The Baltics and Ukraine: then as now
How imperialism nurtures fascist seedlings
Introduction
Both Ukraine and the Baltic states experienced vast antisemitic pogroms, extermination of other minority communities, including Roma and Poles. Both Ukraine and the Baltic states heavily collaborated with their Nazi rulers, and some had homegrown tyrants at least 10 years earlier than Operation Barbarossa. All are nowadays heavily subsidised by NATO, all heavily discriminate against Russian minorities and the Russian language and all are intensely Russophobic to the point of absurdity.
The Communist Party is partly banned in the Baltics, as are sometimes even the Socialists, and yet both are forced to support annexation to NATO, as dissent on this issue is punishable by prison terms. Political prisoners are growing in number and there are few legal defences available.
Claire Daly, a Euro MP, has publicised the case of a notable Lithuanian dissenter, Algirdas Paleckis, in the European parliament and visited him in prison. The accused had at one time taken the state authorities to court regarding a false flag provocation that took place in 1991 and resulted in deaths. He had proved by ballistic evidence analysis that it had been a fabricated operation. Subsequently Paleckis was arrested on trumped up charges of espionage.
In all respects, on a legal and information level, Lithuania has taken a sharp turn to authoritarianism. That is reflected on a cultural level too. As in Ukraine, de-Russification involves the ban on all aspects of culture – literature, ballet, the visual arts and religion. The persecution of the Orthodox church in the Ukraine for instance is well known.
In Lithuania there is a neo-pagan quasi-religious movement, Romuva, whose leader is Jonas Vaiskunas. He is also a politician belonging to the Lithuanian Nationalist and Republican Union whose symbol bears 3 towers. The party itself claims to be constructed on values that are fully inherited from the Lithuanian Nationalist Union of the 1940s, which bears an identical sign with the addition of a swastika. It is claimed that use of the swastika has ancestral roots – although the Romuva cult had never been active before the emergence of the Nazis. By contrast any family displaying a ribbon of St. George in commemoration of fallen WWII anti-fascist soldiers, or a red flag with a hammer and sickle, risks immediate arrest. The sacredness of the swastika in Lithuania parallels the KKK ritual of burning crosses. Crude symbolism is essential in order to set oneself apart and to consolidate unity. The SS too, were anxious to ditch Christian values of tolerance and forgiveness to create a new species of implacable men to inhabit their 'thousand-year' Reich. They also revived paganism in Germany utilising fictitious ceremonials to construe a non-existent glorious past. The symbol for Romuva itself is a not too subtle – a Swastika composed of criss-crossed snakes.
In a more contemporary setting, it is worth mentioning NAFO. It stands for North Atlantic Fellas Organisation. Its first summit was hosted by the Lithuanian foreign minister, Landbergis. This internet-based instrument of Western propaganda claims the incompatibility of this nation with its Russian neighbours on a supposed racial basis, using the vilest of terms. It is a spiral of hate, sarcasm and pitiless cynicism that assumes the form of a competition. It constitutes a farcical level of cultural debasement of which the West should be really ashamed. For instance, when a Russian tourist was mauled to death by a shark in the Egyptian Red Sea, NAFO organised a celebratory conference in the presence of US and Lithuanian officials, with Kaja Kallas (Estonian PM at the time) video-linked, sporting shark hats, shark toys and an inflatable shark balloon on the stage.
In Latvia, the Russian section of the electorate, whilst constituting nearly 40% of the population, has only one elder MP, Tatiana Zdanova, the child of a Holocaust survivor, and she is regularly attacked in the press and accused of spying for Russia. In fact, just speaking Russian in parliament over there is asking for expulsion. Such is the climate of apartheid in that country.
In Estonia most of the Russians, who constitute a 20% minority, are either deprived of a passport, or issued one branded "alien” – an echo of past Nazi laws pertinent to the Jewish minority. The Russians have no representation in parliament; they are not allowed to vote unless they pass draconian discriminatory Estonian or Latvian language examinations. In both these countries this minority, unless able to prove residence by grandparents in the pre-WW2 period, have no rights whatsoever, often excluded from employment, education and relegated to life in a ghetto. The Karosta documentary, once available on Netflix, illustrates the point that here in Europe they are victimised socially in a manifest form of apartheid. You hear these sad stories from Russo-Latvian refugees. Many have come to Britain seeking employment.
It is not that the Baltic populations are intrinsically ill-intentioned, but that their governments are totally subservient and hijacked by Anglo-American oligarchies and interests, their economies dependent on NATO subsidies now that they are cut off from their former trading partners and allies, in a state of freefall, so that focussing on a scapegoat, an evil enemy from within, distracts the population from realising the cumulative failures of their corrupt rulers. This dependency on NATO by the Baltic states, is also the cause of an enormous increase of expenditure by the British government of public money channelled through the taxation system. It is the main reason for the recent cuts in disability allowance here in the UK. In the process of building for war with Russia, any rail project, any new road or reinforced bridge constructed in the Baltics has a military objective.
These new routes, geared to the transport of tanks and heavy armaments, lead nowhere… other than to obscure little villages in forests and marshland on the Russian borders. Recently some US tank drivers perished there by drowning (see Tiffany Wertheimer, ‘Bodies of three missing US soldiers found in Lithuania’, BBC News, 31 March 2025).
As in the Ukraine, the rate of emigration from the Baltics is very high: in Lithuania alone, approximately 1 million people were lost to emigration following the collapse of the Soviet Union, hitting 25%, of the population even without a war (see Barbora Turauskaitė, ‘Lithuania lost a million citizens to emigration. How did it happen?’, LRT.lt, 4 May 2024). Emigration from Lithuania topped the European figures between 2000-17.
It seems blatantly obvious that these countries are destined to become a possible focus for war in the future. The evil intent is manifest and reflected in the speeches of their obnoxious politicians (not just Kaja Kallas). For the Baltics the focus must be predominantly on the present situation. However, its past, which shares many features with Ukraine, must provide us with the key to better understanding of present and future developments in this likely theatre of war.
In Lithuania, after a brief period of independence following the Russian revolution of 1917, a coup d'etat deposed a democratically elected left-wing coalition in 1927 and the top leaders of the Communist Party were hanged or shot, including Dr. Karolis Pozela, who never resided in Russia, but studied medicine in Estonia. A dictatorship ensued lasting more than a decade.
Pogroms in Lithuania
Soviet Russia, anxious to ensure Lithuania could not be used as a launchpad for hostilities against it, incorporated Lithuania in 1940 despite being aware of the reactionary presence in the country. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, its Nazi troops advanced into Lithuania, emboldening local right-wing militants who demonstrated an exceptional level of collaborationism by carrying out a massacre of Jews in the city of Kaunas.
Several books by racist politicians such as Noreika and Skirpa had been written in advance to exhort hatred towards foreigners and a boycott of Jews, both businesswise and on a personal level. One such was the 1933 publication by Jonas Noreika of Hold your head high, Lithuanians. Even before the Germans arrived, a rabbi had had his head sawn off over a Talmud on 25 June 1941 in the village of Slobodka.
In the following two days, in the Lietukis Garage in Kaunas, Algirdas Klimaitis, one of the leaders of the Lithuanian Activist Front, burst the intestines and lungs of Jewish people with water and air hoses, used a long metal bar to bash heads and finally climbed over a large pile of Jewish corpses to play the national anthem of Lithuania on the accordion. He thereafter bore the nickname of 'death dealer'. A carnival atmosphere pervaded the town on that day. Rounds of applause greeted each killing. Children who were carried on their parents’ backs to gain a better view, or who clambered on chairs and crates, were psychologically scarred by the experience and later in their lives provided vital testimony of these events.
Kaunas exemplified the utmost cruelty that could be achieved with collaborationism, and subsequently larger scale massacres took place in the very same town in the 9th Fort under German supervision, carried out by freshly recruited local militias. Jews had begun to be shipped there from abroad. A Rothschild distant relative from Paris, for example, was murdered in Kaunas alongside trainloads of other victims shipped from France.
The wide scale strategy of extermination on a racial basis had begun in Europe with the tacit approval of large sections of the Lithuanian population. The Germans amply demonstrated they could count on their complicity and quickly armed tens of thousands of recruits, who never fired a bullet in the direction of their masters.
Massacres of Jews by lynching took place shortly afterwards in western Ukraine. In 1941, Lviv children were photographed pursuing elderly women with sticks, participating in beatings and witnessing repeated rapes until these women died.
In Kiev the Baby Yar ravine became a mass tomb for more than a hundred thousand Jewish people. Evgheni Evtushenko wrote a celebrated poem, and Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his 13th symphony, in response to these vile atrocities. These artworks per se represent some of the highest denunciations of anti-Semitism ever made, equivalent to E Zola’s, J'accuse, both emanating from the Soviet Union. Ukrainian guards in German uniforms carried out most of the killings, according to the few survivors, who all stated, "They spoke Ukrainian excellently". The selected victims included Jews, Roma, Communists, Russians, all of them ordinary Soviet citizens whom the previous government had recognised as equals. All the communists were killed, and the atmosphere of cosmopolitanism that so much enriches a society in all fields of knowledge – precisely what made semi-literate nationalists vent their anger and frustration – was wiped out in just a few days. Provincialism, obsequiousness, subservience, narrow-mindedness, became dominant features of such societies – a state of affairs that still blights a large section of the population in those lands.
The filming of these pogroms served the propaganda purpose of demonstrating how much Jewish people were hated in other countries besides Germany and laid the foundation for establishing gas chambers and crematoriums in eastern Europe. These pogroms, carried out by civilians in the initial phase, were filmed by German crews mainly in Kaunas Lithuania, Lviv in Ukraine and on Latvian beaches.
Vilnius was a town historically populated by Jews and Poles. The Jewish presence dated from the 13th century. What occurred there is another infamous example. Fewer than 10% of the population were listed as Lithuanians before 1941 as Jews were effectively denied citizenship. Napoleon had called Vilnius "the Jerusalem of the north" owing to the large presence of Ashkenazis, of whom a third were Polish. Yiddish and Polish were widely spoken and schools operated in those languages. After 1941 the Lithuanian presence in town rocketed to 100% as there were no Jews left. The policy of genocide carried out there was on the largest of scales.
The period in history preceding gassing and incineration was denominated "Holocaust by bullet". This phase alone cost 1.5 million lives and was mostly carried out by Ukrainian OUN Banderites. By contrast, Lithuania holds one of the largest records of genocide in human history by percentage: 96.4 % of the Jewish population was obliterated. All this in a tiny country.
Militias that were formed later in time were assigned to guard the most notorious gas-operated extermination camps. Those were composed of Trawniki men (after a village in Poland) recruited from Baltic and Ukrainian volunteers. Belorussia suffered at the hands of Lithuanian and Ukrainian auxiliaries, as Slovakia did subsequently from the SS Galicia division of western Ukrainians.
Vilnius's nearby forest at Ponary (Paneriai) was one of the largest unmarked burial sites in the world, holding nearly as many victims as Hiroshima. To save bullets, mothers were lined up and shot holding babies or children, then buried whether dead or still alive. When the slaughter was paused. during the day, and more so in the evenings, the earth perceptively moved in waves resembling the sea… so many of the buried were still alive, so tractors were employed to complete the job by crushing. The additional testimonies on the mass murders carried out in the Lithuanian town of Shkud constitute a compilation of the vilest instincts ever recorded in human history.
It must be remembered that in Lithuania there was a shortage, not only of bullets for executions, but also of German operatives. Responsibility for these murders consequently falls squarely on the shoulders of the local militias and auxiliaries, even if only obeying orders.
Later, in Ponary (Lithuania), when the evidence had to be concealed as the Soviets were rapidly advancing, teams of 80 slave labourers, inevitably destined for elimination on completion of the task, were hurriedly recruited to exhume and burn the remains whilst a large mill was utilised to crush the bones into a fine dust. Very few of these teams escaped to tell the tale. They recounted how the bodies of mothers were dug up still clutching their children.
Today in Lithuania there is a 'Museum of Genocide' which is predominantly dedicated to the supposed ‘victims of Stalinism’ when it is widely known that such 'victims', more often than not, included murderers who killed to enrich themselves and/or intending to spend the rest of their lives in the house of the true victims. When the Red Army entered Vilnius, there were masses of cheering insincere Lithuanians, and nobody took any action to remove these illegal occupants from their stolen houses. In fact, it was the Soviets who granted Vilnius the status of Capital of Lithuania. Just a few years earlier, the fact that Jews had allegedly welcomed the Soviets had served as the main pretext to start the pogrom against them. Soviet justice followed when the local Nazi murderers initiated an immediate nationalistic war of 'resistance', resulting in thousands of Lithuanian deaths, through a terror campaign directed against the decent remaining sections of the population who disapproved of the thieving murderous nationalists. Deportations to Siberia did take place, never however in numbers matching those of the victims of the indiscriminate Nazi violence that had taken place.
In recent times an American writer of Lithuanian descent, Sivia Foti, researching the life of national 'hero' Gen. Jonas Noreika (her grandfather) for the purpose of writing a biography, stumbled across the evidence that he was not only renowned as an anti-Soviet fighter for independence, but that he had enriched himself after personally ordering the death of thousands of Jews in the town of Plunge. His antisemitic credentials were further bolstered by the emergence of his aforementioned publication. During the 1990s he was declared a hero regardless! Under the nom de guerre of General Storm, he had operated as leader of the Forest Brothers, which included some Latvian units, conducting an undercover guerilla war against the Soviets after liberation in 1945. The sole aim of this organisation was to safeguard property that had been stolen by brigands and murderers, not just by eliminating the handful of Jewish survivors, but also anyone who had been involved in the anti-fascist resistance, or sheltered fugitives, or could act as a potential witness.These people today constitute the role model for the current government's policies, as clearly there is no room there for feelings of guilt or remorse. We could argue that a very similar set of circumstances surround the case of Stepan Bandera and the OUN-B (the radical wing of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists).
Noreika was eventually caught and shot; his daughter published the damning biography and later disowned her grandfather.
Another case concerned Ruta Vanagaite, a popular Lithuanian actress turned writer. She also exposed those of her relatives who had perpetrated fascist assassinations during the war. Her books were consequently sequestrated, removed from bookshop shelves by legal decree and pulped. She received death threats and had to leave the country.
You know how bad a government really is when, as a last resort, the only people who speak up in the country are related to fascist assassins.
That was not the case for Giedirus Graubaskas, leader of the Socialistinis Liaudies Frontas. Revealing past criminal activities about the Forest Brothers in an article caused him to be subjected to prompt imprisonment and, to add insult to injury, compulsory psychiatric evaluation by order of the authorities!
It seems that in Lithuania no one is free to discuss historical matters that have been debated and presented in several publications and documentaries for over eight decades and openly in Western Europe. In fact, you may be deemed insane for doing so.
Most left-wing parties in the Baltics operate in a state of semi-clandestinity, targeted by specific legislations. In the Ukraine this persecution is complete. Membership of one such party can often lead to imprisonment and/or death in one form or another.
Though impeccably anti-Soviet, both Noreika and Bandera were imprisoned during the war by the Germans as anti-German nationalists, obtaining privileged prison terms, where they could learn foreign languages in preparation for a future exile. They were exceedingly well-fed and well-treated by their Nazi captors. Achille Starace, secretary of the PNF (Italian national fascist party) underwent the same treatment shortly before the war's end, only to be caught by Italian Communist Partisans whist jogging on the streets of newly liberated Milan, rapidly processed, and strung up alongside his boss Mussolini. Incidentally Bandera was also eliminated by the KGB using an innovative cyanide gas gun in Munich 1959. Just like his Baltic counterparts (partners in crime, the Forest Brothers), his OUN pursued the same path of anti-Soviet armed resistance with Anglo-American assistance, lasting well into the mid-1950s and costing approximately 35,000 lives.Thousands of these ex-Nazis later found refuge in various parts of the Anglosphere where they founded anti-communist communities. According to the podcaster historian Dr Mark Felton, the UK granted refuge to 8,000 Ukrainian Banderites, an astonishing figure considering that the much-publicised rescue of Jewish children in the 'Kindertransport' never exceeded 10,000. Tens of thousands Lithuanian collaborators also eventually found their way into the USA and Canada. These Ukro-Baltic-Nazi forces fostered the myth of a nation without a proper foundation, art, history and demographics, and based their existence and purpose solely on genocide.
The status of Ukrainian as a language separate from Russian remains dubious to this day, and even when artificially imbued with words of foreign provenance, or imported from a dialect spoken in the most isolated and remote corners of the land that still remains incomprehensible for the majority of a population who still prefer to speak Russian and still observe the ceremonial rites of the Russian Orthodox Church. The strict enforcement of the fringe Ukrainian language and culture by a sector of this non-homogeneous nation represents a form of apartheid. Zelensky himself, alongside his cabinet members, is unable to speak Ukrainian properly and resorts to speaking Russian in private.
Kazir Skirpa, the antisemitic Lithuanian leader, found refuge in the US post-war, spending the rest of his life working in the archives of the Library of Congress in Washington.It is alleged that he would have been able to access sensitive information there regarding his role in the pogroms and possible political and financial backing in the post war activities of the Forest Brothers. Still nowadays this institution constitutes one of the main documentary sources and venues for debates concerning the Holocaust in Lithuania. Following Skirpa's death, his body was claimed, repatriated, and the Lithuanian state accorded him a hero's burial. After writing his own version of Mein Kampf, after having been posted to Germany and cooperating with Hitler on the first stage of the final solution for more than 12% of his people, there is a Skirpa street in Vilnius, one in Kaunas and several statues/monuments dotted across the country. He is so popular with neo-Nazis, that he got the nickname of "Pepe the frog", a smiling green cartoon character popularised by the Alt-right in the US. Meanwhile, after a statue of Noreika was destroyed by an indignant member of the public who had acted after reading his granddaughter's biography, the Lithuanian Academy of Science in Vilnius undertook to preserve his memory, and a bigger and better monument was erected on the same spot, utilising a higher grade of marble with official consent, funded by nationalist organisations.
In a similar manner Bandera in Ukraine is honoured today by plaques, a monumental construction-cum-statue in Lviv, floodlit at night, plus various monuments dotted across the country. He is also honoured with street names including Kiev's main thoroughfare, Bandera Avenue (which ironically runs in the vicinity of Baby Yar). In addition schools, dedicated public buildings, institutions and academies are named after him.
All these assassins and profiteers are glorified and granted a hero's status in contemporary history textbooks in their respective countries. The legacy of hate is encouraged and embodied in barely concealed antisemitism on all matters concerning the past when the Jews constituted a large proportion of the population. Today, however, by contrast, these countries are Zionist Israel's biggest friends, providing full support for the criminal policies of extermination of Arabs in Gaza and the Middle East in general. Always on the wrong side of history, always with the oppressors, not the oppressed.
Rabid Russophobia and war mongering are now official government policy in Lithuania, with much of the legislation passed resembling the antisemitic Nazi laws of the 1940's. For instance, a Lithuanian park, Pakruojis Mansion, has banned Russians from even entering it. Security activates the moment a Russian word is uttered within the confines of its fences.
War memorials dedicated to those heroes who fought Hitlerite barbarity and his collaborationist armies, who included Lithuanians and Latvian socialists, are systematically torn down.
In Estonia, the first country to have been proudly declared "Juden Frei" (Free of Jews) by the Nazis in 1941 at the Wansee conference (thus setting a precedent for future exterminations), a monument has been erected to honour collaborationists, utilising the headstones of Red Army soldiers to construct the steps leading to the plinth – a vulgar and deliberate insult, to physically tread on their memory.
The war victims, including masses of innocent civilians who did not partake in any fighting, are truly forgotten whilst perpetrators are rewarded and idealised, except for that minority who were thankfully caught during Soviet times and transported to Siberia.
As previously mentioned with regard to the role of Western NATO imperialism, US/UK/Canadian backing had secured the provision of safe havens for entire regiments of Ukrainian war criminals, e.g., Ivan Marchenko-Demjanjuk, the guard known in Treblinka and Sobibor as "Ivan the terrible", who was given employment in Ohio as a car factory worker. Another proven example is the tumultuous standing ovation accorded by all parties in the Canadian House of Commons, including by President Trudeau, to the 91-year-old Yaroslav Hunka of the SS Galicia division on the 22/11/2023 for "fighting Russia" – a tribute given in the presence of the Ukrainian 'Jewish' president V Zelenski.
Hunka is very fit for his age. He wrote memoirs glorifying the Wermacht and belittling fallen Polish soldiers as cowards. In 2022, he travelled to Ontario for a protest against the SMO in Ukraine, deploring de-Nazification. His SS units participated in the massacre of some 1,200 Polish civilians at Huta Pieniacka. He never faced prosecution because in 1994 the Canadian government officially declared the annulment of any form of prosecution for Nazi war crimes.
A lavish building facing the MET museum (The Ukrainian Institute of America) is dedicated to the Nazi diaspora in New York, whilst near the Civic Hall in Los Angeles a monument bears the inscription "To the victims of Russian Communism". The “victims” in question are of course Nazis, imperialists, slave-driving landowners (kulaks), the White monarchist armies that regularly carried out pogroms and supported by the West during the Civil War.
As part of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation campaign that started the process of Soviet disintegration, most proven fascist murderers in Lithuania were after only 8 years returned from Siberia, although slightly slimmer. Only 28,000 died in exile. The number of departees never exceeded one third of those who actually died at the hands of the fascists. In total the number killed through collaborationism amounted to 250,000. Jews alone numbered more than 200,000. This proves that fascists would never consider sparing a life if given an opportunity. Of the handful of Jews who made it back alive (mostly resistance members fighting alongside the Red Army), very few were able to find any trace of their family members.
Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Lithuanian government prosecuted anti-fascist resistance survivors and fighters for alleged war crimes. One such case was that of Yishak Arad, a former partisan and a leading Holocaust scholar and historian. Post WWII he emigrated to Israel, becoming head of the prestigious Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and research centre. For some years, during Soviet times, he had been a leading Nazi-hunter, working with the NKVD, following the extermination of his family by the fascists. For this very reason he had an arrest warrrant issued against him from the country for which he fought so bravely. However, benefitting from his previous cooperation with the Soviets, he had reached Israel carrying a list of Lithuanian collaborationist perpetrators who had escaped abroad post WW2. He thus was able to provide additional evidence, documents and written testimonies to prove that several war criminals were still alive and residing in the West. As a consequence some ex-nazis had their US citizenship revoked and were unceremoniously deported back to Lithuania, where they received a warm welcome from the press and were never prosecuted.
By contrast many of the few who survived the Holocaust as partisans and even became prosecutors, motivated by the same experiences as Arad was, were subjected to persecution in the post-Soviet era. Such was the case of Joseph Melamed. In 2011, Lithuanian prosecutors arranged for Interpol to disturb Joe Melamed in his Tel Aviv office with allegations that he had “slandered” nine national “heroes” by exposing their alleged Holocaust collaboration in his 1999 book Crime and Punishment.
Memorials to the TRUE victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania do exist, mostly erected in Soviet times, which, whilst not highlighting the fact that most were secular Jews, categorises them as victims of Nazi barbarism, hence recognising them as equal citizens of Lithuania rather than "foreign guests" as the Nazis had previously defined them.
These monuments are regularly defaced, vandalised or obscured by bushes, trees or impenetrable grass. Buildings dedicated to the victims of the real nazi-fascist genocide are nothing more than wooden sheds in the periphery of towns, reliant on token EU or Israeli funding for research relating to ancestry. By contrast those dedicated to the FAKE genocide are a tourist showcase, housed in grandiose stone buildings in the centre of town.
The Israeli government, today a rabid lapdog of imperialism, deplored this situation for many years. However, the recent war in Ukraine and the consequent demonisation of Russia, has led it largely to abandon any pursuit of justice for their own ancestors.
As Ruta Vanagaite once said "There are no Jews left, but the country is still full of chirping Lithuanians". This implies that owing to the high survival rate of Lithuanians, compared to the Jewish members of the community, talk of a Stalinist genocide is demographically incomprehensible. It therefore dismisses the Double Genocide Theory that claims there was one genocide carried out by Germans against Jews, and a separate one against the Lithuanians carried out by the Russians. The purpose of this ‘theory’ is to equate Nazism with Communism whilst whitewashing the extensive participation of Lithuanians in the German genocide of Jews that killed ten times as many people as were rightly punished by the Soviets (mainly by deportation to Siberia) for their appalling crimes. Why should someone get away with murder after all ?
In Lithuania today, the perpetrators and their descendants can continue fulfilling their life in the pursuit of happiness, while for surviving victims and victims’ families there is no choice but to continue suffering in silence.
The myth of the Ukrainian famine also follows the same logic as the Lithuanian Double Genocide Theory.
The term HOLO-MODOR has been intentionally adopted by the Nazi diaspora in North America with the purpose of equating it to the similar sounding HOLO-CAUST, a fully documented genocide during which the Ukrainians played a major role, accounting for the murder of a good quarter of the Jews killed in Europe. The so-called ‘Holomodor’, however, involved unfortunate deaths from an unavoidable famine, which only rabid anti-communists could claim had been deliberately provoked by the Soviets. Fascists, however, claiming that Bolshevism was a Jewish project undertaken at the expense of all non-Jews, actually justified the pogroms they promulgated on the basis that it was revenge for the ‘Holodomor’! Yet how could Jews, Roma, Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Communists and Soviet citizens plus innocent elders, women and children be held responsible for a natural calamity like a famine on the basis of their race? Why did they have to pay with their life at the hands of a well-fed collaborationist militia ? On the basis of what uncontainable rage? At the end of the day, for a scoundrel intent on reaping a profit by looting and killing any excuse will do.
The term Holocaust has Greek roots (Holokaustron) meaning a sacrificial burning and was used in the Latin of the Middle Ages and old French. The Ukrainian version is an artificial combination of the words ‘hunger’ and ‘plague’ in that language, a word which only appeared in the 1970s. These words equate a famine to the crime of an intentionally planned murder by use of bullets, in order to confound and diminish responsibility. Holodomor is an obfuscation of the Holocaust, a construed word to hide a real crime.
Similarly the Black book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press in 1977 seems to have borrowed its title from the Black book of Soviet Jewry (Simply known as the ‘black book’) whose authors ,Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, were celebrated anti-fascist Soviet Jewish authors.This book is a compilation of genocidal crimes committed by the German Nazis and their collaborators. So rigorous was the research that this book, first published in the USA in 1946, was used as a source of evidence during the Nuremberg trial.
As for the Poles, the third biggest group of victims after the Soviets and the Jews, in Vilnius alone, the 30,000 killed far exceeded those, exclusively army officers, who lost their lives in Katyn forest, to say nothing of the 100,000 plus killed by the Ukrainian Banderites in Volhynia. In total, thanks to the German invasion, one in five Poles lost their lives at the hands of the German Nazis and their allies. Yet today Poland obsessively identifies Russia as the main enemy.
The Katyn Forest massacre was another mystification, designed by Goebbels to create a rift between the London-based Polish government and the USSR. Many are the factors undermining the credibility of Soviet responsibility for Katyn, in particular the fact that the bodies contained German bullets only. Another important consideration is that the head of the Nazi ‘investigative committee’ was a mass murderer himself, responsible for 300,000 deaths among disabled Germans, mostly children, who would have not been able to join the military and were eliminated, considered sub-human. The person in question was Dr. Leonardo Conti.
Whilst numbers are important, there must be a qualitative difference between being killed by lynching, rape, torture, mutilation, shooting or gas or being killed in retribution for evil actions. There is a difference between an elder, a woman, a child, being subjected to the shame of public humiliation beforehand, on the one hand, and dying of hypothermia in Siberia after a trial that determined your role in a genocide, on the other. There is a difference between being arrested under the cover of night by police agents while the family is spared, from being burned alive, trapped in a wooden locked building, maybe a church or a synagogue, along with the rest of your community.
The worst aspect of all, is when perpetrators and their ideological and genealogical descendants not only refuse to acknowledge their guilt for the immensity of the crimes they committed, but, without a shed of remorse, play the victim.