When it comes to Ukraine there seems to be some sort of ‘Collective Amnesia,’ everything has gone down the memory hole.
Warning this weeks-long read…
The memory hole… The concept was first popularized by George Orwell in his 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The main protagonist Winston Smith worked for the Ministry of Truth, his job required him to get rid of anything that ran afoul of state propaganda, he states: “When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in”.
Afterwards, the state systematically re-created all potentially embarrassing historical documents, in effect, re-writing all of history to match the often-changing state propaganda. These changes were complete and undetectable.
Today’s definition of Orwell’s memory hole is any mechanism for the deliberate alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, such as from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.
There is an attempt to ‘memory-hole’ the last eight years of Ukraine’s history, however, technology is not quite there yet and any half-decent Blogger can retrieve data even that which has been sent down that proverbial hole.
It also has to be clearly stated that my article in no way and, without virtue signalling, undermines or distracts away from the very real struggles Ukrainian refugees are undergoing.
The Ukrainian people like all workers and refugees around the world are not responsible for the political decisions of their leaders. Governments and politicians are voted to office on their promises, those promises seldom reflect the realities, it is always they that break the covenant of trust, betraying their manifestos as if promises don’t matter.
I have every sympathy for the people of Ukraine and they should be supported in every humanitarian way. They deserve better, they deserve their freedom and the right to self-determination without Russian and Western influence, an influence that has created this entire situation.
It’s also noteworthy to say, we all have a job to hold our politicians to account. around the world, anti-war protests are growing including in Russia our power is in protest and the ballot. This war and those that have brought it about should be condemned to the fullest.
Proxy wars.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a violation of the UN Charter. Without UN authorization, states are allowed to use armed force only in cases of self-defence or to prevent an imminent attack.
Russia will no doubt rely on the same excuse of protection and peacekeeping in Donbas, that NATO’s “pro-interventionists” used for their own military intervention during the Kosovo War. There will be attempts to justify its inception, suggesting it was conducted on the premise of a ‘just cause’: the prevention of mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing against the pro-Russian peoples of Donbas.
Although the US has used Ukraine as a proxy in its fight against Russian-backed Ukrainian rebels in the Donbas, that conflict is still within Ukraine’s sovereign borders.
Even if a case could be made that Russia has the right to defend besieged ethnic Russians, that argument is undercut by Russia’s decision to attack far deeper into Ukrainian territory. If defending the Donbas was Russia’s aim, then it could have pushed harder for an international peacekeeping force, or any number of non-military, diplomatic options.
Ukraine and the US dangling NATO membership over an already volatile situation knowing full well it would result in an esculation of one sort or another.
It’s ironic. during the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. The Americans would not tolerate the Russians in their backyard, yet tongue in cheek they pursued a Ukraine NATO membership.
Bernie Sanders stated…
“I know it is not very popular in Washington to consider the perspectives of our adversaries, but I think it is important in formulating good policy”.
I think it is helpful to consider this: One of the precipitating factors of this crisis, at least from Russia’s perspective, is the prospect of an enhanced security relationship between Ukraine and the United States and Western Europe, including what Russia sees as the threat of Ukraine joining the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO), a military alliance originally created in 1949 to confront the Soviet Union.
It is good to know some history. When Ukraine became independent after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian leaders made clear their concerns about the prospect of former Soviet states becoming part of NATO and positioning hostile military forces along Russia’s border. U.S. officials recognized these concerns as legitimate at the time.
One of those officials was William Perry, who served as Defense Secretary under President Bill Clinton. In a 2017 interview, Perry said and I quote, “In the last few years, most of the blame can be pointed at the actions that Putin has taken. But in the early years, I have to say that the United States deserves much of the blame…
“Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia.”
Another U.S. official who acknowledged these concerns is former U.S. diplomat Bill Burns, who is now head of the CIA in the Biden administration. In his memoir, Burns quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counsellor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995, and I quote:
“Hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”
Over ten years later, in 2008, Burns wrote in a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and I quote “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin)… In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players…
I have yet to find anyone who views NATO in UKRAINE as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
So again: these concerns were not just invented out of thin air by Putin.
The west could end this anytime and pursue de-escalation and detente. It’s choosing not to.
The US agenda was made plain in September 2013, when Carl Gershman, head of the CIA-tied National Endowment for Democracy, declared that “Ukraine is the biggest prize.” If Ukraine could be pulled into the US-led order, Gershman explained, “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.” In short, in Washington’s eyes, regime change in Kyiv could redound to Moscow as well.
Again, Russia’s invasion cannot be excused, it also cannot be understood, and resolved, without acknowledging that the war in Ukraine did not start last month.
We can get a better perspective by understanding the situation and the facts that brought about this war, a war eight years in the making, it is essential to any resolution.
That question will be one for the international community after hostilities.
Putin is responsible for choosing to invade, the West is responsible for creating the situation that led to that decision.
We should look back and see how we got here and what went down the memory hole.
In doing so some themes will be repeated, but that’s the nature of pulling things back out of the memory hole, it also serves to show how the truth of then, was universal, while the truth of now is so hard to swallow.
You can’t fix a problem you don’t understand. And right now, with Ukraine, the entire western political/media class is pouring a tremendous amount of energy into keeping people from understanding the problem.
In honesty, as a British working-class blogger, I don’t pretend to understand the nuances and complexities of Ukraine and its history, but I do remember the world before censorship or the western propaganda machine told me War is Peace.
Unfortunately, any dissent to the party line is often met with derogatory remarks and accusations of being Putin’s creature, however, I come from a generation that accepted criticising the Hegemony of the US or even our own government, didn’t make you a traitor or a foreign agent of some kind.
In fact, for the sake of full disclosure, I come from the generation that endured the original cold war, I was a British soldier that actually served in West Germany, in what at the time was one of the UK’s elite regiments, our very own nuclear regiment, in any outbreak of hostilities, we were the Russian military prime target in Western Europe. Our direct opposition, Spetsnaz troops, Russia’s version of the SAS. You can believe we spent a lot of time getting to know our enemy, learning how to combat our enemy. But no matter my background, of course, I am now guilty of wrongthink…
Wrongthink, that’s another Orwellianism. When “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was published, “memory hole” entered common parlance along with other Orwellisms like “Big Brother”, “Doublethink” and “Newspeak”, the idea of newspeak is defined throughout the book as being the controlled language created by the totalitarian government.
The purpose of newspeak was to suppress individual rights such as free speech and self-expression. An example of this is depicted, the slogans used “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”.
Even now I feel the Thought Police, readying their case to bin my article down the memory hole but for the sake of prosperity, let’s pull out some of the now censored media articles and try to grasp how Ukrianes’s recent far-right history is quickly disappearing.
Since our own government, along with the US, had one compulsion taking us into unjust war based on contrived evidence of WMD. We have a duty to examine the propaganda narrative of the political/media class.
Out of the memory hole
When Russian President Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine, he invoked ‘Nazism in Ukraine’ as one point of justification – a claim which the rest of the world categorically rejects, however, the evidence is clear, Jackboots are stomping across Kyiv square like its 1939.
This has become a constant point of contention on social media, for many commentators it seems in expressing concerns about the Far-right battalions in Ukraine like AZOV, we are guilty of thoughtcrime, a ‘wrongthink.’ However, it is in the public interest that people understand the players in this deadly game.
A deadly game that could soon engulf Europe if not the world.
To get there, as I keep emphasising, we have to understand this war didn’t begin on the 24th of February but goes way back to 2014.
This is a major escalation of a conflict that has raged for eight years, at the cost of more than 14,000 lives. Began with a US-backed, far-right-led 2014 coup that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected government in Kyiv. In its place came a regime, chosen not by the Ukrainian people, but by Washington.
For the last eight years, we have had a constant barrage of programs and articles in the mainstream press explicitly relating to Ukraine’s Nazi problem.
Our screens have shown images of Ukraine nationalists moving from a well-funded, well-disciplined movement, to becoming organised far-right militia who have now been fully adopted into Ukraine’s military, it’s hard to ignore.
It’s also hard to ignore the montage of media on the subject is now being rapidly censored and disappearing online.
Material that was once churned out by the MSM becoming harder to find by the day. It’s important, especially when you understand the fact, ‘Denazification’ is one of Putin’s demands for Russian withdrawal and a peace prospect. Denying there is a Nazi issue only prolongs any steps towards peace.
Most European nations have a nationalist, extremist history (think Vichy France, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany); even here in the UK, memories of Mosely’s Blackshirts and the battle of Cable street, still hold in the minds of our pensioners. But the difference is in the 21st century, we stomp down on the far right in this country, we de-platform them and take away their audience, we use legislation and the weight of the law, we don’t place them in government or adopt them into our armed forces.
This article in no way deters from Russia’s responsibility and part in this war, it only brings into question the Doublethink we have now to contend with when we are told, Nazis don’t exist in the Ukraine.
Ukraine on fire
This film by award-winning Oliver Stone ‘Ukraine on fire’ shows how the 2014’s Maidan Massacre triggered a bloody uprising that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych and painted Russia as the perpetrator by Western media. But was it? “Ukraine on Fire” by Igor Lopatonok provides a historical perspective for the deep divisions in the region which lead to the 2004 Orange Revolution, 2014 uprisings, and the violent overthrow of democratically elected Yanukovych.
Covered by Western media as a people’s revolution, it was in fact a coup d’état scripted and staged by nationalist groups and the U.S. State Department. Investigative journalist Robert Parry reveals how U.S.-funded political NGOs and media companies have emerged since the 80s replacing the CIA in promoting America’s geopolitical agenda abroad.
The coup government encouraged assaults on Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population, who took up arms to defend themselves with Moscow’s support. Rather than pressure its client in Kyiv to implement a negotiated settlement under the 2015 Minsk Accords, the US has instead poured in weapons and military advisers to assist Ukraine’s fascist-infused armed forces in the proxy war that it helped initiate.
At any other time, by any other state, we would have proclaimed the new Ukraine government illegitimate, a puppet government, however when it’s our puppet it’s absolutely legitimate, no questions asked.
US foreign policy ironically is now once again directed by the ‘The Council on Foreign Relations’ Joe Biden’s little group intent on shifting geopolitics into a new world order. Another NGO. A murky organisation of elitists that astonishingly Just like the Trilateral commission that Sir Keir Starmer Belongs to had Jeffrey Epstein in its ranks.
US foreign policy is often perceived abroad as a selfish exercise to further economic interests, largely driven by a huge energy demand. We would be remiss if we didn’t point out a few incontinent facts about Biden’s foreign policy that could see us all involved in a bloody conflict.
In 2014 Joe Biden was the White House’s go-to guy during the Ukraine crisis, touring former Soviet republics and reassuring their concerned leaders but he was not the only Biden involved in the region”.
The son of the then US Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden joined the board of directors of Ukraine’s largest private gas company ‘Burisma’ which was controlled by a confidant of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings owned by Ukrainian oligarch and former politician Mykola Zlochevsky, who was facing a money-laundering investigation just after the Ukrainian revolution, in April 2014.
At the time the move raised some eyebrows in the US, given the Obama administration’s attempts to manage the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
Less well known, but potentially more sinister, are Mykola Zlochevsky reported ties — by way of his position with Burisma — to Ukraine’s most thuggish billionaire, the larger-than-life Kolomoisky.
In 2015, veteran Russian writer and investigator John Helmer, author of “The Man Who Knows Too Much About Russia”, suggested that Zlochevsky and Pozharskyi were front men for Kolomoisky at Burisma.
He is not the type of “businessman” the Bidens would want to be associated with, said one Ukraine expert. In August, the U.S. Justice Department accused Kolomoisky of robbing billions from the Privat Group bank he owned and using the many companies he has all over the world, including the U.S. to launder it.
The Bond villain-like Kolomoisky, 57, reportedly kept a live shark in a huge tank in his office to intimidate visitors, and once called the 5-foot-7 Russian President Vladimir Putin a “schizophrenic dwarf”.
But his bloodthirstiness reportedly matched his bravado. He crushed Russian separatists with his own private armies, according to numerous Ukrainian and international media reports, and he allegedly ordered contract killings, including a hit on a Ukrainian lawyer as well as the murders of gang members involved in the hit, the Daily Beast reported.
Some of the allegations surfaced in UK court proceedings in a case ultimately settled out of court, the Telegraph reported.
Kolomoisky has never been charged with murder. He has refuted such allegations and also denied involvement with Burisma. Mike Sullivan, a U.S.-based attorney for Kolomoisky, did not return phone calls or emails from The Post.
He has three nationalities — Ukrainian, Cypriot and Israeli — and is reportedly worth about $1.2 billion. He backed the election last year of Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a TV comedian known for, among other things, playing the piano with his penis.
“Kolomoisky was a known thug in his business practices and his organizing of armed militias”, Russ Bellant, an expert on Ukraine and the author of “Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party”, told The New York Post.
Bellant, Helmer and writer Richard Smith have said that Kolomoisky’s shady Privat Group may have owned some or part of Burisma, though no one has proven it.
In 2019 Bellant went so far as to refer to Kolomoisky as the head of Burisma in an essay.
He said he was writing about the Bidens and Ukraine as a way to “unburden myself and tell this to those who care about Ukraine’s election”.
Biden, Ukraine and the Nazis
What better way than to use Nazis to intimidate and anger Russia?
In 2013, the United States put pressure on Ukraine to align with the European Union and distance itself from Russia. But Russia offered Ukraine a better aid package and the Ukrainian president decided to go with Russia, a nation that he was always friendly towards anyways. The US, using Ukrainian intelligence assets developed after WWII, organized large demonstrations with violence against the police and against the government and eventually collapsed the government, forcing the president to flee Ukraine. In 2013 Joe Biden went to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and warned the government not to harm the demonstrators. That act made clear to the world that the US was allied with them, if not orchestrating the demonstrations and then the subsequent coup against the elected government.
As Vice President, Biden was tasked with being the political officer for the takeover of Ukraine, much as VP Nixon did for Eisenhower in preparing for the Bay of Pigs and as Pence is doing now in Latin America. But eastern Ukrainians resented the coup and refused to accept the new regime that the US put in place. The Ukrainian military was ambivalent about repressing these citizens, with one airborne battalion even joining the resistance. So the US began supporting the creation of militia units outside of the established military chain of command, using the Kyiv demonstrators as their manpower source. This is where young Biden comes in.
The core of the demonstrators were members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists cofounded by Stephan Bandera (OUN-B is their shorthand), an organization that adopted a national socialist ideology and was allied with Hitler during the war and was picked up, funded and supplied by the CIA after the war. These new allies continued military operations against the Soviet Union until 1950. During WWII, OUN-B created and led military units that burned and exterminated whole villages of Poles ( about 100,000 killed) and Jews, with a toll of about 1,500,000. In other words, they were psychotic killers.
The OUN-B was integrated into Radio Free Europe operations and political organizations were set up in the US and abroad to give them more influence and reach. But in the entire post-war period, the OUN-B still glorified their World War II leaders. When the USSR collapsed, the US helped bring to power a Ukrainian government that erected many statues to honour Bandera and started pensions for WWII Nazi veterans that were still alive. Europeans condemned the Nazi revival, but the US was silent.
According to (a Google Translation of) the Youth Nationalist Congress (MNK) website, the group “represents the views of the OUN-B in the youth environment… Since 2008, the MNK has been implementing projects in partnership with the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Ukraine…” pic.twitter.com/DrlQw5Nybp
— Bandera Lobby Blog (@mossrobeson__) June 1, 2019