"Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
--Winston to Julia in 1984
This past week marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1945, which came just weeks before the Second World Catastrophe ended in Europe. Also this past week, Vladimir Putin was heard from, which is only right: The Red Army was the one that rolled through Poland--finally, after much delay--and liberated the camps there. (Though a troublemaker might recall that Ukrainians kicked open the doors of Auschwitz.)
But the Russians and the Poles have a memory war going on concerning World War II. Last week, both presidents participated in dueling boycotts of events. Apparently the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, doesn't want to hear Vladimir Putin speak, and vice versa. What we have here is failure to communicate. But not for lack of trying.
Oh, certainly they both want to communicate their own versions of what happened in the 1930s. President Duda wants to ignore that there could have ever been any Poles who collaborated with the Nazis. The Polish government has even considered a law to make it illegal to suggest such a thing.
But for sheer chutzpah, nobody beats Vladimir Vladimirovich.
He blames the Poles for the start of the war. We're not kidding. And he apparently has decided to ignore a little thing called the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, too.
In a speech last month, the former KGB man said of the Poles: "It was them who, while pursuing their mercenary and exorbitantly overgrown ambitions, laid their people, the Polish people, open to attack from Germany's military machine, and, moreover, generally contributed to the beginning of the Second World War."
When Vladimir Putin starts accusing people of mercenary and overgrown ambitions, watch your step.
The current strongman and new tsar of Russia has been on a revisionist kick lately, even claiming he'll develop a scholarly paper on the causes of WWII. No doubt it'll be similar to those unreconstructed writers who claim Southern states didn't really leave the Union in 1861 because of slavery. Books like that do get published, which is why we should always be vigilant of such books. Doubtless, Vladimir Putin can find a publisher for his thoughts in Moscow.
Leonid Bershidsky, one of the leading thinkers on Russia, explained the new interest in the events of 1939-1945: "Since, of all European nations, Poland and the Baltic states are the most concerned with the policy and politics of memory, their loud voices have drawn the European political elite's attention away from [World War II] victory and toward the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, in which Nazi Germany and Josef Stalin's USSR divided up spheres of influence in Europe. One result of this was a European Parliament resolution last year that equates the Soviet regime with the Nazi one in terms of the damage done to Europe, a document that has been a strong irritant to the Russian leadership and to Putin personally."
Aha! Now we know where it comes from, this revisionism. But we can't allow President Putin to get away with it. Even 75 years later.
For the record, and the archives: After the foreign ministers (Ribbentrop and Molotov) hammered out the non-aggression agreement, Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The USSR invaded Poland two weeks later. Less than a month into it, Poland fell. And the Soviets were allied with the Nazis, and provided supplies to Germany, until Operation Barbarossa. Them's the facts.
But if you're going to rewrite history, why stop there?
Vladimir Putin even went to Jerusalem last week to speak at the Holocaust commemoration event, and mentioned in a speech, quite casually, that 40 percent of the Jews who died in the concentration camps were Soviet citizens. Historians at the event said the statement was "absurd."
"I think this [40 percent] number could--and maybe should--be seen as part of the ongoing memory war between Poland and Russia," said Havi Dreifuss, a historian at the University of Tel Aviv.
Memory war. Now that's the way to put it.
Here's another way to put it. From The Times of Israel: "Experts say the increasingly vitriolic, and often ahistorical, claims about the past are driven by the politics of the moment. Russia, facing crippling Western sanctions for its aggression against Ukraine and other international misdeeds, is said to be milking the moral capital it has as the liberator of Auschwitz to portray itself as being on the right side of history."
Except that it wasn't.
Not at first. And not after 1945, either.
And that's something the people of the world should never forget. No matter how much propaganda comes out of Moscow.
Editorial on 02/04/2020