Nixse
0

The Nazi Question And Putin

When Vladimir Putin’s Russian army invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, one of the main reasons he gave as justification was that it was necessary to clear Ukraine of Nazis. The latter were persecuting people of Russian heritage. Many people looked on in disbelief as he made this comment. What exactly was he talking about? The President of Ukraine is Jewish. If the Ukrainians were Nazis, would they have elected a Jew as their President? Furthermore, why was this now an issue? No one had mentioned anything about these Ukrainian Nazis for years, and now Ukraine was supposedly full of them?

But here is where we need to take a step backward and see the purpose of his statements. They are not intended for listeners in the West who have access to real news written by journalists who seek the truth. Instead, they are meant to set the agenda for the majority of the Russian people who rely on the Russian State media for their information.

Through a series of laws, arrests, and intimidation, the Russian state has progressively shut down most access to any media other than that controlled by the Kremlin, so most Russians will only ever hear Putin’s viewpoint. And even if there were no Nazi problem, Putin needed a pretext for the invasion of Ukraine, which was his next move. And he needed the Russian people to accept this pretext because even total dictators need the support of the people, and especially the support of the military forces.

However, it is worth stating that calling someone a Nazi in Russia uses very emotive language. Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and it only threw the German forces out in autumn 1944. Three long years of Nazi occupation were accompanied by many horrors, such as the wholesale murder of Jews and other civilians and the destruction of many cities and much property. In fact, it was almost as much an ethnic cleansing operation as it was a war, and this was what the Nazis did some eighty years ago. And while few in Russia would remember that time personally, many would have heard tales of those years from their relatives. Incidentally, it is worth mentioning that Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, was one of the areas hardest hit by the Nazi invasion.

Nazi
Source: historyextra.com

 

This idea of calling people names such as Nazis to create a pretext is a reminder that the most famous Nazis of all used a similar tactic. Adolf Hitler used to call the Russians “Untermenschen.” This translates as subhumans, that is, people who, in his opinion, were beneath or under the German Aryan race. He also used this term for all the other Slavic races in the area, such as the Poles and the Ukrainians. So then, if a German soldier came across Untermenschen, what did it matter if they were kicked off their land and/or killed? It is ironic that when Vladimir Putin calls Ukrainians “Nazis,” he is using the same vilification tactic as Hitler. What a great role model for Vlad the Invader to choose.

But the similarities between the two of them don’t just stop there. How did these two come to power in their respective countries? In 1933 the German parliament caught fire, and Nazi propaganda immediately blamed their main rivals, the Communists. As a result, the Nazis won the elections shortly afterward by playing on fears of a communist takeover.

Fast forward to Russia in September 1999, when there were a series of explosions that hit four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk. These killed more than 300, injured more than 1,000, and spread a wave of fear across the country. The bombings triggered the Second Chechen War. The handling of the crisis by Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time, boosted his popularity greatly and helped him attain the presidency a few months afterward. This tactic of committing an outrage and blaming your opponent is known as a “false flag” operation, and dictators tend to find them to be a useful tool.

In 1938 Hitler claimed that the Czechs were oppressing the German population in the Czech Sudetenland. Therefore, to liberate them, he proposed to invade Czechoslovakia unless Sudetenland was ceded to Germany. Britain and France duly ceded it at a conference in Munich. They wanted to appease Hitler, and the Czechs were unfortunately sold down the river. With the Sudetenland gone, so were all of Czechoslovakia’s frontier defenses. It duly fell to a German invasion a few months later.

In a similar vein, Vladimir Putin was recently discussing how Ukrainian Nazis were oppressing the Russian population in Luhansk and Donetsk and how they, therefore, needed to be delivered from this oppression. Could he have been using the same tactic?

Source: ndtv.com

 

In 1919 the modern country of Poland was created by the Treaty of Versailles. It had previously been a much bigger country in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Still, it had been partitioned by Prussia, Austria, and Russia at the end of the 18th Century and had disappeared from the map.

When faced with modern Poland in 1939, Hitler claimed that it was an artificial country created on German lands by a committee at Versailles and therefore had no legitimate right to exist. With this justification and ignoring Poland’s previous history, Hitler led Germany into what became the Second World War. Vladimir Putin was heard to say something similar about Ukraine as an artificial country. He said this even though it was none other than the famous Lenin who established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922. Putin often appears to be nostalgic for how the Soviet Union was run. Still, he is somewhat selective about which aspects he admires and prefers to ignore or forget.

It is a definite fact that Putin, the ex-KGB man, has never forgotten the former glory of the Soviet Union, victor over Germany in the Second World War. To him, therefore, the breakup of the USSR was the greatest tragedy of the 20th Century.

He has apparently never got over the humiliation of this loss of status. It is partly to redress this loss that he has embarked on bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s control. By the way, this also means that it would be under his control. Hitler was also greatly motivated by the loss of the glory and honor of Germany, which had been “stolen” from her after the First World War. Both would go on to unleash all-out conflict to attempt to restore what had been there previously. Hitler failed, and so far, it does not appear to be going too well for Putin either.

There have been many books written on the performance of the German military in the Second World War. Many suggest that one of the reasons Germany did not win was that the professional German Officer Corps were not allowed to run campaigns professionally. Rather, Adolf Hitler, whose army rank had been that of a corporal, would interfere with operations leading to many mistakes being made. For example, the German invasion of Russia was divided into three main thrusts; one in the north of Russia towards Leningrad, one in the center of Russia towards Moscow, and one in the south towards Ukraine.

Without debating the respective merits of these plans, it goes against basic military orthodoxy for an army command to split its main forces into three like this. There is always the risk that none of the three attacks will totally succeed because the effort put into each one is diluted by the effort put into the others. If a commander wishes to make three attacks, then he may do so, but NOT at the same time. And in effect, this dilution is what happened in 1941. Leningrad was not captured, nor was Moscow. Things went a bit better in Ukraine, but the overall impression remains one of not delivering a decisive blow in any one of the three attacks. The Soviets were able to keep on fighting back in all three areas.

Fast forward to Ukraine in 2022, and what is the situation? Russian attacks on Ukraine took place in three separate places. From the north down to Kyiv, from the east towards Donbas, and from the south from Crimea. And once again, none of them was decisive. In fact, the attack on Kyiv was a complete failure. A month later after a huge expenditure of life and material, the Russians have decided to concentrate on just the East, and even that is not going so well.

This level of incompetence looks like the interfering hand of Putin. He is not a military man. He is an ex-KGB spy. He knows how to spy on people but not how to organize a coordinated military plan. And yet there he is on television, organizing his commanders. Their body language clearly shows that they would never dream of contradicting him. And so, just a brief look at the current news clearly shows that the Russian army is a shambles after just a few weeks of this current campaign. And part of this is surely the fault of the one who is devising its strategy.

And so, eighty years ago there was Adolf Hitler, a German Nazi conducting war and waging a ruthless, violent and destructive war on almost everyone to establish the supremacy of Germany. And here is Vladimir Putin waging a ruthless, violent, and destructive war on Ukraine to establish the supremacy of Russia. These are two brothers in bloodshed. How ironic that Putin began his Ukraine campaign by calling his enemies Nazis.



You might also like
Leave A Reply

Your email address will not be published.