The Nazi-Jewish heart of Ukraine

Jews traditionally play the scapegoat to the sacred cow of Russian jingoism.

When things go wrong – and when do they ever go right? – the powers that be either hint or say outright it’s all the Jews’ fault. Such powers may be tsars, party secretaries or presidents – plus ça change and all that.

The people perk up on cue: they’ve always known that, viscerally. After all, they themselves can’t be blamed for the country’s ills, can they? And they’ve been proved right!

Many things are currently going wrong in Russia, but Putin’s bandit raid on the Ukraine takes pride of place. With hundreds of thousands of Russians killed or maimed and the war not getting anywhere, someone has to carry the can.

One would think that the Jewish card would be the joker popping out of the pack first. Frankly, I expected that to happen immediately after the collapse of Russia’s blitzkrieg on Kiev last year, but an inexplicable delay occurred.

Now things are back to normal: Putin has explained, practically in so many words, that all the problems are caused by that American puppet Zelensky who is an “ethnic Jew”. I heaved a sigh of relief: my claim that I understand Russia was vindicated.

Actually, the first signs appeared on Russian television a couple of weeks ago, when the famous actress, Valentina Talyzina, explained that Jews are the only people inside Russia who oppose Putin’s noble war effort.

Some of those treacherous vermin hide behind their Russian-sounding names, but that mask, explained Talyzina, must be ripped off. Thus one of the country’s best-known singers, Alla Pugacheva, claims that her father’s name was Boris. In fact, it was Boruch! Need she say more?

And it’s not just Pugacheva either. Talyzina’s colleague, Liya Akhedzhakova, who has just left the country in protest against the war, also has some Jewish tar in her family barrel – the people have a right to know such salient and vital facts.

You must understand that every word uttered on Russian TV has been either prompted or directly ordered by the Kremlin in pursuit of its policy. Hence I knew then that before long the Kremlin would dispense with intermediaries and address the country directly.

So it has happened, and let me repeat: I’m amazed it took so long. In an interview the other day Putin confirmed the suspicion his people had had all along.  

“Western overseers”, he said, “have installed a person at the head of modern Ukraine – an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins.

“And thus, in my opinion, they seem to be covering up an anti-human essence that is the foundation… of the modern Ukrainian state… And this makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in that an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and covering up those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine at one time – and this is the extermination of one and a half million people.”

Those “Western overseers” must have hypnotised 73 per cent of Ukrainians, the proportion that voted Zelensky into office in 2019. And the stupefied people were even manipulated into accepting the appointment of another Jew, Oleksiy Reznikov, as defence minister.

But then, the other day Zelensky covered his tracks by dismissing Reznikov and replacing him… with another Jewish Nazi? Almost. The Ukraine’s new defence minister is Rustem Umerov, a Crimean Tatar and a Muslim. Now if that isn’t a perfidious Nazi ploy, I don’t know what is.

Putin has reiterated the lies first voiced a year and a half ago: the Ukraine is a fascist country in urgent need of denazifying. Russia’s attack is meant to be a clean-up job to eradicate the Judaeo-Banderite Nazis who survived 1945. Those vermin have to be pushing 100 at least, but that doesn’t make them any less venomous.

Accusing Zelensky of covering up the glorification of Nazism also plays into another KGB myth, that the Jews themselves collaborated with the Holocaust. If so, that must have been history’s unique outburst of collective masochism and death wish – the Jews conspiring with the Nazis to kill millions of Jews.  

That some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis is true – but then so did the denizens of every occupied territory, especially in Eastern Europe. Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Byelorussians and Russians could all be found among Nazi murderers.

In fact, some 1.5 million Soviet citizens, most of them Russians, switched sides and donned the Nazi uniform during that war, another unique development in history. They thus advanced, directly or indirectly, Hitler’s war aims, one of which was the extermination of Jews.

Some Ukrainians did massacre Jews, most notably at Babi Yar and, earlier, in Lvov. But Bandera and his nationalist guerrillas weren’t the prime culprits.

In fact, throughout the war (which Bandera himself spent in a Nazi concentration camp) they fought against the Nazis, thus slowing down the Holocaust whether they wanted to or not. Yes, the wartime constitutions of the two Ukrainian nationalist movements were clearly fascist and anti-Semitic. And yes, some Banderites were guilty of anti-Semitic atrocities.

But claiming that today’s Ukrainian state traces its lineage back to the perpetrators of the Holocaust is a pernicious lie calculated to stoke up the anti-Semitic sentiment at Russia’s grassroots. In fact, Putin grossly exaggerated, possibly by an order of magnitude, the number of Jews killed by Ukrainians.

Three million of the six million Jewish victims perished in Nazi death camps, and it wasn’t Banderite Ukrainians who had shipped them there. The claim that half of all other victims were murdered by Ukrainians is both preposterous and arithmetically impossible. But let’s not play the numbers game – it’s the principle that counts.

Whatever atrocities some Ukrainians committed, the Holocaust was a German project, ordered and inspired by the German government, and made possible by the German occupation of Europe. Others collaborated, more or less eagerly and in larger or smaller numbers, but the ultimate sin was committed by the Germans.

Yet there is that outdated doctrine, teaching that sins can be redeemed and forgiven. Thus the world seems satisfied that Germany has lived down the shame of her Nazi past. She is now accepted as a normal Western country, complete with a bicameral parliament, democratic governance, ethnic tolerance and the rule of law.

The Ukraine also features all those attributes of Western polity, and yet she is supposed to be besmirched for ever by some of her denizens who participated in Nazi crimes as junior partners. That proposition is incredible even in theory – and mendacious in practice.

Having got rid first of communists and then of Putin’s puppet Yanukovych, the Ukraine has been fast becoming a civilised, Western-leaning country, one showing more racial tolerance than some. Successive Ukrainian governments have featured Jews, blacks, Buryats, Tatars, Byelorussians, Russians, and the country doesn’t mind.

In fact, the only Eastern European country that hasn’t jettisoned its fascist past is Russia herself. All the worst features of the Russian Empire and communist dictatorship are being revived and lovingly cultivated.

Imperialism, terror external and internal, puppet courts, suppression of independent institutions and media, totalitarian propaganda, total militarisation, massive rewriting of history, claims of racial superiority, rampant xenophobia – such is today’s Russia. And now state anti-Semitism has come off the mothballs too.

People who know Putin say he is not personally anti-Semitic. In fact, he’d be entitled to modify the popular mantra of anti-Semites to say that not just some but most of his friends are Jewish – and have been since his childhood.

But that’s neither here nor there. Personally, Putin may be as Judeophile as they come. However, as a KGB officer and then Russian dictator, he is committed to anti-Semitism institutionally and politically. That’s a bad omen for the few Jews still remaining in Russia.

When the country’s government sends the signal, the population doesn’t take long to remind the world that the word ‘pogrom’ is a Russian contribution to all languages. Russian Jews would be well-advised to catch the first plane out of the country – the last one will be too full.

P.S. To be fair, Ukrainian Jews aren’t the only Nazis out there. This is from the editorial of a major Russian newspaper — please appreciate both the content and style:

“The leaders of a most disgusting Poland, bestial Scandinavian countries, militarist Japan, marsupial animals from Australia and New Zealand and other plague bacilli like the Baltics are all direct or indirect accomplices of the Nazis. And our attitude to them should be the same as to the leaders of the countries in the Nazi coalition.”