Maybe it won’t be as difficult for the Russians as I thought. I have a gut feeling that there are power centers in Washington – and above – that are willing to cut ties in this theater of operations entirely. Just say “see ya later Ukraine, we hardly knew ye,” to then pack and leave and move on to China.
I mean, some goals were met. Western Europe is a smouldering shitpile of weakened and fractured nation-states, whose future could best be desribed as “reduced to abject dependent status” or “wholly reliant on our neo-liberal largesse.*”
So, you couldn’t beat the little wolverine that could, BUT, you believe you can now take on Godzilla?
China ain’t Russia and Taiwan is definitely not Ukraine.
And it seems pretty clear at this point. all the the nations of Zone B, representing more than three quarters of the human population, want in to the Belt and Road initiative, the neo-liberals worst nightmare.
Phase 4, the neo-liberals, whose true power lies in advanced financial hocus pocus and the threat of nuclear armegeddon should anyone question this magic, are about to get their asses kicked.
And the question I’ve asked repeatedly for more than a decade, when it became clear to me, for better or worse, that the rise of China to total fucking dominance was already a fait accompli, and they had yet to hit 3rd gear, was this: will the neo-liberal order take us all on what is the equivalent of Waffen SS Death Ride, rather than accept being tossed into the wastebasket of historical evils, a regretable but mostly irrelevant episode in the fate of a world.
*Neo-liberal largesse. That’s a good one if I do say so myself. Can you trademark oxymorons?
Crystal and Saagar at Breaking Points are wavering a bit. You can hear it in their voices, the quivering. The “long,” “hot and burning,” “brutal and grinding,” “endless and intractable” struggle that can only result in a “bloody stalemate” that will last for “years and years,” the scenario they were banking on, now apparently requires a negotiated peace because the “Ukraine people” are “suffering and dying” “amidst the rubble” somewhere down south in a place called the Donbass.
Lmao …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfCMBF_72y0
Too late kids. This phase of the war, Phase 2, is all but over. The hard part is done, now its just pound away until your helpless opponent surrenders or dies. And it won’t take months. Two weeks tops is the maximum of amount of time you have left to promote the idiotic “stalemate narrative.”
As for negotiations, the Russians no longer have any interest. Do you remember that Russian column to the left of Kyiv, back in March, the one our drunken Speaker wanted to bomb the hell out of?
Well, that column represented the Russian Federation’s peace offer. When it withdrew in a calm and orderly fashion, or was beaten back by heroic Ukrainian counterattacks (!), take your pick, the time for negotiations was up.
At least as far Phase 2 was concerned.
Phase 3 is up next. I don’t know for sure (no one does), but at minimum I would suggest the Russian Federaton is going to require that Odessa surrender without a shot being fired, and that the Zelensky regime must pack its bags and remove itself from Kyiv.
Where it goes will probably be irrelevant to the Russians, as long as the regime evacuates in a westerly direction.
So, tell your CIA handlers, or whoever writes your scripts, to come up with some better narratives, because the ones you are peddling now, which are fact the same ones you’ve been peddling since the beginning, no longer rise to time honored standards of the nonsensical.
Note: Once more peeps. First, the Russian Armed Forces do not use conscripts in theaters of war, with exceptions being made for mobile kitchen staff and truck drivers. It is fact ILLEGAL for them to do so. Second, Putin has signed a law that scraps the prior age limit for VOLUNTEERS, because there have been overwhelming requests from veterans, especially those that were involved in the Georgian and the Chechen Wars, to be allowed to serve there country in its hour of need.
That’s the official spin. My take on this is the obvious one. They want to be in on the kill.
lol, can’t change those tatoos though. Idiots!
I’ve linked this before but it does seem germain to today’s subject material, which I believe to be about the flexibility of patches, one minute you’re wearing one patch and the next you wearing another, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve changed your stripes … so to speak.
So here it is again. Mark Felton Productions: Azov Battalion – History & Symbols.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGdUtUefjCA
I like Mark Felton, for several reasons, one of them being I still don’t know what his politics are. Still, there are times when I want to scream, ” Goddammit you son-of-a-bitch, quit being so overtly objective!”
And then I calm myself, and try to force my radical New Deal Democrat brain to accept that objectivity is a mostly a net positive when delivering the historical facts.
For instance, the fact that the allies used former Waffen SS members to form the main elements used to guard the accused at the Nuremberg Trails, would at best seems highly incongruous, and at worst beyond despicable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qcEFnGeZ6A
But, like anything else, history has nuances.
It helps to understand where it all started even if it is hard to do so. An author by the name Jim Marrs has done us all a big favor by capturing it succinctly in his book, ‘Rule by Secrecy’. In the book, he points out that ‘the prerequisite for grasping the background is understanding’ what is referred to as ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’, a version of which appeared in 1864 in a book by one French lawyer named Maurice Joly who happened to be a member of the Order of the Rose – Croix or Rosicrucians.
Whoever the group members were, it is an open secret that theirs was a secret society and that their intent was very clear – world domination. Also, they probably belonged to a moneyed class of the time and as always, they were, and still are the instigators and financiers of wars everywhere, where their interests may be in danger or might be enhanced. In the ‘Protocols’ it is penned, ‘Outwardly, however in ‘official’ utterances we shall adopt an opposite procedure, and always do our best to appear honorable and cooperative. A statesman’s words do not have to agree with his acts. If we pursue these principles, the governments and peoples which we have thus prepared will take our IOUs for cash. One day they will accept us as benefactors and saviors of the human race. If any state dared to resist us, if its neighbors make common cause with it against us, we will unleash a world war’.
Marrs goes on to give us further insight from the ‘Protocols’…’ that the goal of world domination will be accomplished by controlling how the public thinks by controlling what they hear, by creating new conflicts or restoring old orders, by spreading hunger, destitution and plague, by seducing and distracting the youth. By all these methods we shall so wear down the nations , that they will be forced to offer us world dominion ‘.
The Nazi ‘cult’ is a creation of Western secret society moneyed class even to this day. The book points out that Henry Ford wrote a book which became ‘a shining light to Hitler, in the realm of anti-Semitism and Hitler copied from the book when he wrote his book ‘Mein Kampf’. When it comes to Nazism, the West is sticking to its proverbial guns. They may change the badges but if scratched deeper, the Neo-Nazi cult will always show up in some form.
I came here to find an oasis of sanity in a crazy online media world. Then I got to the comments section.
US/UK = the asses of evil. Don’t get your hopes up.
Ahhhh, so they used to use neo-Nazi symbol! How unexpextedly.
And they STILL use Totenkopf.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Oops83813088/status/1530991980150411273
It’s almost funny the way the US government now denies that there were ever any Nazis in Ukraine during the Second World War when it held two separate extradition trials for one John Demjanjuk whom they charged with being a prison guard in the Nazi concentration camps. They succeeded in extraditing him to Israel in the 1988 when he was in his late sixties. The Israelis initially convicted him as “Ivan the Terrible,” a notorious sadistic prison guard at the Treblinka camp and sentenced him to death; however, upon retrial he was acquited on the defense of mistaken identity and deported back to the US in 1993 at age 73. In 1999, US prosecutors again sought to deport Demjanjuk for having been a concentration camp guard, and his citizenship was revoked in 2002. In 2009, Germany requested his extradition for over 27,900 counts of acting as an accessory to murder: one for each person killed at Sobibor during the time when he was alleged to have served there as a guard. He was deported from the US to Germany in that same year. On 12 May 2011, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. He died in German custody in 2012 at age 91.
~
Washington must have been quite sure this Ukrainian fellow was a true-blue Nazi, having tried several times over the course of approximately 25 years to send him back to the Jews or the Germans to mete out justice to him. He was by no means the exception, as many thousands of Ukrainians are known to have either worked in the extermination camps or served in the Waffen SS. Now Washington sees absolutely no connection between Ukrainians and their historical Nazi ties, even though the country has erected numerous statues and monuments to the leader of the Ukie Nazi movement, the infamous Stepan Bandera. Does Washington never tire of being “right” all the time? Will they never cease trying to cram their ad hoc history up the world’s collective wazoo?
A leopard never changes it’s spots, America and it’s stooges are of course the same soulless wretches they perhaps always have been if you stand down wind of these creatures you will smell the shit a mile off, what with themselves and people like the Chinese well, what a lovely world we live in, heaven help us .
I think the main reason we could slap a Neo in front of Ukriane’s Nazis if we were so inclined, is because the so called best of them, down there in Mariopul, chose to surrender at the end, instead of going out with a legendary Death Ride, Waffen SS style.
Now you could make the case that they couldn’t, because they didn’t have any servicable fighting vehicles once they allowed themselves to be trapped like rats in the Azovstal Steel Works, but this is not an excuse. The whole point of the Death Ride is you commit to one BEFORE you are reduced to the status of the cornered rat.
The General Staff of a Waffen SS Panzer division would calmly do the math; we have X amount of Mark IVs and Tigers remaining, we have Y amount of petrol in reserve, it is therefore our recommendation Heer Oberst, that we commit to the Death Ride before sundown tomorrow, else a glorious death for us all will no longer be possible.
And so the ride would begin.
The UkoNazis did consider a ride of a sort at one point during the latter stages of the Battle of Mariupol. They were going to form a column of civilian vehicles and make a run for their own beleaguered lines on the Donbass front. That would’ve been interesting.
A Life Ride! Leaving one cauldron in an attempt to race through mostly Russian held territory to end up in another cauldron 120 kilometers to the north. Not exactly the stuff of legend, and perhaps the reason why their Commander-in-Chief Zelenski strictly forbade it.
Lmao … I believe the thought of the “hot and sexy” Zelenski having the power to forbid anything is literally impossible to imagine for anyone with a functioning brain.
Yes that’s it. Even commandant surrenders but day after he sends second in command to check if Russians will organize firing squads. hitler is turning in grave 🙂
Lmao … Exactly. May they all be stripped of their SS runes in the afterlife.
when all you’ve got is propaganda to justify your position, everything is a marketing problem.
The Nazi symbol today is made up of stars and stripes. The most criminal and dangerous Nazis have their headquarters in Washington. The Azov battalion? – simple amateur lackeys.
Exactly. And you can add the f***ing “six point star”… 😉
Moderate Nazis, now we’re good to go.