The World of Concentration Camps and Genocide Never Ended
There are persistent and growing reports that the Russians are forcibly deporting thousands of Ukrainians into the Russian hinterlands. This leaves no room for doubt that Putin is emulating the tactics of Soviet dictator Iosif Djugashvili, known to the world as Stalin. In the 1930s and 40s, the so-called “Greatest Genius of All Times and All Peoples” was responsible for something on the order of 20 million deaths outside of war, enough to put his contemporary Hitler to shame. Many of those deaths occurred in the course of deportations he ordered of entire nationalities, with countless people of all ages crammed into railway cars dying on journeys of thousands of miles to remotest Siberia or Central Asia. Many others never saw their homelands again. Vladimir Putin has now thrown the gates to this hell wide open, and there is nothing — NOTHING — to stop him taking millions of lives, just like Stalin, except the Ukrainian people’s will to resist, with the limited help an intimidated America and Europe is willing to give them.
It must be said, though, that the world of concentration camps and genocides never ended and never even paused, after the end of World War II in 1945. Stalin only intensified his crimes up to the moment of his death in 1953. By that time, Mao had come to power in China, where he would destroy more human lives than Hitler and Stalin put together. In North Korea, the Kim dynasty created their own empire of slavery and mass murder. Anybody with even a cursory knowledge of twentieth century history knows the roll call of entire nations brutalized and millions of souls extinguished. None quite matched the horror of the Holocaust, though there were some serious contenders, like Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who forced children to decapitate their parents. The United Nations was founded to prevent these things ever happening again, but proved utterly ineffective, while the United States and the secondary powers never once intervened to stop a genocide in progress.
So the various national leaders’ profession of shock at Putin’s actions rings hollow. They saw what Russia did to Georgia in 2008 and to Ukraine in 2014, and they did nothing. American Presidents and politicians of both parties were passive bystanders. Shrub Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and imagined he saw a soul in there. Hillary Clinton wanted a “reset” with Russia. Barack Obama poured scorn on the very idea that Russia was hostile. Trump was worse than all of them, in some bizarre thrall to the Russian dictator. The Germans were in Russia’s pocket, and the Hungarians, and the Czechs. The roll call of dishonor and disgrace goes on and on. And none of these worthies offered anything more than the vaguest commiserations when the victims were African or Asian. What is the world doing even now for the Uyghur victims of the Chinese regime?
Yes, it’s true: the Ukrainians are attracting sympathy mainly because they are white, Christian Europeans, many of whom look, act, and speak like Westerners, and because Putin’s unprovoked aggression poses an obvious threat to other European nations. The Uyghurs, or the Tutsis in the 1990s, or the Darfuris in the 2000s, could make no such emotional claim on Europeans and Americans; and back in the day, Jew hatred was so open that many western Europeans and Americans felt at least some degree of sympathy with the Nazi persecutors. Even Saint Franklin Roosevelt himself said it was understandable that (Christian) Germans were unhappy with Jewish prominence in the professions!
The answer cannot be to abandon the Ukrainians, or merely condemn Europe and America for racism and hypocrisy. We must work together to build global, human consciousness and compassion and empathy if the roll call of horrors is ever to have an end.