This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was first published by The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1406846
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1406846
Putin knows better. But it’s just irresistible to anger and frighten all the television viewers with images of a regime and army that claimed about 40 million Soviet lives just 70 years ago.
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Vladimir Put-on. “Ridding the world of nazi’s,” while installing one to our white house.
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“The role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust remains contentious in Ukraine today where nationalist heroes who collaborated with the Nazis continue to be honored.”
Putin aside, the fascist, Nazi-loving party remains a major presence in the Ukraine. In fact, at the time of the initial political demonstrations and subsequent Russian moves several years ago, they had something like 15-20% representation and the Minister of the Interior.
The author’s picture of a Ukrainian democratic, pluralistic political system is very rosy colored, to put it mildly. The country is well known for widespread corruption, to wit what Trump tried to play on. And in spite of the fact that the large eastern section of the country is Russian speaking, the Ukrainian “democratic” parliament responded to the accords of 2015 by passing a single State language law — Ukrainian.
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No article is perfect and while your criticisms are on point, it is still an excellent SHORT article on the history of Ukraine over the last 150 years.
What needs to be remembered when discussing Ukraine and its Jewish population is that it was part of “The Pale”, an area where unlike the rest of Russia being a Jew was not illegal. This was because before the conquests of Catherine the Great there were few Jews in Russia. But the large swaths of lands she took from the Ottoman’s, who were extremely tolerant to “people of the book”, contained many non-Christians and especially Jews.
But antisemitism is largely a Christian problem that exists wherever Christianity is the majority religion. So to say it exists in Ukraine is merely to acknowledge the fact that Ukraine is a majority Christian nation.
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I see some parallels to the Trump cult’s blood and soil and great replacement theories
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For characteristics of Putin and Trump, one need only reflect on this quote:
Winston Churchill once said of John Foster Dulles, "He’s the only bull I know who carries his own china closet with him."
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While the pogroms unleashed hateful and painful attacks on Jewish communities in the Ukraine, I would not have been born in America, or even just born, without them. In 1902, it was the pogroms that convinced my paternal grandparents and their two toddler daughters to leave their village, make their way out of the Ukraine and across Europe to the Netherlands, where they found space on a packed ship that would take them to New York. Six years later my dad was born, delivered by a midwife in a Brooklyn tenement. Twenty-three years later he would marry the woman who would become my mother. I never met my grandparents. They died long before I was born, but I thank them every day for their courage.
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If Putin is looking for NAZIs to get rid of, I suggest he look in the mirror, and then blow his own head off.
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Fighting Nazis by annexing the Sudetenland. Figuratively at least.
Putin rids Ukraine of Nazism by bombing the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial.
The Babi Yar memorial rests on a mass grave containing 34,000 Jews who were slaughtered there in 1941 when the city was under Nazi occupation. The massacre was carried out by SS troops along with local collaborators.