The UN Anti-Nazi Resolution, the Prague Declaration and the History of “US Accommodation with Nazism”

UN Anti-Nazi Resolution Supported by Israel and Syria, Opposed by the U.S., Canada and Ukraine

By Carla Stea

Global Research, January 04, 2015

Region: Asia, Latin America & Caribbean, Middle East & North Africa

Theme: United Nations

The Syrian Arab Republic, together with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia are among the many co-sponsors of this UN Anti-Nazi Resolution, adopted by a majority vote of 133 by the United Nations General Assembly on December 18, 2014. There were 51 abstentions. Only 4 nations opposed this resolution: the United States, Ukraine, Palau and Canada. Excerpts from the Resolution state:

“1. Reaffirms the relevant provisions of the Durban Declaration and of the outcome document of the Durban Review Conference, in which States condemned the persistence and resurgence of neo-Nazism, neo-Fascism and violent nationalist ideologies based on racial and national prejudice and stated that those phenomena could never be justified in any instance or in any circumstances.
4. Expresses deep concern about the glorification, in any form, of the Nazi movement, neo-Nazism and former members of the Waffen SS organization, including by erecting monuments and memorials and holding public demonstrations in the name of the glorification of the Nazi past, the Nazi movement and neo-Nazism, as well as by declaring or attempting to declare such members and those who fought against the anti-Hitler coalition and collaborated with the Nazi movement participants in national liberation movements;
6. Emphasizes the recommendation of the Special Rapporteur that ‘any commemorative celebration of the Nazi regime, its allies and related organizations, whether official or unofficial, should be prohibited by States, and stresses in this regard that it is important that States take measures, in accordance with international human rights law, to counteract any celebration of the Nazi SS organization and all its integral parts, including the Waffen SS.
7. Expresses concern about recurring attempts to desecrate or demolish monuments erected in remembrance of those who fought against Nazism during the Second World War, as well as to unlawfully exhume or remove the remains of such persons, and in this regard urges States to fully comply with their relevant obligations, inter alia, under article 34 of the Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949;
11. Welcomes the call of the Special Rapporteur for the active preservation of those Holocaust sites that served as Nazi death camps, concentration and forced labour camps and prisons, as well as his encouragement of States to take measures, including legislative, law enforcement and educational measures, to put an end to all forms of Holocaust denial.”

PRIOR U.S. ACCOMMODATION WITH NAZISM;
On October 27, 2014, the front page of The New York Times reported: “In Cold War, U.S. spy Agencies used 1,000 nazis.” What the headline fails to say is that the U.S. employed and protected men whom they knew were among the most barbaric nazi war criminals. “When the Justice Department was preparing in 1994 to prosecute a senior Nazi collaborator in Boston, named Aleksandre Lileikis, the CIA tried to intervene. The agency’s own files linked Mr. Lileikis to the machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked ‘under the control of the Gestapo during the war,’ his CIA file noted… U.S. agencies directly or indirectly hired numerous ex-nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes”

“In 1968 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover authorized the FBI to wiretap a left-wing journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, ‘a potential threat to national security.’ In Maryland, army officials trained several Nazi officers in paramilitary warfare for a possible invasion of Russia. In all, the American military, the CIA, the FBI and other agencies used at least 1,000 ex-nazis and collaborators as spies and informants after the war, according to Richard Breitman, a Holocaust scholar at American University who was on a government-appointed team that de-classified war-crime records.”

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hated the Nazis, and to provide assistance to the anti-nazi struggle in Europe, he often had to circumvent highly placed pro-nazi and anti-semitic State Department officials, who not too covertly wanted Hitler to win World War II and destroy Soviet communism. Roosevelt’s great skill succeeded in arranging for U.S. Lend-Lease policies to aid the anti-nazi struggles of the Soviet Union and Great Britain, and it was his original, fierce determination to put on trial for treason the major U.S. corporations which he knew were engaging in business with the Nazis throughout World War II.
FDR died early in his fourth term as President, and subsequent U.S. Presidents did not suffer such anguish colluding with Nazis or nazi collaborators throughout the entire Cold War, as this October 27, 2014 New York Times article reports. Indeed, today, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs very recently supervised and micromanaged the destabilization and overthrow of Ukraine’s anti-nazi President, Viktor Yanukovich, and installed a new Ukranian government permeated with neo-nazis and nazi sympathizers.
In one of his first official acts, Ukraine’s new U.S. puppet President Poroshenko made October 14 the Ukranian National Day of Celebration commemorating the day in 1943 that Stepan Bandera’s nazi army was established. During World War II, Bandera’s OUN prepared two assassination attempts against United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a fact ignored by both Poroshenko and his U.S. supporters. Poroshenko’s shameful action is a desecration of the memory of the more than 300,000 heroic Ukranians murdered by the Nazis during the second battle of Kharkov, in May 1942, a battle which, though ending in defeat for the anti-nazi Ukranians, succeeded in slowing and weakening the invading nazi army, thereby contributing, ultimately, to the great Soviet victory at Stalingrad, the turning point in World War II.
There were 51 abstentions voted on Resolution 69/160, largely, and alarmingly, by European countries which had been ravaged by the nazi slaughter during World War II. These abstentions (however they were parsed in “explanation of vote”) suggest that Nazism is no longer abhorrent in parts of these countries, whether as a result of failure of historic memory, particularly in the younger generation, or more likely as a result of the current economic crisis, exacerbated by the noxious austerity measures being imposed upon most countries of the European Union, policies decimating the standard of living throughout Europe and leaving these destitute citizens prey to resurgent nazi propaganda today, as were the 25 million starving Germans in 1923.
Although throughout the past decade, the United States had consistently opposed the anti-nazi resolution, this year, Ukraine, though previously abstaining, for the first time actually opposed the anti-nazi resolution, an ominous development, as on December 14, 2014 the U.S. Congress approved sending lethal weapons to Kiev, including anti-tank weapons, ammunition and troop-operated surveillance drones, anti-mortar radar systems, etc. as part of $350 million worth of weapons, raising the terrifying spectre that the U.S. is actually militarily supporting a pro-nazi resurgence in Ukraine.
THE ASSAULT ON TRUTH: THE “PRAGUE DECLARATION”
In its explananation of vote, Ukraine “condemned Hitler and Stalin alike as international criminals.” This despicable allegation of a false equivalence, which has no basis in reality, is tantamount to Holocaust denial. It is based upon the ideological “normalization” of Nazism in one of the most dangerous and pernicious doctrines now being promulgated throughout Europe, the “Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism,” a doctrine of intellectual cowardice and moral depravity, falsifying reality and historic fact. It attempts to obscure the historically unique horrors and atrocities of Nazism by subsuming them in the general category of “totalitarian,” thereby erasing the racist and genocidal character of the nazi scourge. This is the beginning of the effort at “normalization” and ultimately the legitimization of nazism. This cancerous assault on truth, contaminating European thought since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is a new propaganda weapon for the intellectually feeble, which calls for: “adjustment and overhaul of European history textbooks so that children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes.”
Among the supporters of the Prague Declaration are Margaret Thatcher and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The Prague Declaration is refuted, intellectually, historically and morally by many of the most illustrious scholars, historians and members of the European Parliament, notably in:
THE SEVENTY YEARS DECLARATION 0f 20 January 2013, signed by more than 80 of the most distinguished members of the European Parliament from countries throughout Europe, and which states:

“On the Anniversary of the Final Solution conference at Wannsee,”

“Remember:

“The horror and brutality of the genocidal campaign of total annihilation of European Jewry conducted by the Nazis and their collaborators

That the mass killing of European Jewry preceded that formal adoption of the Final Solution plan by half a year, and began on the Eastern Front in 1941 upon the initiation of Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union,

That millions of non-Jews suffered in numerous ways under the Nazis…

“Recognize:

The Nazi campaign of annihilation of the Jewish people was philosophically, qualitatively and practically profoundly distinct and different to other forms of oppression

“Reject:

Attempts to obfuscate the Holocaust by diminishing its uniqueness and deeming it to be equal, similar or equivalent to Communism as suggested by the 2008 Prague Declaration,

Attempts to have European history school books rewritten to reflect the notion of ‘Double Genocide’ (‘equality’ or ‘sameness’ of nazism and communism)

As unacceptable the glorification of nazi allies and of Holocaust perpetrators and collaborators, including the Waffen SS in Estonia and Latvia and the Lithuanian Activist Front in Lithuania

Attempts to legalise or sanitize the public display of the swastika by racist and fascist groups.”

Among the great parliamentarians supporting the Seventy Years Declaration is the brilliant Lithuanian statesman, Justas Paleckis, whose own son was brutally persecuted by the current Lithuanian government for questioning Lithuanian government dogma, much as Galileo was persecuted for questioning the false dogma of the Catholic Church

Numerous other distinguished European intellectuals respond with repugnance to the intellectual vulgarity of the Prague Doctrine. The Declaration on Unequal Regimes: Contra Prague, June 22, 2010 states:

“We Disassociate From and Reject:

1. The language of the Prague Declaration that promotes the ‘Double Genocide’ model and Holocaust Obfuscation, by calls inter alia to: ‘recognize Communism and Nazism as a common legacy, proclaim substantial similarities between Nazism and Communism,

6. Unacceptable expenditure of state (and EU) treasure and political capital on the revision of history in an effort to obfuscate and minimize the Holocaust, legally and mechanically equating it with other crimes, inter alia by the capricious and ad-hoc redefinition and semantic inflation of the notion of ‘genocide.’”

On October, 2009, the UK Chair of the All-Party Group against Antisemitism, John Mann, MP, described the Prague Declaration as “a sinister document,”; Lithuanian politician Leonidas Donskis states: “The Holocaust should not be equated with other tragedies.” Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center describes the Prague Declaration as “the main manifesto of the false equivalency movement,” stating it is supported by right-wing parties in countries in Eastern Europe.

“UK parliamentarian Denis Macshane MP ‘delivered a letter to the Lithuanian ambassador in London, signed by Lord Janner of Braunstone QC and academics opposed to the Prague Declaration, accusing the Lithuanian government of using ‘embassy-sponsored events’ to manipulate the debate: ‘We find these events consistent with Lithuania’s nationalistic rewriting of history, and with its efforts to limit the freedom of debate on “Double Genocide” and the Prague Declaration.’”

NAZISM
Nazism is explicitly both racist and genocidal. Governments may be totalitarian without being racist, nor genocidal. Any attempt to equate the two, or describe Nazism as merely totalitarian, is a fatal attack on truth and history. In one of the great documents following World War II, “The Plot Against the Peace,” by Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn, the unique character of Nazism is described: “It was against the Slav peoples, the traditional enemy of Pan-Germanism, that the policy of genocide was most extensively applied. ‘It will be one of the chief tasks of German statesmanship,’ Hitler had told Hermann Rauschning, ‘for all time to prevent, by every means in our power, the further increase of the Slav races. Natural instincts bid all living beings not merely conquest their enemies, but also destroy them. In former days, it was the victor’s prerogative to destroy entire tribes, entire peoples.”

“Following the liberation of Lublin in the summer of 1944, a group of some thirty foreign correspondents visited the Maidenak Death Camp. Among the correspondents was the American newspaperman, W. H. Lawrence. On August 27, 1944, Lawrence sent a dispatch to the New York Times which opened with these words: “I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth – the German concentration camp at Maidenak, which was a veritable River Rouge for the production of death, in which it is estimated that nearly 1,500,000 persons from nearly every country in Europe were killed in the last three years..This is a place that must be seen to be believed…’”
“Here there were thousands of war prisoners….who died at a terrible rate from hunger and disease. Here there were fields where thousands and tens of thousands of persons were burned on funeral pyres…Here there were types of ‘murder vans’ as well as solidly built casements where victims were asphyxiated by ‘cyclone gas.’ Here bodies were burned in the most primitive method of ancient India; a row of logs and a row of corpses, then another row of logs and another row of corpses, but also in simply constructed furnaces like giant cauldrons, as well as in perfected furnaces for blitz cremation. Here people were shot in ditches or killed with a blow of an iron rod which broke their necks. Here people were drowned in artificial ponds or hanged on gallows of different types, from a simple gibbet with a crossbar to an up-to-date portable scaffold furnished with pulleys and a flywheel. This was a regular death factory where the size of the daily slaughterings were regulated by two factors; by the number of people entering the camp and by the amount of labor needed for the never-ending construction work.” (Sayers and Kahn).
“The enslavement of millions of men, women and children was only one aspect of the Pan-German plan which the German General Staff methodically followed in its European conquests. The General Staff employed a wide variety of measures aimed at the ultimate subjugation of some 500,000,000 people in Europe and Soviet Russia by some 80,000,000 German rulers…. Immediately after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the German High Command arranged in their military schools and institutions special courses of lectures emphasizing the necessity of exterminating masses of the Russian people.” “The testimony of both Soviet and French war prisoners, who were victims and witnesses to the nazi barbarities in the Yanovska concentration camp in Lvov, describing nazi crimes: “In this camp war prisoners were exterminated without any pretext, often for a bet. Wepke, a Gestapo Kommissar, boasted to other camp executioners that he would cut a boy into two parts with one blow of a hatchet. They did not believe him, so he caught a ten-year old boy in the street, forced him to his knees, made him put his palms together and hide his face in them, made a trial stroke, adjusted the boy’s head and with a single blow of the hatched slashed the boy in two. The Hitlerites congratulated Wemke warmly and shook him by the hand.. Children were used by the Nazis as living targets.”

The “Holodomor,” a famine that occurred in 1932, is currently cited by right-wing Ukranians as evidence that Stalin was trying to exterminate them, and they call this a “man-made” famine. They forget that 1932 was one of the worst years of the great depression, with starvation rampant throughout Europe, the United States, and Asia. In the United States, President Hoover slaughtered a massive number of starving American veterans camped in Washington, attempting to get the “Bonus” they were promised in payment for their military service. The shacks they were living in were incinerated, and Generals such as MacArthur and Eisenhower were involved in the eviction and extermination of these impoverished veterans. This global famine was also “man-made.” It was the great crisis of capitalism. And there were capitalists who made fortunes out of that crisis.
In “explanation of vote,” the United States representative states she is “concerned about the overt political motives that had driven the main sponsor of the current resolution. That government had employed those phrases in the current crisis in Ukraine.” Nowhere in this resolution was Ukraine mentioned or singled out. This was not a country-specific resolution. In previous years the U.S. delegation cited “freedom of speech” as their reason for opposing the resolution. Whatever their reasons, and however contorted the “reasoning,” the U.S. continues to condone the resurgence of Nazism. And it cannot be ignored that among the co-sponsors of the Anti-Nazi resolution is the Government of Syria.