Russia's Von Stauffenberg moment
I’m not a fan of Von Stauffenberg and think his myth has been promoted to assuage German guilt over their military being more than willing accomplices to genocide and lubensraum death empire building.
This is true for nationalist Navalny and was true for the ‘good Germans’ i.e. war criminal Slav hating lebensraum anti-Semite warriors Junkers who tried to get rid of Hitler while continuing the war against Slavs. Von “Poles only happy under the boot” Stauffenberg was no hero and neither is Navalny.
I am not the only one:
Or here:
The movie also gives us little sense of what else was going on in the Reich in the summer of 1944 when the assassination attempt finally took place. At that point, as the Red Army advanced and war crimes tribunals loomed, the SS was even beginning to wind down the extermination of the Jews. In other words, Stauffenberg left it until extremely late in the day. One might also think, from watching the movie, that the conspirators were enlightened democrats. Far from it. Men like Carl Goerdeler, who would have become German chancellor if the Stauffenberg coup had succeeded, were national conservatives who hated the Weimar Republic as much as the Nazi dictatorship and wanted essentially to restore aristocratic rule and maintain German domination of contintental Europe. (There was another connected group, the Kreisau circle around Helmuth James von Moltke, which was motivated more by Christian and socialist principles, but unlike the national conservatives it declined to act against Hitler.)
I have in the past relentlessly attacked the Russian ‘woe is me’ narrative and the ‘good Russian’ narrative that Russians are the real victims, the true victims of its evil Tsars and Stalins and Putins.
Unless they’re a foreign invader or an incidental madman, countries generally deserve the leaders they get - the leader grew up in the country or was accepted by the country (I’m still calling Hitler a German and Stalin a Russian). Hitler didn’t delude a nation, he was the natural consequence of generations of lies and hatred, starting before Bismarck, going through the Kaiser, then Ludendorff who seized power from him then Hindenberg. Putin is just another genocidal Russian tsar who would be loved by Russians if he was a bit more effective, honest and generous. But Russians hate him for being corrupt, ineffective and dishonest. And losing the war. Like Stauffenberg ‘hated’ Hitler for losing a war.
We at Fallout started calling this war genocide before many Ukrainians did. I’m not boasting or criticizing them, I think Ukrainians were generally shocked and unbelieving that this was happening to them. Being genocided is unbelievable - especially from people you were told for centuries were your cousins, brothers and sisters even. Despite the Holodomor and centuries of oppression (Lemkin’s Soviet Genocide in Ukraine).
We were talking genocide privately around the end of February, long before Bucha. Phil wrote in March and we have the receipts. I started writing our book (UPDATE) exactly on April 11th after agreeing with my friend Philip Blood we should write something. Not to make money, I put in hundreds of hours into a project instead of I could have spent doing legal work or marketing - but to do something (nothing compared people like the soldiers fighting or volunteers like Nick Budd).
Genocide is a scary word and people are terrified of it. There are good reasons to be cautious like Eugene Finkel was up to Bucha because a claim of genocide is stating that the worst thing in the world is happening, don’t say it lightly, especially in light of the intent requirement for the legal crime of genocide in the Genocide Convention:
We did have a bit of a go at academics other than Finkel in another later podcast when they still refused to call it genocide.
Anyway, back to the direct subject, I justed wanted to point out that we were not Johnny come lately and even the delayed and cautious academic response is a hundred times better than the Russian non-response to their war.
I carefully chose von Stauffenberg as an example of the Russian response.
He started plotting against a losing war. Not a genocide war as such.
Yesterday we saw some degree of Russian protest against what the naive call the war and we at Fallout call, protests against mobilisation.
And we are not the only ones.
Where were these Russians in 2014? On February 24 2022? In March 2022? When the graves were found in Bucha? When the graves were found just now in Izyum? When the Russians massacred Ukrainian POWs? When the Russians flattened Mariupol?
That’s a city destroyed. Thousands dead. You need to be stupid, callous, cynical and/or a little bit evil to ignore that. Or a typical ‘laugh love live’ Russian. The ‘non-political’ ones.
Russians ignored the genocide up to this point.
Remember, “it hurts to be Russian right now”. Those poor suffering Russians.
It’s always about Russia. Russian suffering. Poor Russians.
Well, my grandfather was in the Polish resistance back when the occupation regime was a bit more brutal than this. He went through four concentration camps, including Auschwitz and the hellhole of Dora. He didn’t shout no war.
I don’t think the Gestapo gently picked my grandfather up in his blood-splattered cell during the two months of torture we have on record.
All those WW2 partisans that the Russians appropriate - they were mostly Ukrainians, Belarussians and Poles. Or Jews labelled bandits/partisans and hunted down by the Nazis as part of extermination warfare.
This is supposed to be a protest, occurring close by to where I live:
Funny they didn’t protest the genocide and invasion earlier.
But mobilisation… oh no.
Don’t want to die for glorious rodina and Putin’s war (yours)?
My heart bleeds for you.
Not.
You were happy to live of Putin’s breadcrumbs. You didn’t protest over Bucha. You didn’t protest over Mariupol - the dead children. THE DEAD CHILDREN.
(Reuters via BBC)
You didn’t protest over Izyum even just now.
But now your precious little lives are slightly inconvenient? Woe is me. Woe is me.
Sip your rebranded genocide Tsarbucks coffee, complain that Russian incompetence means you don’t have real McDs fries (in the land of the potato) and remember to appropriate the Chechens as Russian resistance fighters just like you did Belarussians, Ukrainians, Poles and above all Jews in World War 2.
Meanwhile, Iranians are burning police cars and hundreds or thousands will die. And they know it.
And Russians are protesting mobilisation. Not war. Not war crimes. Not crimes against humanity. Not genocide.
Poor Russia.
No Ko-fi buttons this time because we’re not completely soulless grifters.
PS I’ve lost the terrible animated video by a Russian where he shows a sequence of Russian rulers doing bad things to Russians. Woe is me, woe is me. Might add later.
Update:
PPS hahahahaah
PPPS The road to Bucha is through Pushkin (27 May 2024 update)
Use English subtitles
PPPPS A more sympathetic look with
