The level of cognitive dissonance in the establishment media has become almost sad.
It’s really strange that, at the very same time that much of the media was crying over the defeat or plight of Azov fighters in Mariupol, a homegrown white supremacist was carrying out a massacre in Buffalo – and even sporting the same Nazi-derived Black Sun symbol that is so popular with Azov and much of Ukraine’s militant far right.
And yet the homegrown killer – a mere teenager – was being (rightly) condemned and vilified, while the masses of armed fighters in Mariupol (many of whom subscribe to an openly white supremacist Nazi ideology) were being lionised as heroes or mourned as martyrs.
You could call it establishment hypocrisy: or you could call it, as I said, cognitive dissonance.
If it’s the latter, then it’s *mass* cognitive dissonance, as I’m sure the same bandwagon-chasing types who’ve been proudly regurgitating the Nazi-era ‘Glory to Ukraine’ memes and hashtags for the past few months were among the first to broadcast their outrage at the horrendous actions of a domestic terrorist gunning down American citizens.
It vividly demonstrates the level of reality-warping that these people – including any number of mainstream ‘journalists’ – are floundering in. Up is down and fire is wet.
While a mass shooting event in the US is nothing new, what’s particularly of note at this current time is that – as various online observers were quick to notice – the teenager was wearing the Black Sun symbol (prevalent among Neo Nazi groups) during his livestreamed attack: which happens to be a favoured and favourite symbol of the Azov fighters in Ukraine, among other groups with an affinity for the Nazis and the SS.
While it’s true to say that the Black Sun symbol (and Nazi imagery in general) is not exclusive to Ukrainian Neo Nazis, but is more generally used by Neo Nazi groups or enthusiasts in various different countries (and this is the argument most journalists have adopted to dismiss any attempts to link the Buffalo shooter to the situation in Ukraine), it’s also fair to say that the symbol is especially prevalent among Azov fighters and other white supremacists who have been highly active in Ukraine since at least 2014.
You know, the same guys we’ve been funding, arming and hero-worshipping for some time now?
Therefore, while there is no connection in material terms between the Buffalo shooter and Ukraine, there is certainly an ideological connection, employing the same imagery: as well as an ideological line of descent (from Norway’s mass killer Anders Breivik, for example, to Christchurch killer Brenton Tarrant and from Tarrant to the Buffalo shooter).
The fact that these killers reference each other clearly spells out that these are not isolated acts: but acts spawned from within a shared ideological framework and mythology.
By that same measure, you cannot pretend – as most mainstream journalists and commentators are trying to do (see here, for example) – that Peyton Gendron‘s sporting of the Black Sun symbol has *no* relationship to Nazi militias in Ukraine sporting the same symbols: any more than you can pretend Brenton Tarrant (who also brandished the Black Sun symbol) being in Ukraine with Azov fighters (which he was) had no relationship to his carrying out a massacre in Christchurch.
At the very least, in the Buffalo shooter’s case, the relationship is *ideological*.
But again, the mass cognitive dissonance in the major media doesn’t permit them to see or acknowledge this obvious reality. Any criticism or scepticism about the Azov fighters (and other extreme militants) in Ukraine is dismissed out of hand or labelled as Russian propaganda.
The Buffalo shooter’s adopted (if messy) ideology is clearly in-tune with the race-based/Neo-Nazi ideology of Ukraine’s highly prevalent extreme right. As pointed out previously, the Azov Battalion (currently being celebrated and mourned online and in the media), was founded by someone who actually said the group’s mission was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led subhumans”.
In keeping with such thinking, the Buffalo attack, according to the alleged online document/manifesto, ‘was intended to terrorize all non-white, non-Christian people’.
It’s not rocket science: there’s obviously a connection – at the ideological and propaganda level.
The same school of bullshit ideology that the Buffalo shooter fell for is the same ideology that groups like Azov, C14, Svoboda and others in Ukraine having been espousing for years: but the mass media has gone out of it way for the passed four months to pretend otherwise (an obviously concerted and deliberate policy of omission that was covered at length here in March).
Whether the 18 year-old was simply brainwashed by certain online extremist content or whether he might even have been somewhat goaded or manipulated into such an act by agencies interested in such things happening, it’s impossible to know for certain. Certainly, a hell of a lot of people *have* been brainwashed by online falsehoods and the newly mainstreamlined white supremacist movement: and an 18 year-old is particularly vulnerable to that sort of thing (as we saw with the number of very young people indoctrinated by extreme Islamist ideologies during the ‘ISIS’ operations).
I think I just made up a word, by the way: ‘mainstreamlined’. But it’s true: ideas and tropes that were once considered unacceptable in civilised society have become increasingly more accepted and mainstreamlined in the last several years, turned into memes and hashtags and even t-shirts.
Some of this has been organic: and a lot of it hasn’t been, but rather manipulated and engendered by vested interests and wealthy funders of online indoctrination and hate-fuelling (ranging from things like Cambridge Analytica and the MAGA psy-op to organisations like the Gatestone Institute, etc, all the way down to run-of-the-mill far-right groups and white supremacist networks).
The Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron‘s online ‘manifesto’ (we’ll used that word loosely), published to Google Docs, apparently includes references to the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, as well as citing Brenton Tarrant, the man who carried out the Christchurch Massacre in 2017.
I can’t actually access the document itself online, so I’m relying here on various media organisations’ accounts of what Gendron’s document says. But Tarrant appears to be an inspiration for Gendron’s act of mass murder: Gendron livestreamed his rampage just as Tarrant did in New Zealand.
Let’s remember that Tarrant in fact had some link to Ukraine, having spent time with Ukrainian militias (which almost certainly included Azov). This is something I explored at length in an older piece in 2018 about the growing ‘White Jihad’ movement and its links to Azov and the situation in Ukraine.
If Tarrant was an inspiration for the Buffalo shooter, let’s note that Neo Nazi mass murderer (and Freemason and self-proclaimed Knight Templar) Anders Breivik was an inspiration for Brenton Tarrant himself and was cited as such in Tarrant’s own ‘manifesto’.
So this is very much an ongoing cycle or ‘saga’ of mass psychosis, indoctrination and violence: or, as I called it at the time of the Christchurch attack, ‘a perpetual motion machine‘.
But the corporate-aligned journalists and commentators are either so embarrassed or so *confused* by the apparent incongruousness of their own position – supporting and celebrating the ultra far-right abroad but condemning it at home – that they don’t know how to address the contradictions anymore.
But should we expect any better from an establishment media that also spent years telling us Al-Qaeda were our deadly enemies (and the very reason for the protracted War on Terror)… only to then tell us that Al-Qaeda fighters working to overthrow the Libyan state in 2011 were ‘heroes’ and ‘pro democracy forces’ on whose behalf we had to mobilise the full military might of NATO?
One of those Libyan terrorists – a boy named Salman Abedi, being kept in Manchester with a bunch of other Libyan Islamists – came back from helping overthrow Gaddafi’s state and carried out the Manchester Arena Attack (a saga I covered here): and the cognitive dissonance in the establishment media was as glaring in Abedi’s case as it is now in the Buffalo case.
They either just don’t get it – or they’re actively trying to obscure the obvious truth. It’s all very perverse.
All the more so when we consider all the rhetoric in recent years about dealing with domestic white supremacists and far-right extremists in the US: and all the outrage against those involved in the idiotic January 6th Capitol Riot, for example.
But arming, financing and championing actual self-proclaimed white supremacists to fight a proxy war in a foreign land? That’s ok, apparently.
For that matter, since we’ve mentioned it here, it passed under most people’s radars that at least one individual involved with the extreme right in Ukraine was also seen at the January 6th Capitol Riot itself. At least this seems to have been the case.
***Ukrainian Military Spotted at Jan 6th PsyOp*** pic.twitter.com/cCDCBrTZmk
— FlimFlam (@JDscramble425) March 5, 2022
So, again, while there are no material connections between the Buffalo shooter and the Ukrainian militias, there are certainly documented connections more generally speaking between Ukraine’s far-right groups (again, especially Azov) and international white supremacist activity, especially in the United States.
There were links, after all, between Ukraine/Azov and the group that organised the evocative and incendiary Charlottesville white supremacist rally in 2017 (at which various extreme-right groups, including the Nazi Party in the US, gathered to march with torches: and which included Nazi/swastika flags being waved) – a fact that I covered here at the time.
Moreover, as I touched on here in 2018, an FBI indictment seemed to have revealed that American white supremacists had been receiving training from Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi ‘Azov Battalion. This specifically linked to the unrest in Charlottesville and the white-power activists who had violently attacked and assaulted counter-protesters at white nationalist and white supremacist events (one young woman was murdered and nineteen people injured).
As I’ve kept trying to convey on this site over the years, there is a white supremacist movement with global ambitions: and its gravitational center right now is Ukraine.
Whatever you want to call them – Nazis, white supremacists, far right extremists, or whatever else – these people and groups are developing along the same lines as the Islamist extremists were before (who were, as it happens, gifted their own gravitational centres by NATO and the West in Libya, Iraq and Syria).
Where the Islamist extremist networks and individuals were dreaming of an Islamist ‘caliphate’, the ‘white power’ movement is looking for fascist white ethno-states devoid of other races, multi-culturalism, or liberalism of any kind.
What has gone on for years now in Ukraine has been an epicenter for this movement: because the volatile situation that has been concocted in that country has provided a staging area, training ground and indoctrination center for white-supremacist extremists. That’s why Brenton Tarrant was there. That’s why Israel was sending weapons to Azov. It’s why scores of ‘volunteers’ were flocking to Eastern Ukraine long before Russia’s invasion – and why scores more have gone over there *since* Russia invaded.
An Australian news article from four years ago, for example, reported on Australian ‘Nazis’ who had ‘joined thousands of ultranationalists flocking from across the world to take up arms in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass…’
As I’ve said before, this is perfectly in keeping with Azov and Ukrainian-based Neo-Nazis as the white supremacist version of ISIS: and with Ukraine itself being set up as the epicenter for this movement. As Michael Colborne wrote four years ago: ‘They’re trying to turn Kiev into a capital of the global far-right, inviting neo-Nazis and white supremacists from around the world to visit…’
Again, I’m not suggesting that there’s any material link between the Buffalo shooter and Ukraine (though there was between the Christchurch killer and Ukraine): but the extent most of the media has gone to to pretend there isn’t even even an *ideological* connection is… well, it is both suspect and disingenuous.
This connection between groups like Azov or Right-Sector in Ukraine (supported for years now by the US, Britain, Canada and others: see here) and self-professed Neo Nazis or white supremacists in the US or elsewhere is something I’ve been writing about here for years.
It’s just rather perverse that a brainwashed and hate-filled teenager in the US goes on a racial murder spree with a gun and is (rightly) vilified and condemned by the US media and politicians: but the same media and politicians are supporting and celebrating far-right white supremacists with guns (and even using the same symbols) in Ukraine… and with no apparent sense of irony.
Read More: ‘The Truth About Nazis in Ukraine: And Why the Media is Covering it Up‘, ‘The Christchurch Massacre: And the Perpetual Motion Machine‘, ‘The AZOV BATALLION, White Jihad & the Return of the Nazis: Connecting the Dots…’, ‘Salman Abedi, Libya & the Terrible Truth About the Manchester Arena Attack…’, ‘The January 6th Capitol Riot – What REALLY Happened…?‘
