Four countries vote against anti-Nazi UN resolution

[FluffyMcDeath]

It's an old vote from December 2013 when the protests were growing in Kiev and Russia had just signed a gas deal.

The bill entitled "Combating glorification of Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance : resolution / adopted by the General Assembly" was adopted by the UN council but 4 countries voted against it.

Kiribati is a small country with a population of about 100,000 which gained independence (and I've got a feeling that should be in quotes) from the UK in 1979.

Palau runs under a Compact of Free Association with the US (since 1994) which means the US doesn't directly administer the place any more but still gets bases there that can't be refused. Since Palau almost always votes with the US the next Naysayer will be no surprise.

United States of America. It might be because the bill was put forward by Russia, or it might be because of the reason that Russia brought forward the bill and that is because by far the most effective fighting units that Kiev has (and the most loyal support of the government of Kiev) come from Nazi groups.

Canada. Stephen Harper has thrown his hat in with the militarists in the US. Whatever they do is fine by him. There is one tiny little sticking point though - he must have had to make a hard decision:

Israel voted YES.

Most US allies (erm, NATO and wannabe NATO states) chose to abstain.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Decided to parse the voting data and stuff it into googles geochart api.
Green is for, red is against and black is abstain.

No vote is given against Central African Republic though it appears in the list. Places like Kosovo, Western Sahara and French Guiana (and I guess Greenland) aren't listed as voting so maybe they don't get a vote.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

When I started my post the other day I had heard that three countries had voted against a UN anti-nazi bill but I had heard it through several sources that linked back to RT and other Russian sources. I scoured the western news and saw absolutely nothing - nada. Fox, msnbc, CBC, CTV, CNN etc. Not a sign of the vote in the North American news. A cursory look at BBC didn't show the story there either so I started looking at UN votes and found the one I posted above.

Oh well, I thought, it's just some Russian site re-posting old news as new and misrepresenting the votes slightly - still the country list was obviously split on political lines and I thought it would be cool to colour a map.

Today I found out that there had indeed been a recent vote on the same subject brought forward by Russia and a few more countries were abstaining - interesting places like Yemen and Turkey - and a few more countries were listed with no vote. However, the two tiny Nay Nations didn't vote against this time which would have left only the US and Canada voting against an anti-Nazi bill - if th ey hadn't been joined by ....

Ukraine!!

 

[Glaucus]

And how does one combat the glorification of nazism? Most certainly by placing limits on things like freedom of speech, expression and assembly - I don't see how else we could combat the glorification of Nazis without doing that. It's exactly how they do it in Germany but with very limited success. I didn't think Fluffy was pro-censorship. And really, it's kinda weird to advocate using methods made famous by Nazis to combat Nazism.

You know, there's a lot more to a bill than it's title. The Patriot Act and Canada's Anti-Terrorism bill have pretty nice sounding titles too, how could anyone disagree with those? And yet people do and for good reason and none should automatically be assumed to be terrorist sympathizers. Likewise, you can't make a similar conclusion here. This bill does have some good bits about it, but it also may go too far in places.

There's also the fact that the US and Canada don't have a huge ultra-nationalist movement based on Nazism. It exists, but it's not the force that it is in many European nations, including both Russia and Ukraine. So there certainly wouldn't be as much urgency here as there might be in other nations like Greece which has the highest number of neo-Nazis elected in parliament.

Btw, that reminds me, back when we were talking about Greece the issue of ultra-nationalism came up and who was it that rushed to it's defense? Hmmm....

Anyway, as for Ukraine, they might have good reason to oppose it.

Expresses concern at recurring attempts to desecrate or demolish monuments erected in remembrance of those who fought against Nazism during the Second World War

This says we shouldn't desecrate or demolish any monuments in the remembrance of those who fought against Nazism. For most people that sounds reasonable, but it also means Ukrainians couldn't for example demolish monuments of Stalin, who killed more Ukrainians than Hitler did. This might seem like a minor point, but it's not, Stalin was particularly horrible and a close second to Hitler in the murder department. Stalin was so horrible to Ukraine that many Ukrainians saw the Nazis as saviors and I don't really blame them - although of course that was never really the case. Still, for Russia to put forward such a bill and not address the horrors of Stalin but also to force Ukrainians to effectively honor him is a bit much.