In the age of cancel culture, guess what was not canceled at Stanford last month? A panel on the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi factor of the Ukrainian army.
The Stanford researcher who hosted the panel, Francis Fukuyama, has since said he is proud to support Azov when he was pushed on the Nazi symbolism and history of the group.
“I think you need to do a little more reading on Azov,” he wrote in an email to the San Francisco Chronicle. “They originated among Ukrainian nationalists, but to call them neo-Nazis is to accept Russia’s framing of what they represent today. By the time they defended Mariopol they were fully integrated into the [Armed Forces of Ukraine] and are heroes that I’m proud to support.”
That’s false. They did not originate as a Ukrainian nationalist group. They are followers of Stepan Bandera who was a Nazi collaborator during World War II and founded by Andriy Biletsky who advocated a “crusade of the white nations of the world against the Semitic-led subhumans.”
More telling is why this event happened in the first place.
Stanford has been a reluctant defender of free speech so for this to go down so easily is worth noting. As one outlet put it: “The fact that neo-Nazis are now paraded on campuses of leading academic institutions in the US must be seen as an alarming sign of the extent of the rightward shift of both the bourgeoisie and significant sections of the middle class and academia. Serious intellectuals, students and young people must draw far-reaching conclusions from this development.
