I see Petlyura really as the father of Ukrainian fascism more than Bandera. Bandera was more or less a pupil of Petlyura and so this movement has its origins to the time when the Germans first occupied the Ukraine in 1918. They saw the advantage then of sponsoring an extreme Ukrainian nationalist movement with clerical overtones, anti-Russian, anti-Jewish and deeply so. We should remember Petlyura denounced Russians and Jews and also outlawed the Russian language. And so the flag of present day Ukraine dates to that time as well.
So all of this was then re- … that was a kind of dress rehearsal. A lot of American Jews know about this because it is their family background, the estimates of historians is that between 150,000 and 200,000 Jews were killed in the Ukraine just during the period from 1917 to 1921, during these pogroms. There was over 2,000 pogroms.
So, this is well-known to many American Jews even if the American-Jewish leaders may not wish to come out and denounce US foreign policy in the Ukraine, in supporting these movements, nevertheless many, many American Jews are familiar with this story.
Robles: What is the reaction, what is your reaction to Victoria Nuland? She is a member of the Jewish community. I am sure she had Intelligence, I am sure she knew exactly who Svoboda was, who Yatsenyuk was, who Tyganbok was. How could they actually allow these people to come into power?
Lituchy: Yeah, well it’s very hard for me to know exactly what’s in the mind of someone like Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland or much less her husband Robert Kagan, the hardline neo-conservative, theorist and advisor to presidents from Reagan to Clinton.
As far as their Jewish identity and their desire to use political movements with deeply anti-Semitic as well as racist, anti-Russian racist ideas, that is something really for a psychiatrist, I think, to figure out.
Robles: Is this a case perhaps of they are after Russia, so they’ll do anything they can?
Lituchy: Well John, the United States has …. US foreign policy has, for a very long time used former Nazis and other neo-Nazis in foreign policy.
Perhaps the most dramatic recent case of this was in Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia it became quite clear when the United States first was putting pressure to break up Yugoslavia in early 1990, it was quite clear that the conflict that was emerging in Yugoslavia was sponsored by the United States and European countries like Britain and Germany and even the Vatican by reviving neo-fascist movements.
These neo-fascist movements whether they be the Croatian Ustaša, or Croatian Nazis, or Bosnian-Muslim fascists, like Alija Izetbegović, who in fact was a former Nazi. Regardless of what they were, it was clear that this was part of the policy and that was what was driving the conflict and that ultimately proved to be the decisive factor in shattering Yugoslavia, in destroying Yugoslavia.
And that was why I began to organize conferences and ultimately leading to my book on this subject of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, because there was a clear connection to US foreign policy in the Balkans and the revival of these fascist movements, and that story was being suppressed.
That was being suppressed in the media at that time, it was even suppressed in Holocaust institutions. Well particularly the US government Holocaust Museum in Washington DC told nothing about the story of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia when it opened in 1993 and in fact they invited Franjo Tudjman, an open anti-Semite and racist, an anti-Serb, to speak to the opening of that museum.
Robles: How could they possibly do that? What were they thinking? Are they making a mockery of everything?
Lituchy: The Yugoslav Jewish community did protest that but it got no play in the media, it was suppressed just as they had suppressed in the museum the whole story of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia at that time.
Since then, of course, they have added it to the museum but at that time because it was an inconvenient truth for the US government to talk about it, the US government in their museum on the Holocaust just erased the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, it didn’t talk about the hundreds of thousands of Serbs, the 60,000 plus Jews, and the hundreds of thousands of Romas who were killed in Yugoslavia simply for being who they were, for racist reasons by the Croatian Ustaša and other fascist collaborators.
The lesson that was learnt from that experience in the 1990s in the Balkans was that this oppression of historical truth in regard to the Holocaust is a life-or-death issue because it ultimately it sets peoples up for victimization. In other words, the same people who were the victims of the Holocaust in World War II were being targeted to be victimized all over again. And this is the problem again with the Ukraine.
This is why the story of the fascists in the Ukraine, the massive involvement of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists, in carrying out the Holocaust in the Ukraine and their subordination to the SS and the Nazis in the occupation and Holocaust in Ukraine in World War II is being suppressed because it goes contrary to US foreign policy and because the aim of US foreign policy is to suppress that truth. So the same people can be victimized all over again – in this case, Russians and Jews.
Robles: Since you mentioned that, how important it is not to forget history, President Putin today just signed several laws into effect making Holocaust denial, making whitewashing Nazism, being an apologist and making false statements about World War II, those are now – in the US they are called felony offenses – but those are serious crimes now in Russia.
Lituchy: They are serious. They are serious.
Robles: What I have seen, for example with my students, young people today almost know nothing about the Holocaust, about what Nazis did in the concentration camps, about the experiments, about the atrocities. In Ukraine I think people just try to ignore the problem. Now there is blood flowing in the streets.
Lituchy: Governments today in the West, the United States, the European Union, Britain, Germany, they want to suppress the truth about the Holocaust in the Ukraine. They want to suppress the truth about the fascist movement in the Ukraine and its crimes because they want to allow these movements who victimized the peoples of the Ukraine, the non-Ukrainian population, the Russians and the Jews, and anyone who isn’t Ukrainian. They want to victimize them all over again so that they can use this Ukrainian ultra-nationalist and fascist movements to establish NATO expansion into the Ukraine. I think everyone knows that but that’s being suppressed by the media. It’s being suppressed by the government.
You were listening to an interview with Professor Barry Lituchy, he teaches history at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York. He is also the editor and co-author of “Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia” analysis and survivor testimony. He is the President and founder of the Jasenovac Research Foundation, as well as the Vice President of the Holocaust Memorial Committee in Brooklyn, New York.
John Robles
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