Holocaust Denier at the Christmas Party?
Holocaust obfuscation on the agenda at NYC Banderite Christmas fundraiser
On the first Saturday of December, a New York City building formerly known as the “Home of the Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front” is hosting a Christmas fundraiser event for the “Organizations of the Ukrainian Statehood Front in the United States.” As readers of this blog know, the “Front” refers to a coalition of “facade structures” affiliated with the Banderite faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN-B, which still exists.
The upcoming OUN-B “Christmas program” in Manhattan calls for the presentation of a book (supported by the president of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine) about a former leader of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera’s clandestine network in the United States, as well as a poetry reading by a Ukrainian American man who this year praised the infamous Holocaust denier David Irving as “the best and most honest historian about all events surrounding WW2.”
Let’s start with the guest speaker, Adrian Bryttan, “a renowned violinist, conductor, and translator” who has claimed that “Jewish science weapons destroyed Germany to this day.” On Facebook, Bryttan has shared articles from neo-Nazi and white nationalist websites such as the “National Vanguard” (2018), “Unz Review” (2019), and “Taki’s Magazine” (2020). Commenting on a book about the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, this David Irving fan once said, “Now that cultural Marxism is more discussed, the Jew establishment machine is frantically churning out material intended to distance Jews from Marxism...”
In 1970s Manhattan, Bryttan conducted the choir at St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka, which opened “Saturday Night Live” with a performance after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Several years after the OUN-B’s “Ukrainian Liberation Front” monopolized control of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), headquartered nearby the Banderite building in Manhattan, in 1985 the UCCA organized a rally outside of the Soviet consulate and a concert at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Bryttan, to commemorate “the efforts of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to liberate Ukraine from Nazi and Soviet domination.”
In the early 2000s, Adrian Bryttan became a columnist for the Ukrainian Weekly, published in Jersey City. That gig might not have lasted long, but he remained a contributor for this Ukrainian American newspaper until at least 2019. From 2015-18, he wrote several film reviews. One of those was for the 2017 “Holodomor” film “Bitter Harvest,” which was overwhelmingly panned by critics. Its Wikipedia page notes that Adrian Bryttan of The Ukrainian Weekly however praised this movie as the “world-class Ukrainian art film of our time.” Surprised, and perhaps embarrassed, by “the mean-spirited, derisive tone of certain film critics,” Bryttan wrote a bitter follow-up in order to respond to the “Hollywood/reviewer elite [who] consider themselves the conscience and cultural vanguard of our nation. Today, their Narrative is globalism and open borders, while nationalism is maligned as extremism.”
The failure and mockery of “Bitter Harvest” in 2017 appears to have played a role in radicalizing Bryttan. In the following year, he lambasted “Challah-wood” on Facebook and shared an article from the neo-Nazi website “National Vanguard” that described the 1948 romantic comedy “A Foreign Affair” as “a post-war propaganda film designed to rally popular support for the destruction of the German nation and its reconstitution as a Jewish American colony.” Bryttan soon started to promote the “rigorous historian” E. Michael Jones, an antisemitic Catholic writer that has described the Holocaust as “a reaction to Jewish Messianism (in the form of Bolshevism).” In December 2018, Bryttan shared a “brilliant talk by Dr. Jones,”
about the vicious all-out assault by Hollywood, the Frankfurt School, Time magazine … to destroy the basic fibers of Germany and her culture after WW2, via manipulative social engineering through the "sciences" of Psychology, Psychiatry and Sociology; the Germans bore the brunt of this psychological warfare, and they lost... the Jewish science weapons destroyed Germany to this day...
Adrian Bryttan explained to his Facebook friends in the coming weeks, “Even after Stalin purged many of the original Jew Bolsheviks in the 1920s, he retained Jews like Lazar Kaganovich to starve Ukrainians into submission and run the systems of concentration camps known as the Gulag Archipelago.” So if some Ukrainians helped the Nazis to genocide Jews and even guard the death camps, apparently they were just settling the score—the classic example being John Demjanjuk, a former guard at Sobibor. In September 2019, Bryttan shared a blog post from a pseudonymous Holocaust denier about the “contradictory, shifting and evasive testimony” of Holocaust survivors, starting with the Demjanjuk case. Around this time, Bryttan wondered why children should be “educated regarding the meaning of swastikas and nooses … [but not] the symbols for Antifa, Black Fist, SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center], Hammer& Sickle and ADL [Anti-Defamation League].”
According to the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms of Ukraine (ODFFU), the OUN-B front group that technically owns its U.S. headquarters building in New York, the upcoming Christmas fundraiser will get started with “the world premiere of Dr. Adrian Bryttan’s translation of works by the great Ukrainian poet and bard Taras Shevchenko.” A flier for the event claims that Bryttan is “the only English translator to capture the full lyricism, beauty, imagery, [and] style” of Ukraine’s most famous poet.
Evidently the ODFFU is not the main organizer of the event, but its Banderite partners from the Vovk Foundation based in Pittsburgh and Morgantown, West Virginia. When I introduced the relatively new Vovk Foundation almost a year ago, this “news” item on their website didn’t strike me as suspicious: “Adrian Bryttan Stringed Instrument Collection Donated to Vovk Foundation.” In 2014, Bryttan and a future co-founder of the foundation joined forces to protest the Ukrainian pianist Valentina Lisitsa for her “constant stream of savage anti-Ukrainian tweets.”
The Wowczuk brothers—Yurij, Borys, and Zenovy—founded the Vovk Foundation in 2022 to honor their grandfather, one of Stepan Bandera’s deputies, who for a time led the OUN-B in the United States during the Cold War. Although the Banderites killed thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, Fedir Vovk (who later changed his name to Ivan Vovchuk) temporarily sheltered a Jewish family that he knew, for which Yad Vashem in Israel declared him one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Earlier this year, Borys Lozhkin, the president of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine, argued in an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post, “Ukrainian nationalist Ivan Vovchuk’s story must be brought to light.”
For decades, Russian authorities, formerly Soviet, have called the Ukrainian nationalist movement a Nazi movement in an effort to discredit Ukrainians who want to live in a free and democratic Ukraine. They have focused their energy on the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, a political party that was established in 1929, dedicated to the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state. … Russia’s current propaganda campaign is not only historically inaccurate, but deeply offensive. It is an insult to the memory of Holocaust victims and the bravery of individuals like Vovk who stood against real antisemitism and Nazism. And it is an insult to the modern Jewish community in Ukraine.
As for Fedir Vovk, or Ivan Vovchuk, “His story is a beacon of humanity and courage, countering the baseless Russian propaganda that seeks to paint Ukraine as an antisemitic, Nazi state. … This is why I am working with the Vovk Foundation on a new book, detailing the history of Ivan Vovchuk, to dispel the fictitious lies propagated by Putin and his anti-Ukraine allies in the West.” In other words, Lozhkin decided to work with the Banderites to whitewash the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which helped to perpetrate the “Holocaust by Bullets” in Ukraine. Days after Lozhkin’s article, the OUN-B leader from Ukraine (Oleh Medunytsia) left flowers at Vovchuk’s grave in Pennsylvania.
After Adrian Bryttan’s poetry reading, the eldest Wowczuk brother (Yurij, who is also the ODFFU Director of Research, and a subscriber of this blog) is scheduled to present National Tribune: the Life and Ideas of Ivan Vovchuk, a new book that according to the Vovk Foundation was “produced in collaboration with Borys Lozhkin.” The book is apparently named after the Ukrainian American newspaper published by OUN-B in New York City until 2018. In its final decade, the National Tribune regularly featured articles from leaders of the far-right “Svoboda” party in Ukraine. According to a leading OUN-B member (Oleh Vitvitsky), the Wowczuk brothers’ late grandfather is “an unknown ideologue of Ukrainian nationalism” and remains “an uncompromising destroyer of the imperial myths of Moscow.”
Research and exposure of the Kremlin’s invasive, insidious, often hybrid colonial policy runs through all of his journalistic work. It was Ivan Vovchuk who, as part of his report delivered at the Second Congress of SKVU [World Congress of Free Ukrainians, today known as the Ukrainian World Congress], introduced into public circulation the concept of Great Russian racism — intolerance of the right to freedom and statehood of other nations, which has recently been enshrined in Ukrainian legislation under the name “rashism.”
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Vovchuk from Poltava does not miss one of the most terrible Bolshevik-imperial myths about the causes of the Holodomor in Ukraine ... On the twentieth anniversary of the great tragedy, he published an article entitled “The Siege of Ukraine,” in which, based on economic analysis, he convincingly proves that the only real cause of the Holodomor was the Kremlin's carefully planned policy of genocide against the Ukrainian peasantry as the core of the nation. Vovchuk refutes all the theses of Bolshevik propaganda about crop failure, drought, or plans for excessive grain exports, emphasizing that it was the “imperial arithmetic” of crop distribution that caused the tragedy.
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Another one of the myths that Ivan Vovchuk debunked was the statement about the existence of not just "Russians", but "good Russians", which, unfortunately, is still popular in some circles today. Characterizing the Russian opponents of the Bolshevik regime at the time, Vovchuk seems to be looking fifty years ahead: "Russian opposition movements, despite all their diversity, seek to improve and correct the existing system of the USSR's imperial complex. All of them … seek reforms of the Bolshevik totalitarian empire, but not the disintegration of the evil empire, not the creation of independent states of free nations on its territory.
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Developing the theme of the liberation struggle, Ivan Vovchuk foresees a war between Ukraine and Muscovy in the future. “Knowing that Ukraine, as well as the entire freedom-loving world, cannot avoid a fight with Russia,” Vovchuk emphasizes prophetically, ”we worked so that in tomorrow's fight with the empire the imperial wall would collapse.”
The Wowczuk brothers, who founded the Civil-Military Innovation Institute (“CMI2”) based in Morgantown, West Virginia, appear to have allies in both of their Senators. Shelley Moore Capito recently became the no. 4-ranked Senate Republican as chair of the Senate Republican Policy Conference. Just over a month ago, she visited the CMI2’s “Adaptive Experimentation Facility,” which she described as “fascinating” and said “has the potential to support innovation and readiness for our military.” Then-Governor Jim Justice, now the junior Senator, described the CMI2 facility as a “one of a kind military capability” and gave a shoutout to the youngest Wowczuk brother (Zenovy) in his 2023 West Virginia State of the State Address.
These Banderite siblings are defense contractors who have tried to reactive the ODFFU in Pittsburgh, and apparently also founded a venture capital firm that “makes strategic tactical investments in innovative companies supporting the America First vision.” They’ve already received some help from the Ukrainian ambassador to promote the book about their grandfather, Bandera’s deputy, in Washington.
Senators Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Jon Tester (D-MT) all spoke at the DC book launch event in June. So did Boris Lozhkin, and Andrew Mac, a (former?) Zelensky advisor. The oldest Wowczuk brother moderated a panel discussion with Banderite memory warriors Lubomyr Luciuk from Canada and Walter Zarycky from New York, who were joined by Ivana Stradner from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Steven Moore, described in a Politico profile last year as “The GOP’s Man in Kyiv … working behind the scenes to keep them on board.”
Meanwhile in Kyiv, the Banderite former “memory czar” of Ukraine (Volodymyr Viatrovych) spoke at a National Tribune book launch event alongside another OUN-B member and “historian,” Mykola Posivnych from Lviv, where he is a leader of the far-right “Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists” political party. I’ve seen him visiting the OUN-B building in Manhattan. “Imagine if Hitler established an independent Ukrainian state in 1941 and sent those 1.5 - 2 - 3 million people to the front lines,” Posivnych told the Ukraine Crisis Media Center last year. “Who knows what would have happened,” he said, chuckling, “if things had gone differently.”
I don’t expect that the Banderites will disinvite Adrian Bryttan, or that the OUN-B’s Jewish allies will care. Yaakov Bleich, one of the Chief Rabbis of Ukraine, spoke at a press conference held outside the OUN-B building in New York City ten years ago. More recently, he invited Atlantic Council fellow Adrian Karatnycky, a friend of the “Bandera Lobby” from “Little Ukraine,” Manhattan, to his son’s wedding in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Karatnycky, a co-director of the “Ukrainian Jewish Encounter,” and former employee of a Ukrainian nationalist CIA front, was unfazed about rubbing shoulders with the OUN-B’s far-right youth leader in Cleveland at one of the annual “policy conferences” organized by the Banderites in Washington. “I know nothing about 18-year-old activists,” Karatnycky said last year. “Nor much about the contemporary OUN-B save for the fact that its leaders are strongly pro-Israel and not antisemitic.” As someone who lives around the corner from the OUN-B building in Manhattan, perhaps he’ll also be going to the Banderite Christmas party.
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It is no secret that the Ukrainian nationalists have included and included some mighty unsavory characters, just as, in Jewish folk memory, Galicians were the most ogrish antisemites of them all.
Just now those nationalists are useful, so everyone is expected to pretend that the lavishly documented history of Holocaust participation is Communist propaganda and besides, they've reformed, can't you see?!?