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Comment by realsmittysmith | Hacker News Reader

Be on the lookout for the unholy trinity of Russian troll tactics: 1) bUt thE UsA cOmMiTtEd wAr cRiMes In tHe MiDdlE EaSt! 2) UkRaIne StaGed iT! 3) uKrAinE iS a nAzI sTaTe!

Responses are simple. 1) How's that relevant at all right now? 2) ...in areas that were under Russian occupation for weeks and only recently liberated, okay. Also, why stage atrocities when Russia isn't even hiding the fact that it's committing constant atrocities? 3) Unconvincing and unverified. Nazis are everywhere. Russia has an FSB commander with the SS bars tatted on his neck and their whole playbook in this war is Fascism 101. Ukraine's 6 biggest uber-far-right factions came together in the last election and got a whopping <2% of the vote. Whoop-de-f*#king doo. Tell that to folks with active KKK movements in their states.

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Stepan Bandera, who is highly respected in Ukraine, had a reputation during WW2 of mass murdering Ukrainians who were "insufficiently Ukrainian". Its not unreasonable to ask for an independent investigation by the UN/ICC before assigning blame.

Also, on your first point, considering that many atrocities in the Middle East are ongoing, it is highly relevant. When the West has shown that it doesn't give a crap about war crimes in the Middle East/South America which it is complicit in, then why should they give a crap about war crimes in Europe?

If you had ever spent 0.002 seconds in Ukraine you would know Bandera is not on a pedestal throughout the entire country. Paradoxically, he's more favored in the West despite the atrocities his UPA committed against the Poles, but Bandera's a whole other can of worms that can't be broadstroked across all of Ukraine.

I mean, "doesn't give a crap" is kind of a hard sell, although I understand the uselessness of rhetoric when it comes to horrible sh*t like chemical weapons in Syria, ISIS publicly beheading people, etc. What war crimes in South America has the West been complicit in recently, by the way?

Most people in the West, including myself, knew nothing about Bandera until perhaps a month or so ago, so I'm not sure what you mean by "he's more favored in the West" unless you meant Western Ukraine. He has tons of monuments and streets named after him throughout Ukraine (someone in this thread pointed out the exact number), so I'm not sure how you could claim he is "not on a pedastal".

Funny how you leave out the crimes committed by the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East, how are chemical weapons in Syria and ISIS relevant to my point? Why didn't you mention the mass killings of civilians carried out by the U.S. in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan which the U.S. never accounts for (and when it does it basically says "oops, it was an accident, but not our fault". The mass sale of weapons by the U.S./UK to Saudi Arabia in atrocities in Yemen? Bringing back slave markets to Libya? Mass starvation of Afghanistan by witholding money which belongs to them by the U.S.? Mass murder of Iranians via sanctions by the U.S. for ripping up its own deal? I haven't even mentioned the horrendous amount of hypocrisy on the Israel/Palestine issue.

With respect to South America, perhaps those crimes are older, but they are still within memory. Support for Pinochet and the UK refusing to prosecute him for his crimes (of course, with the explicit support of the U.S.)? The countless interventions by the U.S. in South America over the last 50 years (funny how no one said anything about the U.S. not being allowed to have a sphere of influence back then)? Ongoing right now...mass murder via sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba for daring to exercise their own sovereignty?

The West is so hypocritical that the rest of the world (unfortunately) does not care about Ukraine. It is not the Ukrainians' fault, but frankly countries like China and India are not going to commit economic suicide by refusing to purchase Russian oil/gas, when they know the U.S. and its client states commit war crimes all over the world that are just as bad as what is going on in Ukraine and turn a blind eye to their own crimes.

Ukraine had two ministers of national security who are openly neo-nazis.

Ukrainian nationalists committed massacres in Odessa: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/ukraine-dead-o...

Their national hero: https://www.timesofisrael.com/hundreds-of-ukrainian-national...

"Stepan Bandera led Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought alongside Nazi Germany during WWII, killing thousands of Jews and Poles"

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera#Jews

They sure love to name streets (50 thousand streets reenamed since 2015!) erecting monuments, and march in parades for an actual, documented and proven Nazi collaborator, anti-Semite, and racist who slaughtered thousands upon thousands of Jews, Poles, anyone not Ukranian, in pursuit of "pure" Ukrainian race" (his own words, published in WaPo, of all places).

That's their national hero. Unverified, with only 50,000 monuments and streets named after a literal Nazi.

Obviously only angels live in that country.

Burning people alive isn't cool no matter what. Burning traitors alive is a different issue, although no less humane.

sigh The Bandera argument. I lived in East Ukraine for several years and they're not all hoo rah rah about Bandera at all, so I don't buy the "all Ukrainians worship Bandera THEREFORE they're all Nazis" argument. It's lazy, frankly.

Bandera also spent most of WWII in prison, by the way.

The Israel Times "article" is a poorly researched blurb, not an article. It also says that Ukraine started an armed conflict with Russia in 2014, which is a very Putin-esque take on what the rest of the world sees as an unlawful annexation of sovereign Ukrainian territory.

Was Bandera a hardcore Ukrainian nationalist? Yeah. Remember that Wikipedia article you're citing to me?:

"Ukrainian nationalism did not historically include antisemitism as a core aspect of its program and saw Russians as well as Poles as the chief enemy with Jews playing a secondary role."

Does that mean people in WWII were angels? No. Is history much more nuanced than you're making it out to be? Yes.

Also, not sure where you're getting that 50,000 number from at all.

> I don't buy the "all Ukrainians worship Bandera THEREFORE they're all Nazis" argument. It's lazy, frankly.

What you are doing here is called "ignoratio elenchi" or "a strawman argument", and it is truly lazy. No one has ever made an argument that "all Ukrainians are Nazis".

On the other hand, a huge portion of evidence used as a base to claim that current post-coup Ukrainian government is in bed with neo-Nazis, is confirmed and acknowledged by institutions all over the globe and all around the sides of this particular conflict.

Including the United States and Western media, for whom acknowledging support for neo-Nazis wouldn't be politically favorable.

Ottawa Citizen - Canadian Troops training Nazis and War Criminals https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/allega...

Newsweek - Ukrainian Nationalist Volunteers Committing 'ISIS-Style' War Crimes https://www.newsweek.com/evidence-war-crimes-committed-ukrai...

Reuters - Commentary: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary/...

The Nation - Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/neo-nazis-far-righ...

Foreign Policy - The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/02/the-historian-whitewash...

The Times of Israel - Netanyahu meets with head of Ukrainian party that includes neo-Nazis https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-meets-with-head-of-u...

The Times of Israel - Call for Ukrainian priests to stop glorifying Nazis https://www.timesofisrael.com/call-for-ukrainian-priests-to-...

Al Jazeera - Attacked and abandoned: Ukraine’s forgotten Roma https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/11/23/attacked-and-a...

Haaretz - The Upcoming neo-Nazi Concert in Ukraine That No One Is Talking About https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-the-upcom...

The Hill - The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda https://thehill.com/opinion/international/359609-the-reality...

I love how you completely ignored the fact that two post-coup ministers of national security were openly Nazi.

The west shook hands with Nazi defence ministers and sent them weapons.

That’s a good thing, right?

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