Well, No More

“A leader of the Ukrainian radical group Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), Dmitry Yarosh, has called on Russia’s most wanted terrorist Doku Umarov to act against Russia in an address posted on Right Sector’s page in VKontakte social network.”

With one Ukrainian for every three Russians, the people of that large, populous, immensely fertile, coal-rich Borderland (“Of what?” answers itself) were prominent at every level of the Soviet regime.

The attempt by neo-Nazis, in alliance with Tartar and now also Chechen Islamists, to present Ukrainians as oppressed and colonised, must not be allowed to stand.

It is not true of any body, as such, of Soviet citizens, who were Soviet citizens and who acted as such. Those who instead fought for Hitler were in the same position as, for example, Hungarians who fought for Hitler.

But it is based on such fantasies that a third of the population of Latvia, Soviet citizens until 1991, have been rendered stateless persons on frankly ethnic grounds since then. Such a country is welcomed as a brother into NATO and the EU. Lithuania and Estonia are barely any better.

The regime that has overthrown the elected government of Ukraine and driven its lawful head into exile wishes to join NATO, which would have us at war with Russia at this moment, and wishes to join the EU, which would subject us to the legislative will of Svoboda, of Pravy Sektor, and, if they managed to hold Crimea, of the Tartar Islamists.

Of course, overtly Nazi parties in such traditions as the Arrow Cross and the Ustaše are already legislating for us. Bedlam broke out when they made a breakthrough in Austria some years ago. But from behind what was once the Iron Curtain, a phrase coined by Goebbels, nothing better seems to be expected.

This week’s ruling of the German Constitutional Court creates the serious possibility that the NDP will enter the European Parliament in May. That is, the Nazis from Germany. But mostly from the old East Germany, and, hey, Honecker was, erm, a Russian, or, like, something.

Accession by Bosnia-Herzegovina will bring in parties in which Nazism and Islamism meet, from a state in which Jews and Gypsies are constitutionally barred from becoming President or Senators.

But they were all victims, you see. Victims of wicked Stalin, in whose activities heaven forfend that any of them might have been complicit, never mind that the only people who ever formed the governments of, say, Hungary or East Germany, were Hungarians or Germans. Victims of wicked Khrushchev, that part-Ukrainian born on the border and brought up on either side of it, who gave Crimea to Ukraine. Victims of wicked Brezhnev, born and raised in Ukraine.

Or victims of wicked Tito, that holder of the line against both Hitler and Stalin. The brute. A brute who does not compute. Again, let not your mind be corrupted by the thought that Croats, or Slovenes, or Bosniaks, or Macedonians, or Montenegrins, or the Albanians of Serbian South, or the Teutons and Magyars of the Serbian North, played any role in those of Tito’s doings which were not quite so savoury as resisting first Nazi occupation and then Soviet domination. Never mention that Tito himself was a Croat.

From the Baltic, to the Adriatic, to the Black Sea, we are now supposed to forgive people even for having been Nazis during the War, and even for reviving that rhetoric, that iconography and that action in full in the present age.

That has been our stand ever since the early 1990s, when we failed to ensure the continued existence of Yugoslavia.

Well, no more.