Alt Left: The Nazi Problem in Ukraine

Imagine 10s of thousands armed Nazis in France or Germany – with the permission to parade in SS uniforms to praise their "leader" Bandera once a year – then imagine these guys threatening every politician to kill them if they do not follow their orders.
That is Ukraine kid. https://t.co/dMyUU15b3Y

— — GEROMAN — time will tell – 👀 — (@GeromanAT) January 30, 2023

And these are just the hardcore real heavy-duty Nazis. Basically, they run the damned state and the security forces. They’ve got all the muscle and the security forces won’t do anything to stop them. Zelensky ran on a peace platform and won, but when he got in, the Nazis said they would kill him if he pursued peace, so he turned into a warmonger. Not to mention the much lower-level Nazism of Ukrainian nationalism itself, which in its present incarnation is simply Nazism.

A few other countries are like this.

Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are pretty much Nazi countries. Many of the main heroes of their respective nationalisms were Nazi collaborators who led pogroms and mass murders against Jews and fought Soviet forces alongside the Wehrmacht. There are statues honoring these Nazi Balts all over every one of those countries. The statues of the Soviet heroes who liberated the Baltic barking poodles from Nazism have been torn down recently all over the country.

The Russian minority is brutally suppressed in some countries, especially Latvia. After independence, they decided that you had to know Latvian to be a Latvian citizen, but many Russians who had lived there since birth didn’t know Latvian very well or at all, as they didn’t need to since Latvia was a republic with two official languages. Hence, huge percentages of Russian Latvians were not given Latvian citizenship after independence.

According to Baltic historiography, the Nazis were the good guys who gave them their independence, and the Soviets were the bad guys who took it away. Although the Nazis killed far more Balts than the Soviets did, the focus of Baltic rage is about Balts who number of the single thousands who were deported by the Soviets to Siberia. I’m not sure what the reason was for the deportation, but I imagine it was treason, as they were probably accused of being Nazi collaborators.

The Balts are Nazis in a “kill the Russians” sense but not in a “kill the Jews” sense, although the national heroes of these lands killed a lot of Jews.

The problem is that these countries never had much of a national history up until very recently. Indeed, the Balts had been part of the Russian Empire since ~1700! There was a brief period of independence again after World War 1. It is interesting that one of the largest national minorities in the Bolsheviks were Latvians.

I would argue that Finland is also a Nazi country. Recent Finnish history is all about the Winter War, which was justified, as Finland had a pro-Nazi government and had allied closely with Hitler. Stalin ordered them to get rid of their government and form an alliance with Russia but Finland refused.

Contrary to Cold War lies, the Russians beat the Finns handily in the Winter War. In fact, the Finns had to sue for peace. The language in this surrender request is full of Russophobic language that makes it clear that Finns had been hating Russians for a long time even before WW2.

The Poles aren’t really Nazis as many Poles were killed by Nazis, but Polish nationalism had defined Russia as the main enemy and Germany as the lesser enemy. The Nazis killed 10 million Poles and the Soviets killed 330,000 but to the Poles, the Soviets were the main bad guys!

Many Poles collaborated with the Nazis and large numbers of citizens saw Jews on the streets and turned them in to the Germans. Even riding on the bus was a danger for a Jew. Many were afraid to even leave their houses. After the war at Kielce, there was an anti-Jewish pogrom in this village where 200 Holocaust survivors had taken shelter after the war. Scores of Jews were murdered, and this was in 1946 a year after the war ended. It is unclear what set off this pogrom and the circumstances around it are a bit murky.

The Poles have always been antisemites. As Yitzhak Rabin said,

Poles learn antisemitism at their mother’s breast.

On the other hand, Poland has 4,000 citizens who received the Righteous Among Nations Award by Israel for risking their lives by hiding Jews, so opinion on Jews ran both ways.

Communism was forcibly imposed on the Poles by Stalin, and it was never a good fit although many peasants and workers supported the government in the early days. Stalin famously said,

Trying to impose Communism on the Poles was like trying to put a saddle on a cow.

The comment is apt. Part of the problem was the extreme Catholicism which made atheist Communism pretty hard to swallow.

A rabid form of Catholicism combined with eternal hatred of its German and Russian neighbors helps to define Polish culture. Indeed, Polish national culture it is based on an inferiority complex with regard to these two neighbors. Poles see themselves as caught between and squeezed by these two neighboring lands. Churchill called Poland “the hyena of Europe,” and he was right. In other words, the Poles are screwed up in the head, and they have been forever. Now they are leading the anti-Russia charge in Europe along with the Baltic barking poodles.

To this day there are Polish ultranationalists who dream of a Greater Poland cutting into Germany and all the way down to Ukraine. The new Polish government is not a democracy. It is an authoritarian nationalist regime with a heavy flavor of blood-and-soil ethnic nationalist Volkisch ultranationalism, which is basically just fascism. There have been some very scary fascist torchlight rallies there recently. The government is arguably fascist, though not Nazi, as they hate Germany as any good Polish nationalist does.

Oh yeah, and you hate Russia for not being nice to gays? Granted, point taken. But Poles don’t like them much either and have recently passed some anti-gay laws on their own. The heavy Catholicism figures in the homophobia. But Latvians don’t like Jews either. A recent Pride Parade had to be cancelled due to threats from violent mobs. So if gay rights is so important to you for your Globohomo dream, as long as you are hating Russia for homophobia, how about throwing in Latvia and Poland for good measure, eh?