What a fascist video looks like
By Deirdre Griswold on March 26, 2014
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Shouldn’t a moving picture be worth even more?
Take the video that spread widely across the Internet for a while — until someone claimed it was copyrighted and it got pulled off a lot of websites.
But not all of them. You can still find it on several sites if you google “Ukrainian fascists attack television director.”
The six-minute video shows half-a-dozen burly men from the Svoboda Party in Ukraine attacking Oleksandr Panteleymonov, the acting director of NTU, the state-run television.
The leader of this March 18 attack was Igor Miroshnichenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament’s new committee on “freedom of speech.” His Svoboda Party clearly wants to intimidate anyone not under their thumb: it filmed the attack.
This party has five key ministerial posts in what the West calls the “democratic” new Ukrainian government, including those of vice prime minister and minister of defense, in addition to the position of prosecutor general.
In the video, Miroshnichenko calls the TV director an “animal” while he and several others push him, punch him in the head and face, and grab him around the throat. They demand that he sign the letter of resignation that they shove at him. According to several published accounts of the incident, after they got the letter signed they took him out of the building, bundled him into an SUV and drove off. His whereabouts are unknown, as of March 24.
Yes, this was a real fascist attack by the new “defenders of freedom” in Ukraine. They are vital to the pro-West, unelected government, which got in through a coup that depended a great deal on street fighting by fascist groups like Svoboda and the Right Sector — as well as support from the U.S. and NATO.
The U.S. government knew exactly what Svoboda was. For example, in December, while these groups were leading the violence in the streets of Kiev that brought about the collapse of the elected government, Miroshnichenko himself was in the news — for defaming Hollywood actor Mila Kunis.
[photo of Mila Kunis by Gage Skidmore]
He wrote on his Facebook page that although Kunis was born in Ukraine, she wasn’t really Ukrainian because she’s a “zhydovka” — a very offensive term used by anti-Semites to describe Jewish women. Many of her relatives died in the Holocaust when Germany invaded Ukraine during World War II.
The Svoboda Party is descended from a group that fought alongside the Nazis at that time until they were defeated by the Soviet Red Army.
The U.S. government supports Israel because of the pro-imperialist role it plays in the Middle East, but Washington is totally silent about its anti-Semitic friends in Ukraine.
And don’t look for news of this outrage on prime time. Don’t expect the talking heads or columnists to admit it happened. Ditto for the great “freedom-loving” politicians who are railing at Russia right now for allowing the people of Crimea to separate from the thug regime in Kiev.
Nor is there anything on the website of the Committee to Protect Journalists about the fascist assault on the TV director. Although this committee claims to be “Defending Journalists Worldwide,” it has an agenda that mirrors Washington’s.
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