President Obama's Victory Day Rudeness: I Apologize for My Country's Scorn of Living Russians and Soviet Dead

Mothers and daughters became Soviet warriors. (Click image to view it full size.)

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I AM ASHAMED of how those who rule the Imperial United States and its European satrapies dishonored the millions of Soviet men, women and children who were slain in the epic struggle to save the world from Nazism.

I am ashamed of how we who have never yet suffered comparable invasion  have been taught to belittle the breathtaking sacrifices of those who fought and died to defeat the most obviously sadistic invader our unspeakably savage era has thus far produced. I am ashamed of the politics of xenophobia and greed that demand we disdain fellow humans we should instead hail as heroes and heroines, not just of their own Motherland but of all humanity.

Behind my shame at our overlords' unconscionable bad manners on this particular Victory Day is my far greater shame at how we in the United States have allowed our once-exemplary representative democracy to be reduced to an oligarchy of global oppression and environmental ruination.

I am especially ashamed of how its tyrannies are perpetuated by a white electorate so blinded by racial, socioeconomic and religious hatreds,  it seems idiotic to imagine it will ever stop voting against its own well-being. 

But my country has become so much a police-state, I dare not continue without affirming my shame is the shame of a patriot – that if I did not love my country, I would not so grieve its betrayal. I would not denounce the capitalist One Percent and their political vassals for looting my country into poverty. I would not damn the One Percent's ballot-box disciples for voting my country into ruin merely to inflict suffering on those whose race or ethnicity or gender or sexuality they despise. If I did not love my country, I would not be so appalled by the electronic concentration camp  to which it has been reduced by these betrayers of liberty and their wanton perversions of democratic process.

Nor dare I rationally hope for liberation in what remains of my lifetime. The U.S. Ruling Class is protected by technologies of surveillance and retaliation we can scarcely imagine. Armed with powers earlier generations attributed only to god, it is combining the doctrines of Ayn Rand economics, U.S. exceptionalism and divine-right imperialism into a new and uniquely USian form of Nazism – a Nazism in which absolute power rests not with a single despot but with an infinitely despotic cabal of corporate executives.

The pivotal question of our time, brought into sharp focus by the events in Ukraine, is therefore whether this newest, U.S.-sponsored onslaught of the human penchant for moral imbecility can be brought to bay before its proponents literally nuke the world into a radioactive cinder. 

Yet even if we somehow succeed in building a successful resistance, it may already be too late for our species and this planet as we know it. Indeed it is entirely conceivable some sure but thus far secret knowledge of ourselves as denizens of a dying world is what is fueling the unrelenting greed of the One Percent – a greed so limitless it has no known precedent in human experience.

Is this what is happening? Have the One Percenters been reliably informed their deadly contempt for Nature commanded by the Abrahamic religions has already doomed us? Is the One Percent's intent now merely to see who can collect the most wealth before the too-long-ignored-and-despised Mother Earth sounds the final buzzer? 

Only the darkest and most hopeless of times could produce such otherwise-unthinkable thoughts. And that – the darkest most hopeless time in our species' history – is the time in which we are cursed to live and challenged to do whatever we can to resist the encroaching darkness.

Another dark time, nearly as dark and hopeless as the present, were the months immediately after Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on the Summer Solstice of 1941.

But the Red Army and the Soviet people fought back valiantly, eventually defeating what was then the best trained, most technologically advanced war machine on Earth. 

Let us therefore never forget their victory came at a terrible price – their combined military and civilian deaths now estimated to be as many as 43.3 million. (Yes, this is the same material linked in my second paragraph above. But the source for the 43.3 million figure is the researcher Boris Sokolov, for whom you must scroll far down the text.)

All such numbers are inconceivable unless we restate them in quantities we can envision. 

Picture a man or a woman or a child. Then picture that person dead. Picture a corpse.

If you accept Sokolov's estimate (which I do), picture that corpse multiplied 43.3 million times. Forty-three-point-three million is the present-day population of five cities the size of London. Or five the size of New York City. Or four the size of Moscow. Now try to envision these entire municipalities filled with naught but corpses – decomposing bodies that were once living men, women and children, folks with all the pleasures and pains and ambitions and desires and other emotions you or I or anyone has.

That's what it cost the Soviet Union to save us from the Nazis.

But the most important element in this recitation of grim facts is that the Soviet people prevailed – and that by prevailing they saved us all, every man woman and child now alive – from those earlier forms of fascism and Nazism personified by Mussolini and Hitler. (Yes, Fascist Italy did indeed aid Nazi Germany  in the invasion of the Soviet Union.)

The English-language service of the Russian state television network, RT, celebrates this 70th anniversary of the Soviet triumph with a Victory Day program  so thoughtfully scripted it should be preserved and issued as a DVD. It is a valuable historical document, and if it is available, I will add it to my own personal library. 

RT's coverage gives us the obligatory summaries of the fighting but also offers vital glimpses of social history – stories of the people and how they coped with the stresses of enemy invasion.

It includes a sampling of the often poignant poetry of Russian wartime popular music. It is a musical literature utterly unlike the self-consciously happy-faced, “Boogie-Woogie Bugle-Boy-of-Company-B” trivializations with which we in the wartime U.S. were sedated. But you'll have to wait a bit for all the RT material to load, and then you'll have to scroll down to its last pages.

The songs are each accompanied by translations into English, and two are especially moving. One is called “White Cranes”:  “Sometimes it seems to me each fallen soldier/ That never came back from fields of gore/ In fact did never perish as they told you/ But turned into a crane as white as snow.” The other is “Wait for Me”: “That in the midst of gunfire/ It was your waiting for me/ That saved my life.”

Also especially relevant on this occasion is the 2010 Russian film entitled Brestskaya Krepost – “Brest Fortress” in English – that tells the heartrending stories of some of the soldiers and civilians, among them three women, who fought in the battle that was the Soviet equivalent of our Pearl Harbor and Wake Island battles combined.

Available as a DVD with some versions subtitled in English, it is notably unlike most Hollywood war films in that it neither sanitizes the horrors of the battlefield nor belabors the audience with pro-war propaganda.

The ability of Russian cinematographers to depict horrendous violence without simultaneously glorifying it is a skill that has apparently been carefully denied their U.S. counterparts. But that should surprise no one who understands that in the new imperial U.S. oligarchy, government at every level and all its mainstream informational media (including film producers, textbook publishers and advertising agencies), are owned and controlled by the same self-serving inner circle of voraciously capitalist One Percenters.

Nor is there any doubting the diabolical, Josef-Goebbels-inspired efficacy of the uniquely privatized U.S. government propaganda apparatus that has been spawned by the One Percent's seizure of power. The greed and selfishness the propaganda so successfully evokes was undoubtedly a major if undocumented factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prepared in accordance with state-of-the-art psychological research, its influence is so irresistible, it has already convinced the nominally well-informed people of Western Europe to accept the Big Lie World War II was single-handedly won by the United States. 

This same process of de facto psychological warfare, the relentless dumbing-down I label “moronation,” is what sustains Moron Nation – that portion of the U.S. electorate which is ever more militantly white, theocratically Christian, aggressively reactionary and therefore ever more inclined to embrace a uniquely USian, Ayn Rand version of Nazism. Its emergent ideology is already apparent, not only in the use of “austerity” as a euphemism for calculatedly genocidal elimination of social services, but in a local war against public-transport users I wrote about extensively earlier in this decade.

Now of course the One Percent's (allegedly unofficial) propaganda machine – which in truth is as potent and functionally official as Goebbels' own Ministry of Propaganda – is turning not just its assault weapons but its heaviest Joe McCarthy siege guns on anyone of significance who dares dispute the empire's portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine.

Quoth the ever-reliable Robert Parry via a Consortium News exclusive:

U.S.-taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty has a checkered history that includes hiring Nazi sympathizers as Cold War commentators. Now, one of its current writers has used the platform to bash an American scholar who won’t join Official Washington’s “group think” on Ukraine.

That follows Parry's earlier report detailing how the group-thinkers insist on describing the deadly ramrodding of Ayn Rand capitalist savagery down post-Soviet Russian throats as nothing more than “growing pains” intended “to help (these people) attain a better life.”

Which suggests another presumably unthinkable thought:

Given its context of economic warfare with imperialistic intent, could it be the real reason Obama snubbed the Russian people and their Victory Day celebration is that he cannot agree with what it celebrates?

Remember it was the immediate ancestry of the present-day One Percent that tried via the Bankers Plot of 1934  to join the U.S. to the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

Perhaps then Obama is no different from so many other U.S. politicians in harboring a clandestine, beyond-top-secret commitment to the Nazi resurgence already evident in the Western Ukraine and unquestionably lurking in the Moron Nation shadows of the USian Homeland as well.

After all, what is Nazism – particularly with its profit-expanding policies of slave labor and the extermination of anyone no longer exploitable for profit – but the ultimate form of capitalism?

LB/3-10 May 2015

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