>>19439495
The Right Connections
Many surviving OUN-B members fled to Western Europe and the United States – occasionally with CIA help – where they quietly forged political alliances with right-wing elements. “You have to understand, that we are an underground organization. We have spent years quietly penetrating positions of influence,” one member told journalist Russ Bellant, who documented the group’s resurgence in the United States in his 1988 book, “Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party.”
In Washington, the OUN-B reconstituted under the banner of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), an umbrella organization comprised of “complete OUN-B fronts,” according to Bellant. By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members, with the group’s chairman Lev Dobriansky, serving as ambassador to the Bahamas, and his daughter, Paula, sitting on the National Security Council. Reagan personally welcomed Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7000 Jews in Lviv, into the White House in 1983.
_
“Your struggle is our struggle,” Reagan told the former Nazi collaborator. “Your dream is our dream.”
_
When the Justice Department launched a crusade to capture and prosecute Nazi war criminals in 1985, UCCA snapped into action, lobbying Congress to halt the initiative. “The UCCA has also played a leading role in opposing federal investigations of suspected Nazi war criminals since those queries got underway in the late 1970s,” Bellant wrote. “Some UCCA members have many reasons to worry – reasons which began in the 1930s.”
Still an active and influential lobbying force in Washington, the UCCA does not appear to have shed its reverence for Banderist nationalism. In 2009, on the 50th anniversary of Bandera’s death, the group proclaimed him “a symbol of strength and righteousness for his followers” who “continue[s] to inspire Ukrainians today.” A year later, the group honored the 60th anniversary of the death of Roman Shukhevych, the OUN-B commander of the Nachtigall Battalion that slaughtered Jews in Lviv and Belarus, calling him a “hero” who “fought for honor, righteousness…”
Back in Ukraine in 2010, then-President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the title of “National Hero of Ukraine,” marking the culmination of his efforts to manufacture an anti-Russian national narrative that sanitized the OUN-B’s fascism. (Yuschenko’s wife, Katherine Chumachenko, was a former Reagan administration official and ex-staffer at the right-wing Heritage Foundation). When the European Parliament condemned Yushchenko's proclamation as an affront to "European values," the UCCA-affiliated Ukrainian World Congress reacted with outrage, accusing the EU of "another attempt to rewrite Ukrainian history during WWII." On its website, the UCCA dismissed historical accounts of Bandera's collaboration with the Nazis as "Soviet propaganda."
Following the demise of Yanukovich this month, the UCCA helped organize rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests. When several hundred demonstrators marched through downtown Chicago, some waved Ukrainian flags while others proudly flew the red and black banners of the UPA and OUN-B. "USA supports Ukraine!" they chanted.
Video below:
The Great Ukrainian Reconquista (*): What is the Right Sector fighting for?
(*)Reconquest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7onBw-s3xoM"
Max Blumenthal
24 February 2014
http://www.alternet.org/…/us-backing-neo-nazis-ukraine…
—
Image:
Ukraine Svoboda Party US Support Collage - jpeg
Clockwise:
◌ Top U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland meets with Tyahnybok and Yatsenyuk weeks before they were handed power under Ukraine’s new US-backed interim government.
◌ John McCain with leader of the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party Oleh Tyahnybok.
◌ Ukraine Right-wing militia 'The Patriot of Ukraine'
◌ Ukraine Svoboda Party
4/4
2 MARCH 2014