Ukraine: How the Mainstream Media Learned to LOVE Nazis
With how the hard-left mainstream media and its allies throw around the terms “Nazis” and “white supremacists,” often applying them to those merely opposing their woke racial agenda, you’d think they wholly despised Nazis and white supremacists. And with the way these establishment guardians seek to cancel anyone thus labeled, you’d think that actually exhibiting the passions in question would be disqualifying anywhere, anytime.
You would think that, that is, if you thought that thought was the issue, if you fancied that principle and not situation-determined priorities governed these self-proclaimed fascism fighters. Since they’re in thrall to feelings, however, it’s not surprising that the Western media have now found actual Nazis they cotton to — in Ukraine.
As The Nation’s Lev Golinkin writes:
For seven years, Western institutions have warned about Ukraine’s Azov Movement, which began as a neo-Nazi paramilitary group in 2014 and became notorious for its worldwide recruitment of extremists.
Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, Azov fighters were being feted in Congress and at Stanford University. MSNBC swooned over a Ukrainian soldier whose Twitter account overflowed with neo-Nazi images. Facebook made the stunning decision to allow posts praising the Azov Battalion, even though the company admitted that it was a hate group.
This overnight normalization of white supremacy was possible because Western institutions, driven by a zeal to ignore anything negative about our Ukrainian allies, decided that a neo-Nazi military formation in a war-torn nation had suddenly and miraculously stopped being neo-Nazi.
But the truth is that this is an easily debunked fantasy spun out by a handful of propagandists. Yet Western media has repeated their falsehoods with a neglect for the basic tenets of journalism that stretches beyond the fog of war into the realm of intentional blindness.
Golinkin buttresses his case with concrete examples of Azov’s neo-Nazi bent and the establishment’s whitewashing of it. As to the latter, he relates that in 2018, “The Guardian had published an article titled ‘Neo-Nazi Groups Recruit Britons to Fight in Ukraine,’ in which the Azov Regiment was called ‘a notorious Ukrainian fascist militia.’ Indeed, as late as November 2020, The Guardian was calling Azov a ‘neo-Nazi extremist movement.’”
From The New American, here.