By Bjørn Ditlef Nistad
On May 16, 2017, the Kiev Rada banned the so-called St. George ribbon, that is, a ribbon that war veterans and other residents used on May 9 to celebrate the Victory over Hitlerite Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. A handful of the MPs dared to protest against the ban. This led to the fact that a member of the Rada, Yuri Beryoza, dressed in military camouflage, shouted from the rostrum of the parliament that he ‘wants to take a machine gun and shoot these bastards’.
We can assume that when a MP of the European Parliament calls to shoot the opposition, this should become a big sensation in the media. But that did not happen. Probably, the leading Western media decided to silence the incident.
If this happened in the parliament of any other country, would there be an attempt to silence it? Of course not. If the appeal to shoot the opposition sounded in the Russian Duma or from a supporter of Marine Le Pen or Donald Trump, this would cause the appearance of bellicose headlines in Western newspapers. But if it was a politician from any African or Asian country, his statement would be followed by a message saying that this was a dangerous lack of political culture.
Or, for example, a taxi driver whose legs were shot through by the guards of a Ukrainian politician because he spoke Russian and had refused to say a nationalistic greeting? Can you imagine that the media would be just as silent if the guards of a famous Russian politician shot a taxi driver who, in their opinion, was not patriotic enough because, for example, he had refused to approve the reunification of the Crimea with Russia?
Or, for example, the laws according to which it is a criminal offense in Ukraine to criticize the Ukrainian fascists of the 30s and 40s, that is, individuals and groups that killed hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles during the Second World War? Why do not the media comment on these laws as they constantly comment on Russian laws on compulsory registration of political organizations funded from abroad? And why do such comments appear? Because Russia, like almost all other countries, including Norway, has laws restricting foreign financing of political activity? Or because fascism is, in fact, a part of the state ideology of Ukraine?
In the construction of postwar Europe, it was important that fascism should not have any support in European countries. What is happening today in Ukraine in the form of bans on criticizing fascist organizations, the killing of opposition politicians and journalists, the ban of the Communist Party, the dismissal of policemen for trying to protect war veterans from right-wing extremists and calls for the parliament to shoot the opposition, can not be characterized as anything but fascism.
The fact that our media, headed by the state-sponsored and financed radio company NRK, refuses to report this, can hardly be called anything other than disinformation.