Where are the Nazis of yesteryear?

Commentators are arguing about the real reasons for Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine.

I can settle those arguments once and for all: Putin invaded the Ukraine for the sole reason of confusing me. He has scored a resounding victory: I am all at sixes and sevens.

When the invasion began, Putin explained that the purpose of the “special operation” was to “de-Nazify the Ukraine”. My soul strings got tugged, producing a ringing tone of anti-Nazi sentiment.

The mission sounded noble. Who wouldn’t want to ne-Nazify a major European country in need of such purification? Since it’s the Ukrainian government that was tarred with the Nazi brush, that noble aim could only be achieved by a regime change. So was the regime really Nazi?

I looked for the evidence supporting the claim that the Ukraine has fallen into the hands of heirs to Hitler. Yet fascisoid parties only ever poll somewhere between 0.1 and 2.0 per cent of the Ukrainian electorate.

This is considerably lower than in France, Germany, Italy and a few other respectable countries. If Putin is serious about exterminating Nazism wherever it can be found, those countries would be well-advised to beef up their armed forces.

And if he is really serious, he should oversee a massive domestic purge of all Russian quasi-Nazi groups, which typically get over 20 per cent of the national vote. That done, perhaps he ought to take a look at his own party, whose dignitaries like to proclaim the innate superiority of the Russian race over everyone else.

Some even ascribe it to a microbiological difference: the Russians, explained one of Putin’s top MPs, possess an extra gene of spirituality enabling them to soar over those Westerners. The implication is that the extra-spiritual Russians owe it to mankind to pollinate all inferior races by first conquering them. Sorry, but this sounds more Dr Goebbels than Dr Schweitzer to me.

Then I looked at the Ukraine’s constitution and found it to be almost identical to those of all those unfortunate Western countries that feel the need to put their constitutions down on paper. But perhaps the constitution is ignored?

It isn’t. The Ukraine holds presidential elections every few years, no ballot boxes are stuffed, and the loser leaves office without demur. The country scrupulously observes all the usual civil liberties, and it neither imprisons nor kills nor maims dissidents. That is more than I can say for Russia herself.

Yesterday marked the 10^th anniversary of the rally in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, when tens of thousands of Russians disagreed with Hitchens’s claim of Russia being the most conservative and Christian country in Europe.

The police charged, and hundreds ended up with busted skulls and broken limbs. Dozens were arrested, and the template for dealing with such protests was set.

Since then only isolated heroes dare to take to the streets, and there are more political prisoners in Putin’s Russia than even Brezhnev’s USSR could boast. And hundreds of dissidents have been murdered without even a travesty of justice. Prisoners are routinely tortured, raped with empty bottles or broomsticks and beaten to death. What’s that about missing the beam that is in thine own eye?

All in all, de-Nazification didn’t really sound like a plausible casus belli. That’s where my confusion began. Because, having been frustrated in his attempt to effect a regime change, Vlad seemed to agree with me.

De-Nazification faded away from his banners. Perhaps he felt that his rockets had already blown Nazism to bits by killing tens of thousands of civilians, while his virile soldiers had banged that energumen out of the wombs of all those raped Ukrainian women.     

Then Putin declared that his sole desire, nay cherished dream, was to drag Eastern Ukraine out of the clutches of Eastern Ukrainians. All he now wanted was to liberate the hitherto unliberated portion of the Donbas.

I heaved a sigh of relief, an involuntary impulse common to people whose conundrums are solved. However, before I could re-inhale, the confusion deepened.

Putin’s spokesman Gen. Rustam Minakeyev, commander of the Central Military District, explained the other day that: “One of the objectives of the Russian army is to establish total control of the Donbas and Southern Ukraine. [My emphasis] This will provide a land corridor to the Crimea and also impact the vital parts of the Ukraine’s economy.”

This last part means that the Ukraine would become a landlocked country by losing access to the Black Sea and hence to the ports through which she could run her exports. In simple terms, the country would be beggared.

But “total control over Southern Ukraine” also means rolling all the way to the borders of Transnistria and Moldova. The former is a Russian satellite, the latter an independent republic. Both – even the former – are scared out of their wits.

Moldova immediately began to beg the EU for admission. Its leaders, having been trained in Soviet schools, have noses of bloodhound acuity. Unlike some Western politicians, they know that the chances of the Russian juggernaut braking at their border equal, in round numbers, zero.

The good general then gave the world the benefit of his (and Putin’s) historical insight by saying: “Judging by everything, we are now at war with the whole world, like it was in the Great Patriotic [Second World] War: all of Europe, the whole world was against us. It’s the same now – they’ve never liked Russia.”

Can’t imagine why. Let me guess. Could it be because Russia tends to pounce on anyone within reach and then threaten to evaporate the world with nukes?

This shows that Putin not only re-lives Stalin, but also revises him. His idol was grateful for the invaluable help the Soviet Union had received from the Anglo-American allies. In fact, he admitted that without that help the war would have been lost.

Little did Stalin know that the USSR had fought alone against the whole world, with no allies anywhere in sight. He stands corrected now, and one can only regret that Stalin is no longer around to benefit from this lesson.

So has the fairy tale of a Nazi Ukraine sunk into oblivion? Not at all. This theme has simply moved out of the propaganda mainstream and into the loony fringe, not only Russian but also Western.

Putin stooges, of whom Rodney Atkinson is both the most hideous and the most cretinous, are slow in realising that the Nazi horse has already bolted. They still treat their credulous readers to a pitch like “Oy, mate, wanna see some dirty pictures?”

The dirty pictures in question show portraits of Ukrainian wartime nationalist leaders, such as Bandera and Shukhevych, prominently displayed in some Ukrainian cities, streets named after them, statues erected in their honour.

These are interspersed with photographs of the skeletal remains of the Jews murdered by Ukrainian collaborators with Hitler. Pictures of soldiers in some Ukrainian military units, such as the Azov regiment, displaying Nazi insignia are also quite popular.

Verily I say unto you, the Atkinsons of this world have to think their audience is made up of idiots. That’s not to say that those pictures are fabricated or photoshopped. They aren’t.

Ukrainian nationalists (whose two major groups were led by Bandera and Melnyk) were indeed Nazis, as anyone who has read their draft constitutions will confirm. (Bandera pushed his nationalism too far for the Germans’ taste, which is why he spent most of the war at Sachsenhausen.)

And they indeed were guilty of genocidal atrocities. Ukrainian Jews feared them more than they feared the Germans, if only because Ukrainians were better at identifying Jews at a glance.

Yet they weren’t the only guilty party. During the same period, a whole Nazi country existed that made the extermination of Jews its key desideratum. Moreover, unlike those Ukrainians, that country was strong enough to occupy most of Europe and paint its monstrous picture on a much wider canvas.

That country is Germany, which has shown that even the most heinous of crimes can be atoned and redeemed. Germany renounced Nazism and has done her utmost to rejoin the civilised world. No, she hasn’t been able to guarantee that some of her youngsters, as low on intellect as they are high on testosterone count, won’t be attracted to Nazi slogans or aesthetics.

Such underground groups exist, and crypto-Nazi parties even take part in national politics, with no hope of success. So is Germany still a Nazi country then?

If you agree that she isn’t, then neither is the Ukraine. She produced her fair share of murderers in the past, not only Nazi but also Soviet ones. But, like Germany, she has been trying to cast that past away and rejoin civilisation.

Yes, some Ukrainians, mostly in the west of the country, cherish the memory of Bandera et al., mainly because the nationalists continued to fight the Soviets after the war. The nationalists were their enemy’s enemies, which made them their friends. I hope in time the Ukrainians will reassess those historical figures, but that’s unlikely to happen while the Russians continue to murder and rape them en masse.

And yes, the fighters of the Azov regiment (not battalion, as Atkinson calls it) liked to send out the semiotic signals of Nazism before the war. This is deplorable, and their youth may only explain but not excuse such behaviour.

But once the war started, those youngsters redeemed themselves by shielding women and children with their bodies, and fighting to protect them to the last bullet, the last drop of blood. They do so under Ukrainian flags, not swastika ones.

Messrs Atkinson et al. should put away their beloved pictures (which they probably got from Moscow) and look at a much thicker set, photographs showing murdered – and deliberately targeted – civilians, tortured and raped women, destroyed cities, blown up kindergartens, schools, hospitals and churches.

Then they should ask themselves which side is Nazi here. If they have a modicum of conscience and honesty, they’ll know there’s only one answer. But they haven’t and they won’t.

P.S. Both Atkinson and Hitchens are giftless siblings to their talented brothers. I hate to wax Freudian, however…