/View.info/ In 1941, a few weeks before the attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler uttered his famous words: “The struggle for world hegemony in Europe will be won by the acquisition of Russian space… Russian space is our India and, as the British rule there a handful of their people, so we shall rule this colonial space of ours. We will bring the Ukrainians headscarves, glass beads as decorations and other things that the colonial peoples like”.
Hitler conveyed his idea of the future of the Russian people in another famous formulation of the same year: “Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger.” The Mississippi River, as we remember, is the border beyond which the third American president, Thomas Jefferson, would expel the Indians. Hitler is convinced that the Anglo-Saxons, who “have reduced the number of millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand and keep a modest remnant in a cage under supervision,” are giving the Germans the right example of how to deal with the Russians. According to him, “in the eastern part of Germany” (that is, in Russia), such a process should become “a repetition of the conquest of America.”
Hitler did not call the Russians “redskins” for nothing. His war against the USSR is just another colonial war. All the atrocities of the Nazis (mass murders, resettlement, turning people into working cattle) were experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Germans organized a genocide of the Herro and Nama peoples in South-West Africa. Similar crimes were committed by the French, Dutch, Belgians, Americans, and British. “Fascism has long been known to India under the name of imperialism,” wrote Jawaharlal Nehru, who consistently emphasized that India’s struggle for freedom was part of the world struggle against fascism and imperialism.
The struggle for freedom of the peoples of the Soviet Union in 1941-1945 was also part of the world struggle against fascism and imperialism. Alas, at some point we forgot about it, succumbing to the temptation to declare our struggle exceptional. In a certain sense, in terms of the scope of the hostilities, the intensity of the forces, the number of casualties, this was indeed the case. But this is essentially false. By accepting this untruth, we have stepped on slippery ground. By agreeing to recognize the exceptionality of our struggle, we supported the Western-convenient interpretation that German Nazism was a completely exceptional phenomenon, like the Martians landing in Surrey described in H.W. Wells’ novel. After all, the executioners of Indians and Indians diligently pretended that they had nothing to do with their student, attributing the phenomenon of Hitlerism to German national characteristics, the mysterious movement called National Socialism, the nuances of German history and the evil genius of Adolf Hitler – “a psychopath, which can only appear among the Huns”.
However, fascism existed before Hitler and did not disappear after 1945. At the end of the war, Western democracies found employment in their specialty for Nazi prisoners, sending them to serve in their penal troops in the colonies. For example, the Dutch SS were sent to fight the national liberation movement in Indonesia, and the German SS who were captured by the French were sent to Indochina. The sad truth is that after May 9, 1945, Hitler’s executioners continued to kill people in third world countries – this time in alliance with the French and British.
Nazism cannot be recognized as an exclusively German phenomenon, as this allowed the brown plague to continue to spread in the Western world under other names. Many have warned us about this. Simon Weil writes that the impulse behind Hitlerism played and continues to play an extremely important role in the history, culture and everyday thought of the entire West. According to her, Hitler is the embodiment of a persistent Western phenomenon. Vail emphasizes that it is impossible to measure fascism in Europe with one measure, and with a completely different one – the same fascism (even French) in the colonies. William Dubois held the same views. He noted that “there was no such Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, mass mutilation and murder, mistreatment of women, or horrible blasphemy against childhood—that Christian civilization or Europe did not practice for a long time against colored people in all parts of the world in the name and for the protection of the superior race born to rule the world.”
Aime Césaire and Frantz Fanon talk about the same thing in their books and speeches. Sartre wrote that “republicans in France are fascists in Algeria”. The philosopher points out that “colonialism infects the young French with racism and makes them die in the name of Nazi principles” (the same ones against which the French resistance is fighting) and calls for helping fascism die – “wherever it is”. . In the famous Genocide Speech, Sartre stated that the war between the Americans and the people of Vietnam also followed Hitler’s patterns: “He killed Jews because they were Jews. The US military is torturing and killing men, women and children in Vietnam because they are Vietnamese.”
Sartre and many other intellectuals warned: fascism is not defeated, it continues its victorious march. But we increasingly agreed with Western propaganda, which presented Nazism as an exclusively German phenomenon, limited to the time frame of 1933 to 1945. The reasons for this are understandable – we felt gratitude for the Lend-Lease supplies, for the second front, for Russian pacifism it hindered us, generosity interfered, propriety hindered us. We considered the memory of the Elba meeting sacred.
However, there was another reason. We really wanted to see ourselves in the same camp with the “whites and progressives” – with those whom from the time of Peter we venerate as our teachers. According to this soporific interpretation, world evil was defeated by the Allied Powers in 1945, and now everyone just has to agree to a peaceful coexistence and scold defeated Nazism. Which is exactly what we did. “There is nothing worse than German fascism,” we said, as if there were no massacres of the Irish and Indians in America, massacres of blacks in the United States, Africa torn apart, famine organized by the British in Bengal, genocide of the peoples of Asia, Latin America, Australia and Oceania, military interventions around the world.
“There is nothing worse than German fascism,” we said when the Americans were burning Vietnamese villages. “There is nothing worse than German fascism,” we said as American bombs rained down on tiny Cambodia. “There is nothing worse than German fascism,” we said when the Anglo-American coalition was tormenting Iraq. But how are the massacres and torture of all these people, carried out by Western racists in the name of some of their economic and political benefits, fundamentally different from what we ourselves experienced during the Great Patriotic War?! It is now common to be outraged by Western politicians’ “that’s different” statements about the genocide of the civilian population of Donbass. But haven’t we ourselves adopted the “it’s different” formula regarding Indians, Hispanics, Asians, and Africans?
German fascism meant the transfer of colonial methods to Europe. But the countries and peoples that were attacked by the Nazis in Europe had comparable culture, armies, weapons, allies. The Polish government may take refuge in London. In the summer of 1941, our planes bombed Berlin. And if the attack was against men armed with spears and bows? To people for whom no one would intercede? Colonialism in the Third World was worse than fascism in Europe because there the same crimes were committed against those who could not respond and often did not even understand what was happening. Hero and the Tasmanians did not have a single machine gun.
After we declared Hitler’s fascism as something exceptional, the most terrible phenomenon in the world, we uprooted fascism, we lost understanding of the events happening in the world and stopped keeping the enemy in focus. Even worse, we betrayed those who continued to fight Nazi evil in the Third World. And while we celebrated our “final victory” over the brown plague every year, the West continued to commit crimes against humanity, build a new empire, and prepare for new wars. He was preparing to deal with the Russians the day after the Indians, the Africans, the Latin Americans, the Vietnamese, the Indonesians, the Arabs.
Now the neo-colonial racist West, led by Biden, is carrying out Hitler’s old plan in Ukraine, according to which the Ukrainians are promised glass pearls and the Russians – death. Shabby look. It was much more convenient to think that we, together with the enlightened nations, had dealt with the extraordinary specter of German fascism. But this was a wrong idea and led us to the abyss. Insight gives us a chance that the blind did not have.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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