Robert Parry: Sidestepping Ukraine’s ‘N-Word’ for Nazi

[Tommy_Carcetti]

48. Even when Parry's not completely wrong, he still comes off as the huge hypocrite that he is.

He focuses strictly on the Azov battalion--one of several private militias currently operating in Ukraine independently of the command of Ukraine's army and national guard. And indeed there does seem to be a strong neo-Nazi ideology amongst members of this group. It is undoubtedly disturbing.

However, Parry being Parry, he makes several mistakes fatal to whatever he wants his ultimate point to be. First, he conflates the actions of private militias with those of the Ukrainian government. These are not Ukrainian government troops, period. That they may be conducting their own operations in the same theater does not mean they should be considered one and the same. Secondly, he seems to assume all the private militias are comprised with people with the same neo-Nazi type sentiments as you might find in Azov. You can't just assume--as Parry does--that all these militias are fighting under this mindset. And Azov's a relatively small force--only a few hundred fighters or so, many of whom aren't trained or equipped nearly as well as the regular army, so whatever ultimate impact they may have on the battlefield isn't exactly very clear.

Essentially, Asov's taken the bogeyman role on the pro-Russian side that Right Sector and Svoboda used to have before the presidential election revealed them to have very little public support amongst Ukrainians. The pro-Russian side (and Parry is, without a doubt, very pro-Russian) needs someone to point to so they can mark the Ukrainians and their government as neo-Nazi, or fascist, so to give a clear narrative that the people fighting them are fighting against fascism.

And that's where Parry's gross hypocrisy in this piece comes into play. He criticizes the "western media" for creating a "white hat vs. black hat" narrative with the Ukrainians and their government as the good guys and the separatists and the Russian government as the bad guys.

But that's exactly what he's been doing all along, since February, except in reverse. He's always painted the Ukrainian government in the most unflattering of tones. See how he's insisted--without any evidence whatsoever--that what happened in February was a "coup", and a U.S. backed one at that. He framed the May 2nd mob violence in Odessa as some sort of modern day pogrom massacre of pro-Russian "anti-fascists" by Ukrainian "neo-Nazis" even though even a cursory look at the days events reveal it to be a much more complicated situation than that with both sides at fault.

He's never said a good thing about the Ukrainian government, and hasn't seemed to say anything bad about the separatists or the Russian government, which makes his agenda very questionable.

The truth is, yes, there are neo-Nazis living in Ukraine. There are also neo-Nazis and fascists living in Russia (see Aleksandr Dugin) and neo-Nazis and fascists fighting amongst the seperatists, but Parry won't have any of that. The sad thing is, neo-Nazis are just an unfortunate fact of life just about everywhere.

Parry's supporters insist he is still the principled "investigative journalist" of decades back, but the cold, hard truth is he researches little and reports nothing beyond what his agenda supports. For example, someone so seemingly obsessed with neo-Nazis and fascists in Ukraine would probably take note of the fact that Pavel Gubarev, the "people's governor" of Donetsk, was a proud member of Russian National Unity, a fascist/neo-Nazi paramilitary organization, and Gubarev to this date appears to be very proud of the association. But that runs contrary to Parry's own narrative. So the only mention Parry has ever made of Gubarev merely makes him out to have been some sort of political prisoner of the Ukrainian government:

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/04/the-age-of-the-oligarchs/

For the people who just looooove to quote Robert Parry because of what he did 30 years ago:

Robert Parry is not being honest with you. Robert Parry is a disingenuous, hypocritical hack. Still.