It is nearly impossible to separate the term “Ukrainian nationalism” from National Socialism because the former is not merely a product of the latter, but has been actively promoted as such in order to serve as a “counterbalance” to the “international socialism” embraced by the former USSR during the 20th century. It is one part of a large and well-documented plan by the USA and her allies with the end goal of breaking up Russia into a series of warring states and controlling the world through a series of multi-polar axes of power.
Ukraine has been a major focus of this plan because of her strategic importance through the centuries in the geopolitical struggles between Germany and Russia, her status as a historical center of food production, the fact that she has consistently remained an impoverished land, that she is one of two land gateways from the oil-producing regions of the greater Turanian basin around the Caspian Sea to Europe (the other being through Turkey), and that she is the ethno-historical homeland of the Russian people beginning with the conversion of the Kiyvyan Rus in 988. To control Ukraine is to control one of Russia’s major economic, cultural, historical, and political access points to Germany and the rest of Europe and will have an inherently crippling effect on the whole nation. Germany knows this well, and is why in both the First and Second World Wars, Germany seized Ukraine as quickly as she could before marching to the Caspian Sea.
I asserted in my article on Azerbaijan that Germany’s plans have not changed but that she is trying to learn from the lessons of history. Germany lost World War I in part because she could not seize Ukraine quickly enough. She was able to do this in World War II, but lost because she could not fully get control over the transport lines from the oil fields of Baku and the Turanian Basin to Europe through Ukraine and under the Black Sea. The climax of the fighting over this happened at the horrific Battle of Stalingrad, where the Russians emerged victorious after a five-month battle that killed a million Russians, half-a-million Germans, and most of the city’s half-a-million inhabitants. Germany knows that there is a strong chance she will lose if she is forced into a Battle of Stalingrad scenario again, which is why she is aggressively working with Turkey and the USA to build a comprehensive network of oil pipelines and advanced railway systems around that area, so she can seize the oil fast and ensure that even in the case of a true disaster, she will still be able to get the oil she needs to driver her war machine.
Russia also knows of Germany’s plans as well, for the two have been fighting for centuries, and is the reason for the prolonged conflict in Ukraine and the ensuing violence since the Euromaidan in 2013. For Russia, she is also building her own network of railways and series of pipelines, but must also work to keep Germany from expanding her network into those around Russia’s already-established infrastructure throughout the Caucasus region. This was in large part why Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula, for while it has a history of rebellion owing to the Goths and Tartars for centuries, it is also a major port-of-entry into Ukraine by the Sea of Azov through the port city of Kerch, which leads directly to the Caucasus region through Krasnodar Krai, Russia and to the contested Caucasian semi-autonomous regions including but not limited to Cherkessia, Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria, and of course Chechnya and Dagestan. It is one of the reason why Russia has promoted the emergence of the Donetsk People’s Republic, which for all practical purposes is only “recognized” by Russia, and it is the same strategy that the US and NATO has used, which is to support the creation of micro-states with nationalism as a catalyst to break up the area and make it easier to control just as with the promotion of Catalonian and South Tyrolean nationalism in the European continent.
In order to advance national socialism, Germany and the US have continued to support militant activity in Ukraine, and one of such examples as of recent has been to support and train militias of children and teenagers to serve as fighters:
The campers, some clad in combat fatigues, carefully aim their assault rifles. Their instructor offers advice: Don’t think of your target as a human being.
So when these boys and girls shoot, they will shoot to kill.
Most are in their teens, but some are as young as 8 years old. They are at a summer camp created by one of Ukraine’s radical nationalist groups, hidden in a forest in the west of the country, that was visited by The Associated Press. The camp has two purposes: to train children to defend their country from Russians and their sympathizers — and to spread nationalist ideology.
“We never aim guns at people,” instructor Yuri “Chornota” Cherkashin tells them. “But we don’t count separatists, little green men, occupiers from Moscow, as people. So we can and should aim at them.”
The nationalists have been accused of violence and racism, but they have played a central, volunteer role in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia — and they have maintained links with the government. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Youth and Sports earmarked 4 million hryvnias (about $150,000) to fund some of the youth camps among the dozens built by the nationalists. The purpose, according to the ministry, is “national patriotic education.”
Ministry spokeswoman Natalia Vernigora said the money is distributed by a panel which looks for “signs of xenophobia and discrimination, it doesn’t analyze activities of specific groups.”
Cherkashin is a veteran of the fight against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine; he was wounded in combat and later came to lead Sokil, or Falcon, the youth wing of the Svoboda party. It is important, he says, to inculcate the nation’s youth with nationalist thought, so they can battle Vladimir Putin’s Russia as well as “challenges that could completely destroy” European civilization.
Among those challenges: LGBT rights, which lecturers denounce as a sign of Western decadence.
“You need to be aware of all that,” said instructor Ruslan Andreiko. “All those gender things, all those perversions of modern Bolsheviks who have come to power in Europe and now try to make all those LGBT things like gay pride parades part of the education system.”
While some youths dozed off during lectures, others paid attention. Clearly, some were receptive.
During a break in training, a teenager played a nationalist march on his guitar. It was decorated with a sticker showing white bombs hitting a mosque, under the motto, “White Europe is Our Goal.”
Aside from the lectures — and songs around the campfire — life for the several dozen youths at the Svoboda camp was hard.
Campers were awakened in the middle of the night with a blast from a stun grenade. Stumbling out of their tents, soldiers in training struggled to hold AK-47s that were, in some cases, almost as tall as they were. They were required to carry the heavy rifles all day, and one of the girls broke down in tears from exhaustion.
At 18, Mykhailo was the oldest of the campers. The training, he said, was necessary.
“Every moment things can go wrong in our country. And one has to be ready for it,” he said. “That’s why I came to this camp. To study how to protect myself and my loved ones” (source, source)
If this was in the West Bank, and the children doing this were Muslims, they would be called “Islamic terrorists” and it would be decried as child abuse.
Likewise, if this was in sub-saharan Africa in many of the child armies so infamously known in the area, such as Joseph Kony‘s Lord’s Resistance Army, it would also be criticized.
However, why is there not only a lack of criticism, but what appears to be support for this army in Ukraine? How is it not different in a fundamental sense than these other armies in other parts of the world?
The difference is, as noted above, they are being funded by the Western world for their purposes.
In the movie The Godfather, Luca Brasi plays Don Corleone’s preferred assassin until he is murdered by Virgil “The Turk” Solozzo at the order of the Barzini family in what culminates in Michael Corleone’s transition from American hero to the head of the Corleone family who massacres the other families of New York before relocating to Las Vegas. However, in the original novel, Luca Brasi was not just an assassin, but a psycho who murdered his girlfriend after she gave birth to his child, and then threw the newborn child into a furnace and cooked him alive. Corleone was terrified of Brasi in the novel, but he supported and protected him because, while Brasi may have been a psycho, he was for all purposes “his psycho.”
The same is the case here with the “child soldiers.” It does not matter that these are children fighting or that what they are doing is evil, but that they are “our kids” who are fighting, and it is different if it is “not ours.”