It is well to remember the significance of this attempt by the Americans and British to conclude a separate peace with the Nazis, while Soviet forces were still engaged in the fierce Battle of Berlin and what a betrayal it was of the promised solidarity between the nations fighting against fascist aggression to which the Soviet forces at Stalingrad had dealt the fatal blow [...]
The participants of Munich Conference, 1938. From left to right: Neville Chamberlain, Eduard Daladier, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini
Views: 1543
On February 2nd, 1943, the 6th German Army, under the command of Field Marshall Von Paulus, and elements of the 4th Panzer Army, surrendered to the Red Army at Stalingrad. This stunning victory is considered the turning point in the war in Europe, heralding the defeat of fascist Germany.
That defeat came on May 2ndth 1945, when the German forces in Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich, surrendered to the forces of the Red Army that had captured the city. On May 9th the official act of surrender of the German government and military forces took place in Berlin when the Germans surrendered to the Soviet commander, Marshal Zhukov, a surrender witnessed by representatives of the American, British and French forces. This was the end of the war in Europe.
Surrenders of elements of the German armies in the Italy and Austria on May 2nd and German forces in northern Europe, on May 7th, at first claimed by the western allies to be the official surrender of Germany, were not recognised as such by the Soviet government, since they were in violation of the agreement of the European Advisory Committee of the three Big Powers, that was finalised in March, 1944. That agreement required that the surrender would be one event, would be of the German government itself, not just of army elements in impossible positions, and was to take place at the seat of government from which German aggression had been launched, Berlin.
The western allies had no choice but to agree, and to regard the May 9th ceremony as the official act of surrender of the German government. But it was clear even then that the western allies had tried to arrange a separate peace with the Germans while the Soviets were still fighting and it was made very clear that the Americans and British wanted to steal the show from the Russians. Now 70 years later, the propaganda machine in the west once again claims that the earlier date was the end of the war in Europe.
It is well to remember the significance of this attempt by the Americans and British to conclude a separate peace with the Nazis, while Soviet forces were still engaged in the fierce Battle of Berlin and what a betrayal it was of the promised solidarity between the nations fighting against fascist aggression to which the Soviet forces at Stalingrad had dealt the fatal blow.
During one of his fireside chats on American radio on July 28, 1943, American President Roosevelt said,
“The world has never seen greater devotion, determination and self-sacrifice than have been displayed by the Russian people…under the leadership of Marshal Joseph Stalin. With a nation, that in saving itself, is thereby helping to save all the world from the Nazi menace, this country of ours should always be glad to be a good neighbour and a sincere friend to the world of the future.”
Fine words, and true, but where is the good neighbour now?
Instead of international solidarity between the victors and recognition of the sacrifice of the Russian people that Roosevelt praised, the NATO countries now refuse to attend the Moscow Victory Parade commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany. But why do they insult the one nation that suffered the most, sacrificed the most, fought the hardest and won the greatest victories against the fascists? Is it really about Ukraine? The answer is simply that they see the defeat of fascist Germany not as a victory over fascism but as a failure of the western attempt to crush Russia.
We must also remember that NATO includes the occupied German state whose forces attacked the Soviet Union on June 22nd 1941, a state that still has no sovereignty and is still occupied by American forces two decades after Russian forces left, and whose leaders, now revealed as permitting American intelligence to spy on German companies for economic advantage, are evidently in the pocket of the American government.
It includes Britain, whose war time leader, Winston Churchill, echoing public calls by American General Patton, proposed an attack on the Soviet forces in Europe to take place in July 1945, using combined American-British-Canadian forces as well as the remaining German armies. The plan even included the use of nuclear weapons. It was called Operation Unthinkable, but it was clearly very thinkable and was a plan to pick up where the Nazis had failed, to subjugate Russia, and was only shelved when analysis proved that Soviet forces were too strong to overcome.
It is clear that the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear attacks on Japan, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were incinerated by the Americans and British, were meant as demonstrations to the Soviet Union of their power, as an attempt to intimidate and subdue their supposed ally before the war with Germany was even concluded. The threat of a continued world war against Russia was made with the attacks on those defenceless cities. But with Operation Unthinkable put on hold and the formation of the Warsaw Pact as a defense against the NATO threat, the war against Russia was continued using other means and came to be called the Cold War, a political euphemism, since Soviet forces fought against the NATO allies directly in Korea and Vietnam and by proxies in many countries seeking liberation from western colonialism in Asia, Africa and Afghanistan.
We must also remember that in 1939, when Hitler attacked Poland, both Britain and France reneged on their promise to Poland to defend it in the event of an attack by Germany because they wanted German forces to be able to move right up to the borders of the Soviet Union to make it easier for Germany to launch its invasion of Russia just two years later. The so-called phoney war after the fall of Poland until the May, 1940 German attack on France, gave crucial time to Germany to advance its plans to attack Russia.
The entire focus of the NATO alliance, formed immediately after the defeat of Germany, has been on war with Russia and, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the weakening of Russian power, the NATO alliance has steadily advanced its attack position with a series of wars from Yugoslavia to Georgia and Ukraine, from Chechnya to Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, all designed to eliminate Russian allies and to put NATO forces right up against Russian territory on its southern and western flanks.
In a document known as the Atlantic Charter, drafted on a battleship off the coast of Newfoundland in the middle of 1941, the Americans and British promised that the goals of the world war were not to increase their territories, but to guarantee the self-government of peoples, free trade, global cooperation to secure better economic and social conditions for all, freedom from fear and want, freedom of the seas and abandonment of the use of force as an instrument of policy, and disarmament. The Soviet Union adhered to these principles in the January 1, 1942 Declaration of the United Nations.
But aside from the relentless forcing of “free trade” treaties down workers throats across the world, which really means the freedom to exploit workers everywhere for the profit of a few corporations, the western signatories have violated every one of the clauses in the Atlantic Charter document.
The world was assured that there would be peace but they have given us nothing but 70 years of war. They promised us freedom from want but have relentlessly tried to destroy any government that protects the rights of workers, and poverty has increased dramatically in every western country since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Nations that were promised liberation at the end of the world war, had to fight these same powers to attain that justice. Some like China and Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea, succeeded after long and bitter fighting, while the struggles of many others were crushed or subverted.
In Ukraine now we are witnessing a national army and formations of outright fascist militias, the new SS, firing on, and shelling fellow citizens who protest the lack of legality of the government and the American agenda of using it as a base to attack Russia. The interests of the War Party in the west prevail over the basic demands of their peoples for social and economic justice, and freedom from fear and war.
The whole world owes the peoples of the Soviet Union, of the Russian Federation, a debt that can never be repaid for their defeat of fascism in Europe. They suffered the heaviest losses, the most destruction, the heaviest burden of fighting the Nazi war machine.
The refusal of NATO leaders to attend the Moscow ceremonies on May 9th is an insult to history, to the sacrifices of scores of millions of Russians, and is tantamount to a repudiation of the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the Charter of the United Nations. But it is more than that. It is proof, if ever it was needed, that the main objective of the world war in Europe was the crushing of Russia for the benefit of the three powers, the USA, Britain and Germany. While scrapping among themselves to see who would be top dog on the world street, they were united in their desire to subdue Russia to their will. This objective was long held in check by Soviet power. The fall of the Soviet Union and its replacement by a government initially composed of compradors for the west gave the Americans and their allies the impression that they had succeeded in bringing Russia under their complete domination. But the rise of new leaders in Russia, reinvigorating Russian sovereignty and reviving Russian power and prestige in the world has angered these wolves of war who now circle, and harass, waiting for the opportunity to strike.
Originally published on 2020-05-07
About the author: Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto, he is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada and he is known for a number of high-profile cases involving human rights and war crimes, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
[wpedon id=”4696″ align=”left”]
Adolf Heusinger was far from being the only Nazi war criminal who would later serve at a top position in NATO
Two months ago, hundreds of thousands of Chileans somberly marked the 40thanniversary of their nation’s September 11th terrorist event. It was on that date in 1973 that the Chilean military, armed with a generous supply of funds and weapons from the United States, and assisted by the CIA and other operatives, overthrew the democratically-elected government of the moderate socialist Salvador Allende. Sixteen years of repression, torture and death followed under the fascist Augusto Pinochet, while the flow of hefty profits to US multinationals – IT&T, Anaconda Copper and the like – resumed. Profits, along with concern that people in other ...
Rising tensions in the global relations and hotbeds of old and new crises call for unity and efforts of all peace forces for closing foreign military bases, particularly U.S. and NATO foreign military bases, around the globe. The peace forces are obligated to send a clear message that U.S. and NATO foreign military bases represent the tools of hegemonism, aggression, occupation and that as such must be closed.Peace and inclusive development, elimination of hunger and misery require redistribution of spending for maintenance of military bases in favor of development needs, education, and health services. After the end of the Cold ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
The American aristocracy want inequality of rights, with two basic polar-opposite classes: the ‘elite’, with themselves at the top of everything, and everybody else below them, as subjects to be ruled by them, in such ways as they (themselves, and their fellow ‘elite’) can agree to do. They are convinced that they have earned their high status, in one way or another, and they compete ferociously amongst themselves, to rise even higher within the aristocracy.Many of the aristocrats think that they are ‘elite’ because they are the richest; many think instead that the ‘elite’ are the smartest or the most ...
Just three years after a citizens’ referendum returned Crimea to Russia, from which it had been separated for sixty years, the people of Catalonia, Spain’s largest province, will vote to leave that country.And just as the international community has decreed that the Crimean referendum was a fake, Spain’s Prime Minister felt compelled to declare that the vote could’t possibly take place, that it would be illegal, that independence, in his words, could only be ‘a pipe dream’ for the country’s richest province.Clearly, national governments don’t like losing land and people, however when it suits the international community, some communities are ...
The US President Donald Trump is no doubt a successful businessman who rules his country as if it is a huge enterprise. And this kind of management, to his mind, should lead to success. And very often it really works. As a wise leader he uses different tools to reach his goals. Thus, the most cunning one, which the US exploits in Europe – is indirect influence on the EU countries to gain the desired aim. The EU just becomes a tool in “capable hands” of the US.Let us give the simple example. Last week the Ministry of National Defence ...
I was sickened to hear and watch the events occurring in France. Part of that was for the immediate families, friends and neighbors of those so needlessly killed. Another part was the fear factor, not fear of terror or for myself but fear for how the powers that be would ratchet up the security control within their own societies by using their own biased racist fear factors in order to rationalize it to control their own populations. A wider perspective is the sick feeling of realizing that humanity in general is capable of producing such atrocities.The latter is where a ...
After 267 days, the end of the battle of Mosul was announced on July 10th. “Liberation” is a misleading notion, because the hostilities have not stopped, the human suffering has not stopped.There are still victims in the city every day on both sides.Many refugees have no home to go back to and are suffering from severe mental health problems, especially the children.No reason to celebrateWere inter alia destroyed: 9 of the 10 major hospitals. 76 of the 98 medical centres. 6 big bridges across the Tigris. three-quarters of Mosul’s roads, 400 educational institutions, including schools, universities and education centres. 11,000 ...
Why NATO? At the first glance, an ordinary citizen of the globe can think that probably it must be that everything that is now happening in Ukraine and around, including and reconstruction of international relations and reformulation of the global order in politics, is just a big misunderstanding. For the same people, probably NATO's constant expansion to the east since 1999, i.e., to the direction of Russia, has nothing to do with the attempt to subdue and tear Russia apart as wanted the same both Napoleon (in 1812) and Hitler (in 1941). They will tell you that instead of a ...
On December 7, 1941 the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was attacked by Japanese forces. President Roosevelt, in his well known Infamy speech delivered on December 8, claimed the attack was “unprovoked” and, on this basis, asked for and received a declaration of war from the U.S. Congress. But the evidence suggests the attack was not unprovoked. On the contrary, it was carefully and systematically provoked in order to manipulate the U.S. population into joining WWII. This provocation game, spectacularly successful in 1941, is currently being played with North Korea. The stakes are high.Many good people are reluctant to look critically ...
Clear and convincing evidence will be presented here that, under U.S. President Barack Obama, the U.S. Government had a detailed plan, which was already active in June 2013, to take over Russia's main naval base, which is in Sevastopol in Crimea, and to turn it into a U.S. naval base. There can now be no question that the war in Ukraine started, and resulted from, the U.S. Government's plan to take over all of Ukraine, and especially to take over that Russian naval base, in Crimea, which then was in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine didn't start at the time when ...
In a remarkable book, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, the Canadian historian Michael Jabara Carley describes how, at the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union repeatedly tried, but finally failed, to conclude a pact of mutual security, in other words a defensive alliance, with Britain and France. This proposed arrangement was intended to counter Nazi Germany, which, under Hitler’s dictatorial leadership, had been behaving more and more aggressively, and it was likely to involve some other countries, including Poland and Czechoslovakia, that had reason to fear German ambitions. The protagonist of this ...
The current Ukrainian crisis and, in fact, a civil war which started at the very end of 2013 are grounded in for decades lasting internal interregional antagonisms between the western and the eastern regions of Ukraine. The crisis is fully fueled by the Western governments which armed far-right “European” Kiev regime giving to it a comprehensive political, financial and diplomatic support for the policy of brutal Ukrainization and even Nazification of the whole country but primarily at the expense of the Russian-speaking population at Ukraine’s East. A similar example we experienced in “European” Croatia in the 1990s when the same ...
The WarmongersThe war, which began in August 1914 – to contemporaries the Great War, to posterity the First World War – marked the end of one period of history and the beginning of another. Starting as a European war, it turned in 1917, with the entrance of the US into a world war. The spark that triggered it off was the assassination of the Austrian heir-presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1864−1914), by a Bosnian nationalist of Serb origin – Gavrilo Princip[1], a member of the Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna) movement, in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914 on his official visit to ...
In theory, the global financial system is supposed to help every country gain. Mainstream teaching of international finance, trade and “foreign aid” (defined simply as any government credit) depicts an almost utopian system uplifting all countries, not stripping their assets and imposing austerity. The reality since World War I is that the United States has taken the lead in shaping the international financial system to promote gains for its own bankers, farm exporters, its oil and gas sector, and buyers of foreign resources – and most of all, to collect on debts owed to it.Each time this global system has ...
The Kingdom of Belgium as a multilingual and multicultural society is today a federal type of experimental laboratory of European integration within the framework of the European Union (the EU). This is also a country in which the capital of the European Union is located and a country as one of the original six establishing countries of the present day the EU. The question of the destiny of the Belgian multicultural federalism is of crucial importance for the future process of European integration or disintegration.The Belgian multicultural society: Long united and long dividedThe population of the Kingdom of Belgium is ...
"Please don’t write about Ya’ir Golan!" a friend begged me, “Anything a leftist like you writes will only harm him!"So I abstained for some weeks. But I can’t keep quiet any longer.General Ya’ir Golan, the deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, made a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. Wearing his uniform, he read a prepared, well-considered text that triggered an uproar which has not yet died down.Dozens of articles have been published in its wake, some condemning him, some lauding him. Seems that nobody could stay indifferent.The main sentence was: "If there is something that frightens me about ...
It is quite apparent to everyone that, at present, the socio-economic and political situation in the United States is far from stable and society increasingly polarized. In fact, even members of the current US military and political elite admit this in their public speeches. Hence, President Joe Biden and his team have been trying hard to unite the nation and guide it in a less divisive direction.Since the relationship between the United States and Russia has taken a turn for the worse in recent years, it is quite clear to the author that, nowadays, the US administration has been seeking ...
On September 16, 1982, Christian Lebanese militiamen allied to Israel entered the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila and the adjacent neighborhood of Sabra in Beirut under the watch of the Israeli army and began a slaughter that caused outrage around the world. Over the next day and a half, up to 3500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were murdered in one of the worst atrocities in modern Middle Eastern history. The New York Times recently published an op-ed containing new details of discussions held between Israeli and American officials before and during the massacre. They ...
The edifice of the post-1991 world order is collapsing right before our eyes. President Putin’s decision to give a miss to the Auschwitz pilgrimage, right after his absence in Paris at Charlie festival, gave it the last shove. It was good clean fun to troll Russia, as long as she stayed the course. Not anymore. Russia broke the rules.Until now, Russia, like a country bumpkin in Eton, tried to belong. It attended the gathering of the grandees where it was shunned, paid its dues to European bodies that condemned it, patiently suffered ceaseless hectoring of the great powers and irritating baiting of the East European small-timers alike. But something broke there. The lad does ...
