The moral example of Russia

DANIEL WIRT

Nazi collaborator Ion Antonescu and Adolf Hitler at the Führerbau in Munich (June 1941). Joachim von Ribbentrop and Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel in the background/ Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B03212 / CC-BY-SA

[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).

SS chief Himmler, as seen by TIME magazine in 1943.(Via J.Vaughan, flickr.)

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.

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)

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

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.

Romanian General and dictator Ion Antonescu

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.

Vladimir Putin, the vilified president of Russia.

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.)

Man showing corpse of a starved infant in the Warsaw ghetto, 1941. The appalling criminality of Nazism has been forgotten in the West and even in the east (including in today’s NATO -complicit Poland).  Where are the prominent Jewish voices protesting Kiev’s rampant infestation with neo Nazis? (Photo origen unknown, Wikipedia)

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

Petro Porososhenko amid fawning fellow war criminals David Cameron and US lackey NATO chief Gen. Anderss Fogh Rasmussen. (NATO Summit 2014, via flickr)