Rising fascism in the US

Completely unsubstantiated, baseless, biased error in logic



There’s not a shred of evidence that I have a double standard. The Blatham crew definitely operate with a double standard. They adore Democrats and revile Republicans. I can’t stand either.

Either you’re one of them or just a wack job when it comes to logic.

If I talk all day about how I hate peanut butter, it does not mean I don’t also hate peas just because I didn’t mention it.

You think you’re slick, but sheesh. Back to the drawing board.

I live in Australia. I call it as I see it. I'm not even sure what the real difference is between democrats and republicans. But I do understand double standards, and you engage in them - as do a lot of people on this forum. You obviously just don't see your own double standards.


In the end, I offer evidence for my opinions. If I talk about a flaw in logic - I explain why I think there is a flaw.....but when you disagree, you don't offer any substance to why you disagree, or you just ignore the flaw....it amounts to avoidance on your part.

When one puts work into a position, avoidance of issues is always an indicator of bias

As I've mentioned previously - I've seen many posts by you that I agree with, and I've seen a lot of unwarranted attacks on you. I think reading both the mainstream and the alternative news is a healthy thing...but reading just one type isn't healthy...and nor is it healthy when you stop questioning every source.

I'm surprised you haven't realised (or said) that - with all the facts I linked / evidence I linked - any person looking at it can still come to the wrong conclusion. And that should tell you something.

Exiled chief rabbi says Jews should leave Russia while they can

Interesting to consider the Jewish perspective of events in Ukraine.

I found a good site with varied scholars’ thoughts on the complicated subject.

https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/resources/blog/ironies-history-ukraine-crisis-through-lens-jewish-history

One excerpt:

History Is Not Destiny: Thoughts about the Russian War against Ukraine and the Jewish Past in the Region
Elissa Bemporad, Queens College and The CUNY Graduate Center

As a scholar of Eastern European Jewry, I am intimately familiar with some of the darkest pages in the history of the Jewish communities of Ukraine. I’ve recently written about the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, an exceptionally brutal conflict that broke out following the October Revolution of 1917 and lasted until 1921, between different armies and troops vying to control the territories of the former Russian Empire. Among them were Ukrainian troops, desperately struggling for independence against the Red Army. I’ve chronicled the violence experienced by many Jewish settlements west of the River Dnipro, as Ukrainian forces resented Jews for their alleged pro-Communist position, as saboteurs of the Ukrainian dream of independence.

The tragic pages that tell the story of more than 100,000 Jews murdered in the towns and cities of Ukraine during the civil war are preceded by other painful ones: the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated during the 1648–49 Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmielnitsky—and then, more than a century later, the massacres carried out by Ivan Gonta, as both leaders fought against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some of these pages have fortified Jewish collective memory for centuries, as Jewish identity and the history of these catastrophes became closely intertwined.

Other bouts of violence against the Jewish communities of Ukraine took place in the long nineteenth century, when waves of anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in the midst of extraordinary political upheaval: in 1881–82, unleashed by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, and then in 1905, during the failed first Russian Revolution.

The culmination of the darkness came during World War II, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. With an estimated one and a half million Jews killed in Ukraine from June 1941–44, with thousands of Ukrainians assisting Germans in slaughtering their Jewish neighbors (deceived by the German promise of independence), the Holocaust remains the most somber page in the history of the Jews in the region. In his 1943 account the great writer Vasily Grossman described a Ukraine in which “there are no Jews. Nowhere—not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin… Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered.”[1]

It would, however, be an immeasurable distortion to reduce the history of the Jews in Ukraine to a narrative of pogroms-cum-Holocaust, imposing on the region a teleology of anti-Jewish violence. The towns and cities of Ukraine were far from being mere sites of destruction and suffering; most of the time they were places of coexistence, where Jews produced some of the greatest chapters in the history of Eastern European Jewish life, achieving a grandeur and originality in the spheres of culture, religious life, and politics, ranging from Hasidism and Hebrew poetry to Yiddish literature and Socialist Zionism.

The names of the same towns and cities that form such an important part of the Eastern European Jewish past have been resounding consistently in the media since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine: Uman, Cherkasy, Kyiv, Dnipro, Odessa, Zhytomir, Lviv, Chernivtsy. The horrific war of aggression against the independent state of Ukraine, which is but the latest link in the chain of Russian and Soviet imperialism, as well as a continuation of Putin’s war of 2014 that resulted in Russia’s annexation of Crimea, is having a deep effect on Jewish life and history. The war, which has already triggered the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, with its indiscriminate shelling of civilians, also affects the approximately 100,000 Jews living in Ukraine today.

When reading accounts about Ukrainians taking refuge in a mikvah in Uman together with their Jewish neighbors, or about Hasidic Jews taking up arms to defend their country alongside Ukrainian soldiers, one might be tempted to explain all this by calling attention to a common enemy, which can eliminate preexisting tensions and heal the wounds of the past. But the truth is that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has not only become the most democratic state in the post-Soviet landscape outside of the Baltics, it has also inaugurated a new chapter in the Jewish history of the region, reminding us that history evolves and should not always be written through the specter of the violence of the past.

The peak of this evolution over the past thirty years has been the democratic election of a Jewish president, Volodymir Zelensky, who in 2019 won with an overwhelming majority of 73 percent of the votes—something implausible in any other country in Eurasia—and whose Jewishness was never instrumentalized by his political opponents in Ukraine, but only recently by Putin and his puppet government in Belarus. Zelensky not only passed a law against antisemitism, which was approved by the Ukrainian Parliament in the fall of 2021, but also dedicated the Ukrainian government’s support to fund a memorial complex at Babyn Yar, the site of the single largest massacre in the history of the Holocaust. The site was neglected and abused for decades under the Soviets, and has recently been damaged by the Russians in their indiscriminate shelling. While antisemitism does exist in Ukraine today, all things considered, life might be more dangerous for Jews in American cities than Ukrainian ones.
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The preface to the above mentioned article.

https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/resources/blog/ironies-history-ukraine-crisis-through-lens-jewish-history

As much of the world expresses sorrow and solidarity with the Ukrainian people—and admiration for its president, Volodymyr Zelensky—the ironies of history abound. To students of Jewish history, it is a source of near incredulity that the same recurrent site of mass violence against Jews—from the Khmielnitsky massacres of the mid-seventeenth century to the brutal killing fields during and after World War I to the bloodlands soiled by Nazi murderers in Operation Barbarossa in 1941—is home to a fledgling democracy and an unlikely and inspiring Jewish president. And yet, Ukraine, like history itself, is multidimensional; it was also home at one time to the world’s largest population of Jews and the place of extraordinary Jewish cultural vitality from Poltava in the east to Lviv in the west, not to mention the jewel of Odessa in the south.

To help us make sense of these ironies, JQR has convened a group of four experts of Eastern European Jewish history to provide insight into Ukraine then and now: Eliyana Adler, Elissa Bemporad, Natan Meir, and Jeffrey Veidlinger. This online forum will not be the last word said on a grave political and moral crisis that is not likely to abate soon. But it is helpful to observe it with a thicker and more complex sense of historical perspective.

- David N. Myers

Interesting to consider? Jewish communities have existed in Ukraine from the time of the Kievan Rus', and Babyn Yar was indeed the single largest massacre in the history of the Holocaust.

That's quite a sweeping statement...lumping so many in the same camp. That's a very juvenile attack, akin to saying all used car salesmen are crooks. Obviously they aren't.

Do you know even one person here? Nobody is all black or all white in their thinking. Do you not think it's possible that a Democrat can admire a Republican and vice versa?

Blatham has a crew?

I always thought he had a posse.

American vernacular moves so quickly.

Anyhows, the posse may acore Democrats and revile Republicans but they con't claim to be conservative right wing evangelical Christians at the same time.

If Lush acknowledged she was a Republican, people wouldn't have such a problem.

It's the prolonged, and utterly pointless, deceit, that irks me.

Those are the real double standards.

Posse? Gang? Squad? We've had many meetings debating which term is the most applicable. Personally, I don't really care so long as they continue to carry me on their shoulders through the village in our matching day-glo thongs as day turns softly to the dusk.

I'd trained months to carry you through the Village - you didn't want it

AMEN!

Yes, I know. The starvation of Ukrainians by Stalin is a searing historical fact, imo. I wouldn’t have searched those essays if it hadn’t been for your post.

Well, the thong apparel was mandatory.

No doubt that the Holodomor is a genocide against the Ukrainian people.
(In very general terms, the Famine in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was the largest famine in Soviet history in terms of deaths and the second of the three great famines in Soviet history.)

I mentioned in my quoted post, however, Babyn Yar.
And what happened there was the single largest massacre in the history of the Holocaust: on 29 and 30 September 1941, more than 33,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered within 48 hours.
There was the Kiev (show-) trial, 17 till 28. January 1946, where 15 members of the German army and police were prosecuted for their role in atrocities in Ukraine both at the Babi Yar ravine itself and elsewhere in the country.

I had only a passing reference to Babyn Yar, acquired as recently as the last two weeks.

Reading only today as a result of our exchanges did I comprehend the gravity.

Unfortunately, Babyn Yar is still for many the lesser known part of the Holocaust.
Massive and local – these were the predominant features of the Holocaust in other places in Eastern Europe, but this massacre is the most widely known.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DwbzxemJZIc
There is power in a union.

Does this fit anyone we know?




Yglesias provides no link to this paper but gives attribution to @JoeUscinski
and co-authors.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/12/29/evidence-of-us-backed-coup-in-kiev/?fbclid=IwAR1OqeZq8zHwBOC48BSSUyrjBh2uJusckAUi1s6VP0IiYzE2aVbF5T38Wz4&mibextid=Zxz2cZ

Excerpt:
_______________

Evidence of US-Backed Coup in Kiev
December 29, 2022

NewsGuard gave Consortium News a red mark for “publishing false content” on Ukraine, including that there was a U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. Here is CN‘s detailed proof.

Violence during the Maidan coup in Ukraine, 2014. (Wikipedia)
By Joe Lauria

Special to Consortium News
NewsGuard, the media rating agency, alleges that Consortium News has published “false content” by reporting that there was a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 and that ne0-Nazis have significant influence in the country.

NewsGuard took issue with a:

“February 2022 article ‘Ukraine: Guides to Reflection,’ [which] asserted, ‘Hence, the inflation of Russian behavior in Ukraine (where Washington organized a coup against a democratically elected government because we disliked its political complexion) … .’

It then wrote:

“The U.S. supported the Maidan revolution that ousted then-Ukraine President Viktor Yanikovych (sic) in 2014 — including a December 2013 visit by John McCain to Kyiv in support of protesters — but there is no evidence that the U.S. ‘organized’ a ‘coup.’ Instead, it has the markings of a popular uprising, precipitated by widely covered protests against Yanukovych’s decision to suspend preparations for the signing of an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union.”

Viktor Yanukovych was democratically elected as president of Ukraine in 2010 in an election certified by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a fact not mentioned in NewsGuard’s writings on the change of government in Ukraine. Even though Yanukovych agreed to an EU political settlement and early elections, violence forced him to flee from the capital on Feb. 21, 2014. Reporting that the neo-Nazi Right Sector was at the forefront of the violent overthrow, The New York Times (NewsGuard green check) wrote earlier that day:

“Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sector, a coalition of hard-line nationalist groups, reacted defiantly to news of the settlement, drawing more cheers from the crowd.

‘The agreements that were reached do not correspond to our aspirations,’ he said. ‘Right Sector will not lay down arms. Right Sector will not lift the blockade of a single administrative building until our main demand is met — the resignation of Yanukovych.’ He added that he and his supporters were ‘ready to take responsibility for the further development of the revolution.’ The crowd shouted: ‘Good! Good!’

A study on the violence used to overthrow the government, by Prof. Serhiy Kudelia, a political scientist at Baylor University, says the overthrow succeeded because of “the embeddedness of violent groups” in a non-violent protest. The violence began on Dec. 1, 2013 when these violent groups attacked police with “iron chains, flares, stones and petrol bombs” and tried to ram a bulldozer through police lines. The police viciously fought back that day.

As the International Business Times (IBT) (green check) wrote about these groups at the time:

“According to a member of anti-fascist Union Ukraine, a group that monitors and fights fascism in Ukraine, ‘There are lots of nationalists here [EuroMaidan] including Nazis. They came from all over Ukraine, and they make up about 30% of protesters.

Different groups [of anarchists] came together for a meeting on the Maidan. While they were meeting, a group of Nazis came in a larger group, they had axes and baseball bats and sticks, helmets, they said it was their territory. They called the anarchists things like Jews, blacks, communists. There weren’t even any communists, that was just an insult. The anarchists weren’t expecting this and they left. People with other political views can’t stay in certain places, they aren’t tolerated,’ a member of the group continued.”

The violence by far-right groups was evidently condoned by Sen. John McCain who expressed his support for the uprising by addressing the Maidan crowd later that month. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and then U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt visited the square after the violence had broken out.

NewsGuard’s account of the events of Feb. 21, 2014 says that even though Yanukovych agreed to the early elections, “angry protestors demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation,” and he fled on that day after “hundreds of police guarding government buildings abandoned their posts.” NewsGuard then says “protestors took control of several government buildings the next day.”

Government Buildings Seized

Protestors occupied Kiev’s City Hall, replete with Confederate flag. (YouTube)
But protestors had already seized government buildings as early as December 2013. On Jan. 24 protestors broke into the Agriculture Ministry building in Kiev and occupied it. On the same day barricades were set up near the presidential headquarters. Government buildings in the west of the country had also been occupied. The Guardian (green check) reported on Jan. 24:

“There were dramatic developments in the west of the country on Thursday as hundreds of people forced their way into the office of the regional governor in the city of Lviv, and forced him to sign a resignation letter. Oleh Salo, a Yanukovych appointee in a city where support for the president is in the low single digits, later said he signed the letter under duress and was rescinding his resignation.

Thousands also stormed regional administration headquarters in Rivne on Thursday, breaking down doors and demanding the release of people detained in the unrest there, Unian news agency reported. In the town of Cherkasy, 125 miles south of Kiev, about 1,000 protesters took over the first two floors of the main administration building and lit fires outside the building.

Similar action took place in Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmelnytsky in western and central Ukraine, as well as parts of the north-east, the Party of the Regions said.”

Protestors had begun occupying Kiev City Hall in December, with a portrait of Ukraine’s World War II fascist leader Stepan Bandera hanging from the rafters. On the night of Feb. 21, the leader of the Neo-fascist Right Sector, Andriy Parubiy, announced that the Verkhovna Rada (parliament), the Presidential Administration, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Ministry of Internal Affairs had all come under control of the protestors.

Therefore NewsGuard has published “false content” by reporting that government buildings were occupied the day after Yanukovych fled the capital. It should print a correction.

On the day after Yanukovych fled, the Rada voted without the presence of Yanukovych’s party — the largest in the country — to impeach him after the fact of his violent overthrow. NewsGuard omitted the key fact that the impeachment vote was tainted by the absence of Yanukovych’s party and that the impeachment became largely irrelevant after violence forced him to flee the capital.

Democratically-elected leaders are removed by electoral defeat, impeachment or votes of no confidence, not by violence. NewsGuard writes that “hundreds of police guarding government buildings abandoned their posts” on the day Yanukovych was forced out, but doesn’t say why. As Jacobin (NewsGuard green check) magazine reports:

“Whatever one thinks of the Maidan protests, the increasing violence of those involved was key to their ultimate victory. In response to a brutal police crackdown, protesters began fighting with chains, sticks, stones, petrol bombs, even a bulldozer — and, eventually, firearms, all culminating in what was effectively an armed battle in February, which left thirteen police officers and nearly fifty protesters dead. The police ‘could no longer defend themselves’ from protesters’ attacks,’ writes political scientist Sergiy Kudelia, causing them to retreat, and precipitating Yanukovych’s exit.”

NewsGuard calls the events a “revolution,” yet revolutions in history have typically been against monarchs or dictators, not against democratically-elected leaders. For instance, the 1776 American Revolution, the 1789 French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution, the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and countless others were against monarchs. Coups have been against both elected and non-elected leaders. Revolutions change political systems, usually from monarchies to republics. Ukraine’s political system was not changed, only its leader.

As a reader, Adrian E.. commented below on this article:

“When a movement that is supported by about half the population and opposed by about half the population violently overthrows a democratically elected government, this may be given different names (e.g. coup), but it is certainly not a “popular revolution”.

The Maydan movement was never supported by more than about half the Ukrainian population. It was supported by a vast majority in Western Ukraine, by very few people in the East and South of the country, with people more evenly split in the center/North. This clearly was not a case of a government that had lost public support to such a degree that there was a general consensus that it should resign. It was the case of one political camp representing about half the country that had lost the last elections imposing its will with brutal deadly violence.”

By any measure, Yanukovych’s ouster was an unconstitutional change in government. His “impeachment” without his party present for the vote came after government buildings had been seized and after violence drove him from the capital.

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Know what you’re voting for.

If @TheIntercept is going to insist on being pseudo-adversarial, it should disclose that its billionaire owner, Pierre Omidyar, helped fund forces in Ukraine behind the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014, a major cause of this current crisis. mintpressnews.com/pierre-omidyar…
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Aaron Matè
Twitter