By HUGO DIONÍSIO*
The link between ethnic conflict with Russian-speaking and Russian populations, the Soviet past and the memory of the victory over Nazi-fascism, has its origins in the wave of collaborationism and sympathy with Nazi ideology.
The siege of Russia is not limited to the military, commercial, institutional or financial domains. Before this, another barrier was implemented — or rather, “fed” — in order to constitute a kind of aggressive and active “sanitary belt”, made up of the States whose borders communicate, by land or sea, with those of the Russian Federation.
This “sanitary belt”, conceptualized based on what we know to be the mental framework of the Western ruling classes, has a profoundly ideological nature, aiming to touch, in a repulsive way, on the deepest values embodied in Russian history over the last 100 years and, through this connection, provoke an antagonistic relationship characterized by a mutual repellent effect, preventing any human communication that could be established between the parties.
The sovereign force that resides in the Russian multinational, multiethnic and multireligious culture, responsible, from the outset, for the capacity to aggregate forces that made possible the defeat of Nazi-fascism in the Second World War, is also what separates mineral, human and energy reserves, among others, from the clutches of Western capitalism and its impetus fueled by the imperialist phase in which it finds itself.
If the brutality of an ideology such as Nazism represented, in the first half of the 100th century, the fuel that fueled the aggression against the then Soviet homeland, it was its historical preservation and recovery — in an unparalleled process of revisionism and whitewashing — that made it possible, in the first decades of the XNUMXst century, to use it as fuel for the so-called “sanitary belt” around Russia. XNUMX years later, the recipe is repeated, albeit with the clear limitations that desperation imposes.
What could be more antagonistic and mutually repulsive than Nazism in contact with what can be considered the “Russian soul” updated with the events of the 20th century? What more vivid and carnal image is there, in its brutality and violence, than the nightmare suffered, mainly by the Russian people, at the hands of Nazi terror?
The first to suffer the effects of this “health belt” are the citizens of Russian origin who, after the collapse of the USSR, ended up in Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia and now live there. In addition to banning Russian media, violating their right to opinion and information, based on a supposed policy of combating “Kremlin propaganda” (something that is also seen throughout the European Union and outside the national constitutions of the various countries), Latvia promoted even the elimination of Russian language teaching from school curricula, which has raised concerns among UN human rights experts regarding the protection of the rights of ethnic minorities. For those who accuse Russia of not taking them into account…
According to the narrative, the Kremlin uses Russian as a weapon, which it then uses as a vehicle for its propaganda, perpetrated through the so-called “state media”, which they refer to as all media that, whether financed by the Russian executive or not, is not aligned with the Western narrative. What they never mention is that, after all, the use of Russian as a propaganda vehicle is not, as they say, exclusive to Russian sources, since Latvia itself finances media outlets such as Meduza, who, writing in Russian, only aim to convey information aligned with the Western narrative.
Although not as radical as Latvia in eliminating Russian from school curricula, Estonia is nevertheless an example of destruction and monuments alluding to the Soviet victory over Nazism. Especially under the rule of Kaja Kallas, the process of removal of these monuments witnessed an acceleration, even being discussed in the European context, a process that included the removal of the Soviet tank from the outskirts of the city of Narva. According to Kaja Kallas herself, the tank is a “murder weapon” — perhaps for the “crime” of defeating the Nazis — “and people are dying in Ukraine with the same type of tank”.
But this persecution of Soviet culture and memory — not just Russian — tells us that the propagation of a Russophobic logic incorporates a dimension that goes beyond mere ethnic confrontation, represented, for example, in the discussion of limitations on the acquisition of real estate property by Russian citizens in Latvia, following a proposal especially by the Finnish authorities. For those who say that the Russian people are oppressed, this generalization is not understood.
The link between the ethnic conflict between Russian-speaking and Russian-speaking populations and the Soviet past and the memory of the victory over Nazi-fascism has its origins in the wave of collaborationism and sympathy for Nazi ideology that occurred in these countries on the part of a certain segment of the population and the ruling classes before, at the beginning of and during the Second World War. The responsibility of the Russian Federation, as the sole custodian of the collective historical memory of the victory of the multinational Red Army over the Nazi hordes, bridges the gap between the greed for the vast resources held by Russia and the need to find ideological, theoretical, psychological and emotional grounds to justify the aggression.
This theoretical and ideological justification, in my view, is provided by neo-Nazism and the glorification of the past collaboration with Hitler's forces. The strength of this anti-communist, racist and white supremacist ideology, placed in the foreground, combined with the process of historical revision and whitewashing of Nazi-fascist terror, bridges the gap, from the past to the present, between the anti-communism that justified the aggression against the USSR and the Russophobia that serves as an excuse for the current siege.
Now, in order to promote the so-called “sanitary belt” with the Russian Federation, whose function is to prevent healthy contact between Europe (Germany, mainly), Russia, the Eurasian republics and China, it was necessary to recover the historical asset that constitutes the Nazi ideology, for the USA and for the dominant classes of the collective West. As happens with all assets, only those that already exist can be recovered. per se. The recovery of the Nazi historical heritage is the result of a longer process of preserving and revitalizing this asset.
Nowadays, when we witness the glorification of “Forest Brothers”, an openly anti-communist group that emerged in the Baltic countries, formed by former members of the local Waffen-SS and who fought against what they called “Soviet occupation”, even after the end of the Second World War, having been responsible for horrific crimes against Soviet civilians and police, operating with information from Western intelligence, or we have witnessed the whitewashing and enthronement of organizations such as the “Sonderkommando A”, which, collaborating with the Nazi forces, using Latvians and Lithuanians, murdered almost 250.000 Jews in Lithuania, until 1944, we see that the Nazi historical heritage is very much alive and stronger than it has ever been since the end of the Second World War.
To enable its resurgence and recovery, it was necessary to implement an entire process of revisionism, minimizing the damage and whitewashing its crimes. In Lithuania, General Povilas Plechavicius was honored, fought alongside the Nazis. In 2008, the Lithuanian parliament equated communist and Nazi ideologies, which represented a normalization and historical recovery of Nazism (as opposed to a demonization, as many argue) and, in 2010, Lithuanian courts declared the swastika “part of the country’s cultural heritage”, proving that the ideological equating is nothing more than a process of historical recovery of that past.
The fact is that since 1991 thousands of communists have been persecuted in Lithuania, while demonstrations with Nazi symbols and racist slogans have been allowed. Symptomatic! As Jean Pierre Faye said in the preface to the book The blood archipelago, written by Chomsky and Herman, the act of including Nazism and Communism in the “totalitarianism” category allowed the US to support the most backward, reactionary and tyrannical forces, as long as they did not claim to support “totalitarianism”. Thus, by equating communist and Nazi ideologies, the fact is that the Lithuanian authorities, like many others today in the European Union of “values” and “democracy”, persecute communists, but tolerate — to say the least — extreme right-wing demonstrations. In fact, the profusion of openly reactionary and racist governments in the European Union proves almost irrefutably the reasons behind this equating. The fact is that in all these countries, communists are persecuted, while Nazis are admitted. Nothing like practice as a criterion for measuring truth!
In the Portuguese case, a group like one 1143, aligned with the most extremist factions in Portugal and with people who have a history of persecuting — and murdering — migrants and minorities of any kind (communists, homosexuals, blacks, Asians or Muslims), is characterized in the media mainstream as being a simple “nationalist group”. What does this have to do with the support from André Ventura, from the Chega party, against what he referred to as “Uncontrolled immigration"?
And why doesn't André Ventura himself, the media outlets that give him a voice and space and the powerful interests that support him, mention that it is companies that hire immigrants, that it is employers' associations that ask governments to open borders, that it is the Uber companies of this world that most exploit immigration and that it is the European Union itself, which André Ventura defends, that encourages, causes and legitimises all the immigration we are witnessing? And why don't they attack the uncontrolled tourism that is destroying Lisbon, an activity for which a large part of the immigrants work?
Now, this racist logic that bridges the gap with anti-communism, aiming to link today's Russia as the sole custodian of the Soviet past and from there to its current demonization, in order to justify an aggression, isolation and oppression that makes its plunder possible — as happened in the terrible 90s of the XNUMXth century under Boris Yeltsin — finds a clear example in permission, by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), in allowing its users to express hate messages against Russians).
This Russophobic perspective, absolutely unacceptable for a Europe that claims to be a “value-based” Europe, represents a fundamental pillar of these countries’ accession to NATO and gives us a glimpse of the mechanisms the US uses to get the “elected” countries to make joining the Atlantic alliance not just a question of defense against Russia, but, above all, an existential necessity. And the level of extremism that has been implanted is so great that we only need to listen to the way the elite that makes up the Kiev regime speaks about the Russians, without distinguishing between them, to realize that the hatred is indiscriminate, deep, visceral, as only something irrational, like racism, can be. And the very survival of NATO depends on this irrational, animalistic hatred.
To preserve, recover and revitalize the Nazi historical heritage over time, there is one country in particular that has fulfilled this role like no other: Canada! Even today, Canada resists to provide the identities of the 900 fugitive Nazis who found sanctuary there.
Already in a previous article I have exposed the true living museum that the University of Alberta, and Canadian society, is to the fugitives of the Nuremberg trials, namely those of the 14th Galician Waffen SS Division. However, the Canadian legacy, in this regard, goes much further, with that country having established itself as a peaceful refuge for scientists, military personnel and other Nazi fugitives.
Although in this country, between 1985-1986, and after much political and popular pressure, an investigation was carried out on the subject, at the time called the Deschênes Commission, even leading to a compilation of names, the truth is that the work left much to be desired and was carried out to produce results that were, at the very least, ambiguous.
The commission did not investigate materials held in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc countries, potentially missing crucial evidence held there; Judge Deschênes set strict conditions for consulting evidence from these countries, but with the Soviet response to the inquiry arriving only in June 1986, it was considered too late for the commission to travel and to examine, which suggests that surveying the material reality was perhaps not the main objective of the mission.
The commission did not investigate a list of 38 additional names provided at the end of the inquiry, due to what it considered to be time constraints; the investigation of a list of 71 German scientists and technicians was incomplete; the second part of the commission's final report, containing allegations against specific individuals and recommendations on how to proceed in certain cases, remains confidential and has not been released to the public,
An unredacted copy of Alti Rodal's report to the Deschênes Commission, which contains detailed accounts of how war criminals entered Canada and the government's responsibility for their entry, has not been fully disclosed; the Department of Justice and Royal Canadian Mounted Police files on Nazi war criminals held by those agencies were not made public; evidence of the past activities of members of the Galicia Division was not examined, particularly that which referred to potential war crimes committed in other police units Germans before joining the division; A secret study conducted by the commission found that British and American authorities transported Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe to Canada shortly after World War II without informing the Canadian government and with minimal scrutiny.
Even today, the withholding of this evidence leads to ongoing debates about the accuracy and integrity of the commission’s work, with many arguing that the commission’s work instead helped to whitewash the historical record of Nazi war criminals in Canada. It appears that the Deschênes Commission was more concerned with whitewashing the past than with assessing it and prosecuting the crimes committed.
This entire dossier was reactivated on the occasion of the controversy surrounding the reception of Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian parliament. Accusations of whitewashing have multiplied, which no wonder, considering that it was this commission that declared the members of the Galician Waffen SS Division innocent of having committed war crimes, since, according to the argument, they had been examined upon their admission to the country.
Today, after all this pressure, it is argued that full disclosure of the commission's work, in addition to potentially damaging the credibility of the Canadian government, could also “help Russia”, as it helps to reinforce the Kremlin’s “denazification” narrative. Now, it was not something that was not known, the problem is not knowing the truth, the problem is demonizing Russia, discrediting its version of the facts and justifying the continuation of the war.
What this reality demonstrates, more than ever and especially when we hear Blinken say that the US is an arctic country and which wants to form an organization with Canada and the European Baltic countries to keep that region “conflict-free” (now would be the time to laugh out loud), is that Canada has not only constituted an important “museum warehouse” for the preservation, protection and recovery of Nazi assets, but now also becomes part of the “sanitary belt” that the US promotes around Russia. All this also shows that Canada is nothing more than a banana republic and a retreat camp for important human assets for Anglo-American imperialism.
What this sad reality teaches us is that the historical revisionism that sought to compare communism to Nazism did not only aim to normalize the latter and historically disable the former, erasing the USSR’s contribution to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It aimed at much more than that. It aimed to create a repulsive barrier between Russia and what would be, geographically, its natural allies, the European countries… Coincidentally, for those who accuse Putin of being a “fascist” and “far right”, it is the Europe of “values” and “democracy” that is on the Nazi side…
The revival of Nazism does not only put Russia on the other side. It puts all of us, the Western peoples, on the side of and under Nazi-fascist influence!
*Hugo Dionísio is a lawyer, geopolitical analyst, researcher at the Studies Office of the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP-IN).
Originally published in Strategic Culture Foundation.
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