Who's harboring Nazis again?
There are no words to describe Vladmir Putin's hypocrisy about Nazis.
If Putin has launched his war to “de-Nazify” a country, he should know the calls are coming from inside his own house:
In a recently released six-part [podcast] series, Mark Greenblatt, the Scripps Washington Bureau’s senior national investigative correspondent, dives deep into an evolving global network of violent white supremacist groups.
He introduces listeners to the Russian Imperial Movement, a virulently anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant organization that is actively working with neo-Nazi groups and individuals around the world in a push for global white Christian power.
Greenblatt says that while the group is not sponsored by the Russian state, it has allegedly recruited and trained Russians to fight on the side of pro-Russian militias in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The group seeks a purely white Christian Russia, ruled once again by an authoritarian monarchy, preferably one headed by a descendant of the Romanovs, who held the throne until their overthrow and murder during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
In 2020, the State Department designated the Russian Imperial Movement as a foreign terrorist organization, the first and only time that a white supremacist group has earned the label.
[…]
In his interview with Greenblatt, Vorobyev, speaking through a translator, confirms the group runs two training camps outside St. Petersburg where, for just $500, white supremacist militants and neo-Nazis from Russia, Europe and the United States—in fact, anyone, including would-be Islamist terrorists—can come for a week-long course to learn rural and urban assault techniques, tactical weapons, and hand-to-hand combat.
Combat training for less than the price of a PlayStation 5? Maybe this explains why so many Russians are getting their asses kicked in Ukraine. You get what you pay for.
The “Russian Imperial Movement” appears to be a homegrown organization, but Putin’s Russia has a history of giving refuge to neo-Nazis - not people who just wrote an arguably racist tweet when they were in middle school, but actual Nazis - from the United States:
The American founder of US-based militant neo-Nazi group The Base is directing the organisation from Russia, a BBC investigation has found.
Rinaldo Nazzaro, 46, who uses the aliases "Norman Spear" and "Roman Wolf", left New York for St Petersburg less than two years ago.
The Base is a major counter terrorism focus for the FBI.
Seven alleged members were charged this month with various offences, including conspiracy to commit murder.
[…]
A video posted online in March 2019 shows Nazzaro in Russia wearing a t-shirt bearing an image of President Vladimir Putin along with the words "Russia, absolute power".
We traced Nazzaro and his Russian wife to an upmarket property in central St Petersburg purchased in her name in July 2018 - the same month to which the FBI dates the creation of The Base.
And from Germany, though there’s no word about whether they accuse Nazzaro of engaging in cultural appropriation:
According to Focus magazine, some of the men are members of the Young Nationalists, the youth wing of the NPD, Germany's oldest right-wing extremist party. As the youth wing only counts 280 members, it remains politically insignificant, although its participants are rather active when it comes to public action. The group has run would-be environmental protection campaigns, for example, in an attempt to win over young supporters.
Other participants in the paramilitary training in Russia are reportedly members of The Third Way, one of the most radical political parties in Germany. According to the Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, the party promotes a nationalist and racist ideology influenced by Nazism, and it rejects democracy. The Third Way was founded by members of a right-wing extremist association from southern Germany just as it was about to be banned by lawmakers — in Germany, the hurdles for banning a political party are much higher than those for banning a club or association.
I noted recently that neo-Nazis seem to be siding with Putin and Russia, but it turns out they’re actually somewhat divided about which side is really in thrall to the Elders of Zion. RT and Sputnik have made sure we all know about the Azov Battalion, and Ukraine does have its own unfortunate history of homegrown antisemitism, even though its current President is himself Jewish. David Duke’s “Ph.D.” was bestowed upon him by a Ukrainian university in 2005. Every country in that part of the world has an extremely dark past when to comes to treatment of its Jewish populations.
But Ukraine in 2022 is not the Ukraine of the czarist or Soviet eras:
For many Jews, Ukraine evokes memories of pogroms, antisemitism and Nazi collaboration. Between 1.2 million and 1.6 million Jews were killed in Ukraine during the Holocaust. But Jewish life in Ukraine is no longer what it was — neither under the Nazis nor the Soviet Union.
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Recent surveys bear a new attitude toward Jews. A 2017 Pew Research study found that Ukraine was the most accepting of Jews among all Central and Eastern European countries. Only 5 percent of Ukrainians in the survey said they would not accept Jews as fellow citizens. In neighboring Russia it, was 14 percent, in Poland 18 percent and in Romania 22 percent.
That makes Russia President Vladimir Putin’s pretext for invading, aimed at “denazifying” Ukraine, ring particularly hollow if not utterly hypocritical.
There is no state-sponsored antisemitism.
“The world opened up and people started to learn about religions and nationalities,” said Misha Galperin, a native of Ukraine who is now president and chief executive of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. “People began to travel elsewhere. They got a different exposure to Israel, among other places. Odessa has a regular flight to Tel Aviv. It’s only three hours. It became real and humanized.”
Mark Levin, chief executive of the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry, said that after the mass exodus of Jews from Ukraine in the wake of the Soviet Union’s fall, Jewish populations in both Ukraine and Russia were able to rebuild and expand their communities though they are not nearly as large as they used to be. There are estimates of between 50,000 and 100,000 Jews in Ukraine.
“In the last 30 years, there’s been a renaissance of Jewish life and a building of new Jewish institutions, be it religious, cultural, educational, social,” Levin said. “These are important Jewish communities in the Diaspora today.”
This is how Jews were portrayed in the Soviet Union mourned by Vladmir Putin:
Calling someone a “Nazi” to shut down discussion on the internet is bad enough. Putin calling the entire country of Ukraine a Nazi state, in light of his own tolerance of and support for the white supremacist right, is cynicism on a level for which even years on Twitter hadn’t prepared me.