With how the hard-left mainstream media and its allies throw around the terms “Nazis” and “white supremacists,” often applying them to those merely opposing their woke racial agenda, you’d think they wholly despised Nazis and white supremacists. And with the way these establishment guardians seek to cancel anyone thus labeled, you’d think that actually exhibiting the passions in question would be disqualifying anywhere, anytime.
You would think that, that is, if you thought that thought was the issue, if you fancied that principle and not situation-determined priorities governed these self-proclaimed fascism fighters. Since they’re in thrall to feelings, however, it’s not surprising that the Western media have now found actual Nazis they cotton to — in Ukraine.
As The Nation’s Lev Golinkin writes:
For seven years, Western institutions have warned about Ukraine’s Azov Movement, which began as a neo-Nazi paramilitary group in 2014 and became notorious for its worldwide recruitment of extremists.
Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, Azov fighters were being feted in Congress and at Stanford University. MSNBC swooned over a Ukrainian soldier whose Twitter account overflowed with neo-Nazi images. Facebook made the stunning decision to allow posts praising the Azov Battalion, even though the company admitted that it was a hate group.
This overnight normalization of white supremacy was possible because Western institutions, driven by a zeal to ignore anything negative about our Ukrainian allies, decided that a neo-Nazi military formation in a war-torn nation had suddenly and miraculously stopped being neo-Nazi.
But the truth is that this is an easily debunked fantasy spun out by a handful of propagandists. Yet Western media has repeated their falsehoods with a neglect for the basic tenets of journalism that stretches beyond the fog of war into the realm of intentional blindness.
Golinkin buttresses his case with concrete examples of Azov’s neo-Nazi bent and the establishment’s whitewashing of it. As to the latter, he relates that in 2018, “The Guardian had published an article titled ‘Neo-Nazi Groups Recruit Britons to Fight in Ukraine,’ in which the Azov Regiment was called ‘a notorious Ukrainian fascist militia.’ Indeed, as late as November 2020, The Guardian was calling Azov a ‘neo-Nazi extremist movement.’”
Yet by “February 2023, The Guardian was assuring readers that Azov’s fighters ‘are now leading the defence of Mariupol, insisting they have shed their previous dubious politics and rapidly becoming Ukrainian heroes,’” Golinkin continues. This reflects the media’s general conversion on Azov, too.
What’s more, since Big Tech would never contradict its old media allies, “Meta, Facebook’s parent company, later simplified matters by removing the Azov Regiment from its list of dangerous organizations,” Golinkin adds.
Note, too, that The Guardian had in 2015 called Ukraine “the most corrupt nation in Europe.” Yet while this reflected media consensus at the time, it hasn’t stopped the press from now swearing we must pour billions into the country and risk nuclear war to perpetuate this grand experiment in kleptocracy.
Of course, were our involvement in Ukraine prudent, it might be sufficient to say of Azov that war, even more than politics, makes strange bedfellows; why, we allied during WWII with a far worse entity, psychopathic mass murderer Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
It’s also tiresome hearing about the Nazi/white supremacist boogeyman from media that bat not an eye at Black Lives Matter’s founders being “trained Marxists” or the fact that neo-communist sentiments pervade our pseudo-elite institutions (academia, entertainment, etc.). Golinkin himself plays this game, grossly exaggerating and writing that “Our whitewashing of Azov takes place amid a deadly surge of white supremacy that stretches from New Zealand to Buffalo, N.Y.” and “is an existential threat to our society.” He also repeats the lie that it was “mainstreamed by Donald Trump and Fox News.”
Yet he does correctly point out that this issue is actually “about the deepest, nothing-matters cynicism that screams about 300 neo-Nazis in polo shirts yet embraces a brigade of battle-hardened extremists” in Ukraine. What he doesn’t say, though, likely because he doesn’t grasp it, is that this is par for the relativistic, situational-values, end-justifies-the-means Left’s course.
The Left will push an agenda, such as climate-change “mitigation,” with “Do it for the children!” Leftists, you see, claim to love children. But then they’ll happily kill babies in the womb and facilitate the mutilation of older kids’ genitalia in the name of “freedom” and “expression.” They’ll tout the “rule of law” when trying to imprison President Trump while ignoring Joe Biden’s scandals and ensuring the southern-border invasion continues unabated. They’ll wink and nod at destructive BLM/Antifa riots (600-plus in 2020) but then posture about middle school students tearing down some sexual devolutionary (“LGBTQ”) “Pride” month “decorations,” as property, suddenly, becomes sacrosanct. The perfect expression of this mentality was when a liberal NYC parent explained his opposition to an integration plan at his kids’ school by saying, “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children.”
Yes, it’s also more complicated when it’s about your own Nazis.
None of this is surprising. People divorced from Truth (objective by definition) operate by taste. For them, there generally is no such thing as “principle,” only preferences — which change with the political winds.
The reality is that many leftists couldn’t care less about “Nazis,” except insofar as hurling the term has political utility. Others may hate Nazis, but hate is an emotion, a mercurial thing. And when situational imperatives change those emotions, Nazis can become heroes.
Thus could an SDS radical write, apparently during an honest moment, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
