Ukraine Far Right Battles Police At Parliament In Kiev

[Purveyor]

Source: BBC

Ukrainian nationalists have hurled smoke canisters and stones at riot police during clashes outside the parliament in Kiev.

Violence erupted when the protesters demanded that MPs pass a law to recognise a World War II nationalist group which opposed Soviet forces.

Fifteen policemen were injured and at least 50 protesters had been arrested, the Ukrainian interior ministry said.

MPs did not vote to recognise the wartime Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29611588

[cosmicone]

1. Is Victoria Nuland there distributing cookies? n/t

[karynnj]

11. If she were, it would be to the MPs voting "no"

Note that this story kind of defeats your narrative that the Kiev government is mostly controlled by Nazis.

[cosmicone]

12. It is Svoboda vs Right Sektor

She will need two sets of cookies.

In any event, the government is uneasy about honoring a fascist, pro-nazi leader in this day and age.

Perhaps Victoria Nuland should now switch to "medicinal" brownies.

[The Magistrate]

13. Actually, Sir Police Versus Svoboda And Right Sector United In One Crowd

All anyone need do is actually read the report and examine the photographs illustrating it.

[Purveyor]

14. Ginger snaps, no doubt.

[The Magistrate]

2. So They Do Not Control The Kiev Government, Sir

As anyone actually paying attention, and not merely marinating in propaganda pressed on the Moscow line, already knew.

[another_liberal]

3. Svoboda wants the Rada to honor Stephan Bandera as a national hero.

Bandera led a pro-Nazi, Ukrainian partisan group which helped German occupation forces do things like this:

http://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=4419

(The video takes a minute to start up.)

[candelista]

4. Inter-fascist warfare. (no text)

[Elmergantry]

5. But, But I thought

The Kieve "junta" was comprised of Banderites, RT told me so.... How could they not honor Bandera???

[MattSh]

15. This is about more than honoring Bandera...

The Banderites want them to be legally recognized as war veterans, on par with other WW2 veterans, with all the benefits that go with that, including pensions.

The US taxpayers have yet to provide the funds for that. You don't honestly think there's money in Ukraine for that type of thing, do you?

[Comrade Grumpy]

6. "A World War II nationalist group." That's a polite way of referring to Bandera's fascists.

[The Magistrate]

7. It Will Do To Be Going On, Comrade

Past a point, further adjectives just get in the way of accuracy.

Save for Czechoslovakia, I cannot think of a single east European nationalist movement in the inter-war period which was not also fascist and anti-semitic.

In the Ukraine, things took on a particular virulence.

In the late Czarist period, anti-semitism had been deliberately fomented by the secret police as a measure against leftist radicalism, and as the Jews of Russia were concentrated in Ukraine, it struck particularly deep there. A great many people were thoroughly convinced Jew and Bolshevik were synonymous terms, and had learned it young from their elders. A brief period of independence after the Great War was quashed with extraordinary violence a great many Ukrainians regarded as conquest by Russian Bolsheviks. Not long after this came the extraordinary starvation of several millions of Ukrainians, mostly rural people, as a deliberate policy of the Communist government in Moscow. Things like this leave scars, and upset and unbalance minds. Hate of Russia and of Communism, for a good many people there, was just another way to say hate for Jews, and the prospect of fighting Russia and Communism with any success was only opened by the growing power of Hitler in Germany.

People caught in the middle of a fight between Hitler and Stalin cannot honestly be said to have any clean choices for action; there, to oppose one monster is necessarily to align with another. There is certainly good reason for Nazism to have become our culture's symbol of absolute evil, but part of that identity owes to the fact that we in the West aligned with Stalin against Hitler ourselves, and so for all the power of Anti-Communism here, have still to justify that alignment, and can only do it by blinking a little at just how bad Stalin was. He killed far more people than Hitler, and did so just as torturously and cruelly; granted, he had more time and a larger pool of people available for most of it. But it would be quite easy to make a case for Stalin being 'worse' than Hitler, by both objective and emotional measures. Many people, in that place and in those days, made horrible, even evil choices, that they ought not to have made, but people ought not to be put in a position where just about every choice they can possibly make is foul and likely evil, and people's minds ought not to be systematically debauched with hate inculcated for political advantage, either.

Bandera, and his supporters, sold themselves to a devil, and did evil. I hold no brief for them, and what the Soviets did to them does not bother me. But it remains true that they sold themselves to a devil to fight a devil, and that both the devils involved plumbed the deepest pits of mass cruelty. No one is clean in this, and brandishing it from either side, as if the current events are a replay of the Civil War, or the Great Patriotic War, is profoundly wrong and deeply dishonest.

[hedgehog]

8. Well said.

[ColesCountyDem]

10. Accurate and concise.

[pampango]

9. Far right wants WWII Ukrainian fascists honored as heroes. Parliament says No. Good.

That's the way government is supposed to work. People have a right to protest but I'm glad the parliament rejected their goal of honoring WWII Ukrainian fascists. It is noteworthy that the fascist protesters are unhappy with Ukrainian government policy and not supportive of it.

Violent clashes in Kiev over demands for recognition for nationalist partisans

Clashes broke out on Tuesday between demonstrators and police in front of Ukraine’s parliament in Kiev as deputies inside repeatedly voted down proposals to recognise a contentious second world war-era Ukrainian partisan group as national heroes.

Thousands of Svoboda nationalist party supporters rallied earlier in the capital in celebration of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose struggle for independence for Ukraine was tainted by its collaboration with the Nazis.

Later, masked men attacked and threw smoke grenades at lines of police outside parliament; Svoboda said its members were not responsible for the unrest, which police said was orchestrated by a small group of people at the rally. The interior ministry said 36 people were detained by police.

The unrest overshadowed the passage of laws that the government hopes will contain the galloping corruption that has long hindered Ukraine’s economy. President Petro Poroshenko urged the deputies to keep up the fight against corruption, a problem that he equated with terrorism.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/14/ukraine-demonstrations-outside-partliament-anti-corruption