This transcript appears in the March 18, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
THE NEO-NAZI FACTOR
Ukraine: Who Wants To Start World War III?
[Print version of this transcript]
This is an edited transcript of the presentation made on March 5, 2022 to The LaRouche Organization’s weekly Manhattan Project Town Hall internet program. The entire program is available here.
What will be made clear by the time we get through this discussion today is that what we’ve been saying all along about the nature of this so-called Ukraine crisis is that it actually is the eclipsing of an untenable policy called the unipolar order, or the rules-based order.
The real battle is becoming increasingly clear. It’s between those nations that stand for principles of economic development of sovereign nation-states through collaboration, versus those who bow down to the military might of the unipolar order, which is the United States, the United Kingdom, and NATO. I put the United Kingdom separate even though it’s part of NATO, and the U.S. is part of NATO also. But the U.S. and the British are the two countries driving this, and NATO and Europe are, in a sense, hostages. Just as the people of Ukraine are hostages; they’re cannon fodder in this.
All of Humanity Is at Stake
What is destroying Ukraine is the insistence of the unipolar order that there will be no change in the power of the order coming from London and Wall Street.
Another element of this is exemplified in the statement [Russian Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov made at a press conference yesterday. He said, “The world order is at stake.” What he means by that is very clear: That there is an effort by the major powers of the West to impose on the world a Great Reset, which means a central bankers’ dictatorship that will be to the benefit of supranational corporate cartels, but not to the benefit of any sovereign nation. Any sovereign nation that steps out of line becomes a target. That has become increasingly clear.
One example of this is what just happened at the meeting of the QUAD over the last couple of days. The QUAD is the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. The idea was that the QUAD would in a sense become something like an Asian NATO. At the meeting, there was an attempt to push through a resolution condemning the Russian actions in Ukraine. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, refused to go along. He said India would not condemn Russia, and instead called for dialogue and diplomacy.
Since then, a U.S. State Department cable to diplomats became public, advising how to deal with India and the United Arab Emirates, both of which were unwilling to condemn Russia. The cable instructed that the message be delivered: “Continuing to call for dialogue, as you have been doing in the Security Council, is not a stance of neutrality; it places you in Russia’s camp.” This sounds a lot like what George W. Bush said after 9/11, when he said, “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists.” That, in fact, is the way Washington, London, and NATO are looking at it and are trying to shape it.
In a UN General Assembly vote the other day, 45 nations either abstained or were not present for the vote. The majority of nations voted with the U.S. and the British and NATO, but the fact is that 1/4 of the nations in the world did not go along with it. The population of those nations is probably close to half of the world’s population. Twenty-seven out of the 55 countries in Africa refused to go along.
So, we’re seeing a growing split. The issue is what we defined from the beginning: The underlying issue, has nothing to do with Ukraine. Ukraine was used as a pretext to escalate a war against Russia. This is not something new; this is, in fact, what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has been raising from the beginning. The deployment of offensive weapons in Ukraine, the attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO, targets Russia’s national security. This is the central issue for Russia. Putin has reiterated again that what Russia wants is a neutral Ukraine; nuclear-free, demilitarized, de-Nazified; recognition that Crimea is part of the Russian Federation, and that the Independent Peoples’ Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk be recognized as sovereign nations. There would not have been fighting in Ukraine had the West negotiated honestly with Putin from the beginning, but they didn’t.
Economic Warfare Against Everyone
The effect of this is not only economic warfare against Russia; this is economic warfare against the people of Europe. Natural gas and oil prices are skyrocketing, and that affects everyone in Europe. It also affects everyone around the world. It affects the poorer countries of Africa; it affects everyone in the United States. You’ve seen the skyrocketing prices of gasoline at the pump; the utility costs are going up. These are not only related to the combat going on in Ukraine, but the speculative system and the hyperinflationary policy of bailing out the corporate cartels that are essentially bankrupt.
At the heart of this is the bankruptcy of the financial system that has increasingly tightened its grip on the world since 1971. It’s based on a speculative commitment to defend debt and debt collection; in fact, to increase the debt to pay the old debt, as opposed to investing in the physical economy.
The Schiller Institute has taken as its lead the call for a conference to establish a security order which recognizes the national security interests of every nation and all peoples. Directly connected with that is a transformation of the global financial system, not to a Great Reset, but to a cooperative approach based on investment for all nations in the physical economy and platforms of infrastructure, especially in education and culture for the children, and a scientific culture for the future.
Lies and About-Faces About Neo-Nazis
I’ve been watching how Putin is being portrayed as some kind of deranged lunatic, for his call for the de-Nazification of Ukraine. If you are only familiar with the story coming from the western media, you’re being told that Putin is paranoid, that he is making it up; the issue of Nazis is a non-issue. Well, the reality is very different. This is where you can see the role of lies and censorship, along with the economic sanctions and economic warfare policy as the force being used by the unipolar power to try to keep the world in line; to sustain an existing order which has broken down.
Let me just give you an example. It’s worth listening to this and thinking about it, because you’re not getting this in the western media: a couple of articles in Consortium News in the last couple of days, one, “Atlantic Council Praised Ukraine’s Nazi Azov Battalion,” by Ben Norton and another,“How Zelenskyy Made Peace with Neo-Nazis,” by Alex Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal. This information is not in the mainstream media; it’s not on CNN; they’re still saying Putin is a nut for bringing up the Nazi question.
Well, there was an interview done with the leader of a group called C14 named Yevhen Karas. This was an interview with him in February, 2022. [See David Shavin’s article, “No Way To Hide: C14 Neo-Nazis in Ukraine.”] Here’s part of what Karas had to say:
We are now being given so much weaponry. Not as some say because the West is helping us, not because they want the best for us. But because we perform the tasks set by the West. Because we are the only ones who are ready to do [use] them, because we have fun. We have fun killing, and we have fun fighting.
This is from a leader of an organization which is explicitly neo-Nazi in its outlook. You’ll hear more from him in a second.
On November 2, 2019, at the European Parliament, the Vice President of a commission under the security policy grouping of the European Parliament admitted that members of C14 have been charged with hate crimes, distributing racist materials, and attacking minorities. Well, these are people who are known as Nazis. The State Department characterized C14 as a hate group and identified that in their annual report on terrorists and hate groups.
But when a challenge was made in a Ukrainian court, when they protested being called neo-Nazis, the Ukrainian Appeals Court ruled that they are not a neo-Nazi group.
A Third Generation Rat Line
But listen to what Karas had to say, referring to the Maidan Square where the coup was carried out in February 2014, in which he further self-identifies as a Nazi:
Well, we were hearing that there were not many Nazis on Maidan. Maybe only about 10% are real ideological Nazis. Maybe not even 10%; maybe 8%. But they are much more effective in proportion of influence. How much? Their effectiveness was endless. [Talking about his group:] If not for those 8%, the effectiveness of Maidan would have dropped by 90%.
He said there weren’t that many nationalists, but if not for the nationalists—referring to himself and his colleagues, including the Azov Battalion, another well-known Nazi formation—he said, “If not for that, the whole thing would have turned into a gay parade.” That is, the demonstration supposedly for freedom and democracy in Ukraine only carried out the coup because of the Nazi presence.
I want to give you a couple more examples of the recognition of this, and you can see how the lies are designed—especially now—to tar the leadership of Putin and deny the reality that was known by everyone, and is known by everyone, including in Ukraine. Reuters in March 2018 published a commentary article by Josh Cohen titled, “Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Problem.” It said that there is a growing problem of far-right vigilantes who use intimidation and even violence to advance their agendas, and who often do so with the tacit approval of law enforcement. And it goes on to say that some people say these militias have been reined in, but they have in fact been integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces. They refer there to Azov Battalion leader Andriy Biletsky, who was an advisor to the former Interior Minister and also an advisor to the former Chief of Staff of the Ukrainian military. Why is this important? The Azov Battalion is one of the leading elements of the fighting in Donbas against the Russian population. And by fighting, I mean murder. The destructive genocidal attack on people who are ethnic Russians, but who are Ukrainian, who live in Ukraine.
The whole issue in eastern Ukraine is that after the coup in February 2014, there were constitutional changes which took away their freedom; took away their right to speak Russian in the Donbas region. A fight is going on there, which is a fight of the people there to defend themselves from these so-called nationalists, who self-identify as Nazis. For example, the Azov Battalion leader Biletsky once said that he “will lead the white races in a final crusade against Semite-led Untermenschen.” Untermenschen [subhumans] was the name the Nazis gave to non-Aryans, especially to the Jews they sent to their deaths.
The Anglo-American Establishment
Interestingly, in June 2014, the Atlantic Council, one of the leading cheerleaders for Ukraine against Russia, pushing for a war to punish Russia, posted an article on their website, “The Battle for Mariupol,” while the so-called right-wing nationalists were out to destroy the Russian population. It was written by a reporter who was embedded in the Azov Battalion, who openly identified them as right-wing and neo-Nazis.
In 2018, another Atlantic Council article, “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right Violence,” appeared. But then, two years later, the same Atlantic Council posted an article on Feb. 24, 2020, “Why Azov Should Not Be Designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization.” The line had changed. The 2020 article admits that Azov’s ideology comes from neo-Nazi beliefs, but, Azov must be accepted because it is “an integral part of official structures of the state,” and follows orders given by the Interior Minister. In this case, there’s an admission by the Atlantic Council that the Interior Minister is ordering these Nazi units embedded in the security and defense forces in Ukraine to attack the Russian population. The article concludes that to call these groups government-sponsored Nazi groups would be a “gift to the Kremlin.” In other words, telling the truth would be a gift to the Kremlin.
That’s where you can see an element of how the leading weapon being deployed in this situation is the media, the think tanks, the academics, the creation of a narrative which is far removed from reality. In fact, it attacks reality and those people who are presenting reality as those who are making up stories.
Concerning the so-called attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, said to have been shelled by Russian forces, and that this could have been a new Chernobyl, and, further, could be considered the front end of a nuclear attack on the Ukraine by the Russians. There’s only one problem with that story. The Russians weren’t shelling it, the Russian forces were already in the plant! Why would they shell their own forces? The fire was in a training area next to the nuclear plant, set by the Ukrainian saboteurs who were trying to attack the Russian forces in the nuclear plant. Did you read that in the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN? No, they’re essentially saying that madman Putin was preparing to blow up one of the largest nuclear power plants in all of Europe, to destroy the people of Ukraine.
All of this is being done for the sake of defending a collapsing world order.
The Principle of Westphalia
Because of the lies, many people have not yet come to appreciate those people in the United States who reacted against the globalist elites, who are attacking the Bush Republicans, the Clinton Democrats, and others for taking away sovereignty from the United States. What they don’t realize is that Russia and China are leading a fight globally to defend the concept of sovereign nations acting in the interests of their country in cooperation with other nations. This is the principle of the Peace of Westphalia.
Who is the leader in the world in trying to take down that principle? It was [former UK Prime Minister] Tony Blair, who, since the end of the 1990s and all through the period of the last 20-something years, has carried out a campaign under the slogan “Responsibility to Protect,” which is really an excuse for regime-change of any government which refuses to submit to the order of the post-Cold War, of the unipolar order run by the City of London and Wall Street.
If you oppose that, then you’re authoritarian, and therefore a target for regime change. The Russians will have to pay. The Russian people will have to pay. The implication is that any nation, especially nations not as powerful as Russia, must submit or they’ll also be destroyed. From that standpoint, the fact that 27 African nations refused to knuckle under to the pressure to vote to condemn Russia in the UN General Assembly shows the opposition to this world order. We saw opposition also with the Indian response at the Quad. We see it with countries in Asia, in eastern Europe. The opposition to this world order, I should say central Europe.
The fight that’s being waged is not about Ukraine per se. The people of Ukraine are, rather, the victims of the NATO-U.S. drive to crush Russia. And that’s something you should remember when you’re watching this on television. You’re being induced to support a war that ultimately is going to take away your freedom.
