Obama helping neo-Nazis re-write history of World War II by Wayne Madsen

Obama helping neo-Nazis re-write history of World War II by Wayne Madsen

By refusing an invitation to attend the May 9 celebration marking the victory of the Allies, and specifically, the Soviet Red Army, over Nazi Germany -- what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War -- President Obama has made common cause with neo-Nazis and Axis revanchists from Kiev and Berlin to Tallinn and Warsaw who are attempting to erase the USSR and its immense sacrifices in the war against fascism from the history books and various 70th anniversary commemorations of the war's milestones.

The George Soros and neo-conservative snubbing of Russia in commemorating World War II began with the Polish foreign ministry's refusal to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to mark the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp from the Nazis. Although it was the Soviet Red Army that liberated the death camp, Poland not only decided to snub Putin but it invited Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who has a number of neo-Nazis serving in his country's government, armed forces, and intelligence services, to the Auschwitz ceremony. A number of Ukrainians were allied with the Nazi SS in fighting against the Red Army. Their sons and grandsons, known as "Banderists" for Ukrainian Nazi leader Stepan Bandera, now rally around the Ukrainian nationalist and fascist cause in support of Ukraine's genocidal war against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbass region.

Polish foreign minister Grzegorz Schetyna attempted to re-write history by claiming Ukrainians, not Russians, liberated Auschwitz. Russia's Foreign Ministry responded to Schetyna by stating, "It's common knowledge that Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, in which all nationalities heroically served," adding that Poland was making a "mockery" of history.

Putin has said that there is a coordinated attempt by the West to belittle Russia's role in World War II. The latest attempt to diminish Russia's sacrifices in World War II have come with the announcement by many Western leaders that they will boycott the 70th Moscow anniversary commemoration of the end of the Great Patriotic War. Critics of the decision of the Western leaders to boycott the Victory Day ceremony note that by their actions Obama, Britain's David Cameron, France's Francois Hollande, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili, and others are trying to negate the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens who died during the Second World War.

Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council and an ardent Polish nationalist and anti-Russian, announced that he would not be representing the European Union at the Moscow ceremony. Poland is hoping to lure those leaders boycotting Moscow to its own ceremony marking the end of World War II.

While Obama and his friends in NATO will not be in Moscow, Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who has demanded war reparations from Germany for his country, will buck the NATO boycott and attend the ceremony on Red Square. He will be joined by North Korea's Kim Jong Un in his first trip outside of North Korea since assuming power. Kim's grandfather, Kim Il Sung, was a Communist partisan leader against the Japanese occupiers in Korea.

Another NATO leader who will bolt from the Western military bloc and go to Moscow is Milos Zeman, the Czech president. Right-wing members of the Czech Civic Democrats Party are attempting to deny financing of Zeman's trip to Moscow. Zeman, if he does make it to Moscow, will reportedly be joined by Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. Slovakia is also a member of NATO. Slovakia's President Andrej Kiska, who has links to the Church of Scientology, refused Russia's invitation to attend the Victory Day event. Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades will buck the wishes of other European Union leaders and be in Moscow.

Nicos Anastasiades

Also joining other leaders in Moscow who are ignoring the West's boycott of the May 9 event are Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian President Shri Pranab Mukherjee, South African President Jacob Zuma, Cuban President Raul Castro, Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang, Serbian PresidentTomislav Nikolic, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliev, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, Kazakshtan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Armenian President Serzh Sarsyan, Tajikistan PresidentEmomalii Rahmon, and Kyrgyzstan President Almazbek Atambaev.

There are also high-level government delegations expected in Moscow from the Netherlands, which is surprising considering the fact that Malaysian Airlines flight 17 departed from Amsterdam before it was shot down over eastern Ukraine. Although the Ukrainian regime has tried to lay blame for the shoot down on Russian-backed separatists, there has been no final conclusion as to the perpetrators. However, given reports from the Netherlands that crash investigators believe that the plane was shot down by air-to-air gunfire from Ukrainian air force warplanes, the presence of a Dutch delegation in Moscow implies that the Netherlands authorities may be aware of Kiev's culpability in the attack.
In what can only be considered a diplomatic slap at the Kiev regime and its Western supporters, the leaders of the self-declared people's republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine will be in the same Red Square viewing stand as the leaders from 30 other countries, including China, India, and South Africa, a fact that will confer a semblance of de facto international recognition of their status. In addition, the leaders of the republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will also be present, constituting a diplomatic defeat for the authorities in Georgia who view the republics as integral parts of their state.
 
Kiev authorities, supported by ex-U.S. ambassadors, push for their own May 9 ceremony rivaling that planned in Moscow to celebrate victory over Nazism. Ironic, since the Kiev regime is backed by neo-Nazis who support Adolf Hitler and his Ukrainian henchman Stepan Bandera [left].  Baltic leaders boycott Moscow Victory Day event while their capitals host vigils for Nazi SS veterans. [right]. The U.S. embraces these proto-Nazi governments as allies.

The Obama administration is applying intense pressure on South Korean President 
Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to refuse Moscow's invitation to the participate in the May 9 event. Venezuela, Brazil, and Nicaragua are expected to send high-level delegations to Moscow.

The leaders of the Baltic nations, where there have been recent ceremonies honoring the military veterans of their nations who fought alongside Adolf Hitler's troops, will not be in Moscow.

The leaders gathered in Moscow will witness troops from at least 10 nations marching alongside their Russian counterparts. Some Russian troops will be clad in the World War II uniforms of the Soviet Red Army. German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she will skip the May 9 ceremony in Moscow but show up the following day, likely to apply further pressure on Putin over the Ukraine situation. Three former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine, John Herbst, Steven Pifer, and William Taylor, have called on world leaders to attend a Victory Day ceremony in Kiev and not Moscow. Such a move would be awkward considering the number of neo-Nazis embedded in Ukrainian military, police, and militia units.

The Kerry-Lavrov chess match - By Pepe Escobar

The Kerry-Lavrov chess match By Pepe Escobar It's hardly a match between equals - as one is playing Monopoly while the other plays chess. It's as if Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been postponing his checkmate, while US Secretary of State John Kerry increasingly realizes he's facing the inevitable. Lavrov has explained over and over again, a loose federation is the only possible solution for Ukraine, as part of a "deep constitutional reform". That would imply ethnic - and even sentimentally - Russian eastern and southern Ukraine would be largely autonomous. Kerry gave signs of agreeing around two weeks ago that Ukrainian regions need more decision power; but then the White House recharged its moral blitzkrieg - coinciding with President Barack Obama's trip to The Hague and Brussels. Still, even after an inconclusive four-hour Kerry-Lavrov chess match in Paris, there will be a checkmate. The Russian solution is the same plan proposed by Moscow already a few weeks ago, and again discussed on the phone by Obama and President Vladimir Putin on Friday - which prompted Kerry to redirect his flight to Paris. Each Ukrainian region, according to Lavrov, would be able to control its economy, taxes, culture, language, education and "external economic and cultural connections with neighboring countries or regions". That's such a sound plan that even former - or perennial, depending on spin - cold warriors such as Henry Kissinger and Zbig Brzezinski reasonably agree. The key problem is that Washington immovably considers the present Kiev set up - also known as the Khaganate of Nulands, as in State Department Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nulands - as legitimate. Moscow sees them as a bunch of putschists and fascists. And Washington still refuses to press Kiev to accept a federal system - thus allowing, among other things, Russian as an official second language. The latest American stunt is a massive propaganda drive of "The Reds are coming" kind, about Russian troops massing at the border(pliant corporate media spins numbers over 100,000). Kerry, for the moment, is at least refraining from hysteria; he admits Washington and Moscow agree a diplomatic solution is a must, just to revert to the new meme - the artificial, Pentagon/NATO-spun "prelude to an invasion". Washington's official position remains that Moscow must disarm its forces in Crimea (it won't happen); admit international observers (it might happen); and pull troops back from the eastern border (Moscow argues these are exercises, with the same number as usual - fewer than 20,000). Lavrov having to stress over and over again there are no Russian plans to invade eastern Ukraine sound almost like a punch line in stand-up comedy. Beware The Empire of Chaos  Then there are the upcoming presidential elections. Rivers of vodka may be bet that that will be an extremely dodgy operation. The Svoboda and Right Sector goons currently in positions of power will do everything to tamper with the results (as they are not exactly popular). After German Chancellor Angela Merkel's horse - former boxer "Klitsch" - decided to abandon the race, the leader is - what else - an oligarch: billionaire chocolate tycoon Petro Poroshenko. He already dismissed the federal solution, as in "somebody in the Russian government trying to tell us what type of governmental system we should have". And there's nothing about "democracy" to start with, as the regime changers, as reported by Kommersant, are in full speed already rewriting the Ukrainian constitution, with Prime Minister "Yats" Arseniy Yatseniuk urging them to come up with the final redaction within the next two weeks. The unspoken Siberian tiger in this room is a Russian unconditional. Kiev must officially pledge that Ukraine will not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And we all know, since the Khaganate of Nulands was installed, this was always about the Pentagon-led expansion of NATO. Putin's "carrot" to Obama is something that he also told him on the phone: the future of Transnistria in Moldova, on Ukraine's south-west border, should be solved by talks in a 5+2 format; Moldova, Transnistria, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Russia and Ukraine, with the European Union and US as observers. Once again, no "invasion" involved. Glaring in all this is an already immovable fact - Crimea joining the Russian Federation. And there's no turning back, whatever the US, the EU and Kiev may spin. But that poses an ulterior problem. Putin's rationale to move on Crimea - after Russian intelligence uncovered a plot to replicate in Simferopol the coup in Kiev - was that Crimea's autonomy was not enough to protect it from the regime changers. The same could be argued later about ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in eastern and southern Ukraine. So the autonomy conditions - and the constitutional reform - would have to be ironclad. They probably won't. Still, the stark fact is that no one gives a damn about "the Ukrainian people", be it the US, the EU or the International Monetary Fund (Russia at least cares for Russians in Ukraine). Another even more sensitive ulterior problem, assuming Washington and Moscow reach a deal, is how far can you trust the "word" of the United States government. Russia has first-hand experience on the matter, as in Bush father promising Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand across eastern Europe. It did - like a blob in a cheap horror flick. We should never forget the Big Picture; as with the NSA Orwellian-panopticon complex, this is most of all about the application of the Pentagon's Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine, which implies encirclement of Russia (via NATO), coupled with the pivot-style encirclement of China. And the overarching logic remains the same; this is The Empire of Chaos in action. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.