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Ukrainians Are Not Nazis—and They Need Our Help
Why conservatives and libertarians should support aid for Kiev—and diplomacy with Russia.
It’s one thing for libertarians to argue against helping Ukraine with weaponry, but it is quite another to call Ukrainians neo-Nazis and anti-Semitic, giving credence to the barrage of propaganda on Russian TV, and to try to defame their struggle. There are some elements that could be so described, especially in the Azov Brigade, which fought key battles with the separatists and Russian invaders. But the national election last May showed them winning only 1 percent of the national vote and being decisively defeated.Let’s see: America allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler. We then gave succor to former Nazi scientists to help build our rockets. Today we are aiding the terrorist Kurdish PKK against ISIS in Syria (WSJ 7/25/15); we are now on the same side as the Iranians to defeat ISIS in Iraq; and we sustained many assorted dictators during the Cold War. Think of the Saudis, too: we now help Saudi Arabia’s dictators (even refueling their bombers) to target and kill Yemenis who never did America any harm—indeed, they are al-Qaeda’s enemies.
Ukrainian history is bloody and complicated. After the Soviets killed some 7 million Ukrainians, is it a wonder that many survivors welcomed the Germans? And their leader, Stepan Bandera, went on fighting for years. Resisting Ukrainians and Poles were only finally suppressed by Stalin five years after the end of the Second World War, in 1950. Anne Applebaum’s book Gulag movingly describes how survivors in the labor camps revolted and killed their guards after Stalin’s death. They weren’t the intellectuals and peasants who filled the camps in the 1930s, who didn’t know how to fight and kill.
Sohttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ukrainians-are-not-nazis-and-they-need-our-help/
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