7 January 2024 by HELMHOLTZ SMITH Leave a Comment
Earlier I spoke of the Soviet propaganda line that the Warsaw Treaty members were all “socialist brothers” rather than the reality that they were former enemies put under a tight grip. Today I want to look at NATO’s propaganda line – the “communist subjugation of free people” – in which all the Nazis were Germans.
But they weren’t all Germans
Foti’s mother had always planned to one day write the heroic saga of her father, Jonas Noreika, a celebrated war hero and anti-Soviet partisan in his native Lithuania, but she never did. Foti, a journalist turned high school English teacher, set out to carry out her mother’s wish to honor her revered grandfather. However, her research found something unexpected: evidence that he was not a war hero, but a Nazi collaborator responsible for the deaths of at least 8,000 Lithuanian Jews.
To Sylvia Foti’s credit, she faced truth and wrote it up. Yes, her grandfather did fight the Soviets, but, before that, he was an accomplished Jew-killer and Nazi collaborator. She refused the easy route of pretending it away as “Russian disinformation”.
The Germans had a lot of – enthusiastic – help. Especially in Western Ukraine and the Baltics. (If you’re on X, look up Holocaust In Ukraine.)
But that was then. Yaroslav Stetsko, Nazi past washed away, now a major player in the Anti-Bolshevik League, was a guest in the White House. Many of the SS division Galicia got into Canada legally, their Jew- and Pole-killing past edited out and replaced by the official story that the Germans did the Holocaust all by themselves. Former allies of Nazi Germany were re-branded as Captive Nations deserving our full support. The West smoothed over and forgot the Nazi collaboration, forgave the murders and folded these people into the anti-communist coalition of free countries.
In 2010 the NYT could write “Declassified Papers Show U.S. Recruited Ex-Nazis“, in 2014 NPR could write “How Thousands Of Nazis Were ‘Rewarded’ With Life In The U.S.“. Do you think this would be called Russian disinformation today? Let’s ask the EU disinfo site – “For many years, Russian state-controlled media have claimed that various states and entities are ruled by Nazis or permeated by Nazi ideology.” Yeah, guess it would be.
Of course, some people remember – “In the years since the Maidan uprising brought a new government to Ukraine in 2014, numerous monuments to Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators have been erected, at times as frequently as a new one each week“. But you’ll have to look pretty hard in the media these days. Lots of “How the Russian media spread false claims about Ukrainian Nazis” instead.
And so the past became present. That reconstruction of reality conditioned people to think that Putin’s just blowing smoke when he talks about Nazis in Ukraine. But, if you know what actually happened, you realize that he’s not making it up and, understandably, the Russians are rather neuralgic about swastikas and other Nazi regalia on parade. (Lots of pictures. The Western media used to notice them, but no more.)