This article appears in the March 11, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Part Two: No, Putin Is Not Exaggerating
No Way To Hide: C-14 Neo-Nazis in Ukraine
[Print version of this article]
There are various neo-Nazis in the military, internal security, and policing sectors of post-2014 Ukraine. A full treatment of this problem was published as a feature in the February 7, 2014 issue of EIR, including the article, “Western Powers Back Neo-Nazi Coup in Ukraine.”
Here it is useful to add to the portfolio the file of Yevhen Karas, the leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi group, “C14.” Recently, Karas usefully punctured some of the consoling delusions about the role of the neo-Nazis in Ukraine—euphemistically referred to as “radical nationalists,” the “far right,” etc. Particularly punctured were the delusions that deny the key role of these neo-Nazis in the violent overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine, in taking over the Maidan in 2014, and in carrying out killings, intimidation and repression—all on the part of those in the West exploiting Ukraine in an all-out violent confrontation with Russia. At some point, your neighbors may wish to ask themselves, “Do I hate the Russians enough to embrace neo-Nazis and risk thermonuclear war?”
Karas: The West Supports Us Because
We Have Fun Killing
In a panel discussion on Feb. 5, 2022, available here, Karas began to explain why they had “been given so much weaponry” by the West. Without blinking, Karas says that it is “because we perform the tasks set by the West, because we are the only ones who are ready to do them. Because we have fun, we have fun killing and we have fun fighting….”
He exposes a lot in a little over two minutes explaining that their paramilitary groups are the chosen vehicle of the British-Polish-Turkish alliance with Ukraine, “because we have started a war that has not been seen for 60 years.” (And, indeed, the continual and relentless warfare waged against civilians in the Donbas had pre-empted the Minsk peace arrangements, keeping the war alive.) He then goes on to make fun of the cover story that Ukraine was simply re-joining its brothers in Europe. Instead, Ukraine should simply forget about some narrow goal of joining with Europe. Rather: “We are a huge powerful state, and if we come to power, it will be both joy and problems for the whole world.”
Then he partly explained what he meant, by describing what really happened, contrary to the Western narrative, in the 2014 coup: “Maidan was the victory of the nationalist ideas.” For Karas, the only nationalists are the neo-Nazis. “Nationalists were the key factor there, and, clearly, at the frontlines.” Even if we were only 8% of the participants, we accomplished 90% of what was done.” That is, their violent actions hijacked the Maidan. “If not for nationalists, that whole thing would have turned into a gay parade.”
No ‘Neo-Nazis’ Here! We’re Just Enemies of Jews and Russians
Karas’s C14 grouping was founded by Oleh Tyahnybok in 2010 as the youth group of the far-right Swoboda party. (“Swoboda” itself is the re-branded name of Ukraine’s “Social Nationalist” party—correctly suggesting their common ideology with Germany’s “National Socialist,” or Nazi party.) C14 itself employs Nazi insignia, including a very obvious version of the swastika.
C14’s militia training led to the deployment of its forces to the Maidan in the winter of 2013-2014 and to the undermining of any constitutional compromises. More recently, it has received government funding for “national-patriotic education projects.” Also, as of 2018, the Kiev municipal government had hired C14 to ‘police’ the streets, where it has received notoriety for its joyous physical methods against gypsies and homosexuals.
Karas has denied that C14 uses illegal means in its “policing” and other activities. However, when it is pointed out that its beatings of victims is illegal, he doesn’t miss a beat: “Beating a person is probably one-tenth of our actions.” Then he proceeds to explain some of the nine-tenths. For example, C14 threatenes physical force against citizens who were wearing St. George ribbons on the May 9th celebration of victory over the Nazis in World War II. Then, the actual police played the soft-cop, pointing to the C14, and simply telling the ribbon-wearers, “There are warriors here.” Off come the ribbons. As Karas proudly puts it, “That is, to some extent, we act as a detonator.” It doesn’t always have to come to beatings. Separately, C14 confirms its thuggish “mafioso” tactics. It has actually advertised its services as a “muscle-for-hire” group, writing that, if you provide contributions and indicate your “enemies,” C14 will make sure that your enemies will find life is more difficult for them.
More recently, Karas has taken pains to explain how he and C14 are not really “neo-Nazi.” It is just that their main “confrontations” seem to be with “non-Ukrainian ethnic groups that controlled Ukraine’s political and economic forces.” And, he continues, they just happen to be Russians and Jews—so, he and C14, he complains, get confused in the public’s eye with neo-Nazis. “We don’t consider ourselves a neo-Nazi organization, we’re clearly Ukrainian nationalists.” Evidently, the distinction is that they speak Ukrainian, not German—for these purposes, a distinction without a difference. However, the larger point is that there’s not even any desire to make a real defense; rather, this “wink-and-nod” arrangement helps, further conveying the “de facto” arrangement in today’s Ukraine, of a country that has been hijacked.
Why the ‘14’ Name?
However, if they walk and talk like Nazis—and in addition, are actually named after one—they might be Nazis. It turns out that the curious “14” in their chosen title is an homage to the infamous “14 Words” of American Nazi, David Eden Lane. The latter trooped through various groups, including the KKK and the Aryan Nation, before taking an oath to The Order, sworn to deliver “our people from the Jew and bring total victory to the Aryan race.” There, he drove the getaway vehicle in the 1984 murder of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio commentator in Denver, Colorado. Members of The Order ran militaristic training camps.
To finance their scheme to “liberate the Pacific Northwest as a homeland for whites” against what The Order and similar groups call ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government, the group evidently funded themselves via armored car hijackings and counterfeiting. From prison, Lane ran, with help from his wife, his “14 Word Press,” which, among other things, published his much-circulated, fourteen-word rallying cry: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
C14 is not the only number trick amongst Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Aside from the “magical” power of “14,” there is also “88”—a coded version of “Heil Hitler” (as “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet). Of note, Yuri Biryukov, a former aide to the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, posted “1.4.8.8.” on his Facebook page. Biryukov, aka “Phoenix,” whose businesses include an IT company in the United States, stepped forward in March 2014 to financially support the Ukrainian military. He later bragged that he was one of the first to go to the Maidan, on Dec. 1, 2013.
Neo-Nazi Role Too Hard To Hide
Putin’s targeting of the neo-Nazis has provoked no little verbal diarrhea in the West. The generic defense of Azov and other neo-Nazis, when the charge is brought up, is that, as a small percentage of Ukraine and of the Maidan protesters, they have had no effect or influence upon the otherwise healthy democratic Ukraine. Neo-Nazis are in many countries, they add, and those in Ukraine are even less significant than those in the United States.
In fact, however, Jewish groups, even U.S. congressmen, have taken steps to stop Western arms and support from being provided to Ukrainian neo-Nazis. In March 2018, the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill passed in the Congress and signed into law stipulates that “none of the funds made available by this act may be used to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” One of the sponsors of the ban, Rep. Ro Khanna, stated: “White supremacy and neo-Nazism are unacceptable and have no place in our world.”
Efforts today to cover up this truth about the neo-Nazis are transparently false. In a March 1 article in Politico, Daniel Fried of the Atlantic Council (funded by NATO, the U.S. State Department, and military contractors) claimed to have decoded Putin’s call for “denazification.” Fried writes that today the term means “the replacement (probably killing or arresting) of Ukraine’s pro-Western, democratically elected leaders with a Kremlin puppet.” Fried writes this with no intent at irony, seemingly oblivious to the neo-Nazis’ key role in the 2014 overthrow of a democratically-elected government, and the “caught on tape” conversation of the State Department’s Victoria Nuland speaking with the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, in which she is assigning positions in the new Ukraine government.
Fried further explains that Putin believes that “Ukrainians don’t really exist as a people…, but if they do, they’re Nazis. Even by Putin’s standards, that’s grotesque.” Indeed, there is something grotesque here—but Putin’s been clear all along, that the well-funded and totally protected Nazis in Ukraine, however small in number, have held the country hostage, and that Ukrainians are more than capable of governing themselves and choosing their own leaders, if those who ran the coup in Ukraine were not holding the country hostage. Even by the Atlantic Council’s standards, Fried’s offensive defense is grotesque.
Zelenskyy’s Flight-Forward:
Toying with the Holocaust
Despite the outbreak of Western media use of the one-liner, “Zelenskyy is Jewish,” so as to brush aside any investigation of the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine, Zelenskyy is on record in saying that Judaism plays almost no role in his life, and many other factors are much more important. So, in his new role thrust upon him as defender of the Jewish faith, he went flight-forward, treating the horrendous Nazi genocide during World War II at Kiev’s Babyn Yar as a fit subject for the cheapest of lying.
Zelenskyy issued a tweet: “To the world, what is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar? At least 5 killed. History repeating...” How could this be understood as anything but, “the Russians bombed the site of the Nazi mass murder of Jews, five people were killed there, and the Russians are about to escalate the genocide…” His tweet did what it was calculated to do, setting off a wave of horrific images, triggering a visceral gut reaction around the world, not to be erased.
However, there simply was no bombing of Babyn Yar.
As the chairman of the Babyn Yar Memorial Center’s advisory board, Natan Sharansky, explained: A missile targeted a broadcast tower and hit it. There was damage from the flying debris to the nearby sports complex. (He didn’t say it, but there was probably also damage to two other nearby establishments, a hamburger restaurant and a motorcycle repair shop.) However, the Babyn Yar “site,” different from the Babyn Yar Memorial, encompasses hundreds of acres. And there are also three cemeteries—including a Jewish cemetery—closer to the broadcast tower than the Memorial. Sharansky: “The bomb was of course targeting the radio tower.” Nothing of the Memorial was damaged, and a close-by synagogue, Sharansky said, was “not damaged… The building that was damaged [the former sports facility] was not… part of the museum.”
In fact, hours before the single missile was fired, the Russian Defense Ministry had publicly warned the neighborhood that “the technological infrastructure of the SBU [Ukraine’s Security Service] and the 72nd main PSO [Psychological Operations Unit] center in Kyiv will be hit with high-precision weapons. We call on … Kyiv residents” not to get close to the 370-foot-high broadcast tower. No one did, and no civilians died or were wounded.
At the Babyn Yar site, there is a report of debris having hit the nearby cemetery; but it is worth noting that the desecration of Jewish cemeteries had become quite routine in post-2014 Ukraine. For example, the destruction of the monument on top of the mass grave of 800 Jews, murdered by Nazis and local collaborators in Lysychansk, Ukraine, was destroyed in December 2021—and when repaired, destroyed again in January. Despite the protest of the Director General of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, Eduard Dolinsky, not a peep was heard from Zelenskyy.
‘Snow Is Black’
It was shortly after the attack on the tower that Zelenskyy went flight forward with the type of Nazi “Big Lie” technique, made infamous by Josef Goebbels. In Goebbels’ time, indelible film images, hard to expunge, were set loose amongst the German population, of Jews as vermin scampering amongst precious grain supplies. The image is different today, though fully as operative, as most of the West swallows the inverted image that Putin’s precise military objective of denazification is a revival of the Nazis—a clinical example of Bertrand Russell’s famous brag, that really effective control of populations could be managed when one could convince them that “snow is black.”
Western populations, conditioned for decades to being oblivious to the physical and psychological horrors of actual genocidal policies taking place today—notably in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen and in Afghanistan—now are allowed an orgasm of righteousness against the Russian military actions in Ukraine, where, as British General Sir Richard Barrons told BBC News, the people being killed were not Arabs or Afghans, but “people who live and look like us.”
Various warnings over the recent years (particularly 2014-2021) regarding the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine had been made by the Israeli government, by U.S. Congressmen, by the American Jewish Committee, by the Simon Wiesenthal Institute, by the Anti-Defamation League, and others. These same voices are now largely silent, as the Ukrainian neo-Nazis are to become “our neo-Nazis,” lamentably necessary for the geopolitical confrontation with Russia. How is this any different from the excuses in the 1930’s, of those in the West aiding and abetting the rise to power of the Nazis, including the military build-up of Nazi Germany? One might ask, how did that work out? Would repeating those mistakes in a nuclear world be the thing to do now?
davidshavin@larouchepub.com
