How to denazify the Nazis?

by Rostisalv Ishchenko

http://actualcomment.ru/kak-nam-obustroit-natsistov.html

Translated by S

I hope that at present those, who thought that Ukrainian civil war would continue for years and even for decades, clearly see that the Kiev regime and the government of Ukraine will fall within several months, at the worst – in about a year.

The war goes on, because the Kiev leadership, using habitual submissive inertia of the population and relying on wreckage of the state machinery, brutal force and the acknowledged central authority status, has an opportunity to accumulate the remaining recourses (equipment, people, money) and thrust them into the furnace of war.

If there is no at least nominally legitimate authority in Kiev, the army won’t fight, the Ministry of Internal Affairs will subject itself to the local authorities, and every Nazi gang refashioned into “volunteer battalion” will take orders from its führer and fight each other about loot. Also they, already far from being an organized military force, will plunder and commit atrocities in particular regions.

The Liberation army is capable to restore some order comparatively swiftly. It’s also possible to ensure the inhabitants’ minimum persistence (particularly with Russian support). But once the Nazi government, Nazi army and major Nazi gangs are gone, the society will still adhere to Nazi ideology, so ingrained in the heads of at least half of the population.

Meanwhile there will be a lot of weaponry. It’s easy to annihilate the hundred-men-gangs that drive tanks and APCs. It’s not hard to smash tens of hundreds of such gangs. But it is impossible to disarm the entire 40-million population.

Hence the record of the first crop of Banderites has been not only well-remembered, but heroized by Nazi propaganda, the hiding Nazis, having almost unlimited number of weapons, might start terrorizing people in the freed territories. Chasing the officials, followers and activists of a new authority, sabotaging and organizing diversions by hiding Nazis can become a greater and, above all, longer-lasting problem than the very military action.

Military-police methods of struggle with ideology-driven underground result efficient only over a long period and if the recourses of the hiding Nazis are limited. In a country with 2 million “civilians” who might be in sympathy with fascists it’s impossible to root out such kind of underground movement.

This underground, as the Lernaean Hydra, will grow new heads for each head cut off, despite alteration of generations. Its activities can be limited and made almost invisible, but not crushed to the full extent. It will wait for its finest hour for decades as the Banderites did between 1945 and 2014. It’s possible to put an end to active banderism and to underground Nazi resistance only if masses cease favoring the Nazi ideology.

There are not so many committed Nazis in Ukraine – up to several tens of thousands. Many have died and many will die on the civil war front. Many of them will be killed in the midst of the obliteration of armed gangs into which Ukrainian army is about to disintegrate. The hundreds of Nazis, who hold political posts or actively participate in propaganda activities, have already fallen under penal articles. If lived through, they will be jailed for long or forever. It’s impossible to imprison or kill off the millions. Better said, technically, yes, it’s possible, but moral, material and political costs will be too high, and the result won’t justify those costs.

That’s why the millions, who rejoiced at the “fried Colorado beetles” news through social media and demanded to annihilate the Donbass’ cities along with their populations (because in their opinion, “there are no civilians”), risk nothing: although their actions are amoral, however they lack the elements of crime. At the same time, those millions by moral support for Nazis (who are considered absent in Ukraine) prepare the nutrient medium the Nazi underground movement melts into. And in such a way it gets to be uncatchable and extremely enduring.

They, the millions, of course will accept a new ideology and will reason basing on TV news. But it won’t prevent them from being faithful to “European dream”, which has been stolen from them by Donbass people. The war will always dwell with war participants; they always deem themselves heroes. Mutilated soldiers, whose number totals to thousands and keeps growing, won’t tell their children that they lost limbs, having stupidly let drag themselves into fight for the wrong. They will talk nonsense about “European dream”, hordes of “Donbass terrorists” and quintillions of regular troops of the Russian Federation, against whom only a few fighters (“cyborgs”, “Kruty heroes”, “the 300 Spartans”) stood.

Marginal revanchism is a Nazi medium. While telling their children and grandchildren about merits beyond the call of duty, the most ordinary victims of 4 waves of mobilization, who are nowhere near the Nazi ideology, will impress the feeling of marginality (enmity toward state and society) upon their minds. They will also inculcate a desire to repeat “exploit” of the fathers and grandfathers and to “free” the non-vindicated Motherland in young generation.

This unobservable influence of family legends has not let the Ukrainizers oppress the Russian spirit in Ukraine within 3 post-soviet decades. But the same unnoted influence of family legends had allowed the Banderites to survive 70 years and show up at the beginning of the 21st century. It’s able to maintain the Ukrainian neo-Nazis’ ideas for entire decades and provide the grounds for hiding Nazis.

One can’t catch / jail / shoot all of them, given that those will seem to be alike, to be living next to you since ages, speaking the same language.

The only way to rapidly eradicate the Nazism or any other ideology is to make it unpopular with the society and to bring the carriers of this ideology out as uptight misfits who are bound to fail and rust. Actually the communist ideology was being wiped out exactly in this way since dissolution of the Soviet Union. As a result, the surveys done in all former soviet states show that, regarding matters of their concern, the most population sympathize with left wing’s agenda. Nevertheless, the general population vote for the right wing, because it’s sort of obscene to support the leftists.

So, we’re familiar with technology. Moreover, we know who the main target audience is: the youngsters. As the members of Ukrainian hitlerjugend aged 14 and older are unlikely to get reeducated easily, younger children and teenagers, especially kids aged 10 and less, will strongly depend on created social environment. When implementing more or less appropriate propagandistic activities, it’ll be possible for no parent to reveal to a child that he or she was killing children in Donetsk, that he or she was destroying the country by inflicting hunger, unemployment and disorder on sorely trouble-free state.

It was shameful to have a Nazi past in postwar Germany and Italy, i.e. after 1945. The anti-Nazi sentiment in those countries is one of the strongest. E.g. Germany even doesn’t let itself to publicly support neo-Nazism, as opposed to what Poland takes the liberty to do. The Polish ended up among victims of aggression circumstantially, they didn’t have to get denazified. They weren’t ashamed.

The first task is to give the society a moral reference point, to show it the seamy side of the today’s Kiev regime, so that no sane human being could admit that he or she voluntarily supports it.

There is the second task, and the German also completed it.

It suddenly turned out that there were no Nazis in the country that supported Hitler even after his death and was brought to senses only owing to decisive defeat of its armed forces and total occupation of its land. I mean, somebody perished in battles, somebody was executed, somebody was imprisoned, somebody managed to get away, but the rest happened to be anti-fascists… millions, tens of millions of anti-fascists, secret “regime busters”. German people experienced such a huge cultural shock that they (being of sound mind) could not avow that they had supported the Nazi regime. They persuaded themselves that, though silently, inwardly, they fought against Nazism. It turned out that even the millions of frontline soldiers “defended not Hitler, but Germany”.

It’s indispensable to let Ukrainian Nazi fellows, accomplices to the coup d’état, social media “fighters” feel themselves the regime’s opponents. They will find a pretext on their own. If an “anti-terrorist ops veteran” tells his grandchild that he lost hand defending the Donbass from Nazi horde or that he sustained burns not in a tank which was set afire when assaulting Slavyansk, but in a line of weaponless “Berkut” special forces who held back heavily armed militants, no doubt it won’t be fair with regard to retaliation matter (at least to moral condemnation), but farsighted as for denazification of the society. Person, telling to her or his son about how he or she fought against Nazis, will never be able to advocate the Nazism again. It’s possible to make it through whatever public disapproval. It’s impossible to get over the reproof of one’s own offspring, children and grandchildren.

The carrying out of a death sentence of Makarova Antonina M. (alias – Ton’ka The Machine gun shooter) took place in 1979. She collaborated with Nazi Germans in so called “Lokot Republic” in Bryansk region. In 1942 the woman shot dead more than 1500 people. Antonina raised 2 daughters to be true soviet citizens who hated Nazis and Nazi collaborators. The girls were staggered, having got to learn that in fact their mom was not an honored soviet trench fighter, but collaborator and Nazi butcher. Mrs Makarova worked hard in a postwar time; her photos did not leave the honor board. And it is not only her case. Many collaborators, traitors became all-right soviet citizens, best workers. Exactly this played badly for them. The witnesses of their crimes recognized them precisely by the honor board photos, newspaper images, etc.

It’s impossible to show a false face for decades. The majority of those people just psychologically replaced real biography by made-up one. All men are liable to invent explanations for their wrongdoings, and those explanations even justify and prove the misdeeds to be necessary. Dirty tricks are misrepresented as heroism. The person starts believing the invented version. This process goes faster in mass conscience. Already in 2005 more than a half of Kiev inhabitants who participated in the 1st Maidan asserted that they walked out to the streets not to support Yuschenko, that Yuschenko betrayed them, that “orange” politicians were all scum, that they would never come to protest on Maidan. However, in 2013 those people again went to Maidan. All the top brass of Ukraine elite, with rare exception, is former members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (like Kravchuk and Kuchma who held senior positions in the party) or Komsomol (Young Communist League) leaders (like Turchinov). The most important is that, if those wake up tomorrow morning and find out that the Soviet Union has been miraculously revived, the first thing they’ll do is to take off to a district committee of the party and demand to reissue their party membership cards.

I’d like to point out once more that only certain, utmost lame (generally, psychologically insane) people can do evil and be proud of it. The most people find themselves on the dark side because of their own spinelessness and they forget about it with relish, if the society lets them forget.

That’s why it seems necessary to combine the following measures:

- severe punishment for leaders and organizers of the coup d’état, as well as for blatant war criminals and sadists (I think, it’s rather okay to postpone the restoration of regular justice system in the liberated territories for several weeks, so that people manage to impose their own sentence on criminals, if they will);

- pitiless execution of Nazis and thugs who refuse to lay down arms after Ukrainian military and governmental institutions collapse;

- intensive anti-Nazi propaganda while exposing all the horrors of Nazis’ crimes (without fear to go too far with that and not getting distracted from it by trending topics as time goes on);

- consigning to oblivion the behavior pattern of many cannon fodder guys and “volunteers” of the dictatorship, so giving them an opportunity to forget their past and raise kids right.

Of course, it’d be great to apply the methods of the USSR that forgave neither those who had joined punitive squads or auxiliary policy, nor those who had verbally favored German occupation (it did not matter whether in printed words or by word of mouth).

The French took more drastic measures. They hung ordinary city officials, who served in the Vichy government (by the way, this government was totally legal and it acted in conformity with the Constitution and laws of France). But neither USSR, nor France faced up to civil war (when a half of population fights against another one).

Civil war ends in victory of one or another party. There is no doubt that we’ll win. Nevertheless, the other party won’t vanish. It’s impossible to eliminate it. Since civil war got started, it is clear that every side is supported by remarkable percentage of citizens (up to a half), otherwise the majority would suppress the minority. Here you have the slaughter of minorities in Rwanda ([1994 genocide] stopped due to arrival of peacekeepers) and Cambodia ([1975-1979 genocide] ended following the Vietnamese invasion). It is not acceptable for Europe (by the way, those massacres in Africa and Asia settled not a single matter, while people who initiated and led them got killed in a short time).

Therefore, in any case we have to come to an agreement. Then the agreement can’t be a halfway one. There can be no ideological compromise with Nazism. So, the Nazi mob, which presently considers that Ukraine stays clean from Nazism, once we’ve won, firstly must get convinced that no, it doesn’t, and secondly that it was fighting the Nazism on its own whenever and wherever possible.

Otherwise this war will cast a shadow over decades. Even to the third generation, the revanchists will be ready to take advantage of whatever problems of ours in order to revenge.

If you can’t kill the carrier of ideology, kill the ideology. It’s difficult, but the only thing to do.

Rostislav Ischenko, president of the Centre for System Analysis and Forecast, exclusively for the “Timely comments”