Springtime for Hitler and Ukraine-ee

The New York Times is worried about Ukraine soldiers. It is not that they are Nazis. Anti-Semitism is baked into liberalism. No, what bothers NYT is that the soldiers wear Nazi garb, which reveals their Nazism.

NYT reported, “Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.

“In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.

“The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II.”

As John Lennon sang, You've Got to Hide Your Love Away.

But his song was about his first marriage which Brian Epstein wanted out of the newspapers in fear that it would hurt the band’s image in the early years of the Beatles.

NYT is trying to hide the fact that Ukrainians were part of a slaughter of unarmed Jews by Nazi allies during World War II. Ukrainian soldiers used their bullets on Jews, not just Russians, during Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum reported, “Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941, brought a wave of destruction to 4 million Jews residing in the Soviet territories. Approximately, 1.5 million were able to evacuate or escape deeper into the Soviet Union, leaving around 2.5 million Jews under German-occupation. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered the majority of those left behind. Mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) followed the German Army, murdering Soviet civilians and Jews one bullet at a time. It is largely unknown that one out of three Jews killed in the Holocaust were murdered by bullets, not in gas chambers.”

2.5 million. About one third of that total was in Ukraine.

Ukraine soldiers killed 1,600 Jews in Piryatin, Ukraine, on the second day of Passover in 1942. That was just one example.

The deaths were by firing squads and the bodies were dumped in ravines and other mass graves. France, Poland and other occupied nations sent their Jews to the concentration camps. Occupation gave them an excuse to rid their nations of Jews.

NYT is in lockstep with Zelensky and his refusal to make peace with the Russians who invaded his nation. Although he is Jewish, he uses units with Nazi heritages to battle the Russians. The origins of the units is not the issue. The fact that they are proud of the evil from 80 years ago.

This is problematic for Zelensky’s propagandists in the USA. NYT downplayed the history of the Ukraine’s Holocaust of Jews.

NYT said, “Questions over how to interpret such symbols are as divisive as they are persistent, and not just in Ukraine. In the American South, some have insisted that today, the Confederate flag symbolizes pride, not its history of racism and secession. The swastika was an important Hindu symbol before it was co-opted by the Nazis.”

Um, the objection to the Confederate flag was its defense of slavery. As for the the use of the swastika by Hindus, Berlin is 3,590 miles from New Delhi.

NYT went out of its way to downplay the Nazism of Ukrainians in World War II.

The newspaper said, “Factions from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its insurgent army fought alongside the Nazis in what they viewed as a struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty. Members of those groups also took part in atrocities against Jewish and Polish civilians. Later in the war, though, some of the groups fought against the Nazis.”

Some. So not all the Ukrainians wanted the Nazis out. The choice between Nazi occupiers and Soviet occupiers was a tough call because Stalin had starved 6 million Ukrainians a few years earlier in the Holodomor. The older I get, the more I realize how often there are no good guys.

NYT also said, “Some Ukrainians joined Nazi military units like the Waffen-SS Galizien. The emblem of the group, which was led by German officers, was a sky-blue patch showing a lion and three crowns. The unit took part in a massacre of hundreds of Polish civilians in 1944.”

No mention was made of Babi Yar, the execution of 33,771 Jews (the Nazis were meticulous in recording their atrocities) near Kyiv on September 29 and 30, 1941.

Alan Dershowitz ripped NYT report.

Writing in Newsweek, he said, “Historically Ukraine has been one of the most antisemitic countries in the world. Even before the Nazi invasion, Ukrainian citizens conducted pogroms and mass killings of Jews. One of the worst offenders was Bohdan Khmelnytsky who several hundred years ago murdered tens of thousands of Jewish women, babies, and men, in a prelude to the Holocaust, and in the name of Ukrainian nationalism. That, too, was then, but now the statue of this anti-Semitic mass murderer stands proudly at the center of Kyiv and his picture adorns current Ukrainian currency.”

He also said, “The Times reports that even some Jewish organizations are prepared to give Ukraine a pass on its toleration of neo-Nazis, because they don't want to be perceived as supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin's narrative about Ukraine being a Nazi state. Ukraine is not a Nazi state; it is a state that elected a Jew as president, while tolerating Nazism in its military. Those who refuse to condemn such intolerable toleration only encourage it by their mistaken silence.

“Calling out military groups that would like to turn Ukraine into a Nazi state, does not further the Russian narrative. It only tells a painful truth about the present, the past, and the likely future.”

None of today’s soldiers participated in any of this slaughter. The sins of the ancestors should not be visited upon their sons.

But for crying out loud, journalists should be honest in reporting Ukraine’s participation in World War II because it puts in context the horror of embracing Nazism without apology.

Of course, NYT does not practice journalism. This is one more disgusting example.