The Futile Attempt to Learn Why Philadelphia (and Your Hometown) Is Voting to Arm Nazis

The reader is no doubt aware the US backed a deadly coup against the elected government of Ukraine using open fascists who have launched a war against Ukraine's ethnic Russian population. That nation has had the geographic misfortune of being Russia's fertile underbelly and thereby a historic battleground for a spectrum of extremist madmen willing to fight with or against the last standing Ukrainian. The latest bloodshed demand comes from Washington, and DC is simply doing there what it needs to do everywhere else on the global chessboard when a coup is on the agenda – link with the most dangerous elements of an otherwise normal society, extremists willing to sell out their homeland in exchange for the opportunity to raise the Jolly Roger and slit the throats of ancestral enemies. By our allies shall ye know us.

I am on a quest to get an answer as to why Democrats representing my native 'liberal' Philadelphia felt compelled to vote affirmatively to send guns to Nazis with American taxpayer funds, borrowed at interest. This seems a reasonable question. Unfortunately no one in a position to answer me has shown any interest in engaging in an honest exchange, thus I appeal to a public forum in hope of shaming my local officials into functionality. My assumption is that the good people of Illinois and Arizona and Ohio have equal interest in looking around their communities without arriving at the conclusion that sending weapons to Eastern European fascists is the best use of their taxpayer dollar.

Philadelphia is, according to 2014 US Census estimates, the “poorest big city in America,” with more than 26% of the population below the official federal poverty line and 185,000 of those unfortunates in “deep poverty,” double the national rate. What remains of the public school system which educated me is in absolute funding freefall and at South Philadelphia High School, the closest to my home, 97% of the students are from families who qualify for assistance. We have a collapsing infrastructure, including 200 year old pipes which leak 60 million gallons of potable water daily and 120 year old pipes leaking natural gas. Our congressional delegation, confronted with these facts, decided it was a priority to buy weapons for Nazis several thousand miles away.

Having interest in the darkest corners of politics from an extremely young age, and coming into my teens in the 1980s, my expectations of American foreign policy have always been low. My biological father was ruined by two tours of killing and bleeding in Vietnam, a sentence served for his crime of being born working class. As a bookish (and eventually fatherless) twerp I cut my teeth on true tales of the severed heads and hands of campesino activists being displayed in Central American villages by our proxies as a message to other potential Commies to quit it, and followed in detail our continuing national project of feeding guns to religious lunatics from Occupied Palestine to Afghanistan. While my peers pondered the abyss via Alan Moore comics I reflected upon it in the political nonfiction of Noam Chomsky.

I expect atrocity. Few things could or would surprise me, the limbo bar goes lower in each successive cycle of evil of two lessers elections. Along with my morning caffeine I peruse Antiwar.com to catch up on what new My Lai or Abu Ghraib we engaged in while I slept. I am rarely surprised and never disappointed, for disappointment would require minimal expectation of decency.

Lower still on my scale of expectation is that of any action resulting from my initially regular and recently diminished contacts with my elected representatives, safely tucked into gerrymandered districts where the cries of the dying need not trouble them. As an unaffiliated anti-war activist, decades of staff-written form letters in response to my missives have been forwarded to me, always weeks or months after relevance, spewing the usual lies about why the School of the Americas or more nuclear weapons or drone assassinations need to be funded, and why everyone between Morocco and India needs to be armed and/or bombed.

The useless congressional correspondence dance wears on a person nearly 30 years in, a loop in which I reaffirm my sanity by stating the truth at liars of middling intellect, only to have my intelligence questioned by those same taxpayer-funded buffoons who ignore me and continue funding death at our expense.

That said, even I have had to raise an eyebrow at our recent support for open fascists in Ukraine. I have no illusion that neo-Nazi white supremacists who have threatened to kill the entire ethnic Russian population of the country are markedly worse than our usual proxies and allies. Nor do I have reason to expect any caution regarding the real risk of a third world war in supporting them on the part of the comically unlettered lump of self-enrichment who purports to represent me in the House.

My surprise comes at the fact that the American population, having been exposed to countless Holocaust books and movies, to years of Greatest Generation documentaries, to Anne Frank... at the very least to Hogan's Heroes and the Indiana Jones movies, might for once bristle at arming people who proudly walk around wearing swastikas, or march in support of a Waffen SS division. The limbo bar might not, I naively thought, go quite so low that arming our official cartoon villains could be accomplished without a peep of dissent.

As proof of even my overestimate of the American moral compass, in one of its periodic spasms of harmful insanity the US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in bipartisan fashion to urge the shipment of lethal aid to people who thought World War II had a poor result and needs a rematch, this time with the USA on Team Swastika. This vote followed a failure to pass an amendment introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) to limit our gifts of Ukraine weaponry merely to ethnic cleansers who refrain from obvious “praise or glorification of Nazism or its collaborators, including through the use of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, or other similar symbols.” Too much to ask, I suppose, and one wonders if Conyers has been added to the no-fly list for his evident support of terrorism.

Pennsylvania losing population in each successive census, formerly influential Philadelphia has been reduced to federal representation split into three gerrymandered districts: PA 1st, PA 2nd and the decided minority partner PA 13th. The first two have been drawn so that white Philadelphia will have one safe Democratic seat via traditionally working class Catholic ethnic River Wards, and another safe Democratic seat which is predominately African-American. I live in the former all of three blocks from the border of the latter. Bob Brady and Chaka Fattah, both representatives of a city in which they split one of our country's primary concentrations of urban Jews, sexual minorities and African-Americans, voted to send guns to Nazis using our money.

Motivated by getting a straight answer as to how and why that is possible, I began phoning multiple offices of our representatives. I began with Fattah's offices, asking staffers why an African-American man with an Afrocentric name from a 69.1% non-white district finds himself backing guns for people who make a 14 word pledge to fight for the 'white race.' His intake staffers to this point have responded to my calls largely with a stunned silence, and I have exhorted them to research the issue for themselves by searching for the Conyers amendment and keywords such as 'Azov Battalion.' Several times my phone number has been taken down with a pledge that a foreign policy aide will get back to me, and only after a week of stating that this stonewalling was forcing my hand toward public shaming via this article did an aide finally call me briefly to defend the vote. Perhaps the Fattahs are overburdened with other concerns.

I was informed by an aide that there aren't any Nazis in Ukraine, we are certainly not funding them and any impression I have otherwise is incorrect. After a few attempts on my end to get the aide to independently verify the veracity of my claims by spending even 30 seconds using the search engine of his choice, and stating that my narrative is radically different than his because I am apprised of reality, he moved to try and end discussion by thanking me “for my input.” I stated that innocent people are going to die as a result of the ignorance of Fattah and his staff, for the offense of speaking the wrong Slavic language and praying in the wrong Christian church, and this was simply not good enough a response. I suggested Fattah owes us all an apology and needs to make amends for this insane damage, at which point the aide hung up on me in mid-sentence.

For those curious as to what happened to Ben Franklin's congressional seat, our marginally intelligible representative is Bob Brady, for 30 years Philadelphia's Democratic Party boss, during which span over 1,000 criminal charges have been pursued against party officials. Brady was not initially elected to the seat but named himself to it mid-term by fiat in 1997 when the previous representative was awarded an ambassadorship by Bill Clinton. Brady repeatedly ran for mayor of Philadelphia, his preferred job, and has been repeatedly rejected for same in the Democratic primary (the “real election” in a single-party city). Not able to win that office and the thought of working an honest day in the private sector being abhorrent, since 1998 he 'runs' unopposed by Democrats in congressional primaries and wins 85-99.9% of every general election vote dependent upon the Republican Party's decision to stand a tomato can or leave us with a single candidate 'race.' Brady does not need to answer policy questions to retain his seat, and generally does not.

Perhaps because I am a constituent and entitled to feel special, Brady's staffers only ignored my calls and messages about Nazi money for a little over two weeks, repeatedly taking my number and assuring me a foreign policy aide would call me back. None ever did, but two weeks into my proactive calling I was patched through to an unidentified aide who told me that the office was “aware” of my calls and quickly followed by asking pointedly if I am “from Russia” or if I have “family from Russia.”

What I could have shared at that juncture was that I do not, but that a quarter of my ancestors were ethnic Poles from a portion of Galicia which was ceded from Poland to Ukrainian SSR after the war, people who did so poorly after emigrating to Philadelphia's Slavic slums in the 1920s that they moved back to Poland, only to flee Nazi occupation and Poland forever in 1939 and 1940. This seemed a bit much for the fellow to follow, and really aside from the point, so I simply responded that I am a native born American citizen with, as many of us have, recent ancestors who fought the SS on the Western Front and that I am no supporter of bullets for fascists.

Brady's aide then made the stunning statement that the only news outlets in the world claiming that Ukraine has fascists are Russian ones, and I need to stop being propagandized by Russia Today. I responded that almost every news outlet on the planet and even some in the US are filled with photos of and articles about Ukraine's coup Nazis, and that no one is more vocal about Ukraine having fascists than Ukraine's parading, Sieg heil-ing, banner-carrying fascists. I further suggested I was not the party being taken in by propaganda.

I asked the aide why John Conyers, a fellow Democrat, would introduce an amendment specifically attempting to bar sending guns to Nazis in Ukraine if they do not exist. Instead of answering that the Brady aide stated the violent overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government was not a coup, although he had no coherent words for what did occur, and attempted to change the subject to “Russia's invasion” of Crimea.

I reminded the aide that Viktor Yanukovych won two rounds of the 2010 national elections, rather better than the second place popular vote finish which elected George W. Bush in 2000, and was removed by force by people wearing replica SS helmets. The retort was that Yanukovych “fled to Moscow,” with the Brady aide asserting in effect that fleeing from Nazis for one's life toward Russia is somehow a poor reflection on both Yanukovych and Moscow as opposed to a poor refelction on Kiev. Or Nazis.

I noted that the American weapons in question were headed not to Crimea but to kill ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens in the Donbass, that Crimea voted overwhemingly to leave Ukraine in the sort of referendum we forced in Kosovo, and that Russian troops had been stationed in Crimea since the dissolution of the USSR by treaty, with the full knowledge and support of elected Ukrainian governments. I noted that the Crimea vote was taken only after the Russian language was barred as an official language by the coup government, to which the aide shot back that the Crimean referendum did not have international observers.

I informed him there were a hastily flung together set of international observers, as the NATO-oriented Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was invited to send observers, but refused for the obvious reason that nearly 100% of Crimea was about to vote to leave Ukraine and an honest witnessing of that by the West would be embarrassing to the West. I noted too that I had been an election station chief in the 1998 Bosnian national election for the same OSCE through contract to the Department of State and that anyone arguing with me on the subject is most likely out of his depths.

This seemed to shut the aide up for a few seconds so I took advantage of the silence to ask if he were aware that Crimea was arbitrarily reassigned from the Russian SSR to Ukrainian SSR by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, explaining why most people born there speak Russian. As an answer I was told I was “being rude” and hung up upon. I called right back and the receptionist told me after a brief hold that no one could speak to me because “everyone” was in a meeting.

At no point has either office owned up to the reality that they voted to send guns to Nazis, let alone honestly explain to me how this decision came to pass.

An irony in our local Nazi lust is the presence of an established multi-generational Ukrainian-American community in the urban-suburban 13th District, rare contested territory between the two parties, and home of newly elected Representative Brendan F. Boyle. Boyle is a Democrat listed as Not Voting on the issue of the USA sending guns to Nazis, this apparently not being the sort of thing one feels compelled to take a stand on. The Far Northeast of the city and adjacent suburbs are home to Ukrainian parishes, community centers and a private Catholic girls' high school where to this day all students of all backgrounds take one semester of the Ukrainian language as taught by nuns as a graduation requirement. It is a severe understatement that elements of the community are not fans of all things Russian. If anywhere in the US could pressure a congressman into a yes vote on guns for Ukraine, this would be the district I would expect, especially as the district's sizable recent Russian immigrant community does not yet have the vote. And yet Not Voting. Boyle is a graduate degree holder from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and an intellectual cut above the remainder of the delegation; I have a thus far unanswered query out to his press aide as to why he dodged a position intentionally. “Fight fiercely, Harvard!”

The Ukrainian-American population of our congressional delegation who did vote yes on arming fascists is statistically insignificant, thus that community appears to have been a non-factor as constituent pressure. It is a sad day when a major American city has three votes to cast on buying guns for Nazis and the best we can cough up is one non-decision.

Philadelphia has elected people who arm Nazis. I encourage my fellow Philadelphians to repeat that sentence to yourselves until you feel compelled to do something about it. Being the only person around here asking questions about weapons for fascists makes me seem crazy. One concrete action which might not rectify things totally but would certainly be a small goosestep in the right direction would be a flood of calls to the offices of Congressman Bob Brady (202-225-4731) and Congressman Chaka Fattah (202-225-4001), demanding to know why the home of American independence voted to love the Fuehrer's face , including training the Azov Battalion beginning on Hitler's birthday in case things were otherwise too subtle.