Also what the fuck is this guy talking about. Germans spent almost the entire time between 1990 and 2022 not only feeling a historical debt towards Russia but in fact being literally psychologically incapable of extending those feelings to Ukraine or the Baltics
Isn't it NOT what happened tho? I am not 100% sure, mostly reading Wikipedia at this point, but it seems to claim that Soviets actually had a more intense lustration than the West. (Which only makes it weirder that they managed to find an all new 2nd set of bastards to run a new oppressive machine)
Yeah to be totally fair the problem was less that the West was better at lustration and more that the DDR never had a parallel to the events of '68 in the BRD
Both Germanies were actually pretty shit at lustration. What the Westies did that the Osties did not was begin (in the sixties and seventies, not the forties or fifties) a large-scale /societal/ reckoning with their parents' crimes. This has been a formative break in historical perception.
This, by the way, is a logical consequence of one thing and one thing only, and it is that an unfree people that does not enjoy freedom of speech by definition cannot discuss its past.
Very good point.
But does a country's failure to reflect on its past necessarily constitute an actual, and not merely an academic problem? The GDR might just be a special case.
I don't really think it's special. It's something where it is very typical among Eastern European countries, in that any real substantive discussion of the Holocaust - and therefore confrontation with narratives that deemphasise it - only begins in 1991.
Yep. The Soviet black winning over Nazis allowed them to "other" Nazis as an entirely external problem, an outside monster that was defeated. It might have had bad people collaborating with them, but they were still "other" - spies, traitors. Not "us". "Them". Vlasov, Bandera etc.
And in post-USSR even after 1990s there was no reckoning. Chechens were allowed to return in 1957. Crimean Tatars - in the 1990s. There was a bit of talk about Vlasovs/Cossacs in the context of church revival in the 1990s, but it still felt a taboo. Khatyn was still not mentioned in school textbooks
OH right, sorry!!! Indeed, that's a trace of my constant ranting about Katyn and Khotyn! Like, I know what I'm ranting about, but it slipped into my motor memory 🙈
Infamously, the Lukashenka regime ambassador to Israel wrote an entire open letter in Haaretz justifying the idea that Belarus continues to teach a narrative of "the Nazis killed Belarusian citizens" without further specification FOUR YEARS AGO.
I'm missing some context here, I think... Like, did he mean "Belarusians are practically Jews, as far as Nazis go? We are both victims, to the exactly same extent?" Just pure naivität, that's what you mean?
It is essentially a reheated version of the Soviet narrative that "the fascists killed Soviet citizens," with any emphasis that Jews suffered in a particular way perceived as Jewish nationalism.
