culpritus [any]

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Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: October 20th, 2020
  • culpritus [any]@hexbear.nettoУкраїна | Ukraine 🇺🇦@lemmy.ml•Russia is the World’s Breeding Ground for Neo-Nazi CultureEnglish
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    1 year ago

    https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/08/14/the-russians-and-ukrainians-translating-the-christchurch-shooters-manifesto/

    August 14, 2019

    The Russians and Ukrainians Translating the Christchurch Shooter’s Manifesto

    In Ukraine, one fan of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto has done far more than just share or promote a translation.

    This fan is the administrator of a Ukrainian-language Telegram channel with nearly 1,000 subscribers (we have chosen not identify the channel) that features content openly praising and glorifying the Christchurch shooter as well as sharing uncensored neo-Nazi content that explicitly encourages violence. This administrator also shared a Ukrainian translation of the El Paso shooter’s manifesto only two days after the attacks.

    Another interested reader in the manifesto, another post suggests, is a member of neo-Nazi movement Karpatska Sich (Карпатська Січ) — a group who, as the Bellingcat Monitoring Project documented, was involved in actions against KyivPride in June 2019. In a post on their own Telegram channel on August 14, Karpatska Sich openly urged its members to purchase a copy of the translation, encouraging its members to “get inspired” by it.

    Among the books the interested reader has in their collection are at least three books published by the literature club of the Azov movement, as well as a book about radical Ukrainian integral nationalist ideologue Dmytro Dontsov. Also visible is a knife featuring the SS motto and morale patches from two different Ukrainian brands popular with members of the far-right.

    Ironically, however, the biggest online promoters of a Russian-language translation of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto aren’t in Russia: they’re in Ukraine. A Kyiv-based neo-Nazi group with roots in Russia, Wotanjugend, is behind the promotion if not the translation itself of the manifesto.

    According to the authors of Militant Right-Wing Extremism in Putin’s Russia: Legacies, Forms and Threats, Wotanjugend developed during the 2000s among the hardcore neo-Nazi music scene in Russia, with leaders and members who “styled themselves as an elite neo-Nazi avant-garde.” Many of Wotanjugend’s leaders, being anti-Kremlin and anti-Putin, were supporters of the protests on Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv that mushroomed into a revolution in February 2014.

    As Russian-led forces in eastern Ukraine set off war in April 2014, some Wotanjugend members came to fight with far-right battalions, including the Azov Battalion. Later in 2014 two of Wotanjugend’s leaders, Alexey Levkin and Ivan Mikheev, moved to Ukraine where they remain today.

    Since coming to Ukraine, Wotanjugend has been able to act openly and with clear connections to the Azov movement. Levkin, for example, has described himself as an “ideologist” with Azov’ National Militia. A group with himself and another Azov figure, Olena Semenyaka, have organized a neo-Nazi record label and shop that sells music with racist, anti-Semitic lyrics and paraphernalia with open Nazi symbolism at the Azov movement’s Cossack House, just off Maidan Nezalezhnosti in central Kyiv.

    In May 2019, Wotanjugend hosted an event called “Fuhrernight” in Kyiv, which featured Nazi flags and photos of Adolf Hitler on an altar surrounded by candles.