As far too many Americans get themselves into a Russia-slamming froth over Ukraine, it’s informative to recall a piece of history — WWII era and prior. The German Nazi party, and indeed most of western Europe saw a dividing line at the Oder River, east of Germany, a natural border between Germany and Poland. East of the Oder meant Slavic people. Slavic people meant the Balkans. And to much of western Europe — and particularly to the Nazis — Slavs were untermenschen, lower (or sub-) humans. So tangible was the disdain for the Balkans that a now-departed friend who grew up on the Adriatic coast of Mussolini’s Italy during WWII once told me a childhood story. He and his friends would urinate into the Adriatic, pretending to be “pissing on Albania” across the sea.
This should interest us because the racist east-west fissures in European history long predate the current Ukraine situation. Meanwhile the Azov Battalion and the other outspokenly white supremacist neo-Nazi elements of Ukraine should be particularly offensive to anyone who desires to see the world evolve out of that WWII era and into a economically and ecologically more peaceful and cooperative one. (It’s curiously pathological that German Nazis were astounded by the devotion and fury of their Ukrainian Nazi colleagues.)
Apparently this desire for peace is not foremost among the political and elite classes in the USA. By provoking — or at least supporting — the Ukrainian coup of 2013, and by weaponizing those neo-Nazi elements, the US government and its corporate funders have done yeoman’s work of devolving the world back toward 1930’s era Fascism. Which isn’t terribly surprising, given the US’s role as global arms proliferator and its best imitation of the most violently repressive empire in world history. This role appears to also mandate censorship. Censorship that serves the interests of the corporate elite that retain a tight grip around the throat of Western politicians: Big Dirty Energy, Big Tech, Big Weapons, and Big Pharma. Don’t fret, this situation, long-engineered by the US and its NATO acolytes will see windfall profits for all these elite corporations in the midst of a situation rendered existential by the possibility of accidental or willful deployment of atomic weapons. Nuclear winter.
Censorship as the prescription for hiding war crimes. Including the crime of economic terrorism, of starving innocents. And the war crime of ramming NATO down the throat of those Slavic untermenschen (after promising not to). Lies and authoritarianism. Nothing new here; rather a tip of the hat to Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. One has to wonder: what the hell was the point of WWII?