Last Wednesday, May 6th I attended a meeting held at the headquarters
of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) the union representing City University
teachers, on the crisis in Ukraine. Immanuel Ness, a leading scholar of U.S. and
international labor and peoples movements, Jackie Di Salvo, a City University
Professor of English and major activist in Occupy Wall Street, and others., Tom
Riggins from our editorial staff and David Laibman, editor of Science and Society,
Barry Lituchy, founder and director of the Jasenovac Research Institute(JRI) with
whom I have worked for a long time were also in attendance along with other
veterans of the many struggles against exploitation and oppression at home and
abroad. I hav I have knownr many for decades and it was good to see them again.
But the purpose of the event was to get out the word about what was
happening in Ukraine. Three speakers from Odessa, the Black Sea port city famed
for its cultural diversity in Eastern Ukraine. All three were young people, products
of the post-Soviet period. All had experienced the horrors of war the war raging in
Eastern Ukraine and the stories they told, which would not appear in U.S.
“mainstream” media should be a source of shame to the leaders of the U.S/NAT0
bloc, assuming of course that they are capable of any sense of shame concerning
the victims of their geopolitical manipulations.
From the three speakers, Irena, Olga, and Pavel, all involved in Human Rights
Activism and in attempting to assist the victims of this U.S./NAT0/EU supported
war, the families made homeless, and the children who have become displaced
war orphans I made these evaluations.
A year ago, on May 2, what I would call storm troop battalions came to Odessa to
launch what was in effect a political pogrom. The city had been the center of
demonstrations against the U.S. NAT0 backed forces that ousted the Soviet
influenced government in Kiev through what was essentially a coup and then
intensified attacks on the large ethnic Russian population and others while
preparing to give the EU the economic concessions that the previous government
refused to make. A soccer game was going on in Odessa which brought in large
numbers of people by train. The storm troop battalions, attached to Nazi fascist
parties (and that is a statement of fact, not an exaggeration) which directly identify
with and seek to emulate the Nazi fascist groups that fought with and for the Axis
in the war against the Soviet Union, drove hundreds of anti-fascists into a trade
union building, set the building on fire, and then beat and murdered many who
sought to escape to escape from the building. Figures today have the death toll at
68 and the number of those injured at over two hundred.
These events are essential in understanding the war which has been
raging through Eastern Ukraine. But, as the speakers showed, they have been
either minimized or trivialized in the mass media of U.S./NAT0 bloc countries.
First, the events were defined as a riot connected to “football hooligans” even
though the soccer game was essentailly a provocation for with what happened,tproviding
a basis for the Nazi groups to make their way to Odessa. Then sanitized versions of
the Kiev government’s cover-up that the victims were “Russian agents”, along with
the standard propaganda ploy that all of this was “regrettable violence” was the
result of “extremists on both sides.” Olga, an attorney, spoke of speaking to
desperate people seeking to save themselves and their children. Pavel, the
youngest of the speakers, spoke of his work in organizing a peace shelter for
displaced children. The speakers presented video clips of both the atrocities and
the peoples will to resist. While the U.S. president and various NAT0 bloc leaders
were snubbing the Victory Parade held today in Moscow on the 70th anniversary of
the victory over fascism, people in the Eastern Ukraine were in effect fighting like
Soviet Partisans during the war against the grandchildren and great grandchildren
of those who fought on Hitler’s side in the various Wafer SS units and other fascist
armed groups from all other Europe for whom war crimes were the daily norm.
A rich discussion followed the presentations. Barry Lituchy mentioned
that relatives of his in Odessa in 1941, Jewish victims, had been among many who
had experienced a similar massacre. One of the speakers responded. That the
local fascists contended that those who were so murdered in 1941 had not
resisted, whereas these were involved in anti-government resistance so they
somehow deserved it more. The response of the Kiev government was to arrest
and imprison those who fought against the killers. The response of the U.S. and its allies was to bury the story and continue to support the Kiev government.
Another speaker, Sergei, discussed the institutional and ideological
discrimination against people of Russian ethnicity and the role of U.S. media in
portraying the Kiev government and Ukrainians generally as the victims of Putin’s
bullying.
As I listened to the speakers, I thought of Martin Luther King’s second most
important speech---his speech against the Vietnam War and his call to both
Lyndon Johnson and the American people that “the madness must cease.” King
had reasons to support Johnson from his enemies as we have reasons to support
Barack Obama from his. But the delusions and outright lies which served as the
ideological foundation for U.S. policy in the Vietnam War eventually destroyed the
Johnson administration’s great society program, playing directly into the hands of
its political enemies. What the administration is doing in Ukraine and in the Near
East and toward Venezuela serves the interests of reaction at home and abroad.
From the beginning of the cold war era, the CIA and other U.S. agencies recruited in both propaganda work and “counter-insurgency” many who had served the Axis during WWII, covering up their past histories and portraying them as anti-Communist refugees from Soviet “captive nations,” Here the Nazis though make no secret of what they are and fight to expand their influence as Nazis in the Kiev government and eventually take it over. In their own minds they are continuing Hitler’s war. And we must demand that the Obama administration end its support for the Kiev government that backs them and its attempts to intimidate the Russian government, who frankly, given the situation in Ukraine, its geopolitical location, and the fact that until a generation ago it was an integral part of the Soviet Ukraine, might be criticized for its lack of action rather than any aggressive response. The speakers hoped that people at the meeting would try to bring the message of what is happening in Ukraine out to more and more Americans. Hopefully we all will do that. Today we should be all celebrating the victory over fascism 70 years ago instead of denouncing our own government and its allies for backing fascists in Ukraine, but that is where we are. It is important to keep this story alive. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the video clips that were shown at the meeting.. Instead I have posted below a clip from RT TV, in this case,, the Russian English language network in this case in Russian with English subtitles, which, while it is far more “moderate” in its tone then either the speakers or I would be, presents a description of the events far more comprehensive and on point then U.S. media
