The racist and Islamophobic views of the so-called ‘influencer’ Laura Loomer are not new. Yet who expected she would openly embrace Ukraine’s leading neo-Nazi, Andriy ‘White Fuhrer’ Biletsky? Her interview with Biletsky had the explicit mission of white-washing Biletsky’s vicious Nazi ideology, so as to accommodate a marriage of Kiev’s crusade against Russia to the anti-Islam crusade by Israel’s ‘blood and soil’ gang, led by such as Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir.
The first 30 minutes were devoted to an attempt to dispel the controversy around Biletsky’s use of a windswept swastika for the insignia of his Azov Brigade. She tried to get Biletsky to realize that the swastika wasn’t a good look for selling Ukraine’s image to the world, what she called an “optical crisis” for Ukraine. While Biletsky pretended that he had nothing to do with the offending insignia, one that he himself had selected in founding the Azov Brigade, he stuck to his guns, saying that they had to keep it, as Ukrainians had bled for that symbol. Rather, Kiev’s Western allies needed to be re-educated. He provided his stock-in-trade narrative for naïve Westerners as to why the swastika is not a swastika.
He began: “What you see on the old Azov chevron is a monogram that stands for ‘the idea of the nation'.” Basically, it may look like a swastika, but it is really an “N” with an “I” inserted down the middle of the “N.” He provided no explanation as to why an “N” is used, as that letter does not exist in the Ukrainian alphabet. He conceded: “I perfectly understand the controversy because of some similarity of signs.” But the “‘idea of the nation’ is one of the key slogans of Ukrainian patriots, of Ukrainian nationalists. It again exists for more than a hundred years as a concept.”
Biletsky’s unstated reference is to the 1920’s ‘blood and soil’ concept of Dmytro Dontsov, the ideological father of what would be Ukraine’s original Nazi collaborators, the OUN and Stepan Bandera. Dontsov’s ‘idea of the nation’ involved the idea that a nation was based upon only one ethnically pure people, and so each such nation was in competition with every other nation for survival.
