United Europe Against “Russian Barbarity”

Today Russia commemorates 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Patriotic war.

In a stark contrast, Europe had commemorated pompously the 70-th anniversaries of the outbreak of World War II and of the signing of the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact but currently seems oblivious to another key historical date ― June 22, the 70th anniversary of the start of Russia’s Great Patriotic War which began with the fascist invasion of the Soviet Union… A key circumstance to be borne in mind in the context is that on June 22, 1941 Russia came under an attack launched by the Berlin-led united Europe which bowed to the Nazi world order rather than by Germany alone. As a result, Russia’s tragic anniversary ― June 22 ― should confront the European ruling class with historical memories as disturbing as, for example, those evoked by September 30, a similarly unpublicized date on which the West inflicted unprecedented disgrace on itself by sealing the notorious Munich Pact with Hitler.

By the summer of 1941, the list of German conquests counted 11 countries: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece, all of which were partitioned and issued statuses in line with Berlin’s designs. Some of the countries and territories ― Austria, the Sudetenland, Danzig, Prussia, Poznań, Silesia, Luxembourg, Belgium’s Eupen and Malmedy, Alsace, Moselle, and North Slovenia – were occupied and annexed. Others were put under direct German military or civilian administration as the Polish General Governorate, Norway, the Netherlands, and Northern France or run by puppet regimes as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovakia, Denmark, Vichy France, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece. Among other countries whose independence de facto evaporated, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria became Germany’s so-called satellites within an aggressive bloc and as such contributed military forces to the Eastern front, while the nominally neutral others ― Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland ― in a variety of ways cooperated with Berlin. Sweden supplied ore, ball bearings and even canons to Germany, and Switzerland was Germany’s supplier of optical appliances, aircraft defense guns, and automatic canons. On top of that, Switzerland provided to Germany considerable financial assistance and a transit corridor via the Alps. Portugal exported to Germany wolfram and served the latter as a key transit hub. Spain even dispatched the Blue Division to fight against the Red Army and re-sold to Germany part of the oil it imported from Latin America, notably meeting with no resistance from the Anglo-Saxons in the process.

Norwegian, Slovac, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, and French forces (the SS Charlemagne regiment) fought against the Red Army along with the Wehrmacht. As recent studies showed, the Polish contribution to the Nazi cause used to be seriously understated: according to a paper in Gazeta Wyborcza by Ryszard Kaczmarek, the author of Poles in the Wehrmacht, from the University of Silesia, at the moment some 2-3 million of Poles should be aware that someone from their family trees served in the German Army. Kaczmarek estimates the Polish death toll at the Eastern Front at 250,000.

Therefore, the Soviet Union faced the onslaught of practically all of Europe bracketed withing a huge military-industrial complex by Germany, the country with a strategy aimed at creating a barrier between Europe and Asia of which, in Hitler’s view, Russia was a part. In Hitler’s own words, the Nazi plan was “to push this frontier (between Europe and Asia) as far east as possible, and if need be far beyond the Urals…Petersburg, the poisonous nest from which for so long Asiatic venom has spewed forth into the Baltic, must vanish from the earth’s surface… The Asians and Bolshevists must be chased out of Europe, the episode of 250 years of Asianness was at an end”.

The above illustrates the essence of the mission Churchill intended to take over from Hitler. The British leader wrote in an October, 1942 secret memorandum: “It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe. Hard as it is to say now, I trust that the European family may act unitedly as one under a Council of Europe. I look forward to a United States of Europe”. The mission rose to the highest lines of Great Britain’s agenda in 1944 when the Red Army crossed the Soviet border, bringing liberation from fascism to Europe. Describing the period of time in his memoirs, Churchill stressed that from the moment the approach to strategy and tactic had to be premised in the following assumptions: “Soviet Russia had become a danger to the free world…A new front must be created against her onward sweep…This front in Europe should be as far East as possible…” The intensification of the US and British preparations for the opening of the second front which finally materialized in France in June, 1944 was fully attributable to the above regards. Churchill’s “unification efforts” culminated in March, 1945 when the plan for Operation Unthinkable – an attack on the Soviet Union by 112-113 divisions including those from the ranks of the routed Wehrmacht due to commence on July 1, 1945 – was devised. As of today, the existence of the originally mysterious plan is an open secret.

The inescapable conclusion is that while the war in Europe was largely a “family conflict” over primacy, the Soviet Union fought its Great Patriotic War in the name of the survival of Russia and Russians. Commemorating the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War would automatically put into the spotlight the painful question of the Western elites’ responsibility for unleashing the global conflict and, importantly, cannot be decoupled from a resolute and unambiguous condemnation of fascism, while its unannounced rehabilitation is underway across the West. The process evolves undisguised in East Europe and has a form of creeping revisionism – the reanimation of the ideology justifying the right of a circle of the chosen to exercise global governance – in the West.

The truth to be faced is that we are witnessing the world order tested in the fascist Germany and the Nazi-occupied rest of Europe being applied on a much wider scale. Since, as Z. Brzezinski admitted, the present-day new world order is built at Russia’s expense, contrary to Russia’s interests, and in fact, on the ruins of Russia, the Western elites are determined to debar Russia from decision-making in the grand game played out by their own arbitrarily set rules.The situation was lucid in 2009 when the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly passed a resolution equating the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany as two countries allegedly sharing the responsibility for unleashing World War II. As of today, Europe’s conduct is similarly obnoxious – on June 9, the European Parliament intervened into Russia’s domestic affairs with a biting resolution carrying a whole array of intrusive statements ranging from expressions of discontent at the regulations to be observed by opposition parties in Russia to a call for a withdrawal of Russian forces from Abkhazia and South Ossetia or for the “rectification of trade irritants, such as the Russia-Kazakhstan-Belarus customs union”. Europe is trying to slap on Russia the role of a minor partner who must be accountable to the West for its every step.

We are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War at the time when the West is openly launching an aggression against Libya. The compromised practice of appeasing the aggressor will not work – the aggression against a sovereign country must be condemned vocally and with utmost clarity.

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation