Russia, the new nazi Germany?

This video is called Hitler’s Holocaust 2 of 6 The Decision.

By Owen Jones in daily The Guardian in Britain:

David Cameron and the cynicism of comparing Putin to Hitler

Vladimir Putin is responsible for some awful human rights abuses in Ukraine, but Cameron drawing parallels to Hitler is a cheap, politically motivated shot

Wednesday 3 September 2014 11.35 BST

Oh, here we go. The west’s escalating showdown with Vladimir Putin has led to Adolf Hitler being invoked. According to David Cameron, the west risks “repeating the mistakes made in Munich in ‘38”, making it clear the role he sees the Russian leader as assuming. Putin was able to flatten Chechnya at the beginning of the century without such inflammatory comparisons – Tony Blair even cheered him on – but it was only a matter of time before western leaders began flinging Nazi comparisons around in the Ukraine crisis.

The west comparing its latest enemy number to the German Fuhrer has been a standard tactic for decades. When Egypt’s General Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, Britain’s prime minister, Anthony Eden, compared him to Hitler, while Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell opted for a comparison with Benito Mussolini. Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic was the Hitler of the late 1990s, and the US dabbled with describing former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in these terms too. On the eve of the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein was repeatedly compared to Hitler, with Donald Rumsfeld even casting George W Bush in the role of Winston Churchill. The media abounded with such parallels in the build-up to the Iraq disaster, with one Telegraph article headlined “Appeasement won’t stop Saddam any more than Hitler” and even suggesting Iraq could bomb Southampton. On either sides of his rapprochement with the west, Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi faced the Hitler treatment, too.

In and of themselves, these comparisons are self-evidently ludicrous. Hitler was a racist totalitarian dictator who presided over the world’s only attempt at industrialised genocides of entire peoples, killing tens of millions in the process. It is possible to regard foreign leaders as deeply unpleasant and abusive of basic human rights without believing they are Hitler. There is plenty of space between “democracy that respects human rights” and “genocidal totalitarian regime with ambitions to conquer much of the world”. Cameron’s comparison will undoubtedly fuel anti-western sentiment among the Russian population: after all, the Soviet Union was absolutely instrumental in the defeat of Nazism, suffering well over 20 million fatalities. In the case of Russia, comparisons to Hitler could hardly be more insulting.

But the propaganda purpose is clear. Hitler is the most despised leader in history; everybody rational agrees that intervening was the right thing to do in that case. Those who demanded his appeasement are utterly discredited by history, and therefore it is highly effective to regard opponents of current western wars as the same dangerously naive, inadvertent friends of tyrants that can only be defeated. It is obvious in hindsight that the appeasers were wrong; their inheritors will one day be seen in just the same way after they have inflicted similar damage, or so the narrative goes.

There is no doubting the pernicious role of Putin. Pro-Russian rebels in the so-called Dontesk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic have been found to be arbitrarily detaining civilians and subjecting them to torture and other terrible mistreatment. Terrible human rights abuses have been committed by such rebels.

But let’s not pretend Ukraine’s government are champions of human rights either. According to Human Rights Watch, they have been using “indiscriminate rockets in populated areas” in violation of international humanitarian law. There have been unlawful, indiscriminate attacks by both government and rebels in Luhansk, and Ukraine’s government has shelled civilians in Dontesk, too. Amnesty International has similarly damned pro-Kiev vigilantes in eastern Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians have fled for the Russian border.

War between the west and Russia is clearly unthinkable, and only a negotiated settlement involving all parties in Ukraine can provide lasting peace. The ceasefire announced by Ukraine and Russia is promising, and needs to be supported to ensure that it lasts. Let’s resist the Hitler comparisons, which intend simply to shut down any reasoned discussion, to demonise all those who are not hawks, and to ratchet up tension. Soon enough, though, western leaders will settle on a new enemy number one, and the Hitler comparisons will begin all over again.

Also from The Guardian today:

Far from keeping the peace, Nato is a threat to it

It was the prospect of Ukraine being drawn into the western military alliance that triggered conflict in the first place

The war-mongering in the German media against Russia continues unabated. The latest example is the current issue of the weekly magazine of the German Bundestag (parliament), Das Parlament, which deals with Russia as its main topic. The newspaper combines a vicious propaganda campaign against Russia with an unbelievable distortion of history in regard to the Second World War: here.