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| Outside the Royal United Services Institute |
by New Worker correspondents in London and Bristol
ANTI-FASCIST protesters were out in force on Friday October 23 in London and on the following
Saturday and Monday in Bristol — to protest against the visit to London
of leading Ukrainian neo-Nazi Andriy Parubiy for talks with senior
Government officials — and to analyse Nato aggression and strategy in
Europe.
Andriy Parubiy is the deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament and a
politician with a far right record. Parubiy, along with Oleh Tyahnybok,
in 1991 founded the Social National Party of Ukraine, a fascist party
styled on Hitler’s Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic
Ukrainians.
The ideology of the SNPU was radical nationalism and neo-Nazism. Its
official symbol was the somewhat modified Wolf’s Hook (Wolfsangel), used
as a symbol by various the German SS divisions. Ukraine had its own
Galician SS division, which provided large numbers of concentration and
death camp guards.
As seen by the SNPU leadership, the Wolf ’s Hook became the “idea of the
nation”. Moreover, the official name of the party’s ideology, “social
nationalism,” clearly referred back to the “national socialism” of the
National-Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP or Nazi party) and of
the Hitlerite regime.
In 1998-2004 Parubiy was the head of paramilitary youth wing of
Social-Nationalist Party “Patriot of Ukraine”, which existed until
December 2014 when it joined the Right Sector.
Just last summer, a prominent leader of party’s youth section was
distributing texts from Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels translated
into Ukrainian.
Parubiy and several other activists of Patriot of Ukraine were tried for
beating Communist-led demonstrators in Lvov on 7th November (the
anniversary of Kristallnacht) 1997.
After 2004 Parubiy projected a more moderate public image but during the
recent events he also cooperated with Svoboda and Pravyi Sektor. In
that year the SNPU changed its image and name, to become Svoboda. At
that point Parubiy left the organisation following a split over the name
change and image.
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| Ukrainian fascist Andriy Parubiy |
Despite this change of image, his core views, far right Ukrainian
nationalism based on the heritage of Stephan Bandera, did not change
fundamentally. In 2010 Parubiy vocally campaigned against the European
Parliament for its negative reaction to the declaration of Stepan
Bandera as a Hero of Ukraine.
Bandera was the head of the OUN-UPA, a fascist organisation that
collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War and was involved
in carrying acts of genocide against Poles, Jews and others.
Parubiy and his colleagues preached that Ukraine was a bastion of
western values and racial purity set against the cosmopolitan
“Asian/communist hordes” of Russia.
Parubiy came to London to talk with senior Government, Conservative,
Labour and SNP MPs and Nato officials about military and economic aid to
the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev in its war against the breakaway
anti-fascist states of Donetsk and Lugansk.
One of his appointments was on Friday morning with the Royal United
Services Institute (RUSI) in Whitehall, an “independent think tank”
linked to the British establishment, where Parubiy had been invited to
speak.
But he was greeted at the door by a protest organised by Solidarity with Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine.
People attending the meeting were given leaflets about Parubiy’s
neo-Nazi career. Members of RUSI staff who came out to talk to
campaigners expressed their discomfort that he had been invited. RUSI
director Michael Clarke also spoke to campaigners to defend his decision
to invite him.
The same evening Parubiy attended a social function at a Ukrainian club
in Holland Park Avenue — close to the Ukrainian embassy and not far away
from Linden Gardens where the London headquarters of the OUN had been
for decades after the Second World War — campaigning overtly and
covertly to undermine the Soviet Union and funded by United States
government and Nato bodies.
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| Daphne Liddle CC NCP at evening picket |
And the anti-fascist campaigners were there to greet him again — this
time in greater numbers supported by the New Communist Party, Socialist
Fight, the Communist Party of Britain, the Revolutionary Communist Group
and the CPGB (ML).
Along with the main SARU banner there were several hammer-and-sickle
flags — a symbol now outlawed by Kiev because they fear it will inspire
resistance to the fascism there as it did in the 1940s.
Parubiy met with Labour Lord Robertson, former Nato general secretary.
He also met with Shadow Leader of the House of Commons Chris Bryant,
Labour MP Stephen Pound, SNP MP Stephen Gethins and, separately, with
Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski.
In Bristol on Saturday Bristol Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (BUAFS)
hosted a meeting of around 30 anti-fascists to discuss “The imperialist
crisis and the drive to war in Europe”. Speakers included Alex Gordon
from the RMT transport union and SARU, Dan Glazebrook, author of Divide and Ruin, and Luke Beesley of BUAF, Joti Brar from the CPGB(ML) and Alex Kempshall, who chairs the New Communist Party.
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| NCP National Chair Alex Kempshall (left) at the Bristol meeting |
Alex Gordon spoke of his union’s work to achieve trade union solidarity
with anti-fascists in Ukraine and Alex Kempshall gave a long, detailed
analysis of the economic problems of Ukraine and the schemes of the
European Union and other western powers to get its hands on that
country’s vast natural resources.
And on Monday the BUAFS comrades were out as usual for their regular
weekly picket of the BBC headquarters in Bristol — demanding more
accurate and honest reporting on the situation there.
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