They're back. Neo Nazis in the Ukraine.

I saw this footage before I left for San Francisco last week. There is a resurgence in right wing neo nazi groups throughout europe and the baltic states that is truly frightening. I find the harassment of the elderly people honoring their war dead simply despicable.



The youth and right wing elements in these countries are reacting to the Stalinist era abuses at the hands of the russians with a new infatuation with the fuehrer and anti-semitism. Ultra nationalism morphs into fascism and man's basest nature quickly reveals itself, the population caught between the twin poles of the oven and the gulag.

Today a monument to jewish victims in the Ukraine was defaced with a swastika. Over one million and a half Ukrainian jews were killed in World War II by the Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, the Waffen SS Nazi death squads. Bystanders said that the Pogroms perpetrated by the Ukrainian citizens were even more extreme than those conducted by the Nazis.

In any case, seventy years seems to be a blink of the eye in the timeline of history. Regrettably, those that think we have either learned anything since the holocaust or moved forward in a human way are probably sadly mistaken.