Flashback: U.S. Congress Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine

• U.S. Congress Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine
  Originally published: Orinoco Tribune by Robert Parry (12 June 2015 – Reposted: March 21, 2022 )  |  – Posted Mar 23, 2022
  Editorial note: Orinoco Tribune does not generally publish articles that are over 10 days old. However, in this case an exception is being made, as the subject matter of the following piece remains as significant today as at the time of its publication.
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  Rather than fully inform its readers about a crisis that has the potential of becoming a nuclear showdown between the United States and Russia, the [NY] Times has chosen to simply be a fount of State Department propaganda, often terming any reference to Kiev’s Nazi storm troopers to be “Russian propaganda.”
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  Now, however, a unanimous U.S. House of Representatives–of all things–has acknowledged the unpleasant truth.
  –  (Robert Parry,  June 2015, emphasis added)
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  Last February [2014], when ethnic Russian rebels were closing in on the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, the New York Times rhapsodically described the heroes defending the city and indeed Western civilization–the courageous Azov battalion facing down barbarians at the gate. What the Times didn’t tell its readers was that these “heroes” were Nazis, some of them even wearing Swastikas and SS symbols.
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  The long Times article by Rick Lyman fit with the sorry performance of America’s “paper of record” as it has descended into outright propaganda–hiding the dark side of the post-coup regime in Kiev. But what makes Lyman’s sadly typical story noteworthy today is that the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has just voted unanimously to bar U.S. assistance going to the Azov battalion because of its Nazi ties.
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  When even the hawkish House of Representatives can’t stomach these Nazi storm troopers who have served as Kiev’s tip of the spear against the ethnic Russian population of eastern Ukraine, what does that say about the honesty and integrity of the New York Times when it finds these same Nazis so admirable?
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  And it wasn’t like the Times didn’t have space to mention the Nazi taint. The article provided much color and detail–quoting an Azov leader prominently–but just couldn’t find room to mention the inconvenient truth about how these Nazis had played a key role in the ongoing civil war on the U.S. side. The Times simply referred to Azov as a “volunteer unit.”
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  Yet, on June 10, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bipartisan amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act–from Reps. John Conyers Jr., D-Michigan, and Ted Yoho, R-Florida–that would block U.S. training of the Azov battalion and would prevent transfer of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to fighters in Iraq and Ukraine.
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  “I am grateful that the House of Representatives unanimously passed my amendments last night to ensure that our military does not train members of the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, along with my measures to keep the dangerous and easily trafficked MANPADs out of these unstable regions,” said Conyers on Thursday.
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  He described Ukraine’s Azov Battalion as a 1,000-man volunteer militia of the Ukrainian National Guard that Foreign Policy Magazine has characterized as “openly neo-Nazi” and “fascist.” And Azov is not some obscure force. Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who oversees Ukraine’s armed militias, announced that Azov troops would be among the first units to be trained by the 300 U.S. military advisers who have been dispatched to Ukraine in a training mission codenamed “Fearless Guardian.”
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  White Supremacy
  On Friday, a Bloomberg News article by Leonid Bershidsky noted that “it’s easy to see why” Conyers “would have a problem with the military unit commanded by Ukrainian legislator Andriy Biletsky: Conyers is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Biletsky is a white supremacist. …
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