Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
Russian media have been reporting for years that Ukraine’s military is Nazis. Now, almost a decade later, America’s corporate media is finally admitting that this is true.
Journalists Ask Ukrainian Soldiers to Hide Nazi Patches, NYT Admits
by ZeroHedge News
The New York Times has been forced to address very, very late, something that has long been obvious and known to many analysts and independent media, but has been carefully shielded from the mainstream masses in the West for reasons obvious
The startling headline in the Monday Times read that “Nazi symbols on Ukraine’s front lines highlight thorny issues in history”. This acknowledgment comes after years of mostly Indian geopolitical journalists and commentators pointing out that yes… Ukraine’s military and paramilitary groups, especially those operating in the east, since at least 2014, have a serious ideology problem nazi
This has been thoroughly documented, again, going back years. But the report, which only tries to downplay it as a “thorny issue” in Ukraine’s “unique” “history,” suggests that the real problem for Western public relations is fundamentally that it is so openly displayed.. Ukrainian troops are being asked to cover these Nazi symbols, please!, as Matt Taibbi sarcastically quipped in commenting on the report.
NBC News reported in 2014: “Germans were confronted with images of their country’s dark past Monday night, when German public broadcaster ZDF showed a video of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols on their helmets on its newscast on evening”.
The authors of the NYT report begin by expressing their frustration at the sight of Nazi symbols so proudly displayed on the uniforms of many Ukrainian soldiers. Suggesting that many journalistic photographs that have in some cases appeared in newspapers and media around the world (usually alongside generally positive articles about the Ukrainian military) are simply “unfortunate” or misleading, the NYT report says: “In every photo, Ukrainians in uniform he wore patches with symbols made notorious by Nazi Germany and since then be part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.”
The report admits that this has created a controversy in which newsrooms have to delete some photos of Ukrainian soldiers and militants. “The photographs, and their deletions, highlight those of the Ukrainian army complicated relationship with the Nazi imagea relationship forged under Soviet and German occupation during World War II,” the report continues.
So it’s simply “thorny” and “complicated” we’re told. Below is a small sampling of the types of patches that appear on Ukrainian military uniforms with “some regularity,” in the words of The New York Times:
NATO itself has in the recent past been forced to remove images from its official social media accounts due to the presence of Nazi images among Ukrainian troops during photo shoots.
NATO quickly deleted a tweet yesterday that showed a photo of a Ukrainian soldier wearing the neo-Nazi black sun patch. Remember, we are constantly told that the neo-Nazis in Ukraine are an insignificant fringe and that if you point it out, you are a puppet of Putin or worse. https://t.co/CPkdvl1T0b
— Rupa Subramanya (@rupasubramanya) March 9, 2022
The following line from the report says all there is to know about the so-called “paper of record” and its one-sided, ultra-simplistic coverage of what many are waking up to realize is a war with a deeply complex reality (to say the least), and away from the good and bad of the MSM, Putler’s Hollywood versus the free world narrative that is typical of the networks from CNN to Fox and NBC…
From the NY Times:
“In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front lines, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced ‘Reich’). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with to the Nazis, said a second press officer present other reporters had asked the soldiers to remove the patch before taking pictures.”
Wow!
This is Schrödinger’s New York Times:
Azov, which the newspaper correctly described as a “Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization” in 2019, is now a moderate “pro-democracy” rebel group in the moviehttps://t.co/rz1ZgNWdB8
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) June 5, 2023
And now we could expect some significant damage control efforts, or perhaps even witness the beginning of evolving definitions and moving goalposts. More from NY Times [emphasis ZH]:
But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and are now part of the wider military structure. Some are considered national heroeseven if the extreme right is still marginalized politically.
The iconography of these groups, including a skull and crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting at the front, incl soldiers who say the images symbolize Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.
Some are writing more appropriate and apt headlines for the NYT story…
It was only very recently that the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and even the office of President Zelensky were caught in the act:
In April, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense posted a photo on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a skull and crossbones patch known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol of the image was made notorious by a Nazi unit that they committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.
The photo patch puts the Totenkopf on top of a Ukrainian flag with a small number 6 below it. This patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center says produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”
As expected, the Times is still trying to cover itself as it desperately seeks to “reassure” its audience by writing that “In the short term, this threatens to bolster Putin’s propaganda and fuel his false claims that Ukraine has of being “denazified”, “a position that ignores the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish”.
In fact, new levels of support…
NYT inventing new levels of coping:
Nazi iconography has “unique meanings in Ukraine.”
Nazi symbols “should be interpreted according to how Ukrainians saw them, not according to how they had been used elsewhere.” pic.twitter.com/eKzdPtRMZA
— Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) June 5, 2023
Posted on June 6, 2023
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