War crimes don’t just go away. Hans Frank, Nazi Governor General of Poland (the so called General Gouvernment) said on the gallows at Nuremberg that it would take a thousand years for the world to forgive the Third Reich. Seventy-five years later it is doubtful whether the world concerns itself very much with Nazi Germany and its murderous and genocidal acts. History is memory and memory is history. Those most affected by the Nazi genocide, the victims and their families, Jews and Gentiles, are indelibly marked with an unending pain which can never be forgotten. The perpetrators, of course, spent their lives in denial; they and their descendants are shocked that anyone can place blame on them. They were just following orders, it was wartime and besides, these crimes happened long ago. Let bygones be bygones. It’s a new world. Time to forget it and move on.
Yet memory endures. History, despite attempts by various revisionist scholars to sanitize and deny that terrible criminal deed occurred, will not be sanitized. George Orwell noted that he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future and with that the education of future generations. The former nation known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) died in 1991 and devolved into its constituent “Republics” which are now independent sovereign nations. When the USSR collapsed, Great Russia took the name of the Russian Federation. New name, same officials. Its new leaders, however, didn’t arise de novo, but rather were part of the old nomenklatura. They quickly learned the way of capitalism and under the former First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party, Boris Yeltsin, now President of the Russian Federation, kleptocracy arose and became the order of the day. The kleptocratic regime had the trappings of a western capitalist democracy and even included a stock exchange. Capitalism won. All was now satisfactory in the eyes of the West, But the Cold War was never about capitalism versus Communism. It was about freedom versus a totalitarian regime of a social fascist style incarnated as Communist internationalism while actually disguising Russian Social Imperialism. After Yeltsin left office he was succeeded by his handpicked successor, a former KGB functionary, Vladimir Putin.
History remembers the failure of Great Britain and France, their weak appeasement policy that enabled Hitlerian Germany to become the most powerful nation on the European continent and the Munich Conference of September 1938 that peacefully sacrificed Czechoslovakia to the Nazi war machine. It was Poland’s turn next and the two ideological enemies, Nazi Germany and Communist USSR signed a treaty in August 1939 with secret clauses dividing up Eastern Europe along with a ten year non-aggression treaty. This treaty, known infamously as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led to World War II a mere week later. History remembers the ignominy of this treaty and its results. Stalin’s USSR annexed its part of Poland and the Baltic States. While the Nazis commenced genocidal murder in their section of Poland, the Soviets were busy too. Most notorious was the murder of almost 22,000 Polish officers by the NKVD. Skulls of the dead Polish officers showed each one with one bullet hole, When the bodies were discovered by German troops after they invaded the USSR, the Soviet response was that they were killed by the Nazis. History, and investigations bear out definitively that in this case it was the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) that committed these crimes on Stalin’s orders. These murders occurred in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, in western Russia and is known as the Katyn Massacre.
More recently, just a few days ago, Ukrainian troops who liberated Izium from Imperial Russian occupation found mass graves with hundreds of bodies with hands tied and showing wounds indicative of pre-mortem torture. The Russian invasion of its neighboring country is now seven months old and the war is not going the way the Russian vozhd desired. Ukraine, aided by American and certain NATO members has managed to stop the Russian advance and now is in an offensive mode, liberating over a thousand square miles of occupied territory. Today, vozhd Putin ordered the call up of three hundred thousand reservists. No one knows for sure but informed observers estimate Imperial Russian casualties of at least 80,000 along with the loss of tremendous amounts of materiel and ordinance. This call up has not been received favorably by the Russian people and has been greeted with riots and demonstrations. It seems, from statements by Putin, that the war will continue as long as he remains in power.
Going forward, it is not the role of the United States, the so-called indispensable nation, to effect regime change in the Russian Federation or in any other nation. This is the responsibility of the Russian people. They have a long history of a great culture, music, dance, literature and certainly their culture is second to none. The question is how do the Russian people want to be remembered by history, as a great people or as the reincarnation of Communist murderers? Significantly, there were never deCommunization trials or any form of truth and reconciliation hearings in the former USSR. It’s up to the Russian people. The failed Soviet invasion of Afghanistan eventually led to the downfall of the social imperialist USSR. The Brezhnev Doctrine is dead, buried and forgotten. Now the Russian people, fathers, mothers, wives, children, brothers and sisters have a heavy burden. The next move is up to them: War or Peace? It is their choice. How they will be governed and whether they finally will enter the 21st century as a normal nation is up to them. Whether the Ukrainians and other people tortured by the Russian bear will forgive them remains a matter of history. It would be good for the Russian people to remember Hans Frank’s last words.
Garry S. Sklar
Las Vegas, NV
September 21, 2022
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