 Empire solves Ukraine's Nazi problem with a logo change. Ah, that's much better. Problem solved. British Empire smut rag The Times has a new article out titled Azov Battalion Drops Neo-Nazi Symbol Exploited by Russian Propagandists, which has got to be the most hilarious headline of 2022 so far, and I'm including the onion and other intentionally funny headlines in the running. The Azov Battalion has removed a Neo-Nazi symbol from its insignia that has helped perpetuate Russian propaganda about Ukraine being in the grip of far-right nationalism, The Times informs us. At the unveiling of a new Special Forces unit in Kariv, patches handed to soldiers did not feature the Wolfsangle, a medieval German symbol that was adopted by the Nazis and which has been used by the battalion since 2014. Instead, they featured a golden trident, the Ukrainian national symbol worn by other regiments. Yeah, that's how you solve Ukraine's Nazi problem. A logo change. Claiming its Russian propaganda to say the Azov Battalion uses Neo-Nazi insignia and is, ideologically, Neo-Nazi, is itself propaganda. A month ago, Moon of Alabama published an incomplete list of the many mainstream Western outlets who have described various Ukrainian paramilitaries as such. So if it's only Russian propagandists who've been saying the Azov Battalion is Neo-Nazi, then Silicon Valley social media platforms should immediately ban outlets like NBC News, the BBC, The Guardian, and Reuters. Before this war started this past February, it wasn't seriously controversial to say that Ukraine has a Nazi problem except in the very most virulent of Empire spinmeister echo chambers. Even in the early days of the conflict, it was still happening with mainstream publications who hadn't yet gotten the memo that history had been rewritten. Like this NBC News article from March titled Ukraine's Nazi problem is real, even if Putin's denazification claim isn't. Here's an excerpt. Just as disturbing, Neo-Nazis are part of some of Ukraine's growing ranks of volunteer battalions. They are battle-hardened after waging some of the toughest street fighting against Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine following Putin's Crimean invasion in 2014. One is the Azov Battalion, funded by an avowed white supremacist who claims Ukraine's national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. In 2018, the Congress stipulated that its aid to Ukraine shouldn't be used to provide arms training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion. Even so, Azov is now an official member of the Ukrainian National Guard. So plainly it is not Russian propaganda to highlight the established fact that there are many paramilitaries in Ukraine who are receiving weapons from the US and its allies. The change in insignia isn't being made to correct a misperception, it is being made to obscure a correct perception. The change in insignia is a rebranding to a more mainstream-friendly logo, very much like Aunt Jemima rebranding to Pearl Milling Company due to the Jim Crow racism the previous branding evoked. The primary difference is that the corporate executives of Pearl Milling probably aren't still interested in turning America back into an apartheid state. As journalist Alex Rubinstein noted on Twitter, Al-Qaeda in Syria went through a similar rebranding not long ago for the exact same reasons. Quote, Azov is the new Al-Qaeda in Syria. We aren't Al-Qaeda, we split from them. Sure, all of us are former members, but our new group, J. Shalsawahiri, isn't down with that sort of thing. We still fly the black flag, but we changed the words on it. Now please send us more weapons," end quote. Indeed, it is very normal for the U.S. and its allies to provide backing to fascistic extremists in order to advance imperial agendas because those tend to be the armed factions in a given area who are willing to inflict the brutal acts of violence upon their countrymen necessary to facilitate those agendas. From far-right militias in Latin America to tyrannical jihadists in the Middle East, this pattern of backing murderous fascists and then having to manage public perception of their depravity has been going on a long time. After the U.S. alliance began working with Al-Qaeda-aligned factions to push regime change in Syria, it eventually became necessary for them to rebrand to appease public concerns about their image. When the U.S.-backed Contras were committing human rights atrocities in Nicaragua to stomp out the leftist Sandinistas, the Reagan administration was launching a massive perception management campaign to manipulate the way people see the situation. In Ukraine, neo-Nazi paramilitaries just happened to have been the armed thugs who were depraved enough to do what the empire needed done on the ground. As Ukrainian-American peace activist Yuli Dubovic explained for multipolarista, they were the ones who were willing to fire upon their own countrymen in the eastern part of the nation. The people in Donetsk and Luhansk were less lucky. The coup government dispatched the military to suppress their insurrections. At first, many Ukrainian soldiers refused to shoot at their countrymen in this civil war that their U.S.-backed government started. Seeing the hesitation of the Ukrainian military, far-right groups and the oligarchs that were backing them formed so-called territorial defense battalions with names like Azov. Much like in Latin America, where U.S.-backed death squads kill left-wing politicians, socialists, and labor organizers, these Ukrainian fascist battalions were deployed to lead the offensive against the militias of Donetsk and Luhansk, killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians. The fact that factions like the Azov battalion have been the ones willing to get their hands dirty in Ukraine has been a major factor in their ability to shore up influence over the nation's affairs for an excess of their numbers. A dynamic described in detail by the Grey Zone's Max Blumenthal and Alex Rubenstein. As noted by journalist Aaron Mate, when Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine, these extremists openly threatened to lynch him if he worked to make peace with Russia as he had pledged to do. And on that note, it's worth issuing another reminder at this time that the U.S. could easily have prevented this entire war by simply giving Zelensky protection from those factions so that he could enact the peace mandate he'd been elected to enact. But of course the U.S. would never do such a thing because the U.S. always wanted this war and because the U.S. does not actually oppose Nazism and because the U.S. does not actually believe in democratic mandates. Which is why when concerns were raised about arming neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, the only offer on the table was a logo change.