On Tuesday, October 29, Israeli warplanes bombed a five-story house in Beit Lahia belonging to the Abu Nasr family. Immediately after the bombing, the Government Media Office in Gaza announced via Telegram that the bombing killed 93 people, while 40 others remain missing.

Ahmad Abu Nasr, 24, says that the building that was bombed contained most of the Abu Nasr family, who came from different parts of northern Gaza and took refuge in the building.

“Many families and dozens of displaced people were taking refuge in this house. They came from dangerous areas, such as Beit Lahia refugee camp, the Sheikh Zayed area, and many areas in the north. They came to take refuge in their relatives’ homes. Entire families, young, old, women and children — they were all wiped out,” Abu Nasr tells Mondoweiss

“The martyrs were lying in the streets as a result of the intensity of the bombing, dismembered,” Abu Nasr adds. “Parts of their bodies were visible above the rubble, and the rest of their bodies had disappeared.”

An older man, Abdul Qader Abu al-Nasr, 66, sits in front of the rubble of the destroyed building. The sound of women wailing around him is audible in a video interview with him collected for Mondoweiss. Around him are survivors of the massacre, including women carrying their children.

The man recounts the horror of what he witnessed. “What do you want me to tell you? Who should I tell it to? Who will hear our screams or care about us?”

Abu al-Nasr lost 11 members of his family, including his sons, daughters, and grandchildren. “The building was just bombed on top of their heads. All of them were civilians fleeing death.”

“Let the world eat, sleep, and drink. The Israeli army killed my sons. They killed my daughters. They killed my grandchildren. What is the world waiting for?” Abu al-Nasr does not finish his last sentence before he starts crying.

(Mirror.)

Within the camp, first barrack foundation is located next to the entrance. The foundation consists of c. 20 cm high and 1 meter wide bank of fine sand (Figure 6) and is the size of prefabricated barracks that the Finnish woodcraft enterprises sold [to Axis] troops in great quantities […] (Figure 7) (Westerlund 2008b, 133; Kallatsa 2009, 21).

A concrete slab that served as a base for a stove is identifiable within this foundation. Remains of some more lightweight structure were documented opposite to the barrack. Deeper into the camp, a kitchen and mess hall (with cooking area reinforced with concrete), and an animal shelter with a turf foundation (and a manure pile behind it) stood on the riverside terrace. A rubbish pit filled with German tins was documented between the barrack foundation and the kitchen (S1; see Seitsonen and Herva 2011, Figure 10.7) in 2006 and excavated in 2009.

One of our informants had visited the mess hall as a young boy on a cloudberry-picking trip, possibly in 1943, and his recollections indicated that there had been structures in the camp that have not left any visible traces on the ground. He reminisced, for instance, that near the kitchen and the animal shelter had stood lightly built tent-like structures, some of which had been covered with turf for insulation, including a sauna for delousing the soldiers.

These lightweight structures were probably ‘yurt’-shaped cardboard and plywood tents, an important wartime product of the Finnish woodcraft industry (Figure 7). There are several vague stone and concrete features that may derive from the foundations of stoves used in lightweight tents.

[…]

Artefacts related to everyday economic and household activities form over two-thirds of the catalogued finds, as might be expected in a base inhabited for nearly four years (Table 1). Sherds of porcelain and glass, cutlery and empty ration tins were most common in this category. The food economy seems to have relied largely on [Wehrmacht]-issued canned meat and fish, some produced in the occupied Denmark and Norway (Figure 10(i)–(j)).

Many of the tins and tin tops have indented manufacturer stamps on them, but as far as we know, there are no guides at the moment for decoding the canning plant identities; descriptions of the tins’ contents were marked on the storing cardboard boxes or crates (Nash n.d.).

Nearly 500 sherds of porcelain were catalogued and show an interesting variety: at least one-third are of a Finnish origin, mostly products of the Arabia factories with various flowery and gilded designs, whereas the rest comprise [Wehrmacht]-issued ware. Two sherds of the latter are products of Johann Haviland, Bavaria and one sherd has the stamp ‘Fl.U.V., 1942, Bohemia’ (Flieger Unterkunft Verwaltung, Flight Barracks Administration; Figure 10(d)–(g)).

Some of the Arabia sherds have manufacturing dates on them which show that they were made in the late 1920s and the 1930s. Some could also be refitted and turned out to be from an Arabia Pääsky jug (Figure 10(b)). The presence of Finnish wares is interesting in the view that there was a large German supply depot in Kaamanen, some 20 km away from Peltojoki, where large quantities of military-issued porcelain was stored: when it was exploded in 1944, the surroundings were sprinkled with porcelain sherds. Why, then, such a prominent presence of Finnish civilian wares in a [Wehrmacht] camp?

Also one piece of cutlery found at Peltojoki, a small spoon with flower ornamentation, is a civilian item, whereas another spoon is a Finnish military issue, with the stamps Puolustuslaitos, Sorsakoski (Finnish Defence Forces, Finnish manufacturer), and the Finnish swastika emblem (the symbol of the Finnish Defence Forces since 1918, and unrelated to the [Fascist] swastika).

The rest of the cutlery finds are standard [Wehrmacht] issue, all stamped Fl.U.V. (Figure 10(j), (s)–(t)). Pieces of bottle glass were found primarily in the glass dump on the upper terrace (S31) and indicate that alcohol was abundantly available. A couple of bottle tops shows that at least French Delbeck wine or cognac and products of Swedish state-owned Aktiebolaget Vin & Spritcentralen were consumed at Peltojoki (Figure 10(v)–(w)).

[…]

Documentary sources and memoirs show that the [Wehrmacht], including the battle-hardened élite Gebirgsjäger, were poorly prepared to, and overwhelmed by the unfamiliar Arctic environment, which effectively stalled their advance so quickly in 1941 (Pipping [1947] 2008, 10; Jokisipilä 2005). […] The [Wehrmacht's] performance improved over time, however, as manuals were prepared (e.g. Halter 1942; Wehrmacht [1943] 2006; Merkblatt 18a, 17 1943; Merkblatt 18a, 26 1944) and active training programs assisted by Finnish specialists implemented (Alftan 2005, 189; Airio 2014, 238–240).

[…]

A tabulation of the recovered finds by the origin illustrates the place of Peltojoki in a wider network of [Axis] military logistics and movements of things (Table 2, Figure 11). For instance, canned food was imported from Denmark and Norway, and alcohol from Sweden and Central Europe, whereas porcelain finds included Central European as well as Finnish products; as an extreme example, at a nearby WWII site fish tins originating from Brazil were uncovered in a German dump.

The presence of products from numerous countries and factories echoes also the commercial importance of war efforts for diverse entrepreneurs in the occupied countries, as well as in [the Third Reich], Finland and even the ostensibly neutral Sweden. The [Axis] presence instigated a major economic boost in Lapland (e.g. Björklund 1981; Westerlund 2008a), which was not without ethical implications, given that PoWs were quite liberally used as a cheap workforce by various companies in different countries (e.g. Westerlund 2008a, 2008b; Suhonen 2011).

(Emphasis added.)

Some anticommunists may not see what the 'big deal' is with Fascists benefitting an economy, but that is only because somebody conditioned them to believe that 'economic prosperity' should trump everything else… including war crimes. I once had a conversation with an anticommunist who explicitly defended the phenomenon of overproduction because it was necessary to 'keep inflation down'. The obvious wastefulness of the process was irrelevant to him!

There is a myth that ‘democracy’ elected Adolf Schicklgruber into power. While it is correct that the so-called ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’ became the Weimar Republic’s largest party in 1932 (despite lacking a majority), which is probably how this misconception originated, Adolf Schicklgruber himself was unappointed by the common voter. Instead, the bourgeoisie’s representatives appointed him:

For two years, repeatedly resorting to Article 48 to issue presidential decrees, the Bruening government sought and failed to build a parliamentary majority that would exclude Social Democrats, Communists, and Nazis. In 1932, Hindenburg dismissed Bruening and appointed Franz von Papen, a former diplomat and Center party politician, as chancellor.

Papen dissolved the Reichstag again, but the July 1932 elections brought the [NSDAP] 37.3 percent of the popular vote, making it the largest political party in Germany. The Communists (taking votes from the Social Democrats in the increasingly desperate economic climate) received 14.3 percent of the vote. As a result, more than half the deputies in the 1932 Reichstag had publicly committed themselves to ending parliamentary democracy.

When Papen was unable to obtain a parliamentary majority to govern, his opponents among President Hindenburg's advisers forced him to resign. His successor, General Kurt von Schleicher, dissolved the Reichstag again. In the ensuing elections in November 1932, the [NSDAP] lost ground, winning 33.1 percent of the vote. The Communists, however, gained votes, winning 16.9 percent.

As a result, the small circle around President Hindenburg came to believe, by the end of 1932, that the [NSDAP] was Germany's only hope to forestall political chaos ending in a Communist takeover. [Fascist] negotiators and propagandists did much to enhance this impression.

On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule, perhaps even a monarchy.

Within two years, however, Hitler and the [Fascists] outmaneuvered Germany's conservative politicians to consolidate a radical [anticommunist] dictatorship completely subordinate to Hitler's personal will.

I have to admit that at first I forgot why I wrote this draft when I went back to review it (I had written nothing other than two URLs, both of which had little to do with November). It quickly dawned on me that presently it is election season here in Imperial America, and for months now centrists, social democrats, neoclassical liberals, and other (white) moderates have been pressuring everybody to vote, frequently under the pretension that it is necessary to ‘stop fascism’.

I have been studying fascism for seven years now and I can confidently say that engaging in a hopelessly broken process like a U.S. election is not an antifascist method. The most that voting may do is measure how little opposition that the ruling class can expect from the general public when the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie inevitably appoints its own representatives to the government. That is it. U.S. elections are effectively nothing more than glorified public opinion polls, just like the Third Reich's plebiscites.

My best advice is to boycott the election as a means of protesting an illegitimate process. Your time would be much better spent on supporting the proletariat (especially strikers) through direct action. If you absolutely must recommend voting, though, you could at least familiarize yourselves with the gross corruption that is part of the process, then constantly demand election integrity. I personally don't consider that the best action to take, but I can promise you that that would be more effective than scorning adults who feel alienated from voting.

In any case, the point here is that stopping fascism is not so easy that you can do it at a ballot box (something that thousands of voters in the Saar Basin learned the hard way in 1935). Rather, (neo)fascism is the inevitable consequence of capitalism's contradictions and inadequacies. Only when the lower classes finally overthrow capitalism will neofascism lose its purpose. Don't blame me; I didn't invent reality.

Doing a little research on horror films from the Third Reich, it appears that only a handful of titles originated from it: Der Dämon des Himalaya, Der Student von Prag, Fährmann Maria, Der Hund von Baskerville, and (technically) Spuk im Schloß. (A few sources call Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse and Der Schimmelreiter horrors, but that is quite arguable, and Fascist Italy’s horror films were even fewer: Maciste all’inferno and possibly the lost film Il caso Haller.) From what I can tell, this very particular subject has attracted little more than a passing interest from Anglophone academics, and going by first impressions, none of those films looks especially political either.

Nevertheless, I know how to improvise, so I am inviting you to read about a film that is instead somewhere in the same neighbourhood as horror: propaganda that demonises us. It lacks the supernatural elements of an ordinary horror film, so you may be disappointed that it does not depict us as unfigurative monsters. That said, it does feature an early example of what I like to call “anticommunists’ ignorant view of how communists talk”, so let us not look this gift horse in the mouth, shall we?

Quoting David Welch’s Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945, pages 214–217:

Goebbels was returning to his original mission of safeguarding Europe from the ‘Jewish‐Bolshevik conspiracy’. Reflecting this shift was Karl Ritter’s virulently anti‐Bolshevik film G.P.U. (1942). Interviewed by Filmwelt while making the film, Ritter outlined the basic propaganda message that was to be disseminated: ‘That the German Armed Forces had destroyed the terror organization of the G.P.U. which had been established by Jewish‐Bolshevik “criminals” intent on planting the vile seeds of Bolshevik revolution throughout the world.’³¹

G.P.U. came from an original idea by the actor Andrews Engelmann, who starred in the film and wrote the script together with Ritter and Felix Lutzkendorf. Production was started in December 1941, and it had its première in Berlin on 14 August 1942. The following synopsis is taken from the Allied Commission’s Catalogue of Forbidden German Feature Films:

Olga, a White Russian refugee from Bolshevik terror, has joined the Bolshevik G.P.U. Secret Police in order to find the man who killed her parents. After many years she at last meets him in Riga and then in Kowno in the summer of 1939. He is Bokscha, one of the chief agents of the G.P.U. in Europe, instigator of numerous assassinations, uprisings, acts of sabotage, etc. Bokscha falls in love with her, she goes with him to many countries. At last in France she feels the time is ripe, denounces him to Moscow as a traitor and he is liquidated.

She goes to Moscow, refuses the decoration offered to her, discloses her real reasons for joining the G.P.U., and she too is liquidated. Interwoven is the story of a young Baltic couple whom Olga befriends; in Rotterdam they are arrested by the G.P.U. and imprisoned in the cellar of the Commercial Attaché of the UDSSR, and the film ends with the victorious advance of the German Army into Holland in May 1940 when the two young people are at last released.³²

The film is intended to reveal the Jewish influence behind Bolshevism and the brutality of the G.P.U. In the prologue to the film, G.P.U. is translated as: Grauen (horror), Panik (panic), Untergang (destruction). So as not to leave the audience in any doubt, the Programm von Heute, which accompanied the film, stressed the insidious nature of the G.P.U. in a language reminiscent of that used to describe Jews: ‘It is mid‐1939. Like the threads of a spider’s web the G.P.U. spreads out beyond the Soviet “paradise” to engulf many unsuspecting lands.’³³

In fact the term ‘G.P.U.’ was no longer employed in the USSR; it had been replaced in 1934 by NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Domestic Affairs). But of course this did not affect Goebbels’s anti‐Bolshevik propaganda. The G.P.U. was so firmly embedded in the minds of [anticommunist] Germans as the symbol of Russian barbarism that it had to be perpetuated regardless of whether it existed or not.

Moreover, the Russian Secret Police are presented as a Jewish‐directed Communist organization. This is established in the first scene where Olga Feodorovna is giving a violin recital for the International Women’s League in Riga. Introducing Olga, the Chairwoman maintains that the organization was established to further international cooperation and is ‘totally unpolitical’.

But an old man interrupts and claims that they are in fact organized and financed by Jewish interests in Moscow. He maintains that he has proof that they had sent greetings telegrams to the Jewish politician Litvinov‐Finkelstein.³⁴

The Chairwoman repeats that the organization is concerned only with promoting peace and freedom for all people. But the old man will not be interrupted:

OLD MAN. Don’t interrupt! I said, financed by Moscow! The conclusive evidence is the presence of this gentleman, who calls himself a Soviet diplomat. Do you know who this Consular Attaché Smirnov is? He is the murderer Bokscha, G.P.U. agent … yes, G.P.U. agent! The blood of hundreds of thousands of poor people clings to his hands. Yes, I have evidence. I also have evidence that he murdered my son … [struggle] … You will not keep me quiet! Not you! Look at him, this representative of peace and freedom! He should be caught…

The fact that the old man was seen to be violently removed from the hall by G.P.U. agents and subsequently murdered tended to substantiate his allegations. Other scenes served to highlight Jewish participation in the G.P.U. and the manner in which the Russian Secret Police carried out their subversive activities in other countries. Invariably, Bolshevik meetings would take place deep underground, where they would dispassionately plot sabotage and murder beneath portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

In Moscow, Bokscha is shown plotting the downfall of foreign politicians and the sabotage of allied shipments from Sweden. Action is needed in Finland; we are told that Molatov is waiting for a chance to give an ultimatum and then invade the country. Bokscha is sent to Helsinki, where G.P.U. agents are conspiring with Jews to find an appropriate excuse for a Russian invasion. Once again, the meetings take place in cellars where the Bolsheviks can seek refuge in the shadows:

BOKSCHA. I have a very amusing plan; an assassination attempt on Soviet employers and Soviet citizens in Helsinki. This would precipitate an ultimatum and then an invasion.
JEW. And who will carry out these assassinations?
BOKSCHA. Funny question! We will, of course, our people.
ANOTHER MAN. So you mean we should kill our comrades?
BOKSCHA. Yes!
JEW. Do they know about it up there?
BOKSCHA. Of course not, they would report to Moscow in noble indignation.
JEW. [laughing] Yes, that’s certainly very funny.
[They all start laughing and Bokscha closes the meeting. As they leave, one turns to the Jew…]
ANOTHER MAN. That’s a wonderful plan!
JEW. [throws his hands in the air] Oh, wonderful, wonderful!

The Jewish‐Bolshevik conspiracy is invoked by the fact that Bokscha is prepared to engage Jewish agents in his subversive activities. Such scenes are intended to reveal the alien beliefs and behaviour of the G.P.U., who are prepared even to murder their own comrades. The moral appears to be that the ends justify the means — a philosophy that could be equally applied to [anticommunism].

It is interesting to note in comparing these two different political systems that at no time in [the Third Reich’s] film propaganda is Bolshevism discussed in terms of Marxist‐Leninism, although ideological comparisons are implicit throughout. Rather, Bolshevism is equated with certain brutal types that recur in [anticommunist] cinema under different guises, ranging from the barbaric Chernov in Friesennot to the cynical murderer Bokscha in G.P.U.

If the [Fascists] were not prepared to enter into an ideological debate then they had to specify a target for hatred. The stereotype employed in G.P.U. is, of course, Nikolai Bokscha. Yet he is not an amalgam of either the Untermensch line or the deeply committed Communist; he is neither a racially inferior Slav nor a misguided Party member.

Instead, he symbolizes the opportunism of Bolshevism and its alienation from Western civilization. He is referred to in the film as ‘one who has made a career for himself without being either a Jew or a proletarian’. Olga summed up his value to Moscow as a ‘good executioner who is worth a great deal to the Central Bureau’. In another scene with Olga in the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki a portrait of Lenin is drawn to his attention, and he replies: ‘Oh yes! It was the era of proletarian revolution. A dark age! Fortunately one forgets!’

In G.P.U., Asiatic features have largely disappeared from the stereotype image of the Bolshevik enemy. He is now portrayed in collusion with conspiratorial Jews. In fact, in Nikolai Bokscha we have the archetypal bourgeois, albeit a brutal and cynical one. Filmwoche referred to him as ‘the bourgeois after his acre of land, and a manipulator of chaos for his own enrichment’.³⁵

(Emphasis added.)

Aside from maybe the antisemitism being too obvious, it does not sound like there is much in this film that a committed antisocialist would find objectionable: the antiutopian pretensions, a hypocritical upper‐class communist, assertions that we murder hundreds of thousands of innocents (just ’cause), assertions that we’re cannibal‐like savages who enjoy killing each other, and of course, blatant anachronisms (antisocialists are nothing if not inept at managing time). All of these are well trod tropes for those of us who made the mistake of either trying to reason with antisocialists or subjecting ourselves to their mindnumbingly brainless content.

The trope that we are sensitive to criticism while our problems only continue to fester is an all too common one in the capitalist media. Unfortunately for anticommunists, if they think that they are a viable alternative, then they have another think coming. Case in point:

Smart also quoted an anonymous Ukrainian official who said that Pugliese is an “activist” known in Kyiv for “his public anti-Ukrainian rhetoric,” which “coincides with Russian propagandist narratives.” This individual reportedly said that “Ukraine would consider him to be, writing in all capital letters,” an “UNDESIRABLE PERSON.”

My guess is that this official came from the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, which a few months later accused Pugliese of promoting “anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and narratives aimed at demonizing the Ukrainian military,” not least of all with social media posts in which the Ottawa Citizen journalist “repeatedly spoke about the so-called problem of nazism in Ukraine, particularly related to the supposed nazi regiment ‘Azov’. Such rhetoric about the ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ clearly echoes the Russian narrative, which Putin used as an excuse for his invasion of Ukraine.”

[...]

In early 2014, Chris Alexander “committed to work with” the nationalist Ukrainian Canadian Congress “to take immediate and concrete action condemning Russia’s continued economic and political coercion of Ukraine.” That summer, he had an awkward moment at the annual Ukrainian festival in Toronto. A neo-Nazi from “Right Sector Canada” set up a table to raise money for “anything.” When the CBC interviewed Chris Alexander at the festival, and asked him what he thought about this, the Minister fumbled as Right Sector flags waved in the background.

“You’re telling me something second-hand that is a rumor that I have no ability to comment on in a responsible way,” Alexander said, standing in front of a booth for the largest Ukrainian-Canadian financial institution, which is also an OUN-B front, and has supported the Banderites’ book publishing operation in Ukraine.

For the first anniversary of the February 2014 coup d’etat in Kyiv, an important far-right Ukrainian politician, Andriy Parubiy, took a trip to Canada. Parubiy, a former neo[fascist] paramilitary leader, commanded the “Maidan Self Defense Force” that provided the muscle for the “Euromaidan” protests that started in late 2013. A few months later, he was secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, and by 2015 served as the first deputy chairman of Ukrainian parliament. In this capacity, Parubiy took several meetings in Ottawa, and addressed the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) in Toronto.

“I thank the Ukrainian community,” said Parubiy, “which to a large degree displays the [pro-western, nationalist] position of Ukraine, and obviously the [Canadian] government orientates itself on the position of the community.” At the UCC event, he appeared alongside Chris Alexander, who donned a handkerchief from the far-right-led Maidan Self Defense, and made a warmongering speech to Toronto’s nationalistic Ukrainian community.

We know, as you know, that Vladimir Putin is only going to face his comeuppance and his whole mad nightmare is only going to come apart at the seams, when the whole world is standing against him, with every option on the table […] This is the biggest issue facing the world today, in my view […] What is happening in eastern Ukraine has roots that go as far back as […] the Second World War, but it really has to do with the incomplete process of ending the existence of the Soviet Union for good — ending the oppression and the Faustian bargain that had been made in the Second World War with Stalin’s Soviet Union, for good.

[…]

We must speak out against this dangerous ideology [of Russian revanchism] which is present in our own city of Toronto, which is present across Canada, which comes to use through state-sponsored Russian channels that are preaching absolute poison! For Vladimir Putin’s media handlers to be calling the government of Ukraine, calling us Ukraine supporters, [and] to be calling the whole western world “Nazis” is nothing less than reprehensible, and we must be taking the lead, not only in fighting, and supporting those who are fighting, not only in making sure that Ukraine gets all the support that it needs, but in denouncing one of the greatest perversions of history that I have seen in my lifetime […] Ladies and gentlemen, let’s join that fight as well.

There are ideas as stake here, there is ideology at stake here, there is history at stake here, and all of our democracies! All of our democracies depend on the outcome of this struggle. It is going to be a great struggle. We are just at the beginning of this struggle, and I think when I see groups like this assembled, when I see determination on the level that is plain from all of your faces, I know that the future of Ukraine is still bright. I know the ties that bind Canada to Ukraine have never been stronger, and I know that Canada’s leadership in the world on this issue, as on others, has never been more important. […] Slava Ukraini!

Left to right in Toronto, 2015: Paul Grod (UCC president), Ted Opitz (Conservative MP), Andriy Parubiy, Chris Alexander, and Markian Shwec (UCC-Toronto)

Before moving on, let’s take a moment to digest Alexander’s comments about the “perversions of history.” It almost goes without saying that according to him, “Hitler was an ally of Stalin, Putin’s idol,” and “Putin has resurrected this red-brown alliance.” This politician and former diplomat helped to initiate the project to establish an extremely problematic “Victims of Communism” monument in Ottawa.

As David Pugliese recently reported, “The Department of Canadian Heritage is being told that more than half of the 550 names on the Memorial to the Victims of Communism should be removed because of potential links to the Nazis or questions about affiliations with fascist groups, according to government records.”

His numerous stories about this controversial project are another reason for Alexander to have an axe to grind with the award-winning journalist. Pugliese, who specializes in writing about military issues, apparently also embarrassed Alexander back when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Defence.

In the spring of 2022, Chris Alexander told his ~130,000 Twitter followers that Russia is “committing the same war crimes as Nazi invaders.” A couple months later, he said, “There is no substantive difference between the threat to world peace represented by revanchist Nazi Germany in 1939 & that of genocidal, irredentist & fascist Russia in 2022.” Last year, Alexander shared an article about the “Jewish Question” from the U.S. Holocaust Museum, just to compare “Hitler’s determination to ‘remove the Jews’” with “Putin’s obsession with ‘removing Ukraine.’”

Even before Putin launched his so-called “special military operation,” Alexander said that “Germans should understand” they don’t deserve all the blame for “the horrors of the Second World War,” which the Kremlin started. “Germany has overcome its Nazi past. It now needs to face down, with equal vigour, Russia’s dark Stalinist legacy.”

I actually agree with him that Germans should understand that they do not deserve all of the blame for the horrors of the Second World War. Certainly, the Imperial bourgeoisie deserves a great deal of blame for starting it by invading Manchuria in 1931, and anticommunists from the Anglosphere, Austria, the Balkans, the Baltics, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iberia, Italy, Poland, Romania, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Turkey, and elsewhere deserve blame for only aggravating the violence, but contemporary anticommunists do not want to talk about any of that, do they?

Likewise, modern Germany is most certainly not a model for the Russian Federation if it seeks to face down its “dark Stalinist legacy” (don’t laugh!). Between the surviving architecture, the abundance of neofascists, and the mistreatment of anticolonial Jews, only Italy or Japan would be a worse model.

Whatever you may think about the Russian Federation, hopefully we can at least come to an agreement that it is not the greatest threat to world peace today.

And Chris Alexander is undoubtedly the worst historian in Canada:

In the coming months, before Ukraine’s unsuccessful counter-offensive, Chris Alexander insisted, “The war will only end with fascist Russia’s defeat, as the Second World War ended with Nazi Germany’s defeat.”

I lived the last 7 years of my life away from my family, friends so I could work and get a small sum of money that would help me get married and help my family in life. I was working as a sales representative in a company outside my country.

In fact, I was about to be married to my life partner and lover, Aya, who is 20 years old. [W]e were preparing for our beautiful marriage before the war broke out, exploding our hearts and dreams and ending my professional career.

The […] occupation prevented us from completing our ceremony, which we had dreamed of. We had drawn, planned, and dreamed, but all of this was soon destroyed, and our thoughts and plans instead became: how can we survive this nightmare that has befallen us?

[…]

You will help us flee to a safe place with your help (even by donating $5, $10, ...)

Thank for Leslie Marie. She will help us receive donations through her bank account in America, and then she will transfer them to us through my brother’s bank account.

Finally, thank you so much for contributing to saving the life of me and my family. You will help us escape death, starting with a new temporary hope in Egypt and bringing safety. Please, do kindly share this with your network on social media and those you know. I would be thankful.

(Emphasis original.)

For those of us unaware, Mountain Jews are Jewish people who have lived in the North Caucasus for several centuries. They are a unique demographic, identifying neither as Ashkenazic nor Sephardic (though some have had Ashkenazic neighbors), and there are undoubtedly aspects of their culture that many of their Jewish siblings elsewhere would find odd.

When the anticommunists reinvaded Soviet Eurasia in 1941 and later made it to the North Caucasus, some of their victims were Mountain Jews:

[T]he [Axis’s] first encounter with Mountain Jews ended with the latter’s murder. This first massacre of Mountain Jews took place outside the borders of the North Caucasus, in the Shaumian Kolkhoz in the Crimea, most of whose members, it would seem, were Mountain Jews.⁴⁶

In March 1942 one of the Gentile neighbors informed the [Axis] authorities about the “Jewish presence” in the area. In response, Einsatzgruppe D—in cooperation with the military gendarmerie (Feldgendarmerie) and local collaborators—rounded up and murdered all 114 Mountain Jews there.⁴⁷ This was carried out in full cognizance of the fact that these were Mountain Jews, i.e., not Ashkenazi.⁴⁸

The Mountain Jews had been settled in the Crimea under the aegis of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, whose aid the Soviet government accepted as part of a program to resettle Jews “on the land”; the [Axis powers] were aware of this, and it may have inclined Einsatzgruppe D to view the Mountain Jews there as participants in the same “world Jewish conspiracy” and therefore to kill them along with the Ashkenazi Jews.⁴⁹

It should be noted that the annihilation of Mountain Jews was mentioned only in a local military report,⁵⁰ but not in the more official Ereignismeldung (Situation Report) that Einsatzgruppe D sent to Berlin. Thus it may be that the Einsatzgruppe considered its decision to murder the Mountain Jews in the Crimea a local matter, and that they thought they did not need to obtain authorization from Berlin for such actions—either before or after

[...]

The first communities of Mountain Jews captured by the [Axis] in the Caucasus, at the end of August 1942, were two kolkhozes in Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe (Kursk Raion, Stavropol Krai), in which the Mountain Jews constituted a significant portion of the entire Jewish membership.⁵⁷ Meanwhile, spontaneous incidents of looting Jewish property, brutalization of Jews, and murder multiplied rapidly.

There is no evidence that the [Axis] even considered treating the Mountain Jews here differently from their Ashkenazi co-religionists: perhaps the fact that they lived together caused the [Axis] to view them as a single entity. Scores of Mountain Jewish families who remained in Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe were murdered by machine gun fire on September 20 and August 19, 1942, respectively,⁵⁸ a total of about 850 victims.⁵⁹

We do not know with certainty which [Axis] forces were responsible for exterminating the Jews in these two places. In theory, the kolkhozes were situated in the operative domain of Einsatzkommando (EK) 12. However, Soviet findings claim that a large Wehrmacht unit camped in Bogdanovka⁶⁰ and murdered the Jews there; this points to the possibility of the direct involvement of the [Wehrmacht]. This would increase the likelihood that the [Axis powers] (at least in Bogdanovka) were unaware of the Mountain Jews’ uniqueness.

Hence,

86. Both Altshuler and Arad estimate that about 1,000 Mountain Jews perished during the Holocaust. Altshuler, Yehudei mizrah Kavkaz, 151; Arad, History of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 2004, 535. However, this estimate does not take into account up to 1,400 Mountain Jews murdered in the village of Ganshtakovka (see n. 56). With this the death total reaches between 2,000 and 2,500, some forty to fifty percent of the original number in the region occupied by the [Axis].

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

If 2,500 seems like a 'low' number, your suspicion is justified by numerous factors, namely the Axis's limited reach as well as its relatively brief presence where Mountain Jews lived:

The [Axis] advance had brought under occupation large sections of the North Caucasus, including Orzhonikidze (after liberation changed to Stavropol) and Krasnodar territories (krai, pl. kraia), the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Republic, and a large part of the North Ossetian Autonomous Republic, homes to a large portion of the Mountain Jew population. These found themselves under [Axis] occupation for varying periods of up to five months.

However, most of the large groups of Mountain Jews were in fact not overrun. Out of a Mountain Jewish population of 35,000 in the USSR on the eve of the Second World War,⁸ the only major centers that would be occupied were Nal’chik (capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, occupied for only two months) and Mozdok (in Ordzhonikidze Krai, occupied for four and a half months). In addition, Mountain Jews were a significant component of the local population in some small rural settlements.

Silly racial theories:

The [Axis] did not conclude decisively whether the groups were of Jewish origin. Two variants contradicted the possibility of common ancestry with European Jews: (a) the Mountain Jews originated in Persia after mixing with the Persians;³⁸ or (b) they derived from a mixture of several “Eastern races.”³⁹ [...] The [Axis powers] were [...] inclined to the opinion that these were not Jews at all because physically they did not have a Jewish “appearance,” and because they practiced polygamy.⁸⁰

Along with Soviet and partisan recruitment:

A factor reducing the number of Mountain Jews falling under [Axis] occupation was the induction of males between the ages of eighteen and forty (and in many cases older than that) into the Red Army and (to a much lesser extent) the partisan movement. Many testimonies¹⁰ document the enlistment of the men, since at this point—about a year into the war—the Soviet Union was maximizing the exploitation of its human resources to fight the war.¹¹

We can reasonably assume that a large percentage of the men of the community had been drafted before the [Axis] arrived.¹² Regarding participation in the partisan movement, we have only isolated examples and incomplete information allowing no basis for estimating the percentage of Jews who adopted this course.¹³

Taken together, these reasons explain why the Axis’s violence against Mountain Jews was surprisingly less awful than it could have been; the majority of Mountain Jews who had come under occupation survived thanks to the Axis’s uncertainty and hesitation. Even so, for some of us this is going to feel like an inadequate compensation; two thousand deaths is still deeply upsetting.

Further reading: Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus. I leave you with a quote from page 196:

Ashurova recalled how the Ifraimov family of Mountain Jews paid with their lives for an unsuccessful attempt to rescue a family of Ashkenazi Jews: “Our Mountain Jews hid two sisters who were physicians… [The Axis] executed both sisters with the Mountain Jews who were hiding them. Twelve souls [were killed] instantly.”⁴²

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, middle-class liberals condemned general strikes as unpatriotic, economically disruptive, and politically divisive acts that threatened the potential for industrial recovery and national unity in Italy.

Though there was disagreement among the liberal middle classes about the merits of the workers’ reasons for striking, they were unanimous in their criticism of workers’ demonstrations as harmful to the Italian patria (fatherland).

With the 1920 factory occupations and the concurrent emergence of workers’ self-defense groups, the liberal middle classes began associating workers’ demonstrations with physical and ideological violence.

Finally, during the biennio nero, middle-class liberals blamed workers’ demonstrations for the continuing armament of the fasci and the increasingly popular appeal of fascism. Some even expressed explicitly philofascist sympathies, citing the fascists’ successful suppression of disruptive and divisive workers’ demonstrations.

The persistency of general strikes, factory occupations, and workers’ self-defense groups over the 1919–1922 thus turned Italian middle-class liberals increasingly sympathetic to fascism.

Though the liberal middle classes were not unanimous in their philofascist sentiments in the months just before Mussolini’s March on Rome, the writer Renato Simoni was accurate in the declaration he made in his summer 1922 column for the newspaper L’Illustrazione italiana: “the [workers’ demonstration], which was supposed to be a large protest against fascism, has enabled fascism to demonstrate its merits.”¹⁵

Not all middle-class liberals were convinced by these merits—that is, by the way fascists violently challenged the radical labor activity and ceaseless workers’ demonstrations of the biennio rosso—but some certainly were.

[…]

La Stampa emphasized the combativeness of some of the workers who were present; for example, the royal guards had no choice but to arrest “the most quarrelsome and hotheaded” of the demonstrators.⁷²

Additionally, while describing instances of violence involving “a young man struck with a blow to the head falling to the ground” or “a manual laborer struck and [with] his hands on his bloody head,” the newspaper employed the passive voice and thus obscured the direct agency of the policemen and fascist squadristi in the events. It even characterized such incidents as “scuffles” and “skirmishes” rather than as obvious acts of police and fascist violence against demonstrating workers.⁷³

In this way, La Stampa underlined that violence was present at yet another workers’ demonstration while absolving the perpetrating policemen and fascists of their responsibility in that violence. As it had done in its coverage of worker demonstrations in prior years, it presented the outbreak of violence as inherent to the strike rather than the direct consequence of the state and fasci’s violence toward workers.

[…]

La Stampa also held the arditi del popolo at least partially responsible for the fascists’ refusal to immediately disarm. The newspaper asserted that “that which is boiling up, the formation of antifascist forces that took place in Rome a few days ago, and the simultaneous debut of the « Arditi del Popolo », have offered fascism a motive to cry provocation and interrupt their attempts” at peace and disarmament.”

The public exercises of the arditi del popolo in Rome had thus frustrated and angered the fasci into continued armament, which they might have considered stopping had it not been for the 6 July demonstration.⁷⁷

[…]

According to Tasca, despite the fundamentally liberal rhetoric used by the secret action committee in their proclamation of the strikes, the fascists received support from liberal newspapers, many of which had originally “blamed the fascists for contributing towards socialist participation by their excesses.”

However, at this point in what had become a de facto civil war, “the conservative and ‘liberal’ press,” along with the Italian bourgeoisie more generally, “congratulated the fascists who were containing and extending, in the name of the state, the work of destruction” and suppression of workers’ strikes.⁸⁴

[…]

L’Illustrazione, however, went beyond criticizing the striking workers and condemning the economic disruptiveness and violence of the strike, using that criticism as justification for its praise of the actions taken by fascists against the strikes. Explaining how the “the fascist reaction [to the general strike in Milan] produced a broad and immediate consensus in public opinion” that was sympathetic to the fascists, the issue included an entire page favorably depicting “blackshirts [replacing] workers on train platforms and other public services.”⁸⁶

The publication thus not only offered an account of increasing public advocacy for the fascist response to the general strike but itself expressed support for the fascists. It also provided an analysis of the Italian public’s philofascist turn to the Right, declaring that “fascism has protected our right to feel Italian” and that, while “we, the masses, we, the tranquil population […] are threatened with thirst and hunger by the activity of the red organizations […] the fascists focus only on responding to those who cause it.”

Thus, in L’Illustrazione’s conception, with the proclamation of the general strike on the evening of July 31st, “the public [was] called to judge [between] the two disagreeing parties […] the fascists and the socialists”; since “there [was] no government” left to resolve the people’s problems, the public ended up siding with the fascists, who emerged as the ones “who [helped] us, [defended] us” from the industrial sabotage perpetrated by the working-class movement.⁸⁷

The workers’ demonstration, which in the summer of 1921 was perpetuating fascist violence by merely giving existing fascists further reason to be violent, was in August 1922 turning middle-class liberals into explicit supporters of fascism.

Understanding how fascism was often informed by the politics of imperialism and colonialism is of particular importance for historians of fascism and the far right in the former settler colonies of North America, southern Africa and Australasia. Scholars, such as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, have described settler colonialism as an invasive process involving the violent dispossession of the indigenous population, which shares an affinity with fascism’s need for violent expansion and the ‘cleansing’ of populations for the desired nation.¹⁸

Robin D.G. Kelley and Cedric Robinson remind us that many Black activists in the interwar period saw ‘fascism as a blood relative of slavery and imperialism’.¹⁹ While staunchly anti-fascist, the Communist Party of South Africa noted in the early years of the Second World War that non-Europeans in the Union were not wholly convinced that fascism was much different to the racial hierarchy that existed in South Africa at the time.²⁰

[...]

In its strongest formulations, the idea of ‘decoloniality’ might actually lead one to question the very distinction between fascism and colonialism in the Southern African context. Decolonial thought would stress the undoubted reality that in the colonial era, subjects of all southern African régimes, whether settler-controlled or metropolitan-centred, led lives constrained by racial structures and ideologies and the accompanying denial of democratic rights, high levels of state violence and extremely coercive labour practices (and that this history has long-lasting legacies).

This emphasis would point to the conclusion that there was no significant difference between overtly fascist colonial governments (such as Portugal in Angola and Mozambique) and those which claimed to align with democratic values (Britain in Northern Rhodesia for instance). In both cases the experience of the colonised was, it could be argued from this perspective, much the same.

In South Africa, such a view actually has a precedent in the Second World War politics of an important Black leftist group, the Non-European Unity Movement. The NEUM opposed the pro-British war effort of the government of Prime Minister Jan Smuts, arguing that his régime was itself fascist.

They adopted a rhetoric which portrayed themselves as analogous to the European resistance, for instance referring to Black participants in state structures as ‘Quislings’. Black people, in this view, had nothing to gain from an Allied victory, as South African segregationists were indistinguishable from [German Fascists].

However, there is also a strong Black intellectual history in the region, in which opposition to fascism is a significant theme. Within South Africa, at the same time as the NEUM was emerging, the leadership of the main African nationalist organisation, the ANC, supported the war effort, using the rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms.

It is true that they thus hoped to bring leverage to bear on the Allies to impose a liberalisation of racial policies on Smuts. But ANC leaders like Dr A.B. Xuma believed that their ends would best served by an Allied triumph than by the success of Hitler and his local allies in the radical wing of Afrikaner nationalism. The distinction between fascism and other forms of rule was seen by them as being a weighty one.

Moreover, during the era of guerilla war against the [anticommunists] in Mozambique and Angola, Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia and the South African apartheid order, both the insurgent movements and their allies abroad were often anxious to portray their opponents as ‘fascist’. This was rhetorically useful, as a tactic of delegitimisation, but also (although often inconsistently) used as a point of departure for political analysis.

There is thus a serious history of southern African Black intellectual engagement with the topic of fascism, and a closer look at that might be one useful way in which thinking about fascism from a decolonial perspective could be useful.

But, there are broader issues to which the decolonial approach might also usefully point us. One potential application is to insist that the experience of southern Africa needs to be given greater weight in Europe-focused studies of fascism. There is considerable debate on whether the [...] Estado Novo (1934–1974) was ‘technically’ fascist, but it is indisputable that it belonged to the family of prewar European [anticommunist dictatorships].

Its (NATO-backed) colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique from 1960 to 1974 were major military and political struggles. Yet this enormous conflict has not sufficiently registered in the mainstream of European historiography. A decolonial perspective might suggest that this marginalisation reflects a reluctance to integrate the colonial world into historical thought about fascism.

Similarly, [Fascist] overseas operations in the ‘global South’ have seldom been taken seriously as part of the main story of German Fascism. During the 1930s [the Third Reich] ran a vast international organisational operation. This included powerful [Fascist] movements amongst the wealthy German community in South African-ruled Namibia and support to small but vociferous fascist movements in South Africa.

During the Second World War, a mass Afrikaner fascist movement, the Ossewa Brandwag, emerged in South Africa, which had strong clandestine links to [Fascist] intelligence and carried out sabotage operations. Without exaggerating their significance, a lot more could be done to relate these developments to events within the Reich and in the course of the Second World War.

The question of whether they were more significant in the history of [German Fascism] and the world conflict than has generally been allowed, might at least be a useful one to ask.²³

Dimitrije Ljotić’s Yugoslav Nationalist Movement, also known as Zbor (Rally) [...] was a pro-fascistic yet highly conservative political association, which received steady financial and political support from [the Third Reich] dating back its foundation in 1935, and which espoused an extreme anti-Communist, anti-liberal and anti-individualist ideological programme. Zbor was a marginal political phenomenon in the interwar years, and did not succeed in receiving more than 1 per cent of electoral support throughout the 1930s.³⁶

However, Ljotić and his close political associates were to become the decisive political factor during the subsequent [Axis] occupation of Serbia, and assumed important positions in the collaborationist government. Zbor advocated a return to the archaic cultural and religious traditions of the Yugoslav nation, and heavily criticized the political course and influence of Western democracies; unsurprisingly, this ideological stance profoundly shaped its adherents’ contributions to the modernization debates.

[...]

The [Axis] régime in rump Serbia implemented some of the most brutal occupation policies and practices in the entire [Axis occupation of] Europe. The cumulative effects of forced labour, detention and execution of the ‘politically unreliable’, constant economic exploitation and food requisitioning were severely worsened by the harsh reprisals in response to the developing armed rebellion of the Communist and nationalist forces.

The initial [Axis] plan not to set up a collaborationist régime with political and governmental duties needed to be changed as the situation with the guerrilla resistance deteriorated and no further reinforcement of the [Wehrmacht] in Serbia was allowed due to the Eastern front demands. In that context, the originally installed purely administrative body functioning under firm German auspices proved inefficient, and what was suggested was ‘reorganizing and strengthening the Serbian administration so that the Serbs themselves might crush the rebellion’.⁵⁰

The puppet government of General Milan Nedić, a high-ranking pre-war military officer and politician with a favourable popular reputation, was thus established in August 1941. From the very beginning of the [Axis] occupation, Ljotić served as one of the most important men in the collaborationist setting in Serbia: he immediately founded the Serbian Volunteers’ Corps (SDK) which was integrated into the Wehrmacht; members of Zbor joined the collaborationist cabinet, while Ljotić himself became a Commissar for the Rebuilding of the City of Smederevo.

Ljotić’s actual political influence extended well beyond what was suggested by his official title. He had a privileged access to the [Wehrmacht] and occupation authorities in Serbia: although he never formally joined Nedić’s government, he maintained significant influence over its decision-making and plans throughout the war years. Still, the government’s areas of authority were heavily restricted from the very outset, and they only shrank as time went on, as the government failed to secure popular backing, pacify the population or eliminate the military rebellion.

The government functioned under constant [Axis] threats of even more brutal anti-civilian retaliations, executions of the most prominent members of the intelligentsia, and the dismemberment and occupation of Serbia by the other Axis forces, etc. According to Tomasevich:

[T]he Serbian puppet government was so subservient to the [...] occupation authorities [that] it cannot truly be said that it had its own policies in any field of government activity. It was simply an auxiliary organ of the [...] occupation régime.⁵¹

Distrusted by the political and SS elements in the [Third Reich’s] apparatus, the government’s activity was largely reduced to low-level administration, pro-[Axis] propaganda efforts and pointing out to the population the futility of any anti-[Axis] operations.

[...]

From the very beginning of the occupation, wartime writings held on to the rhetoric of participation in an exceptionally significant project, one of building the New European Order. They also constructed Serbia as an important, equal, honourable and respected member of the renovated European family of nations.

In fact, as Nedić’s Minister Olćan noted in 1943, while England’s plans for the post-war reconstruction of Europe relegated the Balkans to the political margins and envisaged an insignificant international position for the region,⁸⁰ Serbia under Nedić had been awarded a ‘dignified place in the European community’, which would, after the war, become a ‘family of harmony and happiness’.⁸¹

(Emphasis added.)

As elsewhere in Axis propaganda, Serbia’s collaborationist government critised the United Kingdom for abusing India:

Numerous lengthy treatises on Indian politics, culture, history, literature and religion criticized the ‘British rhetoric of superiority and detestation’ with regard to the local population, the rhetoric that some of the most prominent pre-war intellectuals had themselves internalized. [...] ‘India’s contacts with the West in more recent times brought to [the country] much misfortune, tragedy, unhappiness’.⁶³

While one could easily gloss over this as nothing but another generic attempt to persuade people into siding against the Western Allies, it is more useful to think of it in comparative terms: the colonisation of India was an example of a 'bad' occupation, whereas the Axis's presence in the Balkans was an instance of a 'good' occupation. In other words, no matter how rough the Serbs might have had it, the Indians had it worse. When seen in this light, Axis propaganda (hypocritically) criticizing British colonialism becomes much easier to understand.

This past summer, Batulin participated in the “Nation Europa” conference, and so did Kristian Udarov, another fighter from the Terror battalion and the Belarusian Volunteer Corps. Yesterday, Udarov’s younger brother died fighting in the National Guard’s Azov Brigade. Earlier this year, Vadin Kitar took a photo with Udarov, who is affiliated with the far-right Ukrainian organization “Tradition & Order,” which was also represented at the neo-Nazi conference in Lviv.

Denis “White Rex” Kapustin, the commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps and one of the most notorious neo[fascists] in Europe, prominently featured in this event, which went unreported by the western media. “White Rex” was one of the only people whose identity wasn’t concealed in photos that the HUR released surrounding the operation to clear the chemical plant, including an awards ceremony led by military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov. Reportedly for his neo[fascist] fighters, this mission was dedicated to avenging the death of Mykola Kokhanivsky, the extremist commander of the rogue “OUN” volunteer battalion, who died this year in the Vovchansk area.

Several years ago, the Security Service of Ukraine arrested Aleksandr Skachkov, a Russian neo[fascist] who served in Kokhanivsky’s unit, for circulating the neo[fascist] manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, the 2019 mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand. The journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko discovered that Kokhanivsky was an early promoter of the Telegram channel, “Tarrant’s lads,” that Skachkov was accused of running. In my article about Nation Europa, I explained that the HUR Timur unit’s “Team Nobody” is linked to a Telegram channel that has provided its subscribers a “full video in good quality” of the Christchurch massacres.

British military intelligence gave two thumbs up to Budanov’s neo[fascist] special forces, if only after completing their mission in Vovchansk. A public “intelligence update” on October 1 said, “It is likely that Ukrainian control of the plant will facilitate further counter offensives in the north of the city to push the RGF [Russian Ground Forces] back towards the Ukraine-Russia border.”

Although the western media hasn’t given too much attention to the HUR’s achievement in Vovchansk, this British update stirred a few triumphant articles, such as “Ukraine Recaptures Vital Chemical Plant in Latest Blow for Vladimir Putin” (Huffington Post) and “Russian Stronghold Falls” (National Interest). I’m no military analyst and have no idea how important a victory this may have been for Ukraine, but the British seemed to hint at the possibility of more cross-borders from the HUR’s neo[fascist] special forces.

Before Russia’s 2024 offensive in the Vovchansk and Kharkiv directions, the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) and its allied units carried out a series of incursions into the Belgorod region of Russia. In the spring of 2023, journalist Leonid Ragozin noticed that Aleksandr Skachkov, the alleged circulator of the Christchurch manifesto, participated in the first RVC raid. Skachkov had a KKK patch on his chest, produced by a company commander in the 3rd Assault Brigade.

As some readers may recall, Vadim Kitar’s girlfriend is the main representative of the Azov-linked brand, “Company Group Team,” and last year, Volodymyr Zelensky gave a peculiar shoutout to this “military community” on Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces Day. Indeed, the “CGT” brand, perhaps above all others, appears to unite those in Ukraine’s “autonomous neo-nazi army” — the Azov movement and allied units. For example, in June 2024, when the Azovite commander of the NGU Svoboda battalion’s Paragon company gave an interview to the battalion’s official podcast, he was interviewed by a neo[fascist] CGT enthusiast from the Svoboda unit.

Last year, when Petro Poroshenko visited the aforementioned 36th marine brigade and received a neo[fascist] patch from one of its units, the former president put his arm around a soldier wearing a CGT shirt. These are just a couple examples that I found months ago, before discovering the degree(s) of separation between them and the Vedmedi SS. Seeing the CGT spokesperson fundraise for her boyfriend’s Junger Group in recent days, I looked up the definition of a “company group” again: “a collection of parent and subsidiary corporations that function as a single economic entity through a common source of control.”