Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

The exclusion of Russia at the official commemorative event marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is not just shameful. It is much darker and sinister. The history of imperialist barbarism is audaciously rewritten to conceal its culpability.

When the industrial-scale Nazi extermination center at Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945, by Soviet Red Army troops, few people would believe it possible that only 80 years later, the memory of the liberators would be written out of official Western history.

This is not just about petty rivalry and envy over historical achievement. The forces of imperialism are rehabilitating and seeking a license for greater war and killing.

Polish President Andrzej Duda this week led other Western leaders and dignitaries at the site of the infamous camp, where 1.3 million people – mostly Jewish – were exterminated in gas chambers. The organizers banned Russia from attending, citing alleged Russian aggression against Ukraine as the reason.

Eight decades ago, the Russian army would go on to liberate all the remaining Nazi death camps – all of them located on Nazi-occupied Polish territory. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmo, Sobibor and Treblinka. The names of these hellish places continue to resonate with horror. This was in the weeks before the final defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich in the Battle of Berlin when the Red Army raised the Hammer and Sickle over the Reichstag building in May.

The Soviet Union was the main victor of the Second World War and paid an incomparable price for defeating the scourge of fascism in Europe – with over 27 million of its people destroyed in the epic struggle.

From 1941 to 1945, the Red Army inflicted over 80 percent of the German Wehrmacht’s total war casualties, while Britain and the United States delayed their European front until the summer of 1944.

However, with the end of the war, Fascism wasn’t eliminated, nor was the capitalist imperialism that bore it. The Nazi variant of imperialism was certainly an extreme manifestation. Its industrialized mass murder of those it considered sub-human was shockingly systematized.

Western imperialism re-emerged soon after the world’s biggest, most horrific war. Only five years later, the U.S. military was killing millions of Korean civilians in a war supposedly to defend the free world against communism. Another 10 years later, millions of Vietnamese were being exterminated in the same evil charade.

Of course, the Western powers were adept at inventing justifying propaganda for their countless wars waged all around the world for domination and their own versions of “lebensraum.”

It has taken several decades to distort and revise the Second World War.

Now we hear Western leaders like U.S. President Donald Trump spouting falsehoods that “the Russians helped us win WWII.”

So, the greatest military victory in history has been reduced to a side role of merely “helping”.

Then we have the European Union’s parliament making odious declarations that the Soviet Union bears equal culpability with Nazi Germany in inciting World War Two.

Such falsification of history is enabled by Polish and Baltic politicians who are obsessed with Russophobia and concealing their nations’ complicity in Nazi-era genocide.

When the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was held in 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin was rightly afforded a prominent place in the proceedings. In 2020, at the 75th anniversary, the Russian leader was honored too.

For the 80th anniversary, all Russian official representation has been banned. How is it possible to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz and not pay homage to the Russian people who liberated it – and all the other Nazi death camps?

The simple answer is that Western imperialist propaganda – euphemistically called “news media”, “academia” and “think tanks” – has so vilified and demonized Russia over a false war in Ukraine. That war is a proxy war waged by the United States and its Western imperialist partners in the NATO military alliance for a strategic defeat of Russia.

Labelling Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine is turning reality on its head. But it must be concocted in order to conceal the real cause of aggression and barbarity.

The expansion of U.S. imperialism after 1945, along with its NATO clients, represents the successor of Nazi imperialism. The endless wars that the U.S. and its Western accomplices have propagated on every continent are responsible for 20-30 million deaths.

The U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza is but one manifestation of the barbarism of Western imperialism and its fascist core. Sickeningly, involving a so-called Jewish state that wraps itself in the justifying memory of the Holocaust to inflict similar horror on others it considers sub-human.

Supporting the NeoNazi regime in Kiev with hundreds of billions of dollars to confront Russia is another demonstration of the criminal war machine that is U.S.-led Western imperialism.

When American and European officials gather at Auschwitz and proclaim their solemn memory, they are actually trying their best to forget Auschwitz and the underlying cause of imperialism.

It is an insult to the Russian people. But more disturbingly it is a sign that genocidal imperialism is at large again. Crazily and paradoxically, while proclaiming to remember the victims of genocide.