For sheer cynical doubletalk, it is hard to top the statement issued by President Obama Monday, to mark the annual worldwide commemoration of the Holocaust, one of the greatest crimes in modern history.
The statement concludes, “let us recommit ourselves to the task of remembrance, and to always oppose anti-Semitism wherever it takes root. Together, we must give enduring meaning to the words ‘Never Again’.”
The two-paragraph text is posted on the White House web site immediately below a statement issued the same day on US policy in Ukraine, announcing new sanctions against Russia for Moscow’s public opposition to the US-backed takeover of Ukraine by right-wing nationalist forces that hail the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.
The February 22 coup was spearheaded by thugs and gunmen from the Right Sector, an openly fascistic organization, and it elevated into the Kiev government representatives of the fascist Svoboda (Freedom) Party.
Svoboda’s top leader for the last 10 years, Oleh Tyahnybok, is on record calling for an all-out struggle against the “Yid-Russki mafia” in Ukraine (i.e., Jews and Russian speakers). He made that statement in a speech at the graveside of a leader of Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought alongside Hitler’s Wehrmacht in World War II.
Tyahnybok has received a series of high-level visitors in Kiev, including US senators John McCain (Republican) and Christopher Murphy (Democrat), Secretary of State John Kerry (for a photograph of Kerry with Tyahnybok see the Kyiv Post here), and most recently Vice President Joe Biden.
None of these US visitors has expressed any discomfort at associating with a fascist anti-Semite. The US ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, has declared himself “positively impressed” at Svoboda’s behavior in opposition and in parliament. “They have demonstrated their democratic bona fides,” he claimed.
Millions of Soviet citizens, including a million Jews, were slaughtered in Ukraine during the Nazi invasion and three years of occupation. Now the political heirs of those who collaborated with the Nazi genocide are working in lockstep with American imperialism.