In today’s Issue:
- Jim Rickards claims Ukraine’s government is Neo Nazi
- What’s the evidence?
- Ukraine’s politics does not align with our ability to understand politics
Last week, my fellow editor Jim Rickards wrote to you about the BRICS. That investment theme happens to be the first I ever encountered.
The idea was that a group of huge developing countries were about to become prosperous consumer nations. This would change the world and stock portfolios forever.
Five years later, I had the chance to personally thank the BRICS idea’s creator Jim O’Neil, Chief Economist of Goldman Sachs at the time. Without his thesis, I might’ve stuck with a career in the circus instead.
He suggested this would’ve been a better outcome given the Global Financial Crisis was raging at the time.
But by the time I met Jim O’Neil, I’d begun following Jim Rickards too. He was the author of the book Currency Wars, which predicted so much of what happened since the financial crisis. Indeed, Jim Rickards’ track record has stood the test of time better than any BRICS prediction.
Unfortunately, that’s not why I’m writing to you today…
In the BRICS article, Jim Rickards mentioned “the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine.”
So you can imagine what our email inbox looks like right now.
While the off-hand mention had little bearing on Jim’s thesis for the BRICS, it does require some clarification…
We publish ideas
The first thing to note is that our publishing company exists to publish investment ideas from “the edge of the bell curve”. Meaning they are contrarian, intriguing, unusual, surprising and all sorts of other odd things.
New ideas make some people angry. While others love them, purely for the sake of it. Neophobes and neophytes is the technical term.
If you’re a neophobe, don’t read on…
Our editors aren’t just controversial for the sake of it. Their ideas have to be well researched and include an investment angle. If readers want to hear it, we publish it. And, let me tell you, there have been some real oddballs.
Some of whom turned out the be right!
Our editors also disagree with each other. A lot. Sometimes heatedly.
Some readers find this confusing. But there is no company line to toe. Our editors publish their ideas, not a compromise or the business owners’ views. Because we don’t pretend to know who is right.
This means we don’t always agree with what goes out. But the publishing company’s ethos has evolved to accept this. As you may have noticed, I often endorse views I disagree with. Because I know, and my readers know, we’re neophytes. And because I think you can judge for yourself. And because I might be wrong.
But we do know that the truth about the future is never to be found in the mainstream media.
Why did Jim claim the Ukraine government is Neo Nazi?
In Jim Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence UK newsletter, he has long analysed and detailed many things about Ukraine. Including the extent to which neo-Nazis feature there. It’s not his focus. But it could prove important, he argues.
And if his latest issue of Strategic Intelligence UK proves accurate, it may become very important in how Trump positions the war in Ukraine in coming months.
What’s his evidence? Here is one example of Jim’s analysis, from a transcript of an interview Jim did for his subscribers back in November 2023:
“They say, “Well, we’re fighting in Ukraine for democracy.” Ukraine’s not a democracy, I mean Zelensky suspended elections, they’re not having elections. He gave no date for when they might resume elections in future. He suppressed the church. He’s arresting priests. He’s closing cathedrals, all the Eastern Orthodox Church because they have some affiliation with the patriarch of Moscow. Again, it’s a purely religious matter. It’s not like the churches are arming the insurgents. It is de facto a dictatorship, an oligarchy.
It is neo-Nazi. That’s not just throwing names around or calling names. The Nazi roots in Ukraine do go back to World War II, particular leader, Stepan Bandera, who was bitterly, bitterly anti-Soviet. Okay, if you want to be anti-Soviet, but his solution to that was to join forces with the Nazis who were killing Jews.
A lot of the Holocaust victims were in Ukraine. Of course, Poland and Germany itself, but really Poland and some other countries were the main centers of it. Ukraine was not on the sidelines of that by any means.
Those people are still around. They call themselves the Azov Battalion or Azov Brigade. They were Nazi insignia. I mean, I’ve seen it all. There’s tons of photographic evidence and witness testimony and interviews with some of the leaders.
They model themselves on the Waffen-SS, which was the militarized version of the SS. The SS Gestapo were the ones who orchestrated the Holocaust, the industrialized killing of the Jews. But they had the military branches with divisions and armor, and they would fight, but a lot of the fighting was designed to come up with more Jewish victims. They were called the Waffen-SS.
Again, they’re the insignia that these Ukrainian brigades are using. So you have a dictatorship, no elections, suppressing the church, neo-Nazi affiliations, Nazi insignias, and that’s who we’re supporting.”
Regardless of whether you come to the same conclusions as Jim, I don’t think it’s fair to claim he’s failed to inform himself. So the question is to what extent he is correct.
I’ll leave that for you to decide for yourself. All answers are acceptable to us. We don’t mind. But don’t bother telling us you’re annoyed. We get that about everything else we publish too…
Not the first Neo Nazis
Jim’s article on the BRICS isn’t the first time he has courted controversy on this topic. Jim raised and was challenged on his claims in a Triggernometry interview about a month ago. You can check it out here. The Neo-Nazis feature, or don’t feature, depending on what you believe, 35 minutes in.
I had some first-hand experiences in Ukraine back in 2016. That was just two years after the Maidan Revolution.
I was travelling with a famous Australian libertarian who personally knew, and to a small extent supported, certain figures in the Maidan Revolution. I think he met some of them on the trip.
On the flight to Ukraine, I asked him about the Neo Nazi allegations made about his Ukrainian friends. He was flummoxed. Hadn’t heard anything of the sort.
Now, imagine if someone claimed your friends might be Neo Nazis. How would you react?
Well, my friend just said he’d look into it. I don’t know what he found. But that’s the right sort of attitude to take.
At customs in Kiev airport, my friend was surrounded by large men wearing black outfits without insignia and carrying machine guns. They marched him off for questioning. He was 78 at the time…
Suddenly, the neophobes don’t look so righteous…
Ukraine is just a very different sort of place. Anything goes and we have no reference point for what is going on or why.
At the Kiev hotel check in, a fellow guest snatched my passport and ran for it. The staff were ready for it. Happens all the time…
My point is that the debate about Neo Nazis in Ukraine is so far removed from how you and I understand politics and the world that I just don’t see value in it.
It’s like a European and American arguing about “liberals,” only to discover they have the precise opposite definition of the word. In Australia, the conservative party is literally called the Liberal Party.
And in the US, the media has been busy accusing anyone who waves their hand at a political rally of doing a Nazi salute. Maybe that explains why the Royal Family wave their hand in such an odd way…
So, good luck figuring out whether there are Neo Nazis in Ukraine in any meaningful sense of the word to you and me. They seem to be everywhere whenever your opponents are in government…
Until next time,
Nick Hubble
Contributing Editor, Investor’s Daily
