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[–]Budget-song-budget[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Article 1/2.

"If Ennio Flaiano were to be called upon today to pronounce on the Italian mainstream on the subject of war, he would surely come out with one of his striking paradoxes:

“It is not so much what I see or read that makes an impression on me, but what I hear: that unbearable noise of nails climbing up the glass.”

On the loudspeakers of the media hegemony the defense at all costs of the words and deeds of the Ukrainian government has been broadcasted in unified networks, whatever the means used by this one, all in view of a costly militarization of the whole Europe, already in dire straits for the economic crisis.

The tasty interview with a commander of the Azov Battalion – composed of nationalists of the Ukrainian ultra-right, who confesses to “reading Kant” to their soldiers, the appearance of the band of “Kiev calling” singing with Banderas’ T-shirts, have discovered more than one nerve of the dominant narrative.

Once it emerged that the political horse on which it was counted allowed an unparalleled accessibility to organizations inspired by Nazism, ethnic nationalism, collaborators of the Third Reich worshipped as “national heroes” with monuments, it started the race to deny the evidence, to reduce a phenomenon that the Ukrainian government first refuses to reduce, or to use consolatory and justificationist narratives, disconnected from reality, such as the one that “the Nazis exist on both sides.

It should be made the usual premise, a must in these times in order not to see one’s own reasoning delegitimized to typhus: the nature of Russia governed by Putin is clearly an oligarchic regime in which the dominant historical bloc (composed of a political bloc allied to precise private economic blocs and controlled by the state) uses all the tools of propaganda, social management and repression for the perpetuation of power. There is no one who can deny that every form of political alternative is subject to strong repression, even when it is a matter of claiming simple democratic access.

However, it could be said, such an authoritarian course is not nowadays functioning only in Russia, but since a long time it characterizes almost all Western nations, which would like to censor it. Our shores are also home to a power managed in a manner increasingly independent of real democratic mechanisms, whether by strong men – or clans – as in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, by plutocratic and oligarchic pillars as in the USA, or by technocratic elites as in Italy. If Russia shows off an unpresentable Khadirov in Chechnya, one has to wonder if the clans of Kosovo, Orban or Erdogan are not equally unpresentable. And one could go on.

However, this is not the point. Returning to Ukraine, never before in a state, in Russia or in the West, we have seen such an agility, cultural and political weight, entrusted to political organizations that blatantly draw inspiration from ideologies, characters, worldviews, explicitly fascist or Nazi. Words and works that in the German penal code would have been a pure crime of apologia for the Third Reich, or the object of a ban, at least until the half-reversal made with the judgment of the Federal Supreme Court of January 17, 2017, which rejected the request to ban the NPD (a neo-Nazi party), only because of minimal electoral importance.

Despite the fact that in the whole area of Eastern Europe movements inspired by ethnic nationalism or reinvigorated inspirations of Pan-Slavism have been reborn, neither in Moscow, nor in the ultra-atlantic Poland has anyone ever allowed themselves to inaugurate monuments and celebrate as a national hero a collaborator of the horrors of the Third Reich and its SchutzStaffel like Stepan Banderas. In the same sense, we have never gone so far as to integrate into the regular army paramilitary militias formed by neo-Nazi groups, celebrating their hierarchs as heroes of the resistance even when their acts have turned out to be real crimes in wartime, such as the taking of civilian hostages in many of the last war scenarios, or in peacetime, such as the massacre of the House of Trade Unions in Odessa.

But, if the narrative of blatantly claimed fascism were not enough, it would suffice to pay attention to the practices and laws directly put in place by the President of Ukraine and his government, in past and recent times.

Since the dawn following the 2014 coup, communists were outlawed (they will be permanently outlawed since 2015 after the appeal against the ban was rejected). With a decree a few days ago, as many as 10 opposition parties (representing 20%) in Parliament were banned:

Opposition Platform

– For Life (43 deputies), Pan-Ukrainian Union “Fatherland” (26 deputies), Opposition Bloc (6 deputies), Shariy’s Party (named after the blogger who animates it), Left Opposition, Union of Left Forces, Ukrainian Progressive Socialist Party, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialists, and Vladimir Saldo Bloc that had in the Ruthenian Rada another 43 deputies.

At the same time all national communication was gagged by unifying the television networks into a single network under government control.

Measures of this kind can be compared to the so-called fascist laws: the law that obliged the press to have a responsible director of prefectural-governmental approval (1926) and the institutionalization of the Great Council of Fascism as the supreme constitutional authority of the Kingdom (1928).

With reference to the issue of the Doneckij Bassein, it is certainly not peregrine to suspect that separatism was to some extent instrumentalized by the Russian government according to its own interests. However, we do not yet have adequate documents to ascertain what Russia’s role was in these political processes.

On the other hand, we have sufficient elements to observe that the alleged Ukrainian reaction took the form of a war that lasted eight years.

The offensive against the Ukrainian government has been carried out by ultranationalist and paramilitary formations with methods that aimed at the annihilation of an ethnic and/or cultural expression (Russian and Russian-speaking), with a massacre that, according to the most conservative estimates (Report of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) concerns at least 3404 civilians (without “part”, because civilians are considered as such) and 6500 separatist insurgents. A war of eight years that the mainstream likes to define low intensity, but certainly high numbers.