by Ralph T. Niemeyer
Today, on the 8th of May, the day of the capitulation of NAZI-Germany here in West-Germany, and tomorrow on the 9th of May, the Day of the Victory over Fascism, it is time to commemorate once more the end of the most brutal and devastating war in the history of mankind which had been planned, prepared and launched by the German NAZI regime and which cost at least 60 millions of lives, half of this amount in the USSR and there foremost on Russian soil.
Fascism brought about by Adolf Hitler and his supporters, Germany`s upper class, industrialists and bankers had not just “happened” to the German people, it had been welcomed by a desperate population when democracy crumbled amid economic turmoil and mass unemployment.
It was also easy to manipulate the masses who still felt the defeat on the battlegrounds of WW I by luring them into a racial superiority over all other nations and by this get everyone ready for yet another war in order to bring “justice” for the German people by executing revanche against the Slavic peoples.
The war against the USSR had been planned for and came as a surprise. It brought unbelievable pain and suffering over the peoples in the USSR and ultimately came back to from where it had started.
76 years later, one should think, peace would be the lesson learnt from the barbaric war, but while the German people only wish to live in peace with all of its neighbors, especially with Russia as all opinion polls show, there are some elements in the German political establishment that seem to either have no sensitivity or are simply being bribed by NATO think tanks and continuously accuse Russia of being aggressive although it is NATO that expanded towards the Russian border while the Biden family triggered a war in Eastern Ukraine that is now in its seventh year.
Imagine, for a moment, what kind of outcry we would have seen if Russia came to deploy troops on the Bahamas or Puerto Rico. A revival of the Bay of Pigs crisis would be ripe. But, even back in 1961 it had not been the Soviet Union which unilaterally caused the crisis by deploying missiles on Cuba as the western media until today falsely reports, but it had rather reacted to the US stationing their missiles on Okinawa island in Japan.
In 2014, when the Obama administration and in particular at that time Vice President Biden, encouraged Ukraine to provoke Russia in order to create an atmosphere of fear among Russian speaking Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine who were not allowed to speak and have Russian language be taught at school or in public any longer, war broke out and Russia had to secure Crimea amid concerns that NATO would seize Ukraine and then try to force Russian marines who were absolutely legitimately stationed on Crimea, to leave from there.
Now, let`s imagine if Ukraine suddenly became a member of NATO, overnight, so to speak, with Russian troops being stationed on Crimea. That would have been an escalation from the Bay of Pigs scenario big time!
Crimea for most of the past centuries has been Russian, and it only happened to become Ukrainian during Soviet times when Nikita Khrushchev, a native Ukrainian, gave it as a present to his home-soviet republic. In 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union one should have returned it to Russia, but Mr. Gorbachev openly told me that one had “forgotten” about it.
Western media cites Russian aggression pointing out Crimea as a case where Russia had broken international law, but closer scrutiny reveals that this was not the case at all. One should rather ask what NATO is up to in the Baltics and US marines in the Black Sea, these days, surrounding Russia and calling it a “threat” when Russian forces are being deployed on Russian soil in order to defend it in case some more aggression would be posed from Ukrainian soldiers and NATO maneuvers near the Russian border.
In Germany, nowadays, the political leadership is full of anti-Russian sentiment and creates cases such as the Navalny-poisoning in the Charité clinic in Berlin in order to blame Russia, and even President Putin personally. Especially, the self declared candidate for chancellor of the Green party, a young woman who got a very loose tongue when it comes to Russia, uses aggressive vocabulary unthought of in the post war times and either not being aware of the own history or, worse, calculating it that way so that Russia would overreact.
And, one shouldn’t forget that the pledge after 1945 that only peace shall come from German soil had already been averted by the NATO bombing of Serbia over the Kosovo dispute advocated by Germany’s first ever Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer, a former pacifist.
76 years after WW II we can only remind ourselves of what is at stake and how precious peace is. Mikhail S. Gorbachev opened the possibility to build the European House together and he had opened the Russian windows towards the West by allowing my fatherland ultimately to be united again. We will always be grateful towards the Russians and Soviets to have trusted us again and we should not allow anyone to split us as the 9th of May is the day of Victory over Fascism. Those who don`t celebrate today have lost.
