Monday, December 8, 2014

Fascist is as fascist does

The Tweet got deleted before I thought of making a screenshot, but this was the picture.
Not that we should judge people by their looks anyway, but no, as Dr. Google found out fairly quickly, this is Russian propaganda at its most brazen and ridiculous. It's not the interior minister.
The thing about the name sounds like a pretty cheap shot, but subsequent investigation bears out that Artëm (pronounced Artyom) is pretty uncommon among Ukrainian speakers, where it can get confused with the popular Ukrainian name Artem (pronounced Artem).
He is said to have killed a neighbor for annoying him with his smoking. He is also alleged to be a member of the right-wing paramilitary "Azov" Battalion, which supports the Ukrainian government (for the time being) against Russian-speaking rebels (though it is apparently largely Russian-speaking itself), and it certainly has a Nazi smell. I have no reason to think Salesov is not really a member of this organization, I just wanted to point out that he is not in any way the minister of the interior.
I think the only way Avakov comes into it is that he was the one who originally authorized the formation of paramilitaries to help combat the Russians and/or rebels, last April, and at the end of October appointed Vadym Troyan, a former deputy commander of the "Azov" Battalion, as chief of the Kiyiv Oblast police (provincial police, not in the city), a hire which was strongly condemned by Ukraine's chief rabbi Yaakov Bleich because of Troyan's far-right associations, and
Holya Coynash of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group calls appointing Troyan police chief an “awful” move. She says Troyan has been linked to neo-Nazi groups such as the Patriots of Ukraine in the past. She does not think the move is indicative of boarder [sic] right-wing sympathies in the government but says it is a careful balancing act in Ukraine currently to criticize right-wing groups because Russia uses any such critiques for its propaganda purposes....
Troyan says he is dedicated to changing the image and content of the police. “No one has the right to insult anyone else.” 
Well, sigh. I'd be the last person to imagine that there is no anti-Semitism or even outright Nazism to be found in Ukraine (we think of it as Cossacks that chased my ancestors out of Bessarabia, though it was probably Russian monarchists), but I'm not sure how organized it is. It's reassuring that the chief rabbi and others feel safe coming out and complaining about this—compare Russia's chief rabbi, the Lubavitcher Berel Lazar, who takes pride in his closeness to the Kremlin and the oligarchs, criticizes them almost not at all, and asks American Jews not to criticize them either, because "they don't understand the soul of the Russian people". Although there's quite a lot for Jews to complain about in Russia.

The reason Avakov authorized forming paramilitary forces, by the way, was that it was part of the process of disbanding the unofficial ones:
as tensions in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, have grown between nationalist groups who continue to patrol the main squares of the city and Arsen Avakov, the country’s new interior minister.
Those guys were crazy, and the object was to bring them under some kind of government control, which was not a bad idea. And a little dependency (the members are paid $70 a month).

Ukrainians in power are way more to the right than I am quite comfortable with (like the power people of Czechia and Hungary), and that really often does go along with anti-Semitic and even fascist associations (hi there, Pat Buchanan), but when you want to think about who is fascist and who isn't, you really need to think more in terms of structure than anything else, and the way Ukraine is working out is just too messy to be fascist.

Fascism requires, in the first place, a heroic Leader, not ambiguous and lost in the misty past like Stepan Bandera, but now, running stuff and inspiring love and fear. In particular mastering the economy with a single voice, not three different voices at once like the economy minister Pavlo Sheremata,
“We are not looking at decoupling from Russia. I wouldn’t call it decoupling,” Sheremeta told IBTimes. “But we need to sign the association agreement with the European Union very soon. As soon as the partnership is signed, the Ukrainian government, the Ukrainian companies will have to adopt EU standards and that’s going to re-launch our economy.”... Despite its calm posture, the interim government has been unable to dispel a sense of confusion and lack of direction.
And you'd expect the trade unions to be kicking back against that management (cheating labor in favor of its pet oligarchs), not supporting it against an anti-labor resistance—
The ITUC has expressed alarm at continued interventions by armed groups in the internal affairs of Ukraine’s trade union movement, with the latest case involving attempts to bring the Federation of Trade Unions of Lugansk Oblast (FPLO) under the control of the self-proclaimed leaders of the “Lugansk People’s Republic”.
FPLO officials were told, at gunpoint, to convene a meeting of the Federation to disaffiliate from the national trade union centre FPU and were threatened with reprisals if they took part in FPU meetings. National centre KVPU has also reported violence and intimidation against its members and officials in the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts.
A leader who will do his best to stop those workers from organizing! A leader who will cultivate a filthy rich upper class of his own sycophants and flunkeys! A leader who will ruthlessly stamp down an independent press for the masses while no doubt leaving some freedom to a more sophisticated audience of his friends! A leader who will demand the nation's spiritual renewal, not some damn chocolate magnate! A leader who will militarize his country no matter what the cost, seeing enemies everywhere! A leader who looks good as good in uniform as out of it! Oh, hell, you probably already figured out where I'm going here...

Via The Economist.
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