MICHAEL J CARLEY—The Great Patriotic War began at 3:30am on 22 June 1941, when the Nazi Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Seas with 3.2 million German soldiers, organised in 150 divisions, supported by 3,350 tanks, 7,184 artillery pieces, 600,000 trucks, 2,000 warplanes. Finnish, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Spanish, Slovakian forces, amongst others, eventually joined the attack. The German high command reckoned that Operation Barbarossa would take 4 to 6 weeks to finish off the Soviet Union. In the west, U.S and British military intelligence agreed. Besides, what force had ever beaten the Wehrmacht?
Category:
NAZIS & FASCISTS
An excerpt form the popular Russian talk show “An evening with Vladimir Solovyov”. Translated and subtitled by Eugenia. A well-known Russian filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov discusses the meaning of the WWII memory for the Russian society and the Russian people. The context of the discussion was the proposed constitutional amendments. Translator’s notes: (1) The Soviet division consisted of 10,000 soldiers. (2) The British light cruiser Edinburgh carrying 5.5 tons of the Russian gold as payment for Western supplies was sunk by a German submarine on its way home from the Soviet port Murmansk in April of 1942. Shakhnazarov mistakenly said that it happened in 1941.
UPDATE: The Dutch Government’s Show-Trial About MH17
25 minutes readERIC ZUESSE—From what has already been made public by the Dutch Government, even before the trial started, they have made clear that this trial will exclude from consideration a great deal of evidence, such as that on 7 August 2014, just weeks after the MH17 downing, a secret agreement was drawn up between four U.S. allies to serve together as constituting an official “Joint Investigation Team” about the event, the terms of which agreement have not been made public even to the present day.
Immigrants as a Weapon: Global Nationalism and American Power
21 minutes readYASHA LEVINE—In the late 1980s, these immigrants — their ideologies, their resources, their organizations, and their American support — started to flow back into their home countries. In the ideological vacuum of post-communism, their reworked ethno-nationalist mythologies flourished. From Latvia to Hungary to Estonia to Croatia — the ideas of nationalist immigrant movements that had been backed and kept warm by America’s security apparatus during the Cold War hold huge sway over their societies today.
On the Ukrainian diaspora to Canada—Historical Amnesia and the Blinding Effects of Propaganda
34 minutes read
RICHARD SANDERS—Such crimes are so huge that they cannot possibly be committed by just a few psychopathic individuals. To orchestrate these horrors, widescale social complicity is required. When bigotry and hatred become accepted and normalised within a culture, societies face the spectre of mass psychosis. There are of course a million shades of grey within the cultural syndromes which accept racism, apartheid, slavery, imperialism and other forms of exploitation, hatred and abuse, as the norm. Neither does such social madness happen suddenly. It is a heavily institutionalised cultural process that creeps up slowly from behind our backs.
