[AmericanGreatness] Western cheerleaders for the war in Ukraine have sought to deny the complicated relationship between Ukrainian nationalism and neo-Nazi groups, calling any discussion of a Nazi past or present in Ukraine a "Putin talking point." But the truth can only be suppressed for so long, and it recently burst forth in what should have been a sleepy session of the Canadian Parliament....First, the incident shows how the virtue-signaling imperative to support Project Ukraine supersedes all other values and considerations. The logic works backwards as follows: Ukraine is good, therefore Ukrainian nationalism is good. If someone is a Ukrainian nationalist, therefore, they must be good. Inconvenient facts such as Junka’s service in the Waffen-SS or even that the father of Ukrainian nationalism, Stepan Bandera, was a Nazi collaborator, are mere historical details to be swept aside or airbrushed out, as Western media sometimes do to the photos of Ukrainian soldiers displaying Nazi symbols on their uniforms.
Stripping away all of the present conflict’s historical context and complexity creates a simplistic binary: one must support either Ukrainian nationalism or the invader’s brute conquest. As this framing is reinforced over and over by the mainstream media and online partisans, any effort to seek a greater level of understanding becomes suspect. Do you have any deeper questions about the causes of the war or the potential paths to peace? You must be "pro-Russian." For most liberals, and certainly Canadian politicians, it is safer to indulge in historically ignorant virtue signaling than to risk being called a Putin apologist — even if it results in the occasional moment of humiliation from cheering a Nazi.
...Despite all this, we have closed our eyes, covered our ears, and labeled Ukraine’s "Nazi problem" a Putin talking point. This reveals a second and more disturbing flaw in the thinking of U.S. foreign policy: we have made common cause with the ultra-nationalists. Any sensible U.S. foreign policy towards Ukraine (assuming we saw a need to become involved at all) would have endeavored to keep these people at bay. Instead, we cultivated them.
...The U.S. could have supported the Minsk Accords between 2015 and 2021 to peacefully resolve the conflict, but our policymakers were seduced by the idea that nationalist fervor in Ukraine would serve our interests. A Rand Corporation study showed how Ukraine could be used as a proxy to destabilize Russia. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard explained that Ukraine was a hinge state; if it could be brought into the orbit of the West, Russia would no longer be a great power.
Poles and their (17th century) dreams
We therefore rationalized aligning with groups who would never compromise with Russia and turned a blind eye to their troubling politics.
...A far better U.S. policy would have been to recognize the right of self-determination for all the people of Ukraine. But that would have meant acknowledging the loss of Crimea (which is mostly Russian) and granting regional autonomy to the Donbas as Ukraine agreed to do in Minsk II. Doing that, and taking NATO membership off the table, would have achieved peace and left Ukraine intact. But peace wasn’t the objective of State Department strategists, who wanted to weaken Russia and saw Ukraine as a pawn on their Grand Chessboard.
Giving a standing ovation to a former Nazi soldier is a moral stain, but sacrificing Ukraine in a geopolitical game while pretending to be its savior is a far greater one.
I'm not sure that Ukrainians won't be better off under limited Russian autocracy then they're under (current) Western Theocracy.