NAZIS & FASCISTS

The crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the finest works of late Soviet cinema. In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans set out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard-swept landscape of Nazi-occupied Belorussia. When they fall into the hands of German forces and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that lifts the film’s earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory.

RAMIN MAZAHERI—Well, the resumption of regular weekend repression of protesters would surely hurt Macron’s re-election chances, but will the average Jean and Jeanne Frenchy join them? Believe it or not, many people don’t like being tear gassed in 2021 as much as they didn’t like it in 2019. The massive state repression, the criminalisation, the tear gas, the beatings, the fines, the intrusive searches, the portraying of political protesters as mere rioters – the whole point was to scare away the average Frenchman, and it definitely worked. 

STALKER ZONE— On September 8, the Riga District Court confirmed the decision of the Vidzeme District Court that human rights activist and scientist Aleksandr Gaponenko committed a criminal offence by spreading anti-fascist statements. For these “crimes”, the court punished the scientist with 10 months in prison. He was awarded a suspended sentence and two years of probation.

This is a landmark decision, since previously anti-fascists in Latvia were persecuted only by the secret police and they did it surreptitiously. The decision of the Riga Court of September 8 means that the state has resorted to institutional means of reprisals against anti-fascists. Indirectly, the court’s decision recognised that fascism is a key element of the state ideology, an element that cannot be criticised under the threat of criminal punishment.

RICHARD SANDERS—Why, PM Trudeau, are Canadians supposed to memorialize Nazis as the “victims of communism? And, why are we supposed to “stand with” these Nazis’ descendants if they have still not faced the truth about their forbears’ complicity in the Holocaust and in the Nazis’ mass murder of almost 30 million Soviets?? Shame on you Mr. Trudeau and shame on your Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland for your shared, Cold-War McCarthyism, for your virulent Russophobia and for your equation of Nazis and communists.