Springtime in Kiev. Again.

Kiev’s latest acts of official fascism worship are not a bug but a feature

As in Mel Brooks dark satire of Western Nazi fetishism, it’s hard to believe one’s eyes while witnessing the latest performance put on by the comedian tyrant of Ukraine. Within the span of a week or so, the regime of president-in-eternity-no-elections-needed Vladimir Zelensky has repatriated and reburied with pomp and circumstance the remains of Andriy Melnyk, a twentieth-century Ukrainian fascist leader as well as Nazi collaborator, and named a contemporary military elite unit “Heroes of the UPA” (that is, of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of World War Two).

The UPA was, in effect, the military arm of the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN had two political wings that mattered, one under Andriy Melnyk, the other under Stepan Bandera. They were rivals, but both were fascists.

During the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both OUN wings tried to collaborate with the Nazis. The Nazis, in their arrogance, did not always let them, but the whole OUN was very eager to please. The OUN and the UPA also participated in murderous German violence against Jews, serving as pro-active mass murder auxiliaries. In addition, they conducted a genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign of their own against Poles.

Predictably, the in-your-face obscenity of Kiev’s latest fascism worship moves has provoked Israel as well as Poland. Polish president Nawrocki would like to deprive Zelensky of the high state honors that Warsaw has foolishly bestowed on him and has threatened to curtail Poland’s support for Kiev’s EU ambitions. In Israel, both its official Holocaust remembrance and exploitation agency Yad Vashem and the foreign ministry have taken exception. That is, of course, ironic, since Israel itself engages obsessively in genocide and ethnic cleansing as well as in, literally, every war crime there is. Maybe, in this case, it takes a genocidal fascist to know one.

Official Kiev is in the middle of devastating corruption scandals – but to be fair, when is it not? – and shaken by mortifying revelations about Zelensky personally (surprise, surprise: a raging narcissist on coke and not a democrat but a kleptocrat) from a well-informed insider speaking to one of America’s most influential media outlets. Yet its ruling clique finds time to really rub it in, again, just how much it cannot stop hugging Nazis, dead and alive. Costs in foreign-policy terms? Apparently, no big deal: When the Nazi-loving urge itches really bad, to hell with caution and – very unusually for Kiev – even dissembling.

Some observers speculate that the fascism fetish is being escalated in public again because of the scandals and always plunging popularity of the regime: Zelensky and the rest of his merry gang of war profiteers and proxy war meatgrinder jockeys, such commentators believe, are merely using the Nazi play “out of a position of weakness,” to distract from the extraordinarily, unprecedently fetid swamp into which they have turned Ukraine’s always sleazy politics.

This is a mistake. It is time that even the slowest in the West accept a simple truth about Zelensky, one he is not even hiding (like so many others): He genuinely likes fascists. And, with his extremely cynical manipulation techniques, his vicious persecution of political opposition and any dissent, his abuse of the mass media for propaganda, and his deep contempt for democracy, he has much heartfelt affinity with them, to say the least.

Silly – and, actually, racist – pseudo-arguments, advanced by Western proxy war boosters that Zelensky can’t possibly ally with a violent far right because he is Jewish deserve no serious answer. The current Israeli regime and its policies of war, genocide, supremacy, and ethnic cleansing are fascist. Case closed.

In fact, the Zelensky regime has a longstanding, consistent habit of pandering to, working with, employing at high levels and on a large scale, and honoring the very far right. Some may love to quibble – bored-academic-style – about pedantically precise terms for fine distinctions in one big pile of rottenness. But, in reality, those labeled Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, fascists, ultra-nationalists and so on form a large whole having much more in common than not.

Re-labelling has also served to spread big fat lies: Indeed, in the case of Ukraine there is a long, foul tradition, reaching back far into the frozen depths of the first Cold War, of mendaciously re-packaging Ukrainian World War Two fascists with their own bloody flavor of terror, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. But re-labelling these Ukrainian fascists “integral nationalists” makes about as much sense as calling Idi Amin Dada – once ultraviolent dictator of Uganda and rumored to have sampled a few of his victims – an “integral vegan.”

And so it is in the present, too: Play with words as much as you like, a fact remains a fact: Zelensky’s Ukraine is state with a big fascism problem. In time, its roots reach back to the period between World Wars One and Two, with a massive escalation during the latter. Regionally, it used to be concentrated in western Ukraine and, after the Soviet victory over fascism in 1945, among fugitives in the US, Cananda, and Europe. There, with their brand of ready-to-kill fascist anti-Communism, they served the West in the first Cold War and systematically subverted Ukrainian communities and any institution they could buy their way into, such as Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this self-declared Ukrainian “diaspora” – ironically, a term popularized out of the same Israel-envy that produced an unseemly urge to politically claim a Holocaust of one’s own in the shape of the “Holodomor” (preferably with even bigger victim counts) – re-entered independent Ukraine and “repatriated” its ideology, vitiating Ukraine’s culture and politics with, unfortunately, great success.

In that, long-term sense, Zelensky and his regime’s sympathy for the fascist devil is part of a longer story. Yet Zelensky’s personal contribution is not merely substantial but crucial. First because he has simply gone much farther than any post-independent leader of Ukraine in making fascism part of a deeply sick new normality. And second, because in our world of often imbecilic identity politics, he has, in effect, exploited his Jewishness to promote his normalization of fascism. It is hard to imagine a greater intellectual and moral perversion. But then, this is Zelensky.