Interesting opinion from Mirko from the Ahí Les Va channel that I want to share:
Can you imagine commemorative events about the Normandy landings in which representatives of the United States were prohibited from attending? Or about the liberation of Auschwitz, but leaving Russia out? The first is unimaginable. The second thing happened just a few days ago…
On January 27, 1945, Soviet Union soldiers liberated the Auschwich Nazi death camp; Since that date is commemorated internationally, Russia has logically always been present at the events of the so-called Holocaust Memorial Day … until now, 2023.
Those responsible for the museum that organizes the commemorative ceremony located in Auschwich, Poland, decided to exclude Russia from this edition due to the current conflict with Ukraine.
To put it a bit in its historical context, excluding Russia from an event on Auschwich is like excluding the United States or the United Kingdom from the commemorative events of the Normandy landings, although this is not the first Western attempt to rewrite the history of World War II. World War, much less the last one, it is difficult to find better or rather worse examples.
When the Red Army entered the sadly most famous compound of Nazi genocide, a few thousand prisoners remained, most of them malnourished and seriously ill. During the previous five years in Auschwitz a policy of systematic extermination had been carried out that left more than a million victims (not only Jews, Gypsies, etc.).
For decades, grudgingly perhaps, not too enthusiastically of course, the leading role of the Soviet Union or Russia as the largest of its members in liberating the place of Third Reich crimes has tiptoed across the Western mainstream media. Although there have been attempts with special impetus and growing tolerance since 2014 after the Euromaidan in Ukraine and the start of the armed conflict in Donbass, the then Ukrainian Prime Minister declared on German television that it was the USSR that invaded Germany on the eve of Auschwitz and the Polish foreign minister tried to downplay Russia’s role in liberating the death camp by saying that most of the Soviet soldiers who entered there were Ukrainians, not Russians…
Which, from a historical point of view, is a bit like saying if the majority of the US military who fought Nazism in Europe were Californians, Texans or Wisconsin…
The desire to relegate the Soviet Union in general and Russia in particular from its historical role vis-à-vis Nazi Germany is not something new; but today they reach unprecedented levels and no, they have nothing to do with Moscow’s role in the war in Ukraine, if that were the case the United States or the United Kingdom would have been excluded from similar commemorative events for their role in Iraq Afghanistan or France for theirs in Libya or Israel for their actions in Palestine or Ukraine itself, whose authorities since 2014 have not stopped openly glorifying Nazi figures such as Stepan Bandera, recognized as a Nazi collaborator by the European Union itself.
As the final expression of this unipolar world in which we have lived and which refuses to change, the US government is not only not excluded from the commemorative events on Hiroshima O Nagasaki but is a regular guest. The West has been seeking to distort the role of the USSR in the defeat of Nazism for some time because it finds it essential to justify and promote its present and future geopolitical actions but in line with its foreign policy, but Europe is strange that it does not even seek to do so for its own benefit but rather of those who dictate that policy of excluding a nation that fought Nazism from commemorative events on World War II.
It is not so much a lack of respect for the present, but above all for the past, hundreds of thousands of American, British, Polish or French soldiers who gave their lives for the defeat of Hitler deserve respect and honor forever, regardless of any event carried out by their countries later but apparently for those who today seek to rewrite history the lives of millions of Russians and Soviets do not deserve the same consideration.
