The Western media and political classes have lost their minds with their hysterical Russophobia since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but even before that we have been prepped for the inevitability of war.
Image from 2019
Putin is denounced as a modern day Hitler, who according to the cognitively challenged US president, is carrying out acts of genocide in Ukraine.
The Western leaders, beholden to the interests of the military industrial complex, rant and rave about Russian war crimes, yet they ignore the resurgence of neo-fascism in Germany. A country which has a genocidal history of killing tens of millions of people.
The Clean Wehrmacht
In the 2021 general election Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 4.7 million votes giving it 83 seats in the Reichstag or about 11% of total seats. It has substantial representation in the state parliaments of Germany and is the largest party in the states of Saxony and Thuringia.
This neo-fascist movement in Germany is trying to resurrect the myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’. This emerging neo-fascist party is central to the revisionist history which is popular in Germany. It denies the responsibility of the Wehrmacht for killing over 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union and puts it all down to formations such as the SS.
Alexander Gauland, co-founder of the AfD and one of its leading lights in the Bundestag, has commented how, “Germans should be proud of the achievements of German soldiers" during World War Two. Gauland has gone further and praised the “bravery of German soldiers”. According to Gauland millions of German soldiers served with distinction and should take no blame for the criminal policies of the Nazi dictatorship.
This represents yet another attempt to rewrite history and perpetuate the myth of the ‘Clean Wehrmacht’ whose reputation was ‘unblemished’ by the military campaigns that it fought on behalf of Hitler’s genocidal regime.
This myth, that was firmly rooted in large parts of the German population, was first challenged by the hugely controversial exhibition War of Annihilation Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-1944 that toured 33 cities in the mid to late 1990s. It was received by a deluge of criticism and massive protests to such a degree that it was suspended and later re-released after some ‘editing’.
Wehrmact Officers giving the Nazi salute
Russophobia
The current conflict in Ukraine is bringing back to the surface how many in German society really feel about Russians.
Russophobia in Germany was present at it’s formation in 1871 as a unified state. Friedrich Meinecke, a leading Germanophile, wrote a best selling book in 1908 describing the “bestiality of the Slavs”. German imperialism used this racism to present Russia as an aggressive foe against whom war was unavoidable.
Following two disastrous world wars came the new Cold War. Germany was literally divided. A memory ostracism took over the population (first West, then East Germany)and there was a complete denial of Russia’s decisive role in defeating the Nazis. Nor that the Wehrmacht had slaughtered so many Russian because they were regarded by the Germans as sub-human.
German historian Ernst Nolte in 1989 compared Nazi crimes to Stalinist crimes, presented the Nazis as a reaction to Bolshevism, and portrayed the Wehrmacht as heroes defending against the Asian hordes. This provoked a lot of academic controversy.
This revisionist history has been taken up by Eastern European countries painting themselves as victims of Russia. In 2015 the liberation of Auschwitz commemoration took place without an invite to Russia.
On one of Germany’s most watched talk shows commentator Florence Gaub recently stated:
We should not forget even if Russians look European, they are not European. In a cultural sense. They think differently about violence, or death. … They have no concept of a liberal, post modern life. A concept of life each individual can choose. Instead, life can simply end early with death. Russian life expectancy is quite low, you know, its 70 for men. That’s why they treat death differently, that people simply die.
Where have I heard a German speaker dehumanize Russians before?
In 1943 Joseph Goebbels said of Russia:
It would be mistaken to evaluate it by the standards of Western Europe….The people of the Soviet Union live at a level of brutish primitiveness that we can hardly imagine.
Today the Western press, as always in concert with the state, has been promoting Russophobia for decades now. It can be said to have metastasised into;
a psychopathy which feeds itself on the interpretation of facts and situations in a tendentious way in order to make Russia or her leaders, currently Vladimir Putin, responsible for them.
Ukraine
Western media outlets and the entire political class have completely ignored the many war crimes committed by the Ukrainian army in the Donbass since 2014. Indeed they rarely if ever even questioned the decision taken by the newly formed Ukrainian government in 2014 to ban use of Russian.
The most infamous of these war crimes is the Odessa massacre on 2 May 2014 that left over 100 Russian speakers dead at the hands of the neo-Nazi Right Sector.
Busted have a good break down of what happened here if you are unfamiliar with the Odessa Massacre
The Western press covered it as if it was a complete mystery or worse still, like the BBC, that alleged that it was pro-Russians who ambushed a group of football fans and are to blame for getting themselves killed.
Over the last eight years the incessant shelling of civilians settlements in Donetsk and Lugansk by Ukrainian forces has led to well over 10,000 dead and with thousands more wounded, not to mention the hundreds of thousands driven from their homes.
Every day civilian settlements around Donetsk city are bombarded by Ukrainian artillery causing many casualties amongst civilians. One impartial source for these attacks comes from the daily video reports provided by American journalist Patrick Lancaster. All you have to do is to go to his YouTube channel.
By ignoring these war crimes it suggests that the West condones such attacks on Russian speaking civilians. The US purports to be spreading freedom and democracy, yet it carries out coups and puts into power Neo-Nazis.
The growing neo-fascist movement in Germany and its attempts to whitewash the country’s genocidal past should be a warning to the world. It brings to mind the famous warning that the great Bertolt Brecht gave to German workers after the Second World War:
