Now that he’s taken power, Adolf Hitler will govern as a moderate…

[MattSh]

said exactly nobody since the 1930’s.

Yet, when Hitler took power in 1932, there were a lot of people saying and believing that. Especially in the USA, because what was happening over in Europe would have only a minor effect on the USA, both then and now.

So why then are people tripping over themselves to declare the new fascists of Ukraine to be moderates? Trying to remake Hitler as a moderate did not work in the 1930’s because a fascist is a fascist; trying to remake the fascists in Kiev as moderates using flattering and over the top press will not work this time. That is true even though they are “our fascists” (meaning put in power by the USA).

A ‘moderate’ Hitler?

Relatively little was known in America about Hitler, and many leading newspapers predicted that the Nazis would not turn out to be as bad as some feared. 

An editorial in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin on Jan. 30 claimed that “there have been indications of moderation” on Hitler’s part. The editors of the Cleveland Press, on Jan. 31, asserted that the “appointment of Hitler as German chancellor may not be such a threat to world peace as it appears at first blush.” 

Officials of the Roosevelt administration were quoted in the press as saying they “had faith that Hitler would act with moderation compared to the extremist agitation in his recent election campaigning... They based this belief on past events showing that so-called ‘radical’ groups usually moderated, once in power.”

<snip>

A law passed on April 7 required the dismissal of Jews from all government jobs. Additional legislation in the months to follow banned Jews from a whole range of professions, from dentistry to the movie industry. The government even sponsored a one-day nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses, with Nazi storm troopers stationed outside Jewish-owned stores to prevent customers from entering.

Nevertheless, in July 1933, nearly six months after Hitler’s rise to power, the New York Times ran a front-page feature about the Fuhrer that presented him in a flattering light. For Hitler, it was a golden opportunity to soften his image by praising President Roosevelt as well as a platform to deliver lengthy justifications of his totalitarian policies and attacks on Jews.

http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2013/1/17/how-the-press-soft-pedaled-hitler.html

[Igel]

1. Yeah.

And Mao was an agrarian reformer.

Stalin was a reformer.

Mugabe, in spite of his threats that resulted in the rerunning of the independence vote in Rhodesia, was a good guy.

Castro and other "revolutionaries" were good guys. No amount of proof to the contrary was possible, it was all propaganda.

Qaddhafi was a good guy for many until he "converted" and went all nice and cooperated with Bush II.

Heck, even Assad in 2008 was a reformer and a partner for peace.

My own mother was pro-USSR and anti-US-capitalism until we went to the Soviet Union. While on official tours she kept nudging me and telling me I was wrong. The stores were packed, the people happy. The next day I said I was going out on my own, dressed in shabby clothes. She tagged along as I used a Soviet tour-guide manual and stopped in at stores along the way. Off the tourist track she saw long lines for shoes, dined with Russians in restaurants that didn't have most of the things on the menu, stopped in at stores for locals that had crappy merchandise and food stores that were fairly empty. Public transportation. One day and she was aghast at how horrible living conditions were in late Soviet Russia. It was like at Pushkino--all's ambar, guilt, crystal. Then you open the wrong door and the plaster's off the wall, the parquet floor's barely there, there are no fixtures to speak of and there's a pail of piss in the corner next to empty vodka bottles.

You pick your enemy and then find a way of making his enemy your friend. Realists are okay with siding with pigs and sidling up to really repulsive people as allies when necessary. Idealists have to somehow justify those allies through faith those self-same pigs and repulsive people because what truck can light have with darkness (a very Paulian, binary distinction). Useful idiots overlook the porcine nature of their new ally and their repulsive nature because they can't believe that there's propaganda or that somebody holding some of the same beliefs could be bad.

Those with other agendas have to find a way of making those pigs and repulsive people at least okay in order to justify doing nothing. They're the worst of the crew.

[Aerows]

8. Been to the projects lately?

We aren't the Soviet Union, but you have no room to talk if you live in this country and discuss horrible living conditions in another country, as though we don't have some that are just as, if not more than, horrific. Yeah, it's better than starving on the Steppes, or ... Uh, dying because of poverty and crime due to where you live sucks no less regardless of where you do it.

[Sunlei]

2. If or when Ukraines 'bank' is handed over to Putin control, then we know Ukraine is toast.

It was the 'world bank' that handed over to Hitler control, the banks of the first 2 countries he invaded.

I would expect nothing less of todays Corporate. monsters, to try some of the same media tactics that worked back then. Grab the countries money and resources, to hell with the citizens.

[frazzled]

3. Oh, I thought you were talking about

Putin.

Let's put this myth to rest, from two of the most reputable sources (New York Review of Books, New Yorker). First of all, while admitting that some right and far-right groups participated, Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale and the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin—no fascist sympathiser— explains:

The transitional authorities were not from the right, or even from the western part of Ukraine, where nationalism is more widespread. The speaker of the parliament and the acting president is a Baptist preacher from southeastern Ukraine. All of the power ministries, where of course any coup-plotter would plant his own people, were led by professionals and Russian speakers. The acting minister of internal affairs was half Armenian and half Russian. The acting minister of defense was of Roma origin.

The provisional authorities are now being supplanted by a new government, chosen by parliament, which is very similar in its general orientation. The new prime minister is a Russian-speaking conservative technocrat. Both of the major presidential candidates in the elections planned for May are Russian speakers. The likely next president, Vitali Klitschko, is the son of a general in the Soviet armed forces, best known in the West as the heavyweight champion boxer. He is a chess player and a Russian speaker. He does his best to speak Ukrainian. It does not come terribly naturally. He is not a Ukrainian nationalist.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/01/ukraine-haze-propaganda/

Next, from David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, and a Russian-speaker who spent a number of years as Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, writes about Ukraine in this week's New Yorker. It starts with a story about Solzhenitsyn and Putin as unlikely bedfellows in staking a nationalistic Russian claim to Ukraine, and ends with an explanation of why the Russian invasion is to be condemned:

To them (Solzhenitsyn and Putin), Ukraine was no more a real nation than Glubbdubdrib or Freedonia. Vladimir Putin, a former officer of the K.G.B., was the first post-Soviet leader to deliver a state prize to Solzhenitsyn, who had spent a lifetime in a death struggle with the K.G.B.; a large part of their common ground was a rough notion of what Russia encompassed. As Putin told the second President Bush, “You have to understand, George. Ukraine is not even a country.”

Solzhenitsyn, one of the great truth-tellers of the twentieth century, harbored an exceedingly benign view of one of the more ominous figures of the twenty-first. Putin is an unabashed authoritarian. He masks the Pharaonic enrichment of his political circle by projecting an austere image of shrewd bluster and manly bravado. He is also the sum of his resentments. His outrage over the uprising in Kiev, like his subsequent decision to invade Crimea, is stoked by a powerful suspicion of Western motives and hypocrisies. Putin absorbed the eastward expansion of nato; attacks on his abysmal record on human rights and civil society; and the “color” revolutions in Tbilisi and Kiev—even the revolts in Tehran, Tunis, Cairo, Manama, and Damascus—as intimations of his own political mortality.

...

The invasion demands condemnation: Ukraine is a sovereign state; it has been for a generation. Its cultural, linguistic, and historical affinities with Russia do not make it a Russian vassal. Putin’s pretext—that frightened masses of Russian-speakers in Crimea and eastern Ukraine were under physical threat from “fascists,” and were crying out for “fraternal assistance” from Russia—is a fiction generated by his intelligence services and propagated by Russian state television. (Pro-Russian Cossacks in Crimea are no less anti-Semitic than the racists among the Ukrainian nationalists—something you are not likely to learn on Channel One, in Moscow.)

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2014/03/17/140317taco_talk_remnick

Please, don't pull the Hitler card out of your behind with no historical relevance to the current situation. And don't use purported anti-Semitism among a fringe group to ignore the equal history of anti-Semitism in Russia. Note:

Jewish leaders in Ukraine have written an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, urging him to withdraw his troops from their country and rejecting his claims of anti-Semitic activity there.

The letter, published on the website of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, casts doubts on Putin's motivations for sending his troops into Ukraine in the wake of the mass protests that led to the removal from power of former president Viktor Yanukovich last month. And regarding anti-Jewish sentiment, the letters states that Russia is far more guilty of anti-Semitism than Ukraine.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4497618,00.html

The US special envoy on anti-Semitism has made a similar claim:

Ira Forman, the Obama administration’s special envoy on anti-Semitism, disputed claims by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukrainian revolutionaries were spreading hatred of Jews.

In an interview published Thursday in the Jewish Daily Forward, Forman said Putin’s assertions were not credible.

“We have no indication that what President Putin has been saying about anti-Semitism has been a true reflection of what’s happening on the ground,” he said.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-envoy-rejects-putin-claims-about-anti-semitism-in-ukraine/#ixzz2w9b0KmvI

[MattSh]

4. Timothy Snyder ought to hang it up...

In response to Mr. Snyder's theories...

From Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting...

Svoboda is a far-right party launched in 1991; its original name (the Social-National Party) and logo (a swastika-like superimposed I-N, standing for "Idea Natsii," or "Idea of the Nation&quot were deliberate echoes of Nazism. It supposedly purged neo-Nazi elements in 2004, but its ostensibly more moderate leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, is notorious for his attacks on the "Moscow/Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine" and "the Moskali [Russians], Germans, Kikes and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state" (Channel 4, 12/16/13). Yuri Mykhailyshin, one of Tyahnybok's top advisers, set up something called the Joseph Goebbels Political Research Centre in 2005 (OSW Commentary, 7/4/11). Did some of the people these far-right extremists fought alongside have "completely different views"? One should hope so.

Though not all of them do; another group that played a large role in the violent clashes was Right Sector, an ultra-nationalist movement that has criticized Svoboda for its "pacifism" (Nation, 1/21/14). While disclaiming racism and antisemitism, Right Sector describes itself as "nationalist, defending the values of white, Christian Europe against the loss of the nation and deregionalization" (Le Monde Diplomatique, 3/14). Snyder calls Right Sector "the group to watch" as "the radical alternative to Svoboda," but suggests that it, too, is nothing much to worry about, and possibly even represents a constructive stabilizing force: Its leaders tell Jews and Russians "that their goal is political and not ethnic or racial," and since the government's overthrow, "they have not caused violence or disorder. On the contrary, the subway runs in Kiev." But do the trains run on time?

Snyder insists that "the transitional authorities were not from the right," and that the "new government, chosen by parliament…is very similar in its general orientation." This is simply false; Snyder mentions a couple of political figures who are not fascists, but passes over in silence a number of bonafide far-right extremists who have been given powerful positions.

The new deputy prime minister, Oleksandr Sych, is from Svoboda; National Security Secretary Andriy Parubiy is a co-founder of the neo-Nazi Social-National Party, Svoboda's earlier incarnation; the deputy secretary for National Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the head of Right Sector. Chief prosecutor Oleh Makhnitsky is another Svoboda member, as are the ministers for Agriculture and Ecology (Channel 4, 3/5/14). In short, if the prospect of fascists taking power again in Europe worries you, you should be very worried about Ukraine.

http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/03/07/denying-the-far-right-role-in-the-ukrainian-revolution/

[frazzled]

5. Or maybe you should, too

Let’s consider each of these conceits in turn. Did the current Ukrainian authorities come to power in a fascist coup? As everyone who has followed these events knows, the mass protests against the Yanukovych regime that began in November involved millions of people, from all walks of life. After the regime tried and failed to put down the protests by shooting protestors from rooftops on February 20, EU negotiators arranged a deal whereby Yanukovych would cede power to parliament. Rather than signing the corresponding legislation, as he had committed to do, Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Parliament declared that he had abandoned his responsibilities, followed the protocols that applied to such a case, and continued the process of constitutional reform by itself. Presidential elections were called for May, and a new government was formed. The prime minister is a liberal conservative, one of the two deputy prime ministers is Jewish, and the governor of the important eastern province of Dnipropetrovsk is the president of the Congress of Ukrainian Jewish Organizations. Although one can certainly debate the constitutional nuances, this process was not a coup. And it certainly was not fascist. Reducing the powers of the president, calling presidential elections, and restoring the principles of democracy are the opposite of what fascism would demand. Leaders of the Jewish community have declared their unambiguous support for the new government and their total opposition to the Russian invasion.

Of the eighteen cabinet posts that have been filled in the new government, three are held by members of the far right party, Svoboda. Its leader had less than 2 percent support in a recent opinion poll—one that was taken after the Russian invasion of Crimea, an event that presumably would help the nationalists. In any event, this is the grain of truth from which, according to the traditional rules of propaganda, Putin’s “fascist coup” has been concocted.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/07/crimea-putin-vs-reality/

Your cherry-picking one member of a coalition--one of two vice prime ministers, not the prime minister, btw--is like someone in Russia pointing to Ted Cruz and condemning the entire US government.

No one is denying that there are right-wing idiots in Ukraine--as there are in Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and even here. But that is not a picture of the entire population or even of the entire interim government (May elections will of course potentially change things). But if I'm going to read about the situation on the ground, I'll take the remarks of a renowned history professor, a Russian-speaking editor of one of America's preeminent magazines, and the US special envoy over you. Sorry, that's just how I roll.

[applegrove]

6. I have not seen evidence of a cult of personality

Last edited Sun Mar 16, 2014, 09:19 PM - Edit history (1)

in the new Ukraine government. Hitler and Stalin were the worst type of psychopaths. Both bullying and manipulative at the same time. I had one of those in my life for years and they always make themselves out to be 1000 times more benign than they are. It is absolutely terrifying. Putin does not meet the criteria. He likes to be obvious about his power. He's a bully but not so manipulative. He doesn't turn the regular people in is country into huge mobs...just the officials and oligarchs. So I don't get the comparison.

[geek tragedy]

7. No one is calling Svoboda moderates.

They're pointing out that they are not in charge of the interim government, and will not come close to winning in May.

[AverageJoe90]

9. They said the same thing about Vlad Putin ca. 2000, btw. Look how that turned out!

"United Russia" is nothing more than a semi-fascist hypernationalist party that once masqueraded as politicos who claimed to want to uplift Russia, and to bring it into greatness & glory once more. Just like Mussolini did with Italy in the '20s.

Putin may not be Hitler, but he isn't really any better than Svoboda or Pravy Sektor. In fact, it can be plausibly argued that United Russia is basically Moscow's own equivalent of Svoboda, even if it claims to "oppose" neo-Nazis(if they were openly pro-Putin U.R. would be rushing to their defense like a Klansman would Jim Crow!)