Why is NPR celebrating a historic Hitler Youth analog?

Their article claims that American-Ukrainian scouting organization Plast represents Ukrainian resilience... but the organization's history tells a very different story

Will western liberals ever learn? One would think that the tremendous embarrassment suffered by the Canadian government after its open celebration of a Nazi war criminal would at least introduce even the slightest element of caution before going about celebrating everything Ukrainian without a moment’s hesitation, perhaps even some cursory critical examination. Sadly—or, if you prefer, amusingly—this has not been the case, and one of the latest examples we can see is NPR publishing a photo-journalistic celebration of New York’s chapter of Plast, the charming Ukrainian children’s scouting organization. What is withheld in the article, penned by a former camper himself, is Plast’s continuity from Ukraine’s own WWII-era equivalent of the Hitler Youth.

It isn’t as though Plast was created itself by Bandera and his goons, in fact it predates them—it would have to, of course, considering that Bandera and much of his fascist cohort were members of the organization themselves as children. But where did Plast come from? The NPR article claims that Plast’s origin owes to the sudden and spontaneous creation of three separate and unrelated scout organizations that coincidentally all appeared in 1912. That’s an odd coincidence, and it is an especially odd coincidence when we consider how quickly it followed the 1910 publication of the first volume of the influential Ukraine: The Land and Its People by Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, an influence on Bandera and a book which deliberately stoked nationalist tensions with its noxious race science outlook regarding the differences between Ukrainians and their neighbouring ethnicities. Plast’s official history refers to the writings of Plast co-founder Ivan Chmola, who believed deeply in the need for Ukrainian youth to join paramilitary organizations in order to prepare for a nationalist struggle, which was, another coincidence, a sentiment which happened to have been mirrored contemporaneously in arguments presented by the racist ethno-nationalist fanatic Dmytro Dontsov, yet another Bandera influence.

None of that necessarily suggests that Chmola and his colleagues were in dialogue with Dontsov or Rudnyts’kyi themselves, but it does show how the atmosphere surrounding Ukrainian nationalism was deeply steeped in reactionary tendencies. There are, however, other suggestions to that effect. Chmola, for his part, had helped found Young Galicia, an organization whose principal members also included his fellow Sich Riflemen Yevhen Konovalets, close friend of Dontsov and founder of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and Andrii Mel'nyk, who would go on to be a leading figure in the OUN and a rival for power to Bandera himself after Konovalets’ assassination. Young Galicia was also deeply invested in the ideological indoctrination of children, which makes Chmola’s association both with it and Plast especially in need of scrutiny.

During the 1920s, Plast had as it's symbol the swastika. The excuse often provided in circumstances such as this is that the swastika had not “yet” gained the reputation it has now—and this is a modified truth. The swastika was indeed a popular symbol throughout the world, and was a popular and apolitical good luck charm in the Americas until the Nazi ascendancy in the 1930s. In Europe, however, the symbol had already garnered a reputation for its association with antisemites by at least the mid-1920s, so it seems unlikely that this was an association not understood by Plast leadership. Plast was gaining more and more centrality as an apparatus for nationalist ideological instruction, and by the mid-1920s that scene had been increasingly dominated by open, virulent antisemitism, so it's not even really clear whether they would have been very opposed to the symbol’s association either. Plast was already well on its way to being a mere training organization for far-right nationalists, utterly dominated by ties to rightist groups. It was getting to the point where some family members of children in Plast were beginning to become alarmed as their children would return from camp fawning over Mussolini and Hitler.

It was during his time in Plast that Bandera started to become interested in racist, far-right ideology. In his earlier youth, Bandera was actually an aspiring communist, gripped by the work of Lenin and enamoured by the Bolsheviks. It was only after being introduced to Dontsov by Plast and its likeminded ideological apparatuses that he began to shift to the right. Other Plast alumni, generously provided in a list from Plast itself, include numerous leading fascists and genocidal maniacs from the ruthless OUN and UPA, including Mykola Lebed, a “well-known sadist” and mass-murderer trained by the Gestapo who personally loved to torture Jews and was later employed by the CIA. Plast itself proudly admits that there were so many OUN and UPA members who came from Plast that it would be impossible to list them all. Plast even tells us that the organization itself was instrumental in the formation of the Ukrainian division of the Waffen-SS, the infamous Galician Division, and that Plast members volunteered to serve in it in droves, including one entire VSUM troop (the Nazis had authorized the creation of “VSUM” during their occupation, effectively Plast in all but name). One must in fact wonder whether it is Plast itself that shoulders the burden of responsibility for those hundreds of thousands of innocent lives liquidated by the OUN and its allies.

After the war, Plast was recreated in displaced persons camps by Ukrainian emigrés, alongside the more outwardly military youth group Spilka Ukraїns’koї Molodi (SUM or CYM) and the more adult neo-Banderite organization Zch OUN. US intelligence alleged that as many as eighty percent of displaced persons in the camps from Eastern Galicia had Banderite affinities. Plast’s headquarters would soon after share an address with the headquarters of Zch OUN, along with its newspaper and publishing house, and the reactionary emigré supergroup the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.

As the Ukrainian diaspora fanned out, so did Plast, though it maintains a central leadership, presiding over all of its subsidiaries, including the one in upstate New York. On the other side of the state, CYM still maintains its own camp at Ellensville. More open about their leanings than Plast, even CYM’s website can barely contain its fascism, as it froths about the “evils of Bolshevism.” Plast’s official history relates the tensions which have historically existed between the two—not politically, mind you, just in their competition over the same demographics. Both groups make appearances in shows of support for Ukraine’s fascist past, and are effectively sister organizations who have resisted merging together by now principally because it would be too expensive to make new uniforms. Both still share the Banderite motto of “God and Ukraine,” both organizations continue to propagandize for Ukraine’s Nazi-collaborating past, and CYM alumni of the diaspora have gone on to return to Ukraine and head the reconstituted OUN.

The evidence is irrefutable. Plast is an organization with deep and continuous ties to far-right movements, and has done little to obscure these ties, let alone sever them. NPR’s fawning endorsement of the organization and its perceived “resilience” is a disgusting display of willful ignorance to these facts that should bring deep shame upon its editorial.