Guest Post: Sleepwalking Into Fascism: Why CIA/NATO’s Foreign Policy Has Been Consistent for the Past 77 years
[This is the final installment to a five-part series written by Cynthia Chung which I am proud to present as a guest post. Refer here for Part 1, Part 2 goes over how Ukrainian Nationalism was bought and paid for by the CIA post-WWII, Part 3 goes over NATO’s Operation Gladio, Part 4 goes over the role of the CIA and NATO in the global heroin trade, Miami as the new center of International Fascism and how President Kennedy’s murder is connected to this.]
Thus far in this series we have seen a picture that has painted NATO, the CIA, and fascists including outright Nazis all working for the same apparatus and essentially the same goal: to overthrow democratically elected leaders and replace them with dictators and fascist right-wing governments. In Part 4, it was discussed how the profits of the narcotics trade are used in turn to fund right-wing terrorist activity globally, using the model of NATO’s Gladio. The “great heroin coup” by the CIA and co. was about having complete control over the profits of heroin for this very purpose.
It is here that we will resume our story.
Snow is Now Black
Bertrand Russell discussed in his book “The Impact of Science on Society” (1952) that the subject which “will be of most importance politically is mass psychology,” that is, the lens in which an individual views “reality” and “truth.” Russell is very clear, such “convictions” are not generated by the individual themselves but rather are to be shaped by the State.
Of course, individuals are not encouraged to think about an absolute truth or reality, rather they are encouraged to think on a much smaller scale, on individual “facts,” for this is much easier to control and shape and also limits “problematic” thinking such as the ponderance on cause and effect.
Russell, in his “Impact of Science on Society,” goes on to talk about how one could program a society to think snow is black rather than white:
“First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.”
This is of course a program for the most ambitious “reframing” of “reality,” however, as we see today, we do not need to start before the age of ten for other sorts of “reframing,” and nowhere does this seem to be the most successful and effective with any age group than the West’s “foreign” policy.
For snow is something that we see and experience regularly. It is much more difficult to “reframe” something familiar, however, something that is “foreign” has always been a rather blurred and undefined concept for millennia, and thus is a much easier candidate for the State to “reframe” as our collective “reality,” our collective “existential fear.” And thus, for most of history, our understanding of who is our “friend” and who is our “foe” has rarely been determined by the people themselves but rather their governing structure.
Such a governing structure is free to determine for us what is “truth” vs “falsehood” what is “fact” vs “fiction,” because the people, despite all the abuse and exploitation from such a governing force still look to this very thing to protect and shield them from the frightful “unknown.”
Better the Devil you know? In this case, ignorance is most certainly not bliss…
However, the “facts” emboldened by the State have shown themselves to not be so “fact-based” after all, thus we now commonly see from the angels of justice; the flawless, omnipotent, and anonymous “fact-checkers” that “truth” is becoming increasingly not a matter of “right” or “wrong” but rather, about semantics, priorities and what one chooses to emphasize.
For instance, the very real neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine (refer to Part 1 and Part 2), has now been “reframed” by the media to either 1) acknowledge that there are indeed actual neo-Nazis in Ukraine but that they are also nationalists and thus fighting for all of Ukraine, 2) to claim that they are “reformed” neo-Nazis that have apparently been domesticated and are now respectable defenders of Ukraine, 3) Ukraine has a Jewish President and thus such a thing is somehow fundamentally impossible.
The thing is, we have heard this story before, 77 years ago…
Better the Devil You Know?
In 1998, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), at the behest of Congress, launched what became the largest congressionally mandated, single-subject declassification effort in history. As a result, more than 8.5 million pages of records have been opened to the public under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (P.L. 105-246) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (P.L. 106-567). These records include operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA, the FBI and Army intelligence. IWG issued three reports to Congress between 1999 and 2007.
A research group was put together to compile and organize key elements of this massive newly declassified database, the result was the publication of “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” in 2005 published by the National Archives.
Part of the content declassified reveals how the FBI and CIA knowingly worked with Nazi war criminals right after WWII and in several cases before the war was even over.
Timothy Naftali writes in “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” (1):
“The U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) shared the CIA’s view that the pursuit of Nazi war criminals was incompatible with meeting the demands of the Cold War…‘At this time, 1952, the apprehension of war criminals is no longer considered a mission of CIC,’ the 430th Detachment wrote to higher headquarters in the U.S. Army in Austria, adding, ‘It is also believed that the prosecution of war criminals is no longer considered of primary interest to U.S. authorities’…” [emphasis added]
What was causing this abrupt turnabout within certain corridors of the United States to shield Nazi war criminals, and in many cases, those that were not even in service to the United States? Why were these Nazi war criminals so quickly pardoned and judged “harmless” to the world now that they had lost the war?
The reason for this decision by the FBI and CIA was because combating Soviet communism had become not only the first priority in a post-WWII world, but it appeared the only priority of these security agencies, who went so far as to publicly declare that their job did not include going after German war criminals, even if they happen to be residing within the United States (2).
And thus, as long as the Nazis were focused on solely the destruction of the Soviet Union, they were now to be considered as indispensable “allies” to the cause of the so-called “free world.”
However, what this series has shown is that that was most certainly not the case and instead terrorism and tyranny, such as Operation Gladio, McCarthyism and COINTELPRO, were unleashed onto the “free world” such that anything that did not fit within the agreed upon narrow script was to be scrubbed and purged. This included human rights activists and democratically elected political leaders. No one was allowed to challenge the script that had now been chosen for them. What was the script? A gradual move towards fascist right-wing governments, all for our apparent protection against Soviet communism.
Those political leaders who would stand in the way of this were summarily executed by the hit-squads of Gladio including Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, Turkey’s Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, US President John F. Kennedy, Alfred Herrhausen, and Enrico Mattei.
Timothy Naftali writes in “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” (3):
“In 1953, when a congressional request to determine whether Eichmann [one of the leading Nazi organisers of the holocaust] was hiding in the Middle East… the CIA explained to interested U.S. senators that it was no longer responsible for tracking down Nazi fugitives, even the notorious Eichmann. ‘While the CIA has a continuing interest in the whereabouts and activities of individuals such as Eichmann,’ explained a CIA officer with the approval of the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, ‘we are not in the business of apprehending war criminals hence in no position to take an active role in this case.’ The senators apparently accepted this mission statement…[and thus with no further information on Eichmann] the inquiry was suspended in 1954.” [emphasis added]
Incredibly, the 430th Detachment added to this “not in the business of apprehending war criminals,” in their note to the higher headquarters in the U.S. Army in Austria that:
“Therefore, it appears the Salzburg police authorities should be advised that the arrest of [Adolf Eichmann] and [his] transfer to CIC is no longer desired.” (4) [emphasis added]
Timothy Naftali writes in “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” (5):
“United States commanders did not fully agree with the decision of Detachment 430 to wash its hands of the responsibility for dealing with Eichmann. Nazi war criminals remained on a watch list, and if the Austrians were to pick up Eichmann, he would have to be handed over to the CIC. But there would be no new U.S. efforts to track him down.”
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust – the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” which was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent.
Eichmann was tasked with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during WWII.
Eichmann once lamented to SS colleagues that only 6 million Jews were murdered under his supervision. (6)
On May 23, 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rose in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to make a stunning announcement “Adolf Eichmann, one of the greatest Nazi war criminals, is in Israeli custody.”
Nearly two weeks earlier, Eichmann had been captured by Mossad agents in Argentina on May 11th, 1960. He was living under the alias Richard Klement for a decade after the war.
Timothy Naftali writes in “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” (7):
“Eichmann’s abduction came as a complete surprise to the U.S. government. The Israelis had given no warning to the CIA (the principal point of contact between the Israeli intelligence community and Washington since 1951) that they had tracked down the most famous living Nazi war criminal and would summarily bring him to justice.
…the Israeli capture of Eichmann did more than refocus attention on those men who had managed to elude justice in the chaos of the immediate-postwar period; for the CIA, this unexpected event would force a re-examination of some of the former Nazis it had recruited in the rush to produce intelligence results in the 1950s. Some of Eichmann’s associates, it turned out, had worked for the CIA…
Why did the CIA have any postwar relationships at all with individuals who had worked alongside Adolf Eichmann in persecuting and exterminating millions of people? Under what circumstances could individuals with these records be considered acceptable agent material? Leaving aside the moral dimension for a moment, what operational value could these veterans of the war against the Jews have had in the clandestine struggle with the Soviet Union? The organization for which they worked, the SD and later the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), was the intelligence arm of the SS and of the Nazi Party. Like most intelligence services in totalitarian regimes, the SD was more the watchdog of ideology than of truth. The fact that some of these men were in the anti-Jewish office of this already ideological service should have made their intelligence credentials even more suspect.” [emphasis added]
However, this very obvious fact did not deter the U.S. government from sponsoring Reinhard Gehlen, chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East military intelligence service, in a CIA backed surveillance apparatus established in West Germany; called the Gehlen Organisation (1946-1956) which subsequently became the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) from 1956-1968 to which Gehlen was the founding president.
West Germany was told it needed to be kept on a short leash for its Nazi crimes and ambitions during WWII, such that they were occupied for nearly 10 years by British, French and American militaries. Yet, at the same time, a high-ranking “former” Nazi was to be in charge of their security and intelligence?!?
West Germany’s occupation only ended on May 5th, 1955 after West Germany agreed to join NATO in 1954. It was only after West Germany’s agreement to join NATO that they were permitted to have a military force of up to a half-million men and resume the manufacture of arms.
In other words, it was only after West Germany agreed to seal its fate with the rest of the NATO countries in an eternal stand-off with the Soviet Union that they were then granted their crumb of “freedom.”
The rights of Germany were not being restricted because of its Nazi war crimes, as the CIA and NATO clearly showed they were so ready to pardon in its war criminals. The reality was that Germany was being used as the bulwark against the Soviet Union, and the German people were now going to pay the price for the crimes of its Nazi leaders. It would be the German people who would have to bow their heads in subservience while “former” Nazis were given first class treatment by the CIA and co. (much of this paid by the American taxpayer I might add).
Timothy Naftali writes in “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” (8):
“Materials released by the CIA and the Defense Department under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 permit a thorough analysis of the origins, implications, and results of the U.S. government’s postwar sponsorship of Reinhard Gehlen and of the organization that became the Bundesnachrichtensdienst (BND), the West German Secret Service, in 1956.
Four broad conclusions emerge…First, despite being the principal source of funding for Gehlen’s activities for close to eleven years, the U.S. government never achieved the control of Gehlen’s operations that it had expected, sought, or should have had. Second, Reinhard Gehlen often acted in bad faith in his dealings with the United States. He deceived a generation of U.S. intelligence officers about the details of his operations and violated the basic agreements that were designed to undergird the system of cooperation. Third, a substantial number of former members of SD Foreign Intelligence, the Gestapo, and the Waffen-SS were recruited into the organization when it was being funded by the U.S. government. Gehlen’s recruitment of these individuals was not done at the behest of the U.S. government; however, after Washington learned about Gehlen’s use of war criminals, it opted to do nothing about it.
Finally, the CIA did not hold Gehlen and his organization in high regard as intelligence assets. The Agency’s major goals in the Gehlen affair were to facilitate U.S. penetration of a future West German intelligence community…” [emphasis added]
As a result, the German people would never be allowed to be sovereign. They were to be the eternal losers of WWII, and they would have no choice but to do the will of their masters at the CIA and NATO headquarters, the latter of which would have its fair share on its staff of “former” Nazis who would go on to become high-ranking commanders in NATO after WWII.
NATO’s Dubious Allegiance
It was not just the CIA who was willing to work with “former” Nazis as part of America’s post-WWII foreign policy; such as the case of Nazi affiliated OUN-B’s Mykola Lebed and the CIA’s AERODYNAMIC (discussed in Part 2), where Stefan Bandera Nazi affiliated-ultra-nationalist propaganda continued to be heavily promoted in Ukraine during the Cold War years with CIA funding. This ultra-nationalist radicalization of certain groups of Ukrainians was justified for the very plain fact that it encouraged hatred of the Soviet Union. Ukraine would also be a bulwark of sorts but viewed as much more expendable than the Germans.
One CIA analyst judged that, “some form of nationalist feeling continues to exist [in the Ukraine] and… there is an obligation to support it as a cold war weapon.” (9)
This philosophy was seen very clearly in NATO’s choice of staff.
Adolf Heusinger, who served as the Operations Chief within the general staff of the High Command of the German Army in the Nazi German Armed Forces from 1938 to 1944. He was then appointed acting Chief of the General Staff for the Nazis.
Heusinger, like Gehlen, would never be tried at the Nuremberg trials. Instead, he was given control over the newly established West German army, as general of the Bundeswehr from 1957 to 1961. He then became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1961-1964. This overlapped with the period of heightened assassination attempts against de Gaulle, to which NATO’s Operation Gladio was implicated (see Part 3).
Hans Speidel, a Nazi general, was one of the major military leaders of West Germany during the early Cold War. He was a principal founder of the Bundeswehr. He was a major figure in the German rearmament and oversaw the Bundeswehr’s integration into NATO. (10) He became a military advisor to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Supreme Commander of NATO’s ground force in Central Europe from 1957-1963.
According to an article in Der Spiegel (11), which cited documents released by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (foreign intelligence agency of Germany) in 2014, Heusinger and Speidel may have been part of the Schnez-Truppe, a secret illegal army that veterans of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS established in Germany in 1949.
You would think such a thing were unlikely or even impossible, but the truth was that such a secret illegal army made up of Nazis post-WWII follows NATO’s Operation Gladio to the script.
Johannes Steinhoff, Luftwaffe fighter pilot during WWII and recipient of the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross (the Nazi military’s highest award), became the German Military Representative to the NATO Military Committee in 1960, served as Acting Commander Allied Air Forces Central Europe in NATO from 1965-1966, as Inspector of the Air Force 1966-1970 and as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1971–1974.
Johann von Kielmansegg, General Staff officer to the High Command of the Wehrmacht 1942-1944, was lieutenant general of NATO’s Supreme Command of Allied Land Forces Central Europe in Fontainebleau and NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1967-1968.
Jurgen Bennecke was also a general in the Wehrmacht and was NATO’s Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces Central Europe from 1968-1973.
Ernst Ferber, a Major in the Wehrmacht and group leader of the organizational department of the Supreme Command of the Army (Wehrmacht) from 1943-1945 and recipient of the Iron Cross 1st Class, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1973-1975.
Karl Schnell, battery chief in the Western campaign in 1940, later First General Staff Officer of the LXXVI Panzer Corps in 1944 and recipient of the Iron Cross 2nd Class, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1975-1977.
Franz Joseph Schulze, a Lieutenant in the reserve and Chief of the 3rd Battery of the Flak Storm Regiment 241 and recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross in 1944, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe from 1977-1979.
Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin, Lieutenant of 24th Panzer Division in the German 6th Army, adjutant to Army High Command, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1979-1983.
[Note: This is not a complete list of “former” Nazis who served under NATO.]
Thus, from 1957 to 1983, NATO had at least one if not several high ranking “former” Nazis in full command of multiple departments within NATO.
The position of NATO Commander and Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe (CINCENT Commander in Chief, Allied Forces Central Europe – AFCENT) was a position that was filled SOLELY by “former” Nazis for 16 YEARS STRAIGHT, from 1967-1983.
Can you see a pattern forming yet?
As previously mentioned in this series, in the context of this, NATO’s recent twitter scandal posting the Black Sun Nazi occult symbol this past international women’s day, might not have been a slip-up after all…
Fact Checking the “Fact-Checkers” on Ukraine
Before we go through the situation of Ukraine today, I wanted to share with you a very relevant story of how the CIA buys News.
Udo Ulfkotte was a well-known German journalist and author of numerous books. He worked for 25 years as a journalist, 17 of which were for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), including his role as editor. In his 2014 book “Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys News,” Ulfkotte goes over how the CIA along with German Intelligence (BND) were guilty of bribing journalists to write articles that either spun the truth or were completely fictitious in order to promote a pro-western, pro-NATO bent, and that he was one of those bought journalists.
In an interview, Ulfkotte describes how he finally built up the nerve to publish the book, after years of it collecting dust, in response to the erupting 2014 crisis in Ukraine stating:
“I felt that the right time had come to finish it and publish it, because I am deeply worried about the Ukrainian crisis and the possible devastating consequences for all of Europe and all of us…I am not at all pro-Russia, but it is clear that many journalists blindly follow and publish whatever the NATO press office provides. And this type of information and reports are completely one-sided”. [emphasis added]
In another interview Ulfkotte stated:
“it is clear as daylight that the agents of various Services were in the central offices of the FAZ, the place where I worked for 17 years. The articles appeared under my name several times, but they were not my intellectual product. I was once approached by someone from German Intelligence and the CIA, who told me that I should write about Gaddafi and report how he was trying to secretly build a chemical weapons factory in Libya. I had no information on any of this, but they showed me various documents, I just had to put my name on the article. Do you think this can be called journalism? I don’t think so.”
Ulfkotte has publicly stated:
“I am ashamed of it. The people I worked for knew from the get-go everything I did. And the truth must come out. It’s not just about FAZ, this is the whole system that’s corrupt all the way.” [emphasis added]
Udo Ulfkotte has since passed away. He died January 2017, found dead in his home, it is said by a heart attack. His body was quickly after cremated, thus preventing any possibility of an autopsy from occurring. His book has been made pretty much impossible to find available for purchase at this point.
Today’s situation concerning media reporting on Ukraine does not seem to be any different, if anything, it is much much worse.
To bolster support for the Ukrainian military, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries.
Ukraine’s propaganda strategy earned it praise from a NATO commander who told the Washington Post, “They are really excellent in stratcom — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.” The Post ultimately conceded that “Western officials say that while they cannot independently verify much of the information that Kyiv puts out about the evolving battlefield situation, including casualty figures for both sides, it nonetheless represents highly effective stratcom.”
Dan Cohen for Mint Press News writes:
“Key to the propaganda effort is an international legion of public relations firms working directly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to wage information warfare. According to the industry news site PRWeek, the initiative was launched by an anonymous figure who allegedly founded a Ukraine-based public relations firm…
According to the anonymous figure, more than 150 public relations firms have joined the propaganda blitz.
The international effort is spearheaded by public relations firm PR Network co-founder Nicky Regazzoni and Francis Ingham, a top public relations consultant with close ties to the UK’s government. Ingham previously worked for Britain’s Conservative Party, sits on the UK Government Communication Service Strategy and Evaluation Council, is Chief Executive of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation, and leads the membership body for UK local government communicators, LG Comms.”
Thus, Ingham who has been a member of the UK government and continues to have very high-level connections within the British government, is playing a leading role in shaping how the Ukraine war is being represented.
Dan Cohen provides a thorough explanation of how these “PR firms” have been responsible for reporting and spreading fabricated news and that even when such reports are found conclusively to be untrue, they continue to use them nonetheless. These PR tools include propaganda graphics, which are created in order to encourage radicalization and promotion of ultra-nationalist identity; using xenophobic and racist language (not just to Russians), outright praise of Ukrainian neo-Nazis as heroes, the idolization of Nazi affiliated OUN-B leader Stefan Bandera, and the encouragement of violent acts against other individuals (see Cohen’s article for examples).
Why would someone like Ingham be involved in something like this? Well, if you have already read Part 2 to this series, you will see that this is just a continuation of a several decades-long script.
If you have ever wondered who is behind the omnipotent “fact-checkers”, in the case of StopFake who have self-described themselves as such, they are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) aka the fully-rogue department of the CIA, the Atlantic Council, the International Renaissance Foundation (funded by Open Society Foundation’s billionaire George Soros), the British Embassy in Ukraine, the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the German Marshall Fund, among others.
StopFake was hired by Facebook in March 2020 to “curb the flow of Russian propaganda” but was found to be employing multiple figures closely tied to violent neo-Nazis. This has, however, not deterred Facebook from continuing to work with StopFake.
At the end of the day, it does not seem to matter how many times these arbiters of truth are found to be wrong, for U.S. officials have already admitted that they are literally just lying to the public about what is going on in Ukraine.
So How Serious is Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Romance?
Interestingly, the Atlantic Council itself acknowledges it is quite serious, in an article published in 2018 titled “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right Violence (And No, RT Didn’t Write This Headline).”
Josh Cohen for the Atlantic Council writes [links are from the original article]:
“It sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not. Last week Hromadske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote “national patriotic education projects” in the country…”
Yes, you read right, C14 along with the Azov Battalion has been training children, with encouragement and funding by the Ukrainian government via Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports under the title “national patriotic education projects”, including in terror tactics.
Josh Cohen continues [links are from the original article]:
“Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.”
After the March 8 2018 attacks against International Women’s Day marchers, Amnesty International wrote “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.”
Josh Cohen writes:
“To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity.” [emphasis added]
However, we heard it, straight from Yevhen Karas’s mouth, the leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi group C14, what determines who holds power in Ukraine has never really been about polls and elections.
As the famous “f*ck the EU” tape revealed to the dumbfounded world, the Ukrainian people don’t actually have a say in who runs their government. After the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” where Ukrainians literally died for “democracy,” the U.S. went on to “influence” the roster of the newly formed Ukrainian government, specifically around members of Svoboda and Pravyi Sector (Right Sector) who held five senior roles in the new government, including the post of deputy prime minister.
But neo-Nazis have not just been receiving western support in the political sphere.
Just this past October, as a reaction to her failed diplomatic visit to Russia, Victoria Nuland, according to French journalist Thierry Meyssan, went ahead and “imposed” Dmytro Yarosh onto President Zelensky. On Nov. 2, 2021, President Zelensky appointed Dmytro Yarosh (leader of the neo-Nazi affiliated ultra-nationalist paramilitary group Right Sector 2013-2015) as Adviser to the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi (for more on this refer to Part 1).
This is the very same Dmytro Yarosh who has been on Interpol’s “wanted list” since 2014.
Neo-Nazis have also received ongoing training by the CIA, British SAS (Special Air Service) as well as other NATO countries such as Canada since at least 2014. This training has continued despite Russia’s entry into Ukraine, which has been confirmed by The Times, Ottawa Citizen, CTV News, and Radio Canada.
The Canadian government has attempted to deny any knowledge of training neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine and have made the claim that they are not responsible for verifying who they are in fact training, but that this is the responsibility of the Ukrainian government. However, such claims of ignorance fell through when the very neo-Nazis they were training went ahead and posted pictures on their social media accounts, showcasing their neo-Nazis badges identifying them as such, plain for everyone to see.
On the same day as the untoward NATO tweet on International Women’s Day of a Ukrainian soldier with the Nazi Black Sun occult symbol, photographs appeared on NEXTA’s twitter feed showing the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion receiving training by instructors from “NATO countries” on how to use NLAW grenade launchers.
The ultra-nationalist Right Sector have also appeared in the field with UK-made NLAW launchers.
UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told the House of Commons on March 9 that “as of today, we have delivered 3,615 NLAWs [to Ukrainian forces] and continue to deliver more. We will shortly be starting the delivery of a small consignment of anti-tank Javelin missiles as well.”
For a full list of all the weapons sent to Ukraine since 2014 by all involved countries, refer here.
For those especially adamant that neo-Nazis are not “officially” a part of the Ukrainian army, you should be informed that the Azov Battalion is part of Ukraine’s National Guard, and thus, yes it is officially part of Ukraine’s military.
Andriy Biletsky, the Azov Battalion’s first commander and later a National Corps parliamentarian previously led the neo-Nazi paramilitary organisation “Patriot of Ukraine,” and once stated in 2010 that it was the Ukrainian nation’s mission to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].”
In 2019, the Soufan Center, which tracks terrorist and extremist groups around the world, warned:
“The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist network… [Its] aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion’s overarching objectives, to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy.”
The Soufan Center described how the Azov Battalion’s “aggressive networking” reaches around the world to recruit fighters and spread its white supremacist ideology. Foreign fighters who train and fight with the Azov Battalion then return to their own countries to apply what they have learned and recruit others.
In 2014, Newsweek published an article titled “Ukrainian Nationalist Volunteers Committing ‘ISIS-Style’ War Crimes.” Is this an indication of how both the Azov and ISIS have received their funding and training from the very same sources? Hmmm.
One of President Zelensky’s advisors, Oleksiy Arestovych, has stated in numerous interviews his open admiration for ISIS/ISIL tactics and approach to business and governance. Double hmmm.
NATO has recently gone so far as to make a short film honoring the Baltic Nazi collaborators the “Forest Brothers.” The NATO film lionizes the “Forest Brothers,” former Waffen SS fighters who voluntarily collaborated with the Nazis, as anti-communist heroes.
Dovid Katz, a leading historian and anti-Nazi investigator condemned the NATO film for rewriting history:
“By going beyond turning a blind eye to the worship of pro-Hitler forces in Eastern Europe…[NATO] is crossing the line right into offering its moral legitimization of Nazi forces such as the Latvian Waffen SS.” [emphasis added]
David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist and reliable voice of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, noted that even prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “the United States and NATO allies [were] ready to provide weapons and training for a long battle of resistance.”
This is the very same David Ignatius who was once President of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) (aka specialists in color revolutions), who arrogantly stated in a 1991 interview that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA…The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection”.
I guess the NED has had a change of heart on “openness is its own protection.”
Jeremy Kuzmarov for Covert Action Magazine writes in an article titled “National Endowment for Democracy Deletes Records of Funding Projects in Ukraine” [links from the original article]:
“The National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—a CIA offshoot founded in the early 1980s to advance “democracy promotion” initiatives around the world—has deleted all records of funding projects in Ukraine from their searchable “Awarded Grants Search” database.
The archived webpage captured February 25, 2022 from 14:53 shows that NED granted $22,394,281 in the form of 334 awards to Ukraine between 2014 to the present. The capture at 23:10 the same day shows “No results found” for Ukraine. As of right now, there are still “No results found” for Ukraine…
The erasure of the NED’s records is necessary to validate the Biden administration’s big lie—echoed in the media—that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was ‘unprovoked.’” [emphasis added]
Who will suffer the most in this plan for a long battle of resistance? The Ukrainian people.
If Putin’s top reason for going into Ukraine is to “denazify” the country, and the CIA, NATO and co. are persistently “nazifying” the political and military components of Ukraine, you can see how this is making a situation for peace in Ukraine impossible, and that it is the CIA and NATO that are to blame for this.
You can also understand how Ukraine’s entry into NATO was unacceptable merely by its geographic location (the distance between Ukraine’s border and Moscow is 450 km), however, add in the fact that NATO is involved in the promotion of neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine and that now both Sweden and Finland have also expressed a desire to join NATO (with no referendum since democracy is officially dead in Cold War 2.0) and we have ourselves a real sh*t storm.
However, this is not just a threat to Russia. The reality of the situation is that Ukraine has been in a civil war these past 8 years, though the western media refuses to acknowledge this very important fact.
Ivan Katchanovski, Professor of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, told MintPress:
“People who take at face value the Western media coverage would have a very distorted perception of the Ukraine conflict and its origin… They omit or deny that there is a civil war in Donbas even though the majority of scholars who [have] published or presented concerning this conflict in Western academic venues classify it as a civil war with Russian military intervention. The Western media also omitted that recent ‘unity marches’ in Kharkiv and Kyiv and a staged training of civilians, including a grandmother, were organized and led by the far right, in particular, the Neo-Nazi Azov [Battalion].”
Robert Parry from Consortium News writes [link is from original article]:
“On Sunday, a Times article by Andrew E. Kramer mentioned the emerging neo-Nazi paramilitary role in the final three paragraphs… In other words, the neo-Nazi militias that surged to the front of anti-Yanukovych protests…have now been organized as shock troops dispatched to kill ethnic Russians in the east [of Ukraine] – and they are operating so openly that they hoist a Swastika-like neo-Nazi flag over one conquered village with a population of about 10,000.
Burying this information at the end of a long article is also typical of how the Times and other U.S. mainstream news outlets have dealt with the neo-Nazi problem in the past. When the reality gets mentioned, it usually requires a reader knowing much about Ukraine’s history and reading between the lines of a U.S. news account.” [emphasis added]
In the above image which outlines the population distribution of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians within Ukraine, you can understand how an ultra-nationalist view that identifies as solely ethnic Ukrainian would be a catalyst for a civil war.
The people of Donbass have understandably asked for independence from Ukraine, yet the Ukrainian government has refused to allow this nor intervene for a peaceful resolution. What does this mean? The war can only end when one side is fully dead.
Not only is it publicly known that the U.S. and NATO have been funding and training neo-Nazis, but they have also been supplying a massive supply of arms (as previously mentioned). It got to such a point where in 2018, Congress had to ban the United States from sending further arms to Ukraine militia linked to neo-Nazis, specifically mentioning the Azov Battalion. For some reason this ban was to only last for three years thus it is apparently fair game now?
But you may say, what about Russia’s crimes against the Ukrainian people, aren’t they far worse than even vicious neo-Nazis? Namely the bombing of the Mariupol theater and the Bucha massacre. Thorough journalistic investigations have already been done on the former, which can be found here, that conclusively shows the bombing of the Mariupol theater was a false-flag.
As for the Bucha massacre, there has been no evidence presented as of yet that conclusively proves who committed this atrocity, there have only been assertions. Recall that the chemical attacks in Syria were also full of assertions, to which investigative journalist Seymour Hersch wrote a report titled “Whose Sarin,” which conclusively proved that the popular assertions being pushed by the Obama government in their attempt to incriminate the Syrian government, were in fact false. Rather, it was pointing to the fact that the actual terrorists were the ones using sarin on the Syrian civilians, who were receiving American and co. funding and arms.
Unfortunately, time is of the essence in investigating crimes such as these, and despite the outcries of the inhumanity of such events, there is always heavy foot-dragging if not outright dismissal over an official and neutral investigation of such crime scenes. Why is this?
Russia has asked the UN Security Council for an investigation and to discuss the Bucha massacre. China has also called for an official investigation into this and has received backlash for withholding blame until all facts are known. However, an official investigation has been repeatedly refused. Why? This should be the official protocol for such matters.
Instead, the response to this was for the UN to suspend Russia from its human rights body. Thus, not only denying an official investigation, but denying Russia a voice in responding to the matter.
The disturbing elephant in the room in all of this, is that the Azov Battalion has already been found guilty of similar atrocities against its own Ukrainian people, which has been thoroughly investigated by Max Blumenthal and Esha Krishnaswamy and which can be found here (warning there is graphic content).
The Azov Battalion has also been found guilty of purposefully putting Ukrainian citizens in jeopardy by positioning their artillery and military in residential areas and buildings, including daycares and hospitals, to which even the Washington Post had to acknowledge in their misleadingly titled article “Russia has killed civilians in Ukraine. Kyiv’s defense tactics add to the danger.”
However, these are not simply “defense tactics,” they are blatant war crimes that are recognized as such by international law. These war crimes are publicly acknowledged to be going on, causing the deaths of a significant number of Ukrainians. Just to be clear here, during times of war, to which the Washington Post also acknowledges, Ukrainian soldiers and weaponry are legitimate targets for the Russian military. It is not Russia that is committing the war crime here, it is the Ukrainian government. They have literally been caught using their own people as human shields.
Does this still sound like a patriotic nationalist movement for the welfare and sovereignty of the Ukrainian people?
According to an interview with Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine Intelligence Officer, the Russian military have made it clear that they are using “Syrian tactics” in Ukraine.
Scott Ritter explains, the Russian military’s tactic in Syria was:
“…to surround urban areas where these jihadists had been gathered, terrorizing the population, surround them and give them the opportunity to evacuate on buses with their security guaranteed by Russian military police. A soft approach that protected civilians, that protected civilian areas.”
It was this tactic that allowed the Russians along with the Syrian army to defeat ISIS and other terrorist affiliates. Today they only occupy the Idlib province. These terrorists who remain would not have been possible without Turkish support. This initiative to rid Syria of ISIS was something that the United States has clearly never been interested in supporting.
Interestingly, when the Russians entered Syria to combat the terrorists at the behest of the Syrian government, this was also called a “Russian invasion” by certain quarters of western media. However, it was not the Russians who bombed Syrian cities to the ground, that was the good ol’ U.S. of A.
In the same interview, Scott Ritter stated that these very terrorists who have been stationed in Idlib are now being brought into Ukraine:
“…[Zelensky] has opened the door for illegal warriors, the mercenaries from Europe…the exploiters of conflict…[and] they brought in the jihadists…they brought in the people..[who] ostensibly want to kill Russians…It’s a poison pill…now we are going to have these jihadists, who are being armed by the way with javelin missiles and stinger missiles. Imagine what happens when a bunch of bloodthirsty jihadists take these weapons into Europe. Would you like to be the German Chancellor driving on a highway knowing that up in the hills could be a jihadist hit-team armed with javelins?…This is literally the worst kind of decision-making ever to put that much weaponry into Ukraine in an uncontrolled fashion. Even before the jihadist came in you were giving it to neo-Nazis who can’t surrender. They can’t surrender because they will be killed, rightfully so. So what do desperate people do when they can’t surrender and they don’t die? They run away with the weaponry they have. They’ll be burying it, making caches, falling back on it, continuing the futile resistance and in their anger to the West they’ll lash out at the West…that is how global terrorism is born.”
How is this in the best interest of anyone’s welfare in Europe, let alone Ukraine? It isn’t.
In November 2015, a UN resolution was brought forward condemning the glorification of Nazism. Of the total 126 member states, 53 countries including member nations of the European Union abstained from voting, four countries voted against the resolution: Canada, Palau, the United States, and Ukraine.
Why do you think that is?
Zelensky: the Enigma
Many have been especially confused as to how Ukraine can have such a serious neo-Nazi problem, when they have a Jewish President.
There is something you should know about the position of “president” of Ukraine since 2014, in a country where neo-Nazis have been made more confident than the mafia ever was, that they literally cannot be touched since they have the direct backing and protection of the United States and NATO.
When President Poroshenko (June 2014 – May 2019) negotiated the Minsk agreements in September 2014, he agreed, with Germany and France, to the special autonomous status of Donetsk and Lugansk, and that under this special condition, they would stay part of Ukraine.
According to an interview with Scott Ritter (12), this was unacceptable to the neo-Nazis who threatened Poroshenko’s life, if such a thing were to be implemented.
The Minsk agreements were never put into action. Instead, Ukraine entered a civil war that has gone on for 8 years and continues to this day. The Minsk agreements were officially expired on February 21st, 2022, the same day that the State Duma of Russia passed a bill officially recognizing Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states. This ultimate rejection by the Ukrainian government was a clear indication that their war against Donbass would be escalated.
The situation with President Zelensky is no different.
In October 2019, President Zelensky (who assumed office in May 2019), had a recorded face-to-face confrontation with the militants from the Azov Battalion, who had launched a campaign to sabotage the peace initiative called “No to Capitulation.”
Kyiv Post translated the conversation as such:
“’Listen, Denys [Yantar], I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons. Don’t shift the conversation to some protests,’ Zelensky said, videos of the exchange show. As he said this, Zelensky aggressively approached Yantar, who heads the National Corps, a political offshoot of the far-right Azov volunteer battalion, in Mykolaiv city.
‘But we’ve discussed that,’ Yantar said.
‘I wanted to see understanding in your eyes. But, instead, I saw a guy who’s decided that this is some loser standing in front of him,’ Zelensky said.”
The Kyiv Post continues in their article, that this reaction by President Zelensky received a strong backlash from certain quarters of Ukraine:
“Andriy Biletsky, head of National Corps and the Azov Battalion, threatened Zelensky on his YouTube channel that more veterans would head to Zolote if the president tried to evict them from the town. ‘There will be thousands there instead of several dozen,’ he said…
Singer Sofia Fedyna, who is a lawmaker with the European Solidarity party of former President Petro Poroshenko, which has 27 seats in parliament, was particularly aggressive in her response. She issued physical threats against Zelensky.
‘Mr. President thinks he is immortal,’ she said in a video shared on Facebook. ‘A grenade may explode there, by chance. And it would be the nicest if this happened during Moscow’s shelling when someone comes to the front line wearing a white or blue shirt.’
Zelensky has previously visited the front line dressed in civilian clothing, rather than military fatigues.”
Thus, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion publicly threatened Zelensky if he were to intervene on attempting to negotiate peace and end Ukraine’s civil war.
However, this is not the full story on who is Zelensky.
President Zelensky is also backed by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who sponsored Zelensky’s rise to presidency, not just with his presidential campaign, but also in the tv show “Servant of the People,” that Zelensky literally “play-acted” as President for three seasons, which ran from November 16th, 2015 to March 28th, 2019. Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine less than two months after the last episode aired, on May 20th, 2019.
Former President Poroshenko even publicly called Zelensky “Kolomoisky’s puppet” during the presidential campaign. (13)
“For years, Zelensky’s company has produced shows for Kolomoisky’s biggest TV channel, 1 + 1. In 2019, Kolomoisky’s media channels gave a big boost to Zelensky’s presidential campaign. After, Zelensky’s victory, Kolomoisky kept up his relationship with the president, nominating over 30 lawmakers to Zelensky’s newly established party, and maintaining influence with many of them in parliament.”
Since Zelensky’s presidency, Kolomoisky has been able to secure control over a significant portion of Ukraine’s energy sector, including Ukrnafta and Centrenergo, as well as Burisma Holdings.
A 2012 study of Burisma Holdings done in Ukraine by the AntiCorruption Action Centre (ANTAC) found that the true owner of Burisma Holdings was none other than Kolomoisky.
Recall the Joe and Hunter Biden scandal over Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company. The Bidens ties with Kolomoisky and the situation of Ukraine today is not a coincidence.
In the 1990s, Kolomoisky set up PrivatBank, which quickly grew to be one of the biggest financial institutions in Ukraine.
In 2016, Ukraine nationalized PrivatBank from Kolomoisky and his business partner, Gennadiy Boholiubov. A U.S. Justice Department civil forfeiture complaint from December 2020, said the two men “embezzled and defrauded the bank of billions of dollars.” [emphasis added]
There is also the matter of the Pandora Papers, which has confirmed that Ukrainian oligarch Kolomoisky was funneling millions of dollars in concealed assets offshore. Zelensky was also implicated in this. And what this of course also means, is that the City of London is tied into all of this.
Kolomoisky has a notorious history of being a literal “raider” of Ukrainian companies, as confirmed by Harper’s Magazine, and Forbes.
Forbes reports:
“Bogolyubov and Kolomoisky fostered strong reputations as corporate raiders in the mid-2000s, becoming notorious for a series of hostile takeovers. Hostile takeovers Ukrainian style, that is, which often included the active involvement of Privat’s quasi-military teams.”
Kolomoisky, who is Jewish, is also a funder of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion since it was formed in 2014, which has been confirmed by Reuters, Newsweek, and Aljazeera.
He has also bankrolled private militias like the Dnipro and Aidar Battalions and has personally deployed them to protect his financial interests.
In other words, Kolomoisky is funding the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who have been fighting Eastern Ukrainians for these past 8 years, and thus has been directly fueling the civil war in Ukraine. One of the reasons for this, is that Donbass is a region with many natural resources, especially for the energy sector, to which Kolomoisky would very much like to be in possession of. This could only occur with the extermination or occupation of the people of Donbass.
Interestingly, this past Victory Day (May 8th), First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky’s interview was cut short on Sky News when he brought up that Zelensky shared on his Twitter account for Victory Day the insignia of the Nazi 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf.
After years of civil war, the city of Mariupol has now been liberated. An editorial by Strategic Culture Foundation writes:
“But perhaps the clearest test case of lies from facts surely is the liberation of Mariupol by Russia. The city is returning to normal after weeks of heavy fighting. Humanitarian aid is being provided by Russian forces in coordination with the UN and Red Cross. As with other parts of liberated Donbass, civilians are expressing relief and gratitude for having gotten rid of militants who had been holding them under siege with their hateful Nazi ideology.”
Do you think the people in the West will ever hear about this?
Where do We go from Here?
Well, let me put it this way. The United States and NATO know they cannot defeat Russia or China in a direct war, hence all of these proxy wars these past several years under the guise of “War on Terror.” As David Ignatius honestly expressed, their desire is for a long-drawn war. This is because they believe that they can bankrupt Russia and/or set the stage for internal unrest and eventual coup. However, things are clearly not going as planned.
What has been greatly underestimated in this situation is 1) China’s solid alliance with Russia, 2) that Russia is the most resource abundant country in the world to which Europe is dependant on, and 3) the economic brilliance of Sergey Glazyev.
Russia’s rouble has also not tanked as expected. In fact, it has actually grown stronger than ever.
Alasdair Macleod for Goldmoney writes:
“Keynesians in the West have misread this situation. They think that the Russian economy is weak and will be destabilised by sanctions. That is not true. Furthermore, they would argue that a currency strengthened by insisting that oil and natural gas are paid for in roubles will push the Russian economy into a depression. But that is only a statistical effect and does not capture true economic progress or the lack of it, which cannot be measured. The fact is that the shops in Russia are well stocked, and fuel is freely available, which is not necessarily the case in the West.
The advantages for Russia are that as the West’s currencies sink into crisis, the rouble will be protected. Russia will not suffer from the West’s currency crisis, she will still get inflation compensation in commodity prices, and her interest rates will decline while those in the West are soaring. Her balance of trade surplus is already hitting new records.”
It is the West who has miscalculated in all of this, and it is their economy that will utterly tank from this “long-drawn” war these oligarchs have been having wet dreams about for God knows how many years.
We have done this to ourselves. And if we truly want to correct the matter, we should first have the respect to admit the truth in our complicity to much of the world’s woes during this Cold War period. Those of us who have lived in abundance, in comfort, and security, should take the first step to speak out and say no more to the rest of the world living in starved war-torn agony.
We must stop caring for ourselves first at the expense of all else. We must start caring for what happens to the rest of the world and acknowledge the crimes that have been committed in our name. Only then can we truly have the humility to see that the solution has been in front of our face the whole time.
If we fail in this, the western world will not be able to sustain itself for much longer economically. And when it falls, what sort of people do you think you will be surrounded by after all these years of supporting fascism under your very nose?
Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and a writer at Strategic Culture Foundation, consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page. This article was originally published on by Strategic Culture Foundation.
Footnotes:
(1) Timothy Naftali et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press: pg. 338
(2) Ibid. pg. 338
(3) Ibid. pg. 337
(4) Ibid. pg 338
(5) Ibid. pg. 338
(6) Ibid. pg. 337
(7) Ibid. pg. 337
(8) Ibid. pg. 376
(9) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 89
(10) David Clay Large. (1996). Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era.
(11) Klaus Wiegrefe, “Files Uncovered: Nazi veterans Created Illegal Army”, Spiegel Online, 14 May 2014.
(12)
minute 19:33
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Minute 0:49
Cynthia is an info goddess. All I need to know now is who was the driver of the car that crashed head-on killing Putin's chauffeur? I read at one time that he was hospitalized and never heard anything else.