Behind the Ukraine crisis is a revision of World War II history that seeks to honor eastern European collaborators with Hitler and the Holocaust by repackaging these rightists as anti-Soviet heroes, a reality shielded from the U.S. public, as Dovid Katz explains.
By Dovid Katz
Would America support any type of Hitlerism in the course of the State Department’s effort to turn the anti-Russian political classes of Eastern Europe into paragons of PR perfection that may not be criticized, howsoever mildly?
It was frankly disconcerting to see Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, embracing the leader of Ukraine’s far right, anti-Semitic, pro-fascist Svoboda party last December. It was disturbing to learn of the neo-Nazi elements that provided the “muscle” for the actual Maidan takeover last February (BBC’s Newsnight was among the few major Western outlets to dare cover that openly).
German dictator Adolf Hitler
Most disturbing of all has been the mainstream Western media’s almost Soviet-grade wall somehow erected against critical mention of the far-right component of Ukraine’s 2014 history, rendering any such thought as worthy of ridicule on New York Times opinion pages last spring.
Most hilarious was the Times’s May 2014 publication of an (obviously ghost-written, State Department-scripted) op-ed by Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia V. Tymoshenko which quotes Churchill writing to Roosevelt, “Give us the tools, as we will finish the job,” rumbling on about “the just and open democracy that is America’s greatest bequest to the world.”
This, from the far right politician who had shortly before that expressed genocidal musings for the millions of Russian-speaking citizens of her country, and who was, during her tenure as prime minister, a prime devotee of the wartime fascist leader Stepan Bandera, whose organization slaughtered tens of thousands (many historians put it at hundreds of thousands) of Polish and Jewish civilians based on ethnicity, in the Aryanist drive for an ethnically pure state precisely on the Nazi model.
It was therefore refreshing to read in last Saturday’s Times a report that had, albeit buried near the end, a single line informing readers that “One [militia active in the Kiev government’s military campaign] known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.” By contrast, London’s right-of-center Daily Telegraph ran a whole report Monday titled “The neo-Nazi brigade fighting pro-Russian separatists,” rightly including the observation that the neo-Nazi forces being used by the Ukrainian government to do military heavy lifting “should send a shiver down Europe’s spine.”
This goes to the heart of what is being kept from so many Western, and especially American readers. Putin — for all his authoritarianism, anti-democratic bent and revanchism — is not the cause of the Ukrainian conundrum (though he is certainly exploiting it). There is a genuine divide in Ukraine between a nationalist-dominated west and a Russian-speaking east.
Anybody who has traveled the country will tell you that these “Russians” in the east, and wherever else they are to be found, would much rather be living in a European Union-type country than in a Russia-type country. What then is the problem? They do not want to live in an ultranationalist-dominated state that is anti-Russian in a 1930s Aryanesque sense of ethnically and linguistically pure Ukrainism. They much prefer the Russia-model state to that.
Now those anti-racist values, including the revering of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance that brought down Hitler, and the disdain of societies founded on models of racist purity, are in fact also American values. But that affinity between Western values and the easterners would never even be guessed at in the avalanche of Cold War II newsfeed coming our way.
Incidentally, some Western reports that caricature the Putinist press’s use of the word “fascists” for Ukrainian nationalists don’t appreciate the colloquial Russian usage where it refers not necessarily to swastika-wielding thugs but even to high society that holds in esteem the likes of Bandera and other World War II-era Nazist fascists as supposed mythical “freedom fighters” to be revered today by the state, in street names, statues, museums, and more.
That is not to say that America’s allies among the western Ukrainian nationalists are all pro-fascist. They are not. But there are two salient issues that go beyond Ukraine and cover all of “anti-Russian” Eastern Europe, particularly the new member states of NATO and the EU.
The first is casual acceptance of neo-Nazi elements, symbolism and ideology as part of any kind of supposedly centrist mainstream. In Latvia and Estonia, this is exemplified by tacit (or not so tacit) state support for honors for those countries’ Waffen SS divisions. In Lithuania, it can be manifest in state-sponsored shrines to the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) killers who unleashed the Holocaust on Jewish neighbors before the first German soldiers had quite arrived.
But there is a second issue that is much deeper, and has nothing to do with these more ostentatious kinds of Nazi worship. That issue is history.
‘History’ Alive
While World War II is indeed “history” for the West, it is very much part of Now in Eastern Europe. State-sponsored institutions in the three Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, especially, and also at times in Croatia, Romania and elsewhere have invested a fortune in a kind of Holocaust revisionism that would whitewash their own nationalists’ collaboration with Hitler and turn the Soviet Union into the real Hitler.
Known as “Double Genocide,” it posits the absolute theoretical equality of Nazi and Soviet crimes. Its constitution is the 2008 “Prague Declaration,” which most Americans have never heard of, that sports the word “same” five times in reference to Nazi and Soviet crimes. Even fewer Americans know that one of its demands, that the world accept a unitary mix-and-match day of remembrance for Nazi and Soviet victims, was snuck under the radar into last June’s congressional military appropriations bill.
The issue across the board is the choice made by nationalist elites in Eastern Europe to construct national myths not on the merits of a country’s great artists, poets, thinkers and genuine freedom fighters, but all too often, on the basis of Nazi collaborators whose claim to fame is that they were also “anti-Soviet patriots.”
The fact of the matter is that virtually all of Hitler’s collaborators in Eastern Europe were “anti-Soviet.” In fact, the Soviet Union was the only power putting up resistance to Hitler in Eastern Europe. If the Soviets had not pushed the Nazi armies back by the spring of 1944, at huge sacrifice to all the Soviet peoples, there would have been no D-Day or opening of a Western front.
Whether it is hero-worship of Hungary’s Miklós Horthy, leaders of Croatia’s Hitlerist Ustasha, the Nazis’ Waffen SS divisions in Latvia and Estonia, or the likes of Ukraine’s Bandera and his OUN and UPA, and the Waffen SS, it is an offense to Western values that a NATO or EU state, or NATO/EU-aspiring state, would disburse state funds on the distortion of history, obfuscation of the Holocaust and construction of societies that admire the worst of history’s racists.
To do so quite simply implies that all the minority citizens they butchered, or whose butchering they supported, were quite unworthy of continued existence. Incidentally, all these countries have real heroes from that darkest moment in their history: those (often the simplest of people) who just did the right thing and risked all to rescue a neighbor from the Nazist establishment collaborationist leadership of their own nationalists.
A High Low Point
The trend reached an unseemly highpoint in 2012, when the Lithuanian government financed the repatriation from Putnam, Connecticut, to Lithuania of the remains of the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister Juozas AmbrazeviÄius Brazaitis, who had personally signed documents confirming Nazi orders first, for Jewish citizens of his city, Kaunas, to be sent to a concentration camp (it was actually a mass murder site), and a few weeks later, for the remainder to be incarcerated in a ghetto within four weeks.
Instead of politely protesting, the American embassy in Vilnius helped camouflage the event with a symposium on the war and the Holocaust that did not even mention the reburial underway.
According to some in State Department circles, the Obama administration, shaken by criticism of its long-standing anti-neocon caution in Iraq and Syria, and rueful over Libya, has tried to show its muscle, and satisfy the contingent led by Robert Kagan and his wife, Victoria Nuland, now assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, with sheer one-sidedness over Ukraine.
That is the Ms. Nuland who was caught telling the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine “Fuck the EU,” which would have preferred peaceful, democratic change in Ukraine. She was also plotting which politician would emerge as prime minister in that nation in the worst neo-con tradition of organizing who will emerge as ruler after the next fixed case of foreign regime change.
In Ukraine, a negotiated solution could maintain the nation’s independence and freedom to join the EU but not the military alliance NATO that is the huge humiliation for Russia (a hostile military alliance coming right to more of its borders).
Any viable solution needs to take into account that it is a deeply divided country even in the absence of (ever-present) Putinist mischief. It therefore needs to also take into account the many millions of Russian speakers who oppose the racial chauvinism of some of the nationalist elite now in or close to the government, and who have very different ideas about Twentieth Century history.
That is the way forward, not the Cold War II nonsense of spreading the word that the westerners are pure angels and the easterners pure demons, not the neocon nonsense that America’s greatness depends on endless foreign military misadventures in regime change that lead to long, unpredictable, and uncontrollable cycles of violence.
That America shares with Russia the magnificent legacy of having in tandem brought down Hitler’s empire is a heritage worth invoking for building better understanding, not a fact to be buried in deference to the far-right revision of Holocaust history with which much of nationalist Eastern Europe is so obsessed.
Dovid Katz, formerly professor of Yiddish Studies at Vilnius University, is a New York born, Vilnius-based independent researcher. He edits DefendingHistory.com. His personal website is www.dovidkatz.net.
After words about
“Ukraine’s far right, anti-Semitic, pro-fascist Svoboda” lol :D
You can concludde article is COMPLETE RUBBISH.
Written by gal, who DON’T GIVE A F*CK ABOUT UKRAINE POLITICS AND HISTORY.
“This, from the far right politician who had shortly before that expressed genocidal musings for the millions of Russian-speaking citizens of her country, and who was, during her tenure as prime minister, a prime devotee of the wartime fascist leader Stepan Bandera”
LOLOLOLO Yulia Timoshenko a FAR RIGHT FASCIST?? :D :D :D
I am not “Svoboda” fan. But they are just common right party. Thats all
No fascism, no nazism, no anti-semitism. Just right ideas, healthy nationalism, conservative views on society.
Callin Yulia Timoshenko a far-right is ridiculously DUMB. No comments.
Maybe she is a bitch, but not fascist/nazi )
What the author is neglecting to mention in relationship to Ukrainian and Lithuanian welcoming German forces during the second world war was the horrors that the Soviet regime put them through during the 1930s.
It’s understandable why they welcoming German forces. But the fact that Nazi’s collaborators chose another monster doesn’t excuse their crimes and doesn’t make them heroes.
Stalin’s regime put all Soviet people through horrors. ALL, no matter what nationality. He was insane maniac, and it’s onle reasonable explanation for his actions. It’s not that Ukrainian and Lithuanian were only ones victims of repressions. It’s like everyone fogret how many Russians died in GULAG.
I just trying to say that naturally ex-soviet states doesn’t keep warm feelings for Stalin’s regime. But heroing Nazi’s collaborators leading to the simple conclusion. That they fought for the “right guys”, and revising such dark period of history like WWII in sense like that is very, very disturbing.
P.S. I really hope you understand what I mean. My English is not perfet.
Your English is understandable. Stalin was an insane maniac, and so was Hitler. The fact is that people under stress always choose the most insane maniac to lead them, they think against the enemy, but the consequences always come back to them.
The media’s deliberate evasion of the issue of neo-fascists in Ukraine goes back to the creation of the captive nations apparatus by the CIA of Allen Dulles immediately after WWII ended. The book (chapter 5 is on Ukraine) Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War documents the truth: http://www.archives.gov/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf
Save us from selective Amerikan historical revisionism and the flogging of the Holocaust. This world, this real world needs real time solutions. Let us not get buried by the past which is obliterating the present.
“Eisenhower’s Rhine Meadow hunger camps for German civilians”
I suspect the word ‘civilians’ was meant to be ‘POWs’.
Was this true? There seems to be a bit of truth to the story, but only a bit.
file:///C:/Users/Jackie/Documents/U.S.%20%28and%20French%29%20abuse%20of%20German%20PoWs,%201945-1948.html
For a few months rations were reduced to the former German soldiers. I’m going to speculate as to the “why” of that.
Allied POWs in Europe had been released, and their stories of “barely enough” food had been heard. Payback time.
Allied leaders had toured the Holocaust camps and the experience had left them with a cold hatred of everything German – for a while at least. Even the ‘tough guy’ Patton is said to have ducked behind a building and thrown up.
Food was short in any case. All of a sudden the Allies were responsible for not only the POWs, but also for the DPs (displaced persons) who had been released from German slavery. Merely looking at these poor folks wouldn’t have caused any love for the Germans.
Transport was probably an issue. The buildup for Operation Downfall (invasion of Japan) and the other ongoing operations in the Pacific was likely devouring available shipping.
That buildup involved taking US soldiers in Europe home. Some would be demobilized into the Reserve, and others would be moved straight to the Pacific for that aforementioned invasion of Japan. These tried and tested troops were replaced by newbies – young kids right out of high school. The replacements would have had zero respect for the defeated Germans.
The French in particular had endured many years of occupation by the Master Race. It was payback time, and damn the legalities. Besides, there was an awful lot of cleanup to do.
A subliminal issue: After WW1 German soldiers had returned to Germany and had been major factors in the political shaping of that country. Too many of those used their military skills and weapons to do that shaping. By keeping the POWs out of circulation for a few years the new Germany might take a form desired by the Allies.
Churchill was probably a big factor. He had always hated Communism, and all of a sudden the Allied Armies are melting away while there is no visible sign the same is happening with the Russian forces. I’d suggest he wanted to keep the German POWs around in case they were needed to fight off the invading Red Hordes.
IMO Churchill had one more motive. He had directed his military staffs to war-game an invasion of Russia, and he’d have needed the old Wehrmacht to help pull off this stunt. Only when Brooke told him that such an invasion wouldn’t do any better than the earlier German one did he give up on the scheme.
The Germans knew they were going to catch hell when the war was over. There was a bitter ‘joke’ going around: “Enjoy the war; the peace will be terrible.” So they were – for the most part – not surprised by what happened post-war. Even the mass cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe went smoothly.
These expulsions, which resulted in the removal of up to 2 million Germans from Eastern Europe, were planned and executed by troops, police and militia, under orders from the highest authorities, with the full knowledge and consent of the Allies. Eastern European and Allied observers alike remarked on the utter passivity of the victims, the majority of whom were women, children and the elderly (most German men had been drafted during the war and either killed or interned in POW camps)
It was an orderly expulsion, and in the opinions of almost everybody around, a well-deserved one. These people were expecting much worse.
Corrected Link.
http://www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/for/us-germany-pow.html
http://youtu.be/hbp61fOVFaE
Payback? So the sanctimonious “Rule of Law” which the Allies yammered on about after the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial only applies to losers? It sho don’t apply nowadays to the invaders of the Middle East, do it! Killing defenceless civilians, stealing oil! Hypocrites.
More than nine million Germans died as a result of deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after the Second World War, including 1.5-2 million German prisoners.
http://www.whale.to/b/starvation_of_germans.html
What the US is Really Threatening in Ukraine
http://journal-neo.org/2014/08/17/what-the-us-is-really-threatening-in-ukraine/
Using Holodomor in reference to the famine emphasizes its man-made aspects, arguing that actions such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs, and restriction of population movement confer intent, defining the famine as genocide; the loss of life has been compared to the Holocaust.
An interesting link to the M.S.M.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEC9X6K9zdI
It is also crystal clear that the US as an imperial power has to use radical elements in all its local proxy wars against regional competitors. The main tool is of course radical Islamsism, as employed against the USSR in Afgangistan in the 80s, against Serbia in the 90s (using Bosnia’s Izetbegovich), against Russia in the Caucasus, and against Egypt (Muslim Brotherhood) and Syria more recently (and also against China, see the Uygurs).
Another favorite tool in Eastern Europe against Russia are of course nationalist movements that usually have a anti-Sovjet and perhaps even pro national socialist history. Regardless, they are useful for current US imperial interests, so they are funded and employed, until they are no more useful, then the funding simply stops, or perhaps they are re-labelled “terrorist” and killed.
Business as usual.
Most of the arguments that the “Holodomor” was atrocity propaganda by Ukrainian nationalists against the Sowjets seem to be based on the Douglas Tottle’s 1987 book “Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard”:
http://www.plp.org/books/tottlefraud.pdf
Certainly an allegation that could be plausible and that has to be investigated carefully. I agree that so far I have seen very little primary sources concerning the Holodomor.
Good essay, but I agree with earlier comments that it tells only half of the story.
Large parts of Eastern Europe did not voluntarily join Bolshevism/Communism after WWI. And early Bolshevism (until later purges by Stalin) was to a significant extent also a Jewish movement, given that Jews were oppressed in Zarist Russia prior to the revolution. Therefore is is clear that by the 1930s there was a strong anti-Russian and anti-Jewish movement in many of these countries. Even if the Holodomor initially were a “natural” famine (I have yet to study the sources indicated above), Stalin would have been obligated to help the farmers out, and obviously he didn’t, so either it was premediated murder or at least conditional intent to kill those resisting Ukrainians.
Also remember that the newly formed Baltic countries didn’t voluntarily join the Sovjet Union, and neither did Finland like being attacked by Stalin. And of course recall the Katyn massacre, 22000 Polish officers and intelligentsia being killed by the Sovjets.
Therefore it is crystal clear why significant parts of the population in all these countries welcomed the advance of the German Wehrmacht as a liberation of Sovjet and Jewish oppression. Note that even the 1956 Hungarian revolt began as a revolt against the local Jewish communist masters (see David Irving: Uprising).
Regarding the “distortion of history, obfuscation of the Holocaust and construction of societies that admire the worst of history’s racists.” Well, the fact of the matter is that we still lack any scientific confirmation of the official Holocaust narrative, i.e. the “6 million gassed Jews”. A few open questions remain (e.g. concerning the Rheinhardt camps), but by now it is already clear that at least 80% of this alleged “mass murder” were pure atrocity propaganda (nothing new, the Brits already employed this technique in WWI against the Germans, including gas chambers to kill the Serbs). As was already mentioned, many European countries prohibit professional research in this field by law… (For starters: Debating the Holocaust: A New Look At Both Sides by Thomas Dalton)
Concerning war crimes and crimes against humanity during the WWII era, based on actual scientific evidence, the worst offender was Stalin, second come Roosevelt and Churchill (large scale fire bombing of German cities and Tokyo 43-45, nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 45, Eisenhower’s Rhine Meadow hunger camps for German civilians 45-46, expulsion (agreed at Potsdam) of 12 million Germans from Eastern Eurpe thereby killing about 2 million from 45-48), and in the very last place we find Hitler (Lidice and some other massacres mainly in the East which were not part of anti-partisan activities).
If you mention “the worst racists”, please remember in which army Blacks had to fight seperately from Whites during WWII (US), and in which country Blacks had to enter buses only at the rear even decades after WWII (and recall what Jesse Owens said about Hitler and FDR). Also, remember how many oppressed people around the world begged Hitler for help at the time (e.g. Slovak and Ukranian minorities in Chekoslovakia after Munich 1938, later the Palestinians and Indians under British oppression).
Conclusion: It’s not simply black and white…
There is more to be aware of . . . .
http://www.rense.com/general86/realholo.htm
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html
http://www.rense.com/general75/ehr.htm
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html
http://mwcnews.net/focus/editorial/36409-genocidal-criminals.html
“This hatred brought armies into the American South, bearing the terrorists who, unknown at that time, were the first Communist totalitarians determined to wreak their hatred and policies of annihilation on all civilized people.”
Your first author isn’t very good at humor. I’m going to assume the others aren’t either.
Thank you for this excellent analysis.
Here we have a good example of how not to make friends & influence people.
@ Zachary Smith – Well, technically, when you practice to deceive, the burden of proof falls on you. As it appears you’ve had six months to do a little research, what conclusion can be drawn? Academic laziness? Refusal to part with a cherished misconception? Embracing the Holodomor myth, in its distilled essence, represents a truly insidious form of anti-Semitism.
Up on the right hand side of this page – near the top – is a window with titled “SEARCH THIS SITE”. I found your previous post by searching with the keywords sanford and holodomor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Tottle
I’d invite people to learn more about Mr. Tottle. IMO he’s a genuine crank.
Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953
I doubt if there was more than a passing mention of the Ukrainian Famine in a book about Stalin’s Wars.
Christopher Simpson, Blowback. America’s recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War
If there was even that passing mention in this one, I overlooked it when examining my copy.
The next two are really cute – foreign-language books about France in the Thirties and the Vatican.
Mark B. Tauger — finally a reasonable source.
From the information available to me, Associate Professor Mark Tauger’s efforts came up with the wrong answer. For any here who want to see why I say that, here are some links.
http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2002/280205.shtml
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/stalin.htm
Back in 1985 the US Congress authorized a study of the issue. Here is the short version of of the Commission’s conclusions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Commission_on_the_Ukraine_Famine
1 There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932-1933, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by Soviet authorities.
Finally, a ten-page chapter from a book written by a man who was in the USSR at the time.
http://www.unz.org/Pub/LyonsEugene-1938-00572
The Ukrainian famine in 1932 was real. It was man-made. And it was every bit as horrible as the Holocaust.
Once more: Embracing the Holodomor myth, in its distilled essence, represents a truly insidious form of anti-Semitism.
To ’embrace’ reality now makes a person an anti-semite. One wonders when speaking of the horrors in Armenia or Cambodia or Mao’s murders will mean risking a jail term. After all, they DO distract from the unique horror of the Holocaust.
OK, it all is obvious for anyone who can think a bit. But it’s good for the western audience, though useless as usual…
Another point. “Putin — for all his authoritarianism, anti-democratic bent and revanchism”. Could someone tell me at last what the hell it’s mean? Especially in comparison with any other world leader. It seems there is a silent arrangement – don’t say any good stuff on Putin even accidently.
There was real Stalin and his real crimes, there is mythic Stalin. There is fantasy Putin for the same aims – to be a focus of the evil. But what does REAL evil do Putin? Where is his revanchism?
(I have an idea on the sins of the Putin’s administration, but I afraid it’s very different from above lines…)
Yar,
There are many commenters here on this site who are as frustrated as you are, when it comes to how the Western Media portrays Putin. I firmly believe that if anything Putin has acted as though he is the only adult in the room when it comes to our current events.
The west is acting as though it wants a bar fight. I mean, spit on the other fellows shoes, call his mother a whore. None, of that is right, or true, but it may just bring it on. Like ‘Operation Cyclone’ the U.S. is using our old play book, again. So, by our media calling Putin names, and that type of stuff, we are just trying to pick another fight with an old foe.
As usual the U.S. takes from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s play book, and we hire the thugs to do our dirty work. Even if Putin were to lose, he still may have the last laugh, considering the U.S. will then need to defend itself from the very same thugs it hired to do it’s evil destruction on a society in it’s crosshairs. Then in time none of that would be remembered, and Hollywood would film another ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ movie, and all is well again.
I have a feeling that there maybe another outcome this time. The USD and the almighty Petro-Dollar hegemony may finally becoming to an end. We will just have to continue on, and see how this all works out.
Putin IS the only adult in the room. Especially when compared to the likes of Obama, Kerry and their poodle over in London. If Putin was as irresponsible as the idiots in the West we would already all be dead.
Yar,
If I may continue on with the thought of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s play book strategy to hire the thugs, and then be stupid enough to not consider any strange bedfellow blowback…well there is even more money yet. Operation Cyclone, Charlie Wilson’s war rang up some good old fashion war money. It’s the stuff Smedley Butler was talking about. Increase in budgets is heaven to these people. It’s is sad this money isn’t spend plowshares. Not to mention non fossil energy projects, as I digress….
Although from a weapons sale point of view even the blowback will sell not just weapons but equipment as well. There truly is profit in chaos. How much did America spend on that crazy ass base over there in Iraq? That alone would do all of us well.
Weapon sales! Have you seen the pictures in our news of Furguson Mo. Wait until all these American municipalities receive their first invoice for the purchases on ‘Parts & Labor’ for all that cool stuff. Then what? Aren’t we all broke yet?
I am providing a link below which to me is straight out of Carrol Quigley. Just don’t shoot the messenger.
http://www.alt-market.com/articles/2277-order-out-of-chaos-the-doctrine-that-runs-the-world
Joe, thank you.
I aware of the role of “fantasy Putin” (and all evil Russian barbarians). I’ve tried to hear the “real” arguments from those who repeat the mantra above.
Oops…
Here is a link to a site giving an alternative view to the Holodomor history
http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/?s=Holodomor
@ Zachary Smith – Well, technically, when you practice to deceive, the burden of proof falls on you. As it appears you’ve had six months to do a little research, what conclusion can be drawn? Academic laziness? Refusal to part with a cherished misconception? Embracing the Holodomor myth, in its distilled essence, represents a truly insidious form of anti-Semitism. That term gets thrown around indiscriminately. But if you ask Annie Lacroix-Riz, Professor of History at University of Paris and the granddaughter of an Auschwitz victim, I’m sure she would be happy to give you the proverbial ear-full.
Douglas Tottle, Fraud, Famine and Fascism. The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, Toronto, Progress Book, 1987
Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006
Christopher Simpson, Blowback. America’s recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War, New York, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988
Annie Lacroix-Riz, Le Vatican (réf. n. 7); Le Choix de la défaite : les élites françaises dans les années 1930, Paris, Armand Colin, 2006, rééd. 2007
Mark Aarons et John Loftus, Des nazis au Vatican, Paris, O. Orban, 1992
Mark B. Tauger: Agriculture in World History, Routledge 2010
To F. G. Sanford: Back in March of this year you posted almost the same materials.
“Just the facts: There was a wheat rust epidemic, crop failures occurred all over the USSR, collectivization and mismanagement contributed, then the peasants slaughtered draft animals to eat leaving them with no plow-horses”
In neither instance did you provide any source for these interesting claims. Could you kindly tell me where you learned of the natural disasters as well as how the peasants in the Ukraine suddenly forgot all their farming skills. Internet links would be ideal, but names of reference books will also serve.
Soviet archives document how much gain was shipped by Stalin to Western Europe. grain taken from Ukrainian farmers. This is also documented in British and Canadian diplomatic sources. Almost all those died from famine after grain was confiscated were Ukrainians and Kazaks. Curious that outside these regions little famine occurred. Oh by the way most of our family starved to death in this famine and I know of others who gathered bodies and have seen photographs and heard testimonials of these events.
While we’re on the subject of historical revisionism, it’s worthwhile to point out that the Holodomor “genocide” is a perfect example. Stalin was no angel, to be sure. The collectivization project which sought to nationalize the agriculture “industry” was a disaster of bureaucratic inefficiency and incompetence. But it was no “genocide”. There was first and foremost a “wheat rust” (fungus) epidemic that destroyed significant portions of the crop, and that was compounded by bad weather. Hungry peasants ignorant of the consequences and without any foresight slaughtered nearly all draft animals and ate them, leaving no practical means to plow the fields or transport the harvest the following year. Failure of collectivization would have been a massive propaganda disaster for Stalin, who consequently denied and obfuscated the truth. This created the notion that he was covering up a state-sponsored genocide. The “truth” is easily obtained, unless one’s motive is merely to preserve the fantasy of Stalin’s evil “genocide” as an excuse to justify Ukrainian cultural barbarism, which is also a well-established fact.
Hitler’s industrialized mass murder was diabolical in the extreme, seeking to optimize killing efficiency with gas chambers and crematoria. Ukrainians accomplished the same process in one step. Their favorite method was packing victims into a barn or building, setting it on fire and cheering the results – just like they did in Odessa at the Trade Union Building. While Hitler’s SS sometimes used firing squads and mass graves, the Ukrainian SS units noted they could save on bullets by standing the victims three deep and shooting them. One shot, three kills. Even that got prohibitively expensive, so they turned to an even more economical solution: they used axes to kill the victims. It’s easy to pretend none of this is true, but the motivation to do so stems from an even uglier reality.
These people are not really “neo” Nazis. They actually ARE Nazis. Many of the “old guard” are still alive, and they still don their SS uniforms and march for special occasions. Nazism is very much alive and well in these countries. NATO, EU and American stupidity has served to breath new life into the likes of Anders Breivik. He has millions of “fellow travelers”, and these events have given them new inspiration. They have planted the seeds of a new “Holodomor”, and the harvest is likely to be a “bumper crop”.
” it is an offense to Western values that a NATO or EU state, or NATO/EU-aspiring state, would disburse state funds on the distortion of history, obfuscation of the Holocaust and construction of societies that admire the worst of history’s racists.”
The writer of this piece — Dovid Katz, formerly professor of Yiddish Studies.
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Yes of course any free discussion on the “holocaust” is not allowed , not wanted anywhere under penalty of a prison sentence or worse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Historical_Review
Known as “Double Genocide,†it posits the absolute theoretical equality of Nazi and Soviet crimes. Its constitution is the 2008 “Prague Declaration,†which most Americans have never heard of, that sports the word “same†five times in reference to Nazi and Soviet crimes. Even fewer Americans know that one of its demands, that the world accept a unitary mix-and-match day of remembrance for Nazi and Soviet victims, was snuck under the radar into last June’s congressional military appropriations bill.
This was an interesting and informative essay, and I thank the author for his efforts to enlighten us.
That said, I believe the issues of the US supporting neo-Nazis and recognition that the Soviets committed monstrous crimes need to be kept separate.
Perhaps there was always a strain of anti-semitism in the Ukraine – it’s something I just don’t know about either way. But the fact remains that the Stalin-enforced famine of 1932-1933 known as the Holodomor looked very much like a genocide to the people who were dying in droves. I doubt if the death toll will ever be known, for the Communists weren’t keeping records. But the odds are good that the numbers were of the same order of magnitude as the Holocaust. This event alone would have made even the Nazis look good by comparison.
I’m going to assume the Nazis looked for assistants in all the invaded countries – people who would help them with their ‘Jewish problem’. In most of them – places like Croatia and Lithuania – they found some sewer-level types who exist in all societies. Perhaps the situation in the Ukraine was complicated by the famine which had killed so many there.
I want it understood that I also find the BHO administration to be totally disgusting in its imitations of Hitler’s activities – the recruiting of pond scum.