…Putin needed a story to spin, no matter how full of holes, and thus the neo-Nazi claims. But as it turns out, Crimea’s streets are not exactly paved with extremists—a fact that has proven troublesome for Russian state TV channels looking to find token far-right bogeymen.

And of course, Crimea’s streets are not full of Neo-Nazis, because the population of eastern Ukraine wholly rejects the abhorrent ideology of the “Euromaidan’s” Nazi vanguard, and backs Russian forces who have been permanently stationed there for years under treaty and as a consequence, have deterred any abusive incursions by the far-right into the region.

Still, the impression the Daily Beast would like to get across to readers is that the concept of Neo-Nazis leading the so-called “revolution” in Kiev, is absurd. In fact, the truth that Kiev’s Independence Square was full of Nazis, was right under the nose of the entire world – with a handful of Western journalists even admitting as much.

Nazis Hiding in Plain Sight 

The impressive pictures broadcast by the Western media of mobs filling Independence Square featured scores of large flags waving in the crisp cold air of Kiev. Prominent among them were the blue and yellow banners of Svoboda, with a peculiar 3-fingered salute stamped on each one. The odd iconography, had the Western media investigated, is in fact a revised Nazi salute, a play on the Ukrainian coat of arms and German Neo-Nazi Michael Kühnen’s three-fingered salute. Before that, Svoboda used the more obvious “Wolfsangel,” popular among Neo-Nazis and a symbol used by the Waffen SS during World War II.

Spiegel Online would report in its article, “‘Prepared to Die’: The Right Wing’s Role in Ukrainian Protests,” that:

“The Svoboda party also has excellent ties to Europe, but they are different from the ones that Klischko might prefer. It is allied with France’s right-wing Front National and with the Italian neo-fascist group Fiamma Tricolore. But when it comes to the oppression of homosexuality, representative Myroshnychenko is very close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, even if he does all he can to counter Moscow’s influence in his country.

“The EU is the only possibility for us to defend ourselves against Russian pressure,” he says. He and his party see the alliance with Klitschko as being purely tactical. Klitschko, after all, would like to limit the powers of the president while Svoboda dreams of a country with a strong leader.

Myroshnychenko was press spokesman for the Ukrainian national football team in the lead up to the 2008 European Championships, but he isn’t exactly cosmopolitan. He would even like to see foreign professional football players deported because they “change Ukraine’s ethnic map.”

There have been other, similar incidents. In a 2012 debate over the Ukrainian-born American actress Mila Kunis, he said that she wasn’t Ukrainian, rather she was a “Jewess.” Indeed, anti-Semitism is part of the extremist party’s platform; until 2004, they called themselves the Social-National Party of Ukraine in an intentional reference to Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party. Just last summer, a prominent leader of party youth was distributing texts from Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels translated into Ukrainian.

Without the nationalists’ tight organization, the revolt on Maidan Square would long since have collapsed. But Svoboda also embodies the greatest danger to the protest movement. The party’s foot soldiers, with their muddled, right wing doctrine, aren’t likely to hold back for much longer.”

Speigel Online notes what other independent geopolitical analysts have been saying since the mobs took to Kiev’s streets months ago, that the “pro-democracy,” “pro-European” facade was propped up by literal Nazis who were armed and fully backed by the US – and without which, the entire movement would have collapsed.

The BBC admitted of current Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok, in a 2012 article titled, “Svoboda: The rise of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists,” that:

But while the party’s radical past can be papered over, it cannot be erased. Its name until 2004 was the “Social-National Party” and it maintains informal links to another group, the Patriots of Ukraine, regarded by some as proto-fascist.

In 2004, Tyahnybok was kicked out of former President Viktor Yushchenko’s parliamentary faction for a speech calling for Ukrainians to fight against a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” – using two highly insulting words to describe Russians and Jews – and emphasising that Ukrainians had in the past fought this threat with arms.

In 2005, he signed an open letter to Ukrainian leaders, including President Yushchenko, calling for the government to halt the “criminal activities” of “organised Jewry”, which, the letter said, was spreading its influence in the country through conspiratorial organisations as the Anti-Defamation League – and which ultimately wanted to commit “genocide” against the Ukrainian people.

Astonishingly, it would be overt Jew-hater Oleh Tyahnybok that US Senator John McCain would share the stage with in Kiev during the climax of “Euromaidan” in support of the “pro-European” mobs.

While the opposition that has now seized Kiev claims to share “European values,” one must wonder just what those values are. While the West uses alleged anti-homosexual policies in Moscow as a pressure point against Russia, it gladly allies itself with anti-homosexual bigots and racists in Kiev. Apparently, “European values” are whatever can be selectively leveraged when beneficial, and blatantly ignored when inconvenient.

While other groups among the Ukrainian opposition exhibit their extremist views more overtly than Svoboda, like Right Sector, there are also opposition parties that conceal their bigotry, racism, and right-wing ideology with more skill.  This includes protest leaders in Kiev such as Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Oleksandr Turchynov, both of deposed, disgraced, convicted criminal, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s All Ukrainian Union or “Fatherland” party. Both have taken controversial stances regarding homosexuals.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk would go as far as stating – when his views regarding homosexual marriage were labelled “conservative” – that:

 ”I do not agree. If a man has normal views, then you label him a conservative, but those who use drugs or promote sodomy – you label them a progressive person. All of these are perversions.”

And despite all of this, news organizations like the BBC have attempted to endear global audiences to Ukraine’s pro-EU Nazis in articles like, “Ukraine protests: Singing in the cold.”

Russia’s Standing Up to Nazis – And Paying the Price (Again)

The BBC itself has already admitted that armed Nazis played a leading role in overthrowing the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych. In its short video report, “Neo-Nazi threat in new Ukraine,” it exposes a nightmarish resurgence of Nazi ideology, and all the blind hatred and violence that goes with it. Despite this admission, the British state-owned media arm would publish an outrageous article titled, “Crimea seen as ‘Hitler-style’ land grab,” where BBC editor Simona Kralova attempts to draw historical parallels, not between Russia’s stalwart fight against Nazis in World War II, but how Russia is now acting like the Nazis in World War II.

After admitting that the West backed literal Nazis in the armed overthrow of a democratically elected government in Kiev, for the BBC to then accuse Russia and in particular President Vladimir Putin’s defense of what’s left of Ukraine as a “Hitler-style land grab,” presents unparalleled deceit, and perhaps even desperation from the Western media.

One must wonder what else the West would expect Russia to do directly along its own borders, when it itself admits Nazis have overrun the Ukrainian capital (with their assistance) and considering the disastrous toll Russia paid during World War II when last they crossed paths with Adolf Hitler’s toxic Nazi ideology. 20 to 30 million Russians died in that struggle, perplexing the mind that the West would now condemn Russia for minding the lessons of history and standing up against Nazism yet again before it is able to find a foothold from which to exact another historically tragic toll upon humanity.

The BBC and others across the Western media have for years quietly chronicled the rise of extremist groups like Svoboda in Ukraine, and despite this, they have turned apologists for ideologies and agendas they themselves categorize as intolerable within their own societies. Much of what Svoboda and other right-wing groups now in power in Kiev do, would be considered “hate crimes” in the West where Svoboda draws its support.

Russia finds itself once again on the right side of history, but again, appears poised to pay the price. While growing numbers of people begin to see through the “Euromaidan” facade, the US, UK, and EU are already poised to for a wider confrontation with Russia over its attempts to check the fascist foothold the West has created directly along its borders.

It is truly dangerous times when Nazis are the heroes and those standing up against them are the villains. The tired but true cliche of “failing to learn from history,” comes to mind. The doom of repeating history now lays before us.

Introduction

In the biggest power grab since George Bush seized Eastern Europe and converted it into a NATO bastion confronting Russia, the Obama regime, together with the EU, financed and organized a violent putsch in the Ukraine which established a puppet regime in Kiev.[1]  In response the citizens of the autonomous Crimean region, fearing the onslaught of cultural and political repression, organized self-defense militia and pressured the administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin to help protect them from armed incursions by the NATO-backed coup regime in Kiev.[2]    Russia responded to the Crimean appeal with promises of military assistance – effectively halting further Western absorption of the entire region.

Immediately following the proxy putsch the entire US-EU propaganda machine spun into high gear.[3]  The nature of the Western power grab of the Ukraine was ignored.   Russia’s defensive action in Crimea became the focus of media and Western government attacks.  Unconditional support for  the for the violent seizure of the Ukraine by the US and EU-backed coup was broadcast by the West’s entire stable of journalistic hacks and accompanied by screeds calling for measures to destabilize the Russian Federation itself through a full-scale economic and diplomatic war.  The US and EU convoked meetings and press conferences calling for trade and investment sanctions.  Threats emerged from the White House and Brussels calling for a “freeze of Russian assets” in Western banks, if Moscow did not hand over the Crimea to the coup regime in Kiev.  Russian capitulation became the price of mending East-West ties.

The Washington-based advocates for imposing sanctions against Russia view this as an opportunity to: (1) punish Russia for acceding to the Crimean autonomous government’s call for defense against the Kiev putsch by activating Russian troops stationed  in the region; (2) weaken Russia’s economy and isolate it politically from its major Western trading and investment partners; (3) legitimatize the violent seizure of power by neo-liberal and neo-Nazi clients of the US; and (4) promote destabilization within the borders of the Russian Federation.  At a minimum, economic sanctions have become an aggressive tool for energizing the corrupt pro-Western elites and oligarchs in Russia to influence the Putin government to accept the de-facto regime in Kiev and deliver the autonomous Crimean nation into their hands.

“Sanctions” are seen by the White House advisers as:  (1) projecting US power, (2) securing the Ukraine as a strategic new base for NATO, (3) ethnically cleansing this diverse and complicated region of its Russian-speaking minority and (4) opening the Ukraine for the whole-sale plunder of its economic and natural resources by Western multinational corporations.

The Obama regime cites the “success” of the financial and economic sanctions against Iran as a ‘model’ for what can be achieved with Russia:  A weakened economy, diminution of its trade, destabilizing its currency and provoking consumer scarcities and mass unrest. (FT 03/05/2014 p.2)  Secretary of US State John Kerry is pushing for more extreme forms of economic reprisals:  trade and investment sanctions, which obviously could lead to a break in diplomatic relations.(FT 03/05/2014 p.1)

Impact of Sanctions on Russia, the US and EU

Energy and financial sanctions on Russia, assuming that they can be imposed, would have a severe impact on Russian energy companies, its oligarchs and bankers.  Trade and investment agreements would have to be abrogated.  As a result Europe, which relies on Russian oil and gas imports for 30% of its energy needs, would slip back into an economic  recession (FT  03/05/2014 p.2). The US is in no position to replace these energy shortfalls.  In other words, trade and investment sanctions against the Russian Federation would have a ‘boomerang effect’ – especially against Germany, the economic ‘locomotor’ of the European Union.

Financial sanctions would hurt the corrupt Russian oligarchs who have stashed away tens of billions of Euros and Pounds in European real estate, business investments, sport teams and financial institutions.  Sanctions and a real freeze on the overseas assets of the Russian billionaires would curtail all those profitable transactions for major Western financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan-Chase and other “giants of Wall Street” as well as in the ‘City of London’.  (FT 03/05/2014 p.2)  In “punishing” Putin, the EU would also be “spiting on itself”.  Sanctions might weaken Russia but they would also precipitate an economic crisis in the EU and end its fragile recovery.

Russia’s Response to Sanctions

Essentially the Putin Administration can take one of two polar responses to the US-EU sanctions:  It can capitulate and withdraw from Crimea, sign an agreement on its military base (knowing full well that NATO will not comply), and accepts its own international status as a quasi-vassal state incapable of defending its allies and borders; or the Putin Administration can prepare a reciprocal set of counter-sanctions, confiscate Western investments, freeze financial assets, renege on debt payments and re-nationalize major industries.  The Russian state would be strengthened at the expense of the neo-liberal and pro-Western oligarchical sectors of Russia’s policy elite. Russia could terminate its transport and base agreements with the US, cut off the Pentagon’s Central Asian supply routes to Afghanistan.  President Putin could end sanctions with Iran, weakening  Washington’s negotiating position.  Finally, Russia could actively support dissident anti-imperialist movements in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America while strengthening its support for the Syrian government as it defends itself from US-supported violent jihadists.

In other words, US-EU sanctions while attempting to undermine Russia could actually radicalize Moscow’s domestic and foreign policy and marginalize the currently pro-Western oligarchs who had influenced the heretofore conciliatory policies of the Putin and Medvedev Administrations.

The EU and Obama might consolidate their hold over the Ukraine but they have plenty to lose on a global scale.  Moreover, the Ukraine will likely turn into a highly unstable vassal state for the NATO planners.  EU, US and IMF loans for the bankrupt regime are conditional on (1) 40% cutbacks on energy and gas subsidies, (2) 50% cuts in public sector pension payments, (3) major increases in consumer prices and (4) the privatization (plunder) of public firms.  The result will be large-scale job loss and a huge jump in unemployment.  Neo-liberal austerity programs will further erode the living standards of most wage and salaried workers and likely antagonize the neo-Nazi ‘popular base’ provoking new rounds of violent mass protests.  The West would move forward with ‘agreements’ with their Ukraine clients ‘at the top’ but face bitter conflicts ‘below’.  The prospect of Brussels and the IMF dictating devastating economic policies as part of an austerity program on the masses of Ukrainian citizens will make a mockery of the puffed-up nationalist slogans of the far Right putschists.  Economic collapse, political chaos and a new round of social upheaval will erode the political gains assumed in the power grab of February 2014.

 Conclusion

The unfolding of the US-EU-Russian conflict over the Ukraine has far-reaching consequences, which will define the global configuration of power and foster new ideological alignments

Western sanctions will directly hit Russian capitalists and strengthen a ‘collectivist turn’.  The Western power grab of the ‘soft underbelly of Russia’ could provoke greater Russian support for insurgent movements challenging Western hegemony.  Sanctions could hasten greater Sino-Russian trade and investment ties, as well as military cooperation agreement.

Much depends on Obama and the EU’s calculation of another weak and pusillanimous response from the Russian government.  They are confidant that the Russian Federation will once again, as in the past, ‘bluster and object’ to Western expansionist moves but will ultimately capitulate.  If these calculations are wrong,  if the West goes through with financial and energy sanctions and President Putin makes a robust riposte, we are heading into the eye of a new political storm in which a polarized world will witness new class, national and regional conflicts.

Emails obtained by journalists at NBC News reveal that officials at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission — the government agency that oversees reactor safety and security — purposely misled the media after the Fukushima, Japan disaster in 2011.

On Monday this week — one day shy of the third anniversary of the Fukushima meltdown — NBC published emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act that for the first time exposes on a major scale the efforts that NRC officials undertook in order to diminish the severity of the event in the hours and days after it began to unfold.

“In the tense days after a powerful earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan on March 11, 2011, staff at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission made a concerted effort to play down the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis to America’s aging nuclear plants,” Bill Dedman wrote for NBC.

Through the course of analyzing thousands of internal NRC emails, Dedman and company unearthed evidence that proves nuclear regulators went to great lengths to keep the scary facts about the Fukushima meltdown from being brought into the public eye.

Even when the international media was eager to learn the facts about the Fukushima tragedy while the matter was still developing, emails suggest that the NRC’s public relations wing worked hard to have employees stick to talking points that ignored the actual severity of the meltdown.

“While we know more than these say,” a PR manager wrote in one email to his colleagues, “we’re sticking to this story for now.”

That story, Dedman wrote, was filled with “numerous examples…of apparent misdirection or concealment” waged by the NRC in an attempt to keep the true nature of the meltdown hidden, especially as concerns grew that a similar event could occur on American soil.

“The talking points written during the emergency for NRC commissioners and other officials were divided into two sections: ‘public answer’ and ‘additional technical, non-public information,’” Dedman wrote. “Often the two parts didn’t quite match.”

According to NBC, emails indicate that the NRC insisted on sticking to talking points that painted a much different picture than what was really happening three years ago this week. Japanese engineers employed by the NRC at American facilities were effectively barred from making any comments to the media, some emails suggest, and at other times those regulators rallied employees at the NRC to keep from making any comment that could be used to disclose the detrimental safety standards in place at American facilities.

In one instance cited by Dedman, spokespeople for the NRC were told not to disclose the fact that American scientists were uncertain if any US facilities could sustain an earthquake like the one that ravaged Fukushima .

“We’re not so sure about, but again we are not talking about that,” reads one email cited by NBC.

At other times, the report added, NRC officials were left in the dark about what was actually unfolding on the other side of the Pacific because access to social media sites had been blocked on their work computers, causing some regulators to only hear about information pertaining to Fukushima once it trickled down to a point where they could access it.

In one email, for example, NRC public affairs official David McIntrye wrote in apparent disbelief to his colleagues that scientist and actor Bill Nye was participating in “an incoherent discussion on CNN” about a potential hydrogen explosion at Fukushima.

“I’m not buying it,” McIntyre wrote.

Five minutes after that email was sent, a colleague responded by writing, “There is a good chance it was a hydrogen explosion that took the roof off that building, though we are not saying that publicly.”

Days later, McIntyre blasted his supervisor for hesitating during a CNN interview in which he was asked if US plants could withstand an earthquake on par with the one suffered by residents of Fukushima.

“He should just say ‘Yes, it can.’” McIntyre wrote, instead of hesitating. “Worry about being wrong when it doesn’t. Sorry if I sound cynical.”

NBC News did not respond specifically to emails published in Dedman’s report, but the agency’s public affairs director emails a statement ensuring that “The NRC Office of Public Affairs strives to be as open and transparent as possible, providing the public accurate information in the proper context.”

“We take our communication mission seriously. We did then and we do now. The frustration displayed in the chosen emails reflects more on the extreme stress our team was under at the time to assure accuracy in a context in which information from Japan was scarce to non-existent. These emails fall well short of an accurate picture of our communications with the American public immediately after the event and during the past three years,” NRC Public Affairs Director Eliot Brenner wrote in the email.

Arguably more disheartening than the NRC officials’ attempt to whitewash the disaster, however, are the facts of the matter addressed in secret by the agency but not disclosed publically. More than 30 of the nuclear power reactors in the US are of the same brand used in Fukushima, NBC reported, and some of the oldest facilities in operation have been in use since the 1970s. Despite this, though, the NRC instructed employees to not mention how any of those structures would be able to stand up against a hypothetical disaster.

On Monday, Fukushima expert and author Susan Q. Stranhan published an op-ed carried by the Philadelphia Inquirer which called into question the safety of the several nuclear facilities within the state of Pennsylvania, where a disaster in 1979 at Three Mile Island refocused national attention on the issue of nuclear safety.

“During Fukushima, the NRC recommended that Americans living within 50 miles of the plant evacuate, a wise call based on a dangerous radiation plume that spread about 30 miles northwest of the reactors. Despite that experience, the NRC today remains steadfast in its belief that the existing 10-mile emergency evacuation zone around US nuclear plants is adequate and that there would be plenty of time to expand that zone if conditions warranted,” Stranahan wrote.

“Three years after Fukushima Daiichi, the NRC and the nuclear industry continue to repeat a familiar mantra: The likelihood of a severe accident is so low there is no need to plan for it. That was what the Japanese said, too.”

Meanwhile, RT reported last month that a new lawsuit has been filed by crewmembers who sailed on the USS Ronald Reagan three years ago to assist with relief efforts off of the coast of Fukushima but now say they were poisoned by nuclear fallout. When filed, Attorneys said that “up to 70,000 US citizens [were] potentially affected by the radiation” and might be able to join in their suit.