Not Everyone is Crying for Ukraine

[Anthony '58]

(02-27-2022, 11:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(02-27-2022, 07:23 PM)Anthony Wrote: I have just sent the following letter to the editor of the (left-leaning, to put it charitably) Asbury Park Press:

Dear Editor:

After the Nazis and their Ukrainian allies murdered 24 million Russians during World War II, with Ukrainian guards also enthusiastically assisting the Nazis in the slaughter of millions of Jews and Roma (Gypsies) at such infamous death camps as Treblinka and Sobibor, and after the Communist tyrant Khrushchev, in the name of "destalinization," arbitrarily tore Crimea and the Donets Basin away from Russia and gave them to Ukraine in 1954, expecting the Russians to kiss and make up is like asking African-Americans to forget slavery, Native Americans to forget the genocide that was perpetrated against them, and for the Irish to believe that centuries of British abuse never happened.

Before President Biden tries to "fix" this corner of the world, he had better read a history book.

We are all aware of what the fascists did.  The Nazis might have won on the Eastern Front had they granted independence to Ukraine,which would have given Germany its strongest, best-motivated, and most-reliable ally. The Nazis did grant the Ukrainian people one dubious freedom -- that of murdering Jews, Roma, Poles, and Communists.Hitler was so  stupid toward Ukraine that he gave Odessa to Romania. Ukraine would have been the breadbasket of the German-dominated part of Europe.

Let's not forget that Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death because he dreaded a great nation (Ukraine is a great nation already) within his horrid empire. It is not surprising that when the Wehrmacht entered Ukraine that, as in the Baltic Republics, the Ukrainian people saw th Germans as liberators. The Nazis quickly betrayed any such good will and got little in return.


Putin made claims that Ukraine has more than its share of fascists. OK, one fascist is one too many. Any Ukrainian who still admires Stepan Bandera is as much a disgrace as a neo-Nazi in America. But all this happened 75 years ago and it is no longer relevant. Look at it this way: if Germany and Israel were to end up on the same side in war, what would the Israelis call the Germans now?

Brothers!

Seventy-five years is more than enough time for the melting-away of old enmities. OK, the Holocaust and Holodomor remain infamies to be refuted through the ages, just like the Inquisition and the Atlantic Slave Trade.

If the Ukrainians wanted to get even with the Russians for the Holodomor, they would have had my blessing, if I wasn't yet unborn in the years following Operation Barbarossa.

But the Jews and Roma had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Holodomor.

The perverted dynamic that was at work here is that since the Nazis were the enemy of the Ukrainians' enemies (the Russians), the Nazis were the Ukrainians' friends - so it "logically" followed that the Jews and Roma were the Ukrainians' enemies' enemies' enemies, and therefore their enemies, too.

The same thing happened here in 1981, when white middle-class Americans gleefully cheered when Ronny Rayguns fired the air traffic controllers en masse; after all the unions - including PATCO - were the white middle class's enemies' enemies' enemies', and therefore, their enemies too (Reagan got elected in 1980 because he successfully presented himself as the enemy of the white middle class's enemies - the hippies and the blacks - making him the friend of the white middle class).