That meme apologizing for Ukrainian fascism... [View all]

[JackRiddler]

You may have seen this meme since last week's elections to the European parliament, and the simultaneous snap presidential elections in Ukraine:



It's good news that the proportion won in the May 25th presidential election by the leader of the extreme-right Svoboda was very low.

Despite the presidential election results, however, this group remains in the Kiev government. Svoboda has been a junior partner since the February 2014 coup, in a coalition with the Fatherland party, which also accommodates ethno-nationalism. The Kiev government continues to implement an extreme neoliberal program as dictated by EU and IMF -- the same set of policies that have ruined the lives of people in Greece and elsewhere in the EU, after being pioneered for many years in the IMF's class war on the third world.

Those who defend the Kiev government must answer this. The Ukrainian ethnic-nationalist fascists of Svoboda, who present apologetics for Nazi collaborators from the WWII period, and who engage in thug violence against perceived Others on the street, currently hold key power positions in the Kiev cabinet. A past Svoboda member is in charge of the security forces currently attacking ethnic Russians in the east.

How would the international left act, if Golden Dawn held the security ministry in Athens? Would anyone try to excuse it by saying that Golden Dawn was only a junior partner in a coalition, or didn't hold that many ministries? Would they consider it a mitigating factor that Golden Dawn was actually not very popular with the voters? Wouldn't an electoral defeat for Golden Dawn be even more of a reason to call for the expulsion of Golden Dawn from an Athens government?

The meme graphic is opportunistic and methodologically invalid. In any presidential elections there can be only one winner. EU parliament elections are often used for protest votes, since the EU parliament has little real power. In the most comparable recent election in Ukraine, for parliament in 2012, Svoboda took 10% of the vote. Anti-fascists should rightly see this as a crisis, as they do when Golden Dawn takes a comparable percentage of the Greek vote.

The May 25th Ukrainian elections were otherwise suspect, declared after the February coup and held under conditions of civil conflict in the eastern provinces, with low turnout compared to earlier, undisputed presidential elections.

Progressive popular movements were among the broad coalition of political orientations expressing themselves in the Maidan movement. That doesn't mean that the government that took power after Yanukovich fled the country in February merits apologetics from the international left community. This government was planned in advance by the State Department. Prior to the coup, the prime minister, Yatsenyuk, a former central banker, announced on his foundation page that he is in partnership with the State Department, NATO, and NED (a U.S.-government agency that engages in "regime change" operations).

The international left needs to resist false dichotomies wherein, if they oppose Putin, they must therefore support the current Kiev regime backed by the State Department.

Svoboda's poor performance in the presidential election should not be the occasion to make excuses for their continued participation in the Kiev government. No one's saying that Ukrainian people are more susceptible to being fascist than other European peoples. Clearly, fascism is a Europe-wide problem right now. What we are saying is that unlike in France or in Greece, bad as the situations are there, the Ukrainian fascists are in the government! The fault for that lies not with the Ukrainian people, but the Kiev government, the Fatherland party, Yatsenyuk and his partners: NATO, EU, State Department, NED, and a variety of Ukrainian and Western oligarchs.

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(Why did they call a snap presidential election but no parliamentary election? We'll see what Poroshenko does about it, if anything.)