Whose Victory Will Ukrainians Celebrate on May 9?
Since WW II could have ended pretty much only in two ways in Europe --
(a) Nazi Germany's victory over the Soviet Union (the last European power that was able to defeat Hitler) and then probably over the United Kingdom (even with U.S. assistance) or
(b) The Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany with British, French and American (incl. Canada) assistance,
on May 8th and 9th the residents of the former Soviet Union can do several things:
Choice #1. Celebrate the defeat of Hitler's Nazi Germany by a lesser evil, Stalin's Soviet Union, and be grateful that from 1945 to 1991 they lived in the Soviet Union and not Nazi Germany's Lebensraum for Aryans and their sub-human non-Aryan servants & vassals.
Unfortunately, in human politics over the last 4 thousand years, when it comes to the goodness of political regimes, there is no black and white, just shades of grey, gradations of good and evil. So in our choices as citizens, tax-payers, voters, employees and even consumers, we are faced (and forced by lack of meaningful choice) with supporting the lesser evil.
Even when the modern self-professed cradle of democracy (the United States) was founded in 1776, the rights and privileges of democracy were denied to African-American slaves and the Native Americans.
So with all that in mind, the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany was a victory of relative good against clear evil.
Choice #2. Celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union and all its ethnicities (Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Kazakhs, Tatars and etc.) who fought and died side-by-side to destroy the Nazi Fascist menace while acknowledging that the Soviet victory in May of 1945 deprived many nationalities & countries in central and Eastern Europe of democracy and full political & economic independence.
Yes, the celebrations must be tempered by a remembrance that Stalin's victory brought with it another 45 years of Soviet socialist communism, a system which, although it gave Soviet peasants and the working poor free education, medical care and the opportunity to rise to the very top of its political, academic, social and industrial sectors, dealt with authoritarian and totalitarian ruthlessness with its political opponents.
Here we must note that Post-Stalin Soviet Union (1952 -1991) was matched, if not surpassed, by other non-communist regimes in imprisoning, kidnapping, torturing and disappearing political opponents -- including regimes that were supported by the United States (a country which incarcerates the highest percentage of its population today than any other country in the world!) such as Shah's Iran (’41-’79), Hussein’s Iraq (’79-’91), Pinochet's Chile (’73-’90), Argentina during its Dirty War (’69-’83), Franco's Spain (’39-’75) and etc.
Choice #3. Commiserate the defeat of Nazi Germany along with those Nazi collaborators who are still alive and/or their progeny.
After all, had Nazi Germany won, those non-Aryan collaborators (especially the non-Jewish and the "western" Slavic ones), could may have enjoyed a short-lived cozy place as the local overseers of Hitler's Final Solution and local laborers in Lebensraum.
The folks opting for #3 do need to understand that Nazi Germany never intended to give Eastern European non-Aryan nations any real independence, but only dangled it fraudulently in front of them to get their assistance in fighting the Soviet Union and those pesky Bolshevik sub-human Jews.
They must also understand that collaboration with the Nazis, no matter what their intentions (desire for independence, hate for Communist-Bolsheviks, hate for Jews, Gypsies and etc.), cannot be justified morally or excused, especially the collaboration in the Holocaust, the intentional ethnic/religious extermination of the Jews.
The vast majority of Germans – and Germany as a country in its state policies --have already gone through this necessary healing and rehabilitative process of acknowledging the evil of Nazism and their responsibility in supporting it and the horrors of war and death that it inflicted upon millions of people.
The vast majority of Soviet citizens – and Russia as a country in its policies of rehabilitating the victims of Soviet communist persecutions – has also understood the evil and wrongness of Soviet Stalinist-Bolshevik terror against all perceived political opponents.
So Choice #3, no matter how glibly it’s spun or presented – such as in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and now in Ukraine, where local SS veterans and other Nazi collaborators are now being promoted and glorified as freedom fighters whose Nazi collaboration is excused and justified by their hate and struggle against Soviet Communism – is a long-term moral and spiritual dead end, which will do nothing but bring more xenophobia, ethnic cleansing, authoritarianism, militarism and eventually the horrors of war.
We only advance as humanity when we acknowledge our mistakes and those of our ancestors (even the generations of our parents & grandparents who are still alive!), repent, make amends and commit to making sure that such wrongs stop and are never repeated again.
[As side note, despite living in greater Washington DC for 5+ years, I could never root for the Washington Redskins – an American Football team whose name is a living perpetual insult to all the Native Americans that were killed, displaced and disenfranchised by the seizure of their land by colonists and the U.S.]
Otherwise, the cancer of ethnic, racial, gender, religious, linguistic or cultural superiority will slowly and surreptitiously reappear, grow and spread -- leading inevitably to more conflicts, wars and human death & suffering.
Personally, as you may have guessed, I’m opting for #1 and #2 – so on May 9th I’ll be at the Victory Parade in Moscow, Russia, where I can pay respects to the memories of my maternal grandfather, who went MIA and maternal great uncle who fought since 1941, was captured by the Nazis, escaped a POW camp, rejoined the fight and eventually died only two weeks before the end of the war from shrapnel near Koenigsberg in Eastern Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia).
I’m not going to boycott Russia’s 70th anniversary victory celebrations because of the current Civil War in Eastern Ukraine. Why? Because I spent last May and June in Lugansk in Eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Coal Basin.
There, I saw with my own eyes how the residents of Lugansk voted freely and overwhelmingly on May 11, 2014 in a referendum for governmental autonomy from the new U.S.-backed Turchinov-Yatsenyuk regime.
For better or for worse, despite what you hear from Western Media, the residents of Lugansk voted freely and somewhat naively without Putin Russia’s secret meddling for autonomy from a new government that they believed was headed by extreme Ukrainian Nationalists, including supporters and progeny of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, who would discriminate against ethnic Russians, Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Eastern Orthodox Christians loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate.
The residents of Lugansk were also afraid that the new Kyiv government, which illegitimately overthrew Ukrainian President Yanukovich, a corrupt, but democratically elected president, would eventually pit Ukraine against Russia at the behest of their American and NATO backers (their words & logic).
So they voted for governmental autonomy, many naively believing that Lugansk would be absorbed (annexed) by Russia just like Crimea, another region (formally part of Ukraine since 1954) and they preferred to live in Russia that in Ukraine run by Yatsenyuk, Turchinov, Tyagnybok (head of Svoboda Party), Yarosh (head of Right Sector) and Poroshenko.
BTW, the residents of Crimea also voted overwhelmingly and freely for independence and joining Russia pretty much for the same reasons – and today do not regret their choice despite Western and Ukrainian sanctions against Crimea. It’s an inconvenient truth, but a valid example where a people’s right to self-determination trumped (with “neighborly” Russian assistance) the territorial integrity argument that every state likes to use to prevent loss of territory to separatist movements of aggrieved local populations.
Afterwards, instead of negotiating with these regions over autonomy and/or federalization, the Poroshenko government decided to restore its control over Donetsk and Lugansk just like the North over the South in the American Civil War (1861-1865) and Russia over Chechnya in 1995 by trying to take over the separatist regions with brute military force and punitive military and economic measures against the civilian population.
Here, Ukraine’s President Poroshenko did what corrupt President Yanukovich did not dare – began to use military force against civilians and local militias, including aerial bombardments, cluster bombs, incendiary white phosphor munitions and surface-to-surface missiles against military and civilian targets in civilian residential areas.
We – Americans, Ukrainians and Russians -- are lucky that Putin’s Russia has not responded to the installation of a pro-US/EU/NATO regime in Ukraine on February 22, 2014 the same way the U.S. has responded to “similar challenges” (a) over the last 70 years in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia, and now Syria or (b) enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Instead, Russia’s support of the Donetsk Separatists (military and financial) has been minimal in comparison to the U.S. doctrine and interventions in the above conflicts.
Despite what you may hear from pro-Poroshenko Ukrainian and Western corporate media, the vast majority (>= 95%) of the separatist forces are composed of local men who took up arms to defend their region against what they perceived to be an illegitimate regime that would not respect their region’s right to self-determination and would discriminate against them. But that’s how civil wars generally start.
Based on these factors, I could not apply double-standards to Russia and boycott the 70th anniversary Victory Day celebrations because of Russia’s annexation of Crimea support for the Donetsk and Lugansk.
What do you think?
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