Via Дмитрий Колесник Excerpt: The purpose of the elections was to return a parliament which contained only token opposition. To achieve this, opposition parties were subjected to a campaign of repression by fascists colluding with police. In large parts of the south-east, which are under military occupation by fascist paramilitary groups, opposition meetings were broken up and activists harassed. The KPU found it almost impossible to campaign openly. On 18 September, a KPU rally against the war and price rises was attacked by ultras from football teams. On 27 September a “March for Peace” called by the KPU was banned and then attacked by fascists. In a parallel with events following the May 2 Odessa massacre, those attacked by fascists were themselves rounded up and arrested by police. The “European values”, which the leaders of the Maidan coup were so keen to adopt, turn out to be the values of the European ruling class, which will support any force which is capable of delivering its interests. In this case its interests are to bloc with the USA against Russia and impose austerity on Ukraine. The two figureheads, Poroshenko and Yatseniuk, reflect the differing aims and objectives of the EU and the USA, respectively. To date, they have collaborated to deliver common interests, but it is only a matter of time before they discover that, while imperialisms have permanent interests, they never have permanent friends. Fascists enter mainstream The main fascist party, Svoboda, saw a decrease in its vote, a result of the swing towards the People’s Front which adopted much of the fascists’ violently Russophobic rhetoric and ran on an ultra-nationalist “war party” platform, with several neo-Nazi “volunteer battalion” commanders running on its ticket. The overtly neo-Nazi “Right Sector”, a coalition of fascist groups, won 284, 802 votes. In the 2012 election, its largest component UNA-UNSO won just 16,937 votes. Together, the fascist parties took more than one million votes, but failed to cross the threshold. Although their representation in parliament will be limited to leaders elected in single-member constituencies, their real influence lies in their control of the key levers of the state apparatus. Yuri Michalchyshyn, a Svoboda party ideologue, who holds an honorary medal of the SS Galicia division, called for the Ukrainian air force to turn Slavyansk into a “lunar landscape”, described the holocaust as a “particularly bright period in European history” and founded “the Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center”, quit Svoboda to become head of the propaganda and analysis department of the Ukraine Security Service, SBU. When Right Sector leader Borislav Bereza stated that the Kiev police will begin “cooperation” with the Right Sector, he was simply confirming as policy a situation that has de facto operated across large parts of Ukraine since the Maidan coup.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 08:53:13 +0000