NAZIS & FASCISTS

BEN NORTON—Since a US-backed 2014 coup overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government and installed a viciously anti-Russian and pro-NATO right-wing government, Kiev has been battling pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country. Neo-fascist Ukrainian groups like Right Sector and Svoboda played a major role in this Western-backed regime change operation. In the violence following the putsch, these forces cohered into neo-Nazi militias like the Azov Battalion and C14 (named after the white supremacist “14 words” slogan). In 2014, the Azov Battalion was directly incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard, merging the explicitly fascist militia with the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior and military.

Little initially differentiated Auschwitz, situated between Krakow and Katowice, from other concentration camps established during the war. On June 14, 1940, the day Paris fell, the first 728 inmates arrived, all of whom were Polish political prisoners. Housed in a nearby tobacco factory until the buildings and infrastructure were ready to absorb them, the camp was initially manned by thirty German criminal inmates imported from Sachsenhausen. Within ten months, 10,900 were imprisoned, and from October 1941 onwards a second complex was built to ease the congestion an anticipated influx of Red Army prisoners in Auschwitz I would cause. Auschwitz II-Birkenau absorbed the 10,000 Soviet prisoners that arrived in late 1941, with all but 945 perishing by early 1942.

JOHN LAUGHLAND—The dangers of using legislatures to write history are even greater when, as in this case, the purpose of the resolution is polemical. The general idea of the text is that Europeans must remember their dreadful past in order not to repeat it in the future: everyone knows that the European project was born in the ruins of the Second World War. But the goal of this resolution is to recalibrate the usual memory of the Nazis and the Holocaust to put the memory of Communist totalitarianism on an equal footing with Nazism. Communism, the resolution says, was Nazism’s ideological twin, and the USSR shares equal guilt with Germany for starting the war.

The United States encouraged and aided the breakup of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in an effort to weaken its main political and economic rival. An important ideological weapon in this effort was the demonization of the Soviet Union generally and especially of the Stalin era. Since then the United States and NATO have engaged in wars and killed civilians on a scale that no one could blame the Soviet Union for – a million civilians, mostly children, by the war and then boycott on Iraq from 1991-2003, and another several hundred thousand at least since then. This boycott and these invasions would have been impossible if the USSR and Soviet bloc had still been in existence.

THE SAKER—There are two phenomena which explain this gradual dissolution of meanings into meaningless and insipid categories: first, the correct meaning of many terms has been covered by a thick layer of ideological imperatives and, second, most 21st century politicians couldn’t care less what any word really means. All they care about is framing the discussion in a way which makes it easy for them to obfuscate their numerous crimes.