In November 2022, the Ukrainian Youth Association, also known as “Soom,” (SUM—Spilka ukrayinsʹkoyi molod—or CYM—Спілка української молод) held its 20th World Congress in Hanover Township, New Jersey. Supposedly an “isolationist” attitude dominated: CYM, despite its plummeting membership, “should be for privileged people only.”

Well, they’re certainly right when they say that it’s for privileged people only, but not necessarily in the way that they had in mind. (I think that the photograph speaks for itself.)

Just over 50 delegates participated in the World Congress on behalf of CYM branches in Ukraine, Estonia, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States. After years of singing, “now a SUMivtsya,” (member of CYM) “tomorrow a fighter,” CYM adopted a new slogan for the upcoming year: “now a fighter.” In 2023 the organization vowed to commemorate the 140th birthday of Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), a fascist ideologue who translated Mein Kampf.

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Longtime readers of the Bandera Lobby Blog may remember that George Borec, a veteran of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the 1940s military wing of OUN-B, got a street in Penrith, Australia named after Stepan Bandera, and financed the construction of a nearby Banderite youth center in a suburb of Sydney. The local branch of CYM has since relocated to a newer building, where visitors are greeted at the front entrance by portraits of far-right OUN leaders (Bandera, Konovalets, Shukhevych, Stetsko) and Symon Petliura, a World War I-era figure whose military forces carried out pogroms against Jews.

I froze upon reading this.

According to historian Per Rudling, the “Roman Shukheyvch Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex” affiliated with CYM in Edmonton, Alberta was opened in 1973 with significant funding from the provincial government. In 2020, he explained, “The purpose of the complex, the OUN(b) press declared, was to ‘become a blacksmith’s forge, which will forge hard, unbreakable characters of the Ukrainian youth’ and to ‘raise and harden a new generation of fighters for the liberation of Ukraine…’”

Meanwhile, I reported that the federal government awarded the Banderites $279,138 to “repair” the complex in 2015, and CYM-Canada charged to the defense of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS monument in Oakville after it became the subject of an international news story.

They’ve been much more quiet about the recent “Nazigate” scandal…

CYM-Canada published this imagine in 2020 after the Ukrainian Waffen-SS monument in Oakville was vandalized with anti-Nazi graffiti.

‘KNOW THE FACTS, NOT THE PROPAGANDA’. Finally we can agree with these anticommunists on something.

In 1991, SNUM was reformed as the official branch of CYM in Ukraine. From 2005 through 2016, it received over $400,000 in grants from the U.S. State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy. From 2016 until 2019, CYM and another, more radical OUN-B youth group in Ukraine were members of the Reanimation Package of Reforms Coalition, the “largest and most visible reform network” in the country, which has been funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and Global Affairs Canada.

The NED…we meet again.

Events that happened today (October 7):

1866: Włodzimierz Halka Ledóchowski, Fascist sympathizer, was born.
1900: Heinrich Himmler, Axis commander and politician, stained the human race for all time.
1904: Armando Castellazzi, one of Fascist Italy’s professional footballers and managers, started his life.
1920: Georg Leber, Luftwaffe member, was delivered to the world.
1923: Irmgard Ilse Ida Grese, SS officer and concentration camp guard at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz… I don’t even want to say it. Just thinking about her makes me mad.
1940: Arthur H. McCollum proposed bringing Imperial America into the war in Eurasia by provoking the Empire of Japan into assaulting one of the U.S. colonies.
1944: During an uprising at Birkenau concentration camp, Jewish prisoners burnt down Crematorium IV (as portrayed in the excellent motion picture, The Grey Zone). Meanwhile, Helmut Lent, Axis night‐fighter ace, died having suffered injuries in a crash landing two days earlier.
2014: Siegfried Lenz, Fascist and Kriegsmarine draftee, expired.