All Americans Should Condemn Public Employee Paul Massaro’s Shameless Embrace Of Fascism

It’s disgusting that someone who works with the US Government would glorify a World War II-era war criminal that’s infamous for collaborating with Hitler and who inspired his followers to carry out a terrorist campaign of genocide against Jews, Poles, Russians, and others.

US Government (USG) employee Arthur Paul Massaro III, who works as a senior advisor with the Helsinki Commission, deleted a tweet where he posed with a patch honoring Stepan Bandera while keeping up the earlier one where he posed with a signed Azov Battalion flag. He said that he took down the first “at the request of a good Polish friend” while offering no explanation for why he didn’t delete the second. Massaro’s recent description of them as “heroic” might be the reason why, though.

In any case, all Americans should condemn this public employee’s shameless embrace of fascism, especially since he expressed this view on these two examined occasions during work hours and while in his taxpayer-provided office in DC. It’s disgusting that someone who works with the USG would glorify a World War II-era war criminal that’s infamous for collaborating with Hitler and who inspired his followers to carry out a terrorist campaign of genocide against Jews, Poles, Russians, and others.

Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, which can’t reasonably be described by anyone as so-called “Russian propaganda”, shared plenty of facts about this fascist on their official website proving that he was truly a despicable creature. Even Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who also can’t reasonably be described as supposedly being “under Russian influence”, condemned the glorification of this genocidal monster as recently as the start of this year.

According to publicly financed TVP’s report about his reaction to the Ukrainian Parliament’s praise of him on his 114^th birthday at the time, he said that the massacre of between 100,000-200,000 Poles that Bandera inspired “was a genocide. We will ever fight for remembrance. There’s no agreement in me for the relativisation of this crime.” It also deserves mentioning that Poland commemorates “The National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalist” every 11 July.

Last year, President Andrzej Duda was reported by local media to have pleaded the following at the latest such event: “What do we want? We want the truth. What do we want? We want graves.” Morawiecki, for his part, was quoted in the same report as demanding that “this decades-long conspiracy of silence - first between the rulers of PRL (Polish People's Republic), Moscow's loyal servants, and then maintained by the elites of the Third Polish Republic - must be broken.”

Quite clearly, Warsaw is wholly against the glorification of this genocidal fascist and regards all attempts to sweep his war crimes under the rug to be the legacy of a Soviet-era conspiracy. This stance implies that those contemporary anti-Russian forces in Ukraine who deny what Bandera did, especially to Poles living in what had previously been the Second Polish Republic, are operating under outdated orders from the Kremlin seeing as how Moscow nowadays raises maximum awareness of his genocidal crimes.

Returning back to Massaro’s shameless pro-fascist stunt that he twice carried out on government property (and while on the clock at that), they’re all the more reprehensible for two additional reasons. First, one of the Congressmen who runs the Helsinki Commission is Stephen Cohen, the first Jew to represent Tennessee in the House of Representatives. If Ilhan Omar had been his underling instead of Massaro, then her flaunting Bandera’s patch would have been the top anti-Semitic scandal in the US.

The double standards that are applied towards Massaro’s indisputable anti-Semitism and Omar’s alleged such expressions reek of racism and so-called “political convenience”. She’s a dark-skinned Muslim while he’s a Caucasian, which makes for an uncomfortable contrast of optics in terms of how folks are reacting to their respective scandals. Furthermore, he’s hardcore in support of Kiev while she’s somewhat less so, which might be another reason apart from the racist one for why he gets a pass for his anti-Semitism.

The second reason why what Massaro did is so reprehensible is because he’s a senior USG employee whose reckless actions thus risk needlessly complicating relations with his country’s Polish ally. It’s unimportant whether people support their joint anti-Russian proxy war in Ukraine since the point is that he might prompt Warsaw to officially protest his latest stunt. Americans shouldn’t tolerate a rogue employee meddling in their foreign relations like he just did, ergo another reason to condemn him.

Nevertheless, it’s unlikely that any consequences will follow USG employee Massaro flaunting fascist symbols on the clock in his taxpayer-provided office. The authorities don’t want to draw attention to Bandera, his fascist genocidal legacy, and Poland’s justified hatred of him and his Nazi-allied terrorist group of anti-Semitic war criminals. For this reason, Massaro will probably escape this scandal without even a slap on the wrist, all because his government wants to cover up the truth about Bandera.