President Joe Biden has officially abandoned any pretense of celebrating victory over the nazis.
Biden to sign Ukraine bill on Russia’s Victory Day
President Joe Biden will sign legislation allowing the administration to lend or lease weapons to Ukraine on Monday, which coincides with Russia’s annual military celebration.
The White House announced Friday that Biden will sign the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act on May 9 after it passed in the House by a 417-10 vote late last month and passed in the Senate before that. Lawmakers in both parties applauded the bill’s passage, which is a revival of a World War II-era program that helped supply allies in the fight against Nazi Germany.
Russia’s Victory Day commemorates the country’s role in defeating Nazi Germany, and there are concerns that Russia may increase its military operations in Ukraine in order to ensure they have a victory ahead of the celebratory day.
Biden will participate in a call Sunday with G-7 leaders, and the White House said it wasn’t an accident that they’re set to speak before the Russian holiday, which includes a military parade and a speech by President Vladimir Putin.
“I think it should not be lost the significance, on anyone, the significance of when the timeline, of when this G-7 meeting is happening, which is the day before Russia’s Victory Day, which President Putin has certainly projected his desire to mark that day as a day where he is victorious over Ukraine. Of course, he is not,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday.
Victory Day commemorates the official surrender of all Nazi forces at 2300 Central European Time May 8, 1945. In the western bloc, Victory Day is celebrated as Victory in Europe Day on May 8. The former Soviet Union and now Russia celebrates Victory Day on May 9, due to the time zone difference.
That said, I think there were political reasons for splitting the holiday. By Spring 1945, the western allies were in an odd situation. They were “formally” still at war with Germany, but in actuality, the nazis were now America’s allies, and the Soviets were the enemy.
Operation Sunrise, from Wikipedia:
Operation Sunrise, or the Bern incident, refers to a series of World War II secret negotiations from February to May 1945 between representatives of Nazi Germany and the United States to arrange a local surrender of German forces in northern Italy. Most of the meetings took place in the vicinity of Bern, Switzerland, and the lead negotiators were Waffen-SS General Karl Wolff and American OSS agent Allen Dulles. The meetings provoked Soviet suspicion that the Americans were seeking to sign a separate peace with the Germans and led to heated correspondence between Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt, an early episode of the emerging Cold War…
Wolff and his forces were being considered to help implement Operation Unthinkable, a secret plan to invade the Soviet Union which Winston Churchill advocated during this period. Wolff was later proven to be complicit in the murder of 300,000 Jews. On 26 April, the SS general was captured by Italian partisans, but was rescued by Dulles’ Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Swiss intelligence. Despite Wolff’s promises to Dulles in Bern made in March, Vietinghoff stalled for as long as possible about surrendering, only permitting Wolff to sign the instrument of surrender on 29 April 1945.
The actual surrender in Italy was signed on 29 April 1945 agreeing to a cessation of hostilities on 2 May. Wolff justified his actions to Berlin officials by explaining that the agreement had pre-empted “a Communist uprising” in northern Italy. Wolff and his officers were not interned at this time, but instead celebrated the resolution at Gestapo headquarters in Bolzano for several days with Allied commanders. The Americans had to periodically repel partisans who attempted to seize the Germans [emphasis mine]. Victory in Europe Day occurred on 8 May.
Due to these considerations, it was of upmost importance to differentiate victory in World War II from the Soviet Union. From their inception, Victory Day and VE Day were two separate, unrelated holidays. Our leaders paid lip service to VE Day for some time afterward, there was no emotion or sincerity in it. Any time a western audience is shown a media depiction of nazi and Soviet soldiers at war, the majority of viewers will almost invariably sympathize and empathize more with the nazi soldiers, and perceive the Soviets as the hated enemy. That’s 75+ years of propaganda at work.
Unsurprisingly, our shared victory over the nazis has largely dropped from our public consciousness. Biden forgot about D-Day 2021 altogether, didn’t even tweet about it. So far, today, the White House has made no mention of VE Day either.
Remember the two feuding women who went to King Solomon? The first woman genuinely loved the baby, because he was hers. The roommate only wanted the baby out of jealousy and spite. So when Solomon offered to divide the baby in half, this upset only the true mother. That’s effectively what happened with Victory Day. The West demanded half the holiday, then dropped it out of disinterest. Now the holiday only exists in the East, while the West actively tries to spite it.
This nasty propaganda does come at a price. We rot the foundation of our own house. Out of spite we try to poison the Russians’ well, but in the end, just poison our own.
Some related reading:
The Denazification of Ukraine, the example of one family (in Russian).
I was referenced in an article for the online newspaper Moscow Evening, very cool. Read it here (in Russian).
Earlier this week, Moon of Alabama published a great article arguing that US “intelligence victories” in Ukraine are bullshit, not true and designed only to provoke the Russians into escalating. I’m inclined to agree. Our “intelligence community” as consistently underperformed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and failed to correctly predict Russian entry into the Ukrainian war, and I’m supposed to believe they’re suddenly good at their jobs? I doubt it.
Former Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud has been writing an excellent series about the background of the conflict in Ukraine. You can read it here.
I’ve made a select list of posts I’ve written about the Ukraine war. I hope I succeeded in providing enough background information to bring an uninitiated person up to speed.
An admin note, I have received complaints about the commenting system on the website. I briefly turned off the comments and turned them back on again. There should be no issues now, but if there are, please let me know.
Update:
From YouTube:
Citing “discrepancies in content,” the German magazine Der Spiegel has removed a video showing the testimony of an evacuee from Mariupol’s ‘Azovstal’ factory, a stronghold of the neo-Nazi Azov militants and other Ukrainian fighters. The woman in the video had revealed that her family were basically being lied to, held hostage, and used as human shields by the Ukrainian militants. Another German outlet, Junge Welt, noticed the deletion on Thursday evening. According to JW, Der Spiegel published the three-minute video on Monday. It featured Natalia Usmanova, who had worked at Azovstal before the conflict and sheltered there with her husband and children.
In the recording, Usmanova tells reporters that Azov militants “kept us in the bunker” for two months and did not allow her family to leave using the humanitarian corridors established by Russian troops. “They hid behind the fact that they are supposedly concerned about our safety,” Usmanova said, according to a German translation, adding that her family was repeatedly yelled at to “Go back to the bunker!” “Ukraine has died for me as a state,” Usmanova said at the end of her testimony.
Der Spiegel said it had obtained the video from Reuters, and that it was temporarily taken down “because of discrepancies in content that were subsequently discovered.” Asked to specify the alleged discrepancies by RIA Novosti, Der Spiegel said they were “still in the process of clarifying this issue.” The video published by Reuters is only a minute long, however, and has Usmanova talking about the intensity of artillery fire and the difficult life inside the bunker. Both videos come from the same interview with multiple press outlets – including RIA Novosti, which has confirmed the authenticity of Usmanova’s remarks from the now-deleted Spiegel clip. Instead of the video, the German magazine now features a photo of Usmanova in a bus with other civilians, taken by a RIA Novosti photographer on May 1. Usmanova’s testimony directly contradicts claims by Azov militants and the government in Kiev that Russia is preventing the evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal complex. Moscow has repeatedly opened humanitarian corridors from the area. The UN announced that another 500 civilians have been evacuated from the plant in the night between Thursday and Friday.
See remarks from Reuters here.
Ian Kummer
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Guys, I just updated the story with news of Der Spiegel removing an interview of a woman evacuated fro the Azovstral plant in Mariupol, who claimed that Ukrainian militants were holding her and her family hostage and preventing them from leaving.
“Any time a western audience is shown a media depiction of nazi and Soviet soldiers at war, the majority of viewers will almost invariably sympathize and empathize more with the nazi soldiers, and perceive the Soviets as the hated enemy.”
Citation fucking needed. It isn’t the Nazis who get their own Call of Duty campaigns.
Look at how German WWII soldiers are usually depicted in movies and shows, like Band of Brothers, and you can go back pretty far with that, even the 1960s (when anti-German sentiment was still sort of around). Compare that to the way Soviet soldiers are depicted, like Enemy at the Gates.
The Soviets are usually depicted as a one-note dictatorship (which, spoiler, it was a dictatorship. There’s plenty of room for nuance, but Stalin was fundamentally a piece of shit and the USSR under Stalin was fundamentally a miserable place), but that’s a far, far cry from not presenting the average Soviet as sympathetic. If anything they come across as doubly victimized: Nazis on one side and Commissars on the other. Enemy at the Gates specifically carries a lot of blame for the modern western perception of the Ostfront; it’s absolutely filled with cliches and myths that were taken as true and directly copied into other works. And even something like Enemy at the Gates, if you come away from that identifying with the Germans, I don’t really know what to say.
I won’t defend the leveling portrayal (‘the noble German was just doing his patriotic duty, like his American foe’) featured in Band of Brothers, but I will say that BoB takes place in the comparatively restrained Western theater where it can get away with that sort of thing much more easily. It’s also part of a very old impulse, one that has to do with attempts to depoliticize the Wehrmacht once (West) Germans were our allies. The point wasn’t to de-vilify the Nazis, in fact it was the exact opposite: the goal was to project everything bad onto the SS, while pretending that the regular army was largely innocent and were just good unquestioning patriots upholding Prussian military virtue. Battle of the Bulge (1965) was a major milestone in this process.
That’s exactly my point. Our propaganda portrays Nazi Germany and the USSR as two sides of the same coin. And what you just described is the “slave race” stereotype, which strips Russian and Soviet people of their victory, and portrays them as pathetic, worthless slaves under Stalin’s boot. Did you know that Enemy at the Gates was so outrageous, Stalingrad veterans (unsuccessfully) petitioned the government to strip the movie of its distribution rights?
And yes, the Western Front was more “restrained” if you don’t count the millions of people who were carted off to concentration camps. The key difference between East and West is that most populations in the West surrendered immediately and joined Hitler in his holy crusade eastward. It was not the first crusade, and apparently not the last one either.
Making the SS as the bogeyman is a lovely myth, and a false one. The fact of the matter is that there was no such thing as an “innocent” German soldier. They all participated in mass rapes and extermination against the Soviet Union. But no, our allies weren’t just “West Germany.” It was the nazis. The nazis were our allies. Negotiations with the nazis began months before the war ended, with the clear goal to have them fight side by side against the big bad evil Soviets.
That’s my point.
The funny thing… Whoever of Russia’s rulers is praised in the West is despised or hated at home. And whoever is demonized in the west is treated with maybe cautious yet respect in Russia.
Gorbachev and Yeltsyn, Western darlings, are cursed and despised to no stop.
Khrushchev, another Western darling, was despised in Soviet times and today is either forgotten, or hated as a Trostkyite.
Tzar Nikki 2? Again, West’s darling and actually pathetic clown who ruined everything his father did.
On the contrary, iiivuuul Stalin. The least of evils of what CPSU had to offer. The one who flogged exhausted country like there wa no tomorrow – but history proven there really was no tomorrow and yet another pan-European assault was looming. We survived. And was he actually more cruel than contemporary European politicians? Open racists Pilsudsky, Churchill, Hitler, Korti, Farnko, for example? Was there anything like Belgian Congo inside USSR? That needs some proofs.
Iiiivul Putin… well, the running joke is that “you there scorn Putin for being too much Putin, and we all scorn Putin for being not enough of Putin”
John (Ivan) the Fearsome? again, the pinnacle of the might. Perhaps overstretched and failed, but it is easy to talk in the hindsight. Did atrocities to one-percenters? We-the-people could not care less, you know. West’s reaction? kindergarten namecalling, West renamed him into John the Terrible. Vivdly shows how adult you are there.
And so forth, that is the pattern. And there can be three explanations.
1. Russians are mentally handicapped, forever and ever, all of them. Russians do not know what is good and bad for them. Never could, never would.
2. Westerners do not know a thing of what was and is going inside Russia, and they don’t want to. They only care about feel-good kool-aid, so they are busy badmouthing everything other nations take pride in. Shit on competing beauty and then you can say you own the only beauty in this world. Sounds like a plan.
3. Western only know about Russian rulers what their one-percenters propaganda tells them. And for the western one-percenters good Russian ruler is one that prostitute and pillage Russians for the advantage of Western masters. And evil, bad, crazy ruler is anyone who does not.
You are free to pick any explanation that sooths your pre-programming.
Checkout this portion of Putin’s Victory Day Speech:
> Soldiers and officers from many regions of our enormous Motherland, including those who arrived straight from Donbass, from the combat area, are standing now shoulder-to-shoulder here, on Red Square.
> We remember how Russia’s enemies tried to use international terrorist gangs against us, how they tried to seed inter-ethnic and religious strife so as to weaken us from within and divide us. They failed completely.
> Today, our warriors of different ethnicities are fighting together, shielding each other from bullets and shrapnel like brothers.
> This is where the power of Russia lies, a great invincible power of our united multi-ethnic nation.
Imagine any Western politician saying something like this. Even the ‘woke’ ones! We can only dream of this level of ethnic unity in the West.
Well yes, and that’s why I find it funny when people (usually right-wingers and conservatives) talk about Russia being this BASED HOMOGENOUS ORTHODOX WHITE NATION, when that’s not even how Russians portray themselves.
> Even the ‘woke’ ones!
Even? They are the worst. They are uponly stroking reverse racism. It is the same divide et empera, just the pendulum is going reversed direction this time.
Can you realistically imaging a woke politicians to – at the same time –
1. demand all whites to knee before blacks, because some other whites did cruel things to some blackes decades ago, and
2. aim at sincere bortherhood and equality between kneeled one and promoted one ?
Those two visions fit together, really?
> reverse racism
I have to take issue with this term as it implies racism is only ‘supposed’ to go in one direction. It’s high time for all of us to put to rest this hateful ideology.
> Those two visions fit together, really?
They don’t and that’s why things are heating up in the west. The level of cognitive dissonance is off the charts…
Just remember that if you wore a poorly made red hat with a simplistic slogan on it at all in the last six years you were deemed a NAZI by certain people. And you’d be treated worse if you aren’t white. Today these same people have no problem sending ROCKET LAUNCHERS to ACTUAL NAZIs. So if I’m a NAZI what does that make them?
My friends here in Western Europe just don’t seem to get it. ‘RighT SeCtor IS ONLy 5% oF the vOtE.’ Uhhuh. And what percentage did the NAZIs need before they could intimidate the rest of the population? Of course most of them are white, they’d probably be left alone.
I’m afraid to say that once we reach a certain level of cognitive dissonance, dialogue is no longer possible. The question is, does that point lie in our future or our past?
> I have to take issue with this term
I agree with this point. Sometimes this implication irritates me too.
But would I say “black racism” it would also be not correct, as that is not only black thing today, many other corrosive groups participate
.
Perhaps one better say causcasophobia, hatred of Caucasian men. But, coining and then promoting a term is a large work per se. Twice so for just a short on the go comment in a blog. So I just took an easy option and used the already coined term, even if it is not scientifically correct.
> if you wore a poorly made red hat with…. you were deemed a NAZI by certain people.
Hyperinflation of words. Language cease being a communication tool, a map.
If everyone is nazi then no one is.
This is working to normalize being nazi.
I wonder if that was intention or just a lucky free bonus.
> RighT SeCtor IS ONLy 5%
Do they look at KKK through same lenses I wonder? Klan is much much less than 5% is it not.
But basically it is willful blindness, it is plausible deniability.
They know that MAGA is not RS, so nazism is not synonymous to RS. They know it in US and they instantly unknow it in Ukraine. Doublethink as it is.
I also observe, that in USA there is… No culture of losing?
Looser is the worst offense.
Admitting fault does not normalize situation but calls to blame all other faults on the looser.
In USA, it seems to me from afar, there is no such thing as admitting fault (the latter assumes some objective norm and objective deviation from norm) but admitting weakness.
So, no. Communication is not possible, because almost no one really believe in some neutral (public, common, shared) media(reality?) where everyone could compromise.
It is a weird case of tragedy of commons. Reality and language are carved to pieces and pocketed for the sake of short-term advantage.
Any Sisyphus who takes on fixing some common ground would be attacked from all the parties. Those are extinct species today.
When 10 years ago some bloggers here wrote USA is doomed to war, and can only chose between Civil War and ww3, it looked a stretch beyond imagination. But look where we are now…