If you’ve been following the recent events
in the Ukraine, you will have heard a lot of talk about the Second World War.
Kremlin apologists have been quick to seize upon the influence which the
Ukraine’s far right exerted in the protests and in the new configuration of
political power. Defenders of the Euromaidan protests have retorted by linking
Putin’s anti-Western, illiberal, ‘Eurasianist’ political philosophy with
Nazism. The folks who have taken over Crimea’s parliament and main airport have
been reported as brandishing black and orange ribbons – the colours apparently
commemorate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.
This sort of thing isn’t limited to the
Russia-Ukraine dispute. Slobodan Milosevic was fond of reminding the West of
Serbia’s support for the Allies, and of slandering his Croatian, Bosnian, and
Kosovar opponents for the fact that some of their countrymen collaborated with
the Axis. Israel and its defenders are always using the Holocaust to excuse or
downplay the Zionist regime’s crimes, and some love to note the role that
Yasser Arafat’s uncle, the then-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, played in raising
Arab volunteers for the overseas divisions of the SS.
Yes, there were Ukrainian, Croatian,
Bosnian, and Palestinian collaborators with the Axis – but every nation and
ethnicity has its share of knuckle-dragging right-wing nutjobs. The more
fundamental problem with the Nazi analogies is this: the fight against the
Nazis was the Left’s.
It was we of the Left who fought the
fascists on the battlefields of Spain. It was we of the Left who went
underground to resist them. It was left-wing partisans in Yugoslavia, Greece,
and the Warsaw Ghetto who fought the good fight when Washington and Whitehall
would have been happy to make a separate peace with someone like Hess or Göring
and use the Nazi state as a bulwark against the Soviets. It was our Revolution
in 1917 and our economic policies which gave the Stalinist regime the
industrial base and skilled workforce it needed to repel the German invasion –
against Tsarist Russia, the Nazi war machine would have overrun Stalingrad and
been in Vladivostok by lunchtime.
Every time a right-wing political actor,
right-wing political movement, ethnic group, or capitalist state does something
and justifies it by citing anti-Nazism, they are stealing the Left’s birthright.
The fruits of victory belong not to this or that Eurotrash ethnic group, but to
the Left and to the global working class.
Crimea has a Russian majority and its
transfer to Ukraine in 1954 was a ridiculous idea. Its inhabitants ought to be
able to secede and join Russia, and particular heed should be paid to the
wishes of the Crimean Tatars, expelled in 1944 as part of Stalin’s genocidal
deportation policies. The United States and its ‘post-racial’ president should
also not be supporting the formation of a government backed by far-right
demagogues like Svoboda and Right Sector.
But the allusions to the Second World War
that are being thrown about by the pro-Russian side of Ukrainian politics are off-base.
Fascism emerged as a response to the rise of the Left – a fascist regime is
simply capitalism run by different people than the traditional bourgeoisie,
like a Silicon Valley corporation in which straight-laced shareholders hand
over day-to-day management to a Birkenstock-wearing CEO. There is nothing
specifically ‘German’ about fascism, and Russians are not destined by fate to be
its victims; indeed, some interesting historical research has been done about
the key role played by White Russian émigrés
in far-right circles in Munich during Hitler’s formative political years.
When Russian nationalists slag off the new
Ukrainian government as a ‘Bandera regime’ (in reference to the wartime
collaborationist Ukrainian leader) or evoke the spectre of ‘neo-fascism’ in
response to the events in the Ukraine, they are doing the same thing that
Israel did in 1961, when it indicted Adolf Eichmann for ‘crimes against the
Jewish people’, or that a right-wing Polish leader did in the mid-2000s, when
he argued that Poland should get more seats in the European Parliament to make
up for all the extra Poles who would be alive if Germany hadn’t killed them all.
That is, they are turning a universal ideological struggle into an ethnic bitch-fight,
and seeking to monopolise the fruits of victory for their own ethnic group.
