October 2, 2023
History tells us where we
are in the human story and what we, alive now, must do to advance this story.
To tamper with history is among the gravest of sins against the human cause.
The first sign of trouble
to come, I recall thinking, was in June 2014. June 6 fell on a Friday, and that
weekend leaders of what used to be called the Allied powers gathered on the
Normandy beaches to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the D–Day landings and
the beginning of the Allies’ final triumph over the Nazi Reich.
No Russian official was
invited to join the gathering.
How shamelessly
undignified, I recall thinking. What a pack of embarrassing slobs, those
second-rate “leaders” who assembled for photo ops on the sand.
Then I thought of a book
Tom Engelhardt brought out a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed. The Commissar
Vanishes (Metropolitan, 1997) is a collection of before-and-after photographs
showing how, during the Stalinist years, the Soviets airbrushed those it judged
political enemies out of official photographs. The book is mildly amusing but
mostly frightening.
And then I thought of how
diabolically powerful it is, how Mephistophelian, to tamper with history. And
now I note bitterly how common this practice is among those who purport to
speak for us but who, in reality, act against us.
A year after the D–Day
events it came time to mark the Red Army’s liberation of Berlin in April 1945.
And again: No American leader and no European of any rank so far as I recall,
attended the ceremonies in Moscow. No speeches, no public messages honoring the
Soviets’ extraordinary sacrifices and heroism, barely any mention of the
anniversary in the Western press.
Another airbrush job. This
time I felt a sting of indignation that made me ashamed of the nationality fate
has assigned me. A worthy Western leader would have stood and said loudly, “We
are all Russians today.”
Nine years ago, eight years
ago: We all recall what had transpired at the time of these disgusting
perversions of the past. In February 2014 the U.S. orchestrated an
antidemocratic coup in Ukraine and installed a viciously Russophobic puppet
regime in Kiev. Moscow responded, as a first-year poli sci student could have
predicted, by reannexing Crimea and supporting the Russian-speaking majority in
Ukraine’s eastern provinces.
By the spring of 2015 Kiev
was daily shelling civilian populations in the east, a campaign that would last
eight years and claim roughly 14,000 lives. Moscow had by then decided to
support Luhansk and Donetsk as autonomous republics, while co-sponsoring
accords — the two Minsk Protocols — that would have held Ukraine together as a
federated republic.
These events marked out the
battle lines with which we are now condemned to live. NATO approved of the
merciless shelling of noncombatants to the extent it trained the Armed Forces
of Ukraine to achieve maximum effect. The West never had any intention of
backing the Minsk accords, which, in addition to saving Ukraine as a unified
nation, would also have saved many thousands of lives.
The Russiagate years
followed these events, erasing all possibility that, at least for the
foreseeable future, any kind of balanced, mature understanding of Russia, its
people, and its conduct in international affairs can be restored.
Our topics here are two.
One is hatred, prevalent as the reigning Russophobia now is. The other is
history and how this is abused to bring hatred to the desired pitch.
History is among our most
precious treasures. It is our essential anchor. It is our village green, our
corner tavern, and each generation writes it to reflect how those alive
understand it. History tells us where we are in the human story and what we,
alive now, must do to advance this story as others have delivered it to us.
Do we have to continue on
in the direction of those who came before? Do we have to turn in a new
direction? These are the kinds of questions history hands us.
Let me go out on a limb
here. To tamper with history is among the gravest of sins against the human
cause.
Those Soviet propagandists
who were clever in the darkroom understood very well the power of perverting
history. As we say now, if you control the past you control the present.
All those who stood on the
Normandy beaches nine years ago, along with those who stayed silent a year
later, were the political descendants of leaders who once condemned the Soviets
for their ruthless trespasses on the past. Now these same people are the
trespassers — not just on Russia’s past, or Europe’s, but on my past and your
past, too.
I bring the anger readers
will scarcely miss to two events that occurred last week. Let us consider each
of these injuries briefly.
There is, first, the mess
in which the Canadian government has landed itself by celebrating a Nazi
officer.
A week ago last Friday the
Canadian Parliament responded with a standing ovation when the speaker, Anthony
Rota, introduced a 98–year-old named Yaroslav Hunka as a hero for having fought
on the side of Ukrainians during World War II. Hunka stood, the picture of
modest valor, just after Volodymyr Zelensky had addressed the chamber. When
Hunka’s service against the Soviets was noted, the Ukrainian president pointed
towards Hunka in approval.
As it quickly emerged,
Hunka served as a member of the Galicia Division of the Nazi Waffen SS. This
unit was among the more brutal in its extermination of Jews during the war.
Rota resigned as
parliamentary speaker last week. Zelensky, who knew good and well who a
Ukrainian fighting the Soviets was fighting with and for, has had nothing to
say. And amid a considerable political kerfuffle in Ottawa, Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau offered this apology:
“For all of us who were present to have
unknowingly recognized this individual was a terrible mistake and a violation
of the memory of those who suffered grievously at the hands of the Nazi
regime…. It is extremely troubling to think that this egregious error is being
politicized by Russia and its supporters to provide false propaganda about what
Ukraine is fighting for.”
The Western powers, with
the collusion of the Kiev regime’s leadership — and I don’t want to hear
another word about Zelensky’s Jewishness — have spent years blurring the Nazi
past in Ukraine and erasing the considerable presence of neo–Nazis in the Armed
Forces of Ukraine and at all levels of the bureaucracy and government.
This is what you get — a
dog’s dinner, a present devoid of a past. And instantly the Canadian PM, an
American puppet in his own right, violates memory once again — in defense of
memory, of course — by telling us Russian propaganda is what we must first
worry about.
I am sick of this murk,
this hypocrisy — all of it the consequence of an insidious campaign to tamper
with history so that the U.S. and NATO can harness the visceral hatred of
xenophobic extremists to wage a proxy war against Russia.
Hardly was I finished
thinking through the travesty in Canada when U.S. Secretary of State Antony
Blinken issued forth with this rendering of the same contentious chapters in
European history:
“Eighty-two years ago, Nazis murdered
34,000 Jews at Babyn Yar. Soviets buried this history, which today Putin’s
government manipulates to provide cover for Russia’s abuses in Ukraine. The
U.S. is committed to justice for Holocaust survivors and accountability for atrocities.”
There are only two ways to
read this nonsense. Either the secretary of state should fire the underling who
writes his social media posts, or Tony Blinken now goes so far as to assume he
can mangle history beyond all recognition, and in our confused present the
result will stand.
For the record, Babyn Yar
(also spelled Babi Yar), a section of Kiev, was the site of multiple Nazi
massacres during World War II. Blinken’s reference is to the events of Sept.
29–30, 1941, when 34,000 people were massacred. In total, 100,000 to 150,000
Jews, Soviet POWs, Romani and others were killed there.
While the Nazis attempted
to cover up the Babyn Yar atrocities, the Soviets instantly publicized them
when they liberated Kiev in 1943. After the war they tried those deemed
responsible.
Where did Blinken get such
an idea from? It appears he is not the only person to believe this version of
events. A September 2021 article in The Times of Israel about the 80th
anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre said that virtually no one was prosecuted
for the massacre and that the Soviets refused to commemorate the killings, thus
“buried this history.” The newspaper said:
“At the Nuremberg Trials of the 1940s, one
Nazi, Paul Blobel, was sentenced to death and executed for crimes at Babi Yar,
among other places. Two others were given prison sentences. A 1968 trial ended
with prison terms of 4-15 years for seven defendants; three men were acquitted
in those trials, the last of any Babi Yar perpetrator. …
In Ukraine, Babi Yar is also relatively
obscure, partly due to communist authorities’ decades-long refusal to
commemorate it. It was part of a broader policy that downplayed the suffering
of Jews in the Holocaust, coopting it into the Soviet narrative about patriotic
sacrifice in a fight against Nazism.”
But the facts do not
support the idea that the Soviets buried the story or that only a handful were
tried at Nuremberg. The Soviets conducted trials in Kiev in 1946 and a dozen
perpetrators were hanged in the city’s Maidan square, scene of the 2014
neo-Nazi-backed coup that has led to the current war. Wikipedia says:
“In January 1946, 15 former members of the
German police … were tried in Kyiv over their roles in the massacre and other
atrocities. Twelve of them were sentenced to death. … The other three received
prison sentences. Those condemned to death were publicly hanged in the town
square of Kyiv on 29 January 1946.[57]”
In memorials, the Soviets
treated the Babyn Yar victims equally, without singling out Jews or Roma,
leading to a popularly held notion that the history was buried. Wikipedia says:
“After the war, specifically Jewish and
Roma commemoration efforts encountered difficulty because of the Soviet Union’s
emphasis on secular remembrances honoring all nationalities of the Soviet
Union, so memorials (including at Babi Yar) would generally refer to ‘peaceful
victims of fascism.’ Memorials were not explicitly forbidden, but successive
Soviet leaders preferred instead to emphasise the wide-ranging origins of those
murdered at the site.
This meant that both Jewish and Roma
peoples were not specifically memorialised at the Babi Yar site until the Soviet
Union collapsed.[61] Indeed, Yevgeny Yevtushenko‘s 1961 poem on Babi Yar begins
‘Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet’ (‘Over Babi Yar there are no monuments’); it
is also the first line of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13.”
While The Times of Israel
story also spoke of the upsurge of support in Ukraine for the Ukrainian fascist
collaborators who took part in the massacre, Blinken makes absolutely no
reference to it.
Those with little respect
for history, and so none for us to whom history belongs, have many reasons to
pervert it. For the past decade their cause has been to abuse history to induce
a deep an enduring hatred of Russia and its people.
And as the events reviewed
here indicate, the specific cause now is to recruit us to the side of a nation
with a long history of Russia-hating so that we will excuse its disgraceful
excesses, or pretend, even better, there are none.
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