The spread of capitalism, like the missionaries in the age of exploration and expansion, brings democracy, human rights and werstern moral values … I don’t particularly care for the allies the US and Western European nations choose to combat the evil Russies. The western hypocracy continues as propaganda has replaced the integrity of the news media.

You Want To Name Streets After the Murderers of Ukraine’s Jews? | The Forward |

In early July, Kiev named a major boulevard in honor of Stepan Bandera, and the city plans on naming another for Roman Shukhevych. Both these men were leaders accused of Nazi atrocities.

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Stepan Bandera on a 2009 postage stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth (NY Books)

On May 25, the Ukrainian Parliament held a moment of silence in honor of Symon Petliura, a nationalist responsible for the murder of 50,000 Jews in the early 20th century. When asked for a response, Josef Zissels, chairman of the Vaad organization of Ukrainian Jews, told JTA that worrying about Petliura “leads to unnecessary assignment of blame.” The same article quotes Zissels’s earlier statement that Jews, after all, also did terrible things to Ukrainians.

The whitewashing, now a disturbingly widespread phenomenon, ramped up in earnest after Ukraine’s 2013-2014 Maidan uprising and the ensuing conflict with Russia. On January 1, 2014, 15,000 ultra-nationalists marched through Kiev carrying placards with Bandera’s image and chanting OUN slogans; today, marches honoring Bandera, the OUN and Ukrainian SS units take place regularly across Ukraine.

In the spring of 2015, Ukraine’s parliament passed a highly controversial law, mandating that Bandera and his groups be regarded as Ukrainian patriots, and making denial of their heroism a criminal offense. The law was ratified despite vociferous condemnation from leading Western historians, proponents of free speech and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Ukraine is now home to several battalions of heavily armed fighters who use OUN and neo-Nazi insignia.

Some deny OUN’s atrocities outright. In a recent Foreign Policy essay, Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Viatrovych rejects the OUN’s involvement in the infamous 1941 L’viv pogroms. And Yaakov Bleich, one of several men claiming the position of chief rabbi of Ukraine, said in his 2013 testimony to U.S. Congress: “Most Jews and many others consider Bandera and his group of Ukrainian nationalists in Western Ukraine responsible for dozens of pogroms. It may or may not be true, but to someone who believes it, it will be frightening.”

When denial isn’t enough, justification takes over. For example, some try to mitigate the fact that Ukrainian nationalists cooperated with the Nazis as policemen and concentration camp guards, and carried out wholesale slaughter of Jews of their own volition, with this logic: Since the Soviet Union persecuted Ukrainians, and since some Jews were part of the Soviet apparatus, it’s perfectly natural that the Ukrainians took revenge when they were given the opportunity. The Jews had it coming.

Released CIA files show US intelligence officials made efforts to protect Mykola Lebed, Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, in order to get information.

CIA Report details ties between US and ex-Nazis | Jerusalem Post |

NEW YORK — Declassified CIA files reveal that US intelligence officials went to great lengths to protect a Ukrainian fascist leader and suspected Nazi collaborator from prosecution after World War II and set him up in a New York office to wage covert war against the Soviet Union, according to a new report to Congress.

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Operation Gladio - US intelligence hired Nazis for espionage to battle communists of the Soviet Union during the Cold War  

Mykola Lebed led an underground movement to undermine the Kremlin and conduct guerrilla operations for the CIA during the Cold War, says the report, prepared by two scholars under the supervision of the National Archives. It was given to Congress and posted online.