In Favour of Basic Principles

Echoing the Conservative Councillor Carl Thomson, Alex Gordon of the RMT (Alex’s highly contentious historical perspective is not essential to his main point here) writes:

Last Tuesday BBC’s flagship Newsnight programme broadcast the first of Gabriel Gatehouse’s reports on manoeuvres by Ukrainian Right Sector (Pravy Sektor) paramilitaries to orchestrate the country’s second paramilitary coup in 18 months.

In February 2014 mass protests against President Yanukovych’s decision to cancel a European Union “partnership agreement” spiralled into chaotic violence in Kiev’s Maidan Square as far-right armed gangs pursued a deliberate strategy of tension to topple the government.

At that time most Western media shamefully turned a blind eye to the presence among protesters of open neonazis adorned with swastikas and “white power” symbols proclaiming their loyalty to Ukrainian WWII nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

The tipping point for the Yanukovych government came when mysterious unidentified snipers opened fire on anti-government protesters in Maidan Square killing some and wounding others.

The assumption encouraged by Western media at the time was that the shots were fired by government supporters.

Several months later a Channel 4 investigation showed that the sniper fire came from the roofs of buildings controlled by anti-government forces, in particular by Right Sector.

The toppling of Yanukovych was followed by the rise of chocolate billionaire Petro Poroshenko as Ukraine’s new president, surrounded by US advisers and government ministers, some of whom still carry their US passports.

Since then Ukraine has plunged into a nightmarish civil war as a new US and EU-backed government pursues a medieval scorched-earth strategy against the population of the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine who reject the legitimacy of Poroshenko’s foreign-backed regime.

Over 100,000 people from the war-affected areas of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbass are now internally displaced persons according to the United Nations. Many more are refugees in neighbouring Russia.

Up to 10,000 persons may have died as a result of military bombardment of civilian areas, while appalling war crimes have been recorded by so-called “volunteer battalions” such as those of Pravy Sektor attached to the Ukrainian armed forces.

In Odessa on May 2 2014 Right Sector supporters brought into the city attacked anti-fascist opponents in the city’s Trade Union House.

As anti-fascists barricaded themselves inside, Ukrainian nationalists set fire to the building with petrol bombs, burning those inside alive and shooting those who escaped into the street.

No prosecution, nor even any investigation of this atrocity that caused the deaths of over 50 people has yet been carried out by Ukrainian authorities.

The recent rise of neonazi paramilitaries in Ukrainian politics is not simply the consequence of a collapsing economy ruled over by feudal oligarchs sponsored by US and German politicians.

It is the product of 20 years of intensive propaganda aimed at popularising a revisionist historical view of Ukrainian nationalism since the break-up of the Soviet Union after 1990.

The intensive post-Soviet effort to create a single ethnic and linguistic national identity in a country whose populations were ruled over by four separate empires with dozens of different national and linguistic identities until the 19th century is riddled with historical falsification.

National mythologies stretch from bizarre racial theories expounded by some nationalists that Ukrainians are descendants of the Aryan race, to official rehabilitation of Bandera and the legacy of wartime collaboration.

Modern Ukraine was only united as a result of the process begun by the 1917 October Revolution.

The defeat of the “White armies” in the wars of intervention from 1919-20, the rapid economic development of eastern Ukraine as part of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine — the very region now being devastated by president Poroshenko’s so-called “Anti-Terrorist Operation” — and the victory of the Red Army in smashing the German war machine by 1945 built the modern state and brought social and industrial development.

As Ukraine’s new oligarch clans vie to dominate the chaotic remains of the state, the role of historical memory has become increasingly important.

Nationalists announced their presence in the political scene following the 2014 Maidan coup by toppling Soviet-era statues of Lenin.

Sacking of Communist Party offices by nationalist mobs was accompanied by demands for “lustration” — meaning to ceremonially purify — seeking to cleanse a new regime from the remnants of the past.

By late 2014 former Communist officials in Ukraine were being kidnapped, murdered, hounded from office and exposed to public humiliation rituals.

On May 17 2015 two new laws were passed in the Ukrainian parliament banning communist symbols and ideology and honouring nazi collaborators.

On 23 June the first meeting of Ukraine’s so-called “De-communisation Commission” — a punitive agency, which aims to destroy the opposition left-wing — took place, chaired by deputy justice minister Natalia Sevastianova.

The commission opened a procedure on non-compliance with the Law on De-communisation of symbols, statutes and programmes against three parties — the Communist Party of Ukraine, the (New) Communist Party of Ukraine and the Party of the Workers and Peasants.

The Communist Party of Ukraine stated:

“There is no doubt that consideration of the above-mentioned ban on these three parties will be followed by a massacre of other organisations and movements that declare themselves in favour of basic principles of justice, freedom, equality and fraternity in their programmes.”

Sevastianova says the commission has no plans to ban neonazi parties and organisations.

The Ukrainian regime is flagrantly violating the rights and freedoms of its citizens, cynically violating generally accepted standards for protection of ethnic minorities and political opposition and is breaking UN and Council of Europe resolutions condemning the social genocide and propaganda of nazism and fascism.

As BBC Newsnight belatedly reports — hundreds of combat-clad neonazis shuffling through Kiev’s Maidan Square clutching red and black flags adorned with Ukrainian nationalist trident symbols — the spiral of nationalist violence and repression in Ukraine continues.

The Communist Party of Britain is calling for all those who remember history to stand up and protest against the persecution of communists and the glorification of nazism in Ukraine.

And the shame is that this has fallen to that party to do.