Comment on the situation in Ukraine and the growing confrontation between NATO and Russia

Followed by

1. Historical note Ukrainian fascists in Normandy – 115,500 Osttroopen fought the allied landing
2. Why D-Day took place in 1944 – On the defeat of fascism in the Second World War

Dear Friends, Sisters and Brothers,

Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of D-Day. The leaders of all the major nations who fought in the European theatre of the Second World War will take part in ceremonies in Normandy, where the Western allies launched a “second front” against Hitler that ended eleven months later with the surrender of Nazi Germany.

The situation today is marred by a serious military rift among the allied nations who defeated fascism. The Harper government is sending war planes and troops to Eastern Europe as part of the NATO military alliance’s growing military confrontation with Russia. NATO is conducting exercises aimed against Russia.

The West is accused of engineering the coup against Ukraine’s elected government on February 22. The new regime promptly passed laws eliminating recognition of the Russian language spoken by 8 million of its citizens and launched a violent “anti-terrorist” campaign where they live. Many Russian speakers and their allies boycotted Ukraine’s May 25 presidential election, not just in the Eastern region, but across the country.

Russia is accused of annexing Crimea, where according to credible reports people voted overwhelmingly to escape Ukraine by joining Russia. Of course, Harper’s narrative about Crimea is totally different. But there are other important facts.

In Kiev, pro-fascist armed groups are tightening their grip on power through “lustration” (banning people from politics), taking steps to ban and physically eliminate the Communist Party of Ukraine (the main working class party), and a full-scale civil war against the Russian minority.

The parties that hold power in Kiev are so far-right they honour Ukrainian Nazi leaders in the Second World War as heroes.

The massive propaganda campaign about the situation in Ukraine needs to be countered by the truth and solidarity with Ukraine’s anti-fascist forces.

The Russian minority in Ukraine has a perfect right to vote for separation, and they have. That does not make them terrorists.

By comparison, the Harper government calls people “terrorists” if they support Aboriginal rights and environmental protection. The slur is just as dishonest and potentially dangerous as the one used by the Kiev government.

If Quebec voted to leave Canada, that does not make the people of Quebec terrorists. Yet Harper fully backs the Kiev regime which calls Russians “terrorists” because they voted to leave Ukraine. In April, Kiev made it a serious criminal offence to advocate separatism.

If the Kiev regime would recognize the right of national self-determination, there would be no civil war in Ukraine. It is a right won at the cost of defeating fascism, and is enshrined in the United Nations’ Charter.

Supporting Kiev with guns, training and dishonest propaganda, Western leaders are supporting the fascist ideology behind the regime’s genocidal war against Russians in Ukraine taking place right now.

It makes me wonder which veterans Ukraine’s president-elect Poroshenko will be honouring in Normandy tomorrow. The historical fact that many Ukrainians fought against the Western allies in Normandy is noted below.

In Solidarity,
Darrell Rankin
Manitoba office, Communist Party of Canada

1. Ukrainian fascists in Normandy
Ukraine’s new president Petro Poroshenko, elected in an unconstitutional poll boycotted by people across the country, and Russian president Vladimir Putin will attend the 70th anniversary commemoration of D-Day in Normandy. Most of these nations’ soldiers died fighting fascism together on the Eastern front, far from Normandy.

It may be a chance to remember the bond these nations once had in the common fight against fascism, but the glorification of Nazi Ukrainian war criminals in the Western regions of Ukraine makes that hope very remote.

Still, it is a chance for Putin and Poroshenko to exchange views on ending Ukraine’s campaign against the Russian separatists and mis-named terrorists in Eastern Ukraine. Many people there boycotted the elections and feel their elected government was stolen through the February 22 coup, and their protests against the coup should not make them “terrorists.”

Poroshenko may acknowledge that many Ukrainian fascists died fighting to stop the allied landings on D-Day. Some Russian fascists probably also fought in Normandy, but in far fewer numbers.

In 1943, Hitler transferred many Osttruppen (low-level military units comprised of Slavs) to Western Europe, especially France, for counter-insurgency operations.

According to Prof. Mark Elliott, “There were 115,500 dug in on D-Day, 6 June 1944… American intelligence had amassed voluminous data on the Osttruppen – not only head counts, but also precise knowledge of unit movements, current locations, even troop morale, but this information rarely filtered down to the front-line units , who were bewildered to encounter German POWs who could not speak German.” (1)

Elliott notes that a large portion of the Osttruppen were comprised of Ukrainians for a number of reasons, including that a comparatively large portion of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was occupied compared to the Russian SSR.

Elliott’s figure is a summary one, so to obtain more detailed numbers a researcher would have to access the CIA records cited in Elliott’s article.

(1) Mark R. Elliott, “Soviet Military Collaborators during World War II,” Ukraine during World War II, ed. Yury Boshyk (Canadian institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1986: Edmonton), p. 97.

2. Why D-Day took place in June, 1944
I’m re-sending an article with historical facts why the Western allies failed to open a second front against Hitler Germany until three years after Germany invaded Russia (June 1941).

Simply put, the Western allies waited for the Soviet Union to do most of the fighting against Hitler Germany. The United States and Canada especially benefited from this arrangement. For example, in the 1940s Canada was the world’s third largest exporter of capital (Andrei Gromyko, The Overseas Expansion of Capital (Moscow: 1982). p. 33.)

Sixtieth Anniversary of the Victory over Fascism in Europe
by Darrell Rankin, People’s Voice, May 16, 2005
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/Pv16ma05.html#fascismEurope

“If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way we let them kill as many as possible.”
– Harry S. Truman, June 23, 1941

* * * *
By saying the United States might work with Nazi Germany to fight the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, U.S. Senator Truman of Missouri was expressing a popular view in the U.S. ruling class. Truman made his remark to the New York Times days after Hitler launched his brutal and terrible invasion of the USSR with over 3 million soldiers and 3,300 tanks.

Truman’s wish was tragically fulfilled. By the end of the Second World War in Europe on May 8, 1945 some twenty-five million Soviet citizens had perished, half of the war’s total dead. Germany’s losses were close to six million people, victims both of war and German imperialism’s murderous fascist ideology, laced with Aryan racial superiority and anti-communism.

Like Truman, U.S. imperialism had no great or principled concern to avert a world war. War would allow the U.S. to end up as the world’s only superpower. And in common cause with Hitler, war would deal a deadly blow against the world’s first socialist state, the USSR.

Many of the finest communists in the twentieth century laid down their lives in the battle against fascism. But Truman ended the war as the president of the United States. Months later he was helping to spark the Cold War and destroy the united front with the USSR that had defeated German fascism.

Revisionist history portrays the U.S. as the most important liberator of Europe and as a firm ally in the struggle against Nazi Germany, a view constantly nurtured by movies, right-wing politicians and the corporate media. Many young people believe that the USSR was allied with Nazi Germany, or that the U.S., Britain and Canada fought against the USSR in the Second World War.

The truth is that the U.S. and Britain were Germany’s main imperialist rivals. Their leaders used the war to weaken both Germany and the USSR, postponing a major “second front” against Hitler until June, 1944. A war that could have ended in 1943 dragged on. Millions more lost their lives on the “Eastern Front” – a struggle that in intensity and loss is incomparable in all of human history.

According to Victor Falin, a doctor of historical sciences, “If it had not been for (the) delays with the opening of the second front, there would have been 10-12 million fewer victims among the Soviet people and the allies, especially in occupied Europe. There would not even have been Auschwitz, for it began working actively only in 1944.”

It was the USSR that broke Nazi Germany’s military might. The USSR emerged from the Second World War with losses greater than any other country, but with the love and political support of people around the world who recognized truthfully the country’s leading role in the defeat of fascism.

The world’s peoples were saddened and inspired by the sacrifice made by the USSR, which lost the best sons and daughters of its working class. They supported the creation in 1945 of the United Nations, whose charter expresses determination “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

The United Nations Charter enshrined respect for the obligations of international law, prevention of war and the self-determination of peoples; later resolutions added the obligation of disarmament. These mainly new fundamental principles of international law were especially appreciated in nations liberated from fascism by the Soviet army and in nations still languishing under the colonialism of the victorious imperialist powers.

This democratic and human legacy of the Second World War was never respected or truly supported by the imperialist countries. Today these same imperialist countries are locked in constant rivalry for markets and resources, they have weapons far more dangerous than in 1945, they are adopting new military doctrines that reject international law, and they have leaders who ought to be tried as war criminals for aggressions against Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and a number of other countries.

Like sixty years ago, alarming ideas of using war for narrow interests are very alive in ruling circles of all the imperialist countries. Militarism is gaining alongside imperialism’s record of crisis and failure. But resistance to the imperialist war danger is growing throughout the world, including in the working class of imperialist countries.

Unity, action and support for the great democratic legacies of the Second World War will take the world’s peoples away from the imperialist nightmare, a direction especially important for the international working class.

Respect for international law, general disarmament, the prevention of war, and respect for state sovereignty and self-determination of peoples – all these are needed more than ever as humanity is crushed by imperialism’s unsolvable crisis, and they show the way forward to a world of far greater justice, where peace and socialism prevail.