Angry Planet - What's Behind Putin's Nazi Bullshit

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

This episode was originally going to be called something like not everything is the Holocaust. We were going to talk about how the Nazi attempt to kill all of Europe’s Jews during World War II wasn���t much like being told to get a vaccine or wear a mask.But events have overtaken us. Mask mandates are falling and the war in Ukraine is all I can think about nowadays - I don’t know about you.When Vladimir Putin ordered his invasion, he claimed he was going to de-Nazify Ukraine’s government.That was bullshit, but like a lot of bullshit, there’s a germ of truth.Today we’re going to talk about what it means to de-Nazify a government with a Jew at it’s head and an ambivalent history.Joining me today is Edna Friedberg, a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who hosts, among other things their Facebook live show.You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields, and I'm flying solo today without the man who is the wind beneath my wings, Matthew Galt. This episode was originally going to be called something like, not everything's the Holocaust. We were going to talk about how the Nazi attempt to kill all of Europe's Jews during World War II wasn't much like being told to get a vaccine or wear mask. But events have overtaken us. Mask mandates are falling, and the war in Ukraine is all I can think about these days. I don't know about you. When Vladimir Putin ordered his invasion,

He claimed he was going to denazify Ukraine's government. That was bullshit. But like a lot of bullshit, there's a germ of truth. Today, we're going to talk about what it means to denazify a government with a Jew at its head and an ambivalent history. Joining me today is Edna Friedberg. She's a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who hosts, among other things, their Facebook Live show. I'm very lucky to be able to say Edna is my wife. wife. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Are you sure about that? The grateful part?

That I'm your wife. Oh, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what they tell me. So, nice to be here. Not to sound like we're just an operation working out of a basement somewhere in Washington, D.C. Okay. So can we start off by talking about what part Ukraine has played in Jewish, life historically? For Ashkenazi Jews, which is the term that we use for Jews of European background, which is the vast majority of American Jews, Ukraine is their homeland. It's their roots. For many of them, it's literally where their ancestors came from, where they emigrated from, especially in the first part of the 20th century. But it's also a kind of metaphorical or romantic homeland, the mythical homeland of Tevia in Fiddler on the Roof.

If people remember that musical or that movie, that village was based on a kind of agricultural village in Ukraine where the author of Fiddler on the Roof grew up. So it's both the genealogical root of American Jews and it's also their kind of cultural spiritual homeland. We're talking about for hundreds of years too, right? I mean, how long have Jews lived in Ukraine? Jews have lived in Ukraine since the earliest recorded settlements in that region. But I have to note that for hundreds of years, they were restricted on where they could live

by the imperial government, the Tsarist Russian government, really trying to kind of eliminate the Jews of the area as an economic competitor. They forced them to live in an area that came to be known as the pale of settlement. And Jews in Tsarist, Russia could not live in most cities. They were prohibited from being there. And so that concentrated them in the areas of what is now primarily Western Ukraine and areas that at different times have been Poland, Hungary, Romania. It's one of those areas where you might have changed borders without moving afoot at all as different empires came and went and fought over these borderlands. And we're talking about a lot of people.

On the eve of World War II, the number of Jews living in what was then a Soviet Republic of Ukraine was around 2.5 million people. So it is a really sizable population. That actually makes us sort of come around to the Second World War because there aren't quite so many Jews living in Ukraine anymore. So can you take us a little bit through Ukraine's history? it's complex when it comes to the war years, right? Yeah. So Ukraine, as I mentioned, was on the western edge of the Soviet Union. And when the Soviets ally, Nazi Germany, betrayed them with a surprise military attack in June 1941,

codenamed Operation Barbarossa, Ukraine was the front line of that assault. And so Ukrainian civilians of all different religious back. backgrounds and no religion, found themselves in the crosshairs of this fight between two military giants. So we have kind of two timelines happening here, the timeline of the war, and then literally following on the heels of the advancing German soldiers were death squads, mobile killing squads, whose sole aim was to come and shoot civilians in massacres. So that is the second wave, the Holocaust that follows the military wave in the invasion of the Soviet Union. And these were massive, massive undertakings.

The initial targets of these killing squads known in German as Einzatzgruppen were Jewish men, but they eventually, and quite quickly, after the summer of 1941 and into the bloody fall of 41, expanded their focus to kill every person that they defined as Jewish, regardless of gender, age, disability, religious belief. This isn't a matter of people who are martyrs for a cause, but they are defined as Jewish on a pseudoscientific racial basis. And eventually, these shooting units with help from local collaborators, would murder 1.5 million Jewish people in what we now call.

call the Holocaust by bullets. It wasn't just Jews who were killed, but Jews were the target. I mean, is that, is that right? That's correct. So what I would say is that all Jews were targets, all Jews were victims, but not all victims were Jews. So if you were a Jewish person living in Ukraine, and not just Ukraine, we're talking also parts of Eastern occupied Poland, the Baltic states, in Romania, many other areas also suffered from these shooting massacres. Anyone who was Jewish in those areas was destined for this bloody death. But other political enemies, some Soviet prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti, people who at the time would have been referred to as gypsies, many, many others also found their way to these mass graves

and to these shooting squads. But the overwhelming number of victims were Jews. One of the biggest and most intense kind of spasms of this type of violence has been in the news this week because its site came very close to being bombed. And this is a site, I believe now actually it's kind of been swallowed by or incorporated by the city of Kiev in Ukraine. But at the time was on the outskirts, a ravine known in Ukrainian as Babiniar, where people might have heard of it in its Russian name, Bobby Yard. In September 1941, we just marked this anniversary last fall 80 years ago. In the course of just two days, these German killing squads murdered some 33,000 Jewish civilians for the sole crime of having been Jewish. And that's a very intense, intense spasm of violence.

What was in the news was that people heard that this site, which has become a memorial site, and I can talk a little bit about the politics at the memorial if you want, because nothing is straightforward in this region. There were initial reports that the Babiart Memorial had been bombed or hit by a Russian irstrike. In fact, that is not true. There was a nearby television or some kind of broadcasting tower that was hit. And the memorial itself, it seems to have been spared.

But it really touched a nerve and showed just how raw a lot of historical memory and historical pain is in this area. The idea that a criminal site that is considered sacrosanct by so many would have been targeted just caused a lot of outrage. What we really need to talk about is the role of Ukrainians who were not Jewish. And there were some people who were collaborators. Is that right? During World War II, there were some Ukrainians who were collaborators, but they were a minority. They were deliberately recruited by the Germans who understood that there was a subset of Ukrainian nationalists who were themselves anti-Semitic, that is, they hated Jews. They were anti-communist.

They hated Moscow. And therefore, we're ripe for the picking to become aligned. with the German invaders. They were part of a couple of different groups, one known as the OUN, which is an acronym in Ukrainian that I won't translate for you, but if you want to Google OUN, you can see it. There was another Ukrainian insurgent army, and some of them also joined a special unit of the Waffen SS, known as Waffen-S-S-Kalitzen, named after the area, the adjacent area of Poland, Galizia. And you can still actually find neo-Nazi kind of reenactors is the best way that I can

describe them. People who donned some of the insignia of these units from the war today. I'm talking about now in areas in Western Ukraine and look to this glorified past to a time when they felt like they were part of something bigger and brighter. Many, many more Ukrainians, though, Jews as well as non-Jews, fought against the Germans. They were soldiers in the Soviet Red Army. And additionally, since we've been talking about the Holocaust, more than 2,600 Ukrainians have been officially recognized as righteous among the nations, people who risked their lives, non-Jews, who risked their lives in order to rescue or provide safety to Jews during the Holocaust. So it is, again, a complex picture with people of many different motivations and many different

behaviors and choices. Do you think that the Jews living in Ukraine even before the war would have been surprised by someone like Volodymyr Zelenskyy, actually becoming president of Ukraine? I mean, it wasn't the most hospitable place, right? They would have thought that you were out of your mind drunk. if you said, fast forward 80 years and the symbol of Ukrainian patriotism, nationalism, bravery, embraced by the population would be a Jew. They'd say, you know, what are you smoking if that was going to be? Their vernacular.

The history of anti-Jewish sentiment and also anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine is so deep and so profound. there are liturgical prayers in Jewish prayer books about massacres that have taken place all the way from Cossacks in Ukraine in the 1600s through big outbreaks of violence in the 1880s following the assassination of the Russian Tsar Alexander II, all the way up to the First World War, wave after wave of violence, often deliberately fanned. encouraged and amplified by the Tsarist authorities who wanted to distract local peasants from the real problem. So they liked that there was someone to blame and someone to kind of operate as a punching bag and a release, a release for resentments in local populations. So there's a lot of that. What is astonishing is not just that Ukraine is now the only country in the world, other than the Jewish state of Israel, to have had. not only a Jewish president, but also a Jewish prime minister, the former prime minister, Groiseman, but also just the way that attitudes have changed in this country in the course of

just 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukraine's independence in 1991. The Pew Foundation has been conducting regular surveys of attitudes about not only Jews, but all different minority groups in countries across Europe. And Ukraine, much to many people's surprise, consistently comes in as one of the countries in Europe with the most favorable attitudes in the population towards Jews. Compare it also to a country like France. You know, we think of France as the cradle of European liberalism and tolerance and the rights of citizens. The far-right party of Marine Le Pen got around a third.

third of the vote in the last French election, I think, in 2017. Contrast that to Ukraine, where a similarly nasty anti-Semitic party got less than 2% of the vote. So this is a nation that has really reinvented itself quite deliberately pushing itself away from a past that had a lot of intolerance and violence and is trying desperately and is still trying desperately to be a modern, democratic, more tolerant place. And that's part of what makes it so heartbreaking to see what's happening is that they're not being afforded the opportunity to continue in that evolution. It really does sound like denotification would be like the last thing that they needed to accomplish by invading Ukraine. Would you say that's about fair to say? Yes. I mean, it's so absurd. It's almost

not worth talking about, but it is worth talking about because it has to do. with the collective trauma that the Soviet Union and the Soviet people experienced during the Second World War and the way that Soviet government and then subsequent government, especially that of the endless, endless rule of Vladimir Putin, have reinforced this mythology of collective sacrifice of collective martyrdom during the Second World War. Honestly, I'm talking to you about the ways that. that someone with a kind of nuanced and deep understanding of Ukraine during the Second World War might see what you would find if you were trying to hunt for Nazis or hints of Nazis there.

You know, where are they coming from? Putin is not doing that at all. He is using this as a blunt force object. Basically, Nazi is the nastiest insult that you can give. It is the bogeyman of the Russian people. And if you can say we are fighting Nazis, you are conjuring up this past from 75, 80, 85 years ago. That's what we do as Russians. We kick the asses of Nazis and we're going to do it again.

We did it then and we're going to do it again because we keep the world safe from Nazis. And that is really what Putin is doing here and the way that it works in this propaganda bubble that he's creating for people living. all across the Russian Federation. The thing that is sad and scary to me is as other sources of information and foreign journalists are pulled out of Russia for very good reasons related to fears for their safety, but the options for alternative narratives that Russians can hear or access are growing fewer and fewer. And that makes it more likely that Putin's false narrative of both the pretext for this, war, but also how the war is going and how it's being conducted, it makes it all the more likely

that the Russian public will have to subsist on this diet because they won't have other sources of information available for them to digest. The good news is that the BBC is bringing back shortwave radio so that you could reach into Russia and Ukraine and with the light of truth, I guess. So if you're hearing this, downloading it, and we actually have some listeners in Russia and Ukraine. Get yourself a shortwave radio. Absolutely. I have to say I was following that story. I might have texted to you down in the basement about it to say, hey, did you notice that the BBC is bringing back shortwave?

I found myself actually browsing the website of a place that my parents worked in the early 1960s and still exists. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. which are part of the nonprofit known as Voice of America here in Washington that has continued. Started during the Cold War, but people may not realize all the way through today, broadcasts all over the world, not only in radio, TV, but on social media platforms. And they are there to be an alternative source of news. So the one thing that I found myself hoping today is that people in Russia and maybe in Belarus too might take a note from the playbook of freedom-loving and dissident-type people in both China or Iran or

other places that have tried to put a stranglehold on the flow of information. There are a lot of really tech-savvy people in those countries who have learned how to work a mean VPN and get to other sources of information. I know that because they also, for example, come to the website of the Holocaust Museum, even though Holocaust denial is the official line of the state in Iran. So people who want to get true information will often find ways to do it. And that gives me some cause for optimism. In Ukraine, while there may not be an awful lot of Nazis, there are some of the Nazis victims and the people who resisted them who still live there. Can you talk a little bit about them? Sure. So in the last two weeks, we have seen what is indisputably the last.

largest exodus of refugees since World War II. The latest estimates from the UN are over two million people who have fled the country, one million of whom are children. Now, one reason that those numbers are so skewed towards women and children is that men of possible fighting age are not legally allowed to leave. But the other reason that people might not leave, including women and children is that they may have people that cannot flee because physically they're unable to. And I'm talking about the very old, someone's grandmother, someone's elderly father who are there. These are people for whom the Second World War is actually a memory. And we know from reporting on the ground and from people who work with Holocaust survivors who live in Ukraine as well, that

this is bringing back really, really traumatic memories for them of other times in their lives when they were hiding from bombardment, when they were running for safety. The estimates of the number of Holocaust survivors living in Ukraine vary, but it is somewhere in the thousands. These are very old people. By definition, the youngest among them would be in their 80s. Many are in their 90s. and they are homebound, a lot of them, dependent on caregivers, are bedridden, have no mobility, cannot leave, and are once again under indiscriminate attack. And I know I read an interview with one member of a Jewish nonprofit who said he was talking to an elderly woman, a Jewish Ukrainian woman, who was hiding in the same basement that she had hidden in during the Second World War. The feeling that the world is falling apart around you again and that a secure, tolerant society was possible is just being completely dismantled. That is an extreme trauma and legitimately terrifying for people who have suffered enough in their lives and now are suffering again.

So it's just a compounded level of tragedy or layer of tragedy and fear. and fear and insecurity for people who you hope would have at least had the dignity of a peaceful old age after what their youth had been. I do want to note, actually, that we mentioned earlier. We had talked a little bit about people who were rescuers during World War II, non-Jews, who helped their Jewish friends or neighbors. There are supposedly something around 15, 16, 17 of them still alive in Ukraine. And there are actually, this is a very tiny subset of people, but there are actually some NGOs who are trying to make sure that they have access to their medications, sufficient food, are not just abandoned and neglected, because when they saw people

in need at a very different moment in time, they did not turn away. And so we hope that they will remain safe and also cared for during this moment of chaos and fear. Originally, we were going to talk about Holocaust analogies. They're everywhere. Whenever anyone wants to make a point, they invoke the Holocaust and Nazis. So you've actually written about how those analogies don't necessarily work. Can you explain why that is? I think that often Holocaust analogies are the lazy way out, that when someone just needs to express

in emphatic terms and emotional terms and in a way they hope will get the world's attention, they say, it's like the Holocaust, or this is Hitler, or they're Nazis. It's kind of a shorthand for the ultimate evil. And I don't like that for a couple of reasons. One is a basic human reason that when people do that, I think they forget that there are still human beings alive. There are still individuals alive for whom the Holocaust is actually their life. It's not some kind of fairy tale or, you know, superhero tale with villains and victims that you call on to win an argument. But it's actually about their murdered families, their parents, their sister, who they'll never see again.

their first wife and their child who were murdered, that it's actually somebody's loss and pain. And so that at the most basic is the reason that I don't like it. But the bigger, more abstract reason, if simple empathy doesn't do it for people, is that I think when you lose the specifics, both of the Holocaust and of whatever the contemporary issue is that you're trying to make a point about, you don't get anywhere. You have no ability to either make change or understand the causes or push for things to be different. And I think you just end up playing into some kind of Olympics of suffering. So I don't like it when people say that Putin is like Hitler, not only because there are many reasons as a historian that I can say that he's different, but also it makes

it sound like it's not bad enough to just be Vladimir Putin. He himself is a mass murderer. he himself is a despot and dictator and seems to be directing a war full of war crimes against civilians. So why isn't that sufficient enough? Why does it have to be about the Holocaust? The other reason is that we study history, I hope, because it will help us to make different choices and help us to shape a different world for our kids. But we lose the ability to do that if it just becomes an epithet that we throw around. That's why it's so important to look at the specifics, the way we were talking about the Holocaust being carried out in mass shootings in Ukraine, as opposed to gas chambers elsewhere in Europe. It's really important to understand the context

so that we know what choices people had, what choices they could have made. And I'm not just talking about victims who might run away or fight back, but also who are these shows. shooters. What leads someone to be part of a murder squad and to do it day after day after day for months? That to me is where the value is in this history. It's not there just to make us feel sad or to feel sorry for Jews or to think, oh boy, I'm lucky to live now. But to really understand how societies fall apart and how people lose the basic moral core that I like to believe is present in children and that they kind of shed it over time through learning to hate, through learning to feel powerful, through putting aside feelings of compassion or empathy in exchange for other motivations

like greed, like belonging, like nationalism. So that's a kind of rambling answer. I can give you some more examples if you want something meatier, but that's where I start. talking about Holocaust analogies is the perfect opening to some of the things that have been going on currently in the United States. Again, as we were going to talk about if Russia hadn't invaded Ukraine, all over the country, whether you're for the vaccinations, against vaccinations, you are quite possibly going to pull out the Holocaust to prove things. what in the world does the Holocaust have to do with vaccines? It's got nothing to do with vaccines, but it has everything to do with the way that Americans like to think of themselves as being in the right and being on the side of good. And I keep thinking of the often quoted, slightly misquoted line from the English poet Alexander Pope who said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.

People often quoted as a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But I would say that people know, Americans know a little bit about the Holocaust. They know just enough about the Holocaust to be dangerous and careless about it. So they know this was a time in history where large numbers of innocent people were discriminated against, restricted, oppressed, killed just because of who they are or who they are. or who they were. And people identify with them. And of course they're going to identify with the side they see as blameless and good in that fight and not the oppressive, jackbooted government overreach Nazi vision that they have.

So when people say that a COVID vaccine mandate is just like the Nazis, it has no basis. In fact, it's not even close to anything. that happened. But I tend to categorize Holocaust analogies into three categories. You've heard me say this before because you live with me. But they are crazy, hazy, and lazy. The COVID vaccine mandate complainers are in the crazy category. It's just so out of touch with anything from the historical record. It doesn't actually merit much discussion. The lazy ones are people who are just trying to kind of make an emotional plea to say you are pure evil, pure distilled evil, and that's why I don't like you, my enemy.

And the largest category, and to me, the most dangerous one is what I call the hazy Holocaust analogies, the ones that have just enough knowledge, just a kernel of truth in them, so that it feels credible, but it actually is distorting the history. And you can find this on all parts of the political spectrum. lefty, progressive liberal people are just as guilty of it as right-wing conservatives, small government people. I'll give you a couple of examples. People who talk about animal rights have sometimes referred to the Holocaust on your plate to say that meatpacking facilities and meat slaughterhouses are just like Nazi death camps. It's absurd. And in fact, it's offensive because

we're talking about millions of human beings being killed. But for these animal rights advocates, they're saying that all lives, whatever species, are equal. And so they are taking what little they know about mass killing and transposing it onto their objection to the consumption of meat in this country. One that might be more palatable to people, but I think is just as bad, are comparisons that were made between detention centers on the U.S. southern border four years ago and ongoing aimed at stopping and processing the flow of migrants from Central America and Mexico. Many people, including people in Congress, referred to those as concentration camps. And that's the kind of hazy analogy I'm talking about.

It's true that a concentration camp is a place where a government would hold large numbers of innocent people and sometimes separate parents from children, but that's as far as the comparison goes. And once again, something can be terrible without having to be the Holocaust. Why isn't it just bad enough to say the U.S. government is separating innocent children traumatized from days or weeks of travel across a desert with their parents? Why is that not bad enough on its own, why do we have to call them Nazis? So those are a few of the examples. And again, that if you just kind of turn it into, you're the bad guy, what is there left to talk about? Nothing. It's like a mic drop, but one that isn't particularly impressive.

Last thing is just to take a brief look at the fact that there are Nazis among us. fascinatingly, there are people who just didn't get enough out of the history books and want to live that Nazi life. So let's go back to Charlottesville, where I was actually working at the museum with you when Charlottesville happened. And what do we say about these people? Is there anything even to be said about them? Yeah, I see them, look, I'm not a psychologist, but I play one on TV or I play one on our sofa. I see a lot of these men and they are overwhelmingly men, they are overwhelmingly young and overwhelmingly by self-selection white, although not all, as a reaction against a culture that seems to be increasingly intolerant. and I'm talking about an intolerant left that is so orthodox that what you can say is often

circumscribed, what you can joke about, seems to be smaller and smaller every day. And I realize I'm sounding like the ultimate middle-aged cranky person right now. But there is something that I think many of us who do not consider ourselves racist can relate to. And some of these young men who say, I'm going to reject all of these orthodoxies. I'm going to be as racist and sexist and old school and violent as I can be simply because society tells me that I can't. And as the parent, along with you, of some teenage boys, I can kind of see that attitude. You know, maybe not as extreme form, I hope.

But that it's a psychological reaction taken to an extreme. And also for someone who wants attention, we're talking about them now. We're talking about them several years later. You know, it's like the old saying, there's no such thing as bad press. I really, really believe that people like the Charlottesville marchers are quite fringe, but they're not as small a fringe as we'd like there to be. And unfortunately, there are movements like that all over the world. This is a kind of thing that historians can track.

Whenever there are moments in human development of great change, rapid change, people get anxious. And out of those kind of anxious moments, often extremist movements arise. And that is the dynamic that we can see when we study the Holocaust in all of its specificity. the stresses and fears and panics brought about by a massive world war, the First World War, by the economic Great Depression, by demographic changes around the world. And out of that comes a longing for something that will make it all go away, that will simplify it, that will return us to some kind of mythical, better, calmer past. And so I think we're seeing kind of in a microcosm some of those same dynamics at play.

and it would behoove us to be alert and to monitor them and to take them at their word. Because when someone says they're going to wage a violent revolution, let's not give them the chance to see if they really mean it. Because too many times in history, they have meant it. And it does not bode well for democracy when that happens. Let's just hope that whatever happens in Ukraine in the coming weeks doesn't lead to another one of those changes. Anyway, Edna Friedberg, thank you so much for joining us on Angry Planet. I hope that I have not offended you in any way so that we can have a nice peaceful dinner after recording this. That sounds good, as long as you do the dishes.

That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please throw us $9 a month all at Angry PlanetPod.com or Angry Planet.com, where you can get commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes and two bonus episodes every month. Things have been a little bit intense the last few weeks,

but we're kind of getting back up to speed. I thought this was a wonderful episode. I also think we've figured out a way to redo the episode that we pulled. We're going to sit down to work that out next week. I've also recorded one that is just a conversation about nuclear anxiety and what kind of good pop culture is out there to soothe it. Let's be looking for that soon. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.

Stay safe until then.