NP: On the Ukraine thread

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Am 12.02.2022 um 13:16 schrieb Mark Kohut:

> Here's another, easier, contingent prediction. IF Autocrat-in-Chief
> Rutin DOES commit the international war crime of invading a
> sovereign country, what you wrote is
> what he will claim. The (disputed) neo-Nazi battalions, part of the
> Ukraine Army ready to fight for their country, 'attacked' the Russian
> military exercise of bringing 130,000 soldiers
> to the border of their state---obviously in self-defense readiness
> against all those "neo-Nazi battalions" who were not there until the
> Russian tanks were.

There is nothing "disputed" about the Azov Battalion.

The "international war crime of invading a sovereign country" reminds me
of John Kerry:

"You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by
invading another country on completely trumped up pretext."

I predict that Putin will claim that there are WMD in Ukraine that can
reach Moscow in 45 minutes. Or that Ukrainian soldiers took babies out
of incubators, stole the incubators and left the babies to die. Or that
Zelensky is planning a genocide of his own people and distributing
Viagra to his soldiers. In any case, the facts will be fixed around the
policy.

> You are still Dr. Hilarious although not a Nazi as the plist said in
> unison when I called you him before but just as crazily hilarious. The
> mind boggles.

What a weird ad hominem.

> You
> should look at them [Nazis]
> in the US and see with whom they align, speaking of Russia Love...

It may well be the case that some American neo-Nazis adore Putin's
Russia. Others, as I have demonstrated before, train with the Azov
Battalion:

"Last month, an unsealed FBI indictment of four American white
supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) declared that the
defendants had trained with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia
officially incorporated into the country’s national guard. The training
took place after the white supremacist gang participated in violent
riots in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, California and Charlottesville,
Virginia in 2017. The indictment stated that the Azov Battalion 'is
believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United
States-based white supremacy organizations.'

After a wave of racist violence across America that culminated in the
massacre of twelve Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the
revelation that violent white supremacists have been traveling abroad
for training and ideological indoctrination with a well-armed neo-Nazi
militia should cause extreme alarm."

"There is one likely explanation for the U.S. government’s hands-off
approach to Azov recruitment: the extremist militia is fighting
pro-Russian separatists as a front-line proxy of Washington. In fact,
the United States has directly armed the Azov Battalion, forking over
anti-tank rocket launchers and even sending a team of Army officers to
meet in the field with Azov commanders in 2017.

Though Congress passed legislation this year forbidding military aid to
Azov on the grounds of its white supremacist ideology, the Trump
administration’s authorization of $200 million in offensive weaponry and
aid to the Ukrainian military makes it likely new stores of weapons will
wind up the extremist regiment’s hands. When queried by reporters about
evidence of American military training of Azov personnel, multiple U.S.
army spokespersons admitted there was no mechanism in place to prevent
that from happening."

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/11/17/blowback-us-funded-ukraine-neo-nazis-mentor-us-white-supremacists/

It seems that the Rise Above Movement, Donald Trump and you can agree on
at least one thing: Arming the Azov Battalion is a good thing.

I am anti-Nazi, and I disagree.