SCG News, “The Odessa Massacre – What REALLY Happened” (StormCloudsGathering, 12 May 2014)
It’s only 11 minutes long but this short documentary on the Odessa Trade Union Building massacre and arson (2 May 2014) is far more informative than what’s been reported so far by the Western mainstream media. A full transcript for the film can be found at the StormCloudsGathering website. Basically the documentary is a collage of videos taken by eyewitnesses and organised more or less to follow the voice-over narration. The narration is clear and easy to follow and the sequence of videos is also very clear with no jumpiness or blurriness that might be expected.
Those viewers not familiar with what happened on that day in early May and who relied on mainstream news for their information are best advised to watch the documentary straight through and then go to the SCG website to read the transcript. Along with the transcript are links to other videos uploaded to Youtube.com.
There is quite a lot in the documentary that I did not know concerning the events in Odessa that day: the fact that the city police actively colluded with fascists, did nothing to stop the fires that broke out in that structure, refrained from apprehending people making Molotov cocktails to throw at the fires and failed to assist fire emergency crews to reach the scene or put out the blaze. Add to that crowds in the Odessa city maidan blocking the fire engines’ access to the building. Also I did not know – though I should have suspected anyway from reading previous news about the horrific incident – that the provisional government in Kyiv at the time arrested those people who survived the massacre and arson.
The documentary also misses a fair amount of detail and viewers are best advised to visit other websites to see what these are. In particular I recommend the article “Bloodbath in Odessa guided by Interim Rulers of Ukraine” posted on 15 May 2014 at the Oriental Review website. This article gives details about how different groups of fascists posing as soccer fans were organised so as to attack a pro-federalism rally and drive the activists into the trade union building where other fascists were waiting to torture, kill and butcher them, and then douse their heads and hands with chemicals which were then burnt to prevent later identification.
Regardless of the fact that the documentary is not a definitive report of what happened in Odessa, I think it still does a far better job than what we have seen of the mainstream news media’s pathetic efforts to present the events of that day as having been caused by the hapless activists. The documentary then goes on to demonstrate the links between the fascist murderers in Odessa with the provisional government in Kyiv, then headed by Oleksandr Turchinov and Arseni Yatseniuk, and backed by the US State Department through its Undersecretary Victoria Nuland (who incidentally is married to Robert Kagan, one of the authors of the Project for the New American Century). The film then concludes by warning that a rebellion is starting to spread through Ukraine against the oligarch regime in Kyiv, currently headed by Petro Poroshenko, and its supporters in the US, the EU and the IMF. Kyiv is desperate to contain the uprisings in eastern Ukraine and maintain the country’s post-1990 territorial integrity (minus Crimea) so as to hang onto the nation’s taxpayer base and qualify for an IMF bailout loan of US$17 billion.
As the narrator notes, history is written by the winners. For the sake of the people who were massacred in the Odessa Trade Union Building, we must not allow the dark forces that killed them to win.