Bratstvo was founded as a political organization in 2004 by Dmytro Korchynsky, who previously led the far-right Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).
Korchynsky, who now fights in Bratstvo’s paramilitary wing, is a [Shoah] denier who falsely blamed Jews for the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine, and peddled the claim that “120,000 Jews fought in the Wehrmacht.” He has stated that he sees Bratstvo as a “Christian Taliban” (Intercept, 3/18/15).
(Emphasis original. See here for further examples of the NYT’s casual profascism. Depending on your criteria for Jewishness, the claim that 120,000 Jews served in the Wehrmacht is not necessarily a lie, but it was not something that the Third Reich sometimes tolerated out of good will either.)
I understand that the Ukrainian state is a neonazi state. But WHY is there so many varieties of nazis?
It’s the one thing that makes no sense to me. How many ways can someone be Russophobic and antisemetic?
Because neofascism (like its predecessor) is a nationalist phenomenon, and the nation where it grows imbues it with local characteristics. Polish neofascists and Ukrainian neofascists both despise Russians and Jews, but since Poland and Ukraine themselves have had a long and complicated history with each other, that isn’t enough to make them natural allies.
Every time someone in Poland speaks publicly against Ukraine media hysteria, it is always either a libertarian or other fascist (we do have some communists but they are unhearable, even trots and anarchists fell way beyond the margin of media tolerance).
That’s because neonazism in Ukraine have many sources - OG banderites, skinheads, football hooligans, gusanos, white remnants, religious fanatics, etc. And also many foreign contacts and sources. All those were left to bloom for over 20 years and thus differentiated, and after 2014 most of those groups came unto the maidan clique umbrella, but unlike in nazi Germany there was no gleischaltung.
