Photo: CFP

The US Embassy in China published an article on Thursday promoting a Nazi-glorifying Ukrainian organization, a stark contrast to the anti-Nazi political claim of the US. 

In the article the US embassy published via its WeChat public account on Thursday evening, it ran an introductory promoting the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, while mentioning something rather worrying that the organization had patronized the two films on Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych.

Chinese netizens found out that the two Ukrainian historic figures are in fact Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and fascists, and that the organizations they led actively worked with German Nazi, and staged "racial purification" in western Ukraine and launched mass killings of the Jewish people in the 1940s.

Other netizens also revealed that the movies endorsed by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America - namely Assasination: An autumn murder in Munich and The Undefeated, glorified the two as "Soviet Union-resistance heroes" without mentioning their infamous collaboration with the Nazi.  

Photo:web

The Global Times found that the movies in question do show the logo of the organization at the beginning. 

Although political forces in Ukraine have been defending the two figures and viewing them as national "heroes," while calling the voices "smearing them as Nazi company" political slander from the Soviet Union and Russia, the Global Times found that even those US-endearing anti-Russia scholars have admitted their support for the Nazi Fascism.

For instance, Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University, US, in his A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev, disclosed directly that Bandera "aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities."

Snyder wrote in the piece that "During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews," and "Young terrorists such as Stepan Bandera were formed not by the prewar empires, but by fascist ideology and the experience of national discrimination in Poland."

The Ukrainian Military Organization, however, formed of Ukrainian veterans in Poland, followed the movement that sought to change the boundaries of Europe: fascism, Snyder noted.

Even the Atlantic Council, a think tank that defends the US hegemony, published an article in 2010 that said "former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko's decision to confer the title of Hero of Ukraine on nationalist leader Stepan Bandera on Jan. 22 has unleashed a storm of outrage inside and outside Ukraine. Critics accuse Yushchenko of whitewashing a Nazi-era fascist and betraying the ideals of the Orange Revolution that brought him to power."

The Atlantic Council pointed out that "Bandera hoped for an alliance with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union … In the years that followed, the nationalists did fight both the Germans and the Soviets, but they also fought and killed thousands of Poles and participated in anti-Jewish actions."

Apart from that, Bandera and Shukhevych were also explicitly tagged as "Nazi cooperators" by Israel, the Global Times has found.

Poland and Israel have protested and condemned for multiple times against the commemoration of the mentioned figures. Israel's ambassador to Ukraine Joel Lion in 2018 issued a statement, condemning the Lviv region's decision to name 2019 the year of Stepan Bandera.

"I cannot understand how the glorification of those directly involved in horrible anti-Semitic crimes helps fight anti-Semitism and xenophobia," he wrote, The Times of Israel reported in 2018.

Figures such as Bandera and Roman Shukhevych are widely seen as "heroes who fought for Ukraine's independence," but "we see them as the killers of Jews," Lion said in an interview with a local radio.

Observers said that the US embassy's move to promote the Nazi-collaborators-whitewashing organizations and the mentioning of the movies in question while completely neglecting their infamous history is no different to denying German Nazi's massacre.

Such a move by the US naturally leads to another question: Does the US really care about the ordeals that the Jewish people went through or it just wants to use the tragedy as a tool to attack Russia in order to safeguard its hegemony?

Netizens said they are not surprised that the US has done so. Most of them recalled that US media such as the Los Angeles Times had reported that the US government made a secret deal with the infamous Unit 731 of the Japanese army which committed atrocious war crimes in China during World War II.

The Xinhua News Agency reported in August 2021 that in a secret deal struck between September 1945 and November 1948, Fort Detrick of the US Army spent 250,000 yen, equal to several thousands of US dollars at that time, obtaining data and medical papers on human experiments, bacterial tests, germ warfare, and toxic gas experiments conducted by Unit 731.