The moral example of Russia

649

DANIEL WIRT

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[dropcap]Thanks[/dropcap] to The Greanville Post for bringing my attention to an article by Clara Weiss, ⁽¹⁾ and a short documentary regarding the fate of the Romanian dictator and Nazi collaborator, Ion Antonescu. ⁽²⁾  These, along with my recent discovery of a two-part documentary, “Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades” (Part 1 here and Part 2 here)  form a near-perfect crystal of historical knowledge, a unit of knowledge vital for understanding fascism, the perpetrators and the resisters, past and present, especially important because of the current re-emergence of fascism and Naziism in Europe.

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First look at the short documentary from 1946.   Four men walking, heads-up, in a calm, beautiful wooded setting,  all immaculately groomed and wearing fine suits, all apparently healthy.  Specifically, they are not naked, bruised, emaciated or cowering with terror.  They are not being beaten or abused by the armed guards escorting them.  They are not shackled.  They are not tied to the posts or hooded before being shot by the firing squad.  In a word, they are allowed a full measure of DIGNITY under the (grim) circumstances — dignity that they, and fascists like them fully denied their millions of victims.  This is a cinematic tour de force — the silence amplifies the chirping of the birds, the crack of the gunshots and the screams of the victims of these fascists — more powerful by virtue of the absence of color and sound.  The toss of the expensive hat near the end — as close to nakedness that these fascist psychopaths get.

Next consider their victims (here and here).

Victims by the hundreds of thousands, forced to strip naked, taunted, humiliated and beaten while being marched to mass graves, where they are forced to arrange themselves sardine-style on top of the still-warm, bleeding bodies of the prior wave of victims, mothers vainly trying to shield their children, before being shot.  The dehumanization of the “Untermenschen” (German for “subhumans”, a term also used by the Ukraine junta’s Yatsenyuk, nicknamed “Yats” by Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland, of the Kaganate of Nulands, a cell in the US neocon cabal).

Now read the two-part article by Clara Weiss, “The Nazi War of Annihilation Against the Soviet Union” (based on her review of the book, Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, ed. by Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, David Stahel, Rochester University Press, 2012) to understand more about the past history and see how current events rhyme with that  history.

Weiss says, “The material presented sheds light on the historical background to the criminal policies currently being pursued by US and German imperialism in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.”  Indeed, the US and its lapdogs are actively supporting and promoting the reemergence of fascism and Naziism in Europe in the service of western (Atlanticist) cultural and economic hegemony and unipolarity.  In fact, this is but one of the multiple battlefronts of the U.S. and its Atlanticist partners.  But the common denominator in all of these (worldwide) fronts is dehumanization and lack of respect for other cultures — systematic humiliation, abrogation of dignity and torture.  To name but one recent example, consider the dehumanization and torture employed by the US in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, overt symptoms and signs of moral deficiency and depravity, the antithesis of moral strength and rectitude.  Or, compare the circumstances of the death of Antonescu with the death of Muammar Gaddafi that the US/NATO bears proximate responsibility for.

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Again, from “The Nazi War of Annihilation Against the Soviet Union” ⁽³⁾:

“In the Holocaust, the most significant role after Nazi Germany was played by the Romanian fascist regime of Ion Antonescu. Romania joined Operation Barbarossa after Hitler promised Antonescu territorial gains in Transnistria, Bukovina and Bessarabia. All of these territories, and in particular Bukovina (now extinguished from the map), had a significant Jewish population with long historical traditions.

Antonescu early on decided to remove all Jews from these areas’ villages. In Transnistria, a broad network of concentration camps and ghettos was set up. Here, some 250,000 Jews and 12,000 Roma were murdered.

Romanian forces were heavily involved in some of the worst massacres of Jews in what is today Ukraine. In one of the most notorious massacres of the Holocaust, the Massacre of Odessa (October 22-24, 1941), which was directly ordered by Antonescu, some 35,000 Jews were murdered. Providing a glimpse of the barbarity of this orgy of violence, Lower writes:

“Romanian methods of murder included throwing grenades at and shooting Jews who had been crammed by the thousands into wooden buildings. In an act reminiscent of the burning of Strasbourg’s Jews in the fifteenth century, Romanians forced Jews into the harbor square and set them on fire. Except that in this twentieth-century version, the Romanians did not allow Jews to save themselves through conversion (baptism). Thus, the barbarism of the religious wars was outdone by these modern campaigns of colonization and national purification.” [Pp. 205-206]

A few weeks later, at least 48,000 Jews were shot dead in Bogdanivka at Christmas by Romanian soldiers, German SS and Ukrainian militia, as well as other collaborators.

A report from 2004 established that, overall, the Antonescu regime is responsible for the murder of some 280,000 to 380,000 Jews in Transnistria, Bukovina and Bessarabia.

This historical record of the Romanian bourgeoisie is a serious warning to workers of Eastern Europe in light of the fact that the Romanian government is now intimately involved in the imperialist war preparations against Russia, stoking up civil war in Ukraine. (See: Romania joins imperialist war drive against Russia).

[dropcap]After[/dropcap] the end of World War II, Antonescu was briefly detained in Russia before being returned to Romania, where he was tried and convicted by the Romanian People’s Tribunals (Tribunalele Poporului), “…set up by the post-world War II government of Romania, overseen by the Allied Control Commission to try suspected war criminals, in line with Article 14 of the Armistice Agreement with Romania which said:  ‘The Romanian Government and High Command undertake to collaborate with the Allied (Soviet) High Command in the apprehension and trial of persons accused of war crimes'”.

The Soviet death toll fighting the Nazis and their collaborators in World War II was about 30 million.  The Soviets could have tortured Antonescu before executing him, either directly or by Romanian proxy, but they did not.  Instead they set up a judicial process in collaboration with post-war Romania, and the end result is documented in the film.  Allowing Antonescu to maintain basic human dignity and not torturing him were signs of strength and moral superiority, not weakness.

And Russia is still taking the moral high ground.  The US has promoted “color revolutions” in former Soviet states, and NATO has progressively moved its bases across Eastern Europe to Russia’s doorstep.  In response Russia has pursued a non-confrontational, non-aggressive policy of diplomacy and attempted engagement with Europe and the US, figuring that if it played by the rules of the West that it would be accepted as a partner by the West — but the Russophobia has continued, unabated, since the (purported) end of the Cold War.  The US, in concert with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Britain, France and others have created, financed and promoted Wahabi terrorists worldwide, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya and Syria, and then use this monster to promote a vicious, generalized Islamophobia — one tool from the imperialism toolbox of the US, employed in the service of its goal of hegemony and unipolarity.  And what is Russia’s policy?  Respect for Islam and recognition that the Wahabi takfiri freaks do not represent the vast majority of Muslims.  Russia sets the example by trying to establish friendly relations with its large Muslim neighbors.  And in response to the US-promoted Nazi coup in Ukraine and subsequent provocations by the US and its lapdogs, Russia has responded with measured, rational steps to protect its vital, regional interests (including accepting Crimea back into the Russian Federation, with no loss of life, after Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede from Stepan Bandera-stan, i.e. secede from a post-coup, Nazi-worshipping Ukraine deeply hostile to ethnic Russians).

Russia has engaged in careful, patient diplomacy, especially with regard to the very difficult situation in Novorossiya, ethnic Russians in southeast Ukraine who have declared independence from Banderastan Ukraine and who are under attack with heavy weapons by the junta.  (Russian diplomacy is decried as weakness by certain western liberal “armchair revolutionaries” who advocate exactly what the US dearly wants:  direct and overt Russian involvement in a conventional war in Ukraine, solidifying NATO’s tenure in Europe, making Europe dependent on NATO and the US, splitting Europe away from Russia, laying the groundwork for destabilization and regime change in Russia to allow those good ol’ Yeltsin days of oligarchy and kleptocracy to return, with Russia as another vassal and resource colony of the West, and as a consequence, making the ultimate fate of Novorossiya in southeast Ukraine even more tenuous than it already is.)

So, it is not weakness or appeasement for Russia to continue to supply coal and gas to Ukraine and hostile European countries or to be seen as actively brokering peace with its “partners” (like the vile Poroshenko and the duplicitous US and Germany) — instead, these are carefully considered and mostly skillful chess moves in the propaganda component of the fourth-generation war that is being waged.  This is an existential issue for Russia, an existential reality divorced from and transcending by many orders of magnitude the fantasy world of western liberal keyboard activists, professed friends of Novorossiya, who are warm and safe in their suburban homes, pounding out their daily doses of Russophobia and Putin-bashing (“Putin is a coward, Putin is weak, Putin is a traitor, hang the SOB, hang the bastard…”), some with suspect motives and affiliations, some apparently refighting the US Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, some employing juvenile sports team language and analogies, some obviously afflicted with that hypocritical western liberal R2P (responsibility to protect) disease, many with interesting psychological features easily recognizable by those with basic training in psychiatry, and ALL “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” when it comes to actually doing something about the proximate (root) cause of the problem — US liberal fascism and imperialism, based in and a consequence of late-stage capitalism.  They have no concept or appreciation of the strategy of harm reduction that Russia, under the leadership of Putin, is engaged in.

Perhaps the lives of war criminals like Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk, and the Pravy Sector and Svoboda Nazis will someday be spared by people who know the terrain of the moral high ground and recognize the advantages of imprisoning, but not killing them.

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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NOTES

(1) Originally published at the World Socialist Web Site,  http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/12/nazi-j12.html

⁽²⁾ https://www.greanvillepost.com/2015/01/14/the-well-deserved-execution-of-romanian-dictator-ion-antonescu/

(3) Part two of this series can be found here.

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SS chief Heinrich Himmler inspects a camp for Soviet prisoners of war. 1941. Afforded no protections under international conventions, the German army felt free to treat Soviet prisoners despicably, as animals. 3.5 million died in captivity. (US National Archives)