Revising WW2 History=Preparation for War

Hat tip to Andrei Martyanov

My interest in learning history began with WW2 history as I was exposed to the Victory at Sea series of programs at an early age and my step-Grandfather captained a destroyer in the Pacific during the war, and my interest grew from there. I’m familiar with the rewriting of history for political purposes and the sweeping under the rug of inconvenient facts on all sorts of topics which complicates the quest for objectivity. Today as I made my rounds of my favorites, I found an excerpt from the following essay at Andrei Martyanov’s blog and opened the provided link to read the entire article, which is in Russian and published by the Donetsk News Agency or DAN, “Revising History Is the West's Strategy for Preparing for War.” The author’s background is supplied by the publication as follows:

Independent military analyst Ralph Bosshard is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Swiss Army and a former senior OSCE official, who has worked in Ukraine and Donbass, among other things, as a representative of the organization. In an article for the Donetsk News Agency, he analyzes the systematic efforts of the West to distort the history of World War II, attempts to downplay the feat of the Soviet people and, moreover, to rehabilitate the Nazis and their accomplices.

As you read, he’s neutral and then some as you’ll discover by reading further. He puts forth a disturbing thesis that’s backed by much evidence. I haven’t examined the SMO here very much, although I extensively covered its outset at my VK site and have made many comments at the Moon of Alabama blog as well as at Simplicius’s substack. Bosshard’s essay certainly has geopolitical ramifications:

There are people all over the world who love to talk and write about things they don't really know about. Such people usually make a career in politics and journalism. Now they like to write about the war in Donbass. They know neither Russia, nor Ukraine, nor the war, but this does not prevent them from spreading their beliefs about it. They perceive the facts as persecution.

After my discharge from the Swiss Army, I was interested in two topics: military operations and history. Preparing for military operations has been my job as head of the operations preparation department of the Swiss Armed Forces for five years. The necessary training in the Swiss army and NATO was weak, but at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation it was much better. At the end of my career in the Swiss Army, I taught operational training at the Operational Training Staff. I know what I'm talking about when I use the term "military operation." I studied history at the University of Zurich. In summary: I am a professional in the field of military history.

Revisionist nonsense

And since I returned to military history, I have been increasingly confronted with revisionist theories about World War II. Recently I was told that the Soviet partisans were militarily "useless" and that they were "a bunch of deserters and criminals" who were supposedly more dangerous to the civilian population of Belarus than to the German occupiers. Historiography about them is allegedly a mixture of Soviet propaganda and romanticism. I then studied the Soviet partisans and came to the conclusion that they were definitely much more effective than the French Resistance.

Estonian members of the Waffen-SS were "fighters for Estonia's freedom from the Soviet Union," Estonia's permanent representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, where I worked for six years, said a few years ago. The ambassador then said that it was unpleasant that they wore a black SS uniform, but they were still "freedom fighters." When I heard this, I was surprised: I had not previously associated the Waffen-SS with the struggle for freedom.

I also vividly remember an elderly gentleman in Austria who claimed that the German Wehrmacht had "prevented" the Soviet attack on Western Europe on June 22, 1941, and had launched a preventive war. Aha, I thought, this man was probably trying to convince me that the German attack was an act of legitimate self-defense by the National Socialist Third Reich against the Soviet Union. The theory that the Nazis "fought Bolshevism" for Western Europe is just around the corner. A young man tried to explain this theory to me many years ago in a bookstore in the center of Kiev, and also wanted to use this opportunity to sell me a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Then I saved this money and instead of a portrait, I spent it on a cold beer – definitely the best investment.

These are just three examples of a series of similar experiences that I have experienced.

Ignorance and surprise

Recently, in Switzerland, I took part in a discussion event dedicated to the Second World War, at which my Belarusian colleague made an introductory speech. It was interesting to observe the reaction of about 60-80 journalists, historians and teachers present: information about the suffering of Belarusians in 1941-1945 was new to them. They knew neither about the tragedies of Ozarichi and Khatyn, nor about Operation Bagration. They were hardly aware of the countless crimes committed by the German Wehrmacht, not just the SS and the Gestapo.

The reason for this is clear to me as a military historian: After 1945, the U.S. Army Military History Service hired a large number of German generals to write the history of the war that had just ended. And the gentlemen took the opportunity to embellish their role, to invent a fairy tale that the German Wehrmacht had always fought honestly, and to explain why they—in fact, supposedly superior soldiers—were still defeated by the Red Army. Many of them remained true to their National Socialist beliefs and still considered the soldiers and officers of the Red Army to be "subhuman." Their self-justification has defined the historiography of German-speaking countries for decades. And today, this spirit once again defines reporting on the Russian army and the war in Donbass.

History Revision Strategy

Behind all this is a treacherous strategy: the West now wants to reconsider the order that was created in San Francisco in 1945 by the UN Charter. The guardians of this order should in fact be the victorious powers in World War II – along with the United States, Great Britain and France, as well as Russia, as the successor of the Soviet Union, and China. For years, the West has wanted to dismantle this order and install in its place a new "rules-based order" that it can define without consulting countries that it has already declared enemies. Therefore, the contribution of the Soviet Union to the victory over National Socialism is now being minimized. And since European neo-Nazis are sent to war against Russia as useful and fanatical idiots, one must be careful about criticizing the Nazis. The direction of these efforts is clear: to discredit, isolate and marginalize Russia.

But things go even further: in general, they seek to demonize Russians as a people, deny that they are a cultured nation, and portray them not as people, but as aggressive monsters who must not be allowed to attack the "civilized West."

The authors of this strategy also know that the borders of several republics of the former Soviet Union were determined at the Yalta Conference of 1945. One of these republics is Belarus. Today, many Russians still live in many republics of the post-Soviet space, and these republics are faced with the task of clarifying their national identity. These people also know that the memory of the Great Patriotic War is important to many people and plays an important role in the national identity of these countries. Weakening this national identity and the cohesion of societies is part of a broader strategy: its goal is division and domination.

Germany waged war on foreign territory for five years, from the autumn of 1939 to the autumn of 1944. The United States and Western European colonial powers fought wars on foreign continents for 45 years after the end of the war. And since 1991, NATO, which was actually created as an instrument of self-defense, has been waging wars outside the territory of its alliance. These peoples do not know what war means in their own country, and therefore take war lightly. The revision of history is a preparation for war, and we must put up a determined resistance before it is too late. [Bolded italics my emphasis.]

It appears that the essay was also published in elsewhere in Europe given the author’s appeal at the end as Russia’s already resisting with determination. The ongoing mystery for me as historian is the reversal of the UN’s intent by the USA when it knew it would be in violation of the UN Chater when it came into force on 24 October 1945 and clearly desired to pursue its traditional behavior of doing whatever it wanted to do and damn what the world thought despite the wise words of George Washington and the message within the Declaration of Independence. Fortunately, in the last polling I read, 80% of Europeans were against a wider war in Europe, so the strategy doesn’t appear to be working, although those currently in office aren’t heeding their public’s desires. Russia also doesn’t have any desire to go beyond its SMO.

Recently, RT publicized the release of a new book, and linked to its pdf version, aimed at refuting the falsified WW2 history circulating in the West—I won’t call it revisionist because the intent is to falsify and propagandize, which isn’t what genuine revisionist history seeks to do—Miracle in the East: Western War Correspondent Report, 1941-1945, which I again link to. It in turn is part of a bigger project as this prefatory comment informs us:

This book is a part of the multimedia grant project named The Return of Stolen Meanings. The Truth about the Great Patriotic War in English and American press from 1941 to 1945, prepared by the Foundation for Historical Outlook and sponsored by the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives.

I made a search to try and find more info of the above effort but only came up with a similar media announcement like RT’s in the English version of Pravda. However, a link to The Archive revealed it having available for download The Great Patriotic War: The Russian Version Of WWII—”The History of the War as Taught to Soviet Schoolchildren”—which was published in 1974 in English as an abridged version of the 1970 Russian edition. Between those two publications there’s almost 900 pages of objective history that deal with a portion of WW2 history, which we must remember has one of two earlier starting points depending on one’s POV, both being invasions of China by Japan in 1931 and 1937, my preference being 1931—the war between Japan and China is now mostly forgotten in the West since it now wants Japan in NATO to again confront China.

One last note on the veracity of the Thucydides Trap hypothesis that’s a clear example of revisionist history that borders on falsification as proven by Dr. Michael Hudson and discussed in his The Collapse of Antiquity on page 111:

The “Thucydides trap” theory recently in vogue trivializes this conflict [The Peloponnesian War] as one simply of geopolitical rivalry, depicting the War as resulting from Spantan jealousy of Athens as a rising rival. But the conflict was domestic as much as foreign, because it was fundamentally about democratic attempts to limit oligarchic wealth. There was no commercial rivalry between Sparta and Athens, because Sparta was not a commercial economy. The conflict was between oligarchic and democratic power and the alliances resulting from domestic class antagonisms. This conflict existed within both Athenian and Spartan society, not merely between the two. [My Emphasis]

A great many people were deluded by the hypothesis and tried to use it as justification for a more aggressive Outlaw US Empire policy toward China, which IMO is why the hypothesis was formulated. Hudson proved beyond doubt that Sparta wasn’t a commercial/trading nation so there’s no way any sort of rivalry/jealousy could emerge between Athens and Sparta on those grounds. The difference is as summarized above and explained further in the text that preceded it. And the differences between China and the Outlaw US Empire are rather similar in that they’re grounded in their political-economies and governing philosophies which are the reasons for China’s rise and the Outlaw Empire’s fall.

There’re other examples of propaganda and the suppression of Truth later leading to justifications for war. The suppression of George Seldes interview with Marshal Von Hindenburg at the immediate end of hostilities in November 1918 where he confessed the real reasons for Germany’s surrender allowed Hitler to use the Stab in the Back as propaganda for his rise to power and subsequent warmaking. That interview was finally published in 1929 in You Can’t Print That, which can be freely downloaded at the link, but was too late to halt Hitler’s rise. The Warren Commission also published a lie. The 911 Establishment Narrative is a lie. It was proven in court that the US Government conspired to murder Matin Luther King, and it’s now admitted Sirhan Sirhan was a patsy for the assassination of Robert Kennedy. The investigation into the attempt on Trump’s life is also revealing some rather unsavory information that can be read about here.

Seeking Truth is difficult at times, but the quest must be made no matter where it leads or who it indicts.

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